Geomancer (Well of Echoes) by Ian Irvine Read Free Book Online Page A

was spotty, which was a torment, and his downy chin incited sneers of ‘bum fluff’.
    He had a strong body though – broad, square shoulders, a stomach as hard and flat as a paving stone, jutting buttocks which excited ribald comments from the women he worked with, and heavy thighs. He was also, he liked to think, sturdily equipped for breeding.
    Not that, Nish thought gloomily, he got any chance for that. Despite the severe shortage of males the women of the manufactory, like those of the mining village nearby, were not enamoured of him. He felt sure it was because he was short and spotty, and had no beard. How he hated his body.
    That had nothing to do with it, of course. In these times even hideous men had their choice of partners. Moreover, he had other appealing characteristics – he was clever and of good family. Unfortunately he had one handicap fatal to intimacy. With women younger than his mother, Nish was so anxious that he became mortifyingly inarticulate.
    Though not particularly skilled with his hands, Nish had a lively, restless intelligence and learned quickly. He also had a brilliant memory – for names, faces, things seen and conversations overheard. That was of great benefit to him in his other, unmentioned occupation.
    Both his father, Jal-Nish Hlar, and his mother, Ranii Mhel, had been examiners. All the more incomprehensible that they could have made such a mistake with him. Every child in the east, and possibly the entire world, was taken before the examiners at age six, where every talent, creative or intellectual, manual, mechanical or psychic, was identified. On that basis children were assigned their occupations for life – labourer, miner, scribe, artisan, merchant, soldier,
breeder
! There was no room for childhood; the war with the lyrinx was a hundred and fifty years old. The soldiers, and the other dead, had to be made up. Children must work. The entire world was regimented for one thing – survival.
    The examiners came again at the age of eleven, and for the third and final time at sixteen, to make sure. Some promising talents withered early, while others blossomed late.
    Nish had been happy in his prenticeship as a scribe for one of the great merchants of Fassafarn, a trading city on the south coast of Einunar. Fassafarn was an ice-free port through which much of the wealth of the south was shipped to markets as far away as Crandor, and even Thurkad before its fall. He had been learning the principal languages and scripts of the known world, and was ideally suited for such work. Nish liked meeting powerful people and being trusted to translate their documents. He’d planned to become a merchant himself, one day, and make so much money that he could buy anything he wanted.
    Then, aged sixteen, came the catastrophe. After his examination there had been hurried conferences and, with no more than an hour’s notice, his parents had shipped him across the mountains to become a prentice artificer at this godforsaken manufactory. Nish was devastated. It did not occur to him that the move might have saved him from the army. Their only instruction had been to ‘Keep your eyes and ears open, and write about what you see and hear, every day’. Nish was a dutiful son. He still wrote every day, and once a month his bulky letter would go out with the other mail.
    His first year at the manufactory had been a nightmare. All the other prentices, male and female, had been taller. His skin erupted into hideous spots. Worse, he knew less about being an artificer – the design, constructing, operating and repairing of machines of warfare – than even the six-year-old factory kids. But worst of all, rumour spread that he had failed disastrously as a scribe and had been sent here as a last resort. If he failed again he would become a pit labourer, as good as a slave.
    Nish could not bear that. It was the most powerful motivation of all. He was determined to succeed at being an artificer, no matter what it