He’d had her stroke a piece of iron with a lodestone until it was magnetised and she could pick a nail with it. Later he had sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and moved the nail around underneath. The filings had formed curving patterns sweeping from one end of the magnet to the other.
The shape of the fields (for there were at least two here, unlike other nodes she had experience with) told her that the spire was an enormous magnet or collection of magnets. Tiaan had done other experiments with magnets, making other patterns. By moving a magnet inside a coil of wire she had made circular patterns around the wire. They had fascinated her so much that she fell behind in her work and had been reprimanded by Crafter Barkus. Tiaan had never gone back to magnets. There had been no time for toys at the manufactory.
What might a magnet as large as a mountain be able to do? What power it must have!
‘I can see the fields,’ she said.
Weeks went by, a time of the most exhausting mental labour. Day after day Tiaan spent on her stool, exploring the unusual paired fields, working out how to channel them safely, and then creating the aura in the cages. The work left her head throbbing at night, and sometimes it still ached when a hostile Liett hauled her from her bed in the morning. And every time, after using the amplimet, Tiaan dreamed the wildest crystal dreams about flesh-formed monsters.
They worked every day for all the waking hours. The lyrinx kept no holidays or feast days. Nor had they any concept of recreation, so far as she could tell. If they had a culture she saw no signs of it, apart from the wind music. The place was undecorated: no artworks or pottery, no furniture except of the most rudimentary kind. She knew the lyrinx could read and write, though she saw no books, scrolls or any other kind of document. But of course this place was a workshop and laboratory, dedicated to the war. Their homes, or nests, could be completely different. Moreover their language was incomprehensible, to say nothing of skin-speech. Their greatest poets and orators might have been reciting beside her and she would have known nothing about it. Alternatively, Ryll might have been telling the truth. Perhaps the lyrinx were a lost people, without even their own Histories.
Despite her efforts, the lyrinx did not seem to be making progress. Tiaan was glad of it. They were careful to hide the real purpose of their experiments from her, but the procession of bizarre, flesh-formed creatures that writhed and squealed and expired on the bench was terrifying. She could not bear to think how the lyrinx would use them, if they succeeded.
Tiaan despised herself for collaborating with the enemy. As the work progressed she became filled with self-loathing. She rebelled many times, and each time they simply took away the amplimet. Each time the agony was greater.
The lyrinx became increasingly frustrated with their inability to understand the amplimet and the fields Tiaan could tap with it. For years their most talented mancers had been working with captured controllers, but to no effect. They simply could not use such devices.
Each day, after her other work was done, they interrogated her, trying to wrest the secret from her. They made Tiaan demonstrate her art from first principles, as if teaching the lowest prentice. They had spent weeks watching and studying her while she explored the fields below and around the spire. They monitored her with strange instruments, some half-mechanical and half-alive, like living versions of her controllers. Coeland suggested that she was deliberately thwarting them. Liett made veiled threats.
It made no difference. They understood how her devices worked, and the nature of the fields here. They could sense the raw power the spire was bathed in – that was why they had come here in the first place. They could visualise the fields with the captured controllers and with her amplimet. But they could not draw that power, no matter how hard they tried, or how cleverly. The ability simply was not in them.
I must be the rankest coward on Santhenar, Tiaan thought one night as she lay in bed, hands pressed to her throbbing temples. The day’s work had been particularly gruelling. I deserve to be killed and eaten.
She felt strangely detached from her body, as if a crystal dream was coming. Or was it crystal fever? They had driven her so terribly hard lately. She drifted into a daze where the ache persisted and she was still aware of the room, but everything was subtly shifted.
Crack! Lines of fire lashed across her back and curled around her side, ending in blinding stings on her belly. Crack! More lashes, crossing the first.
An image, distant and out of focus: a man hanging suspended from an engraved dome. Another, across the room, hurling punishment stars at his unprotected body. Each star had a soft central core trailing many thread-like tentacles, like those of a jellyfish. And like a jellyfish they wrapped around, stinging and burning.
There was something about the prisoner – the tall, well-proportioned frame, the dark hair hanging like a mop over his face. Slowly she brought him into focus and her own pain faded, becoming no more than a silken cord across her back, a caress.
The man threw up his head in agony. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. He seemed to be staring right into her eyes, reproaching her for her oath-breaking. ‘Faithless friend,’ he sang out between the strikes. ‘Why have you forsaken me?’
It was Minis, her love. He had raised his people’s hopes and she had let him down. Tiaan came fully awake and the daydream disappeared. He was the reason she was still alive; only she could save him. It was her destiny, and once she did, the Aachim would change the balance. With their aid, humanity would be able to stand up to the lyrinx. She would no longer be a traitor. Tiaan would be the woman who had saved the world.
But first she must escape from Kalissin and make her way a hundred leagues across country to Tirthrax. That would not be easy. Tarralladell and Mirrilladell, scoured bare by ice sheets over thirty thousand years, were a mass of rivers, swamps and elongated lakes that ran south from the Great Mountains to the inland seas of Tallallamel and Milmillamel. There was no crossing this country from east to west, after the thaw. No roads or bridges went that way. All but local traffic moved north-south, by boat in the summer and by keel on the ice in winter, though winter was so cold that few people travelled at all. They huddled in their huts and prayed that the food would last until spring. How was she to cross such country alone?
The latch rattled. Leaping out of bed, Tiaan flung on her clothes. If she did not, Liett would haul her down to work naked.
Liett seemed particularly irritable today. Tiaan had her pants on but only one arm through her sleeve when she was dragged out the door. She felt foolish, stumbling behind the hurrying lyrinx, trying to dress one-handed.
In the work chamber, Liett thrust her across the room. ‘Get to work! And see that you do better than yesterday, or today may be your last.’
That only made things worse and the day turned out as unproductive as all the previous ones. By nightfall Liett was trembling with frustration. Several times, looking up from her work, Tiaan noticed the lyrinx staring at her. The expression in her eyes was disturbing. Suddenly Liett sprang up, strode to the door and flicked the fingerlock. Tiaan wondered why.
Returning to her bench, the lyrinx began arranging her incubation jars. Tiaan put it out of mind and was concentrating on the field when Liett took her from behind and held her arm down flat. Using an implement like a leather worker’s punch, Liett cut out a disc of skin and flesh, the size of her little fingernail, from the inside of Tiaan’s left arm.
Such a small wound, but Tiaan slumped on her stool, feeling faint. Liett macerated the sample into particles too tiny to see and stirred it into a jar of yellow-tinged fluid, like broth. Air bubbled through the fluid. She spent the rest of the day there, concentrating hard while Tiaan trickled power to maintain the aura inside the metal bars. Liett changed the fluid several times.