there, beneath the glass-domed roof, he had completed the geomantic globe last autumn. So they weren’t going to kill him after all – at least, not just yet. They still wanted something from him.
Gilhaelith was led inside and, to his unparalleled joy, the globe stood on the stone bench where he’d last used it, under its dust cloth. Ryll was waiting beside it, along with one of the lyrinx mancers who’d kept watch over Gilhaelith previously. He felt another tickle of hope. Perhaps in the present crisis they couldn’t spare the second mancer. The fellow’s skin was flashing and flickering in all the colours of the spectrum, such was his agitation. Ryll maintained a studied calm, though he kept scratching his claws across the bench.
‘I’ve brought you here for the final tests on the flisnadr,’ Ryll said, indicating a barrel-shaped object covered with a canvas. ‘Let’s begin.’
‘I need answers before I’ll agree to help you,’ said Gilhaelith, who was beginning to see the faintest possibility of escape.
Ryll extended his claws towards Gilhaelith’s face. Gilhaelith didn’t flinch. ‘If you could do without me you would have killed me long ago. What’s going on?’
Ryll didn’t even think before answering, which meant that things were desperate and the need for the flisnadr urgent. ‘The humans have attacked Oellyll with the spores of a fungus that causes us to shed our outer skin and tear ourselves to shreds in agony.’ He explained the circumstances of the attack.
Gilhaelith recalled the infected lyrinx that had been put out of its misery as they’d fled from Snizort last summer, and saw the implications at once. Had humanity got the idea from him? He vaguely remembered talking to someone about the incident, at Fiz Gorgo, he thought. ‘Are you abandoning Oellyll?’
‘No decision has been taken,’ said Ryll. ‘Shall we begin?’
He had told Gilhaelith all he needed to know. Oellyll surely would be abandoned, either because lyrinx were being infected with the fungus, or for fear that they would be. This was the crisis – the moment upon which the fate of both lyrinx and humanity hinged. He had to take advantage of the first chance he got, for the instant he gave Ryll what he wanted, Ryll would put him to death.
That knowledge quite concentrated the mind, and Gilhaelith rehearsed once again the attack he’d been planning for months now. He was ready; all he needed was the opportunity.
Ryll went to the flisnadr, though he left the canvas over it so Gilhaelith couldn’t see how it was used. They worked for a night and a day, then slept for a few hours. Gilhaelith was bound hand and foot and watched over by four lyrinx guards, then untied and they worked on. Ryll was methodical and took no chances. Neither did he allow Gilhaelith any.
On the afternoon of the following day, Gilhaelith heard the whine of a thapter not far above. ‘What’s that?’ he said, hoping to distract Ryll.
Ryll cocked his head. ‘Thapter. Go and see,’ he said to one of the guards, and the lyrinx ran off.
‘Perhaps they’re going to attack with more spores,’ Gilhaelith said.
‘They’ll get a surprise if they try,’ said Ryll, pretending indifference, though his skin colours told otherwise.
They continued, Gilhaelith sliding the brass pointers on their circumferential rings as he tuned the geomantic globe to the field, while Ryll worked under the canvas. Gilhaelith couldn’t see what he was doing, though he could feel the effects on the field, which kept drawing down then flaring up. So the flisnadr is working, Gilhaelith thought. And if Ryll can control this dark and dangerous field, formed around the perilous Alcifer node-within-a-node, he can control just about any field in the world. He can take all the power from it, to deprive the enemy, or give it all to his own kind. He can do anything he wants with it. How can humanity counter that?
Surprisingly, Gilhaelith cared. The knowledge that he truly was doomed had come like a blinding revelation. His own selfish interests, which had sustained him all his life, would never be satisfied, but somehow that did not matter any more. What did matter was the fate of humanity, and he might hold the key to saving them. It seemed it was time to throw in his lot with his own kind after all.
The lyrinx came running back. ‘It’s the same thapter that attacked the air shaft last week,’ he said. ‘It’s not attacking, though; just circling.’
Tiaan’s thapter, Gilhaelith thought. This is my chance. If