Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Ziani shrugged. 'I don't know what came over me,' he said.

  'I do.' The man leaned forward a little. The sun edged his dark head with gold, like an icon that's hung too long in the candle smoke. 'Thinking you're better than everybody else, that's what did it. Thinking you're so bloody clever and good, the rules don't apply to you. I've seen your kind before.'

  'I admit I'm guilty,' Ziani said. 'But that's not what you want to talk to me about. You want to know who else was involved.'

  'Go on.'

  Ziani said four names. The secretary, he noticed, had a wax writing-board next to him, but wasn't taking any notes. He tried another four. The secretary yawned.

  'You're wasting my time,' he said. 'You don't even know these people, and you're asking me to believe they all came round to your house, these important men you've never met, to see this mechanical doll you were making for your kid.'

  'I'm telling you the truth,' Ziani said.

  'Balls.' The man wriggled himself comfortable in his chair. 'I don't believe you.'

  'You agreed to see me.'

  'So I did. Know why?'

  Ziani shrugged. 'I'm prepared to sign a deposition,' he said. 'Or I'll testify in court, if you'd rather.'

  'No chance. I know for a fact you wouldn't know these people if you met them in the street. You didn't have any accomplices, you were working alone. All I want from you is who put you up to this. Oh, your pal Falier Zenonis, sure; but he's nobody. Who else is in on it?'

  Ziani sighed. There was nothing left inside him. 'Who would you like it to have been?'

  'No.' The man shook his head. 'If I want to play that sort of game, I decide when and how. You're here because obviously some bugger's been underestimating me.'

  'All I wanted,' Ziani said, 'was for my wife to get my pension. That's all that matters to me. I'll say whatever you like, so long as you give me that.'

  'Not interested.' The man sounded bored, maybe a little bit annoyed. 'I think you thought the idea up for yourself, all on your own. Trying to be clever with men's lives. You can forget that.'

  'I see,' Ziani said. 'So you won't do what I asked, about the pension?'

  'No.'

  'Fine.' Ziani jumped to his feet and threw his weight against the edge of the desk, forcing it back. The man tried to get up; the edge of the desk hit the front of his thighs before his legs were straight-a nicely judged piece of timing, though Ziani said it himself-and he staggered. Ziani shoved again, then hopped back to give himself room and scrambled on to the desktop. The man opened his mouth to yell, but Ziani reached out; not for the throat, as the man was expecting, and so Ziani was able to avoid his hands as he lifted them to defend himself. Instead, he grabbed the man's shoulders and pushed back sharply. It was more a folding manoeuvre than anything else. The man bent at the waist as he went down, and his head, thrown backwards, smashed against the stone sill of the window. It worked just as Ziani had seen it in his mind, the angles and the hinges and the moving parts. Seventeen years of looking at blueprints teaches you how to visualise.

  He was only mildly stunned, of course, so there was still plenty to do. Ziani had been hoping for a weapon; a dagger slung fashionably at the waist, or something leaning handy in a corner. Nothing like that; but there was a solid-looking iron lampstand, five feet tall, with four branches and four legs at the base to keep it steady. Just the thing; he slid off the desk, caught hold of the lampstand more or less in the middle, and jabbed with it, as though it was a spear. One of the legs hit the man on the forehead, just above the junction of nose and eyebrows. It was the force behind it that got the job done.

  The man slid on to the floor; dead or alive, didn't matter, he was no longer relevant. Three flights of stairs, and Ziani had counted the steps, made a fairly accurate assessment of the depth of tread. It would be a long way down from the window and he had no idea what he'd be dropping on to; but he was as good as dead anyway, so what the hell? At the moment when he jumped, entrusting himself to the air without looking at what was underneath, he couldn't stop himself wondering about Falier, who was supposed to be his friend.

  It wasn't pavement, which was good; but it was a long way down.

  For a moment he couldn't breathe and his legs were numb. I've broken my bloody neck, he thought; but then he felt pain, pretty much everywhere, which suggested the damage was rather less radical. Somewhere, not far away (not far enough), he heard shouts, excitement. It was a fair bet that he was the cause of it. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself on his feet and running. It hurt, but that was the least of his problems.

  Because he'd never expected to survive the drop, he hadn't thought ahead any further than this. But here he was, running, in an unplanned and unspecified direction. That was no good. The pity of it was, he had no idea where he should be heading for. He was somewhere in the grounds of the Guildhall; but the grounds, like the building itself, were circular. There was a wall all the way round, he remembered, with two gates in it. The only way out was through a gate. If they were after him, which was pretty much inevitable, the first thing they'd do would be to send runners to the gatehouses.

  Every breath and heartbeat is an act of prevarication, a prising open of options. It'd sounded good when the preacher had said it, but did it actually mean anything? Only one way to find out. The gardens were infuriatingly formal, straight lines of foot-high box hedge enclosing neat geometric patterns of flowers, nothing wild and bushy a man could hide in long enough to catch his breath, but there was a sort of trellis arch overgrown with flowery creeper, a bower or arbour or whatever the hell it was called. He headed for it, and collapsed inside just as his legs gave out.

  Fine. First place they'll look.

  Breathing in was like dragging his heart through brambles. He got to his knees and peered round the edge of the arch. There was the wall, a grey blur behind a curtain of silly little trees. He followed its line until he came to a square shape, almost completely obscured by a lopsided flowering cherry. That would be a gatehouse. He didn't know what time it was and he couldn't see the sun through the arbour roof, so he couldn't tell if it was the north or the south gate. Not that it mattered. He wasn't likely to get that far, and if he did the gatekeepers would be on him like terriers.

  He plotted a course. Arbour to the line of trees; using the trees as cover, along the wall to the gatehouse. He could hear shouting coming from several different directions, and he wondered whether they'd catch him and take him back to his cell to be strangled, or just kill him on the spot.

  I'll escape, though, if only to he annoying. He stood in the doorway of the arbour for a moment, until he saw two men running towards him. They were wearing helmets and carrying halberds; there goes another option, snapping shut like a mousetrap. He lowered his head and charged in the direction of the trees. They'd get him soon enough, but at least he was making an effort, and he felt it was better to die running towards something, rather than just running away.

  It was inevitable that sooner or later he'd trip over something and go sprawling. In the event, it was one of those ridiculous dwarf box hedges that did the damage. He landed on his face in a bed of small orange flowers, and the two warders were on him before he had a chance to move.

  'Right.' One of them had grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. 'What's the drill?'

  He couldn't see the other warder. 'Captain said get him out of sight before we do him. Don't want the Membership seeing a man having his head cut off, it looks bad.'

  The warder he could see nodded. 'Stable block's the nearest,' he said.

  Between them they hauled him to his feet and dragged him backwards across the flowerbeds. He sagged against their arms, letting them do the work; buggered if he was going to walk to his death. He heard a door creak, and a doorframe boxed out the light.

  'Block,' said the other warder. 'Something we can use for a block.'

  'Log of wood,' his colleague suggested.

  'How about an upturned bucket?' the
first man said.

  'Might as well.' The unseen warder trod on the backs of Ziani's knees, forcing him down; the other man came forward with a stable bucket, shaking out dusty old grain. Ziani felt the wood under his chin. 'Grab his hair,' the second warder said, 'hold him steady. Halberd's not the right tool for this job.'

  A simple matter of timing, then. Ziani felt the warder's knuckles against his scalp, then the pain as his hair was pulled, forcing his cheek against the bucket. He heard the cutter's feet crackle in the straw as he stepped up to his mark, in his mind's eye he saw him take a grip on the halberd shaft and raise his arms. A good engineer has the knack of visualisation, the ability to orchestrate the concerted action of the mechanism's moving parts. At the moment when he reckoned the cutter's swing had reached its apex and was coming down, he dug his knees into the straw and arched his back, jerking his shoulders and head backwards. He felt a handful of his hair pull out, but he was moving, hauling the other warder toward him.

  He heard the halberd strike; a flat, solid shearing noise, as its edge bit into the warder's forearms, catching them just right against the base of the iron band that ran round the bottom of the bucket. By the time the warder screamed, he was loose; he hopped up like a frog, located the cutter (standing with a stupid expression on his face, looking at the shorn stub of his mate's left hand) and stamped his foot into the poor fool's kidneys. It wasn't quite enough to put him down; but the other man had obligingly left his halberd leaning up against a partition. All Ziani knew about weapons was how to make them, but he did understand tools-leverage, mechanical advantage-and the principles were more or less the same. With the rear horn of the blade he hooked the cutter's feet out from under him, and finished the job efficiently with the spike. The other man was still kneeling beside the bucket, trying to clamp the gushing stump with his good hand. The hell with finesse, Ziani thought; he pulled the spike clear and shoved it at the wounded man's face. It was more luck than judgement that he stuck him precisely where he'd aimed. In one ear and out the other, like listening to your mother.

  His fingers went dead around the halberd shaft; it slipped through, and its weight dragged it down, though the spike was still jammed in that poor bastard's head. It had taken a matter of seconds; two lives ended, one life just possibly reprieved. It was a curious sort of equilibrium, one he wasn't eager to dwell on. Instead he thought: this is a stable, wouldn't it be wonderful if it had horses in it?

  Of course, he had no idea how you went about harnessing a horse. He found a saddle, there was a whole rack of the things; and bridles, and a bewildering selection of straps with buckles on, some or all of. which you apparently needed in order to make the horse go. He'd decided on the brown one; it wasn't the biggest, but the other two looked tired (though he had no idea what a tired horse was supposed to look like).

  Pinching the corners of its mouth got the bit in. He fumbled hopelessly with the bridle straps, sticking the ends in the wrong buckles until eventually he managed to get the proper layout straight in his mind. The saddle went on its back, that was obvious enough. There was some knack or rule of thumb about how tight the girths needed to be. He didn't know it, so he pulled the strap as tight as he could make it go. The horse didn't seem to mind.

  That just left getting on. Under better circumstances, he might well have been able to reach the stirrup. As it was, he had to go back and fetch the bucket to stand on. It was slippery, and he nearly fell over. I wish I knew how to do this, he thought, and dug his heels into the horse's ribs.

  After that it was shamefully simple. The gatekeepers had seen him being caught and so weren't looking for escaped prisoners any more; besides, he was on a horse, and the prisoner had been on foot. The horse wanted to trot, so the saddle was pounding his bum like a triphammer. He passed under the gate, and someone called out, but he couldn't make out the words. Nobody followed him. Two murders, possibly three if he'd killed the secretary of the expediencies committee when he hit him with the lampstand, and he was riding out of there like a prince going hawking. His head ached where the hair had been pulled out.

  As soon as he was through the gate, he knew where he was. That tall square building was the bonded warehouse, where he delivered finished arrowheads for export. The superintendent was a friend of his, sometimes on slow days they drank tea and had a game of chess (but today wasn't a slow day). He was in Twenty-Fourth Street, junction with Ninth Avenue.

  Three blocks down Ninth Avenue was an alley, leading to the back gate of a factory. It was quiet and the walls on either side were high; you could stop there for a piss if you were in a hurry. He contrived to get the horse to turn down it, let it amble halfway down, pulled it up and slid awkwardly off its back. It stood there looking at him as he picked himself up. Nevertheless, he said. 'Thanks,' as he walked away.

  The factory gate was bolted on the inside, but he managed to jump up, get his stomach on the top of it and reach over to draw back the bolt. The gate swung open, with him on top of it. He slipped down-bad landing-and shut it behind him, trying to remember what they made here. At any rate, he was back on industrial premises, where the rules were rather closer to what he was used to.

  He was in the back yard; and all the back yards of all the factories in the world are more or less identical. The pile of rusting iron scrap might be a foot or so to the left or right; the old tar-barrel full of stagnant rainwater might be in the north-east corner rather than the north-west; the chunky, derelict machine overgrown with brambles might be a brake, a punch, a roller or a shear. The important things, however, are always the same. The big shed with the double doors is always the main workshop. The long shed at right angles to it is always the materials store. The kennel wedged in the corner furthest from the gate is always the office. The tiny hutch in the opposite corner is always the latrine, and you can always be sure of finding it in the dark by the smell.

  Ziani ducked behind the scrap pile and quickly took his bearings. Ninth Avenue ran due south, so the gate he'd just climbed over faced east. He glanced up at the sky; it was grey and overcast, but a faint glow seeping through the cloud betrayed the sun, told him it was mid-afternoon. In all factories everywhere, in mid-afternoon the materials store is always deserted. He looked round just in case; nobody to be seen. He scuttled across the yard as fast as he could go.

  The geometry of stores is another absolute constant. On the racks that ran its length were the mandatory twenty-foot lengths of various sizes and profiles of iron and brass bar, rod, strip, tube, plate and sheet. Above them was the timber, planked and unplanked, rough and planed. Against the back wall stood the barrels and boxes, arranged in order of size; iron rivets (long, medium and short, fifteen different widths), copper rivets, long nails, medium nails, short nails, tacks, pins, split pins, washers; drill bits, taps, dies; mills and reamers, long and short series, in increments of one sixty-fourth of an inch; jigs and forms, dogs and faceplates, punches, callipers, rules, squares, scribers, vee-blocks and belts, tool-boats and gauges, broaches and seventeen different weights of ball-peen hammers. At the far end, against the back wall, stood the big shear, bolted to a massive oak bench; three swage-blocks, a grinding-wheel in its bath, two freestanding leg-vices, a pail of grimy water and a three-hundredweight double-bick anvil on a stump. Every surface was slick with oil and filmed with a coating of black dust.

  It was the familiarity of it all that cut into him; he'd worked all his life in places like this, but he'd never looked at them; just as, after a while, a blind man can walk round his house without tripping, because he knows where everything is. All his life Ziani had worked hard, anxious to impress and be promoted, until he'd achieved what he most wanted-foreman of the machine room of the Mezentine state ordnance factory, the greatest honour a working engineer could ever attain this side of heaven. Outside Mezentia there was nothing like this; the Guilds had seen to that. The Eternal Republic had an absolute monopoly on precision engineering; which meant, in practice, that outside the city, in the vast, unchart
ed world that existed only to buy the products of Mezentine industry, there were no foundries or machine-shops, no lathes or mills or shapers or planers or gang-drills or surface-grinders; the pinnacle of the metalworker's art was a square stub of iron set in a baked earth floor for an anvil, a goatskin bellows and three hammers. That was how the Republic wanted it to be; and, to keep it that way, there was an absolute prohibition on skilled men leaving the city. Not that any Mezentine in his right mind would want to; but wicked kings of distant, barbarous kingdoms had been known to addle men's minds with vast bribes, luring them away with their heads full of secrets. To deal with such contingencies, the Republic had the Travellers' Company, whose job it was to track down renegades and kill them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. By their efforts, all those clever heads were returned to the city, usually within the week, with their secrets still in place but without their bodies, to be exhibited on pikes above Travellers' Arch as a reassurance to all loyal citizens.

  Ziani walked over to the anvil and sat down. The more he thought about it, of course, the worse it got. He couldn't stay in the city-this time tomorrow, they'd be singing out his description in every square, factory and exchange in town-but he couldn't leave and go somewhere else, because it simply wasn't possible to leave unless you went out through one of the seven gates. Even supposing he managed it, by growing wings or perfecting an invisibility charm, there was nowhere he could go. Of course, he'd never get across the plains and the marshes alive; if he did, and made it as far as the mountains, and got through one of the heavily guarded passes without being eaten by bears or shot by sentries, a brown-skinned, black-haired Mezentine couldn't fail to be noticed among the tribes of pale-skinned, yellow-haired savages who lived there. The tribal chiefs knew what happened to anyone foolish enough to harbour renegades. Silly of him; he'd jumped out of check into checkmate, all the while thinking he was getting away.