Putting on the helm, Tiaan swept out in all directions, searching the way she used to map the field. She was looking for power she could use, such as from a hot spring. She found none. All possible sources were too small, too great, too hazardous or too incomprehensible.
Pain shrieked through her chest. Tiaan screamed aloud, fell sideways and struck her ear on rock. The globe rolled across the floor, hit the snow wall and spun like a top. She could not reach it. Tiaan laid her head on the ground. It felt no colder than she did. It was too late.
TWENTY-SIX
Wake up! Cold! Galaxies of sluggish ice like frozen milk-mush, slowly solidifying again.
Wake, Tiaan!
Grinding glacier; gelid blood separating into red, yellow and clear. Eyeballs freezing from the outside in.
TIAAN, WAKE, MY LOVE!
That cracked the frozen crust. She groaned; she stirred. Scales of rime fell from her eyelids. Everything hurt, as if needles of ice were forming inside her.
You’re dying, Tiaan!
‘Want to. Better than this.’
No! he cried as if in pain. I care about you. Save yourself, Tiaan, and then save me.
‘How can –?’ she whispered.
Use the amplimet. NOW!
‘Afraid.’
You’ll die if you don’t. It’s the only chance. For any of us.
She crawled towards the crystal, weeping icy tears. It hurt so much. Tiaan reached out but it was still beyond her fingertips. She could not go any further, until his shocking words galvanised her. Tiaan, my love!
Tears of a different kind flowed out, sheer joy! Minis, her tormented prince, loved her. He’d said so. And of course she loved him, though she had not realised it before. She would do anything for him.
Tiaan clawed her way across the ice, breaking fingernails, scraping breasts and chin and knees. The wires burned as she cradled the globe to her chest and sought out for a source of power. The field of the manufactory node was weak here, as if some other force repelled it. There was not enough in it to light a candle.
She saw not the least trace of a field. It took a long time to work out why. She was trying to force the crystal and it was resisting her. It could not be forced. It wanted to be cajoled. As she let go, something faint and foggy appeared, only to fade away.
She sat back, allowing her mind to empty of everything but the aura of the crystal. The faintest tracery appeared, spidery filaments in the fog. She was seeing further with the amplimet, and deeper, but not the normal, weak field at all. It was as if she was peering through the solid earth.
Lines and planes, spheres and clusters began to resolve. Were they different kinds of fields? They seemed more concentrated than anything she had encountered before.
Tiaan had no idea what they were, or what forces they might contain. The Art required understanding but she knew nothing about how the earth was formed or structured. If she tried to draw on these sources, she would surely kill herself.
Then, as she scanned across those varied shapes, one reminded her of something she’d seen before. It was a long dull plane cutting through the rocks, with occasional bright lenses here and there. It resembled the shear zone bisecting the long tunnel through the mountain. This shape must be a field associated with it. Tension, built up along the shear over hundreds of years, was overdue for release.
Clearly it represented a source of power, enough to save her if she could tap it. She focussed on the planar field. The amplimet made that easy. Mindful of Tirior’s warning, she attempted to draw on the potential as gently as she could. Nothing happened. Tiaan went over the visualisation, the tuning. All seemed correct. She imagined the sub-ethyric path and tried again. Still nothing.
What was she doing wrong? The Aachim had talked about this aspect of geomancy but she had not understood what they were saying. Perhaps she was not meant to draw power by the sub-ethyric path, but via the hyperplane. In that case, how?
Tiaan tried to return to the state where her inner vision caught glimpses of the hyperplane but of course it did not come. She leaned back, more drained than usual. Foolish to think that she could learn a new Art with so little instruction.
Lacking the energy to take off the helm, Tiaan nibbled the corner off a food cake and tried to take a sip from her flask. The drink was frozen solid; the metal stuck to her lips. She let the flask fall. Her head sank. As Tiaan drifted towards sleep, circles and segments began to float through her inner eye.
It was the hyperplane! Bringing up the field of the shear zone, she searched for a path through the hyperplane. It was like trying to trace the way through a shifting maze. Things were there one second and gone the next. Then, for the barest instant, she saw a tiny, thread-like path and snatched at it. The amplimet lit up and the globe grew warm under her fingers, blessed warmth such as she’d never thought to feel again. But it was not enough.
She lost the path but found another and took a trickle more power. Deep in the mountain the veins began to shear, one by one. The ledge gave the faintest little tremor. The wires were hot now. Not painfully hot; deliciously so. Tiaan rubbed the globe over her face and ears, but it soon began to cool. More power was needed. She drew harder and again felt that little tremor, that heat. Taking off her boots, she put her toes in through the wires.
After each attempt she warmed herself and rested before trying again. But that kind of warmth could not last here – the cold overwhelmed it. What she needed was the warmth of a bonfire, not a teacup, though it was impossible to pull such power through tiny paths. She went hunting for a bigger one. Tiaan knew what she was looking for this time.
There it was, a broad pathway. She drew power as hard as she possibly could and suddenly the globe was too hot to hold. Smoke curled up from the collar of her coat. Tiaan beat out a little smouldering patch.
Under the mountain, the webbing of veins across the fault snapped and the entire shear zone, three leagues long, unzipped. The marble side moved down, the granite up by the width of a hand. Not much, but the energy released was colossal. The whole mountain shook, radiating shockwaves in all directions.
The world seemed to turn inside out. Heat blasted from the globe. It was as if she had walked past the open door of one of the manufactory’s furnaces. Orange streamers radiated out in all directions, ablating the snow away in a perfect sphere, as though washed out by boiling water. At a distance of several spans the surface froze as clear as glass. Tiaan opened her eyes, astounded at what she had done. Multi-coloured reflections sparkled off the ice. It was beautiful.
The mountain settled back in place and above her the snow began to flow like a white mudslide. It was little more than a bulge at first, but in a minute the whole side of the mountain was in motion. Inside her bubble the avalanche began as a whisper that swelled to a roar, louder than anything she had heard in her life. The snow layers sloughed away, one by one, and in places the weathered rock as well.
The stone at her back vibrated wildly. Tiaan held the hot globe and helm to her chest. The layers of the avalanche thundered over the ledge above her, plucking at her ice bubble and making a sound like an organ pipe. The surrounding snow was torn away, until with a shudder the slide had gone by, carrying its incomprehensibly huge load of snow, ice, rock, and an occasional tree, down until it half filled the valley bottom.
Silence. Tiaan opened her eyes, scarcely able to believe that she had survived. It was daytime, for she could see though the thick sphere of ice as if it were window glass. A wintry sun hung low in a clear sky. The storm had gone. Her sphere clung to the underside of the ledge like a soap bubble. Below and above were bare rock, a steep slope.