Geomancer (Well of Echoes) (2 page)

T
iaan could hear her foreman’s fury from halfway across the manufactory. Doors were kicked open, workers cursed out of the way, stools slapped aside with his sword. ‘Where the blazes is Tiaan?’ he roared. ‘She’s really cruelled it this time.’

The urge to hide was overwhelming; also futile. She busied herself at her bench. What had she done wrong? There had never been a problem with her work before.

The door of her cubicle slammed back and Foreman Gryste stood in the opening, his chest heaving. A huge, sweaty man, he reeked of cloves and garlic. Thickets of hair sprouted between the straining buttons of his shirt.

‘What’s the matter with you, Tiaan?’ he bellowed. ‘This hedron doesn’t work!’ He banged a crystal down on the bench. ‘And that means the controller is useless, the clanker doesn’t go
and more of our soldiers die!
’ He shook a fist the size of a melon in her face.

Letting out a yelp, she sprang out of the way. Tiaan and the foreman did not get on, but she had never seen him in such a rage before. The war must be going worse than ever. She took up the hedron, a piece of crystalline quartz the size of her fist, shaped into twenty-four facets. ‘It was working perfectly when I finished with it. Do you have the controller?’

Gryste set that down gently, for it was a psycho-mechanical construction of some delicacy, a piece of precision craft work even the scrutator’s watchmaker would have been proud of. The controller resembled a metal octopus, its twenty-four arms radiating from a basket of woven copper and layered glass.

Fitting the hedron into its basket, Tiaan unfurled the segmented arms. She clutched a pendant hanging at her throat and felt a little less overwhelmed. Visualising the required movement, she touched her jewelled probe to one metal arm. The arm flexed, retracted, then kicked like a frog.

‘Ah,’ sighed Gryste, leaning over. ‘That’s better.’

Tiaan moved backwards to escape the fumes. The foreman did not understand. This was not a hundredth of what the controller was supposed to do in working a battle armoped, or clanker as everyone called them. And the crystal had hardly any aura. Something was badly wrong. She visualised another movement. Again the spasmodic frog kick. Frowning, Tiaan tried a third. This time there was no reaction at all, nor could she gain any from the other arms. The aura faded to nothing.

‘The hedron has gone dead.’ She plucked anxiously at her pendant. A single facet sparkled in the lamplight. ‘I don’t understand. What have they been doing with the clanker? Trying to climb a cliff?’

‘It died not fifteen leagues from Tiksi!’ snapped Gryste, taking out a rusty sword and slapping it on his thigh. He took pleasure in intimidating. ‘And the last two controllers you made also failed.
In the battle lines
.’

Her skin crawled. No controller from this manufactory had failed in twenty years. ‘W-what happened?’ Tiaan whispered.

‘No one knows, but two precious clankers were lost and twenty soldiers are dead. Because of
your
sloppy work, artisan.’

Groping for her stool, Tiaan sat down. Twenty dead. She was numb from the horror of it. She never made mistakes in her work. What had gone wrong? ‘I’ll … have to talk to one of the clanker operators.’

‘One was torn apart by a lyrinx, another drowned. Don’t know what happened to the third. What the scrutator will do when he hears …’

Tiaan shivered inside. ‘Do you have the other controllers?’ she asked in a small voice.

‘How could I?’ he snarled. His tongue was stained yellow from chewing nigah, a drug the army used to combat cold and fatigue. That explained the spicy smell. Perhaps the garlic was an attempt to disguise it. ‘The first clanker was taken by the enemy, the second swept down the river. This controller is from the third. We would have lost it too, had it ever reached the battlefront. Gi-Had has gone down to Tiksi to find out what went wrong. The whole manufactory is going to suffer for your incompetence.’

Gi-Had, the overseer of this manufactory, had complete power over the lives of the workers. If she let him down he could send her to labour in the pitch mine until the black dust rotted out her lungs. ‘Is he … angry?’

‘I’ve never seen him so furious!’ said Gryste coldly. ‘He said if the problem isn’t fixed this week, you’re finished! Which brings me to another matter …’

Tiaan knew what the foreman was going to say. Stolid-faced, she endured the lecture, the appeal to duty, the veiled threat.

‘It is the duty of
every one of us
to mate, artisan. There can be no exceptions. Our country desperately needs more children. The whole world does.’

‘So they can be killed in the war,’ she said with a flash of bitterness.

‘We did not start it, artisan. But without men to fight, without people to work and support them, without women having more children, we will certainly lose. You are clever, Tiaan, despite this failure. You must pass your talents on.’

‘I know my duty, foreman,’ Tiaan said, though she did not like to be reminded of it. There was a serious shortage of men at the manufactory. None of those available appealed to her and she was not inclined to share. ‘I
will
take a partner, soon …’

How? Tiaan thought despairingly after he had gone. And who?

Why had her controllers failed? Tian went through the problem from the beginning. Controllers drew power from the
field
, a nebulous aura of force about naturally occurring
nodes
. The field dominated her life. Artisans made controllers and, more importantly, tuned them so they did not resist the field but drew power smoothly from it to power clankers. If a controller went out of tune, or had to be tuned to a different kind of field artisans did that too. Their work was vital to the war.

Clankers were groaning mechanical monsters, covered in armour and propelled by eight iron legs. Hideously uncomfortable to ride in and a nightmare to the artificers who had to keep them going, they were humanity’s main defence against the enemy. A clanker could carry ten soldiers and their gear, and defend them with catapult and javelard. But without power it was just dead metal, so a controller had to work perfectly, all the time.

Had she made a terrible blunder? Removing the hedron, Tiaan inspected it carefully. Dark needles of rutile formed a tangled mass inside the crystal. It seemed perfect. There were no visible flaws, nor had it been damaged, yet it had failed. She had no idea why.

There was no one to ask. The old master controller-maker, Crafter Barkus, had died last year. What notes he’d made on a lifetime’s work were almost unintelligible, and the rest of his knowledge had died with him. Tiaan had learned everything he’d cared to teach her, and had made small but useful improvements to controllers, some of which had been adopted at other manufactories. However, at twenty she was too young to rise from artisan to crafter. The manufactory was sorely in need of someone with greater experience.

Through the door her fellow workers were talking among themselves, no doubt about her. Tiaan felt oppressed by their knowing looks, their unsubtle judgments and pointed jokes about not having done her duty. A twenty-year-old who had never been with a man – there had to be something wrong with her. It was not said meanly, more in puzzlement, but it hurt just the same.

There’s nothing wrong with me! she thought angrily. I just haven’t met the right one. And not likely to, among the misfits and halfwits here.

Two of the prentices sniggered, looked up at her cubicle then guiltily bent over their grinding wheels. Flushing, Tiaan hurried out of the workshop. She wove her way through the warren of clerks’ benches, past the clusters of tiny offices, the library and the washing troughs, then between infirmary and refectory and out through the wall into the main part of the manufactory.

Out here the racket of metal being worked was deafening and everything stank of smoke and tar. She turned left toward the front gate, crossing a bleak yard paved in dolomite in which a warren of buildings had been thrown up as the need required. There were drifts of ash and dust everywhere; the sweepers could not keep up with it. Every surface was covered in a film of oily soot.

‘I’m going down to the mine,’ she said to Nod, gate attendant for the past thirty years.

The old fellow had a white beard so long that he could tuck the end into his belt, but not a hair on his head. He raised the iron grille. One tall gate stood open. Nod held out his hand. No one was supposed to go out without a chit from their foreman.

‘Sorry, Nod,’ she said. ‘I forgot again.’ Gryste always made a fuss so she was reluctant to ask, even though going to the mine was part of her job.

Nod looked over his shoulder then waved her on. ‘I didn’t see you. Good luck, Tee!’ He patted her on the shoulder.

Tiaan found that rather ominous. He’d not wished her luck before. Shrugging on her overcoat, she went out into the wind. The path down to the mine was slushy, the snow on either side brown with soot from furnaces that burned night and day. At the first bend, just before the forest, she looked back.

The clanker manufactory carved an ugly scar across the hillside. From here it comprised a grimy series of scalloped walls ten spans tall, with slits high up and battlements above them. Guard towers hung over the corners, though they were seldom manned, the manufactory being hundreds of leagues from the enemy lines. From the rear a cluster of chimneys belched smoke of various hues – white, orange and greasy black.

Tiaan did not think of the place as ugly. It was just home, and work, the two concepts like joined twins. It had been home since her mother, the pre-eminent breeder in the breeding factory at Tiksi, had sold Tiaan’s indenture to the manufactory at the age of six. She had been here ever since. She occasionally went to Tiksi, three or four hours’ walk down a steep and stony path, but the rest of the world might not have existed.

There was no time for it. Life was regimented for war and everyone had their place in it. The work was tedious, the hours long, but crime was unheard of. No one was afraid to walk the streets at night.

To her left, another path tracked the snow under the aqueduct, then across the gash of the faultline before winding up the mountain to the tar mine. On rare hot days up there, tar oozed out of the shattered rocks and could be scraped into buckets. Mostly, though, the miners hacked solid tar from the drives or followed erratic seams of brittle pitch though the mountain. It was the worst job in the world, and few survived to old age, but someone had to do it. The furnaces of the manufactory must be fed. Its clankers were vital to the war. And the war was being lost.

Controllers were just as critical. Tiaan could imagine how the soldiers must have felt, attacked by ravening lyrinx and realising they had no protection because their clankers had stalled. She could not bear to think that it might have been her fault.

She hurried along the path to the lower mine, where the hedron crystals were found. It was twenty minutes’ walk down a steep decline and Tiaan had plenty of time to fret, though she was no closer to a solution when she reached the main adit.

‘Mornin’, Tiaan!’ Lex, the day guard, nodded at her from his cavern like a statue in a temple. His ill-fitting false teeth sat on the counter, as usual. Sometimes the miners hid them, sparking a frantic search and emotional outbursts.

‘Morning, Lex. Where’s Joe today, do you know?’

‘Down on fif’ level,’ Lex mumbled. Without his teeth it was hard to make out what he was saying. ‘Take six’ tunnel on right an’ follow to end.’

‘Thanks!’ Selecting a lantern from the shelf, she lit it at Lex’s illegal blaze, a brazier full of fuming pitch shards, and set off. The sides of the tunnel were strewn with broken wheels off ore carts, cracked lifting buckets, tattered strands of rope and all the other equipment that accumulated in a mine as old as this one.

When Tiaan reached the lifting wheel she found it unattended. She rang the bell but it was not answered so she got into a basket, eased off the brake and wound herself down. Level one, level two, level three. The shafts ran deep and dark and old here. It had been a mine for hundreds of years before the value of the crystals was recognised. As she passed the fourth level a blast of air set the basket rocking, almost blowing out her lantern. At least the ventilation system was working. There had been bad air down here the last time she’d come. One of the miners had nearly died.

Cranking herself down to the fifth level, Tiaan stepped into the tunnel and made sure the brake was off, otherwise no one could use the lift and the attendant would have to come down on a rope to free it.

It was pleasantly warm on this level, a nice contrast to outside and to the manufactory itself. It was always cold there unless you worked near the furnaces, and then it was unpleasantly hot. However, the artisans’ workshop was right up the other end of the manufactory, on the frigid south side. Tiaan had been cold for most of her life.

She trudged on. Every chunk of waste rock had to be carried up and out, so the tunnels were no bigger than necessary to gain access to the ore and the veins of crystal. Often she had to go on hands and knees, or slip through a gap sideways with the uneven edges scraping her ribs. The rock here was pink granite, impregnated with veins that writhed like blood vessels in a drunkard’s eyeball. The miners came for gold, platinum, copper, tin and silver, though her old friend Joeyn delved for something much more precious – the crystals from which the magical hedrons were made. Some were as big as her fist, and it was these Joeyn especially sought. Only certain crystals could be used for making hedrons. Few other miners could tell which ones to take and which, apparently identical, to leave behind.