Ian Irvine - Alchymist

It was so dark that he could not see what lay beyond -palace or rat hole. He raised the lantern. Faint gleams appeared here and there, reflections off distant surfaces whose shapes shifted as he moved. He stepped into Alcifer and the darkness seemed to suck the light from his lantern. The floor shivered underfoot. He scuffed the dust away with a toe to reveal solid stone, yet it was quivering ever so slightly.

Go back! came an errant thought. You should not be here. He shrugged off the unease. Alcifer was a ruin abandoned an aeon ago. Nothing here could harm him, save the decaying stone and mortar falling on his head.

Hours he walked through haunted, magical halls where the dust lay so thick that his boots made no sound. Hours more he sat on seat or rail, staring into the darkness as he tried to gain a feeling for the building. He was searching for the perfect place to work but a palace such as this confused the mind as it tricked the eye. He could not take it in.

My mind is definitely failing, he thought. Before my illness I could have visualised the entirety of this palace, like rows and columns in a catalogue. Am I reaching my end sooner than I'd thought? Please, not this way, with my work so far from completion. If my mind is going, let me not fade dismally away. Rather would I die in a cataclysm of my own making, as long as in doing so I can approach my goal.

He stood up, staring around him in the darkness and shivering like the very stones. In all the years he'd worked on his study of the world, there was one experiment he'd not been game to attempt. Though it held the best promise of all, it was deadly perilous. Should he try it? If it succeeded, he might use it to find and remove all the fragments of the phantom crystal at once and even, faint hope that it was, repair some of the damage to his brain. He'd either crash through to his goal, or crash to his doom. More likely the latter, but what did he have to lose? Better to die violently than live this way, feeling his faculties slowly fading, knowing he'd either lose his intellect and go mad, or end up a vegetable that the lyrinx wouldn't deign to dine on. 'I'll do it!' he said aloud. 'I'll dare the great experiment and curse the consequences.' First, the place to work. Ignoring the dark, magnificent surroundings, he dragged himself up a last set of stairs to a vast hall covered ankle-deep in ash, through which occasional black tiles were exposed. The frescoed walls were stained brown from flowing rainwater, for the roof had collapsed long ago. Gilhaelith picked his way through the mess towards a tall pair of doors, wedged ajar by a leaning pine that had grown between them. He squeezed through the gap and out.

A broad boulevard, knee-deep in crusted ash, littered with boulders and fallen masonry, and overgrown with great trees whose roots had lifted the paving stones, ran away from him up a round hill. Despite the debris, its noble proportions were evident. The open space across the boulevard had once been a park, it seemed, for the trees there were vast and gnarled with age. A partly collapsed pavilion stood among them, to its right a marble fountain choked with debris, the stone dissolving from the volcano's acid rain. On Gilhaelith's left was an edifice of black stone, apparently the twin of the one he'd just come out of, though this building had an intact roof of some green metal that glinted here and there.

It was a bright, sunny day but Alcifer felt cold and brooding in a way that other ancient places did not. As if something — the city itself? — was waiting for a master who would never return, to complete a purpose that had been overtaken by time and treachery. The tilted paving stones in the street shivered underfoot, such was the power leashed here.

But there was no longer any point to Alcifer, Gilhaelith mused as he mentally reviewed its Histories. Originally built during the chaos of the Clysm, the city was said to have been one vast machine designed to open the Way between the Worlds, but had never been put to use. Soon after its completion, Rulke had been captured by his enemies and cast into the Nightland, a nowhere place that had contained him for a thousand years. During his imprisonment he'd designed a better artefact than Alcifer, reworked it until it was perfect, and on his escape had built it in Fiz Gorgo and Carcharon -his construct.

The constructs of the Aachim were based upon his model, though the original had never been equalled. Rulke's had been a vehicle that could fly, a means of attack and defence, and a device to open the Way between the Worlds.

After his death, Alcifer had slumbered under its covering of forest and volcanic ash for another hundred years, until the lyrinx were attracted to its extraordinary node-within-a-node that now energised both Alcifer and Oellyll. He could sense it from here: a pair of spheres one inside the other, each swelling and contracting to its own rhythm. Their potent fields also expanded and shrank in a complex dance that never repeated itself.

Gilhaelith crossed the boulevard to the fountain and sat on a carved soapstone bench covered in crumbs of volcanic ash. How could such a node have formed? Had it anything to do with the dormant volcano to the north, or could it have been transformed by that pinching-off of force that had created the rolled-up dimensions of the Nightland? He felt awed in the presence of power so much greater than any he'd dealt with before.

The lyrinx had no fear of the place, nor of any hidden purpose it may have had long ago. They had cleared some of its boulevards, built ventilation bellows powered by the field, and begun to delve their own city beneath Alcifer. Getting up and brushing the ash from his pants, he paced along the boulevard towards the hill, wonder growing with every step. Alcifer was vast, but even under the volcanic detriius and forest growth he could see that every structure, from the smallest to the greatest, formed part of one harmonious whole. A single mind had shaped each part of it, a single principle guided his hand — Pitlis the Aachim, the greatest architect who had ever lived, and the biggest fool. Rulke had seduced him with the creation of Alcifer, used it to uncover the defensive secrets of Gar Gaarn, the Aachim's greatest city, and destroyed it.

Gilhaelith spent days trudging the debris-strewn city, trying to understand it so as to find the perfect place to work. His great experiment could not be done anywhere — location was critical. Some places would assist the task not at all, while others would hinder it or even make it impossible. Yet somewhere there would be the perfect locale. It need not be vast or grand. The simplest of pavilions in a park might suffice, but he would not know until he found it, and had tested it with mathemancy, assuming he was still capable of it. One day a talent would be there, the next it would be gone. And every attempt at using mancery caused jagging pain in one part of his head or another, indicating that the phantom fragments were still doing damage.

After five days he was more confused about Alcifer than when he'd entered the city. The genius of Pitlis's design, and Rulke's building, would take half a lifetime to unravel. It humbled him and made his own achievements seem puny.

The city consisted of arrays of buildings, great and small, set along seven intersecting boulevards. Every side street was curved, the intersections being circles or ovals. There were vistas only along the boulevards. Off them, every corner revealed a new surprise, some vast and ornate, others simple — a mossy cul-de-sac with a fountain, a set of elegant steps, a pond or a piece of statuary. Although many of the buildings had been ruined by time, the bones of the city endured, for they had been fused to the living rock with an Art no human could duplicate.

Despairing of ever gaining a mental picture of the whole of Alcifer, he begged Gyrull to take him aloft, so he could view it from the air. She agreed readily, though he was carried up by Liett, the small lyrinx with the transparent, soft skin, now, covered with a paste to prevent it from burning in the sun. Despite her size she lifted him easily, flying in circles over Alcifer for two hours while he tried to impress the city's patterns on his mind. It still wasn't enough, though on the way down he spotted a white building shaped like a five-pointed star that he planned to take a closer look at from the ground-That afternoon he went back on foot, accompanied by male lyrinx who spoke not a single word the entire time. In the centre of the city, at the intersection of the seven boulevards, stood the white palace, and it proved to be unlike any building he had ever seen. It consisted of a core covered by a glass dome — no, not a dome, a soaring shell — with five arms, or wings, each identical, spinning out from it. The arms were roofed with a series of curving shells made of white stone so polished that they had once dazzled the eye. Even now, weather-stained as they were, the building was breathtakingly beautiful.