Geomancer (Well of Echoes) (69 page)

‘I’ve been thinking to put you in the front-line, Cryl-Nish!’

The paper went one way, the pencil another. Nish bent down for them, trying to conceal his shock. He’d thought he had escaped that fate.

‘And you could hardly appeal such a judgment, artificer, after the trouble you’ve caused. Even your own father’s reports say so. Poor Jal-Nish. Well, it’s up to me now. Have you anything to say for yourself?’

‘I believe I’ve done some good since then,’ Nish said weakly.

‘Indeed? That’s not what I heard from the plateau.’

‘What did you hear, surr?’ Nish had to force the words out, he was so afraid.

‘I heard that you threatened Ky-Ara, which led to the destruction of his clanker.’

Nish looked around frantically, wanting to deny it but not daring to. There was no truth the scrutator could not dig out and the process would be most unpleasant.

‘For the want of a clanker the artisan was lost. The crystal too! And a perquisitor maimed.’

‘Ky-Ara should have resisted me,’ Nish muttered.

‘Indeed he should, and will be brought to account for his negligence. As will you.’

The scrutator glanced down at his bony hands. The fingers were gnarled and twisted as if they’d been broken in a torture chamber, then set by someone who knew nothing about bones. He flexed his fingers, which moved as awkwardly as the limbs of a crab. Nish shuddered and tried vainly to conceal it.

The cold eyes saw everything. ‘On the other hand, you have shown courage, Cryl-Nish. And courage, I need not remind you, is an essential quality in the front-line soldier.’

‘I may be more use to you at the manufactory as an artificer,’ Nish said desperately.

‘I doubt it! You’re an indifferent artificer, Cryl-Nish, though you work hard at it.’

‘I’ve done my best. Artificing was not my choice.’

‘Indeed you have, but your best is not good enough.’

‘What about my project for Fyn-Mah? To learn about the flesh-formers?’

‘Have you done any good with it?’

‘No, but I’ve only …’

‘Leave it to her!’

‘But …’

‘No buts, artificer,’ growled Flydd.

Nish stared at the floor in despair. He was doomed. Then inspiration struck. ‘How have you gone with Ullii, surr?’

The scrutator’s mouth curled down, and then suddenly he smiled. ‘I see what you’re about. You hope to prove useful in an endeavour that an old monster like me has failed at.’

‘Well, er … the seeker is difficult to work with.’

‘I found her not unusually so.’

Nish’s mouth fell open. ‘But …’

‘People are not necessarily what they seem, boy. Sometimes we show others what they want us to see. You, for example, think of the scrutator as a bloody old bastard.’

Nish could hardly deny it, so he remained silent.

‘I understand your friend Ullii very well. We got on famously and parted friends.’

Nish could not believe that, although the scrutator would hardly lie about something so easily checked. The piece of paper fluttered from Nish’s hand. He watched it drift down but did not go after it. ‘Then it’s all over for me. I’m done for!’

Those eyes burned through him again.

‘Perhaps I can use you after all, Cryl-Nish. I don’t have the time to keep watch with Ullii. And why should I when you could do it for me? I think I
will
send you back to the manufactory. You can be a second-rate artificer by day. At night, when the seeker is not out hunting crystal in the mine, you will ensure that she keeps watch.’

‘Watch for what?’ Nish said stupidly.

‘For people using the Secret Art. What else?’

‘Oh!’

‘Also for Tiaan. One day she will reappear and I want to know immediately. By skeet, and damn the expense! And then I want her found. This is the sole reason I have spared you, artificer. So you and the seeker can track down Tiaan and, more importantly, this rather interesting hedron she seems to have discovered. Don’t fail me, boy, or you’re lyrinx fodder!’

The following morning Nish and Ullii were on their way back to the manufactory with an escort of six foot-soldiers and a clanker. Ullii was uncommonly cheerful. She did not say much, but when Nish mentioned the scrutator she said ‘Xervish!’ and smiled at some memory. There had to be more to the man than that unprepossessing exterior showed. No doubt there was – one did not rise to one of the most powerful positions in the land without having many talents.

Nish’s father had recovered from his rages sufficiently to travel and had been sent home to Fassafarn by ship. Nish was delighted to see him go. His father the perquisitor was bad enough, but Jal-Nish the one-armed, mutilated failure was a terrible sight to see. The expedition had gone after Tiaan on his orders and it had been a disaster. The blame could fall nowhere else.

As they walked beside the clanker, Nish wondered what would happen to his father. Would he be quietly retired on grounds of injury? Was that what happened to important people who became incapable? They could hardly send
him
to the front-lines.

Nish could not see Jal-Nish settling calmly into domestic impotence. He would drive his mother out of her mind. Ranii was an ambitious, clever woman who, when she was at home, could stand no interference in the way it was run.

Well, Fassafarn was a long way away, thankfully. Nish was unlikely to see home in the next five years.

About a week later, Nish was helping to carry timber for the front doors when Ky-Ara’s clanker rattled up the road. The machine was daubed here and there with mud and reeds, as if it had been hidden in a swamp. The plates were dented and streaked with rust.

The machine groaned to a stop. An elderly operator got out, removed his gloves and rubbed the small of his back. Two soldiers emerged. Turning toward the gate, they saluted smartly.

Nish set down his load, wondering what was going on. The scrutator stepped through the gate, signalling to a quartet of manufactory guards, who marched to the clanker and threw up the back hatch.

‘Come out!’ they ordered.

After a long interval, a dark-clad figure appeared in the opening, was hauled out and dragged across to the gate. Nish hardly recognised Ky-Ara. The once handsome young man was filthy, covered in sores and as thin as a crowbar. His operator’s uniform was stained with mud, and in that tormented face his eyes looked as big as Ullii’s.

There was no trial, since Ky-Ara had admitted his guilt. Nish had no idea what the punishment was going to be – execution, he presumed, in some horribly appropriate way. There was no point sending this man to the front-lines.

Ky-Ara was marched inside and bound to a stake between the artificer’s workshop and the furnaces. The elderly operator drove the clanker through the rear gate and parked it beside Ky-Ara.

‘Take the machine apart, piece by piece,’ said the scrutator to the assembled artificers.

The artificers, including Nish, began to do just that. All the clanker operators, and their prentices, stood silently by. The manufactory’s chronicler sat in a chair by the furnaces, recording everything. The teller being too sick to stand witness, another had been brought up from Tiksi. Her duty was to write the
Tale of Ky-Ara’s Downfall and Ruin
, that it could be told in all sixty-seven manufactories of the south-east, and possibly across the known world.

Food and drink were laid out for him but Ky-Ara touched neither in the three days it took to reduce the clanker to the myriad parts from which it had been assembled. He hung from his ropes, staring with those bloody eyes, and every part removed was a thorn of metal being twisted in his flesh.

Nish was not much given to pity, but before the operation was over he did pity Ky-Ara. The man had withered before his eyes and Nish had never seen such suffering. He wished someone would put the fellow out of his agony, but Ky-Ara was guarded night and day. Justice must take its unforgiving course.

Then the real torment began. The entire manufactory lined up, from Eiryn Muss the halfwit to the scrutator himself, and even Ullii. In stately tread, like pallbearers at a funeral, the greatest and the least went to the pile of clanker parts, selected one each, paced across to the open door of the furnace and hurled it in.

Ky-Ara screamed, and again for every succeeding part, until he no longer had the voice to make any sound at all. That process took many hours, and the line had gone round several times before they approached the end, the pair of cast-iron flywheels. Nish took hold of one, Overseer Tuniz the other. Far too heavy to lift, the flywheels were rolled across to the furnace door, where a dozen hands eased them up a sturdy plank and into the all-consuming blast.

The operator shrieked and fell unconscious. A bucket of water was hurled over him, for the trial was not finished yet. Crafter Irisis removed the controller that still hung about Ky-Ara’s neck, took it apart piece by piece, after which she and the artisans and their prentices solemnly carried the pieces to the fire. Ky-Ara writhed as they went in, but made no sound.

Last of all the scrutator came forth, bearing a knife on a square metal plate. Placing the plate on a small table, beside the hedron from Ky-Ara’s controller, he signalled to the guards. They slashed Ky-Ara’s bonds.

The scrutator beckoned. Ky-Ara lurched to the table. He was a bilious yellow-green and watery blood ran down his chin from a much-bitten tongue. The scrutator indicated the hedron with his left hand, the knife with the right. Nish held his breath. Would the operator take the ritual suicide, the dishonourable way out, or would he pick up the hedron and carry it to the furnace, then await his fate? Or might he go berserk with the knife?

The operator’s emaciated frame was wracked by a bone-wrenching shudder. His hand hovered over the knife, he looked up at the merciless face of the scrutator; then, strangely, he smiled and reached for the hedron instead.

The instant he touched the crystal Ky-Ara was transformed. He stood up straight and the anguish vanished. He seemed ennobled. Holding the hedron out in cupped hands, he bowed to the scrutator, to Overseer Tuniz and to Crafter Irisis, and finally to the mass of workers. Ky-Ara then spun on one boot-heel and marched to the furnace.

There his momentum failed. He made a half-hearted motion of his hands as if to hurl the hedron in, but could not go through with it. Ky-Ara turned back to the watchers, baring his teeth in agony. The scrutator said not a word.

Ky-Ara forced himself. Taking two steps up the plank, he darted his head forward. Nish gasped, thinking that the operator was going to throw himself in, but again Ky-Ara hesitated.

Rotating to face the manufactory, he steadily raised the hedron above his head. Against the blast from the furnace his body was just a dark shape, though the hedron, in front of the dark iron, shone brightly.

Ky-Ara was concentrating so hard that his hands shook. It was not until one of the prentice artisans collapsed, until Irisis cried out and held her temples, that Nish realised what the former operator was trying to do. He was calling power directly into the crystal, a deadly dangerous thing to do. Was he trying to destroy them all?

Nish ran forward but the scrutator caught his coat, dragging him back effortlessly. ‘I can’t afford to lose you, boy.’

The hedron began to glow, lighting up Ky-Ara’s fingers red from behind. A tendril of steam rose from his hand, then the hedron flared so brightly that Nish had to cover his eyes. Ullii screamed and curled up into a ball.

When Nish looked again the hedron had gone dull and he realised that he had not seen steam at all, but smoke. The operator’s whole body was smoking. His clothes were smouldering, and his hair. The crystal brightened again. Ky-Ara gave a shrill laugh which was cut off abruptly. Smoke wisped out of his mouth, his ears, and most gruesome of all, from his eyes. Steaming jelly oozed down his cheeks. Ky-Ara gasped, then slowly began to char from the forehead down. The burning garments fell off and he was like charcoal underneath.

The man was dead but he did not fall down. He became a spread-legged, carbonised statue, still holding the hedron above his head. Beside Nish, Ullii was screaming.

He bent down to put his hand over her nose. It did not calm her until, with a fizzing pop, the hedron burst, scattering fragments everywhere. The seeker’s screams cut off instantly.

‘A fitting end, anthracism,’ the scrutator remarked. ‘Cast the remains into the furnace!’

The remainder of the winter was a time of unending toil for everyone in the mine and the manufactory. Even though the people who’d fled from the raid were back at work, it took weeks to put the place back into operation. One of the furnaces was full of solidified iron and had to be partly demolished to get the residue out. It was not a happy time. Foreman Gryste, put in charge of the artificers after Tuniz’s elevation, drove them like slaves, pouring out bile for the least infringement of his rules. Once Nish was flogged because he failed to ask permission to use the latrine. Gryste was driven by bitterness bordering on insanity, which they had to endure in silence.

Before they could begin building clankers they had to produce all the parts that went to make one up: metal plate, gears and driving rods, housings, nuts and bolts, pins, and a thousand other objects, to say nothing of controllers. The seeker laboured just as hard in the mine, for finding crystal proved more difficult than merely pointing to the rock. However, the crystals Ullii did locate were the best they’d ever had.

In their few free moments, Nish and every other able person laboured with stone and timber for the carpenters, the masons and the metalwrights as they worked to improve the defences of the manufactory. The new gates and strengthened walls were not impregnable, but they would resist attack by the small bands that had so damaged the place before. It would take a sizeable force now.

No one had time for leisure after the work was done – they simply fell into their beds in the middle of the night, knowing they would be dragged out again before dawn. And after all his work was done, Nish still had to visit Ullii and find out if she had
seen
anything, and if Tiaan had reappeared on her fans. The answer was always the same.
Nothing
.