by Ian Irvine
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.
SIXTEEN
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.
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. Sh
e 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.
He glared back, quite as fiercely. They held their positions, each waiting for the other to break, then finally the scrutator barked with laughter and pointed to the other chair.
‘Spill your idea, Irisis.’
‘Come with me, and together we will cajole the seeker, or force her if we must, out of that state. Then we get her to find the biggest cluster of crystals the mountain has to offer and we dig for them, night and day. I’ll take my turn with pick and shovel, if there’s a shortage.’
‘Not much of a plan, crafter, but it’s better than anything I can come up with. Shall we go?’
With her hand on the knob, Irisis looked back. ‘It might be an idea to dress first, surr. Wouldn’t want to alarm her unnecessarily.’
The scrutator looked down at his grizzled nakedness, grinned, and said, ‘Quite!’
Ullii squatted in the corner, exactly as she had for the past couple of weeks. Though it was cold today, she wore only her spider-silk undergarments.
‘Seeker?’ the scrutator called from the door.
The rhythm of her rocking did not alter.
He came up close. ‘Seeker?’
Nothing at all.
‘What are you thinking about, seeker? Are you remembering your friend, Nish?’
She might have rocked a little faster, though more along that line of questioning yielded nothing.
‘Here is your other friend, Irisis. Do you remember her?’ He beckoned Irisis in.
Not by so much as a blink did Ullii react, nor could he gain one from any other approach, though he spent half an hour trying.
‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he whispered to Irisis, over by the door.
‘Since being kind has not worked, maybe you should try being nasty.’
‘Better that you be the nasty
one,’ he snapped. ‘You’ve had more practice.’
She ignored that. ‘Come outside.’
She led him out and around the corner, so that Ullii, even with her hypersensitive hearing, could not overhear.
‘I can’t force her,’ she said, ‘else I will lose her trust. I’ll need it when we go to examine the failed nodes.’
‘True enough. What is she afraid of most in all the world?’
Irisis considered. ‘Apart from Nish’s father, Perquisitor Hlar?’
‘Precisely! Go away. Best that you’re nowhere near.’
The scrutator went inside, this time taking a bright lantern and leaving the door wide open. Ullii groped around for her goggles and mask but he got there first and held them out of reach. She began to moan and flail her arms in the air.
‘Well, at least that’s a reaction,’ he said aloud. ‘Ullii?’
She dropped back into her slack-jawed rocking. Was it an act? Perhaps she was sulking, or punishing him for losing Nish.
He slammed the door a couple of times, opened it again and turned the lantern up to maximum brightness. Ullii put her arms over her face and began to make a keening sound in her throat.
‘Stand up, Ullii,’ he roared, knowing it would hurt her.
She did not move.
‘What are you afraid of, seeker? Are you frightened of me?’
No reply, though for an instant one eye peeped out through her fingers.
‘Do you remember Perquisitor Jal-Nish Hlar, Ullii? Nish’s father?’
She wailed and covered her ears.
He dropped his voice. ‘If you don’t wake up and help us, seeker, do you know what will happen? The Council will cut off my head.’
Ullii went still and her fingers slipped away from her ears, so he knew she was listening.
‘What will happen then, Ullii? You don’t know, do you? Well, listen good. The perquisitor will come!’
Ullii let out a little gasp, ‘No!’