‘Leave it to those who know how.’
Irisis could feel the edge of the drop. Her teeth began to chatter.
One of the soldiers lit a signal lantern. The scrutator held it high, facing across the valley towards the range. He gave a series of flashes, shuttered it completely, then opened it and gave the same sequence again. Irisis could hear the click of the shutter.
‘No reply,’ he said after a long wait. ‘What are the enemy doing?’
‘Coming after us,’ said Oon-Mie. ‘They’re nearly within crossbow range.’
‘Get your weapons out.’
Swords scraped on scabbards. Someone wound the crank of a crossbow. She felt useless, especially when the enemy were so close that she could hear their claws scraping on the rock. If only she could see. With a crossbow in her hands she’d make them jump.
A crossbow twanged. ‘Missed!’ the soldier cursed.
‘How near do you need to be?’ the scrutator said derisively. ‘Any closer and you could have picked his nose with it.’
‘The light’s deceptive, surr.’
‘Then hold off until you can see up their nostrils.’
‘I don’t ever want to see up a lyrinx’s nostrils,’ said Irisis. ‘Are any of them fliers, Xervish?’
‘Doesn’t look like it, but once it’s fully dark they’ll come up the sides without us ever seeing them. And then, my friends, it’s dinnertime.’ He chuckled grimly.
No one else joined in.
‘Look out!’ Oon-Mie cried. ‘They’re throwing rocks!’
Someone pulled Irisis down. There was another thud, a man’s cry of pain, then someone went off the side. Irisis heard every pulpy impact until he finally came to rest a long way below.
‘Who …?’ she said fearfully.
‘Jarle,’ said Flydd. ‘A good man. Don’t look, Zoyl.’
The sound of rending and feeding began. Bones crunched; gobbets of flesh were swallowed noisily. ‘Poor devil,’ said Oon-Mie.
‘At least he was dead first,’ said Flydd heavily. ‘Stay down. They’ll try again.’
FORTY-FIVE
It was nearly dark now. The lyrinx must charge soon. The soldiers were still shooting but did not seem to be doing any damage. The enemy’s claws rasped on the stone, just a few spans below. Oon-Mie was dropping rocks on them. ‘Take that, and that!’ They weren’t big enough to do a lot of damage but Irisis caught one or two cries of pain.
‘Can’t you do anything, Flydd?’ she said. ‘What’s happened to your famous scrutator magic?’
‘I spent it earlier.’ He sounded worn out.
‘For nothing.’
‘Nothing comes for nothing and scrutator magic has painful after-effects, though we don’t talk about such things.’
‘Why not? To maintain the myth of invulnerability for us peasants?’
‘If you like. What’s that?’
Irisis could hear it too; the whirr of a rotor. She felt a rush of wind as the air-floater appeared above them.
‘Get moving,’ yelled Flydd. ‘They’re charging.’
They scrambled up the ladder, Irisis with a rope around her chest. The machine ticked away rather more quickly than when it had brought them here, such was the strength of the field now.
‘That taught us something,’ said Flydd, sitting with Irisis down the far end of the cabin in the dark.
‘That we should never have been born!’ It was just one of her remarks. There was no bitterness behind it. Irisis felt better than she had in ages, though she could not have said why. ‘What do you make of what Zoyl saw?’
‘I reckon the lyrinx have found a way of draining the node.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. We know so little about how they think and work. Some of them are mancers as powerful as any of us scrutators, though they use power differently.’
‘They use the field though?’
‘Indeed, but not through crystals, controllers or any of the devices we employ.’
‘What about those mushroom-shaped spying devices I heard of?’
‘Ah, those. We’ve captured several in the past few years, but we haven’t learned how they work.’
‘Why not?’
‘They’re grown, or flesh-formed, for a particular purpose, such as keeping watch. But once we take them they die – if they’re actually alive – like a flower plucked from the garden.’
‘And you think they’ve tailored such a device to drain the field out of a node?’
‘It’s beginning to look that way. It may be that our clankers overloaded this node and drained it, then the lyrinx flesh-formed a device to do the same. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that they can do it.’
‘It can’t be that easy or they’d be doing it everywhere. How many nodes have gone dead? Four in a year?’
‘Five if you count the one at the manufactory, though it hasn’t completely failed yet.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ said Irisis, ‘is how the air-floater carried us to the node when it was practically dead.’
‘Air-floaters are built as light as possible, so it takes little power to turn the rotor. A clanker needs a thousand times as much. And as I said before, we were using a different field.’
‘Where are we going now?’
‘Further up the coast, to look at another failed node.’
‘How far is it?’
‘We’ll be there before dawn.’
‘Good!’ She snuggled down against the seat, then sat up again. ‘Scrutator?’
‘I told you before, I don’t like you calling me that in private.’
‘I like calling you that in private,’ she said, grinning wickedly. ‘It makes me feel, well, you know …’ she leered at him.
‘I don’t want to know, since there’s nothing I can do about it. What did you want, anyway?’
‘How come you’ve still got this air-floater, if you’re an outlaw?’
He did not answer.
‘Xervish?’
‘I still have a few friends where it counts. They do what they can for me.’
‘Who?’
‘It would not be healthy for you to know.’
Irisis woke in the night, realising that the air-floater was not moving. She was alone, though two people were talking quietly outside the cabin. She began to repair the broken dragonfly reader. Before long, the machine began to move. Irisis finished the job and went back to sleep, to be woken by someone shaking her arm.
‘We’re here, crafter.’ It was Oon-Mie’s voice.
‘Where’s here?’
‘I don’t think it has a name. The failed node lies inland from a town called Fadd.’
The artisan led her over the side onto rock. It was raining. The air-floater pulled away, its rotor spattering cool drops at them.
‘This node is associated with an escarpment that runs inland from the coast,’ came Flydd’s voice. ‘It’s quite high here; on a clear day you can see the ocean. At least, you could if you could see.’
Irisis, used to his provocations by now, did not react.
This node proved to be completely dead. There was not a wisp of the field associated with it, nor could they induce any aura, even by a more refined version of the process they had used previously. There was no power to draw upon.
‘The node-drainer must still be in place,’ said Flydd.
‘Are we going to look for it?’ asked Oon-Mie.
‘It could be anywhere along this escarpment, which runs for a good thirty leagues. We might search for years and not find it.’
‘So we haven’t learned anything here?’ said Irisis.
‘Unfortunately not.’
‘What were you doing in the night, Xervish? When the air-floater stopped.’
‘I had to send a skeet to one of my associates, telling them what we’d discovered. The price of continued support.’
‘I hope you didn’t tell them where we were, or where we were going.’
‘I have to trust someone.’
‘Let’s hope they’re worthy of it.’
The party searched along the nearby part of the escarpment, to fill in the time until dark, when they could signal the air-floater. Irisis was waiting, perched on a rock with her hood over her head to keep off the drifting rain, when something occurred to her.