Resonance Tuner

The Resonance Tuner on the Free Companies' southern hiring-board is Wren Kalloway, age thirty, formerly of the Arcane Syndicate's harmonics faculty, which she left in her fourth semester on the afternoon the faculty proved on a blackboard that a room has no pitch. She had heard it since she was six. She left the proof on the board, the faculty in the room and the Syndicate in the city, and has been for hire since to whichever company can hear her; four can, by her count, and the board lists her under 'specialist — acoustic,' a category the board created for her and has not needed for anyone else. She is the only tuner on the board. She would, she says, like to meet the second.

Her instrument is a tuning fork the length of her body, struck once. It finds the resonant note of whatever it is pointed at — a wall, a ward, a rib — and holds it until the thing gives, and the mana-thread woven through her clothes vibrates colour to the note, so that a company which hires her learns to read her sleeves: blue for rain, gold when she is pleased, a green that means the ward ahead is older than its wall, and a brown that nobody has seen twice. Her workings resolve the way sound does, over the length of the note rather than at the strike, and the Companies' quartermasters have learned to stop timing her; the note ends when the thing gives, and not before. Maris Veloren once hired her to find the pitch of a wall and then punched it. The wall came down. Wren maintains it would have come down anyway, in a moment, and that Veloren was fined for being correct loudly.

She is on warm, faintly exasperated terms with Riona Valez, who came through the harmonics faculty years after her, heard the story of the blackboard in her first week, and has sent her the faculty's lecture notes every term since, without a covering letter; Wren reads them and does not reply and Riona sends the next set anyway, and the two of them have between them decided that this is a correspondence. The Syndicate has offered, twice, to readmit her at full standing, with the blackboard proof withdrawn. She has declined twice, in the same words: the room has a pitch, and she is not coming back until they can hear it. Her sleeves, both times, were the brown.