Geomancer

'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.