Tetrarch (Well of Echoes)
Page 69
Matron: Woman in charge of the breeding factory at Tiksi.
Meriwen: Daughter of Troist and Yara, twin of Liliwen.
Merryl: A human slave who teaches human languages to the lyrinx. Also known as Tutor.
Mihail: Gilhaelith’s manservant
Minis: A young Aachim man of high stature and foster-son of Vithis. Also Tiaan’s dream lover who was forced to spurn her when the Aachim came through the gate to Tirthrax.
Mira: Yara’s sister who dwells at Morgadis. She is embittered after the loss of her husband and three sons in the war. She communicates by skeet with a coalition of like-minded people.
M’lainte: The mechanician in charge of balloon construction.
Mounce: A disrespectful sergeant in Troist’s army.
Munnand: A lyrinx.
Myllii: Ullii’s long-lost twin brother.
Nish: Cryl-Nish’s nickname.
Nivulee: The navigator on Flydd’s air-floater.
Nixx: Gilhaelith’s seneschal
Numinator, the: A mysterious figure mentioned by Flydd when in his cups.
Nylatl, the: A malicious creature created by Ryll and Liett’s flesh-forming. It killed Haani’s aunts and mother and attacked Tiaan.
Nyrd: Messenger to Gilhaelith.
Oinan: Father of Colm.
Old Hyull: A venerable lyrinx, husband of Matriarch Gyrull.
Oon-Mie: A cheerful and reliable artisan at the manufactory.
Peate: A resentful senior miner.
Ranii Mhel: An examiner; mother of Nish.
Ranii Shyrr: Troist’s envoy.
Rulke: The greatest of all the Charon, he created the first construct.
Ruvix: Flydd’s sergeant.
Ryll: An ostracised wingless lyrinx who captured Tiaan and subsequently used her in flesh-forming. After Tiaan saved his life, he allowed her to escape from Kalissin.
Seeker: One who can sense use of the Secret Art, or people who have that talent, or even enchanted objects. Ullii is one.
S’lound: A soldier who travelled with Nish in the balloon to Tirthrax. He was killed when it landed.
Tchlrrr: A young soldier in Troist’s army.
Tiaan Liise-Mar: A young artisan; a visual thinker and talented controller-maker. With the amplimet, she picked up Minis’s cry for help, fell in love with him and carried the amplimet all the way to Tirthrax, where she used it in opening a gate to Aachan, to save Minis and his people.
Tinketil: Mother of Colm.
Tirior: An Aachim clan leader.
Troist: An ambitious junior officer in the army destroyed by the lyrinx at Nilkerrand.
Tuniz: A senior artificer from Crandor, now overseer at the manufactory.
Tyara: A young friend of Minis.
Ullii: A hypersensitive seeker, used by Scrutator Flydd to track Tiaan and the amplimet.
Vithis: Minis’s foster-father; an Aachim from Aachan and the head of Inthis First Clan. When all First Clan (except Minis) were lost in the gate, he became bitterness steeped in bile.
Vunio: A young friend of Minis.
Xervish Flydd: The scrutator (spymaster and master inquisitor) for Einunar. He now leads the hunt for Tiaan and the amplimet and the defence of the manufactory.
Yara: A brilliant advocate, wife to Troist.
Yorme: One of Flydd’s guards.
Zoyl Aarp: A clever but naïve and childish artisan.
MAJOR ARTEFACTS, FORCES AND POWERFUL NATURAL PLACES
Amplimet: A rare hedron which, even in its natural state, can draw power from the force (the field) surrounding and permeating a node. Occasionally can be very powerful.
Anthracism: Human internal combustion due to a mancer or an artisan drawing more power than the body can handle. Invariably fatal (gruesomely).
Booreah Ngurle (the Burning Mountain): A large, double-cratered volcano in northern Worm Wood, with a blue crater lake. It has a strange and powerful double node. Gilhaelith’s home, Nyriandiol, is built on the inner rim of the crater.
Clanker (also armoped or thumpeter): An armoured mechanical war cart with six, eight or ten legs and an articulated body, driven by the Secret Art via a controller mechanism which is used by a trained operator. Armed with a rock-throwing catapult and a javelard (heavy spear-thrower) which are fired by a shooter riding on top. Clankers are made under supervision of a mechanician, artisan and weapons artificer. Emergency power is stored in a pair of heavy spinning flywheels, in case the field is interrupted.
Construct: A vehicle powered by the Secret Art, based on some of the secrets of Rulke’s legendary vehicle. Unlike Rulke’s, those made by the Aachim cannot fly.
Controller: A mind-linked mechanical system of many flexible arms which draws power through a hedron and feeds it to the drive mechanisms of a clanker. A controller is attuned to a particular hedron, and the operator must be trained to use each controller, which takes time. Operators suffer withdrawal if removed from their machines for long periods, and inconsolable grief when their machines are destroyed, although this may be alleviated if the controller survives and can be installed in another clanker. The term is used in a more general sense, eg. construct controller.
Crystal fever: A hallucinatory madness suffered by artisans and clanker operators, brought on by overuse of a hedron. Few recover from it. Mancers can suffer from related ailments.
Field: The diffuse (or weak) force surrounding and permeating (and presumably generated by) a node. It is the source of a mancer’s power. Various stronger forces are also known to exist, although no one knows how to tap them safely. Non-nodal stress-fields also occur, though on Santhenar these are weak and little-used.
Flesh-forming: A branch of the Secret Art that only lyrinx can use. Developed to adapt themselves to the ever-mutable void where they came from, it now involves the slow transformation of a living creature, tailoring it to suit some particular purpose. It is painful for both creature and lyrinx, and can be employed only on small creatures, though the lyrinx seek to change that.
Gate: A portal between one place (or one world) and another, connected by a shifting trans-dimensional ‘wormhole’.
Geomancy: The most difficult and powerful of all the Secret Arts. An adept is able to draw upon the forces that move and shape the world. A most dangerous Art to the user.
Hedron: A natural or shaped crystal, formed deep in the earth from fluids that circulate through a natural node. Trained artisans can tune a hedron to draw power from the field surrounding a node, via the ethyr. Rutilated quartz, that is, quartz crystal containing dark needles of rutile, is commonly used. The artisan must first ‘wake’ the crystal using his or her pliance. If it is too far from a node, a hedron will be unable to draw power and becomes useless. If a hedron is not used for long periods, it may have to be rewoken by an artisan, though this can be hazardous.
Kalissin: A spire of foamed meteoritic iron arising from the centre of the meteor crater of Lake Kalissi. It has a powerful node and is a centre for lyrinx flesh-forming.
Nennifer: The great bastion of the Council of Scrutators, on the escarpment over Kalithras, the Desolation Sink. Nennifer is home to countless mancers, artisans and artificers, all furiously working to design new kinds of Art-powered devices to aid the war against the lyrinx
Nigah: A drug used by the army under extreme conditions to combat cold, fatigue and pain, though addiction can make users aggressive, paranoid and delusional.
Nodes: Rare places in the world where the Secret Art works better because of the field surrounding the node. Once identified, a hedron (or a mancer) can sometimes draw power from the node’s field through the ethyr, though the amount diminishes with distance, not always regularly. A clanker operator must be alert for the loss and ready to draw on another node, if available. The field can be drained, in which case the node may not be usable for years, or even centuries (cf.Torgnadr). Mancers have long sought the secret of drawing on the far greater power of a node itself (cf. Power, Nunar’s General Theory of Power) but so far it
has eluded them (or maybe those who succeeded did not live to tell about it).
There are also anti-nodes where the Art does not work at all, or is dangerously disrupted. Nodes and anti-nodes are frequently (though not always) associated with natural features or forces such as mountains, faults and hot spots.
Nyriandiol: Gilhaelith’s home, fortress and laboratory on top of Booreah Ngurle. The entire building is a geomantic artefact designed to protect him and enhance his work.
Patterner: A semi-organic device developed by the lyrinx to pattern torgnadrs and other artefacts used in their Art. The patterner essentially copies a particular human’s talent into the growing torgnadr, thereby greatly enhancing the talent and allowing it to be controlled by a lyrinx who is skilled in the Art.
Pliance: A device which enables an artisan to see the field and tune a controller to it.
Port-all: Tiaan’s name for the device she makes in Tirthrax to open the gate.
Power: A mancer, Nunar, codified the laws of mancing, noting how limited it was, mainly because of lack of power. She recognised that mancing was held back because:
Power came from diffuse and poorly understood sources.
It all went through the mancer first, causing aftersickness that grew greater the more powerful the source. Eventually power, or aftersickness, would kill the mancer.
The traditional way around this was to charge up an artefact (such as a mirror, a ring) with power over a long time, and to simply trigger it when needed. This had some advantages, though objects could be hard to control or become corrupted, and once discharged were essentially useless.
Yet some of the ancients had used devices that held a charge, or perhaps replenished themselves. No one knew how, but it had to be so, else how could they maintain their power for hundreds if not thousands of years (for example, the Mirror of Aachan), or use quite prodigious amounts of power without becoming exhausted (Rulke’s legendary construct) ?
Nunar assembled a team of mancers utterly devoted to her project (no mean feat) and set out to answer these questions. Mancing was traditionally secretive—practitioners tried (often wasting their lives in dead ends) and usually failed alone. Only the desperate state of the war could have made them work together, sharing their discoveries, until the genius of Nunar put together the Special Theory of Power, which described where the diffuse force came from and how a mancer actually tapped it, drawing not through the earthly elements but via the ultradimensional ethyr.
The ultimate goals of theoretical mancers are the General Theory of Power, which deals with how nodes work and how they might be tapped safely, and, ultimately, the Unified Power Theory, which reconciles all fields, weak and strong, in terms of a single force.
Secret Art: The use of magical or sorcerous powers (mancing).
Snizort: A place in Taltid with a potent and concentrated node, near the famous tar pits and seeps.
Strong forces: Powerful planar fields that are speculated to exist at nodes, though no mancer studying them has survived to prove their existence.
Thapter: Tiaan’s name for the flying construct she and Malien created in Tirthrax.
Torgnadr: Also called node-drainer. A device patterned by the lyrinx to drain a field dry, or to channel power from the field for their own purposes. Torgnadrs are extremely difficult to pattern and most attempts fail, though some result in weak devices such as phynadrs which can draw small amounts of power for a particular purpose.
Well of Echoes, the: An Aachim concept to do with the reverberation of time, memory and the Histories. Sometimes a place of death and rebirth (to the same cycling fate). Also a sense of being trapped in history, of being helpless to change collective fate (of a family, clan or species). Its origin is sometimes thought to be a sacred well on Aachan, sometimes on Santhenar. The term has become part of Aachim folklore. ‘I have looked in the Well of Echoes.’ ‘I heard it at the Well.’ ‘I will go to the Well.’ Possibly also a source; a great node.
The Well is symbolised by the three-dimensional symbol of infinity, the universe and nothingness. A Well of Echoes, trapped in Tirthrax, is held there only by the most powerful magic.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
CONTENTS
MAPS
Tetrarch
PART ONE: MATAH
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
PART TWO: REFUGEE
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
TWENTY-FOUR
TWENTY-FIVE
TWENTY-SIX
PART THREE: DIPLOMAT
TWENTY-SEVEN
TWENTY-EIGHT
TWENTYNINE
THIRTY
THIRTY-ONE
THIRTY-TWO
THIRTY-THREE
THIRTY-FOUR
THIRTY-FIVE
THIRTY - SIX
THIRTY-SEVEN
PART FOUR: SCRUTATOR
THIRTY-EIGHT
THIRTY - NINE
FORTY
FORTY - ONE
FORTY-TWO
FORTY - THREE
FORTY-FOUR
FORTY - FIVE
FORTY - SIX
FORTY - SEVEN
PART FIVE: NODE-DRAINER
FORTY - EIGHT
FORTY-NINE
FIFTY
FIFTY-ONE
FIFTY - TWO
FIFTY-THREE
FIFTY-FOUR
FIFTY - FIVE
FIFTY-SIX
FIFTY - SEVEN
FIFTY - EIGHT
FIFTY - NINE
SIXTY
SIXTY - ONE
SIXTY - TWO
SIXTY - THREE
THE END OF VOLUME TWO
GLOSSARY