Ian Irvine - Alchymist
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- Название:Alchymist
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The very idea of such a crystal felt alien, and it reminded him of those links the amplimet had drawn throughout Snizort, including one to him. Could it be directing him for some purpose of its own? Too bad — without a crystal he was going to die.
He slipped further into the tar, which was now creeping up his groin. It felt hotter than before. Fortunately he'd worked out the mathemancy of crystals long ago, though to create one with numbers, purely in his mind, was another thing entirely. Still, he had always relished challenges.
Gilhaelith began to construct a crystal in layers, beginning at its base and building towards the apex. It was painfully slow — literally painful, he thought wryly. By the time tar had risen to his waist, the phantom crystal was only half done. His shoulders were covered with ribbony black epaulettes; it was dripping down his forehead, clotting over his eyes, and rubbing just smeared it everywhere.
As Gilhaelith built another layer, the tar seemed to dissolve beneath his feet and he slid down to his chest. A bucket-sized clot landed on his head, pushing him face-first into liquid tar, which was forced up his nostrils. Though he clawed it away, he could not clear his nose enough to breathe.
Turning his head sideways, he managed to get a breath through his mouth. Hum'! The layers went more quickly as he approached the tapering apex of the crystal. Only one layer to go. As he sucked another breath, the rest of the clot fell, burying him completely. And it was so hot. His feet were cooking.
But the crystal was done. Gilhaelith looked for power but found none — the field, which had been waxing and waning for days, was dying. The tunnel had failed because the phy-nadrs had not been able to maintain sufficient power to keep it frozen.
Yet for what he planned, only a little power was required. Gilhaelith sought in another direction and discovered a drifting loop of field, cut off from the rest. He drew power into the phantom crystal but there was not enough to energise it.
He had barely enough breath to try again. He found another loop, this one strong as the field waxed dangerously. The node was desperately overloaded and something had to give. But if it just lasted another minute …
His lungs were shuddering for air; fire burned behind his temple as the crystal powered up at last. Gilhaelith used a geo-mantic spell to drive heat from the tar surrounding him, into the seep itself.
He kept at it until the heat licked from his skull to his stomach, the first sign of anthracism. He had to let go. Would it be enough? As the spell faded, a most bitter cold enveloped him, as though he'd been frozen into a block of ice. Then, as the heat of the seep attacked that rigid, frigid shell of tar, it shattered into a thousand pieces.
The shards broke away from his body, leaving him in a cavity lined with fractured tar. The suction was gone; it was solid underfoot. The mosaic fell from his eyes and he could see. Gilhaelith took hold of the still-hard shell of the tunnel and, with a wriggle and a shake, pulled himself onto the floor.
He hurt all over and, behind his eyes, needles pushed relentlessly into the bone. He'd tried too hard and damaged something. He began to crawl blindly down the tunnel. That was where Matriarch Gyrull, who had come pounding back for him, found Gilhaelith. Tossing him over her shoulder, she clawed the last chilly remnants of tar from his nostrils and raced off.
The next few hours were a blur of belching fumes, pounding feet and panicky lyrinx. Gilhaelith saw nothing, for the pain was so all-enveloping he could not open his eyelids. And he was so cold — he could feel the shape of his stomach in ice.
He was carried through a myriad of tunnels, with Gyrull cursing and turning this way and that, and her growing escort hard put to restrain their terror. There was fire underground and they couldn't find a way out, though that wasn't their greatest fear. Gilhaelith had learned enough of their language to deduce that many of the escapeways had been cut off and they expected the unstable node to explode at any time.
They reached the base of a pit with steep sides. The lyrinx made a living tower which Gyrull climbed to get out, a box of relics strapped to her chest, and Gilhaelith, folded over in an elongated travesty of the foetal position, tucked under one arm. The gamy odour of her sweat was intense.
Before she reached the top, the phantom crystal picked up wild fluctuations from the field that seared his forebrain. Gyrull muttered something.
'What?' he croaked, but she did not answer. He could just see out of the crack of one eye. It was dark and he felt so very cold. Beyond the walls, the battle still raged — the groans of the maimed, the clash of weapons against armour, the thudding of catapult balls into walls, ground and tar seeps. Fire flickered in half a hundred places.
She climbed over the rim of the pit and set off without looking back to see if her fellows were following. Gilhaelith supposed they had sacrificed themselves to give their matriarch a chance, or to get the treasure away.
"The torgnadr is going to destroy itself,' she said, finally answering his question. 'How did the humans get in to attack it? They're more cunning than I imagined.'
In the distance, the ground surface domed and a fountain of fire tore through. He was in no state to see the danger. To Gilhaelith it just seemed extraordinarily beautiful.
The matriarch was running full pelt, considerably faster than a human could move. Several times she flexed her wings and leapt in the air, but each time landed hard and kept running. There was not enough in the field for her to fly with such a burden, for Gilhaelith was a big man.
He felt worse every minute. Either he'd burst something inside or the tar was poisoning him. He felt sure he was going to die. He would never solve the great puzzle and achieve a true understanding of the earth. His life had been wasted. And, to his surprise, Gilhaelith felt a creeping remorse for all he'd done, and all he'd neglected, in blind pursuit of that aim — most especially, Tiaan.
His stomach boiled and he threw up all over Gyrull's side and thigh. She wiped it off without breaking stride. Shortly, as she was climbing the southern wall, the sky erupted into a spindle of fire that he could see with his eyes closed. Pain crept, singing, along every nerve fibre. The fire died down, taking with it the last vestiges of the field, and Gilhaelith felt the snapping of that ethereal thread Tiaan's amplimet had drawn to him. His phantom crystal exploded into fragments with a hundred sparkle-like throbs. Now he truly was helpless. It did not matter. Nothing mattered — it was all over.
The new day dawned, as hot as the previous one, but the cold, which had bitten into him ever since he'd cast his freezing spell, grew steadily worse. He lost everything but the rocking motion. Like a pendulum running down, even that sense failed, until finally nothing was perceptible.
Gilhaelith roused twice, once to realise that Gyrull was still running, another time to discover that she had stopped and was speaking in low tones with several other lyrinx, though he still lacked strength to open his eyes. They seemed to be talking about the destruction of the node. What would such a thing look like? How could a node explode, all its contained energies vanishing into nothingness? Surely there had to be some residue?
He felt that there was something he should follow up, but was too lethargic to think.
Days and nights went by, full of running; hasty meetings in shadowed caves or gloomy woods; exhortations to hurry; and other urgent matters that were conducted out of earshot. Gilhaelith was dosed with potions and fed at intervals by a lyrinx who squeezed greasy pulp through its hands into his mouth. His senses were so numb that he could taste nothing, though he felt better afterwards.
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