Ian Irvine - Tetrarch

‘What’s going on?’ she cried.

‘We must begin.’

‘Begin what, Ryll?’

‘Making a torgnadr.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I … may not say. It is to aid us with the war.’

‘It’s not another monster like your nylatl?’ Just the name sent shudders of remembrance up her spine.

Ryll stiffened, closed his heavy-lidded eyes and opened them again. ‘Nothing like that. I have … I am forbidden to do flesh-forming.’

‘Coeland was not pleased with you after the nylatl escaped?’

‘The Wise Mother was furious, and so was Liett.’

‘So you did not get your heart’s desire after all?’

‘I am forbidden to mate, not that it matters now. No female would take a wingless travesty like me. My spoiled line must die with me, for the good of all. Ah, but still … ’ He cast a tormented glance down the row, where Tiaan could just see Liett, bent over and displaying her majestic buttocks.

‘Are you going to take flesh from me again,’ she said, ‘to make your torgnadr?’

‘Of course not! Torgnadrs are not flesh-formed. Besides, that practice is forbidden.’ He bent down to reach something near the floor, then slowly stood up, his eyes ablaze. ‘What do you mean again ?’

Tiaan wished she had not spoken, but from past experience knew that the lyrinx would drag the truth out of her, so she might as well tell him straight away.

‘Liett took a small piece of my flesh to make her snizlet.’

‘ What?’ At his bellow, Liett leapt up and stared in their direction, but on seeing nothing amiss she bent to her work again. ‘She would not dare. That is forbidden.’

‘I still have the scar,’ said Tiaan. ‘On the inside of my arm.’

In one swift movement, Ryll pulled her from the patterner and sat her on top, glistening with the clinging muck. Tiaan looked him in the eye and held out her left arm.

He felt the small circular scar with a fingertip. ‘This was not here when I saved you from the frozen river.’

‘She put it in her jar to grow the first snizlet. I think she used her own tissue as well.’

Ryll slid Tiaan back into the machine. Without further word he went out, walking proud and tall. Dangerous red slashes seared across his chameleon skin.

What had she done? When Liett came by a few minutes later, Tiaan pretended to be asleep. Shortly the troop of lyrinx reappeared, she was hauled out yet again and the scar inspected.

‘Tllrixi Liett!’ the old male roared.

Liett came running. There followed a furious exchange, the old lyrinx roaring, Liett shrinking down until her colourless wings rested flat on the floor. Her arms were stretched out and the old lyrinx stabbed a finger at a mark in her armpit. Liett was questioned in her own tongue. She answered in monosyllables, head bowed.

Finally the old lyrinx struck her once on each cheek, a ritual humiliation. She lay on her face even after he had gone. Ryll stood by, speaking softly in the lyrinx tongue. She groaned but did not move. He squatted beside her but she turned her head away. He lifted her in his arms, tenderly. As she sagged there, Liett’s eyes fixed on Tiaan, giving her such a baleful glare that Tiaan had to close her eyes.

Liett said not a word to her, though she was always in sight for the rest of the day. Ryll hurried back and forth, carrying containers to one patterner or another. Tiaan could not see what they held. Late in the afternoon, Liett appeared with a pair of barrel-sized glass buckets, which she set on the floor behind Tiaan.

Ryll came in, nodded to Liett, then put his hands on Tiaan’s bare shoulders. ‘We are going to begin the patterning. Don’t be afraid.’

She was terrified. Ryll put the amplimet around her neck and held her head straight. Liett lifted something, resembling an upside-down jellyfish, out of the larger bucket and eased it down over Tiaan’s head. Tiaan thrashed her trapped arms. The cool slipperiness cut off her senses one by one, until all she was left with was touch. Strangely, it was not claustrophobic.

Everything felt stronger, more enhanced, from the slippery muck against her belly and back to the clinging, wet-flesh sensation of the tentacled mask over her face. As Tiaan struggled, the amplimet pulsed between her breasts and she began to see the field.

Nothing else happened. She did not draw power, since there was nothing she could do with it in this blind state. Tiaan sensed an immense flow of power, far more than it took to drive a clanker, though she could not tell where it was going.

Like looking into the flames of a campfire, the field was endlessly different and fascinating, and stranger than ever here. She must have watched the play and pattern for hours before it finally flickered out. Tiaan let it go, overcome by melancholy. Everything was so futile, worthless and sad. She wept. She slept.

Tiaan woke just as miserable, and cried for an hour. She did not know why. The mask had been taken off, but something felt different. The smaller glass bucket sat in a recess on top of her patterner, just out of reach, had she been able to reach. Something had begun to grow from its base, rather like a little mushroom. It must be the torgnadr.

A long time ago, back at the manufactory, she had recovered an image of something similar from the aura of a failed controller crystal. It had been a lyrinx spying device. Were they stealing her talent and putting it into this growing torgnadr? If so, why?

The patterning went on once a day, rarely twice, and each time it took a few hours, during which she could feel the amplimet pulsing furiously. After each episode, she woke weeping. They took her out and washed her down periodically, for the jelly irritated her skin. As she finished the sixth patterning, and blinked at the light in her eyes, there came a gasping exhalation from the cube on her right. Rather, it came from the thin-faced woman inside it. As Tiaan stared, the woman’s head flopped to the side, smacking against the top of the patterner.

Liett leapt right over the row, hauled the woman out and laid her on the floor on her back. She was a little bony creature, hardly there at all. Liett thrust down her breastbone several times, so hard that ribs cracked. She put her ear to the thin chest, shaking her head as Ryll raced up.

‘Another failure, Liett?’ he said.

‘What am I going to tell Old Hyull?’

‘What are you going to tell the Matriarch?’

Liett snapped her magnificent wings at him, hurled the contents of the glass bucket into a slops tank and stalked off, leaving the body lying on the floor.

‘Ryll?’ Tiaan could only stare at the sad, dead woman and think she would be next. ‘Ryll, what happened to her …?’

He hunched his shoulders up and down as if his outer skin plagued him. ‘Patterning is hard on humans. In three years we have only created six torgnadrs, and only two at Snizort.’

Tiaan stared at him. ‘How many people have you murdered to make them? Hundreds? Thousands? ’

He shook his head. ‘It is dangerous, though usually it is the torgnadrs that fail. Humans rarely die from it. I was against using this one from the start.’

‘What are the torgnadrs for, Ryll?’ She had often asked that question but never received an answer.

‘I can’t tell you.’

After that, Ryll and Liett worked with increased urgency. Lyrinx ran in constantly, shouting what could only be exhortations to hurry. The patternings became more frequent and the sessions longer.

Despite Ryll’s words, two more people, a man and a woman, died in the patterners in the next three days. Tiaan’s melancholy grew worse after each session, and though she knew that it was due mainly to the patterner, she could not stop. Her face was swollen from weeping, her tear ducts so inflamed that it hurt to cry. Ryll added salt to her diet, she had wept so much away.