by Ian Irvine
Besides, Gilhaelith could not have walked across Meldorin to save his life. He hadn’t regained the strength he’d taken for granted in the hundred years and more he’d dwelt at beautiful Nyriandiol, and perhaps never would. Every stone of that great edifice had been chosen for its geomantic properties. Each had been shaped and placed so as to enhance the natural magic of the mountaintop, and to support him in his life’s endeavour – to understand the nature of the world and the forces that made it so. Without Nyriandiol, Gilhaelith was not a shadow of the master geomancer he’d been while he dwelt there.
He still yearned to complete his life’s endeavour, though Gilhaelith now doubted that he ever would. While trapped in sticky tar deep in the black pit of Snizort last summer, as the node had been about to explode, he’d done the only thing he could to save himself. He’d created a phantom, mathemantical crystal in his mind and used it to draw the power he’d needed to escape. He’d managed to drag himself to safety but in doing so the crystal had burst asunder, spearing its fragments through his brain and damaging part of it. The injury had further reduced his capacity for geomancy. What once had been effortless he now did only with the most prodigious labour, while some things he could not do at all.
But that had not been the worst of the damage. The phantom crystal fragments remained and whenever he drew power, even for the most trivial purpose, they burned more of his brain. Gilhaelith was faced with the worst of all choices. He could hope to prolong his life by never drawing power again, though without practising his Art, his life would be meaningless. Or he could attempt, by geomantic means, to locate and unmake every fragment of the phantom crystal. There lay his only hope of restoring himself to the greatness he’d once had, or at least to what shadow of it he could regain.
In that endeavour he’d spent his previous months at Alcifer refashioning his geomantic globe. He’d made it into the most perfect representation of Santhenar he could create, its lands, seas, mountains, rivers and icecaps, even down to the nodes themselves. It would give him the focus he needed to repair himself, though the work had done him more damage, of course. He’d completed it little more than a month ago, an unparalleled, agonising labour and, in the circumstances, a phenomenal work of genius. But then Matriarch Gyrull had sent him outside to take measurements of the field for her.
In reality she’d used him as an unwitting decoy to try to capture Tiaan and the thapter, and had almost succeeded. Instead, Tiaan had captured Gilhaelith and taken him to Fiz Gorgo. Without the geomantic globe, his agony had been complete and his death, or descent into irreparable brain damage, certain.
Unable to face that prospect, Gilhaelith had single-mindedly set out to get back to Alcifer, unwittingly betraying Fiz Gorgo to Ghorr in the process. He didn’t want to think about that.
He adjusted the sail again, taking advantage of an easterly wind-shift to speed towards the scrub-covered oblong that was undoubtedly the end of one of the breakwaters of the port. What would happen now? Even if he recovered his geomantic globe, using it to find and unmake those crystal fragments risked destroying his mind completely. He could scarcely bear the thought of his greatness reduced to a mindless, drooling vegetable – lyrinx fodder. Assuming that the lyrinx would allow him access to the globe at all. Matriarch Gyrull had been spying on him all the time he’d worked on the globe and had probably seized it in his absence. If she didn’t need him any more, he’d be sent to the slaughtering pens.
The thought checked him for a moment, for Gilhaelith had a horror of being eaten. It wasn’t right that a man so great as he could come to such an undignified end. Dare he go on, confronting such a fate? He took the numbers, to see what kind of omens there were for this choice. The once effortless calculations were now a great strain but the omens proved to be neither good nor bad. It was up to him to tilt fate one way or the other. He would go on. He would risk all to get back what he had lost, no matter what the consequences.
Gilhaelith brought the dinghy in to the eroded stone jetty and tied the painter to a gnarled root that had forced the stones apart. After heaving his canvas holdall up onto the barnacle-covered stone, he pulled himself after it, and froze.
Four lyrinx stood there, back against the shrubbery so that they had been out of sight from below. He recognised three of them: a young wingless male called Ryll; Liett, a young female with outer skin that was quite unarmoured and colourless, so that he could see the purple blood flowing beneath it; and Matriarch Gyrull, big and old with pouched eyes, battle-scarred armour and segments missing from her crest. And, further back, almost concealed by the shadows, the biggest lyrinx Gilhaelith had ever seen – a vast coal-black male with a golden crest. He was one and a half times Gilhaelith’s own majestic height, and probably five or six times his bulk. His folded wings drooped as though he was tired, though the lyrinx held himself erect and his golden eyes seemed to miss nothing.
‘I hoped you would come back,’ Gyrull said, reaching out and encircling Gilhaelith’s bony wrist with her clawed fingers. ‘Come with me, Tetrarch.’
When Gilhaelith had been safely penned in a stone chamber of the underground city, and a pair of zygnadrs, or sentinels, set to watch him, the four lyrinx repaired to an empty dining hall. There the coal-black male selected the lower half of a dead human male from a meat tray and tore it into two haunches, one of which he politely offered to the matriarch.
Gyrull shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry. I have much to think about. Go ahead, Anabyng. You must be hungry after your long flight.’
‘I confess I am,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t settle once in the last two days, so anxious was I to get home.’
Liett took the haunch and bit a chunk from the thigh muscle with her sharp grey teeth. Ryll reached into the tray for a lower leg joint. He hadn’t eaten human flesh for a good while, since there were few humans left in Meldorin. He absently twisted the foot off and tossed it back into the tray, then went across to the table with the others. He was about to tear into the tasty calf meat when Gyrull spoke.
‘I don’t like it, Anabyng. Why has the tetrarch come back?’
The black male chewed and swallowed before answering. Golden speckles broke out on his chest, in appreciation of the quality of the meat. ‘For the geomantic globe. It means more to him than his life, and he is a dead man without it.’
‘Were it up to me,’ said Liett, ‘he would be a dead man now, though I wouldn’t care to dine on his tainted flesh.’ Gilhaelith favoured the most exotic of diets: salted slugs, pickled wood-roaches and other kinds of vermin that not even the lowest of the lyrinx would have eaten but to save their lives.
‘We need him,’ said Ryll, putting down the leg joint untasted.
‘How is the flisnadr going?’ asked Anabyng, referring to the power patterner that Ryll and Liett had been trying to create for many months. ‘Have you made much progress since I left?’
Ryll took up his joint again, stared at the red flesh for a moment, then all at once let it fall on the table. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, human flesh, which he had enjoyed all his life, had lost its appeal. ‘There hasn’t been any progress, Great Anabyng. We’re bedevilled by the same problem that we’ve had from the beginning: linking the individual patterners, with their humans inside, to grow the flisnadr. And we still haven’t worked out how to use Gilhaelith’s geomantic globe to solve this problem.’
‘Then you’d better torture it out of him.’ Anabyng stripped the rest of the meat off the upper thigh, then bit off the protruding bone and crunched it noisily. ‘We’ve got to have it by the beginning of spring.’
‘What’s the matter, Anabyng?’ said Liett, devouring her haunch with gusto. ‘Why so soon?’
Anabyng’s head jerked up and his eyes glowed, though he did not speak.
Matriarch Gyrull struck the table with her fist. ‘Be so good as to use Anabyng’s proper title, daughter. He is our greatest hero of the battlefield, and the greatest in the Art, too. He earned his honour the hard way.’
‘Then it’s incumbent upon you to observe the proprieties, more than anyone.’
Liett’s eyes flashed. ‘You said we had to recreate ourselves to suit the new world once the war is won. That’s what I’m doing.’
‘Have you learned nothing?’ cried Gyrull. ‘You expect me to choose you as matriarch after me, yet you display few of the necessary qualities. Your lack of respect diminishes you, daughter.’
‘Name one person more suited to the honour than me,’ Liett said with an imperious tilt of the head.
‘Even Ryll is more suited to the honour than you,’ Gyrull replied deliberately, ‘and he is male.’
Anabyng spread his great maw wide, making a choking noise that Ryll could only interpret as a laugh. Ryll wasn’t laughing. To even compare him to a candidate for matriarch was mortifying. ‘Matriarch, you mock me,’ he said, hanging his head. His skin colours flashed red and purple and he felt an unusual burning sensation in his cheeks.
‘And insult me,’ cried Liett, giving him a savage look, as if he had deliberately undermined her.
‘By millennia-long custom we are led by a matriarch,’ said Anabyng, ‘and none of us would seek to change that.’
‘Nor I,’ said Gyrull. ‘I merely point out that, in the half-year since we returned from the fall of Snizort, the wingless one has set an example in the mastery of his Art, in strategic thinking about the war and the future, and in unassuming leadership. When he speaks, the common folk set down their tools and listen. You’d be well advised to follow Ryll’s example, daughter.’
Liett, incredulous, flashed out her beautiful wings and bared her teeth at Ryll, for all that she had long sought permission to mate with him, and he with her. Theirs was a volatile relationship.
‘Assuming you do wish to be a candidate for matriarch,’ said Gyrull. ‘On that display, I doubt it. Leave us, Liett.’
‘What?’ said Liett, belatedly folding her wings.
‘Leave us!’ Gyrull snapped. ‘I wish to speak about matters of importance with those mature enough to offer worthwhile opinions.’
Liett began to flounce away. She caught Ryll’s eye and he gave a little shake of the head. She snapped her teeth at him, a last display, then slunk out, head bowed.
‘I truly don’t know what I’m going to do with her,’ sighed Gyrull.
‘Send her to the battlefront,’ said Anabyng. ‘If she survives, it may make a leader of her yet. She does have a great talent, though it’s wilfully misdirected.’
‘I need her here,’ said Ryll hastily. Though he knew it made good sense, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Liett. ‘To send her to battle, unarmoured as she is, would be to condemn her to death.’
‘Perhaps your feelings for her overpower your good sense,’ observed the black lyrinx.
‘No, Ryll is right,’ said Gyrull. ‘We do need Liett to complete the flisnadr; she has special abilities. Enough of that. What news from your scouting, Anabyng? Why do we need the device by the end of winter? I thought we had months more.’
‘The humans are too clever and cunning,’ said Anabyng. He crunched the rest of the thigh bone and slurped up the marrow. ‘I’m worried that they’ll come up with some fiendish new strategy over the winter.’
‘We have them on the run,’ said Gyrull. ‘We’ve defeated them time and again, and by spring we’ll have another ten thousand to set against them. I’m not afraid –’
‘There have been developments. The whole Council of Scrutators attacked Lord Yggur at Fiz Gorgo a few weeks ago but the chief scrutator was killed, along with many others. Only seven of their sixteen air-dreadnoughts escaped.’
‘I heard,’ said Gyrull. ‘But that’s something to celebrate, surely?’
‘Fusshte has taken over,’ said Anabyng, ‘and he’ll pursue us more relentlessly than Ghorr ever did.’
‘But he’s no leader,’ Gyrull said, dismissing the threat. ‘And leadership is what they need most desperately.’
‘I think …’ began Ryll tentatively. ‘Er, Great Anabyng …’ He squared his shoulders and tried to meet the male’s eyes boldly, though Ryll was only too conscious of his physical deficiency, his lack of wings. ‘This power in Fiz Gorgo, that can defeat the entire Council and all their soldiers and mancers, must be a threat to us. We’ve got to find out who they are and what their plans are. If a great leader should emerge from the present chaos we could have a hard time of it, since we’ve failed with the flisnadr. Gilhaelith –’
‘Indeed.’ Anabyng’s eyes met Gyrull’s. ‘I believe that’s the kind of strategic thinking you were talking about, Matriarch. We must extract everything Gilhaelith knows about Fiz Gorgo, without damaging him too much, then put him to work.’
‘Quite,’ said Gyrull. ‘What of the other humankinds?’
‘Lord Vithis has gathered all his Aachim around him. They’ve built camps near the Foshorn, by the south-western edge of the Dry Sea, planted gardens and harvested enough fish from the Sea of Thurkad to see them through the winter. Now they’re building vast stone structures at the Foshorn.’
‘Are they preparing for war against us?’ said Ryll.
‘There’s little sign of it,’ said Anabyng, ‘though I can’t say what they are up to. And if driven to it –’
‘Since they’ve broken with the old humans, at all costs we must avoid provoking them,’ said Gyrull. ‘Or the Stassor Aachim. Or the exiled ones, for that matter. What was their name?’
‘Clan Elienor,’ said Ryll. ‘Though without their constructs, and reduced to beggary on the shores of the Sea of Thurkad, Elienor can’t threaten us.’
‘If we attack them, Vithis might come to their aid despite sending them into exile. We must do nothing to provoke any of the Aachim, for we cannot fight them and the old humans. But it’s the old humans that worry me. They adapt too quickly, and they’re deadly inventive. We’d better step up the attacks on their manufactories.’
‘Indeed. And now I must rest for an hour or two,’ said Anabyng. ‘It was a wearying flight and I’m spent. After that, we’ll see what the tetrarch can tell us.’ He bowed to the matriarch, nodded to Ryll and went out.
‘You haven’t eaten your meal,’ Gyrull said to Ryll, glancing at the joint on the table.
He walked across and tossed it back in the tray. ‘I no longer enjoy the taste of human flesh, Matriarch. I’d like to talk to you about that … if you have the time. I’ve begun to feel that it’s wrong.’
‘Wrong?’ she said without emphasis.
He had no idea what she was thinking. ‘To eat the flesh of another sentient species, one that is, despite outward appearances, not so very different from ourselves, it just seems … I feel that it reduces us to the level of beasts. And we’re not beasts!’ he cried. Then he went on, more tentatively, ‘Are we, Matriarch?’
‘No, Ryll,’ she said softly. ‘We were artists once, and philosophers, with a noble culture that stretched back a thousand years. In those days our identity did not depend on warriors’ arts. We were once great, and we lost it all. No,’ she said reflectingly, ‘our ancestors abandoned the past so that we could survive in the void. We had no choice.’
‘This war stopped being about survival long ago,’ said Ryll. ‘It’s become existence, and it’s not enough. I want our culture back, Matriarch. I feel hollow inside, as if I’ve lost my soul. And I’m not the only one.’
‘Many of us have begun to feel that way,’ she said. ‘And we matriarchs are doing what we can to shape our people for the future, ill-fitted as we are for the task.’
‘Don’t say that, Matriarch,’ said Ryll. ‘You are the best of us; our guiding force.’
‘We were, in the void, and even in the early days here. But the world is changing too quickly, Ryll, and we’re too fixed in the old ways. We can’t guide you much longer. We must make way for a new generation, and I’m afraid …’
‘The war may soon be over but the peace will be even more dangerous for us, for our warrior caste is not fitted for it. Many of our people can conceive of nothing but war and don’t want to give up its glories, even for peace.’
‘We must find a way to change their minds,’ said Ryll.
‘They know nothing but war and if we take it away without giving them something else, they’ll be broken; people without a purpose. It’ll tear us apart. We matriarchs of the six cities have had much mindspeech on the topic this past year. We’re starting to try to shape the thinking of the progressives, like you …’
‘What about the warriors?’
‘The warriors too, as best we can,’ she said, ‘though with limited success. But they are disciplined and obedient to our edicts – in the void, anything else meant extinction. If all else fails, we will have to issue a Matriarchal Edict. It’s not been done since we made the decision to come out of the void, but I think they’ll obey. I think they’ll lay down their arms, but what happens after that I cannot say.’
‘We must replace our warrior culture with a sounder one, fitted for peace.’
‘With what we had before? How can we, Ryll?’
‘We can’t return to the past, Matriarch. All we can do is discover what we once were, and use the best of that heritage to shape our future here on Santhenar, after the war.’
Gyrull was smiling, and now she put an arm across his shoulders. ‘Your forethought constantly surprises me, Ryll. Come, let’s take a walk and you can tell me more.’
NINETEEN
‘How is he?’ said Nish from the doorway.
Four healers were gathered around the shrouded figure of Xervish Flydd, blocking Nish’s view, and he was reluctant to go closer for fear of the horrors he might see, to say nothing of the righteous wrath of the healers. Cryl-Nish Hlar, artificer, who had faced down the mighty, who had defied the greatest figures on Santhenar including the late and unlamented Ghorr, was afraid of these diminutive healers. He had no place here and no right, and he knew it.
