Geomancer (Well of Echoes) (9 page)

‘Don’t joke about it, Joe! I’m not going to be treated like a brood sow.’ Her face had gone brick-red. ‘I love my work, and I can do it better than anyone else. I just want to do my job and live my life.’

‘That’s all any of us want. Unfortunately the war …’

‘The cursed war!’

‘Still, I don’t suppose Gi-Had
would
send you down, Tiaan. You’re his best artisan.’

‘I do seem to have an unusual talent,’ she said thoughtfully.

‘So I’ve heard. Do you know where it came from?’

‘From my mother, according to her, though she tried to cover
my
talent up.’

‘Is that so?’

‘I first realised I was special at the examination, when I was six. In one of the tests they held up a picture, just for a second, then asked me questions about it. I knew all the answers. They were astounded, but it wasn’t hard at all – in my mind’s eye I could see the picture perfectly. I can still see it now, a family playing games on a green lawn. A mother, a father, a girl, two boys and a dog!’ She sighed heavily.

‘After that they showed me all sorts of images. There were maps of places I’d never heard of, the workings of a clock, a tapestry of the Histories. My answers were perfect, because every image stayed in my mind.’

‘What else did they ask you?’ Joeyn looked fascinated. ‘I never had the examination. It hadn’t started when I was a kid.’

‘Hadn’t it?’ Tiaan said, surprised. ‘Oh, all sorts of things. Reading, spelling, remembering, aiming and throwing, number puzzles.’ She smiled at a memory. ‘One didn’t seem like a test at all. The examiners put a little piece of honeycomb in front of me and said that if I didn’t touch it until they came back, I could have a really big piece.’

‘Did you eat it?’ Joeyn asked.

‘No, though I wanted to. Other tests involved making things out of gears and wheels and metal parts. I did badly on those.’

‘That’s odd, for a controller-maker.’

‘I never had those kinds of toys when I was a kid. Mother sneered at people who worked with their hands. Her daughter was certainly not going to.

‘The examiners seemed disappointed, as if that lack had cancelled out my other talent. I remember them talking in the corner, looking back at me and shaking their heads.’

‘So how
did
you end up at the manufactory?’ Taking another sip from his mug, Joeyn settled back in the chair.

‘The last test involved a collection of crystals; kinds of hedrons, I suppose. At least, some were. The others must have been dummies. They put the first in my hand. It was dark-green. A mask went over my face and they asked me to describe what I saw.’ She paused for a pull at her mug.

‘What did you see?’

‘I didn’t see anything. I felt as if I’d failed another important test. Someone took the crystal away and gave me another. I concentrated hard, but had no idea what I was supposed to see.’

Joeyn was leaning against the wall with his eyes closed. Tiaan continued.

‘They gave me the third crystal. It was really cold. I started to say, “I can’t see anything with this one either …” when a pink wave moved through my inner eye. It disappeared and I must have cried out. I tried really hard to get it back. Someone called, “What did you see, child?”

‘The crystal warmed in my hand and suddenly it was like looking down on a pond with oil on it. I watched the patterns and time stood still. There were layers of colours, all going up and down, back and forth and passing in and out of each other. In places they twisted into swirls like water going down a plughole, then came out the other side of nowhere and joined up again. It was so beautiful! Then it vanished. The examiners had taken the crystal. I’d been using it for an hour!

‘I looked for it, frantically. I had to have it back. I kicked and screamed, something I’d never done in my life. It was
withdrawal
, the first time I’d ever felt it. Nothing mattered but that I got the crystal back.

‘I told them what I’d seen and I could see the excitement in their eyes. I wanted to try the other crystals but they put them away and sent me back to my mother. A few weeks later, after an indenture was drawn up, I was sent to the manufactory. Marnie was furious. She’d planned a different prenticeship for me, one worth a lot more to her, but the examiners had made their decision.’

‘For you to become a prentice controller-maker?’ asked Joeyn.

‘Well, yes, though for two years all I did was sweep, clean and empty out the waste. I wasn’t clever little Tiaan any more, I was the brat from the breeding factory. In a way I’m still that kid. I’ve never been able to make friends here.’

‘The cat that walked by herself,’ Joeyn murmured. ‘You’re too different, Tiaan.’

‘What?’

‘You give the impression that you don’t need anyone else. It must be rather off-putting to the people you work with.’

‘I suppose I want … different things. Anyway, old Crafter Barkus started me on my prenticeship when I was eight. I felt
really
useless then. Everyone else was good with their hands and I had a hand full of thumbs. It took ages before I could do the simplest things.’

‘So what did you do?’ he asked with a bit of a grin, as if he already knew. Perhaps he did: it had created quite a stir at the time.

‘I couldn’t stop thinking about the crystal and what I’d seen with it. I wanted it desperately. There were plenty of hedrons in the artisans’ workshops but I wasn’t allowed near them. Prentices don’t get to touch hedrons until they’re twelve. I emptied the waste but those offcuts were from crystals before they’d been
woken
into hedrons. I tried them all but saw nothing.

‘Then one day, a few months after I began my prenticeship, a hedron offcut was thrown out by mistake. I’d given up looking by then so I just scooped the contents of the basket onto the slag heap. As I did, I felt a flash of light and colour.

‘It took hours to find the one chip of hedron in that mass of crystal and slag, but as soon as my fingers touched it I
saw
. I saw things no one else could see, beautiful colours and patterns, forever in motion. I couldn’t make sense of them so I began sneaking into Crafter Barkus’s lectures. I’m sure he knew. He never said anything, but every so often would break off from some abstruse theory to deliver a piece of instruction so basic that the prentices scratched their heads and wondered if he was going senile. I learned enough that way.’

‘What did you learn?’ Joeyn asked idly.

‘What hedrons were for. I became obsessed. My crystal was like the friend I’d never had. I spent the whole day holding it. The nights too. I learned how to read the shifting field around the node here, better than anyone in the manufactory. When I was nine I made a series of paintings showing how it changed every day for a month. The field wasn’t random, as everyone thought. There was a pattern to it, though no one had seen the field clearly enough to realise the pattern was there.

‘I went running into the crafter’s rooms with my paintings …’ She broke off, giving a little shiver. ‘I burst in on a meeting with the old overseer and a
perquisitor!
’

Joeyn chuckled.

‘There was a deathly silence, then the perquisitor turned my paintings to the wall. The room was sealed, a guard put on the door and I was questioned by the sternest old man I’d ever met. Where had I got the pictures from? I was terrified that he would flog me. He did, too, but it wasn’t the worst he could have done. He took my hedron away. I had not been separated from it for months and had the most terrifying withdrawal. I thought I was going to die. I was in a fever for four days.

‘The perquisitor could not believe that I’d mapped the field myself, not until every artisan and operator in the manufactory had been interrogated. I’d made a better map than the army had. It was priceless information, especially to the enemy.

‘Then, when I told him that I could actually change the pattern of the field, the perquisitor went silent. That’s how adepts draw power, you see, and it’s a vital secret. He was afraid I’d let something slip in my childish chatter. He also worried that I would draw power without realising it and end up killing people, or myself. There was only one thing he could do.

‘My true prenticeship began that day, three years early, although it did not end any sooner. Barkus started me with hedrons straight away but my talent did not make it easier. Well, using the hedron was easy but nothing else was. Learning to make the tiny parts of controllers was a nightmare. I was the worst of all the prentices at any kind of craft work. I tried really hard but it didn’t seem to make any difference.’

‘But you mastered the craft in the end.’

‘Yes. My controllers aren’t beautiful, like Irisis’s, but they work better.’ She bent down to sniff the autumn crocuses. ‘The other part was nearly as much trouble.’

He waited for her to go on.

‘Seeing things with a hedron is easy. Tuning the wretched controller to its hedron, and then to the field, was the hardest thing I’ve ever tried to do.’

He took another sip and made a face. ‘Brew tastes a bit mouldy.’

‘Sorry,’ she said at once. ‘I –’

‘It’s the ghi, Tiaan, not the making. Go on.’

‘As students we did not have our own hedrons. We had to use ones made for the prentices years ago. They never
fitted
, and I used to see strange after-echoes from all the different wills that had used and abused them, the way students do. Anyway, they were flawed to begin with.’

‘You wouldn’t give a good one to a bunch of prentices,’ said Joeyn. ‘They’d ruin it.’

‘No doubt.’ Walking to the wicket gate, she stared into the woods.

‘You were talking about tuning the controller,’ he prompted after a while.

She came back. ‘Oh yes. Nearly all hedrons have flaws and a hundred parts of the controller have to be adjusted to take account of them. Sometimes you don’t know how. Move one part too far and it throws everything else out. It might take a day just to get back to where you started from, even if you knew what you’d done wrong. But when you’re a prentice you never do know, and the beatings just make it worse.’

‘I never thought old Barkus was a beater,’ Joeyn frowned.

‘He was a gentle old man. It was the older prentices. They resented me. Anyway, that’s a long time ago. It took ages to learn, but once I did it was easy. I didn’t even have to think about tuning a controller, especially after I made my own pliance. Suddenly I could see the field perfectly. It was …’

‘Like having your own eyeglasses,’ said Joeyn, ‘instead of using someone else’s.’

‘Exactly. I don’t know what I’d do if I ever lost my pliance.’ Tiaan clutched at her throat where it normally hung, before realising that she’d left it back on her bench. She felt anxious about that; not that anyone would dare touch it.

‘I suppose we should be going.’ Joeyn drained his mug.

She stayed where she was. ‘I’m worried, Joe. Irisis tries to take the credit for my good work and blames me for everything that goes wrong. She hates me because I’m better than she is. She’s afraid I’ll be made crafter. Just because her uncle had the position …’

‘And her father and grandfather before that. Birth
is
right, to a lot of people.’

‘And I’m not one of them. Especially since I have
no
father.’

‘Well, what you lack in heritage you must make up for in sweat and cleverness. Let’s go up to the mine and see what we can find.’

Inside, in the lift basket, Joeyn kept winding down after they reached the fifth opening.

‘I thought this part was closed off,’ Tiaan said as the basket shuddered to a stop at the sixth level.

‘It is.’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘Parts are very dangerous. Fortunately I know which parts.’

She looked down. The shaft continued. ‘What’s below this?’

‘Levels seven, eight and nine. Don’t
ever
go down there.’

‘Is the rock all rotten?’

‘Yes, and some parts are flooded. Pity, because there’s more ore down there, and richer, than ever was taken from the higher levels.’

‘What about crystal?’

‘Don’t know. That’s before my time. No one was interested in crystal in them days. Leastways, not here. It would have all been tossed on the mullock heaps, unless a pretty bit caught someone’s fancy.’

‘Maybe I should try there,’ Tiaan said.

‘Too late. I had a look after Barkus first asked me for crystal. I couldn’t sense anything at all. They must need to be freshly mined.’

‘I wonder if that could be the problem?’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Maybe the operators had the controllers out in the sun, and the last crystals were really sensitive to it.’

‘Perhaps. Could also be heat, or frost, or wet. Coming?’

The tunnel snaked this way and that, following the seams. There were many dead ends where seams pinched out or were truncated by faults or shear zones full of crumbled rock and greasy clay. After some hard walking they reached a low mound of rubble. Joeyn surveyed it carefully, holding his lantern up to check the roof.

‘See the cracks up there? An old fracture zone runs right through. Rocks are all shattered to bits; just a few seams of quartz holding it together.’

Her eye followed his battered finger. A web of cracks ran across the roof. Another, larger crack snaked down the side of the tunnel as far as she could see. ‘What if …?’

‘If we’re under it when it comes down, we’re dead! If beyond, we can probably move enough rubble to get out. Depending how much falls. Still want to go?’

‘Can we find the crystal I need anywhere else?’

‘Not quickly.’ He raised an eyebrow, which already had rock dust clinging to it.

‘I’ll do whatever you say.’

‘There’s a lot of dead miners who thought the roof would stay up. Still, I think this one is good for a while. We’ll go carefully. No loud noises. Follow ten paces behind, so if I set something off …’

Tiaan shivered, feeling the roof twitch above her. He patted her shoulder. ‘I started in the mines when I was eight. You develop a nose for danger, if you survive.’

She stayed well back, anxious as she walked under the fractures. Grit trickled down her neck. The place turned out to be a long way in. They went under several more unstable areas before Joeyn stopped where the tunnel terminated in triple dead ends like the stumps of amputated fingers.