Irisis stamped one foot, making a loud clap. Jal-Nish gave her a warning glare.
‘How did this come about, surr?’ asked Arple, the sergeant. His upper lip was so deeply scarred and puckered that he looked like a man with two mouths, one above the other.
Gi-Had explained about the fight in the cavern and its grisly ending. The younger soldiers looked uneasy. ‘I sent Gull and Hurny on to warn the manufactory and returned a different way for Tiaan.’
‘A brave deed, surr,’ said Arple. ‘Not many have that kind of courage.’
‘I was terrified,’ Gi-Had admitted, ‘but I am her overseer. It was my duty.’
‘Get on with it,’ grated the perquisitor, who despised heroes. ‘Every minute the beast is carrying her further away.’
‘Tiaan was gone from the battle cavern,’ concluded Gi-Had. ‘And so was a lyrinx I’d thought dead. Her gear was gone too. It must have taken her.’
‘Why would it do that, surr?’ Arple plucked at that upper lip.
‘Perhaps they want her to teach them the craft of controller-making,’ said Jal-Nish. ‘We will take a shortcut through the mine. Once at the cavern, our seeker here,’ he nodded at Ullii, ‘will tell us where she’s gone. To your places, go!’
Before they had moved a dozen steps, someone came flying out the gate, crying, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ It was a little, dark-haired girl of five or six, with red ribbons in her hair. Racing up to the overseer, she threw her arms about him.
As Gi-Had lifted her up, five older girls appeared, walking demurely in a graduated line. Each embraced their father, then went back into the line. A plump, pale woman stood in the gateway, looking distressed.
When she stepped forward the perquisitor snapped, ‘It’s not a party, probationary overseer. Get moving!’
Gi-Had took a step toward his wife, stopped, gave her a jerky wave then turned away. Her face crumbled. The littlest girl began to cry. Gi-Had, frozen-faced, did not look back.
Ullii was to go in the last clanker, along with Irisis, Nish, Ky-Ara and Pur-Did, his shooter, who except in the most severe weather rode on top, at his weapons.
She had not seen a clanker before and, wearing both mask and goggles, Ullii could not see it now. She did not need to – her other senses were on fire with its strangeness. It stank: the tang of pitch distillate, the odours of sludgy grease and rancid fish oil. It also smelled of metal, spicy rations and the acrid odour that always accompanied the working parts of clankers. However, the stench of the clanker was overwhelmed by that of the soldiers, now breaking from their ranks.
The clanker, though stationary, was surprisingly noisy. Its workings made a low, thudding tick just on the edge of hearing through her muffs, the sound as irritating as an itch between the shoulder blades. The flywheels whined, pipes hissed, and every so often came a rattle as of a knuckle across a washboard.
That was nothing to the way she sensed it. This close, the clanker made a glowing knot in her lattice too bright to imagine, and the knots of the other machines blurred into it. The knot arose from the hedron at the heart of the machine, which drew power from the field, channelling it into the controller that powered the huge flywheels and worked the levers, gears and shafts to drive the iron feet so tirelessly on.
Controller and hedron both drew on aspects of the Secret Art, though not those kinds that mancers employed, and both glowed in her lattice. Even after she turned the forward fan of her lattice away, Ullii could sense the hedron and feel the power, as she had felt the heat and light and blast from the furnaces when Nish led her past them this morning.
A scream rose in her throat. Ullii had an overwhelming urge to tear off muffs, mask and clothes, and curl up in the snow. That would make things worse, but the panic was rising so fast she could not hold it back. She took a shuddering breath.
A hand came up over the nose holes in her balaclava. It was Nish. Catching at his hand with her gloves, she pressed it over her nose. Her head steadied. She took another sniff, tipping up her face to him. ‘I’m better now,’ she said softly. She did feel better, though strange – hot and liquid inside. A nerve twitched in her lip.
‘We have to go,’ Nish said. ‘The soldiers are already out of sight.’
She could feel the clankers now. The other two flared in her lattice as they moved off with a thud-thud that shook the ground beneath her. The hatch was up in the plated back of the third clanker, Irisis gesturing furiously.
‘I have to know it,’ said Ullii.
Nish walked her around the clanker and Ullii touched the overlapping plates along each side, the thick metal legs, the firing platform on top. It felt like an armadillo, her favourite animal. Mancer Flammas had kept one in his workshop. She’d touched the creature, seen how it curled up, and modelled herself on it ever after. The memory made her smile and Ullii climbed willingly into the back of the machine.
Ky-Ara reached out with one long-fingered hand, making sure the controller was seated in its socket and that each of its twenty-four arms was correctly in place. He pulled down his ‘crown-of-thorns’, a metal headband set with eight pieces of crystal, equally spaced. Placing each hand into a wired glove, he reached forward and gripped two knobs. As he moved the right-hand knob, rainbows swirled in Ullii’s lattice. The whine of the flywheels went up a notch as he fixed the field in his mind and drew power smoothly from it.
Ky-Ara’s face went slack with bliss as the bond with the machine was established. His mouth fell open in a vacant grin – the flycatcher phase, Nish sneeringly called it. Ky-Ara would be as much machine as man until they stopped, and if parted too long afterwards would suffer the anguish of withdrawal.
Ullii was fascinated, though that changed as soon as the operator worked the starting lever and, with a squeal of plates and a rattling groan, the clanker moved. The sound went right through her earmuffs. The knot swelled until it filled her head. She tried to change the lattice but the racket ringing through her brain did not permit rational thought. She pressed her hands tightly over her earmuffs. It did not help. Ullii screamed, right in the operator’s ear.
Ky-Ara, wrenched out of his bond, stopped the machine instantly. His head whipped around, mouth agape, eyes staring. ‘What?’ he slurred, in as much pain as she was.
‘I’ve got her earplugs here somewhere,’ Nish said to Irisis, rummaging in his pack.
‘Take your hands away,’ Nish whispered to Ullii. ‘No one speak.’
Ullii slowly withdrew her hands. He handed her the plugs, which she pressed into her ears, then quickly put the muffs on. Nish signed to Ky-Ara.
With jerky movements he re-established the bond. The clanker lurched, stopped, lurched again. Ullii’s hands flew up to her ears but stopped halfway. She could hear nothing. She smiled fleetingly, then worked on remaking her lattice so as to keep the fierce glow of the controller manageable.
Irisis put her boots up on the heatbank, a long metal box filled with hot stones. ‘It’s lovely and warm in here.’
‘Enjoy it while it lasts,’ said Nish, who had spent more than enough time in freezing clankers.
They were only halfway to the mine when there came a low rumble and the clanker stalled as if it had struck a barrier. A distortion wave passed through the machine, warping everything like a reflection in a fairground mirror.
‘What’s going on?’ screamed Ky-Ara, waggling his knobs uselessly. He seemed on the verge of collapse. ‘I’ve lost the field.’
They had all heard the tale of the failed Minnien field, clankers lost, an army slain. Nish leapt through the back hatch, drawing his borrowed sword, as did Irisis. Streaks of light plated across her vision. The ground shook underfoot, the forest trees lashed back and forth. The soldiers were crouched down with their shields over their heads.