K Parker - Memory

Falcata, burned to the ground, just as Josequin was. When the god in the cart had visited Cric, he'd said, I have business in Josequin, and a few days later it had been wiped off the face of the earth by the raiders. But how could Spenno have heard about what had happened to Falcata? Or wasn't that what he'd meant?

'You haven't seen a woman from our lot?' he asked. 'About my age, tall and bony, calling herself Copis or Xipho Dorunoxy?'

'Can't say I have,' Spenno answered slowly. 'And any woman'd stick out here like a bare bum at a prayer meeting. But I know who she is-she's that woman going round with the Mad Monk.' He looked at Monach and grinned broadly. 'That'll be you, I take it. I must be getting old, or I've been breathing in too many fumes. So that's what you're here for. When I heard there was a bunch of our lot roaming around like a load of hooligans I couldn't figure out what on earth they could be after. Should've been able to figure that one out. But you're too early,' he went on, before Monach could interrupt. 'We poured the first one the day after your mate skipped out on us, but it's nowhere near done yet. It came out all right and it's cooled without cracking, far as I can tell; but next it's got to have all the scale and shit chipped off the outside, and then we got to turn out the bore on the lathe and saw off the sprue. It'll be ten days at the earliest, so I hope you're not in any hurry; and what your army's going to eat while you're waiting I haven't a clue, unless you send 'em all out in the woods looking for truffles. Still, that's your problem. Meanwhile, we'll be pouring another six tonight. I wanted to wait and see how the first one came out, but Galand Dev said no, if it's fucked up somehow we can just break 'em up again and melt them down. How he ever got to be a master engineer beats me.'

That had answered Monach's original question, before he'd even got around to asking it. But he wasn't really interested in Poldarn's Flutes any more. Ciartan had been here; so obviously Xipho had known, and that was why they'd been headed this way. In which case, why would she have gone off like that (unless she'd wanted to get here first; but she hadn't been here, assuming Spenno was telling the truth). And there'd been two of them 'The other one,' he said. 'You said there were two-'

'That's right. And soldiers came and fetched the other one away. There was an accident.' Spenno shook his head, a sort of I-told-them-but-they-wouldn't-listen gesture that, Monach guessed, came very easily to him. 'That one got burned up, the other one saved his life. Anyhow, while he was laid up getting over the burns, soldiers showed up and took him on.'

A thought occured to Monach. 'When you say soldiers,' he said, 'are you sure they were regulars and not Amathy house or something like that?'

'No idea. Assumed they were regulars, or why'd old Muno let them take the man away? Must've had some kind of warrant or whatever they call it. I didn't see them myself, though, you'd have to ask Muno or his staff. But, of course, you can't do that, can you?'

They were standing outside yet another shed, outwardly no different from the dozen or so they'd already visited; except that someone or something inside it was making the most appalling noise Monach had ever heard in his life. 'Engine shed,' Spenno told him, raising his voice over the screaming, graunching, whining, squealing and juddering.

'Right now, this is the place where it's all happening. Want a look?'

Before Monach could think of a way of refusing politely, Spenno had opened the door.

The roof was high, with open skylights all the way down one side. In the middle was an enormous brown tube, ten feet long, slightly tapered, and two feet thick at the thinner end, supported at each end by an 'H' of thick oak posts that raised it three feet or so off the ground. Monach saw that the tube was in fact rotating slowly, and the unspeakable noise was caused by a short, thick steel flat-drill, which a man in a leather apron was driving into it by means of a turnscrew. At his feet, the beaten clay floor was littered with what looked like golden snowflakes-thin, flat fragments of swarf, roughly the shape of a butterfly's wing, which tumbled slowly out of the hole in the front end of the tube as the drill cut into it. At the back end of the tube, he saw a thick leather drive-belt looped round a cartwheel-sized flywheel; another belt whose end disappeared into a slit in the wall fed a smaller gearwheel that drove it. Another cradle of oak posts about halfway down the tube's length supported a T-shaped iron rest on which another man was leaning a foot-long chisel; as the tube turned, the edge of the chisel scraped more snowflakes off the dull, pitted brown skin of the tube, leaving behind a smooth, shiny golden surface. In the corner of the shed was propped a three-legged crane fitted with pulleys and chains. A bored-looking man was sweeping up the swarf with a birch-twig broom, though it was pretty obvious that he was fighting a losing battle.

'There it is,' Spenno said. 'That's the first one we poured. They've been at it for a day, a night and the next morning so far, they're on their third cutting head for the drill, and last time I looked they were nine inches in.'

Monach thought about that for a moment. 'It's going to be a long job, then.'

'You could say that, yes. We got a dozen mules on the treadmill on the other side of the wall there, in the mill shed; we daren't lay on any more, in case the lathe bed couldn't handle the torque. Got to keep it absolutely dead straight, see, or the hole up the middle's going to get skewed, and the whole thing'll only be fit for scrap.'

'I see,' Monach said, playing fast and loose with the truth. 'And when you've finished in here, it'll be ready?'

'Not likely.' Spenno laughed, though Monach couldn't hear him over the scream of the cutter. 'Next we've got to saw off the sprue-that's the rough old lump sticking out the arse end, where the hot metal was poured in. That's a week's work, running three shifts a day.'

'Right,' Monach said. 'And then it'll be ready?'

'Once the touch-hole's been drilled and the muzzle's been crowned, yes. Leastways, the tube itself'll be ready for testing. But it'll need a wooden carriage to hold it up-we can't just lay it on the ground and set it off; and we can't figure out the measurements for the carriage till we've done boring out the hole down the tube, because until we've fetched out all that waste metal, we won't have any idea how much the bloody thing's going to weigh. No point building a complicated carriage if we make it too flimsy and it just crumples up soon as we put the tube on it. Mind you, we could get everything right, and then at the last minute we could find there's wormholes or pockets in the tube, where there's been air bubbles that got caught while it was cooling. Something like that, and the whole thing'd be useless.'

Fine, Monach thought; any ideas he might have had about loading a dozen or so Poldarn's Flutes onto the backs of a team of mules and putting twenty miles or so between his little army and Dui Chirra before Muno came back with overwhelming reinforcements wilted on the vine and died. Obviously, Muno and the government in Torcea had been terrified about someone stealing the tubes; wasted anxiety. Even when it was eventually finished, assuming it survived that long and passed its test without blowing up, how in the names of all the gods could anybody hope to steal something that big?

(In which case, either Xipho had screwed up in her planning for once, or else her disappearance wasn't part of some ingenious plan for robbing the foundry and making a lightning-quick getaway into the depths of the forest.)

'Some machine you've got there,' he said. 'Did you build it, or did you have it shipped in from Torcea?'