Full of horror at what I’d watched and still more unanswered questions, three guards took back to Rusper’s quarters. Those three became a night-watch in the corridor. Tazen came awake like a bolt when I came in and sat tall on the rug, but I was too spent and sore and sick to pay him attention. I could barely walk straight, let alone hold a thought, what with that stump still puking blood inside my mind. Along with the echoes of all the things that Hetch had said; all the things they’d wrung out of him without mercy.
Again, that pity.
Did Rusper pity him too? Though he’d allowed it—ordered it, I guessed—would he have made him suffer like that if he’d had another choice?
I don’t remember reaching the chair or pulling the sheepskin round myself; only the Senera’s silhouette in the dwarf’s blood behind my eyes.
Pain woke me, of course, my angry throat prizing me out of nightmares. Tazen nudged his snout at my leg-cast. Plamen’s dog, I told myself—not Plamen the man. His nudging stoked all my other pains to life, though having slept in the chair hadn’t helped them either. I got up cringing and staggered through into the sleeping chamber. I should have used Rusper’s pallet; again he’d not been here.
I went to the window and pulled the shutters open, flinching like an idiot as the sunlight stabbed me in the face. It was midday. People were strolling down there in the extension of the courtyard. I heard wheels turning out of sight. Still ignoring the dog, I walked across the room and opened the door. Two guards stood to attention, both looking straight at my hair. ‘I know it’s white!’ I said. ‘Where’s Caliph Symphin?’ At my tone their faces cycled through a few expressions: first alarm, then affront, amazement, before all three fell behind their duty. ‘Please,’ I said.
‘The Viceroy will soon be returning from council,’ one said. ‘You’re to remain in his quarters and await him.’
‘What—?’ I began. ‘But I’m . . . hungry. And I’ve got duties in the Deep.’
‘Food will be brought,’ the other said. ‘You’re not required in the Deep. Wait for the Viceroy.’
I closed the door. Ugh! Rusper knew me well enough, then, that he’d given them the answers to all the things I would say. But how wasn’t it safe for me in the Deep? How could I not be needed there? Pintle and Gudgeon were sure to give me trouble for this!
Food came as promised. Meats for the dog, and for me some ramsons stewed with the tahini I liked. Also a decanter of bruhm, the sweet ale. I made the ale last all the rest of the afternoon, though that didn’t stop me snarling at him when he arrived. ‘So am I a prisoner too?’
‘Not a prisoner, Flint. Chink in my armour. A tool to be used against me. Did you enjoy what I did to Hetch?’ I smoothed the annoyance from my face, but it was still hard to look at him after his mention of that. ‘No,’ he answered for me. ‘So know they’ll do much worse to you with half a chance. It may have escaped your notice, boy, but you’ve become somewhat easier to single out in a crowd.’
‘What about my duties?’
‘They’ll keep,’ he said. ‘The Deepworks will survive another day of your absence.’
‘But I can’t just sit here doing nothing.’
That won a ghost of a smile. ‘You won’t have to much longer. But for now, please try to trust me. And try, please, to understand.’
Idly he leafed through some papers on his desk before settling his body into the sheepskin chair. As I squatted on the rug with my back to Tazen’s belly, he dozed a while, face making constant little twitches as if resisting a full sleep. He looked cadaverous now: cheeks hollow, skin waxy and pale, the angry redness at his eyes contrasted. Beyond fatigued and growing thinner by the day, I could easily have believed him about eighty years old.
His own meal was brought later and he ate it in a silence I didn’t disturb. ‘Any bruhm still about?’ he asked when he’d finished.
‘No, I drank it.’
‘Shame.’
Night fell. I closed the shutters, screwed open both gauges on the triglycerate oven and sat on the floor at his feet again. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked him at last.
The sigh came from his bones; became a bitter, voiceless chuckle. Slowly patting the arm of the chair, he said: ‘The Deep’s critically unstable.’
‘But you opened the pipeworks.’
‘I had no choice.’
It was true, he said, he’d put measures in place – the best he and his finest engineers could devise – to keep the system from failing when it was forced open on royal command. These emergency tanks, extension conduits and sluices, built at speed while I’d been out in the desert, would take some of the burden off the weakened central channels; enough to now have three at full capacity. There were also intricate additions to the aqueduct network that distributed the water through the city. ‘Arterials-I, II and IV are open, holding,’ he said. ‘III, as you know, may never open again.’
This time I decided not to look or feel guilty at that, even though I knew he’d also righted the broken Arte-III. ‘Lot of extra metal though,’ I shrugged.
An absent nod.
It wasn’t all. Three quarters of the Hub was still underwater, he said, flooded by the backwash from the river that I’d found under the Spectres. The emergency pipes drew on that floodwater too, but couldn’t drain it from the column.
‘But the aqueducts,’ I said, not understanding. ‘Thought they’d be pulling up that water while the Arterials were off. For the supply lines. Then you could fix up the haemorrhage in Arte-III again.’
Rusper puffed, ‘It hasn’t stopped!’
‘What?’
He explained. Of course: the flooding from the Spectre river hadn’t stopped coming; that backwash ongoing. Or at least, as Rusper told me, just kept balancing itself. Through Arte-III’s haemorrhage, the volume of the flood in the Hub was linked to some or other of that river’s water levels. Zone Three: that was its level – the height the flood had reached – and the height to which it would simply keep coming back to. There was no out-siphoning its inflow—‘Not now the Shield have eyes in there,’ said Rusper. ‘Along with the soldiers on Zone Two, a Shieldman guards the Mains Wheels at the ceiling, at all hours. The Satrap will not have them touched.’
That made me burn. The Iron Shield had no business in the Hub or in the Deep. I must have bristled.
‘Digging level too,’ said Rusper, smiling as if enjoying my annoyance.
‘Shieldmen?’
I knew the reason they were watching him like this: Amyra, holding him in line. The Deepworks had also been restarted, though it wasn’t safe. Just as I’d heard announced in public, the Satrap wanted his Deep by the end of the wyle of Gathat, and that meant finishing fifth level in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of sappers were down there, Rusper said, even now—working by night—and the work progressing fast.
‘Too fast,’ he added. ‘One pick struck wrong, one line dislodged or ruptured, and we could start a chain reaction of collapse.’
‘You mean fifth level?’
‘The whole Deep. More even,’ he said. ‘The Hub’s full weight was huge enough without that flood’s millions of tonnes now bearing down. And if the Hub goes . . .’
‘The Builders’ craft is strong enough, you always say that. It’ll hold.’ I wanted to believe that.
‘We can’t know for sure. The Rath somehow ruptured their pipes, remember. We simply cannot be too careful. And now there isn’t time for careful.’
Life had been so simple, fetching water from our humble River Elm. No going back to that, I knew, or forgetting the majesty of what the Builders had left here in Antissa.
But as I sat thinking of destruction—those ancient greenstone walls and pipes, the genius levels of Meck and Symphin, even the citadel and city sucked down into the desert—he changed the subject. I put destruction from my mind and paid attention, knowing my people’s lives hung in the balance more than ever. The struggle had begun: a struggle for the power Rusper held and others wanted. Rusper Symphin. Engineer, Viceroy of Vorth. Exiles’ protector.
He’d told the Sanhedrin today that over the months of the Deepworks the Royal Guild had unearthed proof of much deeper construction: a vast underground network of passages and levels in the north of the desert, in the style of the Builders. By means of his original “scouting” efforts, High Command had found that Rath had accessed parts of that network and reached the fortress in this way. True to my report, Rusper had said that Shen Drumbar in Verunia was one such point of access. As was Chidh Eshipas in Laudassa, now under direct threat of attack.
‘That isn’t true,’ I interrupted.
He stared back blankly. ‘I know.’
‘What about the Spectres?’
The blank look fell; he shook his head. He’d not said anything about the Spectres; not yet. What he had done was give official estimates of enemy numbers as near ten thousand, which was far more than had been believed after the army’s first retreat. ‘As for Laudassa,’ he went on, ‘the Sanhedrin now knows that I have authorised deployment of a garrison there.’
‘That is true though.’ Was I being stupid?
‘Yes it is, Flint. However, High Commander Plamen is not the man fronting that garrison. Is he.’
I froze, understanding now. That was too dangerous, it must be, telling the Sanhedrin such a lie; letting them believe Plamen still lived and presided over a garrison to the south. Not just a garrison, either. Rusper had layered lie upon lie. So far, he’d said, the Rath appeared most active under Laudassa. Sure enough, several viziers – including Dranz and Ramed – had accused Rusper of recklessness in placing the High Commander himself so close to enemy lines with the army not yet mobilised.
‘Even those two spitting cobras held their tongues,’ he went on, ‘when I revealed that we are sitting in the middle. They all know, now, that Antissa is the nexus of the network. Naturally that changed their tune. Not that they said so, of course, but such makes the idea of Plamen’s presence on the extremities of the network, luring numbers away from the fortress, a good deal more attractive. Not to mention, for now, justifying the decentralisation of armed forces as crucial to defence of the fortress.’
‘So you’re not breaking the Satrap’s rules?’
He smiled, ‘Exactly.’
The move had caught the First Circle off-guard. Might a haggard army of four thousand stand against a horde of more than twice that; a horde that could emerge from any part of the northern desert, at any time, just as I’d said? And if it didn’t, could the Viceroy still defend a fortress capital from a force that had undermined and surrounded its foundations? Plamen, it seemed, had been so close to his ends. And while I knew that I couldn’t see the stakes as clearly as Rusper could, it was clear enough what the Sanhedrin could see.
‘Fear, at least, they understand. So we feed it,’ Rusper said. And he had. As if with the ink of their own nightmares, he had drawn it in their minds: a tentacled beast of invisible doom stretching right under their feet. I wished I’d been there to see their faces. ‘Their precious capital, where they’ve so long safely dwelled with disregard for the desert, is in immediate peril. And now every one of them knows it.’
Sanhedrin would reconvene in two days.
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My throat felt better the next day but my body ached worse from the dunes. Still confined to Rusper’s quarters, I spent the morning with Meck’s papers; going over his diagrams again, now with new eyes. Not just the Deeping Sphere but the other cryptic drawings in the hope they might mean more now. They didn’t. How had he known about the sphere? And if he’d known about the sphere, then had he known about the Roads? Had he been down there—seen them?
Why’d he not told anyone?
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I reached for Rusper’s pen and unscrewed it. He’d showed me before. Inside, coiled round the ink compartment, was a strip of torn yellow parchment. A piece, just a torn-off shred, of the famous Theorem formulated by the mathematician Azal, which Meck had passed on to Rusper. Apparently, Gaspar Meck had been the first to solve the problem – at least the part of it contained by this one fragment. Did it mean something, I wondered? Rusper didn’t think so. One by one I let my eyes crawl down the columns of figures, all finely penned in a flowery style that seemed impossible for writing numbers. And symbols. Yes, some of those symbols did look like Builder script . . .
Twice through the day, I checked that the guards were still in the corridor. Always they were, though shifts changed. A meal was brought and I ate it without attention to the food. Tazen ate too. Rusper had said to expect a delivery of new swathes and other sundries but they never came. I played with the dog, but despite his enormous energy, he grew bored with play quickly. Army dog.
I sat at Rusper’s desk, stared out the window; at the massive cumulus clouds that never brought rain. I toyed with the idea of climbing down the ivy trellis but scrapped the thought when I saw Shieldmen down there too.
As morning turned into afternoon I found some sheets of parchment, a stick of charcoal and some inks. As well as I could remember, I started mapping what I’d seen of the Spectres Deep – its tunnels, landings and levels. Then the Deeping Sphere itself: not as Meck had drawn it, but as I’d seen it myself, and this time with all the measurements he’d left out. In a separate diagram I drew the sphere’s core-unit controls, labelling each part with its function, at least as far as I understood. There was still so much I didn’t understand about how it worked, so much I wanted to know, although I knew it was unlikely I’d ever see the machine again. I began a fourth diagram then, detailing everything I knew of the Builders’ Roads. But soon, without a proper map of the northern desert to work with, I got frustrated.
By the late afternoon I’d put away the inks and charcoal and rolled up all my new drawings inside the scroll-tube with Meck’s. I sat in the big sheepskin chair and thought about how strange it was to not have the Sight anymore. I wondered about the ghost and how – whatever he was – he’d thought he served me. If only I’d known why he’d thought that, maybe I could have had a bit more time; more time, at least, to fully map out the Roads through the Sight. Instead he’d rejected me. Taken the Sight away, unmade the Disc and turned me into a freak.
Sharp words and footsteps jolted me out of my brooding. Two men burst into the room and I saw Rusper’s chest deflate as he saw me. I leapt up out of the chair as he urgently swept across the room, shooting glances at walls and corners. Behind him Captain Mondric gave instructions to the guards, stepped in and closed the door behind him.
‘Were we followed?’ Rusper threw back.
‘Not this time.’
‘What’s happened?’ I said, fully expecting to be ignored.
So it surprised me when Mondric looked at me squarely. ‘The Iron Shield has placed the southern caliphs under house arrest,’ he said, ‘to prevent their leaving the capital.’
I didn’t understand. ‘Were they going to?’
‘With their regiments, yes, in light of the enemy activity in Laudassa.’ Which didn’t exist, I remembered. ‘It would appear our Flag-Senera has begun to take a firmer hand.’
‘Has anyone been here?’ Rusper rattled off in my direction. ‘Anyone at all?’
‘No,’ I said, following him into the sleeping chamber and adding from the doorway, ‘Just me.’
‘Not Zeek then? She was to bring your clothes.’ He grabbed a handful of linen from the pallet, dragged it clear and flung it against the window’s wall.
‘Zeek’s not been here,’ I told him quickly, then pressed myself into the doorframe to let him bluster back through. He swooped over his desk now, hands hovering above his papers.
‘Did you touch these?’
‘I used some of your parchment,’ I confessed. ‘Not the good sheets.’
‘Bahh! Never mind that!’ he flapped. Grimacing through tears from the sunlight, he turned from that window and fumbled his goggles into place over his eyes. His body stilled for a moment. Then he launched at the big chair and pulled the sheepskin away. The great pelt landed on the floor in a puff of dust.
Mondric sounded tired: ‘Symphin, they haven’t—’
‘They haven’t,’ echoed Rusper as he leaned against the chair. I couldn’t get my head around all of this panic. There were guards outside – who could have entered?
Rusper circled the chair and flopped his body into it with far more weight than he seemed to have. For a while Mondric stood silent before speaking again. His tone was diplomatic. ‘Perhaps it’s time you recalled Bardon.’
‘No. Not yet.’
‘I understand you’d respect his wishes. But to do so now . . .’
‘I won’t let him become another hostage against me.’
‘If he truly is your ally, you’ll need him close.’
A soft knocking drew the goggles to the door. With a frown, Mondric waved us both to stay, and went to answer. ‘Who calls?’ he said through the door.
A guard replied—‘A servant brings clothes, Captain’—and the door was jerked open to reveal Zeek’s wide-eyed face. Mondric quickly ushered her in and closed the door after her. She stood with an armful of clothing, including the new swathes I’d been promised, and blinked at the sheepskin that lay rumpled on the floor. Then at Rusper’s lenses.
Which looked away from her. ‘Yes girl, put them away.’
Dart-like, she scurried to the bureau and pulled a drawer. But it was stiff; she yanked it twice. And again.
‘Flint, a hand! Or I’ll blow a gasket at that noise!’
Nervous of Rusper’s mood, I hurried over to Zeek’s side and slid my fingers through the ring to pull the upper drawer towards me at an angle. It was strange, and yet it wasn’t, that the Chief Engineer couldn’t have his own furniture repaired. With an awkward tug, I jigged and pulled it open. Then held my hands out for the clothes. Apart from swathes, they weren’t at all what I’d expected. All of these items were tailored to my size, and yet some seemed to fit a higher station. For some reason, though, the girl wasn’t handing me the pile. She wasn’t moving and her eyes were even wider than ever. On instinct I followed them down.
No sooner had the black thing climbed the front panel of the drawer than it had crawled onto my wrist.
Shrieking, I whirled on the balls of my feet and it flew, just missing Rusper, hit the table and fell. It landed right on the sheepskin, where it scuttled up a fold and stopped on top as if parading its barbed tail before us all.
Giddily I shook and patted my arms down while Mondric strode towards the sheepskin and stooped. He cupped his hands. ‘Whip scorpion,’ he said. ‘Nasty nip of a sting, itches like a bastard the next day. Otherwise harmless.’
He’d obviously done this before: deftly pinched the bulblike tail against the body and closed his hands to pin the legs. Three strides took him to the window where he took a glance below and tossed it out.
‘Who brought your meal?’ said Rusper, goggles on me.
I shrugged, fast realising I’d been an idiot. ‘A . . . servant.’
‘Who?’ said Mondric, dusting hands on his chest.
‘I don’t know . . . didn’t know him.’
Rusper nodded, confirming my stupidity. ‘Give me the note then.’
I looked down into the drawer but there was no note. Just a flower: a thin green stem with papery leaves and purple petals. I picked it out and held it up so they could see. Mondric’s shoulders sagged. ‘That’s an Ilovish anemone,’ he breathed.
‘I saw one on the Bronze Coast,’ I said. ‘Telmadh Eflan picked it before . . .’ Wishing I hadn’t said any of that, I dropped the rest. Before Radhi. Before he’d died.
‘That flower’s a token of respect,’ said Mondric darkly, ‘for a fallen soldier.’
Eflan? No of course not. For a second, the hurt of his death stung inside me again; him and all the others whose deaths I’d caused at Drumbar. That’s why he’d picked it. But my sadness froze as this one’s message started to make sense.
Rusper’s voice was flat: ‘She knows.’
‘No she doesn’t,’ countered Mondric, even flatter. ‘The dwarf’s penned by twenty guards. She suspects.’
‘It’s enough.’
‘It’s a challenge.’ Rusper stood and went back to the desk and window and Mondric’s eyes followed him. ‘In her scheme, you are but one more caliph to be controlled, albeit one she cannot buy with promises of Eredian powers. Make your show of strength now, while it counts, or wait for the next threat.’ He paused. ‘Viceroy?’
‘Stop calling me that.’
‘It is your office,’ said the Captain, ‘and I care nothing for how poorly it suits you, Symphin. Do not expect me to sit idly as she makes a mock of royal decree.’
‘That decree is thin protection while she commands the Iron Shield, you know that.’
‘As is mine if you won’t act.’
A cool breeze wafted into the room; stirred Rusper’s hair and brocades as he looked out and skyward. ‘You’re right, Captain,’ he said almost pleasantly. ‘Let her dragoon the citadel like a war-queen. I run this city. Plamen’s ambition was a tool—a tool she used to make a tool of me. Even if she does suspect his death, the game is simpler for it. The First Circle can no longer depose me for a martial Viceroy if they believe him merely indisposed.’
I heard his cogwheels turning but the mechanics were too intricate for me. ‘What are you going to do now?’ I asked his back.
‘Wait for nothing,’ he replied. Voice like iron. The goggle-lenses swung to Mondric. ‘Have the Flag-Senera summoned.’
‘Where?’
‘Dynasty Hall.’
Mondric seemed to hang on hinges. ‘I can’t protect you if you choose to negotiate alone.’
‘Then give me an escort,’ said Rusper. I’d seldom seen him so sure. ‘Summon her.’
----------------------------------------
I was to wear the new clothes: a single-breasted jerkin of taut black fabric and leggings of the same. Five silver hooks enclosed the jerkin down the right. Supple leather boots. There was a headdress as well but I was told not to wear it. I had to let my hair be seen and thought I understood why. Rusper had decided that we couldn’t afford to show fear. And sure enough, as I took to the steps of the Dynasty Hall beside him, I felt courage. His courage. To his right walked the Captain. Four black-cape guards flanked our sides.
Through the nine towering windows the rooftops of the city were sunset-orange. The same light glanced off the marble floor, enlivening its pattern of serpents so that their golden scales seemed to curl and coil in liquid blue. The faces of past satraps watched our arrival.
From the archways straight ahead six Shieldmen strode into view led by Lieutenant Jharis. No, five. The one walking beside the Lieutenant was Amyra herself, in the same striking blue-and-white. Her gown and floor-sweeping sleeves shimmered in ways I’d never seen in any fabric and I wondered if they too had come from Ered. Her hair, as always, was a sculpture; this time her braids threaded with silvery quills that flashed cold.
Mondric halted our group. His strong voice bolstered my courage and echoed. It prompted Jharis to do the same, leaving a long space of floor between the parties.
Adjusting goggles, Rusper lanced out across the marble alone. Amyra followed suit, floating swan-like from her Shield. They met in the middle, under the statue of the first Syphus, too far away for us to hear.
And there they stood, and spoke. We watched.
They spoke for many minutes. The orange light began to dip and their two shadows leaned and lengthened. And all the while, just like the satraps on their plinths, neither Mondric nor Jharis let their eyes stray for a moment. I watched Amyra’s face, serene; the way her lips moved almost too slowly to be making any words and how she’d lift only one pencilled eyebrow at a time. More than once I thought she smiled and I wished I knew the reason. Behind her smiles was she afraid? Did she have anything to fear? Or did we, now more than ever? I let my gaze float to my right and met the eyes of Syphus II. His hateful glare, somehow carved deeper than before, shot jets of ice up through my blood.
Viceroy and Flag-Senera parted. In longer strides than usual, Rusper came back. As he passed between me and the Captain, heading out of the hall, his face gave nothing away. Nor did his pace invite questions and I knew better than to try.
----------------------------------------
The next morning I perched up in the council chamber’s balcony as the red herald called order. Though he still sashayed at the edges of the mosaic, it was clear he now presided over the assembly as Plamen had. Watching Rusper address the traitors with courtesy was strange, but there were no heckles or jeers today. He held them spellbound on the tiers. Dranz, the weasel, was still. The blue-gowned First Circle stood silent. No smiles from Amyra. The Viceroy made his announcement.
Rath had surfaced in Laudassa, in numbers that had almost overwhelmed Chidh Eshipas.
A new lie.
Defence had prevailed, pushing enemy numbers back under-ground, but had left the High Commander Plamen mortally injured.
Another lie.
Caliph Omran’s face went white between his dangling gems. Caliph Arif kept his composure. The other caliphs, those from the south, looked like mice caught in a trap and now I marked how many Shieldmen edged the hall. Amyra’s face was hard to read. Her mouth was a line, not even twitching in response when Rusper named her the new aide to the Viceroyalty in Plamen’s place. There was applause for her, half-hearted; all their thoughts elsewhere now. My heart raced too—what was he doing? Was this what they’d agreed?
Arif then lost his composure, with it the colour from his face, as Rusper spoke on of the Rath and unknown hundreds choking tunnels underneath Verunia; every day closer to finding the way into Antissa’s pipes. A way we’d already found, of course, but he didn’t say that.
He didn’t have to.
Holding the hall rapt without effort, he spoke of armaments prepared by the Royal Guild. The chrozite fusils, months in refinement, were ready for service: efficient, accurate, lethal at range. A sizeable arsenal awaited deployment in the field; enough weapons already to equip at least three units of artillery trained to use them. And, he explained, if the Deepworks were allowed to halt again, it was within the power of the Guilds to construct a battery of war machines – the army’s full compliment of engines – that could be used to draw the Rath out into the openness and heat. The Vedish forces were outnumbered, Rusper couldn’t deny that. But if the desert could be turned against the Rath, ground could be gained.
In two speeches the Sanhedrin had fallen back into Rusper’s hands. The blue-gowns conferred. Supported by three of the five caliphs present, they overruled royal decree and Rusper declared Vorth’s return to open war against the Rath.
But now I got it. Why she wasn’t smiling today, even though she’d just got more powers. Something else was in all this, and whatever it was that they’d agreed, she hadn’t seen it coming. In a loud voice, Rusper put an end to the southern caliphs’ plan of escape, detaching their regiments to defend the south. Now, all six caliphs were to be marshalled to head their regiments at war. They couldn’t stay here in safety. They would be wrested from Amyra’s eye and charms and careful control, and placed instead at the disposal of High Command.
In place of Ezra Plamen—“indisposed” to the south—that was Rusper Symphin. Viceroy, Chief Engineer, Honorary Caliph. And now Commander-in-Chief of the Mooncircle Army.