by K. J. Parker
“Fine,” Miel said. “Which are you?”
Vaatzes laughed. “Oh, I’m all right,” he said. “I’ve never had any doubts on that score. You mean, if I believe so strongly in the Mezentine way, how come they were going to kill me for abomination?”
Miel didn’t say anything.
“The trouble is,” Vaatzes went on, “the Guilds have lost their way. They’ve become…” He made a vague gesture. “I’m not quite sure how to put it. I suppose you could say they’ve become too tolerant.”
“What did you say?”
“They tolerate a lie,” Vaatzes said. “The lie is that their specifications, which are written down in the books and can’t be changed, ever, are perfect and can’t be improved on. And that’s wrong. Obviously it’s wrong. We can do better, if only we’re allowed to. That’s what I mean; their tolerances are too great. They make it an article of faith that you can’t cut this line closer than one thousandth, when it’s actually possible to shave that by half. That’s the real abomination, don’t you think?”
Miel didn’t say anything for a while. “And that makes it all right for you to humiliate perfect strangers.”
Vaatzes shrugged. “Either he’ll learn from it and be a better craftsman, now he’s seen there’s a better way; or else he won’t, in which case he isn’t fit to be in the trade. I remember my trade test, when I was an apprentice. Actually, it was the same as your man back there set me, to file a perfect circle. But it had to be right. The tolerance was one thousandth of an inch, which is the thickness of a line scribed with a Guild specification dogleg caliper. The material was half-inch plate, and the edge had to be chamfered to exactly forty-five degrees, in accordance with a Guild half-corner square. If you got it right, you passed and got your Guild membership.”
Miel nodded. “What happened if you got it wrong? Did they burn you at the stake or something?”
Vaatzes shook his head. “The finished piece is measured with the Guild’s prescribed gauges; basically, a hole the right size cut into a big half-inch sheet. It has to be an exact fit — they test it with a candle. If light shows through, or if a speck of soot finds its way into the join, you fail. If that happens, there’s a sort of ceremony. They put you in a cart, with your work hung round your neck on a bit of string, and on Guild meeting day, when everybody goes to the Guildhall to hear the speeches, they drive you round and round the town square from noon to sunset. People don’t jeer or throw things at you, it’s worse than that. It’s dead quiet. Nobody says anything, they just stare. For that half a day, you’re completely — I don’t know what the right word is. You’re completely separate, apart; you’re up there and they’re down below looking at you, like you’re everything that’s wrong in the world, captured and brought out so they can all have a good look at you and see what evil looks like, so they’ll know it if they meet it again. Then, at sunset, they get you down off the cart in front of everybody, and Guild officers take your piece of work and they kill it; they bash it with hammers, they bend it and fold it over stakes, and finally they heat it up white hot in a furnace until it melts, and they pour the melted metal into sand, so it can’t ever be made into anything else ever again.”
It took Miel a moment to find his voice. “And that happened to you?”
“Good God, no,” Vaatzes said. “I passed. It’s incredibly rare, someone not passing; I think it’s happened two or three times in my lifetime. Which goes to show, the system works. It’s a bit harsh, but it makes for good workmanship.”
“And what happens to people who fail? Do they get thrown out of the City?”
“Of course not. They learn their lesson, and the next year, they take the test again. Nobody’s ever failed twice.”
“Fine,” Miel said. “I wouldn’t recommend you trying to introduce that system here. I don’t think that sort of thing would go down well.”
“Of course not. You’ve got a long way to go, I can see that.”
Miel took Vaatzes back to his room. He had to make his report to the Duke, he said, and then the decision would be made about whether to accept his offer. “We’ll try not to keep you in suspense any longer than necessary,” he told him. Then he went to find Orsea, thinking long thoughts about the nature of perfection.
The Duke in council considered his report, together with a written submission from the Armorer Royal, who gave his opinion that the Mezentine possessed skills far in advance of anything known to the Vadani, and recommended in the strongest possible terms that his offer should be accepted. Further submissions were heard from the exchequer, the trade commissioners, the Merchant Adventurers and other concerned parties, after which the meeting debated the issue, with special reference to the effects of the aftermath of the recent war, the manpower position, the need to remodel the Duchy’s defenses and other pertinent factors. At the conclusion of the debate, the Duke and his special adviser Miel Ducas retired to consider their decision. After a brief recess, the Duke announced that the Mezentine’s offer was rejected.
9
Commissioner Lucao Psellus had seen many strange sights in his time, and it was a tribute to his flawless orthodoxy that he had survived each disturbing experience without allowing a single one of them to damage him in any way. He had, reluctantly, read heresy and listened to abomination, both the forced confessions of the man broken up by torture and the proud ranting of the unrepentant martyr. He had seen things that nobody ought to have to see, every imaginable permutation of the aberrant and the false. He had endured.
The spectacle he was presented with on this occasion was different, if no less taxing, and he found it extremely difficult to cope with. It took the form of a very large foreign woman, dressed in painfully bright patterned red velvet, with pearls in her hair and rings on all ten fingers. Even her boots were red, he noticed. Compared to the woman herself, the news she brought was trivial.
“Of course,” she was saying, “they haven’t made a formal decision yet. It’ll have to go before the council. They’ll call for reports and evidence and what have you, and then there’ll be a meeting, and then the Duke will finally make up what he pleases to call his mind. They’re like that in Eremia, since that young Orsea took over. He’s the worst thing that ever happened to the Duchy; can’t take a decision on his own, always terrified he’ll do the wrong thing, no confidence in his own judgment.”
Psellus made an effort to pull himself together. “You’re not Eremian, are you?”
She laughed. It was an extraordinary noise. “I suppose we all look alike to you,” she said. “No, I’m Vadani, I’m delighted to say.”
“No offense,” Psellus said weakly.
“None taken.” She laughed again. “I know that you people in the City don’t get to see foreigners very often. Besides, it’s actually quite an easy mistake to make. The Adventurers are pretty much a breed apart on both sides of the border; we’re more merchant than Vadani or Eremian. I suppose I’ve got more in common with my colleagues in Eremia than with the silver-miners or the horse-breeders back home. It comes with travel, I always think; you can’t be parochial if you’re constantly moving about. And you don’t get more parochial than backcountry Vadani.”
Psellus frowned. “Since we’re talking about that sort of thing,” he said, “I might as well ask you now. Why is it that all you merchants are women?”
She raised both eyebrows. “Blunt, aren’t you?” she said. “But it’s a fair question, I suppose, and if you don’t ask, you won’t ever know. It’s a social thing, I suppose you could say. You see, where I come from — I know it’s different here, but so’s everything — we don’t like waste. Mountains, you see; you don’t waste anything if you live in the mountains, because anything you can’t actually grow up there, or catch, or dig out of the ground, has got to come all the way up the mountain, usually on someone’s back. So we have this mindset, I guess you could say: make best use of everything you’ve got, and don’t squander your resources. And if there’s something you can’t
use, you apply your mind and find a use for it.”
“That makes sense,” Psellus conceded.
“Well,” she continued. “people are a resource, just like everything else. And mostly, it’s obvious what use most people should be put to. Men work outside, in the pastures or mining; men of good family run things, naturally. Women work inside, running the home, bringing up children. But there’s one group of people who don’t immediately seem to be much good for anything. People like me.”
She paused, clearly waiting for a rebuttal or at least a protest. Psellus wasn’t minded to indulge her, so she went on: “Unmarried middle-aged women of good family. Completely useless, wouldn’t you say? No homes to run or families to look after; obviously we can’t go out herding goats or spinning wool. All we’ve got is a bit of capital of our own and a bit of education. So, when you think about it, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Psellus replied. That made her laugh again.
“You don’t see it, I can tell. And that’s understandable, you don’t have the problem. You’ve got people at the top — all men, of course — and people at the bottom, and nothing in between. I imagine you think it’s perfect, like everything else here.”
Psellus tried not to frown. He wished he hadn’t raised the subject. Some of his colleagues claimed that they actually enjoyed foreigners, their appallingly quaint lack of civilization, but he couldn’t see it himself. “As you say,” he replied, “we don’t have the problem. Please forgive me if the question was offensive.”
She shook her head. “It’s pretty hard to offend an Adventurer,” she said. “You get to learn quite quickly, people are different wherever you go. Wouldn’t do if we were all the same.”
“Ziani Vaatzes,” Psellus said.
“Ah yes. Him. Well, I think I’ve told you everything I know. Seems to me,” she added cheerfully, “like all your nightmares have come true. One of your top people has got away and taken all your secrets with him, and he’s offered to give the whole lot to your deadly enemies, who you just stomped on hard in a war. Couldn’t really be any worse, from your point of view. Of course,” she added, “there’s not a lot to worry about really. The Eremians are poor as dirt, it’d take them a hundred years to get to the point where they could be a threat to you, even if you left them alone and let them get on with it. It’d be different if this Vaatzes of yours had gone to the Vadani, of course, because we may be ignorant hill folk just like the Eremians, but we’ve got all that lovely silver, not to mention a duke who knows his own mind and gets things done. And I wouldn’t be surprised if this Vaatzes isn’t wishing he’d gone the other way up the mountain, if you follow me.”
It took him another quarter of an hour and a certain sum of money to get rid of her; then he crawled away to his office at the top of the Foundrymen’s tower, to pick the meat off what he’d just heard. A cup of strong willowbark tea helped him clear his head, and as the fog dispersed and he was able to give his full mind to the facts, he started to worry.
No doubt the woman was right. The Perpetual Republic wasn’t scared of Eremia Montis. The whole Eremian army, hell-bent on razing the city to the ground, hadn’t constituted enough of a threat to warrant a meeting of the full executive council; and where was that army now? If you took the broad view, there really wasn’t anything to worry about.
But he didn’t have that luxury. Another thing the wretched woman had been right about: from the point of view of the commissioner of the compliance directorate, this was the worst day in the history of the world. A convicted abominator had escaped justice, killed two jailers, seriously injured an officer of the tribunal, walked out of the Guildhall in broad daylight, fled the country and run straight to the court of an actively hostile enemy, begging them to accept all the most closely guarded secrets of the Foundrymen’s and Machinists’ Guild. Yes, Eremia was negligible. So, come to that, were the Vadani, for all their wealth. But that wasn’t the point. Once the secrets were outside the Guild’s control, there was no way of knowing who would get hold of them, or where they’d end up. Geography wasn’t his strong suit, but he knew there was an inhabited world beyond the Cure Doce and the Cure Hardy, not to mention beyond the sea (his colleagues in the Cartographers’ Guild would know about that; except, of course, he daren’t ask them, because they’d want to know the reason for his unusual curiosity). And besides; even if there was no risk at all, that was entirely beside the point. His directorate had been created on the assumption that there was a risk, and the sole justification for his existence was that that risk had to be guarded against at any expense. In those terms, which were all that mattered, he’d failed.
He thought about it for a while, just in case he’d overlooked something, but he knew there was nothing to overlook. It was perfectly clear and perfectly simple. Crisestem and his assassination squad weren’t relevant anymore. Killing Vaatzes would be a desirable end in itself, of course, but it would no longer be enough. The whole of Eremia —
He wanted to laugh, because it was absurd. Here he sat, one man, chairman of a committee, in a tower above a small formal garden, and he’d just taken the decision to wipe out an entire nation. Ludicrous; because even if Vaatzes had already betrayed the secrets; even if he’d written them all out in a book, with notes and explanatory diagrams and a glossary and index in the back, there wasn’t a single soul in Eremia, or Vadanis, or among the Cure Doce or (God help us all) the Cure Hardy who could understand a word of it. But he was going to have to go down the stairs, through the cloister, across the small formal garden into the Great Hall and recommend that the army of the Perpetual Republic be mobilized and sent to kill every man, woman and child in a place he knew virtually nothing about, just in case; better safe than sorry, after all. It was stupid; and of course his recommendation would be accepted, and once the resolution had been passed in Guild chapter and the order had been given to the military, it would happen, and nothing on earth could stop it. Even if, by some extraordinary freak of chance, the army was resisted, defeated, massacred in a narrow mountain pass or drowned by a river in spate, another army would be raised and dispatched, and another, and another after that (because the Republic daren’t ever say it was going to do something and then back down; gods must be seen to be omnipotent, or the sky will fall). Even if the world was emptied of expendable people and the Mezentines themselves had to be conscripted, they’d keep sending armies, until the job was done. As soon as he left this room, the machine would be set in motion and the outcome would inevitably follow.
Not that he cared about savages; not that it mattered particularly if the whole lot of them were wiped out — there was a body of opinion among the more radical Consolidationist factions that held that the Eremians and the Vadani formed a necessary buffer between the Republic and the human ocean of the Cure Hardy, but that was fatuous. The real barrier was the desert, and there was no way an army could cross it. Therefore the Eremians and the Vadani were irrelevant, and it wouldn’t matter if they all died tomorrow.
But for hundreds of thousands of people, even savages, to die simply because he got up out of this chair and walked across that stretch of floor to that door and opened it… The reluctance was like a weight on his shoulders, pinning him to his seat. It was simply too big an act for one man. It was (he grinned as the thought crossed his mind; why? It wasn’t funny) an abomination.
But if it was that, how could it be happening? This act, this extraordinary thing, was nothing more than the Republic conducting business in the prescribed manner. It wasn’t as though he was some king or duke among the savages, acting on a whim. He was a component, an operation of a machine. That was more like it, he thought. The Republic is a vast and complex machine, powered by constitution and specification, with hundreds of thousands of human cogs, gears, cams, spindles, shafts, beams, arms, pawls, hands, keys, axles, cotters, manifolds, bearings, sears, pins, latches, flies, pistons, links, quills, leads, screws, drums and escapements, each performing in turn its specifi
c operation. He was the last operation before the army was engaged, but he was a component of the whole; ordinances and directives drove him, his office and his duties were the keyway he traveled in. It wasn’t as though he had any choice in the matter.
But if he stood up, he would walk to the door and open it, and the Eremians would all be killed. It occurred to him that although sooner or later he would have to stand up, he didn’t have to do it quite yet. He could pour himself another cup of the willowbark tea (it was cold now, but there), pick up a letter or a memorandum, answer some correspondence, sharpen his pen. If he really tried, using every trick of prevarication he could think of, maybe he could buy the Eremians a whole half-hour —
He stood up.
“I’m sorry,” Ducas said.
Ziani lifted his head and looked at him. “That’s all right,” he said. “It was just a suggestion.” He waited for the Eremian to leave, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry. Ziani wondered if he was going to apologize; maybe he’d confess he was the one who talked the Duke out of accepting his offer — he was sure that was what had happened. A strange man, Ducas. But that made him complex, and a complex component can be made to perform several operations at once. Over the last few days, Ziani had come to value him.
“So,” he said, “have they decided what’s going to happen to me?”
Ducas left the doorway, came in; he stood over the chair but hesitated before sitting down. The instinctive good manners of the aristocrat (it’s more important to be polite to your inferiors than your equals). Ziani nodded, and Ducas sat down.
“That’s pretty much up to you,” he said. “Well, strictly speaking it’s up to me, since you’ve been bailed into my charge; but that’s just a formality, since in theory you’re an enemy alien and all that.”