Geomancer

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 father.

'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?'