by Ian Irvine
Something small, frightened and helpless, but Tiaan did not argue. She had coveted the construct for too long.
‘The machine is well provisioned,’ Malien continued, ‘but take what you want from my storerooms. Anything at all.’
‘Thank you.’ What conditions would she put on the gift? Nothing came without an obligation.
Tiaan was exhausted but there was no time for sleep. She spent the rest of the day checking everything and practising. The strong force took a deal of getting used to, for it either flowed like a torrent or not at all. It required much more control, and affected both her mind and her sight. Once, her vision went blue for a minute before flashing back to normal. Another time she thought she was seeing double, a strange hallucination where what she saw through her left eye was a few seconds later than her right. She shook her head and the effect vanished, but another problem remained. Her view of the strong force tended to slip ‘off plane’, which would be disastrous if she was flying. If not for her visual memory, she could not have done it at all.
She would never master the machine in time. Tiaan was terrified of the strong forces; she knew so little about them and Malien could not help. She had to understand them on her own.
‘The design of the flying controller seems a little primitive for Rulke,’ said Malien that evening. ‘Perhaps that’s the problem. There may be something about the original design we haven’t discovered. You’d better get some sleep.’
‘But the Well …’
‘I can hold it a little longer. The morning will be fine, but don’t sleep in.’
That was not comforting. Tiaan kept practising and, by late that night, felt she could operate the machine in relative safety, in its hovering state. Flying was a different matter. When high up, she could not tell how fast she was moving and, if the visibility was poor, it was hard to know whether she was going down or up. But it would have to do.
Rising at first light, she returned to the machine, disabled the sentinels the way Malien had taught her, filled containers with water and did her last checks.
As she climbed out, Malien appeared with a basket and steaming mugs, and a rolled map. ‘This may be of use to you in your travels.’
The map was entitled Part of the Southern Hemisphere of Santhenar, and depicted all the lands between the tropical Isle of Banthey in the north and the frozen Kara Agel in the south.
‘Thank you,’ said Tiaan. ‘It’s beautifully drawn. It must be very old.’
‘Very,’ Malien said dryly. ‘I drew it last night.’
They sat beside the machine for a last meal together.
‘I wish you luck with your construct,’ Malien said.
Tiaan frowned. ‘I don’t like that name. It’s cold, like Vithis.’ She thought for a moment. ‘I shall call it thapter.’
‘Good choice,’ Malien laughed. ‘Where will you go? Back to your own people?’
Tiaan had spent half the night thinking about that, but had not come to a decision. ‘I don’t know. The manufactory is a long way from here. I may go west.’
‘You’ll see plenty of the enemy. The war is at its worst over there.’
‘Then the thapter will be needed.’ Tiaan stood up. Malien was more a mystery than ever. ‘I’d better go.’
‘I hate long farewells.’ Malien embraced her and stood back.
Tiaan climbed in and reached for the controller.
‘Wait!’ called Malien. ‘I have a gift for you.’ She tossed something in the air.
Tiaan caught it. It was a small piece of worked metal in a swirling pattern that was hard to look at, for it seemed to double back on itself, inside, then outside, then inside again. She had seen it somewhere else in Tirthrax. Markings had been inlaid into it, silver on black. Just to look at it was calming.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘What is it?’
‘A symbol of the Well of Echoes,’ Malien replied casually. ‘It signifies infinity, the universe and nothingness. Or to put it another way, the importance, as well as the insignificance, of humanity in the great cosmos. It’s just a token but I’ve laid a virtue on it that may help you find what you are looking for.’
Tiaan put it on the chain around her neck. She knew what she was looking for: revenge! Though even that had lost its force lately. ‘I’ll cherish it always. It will remind me of you.’
Malien smiled and raised her arm.
‘You’ve not said what you require of me,’ Tiaan said after a long interval.
‘I don’t know that I’m wise enough to require anything.’
‘You’ve given me the greatest gift I could hope for. You must want something in return.’
‘The thapter may turn out to be a poisoned fruit, Tiaan. It may ruin your life, or destroy it. I also give it to you because, through accident or design, the amplimet has been imprinted by you. If you cannot use it to the betterment of humanity, who can?’
‘I might be taken by the enemy straight away.’
‘All might be lost in a dozen ways. Even the greatest seer sees only fragments of the future and can never know if what they predict is for good or ill. That’s why I place no condition on you, save to do what you think is right, calmly and clear-headedly, and never out of calamitous passions.’
Was that a warning? Surely it was. ‘I’m afraid.’
‘To live is to be afraid. You’d better go, Tiaan. It’s getting harder to hold the Well.’
Tiaan clung to the controller knob. Already the gift had become a burden. It was not hers at all, but then, how could it be?
‘I feel so alone, and I’ve not a friend in the world.’
‘Apart from me,’ said Malien, with the most fleeting of smiles. ‘And if you should ever need me, come back. Or send word.’
‘I will,’ said Tiaan.
She drew power and the mechanism whined into life, lifting the thapter above the floor. She turned it to face the opening.
‘One last thing,’ Malien called.
‘Yes?’
‘Take care. Whatever you do to Vithis, or Minis, will come back on you tenfold.’
Tiaan went rigid. Malien had known her purpose all along, and still had given her this marvellous thapter. Almost afraid to look, Tiaan sketched her a stiff salute and pushed the knob. The thapter shot forward, much faster than she had expected, and she was hard put to control it as she careered toward the ragged opening in the side of the mountain. She lifted the machine over the piles of rubble, down again to avoid pendant slabs of roof rock, and out into the sunshine. A soaring eagle had to brake in mid-air and was sent tumbling by the shockwave of her passing. Above the glacier, the thapter turned east and disappeared into the mist.
Malien stood watching until the mist concealed it. Already the pain of holding the Well had begun to ease, thankfully. She was near the end of her strength. She would just sit down for a while, then go up and renew the great spell that kept the Well shackled inside Tirthrax. In a way, it was Tirthrax.
Malien sat on the bench behind the remaining two constructs, following Tiaan in her mind’s eye, and fretting about her. She was flying into a maelstrom and Malien could do nothing about it. If only she could have gone with her. Perhaps she should have sent Tiaan to Stassor. No, better to avoid that dangerous complication.
‘I could not even protect my own children,’ she said aloud. ‘I could not save either of them.’ That was the worst part, and it made her unexpectedly long life all the more bitter. A mother should not outlive her children.
Not wanting to start all that again – the useless self-reproach, the futile dwelling on what might have been – she forced against the exhaustion of body and mind and got up. Hard work would keep those thoughts at bay, for the moment.
Passing by the port-all chamber, Malien recalled that she’d previously planned to check it. She spent an hour there and all the while her disquiet grew. Tiaan had assembled the port-all perfectly, so why had it gone so wrong? It took a potent, subtle spell to find out.
As Tiaan
opened the gate to Aachan, the Aachim had stampeded up that spiralling ramp. All that was very clear. Vithis, realising that the port-all was left-handed, not right, and fearing it, had ordered his clan to stay back. They had ignored him and were first into the gate. In desperation he had snatched control from Tiaan, but the gate had gone wrong, hurling all those inside it across the unknown void. The failure had nothing to do with Tiaan.
But the more Malien studied the port-all, and divined what had happened, the more she felt that she had missed something. Or that something had been carefully covered up.
It took hours of the most exhausting toil to uncover it, hours she could not spare. Malien was uncomfortably aware of the unstable Well, and the risk she was taking by not attending to it. But this might be even more important, and once started she could not stop her divination, else those hidden vestiges would vanish like smoke.
And at last she had it. As Vithis took control of the gate, someone had twisted the wormhole, linking it to Tirthrax, inside out. Just for a fraction of a second, but everyone inside had been lost: the entirety of Clan Inthis and some hundreds of other Aachim.
Who could have committed such a monstrous, genocidal deed? Could it have been another Aachim clan? She prayed that it was not. If it had been, Tiaan was flying right toward them. And if not, who on Santhenar had the power, and the malice, to do such a thing?
With a heavy sigh, Malien headed up the stairs to set the Well to rights.
THIRTEEN
The thapter turned over the icefall and headed west, which was where Tiaan’s troubles began. The controller jammed and the thapter kept turning until it was facing Tirthrax again.
She hovered above the blue, deeply crevassed ice not far from the icefall, and disconnected the flight controls. As the thapter settled, clouds of steam hissed up all around. She worked the trumpet but could find nothing wrong with it. She hovered again; the controller was fine now. Tiaan checked the linkages from one end to the other. Everything worked perfectly.
Setting off, she turned and headed west, and again the machine kept turning. It was as if it did not want to leave, though that was absurd. As she drew more power from the field, for a fleeting instant Tiaan saw coloured streaks streaming toward the mountain, and swirling into it. The amplimet must be trying to keep her here.
She set down hard in a vast billow of steam, trying to work out how to overcome the crystal. It was not alive. It could not move or speak. Tiaan could not understand how to deal with it. What could an inert piece of mineral want?
The crystal had already been awake when Joeyn had found it in the mine. It might have been in that state for a million years, and who knew what slow intelligence might have developed in it over that time? Why would it want to free the Well? And what next? She did not dare imagine. Tiaan wished Malien were here to advise her. She thought about going back, but that might be disastrous if the Well had unfrozen further. And whatever the amplimet wanted, she should try to do the opposite.
This time she took off and drew all the power she could handle before flinging the controller over hard. The thapter spun so sharply that her vision went black, but still it turned the other way. She took it down to the base of the cliff and again hovered. Removing the amplimet, she put it in her pouch. Tiaan disconnected the carbon whiskers as well, just in case. Drawing power through just the hedron in its cup, the thapter would no longer fly, only hover like any ordinary construct. Turning west, she thrust on the controller.
The thapter moved forward, away from Tirthrax, without resistance. She kept going all day. It was slow travelling in the broken country at the base of the Great Mountains and she had to constantly detour south around boulder fields, mounds of broken ice at the bottom of icefalls, gorges and other obstacles. The hovering thapter could not rise high enough to cross them.
By the end of the day Tiaan was less than a dozen leagues from Tirthrax. She ate her dinner on top of the thapter, watching the setting sun, then locked the hatch and slept inside. Next day she continued, making better time across untracked snow and through spindly forest, and by the morning after, felt that she might risk flying again.
This time she felt no resistance when using the amplimet – they were beyond the influence of the Well. Tiaan flew on. She was bound to the amplimet now, reliant on it, yet it could not be trusted. Would it do the same thing when next she approached a powerful node? Or would it betray her at the most inopportune time?
Tiaan knew what she had to do – fly straight to the nearest large city, find its scrutator or army commander and turn the thapter over to him. Humanity must be in despair at the Aachim threat. The thapter would give them hope, as well as a weapon better than anything the enemy could field against them.
But every scrutator would know her name by now, and what she had done, for Nish’s skeet would have reached Flydd many days ago. While a far-sighted scrutator might recognise her value, a vindictive one would see only a traitor who must be made example of. From what Tiaan knew of them, the vindictive scrutators outnumbered the other kind, so she would be gambling with her life. First she must do something to prove her loyalty and her worth.
She decided to shadow the fleet of constructs, find out where they were going and, if she could, what their plans were. That would be valuable intelligence and the best she could hope for. Revenge was out of the question.
It did not take her long to pick up the trail, even after all this time. So many machines travelling close to the ground had left an unmistakable path of beaten-down bushes and broken branches. Where they had passed over snow, the crystals had clumped together like grains of sand.
Tiaan followed every winding league of their path. She did not have to, for she could have tracked them from a thousand spans up. But she needed time to master flying the thapter and time to think, though that only emphasised her inadequacies. She had no place dealing with the mighty – she was quite out of her depth.
At night she slept inside, in the most secluded place she could find. Tiaan was not afraid, thinking that most folk would avoid the alien machine on sight, but she did not want anyone to know she was there. She saw few people – the north-west quarter of Mirrilladell was an empty land.
The fleet had headed west from Tirthrax, following the rind of the Great Mountains. Some hundred leagues to the west, the mountain chain turned south, and here the Aachim had spent days searching for a way across. Tiaan followed their trails up one path and another, but all ended in country that not even constructs could cross. They could not negotiate steep banks or cliffs, rugged or very rocky land, nor climb slopes greater than one-in-one.
Finally they had turned south and, near a vast landscape of swamps and mires called the Misty Meres, the dwindling range broke into strings of windswept hills that allowed them through into the west. Ruined guard towers crowned the hills like grey teeth in brown gums, last remnants of the Mirrillim, an insecure people long gone.
Winter had not completely relaxed its grip in Mirrilladell but the lands beyond the mountains now rioted in the luxuriance of spring. A narrow road, the Moonpath, ran west between two large lakes before meeting a broader north–south highway, the Great North Road. It ran north across Lauralin for hundreds of leagues, and south nearly as far. Here the force of constructs had separated. Near Saludith she counted five trails splitting off the main one.
On her tenth day of travel she saw the fleet in the distance, running north toward a rich land ringed by forest and mountain. The map named it as Borgistry, and just south of Borgistry she found their camp. The deciduous trees of the Borgis Woods were already springing into leaf.
It was night when she drew near, keeping low to the ground to avoid being seen, though that was unlikely. The passage of the fleet had raised a dust cloud five spans high. On the other hand, they might have sensing devices that she knew nothing about.
Tiaan flew east then north along the Great Chain of Lakes, to the point where a scattered line of volcanoes thrust up through the skirts of the f
orest. Judging by the luxuriance of the vegetation, it was a long time since any of them had erupted, though several were smoking. Setting down her craft halfway up the slope of the nearest peak, Tiaan checked her surroundings, made a campfire and prepared dinner. From here she could soon tell if the fleet moved.
She did not sleep that night. The promise, or threat, of tomorrow kept her awake. And also, though she suppressed the thought each instant she had it, of Minis. He was a lying, treacherous man whose word meant nothing to him. He had betrayed her. And still the memory sent her heart pounding.
Before dawn broke she was in the air, meaning to conduct a reconnaissance over the fleet. Tiaan hoped that, at this time of the day, and high enough up, she could do that undetected. If she did nothing else, she could learn valuable information about the disposition of their forces.
Her hand shook on the controller trumpet. She wanted to render the constructs useless. Wanted to see the Aachim left helpless, abandoned, bereft. And she wanted Minis to suffer. Or was she following Minis because, despite what he had done to her, she could not keep away from him? Was she truly that weak, that pathetic?
Yes, she was. She was bound to him by hatred now, because breaking free would be even more painful. And she would never be free until she felt neither love nor hate, only indifference.
That realisation was a release of sorts, though she was not strong enough to put Minis behind her. With her emotions fluttering like a butterfly in a cage, she cruised across the camp, high in the dark sky.
The machines were drawn up in a seven-sided array around an open space, in the middle of which several large tents, and dozens of smaller ones, had been erected. The larger tents touched each other, leaving a shadowed space in the middle. The area was lit by globes on poles and she saw vast selections of weapons, piles of supplies, and ranks of soldiers practising battle manoeuvres or firing at targets. They were preparing for war.
