Tiaan could hear her foreman's fury from halfway across the manufactory. Doors were kicked open, workers cursed out of the way, stools slapped aside with his sword. 'Where the blazes is Tiaan?' he roared. 'She's really cruelled it this time.'

The urge to hide was overwhelming; also futile. She busied herself at her bench. What had she done wrong? There had never been a problem with her work before.

The door of her cubicle slammed back and Foreman Gryste stood in the opening, his chest heaving. A huge, sweaty man, he reeked of cloves and garlic. Thickets of hair sprouted between the straining buttons of his shirt.

'What's the matter with you, Tiaan?' he bellowed. 'This hedron doesn't work!' He banged a crystal down on the bench. 'And that means the controller is useless, the clanker doesn't go and more of our soldiers die!' He shook a fist the size of a melon in her face.

Letting out a yelp, she sprang out of the way. Tiaan and the foreman did not get on, but she had never seen him in such a rage before. The war must be going worse than ever. She took up the hedron, a piece of crystalline quartz the size of her fist, shaped into twenty-four facets. 'It was working perfectly when I finished with it. Do you have the controller?'

Gryste set that down gently, for it was a psycho-mechanical construction of some delicacy, a piece of precision craft work even the scrutator's watchmaker would have been proud of. The controller resembled a metal octopus, its twenty-four arms radiating from a basket of woven copper and layered glass.

Fitting the hedron into its basket, Tiaan unfurled the segmented arms. She clutched a pendant hanging at her throat and felt a little less overwhelmed. Visualising the required movement, she touched her jewelled probe to one metal arm. The arm flexed, retracted, then kicked like a frog.

'Ah,' sighed Gryste, leaning over. 'That's better.'