Troist’s twelve-legged clanker came creaking and groaning towards them, stopped, and the rear hatch was thrown open. Gilhaelith staggered out, as white as the salt beneath his feet. He threw up and wavered off towards a vacant tent.
Troist got out soon after, tally sheets under his arm, and came looking for Flydd to give his report.
‘What’s the matter with Gilhaelith?’ said Flydd. ‘He’s usually the picture of self-control.’
‘I took him up to one of the battlefronts. I thought it’d do him good to see what his meddling had caused.’
‘He didn’t like it?’
‘It was a savage attack, and our counterattack was even more bloody. We were right in the thick of it and when it was over, the bodies – theirs and ours – were piled higher than my clanker. A lot of them were in pieces.’
‘That’s what war is like,’ said Flydd. ‘It doesn’t even shock me any more.’
‘It still has an impact on me,’ said Troist. ‘But Gilhaelith had never seen a battle before. I thought he was going to throw up all over my operator.’
‘It’ll do him good,’ Flydd said callously.
‘It’s given him a lot to think about. How’s it going?’ said Troist, nodding towards the field controller.
‘It’s got to work,’ said Irisis, gnawing on a leathery strip of some unidentifiable dried meat, as tasteless as anything she’d ever eaten in the manufactory.
‘Only if humanity is fated to survive,’ said Klarm, who’d recently came back from a spying flight in Chissmoul’s thapter. He was drinking strong black ale, his third for the morning, despite the edict that only weak beer was allowed before battle. Klarm had to have his drink. ‘It may be that our time is over and the lyrinx are due to inherit Santhenar.’
‘I always thought, if we did lose,’ said Irisis, ‘it would be after some mighty siege lasting for weeks, full of incredible deeds of courage and derring-do. I didn’t think they’d just drive us out onto the salt until we died of thirst.’
‘There’ll be an almighty battle before it comes to that. I’m not going out with a whimper.’
‘Nor I,’ she said fiercely.
‘I’ll make my last stand beside you any day,’ Klarm said.
‘Then bring it on,’ she said savagely, flinging the dried meat away. ‘With Nish gone, I don’t have anything left to hope for.’
‘He could have survived,’ said Klarm. ‘I’ve been to the site and found the bodies of the soldiers, but no Nish.’
‘They must have taken him away to question him. And after that, to eat him.’
‘The lyrinx don’t eat people any more, Irisis. Gilhaelith was right about that.’
‘They still kill them, though.’
Irisis stood in the shade of the canvas, watching as Flydd readied the field controller for a last desperate attempt. The struggle was going to be a long-range one, field controller against power patterner, so her work was done unless something broke or needed adjustment. The scrutator was sitting under a piece of sailcloth stretched out with ropes and propped up on poles to form an open shelter whose roof rose about four spans above the salt. He was stripped to the waist and covered in perspiration. She wished she could do the same but that wouldn’t have done in an army camp. Down on the salt, autumn was like midsummer up above.
A stone’s throw away, under another canvas, Klarm prepared to direct his team of operators, who were seated at a long table. Each had a farspeaker globe in front of them, tuned to the massive mind-shockers carried in the forward line of clankers. He and Flydd had concluded that the mind-shockers hadn’t worked because of the failure of the field controller. Runners stood ready to carry messages back and forth between Klarm and Flydd’s team at the field controller.
It squatted on five stubby legs in front of Flydd: an assortment of wires, crystals and strangely curved glass tubes protruding from the top of an open glass barrel. Its operator, Hilluly, another of those young cousins Nish had first tested at Fiz Gorgo, sat by the scrutator’s side, her hands in wired gloves and a bird’s nest of tangled wires and crystals on her head. She was petite, with ashy hair and Yggur’s eyes. She wore a simple white gown belted tightly at a waist that could have been spanned by Klarm’s hands.
A copy of Tiaan’s original but incomplete node map was wrapped around the barrel of the field controller, which could be rotated back and forth. Graduated brass scales ran down the length of the barrel and around its circumference, with pointers that could be slid along to take measurements.
‘What if we offered to give them the relics?’ said Irisis.
‘Out here? And give up the one small lever we have left?’
‘Or threaten to destroy them?’
‘I already tried that one,’ Flydd said ruefully.
Ten spans away, at the far side of Flydd’s shelter so the devices would not interfere with one another, Daesmie hunched over Golias’s globe, relaying messages from the army detachments distributed around them to the four points of the compass, and from Chissmoul’s thapter on watch high above. A runner stood by Daesmie. Because the salt was so flat, the enemy’s movements could not be seen from here. If they broke, or attacked, the news would be relayed at once.
Irisis went over to read what Daesmie was writing. ‘Still no change,’ she said. ‘None of the lyrinx armies have moved all morning.’
They’re playing with us, Irisis thought. They can overrun us whenever they like. She carried the message slate to Flydd, who had a pointed ebony cane in his left hand. He scanned it, nodded and waved her away. Irisis stood well back, and the struggle began.
Flydd pointed to a purple coloured node on Tiaan’s map with the tip of the cane, and said, ‘Ifis 44, Nihim 5, Husp 220, Gyr 8.’
Hilluly moved her fingers inside the gloves. A green light spiralled along one of the twisted tubes; a red one slid down another like an icicle down a wire. Strange poppings came from inside the field controller. Sweat broke out on her forehead.
‘They’ve countered your move with the power patterner, surr,’ Hilluly gasped.
Flydd cursed. ‘Ifis 38, Nihim 11, Husp 187, Gyr 22.’ More lights and noises. Much more sweat.
‘Countered at once,’ panted Hilluly.
‘Oh, have they?’ cried the scrutator. ‘Then let them try this!’
A third list, different names again, but the numbers were all single digits.
Hilluly was rigid, apart from her dancing fingers. A line of flies, which were everywhere down here, gathered on her wet lips. Irisis went to shoo them away but Flydd said, ‘No!’
Hilluly gasped and fell forward. The flies rose and settled on the back of her gown, which was wet with perspiration.
‘Now you can help her,’ said Flydd.
Irisis gave the operator a cool drink. Hilluly sat up, rubbing her eyes with her gloved hands, then tore them off and examined her fingers. They were bright red. She rubbed them on her gown and said, ‘Not that time either, surr.’
He rose from his seat, his every rib showing. ‘Thank you, Hilluly.’ Flydd went across to the farspeaker operator. ‘Any movement yet?’
‘No, surr,’ said Daesmie. ‘The enemy seem to be waiting for something to happen.’
‘Keep listening. I’ll be back in a minute.’
Irisis walked out with him. ‘That looked like a game of Strategies.’
‘It’s exactly like it. I don’t have a perfect understanding of the fields here, and neither do they. I have to guess where their knowledge lies, and their ignorance, and they the same about me. It seems we’re evenly matched – whoever guesses or bluffs best will be the winner.’
‘Or whoever lasts the longest.’