He found the earplugs in her pack, pushed them in and put the earmuffs back. Ullii sat up and said something. He had no idea what. The noise died away. They looked over the ridge. The fall of rock had stopped though the ice was pressing against the mountain right where Ullii had been leading them. The ground shook, several times.

With a roar that dwarfed the previous fall, a larger section of the mountain cracked off. There was another monumental fall of rock and ice. They watched it thunder down. A quarter of an hour later, when the glacier had resumed its normal note, Nish said, ‘I wonder if it’s safe now?’

Ullii must have thought so, for she began to head up the slope towards the fall. They came over the cusp of the ridge and stopped. Nish could see right inside the mountain. It was like a gash in the side of a termite mound, revealing the living cells within.

‘A city inside the mountain!’ He saw several levels and grand, highly decorated columns. ‘So that’s where she went! But why? Is it a lyrinx city?’

‘I don’t think so!’ She shivered.

Dare he risk the rest of the mountain coming down? What of Ullii’s other seeings: the flying lyrinx, and that unnamed horror?

‘I can see her,’ hissed Ullii.

He took no notice; she’d said that many times.

She shook him. ‘I can see her, Nish. Up there!’

Following her arm he saw two figures at the entrance. They were too far away for his eyes, though he did not doubt Ullii. For all the difficulty of working with her, he had never known her to be wrong.

‘Come on! We can take her!’

Whatever impulse had driven her this far now evaporated. Ullii curled up between two rocks. ‘Too late. Too, too late!’

‘Well, stay here!’ he snapped. The opportunity, that he had never dared hope for, had come. Tiaan was alone but for the child. All he had to do was grab Tiaan, carry her to the balloon, fire it up with tar spirits and get away. It would make up for everything. He would be a hero. Nish ran.

As he approached the ragged tear in the mountain, which exposed three levels of the city inside, Nish began to see bright flashes of light. The figures disappeared.

Ullii screamed and came pelting up to him. ‘Don’t leave me!’ she cried, flinging herself into his arms. ‘It’s coming!’

Nish did not ask her what. Such pronouncements seldom resulted in anything he could get a grip on. He kept on and she followed, treading on his heels.

They went in through the lower tear, found a spiral stair in reasonably good condition and crept up it. Up two flights, they came out on the level where Tiaan and the child had been. The floor, broken near the entrance, was strewn with mounds of rubble and ice, enough to fill a quarry.

The sight that met his eyes would live in Nish’s mind until the day he died.

SIXTY-ONE

Haani was tugging at her arm. ‘Tiaan, quickly!’ Tiaan got up, feeling frozen solid. A vast, crackling roar surrounded her. Blue icicles hung from the port-all. She smelt dust and vaguely recalled the sound of falling rubble.

Haani tugged her around. ‘Look what’s happened.’

The amplimet had gone dull but the twisticon was ablaze, colours chasing themselves around its surface, inside, then out, then inside again without any break. The vertical doughnut looked as if it was on fire. The annulus of light from it focussed to a point above Tiaan’s head, then spread out again. It had torn a hole through the wall, and in the middle of the vast hall beyond, some hundreds of paces away, made another ring that stretched from floor to ceiling. Air shrieked through it. It must be the gate, but nothing had come out.

Something flashed into her mind, a fragment from the time she had been unconscious: screams, explosions of light and fire, and cries of utmost agony, as if people were being turned inside out. It vanished just as swiftly, but what had followed did not. A background wailing; thousands of souls in grief. Tiaan felt a chill of horror. What had happened to the Aachim in the gate? Where had they ended up?

Up the far end she saw light where there had been no light before. A tongue of blue-white ice had punched through the side of the mountain. Had she made a dreadful mistake? ‘The little fool has made the zyxibule the wrong way round!’ Vithis had said. What had he meant?

‘Do you think we should run away?’ Haani clutched Tiaan’s hand as the ice scraped and squealed towards them.

‘I don’t know.’ The ice stopped moving. The floor shook twice, and with a rumble more of the mountain wall caved in. Rubble exploded everywhere. Part of the floor collapsed. Most of the ice and rubble slid back out.

They ran towards the opening. It was bitterly cold, for the great glacier that curved around the side of the mountain immediately below them had risen, pushed up against the wall, cracked it open and subsided again. The rock beneath had been ground off like the surface of a road.

Outside they could hear the crack of ice falling, the thunder of its landing far below. Tiaan shivered. Her blouse, pantaloons and sandals were quite inadequate here.

‘Something’s happening back there,’ said Haani.

The great annulus had gone dark. Shadows danced on the wall opposite.

‘He’s coming!’ cried Tiaan, embracing the child. ‘Oh, he’s coming, Haani!’

She ran forward. A hollow boom shook the floor. A dark shape appeared in the base of the doughnut-shaped gate. The shape pushed, concentric rainbows rippling around it as if it was held back by a transparent barrier.

‘It can’t get through,’ said Haani.

There came a brilliant white flash, followed by thunder. Quakes shook the floor and a flat disc of mist condensed in the plane of the gate. The dark shape pushed through it and, as suddenly, the mist was sucked back the other way.

‘What is it?’ whispered Haani.

‘I … don’t know. Perhaps it’s some kind of clanker.’

‘What is a clanker?’

Of course the child would not know. There were no clankers in this land. The war had not come this far, yet. ‘It is a cart that moves by itself, without horse or ox or deer to pull it.’

‘Oh!’

It began to emerge, a long, tapering snout of shining blue-black metal, rising to a cockpit ringed about with circular rails, covered by a metal dome like a lid. Wisps of yellow smoke clung to it; fumes dragged out by its passage. The body was long and broad, with bulbous flares and inexplicable indentations and protrusions. The back was cut straight down. It looked like something made by a sculptor, but if so, the greatest genius in the world. It looked deadly, but it was a work of art too.

‘It is like a clanker,’ Tiaan said to herself, ‘only larger. A dozen people could fit inside, and all their gear. How can they work metal so beautifully?’ Beside it, the manufactory clankers would look like the work of a village blacksmith. She longed to see inside it and know how it was made.

‘But it hasn’t got any wheels,’ said Haani.

There was nothing under it but a dusty, yellow-glowing blur, and it floated well above the floor. Moreover, it did not make the groaning rattle that alerted the whole world to the coming of a clanker. All she could hear was a low whine and an occasional hiss.

‘It … It’s a construct!’ said Tiaan. ‘It must be.’

The construct emerged from the gate, turned the other way, back towards them, and stopped. Another appeared behind it, followed by a third. Tiaan felt an indefinable foreboding. These vehicles seemed ominous rather than welcoming.

‘Haani,’ she hissed. ‘Go behind me. Scuttle around into the ice and hide. Don’t come out until I call you.’

‘But Tiaan, what’s the matter?’

‘Do as you’re told! At once!’

Haani sucked in her breath, gave a muffled sob and crept away. Out of the corner of her eye Tiaan saw her scuttle across the rubble-strewn floor to her left. Tiaan crouched down behind a fallen column.