Devices and Desires e-1

by K. J. Parker

  Orsea frowned, as if the concept was unfamiliar to him. 'Wood.'

  'That's right. For immediate delivery, before they move out of range. Dogwood, cornel wood, ash, hazel. Willing to pay top thaler for quality merchandise.'

  'Well, he's out of luck,' Orsea said. 'Besides, after the way they behaved, I wouldn't sell them wood if they were the last men on earth. Screw them, in fact.'

  'Absolutely.' Miel thought for a bit, but all the edges were getting blurred. 'What's dogwood?' he asked.

  'No idea.'

  'Doesn't matter.' Miel waved away dogwood in perpetuity. 'Sure you won't have another?'

  'Revolting stuff. Just a taste, then.'

  Just a taste was all that was left in the bottle; odd, Miel thought, because it was nearly full a moment ago. Evaporation, maybe. 'I'll say this for them,' he said, 'if I hadn't known they were savages, I'd never have guessed.'

  Orsea concentrated. 'Insidious,' he said. 'Get under your guard pretending to be not savage.' He looked at the tips of his fingers for a long minute, then said: 'So let's get this straight. Nearest to our border are the Doce Votz. Next to them are the Rosinholet.'

  Miel shook his head; an interesting experience. 'No, you're wrong,' he said. 'Next to the Doce Votz you've got the Lauzeta. Next to them's the Aram Chantat.'

  'The Aram Chantat? You sure?'

  Miel shrugged. 'Something like that. Anyhow, now we know what they're like, these barbarians-'

  'No meat. And no drink.'

  'Exactly. Now we know what they're like, we can talk to them. Bloody useful initiative. Good men to have on your side in a fight, I bet.'

  For some reason, Orsea thought that was terribly funny. So, after a moment, did Miel. 'No, but seriously,' Miel went on. 'If only we knew why they didn't come up the Lonzanep road-'

  'Lonazep.'

  'That too. Can't figure that out. Bloody great big desert in the way if you're coming from that direction. Should've starved and parched ten times over before they got here.'

  'Oh, I don't know,' Orsea objected. 'I mean, they don't eat a lot, or drink.' He reached for the bottle, just in case there was a drop lurking inside it somewhere, and knocked it off the table on to the floor. 'Bloody Vadani,' he said. 'Can't even make a bottle that stands upright.'

  Not long after that he fell asleep. Miel, who knew about protocol, struggled to his feet, called a page and had him carried back to his apartments; then he flopped back into his chair and closed his eyes. That was one of the good things about not being a duke: he could grab forty winks in his chair without having to be carried home like a drunk.

  Someone he didn't know woke him up in his chair the next morning with a message from Orsea. The Cure Hardy had gone home, the message said (Miel asked the stranger what time it was; just after noon, the man replied); the Duke's compliments, and it would've been nice if Miel could have been there to see them on their way. A little later, he found Orsea in the small rose garden and apologised. His head hurt and his digestion wasn't quite right-that was what came of eating bread and cheese for dinner, Orsea said-which probably explained why he forgot to tell Orsea about the letter. He considered mentioning it then and there, but decided not to.

  Since he wasn't feeling his best, he reckoned he might as well go home. On his way, he ran into Sorit Calaphates, who thanked him for inviting him to meet the Cure Hardy at dinner. It was news to Miel that he'd done so, but he accepted the thanks in the spirit in which they were given.

  'So,' Miel said, 'haven't seen you around much lately. Been busy?'

  Calaphates nodded. 'My new business venture,' he said with a slight roll of the eyes. 'I'm starting to wonder what I've got myself into.'

  'Remind me,' Miel said.

  'The Mezentine,' Calaphates said. 'You suggested it, remember.'

  'Oh yes,' Miel said. 'Him. Going well?'

  'You could say that,' Calaphates muttered. 'Going to cost me an absolute fortune by the time he's done. Still, clever man, can't deny that. This morning he was on about some new way of smelting iron ore; reckons it'll be better than how it's done in Mezentia, even. Anyway, that's what I need to talk to you about sometime. Not now,' he added, because he was a reasonably perceptive man. 'Later, when you've got a moment. I'll send my clerk, and he can fix up a time.'

  'Splendid,' Miel said. 'I'll look forward to that. So, what did you think of the savages?'

  'Not what I'd been expecting,' Calaphates admitted. 'Quiet. Can't say I took to them.'

  'They've gone now,' Miel said. 'Still, we had some useful discussions.'

  Calaphates nodded. 'Wonder what they'll make of the Merchant Adventurers,' he said. 'Don't suppose they've got anything like them back where they come from.'

  'Merchant Adventurers?' Miel repeated. 'What've they got to do with anything?'

  'The man I was talking to last night said they were meeting them this morning, on their way home. Didn't they mention it?'

  'Possibly,' Miel said. 'Can't think why, though, they live too far away.' He shrugged. He'd had enough of the Cure Hardy. 'Can't do any harm,' he said.

  'Probably want to sell them something,' Calaphates said, reasonably enough. 'In which case, bloody good luck. Strange people, though. All those different tribes.'

  'Sects,' Miel corrected.

  'As you say, sects. The man I was talking to did try and explain, but I'm afraid I lost the thread. Apparently they're all descended from one tribe, but they split up hundreds of years ago over religious differences; they stopped believing in the religion long since, but they still keep up the differences. Charming, though, about the names.'

  'What about the names?' Miel asked.

  'The names of the sects. Let's see.' Calaphates' narrow forehead crinkled in thought. 'Their lot, the Biau Votz; that means Beautiful Voice in their language. The Rosinholet are the Nightingales, the Aram Chantat are the Voices Raised in Song, the Flos Glaia are the Meadow Flowers or something of the sort, and so on. Apparently they believe that when they die, they're reborn as songbirds.'

  'Good heavens,' Miel said, mildly stunned.

  Calaphates nodded. 'People are curious, aren't they? Well, I won't keep you.' He dipped his head in formal salutation and scuttled away.

  The Beautiful Voice and the Meadow Flowers… Miel gave that a great deal of thought on the way home, but in spite of his best endeavours he was unable to arrive at any meaningful conclusion.

  Chapter Twelve

  'This,' the foreman said, 'is the main transmission house. Power for the whole machine shop comes from this one flywheel, which is driven by direct gearing from the big overshot waterwheel out back. This here is the main takeoff-he pointed with his stick-'and that's the gear train that supplies the overhead shafts in the long gallery, where all the heavy lathes and mills are.'

  Falier Zenonis nodded and muttered, 'Ah' for the twentieth time that morning. He knew it all already, of course, though he'd never actually seen it. But he'd spent a week laboriously working through the notes poor Ziani had made; notes, drawings, sketches, detail sketches, you couldn't fault Ziani on his thoroughness when it came to mechanisms. As a result, he knew his way round the machine shop better than his guide; like a blind man who's lived in the same house all his life. But even if Ziani's notes were strictly legal (which he doubted) he didn't want to draw attention to the fact that he'd read them, or known Ziani at all. So, 'What does that thing there do?' he asked, though he knew perfectly well.

  'That?' The foreman pointed. 'That's clever. You just knock back the handle-there, look-and that disengages the main drive. It's a safety thing, mostly; someone gets his arm caught in a belt, you call up to the transmission house and they throw this lever, and the whole lot stops dead.'

  'I see,' Falier replied, remembering to sound suitably impressed. 'Do we get a lot of accidents?'

  'Not really,' the foreman replied. 'Not when you consider how many people work here, and how much machinery we've got running. Obviously, from time to time someone's going to get careless, there
's nothing anybody can do to stop it happening. But you can cut down the risk with the right shift rotations, so nobody's working the dangerous machines long enough to get tired, and only properly trained men use the really big, heavy stuff. That sort of thing's going to be a large part of your job: duty rosters, choosing the right men for each machine, all that stuff.'

  Before his disgrace, Ziani had written out frameworks for duty rosters for the next eighteen months; all Falier would need to do would be to fill in the names and copy them out in his own handwriting. Involuntarily, he wondered where Ziani was at that precise moment, and what he was doing.

  'Tell me about the man who used to do this,' he said, as casually as he could. 'Didn't he get into some kind of trouble?'

  'You could say that,' the foreman replied with a grin. 'You must've heard, it was really big news, just before the Eremian invasion.'

  'Hold on,' Falier said. 'That's right, I-remember now. Abomination, wasn't it?'

  The foreman scowled as he nodded. 'We were stunned, I can tell you. Gutted. I mean, he always came across as, you know, an ordinary kind of bloke. A bit keen, maybe, inclined to shave the rules a bit to get on top of a schedule; but sometimes you've got to be like that to get things done around here. Within reason,' he added quickly. 'I mean, what he did, there's no excuse for that.'

  No excuse. Well. A picture of Ziani as he'd last seen him flooded uninvited into Falier's mind; dazed, he'd seemed, wondering what was going on, in the prison cell in the Guildhall basement, clutching trustingly to the tiny fragment of hope Falier had given him-not for himself, but for his wife and daughter. No excuse; reading the notes and the rosters, page after page covered in neat, ugly, small writing-Ziani always wrote quickly, but he'd never mastered the art of joined-up letters, so he'd invented a method all his own (which was also an abomination, strictly speaking), he remembered the times he'd borrowed Ziani's notes for revision in school, because he'd lost his own, or he'd been playing truant that day. You looked at the page and you thought it was illegible scrawl, but when you looked closer it was as easy to follow as the best clerk's copy-hand.

  'It's always the quiet ones,' he heard himself say.

  The foreman nodded briskly. 'He was that all right,' he said. 'Always kept himself to himself. I mean, he talked to the lads, but he was never one of them, if you see what I mean. Standoffish, I guess you could call it-not like he thought he was better than us, just sort of like he didn't want to join in. Like his mind was always somewhere else. And now,' he added grimly, 'we know all about it, don't we?'

  'Well, I'm not like that,' Falier said, and he gave him one of his trust-me smiles. 'I expect I'm going to have to rely on all of you quite a lot, till I'm up to speed.'

  The foreman shrugged his concerns away. 'Place more or less runs itself,' he said, thereby damning himself for ever in Falier's judgement. 'Let the lads get on with it, they know what to do. I mean, you've got the Specifications, what else do you need?'

  Down the iron spiral stairs into the main shop; a huge place, bare walls like horizons enclosing a vast stone-flagged plain, on which stood rows and rows of machines. Falier had never seen an orchard, though he'd seen pictures and heard descriptions, and had imagined the straight, bare rides between the rows of trees. There was something like that about the shop floor, the same sense of order firmly imposed. There was far more than he could take in; the noise, an amalgam of dozens of different sounds forming a buzzing, intrusive composite; the smell of cutting oil, sheep's grease, steel filings, sweat and hot metal; the crunch of swarf under his feet, the taste in his mouth of thick, wet air and carborundum powder. He knew that Ziani had loved it here, that there was only one place on earth he'd rather be. Himself, he found it too hot, too noisy and too crowded. It had cost him a great deal of effort to get here, but he wasn't planning on staying any longer than he had to.

  'This,' the foreman was saying, 'is your standard production centre lathe; it's what we use for general turning, dressing up castings, turning down diameters, facing off, all that. Driven off the overhead shaft by a two-inch leather belt; four speeds on the box plus two sizes of flywheel, so you've got eight running speeds straight away, before you need to start adding changewheels. Spindle bore diameter one and a half inches; centre height above the bed twelve inches; length between centres…'

  Falier smiled appreciatively. It was just a machine. He'd seen loads of them, spent hours standing beside them turning the little wheels, reading off the scribed lines of the dials, dodging the vicious, sharp, hot blue spirals of swarf flying out from the axis of rotation like poisoned arrows. Ziani, now, he'd loved the big machines, the way a rider loves his horse or a falconer his falcons. To him, backlash in the lead-screw was a tragedy, like a child with a terminal illness; a snapped tap or a badly ground parting tool was the remorseless savagery of the world directed at him personally. There was a certain manic quality about the way Ziani had loved his work which Falier had always found vaguely disturbing. A Guildsman should be a part of his machine-the bit on the end of the handle that turned it a specified number of turns. Passion had no part in it. Looking back, you could see he was likely to come to a bad end.

  'And over here,' the foreman went on, 'you've got your millers; verticals that side, horizontals this side. Tool racks here; you can see they're all arranged in size order, slot drills on the top row, end-mills next row down, bull-noses and dovetail cutters, flycutters, side-and-face, gang-mills, slotting saws. Collets and tee-nuts here, look, vee-blocks, couple of rotary tables…' Falier kept himself from yawning; a lesser man would've given in, because the foreman wasn't looking at him. He felt like a prospective son-in-law meeting the whole family, right down to the last seven-year-old third cousin.

  'Anyhow,' the foreman said, 'that's about it, the grand tour. If there's anything I can help you with, anything you want to know, just ask.'

  'Thanks,' Falier said-his mouth had almost forgotten how to shape words during the long, slow circuit. 'It's going to be a pleasure working here.'

  The foreman smirked. Falier decided he loathed him, and that he'd need to be got rid of, sooner rather than later. No big deal. 'That just leaves your office,' the foreman said. 'This way, up the stairs.'

  The ordnance factory was an old building-ever since Falier could remember they'd been on the point of pulling it down and rebuilding it from scratch, but the moment never quite came. Before the Reformation it had been a religious building of some kind, a temple or a monastery. It had been gutted two centuries earlier, all the internal walls demolished to make the long, high halls and galleries for the rows of machines, but four towers still remained, one at each corner.

  Bell-towers, Falier had heard them called. Three of them housed cranes and winches, for lifting oversized sections of material. The fourth one was the senior foreman's office. Falier had been here once, to see Ziani. It was empty now, apart from a single chair and a bare table (not the ones that had been there the last time he'd seen it; every last trace of Ziani had been purged). There was no door; you looked out and down on to the factory floor, spread out in front of you like a vast, complex mechanism.

  The foreman went away, leaving Falier sitting in the chair looking at the table. He was wondering what he was supposed to do next when a boy, about twelve years old, appeared in the archway and asked if there was anything he wanted.

  Falier frowned. 'Who are you?'

  'Bosc,' the boy replied.

  'Right. What do you do around here?'

  The boy thought for a moment. 'What I'm told.'

  'Good. In that case, get me fifty sheets of writing paper, a bottle of ink and a pen.'

  That was all it took, apparently; Bosc came back in a surprisingly short time with everything he'd asked for. 'Thanks,' Falier said. 'How do I find you when I need you for something?'

  'Yell,' said Bosc, and went away.

  Fine, Falier thought. He spread out a sheet of paper, and began writing down the things he knew he'd need to remember, before they slippe
d his mind. He'd covered three sheets and was crowding the foot of a fourth when a shadow cut out his light. He looked up. Bosc was back.

  'Letter for you,' he said, and he brandished a small, folded square of parchment, presumably in case Falier wasn't inclined to believe him without tangible proof.

  'Thanks,' Falier said. 'You can go.'

  Bosc went. There was nothing written on the outside, so he unfolded it. He saw writing, and folded it back up again. He yelled.

  Bosc came back, almost instantaneously. Presumably he sat on the stairs when not in use, like an end-mill on its rack.

  'Who brought this?' Falier asked.

  'Woman,' Bosc replied. 'Odd-looking.'

  Falier felt muscles tighten in his stomach and chest. 'Odd-looking how?'

  'She was big and old and fat, her face was sort of pale pink, and she was wearing a big red dress like a tent,' Bosc said. 'She talked funny.'

  'Thanks,' Falier said. 'Go away.'

  He counted up to twenty before unfolding the letter again. That handwriting; at first sight, you thought you'd never be able to read it. Falier-

  The woman I've given this to reckons she can get it to you discreetly. Apparently, they're good at it, years of practice. For your sake, I hope it's true.

  In case she's lying or overconfident: to whom it may concern. Be it known that I, Ziani Vaatzes, am writing to Falier Zenonis for the first time since my escape from the Guildhall. He has not been in touch with me since he visited me in prison, and he had nothing to do with my escape or subsequent defection. I'm writing to him because he's my oldest friend in the world, and about the only person in Mezentia who might just read this, rather than throw it straight on the nearest fire. I have information that will prove of great value to the Republic, but what good is it if nobody'll listen to me?

  There; I hope that'll help, if they intercept this. If not, I'm very sorry for getting you into trouble. I don't suppose you'll be able to forgive me if that's happened, but you're the only one I could think of If you've read this far, thanks, Falier.