'Bah!' Nish prodded her again.

Tiaan was getting her breath back, though her knees were still wobbly. 'How did you find me?' she said, hoping Nish could not resist displaying his cleverness.

'Ullii can see the Secret Art in all its forms. Irisis and I taught her to hunt you down.'

Beautiful Irisis, Tiaan's rival at the manufactory. She might have known. Tiaan considered what Nish had said. He was clever and liked people to know it. Perhaps she could learn more.

'How did you get here so quickly?'

'We floated all the way on an enormous balloon, and it was I who first thought of it.'

'A balloon?' Even speaking hurt.

He described the device and how it worked. Tiaan listened with one ear only. Having spent her life making controllers for the eight-legged mechanical war carts called clankers, she saw the potential of flight at once. She also saw the danger, in a world where the technology of magic seemed to be escalating out of control.

Clankers were powered by the field, a nebulous aura of force surrounding naturally occurring nodes. That power was drawn through particular crystals called hedrons, which artisans like Tiaan shaped, woke and tuned to the field. But clankers required so much power, and there were now so many of them, that they had been known to drain a node of its field. One node, not far from Tiaan's manufactory, had simply failed. Hundreds of soldiers had died.

But that was not the worst. Not long ago, a convoy of racing clankers had drawn so much power that it had turned the field inside out. A thousand soldiers had been struck unconscious and when they revived, a squadron of clankers and all their crew had vanished, never to be seen again. Now the war would take to the air. How much power would that require, and what would the consequences be? Could the field survive? But if it did not, could humanity?