Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

‘Free will?’ Salma saw, in that long room, more people than he could readily count. They were almost shoulder to shoulder at the benches, each repeating some action over and over. Some were tending pole-lathes, others shaping shards of chitin. Some at the back fed a row of forges whose red glow shed more light than the grime-covered windows. Others poured molten metal into moulds, and others still honed the edges of the tiny pieces resulting, or freed them from the casts. Each man or woman had a fragment of a job, performed over and over. Each was utterly absorbed by it, working as fast as they could, passing over forever to the next pair of hands in line. Salma wondered what would happen if, in their same free will, they decided not to work.

‘Oh, lose the long face,’ Che snapped at him, annoyed. ‘So they don’t do things this way in the Commonweal. This is industry, Salma. This is how things happen in the Lowlands. We can’t all spend three years making the perfect sword or whatever.’

‘I don’t think I can stay in here,’ Salma said. ‘I’m going to wait over by the door where there’s light and air.’

‘Suit yourself,’ she said, nettled. He caught her gaze as he turned, though, and something must have communicated itself to her. Looking back across the room there was a moment, just a moment, when she saw the hundreds of labouring bodies and wondered: free will, yes, but how many of them had a family an eighth of an inch from starving? How many had come to Helleron to make their fortunes and now could not afford to leave?

At the far end of the factory were stacked bundles of crossbow bolts being carefully counted by an overseer. Each day this one factory shipped hundreds of them, made for a price nowhere in the Lowlands could match. Business was not good enough for Uncle Elias, though. Clearly some part of his grand machine was not keeping pace with the rest.

‘I don’t care how you do it,’ she heard him complain as she approached. ‘Hire more workers or get this lot to work faster, but we’re down almost five parts per hundred, and the orders just keep mounting up. I want next tenday’s turnover to be the same as the last, and the tenday after to be even better.’

The Ant foreman nodded glumly. ‘It will be done.’

‘Good.’ Elias turned to see Che. ‘How do you like my factory?’

‘It’s very impressive, uncle.’ She had begun calling him that, rather than cousin, because he was Stenwold’s age.

‘What does your friend think?’

‘I don’t think he’s really used to it,’ she said.

‘Well, the Commonwealers never were good customers. A bit snobby about their own craftsmanship, if you ask me.’ Elias shrugged. ‘It’s always the same with the Inapt: they want everything handcrafted to thousand-year-old techniques that take forever, and then wonder why everyone else has a bigger army.’

‘Did you ask the foreman about Tynisa and Totho?’

‘He’s seen nobody, but Helleron is a big place. . Excuse me.’

A messenger had just flown into the factory, a young Fly-kinden with wings glittering red in the forgelight. He landed at a run and virtually threw himself at Elias’s feet.

‘Master Monger?’ The youth was quite out of breath.

‘That’s me. Is it from Tarhaven’s delegation?’

‘No, Master. From Officer Breaken at the north-west shaft.’ The Fly handed over a scroll and retired, chest still heaving.

Elias cursed quietly to himself and read the scroll by firelight. His face, when he looked at the messenger, was brutal, and Che thought he would strike the unfortunate man. ‘Is this it?’ he demanded. ‘Is this all the report Breaken knows how to make?’

‘He. .’ The messenger flinched back. ‘He asks for you to come at once, with-’

‘I see what he asks for. Does he have any idea how much this costs ?’ Elias’s hands wrung the scroll and the Fly-kinden stepped further back from him.

‘Uncle Elias?’ Che asked, as much to distract his attention from the wretched messenger as anything else. Staring at her, Elias forced on a smile for Che’s benefit.

‘Is something wrong?’ she prompted him.

‘Just. .’ He let out a shuddering sigh. ‘Just business. Cousin Stenwold has no idea how. . delicate things can be, here in Helleron.’ He looked past her at Salma, standing pale and wan in the forgelight. ‘Do you think your friend would enjoy a little mountain air, Cheerwell?’

She nodded cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’

‘This. .’ He shook the mangled scroll at her. ‘I have some business north of the city, one of my mining concerns. Perhaps some clearer air would do you good. I’m told our local brand can have an effect on strangers.’

Che dearly hoped that Salma would find some more solace in the mountains, but, knowing what she did about the Helleron mines, she had an uneasy feeling about how he would react. She nodded cautiously, but it was to Elias’s back as he was already marching for the factory doors. The messenger scurried after him, and Elias called over his shoulder. ‘Get me another twenty men. I don’t care who you hire them from so long as they’re good for the work. Flares, crossbows. And a repeating ballista — make it two. I’m going to cut the heart out of this now .’

Che and Salma exchanged surprised glances. It seemed Uncle Elias was going to war.

Helleron had been founded where it was because of the mountains. The Tornos range was a miner’s delight, and most of all it was shot through with the richest iron deposits in the Lowlands. What had started as a small foundry town four centuries ago was now the hub of all the Lowlands’ trade and mercantile ventures. Iron and steel were the body and bone of the city, consumed by it in vast quantities, refined in its organs, cast forth in a thousand shapes, and most of them warlike.

Salma had made a rough journey of it, a rigid passenger in the jolting convoy of steam automotives that clattered out from Helleron. It was the motion. It was the smell, it was, Che realized, the very fact of it. He had experienced none of this back in his distant home. Even in Collegium he had always flown or walked. Now he was travelling on a conveyance from another world, and it was making him ill. His golden skin had gone verdigris green by the time Elias called a halt in the shadow of the mountains.

It was not exactly the clear mountain air and scenic views that Elias had promised them. Salma still wore his smile like a shield against the world, but she could see the strain telling in his eyes. They had disembarked in a great quarry, where the stone of the foothills had been scooped away over decades. Gaping, propped-up holes in the sheer rock were the shallow mines, and above them a vast winch-and-pulley system creaked as its steam engine laboured to bring up the next load of men and ore from the utter depths. The quarry floor was laced with rails, and one wall formed the support for a lean-to as large as a castle, where the ore smelting took place. Elias had explained that it was cheaper to smelt it here and then ship the metal over to the city, or at least it had been ten years ago. In the light of recent developments he was having to rethink the profitability of his enterprise.

Elias had begun trying to explain the mine to them but there were a dozen different people with claims on his time, and in the end Che and Salma were left like two baffled islands in the middle of all the bustle. Something had gone wrong here, she saw, spotting a pair of big drilling engines that were obviously out of commission, and one of them blackened and burned. A team of artificers was furiously stripping them both, arguing over what had been done and how best to fix it. There were soldiers here, too: Beetle-kinden guardsmen in Elias’s employ, wearing chain mail and breastplates, and with crossbows to hand. They kept watching the sky, Che noticed. They were clearly nervous.