Geomancer

F ORTY -T HREE

The following day Tiaan learned what they wanted her for. The cages were constructed of finely drawn cometary iron, with floor and sometimes walls of rock glass formed by the impact. Each had particular properties that enhanced the flesh-forming Art. She was required to channel power from the Kalissin fields into the iron filaments so as to induce a smaller, more concentrated aura inside the cage. The lyrinx hoped, by this, to grow their flesh-formed creatures larger.

'I will not do it,' Tiaan said with a shudder.

Liett whirled, caught Tiaan's head in the claws of one hand, and squeezed until they broke the skin in five places. Tiaan dared not move. The lyrinx was strong enough to tear her face off. Liett held her for a minute, then Ryll cried 'Enough!' and Tiaan was released.

'Will you do it now?' Ryll asked, soft-voiced.

'No.'

Liett bared her teeth but Ryll simply plucked the amplimet from Tiaan's fingers and placed it on a high shelf. Taking her by the arm, he led her up to her room and locked her in.

Tiaan knew what to expect now, and perhaps because of that, withdrawal seemed to come on more strongly than ever. Or perhaps it was knowing that Ryll would never relent. Within twenty-four hours she was climbing the walls. By the following dawn she began screaming, which aroused the worst memory of all, the horrible night that had seen her banished to the breeding factory. When Ryll appeared she just gave in.

One touch of the amplimet and the withdrawal was gone. Within an hour she was at the bench, ready to do whatever he required. Tiaan blocked out the betrayal – she had to.

However, after hours of trying she laid the amplimet aside, unable to visualise the strange field here. Her normal way of seeing it did not work. 'I can't do it.'

Ryll scowled. 'Another attempt to delay us, artisan?'

'It's not like the field I'm used to,' she stammered, afraid of their fury.

'Try harder!'

She did, no more successfully, but that evening, fiddling with a piece of iron on the bench, Tiaan noticed that it had smaller particles clinging to it. She tried to pick it up and had to wrench it off the surface. It was a little magnet, and maybe the bench was a bigger one. Perhaps the whole spire was!

The room vanished and suddenly she saw it. She was standing inside an iron spire jutting up from the earth, its feet in fire, tip crusted with ice. She could image the heat flowing from one end to the other, radiating out in all directions before being swallowed by an ocean of frigid air.

Now Tiaan sensed a different, subtler force. The iron spire seemed to be made up of horizontal bands, oriented one way or another, out of which swept fields of force in elongated, intersecting loops. It was like… Tiaan struggled to think of any comparison. Then she had it – an exercise Crafter Barkus had given her before she even began her prenticeship.

He'd had her stroke a piece of iron with a lodestone until it was magnetised and she could pick a nail with it. Later he had sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and moved the nail around underneath. The filings had formed curving patterns sweeping from one end of the magnet to the other.

The shape of the fields (for there were at least two here, unlike other nodes she had experience with) told her that the spire was an enormous magnet or collection of magnets. Tiaan had done other experiments with magnets, making other patterns. By moving a magnet inside a coil of wire she had made circular patterns around the wire. They had fascinated her so much that she fell behind in her work and had been reprimanded by Crafter Barkus. Tiaan had never gone back to magnets. There had been no time for toys at the manufactory.

What might a magnet as large as a mountain be able to do? What power it must have!

'I can see the fields,' she said. Weeks went by, a time of the most exhausting mental labour. Day after day Tiaan spent on her stool, exploring the unusual paired fields, working out how to channel them safely, and then creating the aura in the cages. The work left her head throbbing at night, and sometimes it still ached when a hostile Liett hauled her from her bed in the morning. And every time, after using the amplimet, Tiaan dreamed the wildest crystal dreams about flesh-formed monsters.

They worked every day for all the waking hours. The lyrinx kept no holidays or feast days. Nor had they any concept of recreation, so far as she could tell. If they had a culture she saw no signs of it, apart from the wind music. The place was undecorated: no artworks or pottery, no furniture except of the most rudimentary kind. She knew the lyrinx could read and write, though she saw no books, scrolls or any other kind of document. But of course this place was a workshop and laboratory, dedicated to the war. Their homes, or nests, could be completely different. Moreover their language was incomprehensible, to say nothing of skin-speech. Their greatest poets and orators might have been reciting beside her and she would have known nothing about it. Alternatively, Ryll might have been telling the truth. Perhaps the lyrinx were a lost people, without even their own Histories.

Despite her efforts, the lyrinx did not seem to be making progress. Tiaan was glad of it. They were careful to hide the real purpose of their experiments from her, but the procession of bizarre, flesh-formed creatures that writhed and squealed and expired on the bench was terrifying. She could not bear to think how the lyrinx would use them, if they succeeded.

Tiaan despised herself for collaborating with the enemy. As the work progressed she became filled with self-loathing. She rebelled many times, and each time they simply took away the amplimet. Each time the agony was greater.

The lyrinx became increasingly frustrated with their inability to understand the amplimet and the fields Tiaan could tap with it. For years their most talented mancers had been working with captured controllers, but to no effect. They simply could not use such devices.

Each day, after her other work was done, they interrogated her, trying to wrest the secret from her. They made Tiaan demonstrate her art from first principles, as if teaching the lowest prentice. They had spent weeks watching and studying her while she explored the fields below and around the spire. They monitored her with strange instruments, some half-mechanical and half-alive, like living versions of her controllers. Coeland suggested that she was deliberately thwarting them. Liett made veiled threats.

It made no difference. They understood how her devices worked, and the nature of the fields here. They could sense the raw power the spire was bathed in – that was why they had come here in the first place. They could visualise the fields with the captured controllers and with her amplimet. But they could not draw that power, no matter how hard they tried, or how cleverly. The ability simply was not in them. I must be the rankest coward on Santhenar, Tiaan thought one night as she lay in bed, hands pressed to her throbbing temples. The day's work had been particularly gruelling. I deserve to be killed and eaten.

She felt strangely detached from her body, as if a crystal dream was coming. Or was it crystal fever? They had driven her so terribly hard lately. She drifted into a daze where the ache persisted and she was still aware of the room, but everything was subtly shifted.

Crack! Lines of fire lashed across her back and curled around her side, ending in blinding stings on her belly. Crack! More lashes, crossing the first.

An image, distant and out of focus: a man hanging suspended from an engraved dome. Another, across the room, hurling punishment stars at his unprotected body. Each star had a soft central core trailing many thread-like tentacles, like those of a jellyfish. And like a jellyfish they wrapped around, stinging and burning.

There was something about the prisoner – the tall, well-proportioned frame, the dark hair hanging like a mop over his face. Slowly she brought him into focus and her own pain faded, becoming no more than a silken cord across her back, a caress.

The man threw up his head in agony. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. He seemed to be staring right into her eyes, reproaching her for her oath-breaking. 'Faithless friend,' he sang out between the strikes. 'Why have you forsaken me?'

It was Minis, her love. He had raised his people's hopes and she had let him down. Tiaan came fully awake and the daydream disappeared. He was the reason she was still alive; only she could save him. It was her destiny, and once she did, the Aachim would change the balance. With their aid, humanity would be able to stand up to the lyrinx. She would no longer be a traitor. Tiaan would be the woman who had saved the world.

But first she must escape from Kalissin and make her way a hundred leagues across country to Tirthrax. That would not be easy. Tarralladell and Mirrilladell, scoured bare by ice sheets over thirty thousand years, were a mass of rivers, swamps and elongated lakes that ran south from the Great Mountains to the inland seas of Tallallamel and Milmillamel. There was no crossing this country from east to west, after the thaw. No roads or bridges went that way. All but local traffic moved north-south, by boat in the summer and by keel on the ice in winter, though winter was so cold that few people travelled at all. They huddled in their huts and prayed that the food would last until spring. How was she to cross such country alone?

The latch rattled. Leaping out of bed, Tiaan flung on her clothes. If she did not, Liett would haul her down to work naked.

Liett seemed particularly irritable today. Tiaan had her pants on but only one arm through her sleeve when she was dragged out the door. She felt foolish, stumbling behind the hurrying lyrinx, trying to dress one-handed.

In the work chamber, Liett thrust her across the room. 'Get to work! And see that you do better than yesterday, or today may be your last.'

That only made things worse and the day turned out as unproductive as all the previous ones. By nightfall Liett was trembling with frustration. Several times, looking up from her work, Tiaan noticed the lyrinx staring at her. The expression in her eyes was disturbing. Suddenly Liett sprang up, strode to the door and flicked the fingerlock. Tiaan wondered why.

Returning to her bench, the lyrinx began arranging her incubation jars. Tiaan put it out of mind and was concentrating on the field when Liett took her from behind and held her arm down flat. Using an implement like a leather worker's punch, Liett cut out a disc of skin and flesh, the size of her little fingernail, from the inside of Tiaan's left arm.

Such a small wound, but Tiaan slumped on her stool, feeling faint. Liett macerated the sample into particles too tiny to see and stirred it into a jar of yellow-tinged fluid, like broth. Air bubbled through the fluid. She spent the rest of the day there, concentrating hard while Tiaan trickled power to maintain the aura inside the metal bars. Liett changed the fluid several times.

A day later a glob of matter began to grow at the bottom of the jar. On the third day buds formed into two limbs, then four, then many, then back to four again. Its shape seemed not fixed; or was Liett's flesh-forming constantly changing it? Tiaan suspected that Liett had added other tissue to the jar when no one else was there. Once she noticed a fresh circular scab up in the lyrinx's armpit. Had she used her own tissue? If so, she had taken pains to conceal it. Perhaps that was forbidden.

After a week the creature began to grow rapidly, the limbs branching over and over again until it resembled a four-armed starfish, each arm terminating in a dozen smaller ones, like fingered, coiling tentacles.

In a fortnight, when the creature's body was the size of an egg and the limbs spread to six times that size, it began to show signs of coordination, if not intelligence. All the lyrinx in the spire came to see it, crowding into the room in small groups. There were hundreds of them. Gloom settled over her. She would never escape.

Tiaan rubbed her arm. The injury had been slow to heal and the neat circular scar still ached. Repelled, horrified and fascinated in turn, she could not keep away from the jar. The creature was unique, bizarre. Each of its extremities was different: some like fingers, others resembling claws or probes, bundles of feathers or threads as fine as silk. Some she could imagine a purpose for, others she could not. What did Liett have in mind for it?

The creature began to grow scaly plates all over its body. The plates thickened until the arms could no longer move. It lay on the floor of its jar for a day, whereupon Liett took it out and killed it with a single thrust from a carefully cleaned knife. As she did, pain sheared through Tiaan's head. It passed without after-effects, apart from uncomfortable feelings of empathy for the dead animal.

Liett dissected the corpse, made notes and reduced it to pulp for her next experiment. However, the next three attempts were failures; the creatures terminated within a few days.

Ryll was as busy with his own flesh-forming. His creations were all of a type – an elongated body, heavily armoured and spiked on the underside, long, armoured legs, a spiked club for a tail and a spiked, fanged, plate-armoured head. His experiments likewise were not going well. Tiaan often saw what she now recognised as stress-patterns on his skin: chevron shapes in blacks and reds.

Tiaan could not fathom why that particular form was so important to him, and Ryll would not say. He made his creatures over and again, using tissue samples of unknown source. Each time, when they reached the size of a fat mouse, Ryll collapsed from the strain. His creatures would keep growing for a day or two before falling down in a twitching, uncoordinated mass. Ryll would groan and bang his sensitive crest on the wall. There would be yet another conference with Coeland and other senior lyrinx, much shouting, yelling and violent skin-talk, then they would all go away and Ryll, as soon as he was able, returned to his work. 'I wonder…' Ryll said late one night, about a month after Liett had taken the sample from Tiaan's arm.

Tiaan looked up from the crystal. The work made her nauseous and all she wanted was to go to bed and shut out the world. It was hotter than ever down here; she could not adjust. For most of her life she had been cold. Now she yearned for it. She slept with her window open, whatever the weather. When not sleeping she stood at the window, staring across the lake to the smudges of snow-blanketed forest in the distance, and wondering if she would ever reach it. In the two and a half months she had been held here, there had been no chance to escape. She was not permitted to go anywhere unescorted and was always locked in at night.

'What?' Tiaan said, indifferent.

Ryll was staring at the many-armed creature growing in Liett's jar. It was still tiny – no bigger than a thumbnail.

He looked over his shoulder. The gesture seemed furtive. His colour changed to iron-greys and browns, a camouflage so brilliant that Tiaan could only see him when he moved. She did not think Ryll had any idea he'd done it. What was he up to?

Liett had gone to her chamber some time ago and would not be back until the morning. She began early; Ryll worked late, perhaps so that they needed to spend the least time in each other's presence.

Striding to the door, Ryll thrust a finger in the lock. It gave a gentle snick. Furtively he picked up Liett's jar and carried it to his bench. He fed his own creature, the size of Tiaan's thumb, a knockout pellet. It went still. In seconds Ryll had it out of the cage, made a careful incision from neck to tail, clamped the major blood vessels, scooped Liett's tiny creature from the jar, blew it dry then put it into the incision, with the body at the base of the skull and the tentacles trailing down the back.

With deft stitches he fixed the creature inside, rejoined the blood vessels, sutured the wound and spread a clear jelly over it. Tossing the needle on the bench, Ryll held his armoured creature in one hand and began flesh-forming. Tiaan's brain fizzed.

After an hour or so, the creature gave a single, feeble kick. A thread of purple ebbed out under the jelly, which had formed a clear skin. The creature kicked again and lay still.

Tiaan crept across to stand beside Ryll, who looked saggy today. 'Are you all right?' she said.

'The heat down here does not suit us. We are beings of the cold void.'

She had noticed how sluggishly he moved in the lower levels. 'It does not seem to bother Liett.'

'Liett doesn't have skin armour.' He turned back to the cage.

'Is the creature dead?' she whispered.

'Not yet!' A muscle twitched in his neck. 'But it's in shock. I should not have tried. It's too small.'

'Could you not start at an earlier stage, as with your own children in the void?'

'We don't know enough about other animals.'

They watched the creature for hours. It did not move, or even look to be breathing, though Ryll said it was still alive. Finally, when it was nearly dawn and the creature lay as limp as ever, Ryll rose.

'I must sleep, at least for an hour.'

'And I. Liett will be coming to drag me out in two.' She dozed with her mind full of flesh-formed images and woke feeling hot, claustrophobic and not a little horrified that a part of her had gone into the creature. She was at the window, gulping down lungs of frigid air, when the bolt clicked.

Liett flung the door open. 'Come. I have had an idea. We must work swiftly. You will channel power for me and there can be no mistakes.'

Tiaan dragged herself down the ladders, wondering what would happen when Liett discovered what Ryll had done.

'What is the matter with you today?' Liett snapped. Tiaan had stalled halfway down, hanging from the ladder like a dead spider.

'I worked most of the night with Ryll.'

'Waste of time!' Liett gave her a playful buffet that crashed Tiaan into the wall.

Liett squeezed through the entrance, scowled at Ryll, who was frowning down at his creature, and headed for her bench. Tiaan's brain began to fizz. There was barely any colour in Ryll's skin, and no pattern, just a uniform dull grey. It must be taking all his Art to keep the creature alive.

'Where's my snizlet?' Liett held her jar up to the light. Ryll was too preoccupied to answer. 'What have you done with it?' she screamed.

He did not look up. She bounded across the room, lifted Tiaan by the shoulders and shook her. 'What has he done with my snizlet?'

Tiaan's head was nodding so hard she could not speak. She simply pointed to Ryll's armoured creature.

Liett dropped Tiaan and flung herself at Ryll. Her claws scored down his side, carving a gash between his skin plates. Setting down the cage, he whirled and lashed out.

Liett ducked out of the way. She was brave, but her soft skin made her almost as vulnerable as a human. She struck at him, drawing blood on his brow ridge. He crouched, preparing to spring. Tiaan covered her eyes.

'Stop!' roared a deep voice from the door.

The two froze in place. Coeland levered herself through the opening and stood up. Several more lyrinx followed.

'Well?' she said in a dangerous voice.

'He stole my snizlet!' said Liett. 'He took it without asking and put it in his rrhyzzik, there. And now it's dead!'

'Is this true?' Coeland asked coldly.

'It is true that I took it,' said Ryll, 'but it's not dead yet.'

'I demand satisfaction on his body!' shouted Liett. 'Just last night I understood what I was doing wrong. Now I'll have to start again.'

'Do you make a pleading, Ryll?' Coeland asked.

'The answer is in both our work,' he answered. 'Rrhyzzik is well designed for the…' he glanced at Tiaan, 'the job, but it's a dumb creature; unbiddable. Her snizlet is a brilliant sensor and adaptor, though too weak to survive outside. Yet mate the two together, hers inside mine…'

'Never!' cried Liett. 'His rrhyzzik is as much a monstrosity as he is. It will never do…'

Something clacked in the cage. The creature pushed to its feet, swaying like a newborn calf. Its spined snout quested the air. It took a step forward, fell down, got up again, then took another wobbling step, and another. With each step it grew stronger.

The lyrinx gathered around, even Liett. In a minute it was practically gambolling. It did a running jump, flung four legs in the air at once, somersaulted and landed facing the other way. It pressed against the bars, staring at them, and there was undoubted intelligence in its eyes.

Ryll let out an ear-splitting whoop. 'We've done it!' he roared, lifting Liett high and twirling her around while she batted at him half-heartedly. She was laughing, though. He put her down again, giving her a great kiss on the bridge of her nose. 'Liett, your snizlet is the most brilliant work I've ever seen. Together we've done it!'

She rubbed furiously at her nose. He extended his arm to her. After a considerable hesitation, she clasped it, her hand about his biceps, his about hers.

Coeland grinned wide enough to have swallowed Tiaan's head, clasped arms with both of them, and turned to the entrance. 'Back to work! Grow it to size, Ryll, and you shall have your heart's desire.' She nodded to Liett. 'Perhaps you too, daughter, if you have worked out what it is. This is only the beginning.'