Geomancer (Well of Echoes) (20 page)

‘I don’t think they’ll be here for a while.’ She told him about the lyrinx attack. ‘No one will be walking the road now without a small army.’

‘Lyrinx,
here?
’ He paced across the hut and back.

‘Perhaps something has drawn them to the manufactory; or the mine.’

‘Who knows? What are you going to do now, Tiaan?’

She didn’t answer at once. Tiaan was wondering if the manufactory might take her back, after this dreadful news. ‘Do you think there’s a chance for me?’ she said wistfully. ‘To work as an artisan again?’

‘I suppose it might be possible … I’ve known Gi-Had since he was a little boy. His father was my younger sister’s second husband. Would you like me to speak to him? In a roundabout sort of a way?’

She hesitated. The memories of her treatment, and the horror of the breeding factory, were strong. ‘I’m afraid. I’ll die before I go back down there.’ She shivered.

He went to the fire, made mint tea with a sprig of dried herb from a hanging bunch, sweetened it with honey, and handed it to her.

‘Thank you! Did you manage to get back my … things?’

‘I picked them up on the way back from Tiksi. All except your journal. The new crafter has it.’

‘Thank you. If you could see what I’m wearing under this.’ She held up the muddy sheets at the back, allowing heat from the fire onto her bare skin.

He laughed. ‘I’m too old for that sort of thing.’

Tiaan yawned. ‘I’m so tired. I think I’ll just curl up right here.’

T
iaan slept and did not dream, to be woken after dark by Joeyn carrying wood inside. She yawned, stretched and sat up.

‘Going to be a cold night.’ He stacked the fire. ‘Lucky you’re not sleeping out in those rags.’

‘Where did you put my clothes?’ she asked, warming herself at the blaze.

‘They’re in the pack under the bed.’

She fell on it, pulling out woollen trousers, shirts, undergarments, socks and boots, a heavy coat of waxed cloth with a fur lining, brushes for teeth and hair, a few other personal items, the copy of Nunar’s book, and at the bottom, most precious of all, her artisan’s toolkit. She unfolded the canvas with its dozens of pockets, each containing a special tool. Tiaan remembered the day she’d finished making them. It had been the day she graduated from prentice to artisan. Her fingers lingered on the tools of her trade. She might never use them again but there was no way she could leave them behind. All her self-worth was represented by that small roll of canvas.

‘Was there anything else?’ she asked.

‘Oh, yes!’ He took a leather bag from behind the door.

She loosened the drawstring and opened the mouth of the bag. Feeling inside, her fingers encountered the helm and she had an instantaneous flash of the young man on the balcony, crying, ‘
Help me
!’

She went still, looked up at Joeyn, began to say something then decided not to. Tiaan laid the helm on her lap, the globe beside it.

‘Beautiful work,’ said Joeyn. ‘What are they for?’

‘To sense out what was wrong with the controllers. The crystal we found the other day went in this bracket.’ Just the thought of it set off her withdrawal cravings. She had to make another pliance. She was shaking with desire for it.

‘There was no crystal in your room,’ Joeyn said.

‘Irisis would have taken it down to the workshop.’

‘I wonder she didn’t take these too.’

‘They’re made for me. She wouldn’t want them.’

‘There’s something else.’ Joeyn held a piece of cloth under her nose.

The smell made her step backwards. ‘It’s my headache balm.’

‘Where did you get it?’

‘From the apothek. The crystals gave me terrible headaches.’

‘Are you sure that’s where the headaches came from?’

‘Yes. Why?’

‘My grandmother used herbs and warned me against this one – calluna root. I could never forget the smell. It causes visions, fits, madness, and if you take enough of it, you can choke to death.’

‘But why would the apothek put calluna in my ointment?’

‘I don’t know. He wasn’t a lover of yours?’ said Joeyn with a cheeky grin.

‘I have never had a lover,’ she reminded him primly. ‘Anyway, I hardly know the man.’

‘Perhaps he loves you secretly.’

‘I doubt it. People say that he’s … incapable.’

‘Could anyone else have interfered with the balm?’

She wrinkled her brow. ‘I was too busy to wait while he made it up. Hang on! Irisis brought it down. She wanted to be rid of me.’

‘And now she has, and there’s no way to prove she had anything to do with it. No way to unseat her either.’

‘’I thought …’

‘She’s your enemy, Tiaan. She’ll never allow you to come back.’

Tears formed in her eyes. ‘I don’t know why I keep hoping. I’ll go tomorrow, though I don’t know where to go.’

‘We can talk about that later. It’s dinnertime.’ He lifted the lid of the cauldron on the hob. A delicious spicy smell wafted out. Tiaan licked her lips.

Joeyn dug caked rice from another pot, shaped it into a raised doughnut on a wooden platter then ladled a good helping of stew into the centre. He handed it to her.

‘I can’t eat that much!’

‘Of course you can. The only way to set out is with a full belly.’

‘That’s not till tomorrow.’

‘It might be a long time until you get another meal as good as this one.’

True enough. She dipped her fork. It was a thick stew of meat and vegetables: rich, spicy and hot. Tiaan ate slowly, thinking about tomorrow. She was lost; just as lost as the young man of her crystal dreams.

Had they just been hallucinations brought on by calluna? Was the young man no more than the fantasy of a drug-addled brain? She could not believe that. The dreams were the only good things left in her life. Anyway, she had first dreamed of him the night
before
she got the balm.

Joeyn was gazing wistfully at her.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Oh, nothing really. It’s good to have someone to eat with. I haven’t, since my wife died.’

It was pleasant in his hut. Companionable. She felt at home here. ‘I usually eat alone, too. I … don’t know what to say to people, as a rule. They find me strange.’

‘People
are
strange. Here we are, you just starting out in life, and me at the end of mine.’

‘No!’ she cried. ‘You’re my only friend, Joe.’

‘Then you’d better make some more. Not many miners get to seventy-six. I won’t see eighty, nor want to. What are your plans, Tiaan? I know you’ve something in mind, for you keep going all dreamy and vague, and smiling to yourself as if thinking of a distant lover.’

‘I’m going to go after my dream.’ She left it at that. There was no way to explain the young man, even to Joeyn. ‘There’s only one problem …’

He scraped up the last of the stew with a rice ball and popped it in his mouth. ‘What’s that?’

‘I need another crystal, Joe.’

‘Why?’ He stopped in mid-chew.

‘The helm and the globe are useless without one. It’s … I suppose it’s like not being able to find your reading glasses. You can see the words on the page but you can’t make out what they say.’

He gave Tiaan a keen glance. ‘Well, my roof props are still there. It wouldn’t be too dangerous to get another, I suppose.’

‘Any old crystal would do.’ Tiaan was already feeling guilty. ‘It wouldn’t have to be a specially good one …’ The craving was back again – crystal, crystal,
crystal!
She had to have another, whatever it cost.

‘I don’t suppose so. But on the road
you’ll
be travelling, you’ll need the best you can get.’ He broke off abruptly. ‘I’m going for a walk. I like to settle my dinner before bed. You’ll want to change, and wash, I suppose.’

‘Thank you.’

After the door closed she washed the platters and leaned them against the fireplace to dry. Taking off her layers of rag and gown, she bathed as thoroughly as she could with a bucket of water and put on knickers and singlet. Lying beside the fire, she pulled the rags over her and was soon asleep.

In the night she dreamed of the young man on the balcony and the catastrophe that had befallen his world, but this time the images were fleeting, hopeless, as if he had given up hope. The dream shifted into one of her grandmother’s tales, of a young woman going to the rescue of her lover, only the young woman was Tiaan. She shifted under her covers, sighed and slipped back into the wonderful dream.

Tiaan stirred when Joeyn came in around midnight. She sat up, gave him one of those faraway smiles, and went straight back to sleep.

Shaking his head, Joeyn took off his boots and turned to his own cold bed.

When she awoke just after dawn, his bed was empty. Tiaan dressed, glorying in her own clothes again rather than those hideous, confining gowns, and breakfasted on stew, rice and mint tea. Only then did she notice the chalk scrawl on a broken piece of slate near the door:

Gone down mine. Back by lunch. Keep a careful lookout, just in case. I left you a few old things. They were my wife’s
.

On the bed lay a jacket and overpants lined with fur and filled with down, and a sleeping pouch of the same material. They were better quality than anything she had. Tiaan thanked him silently.

The Tiksi watch could be looking for her right now. She packed, including one of the sheets. You never knew when a rag might come in handy. Knowing Joeyn would not have her set out on the road with nothing to eat, Tiaan wrapped a stale loaf, the partly used leg of corned goat, a handful of rice balls and a lump of cheese, and shoved them in as well.

Rubbing off his note she wrote her own, a simple
Thank you, Joe
. Her preparations completed, Tiaan checked outside and slipped into the forest. She climbed a tree that had a view of the path and the village, and waited.

It was a clear, windy morning and the wind intensified as the day wore on, shaking the walls of the hut. It was exposed in her tree; Tiaan was glad of her new clothing. Nothing happened, except for occasional people passing up and down the path. Noon came and went. Joeyn did not appear. Anxious now, she went back to the hut for bread, cheese and water, then resumed her watch.

A long time afterwards, when Tiaan was beginning to think she should go looking for Joeyn, a short man appeared, striding down the path as if he owned it. He wore the uniform of an artificer. It was the detestable Nish.

Could he be looking for her? News of her escape would have reached the manufactory by now. Her discarded garments were under Joeyn’s bed but there was nothing she could do about them.

Joe had not appeared. She set off for the mine at a trot, trying to leave as few tracks as possible. There was no one in sight as she darted across the open ground and inside the adit. Lex was in his cavern, tallying quotas of ore on a slate. Crouching low, she made it past unseen, took a full lantern from the rack, lit it and hurried to the lift. She got into the basket and wound herself down to the sixth level.

Tiaan stepped out of the basket and took off the brake. If someone came after her, and thought to look, they might tell which level she’d gone to by the markings on the lift rope. Nothing she could do about that either.

Holding her lantern high, Tiaan made her way down the tunnel, praying that Joeyn was here. There was always the chance that she’d missed him, or he’d gone up to the manufactory first. Thus preoccupied, she did not give a thought to the unstable areas as she passed under them. What a change from her first time.

Not far now. She negotiated a tight squeeze, a gentle curve, and ahead were the triple dead ends. In her withdrawal Tiaan could sense the field strongly. She would tear crystal out of the rock with her teeth if there was no other way to get one. She ran forward, then stopped. The middle end was piled with rubble that had half-buried the props. Part of the roof had collapsed.

She moved forward slowly, hoping against hope. It could have fallen any time in the last two weeks. Then, as she swung the lantern, Tiaan saw a battered boot sticking out from under the rocks. She clutched at her heart.

‘Joe?’ she whispered. ‘Joeyn?’

She ran around the pile. He lay on his face with one of the roof props across his back, weighed down with rubble the size of small boulders. Tiaan fell to her knees beside him. ‘Joe?’ She stroked the thin hair off his cheek. It was warm. Her heart leapt. A trickle of blood ran out of his nose. ‘Joe?’

He gave the tiniest of groans, deep in his chest, and his eyes came open. ‘Tiaan?’

‘It’s me!’ She clutched his hand. ‘What happened?’

‘Want to send you off … best you could possibly have.’

She thought of that glowing crystal up the back of the cavity; the one she’d so coveted. He had dug out the vein at the front and dozens of crystals were piled against the wall. The craving urged her to throw herself on them, even with Joeyn dying here. She felt disgusted by her weakness.

‘You shouldn’t have, Joe. Any one of those would have done. How did you hope to get to it anyway?’

His eyes indicated a long pole with a wooden jaw on the end, closed by pulling on a string.