Hurry! Gilhaelith told himself. If Ryll takes the thapter, or crashes it, all is lost. Gilhaelith ignored his own imperative. He must stay calm and, above all, be controlled. His mind was far less than it had been but his unquenchable will was as strong as ever. He could still do it. Focus. Focus the field!
Its grainy strands sharpened but then dissolved into a blur again. He could feel control slipping. With a supreme effort of will, Gilhaelith wrenched it back in place. The field came perfectly into focus and, the instant it did, he reached down to Alcifer’s core that had lain sleeping for over a thousand years, waiting for a master who would never return.
Gilhaelith reached out and down, deeper and deeper, and suddenly there it was. It faded; then, without any warning, the faint nodes beneath the glass surface of the geomantic globe lit up.
Gilhaelith drew a deep breath and willed himself to calm as Ryll spun around, staring at the globe.
‘What have you done?’ Gilhaelith cried, to forestall Ryll and make him wonder if he had done it himself, with the power patterner.
Ryll gave him a suspicious glance, withdrew one arm from the flisnadr and beckoned the watching lyrinx mancer over. The male came at a run, close enough to see into the bowl, then froze. The nodes were glowing more brightly than before, each according to its true nature. Now a slender thread of orange light began to extend from Alcifer’s node-within-a-node to another node, a quarter of the way across the globe.
‘Ah,’ breathed Gilhaelith. Tiaan had previously told him that nodes could be linked. He’d thought a lot about that but had never been able to work out how. At last he began to understand. The thread had now touched the second node, and other threads began to extend out from it towards yet more distant nodes. If he could duplicate in the world what he’d done on the globe, could the power of all the nodes become available to him? His mind reeled with the possibilities – survival, even reversal of the brain damage after all? He didn’t know – it was too much for anyone to take in.
‘Step away from the globe,’ snapped Ryll. ‘Then don’t move.’
Gilhaelith wasn’t quite ready, but it had to be now. He could feel power flowing into the globe and he drew on it to strike his enemies down.
Something low down in the bowels of Alcifer throbbed; he heard a low grinding note. To his geomantic ear it sounded like basalt grating across obsidian. The nodes grew brighter, the threads of light raced between them and suddenly Gilhaelith woke to something that had happened to him a long time ago.
He began to feel the tiny, invisible thread that the amplimet had drawn to the back of his skull when he’d been working for the lyrinx in the tar tunnel in Snizort. He’d forgotten it during the escape, but now he could feel it tugging at him. Abruptly it also seemed to light up, a fiery pulse ran up it into the ethyr and then he felt – oh, horrible, horrible! He actually felt it – the sleeping amplimet in Tiaan’s thapter was driven over the threshold to the second stage of awakening.
‘No!’ he cried aloud. ‘Not that!’ and hurled every iota of power he could at the thread to sever it. He succeeded, but then the strangest thing happened.
All the lights went out, though it was daylight. The world and even the lyrinx faded to frozen translucency, and Gilhaelith shifted. Everything went dull and dim except the geomantic globe; the roused core of Alcifer, which now glowed a baleful red; and somewhere above, frozen in flight, a tiny winking gleam that was the woken amplimet.
He moved a hand. It appeared real, solid, though when he dropped it on the stone table it sank partway into it before enough resistance built up to stop it. Gilhaelith had been shifted outside the dimensions of the world. Or almost out.
Free, he exulted. I’m free.
First of all, he would make his escape from this accursed place. No, before anything, he must exact retribution on Gyrull, for holding him against his will and for refusing him what was rightfully his. Gilhaelith looked around and then down, tracing through the layers of Oellyll as if it were a translucent cake. The matriarch wouldn’t be hard to find, even among so many lyrinx, for few held such power as she did. She would stand out among the lesser lyrinx like a ruby in a tray of grey glass.
Ah, there she was, deep down, in a secluded little chamber, frozen in the act of bending over what appeared to be a coffin. Gilhaelith looked more closely. It was one of the relics she’d retrieved from Snizort, and they were more valuable than the whole city of Snizort had been. Behind her, two other lyrinx, no more than grey shadows, had coffins on their shoulders. They were moving the relics. They must be evacuating Snizort.
Time to be going. Gilhaelith reached out and exerted his new-found power. It was easy here, outside the real world. With no more effort than the wiggling of a fingertip, he pulled down the roof of the tunnel in front of Gyrull, then collapsed it for a few hundred spans, to make sure she would never get out. You did everything for those relics, he thought, including kidnapping and enslaving me. Now you’ll have what remains of your life to regret it.
The floor shook beneath him, reminding Gilhaelith that he knew little about the power he was using, or what the consequences would be. A sharp pang struck him in the heart, and by the time he’d recovered from it, he was back in his body in the glass-domed chamber. All remained as it had been, except that Ryll was now moving in extreme slow-motion. Whatever power had shifted Gilhaelith outside of normal space and time was lapsing. Time and reality would soon resume.
Gilhaelith raised his hand and drew power to blast Ryll and the flisnadr to pulp, but that pain stabbed him in the chest again. He must have taken too much already. Revenge would have to wait. He picked up the globe and staggered with it out to the main door of the palace, then outside. By the time he reached the intersection of the boulevards, the world was almost as solid as it had ever been.
He looked up, thinking that he could at least use power to pull the thapter down to him, but whatever he’d woken in Alcifer’s core slipped beyond his reach. One minute the thapter was frozen in the air above him, the next it had streaked away and vanished. Perhaps he’d taken the globe too far from the centre, but there was no time to think it through. He couldn’t go back; the lyrinx would kill him on sight. Hefting the globe in his arms, Gilhaelith ran for the port, praying that there would be some kind of boat available when he got there. If he made it across the sea, Flydd would be most interested to hear about the power patterner. It gave him something to bargain with.
Ryll.
Ryll was frantically searching for Gilhaelith, who had inexplicably vanished from the glass-domed chamber. Now he stopped abruptly, for it had sounded like the matriarch speaking inside his head. Ryll had little talent for mindspeech – few but the strongest lyrinx did – but he had occasionally picked up fragments of the mindspeech of others, and knew what it was like. This was far stronger, for it came from the greatest mindspeaker of all.
Ryll, I know you can’t answer me. Don’t worry – I can tell you’re hearing what I have to say. Alas, Gilhaelith is free and is now on his way across the sea to rejoin humankind. His knowledge of our flisnadr will strengthen them immeasurably, if we allow them time to understand it. The moment has come that we have long been dreading, but at least we’re prepared for it, and we have the flisnadr at last. Humanity is strong; maybe stronger than we are. Only time and courage will tell.