Such a force should have been a match for twenty-five thousand lyrinx on an open battlefield, but Snizort was surrounded by a maze of tar bogs, mine pits, windrows made from cleared woodland, traps and ancient tar runs that the enemy had set alight. And when the lyrinx emerged from their underground labyrinth they were far more numerous than expected – near to thirty-five thousand. The soldiers, lacking the armour of the clankers, had been slaughtered.

Flangers stood guard outside the command tent as Flydd and Tham went in. Irisis stalked the rim of the hill, looking down at the battlefields but seeing nothing. After all their work, and all their agony down in the tar pits, the result was worse than if they had done nothing.

Yet she'd had a personal triumph in Snizort. Under extreme duress, and with Ullii's help, Irisis had recovered the talent that had been hidden, or suppressed, since her fourth birthday. Her ability to draw power from the field was back. Irisis was no longer a fraud, but a true crafter at last.

All her life she'd obsessed about getting her talent back but, now she had it, it gave her no joy. Why was that? Was she incapable of taking pleasure in her own achievements? Or was it that nothing would ever come of it?

A shiver passed up her spine. Her life's dream, after the war was over, was to be a jeweller. Irisis had a rare gift for that craft and had been making jewellery in her spare time since she was a child. Once the war ended, and controller artisans were no longer required, she planned to follow her dream. However, from the moment they'd escaped the tar pits, Irisis had been troubled by intimations of mortality. She felt doomed.

Despite her earlier talk, today or tomorrow must see the end of them. Not even the scrutator, wily dog that he undoubtedly was, could get them out of this fiasco. There was no hope of escape in the air-floater, for it had been damaged in the explosion of the node and would take days to repair, assuming it had survived the battle at all.