Ian Irvine - Alchymist

He looked uncertain, as if not used to asking favours. The great mancer was vulnerable too. 'Will Nish come, do you think?'

'I'll make sure he does.'

'Tell him to bring his artificer's tools.'

'He has none. He escaped Snizort with just the rags on his back.'

Yggur frowned. 'Instruct him to go to my lower tool room and select what he needs. We may have to take a construct apart. What about you, Irisis?'

I'll be there, if the scrutator will release me.' 'You said you had no master,' Yggur reminded her. She turned away. 'I meant it in a different way.' 'Ah, how you use words.'

Flangers went with them too, and Inouye to pilot the air-floater. She was as meek and quiet as ever, though once or twice, when she moved the controller arm and the machine responded more precisely than before, Nish thought he detected the faintest of smiles. Yggur had worked his magic there as well, to Flydd's irritation. Flydd did not come. He had planned to refuse but Yggur hadn't invited him. The other passenger was Eiryn Muss, whom Flydd was sending back to Lauralin, where he could be useful.

'How long to Snizort, Inouye?' Yggur said as they floated up from the yard and turned south-east.

'Depends on the wind, surr. If it's strong behind us, we might be there in fifteen hours. If against us, it could take two days.'

He studied the sky. 'Hard to tell what it's like up there. There's not a cloud to be seen.'

The trip was uneventful, the winds light and variable but generally assisting them They flew all afternoon and most of the night, arriving over the battlefield Sround five in the morning. Dawn was still some way off and there was no moon; the stars barely illuminated the hummocky ground.

'The smell …' said Inouye faintly.

Eleven weeks had gone by, and the maggots and scavengers had reduced the unburnt bodies to bone, sinew and hide, yet still the battlefield stank of its dead. The Aachim had buried their dead deep, but the other remains lay where they'd fallen. The stench brought it all back to Nish: the knee-deep, bloody mud, the futility of war. He put his hands over his nose and breathed shallowly. It helped, if only a little.

Yggur laid one big hand on his shoulder. 'The sooner we begin, the sooner we can leave this place.' He checked something concealed in his fingers. 'Settle down over there, Inouye, by those pointed rocks. Stay at your post while we're gone; you never know what we may encounter here. Flangers, keep the watch. Cryl-Nish and Irisis, bring your tools.' He shrugged pack onto his back.

The air-floater set down, the crusted ground crunching under the keel. Eiryn Muss slipped between the ropes and was gone without a goodbye. They followed Yggur over the side. An early autumn frost crackled underfoot. He moved purposefully towards a hump about fifty paces distant, which turned out to be a wrecked clanker. The oily smell reminded Nish of his time as an artificer.

The mancer muttered to himself and a light glowed in his hand. He strode off to another hump. This one was a construct, tilted on its side with solidified mud holding it in place.

'Keep watch,' said Yggur curtly.

For what? Nish thought. A thousand lyrinx could be out there and we wouldn't see them.

Yggur made ghost fire in his palm and held it up to the base of the construct while he walked around the machine. 'It's so like the original. Why, I wonder?'

'Perhaps they felt it was perfect as it was,' said Irisis.

'The Aachim's work is their art and they seldom make two objects exactly the same way. Rulke was their most bitter enemy, so to copy his creation must have been bile to them. Why did they not remake it in their own image?'

'Perhaps they were afraid to,' said Nish. 'If they did not understand …'

'Yes,' said Yggur. 'They've not been able to solve the secret of flight, which can only mean one thing — they didn't understand what they were doing. They copied his work blindly, afraid to make changes in case they modified something vital. We've found their weakness.'

He went round it several times, studying everything, then prised open the hatch and climbed inside. A few seconds later he was out again, gagging.

'There's a rotting corpse in there. We'll have to find another.'

And burned underneath,' added Nish, 'doubtless destroying what we came for.'

Yggur leapt down and set off across the rutted field, breathing heavily. They followed him in silence. Dawn was dabbing patches of colour on the eastern sky by the time they found another construct. This one was a wreck, the metal skin torn open and curled back on itself, the hatch completely gone and even the underside smashed in.

'I doubt I'll find what I'm looking for here,' said Yggur, but he inspected it as carefully as the first. He did not spend much time in this one either.

'There was a fire.' He wiped sooty hands on his cloak. 'It looks like the drive mechanism burst open. What's not burned has melted. Even the bones inside are charcoal.' Standing up on the shooter's platform, he scanned the surroundings. 'There's another. We'll have to be careful. The lyrinx may still keep an eye on this place.'

That clanker was also ruined, and the one after. 'This could take days,' Nish said gloomily.

'Why don't we go up in the air-floater?' said Irisis. 'I've seen this place enough times from the air to be able to find you a construct.'

'It'll tell everyone within five leagues that we're here,' said Yggur, 'but I suppose we've got no choice.'

They floated over the walls of Snizort. 'The Aachim constructs were concentrated to the west and north-west,' said Irisis. 'Over there.' She pointed west. 'I can see hundreds of them, close together.'

The humps were clearly visible, and in the middle they saw a magnificent pavilion of golden sandstone, its carven dome standing on seven columns. In the distance a creek, dry save for a few small pools, meandered between the hills.

'That structure wasn't there before,' said Irisis.

'It'll be a memorial to the Aachim dead,' said Yggur. 'So much death! On a dark night the ghosts will be thick as mist.'

Nish snorted. 'I don't believe in ghosts.'

Nor did I, until I took pilgrimage to places where I'd sent armies to their deaths. My Second Army in Bannador; the thousand of my finest who fell in Elludore Forest. I wept for their lost souls, Nish. As will you, should you ever revisit Gumby Marth, or any other place where men's lives were in your keeping.' He went down the back to speak to Inouye.

'Cheerful company, isn't he,' said Irisis, though she couldn't help thinking of the mancer she'd obliterated on the aqueduct at the manufactory. What hopes had she had? What dreams? What fears all too brutally realised? 'Bloody mancers!' They strolled after him. 'Down there, I think, Inouye' said Yggur. The pilot moved the steering arm and released a little floater gas. The machine had just begun to sink when she turned around. 'Something's there, Lord Yggur.'

He did not correct her. Yggur seemed to be sniffing the air, his head questing this way and that. 'I sense it, too. It's .., a kind of defence, or protection! 'Against what?' said Nish.

'I can't say, but it's likely to cause us some trouble.' 'Can't you break it?'

'Only a fool would break a magical defence without understanding what it was for, or who put it there.' 'What's that?' hissed Irisis. 'Where?'

'Way over to the west, by that loop of the creek. See the smoke?' She reached out blindly for the spyglass. Nish put it in her hand. 'Can you see what it is?' 'A camp fire. A big one, and wagons pulled by clankers, though they're the oddest clankers I've ever seen.' 'What's odd about them?' asked Yggur sharply. 'They're clankers below, but above they look like shacks.' 'Nothing to do with the scrutators, then,' said Nish. Appearances are everything to them.'