‘Oh, indeed we will, Chief Scrutator.’ Fusshte raised his voice. ‘Soldiers, Cryl-Nish Hlar still lurks below. Take him if you can, but if you can’t capture him before the amphitheatre collapses, kill him.’

NINE

Five soldiers were lowered over the far sides of the amphitheatre, well away from the flames. They fixed their harnesses to the horizontal ropes and began to inch their way across.

Nish slipped the crossbow onto his back and tied the prepared flagon to his belt. A fierce glee spurred him on. Whatever happened now, he and Ullii had given the Council a slap in the face and his friends a chance to die with dignity. Now what? Fall to his death, or see if he could do a bit more? Fight on, and if the soldiers looked like taking him, he’d jump.

‘Ullii!’ he whispered. ‘We can’t stay here.’

She didn’t move and her eyes had rolled into her head. She’d hardly budged since she’d killed T’Lisp. Had the horror of what she’d done driven Ullii mad? He shook her gently by the shoulder. She didn’t react. He shook her harder.

She slowly turned his way and her eyes rolled down. ‘It’s too late, Nish. The lattice is gone this time.’

‘You can worry about that later,’ he said. If you’re telling the truth. She’d said that before so he doubted her. ‘Come on. Up through the hole.’

To his surprise she acted at once, swinging herself up onto the smouldering deck and crouching there. ‘Keep a sharp lookout,’ he said.

‘There’s no one looking.’ Ullii reached down to him.

‘What are they doing?’

She turned her head each way, like a cat. ‘Running around like ants.’

Nish adjusted his hooks and managed to stretch a leg up onto the deck. Ullii caught his arm, the injured one, and pulled him through. ‘Down!’

He lay on his belly beside her, expecting to see soldiers advancing on them from all directions, but no one was looking towards the small hole burned by T’Lisp’s body. He saw only chaos. The vast amphitheatre deck, some hundred and fifty spans across, was wreathed in smoke and drifting mist that concealed swathes of the surface. Fumes trailed up from the canvas in a dozen places. People, or bodies, lay here and there, some twitching and thrashing, others still. Nish assumed that Ullii’s lattice-working had brought them down.

Squads of soldiers had gathered around two of the burning cables and were trying to smother the flames by wrapping lengths of canvas about them. It didn’t seem to be working. At the other two fires the deck had burned through, leaving nowhere safe to stand. Several soldiers were perched precariously on the ropes, beating at the cables, while the others milled around and an overseer shouted orders from a safe distance.

The rest of the witnesses, numbering some hundreds, had crowded onto a crescent at the far edge of the amphitheatre, as far as they could get from the fires. Squads of anxious-looking soldiers roamed back and forth, trying to keep them in order. The prisoners remained in the centre, in a pen walled with barbed ropes. A squad of Ghorr’s personal guard had their crossbows trained on them.

Nish had wondered why the soldiers hadn’t attacked in greater strength. Now he realised that there weren’t enough. Fusshte had sent more than a hundred down to Fiz Gorgo to hunt for him, and just as many must have been lifted up to the air-dreadnoughts after the trials finished. He could see fewer than a hundred on the deck, most of whom were occupied in trying to control the fires, the prisoners or the terrified witnesses.

One of the fires flared up, someone screamed and soon there was wholesale panic among the witnesses. A small group broke off from the mob and ran. The rest stampeded after them, making waves across the canvas. A group of soldiers tried to restrain them but were trampled. The squad behind them began firing into the crowd, which wheeled and stampeded the other way. Fusshte ran out in front of the stampede, holding up his arms. The leaders stopped dead, only to be trampled by those behind, before the mob finally came to a gasping, groaning halt.

The panic spread to the robed mancers, and then to the other scrutators, who were fruitlessly trying to reach their chairs, which had been left hanging from their air-dreadnoughts as a ready means of escape. Unfortunately the once taut deck had sagged under the weight of hundreds of people, the chairs were now beyond reach, and no one on the air-dreadnoughts seemed to be doing anything about it. Thirty spans off, Ghorr was standing on tiptoe with his back to Nish and Ullii, staring up at his chair, which had been lifted even further and now hung a good ten spans above his upstretched arm. The other arm dangled limply, drenched in blood.

‘Lower it!’ he screeched, turning round and round.

‘He’s afraid,’ Ullii said wonderingly. And then she laughed. ‘The chief scrutator is afraid he’s going to die.’

‘I never thought I’d see the day,’ said Nish, who was beginning to think there might be the faintest chance to rescue the prisoners.

Their side of the deck, which was pitted with holes and smoking patches of canvas, was empty apart from the soldiers desperately trying to smother the cable fires. Belching black smoke kept driving them away and at once the fires sprang out anew. Officers ordered them back but the soldiers were becoming more reluctant every second.

The prisoners were crowded together in their pen, some shouting, some jeering, others watchfully silent. Their fate was all too clear once the cables burned through. Nish counted their guards – eleven. Far too many for him to deal with. His greatest fear was that the soldiers would be ordered to slay the prisoners before the amphitheatre was abandoned.

On the far edge, opposite the fires, a large ropework basket was being lowered to the deck. A group of witnesses rushed it and began fighting to get inside. A meagre, snake-like scrutator, probably Fusshte though it was difficult to be sure through the wreathing mist, roared at them to stay back. No one took any notice. Beyond it a lowered net had been commandeered by a group of robed mancers, who might have been able to control the crowd had they not been so intent on saving their own skins.

The mancers’ net rose jerkily into the air, pulling those inside into a compressed jumble of bodies with arms, legs and heads protruding through the meshes. At least Nish no longer had to worry about them. A scrutator was lifted, in a series of jerks, up into the smoky mist in her suspended chair. Nish didn’t recognise her.

The utter confusion gave Nish an idea. He didn’t think he could reproduce Fusshte’s sibilant tones, but he could probably do a passable imitation of Ghorr’s deeper voice and it might make a difference.

Crouching down so that he couldn’t be seen clearly, Nish put his hands around his mouth and roared. ‘Guard! To me. To me!’

The men guarding the prisoners’ pen spun around, searching for their master. Ghorr had his good arm in the air and was still shouting for his chair, though from a distance it might well have seemed that he was crying for them to come and restore order.

‘To me, damn you,’ Nish yelled.

The guards conferred. Eight of them formed into lines, four by two, and marched in the direction of the chief scrutator. Off to Nish’s left, blue flames flared then ran up a cable for several spans. A horizontal stay rope gave with a ping; canvas snapped like a sail in a high wind. A woman shrieked, high and shrill.

Someone sang out, ‘It’s going!’

The beaters at the burning cable abandoned their posts and fled to the safe side of the deck. One man ran across a hole burned in the canvas and disappeared.

There was pandemonium among the witnesses. One of their guards dropped his weapons, ran to the nearest cable, kicked off his boots and went up it like a sailor up a mast. Others moved to join him.