Geomancer

F IVE

Gi-Had's news came as a great relief to Tiaan. She had begun to doubt her own competence, but if hedrons from other manufactories were also failing there must be more to it than bad workmanship. Did the enemy have a way of disabling them from afar, or were they being sabotaged here? How could a crystal be sabotaged yet look unmarked? She had never heard of such a thing, nor had the other artisans. She was not out of trouble yet.

While everyone was at lunch, Tiaan scoured the crafter's rooms for anything he might have written on the topic. She found nothing, but did not return The Mancer's Art to its hiding place. She was not ready to give it up.

As she locked the door, Irisis appeared. 'What are you doing?' she said furiously.

'I'm trying to find out how a hedron could be sabotaged and leave no trace,' Tiaan replied, and passed by.

Something woke in the artisan's eyes. Irisis stared after Tiaan for a very long time. Tiaan could think of only one approach – to probe deeper into the faulty hedrons, even if she destroyed them in the process. Slipping her pliance over her head, she reached for the first crystal, but stopped. What if the damage spread back? Her throat went tight at the thought of losing her pliance. She dared not risk it. Instead she got out the rough design she had done in the night and set to work.

After three days of dawn-to-midnight toil Tiaan had put together a hedron probe, in two parts. The first was a globe constructed of copper wires following longitudes, latitudes and diagonals, on which were set a number of movable beads, like a model of the moons and planets in their orbits. The beads, each different, were made of carefully layered strips of metal, ceramic and glass. The other part was a helm of enamelled silver and copper lacework in delicate filigrees, designed to fit over her head. A series of springy wires went down through her hair, their flattened ends pressing against the sides and back of her head, unnervingly like a wire spider. At the front, a setting the size of a grape was designed to hold a shaped piece of crystal.

Tiaan opened the two halves of the globe and placed one of the failed hedrons inside. Inserting a piece of crystal into the setting on the helm, she put it on her head. The wires were chilly. Closing her eyes, she slid her hands around the globe and pressed her fingers in through the wires until her fingertips touched the faces of the hedron.

At once she sensed something in its heart – a tiny, shifting aura, all fuzzy and smeared out, like a comet's tail. Her fingers moved the beads one way and then another. The aura was stronger in some positions, almost non-existent in others. Once or twice it disappeared. She tried rotating various wires, then flipping them north to south. That did not help either. Her apparatus was not powerful enough to read the aura, though while viewing it she had the uncomfortable feeling that someone was looking for her. She opened her door but found the workshop empty.

Tiaan examined the small crystal in the helm. It was not a particularly strong one, just the first she'd picked up. She searched through her offcuts but found nothing better, and the basket of waste crystals was empty.

'Gol?' She looked around for the sweeper boy. He did not answer. Tiaan found him sleeping in one of the nooks behind the furnaces, his head pillowed on a burlap sack. These hidey-holes had been the favourite haunt of factory kids since the manufactory had been built. She had used this nook herself once or twice, when she was little.

Tiaan looked down at the sleeping boy. He was an angelic-looking lad – olive skin, a cheerful oval face, red lips and a noble brow capped by black curls.

'Gol!' She shook him by the shoulders.

He woke slowly, smiling before he opened his eyes, as if from a pleasant dream. When he saw her standing there, his eyes went wide.

'Artisan Tiaan!' He fell out of the niche in a comical attempt to look alert and hardworking. 'What can I do for you?'

With an effort she kept a straight face. Gol was always willing, but his work never came up to expectation. Slapdash as well as lazy, he did not know the difference between a job well done and an entirely inadequate one. A harder master would have beaten that out of him but Tiaan could not bring herself to do it.

'Where did you put the waste crystals from my workbench?'

'Around the back of the manufactory,' he said brightly. 'On the ash pile. Would you like me to show you?'

'I told you to put them in the basket in my storeroom!' she said sharply. 'If this happens again, Gol, I'll send you back to your mother.' As if she could. The poor woman was a halfwit with seven children, none good for anything but lyrinx fodder.

'I'm sorry!' He assumed an expression of profound mortification.

Gol's emotions tended to the extreme. Tiaan wondered if there was a brain in his head at all. 'Come on! I'm in a hurry!'

They went past the smithies, where a bevy of half-naked lads wielded long-handled hammers. Eiryn Muss leaned against an anvil, ogling the youths and grinning loutishly. A pair of prentices mocked the halfwit behind his back, slouching about with their tongues out, drooling. Tiaan wondered if men like Muss were required to mate.

As she went past the artificers' workshops, Nish gave her a smouldering stare. He had been watching her ever since the incident in her workshop. She hurried by, looking straight ahead, and opened the back gate.

The rear of the manufactory was a dismal place. The open drains steamed and reeked, a mixture of foetid human waste, tarry effluent and brimstone that had killed every plant in sight. Furnace ash and slag were piled all around the ravine, the most recent deposits steaming gently in the drizzle. A thousand times as much had clotted in the valley below. The river ran acid for two and a half leagues, a series of poisoned pools, stained iron-red or tarry black, in which nothing lived.

Gol led her through the reeking piles then stopped abruptly. 'It's not there!' He began to bawl.

Tiaan went to the brink of the ravine. Ammonia fumes brought tears to her eyes. Most of the ash mountain, saturated after weeks of rain and sleet, had slumped over the edge. Running down in a thick blurt to the water's edge, it looked exactly like a cowdung mudslide. There was no chance of recovering the precious offcuts.

Tiaan wiped her dripping nose. 'Oh, stop whining, Gol! Why can't you ever do what you're told.' The lad wailed loudly. 'Go! Get on with your work! And if this happens again I will have you whipped!'

He ran sobbing up the path. Tiaan leaned against a fragment of wall, all that remained of the monastery that had stood here for a thousand years. Before that, for another thousand, pilgrims had come to worship at the holy well, now buried under piles of slag. Had that been related to the node here?

Returning to the workshop, she checked the benches of the artisans. They had been cleared of their crystal waste as well. There were fresh crystals in the storeroom but she did not want to cut one down. She needed one that was the right size to start with. First thing in the morning she would have to go back down the mine. 'Morning, Lex, I'm looking for old Joe. Is he still working on the fifth level?'

Lex came out of his cavity. A little globe of a man, he looked like one of those smiling dolls that, after being knocked over, always came upright again.

'I haven't seen him, Tiaan,' he said clearly, evidently having his teeth in today. 'I don't think he's here.'

'Oh! I hope he's not sick.'

'Old Joe? He's as tough as miner's underpants. Naw, probably gone down to Tiksi.'

'I'll try his cottage, just in case. Thanks, Lex!'

She headed for the village, a third of a league down the mountain. A cluster of fifty or sixty stone cottages had been built in terraces on either side of the path, though Joeyn's place stood uphill among the trees. An oblong granite structure of two rooms, it had a mossy thatched roof and was surrounded by a fence of woven wattles.

The sun was just coming up as Tiaan pushed open the gate. A path of crushed granite led to a north-facing porch, unfurnished except for a rude chair. A scatter of white daisies grew beside the porch. Clumps of autumn crocuses were in flower here and there. On the other side of the path a vegetable garden contained onions, garlic, leeks and a few red cabbages.

The door was closed. A wisp of smoke came from the chimney. She knocked at the door. No answer. She knocked again and thought she heard a faint reply. Tiaan pushed open the door, afraid something had happened to him.

It was dark inside, the windowless hut lit only by the glow from an open fire. At first her eyes could make out nothing.

'If it isn't Tiaan!' came a hoarse voice from beside the fire. 'Come in, my dear.'

Tiaan made out a seated figure at a bench beside the fire. Joeyn started to get up but broke into a coughing fit.

'Are you all right, Joe?' She ran to him.

He wiped his eyes on his sleeve. 'Miner's lungs!' he gasped, clearing his throat and spitting into the fire. 'It's always like this in the morning.'

'I was worried. I thought something must have happened to you.'

'I've made my quota. I didn't feel like going to work today.'

'But…'

'I'm seventy-six, Tiaan. I only keep going because there would be nothing to do if I stopped. But some days I just don't feel like working.'

'Can I get you anything?'

'I'm not an invalid,' he said with a smile. 'But I wouldn't mind a cup of ghill, if you feel like waiting on me. It's in the jar on the mantel.'

Taking down the jar, she picked out several curling strips of ghi wood and moved the pot over the coals. 'Strong or weak?'

'Like tar. Put in about five strips and leave it a good while. Let's sit on the porch.'

He carried his chair out. Tiaan settled into the other. They watched the mist drifting between the pines. The wind sighed through the wattle fence. Finally Joeyn spoke. 'It's always nice to see you, Tiaan, though I'm sure you didn't come to pass the time of day.'

'What am I going to do about a partner, Joe?'

Looking her over, he smiled to himself. 'I don't see any problem.'

'I'm afraid…'

'It's not such an onerous duty, Tiaan.'

'I didn't mean that. I'll get the ghill.' She rose abruptly, coming back with two wooden mugs. The steam smelt like peppery cinnamon.

While they sipped their ghill, she went over her problem with the crystal.

Joeyn sat ruminating. 'So, you need me to find you another.'

'The most powerful one you can. The last wasn't strong enough.'

'And I suppose it's urgent?'

'Gi-Had threatened to send me to the breeding factory if I didn't solve the problem by the end of the week.'

'As if he would! You're too valuable to him, Tiaan.'

'Why would he say that if he didn't mean it?' Tiaan was not good at reading people and could not separate idle words from serious ones. 'He's in trouble because of the failed clankers, and Foreman Gryste is whispering in his ear about me. He doesn't like me.'

'Gryste doesn't like anyone, Tiaan. Especially since…'

'What?'

Joeyn sniffed his drink. 'He was passed over for overseer when Gi-Had came back from the war a hero. Then Gryste did his own service, was blamed for a defeat that wasn't his fault and broken to a common soldier. He's been at odds with the world ever since. And his habit doesn't help.'

'The nigah leaf?'

'Yes. Makes a man angry. And it's expensive.'

'I'm afraid of him. The war is going really badly, Joe. Desperate people do stupid things.'

'It's been going badly since I was a boy. You stop believing everything you're told after a while. I'm so old that I've seen the Histories rewritten.'

'The Histories are truth!' she cried. More than that, they were the foundation of the world. To challenge them bordered on blasphemy.

'No doubt of it,' he replied, 'but whose?'

'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Not many people do. Hardly anyone lives to my age any more. Have you ever heard of the Tale of the Mirror?'

'Only as a monstrous lie.'

'It wasn't when I was a little boy. It was one of the Great Tales, and Llian of Chanthed one of the greatest chroniclers. Now he's Llian the Liar, the man who debased the Histories. Why?'

'I supposed someone proved -'

'The greatest people of the age were there when he told the Great Tale – Nadiril the Librarian, Yggur, Shand, Malien the Aachim. No one said a word against the tale for a hundred and thirty years, then suddenly the Council of Scrutators had it rewritten. Why, Tiaan?'

'I don't know.'

'This war has destroyed everything we once held sacred.'

She squirmed on her chair. 'I don't like that kind of talk, Joe.'

He went back to the previous topic. 'I don't imagine the breeding factory would suit you very well.' He gave her a sly grin. 'Though it is a life of luxury and pleasure…'

'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.

'Up there!' He pointed with a chisel.

Tiaan lifted up her lantern. A massive vein, hollow in the centre, slashed across the middle end of the tunnel. It was bristling with crystals fist-sized or bigger, more perfect than any she had seen. She could feel something too – the field. She wished she had her pliance so she could sense it properly. If she closed her eyes she could almost see it as coloured curls and billows, like tendrils of chromatic fog moving in and out of the three dimensions. All her senses seemed more acute, as if the field was amplifying them. She wanted those crystals. Tiaan darted forward.

Joeyn caught her by the collar as she went past. 'Stop!'

The shock jerked her off her feet. Tiaan rubbed her throat, which was bruised from the collar. He steadied her.

'Sorry. Didn't mean to hurt you. It isn't safe there.'

The roof above the vein contained a series of concentric fractures as well as cracks radiating from the centre. The pattern was rather like a spider's web.

Her skin crept. 'I don't know why I ran, Joe. I just felt drawn to it.'

'I can feel it too. I often have, down here, though I was never tempted. I don't see how we can get to the vein, Tiaan. The roof is much worse than I remember. It's going to fall. Soon!'

'Is there no way we could hold it up?'

He eyed the rock. 'Wouldn't be easy. Could take days to get enough plates and props in here, and it'd probably come down on us while we were putting them up.'

'What about making it fall?'

He stroked his jaw. 'You don't know what else will come with it. The entire roof could collapse.'

'Oh!' She felt her last hope disappearing.

He paced back and forth, examining the roof from various vantage points. 'Don't give up yet.'

Sitting on the floor, Joeyn withdrew a roll of cord from his pack and tied a slipknot in one end. Laying the knot over the end of his pick handle, he ran the cord down the handle and crept around the wall until he was as close as he could get to the vein without going under the cracked roof.

He reached up with the pick, as high as he could, but not high enough. He edged forward a bit, just under the shattered zone. Still he could not reach. Going right under, and lifting the pick high, Joeyn eased the handle up to a single crystal, trying to slip the knot over the end. The cord fell down.

Creeping back to the safe area, Joeyn replaced the knot and tried again with the same result. He tried a third time. The cord slipped over the crystal. Putting down the pick he pulled the cord tight and gave it a jerk. The crystal did not move. A harder jerk and the cord broke.

Joeyn cursed, which brought on a fit of coughing. He bent double, gasping and choking.

'Don't stand there, please. Get out of the way!' She imagined the roof thundering down on him. No crystal was worth that risk.

The fit ended. He wiped his mouth, gave her a weak kind of a grin and looked up. 'It's not my day yet, Tiaan.'

'How many dead miners have said that?' she murmured.

'Thousands.' A better grin.

Tossing the cord aside, he slipped along the wall, reached up with the handle of the pick and with a single blow snapped off the small crystal. Unfortunately it fell back among the others. Dust filtered down from the roof. Tiaan caught her breath. Joeyn flipped the pick end for end, caught the handle, stood on tiptoe and flicked the crystal out. He caught it in his other hand, creaked backwards and landed in the safe area. Chips of stone fell from the roof.

As he came across, there was a spring in his step she had never seen before. 'My lady!' Holding out the crystal, he bowed.

'Thank you.' She embraced him, the hand holding the crystal touched her ear and she went rigid against him.

'Something the matter?' he asked, stepping back.

She rubbed her ear. 'It felt as if something stung me.' Tiaan took the crystal. It was smaller than the ones she normally worked with, not much thicker than her thumb. It might not do for a hedron but it looked perfect for her sensor helm. Unlike the other crystals it was perfectly clear, save for a hexagon of tiny bubbles midway along its length.

It did not sting her hand but Tiaan could feel the potential in it – stronger than any crystal she'd ever had.