Ian Irvine - Tetrarch

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.

Irisis 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.