she endured the lecture, the appeal to duty, the veiled threat.
‘It is the duty of every one of us to mate, artisan. There can be no exceptions. Our country desperately needs more children. The whole world does.’
‘So they can be killed in the war,’ she said with a flash of bitterness.
‘We did not start it, artisan. But without men to fight, without people to work and support them, without women having more children, we will certainly lose. You are clever, Tiaan, despite this failure. You must pass your talents on.’
‘I know my duty, foreman,’ Tiaan said, though she did not like to be reminded of it. There was a serious shortage of men at the manufactory. None of those available appealed to her and she was not inclined to share. ‘I will take a partner, soon …’
How? Tiaan thought despairingly after he had gone. And who?
Why had her controllers failed? Tian went through the problem from the beginning. Controllers drew power from the field, a nebulous aura of force about naturally occurring nodes. The field dominated her life. Artisans made controllers and, more importantly, tuned them so they did not resist the field but drew power smoothly from it to power clankers. If a controller went out of tune, or had to be tuned to a different kind of field artisans did that too. Their work was vital to the war.
Clankers were groaning mechanical monsters, covered in armour and propelled by eight iron legs. Hideously uncomfortable to ride in and a nightmare to the artificers who had to keep them going, they were humanity’s main defence against the enemy. A clanker could carry ten soldiers and their gear, and defend them with catapult and javelard. But without power it was just dead metal, so a controller had to work perfectly, all the time.
Had she made a terrible blunder? Removing the hedron, Tiaan inspected it carefully. Dark needles of rutile formed a tangled mass inside the crystal. It seemed perfect. There were no visible flaws, nor had it been damaged, yet it had failed. She had no idea why.
There was no one to ask. The old master controller-maker, Crafter Barkus, had died last year. What notes he’d made on a lifetime’s work were almost unintelligible, and the rest of his knowledge had died with him. Tiaan had learned everything he’d cared to teach her, and had made small but useful improvements to controllers, some of which had been adopted at other manufactories. However, at twenty she was too young to rise from artisan to crafter. The manufactory was sorely in need of someone with greater experience.
Through the door her fellow workers were talking among themselves, no doubt about her. Tiaan felt oppressed by their knowing looks, their unsubtle judgments and pointed jokes about not having done her duty. A twenty-year-old who had never been with a man – there had to be something wrong with her. It was not said meanly, more in puzzlement, but it hurt just the same.
There’s nothing wrong with me! she thought angrily. I just haven’t met the right one. And not likely to, among the misfits and halfwits here.
Two of the prentices sniggered, looked up at her cubicle then guiltily bent over their grinding wheels. Flushing, Tiaan hurried out of the workshop. She wove her way through the warren of clerks’ benches, past the clusters of tiny offices, the library and the washing troughs, then between infirmary and refectory and out through the wall into the main part of the manufactory.
Out here the racket of metal being worked was deafening and everything stank of smoke and tar. She turned left toward the front gate, crossing a bleak yard paved in dolomite in which a warren of buildings had been thrown up as the need required. There were drifts of ash and dust everywhere; the sweepers could not keep up with it. Every surface was covered in a film of oily soot.
‘I’m going down to the mine,’ she said to Nod, gate attendant for the past thirty years.
The old fellow had a white beard so long that he could tuck the end into his belt, but not a hair on his head. He raised the iron grille. One tall gate stood open. Nod held out his hand. No one was supposed to go out without a chit from their foreman.
‘Sorry, Nod,’ she said. ‘I forgot again.’ Gryste always made a fuss so she was reluctant to ask, even though going to the mine was part of her