by K. J. Parker
His duty as a member of Necessary Evil was to stay in his office till called for, so that was what he did, with all his might. To help pass the time, he read; and since there were only two books on his shelf (Approved Specifications of the Guild of Foundrymen and Machinists and Collected Poetical Works of Arnaut Pegilannes) he went back over his files on the Vaatzes case; in particular the documents in the abominator’s own handwriting, recovered by the investigating officers from his desk in the ordnance factory. There was no point in doing this, but he did it anyway, because he was bored.
Mostly they were technical stuff: tables of screw thread pitches, tapping drill sizes, major and minor diameters of the standard ordnance coarse and fine threads, material codes, tables of feeds and speeds for each class of lathe and mill. Every qualified Guildsman was expected to have his own copy, taken with infinite care from the master copy on the wall of the Guild chapterhouse. Just for fun, Psellus dug out his own copy and compared it with Ziani’s; there were only two differences, and when he went down to chapter he checked them and found that he was the one who’d made the mistakes, twenty-odd years ago.
There was also a small book; homemade out of offcuts of paper (crate lining, possibly) stitched together with thick waxed thread and glued down the spine to a leather hinge that joined two covers, cut out of scrap wooden veneer. It was a neat job, but why bother; why go to the trouble of making such a thing when you could buy a proper one from a stationer’s stall in the market for a quarter thaler? Psellus checked himself; quite possibly, Ziani hadn’t had a quarter thaler to spare.
He opened it. The same handwriting, precisely laid out on the unruled page — on a whim he measured the spaces between the lines with a pair of calipers, and was impressed to find that they never varied by more than thirty thousandths of an inch; close tolerances, for a man writing freehand; writing poetry…
Psellus frowned. Poetry.
He read a few lines, to see if it was just something Ziani had copied out. He didn’t recognize it, and he was fairly sure it was as homemade as the book it was written in. It was bad poetry. It scanned pretty well, as you’d expect from an engineer, and the rhymes were close enough for export, as the saying went, but it was unmistakably drivel. Psellus smiled.
Her cheek is as soft as a rose’s petal
Her eyes are as dark as night
Her smile is as bright as polished metal
She is a lovely sight.
Which explained, he thought, why Ziani never quit the day job. He imagined him, sitting in his office in the old bell-tower (he’d been to see it during the initial investigation; he’d taken this book from the desk drawer himself, and slipped it into his pocket) on a slow day, nothing much happening; he saw him slide open the drawer and take out the book; a quick glance round to make sure he’s alone, a dip in the ink, a furrowing of the brow; then he starts writing, beautifully even lines through invincible force of habit; secretly, deep down, everybody on earth believes they can write poetry, apart from the members of the Poets’ Guild, who know they can’t. He hesitates, running down the alphabet for a rhyme for night (blight, cite, fight, height), and when he reaches S a smile spreads over his face, as the finished line forms in his mind like an egg inside a chicken.
Psellus rested the book on his desk. So what? Right across the known world, in every country with some degree of literacy, there are millions of otherwise sane, normal, harmless people who are guilty of poetry. Maybe Vaatzes thought he was good at it (if those long-haired layabouts can do it, it can’t be so very hard), maybe he thought he could make money at it, easier than cutting and measuring metal all day; maybe there was a voice in his head, bees making honey in his throat, and he had no choice but to write it down before he burst. Maybe it was a code, and really it was all secret messages from Eremian intelligence.
He opened the book again and read on. It didn’t get better; if anything, Ziani had put his best stuff at the front, like a woman running a fruit stall. It ran in loops; the same rhymes repeated over and over (he’d been particularly taken with cold/gold and heart/apart; sometimes he stacked them in a different order — apart/heart — but that was the limit of his avant-garde tendencies), the same bland sentiments stuffed into the same trite conceits, like sliced meat into flat bread; if original thinking had been Ziani’s besetting sin, there wasn’t much sign of it in his poetry:
My love is like the nightingale
Who sings her soft and tender tale
My love is like the hyacinth
That blossoms on its marble plinth
He frowned again. Would it be useful, he wondered, if he knew who this terrible stuff was addressed to? Anybody in particular? A sort of picture emerged from internal evidence; she had a soft face and wavy hair, and Ziani seemed to think she was nice-looking. That wasn’t much help in narrowing down the list of candidates. Maybe her name didn’t rhyme with anything. Maybe — anything’s possible — the lady in question was his wife.
(What was her name again? Ariessa. Ariessa, confessor, dresser, guesser…)
Well, Psellus thought, the world is full of strange things, and an engineer who writes bad poetry isn’t the strangest. He closed the book again, tagging it in his mind as a piquant and mildly amusing curiosity. On a spurt of inspiration, he opened it again and read down the first letters of each line. Gibberish; no acrostics. What you see is all there is. Sad, in a way. Certainly, there was a bittersweet irony in the fact that the man who would soon be bringing annihilation on the Eremian people was someone who thought prove was a legitimate rhyme for love.
Query: was there any more of this stuff among the papers found at the house, or was this a vice he only indulged while he was at work? Further query: now that Eremia was going to be destroyed and the whole question of Ziani Vaatzes’ crime was thus redundant, could he really be bothered to go down to the file archive and look? Answer to both: probably not.
With an effort, he evicted Ziani’s poetry from his mind and turned his thoughts to Boioannes, and various issues to do with timing. It did rather look as though Boioannes had contrived the war, just so that he could sidestep the ladder of dead men’s shoes (he paused at that particular image; Ziani, he felt, would’ve reckoned it was really good) and gratify his ambition to join and lead Necessary Evil. Sure, Boioannes would be capable of it, but was that what had actually happened? He could probably ascertain the truth by working out timetables, cross-referencing, looking in the files, assuming he was allowed access at that security level. Did it matter? No. It mattered even less than Ziani Vaatzes’ poetry. The simple fact was that the Eremian Duke (Orseus? Orseo? Whatever) had been right — them or us — but the scorpions had done for him. The strongest always wins, and who on earth was stronger than the Perpetual Republic?
Going round in little circles, like a mouse in a box. Psellus yawned, and put the Vaatzes papers away where he wouldn’t have to look at them. If Boioannes was responsible for the wiping out of Eremia, Vaatzes was only a pretext, of little importance; if Vaatzes wasn’t really to blame, neither was Lucao Psellus. He didn’t smile at that thought, because things had moved beyond smiling, but he felt a little happier with himself; like a drunk carter who runs someone over in the dark, and then finds he was already dead.
He stood up. True, he was supposed to wait there until he was sent for. On the other hand, he was bored stiff and his back hurt from too much sitting. He wanted to get out of his office and go somewhere. He left the tower, and the Guildhall campus.
Psellus had lived in the City all his life, but there were huge parts of it he’d never been to (like a good archer, who only uses a very small part of the target). He didn’t even know where Sixty-Seventh Street was, so he stopped at the Guildhall lodge and asked the duty porter, who explained that Sixty-Seventh Street was between Sixty-Sixth Street and Sixty-Eighth Street. Psellus thanked him and started to walk.
It took him the best part of an hour to find the building; a seven-story block, what the people who lived in this part
of town called an island. According to the file, the Vaatzes family lived on the sixth floor, west side. They had four rooms, as befitted their status as supervisory grade. As an act of extreme clemency, Ariessa Vaatzes had been allowed to stay there after her husband’s disgrace, at least until the child came of age; her rent was paid out of the Benevolent Fund, and she received half the standard widow’s pension.
Psellus climbed the stairs. Islands weren’t like the Guildhall, which was a pre-Reformation building, beautiful and impractical. Island Seventeen, Sixty-Seventh Street, was built of yellow mud brick; it was ugly but the stairs were straight and wide, and hadn’t yet been worn glass-smooth by generations of boot-soles. The stairwell was lit by tall, thin, unglazed windows blocked in by iron bars. There was a smell of damp, and various other smells he couldn’t quite identify.
Apartment Twenty-Seven had a plain plank door with external flat hinges. He knocked and waited. Nothing. He knocked again. Across the landing, the door of number twenty-nine opened a crack and a head poked out; an old man with deep eye-sockets and a big, round-ended nose.
“Excuse me,” Psellus said. “I’m looking for the Vaatzes family. Have I got the right place?”
The man looked at him. “Gone away,” he said.
Psellus frowned. “Are you sure?” he said. “The Guild register says they’re still here.”
The man shook his head. “Been gone three weeks now,” he said. “Her and the little girl. He went on before them, of course.”
“I see,” Psellus said. “Would you happen to know where they went? The wife and the daughter, I mean.”
“Couldn’t say,” the old man said. “Men came by to shift the furniture — wasn’t a lot of it left, mind, the soldiers took on most of it when they came for Him. Wasn’t anything good, anyhow,” the man added sourly, “just a few chairs and tables, and some boxes, and the beds. She had her clothes, in a bag. Place is empty now. Don’t reckon they’re in any hurry to move a new lot in. People don’t like living where something bad happened.”
Psellus hesitated; then he said, “Do you think it’d be all right if I went in and had a look? I’m from the Guild, there were some things —”
“Nothing to do with me,” the old man said. “You do what you like.”
Psellus tried the door, pressing down the plain tongue latch. Of course, he noticed, there’s no outside lock; just bolts on the inside, probably. “Thanks,” he said. The old man stepped back and closed the door, then opened it again, just a crack.
He’d been right; someone had stripped the place bare, even wrenched out the nails where pictures had hung on the wall. The windows were shuttered but the shutters had been left open; a few stray leaves had been blown in by the wind, and in places the floor was spattered with white bird droppings. In the main room a floorboard had been levered up and not replaced. Maybe that’s where Vaatzes used to hide his poetry, Psellus thought.
Plain walls, washed with off-white pipeclay distemper; clean and unmarked, which would’ve been impossible if people had been living there. Someone had seen the need to whitewash the place since the family left. From the bedroom window you could see the roof of the ordnance factory.
So, Psellus thought, why would Ariessa Vaatzes move out, after so much mercy had been expended to let her stay here? Several possibilities. Unhappy memories, that’d do it; hostility from the neighbors; she’d gone back to live with her father now she was on her own. Fine; but regardless of what’d happened to her, she was obliged to register her address with the Guild, same as everybody else, and the address in the file was this one. Another possibility: she was dead, and the old man across the way was lying about having seen her take her clothes away in a bag. But if she’d died lawfully, that’d be registered on her file; and who would want to murder her?
Not that it mattered. Sheer idle curiosity was all that had brought him here; he’d wanted to look at her again, to see if she was the sort of woman who’d inspire a man to rhyme love and prove in a homemade book. What if an important memo arrived while he was out of the office?
He shut the apartment door behind him. The old man wasn’t the Vaatzes’ only neighbor. There was bound to be a perfectly simple explanation for her absence, and once he’d found it out he could go back and stare at his wall some more.
Nobody at home at number twenty-eight, but the woman at number thirty seemed positively delighted to talk to him. No, he wouldn’t come in, thanks all the same; she was short, almost circular, with long hair and a bald patch on top, neatly dressed in a faded, carefully pressed blue dress and sandals that looked like they’d belonged to her mother. Ariessa Vaatzes; yes, she went on three weeks ago, took all her things. Three men came to help her, they took all the furniture that was left. A youngish man, and two middle-aged ones; the young man gave orders and the other two did as they were told. They were quick about it, like they were in a hurry. No, no idea where she’d gone. Always kept themselves to themselves, and the little girl was such a sweetheart, it’s always the kids that suffer most when bad things happen.
“Did you see the little girl leave?” Psellus asked.
“Oh yes,” she told him. “Went on with her mother. She didn’t seem upset or anything, of course they don’t realize at that age, bless them.”
“Did Ariessa Vaatzes seem upset at all?”
“Not really,” she replied. “A bit on edge, that’s all. Didn’t say anything to the men, but she left with them. But she never did say much. Quiet little thing, she was. Must’ve been dreadful for her, him turning out like he did.”
Psellus thought for a moment. “Did you talk to him much?” he asked.
“Him?” She looked at him as though he’d insulted her. “No, hardly at all. Oh, he wasn’t rude or anything, just never had anything to say. Always the quiet ones, isn’t it?”
“Did they have any friends in the island? Anybody they got on particularly well with?”
Apparently not. “They did have a few callers, though,” she added, “from time to time. Friends of his from work, I think, and her family, once or twice. Never met any of them to talk to, though, so I can’t tell you much about them. There was a very tall man with gray hair, and a young woman with a baby who came round in the daytime.”
He thanked her and left, walking fast to get back to the office, just in case. No memo; apparently, the war didn’t need him just yet. When was it, he asked himself, that I stopped doing work that was actually of any use to anybody? Was it round about the time I was given a degree of power and authority over my fellow citizens? In the filtered light of his office he wasn’t even sure what time of day it was; time passed unevenly there, dragging or flying depending on how close he was able to come to a state of mental detachment. Had he only just got back from his trip to the outside world, or had he been sitting staring at the wall for hours? Not that it mattered. Like all good Guildsmen, he lived only to serve the Republic. If it could afford to leave him idle for a while, it wasn’t his place to complain, just as he would have no right to object if it required him to work three days and nights without food or sleep. When was it that I stopped believing that?
Some time later, a memo arrived. A tall, thin boy brought it; he knocked at the door, pushed it at him and walked away. Psellus scraped the seal off with his thumbnail.
From Maris Boioannes:
In consequence of various matters, it has been decided to postpone the proposed military action against Eremia Montis for the time being. A document will be issued in due course. Personnel should resume their ordinary duties until further notice. You are required to refrain from discussing any aspect of the proposed military action with unauthorized personnel. Members of the Viability & Effects subcommittee will meet in the lesser chapterhouse at noon tomorrow to consider various issues arising from the above. None of the above affects the status of the mercenary troops currently billeted in the Crescent district of the city, who will be remaining until further notice. Commissioner Lucao Psellus is required to consult w
ith the compliance directorate as soon as possible regarding the detention or elimination of the abominator Ziani Vaatzes, who is still at large.
By order &c.
13
Abominations, Ziani thought, looking down at his work. If I wasn’t an abominator before, I’m definitely one now.
It was horrible; no other word for it. Instead of square- section steel the frame was built out of wood. The lockwork wasn’t machined but pressed and bashed out of plate. The slider was no more than a square of thin steel sheet hammered into a folded box over a square mandrel. The spring had been wound by hand and eye out of junk — scrap pitchfork tines, of all things, drawn down and forge-welded together. Just looking at it made Ziani feel sick.
But it had taken him just three days to put together, and it worked: the first functional scorpion ever built outside the Mezentine ordnance factory. And he could make more of them, very quickly, which was all that mattered.
True, the timber frame would shake itself to bits under the savage force of the recoiling spring. The lock clunked and twanged into battery rather than purring and softly clicking. The slider rattled about in its slot, wasting precious energy. The spring wouldn’t last, but that hardly mattered, since the frame would unquestionably disintegrate first. Without destruct-testing it he couldn’t be sure, but his best guess was that it would last two thousand shots. Which would be enough.
(Enough; it was a word in Mezentine, but people tried not to use it if they could help it. It stood for the admission of defeat, the recognition of the inevitability of inaccuracy, breakdown and failure. Enough was an abomination. In the perfect world to which Specification was a gateway, there would be no more enough. Eremia, however, was about as far as you could get from the perfect world without supernatural help, and the prototype scorpion would be enough for Eremia.)