Did Flydd feel he had nothing more to lose? Nish sniggered. Several others laughed. Klarm, who had been carried inside wrapped in blankets, heaved silently.
Orgestre swelled like a purple toad. ‘I could have you put in irons for that, Citizen Flydd,’ he said pointedly.
A murmur ran through the dignitaries, then Governor Zaeff spoke sharply to him. Irisis didn’t hear what was said, though clearly he’d gone too far.
‘What is Orgestre’s achievement?’ said Irisis quietly. ‘Troist fought all the military battles for him, and Flydd won against their Arts. The Grand Commander has never raised a sword in combat, and now the war has been won he wants praise for being the executioner?’
‘Truly the battle isn’t over until the last man falls,’ Orgestre was saying. ‘We’ve risen from the ashes of our funeral pyre to overcome our enemy. Never in all the Histories has there been such a victory.’
‘If it truly is a victory!’ said Yggur, standing up and meeting everyone’s eye, one by one, as if defying them to attempt anything against him. ‘But should any lyrinx survive elsewhere on Santhenar, or in the void from whence they came, you’ll create an enemy who will never forgive humanity, not in a thousand times a thousand years. Their vengeance will be as eternal as the stars, Grand Commander Orgestre. Your descendants will curse your name, you and all you others who’ve authorised this genocide, until humanity itself is no more.’
‘Don’t commit this dreadful atrocity. Find another way,’ said Gilhaelith.
The governors were scowling now, annoyed at the dissent spoiling their celebration dinner.
‘You brought them here,’ said Orgestre.
‘When circumstances change, an intelligent man changes his mind,’ said Gilhaelith.
‘Sit down or I’ll have you in irons for dealing with the enemy.’ Orgestre turned to the governors. ‘We’ve had the debate – weary days of it. The vote has been tallied, and won. Must we go through it yet again?’
‘I haven’t had my say,’ said Malien.
‘Then please say what you’ve come for so we can get on with it.’
‘To exterminate any race before its time is a great evil, besides what may come of it.’
‘Humanity is worn out with conflict,’ said Governor Zaeff, speaking for the first time, ‘and so is our world. It has to end now, and here. The future must take care of itself.’
‘Oh, it will,’ said Malien. ‘Recall, from the Histories, how the Faellem once cast their rivals on Tallallame, the Mariem, into the void to die. They thought they had eliminated them, but out of the void the Mariem returned, as Charon, and in the end it was the Faellem who lost their world, their humanity and their civilisation.’
‘The irony of the Histories is indeed inexorable,’ said Yggur.
‘While the mighty cringe from their imagined futures,’ said Orgestre, ‘the common folk live in fear that the war will go on forever. We’ve already voted to kill the beasts. Just give me the power and I’ll see it carried out to the last pregnant female and the last whining infant. Those of you who don’t have the stomach may take your leave, and claim hereafter that you had no part in the business.’ He glanced around, and added, ‘though no doubt you’ll profit from it once the war is over.’
‘Before you set about your slaughter,’ said Malien, coming out to the front, ‘attend me a moment!’ She said it so like a royal command that even Orgestre fell silent.
She told them what had happened at the Hornrace and out in the Dry Sea, of the fate of Vithis, Minis and Tirior, and about the Well of Echoes.
‘What’s going to happen to it?’ said Gilhaelith, his eyes glowing with a geomancer’s fascination for any new natural force.
‘No one knows,’ she said. ‘It may keep growing, go quiescent, or even split into a whole swarm of little Wells.’
‘How does it grow?’ asked Zaeff.
‘By taking power from fields and nodes.’
‘Then what’s to stop it growing until it’s consumed them all?’ said Flydd.
‘Maybe nothing,’ said Malien, ‘though all things have a natural limit.’
‘Vithis said “All Santhenar will rue this day”,’ Tiaan reminded them. ‘What did he mean by that?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Malien.
‘You’d better keep an eye on it,’ said Flydd. ‘Why don’t you go now? Oh, if I could have the field map before you go, Tiaan,’ he said pointedly, so the whole room could hear.
‘I lost it,’ she said at once. ‘Out in the Dry Sea.’
‘Lost it?’
‘I think Tirior must have taken it, before she was sent to the Well,’ Tiaan said hastily. ‘It’s ironic, really, since the Well feeds on fields and nodes, that it should have consumed my map.’
Flydd eyed her sceptically. ‘Well, I dare say I can get enough out of the field controller with the incomplete one.’
‘If you’re going to check on the Well,’ said Gilhaelith quickly, ‘I’d like to come too.’
Flydd followed them outside and spoke quietly with Malien for a minute or two, before going back towards the banquet tent, but then he stopped halfway. ‘Incidentally, Tiaan,’ he called, ‘you should ask Gilhaelith to explain the art of deception.’
‘What’s he talking about?’ Tiaan said, once Flydd had returned to the tent.
Gilhaelith chuckled. ‘The best liars keep their stories simple and keep saying the same thing. At all costs, resist the urge to embroider.’
Malien and Gilhaelith headed for the thapter, the others to their tents to change their filthy clothes. When they were alone, Gilhaelith said, ‘I wonder if you might use your good offices to recover my geomantic globe. Now that the war is over, Flydd has no need to hold it, and it would be a comfort to me.’
Malien considered the request, as if judging whether he was practising the art of deception on her. ‘And you could use it to repair your injuries.’
‘The damage is no longer reparable. But even so, I’d like to have it by me. It was my life’s work, and it’s a thing of beauty that comforts me.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. Malien looked him up and down. ‘You’re a contradictory fellow, Gilhaelith. You brought the lyrinx here to exact revenge on them, and you’ve just argued for their preservation.’
‘So I did,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘But the brutalities of war, and my own mortality, have rendered revenge meaningless.’
‘You can’t lie to me, you know. I read men – even geomancers – the way you read books.’
‘I wouldn’t try. I’d never seen war before, Malien, and I had no idea of the horror of it – bodies torn apart, heads ripped off, thousands dying in agony because some fool ordered them to fight. And to think I put it all in motion.’
‘This battle was coming anyway,’ said Malien. She wasn’t trying to comfort him. ‘But I do believe we’re of a mind.’
‘What I’ve done has made my life more meaningless than ever, and I’m beginning to see only one way out. To take my life before I lose my mind.’
‘There could be another way to give your life the meaning you crave.’
‘How?’ he said indifferently.
‘By helping to undo what you’ve brought about.’
‘It’s gone too far; there’s no way to resolve it.’
‘There may be. Let’s get your globe. Do you know where it is?’
‘In the guarded tent next to the relics from the tar pits.’
‘I’ll take the thapter across while we wait for the others. No one would suspect me. And, Gilhaelith, perhaps you can do something for me …’
Tiaan was pacing across the crunchy salt on the other side of the thapter when Malien came walking towards her. ‘Is something the matter, Tiaan?’
‘I can’t bear to think about what they’re doing,’ said Tiaan in a low voice. She kicked a lump of salt out of the way as if it were Orgestre’s head.
‘They’re afraid, and they see it as a simple answer, though there are none.’