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

took. Though he had little aptitude for the craft, he would master it.
    What he lacked in ability and experience, Nish made up with hard work and sheer, directed intelligence. He worked night and day until he was so exhausted that he could have slept standing. He drove his supervisors mad with questions, had them show him the workings of the war engines over and again, and invented ways of teaching his reluctant fingers what the other prentices learned easily.
    At the end of his first year he was ranked among the lowest of the prentices, along with the stupid and the chronically lazy. But he was not
the
lowest, and to Nish that was a major achievement. If his parents were impressed, they did not say so in their infrequent letters. Nish was hurt, but planned to try even harder next year.
    After two years, he was around the middle of the group. That earned grudging praise from his mother and a call to come home to celebrate his eighteenth birthday. He worried in case they had another change of profession for him, perhaps sending him to the army. His imagination and his wide reading told him exactly what war was like. He did not want to experience it – at least, not on the battlefield.
    When he got home Nish discovered that his father was the one who’d changed profession. Jal-Nish was now a perquisitor, charged with rooting out troublemakers, subversives and traitors wherever he might find them. It was an important, lavishly paid position, answering only to the scrutator for Einunar. One day he might even
be
scrutator.
    At the end of his third year Nish had moved above the middle of the prentices, but there, to his intense chagrin, he stayed. Sheer intelligence and hard work, no matter how well directed, could raise him no further, for he simply lacked the aptitude for artificing. It galled him, but Nish was nothing if not self-aware and wrote to his father telling him so, and expressing the wish that he might go back to being a merchant’s scribe.
    His father showed neither surprise nor disappointment. Jal-Nish merely wrote, ‘You’re doing well. Don’t forget to write, every day.’
    Nish bent his head to the clanker parts he had been wrestling with all morning. They formed the lower half of a mechanical-leg assembly, and putting it together was a job he particularly hated. The parts had been made in a dozen different sections of the manufactory and if any one was infinitesimally out of tolerance the assembly became a nightmare. Sometimes he spent days on the most tedious work only to find that one part had to be machined again, and all his labour undone.
    He banged the housing with a dirty fist. He was covered in grease, as always. Nish hated that – he liked to look his best. The women of the manufactory tended to sneer at artificers, mere ‘fitters’ as they called them, because it was such a filthy job. Many of the fitters were women, and they were friendly enough, but Nish disdained them. Artificers were beneath him, though he was one himself. He looked to the top of the heap, where he belonged.
    At that moment Tiaan walked by. Most respected in this manufactory were the artisans. They worked with their hands, but only with precious things: gold and silver, platinum and quicksilver, copper, amber and crystal. They never got dirty doing it and the best were brilliant, lateral-thinking designers. More importantly, artisans worked with their senses. They had special talents, akin to the Secret Art that was the province of mages and mancers.
    Nish could never hope to be an artisan; he lacked the vital talent. But prestige was everything to him and he wanted one of them for his woman. There were four artisans here, though only two were available. Of those, Irisis went by the fitters with her nose in the air, for she was of the House of Stirm, a crafter’s daughter and a crafter’s niece, made for better things than a lowly artificer. Nish hated her for it, but he understood her too. She was much like him.
    Tiaan