The Escapement

by K. J. Parker

  (He tried to remember the proper way to address a duchess, but couldn’t, so he improvised a small, respectful gesture, somewhere between a nod and a bow.)

  “Sorry, did I startle you?” She was smiling awkwardly. He didn’t reply; she went on: “I gather you’re going south to join my husband. Do you think you could give him a letter from me?”

  He repeated the gesture. “Of course,” he said.

  She handed him a small square of folded parchment. She knew, of course, that it had been him who had intercepted the letter that disgraced Miel Ducas. “I’ll make sure he gets it,” he said.

  “Thank you. Usually I use the courier service, but I always feel guilty about it. It’s supposed to be for important official business only, and I’m sure I don’t come under that heading.”

  Fishing for compliments? Unlikely. He had no reason to linger, but he sensed she didn’t want him to go just yet. Of course, he’d saved her life at the fall of Civitas Eremiae. Had she ever wondered about that, in the long hours of futile leisure that made up most of her life: how he’d come to be in the right place to lead her to safety out of the dying city, through the tunnels and cisterns that people who’d lived there all their lives didn’t know about, but which he’d navigated with ease?

  “If you’ve got a moment,” she said.

  “Of course.” There was a stone bench. He perched on the edge of it, just close enough to be able to hear her without having to lean forward. For a man who’d spent his life among trip-hammers and mills, he had excellent hearing.

  “About the war.” She stopped, as though compiling an agenda. “What’s going to happen? They don’t tell me, you see.”

  “I don’t know.” Which was true. “Quite soon now, your husband will advance on the City and start the siege. He’ll go through the motions of a direct assault, but I don’t suppose he’ll keep it up for very long. He won’t want to waste lives pointlessly. An assault will tell him how many defenders there are, where the artillery batteries are positioned, their range, weight of shot and rate of fire. He’ll need to know all that, and it doesn’t come free, he’ll have to buy it with dead bodies. Once he’s got the information, he’ll start the siege operations. That’s a very specialised branch of military science and I don’t know anything about it. The engines I’m building will be important. Given time, they could knock down the walls. But he hasn’t got that long; he’ll be limited by food supplies, mostly, and other stuff like that. My guess is, he’ll use artillery to distract them while he uses sappers to dig under the walls. That’s even more scientific than artillery, but he’s got the advantage of having skilled men who know the work, the silver-miners. My people don’t dig holes if they can help it. If he can undermine a gatehouse or bring down a large enough section of wall, he’s won. Once his soldiers get inside the City, it’ll all be over. If he fails, and the food runs out, he’ll have no choice but to fall back, and I don’t suppose the Aram Chantat will be pleased if he does that. I suppose everything really hinges on how badly they want to take the City.” He paused. “Does that answer your question?”

  She nodded, unconvincingly. “Will you be able to help?” she asked. “With the digging under the walls, I mean.”

  Ziani shrugged. “He’s got men who’re better qualified than I am,” he said. “Obviously I’ll help if I can.”

  “And your friend.” She wasn’t looking at him. “What’s his name? The tall man…”

  “Daurenja.”

  “Daurenja,” she repeated. “Everybody speaks very highly of him. He told my husband he was working on some kind of new weapon; like a catapult, he said, but much stronger. Is that right?”

  Ziani kept perfectly still for a moment or so before answering. “In theory,” he said. “It might work. But he hasn’t built one yet. There are technical problems.”

  “Oh, well.” She smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t be able to understand, even if you explained. Really, I was only asking about the war because I want to know how long Valens is going to be away. I simply have no idea: a month? A year? I’d go out and join him, but they say it’s too dangerous. It’s silly, isn’t it? Here I am, hoping that a city will fall and goodness knows how many poor people will die, just so my husband can come home and everything can be normal. That seems very wicked, really, but I can’t help it.” She turned her head slightly and looked at him. “You understand how I feel, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “Daurenja wasn’t really supposed to tell the duke about his pet project,” he said, “not until we’d managed to build a working prototype. And that’s still a very long way away, and we didn’t want your husband getting his hopes up.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” she said. “I’m sorry if I’ve caused trouble for anybody. And I suppose,” she added, turning her head away again, “you might want it kept quiet so the Aram Chantat don’t find out. After all, a weapon isn’t made to be used just once, and we may not be friends with them for ever.”

  Ziani tried not to show any reaction to that. “Politics,” he said. “None of my business. I just make things.”

  “You had Miel Ducas arrested.” Her head hadn’t moved. “Because of that letter. I’ve wondered why you did that.”

  He was short of breath, just when he needed plenty. “I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I was sucking up to the boss. I wanted to be promoted, in sole charge of the defence of the city. I thought, thanks to my engines, we were going to win; and after the war was over…” He made a show of shrugging, overdid it a little. “A man like me, a factory worker, comes to Eremia and sees how the gentry live: fine houses, estates, lives of elegant leisure. It’s traditional for dukes to reward their low-born but faithful servants with titles and endowments.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw her shift a little. “It’s not as though I laid a trap or anything. The letter came into my hands and I had a choice. Get rid of it, hurt nobody, gain nothing. Or else I could do what I did. I’ll apologise if you want me to.”

  She shook her head. “I think it was Miel who betrayed the city,” she said. “After Orsea turned against him, I mean. And if he hadn’t done that, if the city hadn’t fallen, Valens wouldn’t have come for me. I’d still be married to Orsea, instead of the man I love. So no, please don’t apologise. The city falling gave me my only chance of being happy.” She laughed, from her throat only. “Listen to me,” she said. “Two cities, mine and yours, just so I can have the man I want. I despise myself for it.” She was speaking very clearly, shaping each word like a craftsman. “I know it’s wrong, and really I must be a horrible person, evil, to think like that, but it doesn’t make any difference. I tell myself none of it was my doing; it couldn’t have been, because look at me, I’ve never done anything in my whole life. So where’s the harm in passively receiving the benefits of other people’s misery? But of course it’s not true. Orsea wouldn’t have become duke if he hadn’t married me, and Orsea was to blame for the war, though he didn’t exactly start it. And Valens wouldn’t have joined the war except for me; and his joining in brought in the Aram Chantat, and now it looks like Mezentia will be destroyed as well.” She paused, as though doing sums in her head. “Do you think someone can be blamed just for being born, or not dying? And then I ask myself, with all these terrible things on my conscience, if everything really did go right, and the City fell and Valens came home, could we ever really be happy together, after all that? And the dreadful thing is, I believe we could. I think he could walk up the stairs and shut the door and say, ‘I’m home,’ and none of it would matter any more. That’s an extraordinary thought, isn’t it?”

  Ziani paused to rub his eyes. “Not really,” he said. “I think you’re only evil and wicked if you have a choice. If you do what you have to, it can’t be your fault. I heard someone say once that there’s no such thing as a weapon; there’s just tools, and men who decide how they’re going to use them. And even then sometimes the user doesn’t have a choice. He picks up a chisel and stabs a man in self-defe
nce. He had no choice, and the chisel’s just a tool. The evil came from the man who attacked him in the first place. Now suppose the attacker was a general, the only man who could have saved the city, and without him the city falls. In that case, it’s still the general’s fault, for attacking the man who defended himself. If the Mezentines all die, they brought it on themselves. It’s very simple, when you think about it.”

  She stood up. “Thank you for taking the letter,” she said. “Have a safe journey.”

  Valens took the letter from him without looking at it and tucked it under the stack of reports on the rickety folding table. “You took your time getting here,” he said.

  “The roads,” Ziani replied. “You said something about a book.”

  “Yes.” Valens reached down and picked something up off the floor. “I read it while I was waiting for you. I was surprised how much of it I remembered. I can’t have looked at it for years. They say the things you read when you’re a kid stay with you.”

  Ziani opened it. Diagrams. A mechanism? “What’s it got to do with me?”

  Valens smiled. “Let’s say I wanted a Mezentine perspective.” He picked up a cup, realised it was empty. “Suppose the Republic had put you in charge of the City’s defences. You know that your artillery monopoly’s a thing of the past. You send to the library for anything they’ve got on defending against artillery.” He leaned over, turned the pages back to the flyleaf. “This book was copied by the Guild, so there has to be a copy in the Guildhall library. Or there’s other books on the same subject, presumably saying much the same sort of thing. I want you to read it, then tell me how much of it the Republic’s capable of doing in the time available with the resources it has to hand. Also,” he added, as Ziani took the weight of the book from him, “I remember you telling my great-grandfather-in-law that you knew a way of breaking the City’s defences. I think it’s time you told me what it is.”

  Ziani leaned back, thinking of what the duchess had told him. “Oh,” he said. “That.”

  “That.”

  Deep breath. “You know my assistant, Gace Daurenja?”

  “Oh, I know him.”

  Ziani couldn’t help smiling at that. “Quite,” he said. “He’s a nasty piece of work. But that didn’t stop you listening to him when he offered you his new weapon.”

  Valens nodded. “Does it work?”

  “He hasn’t even built it yet. There’s…”

  “Technical problems?”

  “Yes.” Ziani ran his finger down the spine of the book; rough, starting to crumble in places. “Imagine a man-made volcano. Very useful, but only if you’ve got a container to put it in. Daurenja thinks a metal pot will do the trick, but he doesn’t know how to make one strong enough. He’s tried, but the volcano tears them apart and throws the bits hard enough to take your head off. He thinks I can figure out how to make a stronger pot.”

  Valens’ eyebrow rose. “Can you?”

  “Stronger, yes. Strong enough… That’s not the point, though.” He scowled for a moment. “Daurenja’s a very clever man. Brilliant, really, a genius. But he’s set his heart on getting his idea to work, and that limits him. Now me…” He shrugged. “It’s not my idea, I’m not in love with it like he is. I’m quite happy to explore the possibilities of what his idea can do if it doesn’t work.”

  Valens sighed. “You’re not making sense,” he said.

  “Oh, I think it’s perfectly simple,” Ziani replied. “To make the volcano, you mix stuff together to make a powder, and when you set light to it, you get an eruption. According to Daurenja, it’s like what happens when water falls on a crucible full of molten metal, only much, much stronger.”

  “I see.” Valens sighed again. “What does happen?”

  “Lots.” Ziani smiled. “The crucible cracks, burning hot liquid metal flies everywhere. It can crack walls, punch holes in roofs. The water turns to steam, you see, in a tearing hurry. The steam sort of pushes everything else out of the way. I imagine Daurenja’s powder works the same way, except it makes smoke instead of steam. But the principle’s the same. It’s strong enough to smash a brass pot with sides an inch thick. Daurenja wants the pot to trap the smoke so it’s only pushing one way, pushing against a stone lying on top of the powder, so the stone goes flying through the air. He reckons it’d have many times the force of the biggest siege engine ever built.”

  Valens’ eyes had opened wide. “Would it?”

  “I don’t see why not.” Ziani shook his head. “But even if it does, that’s not much use to you. Suppose I could make a strong enough pot. To set up a forge to make a hundred of the things would take six months to a year. We haven’t got that much time.”

  “That’s true enough.” Valens drummed his fingers on the table. “But you…”

  “I can’t help thinking,” Ziani said. “Dig a hole under the City wall and stuff it full of barrels of Daurenja’s powder. Stop up the hole with rocks, but leave a little gap, just enough to poke a burning rope into.” He drew a little closer, knowing he had Valens’ undivided attention. “The problem with sapping under the City walls is that they’re built on foundations of solid rock. You remember how we sabotaged the silver mines, to stop the Republic getting them. We packed the mine shafts with brushwood and set it alight, to burn through the pit props and cave in the roof. But even if you had the time to cut a tunnel through solid rock, how are you going to collapse it? Oh, there’s ways, according to your miners. There have been accidents in the past, where sloppy practice left gallery ceilings weak and they’ve caved in. But it’d need a lot of time and effort to do it on purpose. When they built the City, they thought about sappers, you can count on it. They built the walls where they are because they reckoned it wouldn’t be practical for an enemy to undermine them. And without some new ingredient, like Daurenja’s volcano dust, they’d have been right. That’s what I had in mind when we were talking to that old man.”

  Valens thought for a long time; then he said, “Nice of you to tell me about it, finally. I’d have been really quite upset if you’d kept it to yourself all this time.”

  Ziani looked at him. “You’ve met Daurenja,” he said, and left it at that.

  Valens nodded very slightly, as though he didn’t want anybody watching to see. “He’s your man, though,” he said. “You can handle him. I don’t see a problem.”

  “No.” Valens looked up as he said it. “I can’t handle him. He scares me. I’d have had him killed, except I don’t know the recipe for the volcano powder.”

  Valens turned away, as though suffering from cramp. When he turned back, he said, “Make him tell you. If you need help; soldiers …”

  “He’d die first,” Ziani said with conviction. “He knows he’s dead anyway without the secret. No, the deal is that I help him make his stronger pot. When I’m doing that, he’ll have to share the secret with me, I’ll tell him I can’t help him unless I know it too. Once I know, of course, the situation changes. We may even succeed. The stupid thing is, all Daurenja wants is the stronger pot; not money or power or anything like that. He just wants to make a pot that can throw big heavy stones. I guess you could call him a visionary.” Saying the word forced him to smile. “So, let him have his pot. It’d come in very useful, I’m sure, in future wars, assuming there’s anybody left alive to fight once we’re finished here. But there’s always someone to fight, isn’t there? Anyway, that’s nothing to do with me. I just want fifty standard-size apple barrels full of his magic powder, and then I can get my job done and go home.”

  Valens picked up a goose quill and sharpened it, slowly and precisely. I could have trained him to be a useful engineer, Ziani thought; he doesn’t hurry, and his hands don’t shake, even when he’s shocked or disgusted. “Fine,” he said. “If what you say is true, it makes sense, and I’m very pleased to hear we’ve got a secret weapon that can crack the City wall, because without one we’d be completely screwed.” He looked down at the point he’d shaved on the quill. “Why d
idn’t you tell me before?”

  Oh well, Ziani thought, and said: “Because Daurenja knows something about me that’d get me killed.”

  “I see.” The pad of his index finger, pressed gently on the point; just enough pressure to prove its sharpness without causing damage. “Who by?”

  “You,” Ziani said. “Among others.”

  “It must be a very bad thing, then.”

  “It is.”

  “Not something you’d care to tell me about.”

  “No.”

  Valens looked up. His eyes were bright, as though he’d just been crying, but his face was completely blank. “But I can’t have you killed,” he said. “I need you to take the City for me.”

  “You’d just have to find another way,” Ziani said. “You’d have no choice.”

  A shrug; graceful, as if he was dismissing trivia. “And Daurenja knows this dark secret of yours, but he won’t tell me because he needs you to make him a stronger pot. I need you to crack the City wall. You need him to tell you how to make the magic dust. I know Daurenja’s a rapist and a murderer; in fact, I had the devil of a job getting out of doing something about it, but fortunately I have resourceful people on my side who can do wonderful things with legal technicalities. So here we are,” he went on calmly, “all of us turning a blind eye to every form of evil under the sun, because we don’t have any choice in the matter. Take me,” he added, looking down at his hands. “I killed my cousin Orsea so I could marry his widow. I knew Orsea wasn’t guilty of treason. The evidence against him was far too glib, if you see what I mean. I knew you were lying. But I had him killed, all the same. And now Veatriz and I are married, and we love each other, and as soon as this bloody stupid war’s over…” He looked up. “I suppose everybody asks himself at some time or other, what wouldn’t I do to get what I want? And the answer is, when I find out, I’ll let you know. The depressing part is, I really don’t care any more.”