Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  'I'll polish it if you want,' Vaatzes said, 'but it'd be a waste of soap. Useless.'

  Cantacusene turned it over a few times, slipped it on to his left hand, flexed his fingers, turned his wrist; the five wood-louse sections moved up and down like the skin of a breathing animal. He took it off and gave it to Miel, who could hardly bear to touch it. He'd seen more than enough for one day.

  'Well,' he said. The gauntlet was still on his hand; somehow he didn't want to take it off. He could hardly feel it. Part of him was thinking, nine thalers; he had the grace, catching sight of Cantacusene's face, to feel ashamed of himself for that.

  Getting out of the forge wasn't something that could be achieved gracefully; he thanked Cantacusene as best he could and walked away, leaving the gate open because he couldn't face fussing with it. All he wanted to do was leave behind the worst embarrassment he'd ever had to endure.

  They'd been walking for ten minutes, up through the winding alleys, before he felt safe to say anything to the Mezentine.

  'Was that necessary?' he said.

  'How do you mean?'

  Perhaps the man simply didn't understand; but that wasn't very likely. He might be all sorts of things, but he wasn't a fool. The whole thing had been deliberate, from start to finish. 'You might as well have cut his throat or bashed his head in.'

  'What?' Vaatzes frowned. 'Did I do something wrong?'

  More than anything he'd ever wanted in his life, Miel wanted to hit the Mezentine. Nothing else would do but to smash his face until the cheekbones and jaws and teeth were beyond recognition as human. But if he did that, he'd have lost.

  'You had to make your point,' he said. 'But did you have to be so bloody cruel about it?'

  'You wanted to see some metalwork.'

  Miel looked at him. 'Were you getting your own back?' he asked.

  Slowly, Vaatzes shook his head. 'You needed to be convinced,' he said. 'That I'm what I claim to be, and I can do what I say I can. Now you are. I'm sorry if your blacksmith got caught up in the machinery, but I didn't start it. Besides,' he went on, 'his whole setup was a joke.'

  'Not to him,' Miel said.

  Vaatzes waved the objection away. 'It's not a subjective issue,' he said. 'There's a right way to do things and a wrong way, and his was wrong. Everything was wrong about it. Tools useless and jumbled up all over the place; no decent workspace; nothing calibrated or even straight, every single thing out of true.' He shook his head. 'If I hurt him, he deserved it. It was his shop, so it must be his fault. It's an abomination.'

  Miel was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'Oh.'

  Vaatzes laughed. 'You think that word's a bit odd, coming from me.'

  'I wouldn't have imagined you'd think in those terms.'

  Vaatzes stopped walking and looked at him. 'The thing you need to understand,' he said, 'if you want to understand what I have to offer-if you want to understand me, even; the one thing that matters is the principle of tolerance.'

  The word didn't fit at all. Miel repeated it. 'Tolerance.'

  Vaatzes nodded. 'That's right. Do you know what it means, to an engineer?'

  Miel shrugged. 'I thought I did, but maybe I don't.'

  'Tolerance,' Vaatzes said, 'is the degree something can differ from perfection and still be acceptable. It's not always the same. For one job, it could be three thousandths of an inch, and for something else it could be half a thousandth. The point is, if you want to make something that's good, you need your tolerance to be as small as possible. That's the key, to everything. It's what the Guilds are built on, it's everything Mezentia stands for. Precision; tolerance. We try and get as close to perfection as we possibly can, and we don't tolerate anything less than that.' He smiled. 'Your man back there,' he said, 'I don't suppose he even thinks in those terms. If it just about works and it sort of fits, it's good enough.' Miel thought about his gauntlets, which had saved his hands in half a dozen battles. 'We don't tolerate the word enough,' Vaatzes went on. 'Either it's good or it isn't. Either a line is straight and a right angle's a right angle, or it's not; it's true, or out of true. True or false, no grey areas. Do you see what I mean?'

  'Fine,' Miel said. 'Which are you?'

  Vaatzes laughed. 'Oh, I'm all right,' he said. 'I've never had any doubts on that score. You mean, if I believe so strongly in the Mezentine way, how come they were going to kill me for abomination?'

  Miel didn't say anything.

  'The trouble is,' Vaatzes went on, 'the Guilds have lost their way. They've become…' He made a vague gesture. 'I'm not quite sure how to put it. I suppose you could say they've become too tolerant.'

  'What did you say?'

  'They tolerate a lie,' Vaatzes said. 'The lie is that their specifications, which are written down in the books and can't be changed, ever, are perfect and can't be improved on. And that's wrong. Obviously it's wrong. We can do better, if only we're allowed to. That's what I mean; their tolerances are too great. They make it an article of faith that you can't cut this line closer than one thousandth, when it's actually possible to shave that by half. That's the real abomination, don't you think?'

  Miel didn't say anything for a while. 'And that makes it all right for you to humiliate perfect strangers.'

  Vaatzes shrugged. 'Either he'll learn from it and be a better craftsman, now he's seen there's a better way; or else he won't, in which case he isn't fit to be in the trade. I remember my trade test, when I was an apprentice. Actually, it was the same as your man back there set me, to file a perfect circle. But it had to be right. The tolerance was one thousandth of an inch, which is the thickness of a line scribed with a Guild specification dogleg calliper. The material was half-inch plate, and the edge had to be chamfered to exactly forty-five degrees, in accordance with a Guild half-corner square. If you got it right, you passed and got your Guild membership.'

  Miel nodded. 'What happened if you got it wrong? Did they burn you at the stake or something?'

  Vaatzes shook his head. 'The finished piece is measured with the Guild's prescribed gauges; basically, a hole the right size cut into a big half-inch sheet. It has to be an exact fit-they test it with a candle. If light shows through, or if a speck of soot finds its way into the join, you fail. If that happens, there's a sort of ceremony. They put you in a cart, with your work hung round your neck on a bit of string, and on Guild meeting day, when everybody goes to the Guildhall to hear the speeches, they drive you round and round the town square from noon to sunset. People don't jeer or throw things at you, it's worse than that. It's dead quiet. Nobody says anything, they just stare. For that half a day, you're completely-I don't know what the right word is. You're completely separate, apart; you're up there and they're down below looking at you, like you're everything that's wrong in the world, captured and brought out so they can all have a good look at you and see what evil looks like, so they'll know it if they meet it again. Then, at sunset, they get you down off the cart in front of everybody, and Guild officers take your piece of work and they kill it; they bash it with hammers, they bend it and fold it over stakes, and finally they heat it up white hot in a furnace until it melts, and they pour the melted metal into sand, so it can't ever be made into anything else ever again.'

  It took Miel a moment to find his voice. 'And that happened to you?'

  'Good God, no,' Vaatzes said. 'I passed. It's incredibly rare, someone not passing; I think it's happened two or three times in my lifetime. Which goes to show, the system works. It's a bit harsh, but it makes for good workmanship.'

  'And what happens to people who fail? Do they get thrown out of the City?'

  'Of course not. They learn their lesson, and the next year, they take the test again. Nobody's ever failed twice.'

  'Fine,' Miel said. 'I wouldn't recommend you trying to introduce that system here. I don't think that sort of thing would go down well.'

  'Of course not. You've got a long way to go, I can see that.'

  Miel took Vaatzes back to his room. He had to make
his report to the Duke, he said, and then the decision would be made about whether to accept his offer. 'We'll try not to keep you in suspense any longer than necessary,' he told him. Then he went to find Orsea, thinking long thoughts about the nature of perfection.

  The Duke in council considered his report, together with a written submission from the Armourer Royal, who gave his opinion that the Mezentine possessed skills far in advance of anything known to the Vadani, and recommended in the strongest possible terms that his offer should be accepted. Further submissions were heard from the exchequer, the trade commissioners, the Merchant Adventurers and other concerned parties, after which the meeting debated the issue, with special reference to the effects of the aftermath of the recent war, the manpower position, the need to remodel the Duchy's defences and other pertinent factors. At the conclusion of the debate, the Duke and his special adviser Miel Ducas retired to consider their decision. After a brief recess, the Duke announced that the Mezentine's offer was rejected.

  Chapter Nine

  Commissioner Lucao Psellus had seen many strange sights in his time, and it was a tribute to his flawless orthodoxy that he had survived each disturbing experience without allowing a single one of them to damage him in any way. He had, reluctantly, read heresy and listened to abomination, both the forced confessions of the man broken up by torture and the proud ranting of the unrepentant martyr. He had seen things that nobody ought to have to seen, every imaginable permutation of the aberrant and the false. He had endured.

  The spectacle he was presented with on this occasion was different, if no less taxing, and he found it extremely difficult to cope with. It took the form of a very large foreign woman, dressed in painfully bright patterned red velvet, with pearls in her hair and rings on all ten fingers. Even her boots were red, he noticed. Compared to the woman herself, the news she brought was trivial.

  'Of course,' she was saying, 'they haven't made a formal decision yet. It'll have to go before the council. They'll call for reports and evidence and what have you, and then there'll be a meeting, and then the Duke will finally make up what he pleases to call his mind. They're like that in Eremia, since that young Orsea took over. He's the worst thing that ever happened to the Duchy; can't take a decision on his own, always terrified he'll do the wrong thing, no confidence in his own judgement.'

  Psellus made an effort to pull himself together. 'You're not Eremian, are you?'

  She laughed. It was an extraordinary noise. 'I suppose we all look alike to you,' she said. 'No, I'm Vadani, I'm delighted to say.'

  'No offence,' Psellus said weakly.

  'None taken.' She laughed again. 'I know that you people in the City don't get to see foreigners very often. Besides, it's actually quite an easy mistake to make. The Adventurers are pretty much a breed apart on both sides of the border; we're more merchant than Vadani or Eremian. I suppose I've got more in common with my colleagues in Eremia than with the silver-miners or the horse-breeders back home. It comes with travel, I always think; you can't be parochial if you're constantly moving about. And you don't get more parochial than back-country Vadani.'

  Psellus frowned. 'Since we're talking about that sort of thing,' he said, 'I might as well ask you now. Why is it that all you merchants are women?'

  She raised both eyebrows. 'Blunt, aren't you?' she said. 'But it's a fair question, I suppose, and if you don't ask, you won't ever know. It's a social thing, I suppose you could say. You see, where I come from-I know it's different here, but so's everything-we don't like waste. Mountains, you see; you don't waste anything if you live in the mountains, because anything you can't actually grow up there, or catch, or dig out of the ground, has got to come all the way up the mountain, usually on someone's back. So we have this mindset, I guess you could say: make best use of everything you've got, and don't squander your resources. And if there's something you can't use, you apply your mind and find a use for it.'

  'That makes sense,' Psellus conceded.

  'Well,' she continued, 'people are a resource, just like everything else. And mostly, it's obvious what use most people should be put to. Men work outside, in the pastures or mining; men of good family run things, naturally. Women work inside, running the home, bringing up children. But there's one group of people who don't immediately seem to be much good for anything. People like me.'

  She paused, clearly waiting for a rebuttal or at least a protest. Psellus wasn't minded to indulge her, so she went on: 'Unmarried middle-aged women of good family. Completely useless, wouldn't you say? No homes to run or families to look after; obviously we can't go out herding goats or spinning wool. All we've got is a bit of capital of our own and a bit of education. So, when you think about it, it's obvious, isn't it?'

  'I suppose so,' Psellus replied. That made her laugh again.

  'You don't see it, I can tell. And that's understandable, you don't have the problem. You've got people at the top-all men, of course-and people at the bottom, and nothing in between. I imagine you think it's perfect, like everything else here.'

  Psellus tried not to frown. He wished he hadn't raised the subject. Some of his colleagues claimed that they actually enjoyed foreigners, their appallingly quaint lack of civilisation, but he couldn't see it himself. 'As you say,' he replied, 'we don't have the problem. Please forgive me if the question was offensive.'

  She shook her head. 'It's pretty hard to offend an Adventurer,' she said. 'You get to learn quite quickly, people are different wherever you go. Wouldn't do if we were all the same.'

  'Ziani Vaatzes,' Psellus said.

  'Ah yes. Him. Well, I think I've told you everything I know. Seems to me,' she added cheerfully, like all your nightmares have come true. One of your top people has got away and taken all your secrets with him, and he's offered to give the whole lot to your deadly enemies, who you just stomped on hard in a war. Couldn't really be any worse, from your point of view. Of course,' she added, 'there's not a lot to worry about really. The Eremians are poor as dirt, it'd take them a hundred years to get to the point where they could be a threat to you, even if you left them alone and let them get on with it. It'd be different if this Vaatzes of yours had gone to the Vadani, of course, because we may be ignorant hill folk just like the Eremians, but we've got all that lovely silver, not to mention a duke who knows his own mind and gets things done. And I wouldn't be surprised if this Vaatzes isn't wishing he'd gone the other way up the mountain, if you follow me.'

  It took him another quarter of an hour and a certain sum of money to get rid of her; then he crawled away to his office at the top of the Foundrymen's tower, to pick the meat off what he'd just heard. A cup of strong willowbark tea helped him clear his head, and as the fog dispersed and he was able to give his full mind to the facts, he started to worry.

  No doubt the woman was right. The Perpetual Republic wasn't scared of Eremia Montis. The whole Eremian army, hellbent on razing the city to the ground, hadn't constituted enough of a threat to warrant a meeting of the full executive council; and where was that army now? If you took the broad view, there really wasn't anything to worry about.

  But he didn't have that luxury. Another thing the wretched woman had been right about: from the point of view of the commissioner of the compliance directorate, this was the worst day in the history of the world. A convicted abominator had escaped justice, killed two jailers, seriously injured an officer of the tribunal, walked out of the Guildhall in broad daylight, fled the country and run straight to the court of an actively hostile enemy, begging them to accept all the most closely guarded secrets of the Foundrymen's and Machinists' Guild. Yes, Eremia was negligible. So, come to that, were the Vadani, for all their wealth. But that wasn't the point. Once the secrets were outside the Guild's control, there was no way of knowing who would get hold of them, or where they'd end up. Geography wasn't his strong suit, but he knew there was an inhabited world beyond the Cure Doce and the Cure Hardy, not to mention beyond the sea (his colleagues in the Cartographers' Guild would
know about that; except, of course, he daren't ask them, because they'd want to know the reason for his unusual curiosity). And besides; even if there was no risk at all, that was entirely beside the point. His directorate had been created on the assumption that there was a risk, and the sole justification for his existence was that that risk had to be guarded against at any expense. In those terms, which were all that mattered, he'd failed.

  He thought about it for a while, just in case he'd overlooked something, but he knew there was nothing to overlook. It was perfectly clear and perfectly simple. Crisestem and his assassination squad weren't relevant any more. Killing Vaatzes would be a desirable end in itself, of course, but it would no longer be enough. The whole of Eremia-

  He wanted to laugh, because it was absurd. Here he sat, one man, chairman of a committee, in a tower above a small formal garden, and he'd just taken the decision to wipe out an entire nation. Ludicrous; because even if Vaatzes had already betrayed the secrets; even if he'd written them all out in a book, with notes and explanatory diagrams and a glossary and index in the back, there wasn't a single soul in Eremia, or Vadanis, or among the Cure Doce or (God help us all) the Cure Hardy who could understand a word of it. But he was going to have to go down the stairs, through the cloister, across the small formal garden into the Great Hall and recommend that the army of the Perpetual Republic be mobilised and sent to kill every man, woman and child in a place he knew virtually nothing about, just in case; better safe than sorry, after all. It was stupid; and of course his recommendation would be accepted, and once the resolution had been passed in Guild chapter and the order had been given to the military, it would happen, and nothing on earth could stop it. Even if, by some extraordinary freak of chance, the army was resisted, defeated, massacred in a narrow mountain pass or drowned by a river in spate, another army would be raised and dispatched, and another, and another after that (because the Republic daren't ever say it was going to do something and then back down; gods must be seen to be omnipotent, or the sky will fall). Even if the world was emptied of expendable people and the Mezentines themselves had to be conscripted, they'd keep sending armies, until the job was done. As soon as he left this room, the machine would be set in motion and the outcome would inevitably follow.