by Ian Irvine
The manufactory lay in rugged Glynninar, a minor state of Einunar at the end of an eastern spur of the Great Mountains. That chain of unclimbable peaks ran from beyond Ha-Drow in the icy south, encircling Mirrilladell and Faralladell and disgorging glaciers to the points of the compass, then on to the tip of the fiord-bound peninsula of Einunar, a length of eight hundred leagues. Northward, a mountain chain almost as large ran up the eastern side of the continent of Lauralin to fabled, wealthy and gloriously subtropical Crandor.
With a sigh at the thought of warmth, she trudged on. This was poor, granitic country, no good for anything but growing trees. From spring to autumn it drizzled, when it was not pouring. Cold mists sprang up from nowhere overnight, while the rare warm days ended in clinging fogs that blew up the range from the sea. From autumn to spring it froze – gales, snow and sleet for week after week.
She passed quite a few people on the track, for Tiksi supplied most of the manufactory’s needs. Though Tiaan knew many of the travellers she did not stop to chat. No one had time these days. The best anyone got was a friendly hello, the worst a curt nod. The land bred dour folk hereabouts; the war had made them even more taciturn.
Tiaan was shy and uncomfortable with people. She found it hard to make friends, for she never knew what to say and felt that people judged her, not for what she was, but because she had no father and had been born in the breeding factory. Not all the propaganda of the war could erase that stain, least of all from her own mind. She felt alone in the world.
It began to drizzle. After an hour or two Tiaan sat down, just for a minute. Any longer and the cold would creep into flesh and bones. She contemplated the sombre pines, wreathed in moss and trailing lichens that stood out like banners in the wind. They had a certain stark beauty. Taking up a piece of decaying granite, she crumbled it in her fingers, allowing the grains to spill onto the slush of last night’s snow. Better go. No point putting it off.
Another hour and more passed before Tiksi began to emerge from the grey, a collection of tall but narrow buildings capped by yellow tiled roofs. The doors and window frames were faded blue. Everyone thought alike in Tiksi. With twenty thousand inhabitants, it was the largest city for a hundred leagues.
Even from here she could pick out the breeding factory. The official name was The Mothers’ Palace, but ‘the breeding factory’ was what everyone called it, and the others like it that had sprung up along the coast over the past thirty years. Its yellow stone walls contrasted sharply with the dingy grey of the surrounding buildings. In a hard world it was supposed to symbolise reward for a job well done, the most important work of all. For Tiaan, who had lived there until she was six, the place had a rather different meaning. It epitomised a world that was trying to take away her rights.
Beyond and below Tiksi she caught occasional glimpses of the steel-coloured ocean. Out to sea an iceberg squatted in the water like a snowy plateau. More dotted the surface all the way to the horizon. This year there were more than usual.
There was a fuss at the gates because she had forgotten to bring her manufactory pass. The guard allowed her through, after much debate, though Tiaan knew it would go on her record, again. Inside the city gates, she checked passers-by, as always, looking for one particular face, her father’s. Without knowing what he looked like, or even his name, Tiaan was sure that she would recognise him instantly.
As she wove through the markets an elderly matron hissed at her, ‘Go home and do your duty!’ Others cast accusing glances at her slender waist, her ringless fingers. Flushing, Tiaan tried to ignore them. She was prepared to do her duty, but not just yet. Turning in at the gates of the breeding factory, she passed through the front door, nodding to the guard. Inside, the place was luxurious, even decadent. Ornately corniced ceilings were painted in a dozen colours. The walls were beautifully papered, while costly paintings and fabrics, and gleaming furniture, were everywhere. A tray of pastries sat neglected on a table. It would probably be thrown out, uneaten. She salivated.
The breeding factory was the most visible propaganda of all, a sign of a future when women might be valued only because they produced the next generation of fodder for the battlefields and maternity wards.
With a heavy sigh she pushed open the door of her mother’s rooms and went in. As one of the best breeders in the history of the place, Marnie had the largest suite with the most luxurious furnishings.
Her bed was larger than Tiaan’s living cubicle in the manufactory. The silk sheets were crimson, the cushions velvet. Marnie lay asprawl on the tangled sheets, a sleeping baby on her belly. A satin nightgown, which to Tiaan’s prudish mind looked positively indecent, was hitched up to the top of her plump thighs. One enormous breast, milky from the baby’s attentions, was fully exposed.
Marnie opened her eyes. ‘Tiaan, my darling!’ she beamed. ‘Where have you been? I haven’t seen you in ages.’
Tiaan bent down to kiss her mother’s cheek. She looked like a pig in a wallow, and neither covered her breast nor drew down her gown. Tiaan could smell her lover on her and was disgusted. Pulling the chair away from the bed, she sat down.
‘I’m sorry, mother. We’ve all been working seven days a week.’
‘Don’t call me mother, call me Marnie! What are you doing way over there? Come closer. I can’t see you.’
‘Sorry, Marnie. I just don’t get any time to myself.’
Marnie’s eyes raked over her. ‘You look awful, Tiaan. Positively thin! Why won’t you listen to me? It’s no life for you, working day and night in that horrible manufactory. Come home. Any daughter of mine can have a position here tomorrow. We’ll fatten you up nicely. You can lie in bed all day if you like. You’ll need never work again.’
‘I like to work! I’m good at it and I feel that I’m doing something worthwhile.’ As always, Tiaan could feel her temper going. She tried to rein it in.
‘Any fool can do what you do, fiddling about with dirty bits of machinery!’ One chubby hand found a box of sweetmeats on the bedside cupboard. Tipping the contents onto her ample belly, Marnie sorted through them irritably. One disappeared into her navel. ‘Damn it! All the best ones are gone. Would you like one, darling?’
‘No thanks!’ Tiaan said, though she was starving. Her temper began to flood. Marnie, despite her image as the wonderful earth mother, was as selfish a person as ever lived. She loved her children only while they were infants. Once off the breast she sent them to the creche, and at six indentured them to whoever offered the most for their labour. Marnie was one of the wealthiest women in Tiksi, but her children saw none of it.
Tiaan changed the subject. ‘Marnie, there’s something I’ve always wondered …’
Marnie bristled. ‘If it’s about your wretched father …’
‘It’s not!’ Tiaan said hastily. ‘It’s about me, and you.’
‘What about me, darling?’ Marnie picked fluff off a chocolate-coloured delicacy and tasted it with the point of her tongue. She settled back on her cushions. No subject was dearer to her than herself.
‘It’s about where I got my special talent from – of thinking in pictures. When I think about something I see it in my mind as clearly as if I was looking at it through a window.’
‘You got it from me, of course! And I got it from my mother. The fights we had when I wanted to come here.’
Tiaan could well imagine them. Marnie’s mother had been a court philosopher, a proud and feisty woman. Her mother had been scribe to the governor, her sister an illusionist of national repute. How Marnie had let the family down!
Marnie, of course, did not think so. She closed her eyes, smiling at some particular memory. ‘Ah, Thom,’ she whispered, ‘I remember every one of our times together, as if you lay beside me now …’
Tiaan rose hastily. In this mood Marnie was prone to go into raptures about past lovers, describing intimacies Tiaan had never experienced and certainly did not want to hear from her mother’s lips. Whoever Thom was, he definitely wasn’t her f
ather.
‘I have to go, Marnie.’
‘You only just got here,’ Marnie said petulantly. ‘You care more about your stupid work than about me.’
Tiaan had had enough. ‘Any fool can do what you do, mother,’ she cried in a passion. ‘You’re like a sow at the trough!’
Marnie rolled over abruptly, scattering sweetmeats across the carpet. The baby began to cry. She put it to the breast in reflex. ‘I’m doing my duty the best way I know!’ she screeched. ‘I’ve produced fifteen children, all living, all healthy, all clever and hardworking.’
Tiaan’s anger faded. ‘I never see them,’ she said wistfully. She longed for a proper family, like other people had.
‘That’s because they’re out doing their duty, and not whingeing about it either. I’ve done all I could for you. You have the best craft I could find, and don’t think that was easy.’
‘Ha!’ Tiaan muttered. Her mother twisted everything. Not only had she not gotten Tiaan her prenticeship, Marnie had fought against it.
‘Maybe you do love your work, Tiaan, but it doesn’t feed you.’
‘Better hungry freedom than pampered slavery!’
‘You’re free, are you?’ Marnie shouted. ‘I can leave this place today and be honoured wherever I go. You can’t even scratch yourself without getting permission from the overseer. I hear your work isn’t going so well, either. Don’t come whining to me when they cast you out! I won’t let you in the door.’
That was too close to the bone. ‘I’d sooner die than live the way you do!’ Tiaan yelled.
‘You wouldn’t have the choice! No man would want to lie with such an ugly, scrawny creature as you.’
Tiaan rushed out and slammed the door. Every visit ended in tears or tantrums, though it had never been as bad as this before. The people hurrying by gave her knowing looks or, occasionally, friendly smiles. Everyone knew how it was between her and her mother. Had something else upset Marnie?
Tiaan sat on the front step, trembling. She was not ugly or scrawny, just hungry and afraid. The rest of the insult passed over her head. Repelled by Marnie’s greedy sensuality, Tiaan could not imagine lying with a man, even to aid the war. Never! she thought with a shudder. I’d rather die a virgin.
Unfortunately, she was hungry for love. Brought up on a diet of her grandmother’s romantic bedtime stories, she dreamed of little else. The women in the manufactory all had husbands or lovers, mostly gone to the war, and talked of them constantly. Tiaan did so yearn for someone to love her. She had no friend but old Joeyn.
Realising that she was shaking with hunger, Tiaan felt a copper coin out of her purse and trudged down to a barrow boy. There she bought a long spicy sausage baked in pastry and set off for home, nibbling as she walked. The sausage was delicious, hot and with a strong peppery flavour. Just half of it filled her stomach and made her feel better.
It was a slow, slippery climb back up the mountain in the rain. Darkness, which at this time of the year came before five o’clock, was already falling before she saw the lights of the manufactory high above. Tiaan toiled up the last distance, went inside and sat down in her cubicle. The hedron lay there accusingly on the bench. Since she was no closer to a solution than before, Tiaan went looking for Overseer Gi-Had.
‘He’s gone up the mountain,’ said Nod the gateman. ‘Trouble in the tar mine. Poisoned air, I think.’
‘Then he won’t be back today,’ said Tiaan. It was four hours’ walk to the tar mine, each way. ‘Have you seen Gryste?’
‘He’s unblocking the waste drains.’
Going left out the gate, Tiaan followed the earth track around the outside of the manufactory wall. She turned the corner, taking a shortcut between huge stone cisterns excavated into the rock to prevent them freezing solid in the four-month winter. In the space between them she glimpsed a couple locked in passionate embrace. There were so many people in the manufactory, and so little privacy, that even the most inhospitable places were in demand.
The discharge flume from the aqueduct had a curtain of icicles hanging from the lip. In the distance a creche-mother was instructing twenty or thirty of her young charges in the use of a sling. They were firing pebbles at the outline of a winged lyrinx, painted on one of the pillars of the aqueduct.
The path wound past stockyards, barns, slaughterhouses and a butchery. The smell was frightful. Tiaan hurried by a cluster of outbuildings where the weavers and other non-essential tradespeople worked. Around the back, piles of furnace ash were eroding into a gully. A series of stonework pipes dripped noxious fluid over the edge.
She found the foreman by a stand of blazing torches, shouting at a group of blackened navvies hacking tar from one of the pipes. They could only work for a few minutes before the fumes drove them out. Their hands and arms were blistered, their red noses dripping.
‘Excuse me?’ she said hesitantly.
‘Yes?’ snapped Gryste, smacking his sword on his thigh.
‘I need to talk to you. About the cont –’
‘Not here!’ He hauled Tiaan away.
Pulling free, she rubbed her throbbing wrist.
‘You can’t talk in front of the navvies, artisan!’
‘Why not?’
‘Morale is bad enough as it is. They’ll get it wrong, and gossip. Where were you this morning?’
‘I had to go to Tiksi to see my mother.’
‘You did not seek my permission.’
‘I – I’m sorry.’ He would not have given it so Tiaan had not asked, though she was due the time off.
‘I’ve had it with your slacking and your refusal to obey the rules. I’m adding a month to your indenture. If it happens again, six months,’ he growled. ‘What do you want?’
Tiaan could not speak. The punishment was all out of proportion to the crime. It did not occur to her to challenge him; to ask if he had that power.
‘Well, artisan? Don’t waste my time.’
‘I need to know how the controllers failed,’ she said in a rush. ‘Did they go suddenly? What other signs were there? Did anything unusual happen at the same time?’
‘I’ve had a report from the battlefield but it doesn’t say much. The controllers started acting erratically. The field came and went. Some of the clankers’ legs had power, the others not. Then the field failed completely.’
‘Has it happened with clankers built by other manufactories?’
‘No idea. They’re scattered across half a thousand leagues and we don’t have enough skeets to send messages back and forth. The armies have priority.’ With a curt nod, he went back to the drains.
Feeling obstructed at every turn, Tiaan went inside and unlocked the old crafter’s rooms. Everything was exactly as it had been the day Barkus died. The new crafter, when appointed, would take over his offices, but though Tiaan was the senior artisan she had no right to use these rooms. The hierarchy must be maintained. She still laboured in the cubicle she’d had as a prentice.
Tiaan spent hours going through the crafter’s journals, trying to find out if controllers had ever failed this way. Barkus turned out to be the least methodical of men, which was surprising since he’d checked her workbooks and journals every day of her eight-year prenticeship. Nothing was organised, much less indexed or catalogued. The only way to find out if he’d worked on a particular problem was to read everything he’d ever written. That was frustrating too, for he often broke off in the middle of an investigation and never resumed it, or continued in the blank spaces of whatever journal he’d happened to lay his hands on at the time.
She went through the bookshelves, cupboards and pigeonholes crammed with scrolls, but found not a mention of her problem. The desk contained nothing of interest – everything secret had been locked away after Barkus’s death. However, as she pulled out the lowest drawer, it stuck.
It took some time to free it, after which Tiaan removed the drawer to see what was the matter. She was used to fixing things. Probably the runners needed waxing. As s
he was rubbing them with the stub of a candle, she noticed that the drawer was shallower than its external dimensions indicated. That could only mean one thing.
It did not take her long to find the secret compartment. Inside lay a slim book made of rice paper, with soft leather covers. She picked it up. The title page simply said: Runcible Nunar – The Mancer’s Art.
No wonder Barkus had hidden it. The penalty for having an illegal copy of any book on mancing would be horrific. Nunar’s treatise was justly famous and many copies had been made, though such books were guarded jealously. Why had Barkus, a humble crafter in an obscure manufactory, obtained an illegal copy?
At a footfall outside the door, Tiaan thrust the book into her coat and pushed the drawer in. A cold voice broke into her thoughts.
‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’
‘I beg your pardon?’ Tiaan said. The intruder was Irisis Stirm, a fellow artisan slightly Tiaan’s junior, although Irisis did not think so.
She stood in the doorway, tapping an elegant foot. Irisis knew her worth. Tall and lavishly endowed, with corn-yellow hair and brilliant blue eyes, she stood out in the manufactory like a beacon. Tiaan had never met anyone with hair that colour, and no one around here had blue eyes, though the old crafter’s may have been when he was young.
‘You have no right to come in here. These are the crafter’s rooms. He was my uncle!’ Irisis pointed that out at every opportunity.
‘I answer to Gi-Had, not you! Look to the quality of your own work!’
That was a mistake. Irisis was much better at managing the other artisans than Tiaan was. Moreover, she made controllers of rare perfection and extraordinary beauty – works of art. Her use of crystals, though, was timid, and she was peculiarly sensitive to criticism about it.
‘At least my controllers work!’ Irisis sneered.
‘Only because we all help you tune them.’
‘How dare you!’ Irisis cried. ‘If Uncle Barkus was still alive he’d put you in your place.’
‘He did! He put me above you. Now he’s dead and I am responsible for your work.’