have survived. Even had he been in the rooms above, the heat must have burned him alive. Not a pleasant death, nor what she’d intended for him. Before Ullii cut out his heart, she’d wanted him to know why.
TWO
After leaving Irisis in the early hours of the morning, Nish had gone back to his cold bed, but had not managed to get to sleep. He couldn’t stop thinking about the morrow. They were due to leave in Malien’s thapter to attack the Council of Scrutators’ secret bastion, Nennifer, and attempt to overthrow them, for the Council was never going to win the war. Indeed, it no longer seemed that it wanted to, for the war kept the scrutators in power. But Nennifer was defended by a thousand crack troops, hundreds of mancers and all manner of uncanny devices, so how could a handful of people, even including Flydd, Yggur and Malien, hope to breach it? It seemed, at the least, suicidal. And why were he and Irisis suddenly being kept in the dark? It hurt, after all they’d done over the past months.
Despairing of ever getting to sleep, Nish dressed in his discarded clothes, which had already taken on the frigid dankness of the room. Pulling on icy boots, he laced them up and stamped his feet, trying vainly to maintain the warmth he’d had from the bed. At the noise, someone muttered angrily from the next room.
Nish shrugged into his coat, pulled a floppy hat down over his neck and ears, and went to the door. With his hand on the latch he thought about going back for his sword, but Fiz Gorgo was the safest place on Santhenar. He left it leaning against the wall.
He had planned to go out the front doors and pace around the outer wall, but as he cracked the door open, such an icy wind coiled in that Nish closed it and headed for the tower instead. This time he did not stop at Yggur’s balcony, but felt his way up the snake-coiled stone stair to the very top. It was pitch black outside – he could see nothing through the embrasures.
On the fourth- and fifth-floor landings, open doors led to black rooms. Nish didn’t look inside; he hadn’t brought a lantern. The rooms on the sixth and seventh floors were locked and, he suspected, sealed with the Art. They held some kind of defensive artefact – Nish had once overheard Yggur telling Flydd about it. He trudged up to the eighth level, a lookout tower that had not been manned during Nish’s time in Fiz Gorgo. Not even the lyrinx, who owned the rest of Meldorin, came near Fiz Gorgo.
At the top he peered out the western embrasure towards the town of Old Hripton, several leagues away around the bay, but the icy breeze made his eyes water and he couldn’t see any lights. Pulling his coat around him, he sat on the stone bench that ran around the circumference of the room. As soon as he sat down, Nish felt drowsy, so he folded up the hood of his coat for a pillow, lay on his back and closed his eyes.
Despair chased the drowsiness away. The world lay in ruins. The Council had failed, the war was in its last desperate stage and the enemy was going to win it. Whole nations had been wiped out, vast regions depopulated as if a great plague had crept across them. Few people had any hope now. They were just going through the motions of fighting and dying. From the lowest peasant to the rulers themselves, hopelessness was all-pervading.
The scrutators attacked despair as they attacked every other crime – with violence – but violence no longer had any effect. A people without hope were glad to die. Human civilisation was going to fall and even its precious Histories would disappear as though they had never been. Nish felt like weeping but his eyes were gritty dry.
And so, Flydd’s mad plan to attack Nennifer. If the corrupt Council could just be overthrown, men and women of stout heart might still be able to hold back the horde and set the world to rights. If anyone could do it, it would be Flydd, who had made the protection of humanity his life’s work. But Nish knew it was folly; no attack could succeed against such defences. They were all going to die, yet somehow it seemed worth it to go out in such a noble, reckless