'Thanks!' Selecting a lantern from the shelf, she lit it at Lex's illegal blaze, a brazier full of fuming pitch shards, and set off. The sides of the tunnel were strewn with broken wheels off ore carts, cracked lifting buckets, tattered strands of rope and all the other equipment that accumulated in a mine as old as this one.

When Tiaan reached the lifting wheel she found it unattended. She rang the bell but it was not answered so she got into a basket, eased off the brake and wound herself down. Level one, level two, level three. The shafts ran deep and dark and old here. It had been a mine for hundreds of years before the value of the crystals was recognised. As she passed the fourth level a blast of air set the basket rocking, almost blowing out her lantern. At least the ventilation system was working. There had been bad air down here the last time she'd come. One of the miners had nearly died.

Cranking herself down to the fifth level, Tiaan stepped into the tunnel and made sure the brake was off, otherwise no one could use the lift and the attendant would have to come down on a rope to free it.

It was pleasantly warm on this level, a nice contrast to outside and to the manufactory itself. It was always cold there unless you worked near the furnaces, and then it was unpleasantly hot. However, the artisans' workshop was right up the other end of the manufactory, on the frigid south side. Tiaan had been cold for most of her life.

She trudged on. Every chunk of waste rock had to be carried up and out, so the tunnels were no bigger than necessary to gain access to the ore and the veins of crystal. Often she had to go on hands and knees, or slip through a gap sideways with the uneven edges scraping her ribs. The rock here was pink granite, impregnated with veins that writhed like blood vessels in a drunkard's eyeball. The miners came for gold, platinum, copper, tin and silver, though her old friend Joeyn delved for something much more precious – the crystals from which the magical hedrons were made. Some were as big as her fist, and it was these Joeyn especially sought. Only certain crystals could be used for making hedrons. Few other miners could tell which ones to take and which, apparently identical, to leave behind.