Ian Irvine - Tetrarch

Shuttering the lantern, he sat in the dark, listening and remembering. His stomach crawled as though his breakfast was still alive. Some weeks ago, a strange disruption had frosted his globe and wrung a sobbing note out of the worldwide ethyr itself. That had not happened before in all his years of listening. The ethyr was only a carrier, normally intangible, and for it to sing meant that a monumental disruption had taken place.

Gilhaelith had not yet discovered what, or where. If some natural force, it must have been a cataclysmic one, though a huge earthquake, eruption or landfall would have reverberated for ages. It had been nothing like that. Nor had it to do with the war. Neither humanity nor the lyrinx had that kind of power.

The sounds were still moving. He put his hands on the keys, again struggling and failing to duplicate them. His curiosity would not let go, but though he played for hours with such intensity that his mustard-stained gown became drenched in sweat, Gilhaelith could not get close. He wanted to draw the source to him but did not know how. For all his geomantic power, he was helpless. Should he go to the bells? He glanced over his shoulder at the cloth-shrouded carillon and shuddered. No, he was not in the right frame of mind for that particular kind of struggle.

When Gilhaelith finally left the organ, the pipes no longer sang. In disgust, he closed the door and climbed the obsidian stairs to the top of his observatory tower, to draw solace from the ever predictable motions of the celestial bodies.

Gilhaelith’s house stood at the top of the volcano whose name was Booreah Ngurle, the famous Burning Mountain, and it was the strangest house in the world. He called it a house, though really it was a great rambling workshop, laboratory and library. Gilhaelith was a polymath, a man interested in everything and master of many disciplines. He was more than one hundred and fifty years old, but in society might have passed for forty, not that he was ever in society. He lived alone apart from a flock of servants whose families had served him for generations.

Gilhaelith spent the rest of the night in his observatory, at the top of the tower near a vine-covered terrace. He was searching for comets, which were more frequent at this time of year, but as the dawn brightened he fell asleep at his ’scope. A servant woke him an hour later with a mug of stout, heated to boiling by plunging a red-hot poker into it. Black liquid foamed over the sides, flecked with shreds of mace.

As Gilhaelith reached for the mug, the greatest pipes of his organ, which had not sounded by themselves in all his years of watching, groaned. The sound was so low that it shook the whole of Nyriandiol. The drink quivered in his servant’s hand. A few seconds later something flashed past the rim of the crater. It could not have been a comet, for it was black and the rising sun glinted off it. Swinging the spyglass around, Gilhaelith caught another flash of black, now dropping sharply to disappear below the rim.

He leaned back in his chair and, putting his lanky legs up on the rail, grated a good third of a nutmeg onto his stout. Stirring it in with a pair of brass dividers, he took a cautious sip. Spice-crusted foam caught on his upper lip. ‘What can it be?’ he said to himself.

He puzzled about the incident until mid-morning, working through all the possibilities he could think of. It did not occur to him to go down into the forest and take a look. Gilhaelith was not a man of action. However, he did check the organ and look into his globe again. Neither told him anything. Frustrated, he occupied himself with other activities, to cleanse his mind of the puzzle.

Late in the morning Gilhaelith was composing a poem in his library – an ode on the power four – when his eye caught an engraving of a scene from the famous but debased Tale of the Mirror . It portrayed the tragic funeral ride of Rulke across the Way between the Worlds to Aachan, his body bound to the side of the construct. The engraving had been on his library wall for ninety-seven years, so long that Gilhaelith had ceased to notice it.

Laying down his quill, he peered at the engraving. The fleeting black image seen earlier resonated with this image of the construct, a congruence so remarkable that he began to contemplate a radical action – actually going down to the forest to investigate. ‘Curious,’ he said. ‘Will I or won’t I?’

He tested the omens by raising a selection of random numbers to the fourth power, then reading the pattern. It was mostly harmonious. ‘Yes, I’ll go down and take a look.’

Being a methodical man, he returned to the tower, took a sighting on the spot where the falling object had disappeared, and marked it on his map. Taking off his robes he donned a dark green shirt, red walking boots and baggy pants which revealed hairy, skinny legs knobbed in the middle by kneecaps as square as pieces of toast.

Gilhaelith tossed a shapeless pack over his shoulder. It contained a length of rope, a hatchet and a large bottle of stout so black that it could have been used to dye soot. Fully equipped, he told the servants where he was going and strode off along the rim of the volcano as though there were springs in his knees.

Booreah Ngurle was dormant at the moment, emitting only wisps of steam and an occasional puff of ash. One day, however, it would come to life and erupt violently, blasting cubic leagues of rock into the air and destroying everything for five or ten leagues around, including Nyriandiol and, if he was in residence at the time, himself.

Gilhaelith enjoyed that uncertainty almost as much as his morning walk on the suspended path. Life on Santhenar was fragile, death often brutal and sudden, and living here reminded him every day. He knew the science of the earth better than anyone, and monitored the tremblers and the gaseous emissions of the volcano as methodically as he did everything in his life. Gilhaelith hoped to predict the eruption and make his way to a safe vantage point, the better to observe it. But if he failed, that would also be interesting, albeit briefly.

Crunching along the ashy ground, which was sparsely covered in silky lamb’s ears and other hardy plants, he looked over the outer side. Further down, weeds gave way to grey shrubs, beyond which the vegetation became increasingly luxuriant. From the halfway point, the slopes were clothed in tall forest that extended into the vastness of Worm Wood in all directions, concealing what lay below. He felt sure the falling object had gone down there, somewhere.

Though Gilhaelith was familiar with this part of the forest, it took him what remained of the day to find the machine. A lesser man might have given up but, once set upon a course, Gilhaelith never did.

It was a construct. He marvelled at that. Gilhaelith knew the Histories well and understood the significance of this machine. It, or the events that had brought it here, would change the world. Just what was the connection with that disturbance of the ethyr weeks ago?

The construct lay on its side, partly embedded in the mouldering remnants of a pair of rotting logs, forest giants that had fallen many years ago. The metal skin was crumpled, the front and side stoved in. He walked around it twice, noting everything for future consideration and making sketches. He might do a painting one day and hang it in his library.

The hatch was closed. ‘Hello?’ he called. ‘Is anyone here?’

There was no answer, so he heaved it open. Constructs had always fascinated him, because no one knew how they worked. In his boyhood, before reality crushed such ambitions, he had dreamed of flying one.

It was growing dark. Gilhaelith slid in through the hatch. It was completely dark inside but his exploring hand struck a glass sphere, which began to glow. Everything about the machine was strange and, to a geomancer, fascinating. He discovered that it bore similarities to clankers, but also had many differences. The most notable: its flight had been powered by one of the strong forces. To the best of his knowledge, no one had ever mastered such forces. Did he have a rival more advanced than himself?