K Parker - The Escapement

Ziani nodded gravely. "Get it done while I'm away," he said. "And I don't know about it, all right?"

"Understood." Daurenja nodded again. "All being well, I should have the mandrel ready by the time you get back, and then it's just a case of getting the slats drawn down. I've already spoken to the men I want striking for us."

Ziani frowned. "That's a bit quick off the mark," he said. "The fewer people who know about this, the happier I'll be."

"They'll be all right," Daurenja reassured him. "Five Eremians and two Vadani. They know which side their bread's buttered."

"Just make sure their shifts are covered," Ziani said irritably. "We can't afford to lose production at this stage. I can handle Valens if I have to, but I really don't want to try explaining to the savages. They're not easy people to talk to."

"Leave it to me," Daurenja said. "After all, when have I ever let you down?"

I should poison him, Ziani thought, after Daurenja had gone. It'd work. I've watched him eat, he just shovels the food in his mouth and swallows, he doesn't give it time to taste of anything. Five drops of archers' root on a slice of salt bacon, and all my troubles would be over.

But of course he wouldn't do that. Too risky, for one thing. What if the monster's digestion was as prodigious as every other part of him? Even with ten drops it wasn't worth the risk, for fear of the look in his eyes if he survived and figured out what had happened. What if he couldn't be killed at all? People must have tried. Also, without Daurenja the horrendous balance of chaos and energy that kept the factory going would immediately collapse. He needed the freak, at least until the thousandth engine was packed and shipped; and by that time, Daurenja would be so deeply embedded, there'd be no chance at all of getting rid of him without wrecking everything. He knows that, Ziani reflected bitterly, that's why he dares to eat.

To chase the thought of Daurenja out of his mind, he grabbed the spanner and stripped the whole saddle assembly off the lathe he was working on. As he'd thought, the problem lay with the lead screw bushes; useless soft salvaged bronze scrap, doomed to failure the moment he'd fitted them. At home, he'd just take a replacement pair from the spares box under the bench. Here, he'd have to make them himself, out of salvaged bronze scrap, in the sure and certain knowledge they wouldn't last out the month.

Try explaining that to the Aram Chantat.

He fished about in the scrap pile for the nearest shape he could find, then took it over to the Eremian who worked the number seventeen trip-hammer. "I need it swaged down to two-inch round bar," he said, choosing to ignore the look on the man's face. "I know it won't be perfect but get it as close to round as you can. It'll be hard enough turning it on one of those bloody useless home-made treadle machines. Of course, I can't use the good lathe until I've made the bearings to fix it."

The man looked at him as though he was blight on winter barley. Behind him loomed the eight-foot-high frame of the hammer; green oak instead of cast iron, already starting to warp in the heat. Two months, and the tenons would spring out of the mortices. If it happened while the hammer was under load, it'd tear itself apart and be completely wrecked. In two months' time, of course, they'd have finished and wouldn't need it any more. He hated the sight of it. "Do I stop what I'm doing now?" the man said. "Only I've got the top on this anvil casting to do, and it's taken an hour to get it up to welding heat. If I leave it and let it cool down, I'll be standing around idle the rest of the morning while it heats up again."

Ziani tried to think, but couldn't. "This is more important," he said, uncertain whether it was true or not. "Get it done and fetch it over to me as soon as it's ready. I'm late enough for the duke as it is."

There was a fairy-tale, every kid in the City knew it. The gods made angels, moulding them out of sunlight. The dark elves saw the angels and were filled with jealousy, wanting shining servants of their own. They tried to make some themselves, but of course they didn't know how to mould sunlight, so had to make do with clay, That was how the first men came to be created; an ignorant fake, so wide of the mark it was almost a parody, but it worked, for a little while. Ziani looked down the long, high shed. It still stank of pine sap and tar. The engines, designed by him from memory, built by hastily trained Eremians and Vadani-even a few savages, they were so short of manpower-certainly worked, for the time being. The cupolas melted the bog-iron and scrap into brittle, impure blooms for the trip-hammers to beat out into sheet or form into round or square bar, or wire for the nail makers' draw-plates. The water-driven circular saws slabbed the newly felled pine trunks into beams and planks, cut them to size ready for the chisels and twybills of the joiners. The end product was an engine capable of hurling a two-hundredweight stone four hundred yards. You'd get fifty shots out of them, maybe half a dozen more if you were lucky, before the crossbeams split under the pounding of the arms and the stubs cracked in their sockets and the dovetails sprang and the dowels sheared and the nails pulled through and the hand-cut screws stripped out of the spongy green wood. That was as it should be. The main difference, according to the story, wasn't that men were ugly and stupid and bad and angels were beautiful and wise and good. The real difference, which defined them both, was that men were mortal. The Republic built machines that lived for ever.

He thought about that, and decided it was a viable hypothesis, though of course impossible to prove conclusively; the gods had made engineers, but Ziani Vaatzes had made Gace Daurenja.

(He examined one of the clapped-out bushings. From memory, he'd made them out of melted-down Eremian coins, in theory pure silver but in practice eighty-five parts bronze. It was the purest, most consistent bronze he could lay his hands on. Not good enough, though.)

No, that didn't work. He hadn't made Daurenja, he'd found him and used him, because he needed an engineer, and Daurenja was competent, more than competent. He was also resourceful, tireless, efficient, highly accomplished, extremely brave; in his own abominable way, even principled. And, like Ziani, he had a simple purpose to fulfill that left him no choice of action. Was it just a coincidence that he was practically impossible to kill, like the angels in the story?

The hammerman brought him his swaged bronze bar; he turned it down and faced it off on one of the wooden-framed treadle lathes, drilled the hole, parted off four bearings, fettled and fitted them. That got the Mezentine lathe up and running again, and he used it to make another eight bearings, naturally much rounder and tighter; four of them to replace the treadle-made stopgaps, and four spares. He tested the result by fixing a half-inch round bar in the chuck and measuring the runout as it spun. Five thousandths of an inch at nine inches from the chuck; a criminal offence in the City, but good enough for Duke Valens and the Aram Chantat.

In the stories, of course, when the dark elves rebelled against the children of the Sun, it was inevitable that they'd lose and be thrown into the Pit, while their trashy, built-in-obsolescent handiwork was turned out to graze the Earth's rocky surface, since Heaven couldn't quite bring itself to put the wretched creatures out of their misery. But supposing the stories had got it the wrong way round? Supposing the dark elves rebelled, and won?

Well; he had the lathe back up and running, which meant he had no excuse for not going to see Duke Valens, as ordered. Get it out of the way and then it's done.

He left the factory, heading for the southern gatehouse, where the messenger had told him there'd be a carriage waiting. Since he was already hopelessly late, he took a short cut through the outer gardens of the palace. Pleasant enough if you liked that sort of thing; a gravel path ran through a series of star-shaped knot gardens, some raised, some sunken, edged with box and lavender. At least the shapes were neat and tidy, though the gravel looked as though it hadn't been raked for a week. Gardeners away at the war, presumably.