Ian Irvine - Chimaera

‘Just the artists and recorders,’ said Irisis. ‘His own people from Nennifer won’t dare talk.’

High above, Ghorr’s rope had been looped over the side of the air-dreadnought while the artificers unwound it from the partly dismantled windlass. They fed the slack onto a hand windlass, which spun under the load, tearing the handles out of the attendants’ grasp. Ghorr dropped a couple of spans before being brought up with a tooth-snapping jerk. He squealed in fright, then roared at his officers to take personal charge. A pair of burly captains hurled the attendants out of the way, took hold of the winch and began to wind furiously. Ghorr rose into the windy zone, where a gust sent him swinging through a long arc. He yelled at his officers, who wound harder, but he swung the other way into the path of three witnesses who were being lifted in a rope basket from the other end of the air-dreadnought.

‘Get out of the way!’ he shouted, but they could do nothing to avoid him. Ghorr smashed into the basket, his chair began to spin, came back the other way, and the basket and chair whirled around and around each other as their ropes spun together.

The chief scrutator tried to rotate his rope chair the other way but it wouldn’t go. The amphitheatre gave a convulsive heave that snapped the cables as taut as wires and pulled Ghorr’s air-dreadnought down by a good span and a half. Nish, Irisis and Klarm were thrown to the canvas.

‘It’s going,’ Ghorr cried. ‘Pull me up, then cut the cable.’

Nish picked himself up. Ghorr’s captains were trying to heave the twisted ropes apart but they wouldn’t budge.

‘Cut them loose!’ said Ghorr.

A shiver went through everyone on the air-dreadnought, as well as the witnesses crowded on the amphitheatre. The officer in charge of Ghorr’s air-dreadnought drew himself up. ‘Those are the recorders , Chief Scrutator,’ he called frostily.

‘And doing their duty to the end,’ Irisis said softly. ‘Look, the blonde one is writing her record even now.’

Ghorr’s reply could not be heard, though his stance said it all. There would be a penalty for that defiance. He threw his cloak off, followed by the securing rope harness, and climbed onto the sides of his rope chair, which swayed dangerously back and forth.

‘What’s he doing?’ said Nish.

‘He’s trying to untangle it himself,’ said Scrutator Klarm. ‘It can’t be done one-handed. He’ll fall.’

Ghorr stood up, hooking his injured arm around the rope with a gasp of pain, and reached up.

‘He’ll never get enough leverage,’ said Klarm. ‘Not on a moving chair.’

The wind was whistling through the rigging of the air-dreadnoughts, whose sides were crowded with staring people. The witnesses on the amphitheatre deck were equally silent and still.

The twisted ropes, with their human cargo, began to swing like a pendulum. It had grown very cold. Ghorr reached up, again and again, and his hand went back and forth. He wasn’t trying to free the ropes – he was sawing at the rope holding up the recorder’s basket.

The recorders realised it at the same moment but none of the women screamed or pleaded. They stood up, holding their scrolls with simple dignity, and kept writing.

‘There’s an image that will live in the Histories after we’re gone,’ said Irisis soberly.

Their end wasn’t long in coming. The ends sprang out of their rope, which began to untwist under the weight, before pulling free.

‘If they hit the deck they may still survive,’ said Irisis hopefully.

Nobody contradicted her, though Nish knew that such a fall, a good thirty spans, must kill them. The basket fell, the three women still standing and recording all the way down. It plunged through the mist, hit hard near the edge of the amphitheatre, the women crumpled into a mess; then basket, rope and contents went over the side.

‘Up!’ said Ghorr in a hollow voice, sliding back into his chair and fastening the ropes about him.

The crew of his air-dreadnought did not move.

‘Up, damn you, or you’ll all taste a scrutator’s quisitory.’

They remained as silent and still as the figures on a painted jug. The crew must have been as shocked as those on the deck.

‘He crossed the line,’ said Irisis. ‘He’s finished.’

‘Not if he reaches his craft before the other scrutators do theirs.’

Klarm turned a strained face to them. ‘I’ve served Ghorr for many years, and he would not go against the best interests of the Council. It’s all that’s kept us alive, the past dark decade.’ He didn’t sound as though he believed it any longer.

‘His actions give the lie to that argument,’ said Nish.

‘The chief scrutator knows much that we do not. He always has the interests of the world at heart. He must have had a reason. He must …’ Klarm closed his eyes as if in pain.

The mist on the amphitheatre was almost gone now, revealing five suspended baskets and another eight nets bursting with people, crammed together like fish in a trawl net. All hung in mid-air while the shocked winch-hands waited to see what was going to happen.

Nish noticed a hanging chair moving slowly, almost furtively, up behind one of the nets.

‘Is that Scrutator Fusshte?’ Nish squinted at the meagre, dark-clad figure in the chair.

‘It is.’ Irisis shuddered. ‘Hello?’

Ghorr was jerked down, then up. He stood up in his chair, cloak trailing in the strengthening wind, and began shouting up to his air-dreadnought. He pointed at Fusshte.

‘What’s he saying?’ said Nish.

‘I can’t make it out,’ Irisis replied.

‘He’s called Fusshte a traitor,’ said Klarm. Then, as if he could not believe what he was hearing, ‘Ghorr has ordered his men to shoot him.’ He knuckled his eyes with his big hands and stared up at the drama, disbelievingly. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’

‘Ghorr knows what will happen to him if Fusshte takes over,’ said Irisis. ‘And surely Fusshte must take over, now.’

‘It doesn’t do to predict the will or the ways of the Council,’ Klarm rasped.

Fusshte signalled to his people to stop lifting. He stood up in his hanging chair and bared his meagre chest, offering himself as a target to any soldier who dared shoot down a member of the Council. Looking up to the soldiers in his air-dreadnought, Fusshte held out his arms, as though addressing them in the speech of his life.

‘He looks so calm; so measured,’ said Irisis. ‘The loathsome little worm.’

‘But not a coward,’ said Klarm. ‘The prize is within his reach and he’s risen above himself to grasp it. Any one of Ghorr’s loyal guard might well shoot him down, and Fusshte knows it. Yet he dares to defy his chief. He risks all to gain all.’

‘To be chief scrutator when Ghorr falls,’ said Nish.

‘Aye. Fusshte has always wanted that. He’s served as a loyal deputy for a decade, and even now he won’t cut down his chief, or repudiate him. He simply offers the contrast to the Council and the witnesses, and allows them to make their own choice. Sometimes a champion will fail at the highest hurdle while the underdog rises to it. Fusshte, it seems, is such a man.’

‘Yet a worm nonetheless,’ said Irisis, ‘and no more worthy of the honour than Ghorr, for all Fusshte’s courage. What’s going to happen now?’

No one fired. Ghorr’s men began hauling him up, furiously. Fusshte closed his shirt and sat down while his attendants did the same, as if it were a race and whichever of them reached their craft first would win the Council as well as the day. Nets fell from the air-dreadnoughts and the remaining soldiers and witnesses fought to get into them.

‘You’d better get to your work, if you have a plan to save yourselves,’ said Klarm. ‘The instant those nets lift off, they’ll cut the cables from above.’