Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  “Like I said, luxury goods. Not the sort of thing most people can afford.”

  “Yes,” Orsea said, as though Miel was being obtuse, “but what I mean is, she knew people here in the palace, and she was spying for the Republic. Aren’t you worried about that?”

  Only Orsea could ask such a question. “Of course I’m worried,” Miel said. Just not surprised, like you, he didn’t add. “Obviously there’s a serious problem.”

  “Glad you can see that,” Orsea snapped. “What are you proposing to do about it?”

  Miel stopped, frowning. “Thank you,” he said.

  “What are you thanking me for?”

  “The promotion. Apparently I’m head of security now, or captain of the palace guard, or something. I’m honored, but you might have told me earlier.”

  “I’m sorry.” And he was, too; sincerely sorry for being nasty to his friend. That was why Miel loved him, and why he was such a bad duke. “It’s because I’ve come to rely on you so much since — well, since the battle. I got wounded and you had to get us all out of that ghastly mess; and since then I’ve turned to you first for everything, loaded it all on your shoulders without even asking if you minded, and now I automatically assume you’re dealing with it all, like a one-man cabinet.” He sighed. Miel felt embarrassed. “You should be doing this job, Miel, not me. I just can’t manage it.”

  Miel forced a laugh. “Only if you wanted a civil war on your hands,” he said. “A Ducas on the throne; think about it. Half the people in this country would rather see Duke Valens get the crown than me.”

  Orsea turned his head slightly, looked him in the eye. “You wouldn’t have invaded Mezentia, though.”

  “You don’t know that.” Miel shrugged. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. In answer to your question —”

  “What question? Oh, yes. Slipped my mind.”

  “What do we do about the spy,” Miel said. They started walking again. “Well,” he said, “you don’t need to be a doctor of logic to figure out that the likeliest place to find spies is the Merchant Adventurers. They go everywhere, know people here and abroad, they haven’t got the same loyalties as us. Nobody else has the opportunities or the motive like they have.”

  Orsea frowned. “So what are you saying?” he said. “Round them all up and have them all killed?”

  Miel clicked his tongue. “No, of course not,” he said. “But we’re looking at this the wrong way. Asking ourselves the wrong questions.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as why,” Miel said. “Think about it for a moment. Why is Mezentia spying on us, after they’ve just beaten us so hard we won’t be a threat to them again for a hundred years? Before, now, that’d make sense. But after?”

  Orsea was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Nor me,” Miel said. “I mean, there could be several reasons.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well.” Miel ordered his thoughts. “It could be that this Razo woman had been spying for them for years, and we only just found out. Like, she was a fixture, permanently stationed here as part of a standing intelligence network.”

  “You think that’s what she was doing?”

  “It’s a possibility. There’s others. For instance, they could’ve been alarmed because they didn’t have as much advance notice of the invasion as they’d have liked —”

  “Didn’t seem to trouble them much.”

  “Yes, but they’re a nation of perfectionists,” Miel said, slightly wearily. “So they decided to set up a long-term spy ring here, to give them more warning next time.”

  Orsea looked worried. “So that’s what you reckon…”

  Miel succeeded in keeping the irritation out of his face. No point in setting up a string of straw men if Orsea took them all seriously. “Another possibility,” he said, “is that they’re planning to invade us.”

  This time Orsea just looked bewildered. “Why would they want to do that?” he said.

  Miel shrugged. “To save face,” he said. “To punish us for daring to attack them. To make sure we never pose a threat again. There’s all sorts of possible reasons. Most likely, it’d be internal politics inside the Republic —”

  “Do they have politics?” Orsea interrupted. “I thought they were above all that sort of thing.”

  Miel actually laughed. “Do they have politics?” he said. “Yes, they do. Quite apart from ordinary backstabbing and dead-men’s-shoes-filling and infighting for who gets the top jobs, they have a number of factions; started as ideological differences over doctrine, nowadays it’s just force of habit and an excuse for taking sides. It’s not politics about anything; just politics.”

  “Oh.” Orsea looked mildly shocked. “Is that good or bad?”

  “For us?” Miel made a vague gesture with his hands. “Depends on the circumstances. Bad for us if someone wants a quick, easy war to gain popular support; good for us if the opposing faction outplays them. It’d be really nice if we could find a way of influencing them, playing off one faction against another. But we can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “We haven’t got anything any of them could conceivably want,” Miel replied. “Except,” he added, “if the Didactics or the Consolidationists want a war for the approval ratings, we’re a handy target.”

  Orsea pulled a face. “Bad, then.”

  “Probably.”

  “You know all this stuff.” There was bitterness in Orsea’s voice, and guilt, and other things too complex to bother with. “I feel so stupid.”

  “I’m an adviser,” Miel said, trying not to sound awkward. “It’s an adviser’s job to know stuff, so you don’t have to.”

  Orsea laughed. “Yes, but look at me. Clueless. What did I ever do to deserve to be a duke, except marry someone’s daughter?”

  Miel frowned, ever so slightly. “Orsea, this isn’t helping. You wanted to know the implications of this Razo woman being a spy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Orsea said. “Go on, you were saying.”

  “That’s right.” Miel pulled a face. “Forgotten where I’d got to. Right; we know she was spying for the Republic, because she admitted it. We can guess why, but that’s about all. To go back to your original question: what are we going to do about it?”

  “Yes?”

  Miel rubbed his eyes. He’d been up all night, and he felt suddenly tired. “I don’t know what to suggest, right now,” he said. “That was all we managed to get out of her, that she was spying for the Mezentines. We tried to get names of other spies, contacts, the usual stuff, but she died on us. Weak heart, apparently.”

  Orsea nodded. “So really,” he said, “we need to find out some more background before we make any decisions.”

  “I think so. I mean, we’ve sent a pretty clear message to the Republic that we know what they were up to and there won’t be any more reports from that particular source; so that’s probably the immediate problem taken care of. Next priority, I would suggest, is finding out who else was in on the spy ring, and making our peace with the Merchant Adventurers. After that, it depends on what we come up with.”

  Orsea was satisfied with that, and they parted at the lodge gate. Miel went away with mixed feelings; a large part of them guilt, for having misled his friend. It wasn’t a significant act of deception. All he’d done was steer the conversation away from one particular topic, and the amount of effort he’d had to put into it, given Orsea’s naïveté, was practically nil. Still, he felt uneasy, guilty. Must be catching, he thought.

  He went back to the turret room in the west court that he’d appropriated for an office (me, he thought, needing an office. If cousin Jarnac ever finds out I’ve got an office, he’ll wet himself laughing). He shut the door and bolted it, then pulled out a key on a chain from under his shirt. The key opened a strong oak chest bound with heavy iron straps and hasps. All it contained was one very small piece of paper, folded many times to make it small. He unfolded it, for the tenth or ele
venth time since it had come into his possession. As he did so, he read the words, tiny but superbly elegant, on the outside fold:

  Valens Valentinianus to Veatriz Sirupati, greetings.

  “Shouldn’t we wait,” Ziani said, “until your husband gets here?”

  The woman in the red dress looked at him. “You’ll be waiting a long time,” she said. “I’m not married.”

  “You’re…” Ziani could feel the brick fall. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Only it’s different where I come from.”

  “Oh yes.” There was a grim ring to her voice. “But you’re not in the Republic anymore.”

  “I’m beginning to see that,” Ziani said. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by it. Can we forget —?”

  “Sure,” the woman replied, her tone making it clear that she had no intention of doing so. “So, you’re the new great white hope — well, you know what I mean — of Eremian trade. Everybody’s talking about you.”

  “Are they?” Ziani said. “Well, there’s not much to see yet, but I can take you round and give you an idea of what we’re going to be doing here, once we’re up and running.”

  She looked at him again. She seemed to find him fascinating; he wondered, has she ever seen a Mezentine before? He’d have expected her to, being a merchant and an Adventurer, but it was possible she hadn’t. Not that it mattered.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll try and use my imagination.”

  “Right,” Ziani said. He put her out of his mind — not easy to ignore something quite so large and so very red; it was like failing to notice a battle in your wardrobe — and engaged the plan. It had grown inside his head to the point where he could see it, quite clearly, with his eyes open, superimposed over the dusty, weed-grown yard like a cutter’s template. “Well, where we’re stood now, this is where the foundry’s going to be.”

  “I see.”

  “The plan is to do all our own casting,” Ziani went on. “Mostly it’ll be just small components, but I’m going to build a fair-sized drop-bottom cupola so we can pour substantial lost-wax castings as well as the usual sandbox stuff. It sounds like a big undertaking, but really it’s just four walls, a hearth, ventilation and a clay-lined pit. Next to it, so we can share some of the pipework, I want to have the puddling mill —”

  “Excuse me?”

  Ziani smiled. “For smelting direct from ore,” he said. “Back home we can get sufficient heat to melt iron into a pourable liquid, but it’ll be a while before I’m ready to do that here. Until then, we’ll have to do it the old-fashioned labor-intensive way. The best we’ll be able to do is get the iron out of the ore and into a soft, malleable lump — that’s called puddling. Then it’s got to be bashed on with big hammers to draw it out into the sections we want: sheet, plate, square bar, round bar and so on. Quite high on the list of priorities is a big trip-hammer, so we won’t actually have to do the bashing by hand, but we can’t do that until we’ve got the water to drive it. Three months, maybe, assuming everything runs to schedule.”

  “Water?” the woman said.

  “That’s right. Like a water-mill for grinding flour. The first big mechanical project will need to be a pump — wind-driven, God help us — to get water up in a tower to a sufficient height. Once we’ve done that, life will be a lot easier.”

  She stared at him for a moment, then shrugged. “Right,” she said. “Go on.”

  “Over here,” Ziani continued, “I want the main machine shop — it makes sense to have the shop right next to the foundry and the smelting area, it saves on time and labor hauling big, heavy chunks of material about the place. So basically we’ll have a big open square area, for fabrication and assembly; the machine shop on the north side, foundry and smelter on the south side, main forge on the east, I thought, because we don’t need the light there so much…”

  He knew it was all passing her by, soaring over her head like the white-fronted geese in spring. He was a little surprised by that; a trader ought to be able to understand technical matters, well enough at least to grasp the implications: that this was an enterprise on an unprecedented scale, never seen outside the Republic; an astounding opportunity, therefore, for anybody with an instinct for business. She didn’t seem to have picked up on that. She was bored. She looked as if she was being introduced to his large, tiresome family, none of whom she’d ever meet again, not if she could help it. Annoying, he thought; can she really be the person in charge, or had they just sent down a junior?

  But he didn’t mind giving her the tour of his hidden realm (wasn’t there a fairy tale about a magical land that only the pure in heart could see?); saying it out loud helped him make it ever more solid in his own mind, gave him another chance to pick up any flaws or omissions that had slipped past him. He was, as usual, talking to himself for the benefit of an eavesdropper.

  “And that,” he concluded, “is all there is to it, more or less. So, what do you think?”

  She was silent, frowning. Then she said, “Fine. Just one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You haven’t actually said what you’re planning on making here.”

  “But —” Stupid woman, hadn’t she been listening? No, he realized, she hadn’t. He’d assumed she’d be able to work that out for herself. Apparently not. “Pretty much anything, really,” he said. “If it’s made of metal, of course. Anything from a siege catapult to an earring back.”

  “Really.” The look in her eyes said, You still haven’t answered my question.

  “Furthermore,” Ziani went on, “and this is the real point of it, we can make machines that’ll make anything at all: pottery, cloth, furniture, glass, you name it. What’s more, it’ll be made to Mezentine standards, faster and cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and every single item will be exactly the same as all the others. Can you begin to understand what that’ll mean?”

  He had an idea that she was struggling to keep her temper. “That’s fine,” she said. “I’m impressed, truly I am. But you haven’t told me what you’re planning to make. I need something I can load in the back of a cart and sell. All you’ve shown me is a derelict yard with thistles growing in it.”

  Ziani took a deep breath. “You don’t quite understand,” he said. “Here’s the idea. You tell me what you want; what you think you can sell a thousand of, at a good profit. Anything you like. Then you go away and come back a bit later, and there it’ll be. Anything you like.”

  The look she was giving him now was quite different. She’d stopped thinking he was boring. Now she thought he was mad. If only, he thought, I had something I could actually show her, some little piece of Mezentine magic like a lathe or a drill, so she could see for herself. But it didn’t work like that.

  She was saying something; he pulled himself together and paid attention.

  “When you were back in Mezentia,” she said. “That place where you used to work. What did you make there?”

  Ziani grinned. “Weapons,” he said.

  She looked at him. The final straw, obviously. “Like those machines they killed our army with?”

  He nodded. “The scorpion,” he said. “Lightweight, mobile field artillery. We built twelve hundred units while I was at the ordnance factory. They used to leave the production line at the rate of a dozen a day.” He couldn’t read the expression on her face, which was unusual. “Quite a straightforward item, in engineering terms,” he went on, filling time. “Tempering the spring was the only tricky bit, and we figured out a quick, easy way of doing that. Machining the winding mechanism —”

  “Why don’t you make them?” she asked, and he thought she was probably thinking aloud. “Orsea’d buy them from you, no doubt about that.”

  Ziani shrugged. “If he could afford them,” he said. “It’s a question of setting up. It’d take a long time before the first one was finished, and in the meantime there’d be workers and material to pay for. I was thinking of something nice and simple to begin with. Spoons, maybe, or dungforks. W
e’d have to start off doing a lot of the operations by hand, till we’d made enough money to pay for building the more advanced machines.”

  She shook her head. “Orsea doesn’t want spoons,” she said. “And nobody else in this country’s got any money — not the sort of money you’re thinking of. These are poor people, by your standards.”

  “I know,” Ziani said. “That’s —” He stopped. She wasn’t invited into that part of the plan; it wasn’t in a fit state to receive visitors yet. “What would you suggest?” he said.

  “Make weapons,” she told him, without hesitation. “Orsea would buy them, he’d give you the money, if you could show him a finished — what’s the word?”

  “Prototype.”

  “That’s it. If you had one he could see. He’d feel he had to buy them, to make up for losing the war and putting us all in danger.” She hesitated, then went on. “We’d put up the money to make the first one, in return for a share in the profits.”

  “You’re forgetting,” Ziani said. “I offered to work for him. He turned me down.”

  She shook her head. “I know all about that,” she said. “You just went at it from the wrong angle; head on, bull-at-a-gate. You’ve got to be more like twiddling a bit of string under a cat’s nose. You get Orsea up here and show him one of these scorpion machines, tell him, this is what wiped out your army, how many of them do you want; he wouldn’t be able to refuse.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Then you could give him your speech, the one you gave me: furnaces and trip-hammers and piddling mills —”

  “Puddling.”

  “Whatever. He wouldn’t be listening, of course. He’d be looking at the war machine. And then he’d say yes.”

  Ziani nodded slowly. “And you, your Merchant Adventurers, would put up the money.”

  “Yes. Within reason,” she added quickly. “For just one. You can make just one without all the machinery and everything?”

  “I could,” Ziani said. “Hand forging and filing, it’d be a bit of a bodge-up. But I don’t suppose your Duke Orsea would know what he was looking at.”