Quillifer the Knight

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Please leave the lord lieutenant’s letter with me,” he said.

  I returned it to his desk and tied up the blue ribbon. “I have seen documents in blue ribbon,” I said, “and in your outer office I saw documents in red ribbon. May I ask if the color is significant?”

  “Blue ribbon is used for matters that are still in progress,” said Edevane. “Red ribbon for those matters which have reached a happy resolution.”

  “An admirable system, my lord.”

  As I made my way out, I wondered if the happy resolution involved the spilling of any liquid matched in color by the red ribbon.

  My answer came a few hours later, when I heard of the fall of Lord High Admiral Mardall, who had lost his office and been carried off to the prison at Murkdale Hags.

  When I’d had my interview with Lord Edevane, his men had been breaking down the admiral’s door.

  * * *

  I know what you would say about the admiral’s fall. The more room at the top, the more room for us to advance. And I suppose it matters little to me, for I had never met the lord admiral, and I suppose he was little better than other politicians.

  Yet it seemed a shame for him to be so singled out, when so many others could be hanged with perfect justice.

  * * *

  “Ay,” said Lipton, “my lord admiral objected to Their Majesties’ plans to halve the funds for the navy.”

  “Why should they do that?” asked the engineer Mountmirail.

  “The chief purpose of the navy is to protect us from Loretto,” Lipton said. “The queen has married Loretto’s heir, and our country no longer needs such protection. Or so they reason.”

  “The high admiral is one of the great offices of state,” said I. “Her Majesty could have merely replaced him. Why drag him to Murkdale Hags?”

  “He will be accused of peculation, sure. Those to whom he awarded contracts for supplying the navy and building its ships expressed their gratitude, sure, and in good silver.”

  “But that is the case with all the great officers, and most of the minor ones,” I said. “There are perquisites and sweeteners customary to each office. For why would anyone serve the state, except to make himself rich?”

  “Mardall was a great sea-captain,” said Lipton, “and fought with the late king in all his wars. With a man as popular as he, it were better to kill him than to permit him the freedom to rally his friends and engage his enemies.” His lips twisted as if he were tasting something foul. “This is Lord Edevane’s work,” he said.

  “I hope you are not so outspoken elsewhere,” said I. “You should be wary in mentioning that name, for your own safety.”

  Lipton cocked a bushy eyebrow. “It’s your safety that concerns me, youngster. For now you are an office-holder, and under Edevane’s eye. If you offend him, or Her Majesty, or anyone powerful—and of course you already have achieved a reputation for doing exactly that—you could be mewed up, or your poll clipped.”

  “That could be true whether I held an office or not,” said I. “And as for peculation, I have no idea why anyone would offer me a bribe to fight monsters, or how I could extort one.”

  “For a courtier,” said Lipton, “you have a very small imagination.”

  We were in Mountmirail’s workshop, set in an old foundry north of the river. A turgid canal that ran beneath the window filled the air with its fetor, and the stench vied in my senses with the hot greasy reek from the forge that had been set up under an awning in the court behind the building. One of Mountmirail’s assistants was hammering out a piece of iron on the anvil, and another sat at a scarred wooden table, working with feathers and glue.

  “Your grinder is complete, sir,” said the engineer. Mountmirail pulled a tarpaulin off the machine. “You wanted an engine that will grind your substance to a finer powder, and so you see I have created a chute that feeds the coarse grind from the old machine directly into a second grinder.” He picked up a wooden scoop and thrust it into the hopper that contained the finer product, then let a thin stream fall through the air. “ ’Twould make a fine ink, if ink is what you are after. Though I cannot see what you would want with so much ink.”

  “I would like three more of these engines,” I said.

  “Erskine would be happy to make them for you,” Mountmirail said, and nodded toward the assistant at the forge. “But he must finish this other project first, for we are repairing damage to the old temple of Horagalles. A wall has cracked apart, and we are making iron staples to stitch it back together.”

  “Does Horagalles still have worshippers here in Howel?” I asked “Or has the temple been converted to some other purpose?”

  “People still worship the Old King,” said Lipton. “But it’s hard to find priests, because men with ambition want advancement, and advancement comes only from Their Majesties, who disparage the old gods and hold to the path of the Compassionate Pilgrim.”

  “It is a grand old building,” said Mountmirail. “The largest temple ever built here. But it’s in poor repair, for it’s in a poor part of town, and the god’s followers are mostly poor. The statue of the Old King is quite wondrous, though, made of gold and ivory, and sapphires for eyes. You should visit it, on a sunny day when you can see it properly.”

  “I shall.” I looked at the assistant who was gluing feathers to a wooden frame. “What are you making here?”

  “A flying bird.” Mountmirail went to a rack and took down a bird-shaped machine, about the size of a thrush. He wound the mechanism with a twist of his fingers, and then tossed the bird into the air. At once it began to thrash the air with frantic beats of its wings, and to my immense surprise the bird began to bound through the air, darting high amid the blackened old roof beams. It seemed to have no sense of direction, for it ran into the beams and the walls, and then fell; but it eventually recovered and flapped off on a new course.

  While the bird was still darting through the air, Mountmirail sent a second aloft, and then a third. I began to hear twitters and tweets, and for a moment I thought the birds were calling aloud, and then I realized that the engineer’s assistant was making the sounds by whistling.

  The first bird began to falter, and Mountmirail caught it as it fluttered gently down, and it beat out the last strokes of its wings in the engineer’s arms. He likewise caught the other two, and then put them on a table for our inspection. Once we were able to look at the machines, the little gears and cogs and eccentrics were plain to see.

  “They are powered by a spring,” he said, “of the kind used in a wheel-lock pistol. Goodman Dowd, yonder, is working on an improved version that will sing as it flies, and without Dowd’s whistling. But there is no real purpose to the thing; it is merely a toy—and an expensive one, for those gears must be made by workmen, and the spring alone is costly.”

  “You don’t think you could make one large enough to carry a man?” Lipton asked.

  “Ay, I could,” said the engineer. “But what would make it go? A spring would not be powerful enough—nor would a man, I think.”

  “There is a place where such toys would be popular,” said I. “And that would be at court. But no—do you know Master Blackwell, of Roundsilver’s Company?”

  Mountmirail blinked at me. “I don’t think so. I’ve never been to the theater.”

  “Never?” I was astonished. “You have never seen a play?”

  “Should I?”

  “Well, my friend,” I said, “you should know that many plays contain wonders, such as gods flying down from the sky, or ghosts rising from below the floor, or chimerae appearing onstage, or transformations from one sort of being to another. And he who can engineer the greatest wonders will have employment and fame. Now if we can persuade Blackwell or some other poet to write a play on the theme of birds, and if your birds are set in flight over the audience, while the actors appear in bird costumes designed wondrously by you, then I flatter myself that your fortune will be made, and your fame also.”

  Mountmirai
l pondered this. “I may have to view a play,” he decided.

  I picked up one of his little birds and viewed it. “I have heard of some other metal birds,” I said, “and these are not pleasant toys.”

  I told Mountmirail of the iron birds now flocking to Fornland’s coast, and asked if he could imagine a remedy. His broad face turned thoughtful. “Larger hackbuts,” said he, “with larger bullets of fine steel to crack the armor.”

  “I should not care to pay the cost of equipping a company of militia with such weapons,” said I. “Especially as they would be useful only for this one purpose.”

  Mountmirail swept aside the cloud of red hair that shaded his eyes. “Chain shot,” he offered. “Cannon balls tied together with chain, to sweep these pests from the trees and wrap them in neat bows.”

  “Cannon and special shot,” said I. “You go from one expense to another. I thought perhaps small mortars, to loft a metal net over the intruders.”

  Mountmirail was skeptical. “That metal net will cost both money and time. For consider that a smith must forge every link by hand.”

  “But the birds can cut through a rope net.”

  “Nets are easily repaired.” He smiled. “And the birds cannot cut them instantly, and in the meantime they are helpless and you may kill them.”

  “With what?”

  “To smash iron?” He waved a hand. “No need for elegance. A big enough hammer will serve.”

  * * *

  Lipton and I recruited Peel, the lank-haired journeyman cannoneer, and we made some experiments with nets and small mortars. After some failures we succeeded in capturing in the net’s coils a herd of sheep, and I reckoned this was the best we could do until we had the iron birds in our sights. With a battery of mortars, a half-dozen apprentices, shot and powder, and a letter to the lord lieutenant of Inchmaden, I sent Peel on a barge down the Dordelle to find transport to West Fornland. I presumed he could find enough war hammers, pollaxes, and halberds in the lord lieutenant’s stores and need not bring any with him.

  After which I continued with my other projects. With my skilled crew of sailors, I won a race on the lake that took place under sail alone. The Count of Wenlock had won two races while I was gone, with His Grace of Roundsilver placing second, and so Rufino Knott soon wrote a song extolling “The Three Great Lords of Ethlebight” for our nautical prowess. I was neither great nor a lord, but I did not object to being included.

  Using Mountmirail’s grinding machine, I began to experiment with ways of making and bottling ink, and I visited the headquarters of the Worshipfull Companie of Dyers, to see if I could find a man to head my ink works. The art of the dyer was the closest I could think to that of ink-maker, an occupation that did not yet exist. I interviewed several journeymen, but they seemed dubious. “Don’t people make their own ink?” they said.

  I found Blackwell in a bagnio in Gropecoun Street, dragged him to Mountmirail’s workshop, and showed him the flying birds. “Consider a meeting between the kingdoms of Earth and Air,” I said. “Duisland may serve as a model for the former, and the rare exquisites of Loretto will serve for the latter. You may have a comedy of wonder and misunderstanding, with a marriage at the end, and thus a happy union of the kingdoms is achieved.”

  “Do you think the master of revels would permit even misunderstandings?”

  “If you made them innocent enough.”

  I sensed a glimmer of interest in Blackwell’s indigo eyes. “I will give the matter some thought.”

  The streets were crowded with members of the Estates, their friends, and their servants. On my way home I stopped in the Flesh Shambles to compare prices in a pair of butcher shops. My father had been a master of the Worshipfull Societie of Butchers, and I was myself a member in good standing of the guild, with the rank of journeyman. I passed the time with my guild brothers, then returned to Rackheath House and fired my cook.

  When I’d examined my first set of accounts, I’d been shocked by the amount it cost me to feed my household. It required but a few calculations to show that my cook had been marking up his cost of meat and poultry, and pocketing the difference between what he paid and what expenses he passed on to the household. Presumably he’d practiced this also upon Lord Rackheath, possibly for years, but Rackheath had no practical experience in buying and selling meat, and hadn’t realized he was being fleeced. After having the footmen heave the cook out into the road, I wrote to his lordship telling him I’d sacked the man, and why.

  For the moment the undercook was promoted into his place, but I began a search for a more seasoned replacement. Visiting the butchers’ shops had given me an idea, and I wished to have a cook in place before I put my own recipe to the test.

  * * *

  Lord Edevane managed to find some of my predecessors’ reports, and these I came to his offices to read. I brought a scrivener to copy anything that I might have found useful. In reading the old despatches, I was disappointed when it came to discovering ways how these beasts were vanquished, for while the old lord wardens wrote that they had done their duty and killed the chimerae, they rarely reported how they had done it. Yet the descriptions of the beasts themselves were of great interest, and from these I understood that kings of old were more interested in tales of fantastic monsters than in practical methods of fighting them.

  It seemed that whatever powers directed the Land of Chimerae took the notion of change as a watchword, and had no sooner created one beast than they replaced it with another. There were dragons that breathed fire, dragons that spat poison, and dragons that fought only with teeth and talons. There were dragons that walked on four legs, dragons that crawled, dragons that had many legs like centipedes. There were dragons with only two legs, commonly known as wyverns, and there seemed as many sorts of sea-dragons or serpents as those that dwelt on land.

  Nor did the chimerae consist entirely of worms. There were giant crabs that spat fire, leopards with poisoned spines and adamantine talons, sables that slipped into human dwellings at night, wound themselves around any they found lying abed, and overcame them with intoxicating breath before drinking their blood. Bulls with the heads of men, apes with the heads of goats. Mantichores with the body of a lion and a scorpion’s tail, harpies with the body of an eagle and the head of a hag. Black, stinging flies with the figure of a horned skull on their abdomen.

  There were no reports of savage iron birds. It seemed I would have to write those reports myself.

  I did notice that many of the older despatches mentioned prayers and sacrifices conducted to the local gods, with thanks to the gods afterward. Perhaps the lord wardens were pious, or perhaps gods had actually helped.

  But now we lived in a different age, and if I were inclined to pray, I would not know to whom to address my prayers. The only divine being I knew would laugh my pleas to scorn.

  I would have to use such talents as nature had provided me, and fight chimerae with whatever tools came to hand.

  * * *

  My new office came with lodging at Ings Magna, and the privilege of taking dinner with the pensioners, who, having received no reward but poverty in exchange for a life of service to the crown, were given humble lodging at the palace, provided they stayed out of sight generally and did not lower the tone. The dinners were served in a depressing undercroft, and the food would hardly tempt the palate of an epicure, but the pensioners themselves were an interesting crew, full of tales of King Stilwell, his wives and companions, and of the high nobility. They retailed as well a long list of palace scandals, crimes, and improprieties long forgotten by the great world outside the undercroft.

  My little room high in the palace was small, dark, dirty, and noisome, but a crew of sailors equipped with swabs and prayer-books soon cleared away decades’ worth of grime. I put down three layers of rush bundles, which I sprinkled with basil, sweet cicely, and lavender, and then laid down carpets. I added a small table, chairs, a wardrobe, a mirror, and toiletries, along with goblets, bottles of wine, an
d a dozen silver candlesticks with perfumed candles. Most importantly, I added a bed with seven feather mattresses and perfumed sheets.

  Thus I was able to welcome Lady Westley to a convenient bower, where we might meet to kiss, caress, and kindle, and thus forget the world for a little while. While she expressed delight in the sanctuary I had created, I sensed a distraction in her manner, and I sat her in one of my chairs, poured wine for her, and asked her what was the matter.

  “I have got a better idea of how much money we owe,” she said. “That is bad enough, but I fear that my uncle’s forthcoming marriage might mean that we will never be able to meet our obligations.”

  The uncle who had raised Lady Westley had no children of his own, and he had made no secret of his intention to make her his heir. But his wife had died, and now he, at the age of sixty, had announced his intention of marrying a maid of seventeen, a granddaughter of one of his colleagues in the Treasury Moot.

  I could understand Lady Westley’s concern, for I could imagine only one reason a seventeen-year-old would marry a man of sixty, and that reason had to do with assets, reserves, income, and deeds to real property.

  “If my uncle gets that girl with child,” said my Girasol, “then his estate will go to his offspring, and Edelmir and I will be bankrupt. With my uncle’s estate, we have a chance to pay much of what we owe, but without it we will be lost.”

  “I hope your husband is not trying to win himself a new fortune at dice,” said I.

  Lady Westley waved a distracted hand. “He says he doesn’t bet so much that it will make a difference.”

  I feared that this might be true, for I supposed there was little practical difference between being bankrupt, and being bankrupt three times over.

  “If only the gaming in Howel was not so high!” Lady Westley said. “But Their Majesties set the fashion, and they play for mad stakes!”

  I remembered Berlauda betting fifty royals that she would make her hoop in palle-malle, and I wondered how many hoops she had missed that day, and what that game had cost the treasury.