‘Why?’

‘I liked the feeling it gave me; sort of warm and comforting. Both my boys were killed in the war, and my wife died of grief …’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’

‘Why would you? She’s been dead thirty-one years, and the boys more than that. Such a long time ago. Life was so lonely.’

‘Why didn’t you take another wife? I would have thought … Well, I’m in trouble because I haven’t mated …’

‘Never met a woman I liked enough.’

Tiaan considered the old man thoughtfully. They had been friends from the day they’d met. ‘I don’t suppose you’d consider –’

‘Don’t be silly, Tiaan,’ he said gruffly. ‘Anyway, as I was saying, my crystal came along and I wasn’t so lonely after all. Felt I was a bit special. One day I happened to mention it to old Crafter Barkus. He was a widower too; we used to share a jar or two some evenings. He came and looked at it. Next I knew, I wasn’t a silver miner any more – I was paid twice as much to sense out crystal and send the good ones to him. Been doing it ever since.’

‘I wish I knew how,’ she said.

‘I wish I could teach you.’

He had been tapping away with hammer and chisel while he was talking. Now he laid them aside, inserted the point of his pick into the cavity and levered carefully. A crystal wobbled. ‘Want to catch that for me?’

It fell into her hands. ‘You can take it, if you like,’ said the miner.

‘Thanks. But what if it turns out like the others? Have you found a new vein?’

‘No, though there are some promising ones down on the sixth level.’

‘Are you going down there next?’ She looked hopeful.

‘Not if I can help it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Rock’s rotten there. Roof used to cave in all the time, before we sealed it off. A shear zone cuts right through the best area.’

‘Oh well, I dare say you’ll find your old stones somewhere else.’

‘Dare say I will.’ Joeyn stretched and yawned. ‘Time to go. Air’s not as good as it should be, down this end.’

Tiaan felt drowsy, now that he’d mentioned it, and saw that the lantern flame had burned low. She followed him to the lift, stepped into the basket and allowed him to wind them to the surface.

Out in the cold and the blustery wind that blew her drowsiness away, she said goodbye.

‘Bye.’ Joe turned down the track to the miners’ village and his lonely hut. ‘Now, you call me if that crystal don’t work,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘I’m sure I can find a better one, with a bit more time.’

‘Thanks! I will.’ Pulling her thin coat around her shoulders, she set off up the slushy path.

Tiaan shaped the crystal and, taking great care, began to wake it into a hedron. This was done with the pendant at her throat, her personal pliance, which enabled her to see the field. Without it she would be psychically blind. The pliance was the badge, almost the soul, of every artisan; making it had proved her worthy of being one. A small hedron of yellow tiger’s-eye quartz, set in swirls of laminated glass and silver metal, it hung from a white-gold chain. Tiaan had used her pliance every day for the past three years and knew its every idiosyncrasy.

A crystal had to be woken before it could draw power from the field, and not even Tiaan could describe how that was done. It was a psychic tuning of mind and matter, a talent you either had instinctively or not at all. It could be trained but not taught. And it was hazardous; it could bring on the hallucinations, and eventually the madness, of crystal fever. Prentice artisans had years of practice with the master, using the merest chips of a crystal, before they were ready to do it themselves. Yet accidents still happened, and the reckless attempted what was forbidden, often with unpleasant results.

Every crystal was different and waking this one proved unusually hard work; it seemed to resist her. She could barely sense its structure through swirling fog. Tiaan concentrated until her head hurt, and slowly something began to resolve. It was a tiny pyramid, vibrating in a blur. Others, identical, lay all around, linked into hexagons that extended to infinity. She lost herself in the pattern, drifting on a sea of regularity. Drifting …

The current was whipping her along now. A long time must have passed. Tiaan had no idea how long she had been lost inside, but she did know that some artisans never came out. However, she had learned how to wake this crystal.

Tearing herself free of its spell, she took a mental step backwards, focussing not on the regularity of the crystal but on the tendrils chaotically drifting through it. Selecting just one, she forced it to take the straight path. It resisted but she pressed harder, using the strength of her pliance, and it moved. The first was always the most difficult. First one, then dozens, then thousands of tendrils aligned and began to stream the same way. Suddenly they vanished, she was looking at the crystal from outside and its aura floated around it like the southern aurora in the night sky. It was awake and meshing beautifully with the field.

Though exhausted, she kept working. There was so much to do. By ten o’clock that night Tiaan knew that the new crystal had the same properties as the last three. Would it fail the same way? Her body felt all hot and cold, her arms twitchy. Such were the effects of working with hedrons, and they were not always benign. Artisans had been known to die at their benches, burnt black inside or their brains boiled in their heads. It was called anthracism and everyone lived in terror of it. Tiaan’s head was throbbing. Time to stop.

Depressed and hungry, she blew out her lantern and trudged off through the labyrinth of the manufactory, with its hundreds of compartmentalised work spaces. Each was crammed with workers, mostly women, making the individual pieces of the clankers that were so vital to the war. Such colossal labour it was that in a year the manufactory, with its thousand workers, its tar-fired furnaces going non-stop, could turn out only twelve clankers. The enemy could destroy a clanker in a few minutes.

Tiaan’s room was tiny, but at least she had one. Most of the workers slept in dormitories where privacy was unknown. She climbed into bed but could not stop thinking. The war was delicately poised; it could go either way. Or so they were told. The failure of a few clankers could lose an entire army, and that could lose the war. And everything depended on controllers and the hedrons that were the core of them, the only way a human mind could shape and focus the power of the field to control such a massive object as a clanker.

The lyrinx were more than the equal of humans, in every respect. Only clankers could make the difference. Without them, humanity was doomed …

Tiaan slept badly and not for long. Her head was full of brilliant, chopped-up images – crystal dreams. She always had them after work. These ones were about dead soldiers all lying in a row, covered in sheets to conceal their horrible mutilation. Long before a weak autumnal sun skidded over the mountains to blink at the fog and furnace fume, she was back at her bench.

Hunger nipped at her belly. She kept it at bay with sips of tar-flavoured water. The manufactory grew crowded. The artisans worked in their own little building on the cold, southern side, walled away with all the other clean occupations. The workshop had double doors to keep out ash and fumes, but they could not keep out the noise. She closed her door, unable to think with the racket of metal being shaped on a hundred anvils, the shouted conversations, the roars of a score of foremen, and always in the background, the hissing of the bellows and the blast of the furnaces.

The failed hedron was still dead, not a spark left of its potential when shaped by her hands. It was as if it had been drained dry, all that psychic promise withdrawn. Now it was no more than a blank piece of quartz.