Colours in the Steel f-1

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Of all the stupid, cowardly things to do,’ the Lord Lieutenant raved, ‘breaking down the causeway so we can’t mount a sortie. So now we’re going to sit behind the walls and watch while they assemble their engines completely unhindered. It’s criminal.’

  ‘We can’t very well watch if we’re behind the walls, surely,’ his daughter replied. The rest of the family managed not to giggle.

  ‘Don’t be flippant,’ he said. ‘You know perfectly well what I mean.’ He tore the crust off a slice of bread, crushed the middle into a hard knob of dough and bit into it. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if money was changing hands somewhere in all this,’ he added melodramatically.

  ‘But I thought-’ His wife stopped herself and returned to her embroidery.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Take no notice. Just something I must have got wrong.’

  ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, squinting to thread her fine bone needle, ‘it’s just that I thought it was you who’d insisted – very sensibly, I thought – that after the, what’s the word, exploratory force or expeditionary force or whatever it’s called, after they made such a mess of things, we weren’t going to have any more going outside the walls to fight them, we were going to sit tight and let them come to us. I think that’s what you said,’ she added. ‘Can you remember what Daddy said, Lehan, dear?’

  Lehan, who was seven, nodded gravely. ‘I think so,’ she replied. ‘That was more or less it, anyway.’

  The Lord Lieutenant scowled. ‘That’s not the same thing at all,’ he replied through a mouthful of bread. ‘Going outside and looking for another pitched battle is one thing. Harrying them while they’re setting up their confounded siege engines is something else entirely. Sheer folly to deprive ourselves of the chance of doing that.’

  ‘But you said their engines wouldn’t work anyway,’ Lehan pointed out. ‘You said it stood to reason that a mob of ignorant savages-’

  ‘That’s not the point. The point is, while they’re weak and disorganised, with their minds occupied with unloading the engines, now’s the best time to attack them. And that fool-’

  The Lord Lieutenant was not, of course, an impartial observer. He was the leader of the Reform faction in the politics of the city, whereas the Prefect (the object of his fulminations; as far as he was concerned, Loredan was merely the Prefect’s agent) led the Popular faction. Although to an ignorant outsider the two factions were completely indistinguishable, the rivalry between them was unremittingly ferocious, and the uneasy truce that had been in place since the emergency began was starting to take its toll of everyone in the Council.

  Nevertheless, the debate in the Lord Lieutenant’s household was fairly representative of what everyone in the city was saying, except that the average man tended to compromise the two positions; he derided the government for its cowardice in breaking down the causeway, while wholeheartedly subscribing to the view that the walls were impregnable and the savages would soon give up and go away.

  ‘They should be doing something,’ said Stauracius, the senior deacon, as he walked off his dinner in the cloister of the City Academy. ‘You’re pretty thick with the Patriarch, Gannadius. You should be lobbying for some action. It’s time the Order’s views were given the consideration they deserve.’

  ‘Oh?’ Gannadius raised an eyebrow. ‘Why? We’re an organisation of philosophers and scientists engaged in abstruse metaphysical research. Why should we have a valid opinion about fighting a war?’

  Stauracius looked at him oddly. ‘I have to say,’ he said, ‘as the effective leader of the Order now that Alexius is so busy with his new duties, you don’t seem to be particularly concerned with our standing in the community. Or our responsibilities, come to that. We have an obligation to guide and counsel at times like these. We should be doing more-’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Gannadius looked away pointedly. ‘So you belong to the let’s-zap-them-with-magic school, I presume. It’s not an approach I have much time for, I’m afraid.’

  ‘It’s nothing to do with magic, as you know perfectly well.’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying we should do,’ Gannadius pointed out. ‘Curse the savages to smithereens. Roast ’em with fireballs or turn ’em all into frogs and fill the sky with hungry cranes. I’d love to know how it’s done.’

  ‘Now you’re even starting to sound like Alexius,’ Stauracius replied disapprovingly. ‘With all due respect, I always felt there was an underlying flippancy in his character that didn’t quite accord with the best traditions of his office.’

  ‘You mean he’s got a sense of humour? Well, perhaps you’re right, and perhaps it’s something that gradually grows on you once you find yourself in charge of the Order. I can distinctly remember a time when I sounded just like you.’

  That served its intended purpose of offending the deacon sufficiently to get rid of him, and Gannadius was able to get to his office without further molestation. He faced the cheerful prospect of a night of administrative paperwork, with a thick wedge of academic reading to catch up on if he wanted a break. He remember how Alexius had complained about such things, and how scornful he’d felt of someone who held the office but didn’t fancy the work. That was all a long time ago now.

  He closed the door, shot the bolts and lit his lamp from the candle he’d been carrying. The sour yellow light cast heavy shadows in the corners of the room, and the smoke from a badly trimmed wick made his eyes itch. It would have been nice to go to bed now, but if he did that all the work would still be there in the morning. He sat down and picked a sheet of parchment off the top of the pile.

  Minutes of a meeting of the Joint Faculties Committee on appointments and funding.

  He scanned the page, noting his name under Apologies for absence and translating minutes-talk into real language as he went along. The words on the page made a sort of sense; but somehow he couldn’t see how any of it was relevant to him, or to anything anybody could possibly be interested in. The world had moved on too much since he’d last sat in a finance meeting.

  Three days now; and so far, nothing had happened. On both sides of the wall, the air was filled with the sounds of hammers, saws, axes, winches and swearing; on both sides, men were hauling on ropes, lugging timber, bashing in wedges and slapping glue into mortices, trimming stones, shouting orders, standing around in groups while someone else tried to resolve the latest unforeseen disaster. Yet the distance between the camp and the wall was still the same, and nothing had dared set foot in it apart from the usual feeding birds and stray dogs. He hadn’t seen Alexius to speak to since the first morning; the Security Council was in more or less continuous session, although what there was for them to do he wasn’t entirely sure. At times he suspected they might have rigged up a couple of dice tables and one of those water-powered organs, just the thing if you’re having a really serious party.

  For some reason, though, his mind kept returning to their ill-fated drinking expedition, and the man Alexius had claimed was Gorgas Loredan. At the time he’d put it down to the rather spectacular amount of industrial-grade rough wine the Patriarch had absorbed; the idea that even if the man was the Deputy Lord Lieutenant’s brother, he’d somehow managed to lure them into a tavern just so as to have a look at them had struck Gannadius as too far-fetched to be worth considering. Why bother? And even if he’d done everything Alexius claimed he had, so what? And yet the Patriarch had seemed convinced that Gorgas Loredan was somehow a bird of very ill omen, for the two of them and possibly the whole city as well.

  And now I’m worrying about it too. I wonder if there really is anything in it? Or is it just a more entertaining subject for contemplation than these truly awful minutes?

  To break his train of thought, he stood and made up a fire in the room’s small hearth. Lately, he’d found a certain degree of pleasure in doing this sort of thing for himself (strange; not long ago, he’d regarded not having to do this sort of thing as evidence that he’d
made something of his life) and he lingered over the job, taking pains to lay the wood properly. Once he’d lit the kindling and got it going, he sat down again, not at his desk but in the fat, comfortable visitor’s chair, with his feet up on a large cedarwood clothes-press. He had the sheet of minutes in his hand and he was looking at it, but he wasn’t reading. Soon his eyelids began to feel heavy, and he let them close-

  – And found himself in front of a different fire, something very hot and painfully bright; he was several yards away from it, but he could feel his skin tingle from the heat. It was like being in a forge, except that he was outside, not in. In fact, it was the building itself that was on fire.

  He looked more closely, and recognised the arsenal; not a place he knew well, although he’d wandered in there once when he was a second-year student with time on his hands. Now it appeared to be burning to the ground; and outside it, using the flames to work with, was a man standing over an anvil, with a small hammer in his hand and a glowing orange strip of metal gripped in a pair of tongs. It was-

  ‘Gorgas Loredan?’

  The bald-headed man turned his head and nodded affably. ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Fancy seeing you here. Would you mind making yourself useful for a moment?’

  ‘Of course,’ Gannadius replied. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Work the bellows while I mix the flux for the solder,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Won’t be a jiffy. But if it cools down I won’t be able to get the solder to run.’

  ‘What do I do?’

  ‘Just pump these handles up and down – there, you’ve got it. Nice and steady, and that’ll be fine.’

  ‘All right.’ Gannadius pushed the handles and raised them again. ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘how come I know all these technical terms? I don’t know the first thing about metalworking.’

  ‘Knowledge is never wasted,’ Gorgas replied, his back turned. He teased out a small pile of white powder onto a sheet of slate, spat into it and mixed up a paste with a bit of stick. ‘Valuable stuff this,’ he said, ‘got to be careful with it. Can’t use anything else with the silver solder.’

  ‘Ah,’ Gannadius replied, wiping sweat out of his eyes with his sleeve. ‘I thought we didn’t know how to use the silver stuff.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Gorgas replied, ‘but the plainsmen do. Marvellous stuff. Right, that ought to do it. Got to be the right consistency, like a cross between spit and snot, or it won’t take. Keep pumping while I do the business.’

  Gannadius nodded and carried on working the bellows. ‘My friend Alexius suspects you of being at the root of all this,’ he remarked as he pumped. ‘I don’t see it myself. What do you think?’

  ‘I think Alexius may have a point,’ Gorgas replied. ‘But wouldn’t it be easier just to ask my brother, rather than guessing yourselves silly and losing sleep over it?’

  ‘True,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Or you could tell me yourself, come to that.’

  Gorgas smiled. ‘I’d love to help,’ he said, ‘but I’m only a dream, sort of like a belch of undigested wind from your own subconscious mind. If you don’t know the answer, then how can I?’

  ‘Ah, but you’re not,’ Gannadius said, ‘because if that was the case, how come I know all this stuff about silver-solder flux and keeping the metal just the right shade of cherry red so the solder’ll take? That didn’t come from my memory; therefore, neither do you. So you can answer my question.’

  Gorgas nodded. ‘Good point. Obviously you’ve learnt a thing or two since you’ve been hanging around with our esteemed Patriarch. Either that-’ Gorgas lifted his head and grinned; he was bright red in the glow of the flames, ‘-or I’m running you, like Alexius says I am. Come on, then, now you’re so clever, you tell me which it is.’

  ‘Why’s the city on fire?’ Gannadius asked.

  ‘Search me.’ Gorgas was bent over the strip of orange steel, delicately touching the stick of solder to the joint. ‘On that subject, you’d have to ask my sister. She’s the clever one in our family.’

  ‘I didn’t know you had a sister,’ Gannadius said, waking up with a start as the pile of papers slid off his lap onto the floor. Someone was tapping on the door. He grunted, picked up the documents (which were now all mixed up and out of order) and said, ‘Come in.’

  A young girl’s face appeared round the door; not someone he recognised. ‘There’s someone to see you,’ she said. ‘They say they’re friends of yours. Foreigners,’ she added meaningfully.

  ‘Hm? Oh. Send them up here, will you? Did these foreigners have names, or are they too outlandish and foreign for you to pronounce?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t ask,’ the girl replied, and her face vanished again.

  Gannadius rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, reflecting on the girl’s emphasis on the word foreigners. He took it to mean that the visitors were either clan agents to whom he was about to hand over the keys to the city, or else incredibly powerful wizards who had come to help him cook up the really devastating magic by which the clan were soon going to be hexed to oblivion; probably, he decided, both. He regretted entertaining the second hypothesis when the door opened again and Venart and Vetriz were standing in the doorway.

  Venart cleared his throat. ‘I’d just like to say,’ he announced, ‘that this was entirely her idea.’

  His sister gave him a scornful look over her shoulder and perched on the edge of the desk. Venart stayed where he was, close to the door.

  ‘Please come in,’ Ganadius said. ‘Would you like something to drink? Please, help yourselves.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’ The girl leant across the desk, neatly gathered the winejug and a cup, and poured. ‘Mm, this is delicious,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  Gannadius smiled. ‘Speciality of the house,’ he said. ‘It’s a sweet wine from the south, with honey and cinnamon. But that’s gone cold, and it should be warm. I’ll ring for some more.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Vetriz said, ignoring her brother’s pleading look. ‘I’m sorry to barge in on you like this, I can see you’re busy. But we wanted to see Captain Loredan-’

  ‘Colonel Loredan,’ her brother muttered.

  ‘Colonel Loredan, and nobody knows where he is. Ven went to his office, but he wasn’t there, and the clerks were terribly unhelpful, and Athli, that’s his clerk, she’s in business with us now, she happened to mention that the Colonel’s on very good terms with Patriarch Alexius these days, so we went to find him to see if he knew where the Colonel was, and when we asked at the palace-’

  ‘Warden’s lodgings.’

  ‘-they said you might know, since you were filling in for him while he was busy with the invasion and everything. Isn’t that a terrible thing, by the way?’

  ‘Shocking,’ Gannadius replied with a smile.

  ‘Isn’t it? Anyway, we were wondering, if it’s not too much trouble, do you think you could pass a message on to the Patriarch to tell the Colonel that we’re back in the city, arrived here just this morning, and if he could spare us five minutes-’

  ‘Vetriz,’ groaned Venart. ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Oh, shut up yourself. Do you think you might?’ she went on. ‘We’d be ever so grateful if you could.’

  There was a knock at the door; the young girl again. Gannadius placed an order for a large jug of warm spiced wine and three clean cups. The girl nodded, took a long look at the two Islanders, and went away.

  Experimentally, Gannadius touched his fingertips to his forehead. It didn’t hurt. He wondered about that for a moment, and made up his mind.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he replied. ‘Venart – that’s right, isn’t it? – do please sit down, I think you’ll enjoy the wine. Yes, I should be able to pass a message through to Colonel Loredan. It may take a day or two, of course. You’ll appreciate that with the recent developments-’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Vetriz replied. ‘We’ve got to be here for at least a week to load the rest of the rope – Ven’s bought up all the surplus rope from the government, a v
ery good deal for us. That’s what we want to see the Colonel about. You see, last time we were here he mentioned they’re very short of seasoned lemonwood staves for making bows, and while we were home this time we managed to get hold of a rather substantial quantity – cancelled order, actually, but please don’t tell the Colonel that.’

  ‘Of course.’ Gannadius nodded conspiratorially. ‘And I’m sure he’ll be delighted. Of course, if you wanted to deal with the matter quickly rather than wait around to see the Colonel personally, I believe the Quartermaster’s Office is allowed to do purchasing without the Colonel himself having to be involved.’

  Vetriz smiled. ‘Oh, we knew that. But when you’ve got a contact high up in an organisation, it does no harm to deal personally. Isn’t that what you keep telling me, Ven?’

  Venart, who was balanced on the edge of a hard straight-backed chair, nodded glumly and said nothing. For once, it seemed, he was perfectly happy to leave all the talking to his sister.

  ‘In return,’ Gannadius said, ‘perhaps you might care to do something for me.’

  Vetriz beamed with pleasure. ‘Well, of course,’ she said. ‘Is it something you want brought in?’

  Gannadius shook his head. ‘It’s more to do with the circumstances of our last meeting,’ he replied. ‘I have to confess, Alexius and I were rather less than honest with you.’

  ‘What, you mean-How absolutely fascinating! You’re talking about the magic, aren’t you? Oh, I forgot, I mustn’t call it that.’

  Another tap at the door; the girl bringing the wine. ‘Thank you, we’ll pour for ourselves,’ Gannadius said firmly. The girl left, looking cheated.