There was a commotion outside and a band of travel-stained lyrinx burst in, led by a small, wingless male. Gyrull, who was studying a parchment, set it down with a glad cry. Liett, eating gruel from a wooden bowl the size of a bucket, dropped it on the floor. Her iridescent wings snapped out, two spans on either side, then she bounded across the room and threw herself at the wingless male. The impact knocked him to the floor, whereupon she sat on his chest and began pumelling him with her fists. He tried to catch hold of her wrists but she was too quick for him.
The other lyrinx were laughing, an extraordinary sight.
What was going on? Even Gyrull was beaming. 'Thlapp!' she said at last.
Liett got up, helping the young male to his feet and linking her arm sinuously along his. He was smiling too. 'Welcome, Ryll!' said Gyrull. 'We were afraid you'd been killed in the siege.'
'There were times,' Ryll said, 'when we were struggling to cross the sea in a boat no bigger than a human outhouse, that I wished I had been. But we survived even the dreadful waters.
He came to her with lowered head, a sign of deference, but she lifted his chin, speaking warmly to him in a dialect Gilhaelith did not recognise. Ryll's skin showed a cheerful, flickering pattern of yellows and blues. Finally he bowed and went out, Liett still attached to his arm.
Later that day Gyrull came to Gilhaelith's room with the young male close behind her.
'This is Ryll; she said, 'one of my most skilled young patterners.'
'I know you,' said Gilhaelith, trying to recall where he'd seen Ryll's face before.
'I fetched you to Tiaan, in the patterning room in Snizort,' Ryll answered coldly. 'She thought you cared for her, but all you wanted was her crystal.'
Gilhaelith shrugged. He wasn't going to explain himself to an alien. 'You speak as though she's your friend! The emphasis made that into an absurdity.
'Tiaan acted more than honourably to me,' said Ryll, 'and I deeply regretted having to use her to aid the war. In other circumstances we would have been friends.' 'What happened to her?' said Gilhaelith. In Nyriandiol, he'd begun to care about her in a way that had disturbed him, for it had meant losing control of a part of his life. To care at all was truly unusual – normally his feelings for other people were no more than efficiency required. People got in the way, made unreasonable demands, and therefore had to be controlled at all times. Abandoning Tiaan had been the easiest solution to his uncomfortable loss of control, but now he regretted it. He'd lost the chance to have an apprentice who would have complemented him perfectly. He'd also lost – what? The possibility of a friend? The chance of intimacy, both intellectual and – though he shied violently away from the recurring thought – physical.
'I don't know,' Ryll replied. 'I was sent to the battle -' 'A shameful mix-up,' said Gyrull with set face. 'Fortunately Tiaan escaped in a construct, though she is now held prisoner by the Aachim. But enough of her. From now on, Tetrarch, Ryll will take care of your needs, when he has time free from his other duties. No one else will attend you, so make no claims on them. And once you go up to Alcifer, take this warning to heart. Savage creatures from the void dwell in the forests of Meldorin – the vicious lorrsk, among others. They keep clear of our boundaries, but put one foot over them and you're game for their table.'
Outside, Gyrull said quietly to Ryll, 'Keep a close eye on the tetrarch and don't trust him the length of a claw. He's a dishonourable man who would betray his birth-mother if it served his purpose. Question everything he says and does. On second thoughts, you've enough to do. I'll tune the zygnadrs to him, night and day.'
'I don't like Gilhaelith,' said Ryll. 'He'll cause us all grief one day. Were it up to me, I would bite his head off.'
'He served us tolerably well in Snizort and may do so again. I've an idea I'd like you to think about, and Gilhaelith's own studies may assist it.'
Ryll grimaced. 'I will do my duty, of course. What is it?'
'It arose from the work you were doing with the torgnadr, and Tiaan, in Snizort. This will be a new kind of device – I call it a disnadr, that is, a power patterner – and we'll need it to put an end to the war. The enemy are creating a myriad of new devices to take the place of the people they no longer have, and each must draw power from the field. If we could find a way to control that power, rather than just draining it away with torgnadrs, their devices could be made to act against them. Should we succeed they'll have to surrender, or die.
'I've had the eleventh level cleared for this work and you will be in charge. No one will be allowed in save those working with you, and especially not the tetrarch.'
'May I have Liett to assist me?' Ryll asked, a trifle over-eagerly.
The matriarch sighed, then considered, her skin colours flickering a silvery mauve. 'I'm minded to say no, because of the trouble there's been between you in the past.' Ryll opened his mouth but closed it again without speaking.
'But then,' she went on, 'together you seem to be worth more than separately. Yes, take my daughter. And whatever you require, you have only to ask. Come, this is what I want you to do…'
Forty
Gilhaelith trudged up a steep ramp towards the lower levels of Alcifer. He was alone, for Gyrull had simply indicated the way and left him, and he'd lost hope of being given the servants he'd asked for.
His helplessness was corrosive. He had not fully recovered and no longer expected to. His stomach throbbed constantly, and walking for as little as half an hour exhausted him. By himself he'd be hard pressed to carry up his geomantic instruments. Even if he managed that, how could he live without servants? It would take all the hours of the day just to find food and prepare it, if there was any to be gathered so close to Oellyll. But he had to go on. Giving in had never been an option for Gilhaelith.
Heart palpitating from the effort, he turned off the ramp at a great black door that marked the gate between Oellyll and Alcifer. Another of those crab-like sentinels stood beside it. He pushed past without incident and approached the door, which was made of a black metal that shone in the lantern light as though it had a hundred coats of lacquer. As he reached out, the door swung open silently. He froze, then peered through, carefully. The floor was thick with untracked dust, so the lyrinx had never been this way.
It was so dark that he could not see what lay beyond -palace or rat hole. He raised the lantern. Faint gleams appeared here and there, reflections off distant surfaces whose shapes shifted as he moved. He stepped into Alcifer and the darkness seemed to suck the light from his lantern. The floor shivered underfoot. He scuffed the dust away with a toe to reveal solid stone, yet it was quivering ever so slightly.
Go back! came an errant thought. You should not be here. He shrugged off the unease. Alcifer was a ruin abandoned an aeon ago. Nothing here could harm him, save the decaying stone and mortar falling on his head.
Hours he walked through haunted, magical halls where the dust lay so thick that his boots made no sound. Hours more he sat on seat or rail, staring into the darkness as he tried to gain a feeling for the building. He was searching for the perfect place to work but a palace such as this confused the mind as it tricked the eye. He could not take it in.
My mind is definitely failing, he thought. Before my illness I could have visualised the entirety of this palace, like rows and columns in a catalogue. Am I reaching my end sooner than I'd thought? Please, not this way, with my work so far from completion. If my mind is going, let me not fade dismally away. Rather would I die in a cataclysm of my own making, as long as in doing so I can approach my goal.
He stood up, staring around him in the darkness and shivering like the very stones. In all the years he'd worked on his study of the world, there was one experiment he'd not been game to attempt. Though it held the best promise of all, it was deadly perilous. Should he try it? If it succeeded, he might use it to find and remove all the fragments of the phantom crystal at once and even, faint hope that it was, repair some of the damage to his brain. He'd either crash through to his goal, or crash to his doom. More likely the latter, but what did he have to lose? Better to die violently than live this way, feeling his faculties slowly fading, knowing he'd either lose his intellect and go mad, or end up a vegetable that the lyrinx wouldn't deign to dine on. 'I'll do it!' he said aloud. 'I'll dare the great experiment and curse the consequences.' First, the place to work. Ignoring the dark, magnificent surroundings, he dragged himself up a last set of stairs to a vast hall covered ankle-deep in ash, through which occasional black tiles were exposed. The frescoed walls were stained brown from flowing rainwater, for the roof had collapsed long ago. Gilhaelith picked his way through the mess towards a tall pair of doors, wedged ajar by a leaning pine that had grown between them. He squeezed through the gap and out.