Free Destiny: Child Of Sky by Elizabeth Haydon

only misstep he had seen Vincane make was the time he had chosen to urinate in the drinking water bucket before handing it down, thinking this to be great fun.
    He had his back to the doorway, and had not noticed that Esten had arrived early for her monthly inspection of the tunnel. The wasting of water was a crime in Yarim Paar, and though Esten chose to disregard a number of common laws herself on a daily basis, apparently this was one about which she felt strongly.
    She had seized Vincane by the ears from behind and twisted them violently, almost ripping them free of his head in the process, following the action up with a resounding box on both sides of his bleeding head. Vincane had learned from that experience and had not repeated his joke, at least as far as Omet had noticed, though he had not seemed to even notice the pain.
    Even those things that could be seen as positive attributes about Vincane somehow or another always turned fetid. Unlike the other apprentices, Vincane had no compunction about hauling out the bodies of the slave-child miners who died in the tunnels, dragging them out of the hod and back to the furnace in the wing of the foundry where the journeymen slept.
    Esten had decreed that the secondary furnace, the journeymen's furnace, would be used as a crematorium since the unfortunate day when one of the slave boys had made the mistake of attempting escape during the monthly airing. Esten had hurled him into the largest main kiln and slammed the door shut. The stench afterward had been minimal, but the slip had been affected by the additional moisture; six racks of tiles were ruined, and so from that time on Vincane would use only the furnace in the far wing for disposal of slave-child bodies. Omet had once gone back to see what had taken him so long, and had retched upon discovering what Vincane's ritual before cremation had been.
    Blessedly, only one of the current crew had died recently; this batch appeared to be fairly hardy. No one spoke of the tunnel; it was forbidden, under pain of death, to do so outside the tileworks. The tileworks itself was merely a front for the digging, which took place all hours of the day and night.
    The front of the foundry, known as the anteroom, held a small forge and some ceramic kilns for firing the tiles and pottery which was sold throughout Yarim and Roland. The first- and second-year apprentices served there, learning to mix and measure the slip, to trim the molds and shovel the heavy pallets of tile from the smaller furnaces.
    The real work took place in the rear, behind the great double doors, in the firing room where the larger ovens and vats were. The third-, fourth-, and fifth-year apprentices lived and worked in this place, pouring and baking drainage tiles and paving stones. The more artistic work was done in the foundry's wings, where the journeymen lived and worked. Sixth-year apprentices, as well as sevens in their journeyman year, spent their days serving the end of their training under the masters of the craft, learning the delicate intricacies of architectural drawing and hand-painted porcelain.
    For a brief time in his fourth year, Omet had served an overseer's rotation among the first- and second-year apprentices, supervising their work. Quickly he had learned the most important lesson of supervision: put the whip to those lower than you on the ladder. It had been an easy few months, and he looked forward to returning to the indolence of supervision when his journeyman year was over.
    Once the profession in which he was training had been a vocation, an artistic calling. Now Omet hated tile, hated the hard work of pouring and baking, trimming and hauling, hated the red clay that stained his hands and arms the color of dried blood.
    And Omet hated the new apprentice.
    Esten's voice reverberated up from the well shaft.
    'Done."
    Omet continued to gather the battered tin plates from the filthy hands of the diggers, watching silently out of the corner of