Geomancer

T HIRTY -N INE

Rahnd kept firing until Tiaan was well beyond range. 'Enough!' Nish collapsed on the rocky ground beside Irisis, feeling incredibly cold, weak and helpless. Despite everything, Tiaan was lost, and the crystal too. If only he had not pressured Ky-Ara. With two clankers, the lyrinx could not have escaped. You fool! Nish thought. You absolute, bloody fool.

The expedition had been a catastrophic failure and someone would have to pay for it. Most had already, including his father. Back a little way, he lay among the rocks like a bloody pile of rags. Nish could not bear to look.

'Well, that's that!' said Irisis. 'I've a mind to roll off the cliff.'

Nish clutched her hand.

'Don't worry,' she said. 'I've already failed at that. We'll face our fate together, Cryl-Nish.'

He followed the specks, dwindling into the infinite sky. 'By this time tomorrow Tiaan will be a hundred leagues away and not even Ullii will be able to find her. What a disaster!'

Irisis eased her leg, letting out a pained grunt.

'How is it?' he said.

'Kind of you to ask. The broken bone hurts so much I can't even feel the other wound.' She gave a short laugh. 'Break the other leg, why don't you? It might take away the pain of the first.'

'Sometimes I just don't understand you,' Nish said.

'Good!'

'Let's get you away from the edge of the cliff. It makes me nervous.'

''I'm happy where I am,' Irisis protested, but he took her under the arms and hauled her up the slope, her feet dragging over the bumpy ground. There were tears in her eyes by the time he got her there. 'I don't much care for your bedside manner, Nish.'

Nish hardly noticed. Guilt was eating him up. Staring distractedly around him, he began to shiver. It was bitterly cold now that the action had finished.

'Better see to your father. He's a lot worse than I am.'

Nish looked across and away, terrified of what he would find there. 'I'll send back to the ice houses for help.' He waved at the clanker.

'I wouldn't bother,' Irisis replied. 'There won't be anyone coming.'

He spun around, mouth hanging open.

'That's right, Nish. The rest were wiped out at the ice houses. Every man!'

'And the lyrinx?'

'All dead.'

More than forty people brutally slain! Nish could not take it in. He'd known them all; had shared a joke with most of them over the past week or two. How could so much life have been lost, so quickly?

His father began to wail shrilly. He was still alive, at least. Nish ran to him, bent over and froze. Jal-Nish, his handsome father, was a ruined man. His face had been torn open. One pulped eyeball dangled from its socket and most of his nose had gone. The left cheek had been peeled back from ear to mouth in three separate rents. Nish could not bear to look at him.

Jal-Nish fell back into unconsciousness. There were deep gouges across his chest and his arm was terribly shattered and torn. Nish looked around for help. The only survivors were Simmo, Rahnd, Rustina, Tuniz the artificer, and Irisis. No, the querist was alive as well, staggering out from the rocks where she'd fallen. Tuniz was unharmed. Rustina had broken bones in her arm, a swollen right wrist, a wobbly jaw and many bruises, but at least she could stand up. Irisis was being carried up the hill on a stretcher. And then there was Ullii, huddled up behind a rock, but she was no use at all. Her eyes had turned inward. She was incapable of speaking.

'What's the matter with her?' asked Fyn-Mah, sitting down abruptly.

'She began screaming when the lyrinx first took off,' Nish said. 'I suppose the Art was burning her. Is anyone a healer?'

'I know a little field medicine,' Rustina whispered. Tuniz had to help her to her knees beside the perquisitor, and then to hold her up.

'He's going to die, isn't he?'

'I'd say so,' the sergeant replied. 'Though I've seen men recover from worse.' She took Jal-Nish's wrist with her left hand. 'Well, the pulse is strong. Maybe he has a chance…'

'I'll do anything.' Nish was only now realising how much his arrogant, demanding father meant to him.

'The arm will have to go,' said Rustina. 'The upper bone is smashed to pieces and no one could fix it.' She looked up as if gauging his courage. 'You'll have to do it.'

Nish imagined hacking his father's arm off at the shoulder, like a butcher carving through a joint. 'I can't…'

'We all must do…' Rustina began.

'He can't do it, sergeant!' snapped Irisis.

'Then the perquisitor will die, and it's probably best. If he did survive, he'd be in torment for the rest of his life, and a horror to look at. Would he want to live?'

'My father can't die!' cried Nish. 'Give me the knife.'

'I'll do it,' said Irisis. They all stared at her. 'It's the leg that's broken, not my arm. I have a steady hand and a good eye.'

Those who had seen her coolly take the shard from Nish's neck knew that. And her metal work was the best anyone had ever seen. Half the women of the manufactory wore jewellery Irisis had made in her spare time.

She had to perform the operation sitting, with her splinted leg out straight before her. It was rather awkward. Nish knelt on the other side, holding his father still, for even in his unconscious state Jal-Nish jerked and twitched.

It took surprisingly little time to remove the arm at the shoulder. Rahnd cauterised the wound with a metal plate off the clanker, heated over a fire of scrub branches. The smell was horrible. Worse, the searing shocked Jal-Nish back to consciousness. His screams could have been heard across the plateau, especially when Irisis began to sew his face back together. Three people had to hold him down.

'Let me die!' he kept shouting, his one eye staring at them, unblinking. Finally the ghastly operation was done, the wounds painted with warm tar and bound up. They put Jal-Nish in the clanker with Irisis and Rustina, who had collapsed, moaning and holding her belly.

'The beast struck her in the middle,' said Nish. 'Maybe it's burst her belly.' He pulled her clothes up and went still.

'What is it?' said Irisis.

Rustina was unmarked but for a set of old scars that carved all the way across her midriff. 'Lyrinx claws. How did she ever survive? She must have been torn right open.'

'She was only a child when it happened,' said Fyn-Mah. 'There was no possibility of her having children so she was allowed to join the army. All she's ever wanted since was to kill the enemy.'

Ullii was still crouched behind her rock. Nish could get no response out of her, no matter what he did. He carried her to the clanker, whereupon she came to life and sprang out again.

'He's screaming!' she moaned, though Jal-Nish, sedated with a heavy dose of nigah, was silent.

Nish let her go. He had no energy left for her.

On the way back they managed to right the crashed clanker, but the flywheels had torn from their mountings and the machine had to be abandoned. Ky-Ara sat beside it, weeping silently. The death of Pur-Did seemed a far lesser tragedy than the loss of his machine. Clanker operators rarely bonded with their shooters.

They buried Pur-Did in the gravel and put Ky-Ara in the good machine, but as soon as they clattered away he began to scream and wail, and had to be held to keep him from leaping out.

'I can still see the clanker,' said Ullii.

'Of course you…' Nish began, trudging beside her, before realising that she had her mask on. Besides, she was looking the other way. They had left the controller behind.

He ran back for it and, reaching in through the back hatch, passed the controller to Irisis. 'Give him this.'

Cradling the controller in his arms, Ky-Ara fell silent. The bond between operator and clanker went through the controller, which was specifically attuned to both. A clanker whose operator was dead was just scrap metal until another controller could be fitted, or a new operator trained to use the old one.

It was a major handicap in battle, though better than the alternative, which would have allowed the enemy to turn a captured clanker on its own troops. Ullii began to scream as soon as they crested the hill, even before they set sight on the dreadful scene at the snilau. 'Waves through the body!' she kept saying. 'Waves of flesh.'

There they found carnage such as Nish had never seen before. More than forty human bodies lay strewn all around, clawed and rent worse than any Hurn bear would have done, as well as a dozen of the enemy. Fyn-Mah called Nish down to help check that all the lyrinx were dead, and to see if any of their troops remained alive.

'Wait!' cried a weak voice. Rustina climbed shakily out of the hatch.

'I don't think…' Nish began.

'They are my troops, artificer.'

There was no arguing with that. They checked the bodies one by one. Rustina called out the details of each, including the way they had died, Fyn-Mah wrote it down and they collected any valuables for the families. All the troops were dead and all their sergeants except for Rustina. The operators and shooters of the other clankers had also been slain. Gi-Had lay behind a low wall of ice blocks, where he had been defending a group of injured soldiers. As overseer, the man had been such a powerful presence. Now he lay lifeless on the red-stained snow and Nish was startled to realise what a small man Gi-Had had been, not much larger than Nish himself. Nish closed the half-frozen eyes and stood with head bowed, profoundly sorry. Despite the whipping, the overseer had been the best of men, in his way.

As he walked off, all Nish could think of was the parting scene at the manufactory: the pale wife, the five girls in a line, and the littlest one, with the red ribbons, crying. Daddy was not coming home.

Several soldiers had died recently, as much of the cold as their injuries. Arple, though suffering a dozen wounds, could not have been dead more than a few minutes. He had dragged himself to one of his troops, leaving a bloody trail, and his body was still warm. The most decorated soldier in Glynninar had met his match.

'What were the lyrinx doing here?' Nish said when the work was done and all the enemy bodies had been checked, warily.

Fyn-Mah looked around, lowered her voice and said, 'We don't know, but…'

'Yes?' Nish prompted.

'It's not the first time we've come across small groups inhabiting the most hostile places. Locations with no strategic value whatsoever, though usually at a powerful node.'

'And it's a most strange node here.'

'Indeed. A double. We think…' She broke off and walked rapidly toward the largest snilau, a multi-chambered one around which the others spiralled like the whorl of a snail shell. The side and roof of the main chamber had fallen in. They went through the hole, Nish with his sword at the ready as Fyn-Mah searched through the debris of ice blocks.

They found nothing in the larger chambers except rugs and furs, some laid over blocks of ice to form rude benches, chunks of frozen meat (not human), several leather buckets and a few other tools. However, in side rooms the querist discovered a series of cages. Some were empty; others contained small, unearthly-looking creatures. All appeared to be dead, yet Fyn-Mah inspected and described every one with meticulous care.

In a cage at the back they found a live creature the size of a mouse, though shaped like no animal Nish had ever seen. It had a long slanted head with protruding sabre teeth, a spined backbone and a clubbed tail. As they approached, it pushed itself up on spindly legs, let out a mewling cry then fell down again.

'What are these beasts?' Nish asked.

Fyn-Mah kept writing. 'Finish that, would you.'

Putting his sword in through the bars, Nish crushed the creature.

'They've been flesh-formed,' Fyn-Mah said. 'Certain lyrinx have the talent to force small creatures to grow differently, to a pattern they make in their minds. But it can only be done in certain places; at nodes. That's all we know. Why do they do it? Is it for food, or culture, or worship? Are they toys, or art? We know so little about the lyrinx. But it may also be – '

Flesh-formers! Nish shuddered. 'That's what Ullii was trying to tell us. "Waves through the body," she said.' He felt his own flesh crawling. 'Or maybe,' he mused, teasing the logic together, 'they're trying to create a weapon. One we'll have no defence against.'

'Maybe they are, artificer. We would very much like to know.'

He came to an instantaneous decision. 'I'd like to find out.'

She looked surprised, the first time he'd seen such a reaction from her. 'Are you man enough for it?'

'Probably not.' A rare admission, for him. 'Though I know languages, and people, and machines. Flesh-forming may have similarities to metal-working.'

'And many differences too.'

'I've grown up with examiners and perquisitors. I'm as qualified as most people.'

'You lack what may be the most important qualification of all,' she said. 'You have no talent for the Secret Art.'

'But I have been working with the seeker, and she can sense out the Art.'

'Not the same thing at all.'

'And there is Irisis.'

'A fraud,' said Fyn-Mah, 'without the talent of the artisan she pretends to be.'

Nish turned away so she would not see his shock. Was there no secret the querist did not know?

'She is brilliant at getting her people to work together and bringing out of them more than they know. She is already a master crafter. She had to become one, to survive.'

'Whatever!' Fyn-Mah said disinterestedly. 'Your own capacity for hard work is undoubted, artificer. And your intelligence. Your judgment can be faulty, however, and there is a question-mark over your integrity. Do you have the guts to keep going, whatever it takes?'

'Did you see what they did to my father?' he said in an almost inaudible voice. 'If Jal-Nish does not die, he will never be a whole man again. For all our differences, he is still my father. He has many faults, as do I, but lack of loyalty is not one of them. I will make up for this affront to him, whatever it takes.'

The querist looked him in the eye. 'I believe you will, Cryl-Nish. Very well, as leader of this force, you have my warrant to follow this question through. You have three months. After that, it will be at the discretion of Jal-Nish's replacement as perquisitor – or of your father, if he recovers.'

With a last look around at the devastation she headed back to the clanker. Nish studied the small corpses, and the cages, wondering what he had let himself in for. Then, thinking about what lay ahead, he doubted if it would matter. Such a small, battered force as they now were might not get the clanker down the cliff. And if they did not, they would all die.