Tetrarch (Well of Echoes)

by Ian Irvine

  The air-floater was now motionless in the still air, invisible in the mist. ‘Come out, Ullii,’ ordered Flydd. ‘Show the pilot where to go.’

  Ullii brushed past him, stormy-faced, and stood next to Hila. She said nothing, simply held her arm in the direction they had to go. The air-floater drifted that way. After a few minutes Ullii’s arm swung straight down.

  The machine dropped through the mist into clear air, settled and rocked gently on its skids. Outside it was as dark as the tar pits. The assault fires were just dull glows beyond the walls. The barrage of blazing balls had stopped.

  Ullii moved two steps and disappeared.

  ‘Seeker,’ Flydd hissed. ‘Stay with us.’

  She came back. Ullii knew where they were. ‘Hate you both,’ she said audibly.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Flydd.

  She did not deign to reply.

  Flydd clipped his cord to her belt. Irisis did the same to his. The air-floater lifted, its rotor just ticking over. They felt its wind but could not see it.

  ‘No sound,’ warned Flydd. ‘They can still hear us.’

  ‘And smell us too,’ Irisis muttered. She could feel her heartbeat in her temples. They were going to be caught. They were going to be eaten.

  ‘Lead the way, Ullii.’ Flydd murmured words that took the spell off the air-floater, restricting it to them alone.

  The seeker led them on a meandering route, like a snail trail across a brick path. Most lyrinx appeared in her lattice, so she knew how to avoid them. Most, but not all.

  No one saw the lyrinx and of course it could not see them. It came running from the left, hit the cord between Irisis and Flydd, stumbled and fell. The impact sent them all flying. The creature sat up, a shadow that seemed to be feeling its ankle as it looked around in the dark. It had no idea what had happened.

  Irisis held her breath. If she moved, it would hear her. She prayed that Ullii would not cry out. She could hear the creature sniffing, trying to work out what was wrong. She hoped it could not pick up their scent in the tar-laden air.

  A knife shimmered as though moving by itself. It disappeared; the lyrinx gurgled; she smelt blood. It toppled forward.

  ‘We need to keep a better watch,’ said Flydd, wiping his blade on the corpse.

  They crept across an open space, holding their staves in front to probe for pits and mires. Ullii’s talent could not always pick out physical objects.

  ‘Bog!’ She stopped abruptly, extracting her little foot with a sucking sound.

  Irisis caught a stronger whiff of tar. There were many tar bogs in this saturated ground. One step too far and it might take five minutes to get out again. If alone, you would never get out.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ hissed Flydd, staring back the way they had come.

  ‘Looks like an attack on the southern wall,’ said Irisis.

  ‘That’s not part of the plan.’

  ‘Maybe it’s the Aachim.’

  ‘It had better not be. That’ll ruin everything. Hurry, Ullii. I can’t hold the cloaking spell much longer.’

  Irisis might as well have been blind again; in the next hour she saw nothing at all. Only Ullii knew where they were going, for she was navigating by her lattice. But knowing where they were going was not enough. She had to find a way to get there and that was harder than it seemed. Ullii’s mind had a unique and tormented logic.

  Fortunately, Flydd had an uncanny grasp of directions and had memorised all the maps they had of Snizort. ‘We must go down,’ he said as they crouched in the concealment of two spindly thornbushes. ‘From the way Ullii’s pointing, the location is deep underground.’

  ‘We already knew that.’

  ‘How do we get underground?’

  ‘There are steps down into all the old tar pits,’ said Irisis. ‘And tunnels leading underground off them.’

  ‘But which pit?’ he mused. Flydd stood for a moment, then squatted again. His knees popped in the still night.

  A light grew in the sky behind them. A flaming catapult ball swished overhead, to thump into the ground close enough that they felt the impact. Irisis held her breath but the flames went out.

  ‘I thought you gave orders about not firing into Snizort tonight?’ she said.

  ‘I did. Bloody rabble. No wonder we’re losing the war. Let’s try the main pit. Can you find that, Ullii?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said almost inaudibly.

  It was easy to forget she was with them. They skirted sucking bogs and the edges of pits that quaked like jelly underfoot. They walked trails of sticky tar before descending 741 steps into the biggest of the many pits on the map; they entered a cavern or tunnel that had an eye-stinging, bituminous reek. Irisis could feel the walls with her outstretched hands.

  Flydd stopped just inside. ‘I’d expect most of the lyrinx to be outside the walls, in the battle,’ he whispered into the absolute dark. ‘But not all. There will be guards within the tunnels, and other lyrinx moving about. Maybe hundreds. We have to be absolutely quiet.’

  You’re making all the noise, Irisis thought irritably. She was desperately afraid of this place.

  ‘I’m having trouble holding the concealing glamour,’ he went on. ‘We’ll have to be quick. If I lose it …’

  They went forward. Most of the tunnels were unlit. Irisis had no idea where they were and she knew Flydd was just as lost.

  Ullii saw clearly and moved steadily on. She saw the enemy too. Thrice she alerted them just in time and they huddled in a pungent crevice or dripping hollow while lyrinx hurried by. They wandered a maze of tunnels until Irisis, without touching her pliance, began to feel the field swirling all around her. She had never experienced that before. They had been underground well over an hour.

  ‘How far, Ullii?’ said Flydd.

  She did not answer.

  ‘Surely the place will be guarded,’ Irisis said.

  ‘From what? There are twenty-five thousand lyrinx outside. How could any intruder get this far?’

  ‘We have! And we guard our precious things.’

  ‘Lyrinx are not like us. They do not steal from each other; they do not sabotage or vandalise. Besides …’

  She detected an ominous note. ‘What is it, Flydd? What aren’t you telling us?’

  ‘You would not station guards close to a node-drainer. If they were there too long it would begin to … disrupt them.’

  A memory flashed back. ‘Like – the way it disrupted the rock of the mine at the manufactory?’

  A long pause before he whispered, ‘Precisely.’

  ‘So this is going to kill us. It’ll take our bodies apart.’

  ‘Not if we’re quick. Jal-Nish survived it, if you recall.’

  She took him by the shoulders. ‘How long before it disrupts us, Xervish?’

  ‘How the blazes would I know?’

  ‘Ten minutes? An hour? A day?’

  ‘Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Depends how strong it is, and how close we have to get to it.’

  She stood in the corridor, unmoving. ‘Irisis?’ said Flydd.

  ‘So be it.’ They continued, but shortly she stopped again, allowing the seeker to move around the corner out of hearing.

  ‘What now?’ he said irritably.

  ‘What’s it going to do to Ullii’s baby?’ she said in his ear.

  ‘It will have to take its chances like the rest of us.’

  ‘But it … Ullii … We’ve got to tell her. At least give her the choice.’

  ‘We’re all soldiers in a war, artisan,’ he said harshly. ‘You, me, Ullii and the child. If we fail, humanity is doomed and where is the child then? We must all follow orders. Is that clear?’

  ‘Yes, scrutator.’

  They hid from another guard. Flydd’s glamour still held, for the lyrinx looked right at them without seeing anything. It peered around uneasily, sniffing the air, its skin patterning in the light of a distant lamp, before hurrying away.

  ‘Glamour’s failing!’ Flydd was
bent over, holding his belly. ‘Barely … hold it.’

  She helped him up and they hurried after Ullii who, no longer roped to them, had disappeared down the tunnel. Irisis was all knotted inside. This was going to go wrong, she knew it.

  It began as the merest tickle across her shoulder blades, indicating that they were within the sphere of influence of the node-drainer. The sensation grew stronger. Soon the flesh beneath her skin was shuddering as it was tugged one way and another. Her stomach began to bubble like a brewing vat. Ullii gasped. Her body was racked by sinuous heaves. Flydd groaned and the cloaking spell vanished.

  ‘Watcher!’ hissed Ullii, sniffing the air like a dog.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Before and after his brief meeting with Tiaan, Gilhaelith had spent days surveying the Great Seep, from the ground and the network of tunnels below it, until his maps were as accurate as he could draw them. The lyrinx drove him hard, making it clear that the project was urgent and had priority over every other activity at Snizort. He wondered why.

  Gilhaelith was not working as hard as they thought, at least not on their project. He spent every spare moment with his icy scrying globe, pretending to do their work, but really studying the Snizort node, which fascinated him. It turned out to be a very strange one, and the fluctuations in its field were extreme, though that might have been because of the power the lyrinx drew from it for their flesh-forming.

  And then again, it might have had something to do with the amplimet, for Gilhaelith suspected it was up to its old tricks again. With the globe he picked up occasional, inexplicable pulses which could hardly be due to anything else.

  He went on to sensing out the hot spot that powered the seep. That was not hard for a geomancer of his experience. He had spent more than a century monitoring Booreah Ngurle in a similar way. Finally, most difficult of all, he had to scry out the pattern of slow currents that brought warm tar to the surface of the Great Seep, and carried cooler material down again, in complex whirls and eddies.

  The tar moved almost imperceptibly, though over seven thousand years it must have travelled quite a distance. Gilhaelith had brought back much geomantic equipment, but none of his crystals and devices proved sensitive enough for this task. Nor, though he spent ages adjusting it, his globe. He had been here for weeks and Gyrull was angry at the lack of progress.

  There was another way – to forecast the path of the currents using mathemancy. He had never used that Art in this kind of endeavour before and was not sure if it would prove any use at all, but what else could he do?

  After a night and a day, Gilhaelith set aside his arrays of numbers, checked the map and pointed to a particular location. ‘Start digging here, and go in this direction.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked the truth-reader.

  ‘As sure as I’ll ever be.’ That was true enough.

  Matriarch Gyrull blew on a horn. Lyrinx appeared from everywhere. They went down to the place Gilhaelith had indicated. Gyrull marked the sandstone face with a claw and they began to hack at the soft rock with tools like enormous mattocks, extending a tunnel toward the Great Seep.

  The work continued day and night. When Gilhaelith returned in the morning to set up his surveying crystals, they had advanced by sixty paces, incredible progress even under such good conditions. The lyrinx worked as though possessed, and they were – Gyrull never had to remind them how important their work was, or how urgent.

  The second day they made nearly as much ground, and the third another forty paces, the work slowing because of the heat, and because the rock here was saturated with tar and difficult to work. At this point Gilhaelith saw the lyrinx’s true genius.

  Two of the creatures lugged in a metal ring slightly smaller than the diameter of the tunnel. After mounting a mushroom-shaped object called a phynadr in the middle of the ring, they activated it using a long rod. Cold pain sparkled in Gilhaelith’s temples, doubling him over. By the time he recovered, the ring was concealed by freezing mist.

  The phynadr was powered by the field and drew heat from the area around it. He had no idea how it worked but there was no doubt of its effectiveness. The tarry rock, now frigid, was brittle and easily broken. His crystals told him that the device took prodigious amounts of power from the field, which was weaker than before.

  The tunnel went forward in cooling stages followed by excavation. By late that afternoon, the fourth day of tunnelling, they broke through the last of the rock into the pure tar of the Great Seep. Now the work became hazardous in the extreme. Liquid tar was all around them, kept out only by a thin, frozen layer that was, relatively speaking, as fragile as an eggshell. If the pressure found a weakness, or just one of the cooling rings failed, the tunnel would collapse and they would be entombed in hot tar. The floor on which they stood shuddered from time to time.

  Gilhaelith was idle now, but never bored. He observed, noted and classified everything around him. The lyrinx were of particular interest, and he saw that they were not completely comfortable in their great bodies or, at least, their outer skin. The lyrinx were constantly scratching, shrugging their shoulders, working their limbs and easing the position of their armour plates. Perhaps there was a disadvantage to all the flesh-forming they had done to their unborn selves, in order to survive in the nightmare environment of the void.

  Gilhaelith was working in an embayment down the tunnel, well out of the way of the diggings. He had learned much about the node, another step toward his ultimate goal, but that was as far as he was going to get here. The war drew ever closer and it was time to get out before he was trapped. He felt sure he would be able to escape, despite how carefully the lyrinx watched him. They allowed him unfettered use of his tools, and that should be enough. But before he left he had to get the amplimet. He wished he could free Tiaan too, for he did care about her, but, no matter how much he might regret it, she had to be left behind. He could not carry her as well as his scrying globe, and he could not get out without it.

  Adjusting it, and sensitising it with an appropriate crystal, he sought for the amplimet. Gilhaelith found it at once, so quickly that momentarily he wondered if it had found him.

  His belly throbbed. The colic had been worse than usual since he’d come to Snizort, for which he blamed the bland food they gave him. None of the delicacies he was accustomed to were obtainable here.

  The amplimet was around Tiaan’s neck in the patterning chamber, and a patterning was going on. He sideslipped that process. Time was everything now and he could not be distracted by irrelevancies. The chamber was empty and there were no guards. Good. He worked out a route to it, and the way out, then scried back to check on the amplimet again.

  It was flashing furiously. Was it communicating with the patterner, or the node? It was hard to tell – the patterns seemed deliberately blurred. Surely the node, which seemed more unstable than ever. And the patterner! That bothered him. Was it trying to alter the patterning? What for? And what to?

  Hitherto Gilhaelith had paid no more attention to the patterning chamber than he had to the rooms where the lyrinx carried out flesh-forming and other dubious activities. Now he turned his attention to the growing torgnadr and realised that it was a node-drainer. And if the amplimet controlled such a device, it controlled all the power of the node.

  A looming disaster for both lyrinx and humanity, but a fabulous opportunity for himself. It was the chance to learn much more about the amplimet, by seeing exactly what it did.

  ‘No progress today, tetrarch?’ snapped Gyrull.

  Gilhaelith started and barely managed to control his face, but Gyrull had other things on her mind and kept going. The field was surging erratically and at present the freezing coils were too effective. The lyrinx had broken a number of matlocks, the metal going so brittle in the intense cold that the tools snapped on impact. It was retarding progress and had to be remedied quickly.

  He went back to his work, keeping a wary eye out now. His scrying was a delicate business, for he knew not what
the amplimet might be capable of, and did not want its attention to turn on him.

  However, after several days of such work Gilhaelith grew bolder, for he was beginning to see the pattern. The amplimet seemed to be drawing filaments of force – almost invisible threads of gossamer – out of the field to itself, to the patterner and to many other parts of Snizort. Power did not flow along those threads, yet he could see faint pulses of light. Why this network?

  ‘Come, tetrarch, you are needed at the front,’ said Gyrull.

  Reluctantly, he began to collect his gear.

  ‘Leave it! There’s no time. I’ll have it packed for you.’

  Packed? Gilhaelith had no choice but to follow. He was not yet ready to break out and could not do it without hours of preparation, but her use of that word alarmed him.

  The tunnel extended hour by hour, day by day. Cooling rings were spaced every ten paces along it, each with its mushroom-like phynadr maintaining the cold that kept them alive. The work was slower now; the broken tar had to be removed carefully in case they broke out of the frozen zone. Late on the tenth day of tunnelling, when they were nearly a hundred paces into the seep, Gilhaelith was called to try his scrying crystals again. His worries had proven fruitless; Gyrull still allowed him access to his tools, though only for a few minutes at a time.

  In the middle of his reading, the pair of lyrinx at the face ceased their pounding and levered with a bar. A curving slab peeled away to reveal something lifelike embedded in the black material. Putting down his instruments, Gilhaelith went to see what it was.

  It turned out to be the body of a wildcat, as long as Gilhaelith was tall, with a huge head and jaws that could have taken his leg off. It was so perfectly preserved that it might have been alive.

  The following morning the diggers found another, smaller predator, more like a jackal, and that afternoon a wild bull with long curling horns. ‘The beast must have been trapped in the seep,’ said Gilhaelith, ‘attracting the predators which died the same way.’