K Parker - The Escapement

"Well, she told me about how long he was spending on it, and…" He dried up. No other people. Just her. And how many times had she mentioned it to him? More than once. Quite a few times; almost as if… "Just her," he said. "And I must have figured it out for myself."

"All of it?"

"Well…" Falier struggled to clear his mind, as though he'd woken up suddenly. "She and I talked about it. I said how I couldn't understand what could be so difficult about it, if he was following Specification. And she…"

"She reached the conclusion."

A statement. "Yes," Falier realised. "Yes, she did."

Psellus nodded slowly. It was as though he was being told something he already knew, but the hunger with which he'd been asking the questions contradicted that. "She's an intelligent woman," he said. "I know, I've spoken to her myself, as you know. But even so, I find it hard to accept that she formed that particular conclusion from that particular evidence, if you follow me. But if you say it was her and not you…"

Falier nodded eagerly. "I'm sure it was her," he said, "now you mention it."

"I see."

"Well, it seemed so convenient." Again, his choice of words disturbed him. "Here we were, trying to find a way of getting him out of the picture, and suddenly this came along. It was…"

"A stroke of luck."

"Yes." Falier realised he was feeling painfully cold. "Just what we needed, at just the right time."

"Indeed. So," Psellus went on, "did you go straight to the authorities, or did you investigate further, to make sure the accusation was well founded?"

He wasn't quite sure what to make of how Psellus had phrased that. "I didn't ask Ziani about it, if that's what you mean, or go poking about in his workshop to see if I could find anything wrong. I went to see the people at Compliance, and they told me I needed to talk to the Justice department."

Psellus nodded. "I know about criminal procedure, thank you. But I find it strange: you decided to go straight to the authorities, just on the basis of a conclusion-a guess, really-instead of looking for solid evidence."

Falier frowned. "I…"

"It wouldn't have been very hard," Psellus continued. "You were his friend, I assume you visited him at home often enough for your calling there not to seem unusual. His wife could have found some way of making sure he was out of the house for long enough for you to look in his workshop. You're an engineer; you could have taken measurements, interpreted the specifications well enough to detect violations. But you didn't do that."

"No. It didn't seem necessary."

"She told you it wouldn't be necessary."

"Yes."

Fear was thawing his mind now, instead of freezing it; and he couldn't help feeling a desperate kind of admiration for this man who understood him better than he understood himself. Because until Psellus started asking his questions, it simply hadn't occurred to him.

"She thought you had enough for an accusation," Psellus said. "No evidence, just your suspicions."

"That's right."

He nodded slowly. "And the clerks at Justice," he said. "How did they react?"

"They listened to what I told them, and said they'd look into it."

Psellus nodded firmly, as though Falier had gaven the right answer. "They didn't ask if you had any kind of proof."

"No." Falier felt as if he was sliding on ice. "I assumed that that's how they usually…" He shook his head. "I don't know what I thought, at the time. It all seemed to happen so fast, and it meant we could be together; I suppose I didn't want to think about it too deeply, because of what I'd done to Ziani." He twisted, as though trying to get away from something. "And it was the right thing to do, wasn't it? I mean, he was breaking the law."

Psellus looked at him, and he wished he hadn't said that. "Yes," Psellus said. "He was breaking the law, so it must have been the right thing to do. And you sent him to his death, but you didn't try and murder him." Suddenly he grinned. "We did that." Then the energy seemed to leak out of him, and he leaned against the gallery rail. "I met him, you know. I went all the way to Civitas Vadanis, and I met him. We plotted the death of an innocent man together. And he gave us Civitas Eremiae; we'd never have taken it without him, but we'd have wasted thousands of lives trying. He's really a quite extraordinary man; he's done almost as much to help this city as he has to harm it. I hope they'll be able to say the same about me one day, when I'm gone."

Next morning, Psellus met the architects. He was already tired when the meeting began; he'd been up most of the night reading. The book was on his desk in front of him when they arrived.

It was a long meeting. At first they said it couldn't be done. Then they insisted it couldn't be done in time. After that, they argued that it couldn't be done with the manpower and resources available. For example, there simply weren't that many picks and shovels in the City-

"True," Psellus interrupted. "We're forty thousand shovels short, but I'm seeing to that. By the time they're needed, they'll be ready. Let's see, what else? Wicker baskets, for moving earth. I can lay my hands on ninety thousand, and I've got another twenty thousand on order; they won't be ready in time, so we're going to have to requisition. Watchmen going from house to house, ordering people to hand over their laundry baskets. Lumber; you're about to tell me we need huge quantities of lumber for propping and shoring, and of course it's in desperately short supply and we can't spare the transport to bring any in, even if we could get hold of any at such short notice. That means we'll have to scavenge what we can from shacks and sheds and fences; if needs be, we'll pull the roofs off houses and take the rafters. Gentlemen, since we haven't got everything we need, we're going to have to do what the farmers do, use what we've got instead of what we wish we had. I'm sure you'll cope. After all, you're experts."

After two hours they stopped arguing and started writing down what they'd been assigned to do. Somehow it was harder to cope with them once they'd stopped fighting him. A fight is a dialogue, once you're used to it practically a conversation; he'd met married couples who had no other form of communication except fighting, and they seemed to get on pretty well. Silence broken only by the sound of his own voice was considerably more intimidating.

And, he reflected nervously when they'd all gone, everything's based on the premise that what I've chosen to do is the right thing; and that's crazy. I've just commissioned the biggest building and engineering programme in the history of the Republic, on the authority of a two-hundred-year-old book I found in the library, written by someone I know nothing about, whose only qualifications for advising me are the fact that he wrote a book, and that it's survived two centuries without being cut up and used to mend shoes.

We can't win this war by force of arms, or even by digging. Only one man can save this city, and he's the enemy.

But Psellus didn't have time to sit thinking about one man; he had to figure out how to convince half a million men to drop everything and start digging trenches. And after that; well, he had the book.

Under the piles of papers on his desk a single sheet lay hidden. He found it, made a space and laid it down. It was blank, apart from six words:

Lucao Psellus to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

He'd written that a month ago. Since then, whenever his mind was quiet for a moment, he found himself hunting for the words that should follow. He had constructed sentences and paragraphs in his mind, complex as the best Guild clockwork, phrases that were springs, cams, sears, pawls, hooks, lifters, escapements, pushrods and connecting rods, axles, bearings, flanges, shoulders, tumblers, flies and ratchets. He could see the shape of the letter when he closed his eyes, but when he came to assemble the components, he could find no way of fitting them together; because there was no standard, no specification for a letter like this. It wasn't a diplomatic communication, a commercial negotiation, a legal pleading, a dispatch from a spy or a note to a friend, a love letter or a challenge to a duel. There could be no precedent, because the circumstances were unique.