Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) (84 page)

‘Are you sure?’ asked the truth-reader.

‘As sure as I’ll ever be.’ That was true enough.

Matriarch Gyrull blew on a horn. Lyrinx appeared from everywhere. They went down to the place Gilhaelith had indicated. Gyrull marked the sandstone face with a claw and they began to hack at the soft rock with tools like enormous mattocks, extending a tunnel toward the Great Seep.

The work continued day and night. When Gilhaelith returned in the morning to set up his surveying crystals, they had advanced by sixty paces, incredible progress even under such good conditions. The lyrinx worked as though possessed, and they were – Gyrull never had to remind them how important their work was, or how urgent.

The second day they made nearly as much ground, and the third another forty paces, the work slowing because of the heat, and because the rock here was saturated with tar and difficult to work. At this point Gilhaelith saw the lyrinx’s true genius.

Two of the creatures lugged in a metal ring slightly smaller than the diameter of the tunnel. After mounting a mushroom-shaped object called a phynadr in the middle of the ring, they activated it using a long rod. Cold pain sparkled in Gilhaelith’s temples, doubling him over. By the time he recovered, the ring was concealed by freezing mist.

The phynadr was powered by the field and drew heat from the area around it. He had no idea how it worked but there was no doubt of its effectiveness. The tarry rock, now frigid, was brittle and easily broken. His crystals told him that the device took prodigious amounts of power from the field, which was weaker than before.

The tunnel went forward in cooling stages followed by excavation. By late that afternoon, the fourth day of tunnelling, they broke through the last of the rock into the pure tar of the Great Seep. Now the work became hazardous in the extreme. Liquid tar was all around them, kept out only by a thin, frozen layer that was, relatively speaking, as fragile as an eggshell. If the pressure found a weakness, or just one of the cooling rings failed, the tunnel would collapse and they would be entombed in hot tar. The floor on which they stood shuddered from time to time.

Gilhaelith was idle now, but never bored. He observed, noted and classified everything around him. The lyrinx were of particular interest, and he saw that they were not completely comfortable in their great bodies or, at least, their outer skin. The lyrinx were constantly scratching, shrugging their shoulders, working their limbs and easing the position of their armour plates. Perhaps there was a disadvantage to all the flesh-forming they had done to their unborn selves, in order to survive in the nightmare environment of the void.

Gilhaelith was working in an embayment down the tunnel, well out of the way of the diggings. He had learned much about the node, another step toward his ultimate goal, but that was as far as he was going to get here. The war drew ever closer and it was time to get out before he was trapped. He felt sure he would be able to escape, despite how carefully the lyrinx watched him. They allowed him unfettered use of his tools, and that should be enough. But before he left he had to get the amplimet. He wished he could free Tiaan too, for he did care about her, but, no matter how much he might regret it, she had to be left behind. He could not carry her as well as his scrying globe, and he could not get out without it.

Adjusting it, and sensitising it with an appropriate crystal, he sought for the amplimet. Gilhaelith found it at once, so quickly that momentarily he wondered if it had found
him
.

His belly throbbed. The colic had been worse than usual since he’d come to Snizort, for which he blamed the bland food they gave him. None of the delicacies he was accustomed to were obtainable here.

The amplimet was around Tiaan’s neck in the patterning chamber, and a patterning was going on. He sideslipped that process. Time was everything now and he could not be distracted by irrelevancies. The chamber was empty and there were no guards. Good. He worked out a route to it, and the way out, then scried back to check on the amplimet again.

It was flashing furiously. Was it communicating with the patterner, or the node? It was hard to tell – the patterns seemed deliberately blurred. Surely the node, which seemed more unstable than ever.
And the patterner
! That bothered him. Was it trying to alter the patterning? What for?
And what to
?

Hitherto Gilhaelith had paid no more attention to the patterning chamber than he had to the rooms where the lyrinx carried out flesh-forming and other dubious activities. Now he turned his attention to the growing torgnadr and realised that it was a node-drainer. And if the amplimet controlled such a device, it controlled all the power of the node.

A looming disaster for both lyrinx and humanity, but a fabulous opportunity for himself. It was the chance to learn much more about the amplimet, by seeing exactly what it did.

‘No progress today, tetrarch?’ snapped Gyrull.

Gilhaelith started and barely managed to control his face, but Gyrull had other things on her mind and kept going. The field was surging erratically and at present the freezing coils were too effective. The lyrinx had broken a number of matlocks, the metal going so brittle in the intense cold that the tools snapped on impact. It was retarding progress and had to be remedied quickly.

He went back to his work, keeping a wary eye out now. His scrying was a delicate business, for he knew not what the amplimet might be capable of, and did not want its attention to turn on him.

However, after several days of such work Gilhaelith grew bolder, for he was beginning to see the pattern. The amplimet seemed to be drawing filaments of force – almost invisible threads of gossamer – out of the field to itself, to the patterner and to many other parts of Snizort. Power did not flow along those threads, yet he could see faint pulses of light. Why this network?

‘Come, tetrarch, you are needed at the front,’ said Gyrull.

Reluctantly, he began to collect his gear.

‘Leave it! There’s no time. I’ll have it packed for you.’

Packed
? Gilhaelith had no choice but to follow. He was not yet ready to break out and could not do it without hours of preparation, but her use of that word alarmed him.

The tunnel extended hour by hour, day by day. Cooling rings were spaced every ten paces along it, each with its mushroom-like phynadr maintaining the cold that kept them alive. The work was slower now; the broken tar had to be removed carefully in case they broke out of the frozen zone. Late on the tenth day of tunnelling, when they were nearly a hundred paces into the seep, Gilhaelith was called to try his scrying crystals again. His worries had proven fruitless; Gyrull still allowed him access to his tools, though only for a few minutes at a time.

In the middle of his reading, the pair of lyrinx at the face ceased their pounding and levered with a bar. A curving slab peeled away to reveal something lifelike embedded in the black material. Putting down his instruments, Gilhaelith went to see what it was.

It turned out to be the body of a wildcat, as long as Gilhaelith was tall, with a huge head and jaws that could have taken his leg off. It was so perfectly preserved that it might have been alive.

The following morning the diggers found another, smaller predator, more like a jackal, and that afternoon a wild bull with long curling horns. ‘The beast must have been trapped in the seep,’ said Gilhaelith, ‘attracting the predators which died the same way.’

‘Put two feet in wet tar,’ said the lyrinx to his left, ‘and you would not have the strength to pull them out.’

Gilhaelith finished his readings and this time did detect something. ‘That way.’ He pointed left of the tunnel centreline, down at a slight angle.

The lyrinx adjusted their cooling ring and continued. They encountered other dead animals as the tunnel slowly extended: once a pair of seagulls, another time a house cat, and then a pair of snakes the size of pythons, wrapped around each other. After that they continued in clean, glassy tar. By the fourteenth afternoon the tunnel was shuddering all the time.

As Gilhaelith walked back that night, a crack opened in the floor in front of him. A wedge of tar forced its way in, whereupon the lyrinx manning the nearest annulus worked her controls and extended the freezing zone. Another lyrinx broke off the solidified obstacle with a hammer. As Gilhaelith continued he saw other filled cracks. In some places there were more cracks than wall. The shell was barely surviving. The pangs in his belly grew worse.

Gilhaelith tried many times to get back to his own work, but Gyrull always needed him somewhere else, even if just to stand around and watch. At night he was escorted to his room to sleep, without his equipment, and a guard waited outside the door. She was taking no chances. Did she suspect what he was up to? Gilhaelith tried every argument to get his devices back but none availed him, and without them he was helpless. Most nights he lay awake, brooding and suffering pangs of colic. He could do nothing about that either.

He had not seen Tiaan again, and did not expect that he would. Gilhaelith had been touched that she’d cared enough to follow him, whatever her true motivation. She certainly had courage, unfortunately marred by an appalling lack of judgment, but he wished she’d stayed away. He cared about her. Not as much as for the amplimet, of course, but more than he cared for anyone else.

It probably would not matter, in the end. This expedition into the Great Seep was foolhardy in the extreme and the probability was high, his mathemancy told him, that they would all die entombed in hot tar. The lyrinx must have been desperate to attempt the venture. He could only assume that some potent artefact had been lost in the seep in ages past. If they were prepared to risk an army to have it, they must be weaker than anyone expected. Or it must be an object of surpassing power and usefulness to the war.

On they tunnelled, and on. Gilhaelith’s existence shrank to a stinking black hole. At night he dreamed he was still in it. They had reached the place his instruments told him to aim for, but found nothing there. The Matriarch was furious.

‘Your Art is less than I was led to believe, tetrarch!’ she said coldly.

‘I told you it would be difficult to find.’ Gilhaelith matched her glare, though inwardly he bitterly regretted the failure. If he had to die, he did not want it to be that way. ‘The Art is seldom exact.’

‘Search again. We’re closer now. Hurry!’

‘Mathemancy can tell me no more. I’ll have to scry with my globe and you must give me more to go on. What am I searching for?’

‘I cannot reveal that,’ she said.

‘Then I cannot help you.’ Again he held her gaze.

Gyrull’s breast plates mottled green, while her belly went a dull cream and her massive thighs showed tortured patterns – red threads writhing on yellow. Indecision, he thought. She needed to tell him, yet was afraid she would give something away.

‘We’re looking for the remains of the village,’ she said, working her arms vigorously, as if uncomfortable, ‘that was built over the tar more than seven thousand years ago.’

‘What was in the village? I must have something to scry for.’

‘There may be relics,’ she said reluctantly. ‘Instruments made of brass and precious metals …’

‘Anything else? Crystals?’

‘Perhaps.’ Even more reluctantly.

‘Crystals are easy to scry for, if I know the kinds.’

She knew but did not want to say. Then it came out. ‘Perhaps brimstone.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But that is the one crystal I cannot find.’

Her pupils narrowed to slits. ‘Why not, tetrarch? You claim to be a master geomancer.’

‘There is brimstone everywhere, here. The tar is full of it, and the hot springs all around.’

‘Try!’ she said coldly. ‘Without your globe.’

So she did fear him using it. ‘I will, but should I scry brimstone, remember that it could be anywhere.’

He did his best but, as before, the results were ambiguous. He calculated some random fourth powers, but they were no help at all. ‘If I am to help you, I must have my scrying globe.’

Gyrull muttered under her breath but had it brought to him. He sensitised it to brimstone, moved his hands over the frigid surface and closed his eyes. Momentarily he saw those wispy filaments, a shock went though his brain and he envisioned a red-hot crystal above and to the right.

Gilhaelith staggered and fell down. It felt as if his head was on fire. He weakly raised an arm, pointing in a circle. ‘That way! No more than ten spans.’

The lyrinx regarded him dubiously but gave the required orders.

Gilhaelith remained on the floor, without the strength to rise. He’d never had an experience like that before. It had been almost mystical, and he did not believe in such things. But he knew he’d found it this time.

Gyrull gave new orders. They were to tunnel out in all directions, like the spokes of a wheel.

‘That will magnify the strain on the shell,’ said Gilhaelith.

‘Always excuses, geomancer.’

‘Currents in the seep will break it like a stick and we’ll lose everything, including our lives.’

‘This is more important than our lives!’ she snapped.

A precious artefact indeed. ‘Not mine,’ he said.

The lyrinx tunnellers set to, showing no fear. Whatever the orders, they carried them out just as enthusiastically. Finding nothing in any of the lower spokes, they allowed these to collapse and began again with a new set, sloping upwards. The pace slowed. It was taking longer than ever to freeze each new section.

‘What’s the matter?’ the Matriarch demanded, late on the seventeenth day of tunnelling, their thirteenth in the Great Seep. At least, Gilhaelith thought it was late. Though he ate and slept at the same time each day, it was hard to keep track of time.

‘The field is fading,’ said the male in charge of the cooling ring. As they both spoke the common speech, they must have wanted him to know what was going on. ‘It’s taking an hour to do what once we would have done in minutes. You must beg the channellers to give us more power, else –’