Muttering to themselves, they went back to their beds. Tiaan locked her door and was just tucking the blanket in when she was flung back into that crystal dream, wide awake. This time she was standing on an island in the middle of a broad river. Behind was a pavilion with seven columns surmounted by a dome of beaten copper.
She was reaching into a basket of fruit when there came an explosion of steam and a wavefront of boiling water thundered down the river. She smelt cooked fish. The water divided on either side of the island before roaring past.
The level sank. Tiaan sighed, but a heart-stopping grinding noise came from upstream, followed by a blast of superheated air. Inexorably, around the bend rumbled a wall of lava – the red viscous ooze continually breaking through the blackened crust. On it came, and on, and nothing was going to stop it.
Tiaan ran back and forth across the island. Boiling water surrounded her. There was nowhere to go. She stood back, watching the lava crackle toward her. ‘Help!’ she cried uselessly.
Help! echoed that handsome face on the balcony, the young man from her dreams. He looked her way, started, and gave a sweet, sad smile that brought tears to her eyes. He put out his arms. He cares for me, she thought, amazed. She began to run, then a wave of lava swept him away.
Again she screamed, again woke; again she reassured the increasingly angry crowd at the door.
Tiaan tried to sleep but was plunged back into the nightmare, running down the corridors of a palace as volcanic bombs fell everywhere, crashing through the ceilings, exploding and setting fire to the magnificent building. ‘Help!’
There was no answer.
NINE
By the time a drizzling morning broke against Tiaan’s solitary window, the dormitory was in uproar and she could no longer distinguish between being awake and dreaming. A nurse checked her symptoms and called the healer, who shouted for the apothek. Between them they decided that Tiaan had gone mad and were about to put her in a straitjacket when Overseer Gi-Had came running.
‘What the blazes are you doing?’ He hurled them out of the way.
‘It’s crystal fever,’ pronounced Healer Tul-Kin gloomily. He reeked of parsnip brandy. ‘Her mind’s broken and will never recover. Might as well send her to the breeding factory.’
‘In a straitjacket?’
The healer shrugged. ‘It only goes to her waist. The business can still be done.’
‘My arse! We can’t do without her. Find out what’s wrong and fix it!’
They took Tiaan to the infirmary, where a nurse bathed her face and forehead, and fed her tea and barley broth. The waking nightmares continued until noon, when she suddenly sat up, saying, ‘What am I doing here?’
She remembered the mad episodes, but only as dreams that were rapidly fading. In an hour or so the details were gone. All that remained was the young man on the balcony and a world exploding. He really cared about her. She knew he did. It was more than a dream. He had been searching for her all this time. She had to find out who he was.
They let her go back to her workroom in the mid-afternoon. The prentices gathered round, delighted that she had recovered. They liked Tiaan, even if they weren’t her friends.
Irisis stood in the background, her face unreadable. Tiaan vaguely remembered the artisan’s face at the door, the pleasure her rival could not entirely conceal. She wondered about that. The whole episode was so strange, and becoming more unreal every second, that she could find no sense in it. Had it been crystal fever? She could not bring herself to believe it. It did not fit the pattern she’d been taught. But then, those with the fever could never be convinced that they had it.
Tiaan sent Gol to fetch the globe, crystal and helm from her room and got back to work. While she was waiting for him to return, old Joeyn came in, covered in dust from the mine. On seeing her, he beamed from ear to ear.
‘I was afraid,’ he said when the prentices had gone back to their benches. ‘Such rumours I heard! I was preparing to break down the doors and carry you away.’
Tiaan was so touched that tears sprang to her eyes. ‘You would condemn yourself to save me?’ She embraced him.
‘Life has already condemned me. What do I care how I die? But you have so much to live for, Tiaan. So much to give; and receive!’
She felt quite overcome. Gol came running with her globe and helm. ‘Did you bring the headache balm?’ she asked the boy.
‘You didn’t ask me to. Shall I get it?’
‘Never mind. Thank you, Gol. I’d like you to empty the baskets around the prentices’ benches.’
The lad raced out. Joeyn hefted the wire globe in his scarred fingers. ‘I’d better go. Take care, Tiaan. I’m afraid for you.’
‘I’ll be all right. I’ve just been working too hard.’
‘There’s more to it than that. There’s malice behind this, Tiaan, and we both know where it’s coming from.’ He looked over his shoulder. Irisis, at her bench, gave him a glare of cold ferocity. ‘If you’re ever in trouble, no matter what it is, come to me.’
He was gone. Overwhelmed by all the work she had to do, Tiaan bent to her globe again. She felt awful, hot and cold at once, as if she had a bad dose of the flu. It was withdrawal from her ruined pliance and there was only one thing to be done about it – work herself so hard that there was no room for anything else. But what if it was crystal fever? Overwork was just the way to bring it back, permanently. Tiaan tried to put that out of mind. She had to prove herself to Gi-Had. Tomorrow might be too late. She needed a breakthrough.
As Tiaan was puzzling over the problem, a few lines from Nunar’s book, The Mancer’s Art, came to her mind. The process may generate a shifting aura about the crystal powering the controller… A nearby sensitive might be able to detect this aura, though in normal use it is expected to be insignificant.
What had Nunar meant by normal use? Surely she’d had in mind small devices that used small amounts of power. At the time, more than ninety years ago, no one had conceived of such mechanical monsters as clankers, or the immense amount of power they would use. To completely empty the field around the node at Minnien the power drain must have been immense, and such power would create an enormous aura. That must be what that shadowy lyrinx had been doing, using some kind of device to pick up the aura of a controller from far away. Yes, that was why clankers could no longer move in secret! It was all connected.
Somehow the hedrons had to be shielded. What did Nunar have to say about that? Going back to her room, Tiaan went through the book, but learned nothing. Nunar had not foreseen the rapid development of controllers, much less that such things would be used by ordinary people instead of mancers, who had their own ways of protecting their work from the prying mind. Controllers had a fatal flaw: their aura – obvious in hindsight. Putting the book back in its hiding place, she returned to the workshop.
The problem was to prevent the hedron leaking an aura that could be sensed, while at the same time allowing it to trickle power to the controller. She tried various coatings – tar, wax, clay, paper, leather – but none had any effect.
Perhaps metal was the answer. Having a sheet of beaten copper to hand, Tiaan wrapped the hedron in it, wondering if it would work at all. If the metal blocked the aura it might stop the hedron drawing on the field as well. However, the hedron worked perfectly, and of course it would. Power was not drawn from the field through the material world, but via a sub-ethyric pathway. That was the very basis of mancing as set out in Nunar’s Special Theory.