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 It was as if it had been drained dry, all that psychic promise withdrawn.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.

Tiaan took her mug to refill it at the barrel outside. On opening the door she was confronted by a dark, wiry man with an eagle beak of a nose. He threw out one arm as if to block her way. His hands were enormous, sinewy, though the rest of him was compact.

'Overseer Gi-Had!' She stepped back involuntarily. Though she had been expecting him, his sudden appearance came as a shock.

'Artisan Tiaan, what progress have you to report?' Gi-Had's brows squirmed over those sunken eyes like a pair of hairy grubs. He had a wooden case in his other hand.

'I -' she turned back to her bench, where the hedron lay with its spread-out controller apparatus like a disassembled birthday toy. 'I haven't found the problem yet. They worked perfectly when I delivered them.'

'Well, they don't work now and soldiers are dying.'