Minis had taught her the rudiments of geomancy, the greatest of all the Secret Arts, which drew on the forces that shaped and moved the earth. Tiaan had not understood that either, though the Aachim had implied that their geomancy employed one of the strong forces.
Jerking awake, she dug The Mancer's Art out of her pack where it had lain, carefully wrapped, for months. It was a small, slim volume written in a fine hand on silky rice paper. Tiaan turned the pages, searching for anything to do with geomancy. She did not find that Art mentioned by name, though late that night when she could barely keep her eyes open, she did discover something else.
The Strong Forces and the General Theory of Power It is my contention that a node may generate as few as four strong forces, or as many as ten. These forces must be mutually orthogonal, and therefore only three can ever manifest themselves in our familiar world. The remainder must lie in other dimensions and can neither influence our physical environment nor be drawn upon by any refinement of the mancer's Art about which I am competent to speculate.
There followed a theoretical discussion of the strong forces, written in such abstruse language that Tiaan could make no sense of it. And then she found this: Though I cannot prove it, I believe that the peril of the strong forces lies in their sheer intensity. The weak field is diffuse, so mancers were able to draw upon it without necessarily hazarding their lives, though those who were unlucky, or greedy, frequently made that sacrifice. Cautious mancers could master their Art from nebulous areas of the field, before drawing upon more concentrated parts.
The strong forces offer no such comfort. Essentially planar rather than three-dimensional, they would contain prodigious amounts of power within the plane but virtually none immediately adjacent. They would also be difficult to sense. Thus, any attempt to draw power from a strong force would almost certainly result in annihilation. No mancer could react quickly enough to control it.
Others have argued that a controller device could be fashioned to overcome this limitation. Not in my understanding of the Art. I believe that such forces are forever beyond the tampering fingers of humanity, and rightly so.
Had the Aachim discovered the answer after all? Tiaan recalled her image of the construct mechanism. Surely its controlling parts were in the wrong arrangement to be sensitive to the strong forces, much less to control them – unless the great Nunar was completely wrong? That was possible. The Mancer's Art had been written a hundred years ago, before the first controller had been invented.
That night, Tiaan had crystal dreams for the first time since opening the gate. They vanished on waking, as usual. She did not leap out of bed, as she was accustomed to do, but lay with the covers pulled well up, thinking about the problem. The Aachim must have a special way of controlling the construct. Could she read that from the aura?
She dozed, woke, dozed and woke again with a rudimentary design in her mind. After another hour she had worked out the details of her sensor, but only when she heard Malien moving about in the kitchen did Tiaan get up.
'Good morning,' she said, springing out of bed.
'You're cheerful today. The sleep must have done you good.'
'It has. I know what to do.' Tiaan spent all afternoon building an array of interlinked hexagons of wire and crystal that mimicked the amplimet's form and structure. It was set around a little glass doughnut she had taken from one of the many storerooms in Tirthrax. The amplimet lay at its heart, in the soapstone basket from the centre of the port-all. She now felt anxious about that. Every time she touched the amplimet, she mentally flinched. Using it was no longer a comfort but a threat.
Sitting on the operator's seat, she slipped her fingers in through the wires of the hexagons and touched the amplimet. It was warm. Stroking along its length, she closed her eyes.
The amplimet began to pulse; she could feel the light beating against her eyelids. Tiaan did not try to control the crystal – this close to the great node of Tirthrax she was afraid to. She merely allowed the pulsation to wash over and through her, drifting with it until, finally, the field sprang into view. It was the greatest she had ever felt.
Tiaan traced the construct's aura into a black metal box whose contents she could not visualise. The aura came out the other end, twisted through the bowels of the machine and went up behind the green glass binnacle in front of her. There she lost it in murky tangles which she could not penetrate. It was like trying to make out a blueprint written in mist. Her eyes ached. The workings must be protected.
But a lock protects nothing if you have the key. She just had to decipher it. Feeling unusually tired, Tiaan rested her head on the glass. Was her obsession with her craft just a way to avoid other responsibilities, as Malien had implied? She did not want to think about that. Better keep going. She was terrified that the lyrinx would come back, and take the construct before she could understand it.
That black container in the bowels of the machine was another mystery. Putting her head through the lower hatch, she peered around, holding out one of Malien's glowing spheres. The box was up in the darkness at the front.
She was trying to sense its purpose when she felt an odd prickle and the image of wires and crystals froze in her mind. It was so quiet that Tiaan could hear her heart thumping. Going up, she traced the aura on the green glass, but the glass lit up and a spiralling red line began to rotate.
Tiaan jumped. Other markings appeared on the surface: blue circles that shrank and expanded again, yellow lines arcing from one side of a rectangle to another, rows of characters that were undoubtedly some kind of writing.
The shapes and colours changed, the writing flowed endlessly, but nothing else happened. As she crouched beneath the binnacle, probing with her inner sight, an alarm shrieked in her ear; then something clamped around her forehead and began to squeeze.
It was a trap and she had fallen into it. Metal fingers gripped her skull. Tiaan tried to tear them off but received a shock that singed her fingers. Her arms flopped uselessly by her sides. She began to shake uncontrollably as echoes of the shock raced up and down her limbs.
Tiaan felt disconnected from her body. Her tongue expanded to fill her mouth, her eyes rolled down as far as they would go, and stuck. She could see her hands hanging like floppy spiders, but she could not move.
It was hours before a grinning Malien appeared and freed her – hours of helpless terror that she would never move again. And hours of crystal dreams that she remembered all too clearly, for she was dreaming awake. She dreamed that she was trapped inside the amplimet, paralysed or frozen, and it was feeding upon her essence as a wasp feeds on a spider. And the whole time, she could see the amplimet in her mind's eye, the central light flashing on and off like a signal lamp.
Her head felt fuzzy; it hurt to think. 'What's so funny?' she said curtly.
'The look on your face,' Malien chuckled. 'Next time, have the good sense to ask me for help. Did I not tell you that there could be traps?'
'I was worried that the enemy would get here first.'
'Better they kill you than you do it yourself. How are you feeling?'
Tiaan sat up. 'A bit shaky.'
Malien gave her a hand. 'We'd better get to work.'
'Yesterday you were lecturing me about working too hard.'
'The lyrinx weren't out there yesterday.'
'What?'
'I saw one this morning, circling high in the eastern sky. I wouldn't want them to get hold of a construct.' By the evening, Tiaan felt that she understood most of the controls, though she had not discovered how to make the construct operate. 'There's still something missing,' she said.