She stood in the corridor, unmoving. ‘Irisis?’ said Flydd.
‘So be it.’ They continued, but shortly she stopped again, allowing the seeker to move around the corner out of hearing.
‘What now?’ he said irritably.
‘What’s it going to do to Ullii’s baby?’ she said in his ear.
‘It will have to take its chances like the rest of us.’
‘But it … Ullii … We’ve got to tell her. At least give her the choice.’
‘We’re all soldiers in a war, artisan,’ he said harshly. ‘You, me, Ullii and the child. If we fail, humanity is doomed and where is the child then? We must all follow orders. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, scrutator.’
They hid from another guard. Flydd’s glamour still held, for the lyrinx looked right at them without seeing anything. It peered around uneasily, sniffing the air, its skin patterning in the light of a distant lamp, before hurrying away.
‘Glamour’s failing!’ Flydd was bent over, holding his belly. ‘Barely … hold it.’
She helped him up and they hurried after Ullii who, no longer roped to them, had disappeared down the tunnel. Irisis was all knotted inside. This was going to go wrong, she knew it.
It began as the merest tickle across her shoulder blades, indicating that they were within the sphere of influence of the node-drainer. The sensation grew stronger. Soon the flesh beneath her skin was shuddering as it was tugged one way and another. Her stomach began to bubble like a brewing vat. Ullii gasped. Her body was racked by sinuous heaves. Flydd groaned and the cloaking spell vanished.
‘Watcher!’ hissed Ullii, sniffing the air like a dog.
FIFTY-NINE
Before and after his brief meeting with Tiaan, Gilhaelith had spent days surveying the Great Seep, from the ground and the network of tunnels below it, until his maps were as accurate as he could draw them. The lyrinx drove him hard, making it clear that the project was urgent and had priority over every other activity at Snizort. He wondered why.
Gilhaelith was not working as hard as they thought, at least not on their project. He spent every spare moment with his icy scrying globe, pretending to do their work, but really studying the Snizort node, which fascinated him. It turned out to be a very strange one, and the fluctuations in its field were extreme, though that might have been because of the power the lyrinx drew from it for their flesh-forming.
And then again, it might have had something to do with the amplimet, for Gilhaelith suspected it was up to its old tricks again. With the globe he picked up occasional, inexplicable pulses which could hardly be due to anything else.
He went on to sensing out the hot spot that powered the seep. That was not hard for a geomancer of his experience. He had spent more than a century monitoring Booreah Ngurle in a similar way. Finally, most difficult of all, he had to scry out the pattern of slow currents that brought warm tar to the surface of the Great Seep, and carried cooler material down again, in complex whirls and eddies.
The tar moved almost imperceptibly, though over seven thousand years it must have travelled quite a distance. Gilhaelith had brought back much geomantic equipment, but none of his crystals and devices proved sensitive enough for this task. Nor, though he spent ages adjusting it, his globe. He had been here for weeks and Gyrull was angry at the lack of progress.
There was another way – to forecast the path of the currents using mathemancy. He had never used that Art in this kind of endeavour before and was not sure if it would prove any use at all, but what else could he do?
After a night and a day, Gilhaelith set aside his arrays of numbers, checked the map and pointed to a particular location. ‘Start digging here, and go in this direction.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked the truth-reader.
‘As sure as I’ll ever be.’ That was true enough.
Matriarch Gyrull blew on a horn. Lyrinx appeared from everywhere. They went down to the place Gilhaelith had indicated. Gyrull marked the sandstone face with a claw and they began to hack at the soft rock with tools like enormous mattocks, extending a tunnel toward the Great Seep.
The work continued day and night. When Gilhaelith returned in the morning to set up his surveying crystals, they had advanced by sixty paces, incredible progress even under such good conditions. The lyrinx worked as though possessed, and they were – Gyrull never had to remind them how important their work was, or how urgent.
The second day they made nearly as much ground, and the third another forty paces, the work slowing because of the heat, and because the rock here was saturated with tar and difficult to work. At this point Gilhaelith saw the lyrinx’s true genius.
Two of the creatures lugged in a metal ring slightly smaller than the diameter of the tunnel. After mounting a mushroom-shaped object called a phynadr in the middle of the ring, they activated it using a long rod. Cold pain sparkled in Gilhaelith’s temples, doubling him over. By the time he recovered, the ring was concealed by freezing mist.
The phynadr was powered by the field and drew heat from the area around it. He had no idea how it worked but there was no doubt of its effectiveness. The tarry rock, now frigid, was brittle and easily broken. His crystals told him that the device took prodigious amounts of power from the field, which was weaker than before.
The tunnel went forward in cooling stages followed by excavation. By late that afternoon, the fourth day of tunnelling, they broke through the last of the rock into the pure tar of the Great Seep. Now the work became hazardous in the extreme. Liquid tar was all around them, kept out only by a thin, frozen layer that was, relatively speaking, as fragile as an eggshell. If the pressure found a weakness, or just one of the cooling rings failed, the tunnel would collapse and they would be entombed in hot tar. The floor on which they stood shuddered from time to time.
Gilhaelith was idle now, but never bored. He observed, noted and classified everything around him. The lyrinx were of particular interest, and he saw that they were not completely comfortable in their great bodies or, at least, their outer skin. The lyrinx were constantly scratching, shrugging their shoulders, working their limbs and easing the position of their armour plates. Perhaps there was a disadvantage to all the flesh-forming they had done to their unborn selves, in order to survive in the nightmare environment of the void.
Gilhaelith was working in an embayment down the tunnel, well out of the way of the diggings. He had learned much about the node, another step toward his ultimate goal, but that was as far as he was going to get here. The war drew ever closer and it was time to get out before he was trapped. He felt sure he would be able to escape, despite how carefully the lyrinx watched him. They allowed him unfettered use of his tools, and that should be enough. But before he left he had to get the amplimet. He wished he could free Tiaan too, for he did care about her, but, no matter how much he might regret it, she had to be left behind. He could not carry her as well as his scrying globe, and he could not get out without it.
Adjusting it, and sensitising it with an appropriate crystal, he sought for the amplimet. Gilhaelith found it at once, so quickly that momentarily he wondered if it had found him.
His belly throbbed. The colic had been worse than usual since he’d come to Snizort, for which he blamed the bland food they gave him. None of the delicacies he was accustomed to were obtainable here.
The amplimet was around Tiaan’s neck in the patterning chamber, and a patterning was going on. He sideslipped that process. Time was everything now and he could not be distracted by irrelevancies. The chamber was empty and there were no guards. Good. He worked out a route to it, and the way out, then scried back to check on the amplimet again.
It was flashing furiously. Was it communicating with the patterner, or the node? It was hard to tell – the patterns seemed deliberately blurred. Surely the node, which seemed more unstable than ever. And the patterner! That bothered him. Was it trying to alter the patterning? What for? And what to?