Thirdly, he'd gleaned that the lyrinx, on the closed-off eleventh level of Oellyll, were working on a new and powerful artefact. The war was escalating into a magical weapons race between humans, Aachim and lyrinx, with every new development requiring more power. Eventually it must drain the nodes past the point of no return. What then? Inexplicable things had already happened when nodes had been stripped of their fields. A whole squadron of clankers had once van-i ished into nothingness. Another time, the fragments of a hundred machines, and the people inside them, had been strewn across forty leagues of countryside, and for weeks after there had been green sunsets. What if that kind of catastrophe occurred worldwide? He could not allow it to happen.
Fourthly, a node could be completely destroyed, though that left a residue of unknown nature but disturbing potential. The residue from the Snizort node was now in the hands of the scrutators, assuming that Gyrull had told the truth. What would they do with it? And had the amplimet anything to do with the node's destruction?
Fifthly, there was some undiscovered potential about Alcifer, and it was more than just the remarkable node here. Whatever lay sleeping, it might just prove to be the last part of the puzzle.
Gilhaelith felt sure there was a way of putting these disparate discoveries together, to reach the understanding that he so craved, but his exhausted brain rebelled. Where the mind failed, it was his policy to put the hands to work. The great and perilous experiment required him to recreate his geomantic globe, incorporating all he'd learned about the world so far.
The pattern of nodes and fields was just the surface expression of tensions between the great forces that moved and shaped the world. If he could model them on his geomantic globe, he might uncover these ultimate forces. As the small is to the great, he thought — another of the key principles of the Art. But of course, his globe would have to be perfect, and he already knew of errors in it. There was much work to be done.
He turned to the globe, a glass-surfaced sphere half a span across, slowly rotating on its cushion of air above an ebony pedestal. It was so bitterly cold that moisture from the air formed wisps of vapour, drawn out to streaky clouds by its motion. Beneath the glass, so detailed that it looked like Santhenar seen from the surface of the moon, was his model of the world. The light reflected from its restless oceans, its glittering ice caps, and even the minute threads that represented great rivers.
With a gesture, Gilhaelith attempted to still the globe, as he'd done so many times before. It was the most trivial of magics, but nothing happened. He tried again, with the same result. Panicky fear clutched at his heart and momentarily he found it difficult to breathe. What had he done wrong? He couldn't think. The process, once intuitive, was lost to him.
He laboriously reconstructed it using pure logic and tried once more. It worked this time. Points of light sparkled here and there on the glass — representations of the most powerful nodes. Taking up a hand lens the size of a frying-pan, he inspected the surface. It had not been harmed by its long journey, but he frowned and plucked at his lower lip. Though he'd made the globe from the best maps in the world, he now knew Meldorin was inaccurate in some important details.
Therefore other lands could also contain errors, while those parts of the globe known only from ancient adventurers' maps might be completely wrong.
No wonder he'd never been able to discover how the world worked. Two-thirds of his globe was based on charts that could have been made up, and he couldn't see how to remedy that. No, there was one possibility, though it would put him in such deep debt that he might never escape it. But then, if the globe worked, it offered another way out of here.
'What progress do you have to report?' Gyrull asked Ryll a few days later.
'The work goes slowly,' he replied. 'A flisnadr is much more difficult to pattern than our torgnadrs, and we only made a handful of them in years of labour. The human slaves we use in the patterners are not strong enough — they keep dying, ruining all our work. And also,' Ryll looked around, in case they were being overheard by other lyrinx, 'I'm unhappy about. . , the morality of it.' He used the word uncomfortably, as if, applied to the enemy, it was a new concept for him.
'You surprise me,' Gyrull said ambiguously. 'I begin to wonder if you've also been corrupted by association with the human, Tiaan.'
'She made me realise that humankind are not so different. And then, what you discovered in the Great Seep …'
'It's always on my mind.' She scratched a scaly armpit. 'The war will be over within a year. We must prepare for the peace now, though —’
'Not all of us want to change,' he said perceptively. 'We've had too much of it, and it's uncomfortable. The way we are is a refuge. Take that away, what do we have left? And yet…'
'Go on,' she said.
'It's not enough to be the greatest and most successful martial species of all, for in our hearts our people know that they're destroying a great and glorious culture, and replacing it with a desert. We know because we've lost our own civilisation, and the best among us lament it. Our ordinary folk just have a feeling that their victories are hollow, their very lives and purposes meaningless. For thousands of years they've been warriors but, once the victory comes, we won't need warriors any more. What will they do then? They don't know anything else. They don't want anything else.
'So now,' he went on, 'some of us are asking what this war was for. It is no longer mere survival — it's now existence.'
'Indeed, though that's a debate for another time. Let's talk about your patterning. I've the impression that you're thinking along new lines.'
'It was Liett's idea,' he said over-generously. 'To link a dozen patterners, each with its human inside. Each contributing, in its own way, to the flisnadr we're trying to create.'
'I don't see how it can work,' said Gyrull.
Pink speckles flushed his chest and throat, as if he took her words as a criticism, but he quickly skin-changed to the brilliant blue of resolution. 'We also have doubts, but first let me tell you about the advantages. If Liett's idea works it will give us a stronger and more robust flisnadr. A weak human must result in a feeble device, if she survives at all, and many don't. This way, we need not pattern any human to their limit, which gives us a better chance of success.'
Gyrull was pleased by the idea, and the forceful way he presented it, though she foresaw difficulties with his plan. 'How can the individual patterners be linked, and how are the different efforts coordinated? It's never been done before.'
'In the past year,' said Ryll, 'we've done many things that had never been done before. I — I have an idea,' he said, now hesitantly. 'I'm not sure you're going to like it.'
Allow me to decide that for myself!' she said peremptorily.
Again the blue of resolution and she smiled to see it. Ryll was developing well.
'Do you recall the behaviour of Tiaan's amplimet in Snizort, just before the end?' said Ryll. 'It appeared to be communicating, via threads of force, with the node.'
'I do. Continue!'
'I thought we might…I don't know …'
'Use the amplimet, and perhaps Tiaan too, to link the patterners together?'
'Yes' he said quietly. 'It's against our creed, but…'
'We've used her and her crystal before. It was not an unqualified success.'
'The torgnadrs we made by patterning Tiaan never reached their potential,' Ryll agreed. 'What happened to them?'