The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  And for this, he thought, I betrayed my friend. It really shouldn’t have turned out this way. If you’re going to do some unspeakably evil thing to gain your heart’s desire, you should at least have the basic good manners to take proper care of your heart’s desire once you’ve got it, instead of leaving it lying around neglected, like a spoilt child’s toys.

  But that was far too easy to rationalise. The crime contains its own punishment; wasn’t that a quotation, or a proverb or something? His betrayal had led directly to Ziani escaping and defecting to the Eremians; that in turn led to the war, which was ruining their marriage. In other words, he could never have won her without making losing her inevitable; not to mention bringing destruction down on the entire Republic, like someone carrying home the plague in a shipment of tainted grain. To bring the world to ruin, for love; put like that it sounded wonderfully romantic – be mine, and let the whole world burn; another quotation, most likely. But he couldn’t twist his mind far enough round to see it in that light, somehow. Rather, he’d done it because he really had no choice in the matter. He had to have her, and it had been the only way to make it happen; the consequences were irrelevant, regardless of how many strangers died because of it. It wasn’t his fault; love was nobody’s fault, just like nobody was to blame for hurricanes, or lightning setting fire to the thatch. It’s not the apple’s fault that it falls from the tree, because it has no choice, if the branch can’t hold it any longer. He’d had no choice, because there had been no other way.

  Even so… He looked at the calculations he’d just finished making, so much hardening steel, apportioned between shovel blades and arrowheads. Arrows to kill men with, shovels to bury them with; add together the inventory of arrowheads already in stock and the requisition for arrowheads ordered to be made, and then imagine them, ten million arrows, each one cutting through flesh, into bone. A mercenary captain he’d talked to in Eremia had told him that in an average battle, one arrow in twenty hits something. He didn’t need his counters to do the calculation. Half a million hits; say a fifth of those manage to pierce armour and reach the flesh inside. Fifty thousand wounds (think of how much a splinter in your finger can hurt; think of an arrow as a huge barbed splinter). He shook his head, remembering the stacks of dead men he’d seen at Civitas Eremiae; stared at them in blank horror, and never even realised that what he was looking at was the true meaning of love.

  He was desperately tired, but he couldn’t get into bed, not with her there. He leaned back in his chair, lifted the mantle off the lamp and crushed the flame to death between thumb and forefinger.

  They said that the Vadani duke had married the widow of the Eremian duke, who he’d had killed on some flimsy pretext. You didn’t need to be a politician or a diplomat to figure that one out. It’s love that makes the world go round, they said; also, that the Vadani duke had only brought his duchy into the war for her sake. And then he’d married a princess of the savages, and when she’d been killed by the Republic’s cavalry in some skirmish, that meant the savages were in the war too, and now the City needed a million shovels double quick, to dig a hole to hide in.

  (I did all that, he thought. For love.)

  He closed his eyes. He’d be asleep in no time; and then he’d wake up with a crick in his neck from sleeping all night in a chair, because he couldn’t bring himself to share a bed with the woman he loved.

  They said Ziani Vaatzes must be mad, to have done all those dreadful things and brought disaster down on the City. Well; they were quite right, for once. And it never rains but it pours, and it’s always darkest before dawn, and every cloud has a silver lining, and sooner or later everybody falls in love with the foreman’s daughter. All perfectly true.

  So he closed his eyes, but it was a while before he fell asleep; his mind was still crowded with numbers and sums, bits of random information, facts he preferred not to face, things he wished he didn’t know. Just before the confusion in his head exhausted itself and faded into sleep, a question formed; one that he hadn’t ever considered before, and yet unless it was answered, nothing in the whole wide world could ever possibly make sense again. It flared up like the last ember of a sleepy fire, burned itself out and faded, and then he slept…

  Why did Ziani make the thing in the first place?

  She wasn’t there when he woke up. Bright grey light filtered through the window. His neck hurt.

  There was the end of a greyish loaf, some white butter, and a thumb’s-length of water in the jug. He changed his shirt, put on his coat and left for work.

  You could tell the time in the City by the smell. They’d already lit the furnace fires, but the smell was woodsmoke, not the foul, clinging taste of coal, so the kindling hadn’t burnt through yet. That meant he was a little bit late, but not enough to feel guilty about. The pavement was sprinkled with black snow, yesterday’s soot settled overnight and not yet trodden in. He stopped at the one-eyed man’s stall and bought a barley cake and half a dry sausage. The streets were still quiet; the day-shift workers weren’t expected to show up until the fires had had a chance to heat up, caking over the forges and bringing the water in the boilers to the simmer.

  The factory porter opened the wicket gate for him, and he stepped out of a narrow street into the cloister that led to the main shop.

  It wasn’t possible, of course; but Falier had always fancied that the roof of the main shop was higher than the sky outside. The City sky always seemed low and cramped, even in the summer heat; now, when the grey clouds crowded in, like stoppers on the bottles whose necks were the City’s drop towers and chimneys, you could make yourself believe that if you stood on tiptoe you could reach up and touch it, though you’d want to wipe your hands on something afterwards. Inside, though, it was different. To see the factory roof you had to lean your head right back, your eye drawn upwards along the line of the great wrought-iron pillars, close, straight and tall as pine trees in a forest. Outside, light seeped down through the cloud and the constant blanket of smoke like blood through a bandage. Inside it came in sideways, through the regularly spaced series of tall, narrow windows, so that during the day there were practically no shadows anywhere, and at night the whole place filled up with an orange glow so thick it was practically a liquid.

  There was always an hour’s break between shifts; enough time for the previous shift’s fire to burn off the last of its fuel and die down without letting the brickwork and the tue-irons cool to the point where they’d start to crack. During that hour, the only activity was dragging out the clinker, sweeping up the drifts of scale flakes, oiling and greasing the bearings of the trip-hammers; quiet, careful work, acts of recovery, almost of tenderness. Men hauled buckets of water to fill up the slakes, refilled the coal bins, greased the bellows leathers, generally made good before the destructive effort of the new shift. It was the time of day when the factory was pleasantly warm instead of uncomfortably hot; warm as the bed you leave when you get up to go to work, assuming you didn’t spend the night in a chair.

  The floor smelt of coal, oily water, wet rust and the unmistakable aroma shared by blood and freshly cut steel. On the toolroom side of the shop they were scrambling about on ladders, greasing the overhead shafts and dusting the long loops of drive belt with chalk, for grip. Two old men who’d been old as long as Falier could remember were walking slowly up and down the ranks of machines, filling the oilers from tall copper jugs. At the end of one row a sudden shower of orange sparks blossomed as someone trued up a grinding wheel, adding the scents of carborundum and burnt steel to the mixture. Falier had seen gardens, he’d even been in the grand formal garden in the inner courtyard of the Guildhall, but he’d never found them convincing. Somehow they’d always struck him as pointless attempts to copy the main shop, using trees and shrubs to represent wrought and cast iron.

  The superintendent’s office was on the eighth level of the galleries that encircled the main shop like the banks of seats in a theatre. Falier climbed the iron spiral staircase
, pausing at each level to look down. With a practised eye you could take in the health of the factory at a glance from here, in mid-shift, when the men scurrying about below dwindled out of individuality into flowing shapes of movement. Between shifts, the factory looked like its own schematic, a reduction intended to convey the workings of the machine. Ziani Vaatzes had told him that once he’d been in here when it was completely empty, apart from himself; there had been some reason for it, a total closedown while everything cooled, maybe the only time in its history when it had been entirely still. As he paused on the seventh level, Falier tried to imagine what that must’ve been like; to be the only living soul in the factory, nothing moving, no sound at all.

  He reached his office. It had no door; it’d be pointless, since it’d be open all the time. He dropped the sheaf of costings on his desk, glanced down at the notes left for him overnight. Cracks in the lining of number six furnace; that was bad, since cooling off number six meant damping down five and seven as well. Two of the big capstan lathes in the fifth aisle had shot their bearings and would need stripping right down to rebuild, out of action for two shifts and part of a third. Too much work, Falier told himself; too many shifts and not enough maintenance, and it’ll only get worse as the pressure grows. A strong superintendent wouldn’t stand for it, no matter what the politicians said. But was he going to tell Necessary Evil that they couldn’t have their ten per cent productivity rise? Of course he wasn’t. So the machines would wear out and seize, the firebricks would start to crack, output would fall when it should be rising and it’d all be his fault. But not today. And maybe it’d all be academic anyway. Maybe the savages would come and smash the factory to rubble with their home-made trebuchets before the authorities noticed the production slump. You’ve got to look on the bright side, haven’t you?

  He sat down in his chair (a Pattern Twenty-Nine, so it was perfectly joined, fitted and finished to within the exacting tolerances of its specification, but that still didn’t mean it was comfortable) and tried to twist his mind round to charcoal reserves, but it had seized like a rusty bolt; too much force trying to shift it and it’d shear. He was my friend, he thought. And yes, I betrayed him, for love, but I always thought I knew him well. So why did he make the stupid thing?

  A mechanical toy; to be precise, a quarter-size model of an old tramp, with a performing monkey on his shoulder. Turn the key twelve times widdershins, turn up the catch and the monkey danced an awkward, crabbed little dance, while the man’s hand lifted up and down, holding a hat to catch coins in. The pattern number was sixty-seven; they were produced mainly for export to the old country, where real monkeys were commonplace and the people were, apparently, easily amused. He thought about that. Ziani would have made all the internal parts himself, but it didn’t seem likely that he’d have gone to the trouble of making the castings for the heads, hands and so forth. He’d have had to start off by carving wooden patterns – highly dangerous as well as time-consuming and pointless, since the slightest difference would’ve marked the thing as an abomination, so clearly that anybody who’d seen the real thing would have noticed. Of course, he could have borrowed authentic castings and taken impressions of them to make his mould. But Ziani had never built a foundry at his home, had he? Surely not. It would have taken up far too much space, and the neighbours would’ve given him hell because of the smoke. Besides, there had been no mention of aberrant castings in the indictment at his trial.

  It followed, therefore, that he’d got hold of genuine castings from someone in the Toymakers’. That on its own should have aroused suspicion; what would an ordnance foreman want with toy components? But supposing he had someone who owed him a favour …

  Correction. The shaped outside parts weren’t solid castings, they were hollow and pressed out of thin brass sheet on a screw-mill. That made a bit more sense. No bother for someone in the Toymakers’ shop to slip a few extra blanks into the mill when nobody was looking, so it wouldn’t have to be a very big favour he’d been owed, as would be the case if the parts had been cast.

  Falier smiled. When the war started to get serious, the Toymakers’ had closed down their pressing and spinning shop. The heavy plant had been moved here, to the sheet-working section of the ordnance factory, and their operators reassigned; now they pressed elbow cops, greaves and tassets out of armour plate, and spun shield bosses and helmet crowns. In which case, the man who’d given Ziani the doll pressings must work here now, under the direction of Superintendent Falier…

  An office runner appeared in the doorway, waiting to take the costings up to the Guildhall. Falier handed them over, and said, “And when you’ve done that…”

  (The boy’s face fell.)

  “I want you to fetch me the record cards on all the tin-bashers who came over from Toymakers’ when they closed down the pressings shop. I expect they’ll be in the personnel archive. East tower, fourth level. Get someone to help you if you can’t understand the filing system.”

  The boy nodded miserably and slouched away. All right, Falier said to himself, as his eye skipped off the charcoal dockets for the fifth time, maybe I can trace whoever got Ziani the pressings. So what? What do you want them for? Oh, I’m building a Sixty-Seven for my kid; she’d set her heart on one, and you know how much they cost. No, of course I won’t mention your name if the shit hits the flywheel.

  (Whoever the unknown donor was, he must’ve been wetting himself ever since Ziani was arrested. Aiding and abetting an abominator – well, he might get off that, if he pleaded ignorance of what Ziani was planning to do, and if he had good friends in the chapel hierarchy. But theft of Guild property, unauthorised supply, breach of trust; enough there to get a man ten years on the treadmills. It’d have to have been a very substantial favour, or else Ziani had known where a body was buried.)

  All that for a stupid doll; but if the kid really had set her heart on one, and if she was highly skilled at nagging and Ziani was soft enough, you could just about fool yourself into believing it. But he knew Moritsa. She’d never shown any interest in mechanical toys. Far more likely that she’d think something like a Sixty-Seven was sinister and scary, and burst into tears at the sight of one, rather than persecute her father until he made one for her. Put like that, it simply didn’t make sense.

  Faced with the impenetrability of that conclusion, he turned away like a horse refusing a jump, and applied himself to charcoal reserves. What charcoal reserves? They were, he realised once he’d unscrewed the figures, desperately short of the stuff, and it was essential. The only alternative was coal, a substance he knew very little about. It was scavenged off the beaches of some province of the old country, shipped across sporadically in huge barges; for three months after a barge convoy had docked, it was cheap and plentiful. Then it disappeared. Charcoal, on the other hand, came in once a month from some huge forest out the other side of the Cure Doce country. The supply was so reliable and the price so stable that nobody ever thought about it. The deliveries still came – an endless line of high, gaunt carts drawn by thin horses, always reaching the City in the early hours of the morning, so they could unload and go away before the streets clogged with traffic; so discreet and invisible, you could easily believe in the Charcoal Fairy – and the quantities and price were exactly the same as ever. That was the problem, since demand had doubled. They needed twice as much of the stuff, preferably at half the price.

  He paused, and tried to think clearly. Surely there were other forests, or could you only make it out of certain kinds of tree, or in certain places? Unlikely, but he didn’t know. Besides, it wasn’t his place to seek out new sources of supply. That was Exchequer’s job, or Foreign Affairs (he had no idea whose responsibility it was, assuming it was anybody’s; more likely, the charcoal people simply turned up each month as they’d always done, without anybody in the administration organising anything); his role in the great river of supply was to be held responsible for the fall in output when the charcoal ran out.

  (I
could write a memorandum, he thought. But who would I send it to?)

  He heard the sound of a boot-sole on the iron grating outside his door, and looked up. He saw a man he didn’t know standing in the doorway; a round, soft, balding man in plain, clean clothes and thin boots, so obviously a Guildhall clerk. Nobody wore anything except steel toecaps in the factory.

  “Yes?” he snapped.

  “You’re Falier.”

  The voice was mild but not weak. A senior clerk, then; although it was hard to believe that anybody of any importance in the clerical grades would come here himself, unannounced, soiling the soles of his fine shoes with oil and swarf from the factory floor. “That’s right,” Falier said. After a night in a chair followed by the depressing implications of the breakages list and the charcoal figures, he wasn’t in the mood for Authority, and he guessed that anybody who climbed his stairs, even in fancy shoes, was somebody he could be rude to without getting into trouble. “What do you want? Only I’m very busy.”

  “My name is Lucao Psellus.”

  Wonderful, Falier thought. I’ve just insulted the head of state. He jumped up out of his chair and tried to make his mouth work, but it wouldn’t.

  “Sorry to disturb you.” Psellus took a step across the threshold, then stopped. “I know you must be rushed off your feet right now. If it’s a particularly bad time…”