Chimaera

‘How many?’ said Yggur. ‘I hadn’t really expected there’d be any, spreading it out in the open like that.’

‘Three or four, and I dare say there are more we haven’t found. It’s not the numbers, it’s fear of the disease that’s done the damage. But the most interesting thing of all is their reaction to the defeat. To have withdrawn from all the other conflicts, we must have profoundly shocked them. For the very first time, they’re afraid of us.’

‘Our new tactics unsettled them,’ said Nish.

‘They’re conservative fighters. They prefer to use their own well-tried methods,’ said Troist, trying to sit up and grimacing at the pain in his clawed chest. His healer put two pillows under his back. ‘If they’re overturned, the lyrinx normally take a while to formulate new ones. It’s the first time we’ve taken the advantage, and we must capitalise on it. We must formulate new tactics for each battle, so as to unsettle them again and again.’

‘Dare we take the battle to the enemy and attack them in their cities?’ said Yggur.

‘We dare not,’ said Flydd. ‘We’d need at least a four-to-one advantage for that, and we’d have to be prepared to sacrifice most of our troops. It’s not worth it.’

‘How many cities do they have?’ said Nish. ‘And where are they?’

‘They have six main cities that we know of,’ said Klarm. ‘All underground, plus a number of smaller ones. They’re not comfortable living permanently in small groups, and never breed in such places, though they can live almost anywhere for a time, for some particular purpose.’

‘Such as the group living in the spire at Kalissin,’ said Flydd with a glance at Tiaan, who was sitting quietly up the back as usual. ‘Is that not so, Tiaan?’

‘It is,’ she said.

‘Seldom do they build structures above ground,’ Klarm went on, ‘and then only small and temporary. But underground they construct massive complexes of tu

Yggur cleared his throat.

‘Almost the whole,’ Klarm amended. ‘Alcifer is thought to hold seventy thousand. The city west of Thurkad, at least as many.’

‘What about those in the east?’ said Yggur.

‘We don’t know their precise locations because we’ve never been able to get near them. That may change once our thapters are free to search from the air. One city lies in the mountains west of Roros, in Crandor. Another two are somewhere in the wildness of the Wahn Barre, or Crow Mountains, one west of Guffeons and the other west of Gosport. The sixth, and I believe the last, is somewhere in the coastal range south-east of Stassor. As many as forty thousand lyrinx are thought to live in each of those four places.’

‘Why don’t we know exactly where they are?’ said Yggur. ‘I find that hard to comprehend.’

‘They cleared the land of settlers from the very begi

‘What can’t be seen from outside may be perfectly clear from above,’ said Yggur. ‘So many lyrinx, coming and going, will have beaten paths which must converge on their cities. Finding them must be one of our priorities.’

‘It must,’ said Flydd. ‘And that’s all, Klarm?’

‘As far as we know.’

‘What are their total numbers?’

‘Counting those away from their cities at any time, and those we know of in small settlements, around three hundred and fifty thousand.’

‘I had not thought quite so many,’ said Troist.

‘That includes infants and children, pregnant females, and old ones. The number of adults capable of fighting would be a little over half that number. Two hundred thousand at the very most, though they couldn’t put all of them in the field at any one time.’

‘So the army we’ve just defeated was a quarter of their fighting force, and perhaps half of the troops they have in the west.’

‘I should say so,’ said Klarm.

‘Maybe we despaired when we should not have,’ said Flydd. ‘The enemy know we have six thapters and many farspeakers. After this defeat, they may be afraid that the war is turning our way. And if we were to ally with Malien’s people, and Vithis with his ten thousand constructs, unlikely as that seems to us –’

‘With all the advances we’ve made over the winter, they’re vulnerable in ways they could not have imagined last autumn,’ said Klarm. ‘Back then they were definitely wi

‘Let’s not get carried away by one inconclusive victory,’ said Yggur. ‘They too have made brilliant advances in the past few years. They’ll come back from this reversal with new tactics and new weapons, and they could snatch back our gains just as easily as we won them.’

FIFTY-ONE

Gilhaelith paced his cell, a watermelon-shaped chamber excavated out of the shale underneath Alcifer. He’d been back for months, he’d finally been able to test the geomantic globe, had made the last changes and thought it perfect. He’d begun the dangerous experiment of scrying out and dissociating the fragments of phantom crystal from his brain, but to his dismay it hadn’t worked. He soon discovered why. Gyrull had deceived him last autumn, fed him some false details about nodes. The globe was wrong in several small but important aspects that made it useless to his purpose, while not affecting hers. He was trying to uncover the errors when Gyrull and Anabyng seized him and cast him into this cell deep within Oellyll. The only way out was through a long, narrow and winding crawl passage, like the stalk of a watermelon, but the entrance was closed off with crisscrossing bars socketed deep into the rock.

And here he had remained, cut off from his Art and feeling his intellect fading every day. He’d pleaded with Gyrull to be allowed to fix the globe and repair himself but, afraid of what he might do with the globe, she would not even allow him to see it. Gilhaelith was in despair.

Occasionally one or other of the phantom fragments would grow hot, or sing a fractured note that seemed to echo back and forth inside his skull. It was a resonance induced by the globe, which meant that the lyrinx were using it to try and solve the problem of their flisnadr, or power patterner. Gilhaelith knew about that. He knew what the power patterner was intended to do, the problems they’d had making it and, he believed, the reason why they’d failed.

The knowledge did him no good, for Gyrull did not trust him. She made no response to his frequent pleas to the guards and eventually replaced them with two ever-watchful zygnadr sentinels: strange, twisted objects like a ball wrenched into a spiral. Their surfaces bore traces of a crab-like shell and segmented legs, reminiscent of the fossils found everywhere in Oellyll, including the walls of his prison.

The weeks went by but no one came near Gilhaelith except a human slave, the lowest of the low, who once a day slid food and water beneath the bottom bar, and took away the wooden pan containing his waste. The man did not speak Gilhaelith’s language, or indeed any of the many languages Gilhaelith knew.

Helpless, Gilhaelith paced his reeking, claustrophobic cell and brooded, and his resentment festered.

A half-grown female lyrinx came ru