by Ian Irvine
Halfway across the room, the slender ray went out, as did all the other specks of light on the globe. She opened her fist, hoping to see the amplimet restored, but it was as dark as before. Still moving, she backed into something she had not seen, for it was covered in a black dustcloth. It gave forth the low, mournful peal she had heard before.
She pulled off the cloth, which could have covered a good-sized shed. Beneath, a carillon of bells was suspended from a small iron tower. Four of the bells were identical, each larger than a witch’s cauldron and spaced well apart at the corners of a square. Hanging in the centre was a fifth bell, elongated like a gooseberry and large enough to cover her from head to foot. It was made of glass, though she could not see through it.
Creeping into the middle of the carillon, she lowered the walker to look under the bells. The four metal bells were just like ordinary village bells. The fifth had no clapper and may have been designed to ring in sympathy with the others. The glass was mirror-silvered inside.
Belatedly realising that she had no right to be poking around here, she was turning away when the amplimet shone out and, beneath the glass bell, she saw a lock of black hair which looked just like her own.
She eased in between the bells, spreading the walker’s legs until she could pick up the lock. It was her hair, surely. No one in these parts had hair like hers. Coming up again, she happened to glance into the bell and was so struck by the deformed reflections in its mirrored surface that she rose inside to see. Everywhere she looked she saw herself, and every movement twisted and changed her. She went still but the reflections continued to shift, warp and change. Get away quick, she thought, but something pulled her back.
She was looking at a dark-haired man holding a little black-haired baby, which was crying. The amplimet flared and the images dissolved as if she were looking into a soothsayer’s crystal ball. A different man turned to her. He wore a half-mask of burnished metal but she knew it was Jal-Nish. The look in his eye made her stomach recoil.
She thrust the amplimet at the reflection. He looked surprised, then vanished as the light echoed back and forth. It took ages before she made out anything else. The reflections moved like ripples on a pond, slowly clearing to silver. She closed her fist around the amplimet again but the surface stayed bright, as if the light was swirling within the glass.
She made out a tower, twisted like barley sugar, in a frozen landscape of black rocks hung with ice of the same colour. In the distance, the sea was covered with jumbled ice floes and crevasses. The scene dissolved, a new image formed and she was standing at a woman’s shoulder as she walked down an endless stair. And someone was behind her but Tiaan was afraid to look back.
Down, down she went, with measured tread, never looking around. The woman came to the bottom, reaching out with old hands for a greatly corroded iron ring on an ancient door that had once been blackened by fire and never cleaned.
Tiaan swallowed. Her hand on the walker’s controller was slippery with sweat. What was behind the door?
‘No!’ someone roared.
A hand went over her hand. The walker dropped and lurched sideways, cracking her head on the rim of the bell. It rang and the vision, or seeing, vanished. The walker clattered out from beneath the carillon.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Gilhaelith shouted, dragging her away from the bells. The walker’s rubber feet skittered on the floor.
It was like being snatched from a dream. ‘I –’ she said. ‘I – I saw a lock of my hair on the floor – and then I looked up. Were you scrying out my life?’
‘Of course, as I do everyone who comes within my realm. What did you see?’
‘A man with a baby. It might have been my father.’ She hoped so. She so longed for him. ‘Then Jal-Nish the perquisitor, wearing a metal mask. And lastly, a woman walking down the steps of a bleak tower.’
‘The Tower of a Thousand Steps. You are lucky, Tiaan. There are many powers in this world and few as benign as I. They do not like being spied upon. Had I not come back, you would now be wishing you were dead. What were you doing here?’
‘I heard the bells. They seemed to be calling to me.’
He started. ‘Calling? What then?’
‘I was looking at your glass sphere but the amplimet went out and a spot on the globe sent a ray right up to the ceiling.’
‘What spot?’
‘The Island of Noom,’ she whispered.
Uncharacteristically, he shivered. ‘Rhymes with doom, Tiaan, and for good reason. You are not a true geomancer yet; I fear what you have just told the world about yourself.’
She followed him across the room. ‘Where are we going?’
‘You are going back to bed.’
‘And you?’
‘I wanted to talk to you, which is why I went to your room, but discovered you gone. However, that must wait. You’ve left me with much to do tonight. I hope I can cover your tracks.’
‘What did you want to talk about?’
‘There’s no time to discuss it now.’
‘Did you discover anything about me, from your scrying?’
‘I did, though I don’t know what it means. No time for that either.’ He saw her into her bed and hurried away.
While she’d been downstairs the weather had changed. Gusts of cold wind had replaced the warm breeze, and the moon was obscured by churning black clouds. Thunder echoed back and forth across the crater, like drumrolls. Hail rattled on the roof, followed by a brief patter of heavy drops.
Tiaan still could not sleep. She pushed herself up in bed, expecting a ferocious thunderstorm like those she had been used to at the manufactory. Lightning lit up the boiling clouds and gave her a show for hours, but there was no more rain. She was sorry about that. It had not rained here since she’d arrived.
The following morning was cool with a heavy overcast hanging low over the mountain, at times descending to the rim and becoming a gentle fog.
‘Can I go outside today?’ she said to Gilhaelith as they took breakfast together in her room. Tiaan tried not to look at the slugs foaming on his platter. ‘I feel so confined.’
‘I suppose so. There’s little chance of anyone seeing you in this weather, but put on your hat and scarf just in case.’
He helped Tiaan into her walker and they set out along the rim of the crater. Tiaan had to be careful of her footing on the rock-littered ground. Several times, when changing direction too quickly, she went close to tipping the walker over.
She was wrestling with her own dilemma. Dare she take the risk of sticking with Gilhaelith, who might betray her, or should she betray him first and flee in the thapter? If she had alerted something to her existence last night, it was now urgent.
‘You’re very quiet, Tiaan.’
She felt guilty. ‘Just thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘What I did last night.’
‘Let’s not talk about that now.’
‘This weather reminds me of home,’ she said with a little sigh. ‘It’s always raining or foggy at the manufactory. My clothes used to go mouldy in their chest. I never thought I’d miss the place.’
‘Home gets into our bones,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘Nyriandiol has been mine for most of my adult life, but I still feel nostalgic for my homeland.’
‘Where was that?’ she asked.
‘Oh, over on Meldorin Island.’ He waved a hand towards the west.
‘The name makes it seem like a little place,’ she said, trying to envision a map of that part of the world. For once, it would not come. ‘It’s not though, is it?’
‘Meldorin is enormous. A good three hundred leagues from south to north, and a hundred west to east.’
‘Whereabouts did you live?’
‘Oh, you know!’ He waved his long hand again, then fell silent.
A third of the way around the circuit of the crater, Tiaan stopped the walker.
‘Something the matter?’ Gilhaelith enquired.
&nb
sp; ‘The crutch strap is chafing. I’m not used to such rough ground.’
‘Do you want to go back?’
‘No. It’s lovely out here.’
They picked their way across the stony rim. Billows of mist drifted around them. Tiaan could feel droplets condensing on her eyelashes. The scarf over her face was dripping.
‘Gilhaelith?’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘What did you want to talk to me about?’
He leaned on an elbow-high boulder, staring into the invisible crater. He seemed reluctant to speak.
‘Gilhaelith?’
‘This is a great gamble, Tiaan. A prodigious gamble, so don’t get your hopes up.’ Another extended pause. ‘I’ve come across something about broken backs. There is –’ His head whipped around. ‘What was that? Did you hear it?’
‘It sounded like a sheet flapping in the wind.’
‘But there’s just the gentlest of breezes.’
The mist broke and re-formed. He ran to the outside edge, peering down toward the forest.
‘Can you see anything?’ she called.
‘No. Sometimes you hear funny noises up here,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I think we should head home, Tiaan.’
She adjusted the chafing strap, rotated the walker and they set off. ‘What about my back?’
He was slow to reply. Before they had gone twenty steps she heard that crack again. Gilhaelith went still, his head cocked to one side.
‘I think I know what it is.’ One hand slid inside his coat.
‘What, Gilhaelith?’ She turned the walker one way and then the other, but could not see anything.
Before he could answer, a winged shape appeared in the fog right behind him. Another thumped into the ground between him and her, and then two more, one on either side.
Gilhaelith whipped out a stubby rod but the rear lyrinx dropped a rope over his head and jerked it tight around Gilhaelith’s chest. The one to the left struck the rod from his hand.
‘What are you doing?’ she cried.
They did not answer. Other ropes bound his arms to his chest. He tried to say something, perhaps a geomantic word of power, for a rock exploded into fragments, gashing one of the lyrinx’s calves. It ignored the minor wound.
Tiaan hurled the walker forward, recklessly attacking the nearest lyrinx with her fist. It pulled back its arm to deliver a blow that would have torn her head from her shoulders. She skittered sideways, careering towards the second lyrinx.
Gilhaelith shouted something she did not catch. Before he could utter another word, the first lyrinx pulled a hood tight over Gilhaelith’s face. She caught a whiff of tar.
Tiaan threw herself at the nearest enemy, who simply put his great clawed hand across her face and pushed. The walker went backwards and toppled. As she crashed down the slope, the last thing Tiaan saw was the four lyrinx lifting off, in perfect formation, carrying Gilhaelith between them.
‘Tia –’ he yelled.
All further sounds were drowned out by the rush of shattered rock down the slope.
FORTY-FOUR
The scrutator had set up camp in a cave below the steep top of the twin pinnacles at Minnien. Irisis and her team had been working for days, mapping the wisps of field as it strengthened and trying to work out what had happened to it. At the same time, they built a device to read the aura of the node, and hopefully its history. It was a contraption of gold and silver leaf, platinum wire and crystals of various kinds. Jewel-like in its delicacy, it vaguely resembled a dragonfly. It could have had a variety of forms but Irisis had taken her frustrations out by making it as extravagant, and as beautiful, as she could with the materials she had. The work was painstaking, and blindness made it more so, but she would make no concessions to her disability.
They had not seen the lyrinx again, though Irisis felt sure that its visit had something to do with the reappearance of the field, which was clearer and stronger each day.
‘It’s nearly strong enough to drive a clanker,’ she said to Flydd on the fourth morning.
He sat up nakedly in his sleeping pouch. ‘Our first piece of luck.’ He scratched his scarred, hairless chest. ‘How is your aura reader going?’
‘Almost finished. The thing that puzzles me, Xervish, is why the Council did not do this a long time ago.’
‘Too blinkered,’ he said. ‘We scrutators think of mancing as the very pinnacle of the Secret Art, and no doubt it is, in terms of sheer power. But it is not a subtle Art, the way we use it, and we do not have the artisan’s ability to see the field. We draw on it intuitively; almost blindly. So, when our Art failed to penetrate the node, we did not consider that lesser abilities might succeed.’
‘It remains to be seen whether our minor talents can.’
‘Your humility is admirable,’ he said with a twitch of the lips.
‘I was taught by a master.’
She began to work another crystal into the dragonfly. Irisis did not need to see for this. As a prentice she had often made jewellery in the dormitory after the lamps had been snuffed out. That craft was her greatest pleasure, though she had little enough time to practise it.
‘What are we looking for, precisely?’ she asked. ‘Or is that another of your scrutator’s secrets that can be revealed to none?’
‘Several things.’ He laid a twisted finger on her bare upper arm. ‘Firstly, using my raw power and your subtle device, we will attempt to induce an aura from the node itself. That could reveal its recent history, though auras can be hard to read and even harder to interpret. Tiaan did this with a failed controller crystal, once. But of course, Tiaan …’ He sighed heavily.
Irisis was heartily sick of Tiaan’s marvels. ‘Might that not be dangerous?’ she said irritably.
‘Very. It will take much power and the only place I can get it is from the node, which runs the risk of power feeding back on itself. Such things can get out of control very quickly. Just to induce an aura in something so powerful as a node will be hard. There will be barriers to overcome.’
‘And other forces?’
‘I was coming to that. The field surrounding a node comes from the weak force that Nunar first described a century ago. But we believe, and it is written in Nunar’s The Mancer’s Art, that stronger forces may also exist. We do not know how to see or draw upon them, though some mancers have accidentally done so. Sadly, none lived to write down what they had discovered.’
‘And if you accidentally hit upon one of these forces …’
‘I will cease to exist even more gorily than that unfortunate mancer up on the aqueduct. And you too, if you’re standing too close.’ He chuckled.
‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ Irisis snapped. ‘I’ve gone off you, scrutator, since you took my sight away.’
‘I warned you, but you were too much of a stickybeak. You had to look back.’
‘I was trying to help you!’
‘More fool you,’ Flydd said cheerfully.
‘Oh, go away. I never want to see you again.’ Then, realising what she had said, she began to laugh. It was that or burst into tears. He laughed with her.
Irisis worked the last of the crystals into place and checked the device with her fingers. It felt just like a dragonfly now, but with only a single pair of wings.
‘I love watching you work.’ His voice was rich with good humour. ‘You have such beautiful hands. And they move so cleverly.’
She held them up before her blind eyes. ‘You just want more of what I did with them the other night.’
‘I confess it. After my torment thirty years ago, I never thought I would feel that kind of pleasure again.’
She looked surprised. ‘You fasted for thirty years? Surely even an ugly old coot like you must have his pick of lovers. You are scrutator after all, and a lot of women find power rather … lubricious.’
‘And you’re one of them.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘Until you, I lacked the courage to bare myself.’
‘Really? Does the great scrutator confess to a weakness.’
‘Ex-scrutator, remember, and you are risking your life by being associated with me.’
‘I imagine the price on my head is almost the equal of your own.’
‘It isn’t, but you will die a most miserable death when they catch you.’
‘When?’ A chill settled over her. She had never heard him talk like that before.
‘The scrutators can’t afford to be humiliated. They will hunt us down and bring us to justice if it takes the rest of our lives. They never give up.’
‘Oh well,’ she said casually, ‘nothing we can do. Better get on with it. This is ready.’
‘I’ll call the others.’
She heard him moving away. Irisis began to take deep breaths, calming herself and getting into the right state for sensing. This would be harder than anything she had done before, and she could not afford a mistake. Flydd’s life depended on it. She clung to the hope that he could somehow save them, in spite of what he had said. But if he died, they were all doomed.
The party came crunching up the hill, chattering. Flydd gave them their orders. ‘Zoyl, I want you to stand here. Oon-Mie, over there. Irisis, stay where you are but get into a comfortable position. This could take a while.’
They moved to their places. ‘Shall we begin?’ said the scrutator. Despite his demotion, Irisis could not think of Flydd as anything else.
‘I’m ready.’ Irisis held the reader out.
‘I’ll take that.’ He plucked it from her hands.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ She felt around in the air for it.
‘You know what I’m doing,’ he said, ‘and why.’ He crunched up to the back wall of the cavern. ‘Your turn will come.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’
‘Just keep a close eye on things. In case.’
He tossed the dragonfly into the air. It rotated and when it came down again, Zoyl cried out, ‘The eyes are glowing.’