no field there, remember? At least, only enough to power an air-floater.’
‘I’m still working on it,’ said Yggur.
‘What progress do you have to report?’
‘None that I care to speak about in a general gathering.’
‘If we can’t move the thapters once we make them,’ Flydd said with deliberation, ‘there’s no point to any of this.’
‘I’ve said it will be done,’ Yggur said frostily. ‘Is there anything else?’ His eye fell on Tiaan and he gestured for her to come up.
She did so reluctantly, hating to be the focus of everyone’s attention, and she hadn’t even had time to brush her hair.
‘I’ve extended my node maps,’ Tiaan burst out, but couldn’t think what to say next. She hastily unrolled her master map so they’d look at it and not her. Everyone did, and the tension eased.
Yggur took the other side of the map and beckoned to Nish, who held her side. Tiaan outlined the thapter’s flight track across to Tirthrax and Fadd, up the east coast to Roros, west to Taranta and back down the west coast of Faranda to the Foshorn.
‘I’ve learned a lot,’ she said, ‘as you can see from the map. It shows another seventy-eight nodes, some of them powerful, and the extent of their fields. Many were not previously known, as far as I can tell. Of course, this wasn’t a proper survey and there are many gaps. I had to sleep,’ she said apologetically. ‘All it really tells us is how little we know.’
‘It almost doubles what we know about the nodes of the world,’ said Flydd.
‘Some were very strange,’ she went on. ‘The one at the Hornrace –’
‘We’ll come to that later,’ said Flydd hastily. ‘Malien or I will tell that tale, if you don’t mind.’
Tiaan did not mind at all. She looked at Yggur, then hesitated.
‘Would you like to go down?’ he said kindly.
‘There’s … something else.’ She gasped it out.
‘About fields?’
‘No.’
‘Oh? Well, please go on.’
Tiaan had her hand in her capacious pocket, clutching the globe for comfort. ‘Before we left, you gave me Golias’s globe.’ She held it high and the lamplight gleamed off it. ‘You asked me to look at it in my spare time.’
‘Never mind,’ said Yggur. ‘I’ve decided to begin again from scratch.’ He put out his hand.
Tiaan held onto the globe. She glanced around the room. Flydd was staring at her in puzzlement. Fyn-Mah was writing notes on a scrap of paper. Irisis played with a controller apparatus in her lap. Nish was staring into the fire.
‘Yes, Tiaan?’ Malien said encouragingly.
Tiaan flicked her wrist as if spinning a ball, but held the globe tight. Its internal spheres revolved, darting reflections in all directions, then she squeezed her fingers and the layers froze as if they’d been locked in place.
‘I’ve solved the puzzle,’ she said softly. ‘I know how the globe works.’
There was dead silence. Yggur set his goblet down with a clatter, looking to Flydd and Malien as if he suspected them of organising a joke at his expense. ‘How did you get it apart, and back together?’
‘I didn’t need to. As we were going along,’ she said, ‘I observed it closely and made a model of all the layers, in my mind. The first few were easy enough. The sixth, seventh and eighth proved rather difficult.’
‘We’ll take that as a modest understatement,’ said Yggur.
‘Once I knew how each of the layers was formed,’ Tiaan went on, confidently now, ‘and how they related to each other, it was a matter of using my artisan’s experience, and what I’d learned of geomancy from Gilhaelith and the Aachim, to work out how the globe could be used to farspeak. I like solving puzzles. Things are so much easier than people …’
‘Only to you, my little artisan.’ Yggur was smiling now.
‘But that was only half the problem,’ Tiaan said. ‘I knew there was something else at the core, but there was no way to see it without breaking the globe. It’s a lot heavier than the glass and metal foil the layers are made from, so the core had to be something very heavy. I weighed the globe, then again in water, and discovered that the core had to be heavier than iron, or even lead. But what elements are heavier than lead?’ She looked at each of them but no one spoke. ‘Only gold, platinum, and quicksilver.’
Putting the globe down on the table, Tiaan spun it hard. ‘It didn’t spin like a solid globe would. See how it wobbles? The core has