by K. J. Parker
“That’s stupid,” she said. “I couldn’t have done anything like that. I’m not an engineer.”
“No.” He nodded. “But you asked Ziani to build the doll, for Moritsa. You told him it had to be the kind that could move its arms. And you knew that if you asked him to do something, he’d do it. He’d have no choice, no matter how terrible it was, because he loved you.”
“Rubbish,” she said. “How would I know about types and mechanisms and stuff?”
He smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “For giving me my cue. You wouldn’t know, unless somebody told you. Somebody who also wanted to get Ziani out of the way. Someone you were in love with – you never cared anything for Falier – and who, for a time at least, was infatuated with you.”
“You’re a very strange man,” she said. “You’re sitting here telling me all this garbage when the savages—”
He held up his hand. “But that wasn’t the only reason,” he went on. “He loved you – I suppose you could call it that, though I should imagine it was more of an obsession on his part; the usual thing with a middle-aged upper-class man and a young low-class woman: the thrill, the sin, the exhilaration of breaking the rules and getting away with it. And I’m assuming the physical side was at least adequate. After all, he chose you, and a man like that could’ve had practically any woman in the City.”
She said nothing.
“Although,” he went on, “from what I can gather, he wasn’t like that. Usually, as I understand it, when a man of Boioannes’ stature and position gets obsessed with sex, a large part of the pleasure is the number and variety of conquests. Curiously, all my researches have only turned up six verifiable liaisons, all of them brief and fairly low-key. The rest of the time, he seems to have been a contentedly married man, until he found you. Now, looking at you, I really don’t see—”
She yawned. “What was that name you said?”
“Maris Boioannes.” He steepled his fingers. “Your lover. It was Boioannes who came up with the idea of tricking Ziani into breaking the law. He told you to nag and wheedle Ziani into making the doll with arms that moved; he’ll have said it was so Ziani could be got out of the way, and then you’d pair off with a nonentity – Falier, who happened to be smitten with you anyhow – and after a decent interval he’d find a way of getting rid of Falier as well, and then you could be together. I wonder,” he went on, “how he explained how Falier fitted into the plan, why he was needed. My guess is that if anybody came snooping round – me, for instance – they’d assume it was all Falier’s idea; that Ziani started building the doll off his own bat, Falier noticed the abomination and turned him in to Compliance to get you for himself. Something like that? I’ll take that as a yes. I expect the way he explained it made a whole lot of sense. Whatever else he was, Boioannes was a wonderfully persuasive man.”
“Maris Boioannes,” she repeated. “I’ve heard of him. Isn’t he some grand politician?”
Psellus smiled. “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “I don’t need to prove a word of this to anybody else. I just need to know it, and make you do what I want you to.”
She was still for a long time; then she nodded, a tiny movement. “All right,” she said. “What’s that?”
“Barrels?” the colonel repeated.
“That’s right.” The staff major shrugged. “Beats me, too. But that’s what they’ve been doing. According to my best observers, all those lights we’ve been watching come up the trench are men rolling barrels.”
The colonel sat down on a smashed beam and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. “What do you make of it?” he said. “I guess they could be using them to prop up the roof of the sap, but it seems like a lot of effort to go to.”
A thump, and the ground shook. Neither man seemed to notice. After four hours of the bombardment, they were getting used to it. “We ought to dig a countersap,” the major said. “If we dig under their sap and undermine it—”
“I suggested that two hours ago,” the colonel replied. “He didn’t even answer my note.”
“He’s not a soldier.”
The colonel grinned. “Neither are we. So, no countersap. There’s probably a very good reason,” he added wearily. “Probably it’d damage the embankment even more than what they’re doing.”
“Not if we shored it properly.”
“You know how to do that?” The major shook his head. “I don’t, either. Their sappers are mineworkers, they know what they’re doing. If we go digging bloody great big holes in the ground, we’ll probably bring down the City walls. No, leave well alone, sit tight and do as we’re told. And no sorties,” he added quickly. “Leave it all up to Chairman Psellus and whoever does his thinking for him. Then, whatever happens, at least it’s not our bloody fault.”
The major drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. “As you say,” he said. “Actually,” he went on, “you didn’t let me finish. What I was going to say was, they were bringing in barrels, but now they’ve stopped. In fact, there’s nothing going on in the trench at all, as far as we can see.”
The colonel frowned. “But the sappers are still there,” he said. “They haven’t gone back down the trench.”
“We don’t know that. They might have gone back, it’s still too dark to see.”
Now the colonel was rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. “Chairman Psellus himself told one of my junior officers it’d take them a week to dig in deep enough to bring down this embankment. It’ll be daylight soon, and then we’ll be able to see what’s going on, and presumably the chairman and his advisers will have a plan of action. Meanwhile, we stand to, as ordered, and resist the temptation to think for ourselves. As I understand it,” he added, “that’s what being a soldier’s all about.”
The major left to report back to whoever he reported back to, and the colonel sat still for a while, watching the red stains seeping through the crack between the horizon and the sky. Daylight, he thought; soon it’ll be daylight, we’ll be able to see what’s going on, and everything will be just that little bit easier. He closed his eyes, and he could still see red streaks. Bad omen, he thought, so he made a conscious decision to think about something else. For example: what could the enemy possibly want with several hundred seventy-gallon barrels?
That, however, was too much for him; he managed to come up with several explanations, but they were all equally improbable, with nothing much to choose between them, and none of them was he inclined to accept. His mind drifted away, slipping through tunnels of memory to the time when his grandfather had taken him to see where he worked, in the varnish factory (that was the connection, because the cellars of the factory had been crammed with barrels full of varnish waiting to be shipped, and he’d got into the most terrible trouble because he hadn’t left the lamp outside the door as he’d been told; one mistake with a lit lamp in here, Grandad had told him, and they’d have to redraw all the maps)…
He jumped up, his mouth open, barely aware that he was yelling. A round shot landed a few yards away, and he felt the spray of dirt it kicked up hit him like a slap across the face. Someone was screaming, but that didn’t matter. He listened to himself; he was howling, “Clear the embankment, evacuate,” but nobody was listening; there were men scrambling round a collapsed redoubt, trying to pull some poor devil out from under the heaps of shattered brick. He ran up to the nearest man and started tugging at his arm; he was shouting, “No, no,” at the top of his voice, but the man didn’t seem to understand, which was ridiculous, because there just wasn’t time to explain; but he had to try, so he bawled, “If that lot goes up, they’ll have to redraw all the maps.” But the man still didn’t seem to have understood, and now there were at least two other men he couldn’t see, grabbing his elbows from behind, pulling him back. But that was ridiculous, because they had to listen to him and get away from the embankment, quickly, now, before whatever was in those barrels blew up…
“Have you thought,” Ziani said suddenly, �
��how you’re going to light it?”
Daurenja grinned. The mud had dried on his face and was beginning to crack and peel, like flaking skin. “Actually, yes,” he said, and he slipped his hand down the front of his breastplate, fished about for a moment and pulled out a cloth bag about the size of a shoe. “I think it’s only fair that you should be the first man to see it in action, so to speak. I think you deserve that.”
He untied the cord round the neck of the bag, and started sprinkling some kind of coarse black powder. It reminded Ziani of the dust left behind in a cellar after all the coal had been used up.
“Is that it?” he asked. “Your magic powder?”
“Hardly magic,” Daurenja replied, not looking up. “Just plain science. And also, incidentally, my life’s work and my gift to all mankind. When I say the word, get ready to run like buggery.”
He’d used up the last of the powder, and shook out the bag. He’d made a line about two yards long, starting under the nearest oil-soaked barrel. “It looks like ordinary soot,” Ziani said. “Is that what it’s made from?”
Daurenja turned his head and smiled at him. “No,” he said. “Ready?”
Ziani nodded, and Daurenja picked up the lantern and threw it on the floor where the powder line ended. “Run!” he heard Daurenja shout, but he ignored him; the sight of the burning powder was too interesting. That little trail of dust wasn’t just burning. It was like watching a blossom unfurl; he simply couldn’t believe that so much fire could come out of a little trail of powder, and the noise it made, and what was that smell?
Daurenja must have grabbed his arm and yanked him; he felt himself stagger, then found his feet and scrambled to keep from falling over. Then the force of the oil catching fire hit him in the back like a door, and a stripe of burning pain licked across his shoulderblades. So that’s why he said run, he thought, and ran.
He had no idea how far he’d gone, but Daurenja stopped suddenly and he stopped too. They’d reached the first zigzag, where the trench folded like an elbow. He felt himself being pushed to the ground, but he took no notice; he was staring at the huge orange rose of flames bursting out of the side of the embankment. It was an extraordinary sight, flames at least twelve feet high reaching out like a trapped man’s waving arms, but he thought, That’s not enough, surely. It’s got to get really hot to make the flour—
Then the noise came. It slammed into him, and suddenly there was dead silence as his ears overloaded; but he didn’t really notice that, either. He was watching the embankment, as much of it as he could see, move – as though it had been lying down and was now standing up, yawning and stretching, taking its time, until it filled the sky. And then it came down again.
Stones, timbers, whole machines and bits of machines, and so very many people. He saw them scrabble in the air as they fell, and when they hit the ground they crumpled, as the force of the fall squashed them against the ground. Then the dirt and the dust came down, dropping over the tumbling mess like a veil. Out of nowhere, a chunk of brick hit him on the point of the elbow. He yelped with pain, and debris fell on him, hard enough to push him down on his face. His eyes were clogged with dirt and grit. He closed them, rubbing furiously at his eyelids. He tried to congratulate himself, to feel pleased; after all, he’d been the one who remembered what happened to the shed full of flour back at the camp, when the Cure Doce set fire to it. His idea, his fault; but it didn’t seem to want to fit. Might as well try and claim the credit for a volcano or an earthquake.
“Shit,” he heard Daurenja say, and the way he said it was almost comical: awed, afraid and very deeply impressed, the tone of voice men use when making lewd remarks about women. He tried to peer through the dust, but it was too thick in the air.
“Right,” Daurenja said shakily, “that worked pretty well. Now we’d better get moving.”
Ziani remembered: the next stage in the plan. Any moment now, the flower of the Aram Chantat would break cover and advance at the double across the plain, to swarm up through the breach and start clearing the defenders off what was left of the embankment. That wouldn’t take very long . He thought about the people he knew, the men he’d worked with in the factory, trying to be soldiers and fight hand to hand with sharp weapons: ludicrous. He could picture them in his mind, lying on the ground like things spilt from a broken crate, skin sliced open, skulls crushed – he remembered a bad accident in the machine shop, some fool letting his hand get too close to a spinning chuck; flesh ripped open (like an impatient man opening a package), a glimpse of white bone before the blood oozed up to cover it; he thought of the blank horror that emptied the minds of the bystanders, how they shrank away, as though physical damage on that scale was somehow contagious. Since he’d escaped from the City, he’d seen more violence and injury than all the rest of them put together: he’d seen men gutted in fighting, Jarnac Ducas paunching and skinning deer, all the conventional horrors that only doctors and savages saw. Now, if he applied his mind to it, he could look at skin, blood and intestines and see only casings, hydraulics and components, and to him all human beings were simply mechanisms, subassemblies of his design. That was a better perspective, he’d come to believe. After all, whoever heard of a mechanic who got squeamish at the sight of a box of gears?
He looked up at Daurenja. The rising sun was behind him, so that he looked like a man wearing a burning hat; his eyes were wide open, fixed on something nobody else would ever see, and the dried mud was peeling off his skin in small, square patches. Let him have his moment of joy, he thought. One moment is all we need, and generally all we deserve.
It was a messy sunrise, like a wound clogged with mud, and as the light soaked into the plain, men started to appear, stumbling forward out of pools of shadow. They were the Aram Chantat, and they were on their way to slaughter the Mezentines.
A man he’d never seen before burst in through the door. His face was bleeding, and he’d wrapped his left hand in a bit of rag.
“They’ve got in,” he said. “They did something with fire, and the embankment just flew up in the air. They’re killing people everywhere, and—”
Psellus held up his hand, palm facing outwards. “Are the City gates shut?” he asked.
The man nodded. “We’ve got to open them and let our people get in,” he said. “Otherwise the savages’ll kill them all. There’s nowhere they can go.”
“No.” The word came out in a voice he didn’t recognise. “On no account are the gates to be opened, is that perfectly clear? On no account.” He paused, just to catch his breath (and he remembered signing the report that started the Eremian war; just one man doing one little thing). “Our soldiers on the embankment will just have to look after themselves. We can’t risk opening the gates. Do you understand?”
The man was staring at him, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “They sent me to ask you—”
“Yes,” Psellus said, “and now I’m giving you an answer. The gates must stay closed. Tell the City wardens to get as many men as possible on to the walls and man the tower batteries. They’re to target the enemy artillery, only the artillery. Have you got that?”
A little nod, but he was still staring wildly. As well he might.
“Thank you,” Psellus said gravely. “Report back to me once the message has been delivered. And tell my clerks, no more interruptions, no matter what happens. That’s very important. Do you understand?”
When the man had gone, she looked at him. “They’re going to take the City,” she said, “and you’re not doing anything about it.”
He closed his eyes, just for a moment. “Wrong,” he said. “I will do something about it very soon, and as a result, they will not take the City. We have an ally who will save us, just as Duke Valens saved Duke Orsea and his wife at Civitas Eremiae.”
The look she gave him made him want to laugh, or to smash her face in. “Really?” she said. “Who’s that, then?” He kept his face still and straight, but under the table he clenched his fists
till they hurt. “Ziani,” he replied.
17
He was right. It took no time at all. Later, it was estimated that a third of the Mezentine dead were killed when Daurenja exploded his mine, either by the force of the blast, or by injuries caused by being thrown into the air, or by falling debris. The Aram Chantat disposed of the rest. An Eremian officer who arrived with unnecessary reinforcements halfway through the operation said it reminded him of killing rats in a barn: you lifted up a trough or a feed bin, then clubbed or stamped on them as they scurried frantically past. They hardly fought at all, he said, like it simply didn’t occur to them to try using their weapons.
In fact it was an Eremian officer, Major General Miel Ducas, who co-ordinated the reduction and elimination of Mezentine forces on the embankment after the breach had been made. His approach was simple but effective. Having used flying wedges to split up the mass of the enemy, he pressed them back against the City wall, surrounded each segment in detail and let the Aram Chantat get on with the job. In spite of their enthusiasm for the work, even the Aram Chantat eventually grew tired from the sheer effort of cutting bone and hammering metal, so he organised them into shifts, a fresh unit coming in to relieve the executioners when they grew too weary to continue. The number of Mezentines killed on the embankment was never reliably established, since a great many bodies were buried under the spoil and rubble; Chairman Psellus later put the figure at twelve thousand, but this was generally held to be an excessively conservative estimate.
Because the chairman was otherwise engaged when the embankment was breached, and all his superiors in the chain of command were killed or severely injured, or disappeared and couldn’t be found, Colonel Zosoter of the artillery took charge of the defence of the forward positions and the evacuation of the survivors. He had precious little to work with. The enemy’s flying wedge tactics meant that his forces were fragmented into isolated segments, and he was unable to communicate with them given the risk – practically a certainty – that any message he sent would be intercepted by the enemy. He was confident that the gates would be opened to let the survivors back in, and acted on that assumption, falling back on the gatehouses as the enemy pressed home their assault.