Tetrarch (Well of Echoes)

by Ian Irvine

  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 v
ents 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.

  EIGHTEEN

  Tiaan roused from the potion while they were still in the forest. She remembered everything except the fall that had broken her back. The bearers were carrying her up a steep slope through forest that had a rich decaying smell. The lanterns were golden orbs swaying across her vision. The night was silent, apart from the tramp of footsteps and an occasional mutter of ‘No, this way,’ or ‘Give us a hand up here.’ The man who had discovered her was just a shadow, well ahead.

  Was Gilhaelith friend or enemy? Most likely the latter. In her travels across Tirthrax, Tiaan had often considered how she might defend herself against attackers. She had not imagined being helpless to do so. This man could use her, or abuse her, in any way he wanted. He could give the thapter to the enemy, or sell her to the most evil man in the world. There was nothing she could do. She wished she had died.

  Hours later, as dawn broke, they carried her out of the forest up through a patch of thorny bushes, over a barrens of black rock and scree that slipped underfoot, and onto the rim of the crater.

  The summit of Booreah Ngurle was elongated like a bean seed and consisted of a large crater at the western end overlapping a smaller one at the east. Ahead, Nyriandiol hung inside the northern lip of the larger crater. Long and low, it extended for several hundred paces around the rim. Apart from a slender tower, from the approach road it appeared to consist of only a single storey.

  The road, a rutted and gullied track deliberately maintained in poor repair, curved around onto the stony rim, here no more than fifty paces wide. The area outside the front of Nyriandiol was paved with roughly worked stone, forming a terrace that had been partly roofed and provided with stools and tables. Other parts were covered in climbing vines. A series of benches had been cut into the welded rock of the mountaintop, forming lower terraces that looked down into the crater.

  From here, as they carried her across, Nyriandiol appeared to grow out of the mountain’s rim, which had been cut away on the inside to accommodate it. Subsequently the rubble had been put back so that, from the outside, only the upper storey and roof could be seen. From the lowest terrace, however, the full magnificence of the place was visible.

  Sinusoidal walls of dark stone curved down for another seven levels. Enormous windows of coloured glass set in small panes made up parts of a giant mosaic which could only properly be viewed from the other side of the crater, with a spyglass. The panes, in groups of nine by nine, were linked by patterns of stone inlaid in the walls in geomantic themes: swirls, bridges and arcs of stone each laid according to secret numbers. The steep roof was covered in shingles of red jasper and even these were set down in numerical mosaics. Nyriandiol was a geomantic masterpiece, designed to safeguard its owner and enhance all his efforts in the great room on the lowest floor.

  The front door, made of a single slab of chalcedony swinging on massive brass hinges, was an oval two spans high and two wide. The door surroundings had been cut from yellow jasper.

  They lugged her inside. The villa was built entirely of stone, the lower floors being vaulted to bear the weight of those above. She was brought into a large room and placed on a bed. Someone saw that her eyes were open and gave her another dose of syrup. Tiaan surrendered to it gratefully.

  She woke in the most mortifying position of her life. A metal dish had been jammed under her and someone was pressing hard on her bladder, forcing her to urinate. She prayed that it was a woman and not the odd-looking scarecrow, Gilhaelith. Whoever it was, they let out a muffled grunt with each thrust. Tiaan kept her eyes firmly closed. Was this a prescription for the rest of her life, having to be helped with every bodily function? If so, she prayed she would not live long.

  Life conspired to devalue her in her own eyes. Each time she gained something it was snatched away. Minis’s rejection had been the ultimate demonstration of her worthlessness.

  Tiaan had always known that she would mate and have children. It was every person’s duty, after all. She often dreamed about it, in an overly romantic way, but now it would never happen. She might still do her artisan’s work sitting down, but the few men available could take their pick, and who would want a mate such as she?

  There had been so many visitors in the day that Tiaan began to feel like a circus exhibit. Several people spoke to he
r, but she did not answer. The drug had left her listless. Overwhelmed by the disaster, and unused to being waited on, she could not think of anything to say to them.

  The nurse gave an especially loud grunt and Tiaan heard footsteps cross the room, away from her. She opened her eyes. Gilhaelith stood by the head of the bed, staring at her. What a strange, ill-put-together fellow he was. His nose was a triangular chunk sawn off the corner of a plank, his mouth seemed to take up half his face, while his chin was so big and square it would not have been out of place in a carpenter’s toolbox.

  Gilhaelith had hair the colour of beach sand, the individual hairs crinkled and lying apart from their fellows in a frizzled mass like the unbraided strands of a rope. It looked as if he had mopped the floor with his head. His eyes were smoky grey, though not hard, as pale eyes could often be – he looked contemplative, even philosophical. They were his only appealing feature.

  Who was Gilhaelith, and what did he want? He was taller than Minis, which made him too tall, and big-framed but skinny. His bones looked too large for his muscles; he had the oddity of broad shoulders but a narrow chest, and his legs made her want to laugh.

  She studied him from half-closed eyes as he went back and forth in the room, walking with a springy, bent-kneed step. He kept staring at her then looking away. Now he was coming toward her. He could walk; she never would. Tiaan did not know how to deal with him either. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. After standing beside her for a few minutes, he went away.

  The room was empty at last. Tiaan looked around. Soft cords ran across her chest, waist and hips, binding her tightly to lengths of timber. She could move only her arms and her head.

  The roof beams seemed to be massive trunks of petrified wood. The room was large and kidney-shaped, the walls built of chunks of dark volcanic rock cemented together with pale mortar. The floor was cleaved stone, slabs of irregular shape also set in mortar then varnished to the colour of beer. The walls were bare apart from three large watercolours depicting scenes from the Histories, all by the same artist.