missing from her crest. And, further back, almost concealed by the shadows, the biggest lyrinx Gilhaelith had ever seen – a vast coal-black male with a golden crest. He was one and a half times Gilhaelith’s own majestic height, and probably five or six times his bulk. His folded wings drooped as though he was tired, though the lyrinx held himself erect and his golden eyes seemed to miss nothing.
‘I hoped you would come back,’ Gyrull said, reaching out and encircling Gilhaelith’s bony wrist with her clawed fingers. ‘Come with me, Tetrarch.’
When Gilhaelith had been safely penned in a stone chamber of the underground city, and a pair of zygnadrs, or sentinels, set to watch him, the four lyrinx repaired to an empty dining hall. There the coal-black male selected the lower half of a dead human male from a meat tray and tore it into two haunches, one of which he politely offered to the matriarch.
Gyrull shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry. I have much to think about. Go ahead, Anabyng. You must be hungry after your long flight.’
‘I confess I am,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t settle once in the last two days, so anxious was I to get home.’
Liett took the haunch and bit a chunk from the thigh muscle with her sharp grey teeth. Ryll reached into the tray for a lower leg joint. He hadn’t eaten human flesh for a good while, since there were few humans left in Meldorin. He absently twisted the foot off and tossed it back into the tray, then went across to the table with the others. He was about to tear into the tasty calf meat when Gyrull spoke.
‘I don’t like it, Anabyng. Why has the tetrarch come back?’
The black male chewed and swallowed before answering. Golden speckles broke out on his chest, in appreciation of the quality of the meat. ‘For the geomantic globe. It means more to him than his life, and he is a dead man without it.’
‘Were it up to me,’ said Liett, ‘he would be a dead man now, though I wouldn’t care to dine on his tainted flesh.’ Gilhaelith favoured the most exotic of diets: salted slugs, pickled wood-roaches and other kinds of vermin that not even the lowest of the lyrinx would have eaten but to save their lives.
‘We need him,’ said Ryll, putting down the leg joint untasted.
‘How is the flisnadr going?’ asked Anabyng, referring to the power patterner that Ryll and Liett had been trying to create for many months. ‘Have you made much progress since I left?’
Ryll took up his joint again, stared at the red flesh for a moment, then all at once let it fall on the table. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, human flesh, which he had enjoyed all his life, had lost its appeal. ‘There hasn’t been any progress, Great Anabyng. We’re bedevilled by the same problem that we’ve had from the beginning: linking the individual patterners, with their humans inside, to grow the flisnadr. And we still haven’t worked out how to use Gilhaelith’s geomantic globe to solve this problem.’
‘Then you’d better torture it out of him.’ Anabyng stripped the rest of the meat off the upper thigh, then bit off the protruding bone and crunched it noisily. ‘We’ve got to have it by the beginning of spring.’
‘What’s the matter, Anabyng?’ said Liett, devouring her haunch with gusto. ‘Why so soon?’
Anabyng’s head jerked up and his eyes glowed, though he did not speak.
Matriarch Gyrull struck the table with her fist. ‘Be so good as to use Anabyng’s proper title, daughter. He is our greatest hero of the battlefield, and the greatest in the Art, too. He earned his honour the hard way.’
Liett dipped her head in a perfunctory manner. ‘But I’m the daughter of the matriarch!’ she said sulkily.
‘Then it’s incumbent upon you to observe the proprieties, more than anyone.’
Liett’s eyes flashed. ‘You said we had to recreate ourselves to suit the new world once the war is won. That’s what I’m doing.’
‘Have you learned nothing?’ cried Gyrull. ‘You expect me to choose you as matriarch after me, yet you display few of the necessary qualities. Your lack of respect diminishes you, daughter.’
‘Name one person more suited to the honour than me,’ Liett said with an imperious tilt of the head.
‘Even Ryll is more suited to the honour than you,’ Gyrull replied deliberately, ‘and he is male.’
Anabyng spread his great maw wide, making a choking noise that Ryll could only interpret as a laugh.