‘I thought you said you were going to do it,’ Flydd said.
‘It’s my task,’ said Yggur, ‘but I plan to call upon everyone here. Everyone with a talent for the Art, I mean. We now have the greatest secrets and Arts of the Council, and they’d made many breakthroughs the world was never told about. If we can work as a team, and we must, together we will be greater than the greatest individual. We must crack Golias’s globe. We cannot win the war without it; not even with a hundred thapters.’
‘The Council didn’t believe the war could be won at all,’ said Klarm.
‘I do,’ said Flydd. ‘Is that your entire plan, Yggur? You haven’t given me much to do. Or Malien. Or Klarm, for that matter.’
‘Klarm will be poring over the Council’s Arts and devices. Malien … can speak for herself.’
‘I expect I’ll be at the controls of the thapter most of the time,’ said Malien.
‘You’re the head of the new council, Flydd. You must lead our embassy-at-large,’ Yggur went on, ‘since you know everyone in the east. While the air-floaters and thapter controllers are being built, and their pilots and artificers trained, you’ll need to fly east and north to rally our allies.’ Yggur looked around the fire. ‘That’s my plan.’
‘It’s a good start,’ said Flydd, ‘but we must also plan the second stage. The lyrinx have had it far too easy in the past. They’ve attacked and we’ve defended; and lost. The Council’s response has always been predictable, so we’ve got to be unpredictable. I want to mount a surprise attack on the enemy in early spring, before they’re ready to fight. I want to shock them; to make them worry about what we’ll do next and how strong we really are.’
‘Good idea. Incidentally,’ Yggur said casually, ‘Tiaan, I believe you attempted to map fields from the air, in the east.’
Tiaan, who was staring blankly at the fire, came out of her introspection with a start. ‘I – I spent a long time at it, surr. I’ve mapped the fields north and south from Stassor for a hundred and forty leagues, east to the sea and west for another eighty leagues – perhaps a tenth of Lauralin. My map is still in the thapter, if you’d care to see it.’
Yggur gaped. ‘You’re making a fool of me, surely?’
‘I never joke about my work, surr.’ She went into the darkness with her head high, returning a few minutes later with a rolled map drawn on coated linen.
Tiaan unrolled it on the rough ground and weighted the ends with rocks. A chart of north-eastern Lauralin, it extended from Guffeons in the north to Tiksi in the south, and as far west as the desert of Kalar. The mountains were drawn in relief and shaded pale grey. Overlaid were a series of black marks, with symbols beside them, each surrounded by coloured haloes of various shapes and sizes, some in single colours, others like rainbows.
‘These represent the nodes,’ said Yggur, touching one of the black shapes with a fingertip.
‘Yes. There are 317 of them in the area of this map. Most, as far as I can tell, were not previously known.’
Yggur glanced at Flydd, whose astonishment was nearly as great as his own. ‘But this is priceless! Why didn’t we know about this?’
‘You didn’t ask.’
‘And the symbols?’ asked Flydd. ‘The kind of node, presumably?’
‘Yes,’ Tiaan said faintly. She hated being the centre of attention. ‘This symbol denotes a normal node, this a spiral node and this a double.’
‘A double node?’
‘It quite disturbed me, passing over it.’
‘How did you manage such detail?’ said Yggur.
‘Oh, this is nothing. I have larger maps of many of the nodes, back in Fiz Gorgo, showing how they changed the various times I passed over them.’
‘But –’
‘I see each field as a coloured picture,’ she said. ‘And once seen, I can remember it forever. For example, this one,’ she pointed to a dot in the Kalar Desert, ‘I can show you how the field changes over a day and –’
‘We can talk about the details at another time,’ Yggur said. ‘Tiaan, such maps may be vital to the war. Will be vital, I should say, especially if the lyrinx expand their attacks on nodes. Would you care to do more of it?’
‘I want to map all the nodes in the world,’ said Tiaan, her eyes glowing. ‘I – I long to understand how the fields work. But … don’t you want me to work on thapter controllers …?’
‘This is more urgent. If Flydd agrees, I’d send you with him when he goes off on his embassies.’
‘She’ll have to come anyway,’ said Flydd gracelessly. ‘Flying the thapter is hard work and Malien can’t do it all by herself.’
‘Assuming I agree to take you,’ said Malien quietly.
Yggur ignored the exchange. ‘Tiaan, wherever Flydd goes, you shall go too, and map the fields of all the lands you pass over. Then, should the war resume sooner than we expect, at least we’ll have maps to go by.’
‘Thank you,’ said Tiaan in a low voice, and turned back to her contemplation of the fire.
‘I believe you’re up to something,’ Flydd muttered to Yggur.
‘I’m thinking ahead,’ Yggur replied. ‘We make more use of the fields each day, as do Vithis’s Aachim, and Malien’s people in Stassor. Malien is worried that we’re taking too much from them. We talked about it some time back. And the enemy uses fields far more than they did before. Now there’s talk of nodes failing of their own accord, and nodes being drained dry by overuse. If it gets worse, whosoever knows the fields best will have the upper hand. That task is yours, Tiaan, and it’s a vital one.’
Tiaan was so transformed by the responsibility Yggur had given her that she declined to fly the thapter when Malien offered her the amplimet. Irisis, who was in the cockpit at the time, saw the longing in Tiaan’s eyes. She gazed at the softly glowing crystal for a moment, then edged it away with the back of her hand. ‘You fly. I want to map.’
All the long hours that it took to get home, Tiaan sat with the relevant section of the map unrolled on her lap, making annotations on a pad in a tiny hand, and coloured markings on an overlay. Each night by the campfire she wrote up her notes and refined her master map.
Klarm was working just as hard. He sat in his corner of the thapter, studying the sheaves of papers he’d taken from Nennifer and writing in a series of rice-paper books with different-coloured bindings. He worked by the campfire too, until dinner, after which he got roaringly drunk every night.
THIRTY-SEVEN
They returned to Fiz Gorgo twelve days after the beginning of winter, having been away for a little over three weeks, and for once it wasn’t raining.
Fyn-Mah came running out before the thapter had set down. Irisis, who was sitting on the rear platform, smiled to see the perquisitor. Normally so austere and controlled, that small, dark-haired figure was staring up at them, fists clenched at her sides. Fyn-Mah didn’t seem to take a breath until Flydd’s head appeared, whereupon she bolted to the ladder. At the bottom she hesitated, no doubt remembering the hideous scene at their departure. She looked up at Flydd, and he down at her, and then she smiled and went up to him in a rush. Shortly afterwards they went inside, ignoring everyone else.
Fiz Gorgo was in very good order. Fyn-Mah had the walls manned day and night and the damage repaired, apart from the upper sections of the blasted towers. The larders were provisioned for the winter and squads of soldiers were carrying out drills on the other side of the yard.
Four days after their return, Yggur called everyone together to discuss new intelligence about the war. Irisis sat up the front, next to Nish. Yggur scanned all the faces, frowned and said to Flydd, ‘Where’s Klarm?’
‘He’s gone out in the air-floater.’