Chimaera

by Ian Irvine

  Nish looked down at his casualty sheets, adding up the dismal numbers. It was clumsy work with his bandaged hands, but when he finally looked up there was hardly a lyrinx to be seen.

  ‘Where have they gone?’ he said. When the nylatl had been released there had been more than twenty thousand of the enemy. ‘Troist? Troist?’ It must be another trick.

  Nish swept the spyglass across the battlefield. The remaining lyrinx changed colour before his eyes until they blended with the grass. They’d had enough.

  ‘It’s over, surr!’ he roared. ‘The battle’s over. They’re running away.’

  The healer helped Troist to sit up, and he took the spyglass in shaking hands. ‘A strategic withdrawal, I would say. There they go, back into the forest. We haven’t exactly beaten them, but we’ve severely damaged their morale. It’s the first time we’ve overcome a superior force on the battlefield. We’ve shown that it can be done.’

  ‘And we have Klarm to thank for it,’ said Nish. ‘Had he not forced them to battle we’d never have done it. And Yggur’s fungus spores have won the day.’

  Troist chuckled. ‘Indeed, the fungus.’

  ‘I could use a laugh, if there’s some secret I’m not aware of.’

  ‘Yggur was only able to collect a cupful of spores. The rest was just flour stained with tea.’ Troist roared with laughter.

  The victory turned out to be far greater than they’d first thought. On the east coast, from Tiksi north all the way to Crandor, every lyrinx force in the field withdrew on the same day, as if the reversal had shaken confidence in their tactics.

  ‘Their mindspeech must be better than we’d imagined, to call all the way to the east,’ said Flydd four days after the battle. They were back in the White Palace in Lybing, reviewing the struggle to see what could be learned. ‘I’d like to know more about it.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’re going to find out,’ said Yggur.

  ‘Did anyone notice any difference in the lyrinx this time?’

  ‘They didn’t seem to fight with as much conviction as before,’ said Nish. ‘I’d put that down to the after-effects of hibernation but … I’m no longer sure.’

  ‘You’re not the first to note it,’ said Flydd. ‘And I thought so too.’

  ‘And this time they didn’t feed on our dead,’ said Flangers. ‘Not a single body was despoiled, though there were plenty they could have fed on during respites.’

  ‘Now that is odd,’ said Flydd. ‘Something’s changed. I wonder what it could be?’

  ‘Judging by the personal hygiene of most of our troops –’ Nish began, grinning.

  ‘This is serious, Nish. Find out why they’ve changed and we may have the key to the war.’

  ‘I hope so,’ said Troist weakly. His wounds had become infected and he’d been brought to the meeting on a stretcher. ‘We may have won the day, but the cost was unsustainable.’

  The smile left Nish’s face as he looked down at the final list. ‘Thirteen thousand dead, another five thousand seriously injured. Many of those will die and half the remainder will never fight again. We’ve lost almost a third of our forces in Borgistry.’

  ‘But saved two-thirds,’ said the scrutator, ‘while the boost to morale, all over Lauralin, is worth another army the same size. And there’s one other thing: Klarm’s spies report a number of lyrinx dead in Worm Wood, infected by the fungus.’

  ‘How many?’ said Yggur. ‘I hadn’t really expected there’d be any, spreading it out in the open like that.’

  ‘Three or four, and I dare say there are more we haven’t found. It’s not the numbers, it’s fear of the disease that’s done the damage. But the most interesting thing of all is their reaction to the defeat. To have withdrawn from all the other conflicts, we must have profoundly shocked them. For the very first time, they’re afraid of us.’

  ‘Our new tactics unsettled them,’ said Nish.

  ‘They’re conservative fighters. They prefer to use their own well-tried methods,’ said Troist, trying to sit up and grimacing at the pain in his clawed chest. His healer put two pillows under his back. ‘If they’re overturned, the lyrinx normally take a while to formulate new ones. It’s the first time we’ve taken the advantage, and we must capitalise on it. We must formulate new tactics for each battle, so as to unsettle them again and again.’

  ‘Dare we take the battle to the enemy and attack them in their cities?’ said Yggur.

  ‘We dare not,’ said Flydd. ‘We’d need at least a four-to-one advantage for that, and we’d have to be prepared to sacrifice most of our troops. It’s not worth it.’

  ‘How many cities do they have?’ said Nish. ‘And where are they?’

  ‘They have six main cities that we know of,’ said Klarm. ‘All underground, plus a number of smaller ones. They’re not comfortable living permanently in small groups, and never breed in such places, though they can live almost anywhere for a time, for some particular purpose.’

  ‘Such as the group living in the spire at Kalissin,’ said Flydd with a glance at Tiaan, who was sitting quietly up the back as usual. ‘Is that not so, Tiaan?’

  ‘It is,’ she said.

  ‘Seldom do they build structures above ground,’ Klarm went on, ‘and then only small and temporary. But underground they construct massive complexes of tunnels and chambers. Their warren of Oellyll, beneath Alcifer, is vast. They have two main cities in the west – one at Alcifer and another in caves in the escarpment west of Thurkad. From those they control the whole of Meldorin and reach out to threaten us here.’

  Yggur cleared his throat.

  ‘Almost the whole,’ Klarm amended. ‘Alcifer is thought to hold seventy thousand. The city west of Thurkad, at least as many.’

  ‘What about those in the east?’ said Yggur.

  ‘We don’t know their precise locations because we’ve never been able to get near them. That may change once our thapters are free to search from the air. One city lies in the mountains west of Roros, in Crandor. Another two are somewhere in the wildness of the Wahn Barre, or Crow Mountains, one west of Guffeons and the other west of Gosport. The sixth, and I believe the last, is somewhere in the coastal range south-east of Stassor. As many as forty thousand lyrinx are thought to live in each of those four places.’

  ‘Why don’t we know exactly where they are?’ said Yggur. ‘I find that hard to comprehend.’

  ‘They cleared the land of settlers from the very beginning,’ said Flydd. ‘And guarded the borders before they went underground. The cities are all in rugged country, heavily forested. Even with all the Council’s efforts, which have been considerable, we’ve not been able to get a spy into any of those places.’

  ‘What can’t be seen from outside may be perfectly clear from above,’ said Yggur. ‘So many lyrinx, coming and going, will have beaten paths which must converge on their cities. Finding them must be one of our priorities.’

  ‘It must,’ said Flydd. ‘And that’s all, Klarm?’

  ‘As far as we know.’

  ‘What are their total numbers?’

  ‘Counting those away from their cities at any time, and those we know of in small settlements, around three hundred and fifty thousand.’

  ‘I had not thought quite so many,’ said Troist.

  ‘That includes infants and children, pregnant females, and old ones. The number of adults capable of fighting would be a little over half that number. Two hundred thousand at the very most, though they couldn’t put all of them in the field at any one time.’

  ‘So the army we’ve just defeated was a quarter of their fighting force, and perhaps half of the troops they have in the west.’

  ‘I should say so,’ said Klarm.

  ‘Maybe we despaired when we should not have,’ said Flydd. ‘The enemy know we have six thapters and many farspeakers. After this defeat, they may be afraid that the war is turning our way. And if we were to ally with Malien’s people, and Vithis with his ten thousand constructs, unlikely as that seem
s to us –’

  ‘With all the advances we’ve made over the winter, they’re vulnerable in ways they could not have imagined last autumn,’ said Klarm. ‘Back then they were definitely winning the war. But by the dawn of spring their spies and informers would have told them about our thapters and farspeakers. They must have been really worried, to risk so much on the premature strike against Borgistry.’

  ‘Let’s not get carried away by one inconclusive victory,’ said Yggur. ‘They too have made brilliant advances in the past few years. They’ll come back from this reversal with new tactics and new weapons, and they could snatch back our gains just as easily as we won them.’

  FIFTY-ONE

  Gilhaelith paced his cell, a watermelon-shaped chamber excavated out of the shale underneath Alcifer. He’d been back for months, he’d finally been able to test the geomantic globe, had made the last changes and thought it perfect. He’d begun the dangerous experiment of scrying out and dissociating the fragments of phantom crystal from his brain, but to his dismay it hadn’t worked. He soon discovered why. Gyrull had deceived him last autumn, fed him some false details about nodes. The globe was wrong in several small but important aspects that made it useless to his purpose, while not affecting hers. He was trying to uncover the errors when Gyrull and Anabyng seized him and cast him into this cell deep within Oellyll. The only way out was through a long, narrow and winding crawl passage, like the stalk of a watermelon, but the entrance was closed off with crisscrossing bars socketed deep into the rock.

  And here he had remained, cut off from his Art and feeling his intellect fading every day. He’d pleaded with Gyrull to be allowed to fix the globe and repair himself but, afraid of what he might do with the globe, she would not even allow him to see it. Gilhaelith was in despair.

  Occasionally one or other of the phantom fragments would grow hot, or sing a fractured note that seemed to echo back and forth inside his skull. It was a resonance induced by the globe, which meant that the lyrinx were using it to try and solve the problem of their flisnadr, or power patterner. Gilhaelith knew about that. He knew what the power patterner was intended to do, the problems they’d had making it and, he believed, the reason why they’d failed.

  The knowledge did him no good, for Gyrull did not trust him. She made no response to his frequent pleas to the guards and eventually replaced them with two ever-watchful zygnadr sentinels: strange, twisted objects like a ball wrenched into a spiral. Their surfaces bore traces of a crab-like shell and segmented legs, reminiscent of the fossils found everywhere in Oellyll, including the walls of his prison.

  The weeks went by but no one came near Gilhaelith except a human slave, the lowest of the low, who once a day slid food and water beneath the bottom bar, and took away the wooden pan containing his waste. The man did not speak Gilhaelith’s language, or indeed any of the many languages Gilhaelith knew.

  Helpless, Gilhaelith paced his reeking, claustrophobic cell and brooded, and his resentment festered.

  A half-grown female lyrinx came running into the main chamber of the eleventh level, where Ryll was working with the patterners. These were large pumpkin-shaped devices, chin-high to a lyrinx, whose gelatinous outsides also bore fossil-like traces, though in this case they were plant fossils: leaves, cones and bark. There were twelve patterners, and inside each was a human female with only her head exposed. Writhing vines or tubes, not unlike the fissured stems of pumpkins, ran from each of the patterners to a barrel-shaped object made of yellow glass, within which a tapered object roughly the size and shape of a bucket was suspended in aqua jelly. The object’s exterior was leathery and covered in nodules the size of peas. Waves of colour passed constantly across it, like a lyrinx’s skin-speech, though the colours never settled. The sides bore a number of irregularly spaced slits that a small human child might have inserted a hand into. It was the growing flisnadr. At least it had been growing – it had stopped a long time ago, well before maturity, and no one could work out why.

  ‘Master Ryll, Master Ryll?’ said the girl.

  ‘Yes?’ Ryll said sharply, for he’d made no progress in months and was keenly aware of his failure. Had the flisnadr been ready at the end of winter they would never have been forced into the recent battle in Borgistry. And when they had done battle, with the flisnadr they would have had a glorious and overwhelming victory, not this humiliating defeat that had sapped the morale of everyone in the great underground city.

  ‘Matriarch bids you come to the nylatl breeding chambers.’

  ‘I’ll be there directly,’ he said, rubbing his aching back. He’d been on his feet for two days, without sleep or any kind of progress to give him the least encouragement that he was on the right track.

  The girl wrung her hands. Soft hands, he noticed, and she’d applied some kind of pearly lacquer to her nails, which had been trimmed down to uselessness. Her armour had hardly grown at all, though her chest had.

  ‘Er, Master Ryll,’ she said diffidently, ‘Matriarch said to bring you without delay.’

  He sighed, exposing hundreds of teeth. ‘Very well, Oonyl. Take me there.’

  She turned away, walking several steps ahead, and he followed. Ryll extended his finger claws, which he kept sharp enough to tear through leather. They were yellowed, not very clean, and there was old blood under one of them. He studied the girl from behind. She was smaller than most, and slighter, and her wings were just nubs that would never develop. But then, once the war was over, what need would there be for fearsome clawed and armoured creatures like him? Perhaps she was the future and his time was passing as well. Assuming there was a future. Suddenly, after years of successes, he had begun to doubt.

  Up on the seventh level, he followed Oonyl into the breeding chamber and was immediately struck by a strong, festering odour. Ryll sniffed the air and detected the tang of blood and rotting flesh. The nylatl always smelled that way, but this time it was worse. Diseased. He spied the matriarch over next to the cages on the far side of the chamber, talking to Anabyng, Liett and several other important lyrinx.

  ‘Ryll!’ said Gyrull peremptorily. She beckoned.

  Ryll hurried over and eased between the matriarch and Liett to see what the matter was. ‘Not another failure?’ he said. ‘The nylatl went so well in the battle.’

  ‘They’re dying!’ Liett said accusingly, as if it were his fault, though Ryll had nothing to do with nylatl these days.

  Though Ryll loved Liett dearly, sometimes he wanted to throttle her. She could be brilliant, even inspiring at times, but so often spoiled it by saying the first thing that came into her head.

  ‘It’s a flesh-eating infection,’ said Gyrull, moving aside. ‘The keepers have tried all the potions they know but none have made any difference.’

  Ryll studied the savage, spiny creature, which lay on its side, whining and licking at itself. The muscles of its back legs were a putrid eruption of rotting flesh. ‘Put it to death, then carry it outside and burn it,’ he said. ‘Are there any others?’

  ‘Hundreds,’ said Anabyng. ‘Near a third of the breeding stock, and more are looking sickly.’

  ‘They’ll all have to be put down,’ said Ryll. ‘It’s impossible to control an infection in such a confined space. Take the healthy ones up into Alcifer and keep them out in the open air, in their cages. They may live. Incinerate all the dead and infected ones, then seal this floor and burn brimstone inside until the whole chamber is filled with its fumes. Wash the ceiling, walls and floor afterwards. That may be enough to kill the infection.’

  ‘If we put down the sickly ones,’ said Gyrull, ‘we won’t have enough breeding stock for the next battle.’

  ‘If you don’t put them down,’ said Ryll, ‘we may lose the lot. The nylatl all spring from one ancestor, so an illness that kills one will probably kill all of them.’

  Gyrull and Anabyng conferred for a moment, then the matriarch said, ‘Let it be done. Come, Ryll, Liett; we must talk.’

  They left the others and w
ent up to the matriarch’s chamber, a large round room, sparsely furnished with a broad low bed, a shelf containing a number of books, a table and stool, and several charts on the wall made from human leather. Gyrull closed the door. They sat on the mats and she took a leather flask from a peg on the wall, pouring a milky liquor into small bone cups.

  They raised the cups as high as their extended arms could reach, then lowered them and downed the liquor in a single swallow. It carved an acrid track down Ryll’s throat and the rising fumes burned the passages of his nose like hot mustard.

  ‘What are we to do?’ said Gyrull. ‘This reversal in Borgistry – no, this defeat – has shaken me.’

  ‘The old humans are deadly cunning,’ said Anabyng. ‘I don’t like to say it, but they’re cleverer than we are.’

  ‘Never say cleverer,’ said the matriarch. ‘Yet they adapt their plans more quickly than we do. In battle we’re stuck in our old, tested ways, while they change their tactics constantly. For the first time since becoming matriarch, I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Attack them with everything we have,’ growled Liett. ‘They’re weaker than they seem.’

  ‘And so are we, daughter. I dare not risk it. What if that’s been their plan all spring, to entice us into all-out war on their terms?’

  ‘They don’t have the numbers. We’ll overpower them through sheer force of arms.’

  ‘They don’t need the numbers when they can track us from above with their flying machines. And when they can talk to each other and coordinate their forces with these devilish farspeakers, far better than we can with our halting mindspeech. Two brilliant discoveries in less than a year, Anabyng. What will they come up with next?’

  No one spoke.

  ‘And then there’s Vithis’s army down at the Hornrace,’ said Anabyng. ‘His massive beam spears across the heavens every night. I don’t know what kind of a weapon they’re developing there, but I know one thing. If they can perfect it, and mount it on their constructs, they could wipe out our entire army before we get within catapult distance. I was with foolhardy Tyss when he flew into the beam, to see what it was made of. It crisped him like a moth in a candle flame.’