Crack! Lines of fire lashed across her back and curled around her side, ending in blinding stings on her belly. Crack! More lashes, crossing the first.

An image, distant and out of focus: a man hanging suspended from an engraved dome. Another, across the room, hurling punishment stars at his unprotected body. Each star had a soft central core trailing many thread-like tentacles, like those of a jellyfish. And like a jellyfish they wrapped around, stinging and burning.

There was something about the prisoner – the tall, well-proportioned frame, the dark hair hanging like a mop over his face. Slowly she brought him into focus and her own pain faded, becoming no more than a silken cord across her back, a caress.

The man threw up his head in agony. His lips were drawn back from his teeth. He seemed to be staring right into her eyes, reproaching her for her oath-breaking. ‘Faithless friend,’ he sang out between the strikes. ‘Why have you forsaken me?’

It was Minis, her love. He had raised his people’s hopes and she had let him down. Tiaan came fully awake and the daydream disappeared. He was the reason she was still alive; only she could save him. It was her destiny, and once she did, the Aachim would change the balance. With their aid, humanity would be able to stand up to the lyrinx. She would no longer be a traitor. Tiaan would be the woman who had saved the world.

But first she must escape from Kalissin and make her way a hundred leagues across country to Tirthrax. That would not be easy. Tarralladell and Mirrilladell, scoured bare by ice sheets over thirty thousand years, were a mass of rivers, swamps and elongated lakes that ran south from the Great Mountains to the inland seas of Tallallamel and Milmillamel. There was no crossing this country from east to west, after the thaw. No roads or bridges went that way. All but local traffic moved north-south, by boat in the summer and by keel on the ice in winter, though winter was so cold that few people travelled at all. They huddled in their huts and prayed that the food would last until spring. How was she to cross such country alone?

The latch rattled. Leaping out of bed, Tiaan flung on her clothes. If she did not, Liett would haul her down to work naked.

Liett seemed particularly irritable today. Tiaan had her pants on but only one arm through her sleeve when she was dragged out the door. She felt foolish, stumbling behind the hurrying lyrinx, trying to dress one-handed.

In the work chamber, Liett thrust her across the room. ‘Get to work! And see that you do better than yesterday, or today may be your last.’

That only made things worse and the day turned out as unproductive as all the previous ones. By nightfall Liett was trembling with frustration. Several times, looking up from her work, Tiaan noticed the lyrinx staring at her. The expression in her eyes was disturbing. Suddenly Liett sprang up, strode to the door and flicked the fingerlock. Tiaan wondered why.

Returning to her bench, the lyrinx began arranging her incubation jars. Tiaan put it out of mind and was concentrating on the field when Liett took her from behind and held her arm down flat. Using an implement like a leather worker’s punch, Liett cut out a disc of skin and flesh, the size of her little fingernail, from the inside of Tiaan’s left arm.

Such a small wound, but Tiaan slumped on her stool, feeling faint. Liett macerated the sample into particles too tiny to see and stirred it into a jar of yellow-tinged fluid, like broth. Air bubbled through the fluid. She spent the rest of the day there, concentrating hard while Tiaan trickled power to maintain the aura inside the metal bars. Liett changed the fluid several times.

A day later a glob of matter began to grow at the bottom of the jar. On the third day buds formed into two limbs, then four, then many, then back to four again. Its shape seemed not fixed; or was Liett’s flesh-forming constantly changing it? Tiaan suspected that Liett had added other tissue to the jar when no one else was there. Once she noticed a fresh circular scab up in the lyrinx’s armpit. Had she used her own tissue? If so, she had taken pains to conceal it. Perhaps that was forbidden.

After a week the creature began to grow rapidly, the limbs branching over and over again until it resembled a four-armed starfish, each arm terminating in a dozen smaller ones, like fingered, coiling tentacles.

In a fortnight, when the creature’s body was the size of an egg and the limbs spread to six times that size, it began to show signs of coordination, if not intelligence. All the lyrinx in the spire came to see it, crowding into the room in small groups. There were hundreds of them. Gloom settled over her. She would never escape.

Tiaan rubbed her arm. The injury had been slow to heal and the neat circular scar still ached. Repelled, horrified and fascinated in turn, she could not keep away from the jar. The creature was unique, bizarre. Each of its extremities was different: some like fingers, others resembling claws or probes, bundles of feathers or threads as fine as silk. Some she could imagine a purpose for, others she could not. What did Liett have in mind for it?

The creature began to grow scaly plates all over its body. The plates thickened until the arms could no longer move. It lay on the floor of its jar for a day, whereupon Liett took it out and killed it with a single thrust from a carefully cleaned knife. As she did, pain sheared through Tiaan’s head. It passed without after-effects, apart from uncomfortable feelings of empathy for the dead animal.

Liett dissected the corpse, made notes and reduced it to pulp for her next experiment. However, the next three attempts were failures; the creatures terminated within a few days.

Ryll was as busy with his own flesh-forming. His creations were all of a type – an elongated body, heavily armoured and spiked on the underside, long, armoured legs, a spiked club for a tail and a spiked, fanged, plate-armoured head. His experiments likewise were not going well. Tiaan often saw what she now recognised as stress-patterns on his skin: chevron shapes in blacks and reds.

Tiaan could not fathom why that particular form was so important to him, and Ryll would not say. He made his creatures over and again, using tissue samples of unknown source. Each time, when they reached the size of a fat mouse, Ryll collapsed from the strain. His creatures would keep growing for a day or two before falling down in a twitching, uncoordinated mass. Ryll would groan and bang his sensitive crest on the wall. There would be yet another conference with Coeland and other senior lyrinx, much shouting, yelling and violent skin-talk, then they would all go away and Ryll, as soon as he was able, returned to his work.

‘I wonder …’ Ryll said late one night, about a month after Liett had taken the sample from Tiaan’s arm.

Tiaan looked up from the crystal. The work made her nauseous and all she wanted was to go to bed and shut out the world. It was hotter than ever down here; she could not adjust. For most of her life she had been cold. Now she yearned for it. She slept with her window open, whatever the weather. When not sleeping she stood at the window, staring across the lake to the smudges of snow-blanketed forest in the distance, and wondering if she would ever reach it. In the two and a half months she had been held here, there had been no chance to escape. She was not permitted to go anywhere unescorted and was always locked in at night.

‘What?’ Tiaan said, indifferent.

Ryll was staring at the many-armed creature growing in Liett’s jar. It was still tiny – no bigger than a thumbnail.

He looked over his shoulder. The gesture seemed furtive. His colour changed to iron-greys and browns, a camouflage so brilliant that Tiaan could only see him when he moved. She did not think Ryll had any idea he’d done it. What was he up to?