‘I will,’ Liett said softly, laying her cheek submissively on her mother’s arm. But as she did so her eyes flashed at Tiaan, such a baleful glare that Tiaan had to turn away.

‘And you, Ryll?’ said Coeland.

Ryll bent until his forehead touched the Wise Mother’s feet. His crest went purple, then red, before fading to grey. ‘I will do my duty,’ he said, equally softly.

FORTY-THREE

The following day Tiaan learned what they wanted her for. The cages were constructed of finely drawn cometary iron, with floor and sometimes walls of rock glass formed by the impact. Each had particular properties that enhanced the flesh-forming Art. She was required to channel power from the Kalissin fields into the iron filaments so as to induce a smaller, more concentrated aura inside the cage. The lyrinx hoped, by this, to grow their flesh-formed creatures larger.

‘I will not do it,’ Tiaan said with a shudder.

Liett whirled, caught Tiaan’s head in the claws of one hand, and squeezed until they broke the skin in five places. Tiaan dared not move. The lyrinx was strong enough to tear her face off. Liett held her for a minute, then Ryll cried ‘Enough!’ and Tiaan was released.

‘Will you do it now?’ Ryll asked, soft-voiced.

‘No.’

Liett bared her teeth but Ryll simply plucked the amplimet from Tiaan’s fingers and placed it on a high shelf. Taking her by the arm, he led her up to her room and locked her in.

Tiaan knew what to expect now, and perhaps because of that, withdrawal seemed to come on more strongly than ever. Or perhaps it was knowing that Ryll would never relent. Within twenty-four hours she was climbing the walls. By the following dawn she began screaming, which aroused the worst memory of all, the horrible night that had seen her banished to the breeding factory. When Ryll appeared she just gave in.

One touch of the amplimet and the withdrawal was gone. Within an hour she was at the bench, ready to do whatever he required. Tiaan blocked out the betrayal – she had to.

However, after hours of trying she laid the amplimet aside, unable to visualise the strange field here. Her normal way of seeing it did not work. ‘I can’t do it.’

Ryll scowled. ‘Another attempt to delay us, artisan?’

‘It’s not like the field I’m used to,’ she stammered, afraid of their fury.

‘Try harder!’

She did, no more successfully, but that evening, fiddling with a piece of iron on the bench, Tiaan noticed that it had smaller particles clinging to it. She tried to pick it up and had to wrench it off the surface. It was a little magnet, and maybe the bench was a bigger one. Perhaps the whole spire was!

The room vanished and suddenly she saw it. She was standing inside an iron spire jutting up from the earth, its feet in fire, tip crusted with ice. She could image the heat flowing from one end to the other, radiating out in all directions before being swallowed by an ocean of frigid air.

Now Tiaan sensed a different, subtler force. The iron spire seemed to be made up of horizontal bands, oriented one way or another, out of which swept fields of force in elongated, intersecting loops. It was like … Tiaan struggled to think of any comparison. Then she had it – an exercise Crafter Barkus had given her before she even began her prenticeship.

He’d had her stroke a piece of iron with a lodestone until it was magnetised and she could pick a nail with it. Later he had sprinkled iron filings on a piece of paper and moved the nail around underneath. The filings had formed curving patterns sweeping from one end of the magnet to the other.

The shape of the fields (for there were at least two here, unlike other nodes she had experience with) told her that the spire was an enormous magnet or collection of magnets. Tiaan had done other experiments with magnets, making other patterns. By moving a magnet inside a coil of wire she had made circular patterns around the wire. They had fascinated her so much that she fell behind in her work and had been reprimanded by Crafter Barkus. Tiaan had never gone back to magnets. There had been no time for toys at the manufactory.

What might a magnet as large as a mountain be able to do? What power it must have!

‘I can see the fields,’ she said.

Weeks went by, a time of the most exhausting mental labour. Day after day Tiaan spent on her stool, exploring the unusual paired fields, working out how to channel them safely, and then creating the aura in the cages. The work left her head throbbing at night, and sometimes it still ached when a hostile Liett hauled her from her bed in the morning. And every time, after using the amplimet, Tiaan dreamed the wildest crystal dreams about flesh-formed monsters.

They worked every day for all the waking hours. The lyrinx kept no holidays or feast days. Nor had they any concept of recreation, so far as she could tell. If they had a culture she saw no signs of it, apart from the wind music. The place was undecorated: no artworks or pottery, no furniture except of the most rudimentary kind. She knew the lyrinx could read and write, though she saw no books, scrolls or any other kind of document. But of course this place was a workshop and laboratory, dedicated to the war. Their homes, or nests, could be completely different. Moreover their language was incomprehensible, to say nothing of skin-speech. Their greatest poets and orators might have been reciting beside her and she would have known nothing about it. Alternatively, Ryll might have been telling the truth. Perhaps the lyrinx were a lost people, without even their own Histories.

Despite her efforts, the lyrinx did not seem to be making progress. Tiaan was glad of it. They were careful to hide the real purpose of their experiments from her, but the procession of bizarre, flesh-formed creatures that writhed and squealed and expired on the bench was terrifying. She could not bear to think how the lyrinx would use them, if they succeeded.

Tiaan despised herself for collaborating with the enemy. As the work progressed she became filled with self-loathing. She rebelled many times, and each time they simply took away the amplimet. Each time the agony was greater.

The lyrinx became increasingly frustrated with their inability to understand the amplimet and the fields Tiaan could tap with it. For years their most talented mancers had been working with captured controllers, but to no effect. They simply could not use such devices.

Each day, after her other work was done, they interrogated her, trying to wrest the secret from her. They made Tiaan demonstrate her art from first principles, as if teaching the lowest prentice. They had spent weeks watching and studying her while she explored the fields below and around the spire. They monitored her with strange instruments, some half-mechanical and half-alive, like living versions of her controllers. Coeland suggested that she was deliberately thwarting them. Liett made veiled threats.

It made no difference. They understood how her devices worked, and the nature of the fields here. They could sense the raw power the spire was bathed in – that was why they had come here in the first place. They could visualise the fields with the captured controllers and with her amplimet. But they could not draw that power, no matter how hard they tried, or how cleverly. The ability simply was not in them.

I must be the rankest coward on Santhenar, Tiaan thought one night as she lay in bed, hands pressed to her throbbing temples. The day’s work had been particularly gruelling. I deserve to be killed and eaten.

She felt strangely detached from her body, as if a crystal dream was coming. Or was it crystal fever? They had driven her so terribly hard lately. She drifted into a daze where the ache persisted and she was still aware of the room, but everything was subtly shifted.