Tetrarch twoe-2
Page 69
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.
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.
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