Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) by Ian Irvine

the next level. He’d assumed that the Aachim would have taken the amplimet. ‘You mean it’s still here?’
    ‘I can
see
it.’
    She meant in her lattice. Of course she could; she had tracked it all this way from the manufactory. And Tiaan too – Ullii had found her after Tiaan had been missing for months. ‘Where is it? Quick, before they think of it.’
    Using the map, it took less than an hour to regain the level where the gate had been made. Nish looked around him. They were in an oval chamber, so large that a good-sized town could have been built inside it, with doors and subsidiary chambers everywhere.
    ‘Over there.’ Ullii pointed.
    Nish ran, looking over his shoulder all the way. There had been too many failures; too many disappointments. Inside the room he was confronted by a strange-looking machine, all glass and crystal, ceramic and wires, ghostly in the dim light. He roved around, trying to make sense of it. Nish did not know what the amplimet looked like. He had never seen it, and the port-all contained dozens of crystals.
    ‘Ullii?’ he shouted. The sound echoed back and forth for ages. That made him afraid, too.
    She came creeping through the door as though trying not to attract attention. Her life was avoiding people. Ullii looked troubled, as if expecting him to yell at her again.
    ‘I can’t find the amplimet,’ he said softly.
    She walked up to the port-all, reached out and took the crystal from a soapstone basket. Nish was amazed that it could be so easy.
    She held it in her hand, gazing curiously at it. The amplimet resembled other hedrons Nish had seen in the manufactory, except for one small detail: it glowed.
    ‘It’s different now.’ Ullii turned it over in her hand.
    Alarm choked him up. ‘What do you mean? Is it damaged? Ruined?’
    ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘It’s just as strong, but it has a different knot.’
    ‘What can you tell about it?’
    She put her hand over the mask as if to block out the least glimmer of light. ‘It is as old as time. It is dreaming at the core of the world.’
    Ullii’s pronouncements sometimes bordered on the mystical and he could make no sense of this one. Further questioning proved useless. She could not put what she sensed into words. It did not matter. He had the amplimet, more important than Tiaan now. If he got it back to the manufactory, that would make up for everything.
    He reached for it.
Snap!
It was as if a spiky ball had embedded itself in his palm and was gouging its way through. He wrenched his hand away and the amplimet went flying through the air. ‘No!’ he cried as it fell toward the stone floor.
    Unerringly, Ullii snatched it out of the air.
    ‘I think you’d better carry it,’ Nish said. It felt as if the amplimet had rejected him.
    She packed it in her little chest pack and fastened up the straps.
    Casting a last look behind him, Nish said, ‘Come on.’ They hurried out of Tirthrax.
    After some hours of scrambling down the mountain, Nish realised that Ullii was no longer behind him. He called her name but she did not answer.
    He set down his pack, rubbing the palm of his hand. The pain still lingered and the centre of his palm had gone white in the shape of a spiky star. ‘Ullii!’ he roared, and knew that could only make things worse. If she was close by, the racket would make her retreat into herself and he might get nothing out of her for hours. Retracing his path, he found her fifty paces up the slope, huddled under a rock. She did not look up as he approached.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ He squatted beside her. She did not answer and he had to give her his hand to sniff before she would rouse. Whenever she was distressed, the smell of him seemed to comfort her. He did not understand that either.
    ‘Tired,’ she whispered. ‘Feet hurt.’
    She had thrown off her boots and socks, and her feet were resting on a patch of snow. The little toes, as small as a child’s, were red and one heel had a large blister.