‘You look grotesque. What on earth have you been up to?’

Nish rubbed his sweaty, sooty, flaking cheeks. ‘It’d take too long to tell.’

‘That was a brave thing you did, Nish.’

‘It might have failed. I could easily have missed and then you –’

A shadow crossed her beautiful face. ‘But you didn’t. You trusted your judgment and your skill and they didn’t let you down. Come on, your cables can’t have much left in them. Whose mad idea was it to set fire to them?’

‘Mine. I …’ He hesitated, not knowing how she would react. ‘I thought it better to kill the lot of you than leave you to Ghorr’s brutal mercies.’

‘Quite right. I would have done the same for you.’

‘How did you get out?’ he said as they hurried across to the pen.

‘I stood on Yggur’s clasped hands and he catapulted me over the wall, as if he had the strength of ten men.’

‘Really?’ said Nish. The bound and mostly gagged prisoners were trying to crawl out of the pen. He hacked through the barbed ropes.

Inouye, the little pilot, was on her knees on the deck. He tore off the gag, cut her hands free and she fell on her face. He left her there, for there wasn’t time to look after her.

‘Where’s Flydd?’ Nish was terrified that he’d find him a bloody, flayed corpse, and he wouldn’t be able to deal with it. He couldn’t see him anywhere.

‘He’s over at the flensing trough.’ Irisis jerked her thumb into the throng. ‘But first we take care of the able-bodied.’

She was right. The strongest and the most powerful must be freed first. And the most powerful were Yggur, Malien and the strange mathemancer, Gilhaelith. Nish couldn’t see Malien and didn’t know what to make of tall, woolly-headed Gilhaelith. He found Yggur on the other side of the pen, struggling furiously with his bonds, and surrounded by a halo of uncanny mist that made him difficult to pick out in the hazy gloom. The gag had been pulled down to reveal a corner of his mouth, and that had been enough for him to use his Art.

Nish came up behind and caught his bound wrists, intending to free him. Yggur whirled and Nish gasped ‘Friend!’ as the knee went for his throat, a blow that could well have killed him.

Yggur pulled the blow, which merely thumped Nish hard in the shoulder. Nish ducked behind him and hacked through the wrist ropes, taking off a good bit of skin in the process. Yggur didn’t flinch. Nish slid the knife under the gag, cutting the cloth.

Yggur staggered. He’d been beaten, evidently, and was not at his best, but he flashed Nish a savage grin. ‘Let’s get to them. Free Fyn-Mah and Flydd, if he’s still alive, then the others. But not Gilhaelith. He’s more trouble than he’s worth.’

‘But surely any help is better than none?’ Nish glanced at the tall mancer, whose look of black rage boded ill once Gilhaelith was free.

‘If it hadn’t been for him we wouldn’t be here now,’ Yggur said.

Nish didn’t understand, but there was no time to ask what Yggur meant. ‘What about Malien and Tiaan?’

‘Ghorr has already sent them up to the air-dreadnoughts.’ Yggur was shaking his hands to restore the circulation. Now he raised his fists high, as if calling power to himself, then snapped them down. Mist condensed in a series of crescent-shaped clouds around the pen and Yggur spun it into a smoky brown doughnut around them.

‘There’s not much time,’ said Nish, cutting the bonds of the prisoners one by one. They had formed a line in front of him, and another before Irisis. Yggur’s retainers were nothing if not disciplined. ‘The cables must burn through any time now and, once they go, this side of the amphitheatre will collapse.’

‘I don’t think it’ll collapse from the loss of four cables,’ said Yggur. ‘It should just sag. But once the scrutators have saved their necks, and those retainers they can’t do without, they’ll cut the deck free from above, no matter how many of their loyal servants remain on it.’

Once all the prisoners other than Gilhaelith had been released, which took only a minute or two, Nish handed his crossbow and bolts to one of Yggur’s surviving soldiers and went looking for Irisis.

‘Where’s Flydd?’ he said to Yggur as their paths crossed.

‘He was at the flensing trough.’ Yggur grimaced as he pointed into the mist.

‘I’ll go after him. Have you got a plan?’

‘Fight for our bloody lives!’

‘With two crossbows and a couple of knives?’

‘It’s a whole lot better than we had five minutes ago.’

Yggur began to form the smoky mist into spectres and walking corpses bearing the faces of the witnesses, which he sent drifting across the deck. Someone screamed in horror or despair, others joined in and shortly the witnesses stampeded again.

Putting his hands up to his mouth, Yggur made a series of barking sounds that reverberated across the amphitheatre and back. After a short silence there came, from the slough that surrounded Fiz Gorgo on three sides, the hair-raising cry of a lyrinx. At least, it sounded like a lyrinx. The mist broke, only to re-form more tightly. The soldiers called to one another in voices tinged with fear. The air-dreadnoughts might not fear the lyrinx when high in the sky on a clear day, but they were perilously vulnerable tethered here in poor visibility.

Other lyrinx cries came from all around and suddenly there was uproar. Nish heard the snapping twang of dozens of crossbows as the soldiers fired madly into the mist-shrouded swamps, thinking that the enemy were attacking. Nish wasn’t entirely sure that they weren’t. The scrutators and mancers, no doubt clinging to their escape chairs, were screaming to be lifted to safety.

‘They’re calling the enemy against us,’ came Ghorr’s outraged voice. ‘Kill them! Kill them all. A thousand gold tells for the heads of each of the chief villains, including Crafter Irisis and Artificer Cryl-Nish. A hundred tells for each of the others, dead or alive.’

Nish squinted into the mist. Oh for a crossbow and a glimpse of his enemy. He would have sent a bolt through the chief scrutator with no more thought than stepping on a cockroach.

Dead or alive. He stopped, one foot in the air, then cast a look over his shoulder. A thousand tells was a colossal fortune, more than an officer could earn in ten lifetimes. And all anyone had to do to earn it was kill him.

‘There must be a hundred soldiers out there,’ he said to Yggur.

‘I dare say,’ said Yggur, ‘though most are keeping order among the witnesses or protecting their masters while they scramble to safety. Go across to the edge of the mist, Nish, and – wait!’

Nothing happened for a tense moment; then a soldier, in the uniform of Ghorr’s personal guard, put head and right shoulder through the mist, sighted on the nearest person, Yggur’s elderly cook, and fired. The bolt took her in the ribs beside the heart and she dropped without a sound. The soldier ducked back into the mist before anyone could return fire.

Yggur let out a roar of fury and, thrusting out his fist, he spun in an arc, flailing shards of ice into the mist.

Nish heard a grunt of pain and the thump of a body hitting the canvas. Yggur ran into the mist and came back, dragging the offending soldier by the throat. In a colossal feat of rage, Yggur lifted the man high with one hand.

‘Is this the quality of the chief scrutator’s guard, that you only dare make war on unarmed old women? No wonder the Council is losing the war.’

‘Condemned – criminal,’ gasped the soldier. ‘Price – on head – hundred tells.’

‘You won’t be collecting it, my friend.’ Yggur spun the soldier in the air, caught him as he turned upside down and drove him, head-first, straight through the canvas deck to the hips, where he wedged, caught by his belt, his thick legs kicking.

Avoiding the thrashing boots, Yggur stripped the soldier of knife, sword and bolt bag, and tossed them to two of his men. He kicked the fallen crossbow to another.