Ian Irvine - Geomancer

She lay on her back, looking up at the amplimet. She no longer had the strength to fight.

‘Well?’ he said. One facet of the crystal flashed at her.

She laid her head on the floor. ‘I will help you,’ she croaked, holding out her hand.

‘Come down.’ He walked out.

Tiaan followed him back to that strawberry-shaped room. ‘This is Liett,’ Ryll said.

Tiaan repeated the name, ‘ Li -ett,’ pronouncing it the way names were sounded in her part of the world.

‘No, Li’ et-t .’ She emphasised the second syllable and ending with a distinct t-t sound, like tapping the bench with a fingernail.

Tiaan tried again. ‘Lee- et !’

The lyrinx parted her lips in a gesture that might have been a smile or a grimace. ‘Just call me Leet!’

Tiaan moved closer to the bench, distracted by a scuttling movement in the box. Inside crouched a creature like nothing she had ever seen before. It was about the size of a mouse, with the general form of a lyrinx-like biped, though a savagely distorted one. Fur took the place of chameleon skin and it had enormous pink eyes.

It scuttled about on all fours. Its feet were padded hoofs, while the muscularity of its back looked more suited to the carrying of heavy loads than to walking upright.

‘What is it?’ Tiaan asked.

‘A thramp!’ Liett replied. ‘Just observe, small human.’

Liett placed her hands around the walls of the cage, gently but firmly, and strained. Tiaan felt a fizzing sensation, though subtly different in pitch and colour from the one Besant had caused in the night flight. The sensation stopped and Liett jerked her hands away, panting with the effort.

She stood up, shaking her head as though trying to dislodge something caught in her colourless crest. Her fingers pressed the spot, over and over. Finally she sat down and closed her eyes.

Tiaan watched the little creature, which had fallen over and was kicking its back legs in uncoordinated spasms. Then, before her eyes, the pads of its feet began to thin and elongate. It happened so imperceptibly that at first Tiaan thought she’d imagined it. She had to compare what she was seeing now with its original self, like a blueprint in her mind, before she was sure.

‘Are you a flesh-shaper?’ she said to Ryll, recalling her dreams in the ice house.

‘Some of us are.’

Had they done this to her while she slept? Was she subtly altered from before? She inspected her hands and the horror must have been evident on her face.

‘Not you, Tiaan!’ Ryll seemed amused.

‘Why not?’ she cried, backing away.

‘Many reasons,’ said Liett. ‘But most important, you are too big.’

‘Oh?’

‘Even our greatest adepts can’t flesh-form a creature larger than a rat. It takes too much out of us. The work is painful and quite draining. We can’t channel power from outside us, as you do. Even if a dozen of us worked together, to flesh-form a creature the size of a cat would drive us to insanity. Even here .’

‘I saw you shape new fingers,’ she accused Ryll.

‘That was regeneration, which is quite different. I was replacing what was lost, not creating a new organism. Our bodies can regenerate even if we are unconscious.’

‘But in the void …’

‘Also different.’ He glanced at Liett. ‘We were subtly shaping our unborn selves. Gently.’

Tiaan went back to the thramp. ‘If you had a hundred working together, or a thou –’

‘That many wills can’t be focussed,’ said Ryll. ‘A hundred is worse than ten.’

‘Moreover,’ Liett went on, ‘you would know it if we tried to work on you. Flesh-forming is torture. This creature has been sedated. Even so, the trauma will probably kill it.’

The thramp was now lying on its side, panting. Its eyes were staring.

‘It does not look so bad.’

‘The worst is to come,’ said Ryll. ‘Liett has just transformed the skin and muscle beneath it. To mould the bones and organs will take days. Flesh-shaping is a very slow process, with many failures, despite what your tellers may have told you.’

‘Then why do it?’

‘Small creatures can be …’ She trailed off at a warning glance from Ryll, then continued. ‘We have a hundred shapers here, and more at other nodes, as you call them. Once one shaper finds the way, others can follow. But one day we will learn to use the power this place bathes in. We will not fear your clankers then, human .’

‘That’s why you wanted our controllers!’ Tiaan exclaimed. ‘And me. You can’t use the field and you want me to show you how. I won’t. Never! ’ Why, why hadn’t she taken that chance to escape, back at the ice houses?

‘Oh yes, you will,’ said Liett, with a glance at the amplimet. ‘You will beg to help us.’

That night Tiaan dreamed the earthly structure of Kalissin Spire and woke afraid. The very crust of the world seemed out of balance here. The land was imperceptibly rising, returning to its elevation before the ice sheets had weighed it down. Below, the fluid mantle drifted, immeasurably slow, to compensate.

Her dreams spoke to Tiaan after she was allowed to touch the amplimet. The fields churned all around her, and she sensed another potential. Beneath the iron spire the magma had subsided, leaving an empty chamber. Cooling, shrinking rock had cracked in concentric circles around the base of the spire, which was sinking, unleashing geomantic forces of many kinds.

Tiaan was woken by the wailing of pipes, not far away. They had been going for days now, playing the sorrowful songs that had been the life and death of Besant, Wise Mother of a lyrinx clan for more than eighty years.

The alien syllables rasped on, hour after hour. Another dream flooded back and Tiaan threw herself out of bed, kicking the sheet of woven rush fibres away. Her skin crawled.

Running to the window and tearing the cap open, she thrust her face through. Freezing air belted her in the face. She gulped down mouthfuls of it, so cold that Tiaan felt clots sinking into her lungs. She welcomed the frigid metal against her skin as she went through her second dream, over and again.

Flesh-forming was a talent unique to lyrinx, honed over the aeons they had spent in the void, when being able to physically adapt their young to new environments had been the ultimate way of surviving. In her dream they had been flesh-forming her, turning her into a monster, an eight-legged beast alarmingly similar to a clanker. When they were finished they would send her out to destroy clankers and kill soldiers, the ultimate betrayal of her own kind. As if she had not done enough harm already. By withholding the crystal, they could force her to do anything, no matter how degraded.

The room trembled, just a shiver. It might have been the spire contracting in the night cold, or an earth trembler far away. Or the stone at the base of the spire preparing to give way. That dream came back too, lifting the hairs on the back of her neck. This place had such potential, but the spire was hanging over an abyss.

What did they really want her for? To draw power through the amplimet? To make a controller that would enhance their hideous flesh-forming? Or, most horrible of all, to flesh-form her ? Despite what had been said about size, that dominated her dreams. It made her shudder to think what they were doing. It was indecent.