was like the prisoners in the dungeons of Nennifer suffering their daily torments.
He landed on the high side, skidding on his knees, out of breath. Surely he was the last? No, one of Yggur’s soldiers was labouring up the slope carrying another, who looked to have broken his leg.
He was almost to the cliff when the outer section of the parade ground dropped sharply. The man with the broken leg screamed. His partner, straining with all his might, lifted the injured soldier above his head and tossed him up onto solid ground. Reaction sent him sliding the other way, down the steadily increasing slope of the falling slab.
The soldier put his head down and even made a little ground before the slope grew so steep that he could gain no traction on it. He clung on with hands and knees, looking up at them in despair as the whole great slab of parade ground, fifty spans wide and about two hundred long, ground off, carrying him over the cliff into the vast abyss of the Desolation Sink.
TWENTY-FOUR
‘What have we done?’ said Nish, lying on the ground with his hands over his face.
Flydd jerked him to his feet. ‘I don’t know, but we’re going to make the best of it.’
The whole of Nennifer was shaking and, it seemed, the mountains behind them. More slabs of parade ground fell into the Desolation Sink and springs burst out of the ground, freezing instantly to brittle fountains. The tethers snapped on the nearer of the air-dreadnoughts, which lifted sluggishly on its flabby airbags.
Spiralling lines of force appeared in Nish’s inner eye, radiating out from the point whence that column of light had originated. His head whirled and he felt a sudden attack of nausea, like lying down when very drunk. Weird visions fleeted through his mind – the vast bulk of Nennifer as transparent as a glass maze; magnified views of one part of it, then another. Distant cries carried to him as if the people were standing close by. Then the enormous building was cut into curving slices and slowly forced apart by a boiling white nothingness.
It had to be an hallucination, but how come he could still think clearly? Klarm let out a cry of disbelief. Nish blinked, turned towards the dwarf scrutator and the vision was gone.
Klarm raised his right arm, pointing with one finger. With wrenching shrieks, like blades piercing his eardrums, Nennifer was sliced into dozens of segments along the spiralling planes he’d seen earlier. For a moment the segments stood in place, slightly offset from each other, their edges as sharp and sheer as razor cuts. It wasn’t right; it could not be real; but there they stood.
Then in an instant the planes or dimensions shifted, but Nish couldn’t take that in – his mind refused to believe his eyes. He doubled over, trying to retch out the head-spinning nausea.
Irisis wiped his face with his coat sleeve. ‘Are you all right?’
He had to lean on her for a moment. Nennifer still stood but the segments had been rearranged, as if they had been withdrawn into another dimension, shuffled like a deck of cards then put back in place. Curve lay perfectly against curve but Nennifer was no longer rectangular. It now resembled a spoked wheel and some of the segments – the layers of the original building – were exposed like slices through a cake.
The air shimmered and the front of the building warped as though a distorting lens had passed along it. Dust devils whirled up. Sections here and there, now unsupported, crumbled to rubble, while the rest of the edifice stood as solidly as if it had been built that way. In the brilliant moonlight, people could be seen at the windows, up on the battlements and in sections that had been sliced open.
The subterranean noises became a grinding roar that blocked out every other sound. Nish smelt the earthy pungency of ground-up rock. Clouds of dust billowed out, obscuring parts of the building, and by the time it began to clear they were all coated.
‘Did the amplimet do all that?’ whispered Flydd, his self-possession gone.
‘The Council didn’t throw Nennifer down,’ Klarm replied shakily.
The ground shook again, hurling men and women from the battlements. One of the surviving front doors was flung wide and people – servants, soldiers, mancers in capes and gowns – boiled out of it, fleeing for their lives. Others climbed out of every hole and crack, threading the front of Nennifer with