Geomancer twoe-1 Page 7

‘That’s odd, for a controller-maker.’

  ‘I never had those kinds of toys when I was a kid. Mother sneered at people who worked with their hands. Her daughter was certainly not going to.

  ‘The examiners seemed disappointed, as if that lack had cancelled out my other talent. I remember them talking in the corner, looking back at me and shaking their heads.’

  ‘So how did you end up at the manufactory?’ Taking another sip from his mug, Joeyn settled back in the chair.

  ‘The last test involved a collection of crystals; kinds of hedrons, I suppose. At least, some were. The others must have been dummies. They put the first in my hand. It was dark-green. A mask went over my face and they asked me to describe what I saw.’ She paused for a pull at her mug.

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything. I felt as if I’d failed another important test. Someone took the crystal away and gave me another. I concentrated hard, but had no idea what I was supposed to see.’

  Joeyn was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. Tiaan continued.

  ‘They gave me the third crystal. It was really cold. I started to say, “I can’t see anything with this one either …” when a pink wave moved through my inner eye. It disappeared and I must have cried out. I tried really hard to get it back. Someone called, “What did you see, child?”

  ‘The crystal warmed in my hand and suddenly it was like looking down on a pond with oil on it. I watched the patterns and time stood still. There were layers of colours, all going up and down, back and forth and passing in and out of each other. In places they twisted into swirls like water going down a plughole, then came out the other side of nowhere and joined up again. It was so beautiful! Then it vanished. The examiners had taken the crystal. I’d been using it for an hour!

  ‘I looked for it, frantically. I had to have it back. I kicked and screamed, something I’d never done in my life. It was withdrawal, the first time I’d ever felt it. Nothing mattered but that I got the crystal back.

  ‘I told them what I’d seen and I could see the excitement in their eyes. I wanted to try the other crystals but they put them away and sent me back to my mother. A few weeks later, after an indenture was drawn up, I was sent to the manufactory. Marnie was furious. She’d planned a different prenticeship for me, one worth a lot more to her, but the examiners had made their decision.’

  ‘For you to become a prentice controller-maker?’ asked Joeyn.

  ‘Well, yes, though for two years all I did was sweep, clean and empty out the waste. I wasn’t clever little Tiaan any more, I was the brat from the breeding factory. In a way I’m still that kid. I’ve never been able to make friends here.’

  ‘The cat that walked by herself,’ Joeyn murmured. ‘You’re too different, Tiaan.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You give the impression that you don’t need anyone else. It must be rather off-putting to the people you work with.’

  ‘I suppose I want … different things. Anyway, old Crafter Barkus started me on my prenticeship when I was eight. I felt really useless then. Everyone else was good with their hands and I had a hand full of thumbs. It took ages before I could do the simplest things.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ he asked with a bit of a grin, as if he already knew. Perhaps he did: it had created quite a stir at the time.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about the crystal and what I’d seen with it. I wanted it desperately. There were plenty of hedrons in the artisans’ workshops but I wasn’t allowed near them. Prentices don’t get to touch hedrons until they’re twelve. I emptied the waste but those offcuts were from crystals before they’d been woken into hedrons. I tried them all but saw nothing.

  ‘Then one day, a few months after I began my prenticeship, a hedron offcut was thrown out by mistake. I’d given up looking by then so I just scooped the contents of the basket onto the slag heap. As I did, I felt a flash of light and colour.

  ‘It took hours to find the one chip of hedron in that mass of crystal and slag, but as soon as my fingers touched it I saw. I saw things no one else could see, beautiful colours and patterns, forever in motion. I couldn’t make sense of them so I began sneaking into Crafter Barkus’s lectures. I’m sure he knew. He never said anything, but every so often would break off from some abstruse theory to deliver a piece of instruction so basic that the prentices scratched their heads and wondered if he was going senile. I learned enough that way.’

  ‘What did you learn?’ Joeyn asked idly.

  ‘What hedrons were for. I became obsessed. My crystal was like the friend I’d never had. I spent the whole day holding it. The nights too. I learned how to read the shifting field around the node here, better than anyone in the manufactory. When I was nine I made a series of paintings showing how it changed every day for a month. The field wasn’t random, as everyone thought. There was a pattern to it, though no one had seen the field clearly enough to realise the pattern was there.

  ‘I went running into the crafter’s rooms with my paintings …’ She broke off, giving a little shiver. ‘I burst in on a meeting with the old overseer and a perquisitor!’

  Joeyn chuckled.

  ‘There was a deathly silence, then the perquisitor turned my paintings to the wall. The room was sealed, a guard put on the door and I was questioned by the sternest old man I’d ever met. Where had I got the pictures from? I was terrified that he would flog me. He did, too, but it wasn’t the worst he could have done. He took my hedron away. I had not been separated from it for months and had the most terrifying withdrawal. I thought I was going to die. I was in a fever for four days.

  ‘The perquisitor could not believe that I’d mapped the field myself, not until every artisan and operator in the manufactory had been interrogated. I’d made a better map than the army had. It was priceless information, especially to the enemy.

  ‘Then, when I told him that I could actually change the pattern of the field, the perquisitor went silent. That’s how adepts draw power, you see, and it’s a vital secret. He was afraid I’d let something slip in my childish chatter. He also worried that I would draw power without realising it and end up killing people, or myself. There was only one thing he could do.

  ‘My true prenticeship began that day, three years early, although it did not end any sooner. Barkus started me with hedrons straight away but my talent did not make it easier. Well, using the hedron was easy but nothing else was. Learning to make the tiny parts of controllers was a nightmare. I was the worst of all the prentices at any kind of craft work. I tried really hard but it didn’t seem to make any difference.’

  ‘But you mastered the craft in the end.’

  ‘Yes. My controllers aren’t beautiful, like Irisis’s, but they work better.’ She bent down to sniff the autumn crocuses. ‘The other part was nearly as much trouble.’

  He waited for her to go on.

  ‘Seeing things with a hedron is easy. Tuning the wretched controller to its hedron, and then to the field, was the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.’

  He took another sip and made a face. ‘Brew tastes a bit mouldy.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I –’

  ‘It’s the ghi, Tiaan, not the making. Go on.’

  ‘As students we did not have our own hedrons. We had to use ones made for the prentices years ago. They never fitted, and I used to see strange after-echoes from all the different wills that had used and abused them, the way students do. Anyway, they were flawed to begin with.’

  ‘You wouldn’t give a good one to a bunch of prentices,’ said Joeyn. ‘They’d ruin it.’

  ‘No doubt.’ Walking to the wicket gate, she stared into the woods.

  ‘You were talking about tuning the controller,’ he prompted after a while.

  She came back. ‘Oh yes. Nearly all hedrons have flaws and a hundred parts of the controller have to be adjusted to take account of them. Sometimes you don’t know how. Move one part too far and it throws everything else ou
t. It might take a day just to get back to where you started from, even if you knew what you’d done wrong. But when you’re a prentice you never do know, and the beatings just make it worse.’

  ‘I never thought old Barkus was a beater,’ Joeyn frowned.

  ‘He was a gentle old man. It was the older prentices. They resented me. Anyway, that’s a long time ago. It took ages to learn, but once I did it was easy. I didn’t even have to think about tuning a controller, especially after I made my own pliance. Suddenly I could see the field perfectly. It was …’

  ‘Like having your own eyeglasses,’ said Joeyn, ‘instead of using someone else’s.’

  ‘Exactly. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost my pliance.’ Tiaan clutched at her throat where it normally hung, before realising that she’d left it back on her bench. She felt anxious about that; not that anyone would dare touch it.

  ‘I suppose we should be going.’ Joeyn drained his mug.

  She stayed where she was. ‘I’m worried, Joe. Irisis tries to take the credit for my good work and blames me for everything that goes wrong. She hates me because I’m better than she is. She’s afraid I’ll be made crafter. Just because her uncle had the position …’

  ‘And her father and grandfather before that. Birth is right, to a lot of people.’

  ‘And I’m not one of them. Especially since I have no father.’

  ‘Well, what you lack in heritage you must make up for in sweat and cleverness. Let’s go up to the mine and see what we can find.’

  Inside, in the lift basket, Joeyn kept winding down after they reached the fifth opening.

  ‘I thought this part was closed off,’ Tiaan said as the basket shuddered to a stop at the sixth level.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

  ‘Parts are very dangerous. Fortunately I know which parts.’

  She looked down. The shaft continued. ‘What’s below this?’

  ‘Levels seven, eight and nine. Don’t ever go down there.’

  ‘Is the rock all rotten?’

  ‘Yes, and some parts are flooded. Pity, because there’s more ore down there, and richer, than ever was taken from the higher levels.’

  ‘What about crystal?’

  ‘Don’t know. That’s before my time. No one was interested in crystal in them days. Leastways, not here. It would have all been tossed on the mullock heaps, unless a pretty bit caught someone’s fancy.’

  ‘Maybe I should try there,’ Tiaan said.

  ‘Too late. I had a look after Barkus first asked me for crystal. I couldn’t sense anything at all. They must need to be freshly mined.’

  ‘I wonder if that could be the problem?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the operators had the controllers out in the sun, and the last crystals were really sensitive to it.’

  ‘Perhaps. Could also be heat, or frost, or wet. Coming?’

  The tunnel snaked this way and that, following the seams. There were many dead ends where seams pinched out or were truncated by faults or shear zones full of crumbled rock and greasy clay. After some hard walking they reached a low mound of rubble. Joeyn surveyed it carefully, holding his lantern up to check the roof.

  ‘See the cracks up there? An old fracture zone runs right through. Rocks are all shattered to bits; just a few seams of quartz holding it together.’

  Her eye followed his battered finger. A web of cracks ran across the roof. Another, larger crack snaked down the side of the tunnel as far as she could see. ‘What if …?’

  ‘If we’re under it when it comes down, we’re dead! If beyond, we can probably move enough rubble to get out. Depending how much falls. Still want to go?’

  ‘Can we find the crystal I need anywhere else?’

  ‘Not quickly.’ He raised an eyebrow, which already had rock dust clinging to it.

  ‘I’ll do whatever you say.’

  ‘There’s a lot of dead miners who thought the roof would stay up. Still, I think this one is good for a while. We’ll go carefully. No loud noises. Follow ten paces behind, so if I set something off …’

  Tiaan shivered, feeling the roof twitch above her. He patted her shoulder. ‘I started in the mines when I was eight. You develop a nose for danger, if you survive.’

  She stayed well back, anxious as she walked under the fractures. Grit trickled down her neck. The place turned out to be a long way in. They went under several more unstable areas before Joeyn stopped where the tunnel terminated in triple dead ends like the stumps of amputated fingers.

  ‘Up there!’ He pointed with a chisel.

  Tiaan lifted up her lantern. A massive vein, hollow in the centre, slashed across the middle end of the tunnel. It was bristling with crystals fist-sized or bigger, more perfect than any she had seen. She could feel something too – the field. She wished she had her pliance so she could sense it properly. If she closed her eyes she could almost see it as coloured curls and billows, like tendrils of chromatic fog moving in and out of the three dimensions. All her senses seemed more acute, as if the field was amplifying them. She wanted those crystals. Tiaan darted forward.

  Joeyn caught her by the collar as she went past. ‘Stop!’

  The shock jerked her off her feet. Tiaan rubbed her throat, which was bruised from the collar. He steadied her.

  ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt you. It isn’t safe there.’

  The roof above the vein contained a series of concentric fractures as well as cracks radiating from the centre. The pattern was rather like a spider’s web.

  Her skin crept. ‘I don’t know why I ran, Joe. I just felt drawn to it.’

  ‘I can feel it too. I often have, down here, though I was never tempted. I don’t see how we can get to the vein, Tiaan. The roof is much worse than I remember. It’s going to fall. Soon!’

  ‘Is there no way we could hold it up?’

  He eyed the rock. ‘Wouldn’t be easy. Could take days to get enough plates and props in here, and it’d probably come down on us while we were putting them up.’

  ‘What about making it fall?’

  He stroked his jaw. ‘You don’t know what else will come with it. The entire roof could collapse.’

  ‘Oh!’ She felt her last hope disappearing.

  He paced back and forth, examining the roof from various vantage points. ‘Don’t give up yet.’

  Sitting on the floor, Joeyn withdrew a roll of cord from his pack and tied a slipknot in one end. Laying the knot over the end of his pick handle, he ran the cord down the handle and crept around the wall until he was as close as he could get to the vein without going under the cracked roof.

  He reached up with the pick, as high as he could, but not high enough. He edged forward a bit, just under the shattered zone. Still he could not reach. Going right under, and lifting the pick high, Joeyn eased the handle up to a single crystal, trying to slip the knot over the end. The cord fell down.

  Creeping back to the safe area, Joeyn replaced the knot and tried again with the same result. He tried a third time. The cord slipped over the crystal. Putting down the pick he pulled the cord tight and gave it a jerk. The crystal did not move. A harder jerk and the cord broke.

  Joeyn cursed, which brought on a fit of coughing. He bent double, gasping and choking.

  ‘Don’t stand there, please. Get out of the way!’ She imagined the roof thundering down on him. No crystal was worth that risk.

  The fit ended. He wiped his mouth, gave her a weak kind of a grin and looked up. ‘It’s not my day yet, Tiaan.’

  ‘How many dead miners have said that?’ she murmured.

  ‘Thousands.’ A better grin.

  Tossing the cord aside, he slipped along the wall, reached up with the handle of the pick and with a single blow snapped off the small crystal. Unfortunately it fell back among the others. Dust filtered down from the roof. Tiaan caught her breath. Joeyn flipped the pick end for end, caught the handle, stood on tiptoe and flicked the crystal out. He caught it in his other hand, c
reaked backwards and landed in the safe area. Chips of stone fell from the roof.

  As he came across, there was a spring in his step she had never seen before. ‘My lady!’ Holding out the crystal, he bowed.

  ‘Thank you.’ She embraced him, the hand holding the crystal touched her ear and she went rigid against him.

  ‘Something the matter?’ he asked, stepping back.

  She rubbed her ear. ‘It felt as if something stung me.’ Tiaan took the crystal. It was smaller than the ones she normally worked with, not much thicker than her thumb. It might not do for a hedron but it looked perfect for her sensor helm. Unlike the other crystals it was perfectly clear, save for a hexagon of tiny bubbles midway along its length.

  It did not sting her hand but Tiaan could feel the potential in it – stronger than any crystal she’d ever had.

  SIX

  ‘Nish!’ Irisis wailed, right in his ear. ‘Get up, quick!’ Rolling over, he blinked at the bright lantern and tried to pull the pillow over his head. ‘Later,’ he moaned. ‘I’m too tired.’

  She poured icy water onto the back of his neck.

  Nish shrieked and leapt out of bed. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Look what Tiaan’s done now!’ she said savagely.

  He rubbed sleep from his eyes. She was holding out a controller, the most beautiful piece of work he’d ever seen. At least it had been. Several arms were broken off and the others twisted as if someone had jumped on them.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Tiaan smashed it, the vicious little cow.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ Nish could not believe anyone would wantonly destroy such a precious thing, least of all Tiaan.

  Irisis sat on the bed, holding the controller against her breast. Its broken arms dangled uselessly. ‘I only finished it yesterday!’ Her lip trembled and she turned away, as if ashamed at that loss of control. ‘It’s taken me a month to make and it’s the best one I’ve ever done. I came in early to fit the hedron but the controller was gone. It was behind the door of Tiaan’s cubicle, like this.’

  ‘There’s a guard down at the offices, night and day.’ Nish rubbed the back of his neck, still throbbing from the ice water. ‘Better speak to him.’