by Ian Irvine
Oon-Mie gave the scrutator another increment of power. ‘Anything?’ she gasped.
‘Not a thing. Zoyl?’
‘Nothing, surr.’
‘I can’t increase it,’ said Oon-Mie. ‘With the very greatest respect, I’m at my limit, surr.’
‘Again!’ roared the scrutator. ‘Remember we’re all under a death sentence.’
Zoyl choked.
‘What do you mean?’ cried Oon-Mie.
‘The scrutator is saying,’ Irisis said hastily, ‘that Jal-Nish is hunting us. If we do this right, he can’t touch us. But if we fail, we will all fall with Scrutator Flydd.’ She put one hand on the lad’s shoulder.
‘Let’s make sure we don’t fail!’ said Flydd. ‘Can I rely on you or not, Zoyl?’
‘Yes, surr.’ There was a quaver in the lad’s voice.
‘Dare you try one last time, Oon-Mie?’ said Flydd. ‘I should point out that I am the one at most risk.’
‘I will try, surr,’ she said faintly.
Irisis did not like it. Oon-Mie was her most reliable artisan because she knew her limits and never went beyond them.
‘Keep it flowing till I tell you to stop,’ said Flydd.
That made Irisis even more uneasy. It was a dangerous escalation of unpredictability.
The power flowed, increased and kept flowing.
‘Anything, Aarp?’ panted the scrutator.
‘No – I mean, there was the very faintest aura but it disappeared right away.’
‘Keep it going, Oon-Mie.’
Oon-Mie said nothing but Irisis could feel her tension distorting the field. She did not like what she felt.
‘More!’ cried the scrutator. ‘More, Oon-Mie, damn it!’
The power went up again. Now there was a definite tremor in it. Drops of sweat ran down Irisis’s forehead. ‘Surr,’ she hissed, ‘that’s enough.’
‘Keep it coming!’
Irisis’s foreboding grew. The tremor became a shuddering vibration that would have torn a clanker apart.
Zoyl moaned. ‘My head hurts. Stop it. Stop it!’
Irisis reached out to him. ‘It’s all right, Zoyl. The scrutator will look after us.’
Without warning that vibration swelled to gigantic proportions. Oon-Mie tried to clamp down but it was out of control, feeding back on itself and growing catastrophically stronger.
Oon-Mie gave a gurgling, clotted gasp. Zoyl Aarp fell down, wailing. The glow grew so bright that Irisis could feel it on her skin.
The scrutator was just to her left; she could see the distortion in the field. His breath crackled in his sinuses. Irisis caught a whiff of burning hair. ‘Flydd?’ He did not answer, nor could he. Power coiled around him like a serpent. Into him. If she did not do something, they were all going to die.
She thrashed around with her arms and one hand touched the reader, which was burning-hot. Wrenching it from his grasp, she slammed it against the wall of the cave, breaking the metal back of the dragonfly. Delicate silver wires tore. A crystal tinkled to the rocky floor.
The flow stopped at once, the glow faded and all she could hear was Zoyl’s stifled moans.
‘Oon-Mie?’ she called.
‘I’m all right,’ the artisan rasped, coughing up gobs of phlegm the size of oysters.
‘Scrutator?’
His tongue made a series of clicks as if he was having trouble moving it. ‘I’ll live,’ he said thickly.
‘Zoyl? Zoyl!’
Irisis crawled across to where the lad had been sitting. He lay on his side, knees drawn up.
‘Looks like he’s had a seizure,’ said Oon-Mie.
‘Just what we need,’ muttered the scrutator, restored to waspish ill-humour.
‘Well, you caused it,’ Irisis flashed.
‘We fail, we die,’ said the scrutator savagely. ‘We succeed, we may live. Those are the most selfish terms I can put it in. Good enough for you?’
‘But you ordered him to risk his life; and Oon-Mie hers.’
‘So? Boys his age risk their lives every day in the army.’
‘But Zoyl is not in the army.’
‘Only because he’s got a skill we need. If we fail, everyone will be fighting for their lives, including people like you and Oon-Mie. And me!’
‘He’s recovering,’ said Oon-Mie.
‘About time! Sit up, boy, and tell us what you saw.’
‘An aura, surr,’ Zoyl croaked. ‘It was not there long but I saw it clearly.’
‘What did you see?’
‘The field. And something else. Two planes lay at the centre, one passing through the other at right-angles.’
‘Planes?’
‘Yes, and they had wiggles all across them.’
‘Is that so?’ breathed the scrutator. ‘What about the core of the aura?’
‘It was strange, surr. Just for an instant I saw the shadow of a lyrinx, etched in lightning, and behind it the field seemed to flow into a pit. As though it was being sucked into a whirlpool.’
‘The field?’ cried the scrutator.
‘Yes,’ said Zoyl.
‘Someone’s coming,’ called a guard.
‘What is it?’ asked Flydd.
‘A lyrinx. No, more than one. Two, three. They’re heading directly towards us.’
The scrutator cursed. ‘To be expected, after the power we’ve used here. How long till dark?’
‘The best part of an hour,’ said the guard.
‘We can’t signal the air-floater till then. Can we defend this place?’
‘Not against three, unless you’ve the power to do it by yourself.’
‘At the moment I’d have trouble fighting off a butterfly,’ said Flydd. ‘We’ll head for the top of this peak. They’ll have to come at us from below.’
‘Unless they’ve a flier among them,’ said Irisis.
‘It’s the best we can do.’
They headed up, Irisis led by the hand by Oon-Mie.
‘That was brave work,’ Irisis said to the artisan.
‘I thought my brains were going to boil out my ears.’
‘But you held your nerve, and that’s what made the difference.’
‘Had it not been for you –’
‘Let’s not talk about that. What are the enemy doing?’
Oon-Mie stopped to look. ‘Still heading for our cave.’
‘Are you sure our work led them to us, scrutator?’ Irisis called.
His voice came from just behind her. ‘I am.’
‘How could they do that?’
‘They once had a way of detecting clankers by the aura from the controller. Tiaan fixed that, brilliantly.’
‘Bloody Tiaan again,’ muttered Irisis.
‘But of course you would know that, Irisis,’ Flydd said in frosty tones. ‘After her crystal madness, you tried to take the credit for it.’
Irisis felt a flush creeping up her cheeks. What fit of stupidity had led her to do that?
Flydd went on. ‘I’d say they have a watching device here somewhere, waiting in case we came to investigate.’
It was a considerable climb to the top of the pinnacle and the sun had gone down before they reached it. Irisis was hauled up the last few spans on a rope, dragging roughly across a gritty rock face before being stood on her feet on a mounded surface. A dank wind blew down the back of her neck.
‘Don’t move,’ said Flydd. ‘We’re standing on top of the pinnacle, a stack of rock whose tip is not much bigger than a bedsheet. Take three steps in any direction and you’re over the edge. Zoyl, what the blazes do you think you’re doing? Put that rock down.’
Thud.
‘Not on my foot, you bloody fool!’
‘I was just trying to help, surr.’
‘Leave it to those who know how.’
Irisis could feel the edge of the drop. Her teeth began to chatter.
One of the soldiers lit a signal lantern. The scrutator held it high, facing across the valley towards the range. He gave a s
eries of flashes, shuttered it completely, then opened it and gave the same sequence again. Irisis could hear the click of the shutter.
‘No reply,’ he said after a long wait. ‘What are the enemy doing?’
‘Coming after us,’ said Oon-Mie. ‘They’re nearly within crossbow range.’
‘Get your weapons out.’
Swords scraped on scabbards. Someone wound the crank of a crossbow. She felt useless, especially when the enemy were so close that she could hear their claws scraping on the rock. If only she could see. With a crossbow in her hands she’d make them jump.
A crossbow twanged. ‘Missed!’ the soldier cursed.
‘How near do you need to be?’ the scrutator said derisively. ‘Any closer and you could have picked his nose with it.’
‘The light’s deceptive, surr.’
‘Then hold off until you can see up their nostrils.’
‘I don’t ever want to see up a lyrinx’s nostrils,’ said Irisis. ‘Are any of them fliers, Xervish?’
‘Doesn’t look like it, but once it’s fully dark they’ll come up the sides without us ever seeing them. And then, my friends, it’s dinnertime.’ He chuckled grimly.
No one else joined in.
‘Look out!’ Oon-Mie cried. ‘They’re throwing rocks!’
Someone pulled Irisis down. There was another thud, a man’s cry of pain, then someone went off the side. Irisis heard every pulpy impact until he finally came to rest a long way below.
‘Who …?’ she said fearfully.
‘Jarle,’ said Flydd. ‘A good man. Don’t look, Zoyl.’
The sound of rending and feeding began. Bones crunched; gobbets of flesh were swallowed noisily. ‘Poor devil,’ said Oon-Mie.
‘At least he was dead first,’ said Flydd heavily. ‘Stay down. They’ll try again.’
FORTY-FIVE
It was nearly dark now. The lyrinx must charge soon. The soldiers were still shooting but did not seem to be doing any damage. The enemy’s claws rasped on the stone, just a few spans below. Oon-Mie was dropping rocks on them. ‘Take that, and that!’ They weren’t big enough to do a lot of damage but Irisis caught one or two cries of pain.
‘Can’t you do anything, Flydd?’ she said. ‘What’s happened to your famous scrutator magic?’
‘I spent it earlier.’ He sounded worn out.
‘For nothing.’
‘Nothing comes for nothing and scrutator magic has painful after-effects, though we don’t talk about such things.’
‘Why not? To maintain the myth of invulnerability for us peasants?’
‘If you like. What’s that?’
Irisis could hear it too; the whirr of a rotor. She felt a rush of wind as the air-floater appeared above them.
‘Get moving,’ yelled Flydd. ‘They’re charging.’
They scrambled up the ladder, Irisis with a rope around her chest. The machine ticked away rather more quickly than when it had brought them here, such was the strength of the field now.
‘That taught us something,’ said Flydd, sitting with Irisis down the far end of the cabin in the dark.
‘That we should never have been born!’ It was just one of her remarks. There was no bitterness behind it. Irisis felt better than she had in ages, though she could not have said why. ‘What do you make of what Zoyl saw?’
‘I reckon the lyrinx have found a way of draining the node.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. We know so little about how they think and work. Some of them are mancers as powerful as any of us scrutators, though they use power differently.’
‘They use the field though?’
‘Indeed, but not through crystals, controllers or any of the devices we employ.’
‘What about those mushroom-shaped spying devices I heard of?’
‘Ah, those. We’ve captured several in the past few years, but we haven’t learned how they work.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re grown, or flesh-formed, for a particular purpose, such as keeping watch. But once we take them they die – if they’re actually alive – like a flower plucked from the garden.’
‘And you think they’ve tailored such a device to drain the field out of a node?’
‘It’s beginning to look that way. It may be that our clankers overloaded this node and drained it, then the lyrinx flesh-formed a device to do the same. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they can do it.’
‘It can’t be that easy or they’d be doing it everywhere. How many nodes have gone dead? Four in a year?’
‘Five if you count the one at the manufactory, though it hasn’t completely failed yet.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Irisis, ‘is how the air-floater carried us to the node when it was practically dead.’
‘Air-floaters are built as light as possible, so it takes little power to turn the rotor. A clanker needs a thousand times as much. And as I said before, we were using a different field.’
‘Where are we going now?’
‘Further up the coast, to look at another failed node.’
‘How far is it?’
‘We’ll be there before dawn.’
‘Good!’ She snuggled down against the seat, then sat up again. ‘Scrutator?’
‘I told you before, I don’t like you calling me that in private.’
‘I like calling you that in private,’ she said, grinning wickedly. ‘It makes me feel, well, you know …’ she leered at him.
‘I don’t want to know, since there’s nothing I can do about it. What did you want, anyway?’
‘How come you’ve still got this air-floater, if you’re an outlaw?’
He did not answer.
‘Xervish?’
‘I still have a few friends where it counts. They do what they can for me.’
‘Who?’
‘It would not be healthy for you to know.’
Irisis woke in the night, realising that the air-floater was not moving. She was alone, though two people were talking quietly outside the cabin. She began to repair the broken dragonfly reader. Before long, the machine began to move. Irisis finished the job and went back to sleep, to be woken by someone shaking her arm.
‘We’re here, crafter.’ It was Oon-Mie’s voice.
‘Where’s here?’
‘I don’t think it has a name. The failed node lies inland from a town called Fadd.’
The artisan led her over the side onto rock. It was raining. The air-floater pulled away, its rotor spattering cool drops at them.
‘This node is associated with an escarpment that runs inland from the coast,’ came Flydd’s voice. ‘It’s quite high here; on a clear day you can see the ocean. At least, you could if you could see.’
Irisis, used to his provocations by now, did not react.
This node proved to be completely dead. There was not a wisp of the field associated with it, nor could they induce any aura, even by a more refined version of the process they had used previously. There was no power to draw upon.
‘The node-drainer must still be in place,’ said Flydd.
‘Are we going to look for it?’ asked Oon-Mie.
‘It could be anywhere along this escarpment, which runs for a good thirty leagues. We might search for years and not find it.’
‘So we haven’t learned anything here?’ said Irisis.
‘Unfortunately not.’
‘What were you doing in the night, Xervish? When the air-floater stopped.’
‘I had to send a skeet to one of my associates, telling them what we’d discovered. The price of continued support.’
‘I hope you didn’t tell them where we were, or where we were going.’
‘I have to trust someone.’
‘Let’s hope they’re worthy of it.’
The party searched along the nearby part of the escarpment, to fill in the time until dark, when they could signal the air-floater. Irisis was waiting, perched on a rock with her hood o
ver her head to keep off the drifting rain, when something occurred to her.
‘Scrutator?’ she yelled. ‘Anyone know where the scrutator is?’
‘He went for a walk in the forest,’ said one of the soldiers. ‘Probably crapping behind a tree.’
‘I was trying to work out the lie of the node, as it happens,’ Flydd said with lofty dignity. He had come up on them from behind. ‘What is it, Irisis?’
‘If there is a node-drainer,’ she said, ‘where is it draining all that power to? And what happens where it comes out – so much power in a small place must have some effect.’
Dead silence. Flydd took her by the arm, shaking her in his excitement. ‘That’s brilliant!’ he cried. ‘It has to be going somewhere, and that must leave a trace. More than a trace – strange things would happen where all that power was dumped. Such a place can’t be hard to find.’
‘How would you go about finding it?’
‘I’d ask people who live in the area. The local querist or perquisitor, first; it’s their job to hear about strange and inexplicable things. If we fly along the edge of the escarpment, we might see something, though I wouldn’t want to spend too long doing it. As soon as it’s dark I’ll signal the air-floater. We’ll have a look on the way back, since we’re going that direction.’
His words made her uneasy. ‘The way back? Where are we going now?’
‘Back to the manufactory. To look at its node.’
‘The manufactory? Are you out of your mind?’
‘Shh! Don’t alarm the others. There’s no choice, Irisis. Only concrete evidence can save me. I have to see a failing node to really understand what’s going on. Dead ones are no good at all.’
‘After Jal-Nish catches us, we’ll be the dead ones.’
The problem with the scrutator, as Irisis well knew, was that once he had made his mind up, nothing could shake him. She did not try. Irisis was too afraid. A senile old fool and a blind woman – what a formidable team! Jal-Nish must be quaking in his bed.
They saw no sign of a power seep on the way back, though as the scrutator had said, such a thing need not occur above the ground. It could lie anywhere in the three dimensions.
He roused her in the night. Irisis was lying awake, biting the ends of her fingers. ‘We’d better talk about how we’re going to do this,’ he said.
‘You talk! I don’t have any ideas and I’m so scared I can’t think of anything but which horrible way I’m going to die.’