The Escapement e-3

by K. J. Parker

  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. "I 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 fulfill 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 t
o the city to start up the factory. He'd been invited to the wedding, of course, but he'd been too busy to go.

  (He tried to remember the proper way to address a duchess, but couldn't, so he improvised a small, respectful gesture, somewhere between a nod and a bow.)

  "Sorry, did I startle you?" She was smiling awkwardly. He didn't reply; she went on: "I gather you're going south to join my husband. Do you think you could give him a letter from me?"

  He repeated the gesture. "Of course," he said.

  She handed him a small square of folded parchment. She knew, of course, that it had been him who had intercepted the letter that disgraced Miel Ducas. "I'll make sure he gets it," he said.

  "Thank you. Usually I use the courier service, but I always feel guilty about it. It's supposed to be for important official business only, and I'm sure I don't come under that heading."

  Fishing for compliments? Unlikely. He had no reason to linger, but he sensed she didn't want him to go just yet. Of course, he'd saved her life at the fall of Civitas Eremiae. Had she ever wondered about that, in the long hours of futile leisure that made up most of her life: how he'd come to be in the right place to lead her to safety out of the dying city, through the tunnels and cisterns that people who'd lived there all their lives didn't know about, but which he'd navigated with ease?

  "If you've got a moment," she said.

  "Of course." There was a stone bench. He perched on the edge of it, just close enough to be able to hear her without having to lean forward. For a man who'd spent his life among trip-hammers and mills, he had excellent hearing.

  "About the war." She stopped, as though compiling an agenda. "What's going to happen? They don't tell me, you see."

  "I don't know." Which was true. "Quite soon now, your husband will advance on the City and start the siege. He'll go through the motions of a direct assault, but I don't suppose he'll keep it up for very long. He won't want to waste lives pointlessly. An assault will tell him how many defenders there are, where the artillery batteries are positioned, their range, weight of shot and rate of fire. He'll need to know all that, and it doesn't come free, he'll have to buy it with dead bodies. Once he's got the information, he'll start the siege operations. That's a very specialised branch of military science and I don't know anything about it. The engines I'm building will be important. Given time, they could knock down the walls. But he hasn't got that long; he'll be limited by food supplies, mostly, and other stuff like that. My guess is, he'll use artillery to distract them while he uses sappers to dig under the walls. That's even more scientific than artillery, but he's got the advantage of having skilled men who know the work, the silver-miners. My people don't dig holes if they can help it. If he can undermine a gatehouse or bring down a large enough section of wall, he's won. Once his soldiers get inside the City, it'll all be over. If he fails, and the food runs out, he'll have no choice but to fall back, and I don't suppose the Aram Chantat will be pleased if he does that. I suppose everything really hinges on how badly they want to take the City." He paused. "Does that answer your question?"

  She nodded, unconvincingly. "Will you be able to help?" she asked. "With the digging under the walls, I mean."

  Ziani shrugged. "He's got men who're better qualified than I am," he said. "Obviously I'll help if I can."

  "And your friend." She wasn't looking at him. "What's his name? The tall man…"

  "Daurenja."

  "Daurenja," she repeated. "Everybody speaks very highly of him. He told my husband he was working on some kind of new weapon; like a catapult, he said, but much stronger. Is that right?"

  Ziani kept perfectly still for a moment or so before answering. "In theory," he said. "It might work. But he hasn't built one yet. There are technical problems."

  "Oh, well." She smiled faintly. "I wouldn't be able to understand, even if you explained. Really, I was only asking about the war because I want to know how long Valens is going to be away. I simply have no idea: a month? A year? I'd go out and join him, but they say it's too dangerous. It's silly, isn't it? Here I am, hoping that a city will fall and goodness knows how many poor people will die, just so my husband can come home and everything can be normal. That seems very wicked, really, but I can't help it." She turned her head slightly and looked at him. "You understand how I feel, don't you?"

  He nodded. "Daurenja wasn't really supposed to tell the duke about his pet project," he said, "not until we'd managed to build a working prototype. And that's still a very long way away, and we didn't want your husband getting his hopes up."

  "Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned it," she said. "I'm sorry if I've caused trouble for anybody. And I suppose," she added, turning her head away again, "you might want it kept quiet so the Aram Chantat don't find out. After all, a weapon isn't made to be used just once, and we may not be friends with them for ever."

  Ziani tried not to show any reaction to that. "Politics," he said. "None of my business. I just make things."

  "You had Miel Ducas arrested." Her head hadn't moved. "Because of that letter. I've wondered why you did that."

  He was short of breath, just when he needed plenty. "I'll be honest with you," he said. "I was sucking up to the boss. I wanted to be promoted, in sole charge of the defence of the city. I thought, thanks to my engines, we were going to win; and after the war was over…" He made a show of shrugging, overdid it a little. "A man like me, a factory worker, comes to Eremia and sees how the gentry live: fine houses, estates, lives of elegant leisure. It's traditional for dukes to reward their low-born but faithful servants with titles and endowments." Out of the corner of his eye he saw her shift a little. "It's not as though I laid a trap or anything. The letter came into my hands and I had a choice. Get rid of it, hurt nobody, gain nothing. Or else I could do what I did. I'll apologise if you want me to."

  She shook her head. "I think it was Miel who betrayed the city," she said. "After Orsea turned against him, I mean. And if he hadn't done that, if the city hadn't fallen, Valens wouldn't have come for me. I'd still be married to Orsea, instead of the man I love. So no, please don't apologise. The city falling gave me my only chance of being happy." She laughed, from her throat only. "Listen to me," she said. "Two cities, mine and yours, just so I can have the man I want. I despise myself for it." She was speaking very clearly, shaping each word like a craftsman. "I know it's wrong, and really I must be a horrible person, evil, to think like that, but it doesn't make any difference. I tell myself none of it was my doing; it couldn't have been, because look at me, I've never done anything in my whole life. So where's the harm in passively receiving the benefits of other people's misery? But of course it's not true. Orsea wouldn't have become duke if he hadn't married me, and Orsea was to blame for the war, though he didn't exactly start it. And Valens wouldn't have joined the war except for me; and his joining in brought in the Aram Chantat, and now it looks like Mezentia will be destroyed as well." She paused, as though doing sums in her head. "Do you think someone can be blamed just for being born, or not dying? And then I ask myself, with all these terrible things on my conscience, if everything really did go right, and the City fell and Valens came home, could we ever really be happy together, after all that? And the dreadful thing is, I believe we could. I think he could walk up the stairs and shut the door and say, 'I'm home,' and none of it would matter any more. That's an extraordinary thought, isn't it?"

  Ziani paused to rub his eyes. "Not really," he said. "I think you're only evil and wicked if you have a choice. If you do what you have to, it can't be your fault. I heard someone say once that there's no such thing as a weapon; there's just tools, and men who decide how they're going to use them. And even then sometimes the user doesn't have a choice. He picks up a chisel and stabs a man in self-defence. He had no choice, and the chisel's just a tool. The evil came from the man who attacked him in the first place. Now suppose the attacker was a general, the only man who could have saved the city, and without him the city falls. In that case, it's still the gene
ral's fault, for attacking the man who defended himself. If the Mezentines all die, they brought it on themselves. It's very simple, when you think about it."

  She stood up. "Thank you for taking the letter," she said. "Have a safe journey." Valens took the letter from him without looking at it and tucked it under the stack of reports on the rickety folding table. "You took your time getting here," he said.

  "The roads," Ziani replied. "You said something about a book."

  "Yes." Valens reached down and picked something up off the floor. "I read it while I was waiting for you. I was surprised how much of it I remembered. I can't have looked at it for years. They say the things you read when you're a kid stay with you."

  Ziani opened it. Diagrams. A mechanism? "What's it got to do with me?"

  Valens smiled. "Let's say I wanted a Mezentine perspective." He picked up a cup, realised it was empty. "Suppose the Republic had put you in charge of the City's defences. You know that your artillery monopoly's a thing of the past. You send to the library for anything they've got on defending against artillery." He leaned over, turned the pages back to the flyleaf. "This book was copied by the Guild, so there has to be a copy in the Guildhall library. Or there's other books on the same subject, presumably saying much the same sort of thing. I want you to read it, then tell me how much of it the Republic's capable of doing in the time available with the resources it has to hand. Also," he added, as Ziani took the weight of the book from him, "I remember you telling my great-grandfather-in-law that you knew a way of breaking the City's defences. I think it's time you told me what it is."