‘Yes, Tiaan?’ said Yggur.
‘It seemed to me that they weren’t quite at home in their bodies.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘It was the way they kept working their limbs, shrugging their shoulders and plucking at their outer skin,’ said Tiaan. ‘They seemed uncomfortable a lot of the time.’
‘That’s hardly surprising,’ said Flydd, ‘considering how greatly they flesh-formed their unborn young, to survive in the void. For every strength that served them well there, they must have a weakness we can exploit here.’
‘How do they feel in themselves?’ said Fyn-Mah, who was sitting close to Flydd, as always since his return. ‘Are they happy with what they’ve become?’
‘Not all of them,’ said Tiaan. ‘Many are born malformed. Some never develop wings and others lack pigment or the armoured outer skin.’
‘Do they treat these ones badly?’ asked Flydd.
‘Not as badly as humans would,’ said Tiaan, ‘though they are regarded as inferior. They’re rarely permitted to breed.’
‘Anything else?’ said Yggur.
‘Snizort had some other significance for the lyrinx,’ said Nish, ‘and it was more important than fighting us. They delayed the battle so they could complete it.’
‘Why hasn’t anybody mentioned this before?’ said Yggur sharply.
Nish shrugged. ‘They made a tunnel into the Great Seep and took a lot of relics out of it. Gilhaelith helped them to find the relics, I’m told.’
‘A tunnel into liquid tar?’
‘They froze the tar first,’ said Tiaan. ‘We saw the entrance as we escaped from Snizort.’
‘And I’ve thought of something else,’ said Nish. ‘Tiaan was with a man called Merryl, a freed slave who’d been held by the lyrinx for many years and spoke their tongue. If anyone knows the enemy’s secrets, it would be him.’
‘What happened to this fellow, Tiaan?’ said Yggur.
‘I haven’t seen him since we escaped.’
‘Chances are that he was put to work, hauling clankers,’ said Flydd. ‘If he survived that, he could be anywhere.’
‘I’ll tell my spies to keep watch for him,’ said Yggur, ‘though I doubt he’ll be found. Pity. Are we finished?’
‘Gilhaelith once mentioned that a lyrinx had developed a dreadful inflammation between its skin layers,’ said Flydd. ‘It clawed its armoured skin off and they had to put it to death. They buried the body and left hastily, as if afraid of infection.’
‘When was this?’ said Yggur, his mouth tightening at mention of the geomancer.
‘He came to visit me at the healers, before Fiz Gorgo was attacked.’
‘How curious,’ said Yggur. ‘Tell me, did he say why the enemy were tunnelling into the Great Seep?’
‘No.’
‘What did they find?’
‘The remains of an ancient village – wooden walls, floors, furniture, and a lot of bodies preserved by the tar. Also some large crystals of brimstone in boxes. They called one “The Brimstone”.’
‘The Brimstone?’ said Yggur. ‘What did they say about it?’
‘Gilhaelith didn’t know.’
‘Or wouldn’t tell you,’ Yggur said darkly.
Not even in that slave-driven time in the manufactory a year ago, after their return from the fatal trek across the ice plateau, had Nish laboured as hard as he did now. The expedition to Snizort required three more air-floaters, which had to be built from scratch in a month. He’d given a list of essential items to Klarm, thinking that they’d be obtainable in Borgistry, only to be told that the old Council had stripped Borgistry clean to make its sixteen air-dreadnoughts. He’d already searched the sites where air-dreadnoughts had crashed and burned but the intense fires had consumed everything, and no one knew what had happened to the other four Fusshte had fled with.
Nish worked in a cramped stone shed in a southern corner of the yard. Being built against the outer wall, it never saw the winter sun. His sole source of warmth was an open brazier fed with chips and wood shavings, when he had the time to gather them. He started work at five in the morning, seldom finished before midnight, and was often so tired that he slept on the floor.
He didn’t see Irisis from one day to the next for she was just as frantic, directing Tiaan and four other artisans in the making of all sorts of devices they’d need before the spring offensive. They’d recovered air-floater controllers, floater-gas generators and all manner of other bits and pieces from Nennifer, but still the work was endless. Nish missed her.
Yggur had sent Fyn-Mah off in the air-floater with Klarm to conscript artificers, smiths, carpenters and all the other workers needed, but she hadn’t yet come back. Some might be found at Old Hripton but others would have to come from Borgistry.
And making air-floaters was the easiest of his jobs, for at least Nish knew what to do and he had the original air-floater to use as a template. He also had to find skilled artificers to carry out whatever repairs would be needed to get the abandoned constructs running. Among the survivors of the amphitheatre’s collapse were a number of artificers who had experience with clankers, but constructs were very different. Nish would have to conduct most of their training without a thapter to work on, as it was about to leave on Flydd’s embassy to the east coast. Nish had the construct mechanism recovered from Snizort some months ago, but for the rest he had to make do with wooden models and drawings, which he knew were not good enough.
But his most challenging job was finding and training pilots to fly thapters from Snizort to Fiz Gorgo. If his other tasks were difficult, this one looked impossible. Few people had the talent to draw power with a controller, and most became air-floater pilots or clanker operators. Once trained for a particular machine it was difficult for an operator to adapt to another; the emotional bond usually got in the way.
Nish discovered that two air-dreadnought reserve pilots had survived the collapse of the amphitheatre. Unfortunately one had gone insane when her craft had exploded. The other, distraught at being separated from her machine, had stepped off the outer wall of Fiz Gorgo while he’d been away on the trip to Nennifer. After much searching, Nish despaired of finding a single pilot.
‘It’s hopeless,’ he said to Flydd after days of frustration and failure. ‘We’ll never be ready for spring, surr. I’m letting everyone down.’
‘Just take it one step at a time, Nish. Don’t think about winning the war, or even being ready for the spring offensive. Just concentrate on getting the next task done. And then the one after that.’
The following day there was a knock at the door of his shed. Nish fed the last of his wood chips into the brazier, held his blue fingers over it for a moment and went to see who was there.
It was Yggur’s newly appointed seneschal, Berty, a small, round, bustling man, not much short of eighty, with wings of frothy white hair on either side of a pink, bald skull. He was accompanied by a pair of downcast, bedraggled and red-eyed men, one big, pockmarked and hairy, the other small and completely bald.
‘Cook found them in an inn at Old Hripton,’ piped Berty. ‘They lost their machines in the battle at Snizort, then became separated from the army. They were pressed into service as sailors, deserted and worked their way from port to port around Meldorin. Gorm and Zyphus are their names.’ He nodded and hurried out.
‘Operators,’ Nish said hungrily, ignoring his misgivings. Since they’d lost their machines so long ago, retraining might be possible. ‘Let’s see what we can do for each other.’
When he took them to see the controllers Irisis’s team were working on, Gorm and Zyphus broke down and wept, and Nish had to leave them for an hour. When he returned, the hairy operator, Gorm, the ugliest, roughest fellow Nish had set eyes on in a long time, threw his arms around Nish and kissed him on the cheek.