caught his bound wrists, intending to free him. Yggur whirled and Nish gasped ‘Friend!’ as the knee went for his throat, a blow that could well have killed him.
Yggur pulled the blow, which merely thumped Nish hard in the shoulder. Nish ducked behind him and hacked through the wrist ropes, taking off a good bit of skin in the process. Yggur didn’t flinch. Nish slid the knife under the gag, cutting the cloth.
Yggur staggered. He’d been beaten, evidently, and was not at his best, but he flashed Nish a savage grin. ‘Let’s get to them. Free Fyn-Mah and Flydd, if he’s still alive, then the others. But not Gilhaelith. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.’
‘But surely any help is better than none?’ Nish glanced at the tall mancer, whose look of black rage boded ill once Gilhaelith was free.
‘If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t be here now,’ Yggur said.
Nish didn’t understand, but there was no time to ask what Yggur meant. ‘What about Malien and Tiaan?’
‘Ghorr has already sent them up to the air-dreadnoughts.’ Yggur was shaking his hands to restore the circulation. Now he raised his fists high, as if calling power to himself, then snapped them down. Mist condensed in a series of crescent-shaped clouds around the pen and Yggur spun it into a smoky brown doughnut around them.
‘There’s not much time,’ said Nish, cutting the bonds of the prisoners one by one. They had formed a line in front of him, and another before Irisis. Yggur’s retainers were nothing if not disciplined. ‘The cables must burn through any time now and, once they go, this side of the amphitheatre will collapse.’
‘I don’t think it’ll collapse from the loss of four cables,’ said Yggur. ‘It should just sag. But once the scrutators have saved their necks, and those retainers they can’t do without, they’ll cut the deck free from above, no matter how many of their loyal servants remain on it.’
Once all the prisoners other than Gilhaelith had been released, which took only a minute or two, Nish handed his crossbow and bolts to one of Yggur’s surviving soldiers and went looking for Irisis.
‘Where’s Flydd?’ he said to Yggur as their paths crossed.
‘He was at the flensing trough.’ Yggur grimaced as he pointed into the mist.
‘I’ll go after him. Have you got a plan?’
‘Fight for our bloody lives!’
‘With two crossbows and a couple of knives?’
‘It’s a whole lot better than we had five minutes ago.’
Yggur began to form the smoky mist into spectres and walking corpses bearing the faces of the witnesses, which he sent drifting across the deck. Someone screamed in horror or despair, others joined in and shortly the witnesses stampeded again.
Putting his hands up to his mouth, Yggur made a series of barking sounds that reverberated across the amphitheatre and back. After a short silence there came, from the slough that surrounded Fiz Gorgo on three sides, the hair-raising cry of a lyrinx. At least, it sounded like a lyrinx. The mist broke, only to re-form more tightly. The soldiers called to one another in voices tinged with fear. The air-dreadnoughts might not fear the lyrinx when high in the sky on a clear day, but they were perilously vulnerable tethered here in poor visibility.
Other lyrinx cries came from all around and suddenly there was uproar. Nish heard the snapping twang of dozens of crossbows as the soldiers fired madly into the mist-shrouded swamps, thinking that the enemy were attacking. Nish wasn’t entirely sure that they weren’t. The scrutators and mancers, no doubt clinging to their escape chairs, were screaming to be lifted to safety.
‘They’re calling the enemy against us,’ came Ghorr’s outraged voice. ‘Kill them! Kill them all. A thousand gold tells for the heads of each of the chief villains, including Crafter Irisis and Artificer Cryl-Nish. A hundred tells for each of the others, dead or alive.’
Nish squinted into the mist. Oh for a crossbow and a glimpse of his enemy. He would have sent a bolt through the chief scrutator with no more thought than stepping on a cockroach.
Dead or alive. He stopped, one foot in the air, then cast a look over his shoulder. A thousand tells was a colossal fortune, more than an officer could earn in ten lifetimes. And all anyone had to do to earn it was kill him.
‘There must be a hundred soldiers out there,’ he said to Yggur.
‘I dare say,’ said Yggur, ‘though most are keeping order among the witnesses or protecting their masters