‘It’s got to be their power patterner,’ said Irisis blearily, much later, as the sun rose over the salt.
‘Of course it is,’ snapped Flydd, who’d reluctantly come to the same conclusion at the end of the sleepless night. ‘I just don’t see how it can be affecting our field controller. That’s why we put those banks of charged crystals at the heart of it – so it wouldn’t need to draw on the field at all. Otherwise any node-drainer could bring it down.’
‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ said Irisis. ‘I wonder …? What has the field been doing during our flight? Has anyone been watching it?’
‘It’s behaving oddly, Crafter,’ said the youngest artisan, Nouniy, who was only seventeen and wore her blonde hair in a myriad of plaits, in imitation of famous Pilot Kattiloe. ‘It’s been whirling, actually.’
‘Whirling?’ said Irisis.
‘That’s the only way I can describe it.’ Nouniy demonstrated its motion in the air with a fingertip.
‘Curious,’ said Irisis, touching her pliance and taking a look for herself. Pulling the rear hatch open, she knelt down and began scratching a design on the salt with the point of her knife.
‘What are you doing?’ said Flydd, crouching beside her with an audible click of his kneecaps.
‘The cycling field must be inducing a contrary field around your sensing crystals, cancelling them out. So the rest of the field controller is working but, since you can’t sense how the field is changing, you can’t do anything with it. Now, if we were to just add …’
She sketched for five or six minutes, stood up and looked at the design from all sides, then nodded. ‘That’ll work. Let’s get it made.’ Irisis carefully carved the pattern out of the salt and crushed it under her boot, in case of spies or traitors.
An aide ran up with a folded message strip. Flydd unfolded it and handed it back to her. She bowed and withdrew.
‘Better hurry,’ said Flydd. ‘Our entire army is on the salt. Whatever the enemy have in mind, it’s not going to be long in coming. And get someone to call Tiaan again.’
Each time a thapter was heard he ran out and stared up at the sky, but Tiaan didn’t appear.
After the modifications had been made, Irisis successfully tested the field controller and went looking for Flydd to tell him the good news. He was preparing a last-ditch defence. If that failed their only options were a suicidal attack on an enemy that vastly outnumbered them, or a desperate flight into the Dry Sea. And everyone knew how that would end.
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.