‘I don’t like it.’ Liett lay a soft-skinned hand on his arm. ‘This risks burning insanity into its very makeup. Better to start again than create a creature we can’t control.’

He looked deep into her eyes. ‘Let’s try first, shall we? If we fail we’ll kill it and start afresh.’ He pressed his hands around the cage but the field did not appear. ‘Tiaan?’

She was still staring at the miserable creature. ‘This is wrong. Let the poor thing die!’

‘Make the aura!’ he snarled.

‘I won’t help you any more.’

Ryll sprang across the room, furious in his wrath, and snatched the amplimet from her hand. One claw tore the skin of her palm and Tiaan felt an audible snap as her bond with the crystal was wrenched apart. It rocked her on her stool.

‘No. This has gone far enough,’ she whispered, staring at the bright beads welling up on her palm.

This time Tiaan was held in a large spherical chamber at the bottom of the spire. It had no window and was stiflingly hot. The room was empty but for a bracket at the ceiling. Ryll hung the amplimet there and locked the door.

She sat on the floor, which proved so unpleasantly warm that she had to get up at once. Her eyes were drawn to the amplimet, hanging four spans out of reach and utterly unattainable. Withdrawal struck her in the face. Tiaan let out a wail of despair and longing.

Twenty-six hours she spent in that room, pacing back and forth. There was nothing to sit on, nothing to lie on. If she stayed in the same place too long her feet hurt. She did not sleep; could not; it was sweltering, and down here the amplimet emitted a harsh glare that she could feel through the back of her head.

Several times Tiaan dozed on her feet but the agony never stopped. It would just get worse and worse and in the end she would break as she always had.

On the morning of the second day she gave in. Rapping on the door with her boot, she said to the lyrinx who opened it, ‘I will do it. Take me to Ryll.’

The creature still panted on the floor of the cage. It looked thinner than before and so did Ryll, who had been working nonstop to keep it alive. Liett was not there; she had been called away to another project. Ryll often looked around as if to ask her something.

Tiaan climbed onto her stool and reached down for that source of power she had tapped before, the lines of force that surrounded and passed through the great magnets of the iron spire of Kalissin.

Over the past weeks she had gained some facility at drawing on that power, taking the barest trickle from it, though she was always aware that it was like filling a thimble from a waterfall. All around was power a billion times vaster than she could handle. One mistake and it would anthracise her.

‘Hurry!’ Ryll choked. ‘It’s failing.’ He looked as if he was drying out inside. His skin had gone baggy.

She channelled power into the cometary iron strands, drip by drip. An aura sprang to life about the cage. Immediately Ryll looked less haggard.

They worked all evening, though Tiaan had no insight into what Ryll was doing. By midnight the red lines of inflammation were fading, the sores less swollen and scabbing over. They continued through dawn and the following day. Only when the sun was setting through a porthole did Ryll call a stop. The creature kicked once or twice then settled into sleep. The crisis appeared to be over.

Tiaan, after two nights without sleep, was so exhausted that she could not even take the helm off. She lay on the metal floor. It felt as if the channelling had worn parts of her away.

‘Shall I carry you to your room?’ Ryll said, bending down.

Pillowing her head on her arms, she snuggled down and closed her eyes. ‘Perfectly comf …’ Tiaan fell into sleep.

Moonrise over a boggy plain. The luminous light reflected brassily off a hundred thousand little ponds, some no bigger than a tablecloth. Rushes threaded their way between them.

Tiaan was sitting on a reedy mound, the sole vantage point in that dismal scape. It moved as she did, like a sodden, floating haystack. There was no track through the mire; no escape!

A movement caught her eye, some way off. The reflection of the moon on one pond had been eclipsed momentarily, as if something had disturbed the smooth plane of water. She stared at the spot for ages. The blink did not recur, but as Tiaan resumed her watch there came another flash to the left of the first, and a third to her right. She looked behind her but saw nothing. All was dark there.

Turning back, Tiaan saw that the ponds were winking everywhere, the flashes of light and darkness getting closer. Whatever caused them was headed directly towards her.

The moon rose higher. A cool breeze made her shiver. Tiaan stood up, staring at the approaching streamlines. She caught the distant chuckling of agitated water, growing ever louder until it became a thrashing roar like the wind-driven paddle-wheels in the coastal fish ponds below Tiksi.

Then she saw it – an elongated shape diving into a pond not fifty paces from her mound. It thrashed across, thick legs moving like paddles and sending gouts of water high. The moonlight illuminated the translucent tips of spines. It resembled Ryll’s creature, only grown monstrously large. An elongated head, an enormous mouth full of teeth, spiky sides and underneath, a spiked club for a tail. Worst of all was the glittering intelligence in its eyes .

Another creature left a trail across a nearby pond. They were everywhere, pounding toward the mound as if racing to get to her first.

She stood up on tiptoe. Now the dark behind her was cut by hundreds of phosphorescent trails. The moon reflected off bleached eyes and grey teeth. Tiaan whirled around and around. They were everywhere; thousands of them. She felt at her waist. No knife; no weapon at all.

The creature she had first seen was ahead of the others. It hurled itself into the pond next to her mound, sending up twin deluges. Mud and reeds were flung in the air. It was three times her size .

It reached the near side of the pond. The flat feet slipped on the wet stems of her mound. Claws snapped out, took hold, and it came out of the water in a rush. Its spiked snout gaped. It lunged .

Tiaan screamed and woke up. It was just a crystal-induced nightmare, to be expected after such overuse of the amplimet.

As Tiaan stood, she saw something fingered in a beam of moonlight from the window. It was Ryll’s creature in its cage.

Come closer.

She spun around, thinking that someone had whispered behind her, though the sound had been unlike any lyrinx voice. The room was empty. Tiaan approached the cage. The creature pressed its snout through the bars. Its eyes were fixed on her.

Closer, closer!

Tiaan stared at the little beast, which was like the one in her dreams, only small. It looked … She did not know what, but deadly.

Hungry.

Recalling the fate of the rats it fed on, she reached for a strip of dried flesh in a basket and held it out, carefully. The creature watched her, unmoving. It was not looking at the meat. Its eyes were fixed on her fingers.

Hungry!

Tiaan moved closer, reaching out until the strip touched its snout. She felt mesmerised by the eyes; the call.

It sprang, hitting the bars so hard that the cage jerked forward. The jaws snapped just a breath away from her fingers. She leapt backwards with a squawk and the forgotten helm fell off. Instantly the whispering in her head stopped, the mesmerising power of its eyes faded. The creature, vicious though it was, was just a wild animal.

It had bent the bars. Tiaan put a heavier cage over the first, weighed it down with a block of metal and went out. A guard escorted her to her room, where she locked the door behind her. Three times that night she woke in a lather and ran to the door, to check that it was still locked.