SEVENTY-THREE

They returned, having been away almost four days, to discover air-floaters in all shapes, sizes and colours moored by the camp, and a myriad of brightly coloured tents surrounded by courtiers and attendants. The dignitaries included Governor Zaeff of Roros, who had already been on her way when the battle was won. Her thapter had carried the ten most important leaders from the east. Orgestre had summoned her more than a week ago, and at the moment of victory he had called in as many of the western governors and provincial leaders as could get here.

‘Orgestre has outflanked Flydd and the other moderates,’ panted Fyn-Mah, who had run to meet them at the thapter. ‘Come quickly, Malien. They’re taking the vote now.’

‘What about us?’ said Tiaan.

‘You won’t have a vote,’ Fyn-Mah said, ‘but you might as well be there.’

They hurried to the meeting tent but it was too late – a white-faced Flydd was just stumbling out. ‘We’ve lost,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Orgestre put his hard line to the vote and it won by thirty-two votes to three. I spoke against it for a day and a half, until I had no voice left, but it made no difference. The only votes against were mine, Yggur’s and Troist’s. The conclave has voted to eliminate the lyrinx.’

‘Three?’ said Irisis. ‘Did Klarm –?’

‘He wasn’t well enough to get to the conclave. And that’s not the worst of it. They took another vote, one I didn’t even see coming. They’ve agreed that the Council will be disbanded immediately. The power of the scrutators, such as we were, has been smashed.’

‘I suppose it had to happen,’ said Malien, ‘though it’s a tragedy it happened now.’

‘I now see that the Council was doomed, once Nennifer fell and I failed to maintain its networks of control. Klarm warned me, back then, but I couldn’t do that and fight the war as well. I didn’t think it would fall this quickly.’

‘That victory sowed the seeds of this defeat,’ said Irisis. ‘You showed that the old Council was hollow, so the instant it was no longer necessary …’

‘If only it had lasted a few days longer, I could have prevented this disastrous decision. The world will come to rue it. And I made a pledge that I can’t fulfil. Yggur hasn’t reproached me though I’d feel better if he had.’

‘You couldn’t have anticipated this,’ said Irisis.

‘Ghorr or Fusshte would have,’ said Flydd. ‘They’d have arrested Orgestre on a trumped-up charge, or had him quietly slain, to make sure he couldn’t have interfered. If I’d just put him out of the way for a week.’

‘So you’ve thought of a way to save the lyrinx?’ said Malien.

After a long pause he said, ‘Unfortunately, I haven’t.’ Flydd glanced at Tiaan. ‘And what the devil did you do with your map? I really can’t countenance this kind of insubordination, Tiaan. Orgestre was apoplectic. I thought his head was going to explode. And he accused me of taking the wretched thing. Me!’

What did it matter, Tiaan thought. The lack of the map hadn’t made one bit of difference.

‘The enemy’s defences are failing,’ crowed General Orgestre at a victory dinner hosted by Governor Zaeff that night, in a vast tent flown in from Lybing. ‘Their food and water are dwindling daily. All we have to do is hold them, and in a week they’ll be dead, without the loss of a single man. It will be my crowning achievement.’

‘If you order any more medals you’ll have to pin them to your backside,’ said Flydd.

Did Flydd feel he had nothing more to lose? Nish sniggered. Several others laughed. Klarm, who had been carried inside wrapped in blankets, heaved silently.

Orgestre swelled like a purple toad. ‘I could have you put in irons for that, Citizen Flydd,’ he said pointedly.

A murmur ran through the dignitaries, then Governor Zaeff spoke sharply to him. Irisis didn’t hear what was said, though clearly he’d gone too far.

‘What is Orgestre’s achievement?’ said Irisis quietly. ‘Troist fought all the military battles for him, and Flydd won against their Arts. The Grand Commander has never raised a sword in combat, and now the war has been won he wants praise for being the executioner?’

‘Truly the battle isn’t over until the last man falls,’ Orgestre was saying. ‘We’ve risen from the ashes of our funeral pyre to overcome our enemy. Never in all the Histories has there been such a victory.’

‘If it truly is a victory!’ said Yggur, standing up and meeting everyone’s eye, one by one, as if defying them to attempt anything against him. ‘But should any lyrinx survive elsewhere on Santhenar, or in the void from whence they came, you’ll create an enemy who will never forgive humanity, not in a thousand times a thousand years. Their vengeance will be as eternal as the stars, Grand Commander Orgestre. Your descendants will curse your name, you and all you others who’ve authorised this genocide, until humanity itself is no more.’

‘Don’t commit this dreadful atrocity. Find another way,’ said Gilhaelith.

The governors were scowling now, annoyed at the dissent spoiling their celebration dinner.

‘You brought them here,’ said Orgestre.

‘When circumstances change, an intelligent man changes his mind,’ said Gilhaelith.

‘Sit down or I’ll have you in irons for dealing with the enemy.’ Orgestre turned to the governors. ‘We’ve had the debate – weary days of it. The vote has been tallied, and won. Must we go through it yet again?’

‘I haven’t had my say,’ said Malien.

‘Then please say what you’ve come for so we can get on with it.’

‘To exterminate any race before its time is a great evil, besides what may come of it.’

‘Humanity is worn out with conflict,’ said Governor Zaeff, speaking for the first time, ‘and so is our world. It has to end now, and here. The future must take care of itself.’

‘Oh, it will,’ said Malien. ‘Recall, from the Histories, how the Faellem once cast their rivals on Tallallame, the Mariem, into the void to die. They thought they had eliminated them, but out of the void the Mariem returned, as Charon, and in the end it was the Faellem who lost their world, their humanity and their civilisation.’

‘The irony of the Histories is indeed inexorable,’ said Yggur.

‘While the mighty cringe from their imagined futures,’ said Orgestre, ‘the common folk live in fear that the war will go on forever. We’ve already voted to kill the beasts. Just give me the power and I’ll see it carried out to the last pregnant female and the last whining infant. Those of you who don’t have the stomach may take your leave, and claim hereafter that you had no part in the business.’ He glanced around, and added, ‘though no doubt you’ll profit from it once the war is over.’

‘Before you set about your slaughter,’ said Malien, coming out to the front, ‘attend me a moment!’ She said it so like a royal command that even Orgestre fell silent.

She told them what had happened at the Hornrace and out in the Dry Sea, of the fate of Vithis, Minis and Tirior, and about the Well of Echoes.

‘What’s going to happen to it?’ said Gilhaelith, his eyes glowing with a geomancer’s fascination for any new natural force.

‘No one knows,’ she said. ‘It may keep growing, go quiescent, or even split into a whole swarm of little Wells.’

‘How does it grow?’ asked Zaeff.

‘By taking power from fields and nodes.’

‘Then what’s to stop it growing until it’s consumed them all?’ said Flydd.

‘Maybe nothing,’ said Malien, ‘though all things have a natural limit.’

‘Vithis said “All Santhenar will rue this day”,’ Tiaan reminded them. ‘What did he mean by that?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Malien.

‘You’d better keep an eye on it,’ said Flydd. ‘Why don’t you go now? Oh, if I could have the field map before you go, Tiaan,’ he said pointedly, so the whole room could hear.

‘I lost it,’ she said at once. ‘Out in the Dry Sea.’

‘Lost it?’

‘I think Tirior must have taken it, before she was sent to the Well,’ Tiaan said hastily. ‘It’s ironic, really, since the Well feeds on fields and nodes, that it should have consumed my map.’

Flydd eyed her sceptically. ‘Well, I dare say I can get enough out of the field controller with the incomplete one.’

‘If you’re going to check on the Well,’ said Gilhaelith quickly, ‘I’d like to come too.’

Flydd followed them outside and spoke quietly with Malien for a minute or two, before going back towards the banquet tent, but then he stopped halfway. ‘Incidentally, Tiaan,’ he called, ‘you should ask Gilhaelith to explain the art of deception.’

‘What’s he talking about?’ Tiaan said, once Flydd had returned to the tent.

Gilhaelith chuckled. ‘The best liars keep their stories simple and keep saying the same thing. At all costs, resist the urge to embroider.’

Malien and Gilhaelith headed for the thapter, the others to their tents to change their filthy clothes. When they were alone, Gilhaelith said, ‘I wonder if you might use your good offices to recover my geomantic globe. Now that the war is over, Flydd has no need to hold it, and it would be a comfort to me.’

Malien considered the request, as if judging whether he was practising the art of deception on her. ‘And you could use it to repair your injuries.’

‘The damage is no longer reparable. But even so, I’d like to have it by me. It was my life’s work, and it’s a thing of beauty that comforts me.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. Malien looked him up and down. ‘You’re a contradictory fellow, Gilhaelith. You brought the lyrinx here to exact revenge on them, and you’ve just argued for their preservation.’

‘So I did,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘But the brutalities of war, and my own mortality, have rendered revenge meaningless.’

‘You can’t lie to me, you know. I read men – even geomancers – the way you read books.’

‘I wouldn’t try. I’d never seen war before, Malien, and I had no idea of the horror of it – bodies torn apart, heads ripped off, thousands dying in agony because some fool ordered them to fight. And to think I put it all in motion.’

‘This battle was coming anyway,’ said Malien. She wasn’t trying to comfort him. ‘But I do believe we’re of a mind.’

‘What I’ve done has made my life more meaningless than ever, and I’m beginning to see only one way out. To take my life before I lose my mind.’

‘There could be another way to give your life the meaning you crave.’

‘How?’ he said indifferently.

‘By helping to undo what you’ve brought about.’

‘It’s gone too far; there’s no way to resolve it.’

‘There may be. Let’s get your globe. Do you know where it is?’

‘In the guarded tent next to the relics from the tar pits.’

‘I’ll take the thapter across while we wait for the others. No one would suspect me. And, Gilhaelith, perhaps you can do something for me …’

Tiaan was pacing across the crunchy salt on the other side of the thapter when Malien came walking towards her. ‘Is something the matter, Tiaan?’

‘I can’t bear to think about what they’re doing,’ said Tiaan in a low voice. She kicked a lump of salt out of the way as if it were Orgestre’s head.

‘They’re afraid, and they see it as a simple answer, though there are none.’

‘I can think of one,’ Tiaan said savagely. ‘If I had the power, I’d destroy all the nodes on Santhenar.’

‘That would be the death of all the Arts,’ said Malien mildly. ‘The good as well as the bad.’

‘If the world keeps on the way it’s going, building ever more powerful devices and taking more and more to operate them, the Art will be the death of Santhenar. Humanity was never meant to have such power, Malien. Look what we’ve done to our world during the brief course of this war, and that’s nothing to what we will do.’

‘Whether our powers are great or small, good and evil apply in the same measure. And if you succeeded, and survived it, what then?’

Tiaan hadn’t thought about that. ‘I suppose I’d just live a simple life without the Art, like everyone else.’

Malien sighed. ‘If only it were that simple. Getting rid of the Art would not change the human nature that has abused it.’

‘But it would limit the amount of damage that evil people could do.’

‘You can’t turn time back, Tiaan; neither for the world, nor yourself. You’re what life and the Art have made of you. If you robbed yourself of that, you would be the unhappiest person in the world.’

Nish and Irisis had joined them and as soon as they were in the air, flying in darkness, Malien said casually, ‘Could we fly over the lyrinx camp for a moment? I’d like to see how they’re faring.’

‘So would I,’ said Tiaan. ‘I knew some of them well. Ryll was a decent man – male – no, I’ll call him a man. He was a better man than many humans I’ve known. And Liett …’

‘Liett held me prisoner,’ said Nish unexpectedly. ‘After … er, Gilhaelith left me behind.’ He glanced at the geomancer, who managed to look abashed for perhaps the first time in his life. ‘The other lyrinx seemed in awe of her. And when she’d finished with me, she left me in Ryll’s custody. He seemed to have grown in stature since I last saw him.’

‘Both Ryll and Liett have grown,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘They’ve greatly influenced the other lyrinx, and this has been recognised.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Tiaan.

‘There’s been a profound shift in their attitudes since the relics were discovered,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘Matriarch Gyrull forced the lyrinx to think about the future as well as the past. The lyrinx who are least flesh-formed and most human, the reverts, are now venerated as being closest to their ancient selves.’

‘The other lyrinx must find that hard to take.’

‘Many do, but most yearn for their children to be more like their ancestors. In lyrinx society, the individual must bow to the will of the whole, or even be sacrificed for the good of the whole, and most do so gladly. Once they discovered their true ancestry, most lyrinx accepted that they had to change to survive and prosper on this world. It would be a tragedy if they were to disappear.’

‘There may be a way to save them,’ said Tiaan. ‘I er … neglected to mention it to Flydd and the others, but Vithis has built a portal out on a pinnacle in the Dry Sea.’

‘A portal? Really?’ Gilhaelith’s eyes lit up.

‘Well, it’s really a device to create a portal,’ said Malien. ‘He had it made to rescue First Clan from the void. And I have the key.’

‘If I could just see a working gate,’ said Gilhaelith. ‘If I could step across to another world, no matter how briefly, it would be the climax of my geomantic life. I would die a happy man.’

‘Your mention of the fate of the Faellem gave me an idea, Malien,’ said Tiaan.

‘I thought it might,’ said Malien.

Tiaan regarded her with a thoughtful smile. ‘Shall we go down and talk to the lyrinx?’

‘But we’ll be branded as traitors!’ said Nish. ‘Flydd will be apoplectic.’

‘I’ll take you back if you like,’ said Tiaan. ‘But I simply can’t stand by and see the lyrinx destroyed.’

Nish and Irisis exchanged glances. ‘I’ve seen enough killing to last me a lifetime,’ said Nish. ‘But …’

‘There’ll be no going back,’ said Irisis. ‘What do we do, Nish?’

‘Now that the war is over, and we’ve miraculously survived it, I just want to go home.’

‘So do I,’ said Irisis. ‘But we can’t. How would we live with ourselves?’

‘You’re right,’ said Nish. ‘Take us down, Tiaan.’