Flydd still hadn’t said a word, but at every stop he went further and further, driving himself relentlessly, though his characteristic crab-like scuttle had been replaced by a stiff-legged, twisting dance, the oddest walk Nish had ever seen. He supposed the healing skin, replaced by the healers’ Art, had pulled taut and was troubling him.
Malien called down the hatch to Yggur and Klarm, who came up. ‘We’re within four or five leagues. Dare we go closer?’
‘I think not,’ said Klarm after a brief glance at the forbidding mountainside passing by. ‘Set down wherever you can find a safe place.’
Malien curved around in a circle, signalling her intentions back to a fur-shrouded Inouye, before heading for a relatively bare, relatively flat patch on the rock-littered slope. The thapter settled, gravel grating underneath. Ten spans back the dirigible came to ground silently.
Irisis opened the upper hatch and gasped at the frigid blast that swept in. Nish pulled his fur-lined coat more tightly around him, the earmuffs down over his ears, and climbed out. As soon as his boot touched the ground he felt a pang of unease, but dismissed it. How could he feel otherwise, so close to Nennifer?
He had never been anywhere like this place. The surface was utterly barren, just shattered rock and grey gravel and grit as far as his eye could see. He saw no living thing: no birds in the sky, no animals on the horizon, no plants anywhere. There weren’t even lichens on the rocks.
‘What a wasteland!’ Nish said to Irisis, who had walked away a few steps and was nudging stones over with the toe of her boot. There was nothing underneath them either.
‘The perfect place for the arid souls of the scrutators,’ she said.
‘Shh!’ Nish gave her a meaningful glance.
Klarm stood behind her, his bowed legs braced against the wind. He’d had the calipers removed before they left Fiz Gorgo, though he still put his foot to the ground gingerly. ‘Take no mind of me,’ he said. ‘I always hated Nennifer and was never more glad than to see the back of it. And –’
‘What?’ said Nish.
‘To me, the choice of location was not suggestive of unparalleled strength and supreme majesty, as the Council would have it. It indicated a deep-seated insecurity and I always wondered …’
Again he trailed off, as if he scarcely dared to speak what he was thinking – a survival strategy, surely. Ghorr had not encouraged people to speak their minds, and that included the host of lesser scrutators who weren’t members of the Council.
‘What did you wonder?’ said Yggur, coming up beside the dwarf and turning his back to the wind.
‘What the Council is most afraid of,’ said Klarm. ‘It isn’t the lyrinx, for all that we’re losing the war. And certainly not their own people, thoroughly cowed after a century of the scrutators’ iron rule.’
Nish and Irisis exchanged glances but neither said anything. It wasn’t their place.
The wind gusted up, howling around the thapter and lifting the tethered dirigible a span into the air. They ran and held it down with their weight, and the effort of running those few steps left them breathless.
‘We can talk about that later,’ said Yggur. ‘Get the dirigible tied down before it blows away.’
‘There’s nothing to tie it to,’ said Nish. ‘You can’t drive a stake into this grit.’
‘Then it’ll have to be anchored to rock. Is something the matter, Malien?’
She had her hands over her eyes and was walking back and forth, taking tiny, sliding steps that rasped across the surface. Her head was bowed. She continued for another ten steps, rotated slowly on the ball of her right foot and came rasping back.
‘Malien?’ Yggur said sharply.
‘I’m not sure about this place.’
‘This campsite?’
‘No, Nennifer itself. I’m sensing a strain on the node.’
‘You’ll have to explain,’ said Yggur. ’Your Art and mine are totally different, remember?
‘I learned to be sensitive to such things,’ said Malien, speaking breathlessly, ‘while guarding the Well of Echoes in Tirthrax against the amplimet.’
‘Is the amplimet doing something to the node?’
‘No … At least I don’t think so. I feel that the amplimet has been contained, yet the node is under strain … like a ball of rubber squeezed between the heels of one’s hands.’
‘Irisis,’ said Yggur, ‘would you take your pliance and tell me what the field is like here?’
She withdrew it from between her breasts and squeezed it in her right hand. ‘It’s incredibly strong,’ said Irisis. ‘I can almost see it.