Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  That made no sense at all. “How? I don’t understand.”

  “You could ask to see the investigator. There’s still time. You could say, if they let Ariessa keep your pension, you’ll tell them who your accomplices are.”

  Accomplices. He knew what the word meant, but it made no sense in this context. “No I can’t,” he said. “There weren’t any. I didn’t tell anybody about it, even, it was just me.”

  “They don’t know that.” Falier paused for a moment, then went on: “It’s politics, you see, Ziani. People they don’t like, people they’d love an excuse to get rid of. And it wouldn’t take much imagination to figure out who they’d be likely to be. If you said the right names, they’d be prepared to listen. In return for a signed deposition —”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Ziani said. “They’d be killed, it’d be murder.”

  “I know.” Falier frowned a little. “But Ariessa, and Moritsa —”

  Ziani was silent for a moment. It’d be murder; fine. He could regret it for the rest of his life. But if it meant his wife and daughter would get his pension, what did a few murders matter? Besides, the men he’d be murdering would all be high officials in the Guild.… The thought of revenge had never even crossed his mind before.

  “You think they’d go for that?”

  “It’s got to be worth a try,” Falier said. “Face it, Ziani, what else can you do for them, in here, in the time you’ve got left?”

  He considered the idea. A few minutes ago, he’d been clinging to the thought that it didn’t matter, any of it. He’d practically erased himself, every trace, from the world. But leaving behind something like this — poverty, misery, destitution — was quite different. The only thing that mattered was Ariessa and Moritsa; if it meant they’d be all right, he would cheerfully burn down the world.

  “What’s the plan?” he said.

  Falier smiled. “Leave it to me,” he said. “I can get in to see the secretary of the expediencies committee —”

  “How?”

  “I got in here, didn’t I? Obviously there’s not a lot of time. I’d better go.”

  “All right.”

  Falier moved to the door, paused. “It’s the right thing to do, Ziani,” he said. “This whole thing’s a bloody mess, but at least there’s still something you can do. That’s got to be good.”

  “I suppose.”

  “I’ll be back in an hour.” Falier knocked on the door; it opened and he left. Remarkable, Ziani thought; I’ve known Falier most of my life and I never knew he had magic powers. Always thought he was just ordinary, like me. But he can walk through doors, and I can’t.

  Hard to measure time in a cell, where you can’t see the sunlight. Pulse; each heartbeat is more or less a second. But counting — sixty sixties is three thousand six hundred — would be too much effort and a waste of his rapidly dwindling supply of life. Ziani looked round; he was an abominator, apparently, but still an engineer. He thought for a moment, then grinned and pulled off his boot, then his sock. With his teeth, he nibbled a small hole; then he scooped a handful of the grimy gray sand off the floor and persuaded it into the sock. That done, he hung the sock from a splinter of wood in the doorframe, with his empty drinking-cup directly underneath. Then he found his pulse, and counted while the sand trickled through the hole in the sock into the cup. When it had all run through, he stopped counting — two hundred and fifty-eight, near as made no odds four minutes. He drew a line in the dirt beside him, and refilled the sock. There; he’d made himself a clock.

  Eight fours are thirty-two; half an hour later, the door opened again. Falier was back. He looked excited, and pleased with himself.

  “All set up,” he said. “The secretary wants to see you in his office.” He frowned. “For crying out loud, Ziani, put your boots on.”

  Ziani smiled. “Are you coming too?” he said.

  “No.” Falier knocked on the door. “Best of luck, Ziani; but it should be all right. He was definitely intrigued. Have you got a list of good names?”

  Ziani nodded. “I’m not too well up in politics, mind,” he said. “Any suggestions?”

  Falier fired off a dozen or so names, all of whom Ziani had already thought of, as the sand dribbled through into the cup. “That’ll probably do,” he went on, “but have half a dozen more up your sleeve just in case.” The door opened; different warders this time. “Well, so long,” Falier said. “It’ll be all right, you’ll see.”

  Not all, Ziani thought; but he didn’t want to sound ungrateful. “So long,” he repeated, and the warders led him out into the corridor.

  Three flights of winding stairs brought him to a narrow passage, with heavy oak doors at irregular intervals; quite like the cells, he thought. Outside one of these, the warders stopped and knocked. Someone called out, “Yes, come in.” A warder went in first; Ziani followed, and the other warder came in behind him.

  He didn’t know the secretary’s name, or his face; but he was looking at a broad, fat man with huge hands resting on top of a wide, well-polished desk. “This him?” the man asked, and one of the warders nodded.

  “Fine.” The warder pulled out a chair, and Ziani sat in it. “All right,” the man went on, “you two get out. Don’t go far, though.”

  It wasn’t easy to make out the man’s face; he was sitting with his back to a window, and Ziani had been out of the light for some time. He had a bushy mustache but no beard, and round his neck was a silver chain with a big Guild star hanging from it. “Ziani Vaatzes,” he said. “I know all about you. Seventeen years in the ordnance factory, foreman for six of them. Commendations for exceptional work.” He yawned. “So, why does a solid type like you go to the bad?”

  Ziani shrugged. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said.

  “I do.” The man leaned forward a little. The sun edged his dark head with gold, like an icon that’s hung too long in the candle smoke. “Thinking you’re better than everybody else, that’s what did it. Thinking you’re so bloody clever and good, the rules don’t apply to you. I’ve seen your kind before.”

  “I admit I’m guilty,” Ziani said. “But that’s not what you want to talk to me about. You want to know who else was involved.”

  “Go on.”

  Ziani said four names. The secretary, he noticed, had a wax writing-board next to him, but wasn’t taking any notes. He tried another four. The secretary yawned.

  “You’re wasting my time,” he said. “You don’t even know these people, and you’re asking me to believe they all came round to your house, these important men you’ve never met, to see this mechanical doll you were making for your kid.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Ziani said.

  “Balls.” The man wriggled himself comfortable in his chair. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You agreed to see me.”

  “So I did. Know why?”

  Ziani shrugged. “I’m prepared to sign a deposition,” he said. “Or I’ll testify in court, if you’d rather.”

  “No chance. I know for a fact you wouldn’t know these people if you met them in the street. You didn’t have any accomplices, you were working alone. All I want from you is who put you up to this. Oh, your pal Falier Zenonis, sure; but he’s nobody. Who else is in on it?”

  Ziani sighed. There was nothing left inside him. “Who would you like it to have been?”

  “No.” The man shook his head. “If I want to play that sort of game, I decide when and how. You’re here because obviously some bugger’s been underestimating me.”

  “All I wanted,” Ziani said, “was for my wife to get my pension. That’s all that matters to me. I’ll say whatever you like, so long as you give me that.”

  “Not interested.” The man sounded bored, maybe a little bit annoyed. “I think you thought the idea up for yourself, all on your own. Trying to be clever with men’s lives. You can forget that.”

  “I see,” Ziani said. “So you won’t do what I asked, about the pensio
n?”

  “No.”

  “Fine.” Ziani jumped to his feet and threw his weight against the edge of the desk, forcing it back. The man tried to get up; the edge of the desk hit the front of his thighs before his legs were straight — a nicely judged piece of timing, though Ziani said it himself — and he staggered. Ziani shoved again, then hopped back to give himself room and scrambled on to the desktop. The man opened his mouth to yell, but Ziani reached out; not for the throat, as the man was expecting, and so Ziani was able to avoid his hands as he lifted them to defend himself. Instead, he grabbed the man’s shoulders and pushed back sharply. It was more a folding maneuver than anything else. The man bent at the waist as he went down, and his head, thrown backward, smashed against the stone sill of the window. It worked just as Ziani had seen it in his mind, the angles and the hinges and the moving parts. Seventeen years of looking at blueprints teaches you how to visualize.

  He was only mildly stunned, of course, so there was still plenty to do. Ziani had been hoping for a weapon; a dagger slung fashionably at the waist, or something leaning handy in a corner. Nothing like that; but there was a solid-looking iron lampstand, five feet tall, with four branches and four legs at the base to keep it steady. Just the thing; he slid off the desk, caught hold of the lamp-stand more or less in the middle, and jabbed with it, as though it was a spear. One of the legs hit the man on the forehead, just above the junction of nose and eyebrows. It was the force behind it that got the job done.

  The man slid onto the floor; dead or alive, didn’t matter, he was no longer relevant. Three flights of stairs, and Ziani had counted the steps, made a fairly accurate assessment of the depth of tread. It would be a long way down from the window and he had no idea what he’d be dropping onto; but he was as good as dead anyway, so what the hell? At the moment when he jumped, entrusting himself to the air without looking at what was underneath, he couldn’t stop himself wondering about Falier, who was supposed to be his friend.

  It wasn’t pavement, which was good; but it was a long way down.

  For a moment he couldn’t breathe and his legs were numb. I’ve broken my bloody neck, he thought; but then he felt pain, pretty much everywhere, which suggested the damage was rather less radical. Somewhere, not far away (not far enough), he heard shouts, excitement. It was a fair bet that he was the cause of it. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself on his feet and running. It hurt, but that was the least of his problems.

  Because he’d never expected to survive the drop, he hadn’t thought ahead any further than this. But here he was, running, in an unplanned and unspecified direction. That was no good. The pity of it was, he had no idea where he should be heading for. He was somewhere in the grounds of the Guildhall; but the grounds, like the building itself, were circular. There was a wall all the way round, he remembered, with two gates in it. The only way out was through a gate. If they were after him, which was pretty much inevitable, the first thing they’d do would be to send runners to the gatehouses.

  Every breath and heartbeat is an act of prevarication, a prising open of options. It’d sounded good when the preacher had said it, but did it actually mean anything? Only one way to find out. The gardens were infuriatingly formal, straight lines of foot-high box hedge enclosing neat geometric patterns of flowers, nothing wild and bushy a man could hide in long enough to catch his breath, but there was a sort of trellis arch overgrown with flowery creeper, a bower or arbor or whatever the hell it was called. He headed for it, and collapsed inside just as his legs gave out.

  Fine. First place they’ll look.

  Breathing in was like dragging his heart through brambles. He got to his knees and peered round the edge of the arch. There was the wall, a gray blur behind a curtain of silly little trees. He followed its line until he came to a square shape, almost completely obscured by a lopsided flowering cherry. That would be a gate-house. He didn’t know what time it was and he couldn’t see the sun through the arbor roof, so he couldn’t tell if it was the north or the south gate. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t likely to get that far, and if he did the gatekeepers would be on him like terriers.

  He plotted a course. Arbor to the line of trees; using the trees as cover, along the wall to the gatehouse. He could hear shouting coming from several different directions, and he wondered whether they’d catch him and take him back to his cell to be strangled, or just kill him on the spot.

  I’ll escape, though, if only to be annoying. He stood in the doorway of the arbor for a moment, until he saw two men running toward him. They were wearing helmets and carrying halberds; there goes another option, snapping shut like a mousetrap. He lowered his head and charged in the direction of the trees. They’d get him soon enough, but at least he was making an effort, and he felt it was better to die running toward something, rather than just running away.

  It was inevitable that sooner or later he’d trip over something and go sprawling. In the event, it was one of those ridiculous dwarf box hedges that did the damage. He landed on his face in a bed of small orange flowers, and the two warders were on him before he had a chance to move.

  “Right.” One of them had grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. “What’s the drill?”

  He couldn’t see the other warder. “Captain said get him out of sight before we do him. Don’t want the Membership seeing a man having his head cut off, it looks bad.”

  The warder he could see nodded. “Stable block’s the nearest,” he said.

  Between them they hauled him to his feet and dragged him backward across the flowerbeds. He sagged against their arms, letting them do the work; buggered if he was going to walk to his death. He heard a door creak, and a doorframe boxed out the light.

  “Block,” said the other warder. “Something we can use for a block.”

  “Log of wood,” his colleague suggested.

  “How about an upturned bucket?” the first man said.

  “Might as well.” The unseen warder trod on the backs of Ziani’s knees, forcing him down; the other man came forward with a stable bucket, shaking out dusty old grain. Ziani felt the wood under his chin. “Grab his hair,” the second warder said, “hold him steady. Halberd’s not the right tool for this job.”

  A simple matter of timing, then. Ziani felt the warder’s knuckles against his scalp, then the pain as his hair was pulled, forcing his cheek against the bucket. He heard the cutter’s feet crackle in the straw as he stepped up to his mark, in his mind’s eye he saw him take a grip on the halberd shaft and raise his arms. A good engineer has the knack of visualization, the ability to orchestrate the concerted action of the mechanism’s moving parts. At the moment when he reckoned the cutter’s swing had reached its apex and was coming down, he dug his knees into the straw and arched his back, jerking his shoulders and head backward. He felt a handful of his hair pull out, but he was moving, hauling the other warder toward him.

  He heard the halberd strike; a flat, solid shearing noise, as its edge bit into the warder’s forearms, catching them just right against the base of the iron band that ran round the bottom of the bucket. By the time the warder screamed, he was loose; he hopped up like a frog, located the cutter (standing with a stupid expression on his face, looking at the shorn stub of his mate’s left hand) and stamped his foot into the poor fool’s kidneys. It wasn’t quite enough to put him down; but the other man had obligingly left his halberd leaning up against a partition. All Ziani knew about weapons was how to make them, but he did understand tools — leverage, mechanical advantage — and the principles were more or less the same. With the rear horn of the blade he hooked the cutter’s feet out from under him, and finished the job efficiently with the spike. The other man was still kneeling beside the bucket, trying to clamp the gushing stump with his good hand. The hell with finesse, Ziani thought; he pulled the spike clear and shoved it at the wounded man’s face. It was more luck than judgment that he stuck him precisely where he’d aimed. In one ear and out the other, like
listening to your mother.

  His fingers went dead around the halberd shaft; it slipped through, and its weight dragged it down, though the spike was still jammed in that poor bastard’s head. It had taken a matter of seconds; two lives ended, one life just possibly reprieved. It was a curious sort of equilibrium, one he wasn’t eager to dwell on. Instead he thought: this is a stable, wouldn’t it be wonderful if it had horses in it?

  Of course, he had no idea how you went about harnessing a horse. He found a saddle, there was a whole rack of the things; and bridles, and a bewildering selection of straps with buckles on, some or all of which you apparently needed in order to make the horse go. He’d decided on the brown one; it wasn’t the biggest, but the other two looked tired (though he had no idea what a tired horse was supposed to look like). Pinching the corners of its mouth got the bit in. He fumbled hopelessly with the bridle straps, sticking the ends in the wrong buckles until eventually he managed to get the proper layout straight in his mind. The saddle went on its back, that was obvious enough. There was some knack or rule of thumb about how tight the girths needed to be. He didn’t know it, so he pulled the strap as tight as he could make it go. The horse didn’t seem to mind.

  That just left getting on. Under better circumstances, he might well have been able to reach the stirrup. As it was, he had to go back and fetch the bucket to stand on. It was slippery, and he nearly fell over. I wish I knew how to do this, he thought, and dug his heels into the horse’s ribs.

  After that it was shamefully simple. The gatekeepers had seen him being caught and so weren’t looking for escaped prisoners anymore; besides, he was on a horse, and the prisoner had been on foot. The horse wanted to trot, so the saddle was pounding his bum like a trip-hammer. He passed under the gate, and someone called out, but he couldn’t make out the words. Nobody followed him. Two murders, possibly three if he’d killed the secretary of the expediencies committee when he hit him with the lampstand, and he was riding out of there like a prince going hawking. His head ached where the hair had been pulled out.