Tiaan ran to the glass. Lyrinx were running everywhere, though she could not tell from what, or to what. Not the gate, at least, for Tiaan had not set any destination.
Nor could she. She had no idea where Tallallame might be, or how to look for it. That was Malien’s job but Malien had gone in the thapter many hours ago, and might not come back. So what was going on down below?
She hurried down the stairs. It took precious minutes and left her knees weak. In the open area at the bottom she walked into an opaque sphere filling most of the space between the bottom step and the wrecked doors. Was it the port-all? She edged around the side of the sphere and looked out. There were lyrinx everywhere and not all of them had wings. The fleetest of the runners had made it in under two days.
‘Ryll?’ she called hopefully. He might not have survived. And if he had survived, he could still be leagues away.
Her call was taken up in deeper, raspier lyrinx tones. Ryll, Ryll, Ryll…
The crowd parted and he pushed through, his heavy jaw set, eyes staring. ‘Is this the gate?’ His hand motion was dismissive.
‘Yes, but I don’t know how to find Tallallame.’
‘Then why did you call us here? The water rises towards the base of the peak. We’re clinging to it like moths, Tiaan, and there’s no room left.’ His great chest rose and fell like a bellows, his skin flickered with barely suppressed panic colours. ‘In half a day – no, sooner – we’ll be lost. Rather would we have died of thirst in the Dry Sea than be drowned in the Sea of Perion.’
‘Malien knows where Tallallame is. Have you seen her?’
He pointed to the sky. ‘She’s guarding the tower, circling higher than the other thapters can fly.’
If Tiaan didn’t make the gate soon, the rapidly approaching Well would consume all the nodes as it came. It stood out against the night, its black-and-gold-threaded funnel reaching up to the sky.
‘Call her down!’ cried Tiaan.
Ryll rapped out a few words in his own tongue and a lyrinx leapt into the air. Tiaan watched it in the moonlight until it converged upon the thapter, which lurched and headed down as erratically as an autumn leaf falling. The other two thapters pursued it until a cloud of lyrinx swarmed up at them, firing crossbows. The thapters turned away towards the Hornrace and the lyrinx escorted Malien down.
‘Malien!’ yelled Tiaan as it settled on a hastily evacuated space. ‘I’ve made the gate but I don’t know the way to Tallallame.’
They diverted around the opaque globe. Malien gave it a curious glance. By the top, her lips had gone grey and she was cold and sweaty. ‘That’s not a climb I care to do again. Show me the port-all.’
‘It – there is no physical port-all. It’s a mental construct, Malien. I imagined the tesseract,’ so easy to say, so difficult to do, ‘put my image of the port-all inside it, inserted the image of the amplimet and it created the cloudy sphere you saw below.’
Malien looked uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know that I can work the way you do, Tiaan.’ She sat on the floor, legs crossed, eyes closed, concentrating hard. ‘Give me your hand.’
Tiaan sat beside her and extended her hand. Malien’s was unexpectedly hard. Nothing happened for so long that Tiaan found her mind wandering, projecting the rise of the waters and the terror of the lyrinx as it climbed up their chests. It was the curse of her visual memory that she could still see the faces of the two lyrinx who had drowned, pursuing her from Kalissin ages ago. The naked fear in their eyes would never leave her.
She wrenched her mind back to the gate and saw clouds, though they seemed to have more colour than any clouds she’d seen on Santhenar. The image shifted, the view looked straight up and she saw a green sky. Another shift; she was looking at trees from above. Giant trees and blue hills.
A swooping drop that left her stomach hanging over one of the branches, and they were at ground level. Blue grass waved in the breeze and there were flowering shrubs covered in red berries. Someone was whispering to her in a foreign language.
‘Tiaan!’ Malien was shaking her. ‘It’s Tallallame. Fix the gate in place and open it.’
Tiaan found it hard to let go of the vision, but did as she was told,