K Parker - The Escapement

"That's stupid," she said. "I couldn't have done anything like that. I'm not an engineer."

"No." He nodded. "But you asked Ziani to build the doll, for Moritsa. You told him it had to be the kind that could move its arms. And you knew that if you asked him to do something, he'd do it. He'd have no choice, no matter how terrible it was, because he loved you."

"Rubbish," she said. "How would I know about types and mechanisms and stuff?"

He smiled. "Thank you," he said. "For giving me my cue. You wouldn't know, unless somebody told you. Somebody who also wanted to get Ziani out of the way. Someone you were in love with-you never cared anything for Falier-and who, for a time at least, was infatuated with you."

"You're a very strange man," she said. "You're sitting here telling me all this garbage when the savages-"

He held up his hand. "But that wasn't the only reason," he went on. "He loved you-I suppose you could call it that, though I should imagine it was more of an obsession on his part; the usual thing with a middle-aged upper-class man and a young low-class woman: the thrill, the sin, the exhilaration of breaking the rules and getting away with it. And I'm assuming the physical side was at least adequate. After all, he chose you, and a man like that could've had practically any woman in the City."

She said nothing.

"Although," he went on, "from what I can gather, he wasn't like that. Usually, as I understand it, when a man of Boioannes' stature and position gets obsessed with sex, a large part of the pleasure is the number and variety of conquests. Curiously, all my researches have only turned up six verifiable liaisons, all of them brief and fairly low-key. The rest of the time, he seems to have been a contentedly married man, until he found you. Now, looking at you, I really don't see-"

She yawned. "What was that name you said?"

"Maris Boioannes." He steepled his fingers. "Your lover. It was Boioannes who came up with the idea of tricking Ziani into breaking the law. He told you to nag and wheedle Ziani into making the doll with arms that moved; he'll have said it was so Ziani could be got out of the way, and then you'd pair off with a nonentity-Falier, who happened to be smitten with you anyhow-and after a decent interval he'd find a way of getting rid of Falier as well, and then you could be together. I wonder," he went on, "how he explained how Falier fitted into the plan, why he was needed. My guess is that if anybody came snooping round-me, for instance-they'd assume it was all Falier's idea; that Ziani started building the doll off his own bat, Falier noticed the abomination and turned him in to Compliance to get you for himself. Something like that? I'll take that as a yes. I expect the way he explained it made a whole lot of sense. Whatever else he was, Boioannes was a wonderfully persuasive man."

"Maris Boioannes," she repeated. "I've heard of him. Isn't he some grand politician?"

Psellus smiled. "You're forgetting something," he said. "I don't need to prove a word of this to anybody else. I just need to know it, and make you do what I want you to."

She was still for a long time; then she nodded, a tiny movement. "All right," she said. "What's that?" "Barrels?" the colonel repeated.

"That's right." The staff major shrugged. "Beats me, too. But that's what they've been doing. According to my best observers, all those lights we've been watching come up the trench are men rolling barrels."

The colonel sat down on a smashed beam and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. "What do you make of it?" he said. "I guess they could be using them to prop up the roof of the sap, but it seems like a lot of effort to go to."

A thump, and the ground shook. Neither man seemed to notice. After four hours of the bombardment, they were getting used to it. "We ought to dig a countersap," the major said. "If we dig under their sap and undermine it-"

"I suggested that two hours ago," the colonel replied. "He didn't even answer my note."

"He's not a soldier."

The colonel grinned. "Neither are we. So, no countersap. There's probably a very good reason," he added wearily. "Probably it'd damage the embankment even more than what they're doing."

"Not if we shored it properly."

"You know how to do that?" The major shook his head. "I don't, either. Their sappers are mineworkers, they know what they're doing. If we go digging bloody great big holes in the ground, we'll probably bring down the City walls. No, leave well alone, sit tight and do as we're told. And no sorties," he added quickly. "Leave it all up to Chairman Psellus and whoever does his thinking for him. Then, whatever happens, at least it's not our bloody fault."

The major drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. "As you say," he said. "Actually," he went on, "you didn't let me finish. What I was going to say was, they were bringing in barrels, but now they've stopped. In fact, there's nothing going on in the trench at all, as far as we can see."

The colonel frowned. "But the sappers are still there," he said. "They haven't gone back down the trench."

"We don't know that. They might have gone back, it's still too dark to see."

Now the colonel was rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. "Chairman Psellus himself told one of my junior officers it'd take them a week to dig in deep enough to bring down this embankment. It'll be daylight soon, and then we'll be able to see what's going on, and presumably the chairman and his advisers will have a plan of action. Meanwhile, we stand to, as ordered, and resist the temptation to think for ourselves. As I understand it," he added, "that's what being a soldier's all about."

The major left to report back to whoever he reported back to, and the colonel sat still for a while, watching the red stains seeping through the crack between the horizon and the sky. Daylight, he thought; soon it'll be daylight, we'll be able to see what's going on, and everything will be just that little bit easier. He closed his eyes, and he could still see red streaks. Bad omen, he thought, so he made a conscious decision to think about something else. For example: what could the enemy possibly want with several hundred seventy-gallon barrels?

That, however, was too much for him; he managed to come up with several explanations, but they were all equally improbable, with nothing much to choose between them, and none of them was he inclined to accept. His mind drifted away, slipping through tunnels of memory to the time when his grandfather had taken him to see where he worked, in the varnish factory (that was the connection, because the cellars of the factory had been crammed with barrels full, of varnish waiting to be shipped, and he'd got into the most terrible trouble because he hadn't left the lamp outside the door as he'd been told; one mistake with a lit lamp in here, Grandad had told him, and they'd have to redraw all the maps)…

He jumped up, his mouth open, barely aware that he was yelling. A round shot landed a few yards away, and he felt the spray of dirt it kicked up hit him like a slap across the face. Someone was screaming, but that didn't matter. He listened to himself; he was howling, "Clear the embankment, evacuate," but nobody was listening; there were men scrambling round a collapsed redoubt, trying to pull some poor devil out from under the heaps of shattered brick. He ran up to the nearest man and started tugging at his arm; he was shouting, "No, no," at the top of his voice, but the man didn't seem to understand, which was ridiculous, because there just wasn't time to explain; but he had to try, so he bawled, "If that lot goes up, they'll have to redraw all the maps." But the man still didn't seem to have understood, and now there were at least two other men he couldn't see, grabbing his elbows from behind, pulling him back. But that was ridiculous, because they had to listen to him and get away from the embankment, quickly, now, before whatever was in those barrels blew up… "Have you thought," Ziani said suddenly, "how you're going to light it?"