Geomancer

'Can you see me?' Nish asked eagerly.

'You don't have any talent.' She said it so baldly that he cringed.

'You can't see me either,' Irisis said in a dead voice.

'Oh, yes. I can see you! But you're not a knot, you're a hard black ball.'

After a pause Irisis spoke. 'You said fans.'

'Another fan goes behind me. It's azure now, much smaller. I can't see it so well. And fans go out to the sides.' She held her arms out. 'And up, and down. The one that goes down is brown but I can't see much on it.'

'Brilliant!' said Irisis. 'That's the talent we've been working so hard to tap? She scribbles on fans? We might as well ask the perquisitor to cut off our heads right now.'

Ullii froze with her arms out. Nish gave Irisis a furious glare.

Ullii slowly rotated, arms spread, until she faced Nish. 'Cut your head off?' she whispered.

'If we don't find Artisan Tiaan and get her back, that's what will happen to us,' said Nish. 'What we were hoping, Ullii, was to make a magic device that we could use with you, to see where Tiaan might be.'

'It doesn't have to be fans,' said Ullii. 'It can be anything I want it to be. Sometimes the world is like an egg floating in the air, full of coloured speckles. Or -'

Irisis gripped a handful of yellow hair as if to tear it out. She began grinding her teeth.

Nish squatted down in front of Ullii. 'The problem is, Ullii, that we don't understand how you see the world. We don't see in fans, or specks in eggs, and we don't know how to use your lattice to find Tiaan. We have to find her or we will lose the war and the lyrinx -' He broke off as she shrank away.

'She has to know,' said Irisis.

'The lyrinx will eat us all,' Nish finished.

Ullii choked, scuttled into the storeroom and curled into a ball. They did not go after her.

Nish carried the platter of food to the desk, offering it to Irisis. She refused. He took a handful of dried figs, tearing their leathery skins open with his teeth and sucking the grainy insides out. Irisis found the sound particularly irritating.

'This isn't going well, Cryl-Nish!'

He looked up, startled. 'That's the first time you've used my proper name in ages.'

'Which should tell you how desperate I feel.'

'I can't believe you'd give up, Irisis.'

'We'll never do it. We'll never see what she sees, and even if we could, I can't make a device to hunt Tiaan down. You know why.'

'I'm beginning to,' said Nish.

'What are you going to tell your father?'

'That it's impossible to make a seeker device because it would take years to work out how Ullii does it. That's true enough, anyway.'

'Yes! No need to say that it's because I'm a useless, incompetent fraud!'

'No need,' Nish echoed. 'We're finished, then.'

He wandered the room, looking at the charts, books and scrolls, and the strange, half-finished devices on the bench. Irisis tore the end off a stick of cinnamon-flavoured sausage. She ate a small piece before laying it aside and staring gloomily at the dusty table.

Someone knocked on the outer door. Nish ignored it but the knocking continued.

'Will you answer the damned thing!' Irisis snapped.

He opened the inner door, unbolted the outer. It was the perquisitor, looking agitated. 'Well?' Jal-Nish cried.

'We're making progress,' lied Nish. 'I can't talk now; we're in the middle of something.'

Jal-Nish grabbed him by the shirt. 'You've got till dawn. Gi-Had's troops found Tiaan in the mine but a band of lyrinx attacked them. Gi-Had was the only one to survive. And Tiaan… Tiaan…' He choked on his own rage. 'This is going to ruin me.'

'What?' cried Nish. A cold foreboding came over him. 'What is it? Is she dead?'

'Her body wasn't among the others. Either she's dead and eaten, or they've taken her! If they torture our secrets out of her…'

'Maybe she's escaped,' Irisis interrupted. 'She's good at it.'

'No one could escape a lyrinx. What am I going to tell the scrutator?'

Nish sank to his knees. 'What are we going to do?'

The perquisitor hauled him up. 'The scrutator wants Tiaan. We're going to find her, if she's alive, and get her back.'

He flung Nish backward to land hard on his bottom. 'You've got until dawn. Succeed or fail, you two are coming with us to finish your work, or to go up against the lyrinx as common soldiers.' He slammed the door in Nish's face.

'I feel sick,' said Nish. 'Like when my father asked me about my school work. Nothing was ever good enough.'

Selecting a piece of cheese, Irisis gnawed at a hard edge. Nish scratched his fingernails on the floorboards. The noise was so annoying that she wanted to smack him in the mouth.

'There's only one thing we can do,' said Nish, 'since making a seeker device is quite impossible. We'll have to take Ullii with us and try to use her directly.'

'She'll go mad!'

'Our necks depend on finding a way.'

Ullii came creeping over to Nish and touched his cheek. 'I want to help you, Nish.'

'I know you do.' He sat up. 'Can you see Tiaan?'

Ullii shrugged. 'I don't know what she looks like.'

Irisis leaned forward. 'The other day you said you could see a woman with a bright crystal. Can you still see her?'

'The crystal went out.'

'You mean she's dead?' cried Nish.

'I can't see her.'

'When was this?'

'Today. Yesterday.'

'Which, Ullii? It's important.'

'I don't know.'

Irisis put a controller on the table and unfolded its arms. 'This was made by Tiaan. It might help you sense her out.'

Ullii did not look at it. 'I don't need to sense her out. If the crystal wakes, I'll see it in my lattice.'

'Is the woman Tiaan?' Irisis demanded. 'Is her knot like this controller's?'

'No, but I can tell she made it.'

'So the woman was Tiaan?' Nish said urgently.

'Yes.'

'At last!' Irisis cried. 'And what is the crystal? Is it like the one in this?' She held the controller out.

'No,' said Ullii.

'What about this?' Irisis took the pliance from her neck and pressed it into the seeker's hands.

'No, it's much stronger.'

'What can it be?' said Nish.

Irisis's blue eyes positively gleamed. 'I wonder…?'

'What?'

'Doesn't matter.'

'Do you understand maps?' Nish said to Ullii.

'I know what they are. I've never looked at one. The bright light hurts my eyes.'

Pulling down one of the charts he had been looking at earlier, he unrolled it on the floor. 'This is a map of the manufactory. Here is the room where you live…' He broke off. 'Of course, you can't see it, and I can't describe it well enough.'

She stared at him through the mask. A long silence. She shivered. Finally, 'I will try with the… goggles. Just for a little while.'

He fetched them off the bench then eased the mask off her face. Her eyes were screwed shut. He fitted the goggles and buckled the straps.

Irisis, noting how his fingers grazed Ullii's nape, scowled.

Ullii looked down.

'Can you see the map?' Nish asked.

'Yes.' Her reply was faint.

He explained the symbols for walls, doors, windows and furniture. She seemed to catch on quickly. Ullii lived in a world of symbols. 'Your room is here. This is the way we walked today. This is where we are now.'

She traced the walls with a finger, so Nish knew she could see them.

'This symbol is the scale. You can use it to work out how far things are from each other – how many steps we walked.'

She understood the concept of measurement but could not apply it. Direction was another problem – she knew right and left, front and back, but the points of the compass meant nothing to her. Her lattice was not based on a fixed frame of reference.

Nish tried to explain north, south, east and west, but Ullii related them to right hand and left hand, becoming hopelessly confused when he turned the map around. He showed her another map, of the lands between Tiksi, the manufactory and her home town of Fassafarn. That meant nothing to her either – the journey here, inside her bag all the daylight hours, had been such a nightmare that she had blocked everything out. Ullii had no idea how far she'd gone, what lands she had crossed or even how long it had taken.