Tetrarch (Well of Echoes) (22 page)

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Find out why the nodes are failing. Are we draining them dry, or has the enemy found a way to block or destroy them?’

‘Not much is known about nodes, surr.’

‘Then you will have the thrill of discovery,’ he said dryly. ‘Get your work done and organise the best artisan here to take your place. You have a week to be ready.’

‘What if Ullii has not recovered by then?’

‘She’d better have. Choose two artisans, best suited to the task. You’ll go in the air-floater, with guards.’

‘Go where?’

‘To Minnien, then to the next node, if necessary. And the one after that. Be prepared for anything.’

He got up, then sat down again. ‘Another matter. A minor one but I thought you’d be pleased to hear about it, since you’re under suspended sentence of the place.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘In the attack on Tiksi, the breeding factory was burned to the ground.’

She smiled. ‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘I dare say it will be rebuilt soon enough.’

She tapped her fingernails on the stone. ‘Tiaan’s mother was there. What will she do, I wonder?’

‘She’s a wealthy woman. She’ll survive better than most.’

‘I dare say.’

Marnie was not surviving well at all. Only weeks before, as the war approached, she had sold everything and converted it to gold, which she kept in a chest in her room. She had been downstairs when blazing balls crashed though the roof, and the fire had burned so fiercely that there was no chance to recover anything.

She went back in the morning, before the ashes cooled, tramping through the rubble in a pair of workman’s boots found in the gardener’s shed. She tracked back and forth for three days, until there was not a handful of ash she had not sifted. Marnie found the half-burned leg of her chair and the brass bands of a chest with her name engraved on it, but that was all. The scavengers had already been. The gold was gone.

All she could do was join the thronging destitute who had lost everything but the clothes they were wearing, and hope someone would take pity on them and give them a few scraps to exist on. Marnie knew her life was over. The breeding factory would be rebuilt but they would never take her back. She was past it.

I
risis sat with Ullii in her darkened room every day, making time where there was none to be had. The seeker spoke not a word. She had taken to throwing her clothes away again and most times squatted naked in a corner, rocking on her bare feet, staring at the wall but seeing nothing. Then, on the third day, she uttered a single word, ‘Nish!’

‘What is it, Ullii? Can you see him in your lattice?’

‘Nish!’ she screamed. ‘It’s got Nish! It’s eating his leg! Claws,
claws
.’ She began to sob. ‘Myllii, Myllii, Myllii.’

‘Who is Myllii?’

Ullii did not reply and Irisis could get no more out of her, for the seeker went back into that silent state.

Returning to the workshop, Irisis sat at her stool and considered her artisans. Of the twenty, there were only three that she would consider taking with her: Goys, a woman of sixty, brilliant but erratic and past her best; young Zoyl Aarp, equally clever but inexperienced and naïve, his head turned by every woman who paid him the least attention; and Oon-Mie, no genius but level-headed and a master of every aspect of her craft. Fistila Tyr, now back at her bench after the birth of her third daughter, was also steady but she must stay here. No one else could be relied upon to get the work done and manage the prickly personalities that most artisans were.

So Oon-Mie had to come; Irisis also needed someone she could rely on. Should the other be Zoyl or Goys? Experience or youth? Several teams of artisans and mancers had already worked on the problem and failed. In this hierarchical world those teams would have been packed with experience. A brilliant insight was required here, and that was the province of the young. Zoyl then, and Oon-Mie would balance him.

Everything was ready, and Irisis was awaiting the arrival of the air-floater, when a lightning raid on a shipment heading down to Tiksi resulted in the loss of six newly built controllers.

The scrutator was beside himself. ‘Those controllers were needed desperately. The node mission will have to wait. How quickly can you make a new lot, crafter?’

‘We have the mechanisms already, surr,’ said Irisis. ‘But without crystal we can’t make them work, and we have no suitable crystal left.’

‘What the hell are the miners doing?’

‘The mine is practically worked out. The last vein Ullii found, before she went away, contained only three suitable crystals. We’ve used them all.’

‘There must be more somewhere.’

‘No doubt, but our miners can’t sense it through solid rock.’

‘And Ullii is no better?’

‘No.’

‘This is bad, crafter. I don’t know what we’re going to do.’

‘There is one possibility, surr.’

‘Oh?’

‘If we could discover where Tiaan came by her special crystal there might be others there like it.’

‘I doubt that.’

‘Or at least another vein we can use.’

‘Does anyone know where she found it?’

‘Only she, and old Joeyn, but he died in a roof fall before she fled.’

‘So presumably he had only just discovered the crystal.’

‘Possibly.’

‘Where was his body found?’

‘On the sixth level.’ Irisis gripped the sides of her stool.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Flydd.

‘I was thinking about being trapped down there.’

‘You’re not afraid of the underground, surely?’

‘No,’ she said softly.

‘Well, get miners in and find the place.’

‘The roof collapsed. Joeyn’s body is still there. Two miners died trying to bring it out.’

‘Did anyone survive the collapse?’

‘I believe so.’

‘Find them; locate the spot as precisely as you can and drive another tunnel into it.’

‘That level is forbidden, surr,’ said Irisis.

‘Do you think I don’t know that? I take full responsibility. Get it done!’

Mining was slow work and all the pep talks and offers of double pay could not measurably speed it up, especially on the unstable sixth level. Moreover, skilled miners were in short supply and even in this desperate situation the scrutator did not want to risk them in unnecessary haste. He had set two teams of miners to the problem, tunnelling in from either side, offering a quile of silver to the team that got there first, but nearly a fortnight had gone by before the slow creep of the tunnel face brought the first team around the collapsed area towards the vein of crystal on the other side.

‘We’ve just about done it, surr,’ said Peate, the senior miner on the team. ‘Next shift, according to my survey, we should break though. And win the prize.’

‘Glad I am to hear it,’ said the scrutator. ‘The Council has not been pleased so far. I hope this will restore their faith in me.
And
in this manufactory …’

Irisis shivered, as did everyone. Bad enough that they had a scrutator breathing down their necks every day. Far worse to know that, even if he was happy with their efforts, his superiors were not.

She went back with Peate, for it had been a week since Irisis had had the time to go down the mine. She had no fear of confined spaces. It was the thought of being trapped down there and slowly starving to death that terrified her.

‘Here we are,’ said Peate, squeezing under a hard layer glistening with golden mica. Two miners, naked to the waist, were using hammer and chisel to break the rock while another shovelled it into a hand cart.

‘The rock’s different here, is it not?’ Higher up in the mine it was pink granite, all sheared and vein-impregnated, but here the granite was blue-grey and the veins were the width of tree trunks.

‘It’s different
everywhere
.’ Peate levered a shattered piece of rock out of the face with his pick. Seeping water had stained the granite in brain patterns.

‘How far, do you think?’

‘Two spans; at most, three.’

‘And you can dig that far in a day?’

‘We can do two spans in this kind of rock, since we’re digging on such a narrow face. Probably not three. Definitely not if we have to prop up the roof, though I don’t think we will.’ He turned away.

Irisis watched them for some time; but as she was about to leave, a muffled crack sounded off to the side, where no one was working. ‘What was that?’ she yelled. ‘Is it the roof?’

‘It’s the team working on the other side,’ said Peate. ‘Won’t do ’em any good, poor sods.’ He laughed, a strangled gasp. ‘They’ll never catch us. The silver is as good as ours.’

‘Would we hear them through all this rock?’

‘Sound travels strangely through stone. Sometimes miners can be working five spans away and you won’t know they’re there, while in another place you’ll hear them from half a league. Who can fathom it? I’m going home. Come back tomorrow afternoon if you want to see the breakthrough.’

Irisis returned at midday to find the team hammering and shovelling like fury, stripped down to loincloths and covered in sweat. ‘I’ve never seen anyone work so hard,’ she marvelled.

The scrutator, perched on a rock like an emaciated vulture, snorted. ‘The other team kept going all night. When Peate’s mob got in this morning, their opposition had only a span and a half to go. Peate hasn’t taken a break in five hours.’

‘He’ll kill himself,’ said Irisis. The miners were staggering about like zombies.

‘No one ever worked themselves to death!’ Flydd said carelessly.

‘Won’t be long now,’ she said a while later, then realised that she was talking to herself. The scrutator had gone to check on the progress of the second team. She followed the tunnel around the other side. Here the roof rock, which was greatly sheared, was held up with a forest of props and beams. She edged between them, afraid that if she bumped one the whole roof would come down. Four miners crouched, their faces yellow in the lamplight.

‘We’re through,’ grinned Dandri, the leader of the team. She poked her stubby finger into a cup-sized hole. ‘Careful now. And remember, no yelling and cheering when we’re in the cavity. We’ll just sit there, drinking our tea and waiting for them to break through. That’ll teach the buggers to gloat.’

‘I would give you the same advice,’ said the scrutator.

‘But
we’ve
done it.’

Flydd and Irisis stood back while they dug out a hole large enough to step through. Frantic hammering echoed from the other side. Someone laughed.

‘Going to tear down the old hut and build a new one with my share,’ said a panting miner.

‘This way, if you please, surr,’ said Dandri.

Flydd took the offered lantern and eased sideways into the cavity, which ran vertically here and was as wide as his shoulders. Holding the lantern out, he turned around, then his lipless mouth curved down at the corners.

‘What’s the matter, surr?’ cried Irisis.

‘No crystal,’ he said in a dead voice.

‘This is the place, surr,’ Dandri pleaded. ‘I checked the survey twice.’

Irisis put her head in. ‘Are you playing a joke, surr? There’s crystal everywhere.’

‘Indeed, but it isn’t any good. I can sense proper crystal, the stuff that can be woken into a hedron, and there’s none of it here. This is just ordinary quartz, as dead as we’ll soon be.’

‘But how can that be?’ cried Irisis. ‘This has to be the place where Joeyn found the wonder crystal.’

‘It’s the place, all right. The aura makes my skin prickle. Good crystal
was
here, buckets full of it. But it isn’t here now.’ He indicated an oval shaft that slanted down towards the seventh level. ‘Someone has tunnelled up and taken the lot!’

Xervish Flydd said not a word for the rest of the day, which was far more frightening than the half-joking threats he was wont to issue in normal conversation. A brief, grim meeting was held, where he put the disaster to overseer, foremen and captain, and dismissed them.

A volunteer soldier followed the shaft, which zigzagged back and forth through weaknesses in the stone, down to the disused seventh level.

‘It had better be lyrinx!’ said Overseer Tuniz, for once without the least trace of good humour, as the soldier scrambled from the hole.

The crisis had a personal dimension for her. The scrutator had promised that she could go home after a year, if the manufactory met all its targets. Home was Crandor, four hundred leagues north. Tuniz had left her work there without leave, to search for her shipwrecked partner, only to discover that he had been captured and eaten by the enemy. She had not seen her little children for a year and without the scrutator’s leave might never see them again.

‘It
was
lyrinx, overseer,’ said the soldier. ‘I found their dung all around the exit. Trod in it, in truth, and right horrible, stinking stuff it was.’

Irisis could smell it on his boots. She moved backwards out of the way.

‘How did they know the crystals were there?’ said Tuniz, rubbing her eyes.

‘I imagine they tortured it out of Tiaan,’ Irisis surmised. ‘They know how desperately we need crystal.’