Geomancer (Well of Echoes) (5 page)

Tiaan changed the subject. ‘Marnie, there’s something I’ve always wondered …’

Marnie bristled. ‘If it’s about your wretched father …’

‘It’s not!’ Tiaan said hastily. ‘It’s about me, and you.’

‘What about me, darling?’ Marnie picked fluff off a chocolate-coloured delicacy and tasted it with the point of her tongue. She settled back on her cushions. No subject was dearer to her than herself.

‘It’s about where I got my special talent from – of thinking in pictures. When I think about something I see it in my mind as clearly as if I was looking at it through a window.’

‘You got it from me, of course! And I got it from my mother. The fights we had when I wanted to come here.’

Tiaan could well imagine them. Marnie’s mother had been a court philosopher, a proud and feisty woman.
Her
mother had been scribe to the governor, her sister an illusionist of national repute. How Marnie had let the family down!

Marnie, of course, did not think so. She closed her eyes, smiling at some particular memory. ‘Ah, Thom,’ she whispered, ‘I remember every one of our times together, as if you lay beside me now …’

Tiaan rose hastily. In this mood Marnie was prone to go into raptures about past lovers, describing intimacies Tiaan had never experienced and certainly did not want to hear from her mother’s lips. Whoever Thom was,
he
definitely wasn’t her father.

‘I have to go, Marnie.’

‘You only just got here,’ Marnie said petulantly. ‘You care more about your stupid work than about me.’

Tiaan had had enough. ‘Any fool can do what you do, mother,’ she cried in a passion. ‘You’re like a sow at the trough!’

Marnie rolled over abruptly, scattering sweetmeats across the carpet. The baby began to cry. She put it to the breast in reflex. ‘I’m doing my duty the best way I know!’ she screeched. ‘I’ve produced fifteen children, all living, all healthy, all clever and hardworking.’

Tiaan’s anger faded. ‘I never see them,’ she said wistfully. She longed for a proper family, like other people had.

‘That’s because they’re out doing their duty, and not whingeing about it either. I’ve done all I could for you. You have the best craft I could find, and don’t think that was easy.’

‘Ha!’ Tiaan muttered. Her mother twisted everything. Not only had she
not
gotten Tiaan her prenticeship, Marnie had fought against it.

‘Maybe you do love your work, Tiaan, but it doesn’t feed you.’

‘Better hungry freedom than pampered slavery!’

‘You’re free, are you?’ Marnie shouted. ‘I can leave this place today and be honoured wherever I go. You can’t even scratch yourself without getting permission from the overseer. I hear your work isn’t going so well, either. Don’t come whining to me when they cast you out! I won’t let you in the door.’

That was too close to the bone. ‘I’d sooner die than live the way you do!’ Tiaan yelled.

‘You wouldn’t have the choice! No man would want to lie with such an ugly, scrawny creature as you.’

Tiaan rushed out and slammed the door. Every visit ended in tears or tantrums, though it had never been as bad as this before. The people hurrying by gave her knowing looks or, occasionally, friendly smiles. Everyone knew how it was between her and her mother. Had something else upset Marnie?

Tiaan sat on the front step, trembling. She was not ugly or scrawny, just hungry and afraid. The rest of the insult passed over her head. Repelled by Marnie’s greedy sensuality, Tiaan could not imagine lying with a man, even to aid the war.
Never!
she thought with a shudder. I’d rather die a virgin.

Unfortunately, she was hungry for love. Brought up on a diet of her grandmother’s romantic bedtime stories, she dreamed of little else. The women in the manufactory all had husbands or lovers, mostly gone to the war, and talked of them constantly. Tiaan did so yearn for someone to love
her
. She had no friend but old Joeyn.

Realising that she was shaking with hunger, Tiaan felt a copper coin out of her purse and trudged down to a barrow boy. There she bought a long spicy sausage baked in pastry and set off for home, nibbling as she walked. The sausage was delicious, hot and with a strong peppery flavour. Just half of it filled her stomach and made her feel better.

It was a slow, slippery climb back up the mountain in the rain. Darkness, which at this time of the year came before five o’clock, was already falling before she saw the lights of the manufactory high above. Tiaan toiled up the last distance, went inside and sat down in her cubicle. The hedron lay there accusingly on the bench. Since she was no closer to a solution than before, Tiaan went looking for Overseer Gi-Had.

‘He’s gone up the mountain,’ said Nod the gateman. ‘Trouble in the tar mine. Poisoned air, I think.’

‘Then he won’t be back today,’ said Tiaan. It was four hours’ walk to the tar mine, each way. ‘Have you seen Gryste?’

‘He’s unblocking the waste drains.’

Going left out the gate, Tiaan followed the earth track around the outside of the manufactory wall. She turned the corner, taking a shortcut between huge stone cisterns excavated into the rock to prevent them freezing solid in the four-month winter. In the space between them she glimpsed a couple locked in passionate embrace. There were so many people in the manufactory, and so little privacy, that even the most inhospitable places were in demand.

The discharge flume from the aqueduct had a curtain of icicles hanging from the lip. In the distance a creche-mother was instructing twenty or thirty of her young charges in the use of a sling. They were firing pebbles at the outline of a winged lyrinx, painted on one of the pillars of the aqueduct.

The path wound past stockyards, barns, slaughterhouses and a butchery. The smell was frightful. Tiaan hurried by a cluster of outbuildings where the weavers and other non-essential tradespeople worked. Around the back, piles of furnace ash were eroding into a gully. A series of stonework pipes dripped noxious fluid over the edge.

She found the foreman by a stand of blazing torches, shouting at a group of blackened navvies hacking tar from one of the pipes. They could only work for a few minutes before the fumes drove them out. Their hands and arms were blistered, their red noses dripping.

‘Excuse me?’ she said hesitantly.

‘Yes?’ snapped Gryste, smacking his sword on his thigh.

‘I need to talk to you. About the cont –’

‘Not here!’ He hauled Tiaan away.

Pulling free, she rubbed her throbbing wrist.

‘You can’t talk in front of the navvies, artisan!’

‘Why not?’

‘Morale is bad enough as it is. They’ll get it wrong, and gossip. Where were you this morning?’

‘I had to go to Tiksi to see my mother.’

‘You did not seek my permission.’

‘I – I’m sorry.’ He would not have given it so Tiaan had not asked, though she was due the time off.

‘I’ve had it with your slacking and your refusal to obey the rules. I’m adding a month to your indenture. If it happens again,
six months
,’ he growled. ‘What do you want?’

Tiaan could not speak. The punishment was all out of proportion to the crime. It did not occur to her to challenge him; to ask if he had that power.

‘Well, artisan? Don’t waste my time.’

‘I need to know how the controllers failed,’ she said in a rush. ‘Did they go suddenly? What other signs were there? Did anything unusual happen at the same time?’

‘I’ve had a report from the battlefield but it doesn’t say much. The controllers started acting erratically. The field came and went. Some of the clankers’ legs had power, the others not. Then the field failed completely.’

‘Has it happened with clankers built by other manufactories?’

‘No idea. They’re scattered across half a thousand leagues and we don’t have enough skeets to send messages back and forth. The armies have priority.’ With a curt nod, he went back to the drains.

Feeling obstructed at every turn, Tiaan went inside and unlocked the old crafter’s rooms. Everything was exactly as it had been the day Barkus died. The new crafter, when appointed, would take over his offices, but though Tiaan was the senior artisan she had no right to use these rooms. The hierarchy must be maintained. She still laboured in the cubicle she’d had as a prentice.

Tiaan spent hours going through the crafter’s journals, trying to find out if controllers had ever failed this way. Barkus turned out to be the least methodical of men, which was surprising since he’d checked her workbooks and journals every day of her eight-year prenticeship. Nothing was organised, much less indexed or catalogued. The only way to find out if he’d worked on a particular problem was to read everything he’d ever written. That was frustrating too, for he often broke off in the middle of an investigation and never resumed it, or continued in the blank spaces of whatever journal he’d happened to lay his hands on at the time.

She went through the bookshelves, cupboards and pigeonholes crammed with scrolls, but found not a mention of her problem. The desk contained nothing of interest – everything secret had been locked away after Barkus’s death. However, as she pulled out the lowest drawer, it stuck.

It took some time to free it, after which Tiaan removed the drawer to see what was the matter. She was used to fixing things. Probably the runners needed waxing. As she was rubbing them with the stub of a candle, she noticed that the drawer was shallower than its external dimensions indicated. That could only mean one thing.

It did not take her long to find the secret compartment. Inside lay a slim book made of rice paper, with soft leather covers. She picked it up. The title page simply said: Runcible Nunar –
The Mancer’s Art
.

No wonder Barkus had hidden it. The penalty for having an illegal copy of any book on mancing would be horrific. Nunar’s treatise was justly famous and many copies had been made, though such books were guarded jealously. Why had Barkus, a humble crafter in an obscure manufactory, obtained an illegal copy?

At a footfall outside the door, Tiaan thrust the book into her coat and pushed the drawer in. A cold voice broke into her thoughts.

‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Tiaan said. The intruder was Irisis Stirm, a fellow artisan slightly Tiaan’s junior, although Irisis did not think so.

She stood in the doorway, tapping an elegant foot. Irisis knew
her
worth. Tall and lavishly endowed, with corn-yellow hair and brilliant blue eyes, she stood out in the manufactory like a beacon. Tiaan had never met anyone with hair that colour, and no one around here had blue eyes, though the old crafter’s may have been when he was young.

‘You have no right to come in here. These are the crafter’s rooms. He was my uncle!’ Irisis pointed that out at every opportunity.

‘I answer to Gi-Had, not you! Look to the quality of your own work!’

That was a mistake. Irisis was much better at managing the other artisans than Tiaan was. Moreover, she made controllers of rare perfection and extraordinary beauty – works of art. Her use of crystals, though, was timid, and she was peculiarly sensitive to criticism about it.

‘At least my controllers work!’ Irisis sneered.

‘Only because we all help you tune them.’

‘How dare you!’ Irisis cried. ‘If Uncle Barkus was still alive he’d put you in your place.’

‘He did! He put me above you. Now he’s dead and I am responsible for your work.’

‘Unless,’ Irisis said reflectingly, ‘you’re sent to the breeding factory to do your duty.’

Tiaan had no comeback. Irisis did
her
duty enthusiastically and often, though so far with no sign of success. Perhaps she used a preventative. That was a serious crime, though not an uncommon one. Heading for the door, Tiaan laughed nervously. ‘I think I’m more valuable here than there!’

Irisis’s blue eyes flashed. ‘You couldn’t manage a dung fight in a pigsty! I’ll be crafter here one day,
over you!
Then you’ll know it.’ She stood by the door as Tiaan went out. There was no chance to put the book back.

Returning to her bench, Tiaan watched Irisis across the room as she donned goggles and mask and sat down at her grinding wheel. It began to whine and the artisan took up a crystal. Soon the air was full of drifting specks.

Tiaan worked fruitlessly for hours, until her head drooped. She laid it on the bench, then realised that the manufactory was silent. It must be midnight. Plodding to her room, she washed in a basin of cold water and fell onto her straw-stuffed pallet.

As soon as her head hit the pillow, Tiaan’s worries returned and, though exhausted, she found herself wide awake. She went over her problems again and again, quite uselessly. Finally, knowing she was never going to get to sleep, she lit a candle, locked her door and took out the forbidden book.

She did not open it immediately. Tiaan was not sure she should look at it at all, but if she took it back to the crafter’s workshop, Irisis’s spies would tell her at once. If she handed it in to the overseer after this delay there would be suspicion that she’d read it first. The scrutator had watchers in the manufactory and little escaped their attention. She would be marked for life.

She considered hurling it into one of the furnaces when no one was looking. However, if the book was protected by a spell, as such things often were, anything might happen. Besides, books were precious, sacred things and Tiaan could not imagine burning one. She could hide it, but what if someone unsuitable found it? What if it fell into the hands of the enemy?

Tiaan opened the book. The paper had a lovely silky feel. The text was written in a number of different hands, no doubt a copy. The language was the common speech spoken throughout the south-east, so she could read the words, though they made little sense. That was not surprising. Her day book, which contained details of her work on controllers, would be equally incomprehensible to most people. Then, as she was flipping through, a heading caught her eye.