Ian Irvine - Geomancer

‘And neither would I. We’ll search every hole, and the banks around.’

Irisis joined a search detail. Nish went with one of the clankers up the slope to a gully where earlier they’d seen a stand of straggly pines. An axeman soon brought down a dead tree and the clanker dragged it back to the camp, where it was cut into fuel for the night. The soldiers gathered cones and kindling, not wanting to use the precious pitch stores unless they had nothing else. They could be trapped in a blizzard for days up here, even in autumn.

Irisis returned alone from the search as the fire blazed up. She looked depressed. ‘No sign of either of them,’ she said to Jal-Nish, who grunted and walked off.

‘Where’s Ullii?’ Nish asked.

‘How should I know?’ Irisis snapped.

They found her among the boulders, close to exposure, wearing only her spider-silk undergarments. ‘What are you doing out here dressed like that?’ Irisis scolded. ‘Have you no sense at all?’ Taking off her coat, she wrapped it around the small woman and carried her back to the fire. Ullii was too listless to protest.

‘He was coming after me,’ she whispered. ‘He wanted to hurt me.’

‘Who?’ said Irisis, head snapping up. ‘The lyrinx?’

‘The man inside. He was picking at the lattice, trying to get into my hidey-hole.’

‘What is he doing now?’

‘I can’t see him,’ she whimpered.

Nish and Irisis went to the clanker, wondering. They found only the body of Dhirr, tormented mouth open, fingers hooked as if he had been trying to get at the seeker, though no doubt it was only a death spasm.

‘He’s dead!’ Irisis said soothingly. ‘He can’t hurt you now, Ullii. Hop in; it’s warmer than outside.’

Ullii would not go into the machine, even after they’d carried the body out and left it with Arple for burying. They dressed Ullii, who squatted between the boulders on the far side of the fire, mask well down over her eyes.

Nish stood by the blaze, warming his hands on a mug of soup. He could hear his father’s voice through the wall of one of the tents.

‘That was a good bit of work you did today, sergeant.’

Rustina’s nasal accent replied. ‘It was close, surr, but I wish it had been closer. A lucky stroke that we were in position in time. We were near to perishing in the great blizzard.’

‘I was worried,’ said Jal-Nish.

I’ll bet you were, Nish thought. Worried that you’d be blamed if they were lost. The only thing you care about is becoming scrutator.

‘We could see foul weather coming from up top,’ came Rustina’s voice. ‘We’d planned for it and took shelter in an old mine tunnel. Lucky we got there in time. The blizzard came on faster than we expected. Without shelter we’d have been frozen solid.’

‘I knew you wouldn’t let me down,’ said Jal-Nish.

Nish was disgusted. For the first time in his life he saw that ambition wasn’t everything.

In a bitter voice she replied, ‘ No one wants to destroy lyrinx more than I do, surr.’

It was not until they had finished their dinner, and those not on watch or out searching were preparing for sleep, that anyone thought to ask Ullii if she could see Tiaan.

‘I could not see her when I was in the clanker,’ she said. ‘The evil man cried out and tried to claw me. I ran away and then I saw her crystal.’

‘That was just after Dhirr died,’ Irisis said to Jal-Nish. ‘He’d blocked her inner sight.’

‘And then what happened?’ asked Jal-Nish.

‘I saw her!’

‘You already said that.’

‘No, I saw her , through my goggles.’

‘As well as in your mind?’ Irisis asked.

‘Yes! But the clawer jumped into the water with her. I could not see her after that. Or her crystal.’

‘You could not see her with your mind?’ Nish guessed.

‘She went out like a lamp.’

‘She’s dead!’ said Irisis. ‘She either drowned or froze, and the hedron fell to the bottom. The cold put it out too.’ She turned away, looking bleak.

‘We should keep looking,’ said Fyn-Mah, who had scarcely uttered a word since her failed mancing.

‘Of course we will,’ Jal-Nish snapped. ‘We’re not here to guess but to make certain .’

It blew a gale in the night. Arple called his troops in and even Jal-Nish knew better than to argue. The sentries had one of the most miserable nights of their lives and it was still blowing hard when dawn came.

Nish’s fingers were so cold that it hurt to bend them. He said nothing – as a child his father’s belt had taught him not to complain. As soon as it was light he joined in the hunt, walking as fast as he could in the conditions, up and down river, across and back, with Irisis. He found nothing. No one did.

Jal-Nish refused to give up. The day passed and the following night, which was, if possible, even more bitter. The day after that dawned bleak and blizzardy. The soldiers began to mutter among themselves and not even Arple could stop them. The querist spoke to Jal-Nish several times during the day but he would not relent.

Finally Artificer Tuniz, after a long consultation with the clanker operators, spoke to Fyn-Mah, who accompanied her to Jal-Nish. Nish, waiting to go on watch, overheard their conversation.

‘We must go back, surr,’ said Tuniz, ‘else we are liable to lose the clankers.’

He turned sharply. His round face was pinched and hollow, the full lips a bloodless grey. The perquisitor looked like a man who had failed and could never accept it. ‘How so, artificer?’

‘It’s just too cold. The oil goes hard and does not do its job. If it gets any colder, and the oil freezes, we won’t be able to move the clankers at all.’

‘Then warm it up! You can do that, surely?’

Tuniz smiled with those filed teeth. ‘Aye, but it will just go hard again. And there’s another problem. A worse one.’

‘What now?’ Jal-Nish hated it when someone tried to convince him against his own conviction.

‘The metal of the linkages gets brittle in this kind of cold. If we break just one, we’ll have to abandon the clanker, and by the time we come back it will be buried for the winter. In the thaw it will rust solid.’

‘Very well,’ Jal-Nish said, bitter in his failure. ‘We leave at dawn.’

Tiaan dreamed that a lyrinx’s huge mouth had closed right over her head, to bite her off at the neck. She dreamed that she was whirled in visible currents of water, blue and green and purple. She dreamed that she had swallowed a fish, which was flapping around inside her left lung, its spines prickling.

Piercing, brittle cold; the worst she’d ever felt. A blow in her chest; another. Something with an overpowering gamey smell went over her face.

Thump, thump, thump , fading to nothing again.

Her fingers and toes hurt so much that she woke weeping. She was wrapped in something that itched and her feet felt as if they had been rubbed with broken glass.

Tiaan opened her eyes. She seemed to be in a cave, the entrance closed off by a hanging. A fire blazed behind her, another not far from her feet. Ryll squatted there, rubbing her feet and calves. The claws were retracted. His hand looked fully regenerated. He had a massive bruise above his right eye.

‘My feet feel like icicles that you could snap off,’ she whispered, too listless to question or even wonder.

‘There is broth.’ He busied himself at the fire, returning with one hand cupped. ‘Open your mouth.’

She opened up but, thinking what he might have made soup from, snapped it closed again.