Chimaera (25 page)

G
ilhaelith shaded his eyes from the setting sun as he tried to make out the port, which had served Alcifer long ago, among the dense forest covering the shore. Could that blocky shape down to the left be it? He adjusted the sail of the dinghy, and then the tiller a fraction. Surely it had to be.

His escape from Fiz Gorgo had been uneventful, as had his trip up the west coast of Meldorin, east through the passage between Meldorin and Qwale and south again halfway down the Sea of Thurkad. It had taken longer than it would have done to walk from Fiz Gorgo across the width of Meldorin, but at least it had been safe. The lyrinx rarely attacked ships on the open sea, while anyone foolish enough to pass through the swamps of Orist into enemy lands would have been killed and eaten on sight. Gilhaelith had taken to the dinghy just that morning, for the ship’s captain had refused to go within a league of the fabled, haunted city, much less the lyrinx’s underground labyrinth of Oellyll, delved into the living rock beneath Alcifer and home to at least seventy thousand of the enemy.

Besides, Gilhaelith could not have walked across Meldorin to save his life. He hadn’t regained the strength he’d taken for granted in the hundred years and more he’d dwelt at beautiful Nyriandiol, and perhaps never would. Every stone of that great edifice had been chosen for its geomantic properties. Each had been shaped and placed so as to enhance the natural magic of the mountaintop, and to support him in his life’s endeavour – to understand the nature of the world and the forces that made it so. Without Nyriandiol, Gilhaelith was not a shadow of the master geomancer he’d been while he dwelt there.

He still yearned to complete his life’s endeavour, though Gilhaelith now doubted that he ever would. While trapped in sticky tar deep in the black pit of Snizort last summer, as the node had been about to explode, he’d done the only thing he could to save himself. He’d created a phantom, mathemantical crystal in his mind and used it to draw the power he’d needed to escape. He’d managed to drag himself to safety but in doing so the crystal had burst asunder, spearing its fragments through his brain and damaging part of it. The injury had further reduced his capacity for geomancy. What once had been effortless he now did only with the most prodigious labour, while some things he could not do at all.

But that had not been the worst of the damage. The phantom crystal fragments remained and whenever he drew power, even for the most trivial purpose, they burned more of his brain. Gilhaelith was faced with the worst of all choices. He could hope to prolong his life by never drawing power again, though without practising his Art, his life would be meaningless. Or he could attempt, by geomantic means, to locate and unmake every fragment of the phantom crystal. There lay his only hope of restoring himself to the greatness he’d once had, or at least to what shadow of it he
could
regain.

In that endeavour he’d spent his previous months at Alcifer refashioning his geomantic globe. He’d made it into the most perfect representation of Santhenar he could create, its lands, seas, mountains, rivers and icecaps, even down to the nodes themselves. It would give him the focus he needed to repair himself, though the work had done him more damage, of course. He’d completed it little more than a month ago, an unparalleled, agonising labour and, in the circumstances, a phenomenal work of genius. But then Matriarch Gyrull had sent him outside to take measurements of the field for her.

In reality she’d used him as an unwitting decoy to try to capture Tiaan and the thapter, and had almost succeeded. Instead, Tiaan had captured Gilhaelith and taken him to Fiz Gorgo. Without the geomantic globe, his agony had been complete and his death, or descent into irreparable brain damage, certain.

Unable to face that prospect, Gilhaelith had single-mindedly set out to get back to Alcifer, unwittingly betraying Fiz Gorgo to Ghorr in the process. He didn’t want to think about that.

He adjusted the sail again, taking advantage of an easterly wind-shift to speed towards the scrub-covered oblong that was undoubtedly the end of one of the breakwaters of the port. What would happen now? Even if he recovered his geomantic globe, using it to find and unmake those crystal fragments risked destroying his mind completely. He could scarcely bear the thought of his greatness reduced to a mindless, drooling vegetable – lyrinx fodder. Assuming that the lyrinx would allow him access to the globe at all. Matriarch Gyrull had been spying on him all the time he’d worked on the globe and had probably seized it in his absence. If she didn’t need him any more, he’d be sent to the slaughtering pens.

The thought checked him for a moment, for Gilhaelith had a horror of being eaten. It wasn’t right that a man so great as he could come to such an undignified end. Dare he go on, confronting such a fate? He took the numbers, to see what kind of omens there were for this choice. The once effortless calculations were now a great strain but the omens proved to be neither good nor bad. It was up to him to tilt fate one way or the other. He would go on. He would risk all to get back what he had lost, no matter what the consequences.

Gilhaelith brought the dinghy in to the eroded stone jetty and tied the painter to a gnarled root that had forced the stones apart. After heaving his canvas holdall up onto the barnacle-covered stone, he pulled himself after it, and froze.

Four lyrinx stood there, back against the shrubbery so that they had been out of sight from below. He recognised three of them: a young wingless male called Ryll; Liett, a young female with outer skin that was quite unarmoured and colourless, so that he could see the purple blood flowing beneath it; and Matriarch Gyrull, big and old with pouched eyes, battle-scarred armour and segments missing from her crest. And, further back, almost concealed by the shadows, the biggest lyrinx Gilhaelith had ever seen – a vast coal-black male with a golden crest. He was one and a half times Gilhaelith’s own majestic height, and probably five or six times his bulk. His folded wings drooped as though he was tired, though the lyrinx held himself erect and his golden eyes seemed to miss nothing.

‘I hoped you would come back,’ Gyrull said, reaching out and encircling Gilhaelith’s bony wrist with her clawed fingers. ‘Come with me, Tetrarch.’

When Gilhaelith had been safely penned in a stone chamber of the underground city, and a pair of zygnadrs, or sentinels, set to watch him, the four lyrinx repaired to an empty dining hall. There the coal-black male selected the lower half of a dead human male from a meat tray and tore it into two haunches, one of which he politely offered to the matriarch.

Gyrull shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry. I have much to think about. Go ahead, Anabyng. You must be hungry after your long flight.’

‘I confess I am,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t settle once in the last two days, so anxious was I to get home.’

Liett took the haunch and bit a chunk from the thigh muscle with her sharp grey teeth. Ryll reached into the tray for a lower leg joint. He hadn’t eaten human flesh for a good while, since there were few humans left in Meldorin. He absently twisted the foot off and tossed it back into the tray, then went across to the table with the others. He was about to tear into the tasty calf meat when Gyrull spoke.

‘I don’t like it, Anabyng. Why has the tetrarch come back?’

The black male chewed and swallowed before answering. Golden speckles broke out on his chest, in appreciation of the quality of the meat. ‘For the geomantic globe. It means more to him than his life, and he is a dead man without it.’

‘Were it up to me,’ said Liett, ‘he would be a dead man now, though I wouldn’t care to dine on his tainted flesh.’ Gilhaelith favoured the most exotic of diets: salted slugs, pickled wood-roaches and other kinds of vermin that not even the lowest of the lyrinx would have eaten but to save their lives.

‘We need him,’ said Ryll, putting down the leg joint untasted.

‘How is the flisnadr going?’ asked Anabyng, referring to the power patterner that Ryll and Liett had been trying to create for many months. ‘Have you made much progress since I left?’

Ryll took up his joint again, stared at the red flesh for a moment, then all at once let it fall on the table. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, human flesh, which he had enjoyed all his life, had lost its appeal. ‘There hasn’t been
any
progress, Great Anabyng. We’re bedevilled by the same problem that we’ve had from the beginning: linking the individual patterners, with their humans inside, to grow the flisnadr. And we still haven’t worked out how to use Gilhaelith’s geomantic globe to solve this problem.’

‘Then you’d better torture it out of him.’ Anabyng stripped the rest of the meat off the upper thigh, then bit off the protruding bone and crunched it noisily. ‘We’ve got to have it by the beginning of spring.’

‘What’s the matter, Anabyng?’ said Liett, devouring her haunch with gusto. ‘Why so soon?’

Anabyng’s head jerked up and his eyes glowed, though he did not speak.

Matriarch Gyrull struck the table with her fist. ‘Be so good as to use Anabyng’s proper title, daughter. He is our greatest hero of the battlefield, and the greatest in the Art, too. He earned his honour the hard way.’

Liett dipped her head in a perfunctory manner. ‘But I’m the daughter of the matriarch!’ she said sulkily.

‘Then it’s incumbent upon you to observe the proprieties, more than anyone.’

Liett’s eyes flashed. ‘You said we had to recreate ourselves to suit the new world once the war is won. That’s what I’m doing.’

‘Have you learned nothing?’ cried Gyrull. ‘You expect me to choose you as matriarch after me, yet you display few of the necessary qualities. Your lack of respect diminishes you, daughter.’

‘Name one person more suited to the honour than me,’ Liett said with an imperious tilt of the head.

‘Even Ryll is more suited to the honour than you,’ Gyrull replied deliberately, ‘and he is
male
.’

Anabyng spread his great maw wide, making a choking noise that Ryll could only interpret as a laugh. Ryll wasn’t laughing. To even compare him to a candidate for matriarch was mortifying. ‘Matriarch, you mock me,’ he said, hanging his head. His skin colours flashed red and purple and he felt an unusual burning sensation in his cheeks.

‘And insult
me
,’ cried Liett, giving him a savage look, as if he had deliberately undermined her.

‘By millennia-long custom we are led by a matriarch,’ said Anabyng, ‘and none of us would seek to change that.’

‘Nor I,’ said Gyrull. ‘I merely point out that, in the half-year since we returned from the fall of Snizort, the wingless one has set an example in the mastery of his Art, in strategic thinking about the war and the future, and in unassuming leadership. When he speaks, the common folk set down their tools and listen. You’d be well advised to follow Ryll’s example, daughter.’

Liett, incredulous, flashed out her beautiful wings and bared her teeth at Ryll, for all that she had long sought permission to mate with him, and he with her. Theirs was a volatile relationship.

‘Assuming you
do
wish to be a candidate for matriarch,’ said Gyrull. ‘On that display, I doubt it. Leave us, Liett.’

‘What?’ said Liett, belatedly folding her wings.

‘Leave us!’ Gyrull snapped. ‘I wish to speak about matters of importance with those mature enough to offer worthwhile opinions.’

Liett began to flounce away. She caught Ryll’s eye and he gave a little shake of the head. She snapped her teeth at him, a last display, then slunk out, head bowed.

‘I truly don’t know what I’m going to do with her,’ sighed Gyrull.

‘Send her to the battlefront,’ said Anabyng. ‘If she survives, it may make a leader of her yet. She does have a great talent, though it’s wilfully misdirected.’

‘I need her here,’ said Ryll hastily. Though he knew it made good sense, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Liett. ‘To send her to battle, unarmoured as she is, would be to condemn her to death.’

‘Perhaps your feelings for her overpower your good sense,’ observed the black lyrinx.