Geomancer twoe-1 Read online

  The only way out was for her to become crafter, effectively the master controller-maker. In that case her indenture would be cancelled and she would be part of the committee of the manufactory, a position of honour and influence. But that was just a dream. The crafter had to do much more than be good at her trade. Artisans were notoriously tricky to manage and she was not good with people.

  ‘What’s the matter with your controllers?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I’ve only just found out that they’d failed. They were perfect when I finished them.’

  ‘How long since you’ve been paid?’ he asked sternly.

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Sit down; eat your lunch!’

  ‘It’s your lunch,’ she said stubbornly, wanting the food but not the charity.

  ‘It’s yours and I expect you to eat it all.’

  ‘But …’

  Joeyn patted the bottle. ‘This’ll do me. I’m going home shortly. I’ve already met my quota for the day.’

  ‘Quota of what? Illegal drink?’ she asked cheekily.

  ‘Do what you’re told!’ He tilted the bottle up again.

  Tiaan consumed the sweet potatoes and began peeling the shell off the egg. She felt better already.

  ‘So why the visit, Tiaan? Not that you aren’t welcome any time.’

  ‘Does there have to be a reason?’

  ‘No, but I bet there is. And I’m wondering if it’s not about my old stones.’ Even if he had just mined the most perfect crystals in the world, Joeyn still referred to them as ‘my old stones’.

  ‘It is,’ she said. ‘The last three you gave me seemed perfect, but failed after a few weeks in their clankers.’

  ‘They were a bit different,’ he admitted over another healthy swig. ‘But not unusually so.’

  ‘Can I see where you got them from?’ she asked, her mouth full of egg. Her belly felt wonderfully full.

  ‘Back this way!’ He headed off in the direction she’d come from, lantern swinging.

  She followed, nibbling on the sticky rice ball. Tiaan was saving the celery stick till last, to freshen her mouth. Beyond the squeeze, Joeyn went down on hands and knees beneath a bulge of shattered granite held together with tiny white veins, and through into a cavern higher than their heads. In the lamplight Tiaan saw threads of native silver shining in the wall, and across the other side, a vein of massive crystals.

  ‘I love it down here,’ Joeyn said, patting the wall. ‘The wonders of stone. Ever the same yet always different.’

  ‘You talk as though the rock is your best friend.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Is this a new area?’

  ‘The miners dug it out last year. One day they’ll be back to follow these seams as far as they go.’

  ‘Why didn’t they keep going while they were here?’

  ‘Because they found some interesting old stones and had to call me in to check them. Woe to any miner who smashes up good crystal in search of base silver or gold.’

  ‘The bloody damn war! Is it ever going to end?’

  Joe prised at a vein with the point of his pick. ‘Been going for a hundred and fifty years, and the lyrinx came well before that, when the Forbidding was broken and wicked Faelamor opened the void into our world. I don’t see it stopping anytime soon.’

  Tiaan knew that story by heart. The twenty-seventh Great Tale, written by the chronicler Garthas, was the most important of the recent Histories, and taught to every child in the civilised world. It was based on the final part of the twenty-third Great Tale, The Tale of the Mirror, but that tale was no longer allowed to be told.

  Many creatures had invaded Santhenar at the time of the Forbidding, two hundred and six years ago, though only one had thrived: the winged lyrinx. Intelligent predators with a taste for human flesh and a burning desire for their own world, they had been at war with humanity ever since.

  ‘We’re never going to defeat the lyrinx, are we, Joe?’

  ‘I’d say not. They’re too big, too smart and too damn tough. I hear that Thurkad has finally fallen.’

  She had heard that too, and that there were a million refugees on the road. Thurkad was the fabulous, ancient city that had dominated the island of Meldorin, and indeed half the known world, for thousands of years. Tiksi was about as far as one could get from Thurkad and lyrinx-infested Meldorin, but the Histories had told Tiaan all about it. If such a powerful place had been overcome, what hope did they have?

  Joeyn withdrew a chisel from a loop of his belt, placed it carefully in the vein and gave a gentle tap, then another. Tiaan watched him work, nibbling her celery. She felt more at home here than anywhere, but only because of him. ‘How do you tell which are the right crystals?’

  ‘Don’t know! When I touch one I get a warm, flowering feeling above my eyes, like a waterlily opening in a pond.’

  She wondered where he got that image from. It was too cold here for waterlilies, or even down the mountain at Tiksi. ‘Were you always like that?’

  ‘Nope! Happened about ten years ago. I’d just turned sixty-six. Got sick one night after dinner; nearly died. Turned out it was the pork. Been eating it all my life, but since then, even if I just touch a bit of bacon rind, throat swells up and I can hardly breathe. Next time I was down here, mining the silver, I touched a crystal and a flower opened inside my head. Happened every time I touched that crystal, so I took it home and kept it beside my bed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I liked the feeling it gave me; sort of warm and comforting. Both my boys were killed in the war, and my wife died of grief …’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Why would you? She’s been dead thirty-one years, and the boys more than that. Such a long time ago. Life was so lonely.’

  ‘Why didn’t you take another wife? I would have thought … Well, I’m in trouble because I haven’t mated …’

  ‘Never met a woman I liked enough.’

  Tiaan considered the old man thoughtfully. They had been friends from the day they’d met. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider –’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Tiaan,’ he said gruffly. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, my crystal came along and I wasn’t so lonely after all. Felt I was a bit special. One day I happened to mention it to old Crafter Barkus. He was a widower too; we used to share a jar or two some evenings. He came and looked at it. Next I knew, I wasn’t a silver miner any more – I was paid twice as much to sense out crystal and send the good ones to him. Been doing it ever since.’

  ‘I wish I knew how,’ she said.

  ‘I wish I could teach you.’

  He had been tapping away with hammer and chisel while he was talking. Now he laid them aside, inserted the point of his pick into the cavity and levered carefully. A crystal wobbled. ‘Want to catch that for me?’

  It fell into her hands. ‘You can take it, if you like,’ said the miner.

  ‘Thanks. But what if it turns out like the others? Have you found a new vein?’

  ‘No, though there are some promising ones down on the sixth level.’

  ‘Are you going down there next?’ She looked hopeful.

  ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Rock’s rotten there. Roof used to cave in all the time, before we sealed it off. A shear zone cuts right through the best area.’

  ‘Oh well, I dare say you’ll find your old stones somewhere else.’

  ‘Dare say I will.’ Joeyn stretched and yawned. ‘Time to go. Air’s not as good as it should be, down this end.’

  Tiaan felt drowsy, now that he’d mentioned it, and saw that the lantern flame had burned low. She followed him to the lift, stepped into the basket and allowed him to wind them to the surface.

  Out in the cold and the blustery wind that blew her drowsiness away, she said goodbye.

  ‘Bye.’ Joe turned down the track to the miners’ village and his lonely hut. ‘Now, you call me if that crystal don’t work,’ he said over his
shoulder. ‘I’m sure I can find a better one, with a bit more time.’

  ‘Thanks! I will.’ Pulling her thin coat around her shoulders, she set off up the slushy path.

  Tiaan shaped the crystal and, taking great care, began to wake it into a hedron. This was done with the pendant at her throat, her personal pliance, which enabled her to see the field. Without it she would be psychically blind. The pliance was the badge, almost the soul, of every artisan; making it had proved her worthy of being one. A small hedron of yellow tiger’s-eye quartz, set in swirls of laminated glass and silver metal, it hung from a white-gold chain. Tiaan had used her pliance every day for the past three years and knew its every idiosyncrasy.

  A crystal had to be woken before it could draw power from the field, and not even Tiaan could describe how that was done. It was a psychic tuning of mind and matter, a talent you either had instinctively or not at all. It could be trained but not taught. And it was hazardous; it could bring on the hallucinations, and eventually the madness, of crystal fever. Prentice artisans had years of practice with the master, using the merest chips of a crystal, before they were ready to do it themselves. Yet accidents still happened, and the reckless attempted what was forbidden, often with unpleasant results.

  Every crystal was different and waking this one proved unusually hard work; it seemed to resist her. She could barely sense its structure through swirling fog. Tiaan concentrated until her head hurt, and slowly something began to resolve. It was a tiny pyramid, vibrating in a blur. Others, identical, lay all around, linked into hexagons that extended to infinity. She lost herself in the pattern, drifting on a sea of regularity. Drifting …

  The current was whipping her along now. A long time must have passed. Tiaan had no idea how long she had been lost inside, but she did know that some artisans never came out. However, she had learned how to wake this crystal.

  Tearing herself free of its spell, she took a mental step backwards, focussing not on the regularity of the crystal but on the tendrils chaotically drifting through it. Selecting just one, she forced it to take the straight path. It resisted but she pressed harder, using the strength of her pliance, and it moved. The first was always the most difficult. First one, then dozens, then thousands of tendrils aligned and began to stream the same way. Suddenly they vanished, she was looking at the crystal from outside and its aura floated around it like the southern aurora in the night sky. It was awake and meshing beautifully with the field.

  Though exhausted, she kept working. There was so much to do. By ten o’clock that night Tiaan knew that the new crystal had the same properties as the last three. Would it fail the same way? Her body felt all hot and cold, her arms twitchy. Such were the effects of working with hedrons, and they were not always benign. Artisans had been known to die at their benches, burnt black inside or their brains boiled in their heads. It was called anthracism and everyone lived in terror of it. Tiaan’s head was throbbing. Time to stop.

  Depressed and hungry, she blew out her lantern and trudged off through the labyrinth of the manufactory, with its hundreds of compartmentalised work spaces. Each was crammed with workers, mostly women, making the individual pieces of the clankers that were so vital to the war. Such colossal labour it was that in a year the manufactory, with its thousand workers, its tar-fired furnaces going non-stop, could turn out only twelve clankers. The enemy could destroy a clanker in a few minutes.

  Tiaan’s room was tiny, but at least she had one. Most of the workers slept in dormitories where privacy was unknown. She climbed into bed but could not stop thinking. The war was delicately poised; it could go either way. Or so they were told. The failure of a few clankers could lose an entire army, and that could lose the war. And everything depended on controllers and the hedrons that were the core of them, the only way a human mind could shape and focus the power of the field to control such a massive object as a clanker.

  The lyrinx were more than the equal of humans, in every respect. Only clankers could make the difference. Without them, humanity was doomed …

  Tiaan slept badly and not for long. Her head was full of brilliant, chopped-up images – crystal dreams. She always had them after work. These ones were about dead soldiers all lying in a row, covered in sheets to conceal their horrible mutilation. Long before a weak autumnal sun skidded over the mountains to blink at the fog and furnace fume, she was back at her bench.

  Hunger nipped at her belly. She kept it at bay with sips of tar-flavoured water. The manufactory grew crowded. The artisans worked in their own little building on the cold, southern side, walled away with all the other clean occupations. The workshop had double doors to keep out ash and fumes, but they could not keep out the noise. She closed her door, unable to think with the racket of metal being shaped on a hundred anvils, the shouted conversations, the roars of a score of foremen, and always in the background, the hissing of the bellows and the blast of the furnaces.

  The failed hedron was still dead, not a spark left of its potential when shaped by her hands. It was as if it had been drained dry, all that psychic promise withdrawn. Now it was no more than a blank piece of quartz.

  Tiaan took her mug to refill it at the barrel outside. On opening the door she was confronted by a dark, wiry man with an eagle beak of a nose. He threw out one arm as if to block her way. His hands were enormous, sinewy, though the rest of him was compact.

  ‘Overseer Gi-Had!’ She stepped back involuntarily. Though she had been expecting him, his sudden appearance came as a shock.

  ‘Artisan Tiaan, what progress have you to report?’ Gi-Had’s brows squirmed over those sunken eyes like a pair of hairy grubs. He had a wooden case in his other hand.

  ‘I –’ she turned back to her bench, where the hedron lay with its spread-out controller apparatus like a disassembled birthday toy. ‘I haven’t found the problem yet. They worked perfectly when I delivered them.’

  ‘Well, they don’t work now and soldiers are dying.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said softly, ‘but I can’t tell why. I’ve got to talk to one of the clanker operators.’

  ‘Ky-Ara is the only one still alive. He should be here tomorrow. He’s been putting a new controller into his clanker. He’s not happy!’

  He wouldn’t be, Tiaan thought. The bond between operator and machine was intimate. To have a controller fail on him would be like losing a brother. To then train himself to the idiosyncrasies of a different controller would be gruelling, physically, mentally and emotionally.

  ‘What have you come up with?’ Gi-Had persisted.

  ‘There are … t-two possibilities. Either the crystals have invisible flaws or the field has somehow burnt them out …’ She broke off as a third, more alarming possibility occurred to her.

  ‘Or?’ grated Gi-Had. His heavy-lidded eyes narrowed to slits. ‘Or what, artisan?’

  ‘Or the enemy has found a way to disable the hedrons,’ she whispered.

  ‘Better hope they haven’t, or we’ll all end up in the belly of a lyrinx.’

  ‘I’m working as hard as I can.’

  ‘But are you working as smart as you can?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘I’ve got my orders. Now I’m passing them on to you. If you can’t do the job I’ll have to find someone who can, even if I have to bring them a hundred leagues. You’ve got a week to fix this problem, artisan.’

  Opening the wooden case, he placed two controllers on her bench, next to the one she’d been working on. ‘Twenty soldiers died because these failed. Another three died recovering them. A week, Tiaan.’

  ‘And if I fail?’ she said slowly.

  ‘Have you given any thought to your other responsibility?’

  She stared at him, white-faced. Tiaan could not think what he meant.

  ‘Your responsibility to mate!’ he said testily. ‘Your foreman spoke to you about it yesterday.’

  Was every single person going to remind her of it? ‘N-not yet!’ she stammered. Just the thought of it made her
heart race. ‘But I will soon, I promise.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for three years, artisan. I’m sorry, but the scrutator is giving me hell and I can’t defend you any longer. If you can’t do your job, and you won’t do your duty –’

  ‘What?’ she cried.

  ‘I might have to send you to the breeding factory.’

  TWO

  It reminded Tiaan that she had not seen her mother for nearly a month. She did not look forward to it, but it was another sacred obligation. Besides, after Gi-Had’s threat she could hardly think straight so she might as well visit Marnie, who did not think at all.

  ‘I’m going down to Tiksi,’ she said to Nod at the gate. ‘To see my mother.’

  This time he did not ask for her permission chit. ‘I hope you’re coming back, Tee?’ Nod tucked his beard into his belt anxiously, then took it out again.

  Nod still held to the old view that men and women were equal, but not everyone did these days. In olden times a woman could do whatever she was capable of, the same as a man. However, the war had taken a heavy toll of humanity. The population was falling and, before anything else, fertile women were expected to breed. Tiaan’s mother was a champion. In twenty-one years she had produced fifteen healthy and surprisingly talented children.

  Tiaan did not want to think about that. ‘I’ll be back, don’t worry.’ She buckled her coat, pulled a cloak around her and set off on the long walk down the mountain to Tiksi, thinking about Gi-Had’s words.

  The scrutator of Einunar, the great province that included this land, was a shadowy figure, spymaster, head of the provincial secret marshals, adviser to and, word had it, power behind the governor. He was one of a dozen on the Council of Scrutators, which was said to run the affairs of the eastern world. No one knew how the council had come into being, or if it answered to a higher power. Certainly it knew too much ever to be disbanded. That was all she knew, and more than she cared to. No one wanted to come to the notice of the scrutator. Tiaan shivered and walked harder.