The balcony was icy. Tiaan slipped, cracking her shin against the stone seat. Limping to the edge, she looked over. The air was perfectly clear, the distant peaks like etchings on glass. A low sun glinted bronze off the ice sheet.

The view was magical but Tiaan could not see it, any more than Malien did in the hours she spent here every day. Malien looked across the void to Aachan, the ancestral world her people had been cut off from thousands of years ago. Now they would never return. The small, cold globe that was Aachan was no longer habitable. They were forever exiles.

As was she. By the time the red sun plunged into a lake of mist, Tiaan was practically frozen to the seat.

‘What the blazes do you think you’re doing?’

Malien was shaking her. Tiaan could see nothing, and for an instant of horror thought her eyes must have frozen solid. The Aachim picked crusted snow off her eyelids, rubbed them with a warm palm and Tiaan’s eyes cracked open.

Back down below, her fingers wrapped around a mug of a custardy-thick, sweet red drink, Tiaan began to feel rather foolish. The emotions that had taken her outside felt alien now.

‘I suppose …’ she said haltingly, ‘I was punishing myself.’

‘What a stupid thing to do! If you have done harm, do something to make up for it.’

Tiaan sipped her drink. Malien was right. She must do something, but what? Maybe she should try to get back to the manufactory and resume her artisan’s work.

Malien was turning the pages of a small book bound in yellow calf, though not reading it.

‘Is something the matter?’ said Tiaan.

Malien laid the book to one side. ‘I cannot tell you what a shock it was to hear of the gate, and see those constructs. Arrogance was ever an Aachim failing, and so many constructs, and such power, would breed hubris in the meekest of breasts. Vithis is a type I know well – a brilliant, blind fool. After the loss of world and clan, he will not compromise. He has suffered – why should others not suffer equally? We have had many such leaders in our Histories, but all looked backwards to a time when we were great, while knowing that such times were past.

‘Vithis is different. Having lost everything that mattered, nothing can moderate him, and now he has the opportunity of a lifetime. With his mighty force, the most powerful ever assembled, he comes to a world ruined by war. What will he do?’

‘Take it,’ Tiaan said softly. ‘But … we are all humankind. Maybe he will ally with us to defeat the lyrinx.’

‘I would,’ said Malien, ‘but why would Vithis? Many Aachim think of you old humans as primitive, even sub-human, and from what you say of him Vithis holds to that view. He may prefer to let the lyrinx win, or even side with them to destroy humanity.’

Tiaan’s blood congealed. ‘He would not,’ she whispered. ‘He could not.’

‘Look at your own Histories, Tiaan. The more advanced races, or the more powerful nations, have wiped out hundreds of the lesser.’

‘But humanity has a great and ancient civilisation. How could anyone think …?’

‘Look to your Histories, I say.’

Tiaan could not countenance it. That Vithis might destroy humanity, and all its culture and Histories, as carelessly as one might kill a cockroach, was incomprehensible.

‘And nothing can be done about it?’ she said in a daze.

‘I wouldn’t say nothing,’ said Malien. ‘Vithis must have weaknesses as well as strengths.’

‘I saw none, apart from clan rivalry.’

‘Which would disappear the instant the Aachim were threatened.’

‘And perhaps your own people would join with them to make an even stronger force.’

‘If pushed hard enough, they probably would.’

‘But not you, Malien?’

‘I will never betray my own kind, Tiaan. But I will do what I can for all humanity.’

‘And I!’ Tiaan swore. ‘Since I brought the Aachim here, I must make up for it.’ How, though? She was trapped by geography, hundreds of leagues from anywhere.

Malien sat forward on her chair, looking down at her boots. Her veined hands shook. She rested them on her knees. ‘I –’ She broke off.

Tiaan said nothing. What could Malien offer her but words? Words could change nothing.

‘You can never know what I felt when I heard about the amplimet,’ said Malien.

Not expecting that, Tiaan felt a surge of jealous anger. ‘Why?’ she said coolly. ‘What is it to you?’

‘The chance to look back to lost Aachan.’

‘You can’t have been born there.’ The Histories were clear on that.

‘I was not. We came to Santhenar thousands of years ago, mostly as slaves of the Charon. For that reason, few of us feel perfectly at home on Santhenar. Nor do I, despite that my children and my partners lie in their graves here. We forever look back to Aachan, mourning the world that we lost. We always hoped and planned to return. Now we never shall. But still I would use the amplimet, if I may, to take a last look at our lost world.’

‘But Aachan was destroyed,’ said Tiaan. The anger had gone but she still felt reluctant to let Malien have it, however briefly.

‘With the amplimet, and a strong enough will, I might look back into the depths of time. I might even see beloved Aachan as a paradise, before the Charon took it from us. Ah, Tiaan, you cannot know how I yearn for that.’ Malien shook her head and tears fell from her ageless eyes.

Tiaan found herself moved by the old woman’s anguish. ‘Take it,’ she said, unfastening the little pouch hanging between her breasts. ‘Look back to Aachan and be at peace.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Malien said softly, and the power and the confidence were gone. She was no more than an ageing woman whose life had seen more of tragedy than triumph.

‘That the amplimet has been corrupted by the gate?’

‘I fear that, but not as much as I fear what I will see on Aachan.’

Malien did not elaborate and Tiaan asked no more questions. She did not have the right. The crystal lay on her hand, glowing in a way that seemed vaguely menacing. They both stared at it.

Malien shuddered, then reached out to lift it away between fingers and thumb. It dragged as if anchored to Tiaan’s palm with sticky threads. Something went snap and suddenly the crystal was tumbling through the air, exploding with light. She cried out but Malien’s long fingers closed around it and the light was cut off.

Malien rose. ‘Come with me.’

Tiaan followed her to the stone bench on her lonely eyrie. ‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Nothing, apart from being here.’ Malien sat on the bench.

Tiaan stood by the glass door, where it was a little warmer. There was still a core of cold in her from before, and Malien having the amplimet only added to that.

‘Isn’t it dangerous using it so close to the node?’

‘It is.’

Malien held the amplimet between her fingers, which were pressed together as though in prayer. The end of the crystal extended past the tips. She rested her elbows on her knees. Her posture was so rigid that Tiaan moved toward the edge of the precipice, the better to see.

Malien’s head turned sharply and Tiaan was shocked at her expression. She looked afraid. The amplimet, normally a luminous white or blue-white, had gone a baleful red. The glow rose and fell, and with each flare Tiaan felt a wrenching in her middle.

The crystal pulsed faster, more erratically. Some kind of struggle seemed to be going on between it and Malien, and Tiaan recalled Vithis’s fear – that it had been corrupted. Would it be a danger to her too, when she got it back? If Malien gave it back.

Abruptly the glow was gone. The illuminated globe inside the door also went out. The sun had set long ago and the night was black, apart from a shimmer of starlight on the distant ice sheet. That seemed ominous. Malien shuddered from head to foot, then rose from the bench until she was standing on tiptoe. She held the crystal above her head and let out a great cry that could have been ecstasy or anguish.