Gilhaelith hurried away. ‘But what are you looking for?’ Nish called.
‘Something they don’t want us to know,’ Gilhaelith said over his shoulder.
The next day was tedious and long. Nish sat in the tent, listening to the whispers in the background, which meant nothing to him, and reading though the pages as Merryl handed them to him. They were just a series of words, with annotations by Merryl, that did not make much sense.
Great Lake (scratchy voice)
Dawn! Dawn! (hoarse voice)
Too late.
Humans.
Fly west to the … (unintelligible.? Burning Mountain)
(long pause)
Fire? (hoarse voice)
(short pause)
Node failing. Node failing. Node fai – (powerful voice. female.? a matriarch)
What node? (scratchy voice)
Where are you? (hoarse voice)
(burst of unintelligible chatter, many voices at once, then a long pause)
Dawn? (hoarse voice)
Dawn! (scratchy voice)
Nish puzzled over the exchange. Were they planning an attack in the morning, as the army passed by a smaller lake between the two largest of the Great Chain of Lakes? Did it involve fire, or was that a completely separate remark? He scribbled two notes and sent them with the waiting runner to Troist and Gilhaelith. Let them agonise over it.
His pages were piling up. He wondered about the other cry – about the node failing – but not for long. Node failures were increasingly common these days. He made a note on his summary sheet and got on with his work.
Rubbing sore eyes, Nish shuffled his papers and stacked them in the pile. He’d been reading for eighteen hours without a break and every time he shifted his head vertigo made him feel as though he was falling off his seat. It had been hard enough in the tent, for one recorder’s writing could have been made by a spider crawling out of an inkwell, and another’s was so tiny Nish had to squint to read it. In a jouncing, rattling clanker on a winding mountain road it was almost impossible. He prayed that the column would stop soon. He was desperate for sleep but would be lucky to get an hour. Even here, the pages were coming in faster than he could read them.
He had dozed off, in spite of the vibration, when the clanker stopped suddenly. There were shouts and screams outside, while a red glow lit up the sky ahead. The operator thrust up the top hatch, shouting to the shooter.
‘What is it, shooter? Are we under attack?’
The shooter did not answer at once. The threaded rods of his javelard whirred and the mechanism creaked as he turned it this way and that.
‘There’s a big fire up ahead,’ he said.
Nish reached for the rear hatch but Merryl put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Remember what Gilhaelith said. We’re to keep away from the fighting unless our lives are directly threatened.’
‘I can’t hide while soldiers are dying.’
‘Their job is to fight, and if necessary to die. Ours is to do this work which may save many lives.’
Nish slid back into his seat. ‘What’s going on?’ he said softly, with a glance at the farspeaker operator. Daesmie was asleep, her head pillowed on her small hands. She looked like a child. ‘What’s Gilhaelith really looking for?’
‘I don’t know.’
A roar echoed down the road from up ahead and flames billowed into the sky. The clanker’s shooter cried out in terror. Nish felt the wash of heat through the front porthole, until the operator lurched his clanker forward, sideways and around. The clanker ahead of them was covered in what looked like burning pitch. Nish could hear the agonised screams of those trapped inside.
‘Stop!’ he cried. ‘We’ve got to get them out.’
The clanker kept going. ‘I have my orders, surr,’ said the operator.
Nish wrestled with the handle of the rear hatch but Merryl caught him by the arm. ‘There’s nothing you can do, Nish. Their rear hatch is covered in burning pitch; you’d never get it open.’
The sounds, and the smell, lingered long in Nish’s nostrils. It reminded him of that awful night in the slave team at Snizort, when he’d salivated over the smell of the burning dead.
‘That was a timely warning,’ Gilhaelith said later that night, when the army had found a safe camp. ‘Troist asked me to personally thank each of you. It saved countless lives.’
Nish nodded absently, his mind still on the horrors of the attack, which had gone on for an hour before the enemy had silently withdrawn. ‘Did we lose many?’
‘Hundreds,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘But it could easily have been thousands. Now, back to work.’