‘But, Matriarch!’ he cried, aghast. ‘No – we need you.’
‘Don’t be troubled,’ she said. ‘I’m not dead yet. But my time as matriarch has been a long one, and I’ll be glad enough to hand on the flask and the cup to a younger leader. One who’s fit to lead us into our new future – if there is one for us.’
‘Have you chosen the new matriarch?’
‘Not yet, though I’m close to it.’
‘May I ask if … Liett?’ Ryll didn’t know whether to hope she was chosen or rejected. Either way Liett would be insufferable. And yet, Ryll felt she would make a good leader in time. Unfortunately, time was no longer on their side.
‘You may not.’ She smiled. ‘It may be Liett, or another. I’ll be watching to see how the favoured ones acquit themselves over our coming trials.’
Some days after the attack, six lyrinx guards came for Gilhaelith. This is it, he thought, they’re taking me to the slaughtering pens. He tried to summon up some vestige of his earlier rage but, after the months of solitary confinement, he felt too apathetic. Could that be due to the brain damage? His every sense, his every emotion, felt damped down these days, and perhaps it was for the best. At least it would put an end to his troubles.
The guards said nothing, just stolidly led him up the ramps towards Alcifer. Other lyrinx ran past all the time, close to panic. Gilhaelith smiled grimly. It was clear that the city had been attacked and the lyrinx did not know what to do. It no longer concerned him. At least he was going to die out in the fresh air, not in a claustrophobic, reeking chamber down in the pit.
But they did not take him to the slaughtering pens. The guards kept going up the road towards the central point of Alcifer, the five-armed white palace with the glistening shell roofs, at the intersection of the seven boulevards. Just there, beneath the glass-domed roof, he had completed the geomantic globe last autumn. So they weren’t going to kill him after all – at least, not just yet. They still wanted something from him.
Gilhaelith was led inside and, to his unparalleled joy, the globe stood on the stone bench where he’d last used it, under its dust cloth. Ryll was waiting beside it, along with one of the lyrinx mancers who’d kept watch over Gilhaelith previously. He felt another tickle of hope. Perhaps in the present crisis they couldn’t spare the second mancer. The fellow’s skin was flashing and flickering in all the colours of the spectrum, such was his agitation. Ryll maintained a studied calm, though he kept scratching his claws across the bench.
‘I’ve brought you here for the final tests on the flisnadr,’ Ryll said, indicating a barrel-shaped object covered with a canvas. ‘Let’s begin.’
‘I need answers before I’ll agree to help you,’ said Gilhaelith, who was beginning to see the faintest possibility of escape.
Ryll extended his claws towards Gilhaelith’s face. Gilhaelith didn’t flinch. ‘If you could do without me you would have killed me long ago. What’s going on?’
Ryll didn’t even think before answering, which meant that things were desperate and the need for the flisnadr urgent. ‘The humans have attacked Oellyll with the spores of a fungus that causes us to shed our outer skin and tear ourselves to shreds in agony.’ He explained the circumstances of the attack.
Gilhaelith recalled the infected lyrinx that had been put out of its misery as they’d fled from Snizort last summer, and saw the implications at once. Had humanity got the idea from him? He vaguely remembered talking to someone about the incident, at Fiz Gorgo, he thought. ‘Are you abandoning Oellyll?’
‘No decision has been taken,’ said Ryll. ‘Shall we begin?’
He had told Gilhaelith all he needed to know. Oellyll surely would be abandoned, either because lyrinx were being infected with the fungus, or for fear that they would be. This was the crisis – the moment upon which the fate of both lyrinx and humanity hinged. He had to take advantage of the first chance he got, for the instant he gave Ryll what he wanted, Ryll would put him to death.
That knowledge quite concentrated the mind, and Gilhaelith rehearsed once again the attack he’d been planning for months now. He was ready; all he needed was the opportunity.
Ryll went to the flisnadr, though he left the canvas over it so Gilhaelith couldn’t see how it was used. They worked for a night and a day, then slept for a few hours. Gilhaelith was bound hand and foot and watched over by four lyrinx guards, then untied and they worked on. Ryll was methodical and took no chances. Neither did he allow Gilhaelith any.
On the afternoon of the following day, Gilhaelith heard the whine of a thapter not far above. ‘What’s that?’ he said, hoping to distract Ryll.
Ryll cocked his head. ‘Thapter. Go and see,’ he said to one of the guards, and the lyrinx ran off.
‘Perhaps they’re going to attack with more spores,’ Gilhaelith said.
‘They’ll get a surprise if they try,’ said Ryll, pretending indifference, though his skin colours told otherwise.
They continued, Gilhaelith sliding the brass pointers on their circumferential rings as he tuned the geomantic globe to the field, while Ryll worked under the canvas. Gilhaelith couldn’t see what he was doing, though he could feel the effects on the field, which kept drawing down then flaring up. So the flisnadr is working, Gilhaelith thought. And if Ryll can control this dark and dangerous field, formed around the perilous Alcifer node-within-a-node, he can control just about any field in the world. He can take all the power from it, to deprive the enemy, or give it all to his own kind. He can do anything he wants with it. How can humanity counter that?
Surprisingly, Gilhaelith cared. The knowledge that he truly was doomed had come like a blinding revelation. His own selfish interests, which had sustained him all his life, would never be satisfied, but somehow that did not matter any more. What did matter was the fate of humanity, and he might hold the key to saving them. It seemed it was time to throw in his lot with his own kind after all.
The lyrinx came running back. ‘It’s the same thapter that attacked the air shaft last week,’ he said. ‘It’s not attacking, though; just circling.’
Tiaan’s thapter, Gilhaelith thought. This is my chance. If I can just get free and signal her, she can take me away from here. He suppressed the thought that, after his previous behaviour, she might refuse.
He glanced up at Ryll, gauging whether it was the right moment, only to realise that Ryll had seen an entirely different possibility. With the flisnadr he could withdraw all the power from the thapter, no matter what node Tiaan tried to use. He could cause it to crash or bring it to ground just where he wanted it.
Ryll hurled the canvas out of the way and his big hands danced over the recesses and protrusions of the warty, chameleon-skinned flisnadr. He thrust his arms into two of the slits, up to the elbows, and the note of the thapter dropped sharply. Gilhaelith knew his opportunity had come.
He wasn’t going to be rash about it, though. One word from Ryll, even a gesture, and the mancer or the guards would slay him out of hand. Gilhaelith continued moving the pointers exactly as before, and kept the geomantic globe turning gently underneath them on its cushion of freezing mist.
The pattern of the fields – for the node-within-a-node produced two fields here – came into view, slightly blurred in his enfeebled mind. He had to focus the fields, and then, right here in this most perfectly designed place in all the world, wake the sleeping construct that was Alcifer itself. If he could correctly align the geomantic globe to do that, he would have power to blast his enemies into oblivion, drag the thapter to himself and make good his escape in it.
The thapter’s mechanism screamed, died away and screamed again as Tiaan tried desperately to escape. She was jumping from one field to another, trying to preserve her power, as Ryll took command of the fields. Her strategy had worked when she’d escaped from Alcifer the first time, almost a year ago, but it could not work now. Tiaan could not hope to defeat the power patterner in the hands of the lyrinx who had designed it.