‘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. Ryll wasn’t laughing. To even compare him to a candidate for matriarch was mortifying. ‘Matriarch, you mock me,’ he said, hanging his head. His skin colours flashed red and purple and he felt an unusual burning sensation in his cheeks.

‘And insult me,’ cried Liett, giving him a savage look, as if he had deliberately undermined her.

‘By millennia-long custom we are led by a matriarch,’ said Anabyng, ‘and none of us would seek to change that.’

‘Nor I,’ said Gyrull. ‘I merely point out that, in the half-year since we returned from the fall of Snizort, the wingless one has set an example in the mastery of his Art, in strategic thinking about the war and the future, and in unassuming leadership. When he speaks, the common folk set down their tools and listen. You’d be well advised to follow Ryll’s example, daughter.’

Liett, incredulous, flashed out her beautiful wings and bared her teeth at Ryll, for all that she had long sought permission to mate with him, and he with her. Theirs was a volatile relationship.

‘Assuming you do wish to be a candidate for matriarch,’ said Gyrull. ‘On that display, I doubt it. Leave us, Liett.’

‘What?’ said Liett, belatedly folding her wings.

‘Leave us!’ Gyrull snapped. ‘I wish to speak about matters of importance with those mature enough to offer worthwhile opinions.’

Liett began to flounce away. She caught Ryll’s eye and he gave a little shake of the head. She snapped her teeth at him, a last display, then slunk out, head bowed.

‘I truly don’t know what I’m going to do with her,’ sighed Gyrull.

‘Send her to the battlefront,’ said Anabyng. ‘If she survives, it may make a leader of her yet. She does have a great talent, though it’s wilfully misdirected.’

‘I need her here,’ said Ryll hastily. Though he knew it made good sense, he couldn’t bear the thought of losing Liett. ‘To send her to battle, unarmoured as she is, would be to condemn her to death.’

‘Perhaps your feelings for her overpower your good sense,’ observed the black lyrinx.

‘No, Ryll is right,’ said Gyrull. ‘We do need Liett to complete the flisnadr; she has special abilities. Enough of that. What news from your scouting, Anabyng? Why do we need the device by the end of winter? I thought we had months more.’

‘The humans are too clever and cunning,’ said Anabyng. He crunched the rest of the thigh bone and slurped up the marrow. ‘I’m worried that they’ll come up with some fiendish new strategy over the winter.’

‘We have them on the run,’ said Gyrull. ‘We’ve defeated them time and again, and by spring we’ll have another ten thousand to set against them. I’m not afraid –’

‘There have been developments. The whole Council of Scrutators attacked Lord Yggur at Fiz Gorgo a few weeks ago but the chief scrutator was killed, along with many others. Only seven of their sixteen air-dreadnoughts escaped.’

‘I heard,’ said Gyrull. ‘But that’s something to celebrate, surely?’

‘Fusshte has taken over,’ said Anabyng, ‘and he’ll pursue us more relentlessly than Ghorr ever did.’

‘But he’s no leader,’ Gyrull said, dismissing the threat. ‘And leadership is what they need most desperately.’

‘I think …’ began Ryll tentatively. ‘Er, Great Anabyng …’ He squared his shoulders and tried to meet the male’s eyes boldly, though Ryll was only too conscious of his physical deficiency, his lack of wings. ‘This power in Fiz Gorgo, that can defeat the entire Council and all their soldiers and mancers, must be a threat to us. We’ve got to find out who they are and what their plans are. If a great leader should emerge from the present chaos we could have a hard time of it, since we’ve failed with the flisnadr. Gilhaelith –’

‘Indeed.’ Anabyng’s eyes met Gyrull’s. ‘I believe that’s the kind of strategic thinking you were talking about, Matriarch. We must extract everything Gilhaelith knows about Fiz Gorgo, without damaging him too much, then put him to work.’