by Ian Irvine
It was so dark that he could not see what lay beyond -palace or rat hole. He raised the lantern. Faint gleams appeared here and there, reflections off distant surfaces whose shapes shifted as he moved. He stepped into Alcifer and the darkness seemed to suck the light from his lantern. The floor shivered underfoot. He scuffed the dust away with a toe to reveal solid stone, yet it was quivering ever so slightly.
Go back! came an errant thought. You should not be here. He shrugged off the unease. Alcifer was a ruin abandoned an aeon ago. Nothing here could harm him, save the decaying stone and mortar falling on his head.
Hours he walked through haunted, magical halls where the dust lay so thick that his boots made no sound. Hours more he sat on seat or rail, staring into the darkness as he tried to gain a feeling for the building. He was searching for the perfect place to work but a palace such as this confused the mind as it tricked the eye. He could not take it in.
My mind is definitely failing, he thought. Before my illness I could have visualised the entirety of this palace, like rows and columns in a catalogue. Am I reaching my end sooner than I'd thought? Please, not this way, with my work so far from completion. If my mind is going, let me not fade dismally away. Rather would I die in a cataclysm of my own making, as long as in doing so I can approach my goal.
He stood up, staring around him in the darkness and shivering like the very stones. In all the years he'd worked on his study of the world, there was one experiment he'd not been game to attempt. Though it held the best promise of all, it was deadly perilous. Should he try it? If it succeeded, he might use it to find and remove all the fragments of the phantom crystal at once and even, faint hope that it was, repair some of the damage to his brain. He'd either crash through to his goal, or crash to his doom. More likely the latter, but what did he have to lose? Better to die violently than live this way, feeling his faculties slowly fading, knowing he'd either lose his intellect and go mad, or end up a vegetable that the lyrinx wouldn't deign to dine on. 'I'll do it!' he said aloud. 'I'll dare the great experiment and curse the consequences.' First, the place to work. Ignoring the dark, magnificent surroundings, he dragged himself up a last set of stairs to a vast hall covered ankle-deep in ash, through which occasional black tiles were exposed. The frescoed walls were stained brown from flowing rainwater, for the roof had collapsed long ago. Gilhaelith picked his way through the mess towards a tall pair of doors, wedged ajar by a leaning pine that had grown between them. He squeezed through the gap and out.
A broad boulevard, knee-deep in crusted ash, littered with boulders and fallen masonry, and overgrown with great trees whose roots had lifted the paving stones, ran away from him up a round hill. Despite the debris, its noble proportions were evident. The open space across the boulevard had once been a park, it seemed, for the trees there were vast and gnarled with age. A partly collapsed pavilion stood among them, to its right a marble fountain choked with debris, the stone dissolving from the volcano's acid rain. On Gilhaelith's left was an edifice of black stone, apparently the twin of the one he'd just come out of, though this building had an intact roof of some green metal that glinted here and there.
It was a bright, sunny day but Alcifer felt cold and brooding in a way that other ancient places did not. As if something — the city itself? — was waiting for a master who would never return, to complete a purpose that had been overtaken by time and treachery. The tilted paving stones in the street shivered underfoot, such was the power leashed here.
But there was no longer any point to Alcifer, Gilhaelith mused as he mentally reviewed its Histories. Originally built during the chaos of the Clysm, the city was said to have been one vast machine designed to open the Way between the Worlds, but had never been put to use. Soon after its completion, Rulke had been captured by his enemies and cast into the Nightland, a nowhere place that had contained him for a thousand years. During his imprisonment he'd designed a better artefact than Alcifer, reworked it until it was perfect, and on his escape had built it in Fiz Gorgo and Carcharon -his construct.
The constructs of the Aachim were based upon his model, though the original had never been equalled. Rulke's had been a vehicle that could fly, a means of attack and defence, and a device to open the Way between the Worlds.
After his death, Alcifer had slumbered under its covering of forest and volcanic ash for another hundred years, until the lyrinx were attracted to its extraordinary node-within-a-node that now energised both Alcifer and Oellyll. He could sense it from here: a pair of spheres one inside the other, each swelling and contracting to its own rhythm. Their potent fields also expanded and shrank in a complex dance that never repeated itself.
Gilhaelith crossed the boulevard to the fountain and sat on a carved soapstone bench covered in crumbs of volcanic ash. How could such a node have formed? Had it anything to do with the dormant volcano to the north, or could it have been transformed by that pinching-off of force that had created the rolled-up dimensions of the Nightland? He felt awed in the presence of power so much greater than any he'd dealt with before.
The lyrinx had no fear of the place, nor of any hidden purpose it may have had long ago. They had cleared some of its boulevards, built ventilation bellows powered by the field, and begun to delve their own city beneath Alcifer. Getting up and brushing the ash from his pants, he paced along the boulevard towards the hill, wonder growing with every step. Alcifer was vast, but even under the volcanic detriius and forest growth he could see that every structure, from the smallest to the greatest, formed part of one harmonious whole. A single mind had shaped each part of it, a single principle guided his hand — Pitlis the Aachim, the greatest architect who had ever lived, and the biggest fool. Rulke had seduced him with the creation of Alcifer, used it to uncover the defensive secrets of Gar Gaarn, the Aachim's greatest city, and destroyed it.
Gilhaelith spent days trudging the debris-strewn city, trying to understand it so as to find the perfect place to work. His great experiment could not be done anywhere — location was critical. Some places would assist the task not at all, while others would hinder it or even make it impossible. Yet somewhere there would be the perfect locale. It need not be vast or grand. The simplest of pavilions in a park might suffice, but he would not know until he found it, and had tested it with mathemancy, assuming he was still capable of it. One day a talent would be there, the next it would be gone. And every attempt at using mancery caused jagging pain in one part of his head or another, indicating that the phantom fragments were still doing damage.
After five days he was more confused about Alcifer than when he'd entered the city. The genius of Pitlis's design, and Rulke's building, would take half a lifetime to unravel. It humbled him and made his own achievements seem puny.
The city consisted of arrays of buildings, great and small, set along seven intersecting boulevards. Every side street was curved, the intersections being circles or ovals. There were vistas only along the boulevards. Off them, every corner revealed a new surprise, some vast and ornate, others simple — a mossy cul-de-sac with a fountain, a set of elegant steps, a pond or a piece of statuary. Although many of the buildings had been ruined by time, the bones of the city endured, for they had been fused to the living rock with an Art no human could duplicate.
Despairing of ever gaining a mental picture of the whole of Alcifer, he begged Gyrull to take him aloft, so he could view it from the air. She agreed readily, though he was carried up by Liett, the small lyrinx with the transparent, soft skin, now, covered with a paste to prevent it from burning in the sun. Despite her size she lifted him easily, flying in circles over Alcifer for two hours while he tried to impress the city's patterns on his mind. It still wasn't enough, though on the way down he spotted a white building shaped like a five-pointed star that he planned to take a closer look at from the ground-That afternoon he went back on foot, accompanied by male lyrinx who spoke not a single word the entire time. In the centre of the city, at the intersection of the seven boulevards, sto
od the white palace, and it proved to be unlike any building he had ever seen. It consisted of a core covered by a glass dome — no, not a dome, a soaring shell — with five arms, or wings, each identical, spinning out from it. The arms were roofed with a series of curving shells made of white stone so polished that they had once dazzled the eye. Even now, weather-stained as they were, the building was breathtakingly beautiful.
Gilhaelith went up the broad steps and pushed at the left-most of the four bronze doors; it grated open. The shivering of the stone grew as he paced down the hall. In the very centre, where the five buildings fused, he entered an enormous, airy and bright chamber, for the covering shell consisted of a single piece of glass. Red water stains ran down the walls, rubble lay here and there, and dust everywhere, but otherwise its magnificence was unmarred.
Just off the centre of the chamber stood a circular bench, many spans across, made of volcanic glass. The rest of the space was empty. Gilhaelith had a keen eye for beauty, though this place held more than that. Without even taking the numbers he knew it was exactly what he'd been looking for.
'Rulke knew the ways of power,' he said aloud. 'He built this palace here because the resonances were perfect, and so they will be for me.' Gilhaelith turned to the silent lyrinx. 'I'll work here. Would you bring up my servants now?' The creature turned away without answering, leaving Gilhaelith to wonder if Gyrull would allow him any assistants. He no longer expected her to.
Somewhat to his surprise the lyrinx returned the following morning with twelve slaves. They were a rough-looking lot, to he expected after years of servitude. Before they so much as picked up a crate, Gilhaelith had to ensure their loyalty, and it would not be easy. They must see him as a traitor, and the only way to overcome that was with naked self-interest, backed up by inflexible control.
My name is Gilhaelith,' he said to the assembled group from the top step of the white palace. 'Gyrull has given you to me. I'm not a harsh master, but I demand instant and total obedience. In return, if you serve me faithfully until my work is done, I'll see you freed and take you home to your loved ones.'
'Seems to me your word is worth no more than any other stinking turncoat's,' said their spokesman, Tyal, a hungry-look-ing fellow with a starkly white complexion. His hands were covered in wiry yellow hairs, the hair on his head was carrot-coloured and his beard was red.
'How long have you been held prisoner by the lyrinx?' Gilhaelith said pleasantly.
'Nine years,' said Tyal.
'And in that time, how many prisoners have they freed?'
'None,' he replied grudgingly.
'And how many escaped from the lyrinx?'
'Couple dozen got away in the early days,' said a short, greatly scarred woman from the back of the group. 'Course, the lyrinx et them all. Weren't many escapes after that, and they got et as well. Every one of'em, right in front of us.'
He let them think about that for a full minute. 'So, Tyal,' said Gilhaelith, giving him the cold stare that had quelled hundreds of minions over the years, 'it seems your only chance of seeing your loved ones again is through me. If you can't trust me, go back and take your chances with the lyrinx.' He held Tyal's gaze a moment longer before turning to the others. 'But to those who stay, and do as I require, I promise you'll get your freedom. What is it to be?'
They all stayed, of course. Any hope was better than none. He smiled thinly. 'Bring my instruments inside. Treat them like eggs.'
After days of work the glass-roofed chamber had been cleaned to Gilhaelith's exacting standards and his instruments arranged correctly. He took the omens with a series of fourth powers, an effort that left him drained and shaking. In the end, unable to do the calculations mentally, he'd had to call for pencil and paper. It was another small failure, though the number patterns were, for the most part, harmonious; not perfect but good enough. Dismissing the servants to their quarters he stood in the geometrical centre of the room, by the great bench, revelling. After months of chaos that had been torment to him, his life was ordered again. He would soon control everything in his small domain. Gilhaelith had little hope that he could reverse the slow decay of his mental faculties, but his health might recover enough for him to complete his work and die fulfilled. He'd last worked on his great project back in Nyriandiol in the spring. It was late summer now and today he would make a new start. As he paced beneath the glass roof, under bleak, rainy skies, he mused on what he'd learned since being taken from Nyriandiol, trying to place it into a pattern he could make sense of.
Firstly, the variety of nodes and fields was greater than he'd ever imagined. He'd always thought that there had to be an underlying pattern — that nodes weren't just random concentrations of power — but he'd never been able to work out what it might be. If only he could, he knew it would form an important part of the puzzle.
Secondly, Tiaan's amplimet was, inexplicably, awake and able to communicate in some fashion with nodes. In Snizort it had drawn a network of filaments throughout the city and pulses had flowed along them. That implied some kind of purpose, if not necessarily intelligence, which was incomprehensible. It was, after all, just a lump of crystal. It had also drawn a filament to him and he must beware the amplimet in future.
Gilhaelith shrugged away the fear. He had always been supremely self-confident and his recent problems had not completely undermined that. He was still a great geomancer. Should the crystal reappear, he would control it, not it him! And, perhaps, if he could reproduce those filaments, he could learn to control a node as well.
Thirdly, he'd gleaned that the lyrinx, on the closed-off eleventh level of Oellyll, were working on a new and powerful artefact. The war was escalating into a magical weapons race between humans, Aachim and lyrinx, with every new development requiring more power. Eventually it must drain the nodes past the point of no return. What then? Inexplicable things had already happened when nodes had been stripped of their fields. A whole squadron of clankers had once van-i ished into nothingness. Another time, the fragments of a hundred machines, and the people inside them, had been strewn across forty leagues of countryside, and for weeks after there had been green sunsets. What if that kind of catastrophe occurred worldwide? He could not allow it to happen.
Fourthly, a node could be completely destroyed, though that left a residue of unknown nature but disturbing potential. The residue from the Snizort node was now in the hands of the scrutators, assuming that Gyrull had told the truth. What would they do with it? And had the amplimet anything to do with the node's destruction?
Fifthly, there was some undiscovered potential about Alcifer, and it was more than just the remarkable node here. Whatever lay sleeping, it might just prove to be the last part of the puzzle.
Gilhaelith felt sure there was a way of putting these disparate discoveries together, to reach the understanding that he so craved, but his exhausted brain rebelled. Where the mind failed, it was his policy to put the hands to work. The great and perilous experiment required him to recreate his geomantic globe, incorporating all he'd learned about the world so far.
The pattern of nodes and fields was just the surface expression of tensions between the great forces that moved and shaped the world. If he could model them on his geomantic globe, he might uncover these ultimate forces. As the small is to the great, he thought — another of the key principles of the Art. But of course, his globe would have to be perfect, and he already knew of errors in it. There was much work to be done.
He turned to the globe, a glass-surfaced sphere half a span across, slowly rotating on its cushion of air above an ebony pedestal. It was so bitterly cold that moisture from the air formed wisps of vapour, drawn out to streaky clouds by its motion. Beneath the glass, so detailed that it looked like Santhenar seen from the surface of the moon, was his model of the world. The light reflected from its restless oceans, its glittering ice caps, and even the minute threads that represented great rivers.
With a gesture, Gilhaelith attempted to still the globe, as he'd
done so many times before. It was the most trivial of magics, but nothing happened. He tried again, with the same result. Panicky fear clutched at his heart and momentarily he found it difficult to breathe. What had he done wrong? He couldn't think. The process, once intuitive, was lost to him.
He laboriously reconstructed it using pure logic and tried once more. It worked this time. Points of light sparkled here and there on the glass — representations of the most powerful nodes. Taking up a hand lens the size of a frying-pan, he inspected the surface. It had not been harmed by its long journey, but he frowned and plucked at his lower lip. Though he'd made the globe from the best maps in the world, he now knew Meldorin was inaccurate in some important details.
Therefore other lands could also contain errors, while those parts of the globe known only from ancient adventurers' maps might be completely wrong.
No wonder he'd never been able to discover how the world worked. Two-thirds of his globe was based on charts that could have been made up, and he couldn't see how to remedy that. No, there was one possibility, though it would put him in such deep debt that he might never escape it. But then, if the globe worked, it offered another way out of here.
'What progress do you have to report?' Gyrull asked Ryll a few days later.
'The work goes slowly,' he replied. 'A flisnadr is much more difficult to pattern than our torgnadrs, and we only made a handful of them in years of labour. The human slaves we use in the patterners are not strong enough — they keep dying, ruining all our work. And also,' Ryll looked around, in case they were being overheard by other lyrinx, 'I'm unhappy about. . , the morality of it.' He used the word uncomfortably, as if, applied to the enemy, it was a new concept for him.
