This was his last chance. Gilhaelith had just started with the globe, developing the swiftest spell he could manage in the circumstances, when the Matriarch yelled, ‘Get the relics out of the tunnel. How are we going, Franll?’
The operator shook his crested head. ‘I don’t see how we can do any more.’
Cuttlefish waves of colours, pastel blues, greens and pinks, pulsed across her skin. ‘We must keep trying. The siege comes to a climax. Move everything to safety, including the tetrarch’s devices.’
‘And me?’ he said hopefully.
‘You stay here. Great human armies surround us, tetrarch, and the Aachim with their constructs.’ She hacked furiously at the frozen face. ‘We will lose Snizort within days. The enemy are trying to set fire to the tar.’
Even Gilhaelith could read the other lyrinx’s skin speech – dismay followed by despair.
‘I’m afraid for you, Matriarch,’ said the operator.
‘I merely serve. Should I die, another stands ready to replace me.’
In his mind’s eye, Gilhaelith could see himself, an ant at the end of a long, brittle tunnel made from something no stronger than cake icing. It would take no force at all to break it. He was not ready to die. There was so much to do. He felt a sudden pang of fear for Tiaan but there was nothing he could do for her.
A dozen lyrinx were up at the face, furiously excavating. The hut had a circular hole through the roof, or so Gilhaelith interpreted the tangle of shortened framing timbers. Puzzled, he climbed up to take a better look.
‘These look as though they’ve been burned,’ he said, ‘but see how neatly. As if by a red-hot blade.’ The ancient documents had said something about that.
She did not answer. More bodies were removed, all clad in bright, ceremonial vestments. On the far side, another lyrinx was working above his head, trying to free a decorated, coffin-shaped box sealed at either end. He broke the seals, lifted off the lid and grey dust poured out, covering him from crested head to clawed toes. He shook it off, flashed a toothy grin at his fellows and pulled hard. The coffin slid free. There was nothing in it but dust and bones.
The work continued. The Matriarch was busy in a corner of the hut, where the side of a small wooden chest had been dug out. They hacked tar from around it and prised open the lid.
Inside, wrapped in a pale-blue blanket, was a large yellow crystal protected in a golden basket. One of the lyrinx reached for it but she snapped, ‘Don’t touch! It’s very fragile.’
‘A brimstone,’ said Gilhaelith.
‘The brimstone.’
‘Is that what you came for?’
She opened her mouth and closed it again. Her old face was expressionless but for an instant her shoulder plates sparkled in exhilaration. She seized hold of her breast plates and worked them back and forth, as if to settle them in place.
He tried again, while they were distracted. Gilhaelith closed his eyes, trying to see the web of filaments, but caught only a few unbroken threads, moving as in a wind. The amplimet’s work must almost be done.
A spasm of fear struck him. It was finished here, and it was in control of the node. And they were deep in the Great Seep, reliant on power. What was it doing? There had to be more. He had to see. Maybe he could draw on it to escape. All his equipment was gone, and all the relics, and there was not so much as a fragment of brimstone left. Only one thing to do. He reached within himself to those ever-troubling gallstones, and forced one to wake.
The tattered webs appeared for a second but they did not show what he was looking for. Only one filament remained unbroken, so fine that he had not seen it before. Light pulsed along it, and it ran into the back of his head.
He tried desperately to see what it was doing, but the gallstone exploded and shrieking agony drove him to his knees. The filament snapped and the tattered webs vanished. It was all too clear now. He had delved too deeply and the amplimet had caught him. How long had it been studying him, and what had it learned?
A loud crack came from behind them. Half a dozen cooling rings back, the floor of the tunnel had sheared in two. Inflooding tar was pushing the sections further apart every second.
‘Matriarch!’ shouted one of the lyrinx. ‘It’s failing.’
She closed the chest, tucked it under her arm and sprang down. Her impact with the floor shook the tunnel and one big foot went though the shell. She wrenched it out. Tar oozed up. The other lyrinx ran, carrying as much as they could.
Gilhaelith forced himself to his knees, tripped, and fell sprawling. His insides were in agony, as if the fragments of stone were being forced down tiny ducts. Ahead, tar bubbled through the gap, already a couple of strides wide at the base. The tunnel now cracked at the top and a curtain of tar flooded in.
The Matriarch hurtled past him and burst through the curtain. Gilhaelith followed, but as he tried to jump, the sections were wrenched apart and he plunged to his knees in the warm tar of the Great Seep. He threw out his arms and managed to catch a lump of hard floor. Gilhaelith tried to pull himself out but the tar clung too strongly.
Like a fly on tar paper, he thought. I’m stuck. The lyrinx were already out of sight. Too late he felt the bitterness of regret. The game was lost, and Tiaan. And for what? He hardly dared to think.
SIXTY
Tiaan dreamed that Old Hyull, a glowing mushroom on his head, was stripping her backbone out from its surrounding skin and flesh, smacking his lips as he slurped down the slippery marrow. She woke squirming with horror, but it was only a dream and a ridiculous one. Backbones did not have marrow, did they? Or was it her spinal cord he was devouring?
Later she woke in what she supposed to be a different kind of patterner, hanging upside down in a collection of translucent spheres as green as grass. She felt blurred in the head, as if she’d had too much to drink. It wore off during the day but her back began to throb low down, where she had broken it. The pain grew until it made her cry out, whereupon Liett pulled her mouth open and forced in half a mug of sweet syrup. It sent Tiaan to sleep within minutes. When she woke, the pain was no more than a nagging ache. She felt that days had passed.
Tiaan kept expecting Tutor to appear around the door, but he did not come. She had not seen him for days and missed him.
That afternoon she was taken to another room and put onto a curving platform covered in what felt like hide. It was mottled in shades of grey and was yielding yet firm beneath. Her hands were slid into receptacles like shoulder-length gloves, her legs fed into thigh-high envelopes of similar material. Suckers were attached to the back of her head, her neck and all the way down to her tailbone.
Ryll tightened leather straps across her body and nodded at a lyrinx standing to one side. She reached beneath Tiaan’s head. The thigh envelopes began to move in constantly changing directions. Sometimes they went up and down, at other times round and round or from side to side, or made all of those movements at once.
Tiaan cried out as a series of pangs struck her backbone. Liett gave her a half-dose of syrup and her vision faded. People moved across the room from time to time, so slowly that it could not have been real. Time slowed to a standstill.
The exercises went on until Tiaan felt as though her bones were dissolving. She was removed and laid out to sleep on a couch at the far end of the room. As soon as she woke, the exercises began again.
There were many more sessions, over as much as a week, before Old Hyull seemed to be satisfied. Ryll carried Tiaan back to the patterner. The jellyfish mask went over her head and they began to repattern the faulty torgnadr. Again she woke weeping. The top of the device was beaded with her tears.