Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) (83 page)

Irisis, Ullii and the scrutator were in the air-floater, hanging silently well above the thorn-covered southern wall of Snizort. It was a dark night with a heavy overcast. The new moon might bring some light when it rose, after midnight. They’d gone up at dusk. The army was supposed to make a diversion but it was nearly midnight and they were still waiting for it.

‘I wish they’d get on with it,’ said Irisis, looking over the side at the lines of tar fires, and camp fires beyond them.

‘You won’t once we begin.’

‘You keep making these gloomy pronouncements. It quite puts me off my adventuring.’

‘I won’t dignify that with a response.’

‘You used to be fun, Flydd. In a dark, twisted sort of a way.’

‘There’s no fun left in the world.’

Irisis gave up.

The onslaught began on the eastern side, evidenced by flares and screams. Ullii pressed in her earplugs and covered her eyes, but her face was screwed up in torment.

Irisis stirred. Not yet! Another battle began on the western perimeter. Still Flydd did not give the word. He was waiting for the third. Now it came with a cluster of blazing missiles arcing across the sky from the north.

‘That’s it,’ whispered Irisis. ‘And already people are dying to ease our way in.’

‘A lot more will die if we fail.’ He uttered words of power, scrutator magic she had no comprehension of. The air-floater and everything in it faded until just the faintest edge-shimmer betrayed it. In fog or mist, which they hoped for near to the ground, even that would be invisible.

Flydd gasped. ‘Quick now. This is painful magic. I can’t hold it long.’

The air-floater drifted high over the southern wall of Snizort, hanging in the dark. Lyrinx swarmed on the wall but did not see them. The battles on the other three sides were picked out by thousands of flares, the blazing tar fires and burning catapult balls, beautiful in the darkness.

‘How are we going to find it, surr?’ Irisis said.

‘Ullii must get us there. You and I will block or destroy the node-drainer, if we can, and we’ll try to get out again.’

‘With the air-floater?’

He hesitated. ‘Possibly.’

Irisis did not like the sound of that. It probably
was
a suicide mission. She said nothing about that to Ullii, who was curled up under the bench, as usual. Irisis felt guilty enough already. Ullii was not speaking to her or Flydd. The meeting with Nish at the Aachim camp had added injury to her previous feelings of betrayal.

The air-floater was now motionless in the still air, invisible in the mist. ‘Come out, Ullii,’ ordered Flydd. ‘Show the pilot where to go.’

Ullii brushed past him, stormy-faced, and stood next to Hila. She said nothing, simply held her arm in the direction they had to go. The air-floater drifted that way. After a few minutes Ullii’s arm swung straight down.

The machine dropped through the mist into clear air, settled and rocked gently on its skids. Outside it was as dark as the tar pits. The assault fires were just dull glows beyond the walls. The barrage of blazing balls had stopped.

Ullii moved two steps and disappeared.

‘Seeker,’ Flydd hissed. ‘Stay with us.’

She came back. Ullii knew where
they
were. ‘Hate you both,’ she said audibly.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Flydd.

She did not deign to reply.

Flydd clipped his cord to her belt. Irisis did the same to his. The air-floater lifted, its rotor just ticking over. They felt its wind but could not see it.

‘No sound,’ warned Flydd. ‘They can still hear us.’

‘And smell us too,’ Irisis muttered. She could feel her heartbeat in her temples. They were going to be caught. They were going to be
eaten
.

‘Lead the way, Ullii.’ Flydd murmured words that took the spell off the air-floater, restricting it to them alone.

The seeker led them on a meandering route, like a snail trail across a brick path. Most lyrinx appeared in her lattice, so she knew how to avoid them. Most, but not all.

No one saw the lyrinx and of course it could not see them. It came running from the left, hit the cord between Irisis and Flydd, stumbled and fell. The impact sent them all flying. The creature sat up, a shadow that seemed to be feeling its ankle as it looked around in the dark. It had no idea what had happened.

Irisis held her breath. If she moved, it would hear her. She prayed that Ullii would not cry out. She could hear the creature sniffing, trying to work out what was wrong. She hoped it could not pick up their scent in the tar-laden air.

A knife shimmered as though moving by itself. It disappeared; the lyrinx gurgled; she smelt blood. It toppled forward.

‘We need to keep a better watch,’ said Flydd, wiping his blade on the corpse.

They crept across an open space, holding their staves in front to probe for pits and mires. Ullii’s talent could not always pick out physical objects.

‘Bog!’ She stopped abruptly, extracting her little foot with a sucking sound.

Irisis caught a stronger whiff of tar. There were many tar bogs in this saturated ground. One step too far and it might take five minutes to get out again. If alone, you would never get out.

‘What the hell’s that?’ hissed Flydd, staring back the way they had come.

‘Looks like an attack on the southern wall,’ said Irisis.

‘That’s not part of the plan.’

‘Maybe it’s the Aachim.’

‘It had better not be. That’ll ruin everything. Hurry, Ullii. I can’t hold the cloaking spell much longer.’

Irisis might as well have been blind again; in the next hour she saw nothing at all. Only Ullii knew where they were going, for she was navigating by her lattice. But knowing where they were going was not enough. She had to find a way to get there and that was harder than it seemed. Ullii’s mind had a unique and tormented logic.

Fortunately, Flydd had an uncanny grasp of directions and had memorised all the maps they had of Snizort. ‘We must go down,’ he said as they crouched in the concealment of two spindly thornbushes. ‘From the way Ullii’s pointing, the location is deep underground.’

‘We already knew that.’

‘How do we get underground?’

‘There are steps down into all the old tar pits,’ said Irisis. ‘And tunnels leading underground off them.’

‘But which pit?’ he mused. Flydd stood for a moment, then squatted again. His knees popped in the still night.

A light grew in the sky behind them. A flaming catapult ball swished overhead, to thump into the ground close enough that they felt the impact. Irisis held her breath but the flames went out.

‘I thought you gave orders about not firing into Snizort tonight?’ she said.

‘I did. Bloody rabble. No wonder we’re losing the war. Let’s try the main pit. Can you find that, Ullii?’

‘Yes,’ she said almost inaudibly.

It was easy to forget she was with them. They skirted sucking bogs and the edges of pits that quaked like jelly underfoot. They walked trails of sticky tar before descending 741 steps into the biggest of the many pits on the map; they entered a cavern or tunnel that had an eye-stinging, bituminous reek. Irisis could feel the walls with her outstretched hands.

Flydd stopped just inside. ‘I’d expect most of the lyrinx to be outside the walls, in the battle,’ he whispered into the absolute dark. ‘But not all. There will be guards within the tunnels, and other lyrinx moving about. Maybe hundreds. We have to be absolutely quiet.’

You’re making all the noise, Irisis thought irritably. She was desperately afraid of this place.

‘I’m having trouble holding the concealing glamour,’ he went on. ‘We’ll have to be quick. If I lose it …’

They went forward. Most of the tunnels were unlit. Irisis had no idea where they were and she knew Flydd was just as lost.

Ullii saw clearly and moved steadily on. She saw the enemy too. Thrice she alerted them just in time and they huddled in a pungent crevice or dripping hollow while lyrinx hurried by. They wandered a maze of tunnels until Irisis, without touching her pliance, began to
feel
the field swirling all around her. She had never experienced that before. They had been underground well over an hour.

‘How far, Ullii?’ said Flydd.

She did not answer.

‘Surely the place will be guarded,’ Irisis said.

‘From what? There are twenty-five thousand lyrinx outside. How could any intruder get this far?’

‘
We
have! And we guard
our
precious things.’

‘Lyrinx are not like us. They do not steal from each other; they do not sabotage or vandalise. Besides …’

She detected an ominous note. ‘What is it, Flydd? What aren’t you telling us?’

‘You would not station guards close to a node-drainer. If they were there too long it would begin to …
disrupt
them.’

A memory flashed back. ‘Like – the way it disrupted the rock of the mine at the manufactory?’

A long pause before he whispered, ‘Precisely.’

‘So this is going to kill us. It’ll take our bodies apart.’

‘Not if we’re quick. Jal-Nish survived it, if you recall.’

She took him by the shoulders. ‘How long before it disrupts
us
, Xervish?’

‘How the blazes would I know?’

‘Ten minutes? An hour? A day?’

‘Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Depends how strong it is, and how close we have to get to it.’

She stood in the corridor, unmoving. ‘Irisis?’ said Flydd.

‘So be it.’ They continued, but shortly she stopped again, allowing the seeker to move around the corner out of hearing.

‘What now?’ he said irritably.

‘What’s it going to do to Ullii’s baby?’ she said in his ear.

‘It will have to take its chances like the rest of us.’

‘But it … Ullii … We’ve got to tell her. At least give her the choice.’

‘We’re all soldiers in a war, artisan,’ he said harshly. ‘You, me, Ullii
and
the child. If we fail, humanity is doomed and where is the child then? We must
all
follow orders. Is that clear?’

‘Yes, scrutator.’

They hid from another guard. Flydd’s glamour still held, for the lyrinx looked right at them without seeing anything. It peered around uneasily, sniffing the air, its skin patterning in the light of a distant lamp, before hurrying away.

‘Glamour’s failing!’ Flydd was bent over, holding his belly. ‘Barely … hold it.’

She helped him up and they hurried after Ullii who, no longer roped to them, had disappeared down the tunnel. Irisis was all knotted inside. This was going to go wrong, she knew it.

It began as the merest tickle across her shoulder blades, indicating that they were within the sphere of influence of the node-drainer. The sensation grew stronger. Soon the flesh beneath her skin was shuddering as it was tugged one way and another. Her stomach began to bubble like a brewing vat. Ullii gasped. Her body was racked by sinuous heaves. Flydd groaned and the cloaking spell vanished.

‘Watcher!’ hissed Ullii, sniffing the air like a dog.

B
efore and after his brief meeting with Tiaan, Gilhaelith had spent days surveying the Great Seep, from the ground and the network of tunnels below it, until his maps were as accurate as he could draw them. The lyrinx drove him hard, making it clear that the project was urgent and had priority over every other activity at Snizort. He wondered why.

Gilhaelith was not working as hard as they thought, at least not on their project. He spent every spare moment with his icy scrying globe, pretending to do their work, but really studying the Snizort node, which fascinated him. It turned out to be a very strange one, and the fluctuations in its field were extreme, though that might have been because of the power the lyrinx drew from it for their flesh-forming.

And then again, it might have had something to do with the amplimet, for Gilhaelith suspected it was up to its old tricks again. With the globe he picked up occasional, inexplicable pulses which could hardly be due to anything else.

He went on to sensing out the hot spot that powered the seep. That was not hard for a geomancer of his experience. He had spent more than a century monitoring Booreah Ngurle in a similar way. Finally, most difficult of all, he had to scry out the pattern of slow currents that brought warm tar to the surface of the Great Seep, and carried cooler material down again, in complex whirls and eddies.

The tar moved almost imperceptibly, though over seven thousand years it must have travelled quite a distance. Gilhaelith had brought back much geomantic equipment, but none of his crystals and devices proved sensitive enough for this task. Nor, though he spent ages adjusting it, his globe. He had been here for weeks and Gyrull was angry at the lack of progress.

There was another way – to forecast the path of the currents using mathemancy. He had never used that Art in this kind of endeavour before and was not sure if it would prove any use at all, but what else could he do?

After a night and a day, Gilhaelith set aside his arrays of numbers, checked the map and pointed to a particular location. ‘Start digging here, and go in this direction.’