by Ian Irvine
Ullii let out a screech that made his hair stand on end. Nish spun around, wondering what had so terrified her. She was not looking that way at all. The seeker was staring towards the base of the tree.
‘Hooks and claws,’ she moaned. ‘Hooks and claws.’ Ullii threw herself into her basket and wrenched the lid closed.
Nish caught an unpleasant reek, like hot rotting meat. What was it? Ullii had said something similar before they’d gone up in the balloon. Was it a predator nearby, or just something she had seen in her mental lattice? Better find out. The brazier would not fill the balloon for hours. Thrusting his battered sword through his belt, Nish began to climb down.
Near the bottom, the decaying reek became stronger, until he began to gag. It did not have the smell of a dead animal; more like a live one that had burrowed through decaying flesh.
Nish went still. The noise sounded like a low, purring growl. The purring bothered him more than the growl. Something began scratching at the bark at the back of the trunk.
Drawing his sword, Nish peered down. He could not see anything. Edging around the tree, he looked again. Still nothing. He lowered himself onto the next branch and ducked his head through the twigs. The beast slid around the tree and stood up on all fours, staring straight at him.
NINE
Tiaan lay on her bed, puzzling about the construct until she drifted to sleep. Perhaps that was why she dreamed of the forbidden book, Nunar’s The Mancer’s Art, which she had found hidden in the manufactory. At the very least, discovery would have meant the end of her career, if not her life, so why had she kept it? Partly for the thrill of the forbidden, though she had never been a rebel. But mostly because the night she had read the thoughts of the great Nunar on the nature of power Tiaan had been touched by something.
The basis of mancery, the Secret Art, was the field. Though artisans were mere craft workers, whenever she plied her trade Tiaan felt kinship with the greatest mancers of the age. But until she’d read Runcible Nunar’s book she had not understood what she was doing. The field was just one of several forces that mancers speculated about, and the weakest of all. No one knew how to use the strong forces, or even if they existed. At least, if anyone had, they had not survived to record it.
Minis had taught her the rudiments of geomancy, the greatest of all the Secret Arts, which drew on the forces that shaped and moved the earth. Tiaan had not understood that either, though the Aachim had implied that their geomancy employed one of the strong forces.
Jerking awake, she dug The Mancer’s Art out of her pack where it had lain, carefully wrapped, for months. It was a small, slim volume written in a fine hand on silky rice paper. Tiaan turned the pages, searching for anything to do with geomancy. She did not find that Art mentioned by name, though late that night when she could barely keep her eyes open, she did discover something else.
The Strong Forces and the General Theory of Power
It is my contention that a node may generate as few as four strong forces, or as many as ten. These forces must be mutually orthogonal, and therefore only three can ever manifest themselves in our familiar world. The remainder must lie in other dimensions and can neither influence our physical environment nor be drawn upon by any refinement of the mancer’s Art about which I am competent to speculate.
There followed a theoretical discussion of the strong forces, written in such abstruse language that Tiaan could make no sense of it. And then she found this:
Though I cannot prove it, I believe that the peril of the strong forces lies in their sheer intensity. The weak field is diffuse, so mancers were able to draw upon it without necessarily hazarding their lives, though those who were unlucky, or greedy, frequently made that sacrifice. Cautious mancers could master their Art from nebulous areas of the field, before drawing upon more concentrated parts.
The strong forces offer no such comfort. Essentially planar rather than three-dimensional, they would contain prodigious amounts of power within the plane but virtually none immediately adjacent. They would also be difficult to sense. Thus, any attempt to draw power from a strong force would almost certainly result in annihilation. No mancer could react quickly enough to control it.
Others have argued that a controller device could be fashioned to overcome this limitation. Not in my understanding of the Art. I believe that such forces are forever beyond the tampering fingers of humanity, and rightly so.
Had the Aachim discovered the answer after all? Tiaan recalled her image of the construct mechanism. Surely its controlling parts were in the wrong arrangement to be sensitive to the strong forces, much less to control them – unless the great Nunar was completely wrong? That was possible. The Mancer’s Art had been written a hundred years ago, before the first controller had been invented.
That night, Tiaan had crystal dreams for the first time since opening the gate. They vanished on waking, as usual. She did not leap out of bed, as she was accustomed to do, but lay with the covers pulled well up, thinking about the problem. The Aachim must have a special way of controlling the construct. Could she read that from the aura?
She dozed, woke, dozed and woke again with a rudimentary design in her mind. After another hour she had worked out the details of her sensor, but only when she heard Malien moving about in the kitchen did Tiaan get up.
‘Good morning,’ she said, springing out of bed.
‘You’re cheerful today. The sleep must have done you good.’
‘It has. I know what to do.’
Tiaan spent all afternoon building an array of interlinked hexagons of wire and crystal that mimicked the amplimet’s form and structure. It was set around a little glass doughnut she had taken from one of the many storerooms in Tirthrax. The amplimet lay at its heart, in the soapstone basket from the centre of the port-all. She now felt anxious about that. Every time she touched the amplimet, she mentally flinched. Using it was no longer a comfort but a threat.
Sitting on the operator’s seat, she slipped her fingers in through the wires of the hexagons and touched the amplimet. It was warm. Stroking along its length, she closed her eyes.
The amplimet began to pulse; she could feel the light beating against her eyelids. Tiaan did not try to control the crystal – this close to the great node of Tirthrax she was afraid to. She merely allowed the pulsation to wash over and through her, drifting with it until, finally, the field sprang into view. It was the greatest she had ever felt.
Tiaan traced the construct’s aura into a black metal box whose contents she could not visualise. The aura came out the other end, twisted through the bowels of the machine and went up behind the green glass binnacle in front of her. There she lost it in murky tangles which she could not penetrate. It was like trying to make out a blueprint written in mist. Her eyes ached. The workings must be protected.
But a lock protects nothing if you have the key. She just had to decipher it. Feeling unusually tired, Tiaan rested her head on the glass. Was her obsession with her craft just a way to avoid other responsibilities, as Malien had implied? She did not want to think about that. Better keep going. She was terrified that the lyrinx would come back, and take the construct before she could understand it.
That black container in the bowels of the machine was another mystery. Putting her head through the lower hatch, she peered around, holding out one of Malien’s glowing spheres. The box was up in the darkness at the front.
She was trying to sense its purpose when she felt an odd prickle and the image of wires and crystals froze in her mind. It was so quiet that Tiaan could hear her heart thumping. Going up, she traced the aura on the green glass, but the glass lit up and a spiralling red line began to rotate.
Tiaan jumped. Other markings appeared on the surface: blue circles that shrank and expanded again, yellow lines arcing from one side of a rectangle to another, rows of characters that were undoubtedly some kind of writing.
The shapes and colours changed, the writing flowed endlessly, but nothing else happened. As sh
e crouched beneath the binnacle, probing with her inner sight, an alarm shrieked in her ear; then something clamped around her forehead and began to squeeze.
It was a trap and she had fallen into it. Metal fingers gripped her skull. Tiaan tried to tear them off but received a shock that singed her fingers. Her arms flopped uselessly by her sides. She began to shake uncontrollably as echoes of the shock raced up and down her limbs.
Tiaan felt disconnected from her body. Her tongue expanded to fill her mouth, her eyes rolled down as far as they would go, and stuck. She could see her hands hanging like floppy spiders, but she could not move.
It was hours before a grinning Malien appeared and freed her – hours of helpless terror that she would never move again. And hours of crystal dreams that she remembered all too clearly, for she was dreaming awake. She dreamed that she was trapped inside the amplimet, paralysed or frozen, and it was feeding upon her essence as a wasp feeds on a spider. And the whole time, she could see the amplimet in her mind’s eye, the central light flashing on and off like a signal lamp.
Her head felt fuzzy; it hurt to think. ‘What’s so funny?’ she said curtly.
‘The look on your face,’ Malien chuckled. ‘Next time, have the good sense to ask me for help. Did I not tell you that there could be traps?’
‘I was worried that the enemy would get here first.’
‘Better they kill you than you do it yourself. How are you feeling?’
Tiaan sat up. ‘A bit shaky.’
Malien gave her a hand. ‘We’d better get to work.’
‘Yesterday you were lecturing me about working too hard.’
‘The lyrinx weren’t out there yesterday.’
‘What?’
‘I saw one this morning, circling high in the eastern sky. I wouldn’t want them to get hold of a construct.’
By the evening, Tiaan felt that she understood most of the controls, though she had not discovered how to make the construct operate. ‘There’s still something missing,’ she said.
‘Like a key for a lock? I wonder …’
‘What?’
Malien touched an isolated button at the base of the binnacle. A curved tube with hexagonal sides slid out from beneath. ‘This leads to a cavity above that black box, low down. Can you sense what used to be in there?’
‘I was trying to when it trapped me.’
‘I think it’s safe now.’
Tiaan sensed out the lingering aura. ‘It held some kind of woken crystal.’
‘What kind?’
‘I can’t tell. Do Aachim use crystals the way we do?’
‘Not exactly, but I expect I can find a hedron or two, if that’s what you’re getting at.’
They spent half the night searching the storerooms, and found a number of woken crystals that would fit, though none had any effect on the construct.
‘I can’t do any more,’ Tiaan said, when it was well after midnight.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Malien. ‘Have you got the amplimet here?’
Tiaan took it from its pouch. Light streamed forth; steady light. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Putting it into that cavity.’
‘But yesterday you said it would be too powerful to use.’
‘I’ll try to moderate it.’
Tiaan moved the amplimet from hand to hand, wondering if they might not be doing its will.
‘Put it into the tube, Tiaan. No, the other way round.’
Tiaan did so.
‘Now, push the tube down, very carefully. I’ll stand ready, just in case.’
When it had gone all the way, she heard a gentle click as the crystal settled into the cavity. They waited, holding their breath. The colours on the glass plate brightened.
‘Close the cap,’ said Malien.
Tiaan pushed it down. There came a metallic screech from below and the whole construct shuddered. Orange rays streamed from the open hatch. Something began to thump against the floor. Malien hit the button; the amplimet shot out of the tube. Tiaan caught it and stuffed it into its pouch. The racket stopped. They looked at one another.
‘It’s too powerful.’ Malien looked drawn. ‘Let’s go. I can’t do any more tonight.’
‘I’ll stay for a while. I need to think.’
‘Don’t do anything foolish.’
‘I won’t,’ Tiaan said absently, her mind on the problem.
With a hedron, power did not flow at all without the artisan drawing it from the field. In the hands of an experienced artisan, power could be controlled delicately. However, the amplimet drew power all the time and, here, even a little was too much.
It seemed to be drawing more than ever now – a flashing glow was visible through the leather pouch. A worm inched down Tiaan’s backbone. She opened the flap but the crystal just shone steadily. She closed it. The flashing resumed. She lifted the flap, fractionally. The amplimet was flashing at a furious rate, just as in her dream.
Closing her fist around it, she ran up to Malien’s chambers. ‘It’s blinking!’ she cried, bursting through the door.
Malien rolled over, touching a globe to the faintest light. ‘What on earth is the matter?’
Tiaan thrust the pouch at her. ‘The amplimet was blinking furiously but as soon as I opened the pouch it stopped. Now it’s doing it again.’
Malien shot up in bed and touched out the light. The flickering glow could be seen through the pouch, and when she lifted the flap, again it stopped.
She slid her legs out of bed, pulled on her boots and shrugged a cloak around her. ‘Come with me. Leave it here.’
Tiaan sat the pouch on the table beside the bed. ‘What is it, Malien?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I think –’
‘What?’ Tiaan had to trot to keep up.
‘Let’s just see, without prejudice. How does the field look to you?’
‘I can’t see it. I left my hedron down in the construct.’
Malien shook her head and walked faster. Tiaan ran after her. The tunnel to the Well was now distinctly warm. At a sweep of Malien’s fist, the cubic barrier smashed into shards that vaporised in the air. The mist in the conical chamber whirled higher and faster, and the light from the shaft now had an oily green tinge. Moonlight, or an exhalation from the Well?
Malien was standing at the brink, her toes over the edge. She was breathing hard.
‘It looks the same to me,’ Tiaan panted.
‘It’s not!’
‘Is it –?’ Tiaan peered down fearfully.
Malien laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘It’s not as bad as I thought. It’s still bound – just! And …’
‘What, Malien?’
‘I think the amplimet is communicating with it.’
‘What’s it saying?’
Malien looked her up and down, wordlessly.
Stupid question. Communication between a woken crystal and a frozen whirlpool of force might take any form. And might have any purpose.
‘You’d better get back to work,’ Malien said abruptly. ‘And hurry.’
Tiaan turned away. Malien did not move. ‘Are you coming?’
‘I hardly dare,’ said Malien. ‘I’ll have to keep watch. Run, this is an emergency!’
Tiaan thought through her problem on the way back. She needed to choke down the flow, yet allow more power through when the construct was further from the node. What if she set the amplimet in a golden box, to contain the aura, but with a rotor at the open end, powered by the flow from the field? The blades, also made of gold, would lie flat. If there was not enough power to spin the rotor, the power would come though. Once the rotor began to turn, the golden blades would rise into position, choking down the flow. Tiaan was sure it would work. It had to – she desperately wanted to make this construct go.
The fabrication was painfully slow but she dared not rush it – the box must seal perfectly and the rotor work every time.
In the afternoon she was so tired tha
t she had to take a nap. She dozed for an hour and roused to find her cheeks damp with tears of longing. She had dreamed that the construct was hers.
By that evening she had built a golden box and assembled her rotor. Tiaan put the boxed amplimet into the tube and closed the cap. Now she saw a field, though it was not the one she normally used. This was different, flatter, weaker; and probably just as well.
The hum resumed. It was lower now, more like the sound the constructs had made when she first encountered them. There was no thumping. Tiaan experimented with the buttons, which did no more than change the images on the green glass. She played with the finger-shaped levers. One lit up the area all around the construct, another changed the sound of the mechanism below from a hum to a whine, a third opened the turret behind her with a whirr-click.
A fourth shook the machine, which slowly rose in the air until it stood hip height above the floor. At last! Tiaan’s heart crashed painfully about her ribcage. Now, if she could just get it to move.
She wiggled the studded knob on the trumpet-shaped lever and was hurled sideways as the machine spun like a top. Her arm grew so heavy that she could barely hold it up. Forcing with all her strength, she managed to push the knob the other way but as the rotation slowed she went off-balance, forcing the trumpet further over.
The construct spiralled sideways across the floor, directly towards one of the main roof pillars. She jerked the knob. The machine spun the other way. Tiaan let out a screech. Her brain seemed to be spinning inside her skull. Each new movement sent the machine a different way. As it whirled toward another pillar, Tiaan saw Malien with her hands cupped around her mouth. What was she trying to say?
Tiaan could not hear a thing. The machine was out of control, spinning so fast that everything became a blur. She felt herself losing consciousness.
Golden sparkles burst in her eyes and the whine stopped. Malien must have cut off her view of the field. The machine came to rest just a handspan from the pillar. Tiaan climbed out, reeled about drunkenly and collapsed on the floor.