The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  The lines so meticulously sketched by the scouts could mean only one thing. He’d seen them before; in a book in his father’s library, one of a job lot he’d bought – histories and ordinances of the famous wars, lives of the great commanders, soldiers’ mirrors, didactic dialogues between A Master and Some Students concerning the various branches of the military sciences. Junk, most of them. He particularly treasured the explanation offered in one gloriously illustrated volume of why feathers on arrows and wooden fins on crossbow bolts make them fly straighter. The projections catch the air, making the missile spin. The spinning motion unseats the malignant spirits of inaccuracy who love to perch on arrows and make them fly wide of the mark. The tiny demons fall to the ground, allowing the arrow to fly unhindered towards the mark. There was even a picture, of weensy blue pointy-eared fiends scrabbling air as they fell, their lips curled in baffled fury. Obvious, really, when you thought about it.

  Almost as ludicrous (he’d always thought) was the catapult book. It had been a particular favourite when he was ten years old, because it had lots of drawings of funny-looking machines. Some of them looked like carts with enormous spoons sprouting out of them, others reminded him of giant wheeled violins, complete with bows; there were things like cheese-presses with crossbows wedged between the weights, and a sort of bent-back sapling arrangement that flicked a giant arrow off a pole. Also, there were the weird shapes. Stars, crinkly wheels, zigzags, knobbly things like overgrown cogs. When curiosity drove him to read the accompanying text, he found that these were supposed to be ground plans of fortified cities. That was what made him classify the book along with the treatise on arrow-riding pixies, because nobody would go to the bother and ruinous expense of building a city like that. All those spikes and wedges and sticking-out bits, and hardly any room left in the middle where people could live. Some old fool with too much time on his hands, he’d decided. And now, here those shapes were again, unmistakable as footprints.

  (The book was, of course, still on the shelf in the library of the ducal palace at Civitas Vadanis. He’d sent riders to find it and bring it back. In the meantime, he’d have to make do with what little he could remember.)

  He considered his enemy, Lucao Psellus. Impossible that anybody, let alone the newly promoted clerk, could have reinvented those exact shapes from first principles. It followed, therefore, that Psellus had his own copy of the book, and enough sense (unlike the young Duke Valens) to appreciate the value of what he was looking at.

  There was a bright side, though. As far as he could remember, the writer had devoted a whole chapter to demonstrating (with really impressive mathematical formulae that Valens hadn’t even bothered to try and understand) that, in the absence of grossly disproportionate forces and various other material factors, an attacker who followed the book’s precepts was likely to beat a defender following the same precepts six times out of ten. The list of possible vitiating factors was long and complicated, and Valens could only remember three of them (outbreak of plague among besiegers/defenders; failure of ammunition supply for one side’s artillery; treachery). It’d be interesting to read the full list again, and see how many of them applied in this case.

  Sandcastles, he thought; another game I used to play, in the big pit where the foundry workers dug out the fine white sand they used for filling mould-boxes.

  Sending for the book was all very well, but he was realistic enough to know that it wouldn’t be much use to him unless he also had someone who could understand it. For that reason, he’d also sent for Ziani Vaatzes. Both of them should arrive within the next two or three days, and then…

  Valens growled, rolled off the bed and sat on the uncomfortable chair. And then, he’d have no excuse not to get started. The siege of Mezentia; it sounded like the title of a play. A tragedy in three acts, complete with hero, villain, love interest, hero’s tragic flaw, betrayal, confusion and finally lots of death. He picked up a report, glanced at it; his father had enjoyed a good play, though he tended to talk to people during what he considered were the boring bits. He liked the fencing, he said, and the speeches before the battles, and the deaths, which were inventive, gripping and so much better than the real thing. Also, he’d been told once that a great duke should be a patron of the arts. It gave an impression of class, and the writers always found a way of getting your name in somewhere. When he’d died, Valens had paid off the Duke’s Men, cancelled all outstanding commissions and made it known there weren’t going to be any more. He’d given no explanation for his decision, and apart from the actors themselves, nobody seemed to have minded or even noticed. There had been a very good reason at the time, which had since slipped his mind. Of course, nothing spoiled a good play as much as a bad performance of it.

  The siege. It went without saying that the City had to be destroyed. If he let them off the hook, his Cure Hardy allies would probably push him out of the way and do the job themselves. Even if they simply gave up and went back home (which they couldn’t do, of course), that’d only make things worse. If the savages withdrew, the Mezentines would have no trouble recruiting mercenaries, and then he’d be back where he started, postponing the inevitable annihilation of the Vadani. No, the City had to fall, just to secure some sort of future for his people, as tolerated satellites of the Cure Hardy in self-imposed exile. A pity, but there it was. It was unfortunate that his one act of impulsive folly should have led to all this, but at the time he’d had no choice. And besides, as a result of it, hadn’t he gained the one thing he’d always wanted, and never thought he’d ever have? She was waiting for him back at Civitas Vadanis. As soon as the war was over and the City was rubble and ashes, they could at last be together, as they should have been from the very beginning.

  Well, then; that settled it. If a city with a population of over a million had to be razed to the ground just so he could go home to his wife… sledgehammers and nuts, to be sure, but it wasn’t his fault. There didn’t seem to be any other way of achieving the objective, and it was something he had to do, just as a dropped stone has to fall.

  5

  The messenger sent to fetch Ziani Vaatzes had left before the farcical night attack, but he heard the news from a dispatch rider on a rather more urgent errand than his own, at the Faith and Trust just outside Paterclo. The rider hadn’t actually witnessed the raid himself, but he’d heard all about it from his friend in the Sixth Lancers. He passed on the word that the assault party had been wiped out without the loss of a single Vadani. The enemy were a joke.

  When he reached Civitas Vadanis, the messenger repeated what the rider had told him four times; once to the city prefect when he reported in; once to Vaatzes when he delivered his message; once to the duke’s new wife, at her personal request; and once in the taproom of the Unity and Victory (formerly the Quiet Forbearance) in Well Street. By noon the next day, half the city knew that Duke Valens had wiped out the enemy’s new ally, and set out at once to tell the other half before they heard it from anyone else.

  After the messenger left on his return journey, with a two-squadron cavalry escort to guard some old book the duke had sent for, the head of the Aram Chantat’s informal but ferociously efficient intelligence service set out to report the news to his master, at the great camp on what had once been the Vadani–Eremian border. The old man (you could think of him as that as long as you were at least twenty miles away; definitely not when you were face to face with him) thanked him politely and told his secretary to make a note of it in the official record of the war. He also asked who the Cure Doce were, though he didn’t seem particularly interested in the reply.

  Although he’d been ordered to report to the forward camp as quickly as possible, Ziani Vaatzes hung on at Civitas Vadanis for one more day. There was a problem with the assembly line that called for his personal attention, he told the messenger; he knew the duke would understand, and of course he’d be on his way as soon as it was put straight.

  “Do you want me to come with you?” Daurenja as
ked him later.

  Ziani shook his head. “I need you to stay and look after things here. It’s bad enough I’ve got to go. We can’t both be away from here, or the whole job’ll grind to a halt.”

  “Of course.” Daurenja nodded briskly. “You leave everything to me. I’ll manage.”

  Of course he would. Ziani knew exactly what the workforce thought of Gace Daurenja, but he understood how to keep them working. So far they’d got four hundred of the heavy engines finished, dismantled and crated up for carriage. Six hundred more to go. A miracle; Daurenja’s miracle. Without him, Ziani knew, he’d probably still be fiddling about trying to fine-tune the prototype.

  Daurenja licked his lips and said, “When you get back, maybe we could make a start on that other business. You know, the thing we talked about.”

  Ziani made a point of looking past him. “All right,” he said. “You’ll have to fiddle the work rosters if you don’t want Valens knowing. And you may want to keep an eye on the rope shop foreman. I have an idea he talks to the savages.”

  “I know about him, thanks,” Daurenja replied with a grin. “He meets them in the Charity once a week, but they don’t pay him enough. I’ll think of something else he can tell them, and then everybody’ll stay happy.” He scratched his chin; he was growing a beard. “I’ve got almost enough clean grey iron for the slats,” he continued. “But I need time on the Mezentine lathe to finish up the mandrel. It’s all right, we’re ahead of target in the machine shop so we can miss a shift without holding anything up. But I thought I’d better just mention it.”

  Ziani nodded gravely. “Get it done while I’m away,” he said. “And I don’t know about it, all right?”

  “Understood.” Daurenja nodded again. “All being well, I should have the mandrel ready by the time you get back, and then it’s just a case of getting the slats drawn down. I’ve already spoken to the men I want striking for us.”

  Ziani frowned. “That’s a bit quick off the mark,” he said. “The fewer people who know about this, the happier I’ll be.”

  “They’ll be all right,” Daurenja reassured him. “Five Eremians and two Vadani. They know which side their bread’s buttered.”

  “Just make sure their shifts are covered,” Ziani said irritably. “We can’t afford to lose production at this stage. I can handle Valens if I have to, but I really don’t want to try explaining to the savages. They’re not easy people to talk to.”

  “Leave it to me,” Daurenja said. “After all, when have I ever let you down?”

  I should poison him, Ziani thought, after Daurenja had gone. It’d work. I’ve watched him eat, he just shovels the food in his mouth and swallows, he doesn’t give it time to taste of anything. Five drops of archers’ root on a slice of salt bacon, and all my troubles would be over.

  But of course he wouldn’t do that. Too risky, for one thing. What if the monster’s digestion was as prodigious as every other part of him? Even with ten drops it wasn’t worth the risk, for fear of the look in his eyes if he survived and figured out what had happened. What if he couldn’t be killed at all? People must have tried. Also, without Daurenja the horrendous balance of chaos and energy that kept the factory going would immediately collapse. He needed the freak, at least until the thousandth engine was packed and shipped; and by that time, Daurenja would be so deeply embedded, there’d be no chance at all of getting rid of him without wrecking everything. He knows that, Ziani reflected bitterly, that’s why he dares to eat.

  To chase the thought of Daurenja out of his mind, he grabbed the spanner and stripped the whole saddle assembly off the lathe he was working on. As he’d thought, the problem lay with the lead screw bushes; useless soft salvaged bronze scrap, doomed to failure the moment he’d fitted them. At home, he’d just take a replacement pair from the spares box under the bench. Here, he’d have to make them himself, out of salvaged bronze scrap, in the sure and certain knowledge they wouldn’t last out the month.

  Try explaining that to the Aram Chantat.

  He fished about in the scrap pile for the nearest shape he could find, then took it over to the Eremian who worked the number seventeen trip-hammer. “I need it swaged down to two-inch round bar,” he said, choosing to ignore the look on the man’s face. know it won’t be perfect but get it as close to round as you can. It’ll be hard enough turning it on one of those bloody useless home-made treadle machines. Of course, I can’t use the good lathe until I’ve made the bearings to fix it.”

  The man looked at him as though he was blight on winter barley. Behind him loomed the eight-foot-high frame of the hammer; green oak instead of cast iron, already starting to warp in the heat. Two months, and the tenons would spring out of the mortices. If it happened while the hammer was under load, it’d tear itself apart and be completely wrecked. In two months’ time, of course, they’d have finished and wouldn’t need it any more. He hated the sight of it. “Do I stop what I’m doing now?” the man said. “Only I’ve got the top on this anvil casting to do, and it’s taken an hour to get it up to welding heat. If I leave it and let it cool down, I’ll be standing around idle the rest of the morning while it heats up again.”

  Ziani tried to think, but couldn’t. “This is more important,” he said, uncertain whether it was true or not. “Get it done and fetch it over to me as soon as it’s ready. I’m late enough for the duke as it is.”

  There was a fairy-tale, every kid in the City knew it. The gods made angels, moulding them out of sunlight. The dark elves saw the angels and were filled with jealousy, wanting shining servants of their own. They tried to make some themselves, but of course they didn’t know how to mould sunlight, so had to make do with clay, That was how the first men came to be created; an ignorant fake, so wide of the mark it was almost a parody, but it worked, for a little while. Ziani looked down the long, high shed. It still stank of pine sap and tar. The engines, designed by him from memory, built by hastily trained Eremians and Vadani – even a few savages, they were so short of manpower – certainly worked, for the time being. The cupolas melted the bog-iron and scrap into brittle, impure blooms for the trip-hammers to beat out into sheet or form into round or square bar, or wire for the nail makers’ draw-plates. The water-driven circular saws slabbed the newly felled pine trunks into beams and planks, cut them to size ready for the chisels and twybills of the joiners. The end product was an engine capable of hurling a two-hundredweight stone four hundred yards. You’d get fifty shots out of them, maybe half a dozen more if you were lucky, before the crossbeams split under the pounding of the arms and the stubs cracked in their sockets and the dovetails sprang and the dowels sheared and the nails pulled through and the hand-cut screws stripped out of the spongy green wood. That was as it should be. The main difference, according to the story, wasn’t that men were ugly and stupid and bad and angels were beautiful and wise and good. The real difference, which defined them both, was that men were mortal. The Republic built machines that lived for ever.

  He thought about that, and decided it was a viable hypothesis, though of course impossible to prove conclusively; the gods had made engineers, but Ziani Vaatzes had made Gace Daurenja.

  (He examined one of the clapped-out bushings. From memory, he’d made them out of melted-down Eremian coins, in theory pure silver but in practice eighty-five parts bronze. It was the purest, most consistent bronze he could lay his hands on. Not good enough, though.)

  No, that didn’t work. He hadn’t made Daurenja, he’d found him and used him, because he needed an engineer, and Daurenja was competent, more than competent. He was also resourceful, tireless, efficient, highly accomplished, extremely brave; in his own abominable way, even principled. And, like Ziani, he had a simple purpose to fulful that left him no choice of action. Was it just a coincidence that he was practically impossible to kill, like the angels in the story?

  The hammerman brought him his swaged bronze bar; he turned it down and faced it off on one of the wooden-framed treadle lathes, drilled the
hole, parted off four bearings, fettled and fitted them. That got the Mezentine lathe up and running again, and he used it to make another eight bearings, naturally much rounder and tighter; four of them to replace the treadle-made stopgaps, and four spares. He tested the result by fixing a half-inch round bar in the chuck and measuring the runout as it spun. Five thousandths of an inch at nine inches from the chuck; a criminal offence in the City, but good enough for Duke Valens and the Aram Chantat.

  In the stories, of course, when the dark elves rebelled against the children of the Sun, it was inevitable that they’d lose and be thrown into the Pit, while their trashy, built-in-obsolescent handiwork was turned out to graze the Earth’s rocky surface, since Heaven couldn’t quite bring itself to put the wretched creatures out of their misery. But supposing the stories had got it the wrong way round? Supposing the dark elves rebelled, and won?

  Well; he had the lathe back up and running, which meant he had no excuse for not going to see Duke Valens, as ordered. Get it out of the way and then it’s done.

  He left the factory, heading for the southern gatehouse, where the messenger had told him there’d be a carriage waiting. Since he was already hopelessly late, he took a short cut through the outer gardens of the palace. Pleasant enough if you liked that sort of thing; a gravel path ran through a series of star-shaped knot gardens, some raised, some sunken, edged with box and lavender. At least the shapes were neat and tidy, though the gravel looked as though it hadn’t been raked for a week. Gardeners away at the war, presumably.

  A woman’s voice called out his name.

  It took him a moment to find her. She was sitting in a small bower scooped out of a large privet bush. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, not since he’d come back to the city to start up the factory. He’d been invited to the wedding, of course, but he’d been too busy to go.