Ian Irvine - Tetrarch

Irisis watched them for some time; but as she was about to leave, a muffled crack sounded off to the side, where no one was working. ‘What was that?’ she yelled. ‘Is it the roof?’

‘It’s the team working on the other side,’ said Peate. ‘Won’t do ’em any good, poor sods.’ He laughed, a strangled gasp. ‘They’ll never catch us. The silver is as good as ours.’

‘Would we hear them through all this rock?’

‘Sound travels strangely through stone. Sometimes miners can be working five spans away and you won’t know they’re there, while in another place you’ll hear them from half a league. Who can fathom it? I’m going home. Come back tomorrow afternoon if you want to see the breakthrough.’

Irisis returned at midday to find the team hammering and shovelling like fury, stripped down to loincloths and covered in sweat. ‘I’ve never seen anyone work so hard,’ she marvelled.

The scrutator, perched on a rock like an emaciated vulture, snorted. ‘The other team kept going all night. When Peate’s mob got in this morning, their opposition had only a span and a half to go. Peate hasn’t taken a break in five hours.’

‘He’ll kill himself,’ said Irisis. The miners were staggering about like zombies.

‘No one ever worked themselves to death!’ Flydd said carelessly.

‘Won’t be long now,’ she said a while later, then realised that she was talking to herself. The scrutator had gone to check on the progress of the second team. She followed the tunnel around the other side. Here the roof rock, which was greatly sheared, was held up with a forest of props and beams. She edged between them, afraid that if she bumped one the whole roof would come down. Four miners crouched, their faces yellow in the lamplight.

‘We’re through,’ grinned Dandri, the leader of the team. She poked her stubby finger into a cup-sized hole. ‘Careful now. And remember, no yelling and cheering when we’re in the cavity. We’ll just sit there, drinking our tea and waiting for them to break through. That’ll teach the buggers to gloat.’

‘I would give you the same advice,’ said the scrutator.

‘But we’ve done it.’

Flydd and Irisis stood back while they dug out a hole large enough to step through. Frantic hammering echoed from the other side. Someone laughed.

‘Going to tear down the old hut and build a new one with my share,’ said a panting miner.

‘This way, if you please, surr,’ said Dandri.

Flydd took the offered lantern and eased sideways into the cavity, which ran vertically here and was as wide as his shoulders. Holding the lantern out, he turned around, then his lipless mouth curved down at the corners.

‘What’s the matter, surr?’ cried Irisis.

‘No crystal,’ he said in a dead voice.

‘This is the place, surr,’ Dandri pleaded. ‘I checked the survey twice.’

Irisis put her head in. ‘Are you playing a joke, surr? There’s crystal everywhere.’

‘Indeed, but it isn’t any good. I can sense proper crystal, the stuff that can be woken into a hedron, and there’s none of it here. This is just ordinary quartz, as dead as we’ll soon be.’

‘But how can that be?’ cried Irisis. ‘This has to be the place where Joeyn found the wonder crystal.’

‘It’s the place, all right. The aura makes my skin prickle. Good crystal was here, buckets full of it. But it isn’t here now.’ He indicated an oval shaft that slanted down towards the seventh level. ‘Someone has tunnelled up and taken the lot!’

Xervish Flydd said not a word for the rest of the day, which was far more frightening than the half-joking threats he was wont to issue in normal conversation. A brief, grim meeting was held, where he put the disaster to overseer, foremen and captain, and dismissed them.

A volunteer soldier followed the shaft, which zigzagged back and forth through weaknesses in the stone, down to the disused seventh level.

‘It had better be lyrinx!’ said Overseer Tuniz, for once without the least trace of good humour, as the soldier scrambled from the hole.

The crisis had a personal dimension for her. The scrutator had promised that she could go home after a year, if the manufactory met all its targets. Home was Crandor, four hundred leagues north. Tuniz had left her work there without leave, to search for her shipwrecked partner, only to discover that he had been captured and eaten by the enemy. She had not seen her little children for a year and without the scrutator’s leave might never see them again.

‘It was lyrinx, overseer,’ said the soldier. ‘I found their dung all around the exit. Trod in it, in truth, and right horrible, stinking stuff it was.’

Irisis could smell it on his boots. She moved backwards out of the way.

‘How did they know the crystals were there?’ said Tuniz, rubbing her eyes.

‘I imagine they tortured it out of Tiaan,’ Irisis surmised. ‘They know how desperately we need crystal.’

‘What are we going to do about it?’ demanded the overseer. ‘We’d better have an answer by the time the scrutator gets up tomorrow, or …’

‘What?’ said the soldier, snappy because his bravery had not been recognised.

‘Or our lives may well be forfeit, and Flydd’s as well. The Council does not like failure and these past six months we have had nothing else.’

‘Time the seeker got over her self-indulgence,’ said Irisis. ‘I’ll see if I can shake her out of it.’

‘What good will that do?’ asked the overseer.

‘She saw crystal in several places in the mountain, before she went away with Nish. I’ll have her search out the best of them, and then we must dig for our very lives.’

Irisis was unable to rouse the seeker from her self-absorbed state. Something drastic had to be done. When it was nearly midnight, she went to see the scrutator. His door was closed. She knocked. There was no answer. Irisis knocked again.

‘Go to bloody hell!’ he roared, so loudly that she jumped.

Taking her courage in both hands, Irisis lifted the latch and pushed the door open. Xervish Flydd was sprawled in a wooden chair, a flask of pungent parsnip whisky dangling from one gnarled hand. An empty flask lay on the floor. He was naked but for a loin rag and his skeletal body was as scarred and twisted as his face and hands. Whatever had happened to him, whoever had tortured him and broken his bones, they had spared no part of him.

‘What the blazes do you want?’ he snarled. Flydd’s voice was clear despite the quantity of liquor he had consumed. ‘Go away! I’m sick of the lot of you.’

A half-written letter, presumably confessing the manufactory’s difficulties to the Council of Scrutators, rested on the table.

‘I have an idea!’ she said.

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Tilting the flask up, he drained the contents in one swallow, then reached for another.

The death wish was rising up in her again. Snatching the flask from his hand, she hurled it out the door, where it smashed satisfyingly.

The scrutator rose to his battered feet, swayed and steadied himself on the table. ‘You could die for that, artisan.’

‘Crafter!’ she snapped. She wanted to run away screaming, but Irisis forced herself to meet his eyes, to hold his gaze. She had never met anyone as tough as Xervish Flydd, and she had to be just as strong. ‘If you don’t pull yourself together we could all die, scrutator. How is that going to help the war?’

‘You lecture me ?’ he said incredulously. ‘The penalty for insubordination is death, crafter.’

‘If I’m going to die, it might as well be of my own choosing!’ Irisis gave him the kind of glare she used to quell importunate lovers and idle prentices.