heard them.’ Irisis stood up, holding her left foot up. ‘What’s that?’
It was a crashing and a rumbling that was growing ever louder. Tiaan spun around, staring up the hill. ‘It sounds like a landslide.’
‘It’s not,’ said Irisis. ‘They’re rolling boulders –’
The ground shook and a rock half the size of the thapter came thundering though the trees, bouncing ten spans high. Passing to Tiaan’s right, it struck the trunk of a big tree, smashing it into jagged splinters as long as Tiaan was tall. Leaves and wood rained down, fortunately below them, then the upper part of the tree toppled and fell down the slope. The boulder, hardly slowed by the impact, kept going and they heard more ground-shaking crashes before it disappeared beyond their ken.
‘Go!’ cried Irisis. ‘You know your orders. Don’t risk the thapter. You can’t get me in by yourself.’
Tiaan hesitated. She was obedient by nature. But then again … She leapt over the side, slid down the greasy slope and gave Irisis her shoulder. The rain grew heavier, running into her eyes until she could barely see. It had been warm at first but the drops now felt like melted ice.
‘Hop as if the fate of the world depended on it,’ she said, terrified that the thapter would slide away and be lost.
Irisis did so, ignoring the pain, and they slipped and staggered up towards the thapter. Another boulder came crashing down, smaller than the first and not bouncing as high, but all the more dangerous because of that. It followed the path of the other and disappeared.
They reached the side just as there came a rumble of thunder, though there was no lightning. The ground shook. Another crash and it shook again; the thapter moved.
‘That’s one hell of a boulder this time,’ said Irisis, putting her good foot onto the ladder. ‘Sounds like half a pinnacle.’
Tiaan felt a spasm of fear. Thump. She boosted Irisis up and pulled herself up the ladder after her. Thankfully Irisis had the presence of mind not to hesitate at the top. She simply went through the hatch head-first, heedless of her injuries.
Thump-thump. The ground shook so hard that the thapter began to slide.
Tiaan fell in on top of Irisis, who let out a groan as Tiaan landed on her wrenched ankle. Tiaan pulled herself up using the controller.
Thump thump, thump thump. Thump-thump.
She jerked up on the flight knob and the thapter lifted, with agonising slowness. One span, two, three. And then she saw it coming and could not contain herself.
The lyrinx had toppled half of one of the pinnacles, which had broken into two gigantic boulders, bigger than houses, plus a host of smaller, thapter-sized ones. They were thundering down the mountainside, spreading into a fan of devastation hundreds of spans across, smashing trees and rocks to fragments as they came. The thapter was right in their path and from a standing start she couldn’t see how she could get high enough to escape.
Thump. Thump-thump.
Tiaan wiped her eyes with her free hand and tried to see where she could go. The two huge boulders were bouncing twenty or thirty spans high, the smaller ones five or ten. She couldn’t rise above them in time.
The only chance was to fly up the slope, between the biggest boulders, until she gained enough speed to sweep upwards. Tiaan turned that way, knowing that neither the height nor direction of the bounces was predictable. Just as dangerously, the air between the fan of boulders was full of fragments of rock and pieces of shattered wood, a hailstorm of it.
She had to fly on instinct, as she had before. Tiaan went left so as to put herself between the two big boulders, which were roaring towards her. She rose to avoid a pair of trees and corrected again as the right-hand boulder bounced in towards its twin. The next bounce took it out again and for an instant her hand froze on the controller, seeing that it was heading directly for her.
An instinctive wiggle took the thapter sideways; the boulder whistled past, its windstorm buffeting the machine wildly, and smashed off the top half of the tree just below her. She took the machine up and curved away as the smaller boulders, carrying a landslide of rocks, clay and wood with them, rumbled underneath.
The flying lyrinx, who had been hanging back to see the result of their handiwork, now turned towards her in an angry swarm, but it was too late. Tiaan peeled