Geomancer (Well of Echoes) Read Online Free PDF Page B

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