Alchymist

'How's it going, Myrum?'

'Nearly done. He's a heavy bugger.'

She started to say, 'Hurry it up,' but broke off. Myrum was doing all he could, and he was injured too. Irisis paced back and forth on the platform. It was shaped like a stepped brain studded with spikes, which restricted her movement considerably. About to smash them down, she realised that they would also restrict the movement of the lyrinx, though it could probably take the risk of crushing them under its armour.

Irisis had not heard the fluttering for a while now, which was even more worrying. Why was the creature taking so long?

Lacking the Art to support itself, it would have fallen a long way. What she'd heard must have been its death throes. As she picked up the lantern to look down, the flickering light went out. Irisis clicked the flint striker, to no effect. The oil was gone.

Moodily, she tossed the lantern over the edge. It fell for several heartbeats before the glass smashed on something, and several more beats before crashing, rolling and banging all the way to the bottom.

'You all right, Crafter?' Myrum's voice echoed hollowly.

'Oil's run out. Where's the rope?'

'It's coming now.'

The darkness was not perfect. When she looked straight up, Irisis could see a feeble illumination. Myrum must have lit another lantern. Feeling her way to the brink, she peered over. Below her, a faint light appeared then vanished, like the reflection in a staring eye.

She looked away, and back. There it was again, shining steadily. Irisis felt in the air for the rope. She could hear it whispering down the sheer face above her.

Snap! That was a pitch-spine breaking off. She would know that sound anywhere. Snap! Snap! The lyrinx wasn't dead – it was coming for her.

Irisis reached up for the rope but couldn't find it. She waved arm and sword in the air. The tip of the sword met a slight resistance. Her fingertips just caught the rope's end and she pulled it down.

Behind her a great shadow rose, one wing spread, the other folded. More spines snapped. She whirled. Forests of them went down as it crunched across the mound towards her. It was taking its time, watching her all the way, and still she could not see it.

Irisis felt the air swirl; smelled the hot breath of the creature. No time to tie on; she let go the rope and swung the sword in a low, vicious arc. The shadow, definitely a lyrinx, kept coming. Her sword struck it on its armoured thigh, wedging there.

'Crafter!' Myrum called urgently.

She had no time to answer. Jerking her blade free, Irisis took a step backwards and froze. She was standing on the brink. Could she lure it over? Unlikely. Lyrinx could see better in the dark than humans. She went sideways, fixing the location of the rope in her mind. It would be difficult to find again, if she lost it.

Irisis stumbled against a miniature pitch spike, too black to see. She hacked at the shadow, again connecting with its thigh plate. The lyrinx slashed back, though feebly. It must be badly injured: Irisis tried a higher swipe and this time the tip of the sword carved through softness. It had gone between two belly plates. Something gurgled; she hoped it was the creature's intestines.

The shadow slumped, panting. Irisis thrust the sword into its sheath, went backwards to the hanging rope and, by a miracle, found it. She pulled herself up, hand over hand, as far as she could go. Not far enough. Her arms didn't have the strength for rope-climbing and the swinging bag was pulling her down. It was all she could do to hold on.

The lyrinx sprang at her, missed, and its fingers brushed the rope. One hard pull and it would have her, and Myrum, over the side. Irisis twisted the rope around her left wrist a few times, hung on with her knees and slashed below her with the sword.

She missed. The lyrinx caught the rope end and began to pull, but very gently. First the phynadr, then her. She drew the length of the blade across the rope, below her knees. It parted and the lyrinx fell back, smashing a thicket of spikes. Irisis hauled herself up another arm's length but could go no further.

'Myrum,' she screamed. 'Pull me up, quick! The bloody lyrinx's right here.'

Silence. The rope jerked up a little way and stopped. The lyrinx lurched at her and missed, its eyes fixed on her as it gathered itself for another attempt. Irisis could only hold the sword pointed downwards, and pray.

Again it sprang, its claws whistling through the air just below the hanging bag. She pulled it up. One claw tore open the side of her boot, before ripping it off. She threw the other one at it, but missed.

'Myrum!' she wailed. 'Pull your heart out or I'm dead.'

The rope moved up again, as much as a couple of spans, before stopping. It was enough to get her out of the creature's reach, though Irisis began to fear that, with his broken ribs, Myrum was incapable of lifting her higher. What if he'd been slain and a lyrinx was now hauling her up? Her empty stomach contracted. That possibility had not occurred to her before.

Something winked in the dim light before whirring past her ear. The lyrinx had thrown a shard of pitch at her. Another spun to one side. They were poor projectiles, difficult to aim.

The rope began to creep up and Irisis dared to hope that she might make it after all. Then the fluttering began again and she heard a whooshing sound, as of a breath rapidly exhaled. What was it up to now?

With a deeper, gasping whoosh and a creaking flutter, the lyrinx lifted off. It moved out into the dim lantern light, its wings clubbing the air so violently that she was buffeted from side to side on the rope. How the beast had managed it she would never know, for one wing was torn in two places and its blood-covered head was the wrong shape, as if stoved in when it had fallen into the chasm. And since it could not use the Secret Art here, it must be flying on sheer indomitable will.

Struck with terrified admiration, she watched it drive through the air towards her, only courage keeping that heavy body aloft. Surelv there had never been such a feat until now.

Her strength was fading- Even with both hands, she could barely hold on. There was no possibility of defending herself with the sword, so she sheathed it. Rising fumes whipped past her face, making her eyes water. Pulling up the frayed end of the rope, Irisis made a quick knot around her waist, one-handed, in case she lost her grip when the beast attacked. It was staggering through the air, now rising, now falling, but always heading for her.

She looked up. No way to tell who, or what, was lifting her. The lyrinx rose above her, struggling to grip the air. Now it plunged, though by her rather than at her. It did not want to lose the prize.

Irisis tried to sway the rope out of the way. It moved but not far enough. The lyrinx caught her by the arm. She tore free, which must have upset the creature's delicate equilibrium for it veered off, flapping furiously.

Now it attacked from the other side. Strands of luminous saliva hung from its open mouth. It was tiring rapidly. She watched it come. If it was so easily disturbed, a more direct attack might just tip the balance.

It swooped. She doubled up her legs and shot them out at its head, as she'd done when a lyrinx attacked her at the manufactory last winter. The rope went the other way and her powerful kick ended up as no more than a tap on the jaw. Irisis lost her grip, fell and, caught by the knot around her waist, flipped upside down.

The lyrinx's teeth snapped together, it swung its left arm but just failed to snatch the bag from her belt. The rope slipped and she thought she was going to fall head-first all the way down into that fiery crack, but it pulled tight. It held.

Irisis swung back and forth without the strength to heave herself upright. The lyrinx came again, a last desperate effort.

Ropes of clotted saliva oozed down its mighty chest. With a hoarse, despairing cry, it lunged for the bag that now hung by her shoulder.

'Help!' she wailed, staring at the flickering light just a few spans above. An unidentifiable figure swayed there, swinging something around its head like a cannonball in a sling. The object hurtled down, looking for all the world like a human head. I must be hallucinating, Irisis thought, as the object struck the lyrinx on its brow ridge. Red showered into its eyes.

The lyrinx gagged, the wings missed a beat, it slid sideways into the sheer black face, and fell out of sight.

The rope jerked and she was hauled up, still upside down. Her head cracked on the sheer fracture surface as she was dragged over the edge, then Irisis was dropped onto the pitchy floor.

'Myrum…' she gasped.

It was not Myrum, but Flangers, on his knees in a small pool of blood. He looked ghastly. A mutilated corpse lay not far away, strangely shortened, though she could barely see it through the tears of relief. Or perhaps it was the fumes. Fyn-Mah was sprawled on the path at the beginning of the broken bridge, unmoving.

'What happened, Flangers?'

"Nother lyrinx.' He sucked in a breath as though it was his last, glancing towards a hollow where the dead creature lay. 'Myrum thought he'd killed it.' Flangers hunched over, supporting himself with both arms, gasping. 'He hadn't. Tore his head off.'

'That was Myrum's head you threw at the lyrinx?'

'First thing I could reach. Poor fellow. A good soldier and a decent man.' Flangers lay on the floor without the strength to lift his head.

'Is Fyn-Mah dead too?'

'Don't know.'

Irisis crawled to the small woman and felt her throat. 'She's alive.' She peered over the edge. 'We'd better move. I wouldn't bet that lyrinx is dead.'

'Leave me,' said Flangers. 'Can't walk.'

'Then crawl – I'm not leaving you behind. That was a mighty heave, Flangers. Any idea how we get out of here?'

One finger pointed to the right.

She discerned a series of ledges between the pitch spears, which might have been close enough together to form a track, though it would be a dangerous one.

'I'll carry Fyn-Mah. Bring the bag and the rope.' Unknotting the phynadr bag, she handed it to him.

'Don't think I can.'

'Just try,' she said. 'I can't get it back without you.'

Once more the appeal to duty lifted Flangers beyond what any normal man could have achieved. What a hero he was. And what a waste that such courage should be directed to so bloody an end.

It buoyed her up as well, and Irisis found the strength to lift Fyn-Mah onto her shoulders. She set off, trying not to think about the path ahead. It was killing work. Several times she had to hoist the perquisitor onto a higher ledge, hoping she would not fall off while Irisis clambered up herself. After a desperate twenty minutes they reached the other side. The black mouth of the tunnel was just above them. She pulled herself up into it and smelled fresh air.

'It's not far now, Flangers.'

They lurched along like two bloody wrecks, turned a corner and emerged halfway up a deep but narrow mine pit. The sky was just growing light, though not enough to illuminate the pit. 'At last,' said Irisis, limping on bloody, pitch-stained feet. She turned the other way. 'Where's the air-floater?'

"This isn't the pit we came down,' said Flangers, who, astonishingly, appeared to have rallied a little. 'We're in the wrong place.'

Irisis put Fyn-Mah down on the ledge. 'Then we'll have to climb.'

Flangers was staring at the rim. 'I can see something moving up there.'

They stepped back into the tunnel entrance. Fyn-Mah said, more clearly than before, 'Go round base of pit.., through tunnel.., other side.'

'You're conscious!' Irisis wished she did not have to pick her up again.

The perquisitor did not answer. Hefting her, Irisis followed the path to the bottom of the pit, around the base and in through a tunnel that had not been visible in the black wall. They were underground for only a few minutes before emerging in a larger pit. The air-floater was waiting across the far side, right where they had left it, its four guards with their crossbows ready. Irisis pushed Fyn-Mah through the ropes, fell through herself and lay on the deck without the strength to rise. Two of the guards carried Flangers aboard.

Muss was already there, gazing up at the rim. He had assumed his old persona – the slim, middle-aged man she'd first met in Gosport – though he still looked frustrated and unhappy. So he didn't get what he went in for, Irisis thought. I wonder what it could be?

'Where were you when we needed you?' she snapped. 'On other duties,' he said, impassive again.

'Where are our mates?' cried a young soldier.

'Dead!' Fyn-Mah tried to sit up but sagged back against the wall of the cabin. 'Go up,' she whispered to Pilot Inouye. 'Out of crossbow range.'

The grapnels were pulled aboard. Inouye twisted a knob on the floater-gas generator and gas whistled up the pipe. The air-floater shot up out of the pit, rising above the hummocks and tar bogs of Snizort, and just in time. A detachment of some hundred soldiers had come through the broken eastern wall and were advancing towards the pit. They stopped and someone waved. Pilot Inouye turned to Fyn Mah. 'They're signalling. I think they want us to land.'

'Keep going!' said Fyn-Mah, forcing herself to her feet. She hung onto the rope mesh, swaying dangerously. 'I have other orders. Guards,' she said to the four men, 'ready your weapons. We cannot be taken.'

The soldiers looked uneasy, but complied. Irisis felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck. She took a crossbow for herself. The loyalty of these men had already been tested. Surely it would take little for them to mutiny – if Fyn-Mah was taken, they would be condemned with her.

On the ground, there was a flurry or activity at the front of the detachment. A black-robed figure waved its arms, a perquisitor Irisis did not recognise. A soldier put a speaking trumpet to his mouth.

'Land at once, whoever you are,' he boomed.

'Go higher!' hissed Fyn-Mah. Clinging death-like to the ropes, she shouted down. 'I may not. I'm on a special mission for Scrutator Xervish Flydd.'

The robed figure snatched the speaking trumpet. 'There is no Scrutator Flydd, only the condemned criminal, Slave Flydd.'

Fyn-Mah let out a muffled cry. She turned to Irisis and Flangers. 'What do I do now?'

'Follow your orders,' said Flangers unhelpfully.

'Muss?' she called.

Eiryn Muss was squatting on the deck, deeply immersed in his own thoughts, and did not answer. Whatever was bothering him, it was more important than their imminent demise.

'Land immediately, in the name of Acting Scrutator Jal-Nish Hlar!' shouted the figure on the ground.

'Perquisitor Fyn-Mah,' said Inouye, 'I must go down. I have a direct order from your superior.'

Fyn-Mah covered her face with her hands.

If the scrutator had fallen, what hope was there for any of them? 'You're risking everything on Flydd,' Irisis said. 'Do you think he can possibly rise again?'

Fyn-Mah groaned, then mastered herself. 'Scrutator Flydd ordered me to go on, no matter what happened to him, and so, I must. No matter what the consequences.'

Irisis felt Death look up from his work on the battlefield, rub a testing thumb down the blade of his scythe, and smile grimly.

The scrutators will torment us all,' cried Inouye, desperately defiant.

'I'm taking the air-floater,' Fyn-Mah gritted. 'If you won't cooperate, we'll throw you down to join your friends and Crafter Irisis will take over your controller.'

Irisis doubted that she could operate it, or that Fyn-Mah would be so ruthless, but the pilot did not know that.

Inouye licked her wind-chapped lips. The bond with the machine was intense, and pilots, like clanker operators, had been known to go insane after their craft was destroyed.

'They'll slay my man and my little children,' she said in a barely audible voice.

'Not if you're forced to it.' said Fyn-Mah in more gentle tones. 'Flangers, make a show.'

Flangers liked it no more than the pilot did, but he took Irisis's crossbow and pointed it at Inouye, in full view of those on the ground.

'This will ruin us all,' wept little Inouye. She obeyed and the air-floater lifted.

'Go north, with all speed,' said Fyn-Mah.

The soldiers on the ground fired their crossbows but the air-floater was out of range and the bolts fell harmlessly back. Someone ran to the broken wall, climbed it and began to signal frantically towards the command area.

'I feared this was going to happen,' said Fyn-Mah. 'With the scrutator lost, there's only one option left.' She groaned and slumped to the canvas deck.

Behind them, three black air-floaters rose from the mound next to the army command area, and followed.

'Or maybe none,' said Irisis, picking the perquisitor up and carrying her inside.

Part Two: Tears

Eleven

Gilhaelith was slipping ever deeper into the bottomless pit of tar and there was nothing he could do about it. He'd tried everything, but his geomancy was useless without some kind of a crystal to serve as a focus, and he had none. He'd even attempted to use one of his ever-troubling gallstones, but under the strain it had burst into jagged fragments that were causing him agony. Before they passed, should he live that long, he'd be wishing he were dead.

His only other resort had been mathemancy, that strange branch of the Secret Art Gilhaelith had developed long ago. It proved singularly useless. Mathemancy was a philosopher's Art, ill-suited to any kind of direct action, much less such immediate peril.

Gyrull, Matriarch of Snizort, had abducted him to scry out the remnants of a village lost in the Great Seep seven thousand years ago. Afterwards, she'd kept Gilhaelith beside her, refusing him the use of his globe and the other geomantic instruments he'd brought with him as his means of escape. But the tunnel into the Great Seep had failed, its shell of frozen tar had cracked and hot tar had been forced in. The lyrinx had fled with their relics, just in time. Gilhaelith had tried to follow but he'd not been quick enough.

He took the numbers again, raising a series of random integers to their fourth powers to see what pattern they offered. It was awesomely bad. He tried again, with an even worse result.

The tar now reached to his hips, its suction far too great for him to pull himself out. Ribbons of liquid tar, from a breach in the roof, began to fold onto his head and shoulders, its bituminous reek burning his nose, throat and lungs.

And it was hot. Not burning hot, not enough to blister, but uncomfortable and getting worse. Eventually, if he survived long enough, he would simmer like a crab in a pot. Fortunately, he wouldn't survive. In a few minutes, when that great oozing clot came down on his head, he would suffocate.

A possibility slid into Gilhaelith's mind as if it had been whispered in his ear – to couple his two very different Arts. Geomancy was hopeless because he lacked a crystal to draw power and focus it. Mathemancy was not a tool for directing power at all. But what if…?

If he could create a phantom mathemantical crystal, and use it to draw power and focus it, might that be the solution? It was a last resort – such a crystal must pull power directly into his head. A little too much would cook him from the inside, a gruesome, slow death. A lot too much and he would suffer the agonising fate of anthracism, human internal combustion, though that would not take long to kill him.

The very idea of such a crystal felt alien, and it reminded him of those links the amplimet had drawn throughout Snizort, including one to him. Could it be directing him for some purpose of its own? Too bad – without a crystal he was going to die.

He slipped further into the tar, which was now creeping up his groin. It felt hotter than before. Fortunately he'd worked out the mathemancy of crystals long ago, though to create one with numbers, purely in his mind, was another thing entirely. Still, he had always relished challenges.

Gilhaelith began to construct a crystal in layers, beginning at its base and building towards the apex. It was painfully slow – literally painful, he thought wryly. By the time tar had risen to his waist, the phantom crystal was only half done. His shoulders were covered with ribbony black epaulettes; it was dripping down his forehead, clotting over his eyes, and rubbing just smeared it everywhere.

As Gilhaelith built another layer, the tar seemed to dissolve beneath his feet and he slid down to his chest. A bucket-sized clot landed on his head, pushing him face-first into liquid tar, which was forced up his nostrils. Though he clawed it away, he could not clear his nose enough to breathe.

Turning his head sideways, he managed to get a breath through his mouth. Hum'! The layers went more quickly as he approached the tapering apex of the crystal. Only one layer to go. As he sucked another breath, the rest of the clot fell, burying him completely. And it was so hot. His feet were cooking.

But the crystal was done. Gilhaelith looked for power but found none – the field, which had been waxing and waning for days, was dying. The tunnel had failed because the phy-nadrs had not been able to maintain sufficient power to keep it frozen.

Yet for what he planned, only a little power was required. Gilhaelith sought in another direction and discovered a drifting loop of field, cut off from the rest. He drew power into the phantom crystal but there was not enough to energise it.

He had barely enough breath to try again. He found another loop, this one strong as the field waxed dangerously. The node was desperately overloaded and something had to give. But if it just lasted another minute…

His lungs were shuddering for air; fire burned behind his temple as the crystal powered up at last. Gilhaelith used a geo-mantic spell to drive heat from the tar surrounding him, into the seep itself.

He kept at it until the heat licked from his skull to his stomach, the first sign of anthracism. He had to let go. Would it be enough? As the spell faded, a most bitter cold enveloped him, as though he'd been frozen into a block of ice. Then, as the heat of the seep attacked that rigid, frigid shell of tar, it shattered into a thousand pieces.

The shards broke away from his body, leaving him in a cavity lined with fractured tar. The suction was gone; it was solid underfoot. The mosaic fell from his eyes and he could see. Gilhaelith took hold of the still-hard shell of the tunnel and, with a wriggle and a shake, pulled himself onto the floor.

He hurt all over and, behind his eyes, needles pushed relentlessly into the bone. He'd tried too hard and damaged something. He began to crawl blindly down the tunnel. That was where Matriarch Gyrull, who had come pounding back for him, found Gilhaelith. Tossing him over her shoulder, she clawed the last chilly remnants of tar from his nostrils and raced off.

The next few hours were a blur of belching fumes, pounding feet and panicky lyrinx. Gilhaelith saw nothing, for the pain was so all-enveloping he could not open his eyelids. And he was so cold – he could feel the shape of his stomach in ice.

He was carried through a myriad of tunnels, with Gyrull cursing and turning this way and that, and her growing escort hard put to restrain their terror. There was fire underground and they couldn't find a way out, though that wasn't their greatest fear. Gilhaelith had learned enough of their language to deduce that many of the escapeways had been cut off and they expected the unstable node to explode at any time.

They reached the base of a pit with steep sides. The lyrinx made a living tower which Gyrull climbed to get out, a box of relics strapped to her chest, and Gilhaelith, folded over in an elongated travesty of the foetal position, tucked under one arm. The gamy odour of her sweat was intense.

Before she reached the top, the phantom crystal picked up wild fluctuations from the field that seared his forebrain. Gyrull muttered something.

'What?' he croaked, but she did not answer. He could just see out of the crack of one eye. It was dark and he felt so very cold. Beyond the walls, the battle still raged – the groans of the maimed, the clash of weapons against armour, the thudding of catapult balls into walls, ground and tar seeps. Fire flickered in half a hundred places.

She climbed over the rim of the pit and set off without looking back to see if her fellows were following. Gilhaelith supposed they had sacrificed themselves to give their matriarch a chance, or to get the treasure away.

"The torgnadr is going to destroy itself,' she said, finally answering his question. 'How did the humans get in to attack it? They're more cunning than I imagined.'

In the distance, the ground surface domed and a fountain of fire tore through. He was in no state to see the danger. To Gilhaelith it just seemed extraordinarily beautiful.

The matriarch was running full pelt, considerably faster than a human could move. Several times she flexed her wings and leapt in the air, but each time landed hard and kept running. There was not enough in the field for her to fly with such a burden, for Gilhaelith was a big man.

He felt worse every minute. Either he'd burst something inside or the tar was poisoning him. He felt sure he was going to die. He would never solve the great puzzle and achieve a true understanding of the earth. His life had been wasted. And, to his surprise, Gilhaelith felt a creeping remorse for all he'd done, and all he'd neglected, in blind pursuit of that aim – most especially, Tiaan.

His stomach boiled and he threw up all over Gyrull's side and thigh. She wiped it off without breaking stride. Shortly, as she was climbing the southern wall, the sky erupted into a spindle of fire that he could see with his eyes closed. Pain crept, singing, along every nerve fibre. The fire died down, taking with it the last vestiges of the field, and Gilhaelith felt the snapping of that ethereal thread Tiaan's amplimet had drawn to him. His phantom crystal exploded into fragments with a hundred sparkle-like throbs. Now he truly was helpless. It did not matter. Nothing mattered – it was all over.

The new day dawned, as hot as the previous one, but the cold, which had bitten into him ever since he'd cast his freezing spell, grew steadily worse. He lost everything but the rocking motion. Like a pendulum running down, even that sense failed, until finally nothing was perceptible.

Gilhaelith roused twice, once to realise that Gyrull was still running, another time to discover that she had stopped and was speaking in low tones with several other lyrinx, though he still lacked strength to open his eyes. They seemed to be talking about the destruction of the node. What would such a thing look like? How could a node explode, all its contained energies vanishing into nothingness? Surely there had to be some residue?

He felt that there was something he should follow up, but was too lethargic to think.

Days and nights went by, full of running; hasty meetings in shadowed caves or gloomy woods; exhortations to hurry; and other urgent matters that were conducted out of earshot. Gilhaelith was dosed with potions and fed at intervals by a lyrinx who squeezed greasy pulp through its hands into his mouth. His senses were so numb that he could taste nothing, though he felt better afterwards.

On what he thought to be the fifth day after the escape, or possibly the sixth, Gilhaelith felt well enough to sit up. It was not long after dawn and the lyrinx had camped in a wooded valley by a meandering river. There were hundreds of them, with more appearing all the time. They must have felt in no danger now, for they were lying about in full view, chatting with voice and skin-speech, their bags and boxes of relics piled in the centre. It surprised him that they should be so casual, after the loss of Snizort.

The underground galleries had been on fire and the tar might burn for a hundred years, so whatever the result of the battle, they could not go back. That must have been a blow to the lyrinx, for Snizort had made a formidable beachhead on Lauralin from which to launch further attacks. On the other hand, the destruction of the node would have immobilised both constructs and clankers, so the lyrinx were in no danger once they escaped the immediate area. They could attack at night and do great damage, though it did not appear they were going to. He got the impression that the fliers planned to return to Meldorin.

In that case, why did Gyrull still want him? He could see her across the clearing, squatting under a tree, talking in a low voice to two other aged lyrinx. Their skin-speech lit up the shadows in lurid reds and yellows, which meant an important conversation.

He dozed during the morning, waking to see Gyrull giving orders to another small group, and later to a third. He learned nothing about what those orders were. His brain hurt whenever he tried to think. There was a strong field here, but he could not have blown a fly off the end of his nose with it.

A cry disturbed his chaotic thoughts. A lyrinx, one of the recent arrivals, was running around the clearing in circles, crashing into trees and other lyrinx, and making a shrill keening, as if in pain.

The matriarch sprang up. Several lyrinx tried to catch the distressed creature but its flailing arms knocked them out of the way. It began to claw at itself, tripped and fell just a few paces from Gilhaelith. He recognised it: one of the diggers who had excavated the lost village in the Great Seep.

The lyrinx was covered in red, swollen pustules and it began to claw furiously at itself, tearing its chest armour off in bloody chunks. The sensitive inner skin was exposed, not the usual pink, but red, pustular and oozing.

Within minutes the lyrinx had ripped most of its armour away, though that did not seem to improve matters. It began to scrape and scour at the living flesh, screaming in agony, until Gyrull motioned, Enough!

Another lyrinx came up behind it and slashed across the back of its unprotected neck, severing the spine. The suffering creature fell dead. They dug a deep hole, buried the lyrinx and left at once. The clearing was now a place of ill omen.

'What are you going to do with me?' Gilhaelith said to Gyrull a couple of days later. She was still carrying him, climbing a steep hill near the coast. He could smell the sea.

She worked her massive shoulders as if she were uncomfortable. The lyrinx often seemed to be, inside their armoured outer skin. 'You were not truthful with me, Tetrarch.'

'What do you mean?'

'When we were looking for the relics in the Great Seep, you spent longer studying the node with your geomantic devices than you did searching for the lost village. You should have found it a week earlier, and we would have got everything away in safety. You're to blame for this situation.'

Gilhaelith was not going to deny it. 'What did you expect? You abducted me.'

'On the contrary, I saved your life. Vithis arrived at Nyriandiol just days later, with a great host of constructs. On learning of your perfidy, he would have slain you out of hand. Besides, you agreed to assist me -'

'Ah!' said Gilhaelith, 'but in the excitement at Booreah Ngurle the price was never fixed, therefore the contract is void.'

'Not so, Tetrarch, for I could see what was in your mind. You had nowhere to go, and both Aachim and scrutators were after you. It suited you well to be taken to Snizort under our protection, to spy on our work and further your own studies. Though never stated, you were happy with that price. The contract stands, and by your procrastination and deceptions, you've dishonoured it. I've not had my price from you, Tetrarch, but I will.'

Gilhaelith bowed his head. 'I can do nothing to stop you. What do you require of me?'

'I shall take you across the sea to Meldorin, and hold you until I find a need that you can satisfy. Once you've done that, I may release you.'

That also suited him. He couldn't save himself, so let the lyrinx do it for him. Once they'd taken him out of his enemies' reach, he'd find a way to get free. He had to, for his own sanity. Since Gyrull had first abducted him, he'd had no control over his life. To Gilhaelith that was like a never-healing sore.

As Gyrull lifted into the air from the top of the hill, with a host of lyrinx rising around her like moths from a meadow, Gilhaelith was trying to think of a way to win his freedom. Once on Meldorin, which was occupied by the lyrinx, he would be trapped. Even if he could get away from them, he did not have the skill in boat craft to make a seaworthy vessel. He would effectively be Gyrull's slave.

They were crossing the sea from a peninsula of Taltid where the gap was only three or four leagues. It would be about an hour's flight, since they were flying into a stiff westerly. Gyrull was at the head of a great wedge of lyrinx, the arms of the flight trailing back for the best part of a league. She was flying easily, despite Gilhaelith's weight, though from time to time her wings creaked as they were buffeted by a particularly strong gust. Ahead, Meldorin was already visible, a forested land clothing mountains that ran down to the coast. He saw little sign that humans had ever inhabited it, just the scar of an overgrown mountain road and what might have been the ruins of a port.

Gilhaelith's thoughts returned to the problem he had wrestled with earlier: what had happened at the node. As far as he knew, no node had ever exploded before, so all he had to go on was his experience as a master geomancer, and his intuition. Both told him that something could not be reduced to nothing – here had to be some consequence, other than the raw power of the explosion itself. But what could it be?

The traumatic escape had left his thoughts sluggish, memory fractured and logic in tatters. By the time they'd passed the midpoint of the journey, Gilhaelith had made no progress on the puzzle.

Then, as they were being battered by updraughts in the base of a cloud, it came to him – the answer that could set him free.

'Gyrull,' he cried, twisting around in her claws so he could see her face. 'I know what's happened at the node.'

The movement put her off-balance just as an unexpected gust jerked her upwards. Torn from her grasp, Gilhaelith fell towards the dark waters, far below.

Twelve

Jal-Nish had taken charge of the clanker-hauling operation. Day and night his short stocky figure was everywhere, issuing orders and threats, and maintaining control of every aspect of the vast operation. The generals together could not have done in a week what he achieved in the first three days. The platinum mask reflected the light of the pyres by night, and the blinding sun by day. He was not seen to eat, drink or sleep in all that time.

Rumour of what he had done to his son spread, and when that mask appeared on their doorstep none dared refuse him. Eighty-two thousand soldiers, camp followers, peasants and slaves had been harnessed into teams. Neither women nor children, nor the wounded who could still walk, had been spared. Another eighteen thousand horses, buffalo and other beasts of burden had been assembled for the monumental task. Every usable clanker, more than five thousand of them, had to be dragged from the festering muck of the battlefield onto solid ground.

The haulers fell dead in their hundreds, hearts bursting under the strain. Many more collapsed, and those who could not get up quickly enough died where they lay, for Jal-Nish would not allow a moment's pause to get them out. He ordered the clankers, on their wooden skids, dragged over the fallen, as a bloody spur to the rest to do their duty. They did, and they kept dying.

Finally they'd heaved the clankers out of the putrid wallow, but that was only the beginning. They needed to move the machines more than six leagues to the field of the nearest node, and already man and beast were exhausted.

The agonising days went by. Nish's sunburnt, whip-torn back was covered in festering sores. Already lean from months of privation, after seven days of slavery he was so thin that he barely left a shadow. He could not sleep; could scarcely eat the slops they were fed on, which had a rotten stench and crawled with maggots, so desperate had the supply situation become. The army's supply wagons had been hauled by clankers, and half had been kept back, leagues to the east, in case the enemy overran the main camp, as they had. Most of the supplies here had been trampled into the mud. Without them, and with many more mouths to feed, everyone had been reduced to quarter rations. The slaves' portion came from that which even the guard dogs wouldn't eat.

Xervish Flydd looked unchanged. He'd been whipped even more than Nish, but was taking it better. He seemed, and it felt strange when Nish first had the thought, at home here. Not as though he belonged, but rather that he had adapted perfectly to his slavery. Flydd was a driven man. He was going to bring down the Council and nothing else mattered. Pain and privation he simply endured.

Tonight, through the smoke from five thousand camp fires, a blood-red moon, a few days past full, was rising over the eastern hills. Not a tree or bush remained and they were now burning grass and chunks of weathered tar. The army had stripped the land to its rocky bones.

Today had been the hardest. They were well out of the battlefield bog now, moving down the valley, and the overseer had driven them like the beasts they were, to make up lost time. Nish's boots were falling to pieces and would soon be gone. Slaving barefoot over this stony ground would cripple him, and the fate of crippled slaves was not something he liked to contemplate.

The whip master had allowed them a scant two hours' rest this evening and it was nearly over. 'I can't go on,' Nish thought, as he had many times, but each time, as the lash coiled around his belly and through the rags of his shirt, pain drove him to one last effort.

Flydd was slumped beside him, head between his knees, snoring. He took advantage of every opportunity to rest. The moon lifted itself clear of the horizon, showing mostly its dark, mottled face, said to be an ill omen. Nish did not believe in omens but its bloody visage made him shudder.

'Surr…' he began.

'Don't call me surr. I'm a slave, just like vou.'

'Thanks for the reminder. Xervish?'

'What?'

'Where's Irisis?' Nish's thoughts had often turned to her over the past days.

'How would I know? A long way from here, I hope.'

'I hope she's safe.' And didn't hear about my disgrace. Nish couldn't bear for her to think ill of him.

Something scuttled across his field of view, slipping into the darkness further along the line of slaves. Nish felt no curiosity -that was a luxury no slave could afford. The figure flitted out again into the darkness. He yawned, closed his eyes…

A whip crack dragged Nish out of sleep. Instinctively he flinched, but it was just the overseer, practising on someone nearby. Nish dared not drift off again; sleeping slaves were a favourite target. He eyed the overseer, who kept raising something the size of a brick to his mouth. He liked to whip as he ate. As the man approached, Nish caught the aroma of freshly baked bread, a whole loaf. He would have killed the brute to get his hands on it. He thumped his clenched fist into the dirt.

'Easy,' said Flydd beside him. 'That'll only get you another lashing. Keep your head down.'

'I'll bet that bread was meant for us.'

'I dare say it was. Don't think about it.'

'I can't help it,' Nish muttered, drooling uncontrollably.

The little shadow flitted behind the massive bulk of the overseer.

'Did you see that?' said Nish.

'Someone's trying to steal the overseer's dinner. I wouldn't want to be the lad when he's caught.'

Nish shivered. The overseer stopped, sniffed the air, took the coiled whip from his shoulder and cracked it, reflectively, against a slave's belly. The man screamed. The overseer chuckled and tore at the bread. The hand holding the loaf fell to his side.

The shadow sprang, snatched the loaf and bolted. The big man cursed, swung the whip and caught the flying figure around the knees, sending it crashing to the ground. Within seconds the overseer was on the youth. A wail rang out; a very familiar cry.

'That's Ullii!' Nish hissed, pulling himself up with the harness. The other slaves began to grumble. 'What's she doing here?'

"Trying to survive.' Flydd was also on his feet, rubbing his scarred thigh.

'He'll kill her.'

'Or worse,' Flydd said grimly.

'What are we going to do?'

Flydd, still rubbing his left thigh, did not answer.

'Leave her alone, you vicious scum!' Nish bellowed.

The overseer whirled and, crushing Ullii under one brawny arm, strode to the head of the line, lashing indiscriminately. Something fell and was crushed underfoot – her goggles.

Ullii convulsed, almost succeeding in getting free. 'Nish!' she cried despairingly. 'Nish, help me.'

Her cry tore at him. All the slaves were on their feet now. Nish wrenched at his harness, which did not budge: no slave had escaped from this overseer.

'Stop it, you damn fool,' hissed Flydd. 'Get out of my way.'

Giving his thigh one last rub, Flydd threw out his right hand. Rays roared from his fingertips to strike the overseer in thebelly, just missing the squirming figure of Ullii. The man was hurled backwards as if he'd been struck with a catapult ball. Flydd moved one finger and the ray severed his harness, followed by Nish's, before fading out.

Ullii scrambled free and ran into Nish's arms. 'Nish, Nish!' she sobbed. 'Save me.'

'This is no time for a family reunion,' Flydd growled. 'Come on.'

He bent over the prone figure of the overseer, taking the whip and the man's belt, which he buckled around his bony hips. It held a sheath knife, a metal pannikin and a pouch that jingled. The loaf he broke into three chunks, handing Nish and Ullii a portion each.

The other slaves in their team began to cry out, holding up their chains and begging to be set free.

'You have an important duty here,' said Flydd senten-tiously. 'To haul clankers.' From the vicious cursing that followed, the slaves did not appreciate that duty as well as they might have. Flydd turned to Nish. 'Take one mouthful and save the rest. After me.'

Ignoring the wails and beseeching cries of the harnessed slaves, he bolted towards the south-east, where a cluster of low, rock-crowned hills broke the horizon. As Nish set Ullii down, she clutched his hand and they ran for their lives. Flydd, despite his age and a limp like a broken-legged crab, was at least fifty paces ahead, almost out of sight in the moonlight.

Ullii ran easily at Nish's side and they caught Flydd as the slope began to rise. He had slowed to a fast walk. 'What did you do back there?' said Nish.

'Later!' Flydd said, hobbling badly now.

He did not look well. Nish guessed it was aftersickness, which all mancers suffered after using their Art.

Flydd looked over his shoulder. Nish did too. There were lights everywhere along the line of the clankers, and someone was running with a torch back towards the officers' tents. More urgently, a group of figures with torches had formed lines at the head of the clankers and was moving in their direction. A bellow came to them on the wind.

'It's a search party,' said Flydd. 'The first of many. Jal-Nish will hunt me to the furthest corners of the world, but he's not going to get me.' He set off again.

'He'll hunt me just as hard,' said Nish. 'My father has betrayed me, Ullii. What am I to do?'

'My family cast me out to die.' said Ullii.

There was no answer to that. He squeezed her hand and followed, walking awkwardly, for the stitching on the side of his right boot had come undone and the sole was flapping. The other boot was nearly as decrepit.

'Why didn't you free the slaves, surr?' said Nish.

'Weren't you listening?' Flydd growled. 'Hauling clankers is vital work.'

'Isn't that a bit hypocritical?' panted Nish. 'After all -'

'I have more vital work,' Flydd said tersely, 'and no one else can do it. But feel free to go back, if your conscience troubles you.'

'It's more flexible than I'd thought,' Nish said hastily.

'So I've noticed,' Flydd said dryly. 'Besides, if I did set them free, they'd want to come with us, and then we'd never get away.' He broke into a pained, lurching trot. 'We'll go around this hill, not over it,' he continued. 'Else we might be seen in the moonlight.'

Beyond, to left and right, were more hills – not a range but a scatter of individual mounds that seemed to grow higher in the distance. All were topped with rocky crowns and a bristle of shrubbery or scrubby trees.

'Good land for running,' said Flydd, 'though not for hiding. They'll have the dogs on our trail before too long.

'What are we going to do?' said Nish.

'I haven't the faintest idea.'

They followed a goat track that wound between the next pair of hills. The bushes were tall enough to conceal them, though the moon lit up the path, which was a blessing. The scrub was full of thorns and burrs, painful to negotiate in the dark.

By the time they reached the other side of the hill the moon was halfway up the sky. They stopped where a ledge of resistant rock stuck out over the slope like the edge of a plate hanging over a tahle.

'Let's take a breather' grunted Flydd, sitting down.

'How did you do that?' said Nish, who was bursting with curiosity. 'If the node is dead, how can you do magic at all?'

'Mind your own business.'

Ullii crouched beside the scrutator. 'Does your leg hurt, Xervish?' She peeled away the torn flaps of fabric covering his left thigh. They were darkly stained in the moonlight. Ullii drew back, visibly distressed.

'More than somewhat,' Flydd replied. 'I'll just dress this, then -' A howl drifted to them on the wind, followed by a furious baying. He rose to his feet with an effort, muttering, 'I thought we'd have a longer lead.'

They hurried down the stony slope. The sole of Nish's boot was practically off but he couldn't stop to fix it. The path narrowed, the scrub closing overhead until it resembled a rabbit run.

Towards the bottom, Flydd, who was limping worse than ever, stopped. 'Ullii, can you smell water?'

'Of course,' she said.

'Lead the way, quick as you can.'

She went down on hands and knees, crept under a bush, turned left and scuttled along a path that had not been visible to Nish. He followed. Thorns tore at his clothing and caught in his hair. Ullii was out of sight, making so little sound that he could not tell which way she'd gone.

'Left!' growled Flydd in his ear, 'And make it snappy. Those aren't puppies behind us.'

'I can't see the path.'

Flydd muttered an imprecation, pushed past and stood up. Letting out a muffled gasp, he pressed his hand to his thigh.

Are you all right?' said Nish.

'I'll have to be.'

They zigzagged down a steep decline where dry leaves and gravel slipped underfoot, over a bank between head-high tangles of berry bushes, and found themselves under some tall trees. The undergrowth disappeared and the ground became springy.

Ullii waited beside a leaning tree. 'The river is straight ahead, Xervish.'

'Can you swim. Ullii?' Flydd asked.

'No,' she said with a shudder.

'What about you, Artificer?"

Nish started. A long time had passed since anyone had called him by that title. 'I can, but not very well.'

'Useless fool!' Flydd said it without rancour. 'The rivers in Taltid aren't deep, or fast, but you can still drown in them. We have to go into the water or the dogs will have us. Ullii, come with me. Hang on to my shoulders, not my neck! Don't make any noise. Nish, you'll just have to do your best. No splashing.'

They went over the bank and Nish lost sight of them. Occasional shafts of moonlight touched the water. There came a splash, a faint cry, a curse, then the sound of paddling.

Nish followed gingerly. He had never been confident in water. To go into a river that he could not even see, in pitch darkness, took a deal of courage, though he'd done it once before and survived. Nish suppressed the embarrassing memories of the escape from Mira's house. Recollecting that the dogs were not far behind, and doubtless the overseer with his whip, he pushed forward.

The bank gave way, dropping him into the river with a mighty splash. Water went over his head and his foot caught on something – a fallen tree or branch. He kicked free, came up and looked around. The trees were taller here and the canopy closed. Not a glimmer of moonshine reached the water.

'Flydd?'

He could hear nothing over his own splashing and heavy breathing. Being prone to panic in deep water at the best of times, Nish was not game to stop paddling so he could listen.

He moved out into a current, which pulled him downstream. It was eerie. For all he could tell, the river might have been three spans wide, or a hundred, though Flydd had said there were no large rivers here.

Nish was beginning to feel more confident. He moved his arms in gentle circles, scissored his legs, and discovered he could keep his head above water without too much effort.

'Flydd?'

There was no answer. He'd surely go downriver as far as possible, so there would be more area to search. Nish floated along, calmly now. The water was cool enough to ease his throbbing wounds; it was the best he'd felt since his slavery began.

His feet grated on gravel – a shoal touched by light and moon-shadow. He pushed around the edge of it, heading for deeper water, then drifted towards the far bank.

A hand seized him by the collar. Nish thrashed, went under and water surged up his nose and down his windpipe. He was dragged choking and gasping onto the bank. He struck at his assailant, only to receive a blow that drove him into the mud. A big foot pressed him down; mud filled his mouth and eyes. He clawed at the bank.

'Don't move!' said a voice he had never heard before. 'Hoy, Plazzo! I've got one. Told you they'd come this way. Oh, boy, I can taste the reward money already.'

Thirteen

Someone grunted. The bushes rustled and footsteps came in their direction.

'Hey! Any sign of the others, Plazzo?' the fellow continued. 'Ungghr.'

A body fell into the water, making a loud splash. Nish was hauled up by the arms.

'What a useless fellow you are,' said Flydd amiably. 'Wipe the mud off your face – you're giving us a bad name.'

Nish blew the muck out of his nostrils and followed. 'There's another of them somewhere.'

'He's already floating downriver,' Flydd said laconically, tearing leaves into strips as he walked. It made a zipping sound, like cloth being ripped, and Nish smelt a pungent odour that resembled mustard oil.

'Where's Ullii?'

'She's here. Being quiet!

They continued on a track winding through scrub. Ullii fell in beside Nish and took his hand. He made to pull away, knowing how badly he stank, but she clung to him.

'Where are we headed?' said Nish, feeling vaguely uncomfortable. The intimacy he'd had with her months ago at Tirthrax was long gone. Evidently her feelings were unchanged. He felt, as he had briefly when they'd met in the Aachim camp weeks ago, that she expected something of him. Nish could not work out what it was, and was too exhausted to think about it. He could have slept standing up.

'I'll tell you when we get there.' Flydd was still tearing leaves. Ullii was carrying them too – Nish could smell them on her.

't' s the red mustard bush; Flydd said quietly, 'since I know you're going to ask. Ullii found it for me. Puts dogs off the scent, hopefully.'

'But not people?'

'I hardly think so.'

The sky had clouded over. Judging by an occasional glimpse of the moon, they now seemed to be heading north. Nish wondered why, but didn't ask.

Long before daybreak he smelt tar and knew they were passing Snizort again, further east. Flydd continued north, bypassing the now abandoned command hill, before turning onto a north-westerly heading across undulating country covered in crunchy, withered grass.

After several hours of weary trudging, it began to get light. The cloud had passed and it would be another clear, hot day. They climbed a rocky mound, not big enough to be called a hill. Nish sank into the shade afforded by a boulder shaped like a two-humped buffalo, closed his eyes and began to doze off. Flydd scanned the scene, keeping to the cover. 'I don't see anyone behind us.'

Nish grunted. He'd eaten his bread long ago and was so hungry he could have bitten off his arm.

'Better fix your boot,' said Flydd.. 'With what?' Nish snapped.

Flydd tossed him the whip and knife. Nish unbraided several strips of leather, poked holes in the boot with the tip of the knife and began to weave the strips through.

Flydd picked shreds of cloth from around the tear in his left thigh, careful not to touch it with his dirty hands. The edges looked as though they'd been burned.

'What happened there?' said Nish.

Flydd waved the question away.

'Do you want me to bandage that?'

'Touch it with those filthy paws and I'm likely to get gangrene.'

Ullii squatted beside Flydd, staring anxiously at the wound. She was wearing a tent-like smock made from a piece of green cloth fastened at the throat, and baggy trousers. She knotted a mask out of a strip torn from the hem of the smock, and covered her eyes, nose and ears. Horizontal slits over her eyes allowed her to see, not that she needed to.

'You're hurting, Xervish, Ullii said, eyes blinking behind the mask as the light grew.

'Somewhat, Ullii.' Flydd touched her affectionately on the shoulder. 'I'll attend to it as soon as we find water.'

She packed surplus cloth into her nostrils and snuggled up to him, which Nish found extraordinary. Ullii was so wary of people. Gazing up into Flydd's eyes, she said, 'I forgive you, Xervish.'

Nish had no idea what she was talking about. Ullii turned to him then, as if challenging him, and her stare was so intense that he had to look away. What did she want? More of the intimacy they'd shared at Tirthrax? It felt like half a lifetime ago and, even though he cared about Ullii, Nish could not turn his feelings on like a tap.

She tossed her head, leapt up and stalked into the scrub. 'What was that about?' said Nish.

Flydd, bound up in his own troubles, answered the question he thought Nish had asked. 'A long time ago I promised to help find her twin brother, Mylii. They were separated when she was four and she hasn't heard from him since.'

'You mentioned him the other day,' said Nish.

'But I didn't tell you I'd lied to her in Snizort, at the node-drainer. Ullii was being uncooperative, so I told her Muss had found Mylii and was bringing him back. Unfortunately, she discovered that I'd lied.'

'Well, it's all over now.'

'I hope so,' said Flydd, 'though I've a feeling it isn't. Go and have a look around, will you?'

Nish was behind a tree on the other side of the mound when he caught a whiff of something burning, or at least extremely overheated. It was a-strange smell, nothing like burning wood or leaves, or flesh of human or lyrinx. The odour was like roasted rock. He called Flydd over. Ullii came out of the bushes, scowling.

'What's that?' Nish said, sniffing.

Unusually, Ullii answered. 'Iron tears.'

Flydd gave her a keen glance. The rising sun carved him out in profile, a black cut-out in a bronze wall. 'You've been here before, haven't you, Ullii?'

She adjusted her mask over her eyes, moving a little closer to the scrutator. 'Came with Irisis ages ago, looking for the node-drainer.'

'Is it the node?' Nish couldn't see anything unusual.

'What's left of it,' said Flydd. 'Let's take a look, shall we?'

'Shouldn't we try to get away while we can?'

'I've got to check something first.' Flydd scanned the landscape. There was nothing to be seen, though ten thousand soldiers could have hidden in any of the valleys still in shadow, or behind any of the stone-crowned hills. 'We've time enough. They haven't found our trail yet. Over there.' He indicated the hill to their left.

They wound up the hill, which was no more than a grassy undulation. From the top, not two hundred paces away, a black hole in the ground emitted wisps of steam.

Ullii stopped abruptly, her small head darting this way and that.

'What is it?' said Flydd. 'What do you see, Ullii?'

'A hole; she said.

'Of course there's a hole,' Nish muttered.

'Don't be a fool, boy! Ullii?'

'Hole in my lattice, Xervish,' said Ullii. 'A pair of holes.'

'A pair?' said Flydd. 'Are you afraid?'

'No,' said Ullii. 'They're empty now.'

Flydd's feet left pale trails in the dewy grass. Nish followed in silence, unable to make sense of it. Why was Flydd squandering their lead for the exploded remains of a node?

Shortly they began to encounter patches of burnt grass, each containing slaggy aggregations of melted rock which must have been blown out of the hole. The patches coalesced, the blobs of slag grew larger until the ground was knee-deep in them. The bigger ones were still hot enough to warm Nish's ankles as he wove between them.

The hole formed a perfect oval about forty spans wide by sixty long. Its rim was as sharp as cheese cut with a knife and crusted with exhalations of red, yellow and brown sulphur. Within, the land had subsided in a series of concentric oval rings, like a squashed spyglass. The outside ring, the highest, bore a hide of withered grass. On the next, the grass had been carbonised in place. The soil of the remaining rings was burnt bare. The centre of the hole was obscured by rising steam.

There were nine of these oval rings, each about the width of a span, the drop to the next being roughly the same distance. They formed a series of giant steps down to the centre, though the shimmering air obscured what lay below. The humidity was choking.

'You're not planning to go down there?' said Nish, eyeing the hole anxiously.

Flydd chuckled mirthlessly. 'Indeed we are.'

He lowered himself onto the first ring and held his arms up. Without hesitation Ullii slipped into them. Flydd could get her to do things that no one else could. The pair turned their backs and went to the edge.

Nish was reluctant to follow but Flydd was not a man for excuses. Going backwards over the first edge, he felt his chest tighten, his pulse quicken.

Flydd and Ullii were well below him as Nish climbed down to the next level. The sides of the oval rings, as smooth as polished stone, resembled a series of pistons one inside the other. At the ninth ring it was stifling, steamy. Waves of heat pulsed up from an oval trench five or six spans deep and, when the steam clouds parted, its base glowed red. Within the trench, a cylinder of rock rose from the centre, listing to one side. The once-smooth stone walls had run like toffee.

On its flat top, like a pair of teardrops on a pedestal, sat two shining globes of liquid metal, bright as quicksilver. They were shaped like drops of water, though each was the size of a soup bowl. A faint humming sound came from them. Ullii had taken her mask off and was staring at the globes as if entranced.

'My, oh my,' said Flydd. 'Can you hear the song of the tears?'

'What are they?' Nish sat near the edge, not too close, praying that Flydd was not going to go after them.

'The distilled tears of the node,' said Flydd.

'I don't understand.'

'No power is ever completely destroyed, Nish. There's always some residuum – and it's ever more complex, warped and strange. I wonder… Can this be an accident, or were they created?'

'Flydd?'

'According to myth, or rumour, the tears are the essence of the node, purified of all base elements by the blast that destroys it. They're believed to be made of the purest substance in the world, and desired by mancers more than any other. But no mancer has ever obtained so much as a speck of that matter, much less a complete tear. They represent the value of a continent.' Flydd gazed at the tears with greedy eyes.

'And you want them?' said Nish. 'Are they magic?'

'Empty,' Ullii interjected.

'Not at the moment,' said the scrutator. 'But their substance, which has been called nihilium, takes the print of the Art more readily than any other form of matter, and binds it much more tightly. Oh, I want them – to make sure no one else can have them.'

'How are you going to get across?'

Flydd gauged the distances. The oval trench was red hot, making it impossible to climb down and up the other side. The stone pedestal seemed cooler, though it still radiated such heat that they could not have gone within a couple of spans of it, even could they have reached that far. Besides, it was well out of reach, its top being three spans below them, and eight or nine out from where they stood.

'Even if we had a rope or a grappling iron we couldn't collect them,' Flydd muttered.

'And I dare say they're heavy?'

Flydd thought for a moment. 'If they have weight as we know it, they would be heavier than lead; they could have the weight of gold, or even platinum. But then again, they may weigh virtually nothing… Let's go up.' Flydd gave the tears one last, lingering look, then turned to the wall.

Nish boosted him up, then Ullii. Flydd reached down a hand to him.

'What are you going to do?' Nish wondered as they reached the top.

'I don't know. The time is all wrong.'

They repaired to the shade of a grove of trees some ten minutes' walk away. Flydd filled the overseer's pannikin from a tiny spring, kindled a smokeless fire under it with dry twigs, carefully washed his hands then lay back with his eyes closed.

'If the field is dead,' said Nish, 'how come you were able to make that blast back there, to save Ullii?' It had been preying on his mind ever since.

Flydd looked up irritably. 'Can you be quiet? I'm trying to think.'

Nish stared at the scrutator as if unable to make him out. Finally Flydd snapped. 'Damn and blast you, Nish! Go away.'

Nish rose abruptly but Flydd said, 'Oh, you might as well sit down. I've lost my train of thought anyway.' He peeled back his torn and bloody pants leg to reveal the jagged, blistered gash in his thigh. 'I had a charged crystal embedded in my leg a long time ago, for just such an emergency.'

'You had it all that time?' Nish exclaimed. 'Why didn't you use it to save yourself?'

'It was for emergencies.' snapped Flydd.

And being enslaved didn't count?' Nish found that incomprehensible.

'My life wasn't in danger, apart from being bored to death by you, I wanted to remain with the army for as long as possible, so I'd know what Jal-Nish was up to. You do know that yoar father plans to lead an attack on the lyrinx? An unbelievable folly that can only end one way.'.'

'I've heard the slaves gossiping about it,' said Nish. Now I'm out of contact, and that's bad.'

'What about the crystal in your leg?'

'Once used, it can't be reused.'

'Why didn't you sew two crystals into yourself? Or twenty, for that matter?'

Flydd sprang up, his face thunderous. 'Don't you ever think before opening your mouth? Nothing comes without a price, Artificer, and putting powerful crystals inside you exacts a hefty one. Discharging one -' He shook his head.

It was a nasty tear, the length of Nish's little finger and burned at the edges. 'That must be painful,' Nish observed.

'You use words the way a blacksmith cuts flowers! Scrutators are trained to overcome pain, and I've had more practice than most, but this hurts like bloody blazes.' Tearing off the sleeve of his shirt, Flydd ripped it into strips and poked them under the boiling water. After a minute or two he fished them out, waved them in the air to cool them, then bound them around the injury.

'That'll do.' Turning away from the pit, Flydd began to limp towards a hill some half a league to the east.

'Where are we going?' said Nish.

'We can't recover the tears on our own. I've got to find help.'

It took the best part of an hour to reach the hill, which was mounded like a breast and topped with a cliffed nipple of gullied grey stone. Flydd panted his way up, emerging on a patch of flat rock some thirty paces across, bisected by a cleft from which a solitary tree sprouted. They sat in its meagre shade while he got his breath back.

'You'll have noticed that this hill is quite distinctive,' said the scrutator. 'Irisis and Fyn-Mah were to rendezvous here with the air-floater, if they got out of Snizort alive.'

'What were they doing there?'

'None of your business.'

'Did you know you were going to be taken prisoner?'

'Ghorr needed a scapegoat and there was nothing I could do about it without -' He broke off, staring back towards the node. 'But of course, if Irisis and Fyn-Mah did escape, they would have been here days ago. Spread out. Look for a sign.'

It took the best part of an hour to find it, an ornamental dagger partly embedded in the ground, as if dropped from a height. Rudely scratched on the blade was: Yes, no, 3.

'What can that mean?' said Nish.

'It means Fyn-Mah found what she went into Snizort to find, that she was hunted and had to flee, and that she's gone to the third place I mentioned previously.'

'That being?'

'None of your business.'

Nish sighed. In this mood, Flydd was impossible to deal with. 'Then we have to walk,' he remarked gloomily. Despite its dangers, air-floating was the most pleasant of all means of travelling. 'Is it far away?'

The reply was pure Flydd. 'Further than the people hunting us.'

They were climbing down the cleft when something winked in the sun to the south. 'That's an air-floater!' hissed Nish. 'Could it be Irisis coming back for us?'

Flydd squinted at the object, which was moving low to the ground along a line of trees that marked the course of a creek. 'She wouldn't dare, in daylight.' The machine began to zigzag back and forth as if following something. 'What can they be doing?'

'Dogs!' whispered Ullii. She'd been so quiet since leaving the node crater that Nish had practically forgotten she was there.

'They've found our tracks,' said Flydd.

Nish hefted a knobbly stick. 'We'd better get ready to fight.'

'Stay down! We can't fight that many people.' A leathery tree grew horizontally out of the cleft before bending to, the vertical. Flydd pulled himself up into the curve and peered around the trunk. Nish crouched between two rocks splotched with bright yellow lichen.

The air-floater lifted and ran directly towards the node crater. Flydd groaned, the tortured sound two trees make when rubbed together in a storm. 'Let's pray no one recognises what's down there.'

The machine settled. Nine figures went into the pit: seven people and two dogs. The pilot and one other person could be seen moving about on the air-floater. Nish twisted his fingers, together. After some minutes it lifted, moved over the depression, bucking in the updraught, and drifted down.

'That's a dangerous manoeuvre,' said Flydd. 'If the walls of the gasbag touch something hot, they're dead.'

Time passed. They could see nothing but the top of the airbag. 'What are they doing?' said Nish.

'A really good pilot could bring it down right over the pedestal. Someone could simply pick up the tears.'

'They're taking a long time,' Nish said later.

'Be quiet!'

The air-floater crept out of the crater and hovered in the updraught, its bow pointing at their hiding place. 'Whoever it is,' said Flydd in a curiously flat voice, 'they have the tears.'

The air-floater lurched, turned away and began to drift, low to the ground, towards the army camp in the distance.

'We'd better make sure/ Flydd said.

They scrambled down the gully. 'I dare say the tears are more important than we are,' said Nish hopefully.

'They are, but the scrutators won't give us up, Nish.'

They could see the smoke well before they reached the hole. It was yellow-brown with threads of black, and smelled like burning hair and meat.

'I can't see anything.' Flydd was peering over the edge. 'I'll have to climb down.'

'Do you mind if I stay here?' said Nish. The stench was making him sick.

'Good idea. Keep watch. You too, Ullii. Ullii?'

She was hanging back, holding her noseplugs in. 'This is a terrible place,' she whispered.

'You don't have to come near.' Flydd eased his injured leg over the side.

Nish watched him go down. A surge of greasy brown fumes obscured Flydd as he reached the fourth oval. He bent double, coughing. Nish moved away from the edge. When he returned, after the smoke had thinned, Flydd was not to be seen.

'Is he all right?' he said to Ullii.

She gagged and doubled over, unable to speak. Nish circumnavigated the depression, seeking a better vantage point, but did not find one. After five or ten minutes, Flydd began to labour up again.

Nish helped him out onto the ground. The skin below Flydd's eyes had gone the purple of a day-old bruise and it took him quite a while to focus.

'Are the tears gone?' said Nish.

'Yes.'

'Who could it have been?'

'Ghorr is my guess, though it could have been any of the scrutators. Can you tell, Ullii?'

'No,' she whispered. 'Can't tell anything. Can't see anything.' In times of stress she sometimes lost her lattice.

'But whoever did take it,' said Flydd, 'they've made sure no one will ever know.'

'What do you mean?' said Nish.

'The trench at the bottom is clotted with bodies. Six soldiers and the air-floater's chart-maker. And the dogs. In an hour, the witnesses will be ash.'

All but us,' said Nish. 'And the pilot.'

'He needs her to get back to camp, but as soon as the air-floater lands, she's dead. He'll call it a seizure.'

And the soldiers?'

'He'll say I ambushed them and blasted the soldiers into nothingness with another crystal. No one will be able to prove otherwise.'

'If he knew we were watching, our lives could be measured in minutes, said Nish.

"He knows we've been there,' said Flydd. 'The air-floater tracked us to the node. Once the tears are safely hidden, he'll come after us.'

'Then we'd better get moving. Which way, surr?'

'North.'

They set off, keeping to the lowest ground. Ullii whimpered and moved close to Nish for comfort, though he was too preoccupied to notice. After some minutes she flounced away and took Flydd's hand. Flydd put his arm around her as he walked. She was red in the face and struggling to keep up, which Nish found surprising. When he'd last been with Ullii, she'd climbed the slopes of Tirthrax more easily than he had.

'Was this an accident?' Flydd mused as they rested among a pile of boulders a couple of hours later, 'Or was it planned from the beginning?'

'What do you mean?' said Nish.

'What if the device Ghorr gave me was designed to be faulty, so as to destroy the node and create the tears?'

'How could that be, surr? You told me it was tested, independently.'

'I don't know. Scrutator Klarm would not be easily fooled, but neither can I believe that the destruction of the node, and the creation of the tears, was an accident. But if it was planned, why didn't the perpetrator come to the node straight away?'

'Maybe he was delayed by the battle,' said Nish. 'Or thought that the tears would form at the node-drainer.'

'I hadn't considered that,' Flydd said appreciatively. 'And perhaps, until today, it was too hot to get near, too steamy to see if the tears were there.'

'Then why not put a guard on it?'

'That would announce that there was something special in the crater. Whoever he is, he wouldn't want anyone to know about the tears.'

'Not even the other scrutators?'

'Especially not the other scrutators…' Flydd toyed with a piece of gravel, deep in thought. 'There's more here than the eye can see, Nish.'

'I don't understand,' said Nish.

'Neither do I, but it bothers me that someone knows far more about the Art than any of us. Why were the tears made?'

"To further one man's ambition.'

'Or one woman's. Four of the scrutators are women, remember? It doesn't do to make assumptions. But what ambition could -?'

Breaking off, he began to pace, glancing from Nish to a silent Ullii, who sat by herself, arms crossed over her belly, rocking back and forth.

'What is it, surr?'

Flydd jerked his head. Nish rose and followed him. 'Surely you trust Ullii, surr?'

'She doesn't need to know.'

'Do 1?'

'A half-baked mooncalf like you?' Flydd said fiercely. 'Certainly not, but you're all I've got. Breathe a syllable of what I'm about to tell you and you're a dead man.'

There wasn't a trace of levity in his tone. Nish swallowed.

'I'm wondering,' the scrutator went on, 'if this might not be an attempt upon a higher power:

'I didn't know there was a higher power than the scrutators.'

Flydd hesitated, as if having second thoughts. 'It's worth my head to speak about this, and yours, but since we're both outlaws in peril of our lives, and I desperately need a sounding board, I'll make an exception. It's the best kept secret of all. The scrutators make out that they run the world, but the Numinator pulls their strings, and has since the Council was formed.'

'Clawers,' called Ullii. 'Coming fast!'

Her eyes were covered again, her face was turned to the north-west. Nish couldn't see anything, but Ullii did not make mistakes. In a few minutes three specks appeared, flying high, directly towards the fuming node crater, which was now a good two-thirds of a league from their hiding place.

'What can they want?' said Nish.

They've worked out what really happened to the node/ said Flydd, climbing the jumbled boulders to get a better look. 'But they're too late.'

Two lyrinx flew down the fuming hole while a third circled, on watch. Within a minute, the two reappeared, rising high into the sky and flying in widening circles before heading in the direction of the human army.

'They won't find them,' said Flydd. 'The tears will be hidden by now. I wonder what they'll do?'

The lyrinx disappeared into the haze. 'Who is this Numinator?' said Nish.

'If anyone knows, they're not saying. Some scrutators think it stands for "The Numinous One", though anyone who styles himself as a divine power must be supremely arrogant. I can only say this: more than a century ago, soon after the war had become worldwide and the Council of Santhenar, as it then was, was struggling to form a united front against the enemy, the power calling itself the Numinator took command. There was a bitter struggle and many mancers died before the Numinator defeated them. The survivors became the Council of Scrutators. The Numinator, he or she, set down the rules by which the Council was to run the world, but afterwards took no part in day-to-day affairs. From time to time the scrutators have chafed under this regime, and even tried to rebel, but were always taught a brutal lesson.'

'And you were one of them?' asked Nish.

'That was long before my time. My crime was simply to inquire into matters that weren't my business. The scrutators taught me my lesson to avoid being punished themselves. They taught me well.'

Nish digested that. 'So you think the Council deliberately created these tears, so as to take on the Numinator?'

'Not the Council. One individual, who may want to control the Council, first!

'But why now, when the war is going so badly, and division could be fatal?'

'I don't know. It may have been decades in the planning. And there's no saying that the person who created the tears is the one who ended up with them.'

'Are we going to find out?' said Nish.

'Don't be a bloody fool, boy. Look at me!' Xervish Flydd held out his arms. 'See the scars, the warped and twisted bones, the very flesh scraped away. 1 was a handsome man when I was young, Nish, but not after the scrutators had finished with me. I should have died then. They did their best to break me, but were ordered to let me live. I was to be a lesson to the other scrutators, not to pry into what wasn't their business. I've often wished they had killed me; I've not had a day without pain in thirty years. But here I am, a living example. Take heed, Nish. Some secrets are meant to be kept.'

Despite his words, Nish could see the resolve in Flydd's eyes – he was going to find out. And what then?

'So why the breeding factories? Why rewrite the Histories? Why-?'

'Good questions for which there are no answers.'

'But-'

'Come on!' Flydd said roughly. 'As soon as the tears are hidden, he'll be after us. He can't afford to let us live.'

Fourteen

Vithis took charge of Tiaan's amplimet and hedron, wrapping them in sheets of beaten platinum which he folded over carefully before putting the packet in his pocket with a shudder. He passed Tiaan to a young cheerful man, a deep-chested giant with blond curly hair, unusual for an Aachim.

'I'm Ghaenis,' he said to Tiaan as the group raced back to their own lines. 'Don't be afraid. You'll come to no harm while I'm looking after you;

For some odd reason, she knew it was true. She had perfect confidence in Ghaenis, and she'd not felt that with any Aachim before, apart from Malien.

Vithis said no word to Tiaan in the half-hour it took to reach the Aachim war camp, running all the way. As soon as they arrived, Ghaenis set Tiaan down on a metal chair and drew Vithis aside. He began to put a case animatedly, with much arm-waving and gesturing towards the constructs.

Vithis listened with set face. Ghaenis's accent was difficult to follow and Tiaan learned only that it had to do with the amplimet. At the end, Vithis shook his head.

Ghaenis renewed the argument even more passionately but with the same good humour. One hand swept out in the direction of the stalled constructs. The other reached for Vithis as if begging a favour.

'I cannot permit it,' Vithis said tersely. 'It's too dangerous.'

Ghaenis kept on. Vithis paced up and down, head bowed, then finally he nodded. The young man listened carefully while Vithis gave a series of instructions, or warnings, then handed the platinum-wrapped packet to him.

Ghaenis gleefully shook the older man's hands, bowed low and, with a cheery wave to Tiaan, ran to a group of constructs and climbed into the leading one.

Tiaan went on with her exercises, surreptitiously clenching and unclenching her leg muscles. She needed to regain her strength. She had to be able to walk, and no one must know it. She was going to escape, somehow.

The camp was furious with activity. A dozen people vied for Vithis's attention, all urgently. He listened to their messages, frowned and called an attendant. 'Bring her!'

The fellow picked Tiaan up as if she were a child and followed Vithis halfway across the encampment to a large tent. From a good ten paces away, Vithis shouted, 'Come out!' in the Aachim tongue. Malien had taught Tiaan a little of the language in Tirthrax.

A young noblewoman emerged. She was small for an Aachim and, with her reddish hair and pale colouring, strikingly different from the other Aachim here. The attendant set Tiaan on the dusty ground.

'This is Tiaan Liise-Mar, the thief who stole our construct,' said Vithis in the common speech. 'Guard her with your life, Thyssea, or Clan Elienor will answer for it.'

The young woman bowed but, as the grim Aachim stalked away, she made an obscene gesture to his back, then gave Tiaan an impish grin.

Tiaan could not help smiling. 'Hello, Thyssea.' The name sounded strange on her tongue. 'Did I pronounce that right?'

'Well enough, for a human. It's Thyzzea.' She spoke the common speech fluently, though with a slight nasal intonation.

'I'm sorry. Thyzzea. I tried to say it as Vithis did.'

'Thyssea is an.., uncouth word. He was being deliberately insulting.'

'Why?' said Tiaan.

'Do you know that Clan Inthis is called First Clan?'

'Yes.' Tiaan put her hand over her eyes. She'd been underground for many weeks and, though it was late afternoon, the sun was painfully bright.

'Come into the shade.'

'I can't stand up,' said Tiaan. 'I broke my back.' She wasn't going to reveal that the lyrinx had repaired it – once her legs were strong enough to walk, it would give her a tiny advantage.

Though they were the same size, Thyzzea lifted Tiaan with little apparent effort, carried" her beneath a scrubby tree which had red-tipped thorns growing out of the trunk, and sat her on the withered grass. 'Clan Elienor is, in the eyes of Inthis and some other clans, Last Clan.'

'Why is that?' Tiaan's curiosity was piqued. She was always more sympathetic to the underdog.

'We're different. Most Aachim are tall and dark, but our clan tends to be small and pale skinned, and many of us have red hair. Inthis reckons our blood was corrupted long ago, by a visitor from another world.'

'Was it?'

'I don't know. The elders guard our heritage closely. We're-so disliked because we're not compliant enough. We often disagree with the decisions of the Ten Clans; or Eleven, now that Inthis has rejoined. We are seen as disloyal but, even worse, individualist. It's a great failing.' She smiled as she said it.

'You're not armed, Thyzzea. That seems odd, in a guard.'

'I'm not a guard. I am of noble blood, and my father's heir, Vithis hates my father, so forcing me to do guard duty is an insult to him and all Clan Elienor.'

Tiaan considered that. 'Is Elienor a small clan?'

'It was the smallest on Aachan. But, unlike other clans, we all made the decision to come through the gate, and most of us survived it. Of the twelve Aachim clans, we are now ninth in numbers. There are five thousand of us.'

'In Tirthrax I met an elderly woman called Malien,' said Tiaan, 'who had something of your looks. Her ancestors were Clan Elienor; she said, though the Aachim of Santhenar no longer hold to clan allegiances.'

Thyzzea frowned. A few of my clan were shipped here as prisoners, or slaves, in ancient times.'

'She's a famous hero. Malien is in one of the Great Tales.'

'Then I hope to travel to Tirthrax some day and meet her. We know little about how our kind have fared on Santhenar in the thousands of years they've been exiled here. Would you care for something to drink?'

'Yes, please. I'm really thirsty.'

'I'll carry you to our tent.'

Tiaan found herself liking the young Aachim, and that would be a problem when she tried to escape, though Thyzzea had not asked Tiaan for her parole.

The tent was the size of a cottage, with a large living area and small rooms opening off it. Rugs on the floor looked costly, though the space contained nothing but some metal chests and a small table, at which a red-haired youth stood, writing in a book.

'My little brother, Kalle,' said Thyzzea, holding Tiaan in her arms. 'Kalle, here is Tiaan, who opened the gate and made the construct fly.'

Tiaan felt embarrassed at being carried like an invalid. She resolved to exercise harder than ever.

Kalle dropped his pen, awe-struck. 'Tiaan!' Remembering his manners, he put out his hand. The long Aachim fingers wrapped right around Tiaan's hand. 'It is a great honour to meet you.'

Kalle looked to be about thirteen, though it was difficult to tell the age of the Aachim. He was also her height, with pale, unfreckled skin, a lengthy, bladed nose, green eyes and hair the most brilliant deep red.

'How is it…?' he looked from Tiaan to his sister.

'Vithis ordered me to guard her,' said Thyzzea.

Kalle flushed the colour of his hair. 'But… Oh! Oh!' He could not look at Tiaan. 'We are dishonoured. What are you going to say to Father?'

'He hasn't come back from the battle…' Seeing the anxious look in her brother's eye, she amended hastily, 'yet.'

Kalle struggled to control himself. 'But he'll be all right, won't he?' His voice was shaky.

'Of course he will,' Thyzzea said in reassuring tones. 'You'd better get back to your studies.'

Kalle began to turn the pages of his book, but his eyes were fixed on the open flap of the tent.

Thyzzea picked up a basket in her free hand. 'Shall we sit under the tree again? It's cooler outside. This is a hot world.' For me too,' said Tiaan.

'You come from the other side of Lauralin, don't you? The city of Tiksi, on the west coast?'

'You know a lot about me,' said Tiaan.

'You saved us. You're in our Histories.'

'But…'

'Yes?' Thyzzea said politely.

'I don't wish to intrude on you. You must be anxious about your father.'

'I am,' she said, 'but that's a private matter and I've a duty to watch over you. Let's talk no more about it. In truth, you're a welcome distraction from worries I can do nothing about.'

'It still seems a bit.., casual,' said Tiaan.

'What do you mean?'

'Sitting here, talking, while the war rages only a league away.' She waved one hand in the direction of the battlefield.

'The battle ended some hours ago and the enemy are retreating west.'

'Did we win, then?' Having been underground for so long, Tiaan had no idea how the struggle had gone.

'No, but nor did we lose.' Thyzzea explained about the unexpected destruction of the node, and the fleet of air-floaters turning the tide of battle at the critical moment. 'The enemy are withdrawing, as they must, because Snizort is on fire. But since there's no field, we can't move our constructs. Until that problem is solved, we young ones have little to do.'

'Why did Vithis leave me with you? I thought I would be imprisoned.'

'You made the gate that brought us to Santhenar, Tiaan. And you learned how to make the construct fly, a secret we've been searching for since the Way between the Worlds was opened. Vithis may be our leader, but the other clans will not follow him into dishonour. You'll be treated with the respect you've earned, in our house.'

'Thank you,' said Tiaan, a little uncomfortable with such praise. 'But I don't understand. Am I a prisoner or a guest?'

Thyzzea looked embarrassed. 'The situation is an awkward one, Tiaan. You are Vithis's prisoner, but my guest.'

Tiaan found this difficult to take in. 'But why you? I mean no insult,' she said hastily, 'but surely, for such an important captive…?'

Thyzzea smiled. 'I'm skilled in all manner of arts – few of my age more so. Even were you not handicapped, you could not escape me. But that's not why I was chosen.'

'Why then?'

'To humiliate my father and degrade me. I'm firstborn, my father's heir, and he is the leader of Clan Elienor. That I should do guard duty for a prisoner who is not our own kind…' she coloured, '.., and now it is I who mean no insult – demeans us both.'

'I don't understand.'

'Clan Inthis has always hated Clan Elienor and tried to do us down. Now Inthis has been reduced to two men, and Vithis is sterile, while Elienor has a higher place than before. It's bile to him.'

They returned to the tree, where Thyzzea unpacked the basket. 'I'm sorry there's no wine to offer you.' She handed Tiaan a mug of water. 'Our supplies are low.'

'I rarely drink wine,' said Tiaan. 'It makes my head spin.'

'We used to take it at every meal, on our own world, though that was the weak wine, not the strong. Strong wine is for adults, except on special occasions, and then only sparingly.'

'I thought you were an adult.'

Thyzzea unpacked hard bread, which was brown with a purple tinge, a variety of dried and smoked fruits of kinds that Tiaan did not recognise, a glass flask of red oil and a string of stubby sausages. With each item she apologised for the lack. Carving slices from the bread and the hard sausages, she drizzled them with red oil and handed the platter to Tiaan.

'In your years I would be about seventeen,' said Thyzzea. We mature slowly compared to old humankind. I am a woman, but not of adult age.'

Tiaan found it strange to be referred to as an old human. She just thought of herself as human, and the Aachim did not seem that different, though clearly they considered themselves to be a distinct human species. Perhaps that was connected to their obsession with their clans. 'Then we're not far apart. The day you came through the gate was my twenty-first birthday.' She took a piece of bread but laid it down again. I hope you find it edible,' Thyzzea said anxiously. 'I enjoyed the food Malien gave me in Tirthrax.' Tiaan tasted the sausage. It was heavily spiced, burning the tip of her tongue and making her eyes water. 'Delicious,' she said, taking a sip from her mug, 'though rather hotter than I'm used to.'

'I'm sorry,' said Thyzzea. 'If it's…' 'I'll just take a little at a time,' Tiaan said hoarsely. Hearing a high-pitched whine from their left, Thyzzea stood up. 'It's a construct. The field must be working again.'

'I don't see how it could be,' said Tiaan though, lacking her amplimet, she had no way of telling. Shortly a construct floated by, whining furiously yet moving slowly, towing another seven with stout cables. The blond-haired giant stood at the controls, looking pleased with himself. He waved to Thyzzea and Tiaan as he passed.

'That's Ghaenis.' Thyzzea rose to watch him go by. She sighed, her breast heaved. 'Doesn't he look magnificent?'

'He carried me from the battlefield. He seemed like a decent fellow.'

'He's a brilliant young man, even cleverer than his mother. He's brave and honourable, and modest too. If anyone can get us out of here, it will be him.' Another sigh. 'But.., of course,' she added, now speaking about herself, 'it can never be.' 'Why not?' said Tiaan.

'He's spoken for by the beautiful Rannilt. And even if he were not, his mother is Tirior of Clan Nataz, and she hates my father even more than Vithis does.'

Tiaan did not ask why. Deep currents ran between the clans.

Thyzzea wrinkled her brow. 'It one construct can go, why not the others?'

'Vithis gave Ghaenis my amplimet, and it's powerful enough to draw from a distant field.' Tiaan wondered how long it would take to move the thousands of constructs stranded here. Weeks, surely.

Thyzzea had gone pale. 'He's using the amplimet? Hasn't anyone told him? But of course, Clan Nataz have always desired it…'

'It'll be all right if he takes it slowly,' said Tiaan.

'You don't understand. We can't use -'

A few hundred paces away, the leading construct screeched to a stop and thumped down. The seven towed machines thudded after it, shaking the ground.

'He must have lost the field,' said Tiaan.

Ghaenis threw himself over the side and landed hard, rolling across the dry soil in little puffs of dust. He stood up, looking back at his construct as if he expected it to explode. A cloud passed in front of the sun and momentarily Tiaan felt icy cold.

'Something's wrong, Tiaan.' Thyzzea's eyes were huge.

'He'll be safe if he's lost the field.'

'You don't understand,' Thyzzea wailed 'He shouldn't have gone near it. We Aachim -'

'He begged Vithis for it,' said Tiaan.

'But Vithis has always been against using this deadly crystal.'

'Ghaenis was most persuasive -'

Scarlet rays streamed out of Ghaenis's torso. The air seemed to shimmer.

'Tiaan!' Thyzzea cried. 'You know the amplimet best – can't you do something?'

'I don't know what the matter is.' Yes, she did. The chill ran all the way down Tiaan's back. 'Power must still be flowing from the field.' She pulled herself up by the trunk of the tree, pricking her hands on the red thorns. 'It's hurting him. Carry me across, quickly.'

Before Thyzzea had taken a step, Tiaan could feel the power – and something else, a brittle, inanimate crystal rage. The treacherous amplimet had refused to be cut off, and it was directing all that power into Ghaenis.

'Can you stop it?' gasped Thyzzea, running as hard as she could.

'If I can get near enough.'

Ghaenis was staggering about with his hands tightly pressed to his ears. The Aachim from the other machines ran towards him, including a striking young woman, presumably Rannilt, whose wavy black hair streamed out half a span behind her.

'Ghaenis, love!' she cried. 'What's the matter?' When Thyzzea and Tiaan were still a hundred paces away, Ghaenis collapsed. Steam or smoke wisped up from his mouth. He arched his back, drummed his heels on the ground then, to the horror of everyone there, burst into flame. Ghaenis screamed but once. Aachim raced up with buckets of precious water but it made no difference. He was burning from the inside out.

Thyzzea stopped dead. Ghaenis arched up in a semicircle, just his heels and outstretched hands touching the ground. His body was grotesquely swollen, his nostrils emitting rings of black smoke. Then he exploded. The legs and head fell back but the rest of Ghaenis was gone. It was the most hideous sight Tiaan had ever seen.

Thyzzea clutched Tiaan hard, making incoherent sounds in her throat. Rannilt screamed so shrilly that the flask of oil under the tree cracked. Two Aachim carried her away from the dreadful scene, still shrieking, and thankfully someone cast a cloak over the smouldering remains.

Thyzzea just stood there, choking. Tiaan wished she were a thousand leagues away. 'Take me back, please. We can't do anything now.'

Thyzzea stumbled back to the tree, gasping for air. Putting Tiaan down, she fell to her knees and began to weep into her hands. Tiaan reached out, drawing Thyzzea to her and folding her arms around the younger woman. She said nothing. Words had no value whatsoever.

Finally Thyzzea disengaged herself and drew away. With a visible effort, she internalised her grief. The Aachim seemed able to do that – or perhaps they preferred not to show emotion in the presence of strangers. 'Rannilt will go out of her mind' she said hoarsely. 'Why, why did Vithis let him have the amplimet?'

Tiaan could not answer that. 'Once anthracism starts, there's no stopping it. But at least it was quick.'

'Ghaenis was a wonderful man. Everyone loved him. What will his mother -?'

Tirior, recognisable from a distance by the black curling hair, came flying across the dirt. Several Aachim tried to stop her from passing through the circle but she knocked them out of the way and pushed through. A great shuddering cry rent the air.

Vithis appeared from the other direction, robes flapping. No one hindered his passage. The crowd separated behind him, before moving away hastily. Vithis converged on Tirior, who was standing by the smoking remains. She turned, ground out something that Tiaan did not hear, then struck Vithis down with a vicious blow to the midriff.

Laying her cloak over the other cloak, she knelt by her son's remains, head bowed.

Vithis picked himself up and retrieved the amplimet from the construct, keeping the platinum sheet between it and his hand at all times. After wrapping it carefully, he stalked towards Tiaan's tree, waving an attendant across. 'Bring her!'

The attendant picked Tiaan up.

'Where are you taking Tiaan?' said Thyzzea with desperate dignity, determined to preserve her clan's honour no matter how far Vithis outmatched her.

Vithis did not deign to reply.

'I must insist on knowing' she said stoutly.

"How dare you question me, child of an outcast clan!'

'You required me to take Tiaan into my house, and so I have. She has guest right.'

"The Eleven Clans do not recognise guest right for aliens.'

'Clan Elienor does,' Thyzzea said, 'and your actions are a deliberate insult to my father, our clan, and myself.' A red spot had appeared high on each cheek; one knee shook as she faced him. 'And to Tiaan, whom our Histories honour, despite your insulting behaviour.'

'You have not reached your majority and cannot offer guest right. How dare you lecture me!'

'My father put me in charge of his house when he went to battle. He gave me his seal and full authority to run his affairs.'

'Then let doom fall on his head! I shall tell you nothing. Attendant!'

As Tiaan was carried away, she was trying to work out what Vithis would do next. It was impossible to focus – she kept seeing Ghaenis's cheery face, and his gruesome death.

Now that his own efforts had failed so disastrously, Vithis would do whatever it took to force the secret of the thapter out of her. She had to resist him. Fortunately the construct, coated with tar, had burned hot. With luck the diamond hedrons and the carbon filaments connecting them to the amplimet had been consumed, and Vithis need never learn they had existed. Let him think the secret of flight lay in the amplimet and how Tiaan had used it. She could not resist torture but, after what Thyzzea had said, it seemed unlikely that the Aachim would permit that. On the other hand, after the death of Ghaenis, anything was possible.

Could she pretend not to understand the talent that enabled her to make the construct fly? Pretending stupidity was a dangerous course; they knew too much about her. But how else could she save herself?

They reached a tent guarded by four Aachim men. 'Let no one disturb us!' Vithis ordered.

The guards saluted and he went in. The attendant sat Tiaan in a metal chair and departed. Vithis walked round the room several times, pushing his fingers through his hair until it stood out like bristles. The hollows under his eyes had a yellow tinge.

He swallowed and turned to Tiaan. 'I have much to get done,' Vithis said softly, 'so let us get this over with as quickly as possible. How did you make the construct fly?'

Vithis, an exceptionally tall man, was standing so close that she had to tilt her head right back to look at him. A fly buzzed around the tent. The sun was going down but the heat and stillness remained oppressive.

'I don't know,' she lied. 'I've never understood how I used the amplimet, even after all the instruction the Aachim gave me. My talent just seemed to grow. Sometimes it was as if the crystal was instructing me.'

His face was as expressionless as metal; she could not judge his thoughts.

'You're lying,' he said without emphasis. 'You blindfolded everyone in the construct and did something to it to make it fly. What did you do?'

'Nothing,' Tiaan said as steadily as she could. She could not match his strength so she must give before him, then spring back. 'You can check Tirior's construct.'

'We will, once it's cool enough to get inside. If you didn't change it, how did you make it fly?'

Any construct can be made to fly if you have an amplimet,' she lied.

'How?' he roared in her face. And why did you blindfold everyone?'

'I didn't want anyone to see the amplimet. Look what it's done to Ghaenis, after you gave it to him. It causes trouble everywhere I go, and everyone who sees it wants to take it from me. It's mine!. Joeyn gave it to me with his dying breath. It's all I have left, since you forced Minis to break his promise to me. Since you killed little Haani.'

'I did not kill her!' he snapped, but it put him off balance. 'It was an accident and reparation has been paid. Neither could Minis break his promise, since he did not have the right to make such a commitment to you.'

Tiaan had to reinforce his false impression of her character. She tried to make her emotions as flighty as a hutterfly. 'I did everything for the love of Minis,' she said with a sweet, dreamy smile, like a smitten adolescent. Then she screeched, 'He promised me! He lied, and you forced him to it. I hate you'.'

Vithis took a step backwards. 'Minis does not lie.' He grimaced as if he'd just swallowed something nasty.

'He lied to me!' she shrieked. 'Liar, liar, liar!' You're overdoing it, she thought. Vithis is a clever, subtle man. Don't be too emotional.

'You show your true nature at last. The amplimet can never be yours, sad little creature that you are. You're unworthy of it.'

'No!' she shouted. 'It's mine.'

He shook her until she felt like vomiting fragments of red sausage all over him. 'You're no geomancer, Tiaan. You have a brilliant native talent, but not the intellect to control the amplimet.'

'I flew my thapter all the way from Tirthrax,' she muttered.

'The crystal would end up controlling you. For the last time, how did you make the construct fly?'

'I had to work the balance between the two crystals,' she said, making up a meaningless term. 'For flight, the balance between the amplimet and the smaller crystal, my hedron, must be just right. I set up a kind of.., oscillation in the field, but it grew stronger and stronger, as if it was feeding on itself. It hurt so much! I thought it was going to anthracise me. Like you did to poor Ghaenis.'

He ignored the barb. 'But it didn't; said Vithis. 'How did you overcome that?'

'The oscillation vanished and the field seemed to be pushing the other way, lifting the construct off the floor. Then… I can't explain it. I visualised the construct flying.., something grew hot beneath the floor and up it went…'

"That's gibberish,' he said doubtfully. 'You're making it up.'

A drop of ice slid down her gullet. She was making it up, and if he was sure of it he would crucify her. Careful, she thought. Be more convincing in your stupidity. 'That's what happened, I swear it!' she rushed out. 'I didn't understand. The feeling of the crystal was soul-deep.' She said it with wide-eyed, gullible since:

'Soul-deep? What mumbo-jumbo is that?'

Someone was at the flap, beckoning. Vithis spoke briefly to the man, then returned. 'I have urgent business elsewhere. Before I go, answer me this. What did you mean, it was as if the crystal was instructing you?'

She seized on that. Back in the manufactory, one of the workers, a girl called Sannet, had heard voices all the time. It had been tiresome to work with her, for Sannet needed to consult her voices before undertaking the simplest task.

'I heard voices. In my head,' lied Tiaan, looking up at the Aachim stupidly.

He was disgusted. 'Have you always heard them?'

Could she reinforce his feeling that she was not completely sane? No, better to pretend that the amplimet had damaged her. 'Never!' Tiaan cried theatrically, 'Until I was given the amplimet by old Joeyn. He was my only friend.'

'I'm not surprised,' said Vithis.

'That very night I dreamed about Minis,' Tiaan went on. 'And afterwards. But.., it wasn't until I used the amplimet in the ice cave that the voices began.'

'Is that so?' he said softly. And did you hear them all the time after that?'

'Only after I used the crystal, and then only for a day or two. In the months it took to travel from Kalissin to Tirthrax, I didn't hear voices at all. There were no nodes by the great inland sea; the crystal could draw no power there.'

And after Tirthrax?'

'I've often heard the voices these last few months.'

'What do they tell you?' He sounded as if he believed her.

Tiaan did not relax. He was weighing everything she said, and if she made one inconsistent remark, one false step, he would have her.

Fifteen

Tiaan recalled something Vithis had said just after coming through the gate to Santhenar. Tirior had wanted the amplimet but he'd been afraid of it, saying that it was corrupt and dangerous. Could she play on that fear?

'I can't bear to be without the amplimet; she said softly. 'I haven't suffered withdrawal since the gate was opened, but whenever someone else has my crystal, I feel the most indescribable longing for it.' She looked Vithis in the eye. 'Yet it frightens me. After Tirthrax, it was as if the amplimet wanted something. As if it were using me.'

The man who had come to the door was back, gesturing furiously. Vithis waved him away.

'Using you? How do you mean?'

'I felt that it was a million years old,' she said breathlessly. And all that time it had lain underground, drawing power from the node. Waiting, and planning what it would do when it got free.'

'What does it want to do?' Vithis spoke as if humouring her, but he was plucking uneasily at his chin.

Perhaps he was superstitious about such things. 'It's following a mineral.., instinct, from times so long ago that the shape of the land was different. I dreamed that it was controlling me, though it didn't want me. It's looking for someone stronger, a great mancer like you! She reached out to him.

He sprang backwards. 'Don't touch me! It's telling you to work on me now, isn't it?' His breath whistled in and out through his teeth.

How could it be telling me anything?' she said with childlike innocence, 'I don't have it.'

Wait here, if you please.'

How could she do otherwise? Again Tiaan reached towards him but he stepped back smartly and slipped out through the flap.

He returned some time later with a woman Tiaan had not met before. She was old, her dark skin weathered to the texture of bark, her hair as grey as aged thatch and her back bent.

"This little thing?' the old woman said, fixing Tiaan with cloudy eyes. She came up close but avoided touching her. Her voice was croaky, crackly. 'It hardly seems possible.'

'We've all seen her fly the construct, Urien, and we know she made the gate.'

Urien stared right into Tiaan's eyes. 'The crystal talks to you, child?'

Tiaan shivered and the old woman smiled to see it. Her gums had withered, exposing snaggly yellow teeth which looked as though they'd been stuck in clay by an inexpert hand.

After I've used the amplimet,' said Tiaan, pretending awe, 'it whispers in my mind, the same way it talks to the node.'

'What!' cried Vithis and the old woman together.

'That was the reason Malien sent me away in the thapter -'

'Thapter?' scowled Urien.

'My flying construct,' said Tiaan. 'Malien had to send the amplimet away, even though she wanted the thapter for herself, because the amplimet was talking to the node. And then the Well of Echoes, trapped inside Tirthrax, began to thaw.'

Vithis's dark face went grey. 'Thaw?' he whispered, staring at her in dismay and a growing horror. Urien was more controlled, but for a moment Tiaan saw fear in her eyes and wondered just what it was that old Joeyn had given her with his dying breath.

'Malien was terrified that the Well would break free,' said Tiaan, 'and with the amplimet there she couldn't hold the Well in place. Had she not sent the crystal away, the whole great mountain and city of Tirthrax might have been destroyed.'

The Aachim withdrew to the far side of the tent in agitation, then went outside and she heard no more. They were gone for ages. When they finally returned, Vithis looked sick.

'How was the amplimet talking to the node, child?' said the old woman.

'The tiny light in the centre blinked on and off, too quickly to count,' Tiaan replied truthfully. 'But as soon as I, or Malien, took the crystal out of its pouch the blinking stopped, as if to hide what it was doing.'

'What else can you tell us about it?'

'After I left Tirthrax, it wouldn't let me go where I wanted.'

Urien pounced. 'But you did get away.'

It was a dangerous moment; Tiaan didn't want them thinking too hard about the secret of flight. 'I took out the amplimet, put an ordinary hedron in its place and hovered away until I was beyond the influence of the node.'

'What else did the crystal do?' said the old woman.

After fleeing your camp – where you shot at me without provocation! – I tried to take the thapter to Lybing, in Borgistry.'

'Why?' said Urien, ignoring the outburst.

'To do my duty and give it to the scrutators, but the amplimet wouldn't let me go that way. It took the thapter towards another powerful node, at Booreah Ngurle, but when we reached the mountain, and I turned for Nyriandiol, it wouldn't let me go there either. I was so furious that I resolved to smash the amplimet -'

'What happened then?' Vithis rushed out, and Tiaan was sure that he believed her.

'It cut off the field and the thapter fell into the forest. That's how my back was broken.' She didn't plan to mention that the lyrinx had repaired it.

'Do you have anything else to confess?' said Urien.

Tiaan did not like the implication, but explained about her time at Nyriandiol and Snizort, and how the amplimet had communicating with the nodes there as well.

The ancient lore mentions such a thing,' Urien said quietly io Vithis. 'It may be at the heart of the mystery of the last amplimet we used – and the catastrophe it caused:

After the death of a clan, followed by aeons of cover-ups,' said Vithis, 'how can anyone tell?"

'You say the amplimet talks to you,' said Urien suddenly. 'What does it sound like?'

'What?' said Tiaan, who hadn't thought of that.

'You said it whispered to you!' Urien snapped.

'It sounds.., a bit like you, but much older. It's a rustly, scratchy sound: Tiaan made a hissing crackle. 'A bit like that. I can't do it very well.'

'What does the crystal tell you, Tiaan?'

Tiaan was ready for that question, for she'd spent the last two hours thinking of the answer. 'The node-master is coming. I must protect the amplimet for the node-master.'

'What node-master?' said Vithis, with a trace of eagerness.

'It didn't say. But…'

'Yes?' Urien and Vithis spoke together.

'I don't think he, or it, comes from this world.'

Vithis visibly steeled himself, then withdrew the platinum-wrapped amplimet from a metal case and exposed it to view. 'Let's see if it wants to talk to you now, Tiaan:

Tut it away,' cried Urien, shuddering. 'How dare you bring it here after what it's just done.'

'Do you think I want to?' he snapped. 'I've always counselled against it. But Urien, our supplies are nearly exhausted and without constructs we're helpless. Should the enemy return in force, they could finish us in a single day. The amplimet terrifies me, but it's our only way out. Take it, Tiaan.'

Tiaan could sense Ghaenis's death in it. 'I'm afraid: She reached for the crystal, but stopped short of it. 'Everything seems so clear when it's talking to me, so perfect, but afterwards it fades like a dream.' Giving a little shiver of yearning. Tiaan put her memories of withdrawal into it, to make the action seem more real. 'All I want is to listen to it again.' She unfocussed her eyes, staring raptly at the wall of the tent.

Tirior slapped the tent flap out of the way and hurled herself in. Ghaenis's death had leached her chill beauty away, leaving her puffy faced, red eyed and aged by twenty years. Seeing the amplimet on Vithis's outstretched hand, a cold rage seized her. 'Have you learned nothing from my son's death?' she said furiously.

'Can you find us a way out of here?' said Vithis, taking a step away from her fury. He folded the platinum over the crystal but did not put it away.

Tirior's eyes followed it. 'There's no way out for Ghaenis!'

He could not meet her eyes. 'I'm sorry. He begged me for it, Tirior. I warned him of the peril – you know how I feel about it – but he would not relent. He said you'd taught him how to handle it.' His eyes burned like fire.

'How could I have?' she said, but now it was she who avoided his eye.

'I don't know, but either he lied or you're lying now.'

'You always return to the same tune, Vithis.'

'And Clan Nataz to the same obsession that brought us ruin in the past.'

What ruin? Tiaan thought. What history does this crystal have, or another just like it, that I know nothing about?

'At least my son didn't lack the courage!' Tirior flashed. 'If you were afraid to take the risk yourself, why not pass the amplimet to your foster-son?'

'He's all that's left of Clan Inthis,' he said, as if that explained everything.

'There's nothing left of Inthis but a callow, lovesick fool and an old man who's no man at all.'

'How dare you!' cried Vithis.

She spoke calmly, carefully, coldly. 'You're not sterile, Vithis, as you try to make out – you're impotent! You don't have the manhood, which explains your cowardice.'

'If I did not know that grief has turned your wits,' he replied. 'I would call you out for that. Clan Nataz has always lusted for the deadly crystal, as for the first in ancient times. And Inthis has always warned against it.'

'Enough, said Unen She did not raise her voice, but made a curious unfolding gesture with one hand, from Vithis towards Tirior.

Vithis, with a mighty effort, calmed himself and bowed his head towards Tirior. 'I am very sorry for your loss, Tirior. Ghaenis was a fine young man. He convinced me that he was strong enough, and reluctantly I allowed him to try. But tell me, Tirior, did you want the crystal for yourself, or for him'to use?'

'I would never have risked my son.' Tirior's eyes flicked to the amplimet and Tiaan saw that, even after the death of Ghaenis, she still desired it.

'Let's get on,' said Urien.

Vithis reached for Tiaan with his free hand but was cautioned by the old woman. 'Best not to touch her while she's under the spell of the crystal. Tiaan, tell us about the node-master.'

'What are you talking about?' said Tirior.

Urien explained.

Tiaan tried to recall those images of Aachan she had seen in her first crystal dreams about Minis. 'Born on fire…' she put on a slurred, dream-like tone. 'Black star-flowers.., red rock creeping, creeping. A shadow in robes, against the flames. Dark hair and long, long fingers.'

Vithis and Tirior stared at one another. 'First Clan!' Vithis hissed. 'I was birthed by the very cracks of Mount Szath. Born on fire!

'Or borne on fire,' said Tirior, 'which might be any of us. And the black unishhta flowers are the symbol of my clan.'

'Clan Nataz was at the heart of all the trouble with our amplimet, in ancient times,' said Vithis.

'Clan Shazmaor caused the trouble!' Tirior said coldly. 'Nataz saved Aachan at great cost to ourselves.'

'So your tales tell,' sniffed Vithis. 'Our Histories have always disputed it.'

She ignored that. 'Besides, if you were to be this node-master she speaks about, why has not Minis foretold it?'

•Who can say what his foretellings mean?' Vithis replied.

'You're too hard on the lad,' said Urien. 'Without him we wouldn't be here.'

'I don't count that in his favour' Vithis said curtly.

'I do! And as for this business of the node-master, it could be that the little wretch has made it all up.'

How little regard Urien had for Tiaan's humanity, to speak that way in her own language. Unless they wanted her to know how they felt…

'It feels so right,' said Vithis. 'Can she be lying, Urien?'

Urien turned away. 'I sense no falsehood. Come over here.' She drew them over towards the wall of the tent.

Tiaan, still staring into space, strained her ears to hear what they were talking about.

'This amplimet is even more deadly than we feared, Vithis,' said Urien in a low voice.

'It was I, remember, who cautioned Tirior about it in Tirthrax.'

'Had I taken it then,' Tirior said bitterly, 'we would not be in this situation now. I would never have allowed the crystal to come to the first stage of awakening.'

'It had already reached it,1 said Urien. 'Had you taken it, your whole clan might now be dead. Destroy it, Vithis.'

'I can control it,' said Tirior. 'If I'd taken it, Ghaenis would still be alive.'

'Don't throw your dead in my face – I mourn my entire clan!' Vithis directed a smouldering glare at Tiaan. 'And I will do whatever is necessary to rebuild it.'

'First Clan is finished, Vithis,' said Tirior. 'You cannot rebuild it from two people. Two males!'

'A few First Clan women have partnered into other clans. They must come home. Duty to clan surmounts all other responsibilities.'

'You would break families, tear partners apart, to stay what is inevitable?' Tirior ground her teeth with rage. 'You'll create only clan war and believe me. Clan Nataz is ready -'

'Even that,' Tirior.

'Enough: snapped Urien and they both fell silent. There's a higher duty than clan, and that is kind. We are all the Aachim left. I don't count the bastard breed of Santhenar, so corrupted by contact with humanity that they are scarcely Aachim at all. Our numbers dwindle each day this war goes on and, if we are to survive, we must put species first. Is that clear?' She fixed them with a glare that brooked no argument.

Tirior bowed her curly black head. Vithis nodded curtly.

'This amplimet is a great prize,' Urien said, 'but I cannot countenance using it. Remember the fate of poor Luthis?'

'The bitter tale is carved into my heart,' said Tirior, 'though the event was aeons ago.'

'We have no choice but to abandon our constructs,' said Urien. 'The risk of remaining here, defenceless, is too great. Tomorrow we'll march south to meet our brethren at the camp near Gospett.'

'Without our constructs, we'll starve,' Vithis announced after a weighty pause. 'This land has been stripped so bare it would not feed a grasshopper.'

'We can't recover them,' said Urien. 'Besides, we have five thousand more at Gospett, and elsewhere.'

'I can save these ones by using the amplimet,' Vithis insisted.

'No! In ancient times many Aachim died, corrupted inside by such crystals. Many more wished they could die. Luthis, as I recall the tale, lived another eighty years after the.., incident with the amplimet, and suffered every minute.'

'Hear me out, Urien; we have to take the risk. But we don't have to risk ourselves,' he went on in a lower voice, just on the edge of Tiaan's hearing. 'Why not use her?' He tilted his head in Tiaan's direction. 'She's used it safely for months. And, watched carefully enough, we may learn more about this node-master she has spoken of, if there is one.'

'You think she's lying?'

'I think she's mad. She hears voices, Urien.'

'Only since she first came into contact with the crystal.' Even so. What do you say to my proposal?' 'I'll think about it overnight, Vithis, but I warn you: I'm against using this amplimet in any circumstances. And you know why.'

'I do. Until the morning then.' He came across to Tiaan. 'I may well have a use for you tomorrow. But for tonight, you will return to your guard dogs. Wait here.' He went out, calling for his attendant.

Sixteen

The black air-floaters rose swiftly from the mound next to the command area and sped towards them. Irisis watched them come, overpowered by those recurring feelings of doom.

Fyn-Mah was supporting herself on the door jamb, swaying with every bump and lurch. The perquisitor was uncompromisingly honest, yet if she obeyed the scrutators she must repudiate Flydd, her superior, whose orders she was following. But Flydd had failed and been condemned, so where did her duty lie? Neither the agony nor her injuries showed on her pallid face. Fyn-Mah was a native of Tiksi, and Tiksi folk kept their feelings to themselves, but by the set of her jaw and the quiver of her normally rod-like back, she was having a hard time of it.

So was Irisis. Flydd was now a condemned man, Slave Flydd, and all his plans were undone. Undoubtedly he was a wily old hound, but the scrutators were equally cunning. There was no possibility of rescuing him. Her face and figure were instantly recognisable, and she too faced a death sentence if Ghorr ever caught her.

Fyn-Mah thrust away from the door and stalked rearward. She'd made her decision. 'Faster!' she said hoarsely, seizing the crossbow from Flangers and brandishing it in Pilot Inouye's face.

'It won't go any faster,' the little woman wept. 'I'm doing all I can.'

'Then we'll be taken.' Fyn-Mah twanged the rope rail, gnawing at her lower lip. 'Flangers, how good are you with a javelard?'

Among the best,' he said uneasily, seeing what was coming He was slumped on the deck, hanging on desperately to the ropes, and the bandage around his thigh was completely red. Flangers should have collapsed long ago, but duty drove him on.

'There's a light one at the bow. See what you can do with it.'

'You're asking me to fire on my own?' he whispered.

'If they catch us, the scrutators will put us to a pointless death.'

'That's no excuse.' He was as honest in his way as she was in hers. 'I've always followed orders.'

'Then obey mine. If the war is left to the scrutators,' gritted Fyn-Mah, 'humanity will be defeated before the year is out.'

'They're my lawful superiors,' said Flangers. 'The war will be lost a lot quicker if we defy our officers as we see fit.'

She drew herself up, saying stiffly, 'As I understand it, I am your superior officer here. I represent Scrutator Flydd, who has ordered me to save myself, and what I carry, no matter who should try to stop me! Taking a paper from her pocket, she handed it to him. 'Does this satisfy you?'

Flangers bowed his head. 'It satisfies the soldier but not the man.'

She seemed to take pity on him. 'No need to kill them,' Fyn-Mah said softly. 'Disabling the air-floaters will do as well. Aim for their rotors.'

Irisis helped Flangers to the bow and together they lifted the javelard out of its bracket. It was lightly built, like a large crossbow. They carried it to a bracket on the port side, halfway down. Flangers picked a wasps' nest out of the bracket and locked the javelard in. Irisis brought down an armload of stubby spears. He wound back the cranks and fitted a spear. His face was as grey as boiled mutton and he could not stand without clinging to the javelard.

'Can you hit the rotor from here?' said Irisis. 'It's an awfully long way.'

He wound the crank another notch, and another, sighting at the leading air-floater, whose large rotor was partly visible behind its cabin. 'I'd say we're just out of range, though it's hard to estimate in the air.'

The leading air-floater was furiously signalling them to go down. Flangers's eyes pleaded with Fyn-Mah They're giving us a direct order. Perquisitor.'

She set her lips. 'Fire.'

Flangers wound the elevation crank, sighted on the first of the pursuing air-floaters, wound again. His hands were shaking. He wiped sweat from his brow and pulled the lever. Click-thunngg.

After a good few seconds the spear fell past the front of the leading air-floater.

Flangers seemed pleased, and Irisis could not blame him. 'Out of range,' he said. 'Only luck could hit the rotor from here.'

'Try again,' urged Fyn-Mah. 'Their shooters are getting ready, and they'll be experts. Inouye, slow up momentarily. As soon as Flangers fires, go full speed.'

The air-floater slowed, allowing their pursuers to gain fractionally. Irisis held Flangers up. He gave the elevation crank another quarter-turn and fired.

'Where did that go?' said Irisis to herself.

'I think that's Scrutator Klarm in command; muttered Fyn-Mah, staring at the first machine through a spyglass. 'He's an honourable man, as scrutators go -' She bit off the heretical thought.

The spear, falling at a steep angle, plunged through the top of the balloon into the roof of the cabin. The impact must have created a spark for the floater gas exploded, sending fire in all directions. The air-floater turned upside down, spilling bodies into the air, and fell, trailing flame. The balloon of the machine beside it collapsed from the Shockwave. The third machine veered away sharply, fired its javelard then raced back towards the command area.

Flangers cried out in horror. Irisis clung to the rail, her stomach churning. The fire had gone out and what was left of the first air-floater was spinning round and round, the rags of the airbag streaming out behind to break its fall. The second machine fell past, slamming into the ground hard enough to break bones. The first also struck and was dragged by the wind into a patch of trees.

Fyn-Mah's face had gone the colour of mud. Her lips were white, and she had trouble speaking. 'I've just killed a scrutator and broken my sacred oath.'

And condemned everyone on this air-floater. Irisis turned away. 'What do your orders say now, Perquisitor?'

Fyn-Mah turned to her. 'We run south with all possible speed and don't stop until we reach the uttermost pole. Or even then.' She covered her face and staggered into the cabin. Irisis heard retching.

Flangers lay sprawled on the canvas deck, arms up over his face. Stepping around him, Irisis went to the stern, where Inouye clung to the steering arm like a drowning sailor to an oar.

'Where are we going?' Irisis said, trying to be calm in the face of disaster.

Inouye was plucking at the hedron of her controller. 'The scrutators will expunge my family from the earth for this, even my little baby. I've brought doom on everyone I love.' Her voice broke and she hurled herself at the rail.

Irisis caught Inouye as she went over, dragged her back and carried the small woman to the cabin. Inouye began to wail and thrash about. Laying her in a hammock beside the silent Fyn-Mah, Irisis went out and bolted the door from the outside.

The air-floater was curving around in a circle. She wrenched it back on course, lashing the steering arm so the machine would continue due south. By the time she'd finished, the rotor had stopped. The air-floater would no more move without its pilot than a clanker could go with a dead operator.

Irisis could not use Inouye's controller, which was tailored just to her, without completely rebuilding it. She replaced it with her artisan's pliance, made from carnelian, layers of glass and silver filigree. Her pliance enabled her to see the field and tune a controller to it, and also to draw power. Nowhere near as much as a controller, of course, but air-floaters did not require much. Setting the pliance to channel power into the mechanism that drome the rotor, she left it to run by itself.

The four dark-faced soldiers stood together at the bow rail. They moved well out of her way as she approached, giving each other significant glances. Their muttered talk had broken off as she approached. They were afraid of her mysterious talent, and bitter that they'd been forced to become renegades.

None were from these parts, nor did Flangers know the country. That left only one person and Irisis had been avoiding him. She did not know how to deal with Eiryn Muss, a man who had reinvented himself so completely that there was no trace of his former self. He made her uncomfortable because she had no idea who he was or what he was thinking. He seemed impervious to everything in life, except the cloak he put on himself to become a different man each time he went out spying.

She found him around the other side, sitting on the canvas deck in the shade, studying a journal roll smaller than his little finger.

'Excuse me,' she said.

He looked up. 'You're wondering what to do and where to go.'

Irisis could not look at him without superimposing the fat, bald, leering halfwit from the manufactory, yet nothing about him, not even his voice, was the same. He did not fit. She preferred him as the halfwit.

'I'm lost,' she said. I have no idea what to do.' She wanted to throw up her intestines.

'Find a safe hiding place, then I'll try to contact the scrutator.'

'How?'

'That's what I do best,' he said simply, and his confidence calmed the roiling of her insides. 'Keep going south until we're out of sight of the battlefield. No, continue until after dark, then I'll give further instructions, if Fyn-Mah isn't capable.'

'She was told to leave Flydd a message,' Irisis recalled. Swinging around in a great circle, she drove the air-floater towards the hills north of the exploded node. 'In case he escapes.' Unlikely as that seemed.

That night they hid in a cluster of ovoid hills, like a nest full of eggs standing on end, in the forest south of Gospett. It was the best hiding place Muss could find close by. Without further word, he went into the cabin to change his clothes and appearance. Emerging scant minutes later as a bent old man, he walked into the trees.

Three days passed and nothing was heard from him. They spent the time on full alert. Though the air-floater was hidden at the bottom of a steep-sided valley between three of the egg-shaped hills, and concealed from all but a lyrinx or air-floater going directly overhead, they could never relax.

The air-floater was so cramped that privacy was impossible, but no one dared go far from it, in case of an emergency. The soldiers kept to the port side, muttering among themselves and giving everyone black looks. Fyn-Mah hardly spoke from one day to the next. She'd risked everything on her loyalty to Xervish Flydd. If he failed her, or if he was dead, she'd have betrayed her oath and her cause for nothing.

The little pilot had gone into a decline. Long periods of silence were followed by frenzied weeping and wailing for her family. Her only solace was her bond with the controller. She slept with it in her arms, rocking and humming to it as if it were a little baby. Without it, Inouye would have turned her face to the wall and withered away. Fyn-Mah, normally considerate of her inferiors, was incapable of comforting her.

Flangers also kept to himself, insofar as that was possible, fending Irisis off whenever she approached. However, on the third afternoon, as she was taking refuge from the heat by wading barefoot up a tiny rivulet, she came upon him sitting next to the water, head in hands. He must have heard her splashing but did not look up. There was a fresh bandage on his thigh and she was pleased to see that no blood showed through it. Flangers's sword and scabbard lay on a mossy ledge behind him, though she though nothing of that. A good soldier always kept tns weapons nearby.

She put a hand on his shoulder This bloody, bloody war.'

Flangers did not look up. I'm just a simple soldier, used to obeying orders. But when the orders contradict each other, what's a man to do?'

'Follow your conscience.'

'It's pulled in two directions, Irisis. The scrutator is a good man and I'd have followed him anywhere. But Flydd has fallen, so how can his orders be legitimate? Or Fyn-Mah's, since her superiors have contradicted them? I have followed her orders, but at the expense of my oath, my duty, my honour. I'm forsworn, Irisis, a traitor in my own eyes. I killed the people in Scrutator Klarm's air-floater, betrayed those I'd sworn to protect. How can I live with that?'

'We must keep faith with our master/ said Irisis, 'and trust to Flydd's purpose, no matter how hard the road.'

'You don't understand,' he said quietly. 'You haven't been forced to choose. A soldier's oath is paramount. For six years I've laid down my life to defend those weaker than me. I did my duty and was decorated for it. I was a hero. Now I'm a vicious traitor who turned on his own and shot them down without warning.'

'You followed orders,' said Irisis uncomfortably.

'Can that excuse any act?'

'I don't know.' Irisis had never thought about it.

'I didn't have the courage to refuse Fyn-Mah, but I should have.'

Irisis could not find any words to say to him.

'All I ever wanted was to do my duty,' he went on. And afterwards, hard work, a good woman, children and friends to share my life. That's all lost. There's only one way out, and it's the coward's way, but at least it'll put an end to it. If you would leave me now, Irisis.'

He rose, reaching for his sword. Irisis was slow to realise what he intended until he had the scabbard in his hand and the sword half out.

'No!' she cried, barring his way.

Flangers was a gentle man, for all his trade. He did not thrust her out of the way, but said, 'Please go, Irisis. It's not a sight for -'

'Will you hear me first?'

'There's no point.' Slipping by her, he drew the sword with a silent, practised movement. In another movement he reversed it and put the tip to his belly.

Irisis hadn't expected him to be that quick. Surely there'd be some last words or, at least, a moment of reflection. Without thinking, she caught hold of the blade with both hands. The keen edges sliced into her palms and fingers.

He grew distressed at the sight of her blood. For a man of war, that struck her as strange. 'Let go, Irisis,' he said softly. 'This blade could take your fingers off in a second.'

'Then I'll have to live without them, for I won't let go. Put down your sword, Flangers. Hear me out.'

He measured her resolve, then, with a little shake of the head, his rigid body relaxed and he pulled the tip away from his belly. She went with him, not releasing the blade until he'd laid it on the ledge. She'd been down that road too.

Taking her wrists in his, he turned her hands palm upward. Blood was flowing freely from deep cuts across both palms and six fingers.

'Look what you've done to your beautiful hands! Why, Irisis?'

Truly an unusual soldier. 'Because we, and Xervish Flydd, can't do without you, Flangers.' She raised her head, never more beautiful, and looked him in the eye. 'And because you and I fought back to back in the tar pits of Snizort, and I care for you as a comrade-in-arms.'

"Then you'll understand that I must salve my honour in the only way left to me.'

'You won't relent?'

'I can't, Irisis. But first let me see to your hands. You must be in pain.'

She said naught to that but allowed him to lead her back to the air-floater, where he cleaned the cuts, smeared them with ointment and wrapped them in bandages of yellow cloth. When that was done, all with great gentleness and consideration, he put her hands in her lap. 'Now will you allow me to make my end?'

'Once you've paid your debt,' she said.

He frowned. 'What debt is that?'

'I risked my life, going down into the tar chasm to save yours. According to the customs of my people, and I think yours as well, you owe me a life. That is also a matter of honour.'

'And I pulled you out afterwards.' He was sweating.

'I might have climbed out anyway,' she lied, 'so you didn't save my life.'

'You're asking for my life in return?' said Flangers.

'It's the only coin you have.'

He thought the matter through, and finally bowed his head. 'It is, as you say, a matter of honour. My life is in your keeping, and no longer mine to take, until you should release me.'

She let out her breath. 'Thank you, Flangers. You won't regret it.'

'I'll regret it every minute my own honour goes unrequited; he said, 'but I've given my word and won't go back on it.' He rose, turning towards the stern. 'But of course, should I ever save your life, the debt is paid, and mine will be in my keeping again. Honour must be satisfied.'

Irisis let him go, her troubles only postponed.

'Irisis, wake up.' Flangers was shaking her by the shoulder. 'There's something going on.'

'What?' she mumbled, still half in her dream, for it was the middle of the night.

'Shhh.' He hauled her out of her blankets. 'The soldiers are set to mutiny. Take this.' Pressing a knife into her hand, he stood by the door of the cabin.

No time to look for her boots. She roused Fyn-Mah and Inouye. Inouye took a deep, quivering breath. Irisis slapped her bandaged hand over the pilot's mouth.

'Don't scream!' she hissed, 'Or we'll be slaughtered where we stand. Inouye, is there any way to get out of here without them knowing?'

Inouye gulped, her breaths coming hard on each other. 'Only by cutting through the ceiling canvas.'

Irisis climbed onto a shelf and pushed her knife through the fabric, which gave with a ripping sound, too loud for comfort.

'What are they doing, Flangers?' she whispered.

'Getting up the courage to attack. They're well trained. We can't hope to beat four of them.'

'I doubt if they'll attack women,' said Fyn-Mah. 'The prohibition against harming females of child-bearing age is a strong one. Besides, as perquisitor I have a certain legitimacy, even after what happened the other day. Whatever they do, they'll be blamed for it.'

'Desperate men with nowhere to turn might well slay us all,' said Irisis, 'and worry about legitimacy afterwards. Can you make a diversion while I cut through the roof?'

Fyn-Mah did something which, in the gloom, Irisis did not see. Suddenly a man's voice boomed through the wall. 'Kick the door in, Rulf. I'll take the traitor first -'

'Why are you shouting?' shrilled another, so loudly that it hurt her ears.

'I'm not -' He broke off.

'Sorcery!' whispered a third, as loud as steam hissing from a boiler.

Irisis slashed through the roof and pulled herself up. Flangers followed swiftly. The soldiers were milling about the door. A stocky man drew his sword with a squeal like a knife skating across metal. He hesitated for an instant, found courage and kicked the door off its flimsy hinges. The sound was like thunder in the still night.

The soldier sprang through, but came flying out again, juggling his sword, which was glowing red. He dropped it on the canvas deck. Smoke belched up and someone kicked it over the side.

The next man to move gets a bolt in the eye;' said Flangers, showing his crossbow. Put down your weapons.'

The soldiers looked up. No one made any move for a long moment. Irisis held her breath. If he shot one, the others would be on him before he could reload.; Four against one could only end one way.

'Who's going to be the first?' said Flangers, pointing his weapon at each in turn. 'You, big man?'

The dark-faced fellow still clutched his sword. 'I'm prepared to die for my duty,' he sneered, 'and I'm not afraid of a stinking traitor like you.'

Irisis could sense Flangers's pain, but he said nothing.

'But are you afraid of a perquisitor?' said Fyn-Mah from the doorway.

White smoke was coiling up from the bush where the red-hot sword had landed. As the leading soldier looked over the side, his weapon drooped.

'Run,' said Fyn-Mah softly. 'Tell the scrutators I forced you with the Art. It's close to the truth.'

He nodded, not looking at her, and slipped over the side. The others followed, disappearing into the forest.

'Inouye,' said the perquisitor, 'go to your station and be ready to take the air-floater up. Irisis, you and Flangers unfasten the tethers.'

'Where are we going?' said Irisis.

'To the next place on Flydd's list. I daren't stay here, in case they get their courage back.'

They spent more than a week travelling from hideout to hideout, sometimes staying only long enough to check if Eiryn Muss had left a message, though they did not see him in that time. On the ninth day after the mutiny, as they drifted over the latest rendezvous – a dead tree with a fire-scarred, hollow trunk, broken off about ten spans above the ground – a head appeared at the top. An arm waved.

Inouye hovered, Flangers let down the rope ladder and Muss scampered up. 'Go west,' he said.

'Did you find the scrutator?' cried Irisis.

'I learned where he is,' Muss said grimly. 'He was sent to slave in one of the clanker-hauling teams. Cryl-Nish Hlar was with him, condemned by his own father.'

'Nish?' Irisis found her voice had gone squeaky. 'He's alive?'

'For the moment.'

'You said was', said Fyn-Mah. 'What's happened?'

'Flydd escaped six days ago and fled north, beyond the Snizort node, with Nish and Ullii.'

'We can assume he's received my message then,' said Irisis. 'We'd better get after him.'

'Unfortunately,' said Muss, 'they're pursued by all the might of the scrutators, including no less than three air-floaters. We can't risk it.'

'So what do we do?'

'Go to the rendezvous. Sit tight and wait.'

'Wonderful!' said Irisis, who hated enforced inaction in any form.

And there was another problem. The phynadr, which they had risked so much for, and lost more to recover, was withering daily. They kept it cool and damp in a wetted sack, but it wasn't enough. Within days, Irisis felt sure, it would be dead, and all their sacrifice would have been for nothing.

But at least Nish was alive. She'd thought she was over him long ago, but lately Irisis had been thinking about him all the time. She would have given anything to be with him now.