Her head cracked into the rose-quartz ward behind her. Irisis slumped to the floor and Nish lost sight of her in the shadows.
Tiaan stepped over her and rose to her feet, reaching out with both arms. A sullen red glow illuminated her face. She looked like a rapt sleepwalker moving slowly towards the amplimet and Nish knew that, once she got it and lifted it high, the crystal would be free.
And Irisis would be its first victim.
THIRTY-ONE
Nish acted instinctively. If he didn’t save Irisis, no one could. Bracing his back against the rail he kicked out with both feet, striking Muss so hard in the chest that he slammed into the wall.
Sliding his rope around the rail, he tore the knife from Muss’s belt and awkwardly hacked himself free. He had to get down to the warding chamber and there was only one way to reach it in time.
He snatched the coil of rope and fled down the ladder, then into the dome. Knotting the rope around his waist, he ran around the inner edge of the room, looking down into the dome chamber. A third of the way around the circle Nish skidded to a stop, whipped the free end of the rope around a bench and tied it tight. He gauged the distance to the dais, ran on for ten steps and hurled himself over, praying that he’d judged correctly. If the rope was too long, he’d hit the floor hard enough to snap his thigh bones, or worse.
Nish fell free for an awfully long time, passed through the network of frozen light then swung in an arc across the chamber. He curved down, his feet almost touching the floor, then up straight towards one of the remaining carbonised mancers, a broad, shapeless woman wearing a pointed leather hat, now mainly char.
There wasn’t time to try and sway out of the way. He smashed side-on into the corpse, shattering it into stinking fragments that clung all over him. The blackened head went flying across the floor.
The impact set Nish spinning on the rope as he shot up towards the far wall and through the beams again, trying to clear the char and muck out of his eyes. He got one eye open just before he reached the top of the wall. He saw Tiaan move, calculated the necessary swing and pushed off with one foot. Now on a different trajectory, he flashed between the rose-crystal wards just as Tiaan, arms outstretched, sprang for the amplimet. He cannoned into her chest and she went flying off to the left. Nish spun the other way and thudded into the base of another of the wards.
Low down, it was solid as rock. Something went crack and a brilliant pain shot up Nish’s right arm. He’d broken it. Momentum gone, he orbited around the inside of the wards, passed out through a gap then in again, and rotated on the end of the rope several times before grounding against the ward that had broken his forearm.
The amplimet sat in the middle of a small alabaster pedestal, its central spark throbbing balefully. Tiaan was nowhere to be seen. Nish wiped crumbly bits of black foam from his face and looked down. Irisis lay directly below him, staring up.
‘How are you?’ he said haltingly, supporting his arm.
Irisis sat up, rubbing the back of her head, and winced. She inspected her fingers, which bore a faint bloody smear. ‘Just a bump on the head. What’s the matter with your arm?’
‘Broken.’
‘That wasn’t very smart.’ She grinned and unfastened the rope from around his middle.
‘I didn’t do it deliberately.’ Nish could hardly think for the pain shooting up his arm.
Again the speaking horns trumpeted their plaintive cry for help, but it wasn’t answered. The turret could no longer be seen through the frozen light which, oddly, shed no illumination downwards.
‘What do we do now?’
‘We find the damn platinum box,’ Irisis said quietly. Tiaan wasn’t in sight, though she couldn’t be far away. ‘We get the crystal into it any way we can, wire the lid on tight and chuck the box into the hottest fire we can make.’
He glanced back at the amplimet. ‘Not so loud.’
‘It can’t hear, Nish. It isn’t alive.’
‘Heat will end it.’ Despite all the trouble it had caused them, Nish was uneasy about destroying such a precious thing.
‘It’s the only solution, but no one else is going to do it. They all want to make use of the wretched thing, though it’s too