Chimaera

by Ian Irvine

  Malien tried that, creeping to the outside edge, putting the thapter’s battered front against it and pushing hard. The fabric of the funnel bulged out, out, out, finally enclosing them in a bubble that tore off and was fired away like a speck of mud from a wheel.

  Tiaan looked back. ‘Don’t look back,’ said Malien.

  Tiaan ducked her head as a glow lit up the sky, brighter than a hundred suns. It became ever brighter, and the shock began to reverberate back and forth inside her head, building up and up and up until, finally, she had to let go.

  ‘Tiaan!’ Malien was shaking her. ‘Wake up.’

  ‘Don’t think I can,’ Tiaan said groggily.

  Malien shook her harder. ‘You have to. We forgot one vital thing.’

  ‘Wassat?’ Tiaan slurred.

  ‘When the node and anti-node annihilated each other, it disrupted all the fields for leagues around. It’s destroyed my crystal, I can’t draw any power and we’re falling.’

  ‘So what can I do?’ Tiaan was too dazed to be worried.

  ‘Use the amplimet, if it works. Failing that, draw on its stored power to get us to the ground.’

  Tiaan stood up shakily.

  ‘We’re falling fast,’ Malien said urgently.

  Tiaan’s thoughts flowed as sluggishly as molasses. She staggered and had to hang onto the side rail.

  Malien snatched the amplimet from around Tiaan’s neck, tore out her shattered crystal and put Tiaan’s in its socket. She brought Tiaan’s hand down on the controller.

  ‘Now, Tiaan!’

  They were plunging to the ground like a meteor. ‘Thirty seconds,’ said Malien.

  Tiaan’s head hurt, and she could hardly remember what to do to make the thapter go. ‘The amplimet won’t obey me. It won’t draw power from any field. It must have lost the ability, going through the gate.’

  ‘Twenty seconds,’ said Malien. ‘Use its stored power.’

  Tiaan struggled but her mind remained blank.

  ‘Ten seconds!’ Malien slapped her hard across the cheek. ‘Wake up.’

  Tiaan found just enough in her to pull the machine out, a bare few hundred spans above a line of arid hills. It jerked forwards, then sideways, bucking and shuddering like a buffalo in a pen. A long way behind them the steaming waters were already rushing in to reclaim the space that the Well had occupied.

  Tiaan rode the careering thapter for as long as she could, which wasn’t even a minute. She could barely stand up. ‘I think –’ It lurched wildly. ‘Help me, Malien.’

  Malien placed her hand on Tiaan’s, on the controller, but the thapter shot left, twisted right then spun in a circle. ‘Oh, the amplimet’s all wrong now!’ she cried.

  Tiaan’s bones felt plastic and her head was flashing from hot to cold in sickening waves. She couldn’t hold it up. She leaned it against the cold wall, which felt a little better.

  ‘Do you think we’ve made any difference?’ she said directly. ‘To Jal-Nish, I mean?’

  ‘I – I don’t think so, Tiaan.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘I can’t. I just have a bad feeling, and I’ve learned to trust my feelings over the centuries.’

  ‘What if we were to sneak back to Ashmode? Could we mount an attack on Jal-Nish? Or his air-floater?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Malien, squeezing Tiaan’s hand. The mechanism was hardly making any sound, now, and the thapter was slowing rapidly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘There’s not enough power stored in the amplimet to take us there. It’s practically drained, and the fields here may be disrupted for weeks. There’s power in them but I can’t get to it.’

  It didn’t seem right for the great adventure to end this way. ‘Where are we, anyway?’ said Tiaan.

  ‘Somewhere south of the Trihorn Falls, as they once were. Those are the Jelbohn Hills on the southern horizon.’

  Tiaan stood up to look over the brown, featureless land. ‘How far is it to Ashmode?’ Once she would have known it instantly, but her mind couldn’t recall the map.

  ‘About eighty leagues. When we came out of the Well it hurled us away at colossal speed. We’re the best part of twenty days’ march away, in this trackless country.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I’ll head for the coast of the Sea of Thurkad. See it, across to our right?’ The mechanism sputtered and Malien put the nose down. ‘I can’t risk flying, in case we lose power suddenly. Once we do, this thapter will only be good for cutlery.’

  ‘Or ploughshares,’ said Tiaan. There was a gentle tap on the hatch. She pulled back the bolt with her toe.

  ‘I’ll hover it along the coast as long as the power lasts,’ said Malien. ‘When we get to a decent town you can take ship wherever you want to go. At least we’re not short of coin.’

  Merryl lifted the hatch and put his head up, flashing Tiaan that heart-warming smile. ‘Did I hear some kind of a bang a while back?’

  ‘You could say that,’ said Tiaan. ‘We destroyed the Well, hoping it would disable Jal-Nish, too. Unfortunately it’s disrupted the fields and we can’t get back to Ashmode.’

  ‘Yggur and Flydd are resourceful,’ said Merryl. ‘I’m sure they’ll come up with something.’

  Tiaan could not be so sanguine, though she appreciated him putting the best face on it. Not even two decades of slavery had been able to curb Merryl’s optimistic outlook.

  The thapter skimmed up a gentle rise covered in short grass with a hint of green, unusual in this brown land, and sighed to a stop on the crest. Tiaan looked down a long slope, also sward-covered, to a rocky creek littered with boulders.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Malien. ‘The amplimet is finished, and so is the thapter.’

  ‘But …’ said Tiaan.

  ‘There probably isn’t a hedron within a hundred leagues that could replace the amplimet. It’s over, Tiaan. The thapter has no power. It’s useless metal. From here, we have to walk.’

  Tiaan climbed down the side, took off her boots and socks and walked around the thapter, taking pleasure in the springy grass under her soles. The great adventure is over, she thought, and I’m tainted. A criminal. I’ll never fly a thapter again. She put one hand on the black flank of the machine and felt a tear well in her eye.

  Merryl clambered down, rubbing his back. ‘I think I’ll walk down to the creek. I’ve spent too much of my life cooped up in caves and thapters.’

  ‘You’ll have all the walking you can take before we get home,’ said Tiaan.

  ‘I can’t wait.’ He grinned and set off, arms swinging. Tiaan watched him halfway down the hill, infected by his cheer.

  Malien had just stepped off the ladder when there came a cry of terror from the thapter.

  ‘No!’ Gilhaelith cried. ‘No!’

  Tiaan began scrambling up as Gilhaelith appeared at the top. He was shuddering, wild-eyed, and his woolly hair was sticking out in all directions.

  ‘The amplimet!’ he said hoarsely. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It’s still in its socket,’ said Tiaan calmly, thinking he must have had a nightmare. ‘It’s all right. It’s drained of all power.’

  ‘Get it out! Quick.’ His head disappeared, then he heaved himself up onto the side, the geomantic globe in his arms, and slid down onto the grass.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Malien.

  He ran about ten strides, put down the globe and knelt beside it. ‘I’ve just realised something that I should have understood a long time ago. Tiaan, do you remember when you flew over Alcifer a month or more back, and something very strange happened?’

  ‘Someone – Ryll I suppose – tried to bring us down with the power patterner,’ said Tiaan. It had been a week after they’d dropped the spores into the bellows. ‘And then, for an instant, time itself seemed to freeze.’

  ‘I did that, by accident,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘I was using my globe at the one place in Alcifer where power was still sleeping since the days of Rulke. But somethi
ng else happened at that moment. As time froze, I was looking up through the dimensions and I saw the amplimet light up like a searchlight.’

  ‘What?’ said Malien, staring at him. ‘Do you mean it woke?’

  ‘It must have been driven to the second stage of awakening,’ Gilhaelith said grimly.

  ‘And it’s been quietly biding its time ever since. And now the destruction of the Well could have tipped it over the edge to the third stage – full awakening.’

  ‘What does full awakening mean?’ said Tiaan, looking from one to the other.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Malien.

  ‘But surely it can’t do anything here, with the local nodes disrupted and its stored power drained?’

  ‘In full awakening, it can take power from anywhere. Tiaan, grab the amplimet and chuck it down to me.’

  Tiaan went up the side. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘Just do it!’ Malien shouted, her jaw muscles spasming.

  As Tiaan went up, Gilhaelith began moving the pointers furiously on his globe. She withdrew the amplimet, extremely gingerly. It didn’t feel any different; indeed, the light passing down the centre was dull red and beating sluggishly. Nonetheless, just holding the crystal sent a shiver up her back. She’d seen what it could do, too many times.

  She tossed it to Malien but Gilhaelith shot up like an unleashed spring and plucked it out of the air high above her head.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  ‘Destroying it isn’t the way.’ Gilhaelith sat it on the ground between the geomantic globe and himself, and resumed his rapid but controlled movements.

  ‘It’s the only way …’ said Malien, but did not attempt to take it off him. ‘Tiaan?’ She walked away across the hill.

  Tiaan followed. ‘What’s he doing, Malien?’

  ‘I would have thrown the amplimet into the red-hot compartment underneath the thapter and let the heat destroy it,’ she said. ‘Assuming it didn’t anthracise me first. But Gilhaelith is a truly great geomancer; perhaps his way is less risky.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Tiaan, admiring the way he worked. The geomantic globe was the most perfect device she’d ever seen. The nodes had lit up all across it, and threads of light were inching out from a number of the brightest. She went back and walked around it, keeping at a distance. There were seven bright nodes. One represented the node at Alcifer, another Tirthrax, and a third one was near Nennifer. The others were spread across the world at places she’d never been.

  ‘They’re the controlling nodes,’ said Gilhaelith, carefully adjusting his pointers.

  And perhaps the ones to be controlled, she thought suddenly. Or used to take control of all of them.

  Gilhaelith looked around, gave a great sigh, as if of bliss, and began to work faster. All his long adult life, more than a hundred and fifty years, he had worked to discover the secret of the great forces that moved and shaped the world. His great project, he’d called it in Nyriandiol. After coming back from Alcifer he’d claimed to have given up the search, but clearly he hadn’t. That must be what he was doing now. He wasn’t trying to curb the amplimet at all.

  Tiaan could scarcely believe it. Was Gilhaelith prepared to risk everything to satisfy his own lust for knowledge, at such a desperate moment? Truly, she reflected, humanity doesn’t deserve the Art. We simply can’t be trusted to use it wisely.

  And then Tiaan came to a far less pleasant realisation. The geomantic globe was too perfect a model of Santhenar. As the small is to the great was one of the key principles of the Art. The Principle of Similarity was another. What if the amplimet took control of the globe? It would provide the perfect conduit to control all the nodes in the world.

  ‘Gilhaelith?’ she called.

  He shuttled his hands back and forth, then came halfway to his feet, knees bent, plucking at the back of his head as if trying to pull out an errant hair. What was the matter with him? Gilhaelith gave a great shudder and sat down again, his long, gawky legs crossed. He resumed his work, more mechanically now, as if his joints had gone stiff.

  ‘Gilhaelith?’ she said sharply.

  He turned his head jerkily, stared at her with glittering eyes and turned back to the globe. The controlling nodes began to pulse slowly, in unison with the pulsing of the amplimet. The threads of light were still slowly extending from them. And when all the controlling nodes were linked? What then?

  Tiaan’s heart gave a painful lurch as she realised what was happening. ‘Malien,’ she shrieked. ‘The amplimet is taking control of him.’

  Again Gilhaelith turned, more stiffly than before, but this time she saw terror in his semi-crystalline eyes. His mouth came open. ‘Help me,’ he said in a brittle croak.

  If she tried, the amplimet would seize her as well, and Malien wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. And then it would take over the world. Tiaan knew she lacked the strength to fight the amplimet, and didn’t see how she could destroy it. It would kill her first. But if she did nothing, Gilhaelith would die an excruciating death.

  He forced back with all his strength, reversing the crystallisation agonisingly, but the amplimet’s power was relentless. ‘Tiaan,’ he gasped, ‘for the friendship that was once between us, help me.’

  EIGHTY

  Malien came running up, then stopped beside Tiaan, staring at the geomancer. She shook her head and drew Tiaan aside. ‘There’s nothing we can do to save him unless you’re game to snatch up the amplimet and toss it into the red-hot compartment. I’m not.’

  Tiaan was remembering Ghaenis’s hideous death by anthracism. ‘Attacking the amplimet would be suicide.’

  ‘I know.’ Malien squatted down and put her head in her hands. ‘I should do it anyway, for the good of the world, but …’

  ‘I’m not brave enough either,’ said Tiaan after a long pause, for an idea was slowly coming into focus. ‘But I wonder if there’s another way.’

  ‘What other way?’

  ‘Help me!’ Gilhaelith reached out to Tiaan. The crystallisation had run up his fingers, across his hands and was now extending up his arms. His feet and lower legs had gone too, and his eyes had the most peculiar, faceted glitter.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, turning away. She couldn’t bear to watch what was happening to him, and do nothing.

  ‘Which way, Tiaan?’ said Malien.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,’ she said quietly. ‘How no one can be trusted with the power to control the nodes. Especially not Jal-Nish.’

  ‘There’s nothing can be done to stop him,’ said Malien.

  ‘I think there might be.’

  ‘Oh?’ Malien said with a sharp intake of breath.

  Tiaan’s eyes were drawn back to Gilhaelith, whose brittle hands were still moving over the globe, though very slowly and mechanically now. The threads of light would soon link all the controlling nodes. Four of them were connected already, and fainter threads had begun to extend from them to other, less powerful nodes. ‘I think I know how to close down all the nodes for good, and Jal-Nish’s tears with them.’

  Malien’s head jerked around. ‘We talked about that once before, Tiaan.’

  It would spell the end of the Secret Art, at least the way humanity had been using it since the great Nunar codified the laws of mancing. There would be no more thapters, air-floaters, constructs or farspeakers. No field-powered Arts or devices of any kind, save those that had been laboriously charged up in the ways known to the ancients. And maybe not them either.

  ‘You’re … not going to do anything, are you?’ croaked Gilhaelith.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gilhaelith,’ Tiaan said, and she was, for she did care for him. Tears pricked at the insides of her eyelids, as if crystals were forming there in mimicry of his transformation. She had to let him die. If she saved him, her friends would all be slain. ‘I can’t.’

  He began to curse her, bitterly and unrelentingly, in a voice that sounded like someone walking over broken gl
ass. Then Gilhaelith broke off in mid-word, his face twisted in agony.

  ‘It did this to me,’ he whispered. ‘It planned it all long ago, and I was too stupid to see it.’

  ‘What did?’ she said.

  ‘Way back in Snizort, when I was trapped in the tar, I heard a whisper in my head telling me to create a phantom crystal and use it to save myself. I did so, but its fragments have been there ever since and no matter what I did I couldn’t get rid of them – it wouldn’t let them go. They just lay there, burning me whenever I used power, and doing more damage. But as soon as I brought the globe down here, the fragments came together in my mind and they were just like a model of the amplimet, linking it to the real one. I couldn’t resist it. I tried, Tiaan, I really did, but it was too strong.’

  He was cut off by another agonised spasm. The crystallisation must be reaching his vital organs. And, from the corner of her inner eye, Tiaan could see filaments beginning to extend out of the geomantic globe, into the ethyr. The amplimet was using the globe to mimic the real nodes and the links between them. Once it had done that, it would be too late to stop it.

  And she had to stop it, but if she just smashed the amplimet, or hurled it into the red-hot compartment, she would have lost the opportunity to do anything for her friends, or to stop Jal-Nish. Tiaan was determined to do both, even at the cost of all the nodes. Gilhaelith’s folly only reinforced her determination that such unfettered power could not be allowed to exist.

  Her plan was desperately dangerous. In all likelihood, she would die even more horribly than Gilhaelith.

  Just do it! She dived, snatched the amplimet from between Gilhaelith’s feet and held it high. It was pulsing even more slowly now, and the blood-red light glowed right through her hand, picking out the pale and fragile bones.

  ‘Don’t take the risk, Tiaan!’ shouted Malien. ‘Throw it into the heat under the thapter.’

  If she tried that now, she would die. Tiaan stepped back a couple of paces and fixed on the geomantic globe, seeing its perfection in her mind and forming the sequence of links between its controlling nodes into a vast mental network. Now for the most desperate step of all – she had to act as if she were supporting the amplimet, doing what it wanted. To oppose it would be to suffer instant anthracism.