Tetrarch

S EVENTEEN

'Master, the pipes are calling!'

Gilhaelith, known locally as the tetrarch on account of his obsession with numbers to the power of four, threw himself out of bed, eyes firmly closed. 'Where is my gown?'

The servant wrapped it around Gilhaelith's gangling frame. Gilhaelith tied the sash with awkward jerks, sat on the bed and raised a pair of large and profoundly ugly feet. Leather slippers were pulled on. He put out a hand, blindly, for he still had not opened his eyes. The servant pressed a two-handled cup the size of a serving bowl into Gilhaelith's fingers. The yellow liquid was too thick to ripple. Even the steam rose sluggishly.

Gilhaelith put the cup to his nose, inhaling pungent fumes of mustard-water that was more mustard than water. His head jerked back; his eyes sprang open.

'Aah!' he gasped, draining half the cup in a long series of swallows that bobbed his larynx up and down like a cork in a pail. 'Aaaah!'

The servant, ever ready, wiped Gilhaelith's streaming nose with a kerchief the size of a tablecloth. Gilhaelith gulped the rest of the mustard-water and sprang to life. 'Aaaaaaaah! Very good, Mihail; a fine brew this morning. Take me down the outside walkway, if you please.'

'I… dare not, master.'

Gilhaelith smiled. The ritual was an old one. It pleased him to ask, and to have the servant refuse. He would have been irked had Mihail answered differently.

'Meet me in the pipe chamber then.'

'At once, Gilhaelith.'

Gilhaelith frowned at the familiarity. But after all, Mihail had served him nearly fifty years, and Mihail's father for thirty years before that. 'Be ready,' he said. 'I am hungry this morning.' He said that every morning. Gilhaelith strode out, the mustard-coloured, mustard-stained robes flapping about his bristly shanks.

It was still dark outside as he walked across the terrace. A thumbnail paring of moon, low in the sky, gave barely enough light to see. That did not matter – Gilhaelith had trodden this path most days in the hundred years since Nyriandiol, the ultimate creation of his life and work so far, had finally been completed.

The night was a little too cool for what he was wearing but his belly radiated a satisfying warmth. Gilhaelith paused under a vine-covered pergola while a mustard-flavoured belch made its wobbly way up. His slippers rasped on the paving stones as he turned down the walkway.

A swooping suspended path of stone, the walkway curved along the outside wall of Nyriandiol, which itself swept in and out. At the far end, the path took a zigzag down and ran back the other way, and so on right down the eight levels of the monstrous building. The path had no steps and no rail. Its surface undulated like waves in the ocean. It was a colossal conceit and a dare, for there was nothing beneath it but the dull gleam of water hundreds of spans below, and to fall meant death. Many workers had died building the path; only one man dared to walk it.

Gilhaelith knew it like the most familiar parts of his body but every day it was a challenge that left his heart racing. Presently it was damp with condensed moisture from the lake, slippery in unexpected places, and if he relaxed it would claim him with profound indifference. Walking this path was a good way to start the day, or the night for that matter.

Safely at the lowest level, he grasped the handle of a door carved from solid red jasper and jerked it open. No need for locks here. The corridor was unlit. He made his way through the blackness to a small chamber, out through whose door yellow light streamed.

Mihail waited inside with breakfast – a platter of freshly salted slugs covered in foaming yellow slime. Gilhaelith downed the delicacies whole, two at a time, smacking his lips and licking the foam off his fingers. On each corner of the tray was a quartered, pickled red onion the size of a grapefruit, with which to cleanse his palate. Gilhaelith selected a quarter, inspected it, found a minute blemish and put it back. The others also failed his scrutiny; the whole sixteen quarters were blemished. Fortunately Mihail knew what to do. He deftly peeled the outer layer off the first quarter, presenting Gilhaelith with a perfect inner segment.

'It's too small,' Gilhaelith said for the sake of form, but took the onion and crunched it noisily.

The servant presented a finger bowl half full of sulphur-water. Gilhaelith waggled his fingers in it, dried them on the proffered napkin and was ready for work.

'You may go, Mihail.'

The servant withdrew. Gilhaelith took up the lantern and went through into the adjoining room, a chamber so vast that neither its ceiling nor far wall could be seen. He set the lantern on the floor, shuttered it completely and stood in the dark, listening.

The pipes were calling. He made out a low note, a fluttery tremble that he could feel through his slippers, and then a higher, eerie keening. Gilhaelith cocked his head. He had not heard either sound before and could not work out what their ultimate source might be.

Unshuttering the lantern, he made his way up the room. The light picked structures out of the gloom – pipes of wood and metal, most in clusters of four by four, rarely nine by nine. The values were important. He would have used larger numbers but Nyriandiol was not big enough to accommodate them. Some clusters were horizontal, though most stood upright. The end of the room was taken up by countless arrays of organ pipes, the tallest stretching up to the ceiling, which here stood the full eight storeys of Nyriandiol above them. Gilhaelith sat in a chair around which were clustered, in symmetrical arrays, more pipes of all sizes, down to ones smaller than a pencil.

The organ was a geomantic device designed to listen in to, and give sound to, the harmony of the spheres. So far, though he had spent a century refining it, Gilhaelith had been frustrated in that endeavour. The subtle vibrations of the planets in their orbits could not be detected by his geomancy, even funnelled through the largest pipes he could create. However, the organ did pick up other vibrations, other tones, and for more than fifty years he had been noting these and trying to discern the underlying patterns and the numbers behind them. Many vibrations seemed related to nodes or to their fields. Fields that in some cases were being drained dry by the power drawn by humanity's squadrons of clankers, and other machines powered by the Secret Art. Another puzzle he was keen to solve.

Gilhaelith had constructed a model of the main nodes he knew about, trying but failing to understand them. His organ was powerful, for he drew upon the great Booreah Ngurle double node to drive it. But it, or perhaps he, lacked sensitivity. He could not tell how to overcome that.

There was something strange about the tones he was now hearing, and he needed to pinpoint them. On a bench across the room, on a pedestal of ebony wood, sat a perfect sphere some half a span across, surfaced with glass. The sphere contained a model of Santhenar, or at least the parts of it for which there were reliable maps. It showed Lauralin and the surrounding islands in detail, including the mountains in relief, though all of that lay beneath the smooth surface of glass.

Drawing on a pair of silken gloves, Gilhaelith passed his fingers over the surface of the geomantic globe, close but not touching. Wisps of cold vapour followed his movements: for sensitivity, the sphere had to be bitterly cold. It was kept that way by what lay at its core.

Beneath his hands, tiny pinpoints of light sparkled. He put on a pair of spectacles, each side of which contained a trio of lenses set within wire coils, like springs. Pulling down on the coils to separate the lenses, he squinted at the markings. With a grimace he lifted his hands and repeated the operation, no more successfully than the first time.

Gilhaelith returned to his chair, which stood in front of a curving console carved from a single block of cedar wood two spans across. It contained a number of organ keyboards whose yellow triangular keys alternately pointed toward him and away, as well as a variety of stops, buttons and pedals. Drawing out some stops and pushing in others, he set his big fingers to the keys and began to play, attempting to duplicate the low, fluttering tremble. He could not, which vexed him. Nor could he work out where the note came from, which bothered him even more. To unmask the source, he must first record the location on his scrying globe.

Gilhaelith was a geomancer of great power, though power itself held no interest for him. He cared about nothing except knowledge. He was wealthy, but likewise wealth had only one value – it allowed him to pursue his drive to understand geomancy in all its subtlety. Geomancy was the Art that underpinned the heavenly bodies and the forces that controlled them, and he sought to master it to the limit of his ability, though in truth he rarely used that power. When he did need to use the Art he relied on mathemancy, which he had developed and of which he was, as far as he was aware, the only practitioner in the world. Wielding an unknown Art had its advantages.

Neither could he precisely reproduce the higher sound that came from the pipes, though Gilhaelith had perfect pitch and knew which pipes made it. That irritated him even more. However, he was able to identify one remarkable feature of the call. It was moving.

That was strange. His organ could pick up the sounds associated with the great forces that shaped and moved the world, but they were always in the same place. It could not detect the harmonies associated with the planets, the moon, wandering comets or other celestial bodies. Occasionally a meteor might be large enough, and come close enough, for him to detect its song – a high squeal rising in pitch before abruptly being cut off – but neither of these sounds was remotely like that.

They were moving slowly. Definitely not a celestial body. A delicious puzzle. He enjoyed puzzles – Gilhaelith had been playing the world game for most of his adult life and was a long way from solving it. What could this object be? The organ was not sensitive to the tones from minor forces such as hedrons, clankers and other devices that employed the Art. He had no interest in the works of vulgar humanity. But this was different, and something in the notes was slightly, hauntingly familiar. Shuttering the lantern, he sat in the dark, listening and remembering. His stomach crawled as though his breakfast was still alive. Some weeks ago, a strange disruption had frosted his globe and wrung a sobbing note out of the worldwide ethyr itself. That had not happened before in all his years of listening. The ethyr was only a carrier, normally intangible, and for it to sing meant that a monumental disruption had taken place.

Gilhaelith had not yet discovered what, or where. If some natural force, it must have been a cataclysmic one, though a huge earthquake, eruption or landfall would have reverberated for ages. It had been nothing like that. Nor had it to do with the war. Neither humanity nor the lyrinx had that kind of power.

The sounds were still moving. He put his hands on the keys, again struggling and failing to duplicate them. His curiosity would not let go, but though he played for hours with such intensity that his mustard-stained gown became drenched in sweat, Gilhaelith could not get close. He wanted to draw the source to him but did not know how. For all his geomantic power, he was helpless. Should he go to the bells? He glanced over his shoulder at the cloth-shrouded carillon and shuddered. No, he was not in the right frame of mind for that particular kind of struggle.

When Gilhaelith finally left the organ, the pipes no longer sang. In disgust, he closed the door and climbed the obsidian stairs to the top of his observatory tower, to draw solace from the ever predictable motions of the celestial bodies. Gilhaelith's house stood at the top of the volcano whose name was Booreah Ngurle, the famous Burning Mountain, and it was the strangest house in the world. He called it a house, though really it was a great rambling workshop, laboratory and library. Gilhaelith was a polymath, a man interested in everything and master of many disciplines. He was more than one hundred and fifty years old, but in society might have passed for forty, not that he was ever in society. He lived alone apart from a flock of servants whose families had served him for generations.

Gilhaelith spent the rest of the night in his observatory, at the top of the tower near a vine-covered terrace. He was searching for comets, which were more frequent at this time of year, but as the dawn brightened he fell asleep at his 'scope. A servant woke him an hour later with a mug of stout, heated to boiling by plunging a red-hot poker into it. Black liquid foamed over the sides, flecked with shreds of mace.

As Gilhaelith reached for the mug, the greatest pipes of his organ, which had not sounded by themselves in all his years of watching, groaned. The sound was so low that it shook the whole of Nyriandiol. The drink quivered in his servant's hand. A few seconds later something flashed past the rim of the crater. It could not have been a comet, for it was black and the rising sun glinted off it. Swinging the spyglass around, Gilhaelith caught another flash of black, now dropping sharply to disappear below the rim.

He leaned back in his chair and, putting his lanky legs up on the rail, grated a good third of a nutmeg onto his stout. Stirring it in with a pair of brass dividers, he took a cautious sip. Spice-crusted foam caught on his upper lip. 'What can it be?' he said to himself.

He puzzled about the incident until mid-morning, working through all the possibilities he could think of. It did not occur to him to go down into the forest and take a look. Gilhaelith was not a man of action. However, he did check the organ and look into his globe again. Neither told him anything. Frustrated, he occupied himself with other activities, to cleanse his mind of the puzzle.

Late in the morning Gilhaelith was composing a poem in his library – an ode on the power four – when his eye caught an engraving of a scene from the famous but debased Tale of the Mirror. It portrayed the tragic funeral ride of Rulke across the Way between the Worlds to Aachan, his body bound to the side of the construct. The engraving had been on his library wall for ninety-seven years, so long that Gilhaelith had ceased to notice it.

Laying down his quill, he peered at the engraving. The fleeting black image seen earlier resonated with this image of the construct, a congruence so remarkable that he began to contemplate a radical action – actually going down to the forest to investigate. 'Curious,' he said. 'Will I or won't I?'

He tested the omens by raising a selection of random numbers to the fourth power, then reading the pattern. It was mostly harmonious. 'Yes, I'll go down and take a look.'

Being a methodical man, he returned to the tower, took a sighting on the spot where the falling object had disappeared, and marked it on his map. Taking off his robes he donned a dark green shirt, red walking boots and baggy pants which revealed hairy, skinny legs knobbed in the middle by kneecaps as square as pieces of toast.

Gilhaelith tossed a shapeless pack over his shoulder. It contained a length of rope, a hatchet and a large bottle of stout so black that it could have been used to dye soot. Fully equipped, he told the servants where he was going and strode off along the rim of the volcano as though there were springs in his knees.

Booreah Ngurle was dormant at the moment, emitting only wisps of steam and an occasional puff of ash. One day, however, it would come to life and erupt violently, blasting cubic leagues of rock into the air and destroying everything for five or ten leagues around, including Nyriandiol and, if he was in residence at the time, himself.

Gilhaelith enjoyed that uncertainty almost as much as his morning walk on the suspended path. Life on Santhenar was fragile, death often brutal and sudden, and living here reminded him every day. He knew the science of the earth better than anyone, and monitored the tremblers and the gaseous emissions of the volcano as methodically as he did everything in his life. Gilhaelith hoped to predict the eruption and make his way to a safe vantage point, the better to observe it. But if he failed, that would also be interesting, albeit briefly.

Crunching along the ashy ground, which was sparsely covered in silky lamb's ears and other hardy plants, he looked over the outer side. Further down, weeds gave way to grey shrubs, beyond which the vegetation became increasingly luxuriant. From the halfway point, the slopes were clothed in tall forest that extended into the vastness of Worm Wood in all directions, concealing what lay below. He felt sure the falling object had gone down there, somewhere.

Though Gilhaelith was familiar with this part of the forest, it took him what remained of the day to find the machine. A lesser man might have given up but, once set upon a course, Gilhaelith never did.

It was a construct. He marvelled at that. Gilhaelith knew the Histories well and understood the significance of this machine. It, or the events that had brought it here, would change the world. Just what was the connection with that disturbance of the ethyr weeks ago?

The construct lay on its side, partly embedded in the mouldering remnants of a pair of rotting logs, forest giants that had fallen many years ago. The metal skin was crumpled, the front and side stoved in. He walked around it twice, noting everything for future consideration and making sketches. He might do a painting one day and hang it in his library.

The hatch was closed. 'Hello?' he called. 'Is anyone here?'

There was no answer, so he heaved it open. Constructs had always fascinated him, because no one knew how they worked. In his boyhood, before reality crushed such ambitions, he had dreamed of flying one.

It was growing dark. Gilhaelith slid in through the hatch. It was completely dark inside but his exploring hand struck a glass sphere, which began to glow. Everything about the machine was strange and, to a geomancer, fascinating. He discovered that it bore similarities to clankers, but also had many differences. The most notable: its flight had been powered by one of the strong forces. To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever mastered such forces. Did he have a rival more advanced than himself?

Then he discovered the amplimet. In all his life he had seen nothing like it. He spent ages there, oblivious to everything else, studying the amplimet without ever touching it. He was wary, for the danger was obvious. Yet he coveted it, and the construct too. Within them lay the answers to questions he had puzzled over for a very long time. How he would enjoy that journey of discovery.

A faint scraping sound from below reminded him that the construct must have had an operator. 'Hello?' he called.

A groan answered him. He climbed down into the darkness. The globe on the wall was broken so he conjured a glimmer with his fingers – the simplest magic of all. A young woman lay on the tilted floor. Gilhaelith had little use for people but she was different from the women of these parts, and quite lovely. He gazed at her.

The woman was small compared to his female servants, and slender, with hair so black and glossy that even in this dim light it shone. Her colouring, and her eyes, suggested that she was from the south-east of Lauralin.

Gilhaelith had no currency with women, apart from the elderly matrons who worked in his villa. He had not spent time with a young woman in a hundred years. From his early life, Gilhaelith knew that human relationships caused only misery. Nonetheless, he did not like to see any creature in pain.

Squatting beside her, knees popping, he called to mind the common speech of the south-east, which he had learned in his youth but seldom had cause to speak. 'My name is Gilhaelith. Who are you?'

'I am Tiaan Liise-Mar.' Her voice was the barest exhalation.

He inspected her from head to foot, probing her skull with bony fingers. 'You've taken a nasty knock, but I think no harm is done. Take my hand; I'll help you up.'

'I can't feel my legs. My back is broken.'

Gilhaelith rocked back on his heels. Broken backs could not be repaired by any healer's skill, nor any form of the Secret Art he was aware of. What was he to do with her?

'Have you friends or family?'

'Not within two hundred leagues,' she whispered.

Beautiful and doomed. What to do? He would take the glowing crystal. He could have his servants bring the construct to Nyriandiol. It would not be easy but it could be done. And Tiaan Liise-Mar?

It would be a kindness to put her out of her misery, as he would do for any animal with the same affliction. He considered it dispassionately, but the practicality of suffocating her, or breaking her neck, under the gaze of those dark eyes, was beyond him. Better to expose her on the floor of the forest. A predator would take her within a day and it would be a quick death, though not a pleasant one. He would not want it for himself, and the waiting would be worse. Gilhaelith lidded his eyes, the better to take the omens. The numbers all fell badly, so he could not expose her either. There was only one thing to do, though he felt sure he would regret it.

'I will have you brought to my house, Nyriandiol,' he said heavily. 'It is not far.'

She closed her eyes. Gilhaelith stood by her for a minute. He could carry her that distance, had there been no option, but was reluctant to. Her back might not be irretrievably damaged, but if he picked her up it would be, and then he would never be rid of her. He would bring down his most reliable servants, a healer and a stretcher.

'I will be gone a few hours,' he said. 'Will you be all right for that time?'

'I'm not going anywhere,' Tiaan said, with an empty laugh that chilled him.

He gave her the last of the stout from his bottle. It went down the wrong way, causing her to cough. Black stout dribbled down her chin. He wiped it off, and with a last backward glance went up the ladder. Outside he closed the hatch and climbed the mountain as fast as he could in the dark. Red-faced and dripping sweat, he crashed into the hall not long before midnight.

'Mihail, Fley,' he roared. 'Get up! An accident down the mountain. Have we a stretcher?'

Mihail, a portly man with a pink, shiny complexion like fresh scar tissue, put his head around the door. 'Healer Gurteys has one, I believe, Master Gilhaelith.'

'Rouse Gurteys and Seneschal Nixx out of bed. A young woman lies injured in the forest. Her back is broken.'

Fley came trotting out of the infirmary with the stretcher under one arm. He was a big man, as muscular as a butcher, but completely silent, for Fley was a mute. Gurteys, his wife, was lean and wiry, with webbed fingers, a perpetual scowl and a voice as raucous as a cockerel.

'As if I haven't enough to do in the daytime,' she said in a whine that caused Fley to clench his fists. Staring at the back of his wife's neck, he opened his fingers into claws, then crushed them closed. That appeared to satisfy him for he followed in silence.

Nixx met them at the front door. An ill-shaped man, the seneschal had a nose so hooked, and a chin so pointed, that he could have held a walnut between them. His eyes were black buttons, his ears pendulous and his egg-shaped skull completely bald. Nixx was polite, efficient and completely loyal. And he had one feature that to Gilhaelith was worth more than all the others – he was the fourth son of a fourth son, and the fourth of his line to have been seneschal to Gilhaelith.

It was around three in the morning by the time the procession of lanterns reached the construct. Gurteys the healer, well back from Gilhaelith's hearing, complained all the way. The servants stared at the fallen machine but did not ask questions. Inside, Gilhaelith and the healer held Tiaan's head while Mihail and Fley rolled her just enough to slide the stretcher underneath. They bound her to it and Gurteys gave her a dose of green syrup that closed her eyes within a minute. The bearers carefully manoeuvred the stretcher up and out of the hatch. Gilhaelith gave orders for them to return with a canvas, to conceal the machine while he worked out what to do with it.

It was a slow trip back. Gilhaelith paced ahead of the stretcher, worn out after his second night without sleep. His belly throbbed, high up. What was he to do with Tiaan? Near the summit he looked back and saw that her eyes were open. She quickly closed them.

Dawn had broken by the time they reached Nyriandiol. Gilhaelith saw Tiaan settled in the room beside his, next to the front door, and left her to the healer. He spent hours pacing the suspended walkway, oblivious to the danger. Usually he found the scenery exhilarating. Now he did not notice it.

When the healer had finished, Gilhaelith met her at the door. Taking Gurteys by the sleeve, for he did not like to touch, he led her out to the main terrace. They stood by the stone wall, looking down into the crater. Below, a man clad only in a loincloth toiled up a winding path, carrying a laden basket on his head. It was piled high with chunks of native sulphur, which condensed around vents inside the crater. Sulphur had always been valuable. The war had made it priceless and Gilhaelith's supply was the purest in the world.

That was another worry. For the past century the war had been so far away that it did not matter, but it was coming closer all the time. The lands immediately east of the Sea of Thurkad looked set to fall before next winter. The scrutators might be thinking it was time they secured their supplies directly rather than paying his outrageous prices. The lyrinx, who had never bothered him, could equally be planning to seize the source to deny it to humanity. Though he loved Nyriandiol more than anything, Gilhaelith saw a time coming when he would have to abandon it, if he was to continue his work.

'What have you found?' he asked the healer.

'Her back is broken,' said Gurteys. 'It's not a bad break, as such things go. It will heal. Unfortunately the spinal cord has been severed. There's nothing I can do about that. She will be paralysed from the waist down until the day she dies.'

Gilhaelith treated his people well, though he had never concerned himself with their lives or problems. Now, as he stared down into the crater, all he could see was Tiaan's face, bleached under the amber skin, and the eyes staring up at the ceiling.

It made him uncomfortable. Gilhaelith had no friends, nor wanted any. People were unreliable. People rejected, spurned and betrayed. His only desire was to play the great game to the limit of his ability, but if Tiaan remained here that would be disrupted. Yet how could he rid himself of her without compromising the crystal and the construct?

The amplimet, carefully wrapped, hung like a lead weight in his pocket. The construct oppressed him too. He wanted to master them, whatever it cost. If the scrutators knew the construct was here they would march on Nyriandiol with an army. To say nothing of the construct's true owner, and he knew that was not Tiaan. The machine was of Aachim make and they must be hunting it even now. Why had she stolen it?

By keeping it secret he risked everything, but he was going to try. He had to. The construct offered knowledge that could give him the advantage in the game.

That reminded him of something. Hastening to the library, he took up a secret book of geomancy his agents had only just uncovered. After ten minutes he had not taken in a single word. Tossing it on the table, Gilhaelith looked for his poem, but did not bother to pick it up. He could see nothing but Tiaan's tormented features.

One remedy had never failed him. In the cool of the cellar at the back of the seventh level, Gilhaelith tapped a foaming mug of his favourite stout. The black brew went down untasted, and another two after it. They proved no use at all.

Since Tiaan had stolen the amplimet and used the construct, she must have some minor talent. Perhaps he could use her. Gilhaelith was a fair man and would pay her for that service. Was there anything he could do to get her legs back?

His library was one of the best in the world, for books were the first treasures to be sold when war swept across a city and drove its citizens onto the road. The world was awash with rare manuscripts; treasures could be had for a few gold coins and his agents were constantly sending him more.

Calling his librarian, Gilhaelith instructed her to find every document that bore on the subject of broken backs, necks, and recovery therefrom. There was plenty; he read all day and half the night before collapsing on his bed for a few hours of sleep. Late that evening he visited the patient, who lay as still and silent as before, then went on with his work.

Gilhaelith ploughed through the rest of the tomes, scrolls and parchments. Though they contained a good lading of miraculous cures, most he was able to dismiss as quackery. He found no reputable healer's opinion that disagreed with his own.