Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  Ziani shrugged. “We don’t do anything like this where I come from,” he said. “The materials I used to use came in rounds or square bars or flat sections, we didn’t mess about breaking up rocks. This could be the state of the art for all I know.”

  Carnufex looked mildly disappointed. “Ah well,” he said. “I was hoping you could give us a pointer or two about improving the way we go about things before you show us how to pull it all down.”

  Closer still, and the tapping was starting to get on Ziani’s nerves. He was accustomed to noise, of course; but this was different from the thumps and clangs of the ordnance factory, where the trip-hammers pecked incessantly and the strikers hammered hot iron into swages. It was sharper, more brittle, a constant shrill chipping, and he doubted whether it was something he could get used to and stop hearing after a while. The men swinging hammers stopped work to stare at the newcomers; the leather sleeves and leggings they wore to protect them from flying splinters of rock were caked with dust, their hair was gray with it and their eyes peered out from matt white masks, so that they looked like actors playing demons in a miracle play. Eventually someone yelled something and they went back to work, bashing on the chunks of rock as if they hated them. No, Ziani thought, this isn’t like the factory at all. There’s no grace here, no patient striving with tolerances in the quiet war against error. This is a violent place.

  “The actual workings are over there a bit,” Carnufex was saying, as calm and matter-of-fact as if he was showing someone round his garden. “I don’t suppose you’ll need to bother with anything above ground. I mean, no point sabotaging it; anybody who wanted to could replace the whole lot from scratch in a month or so.”

  Ziani nodded. He didn’t want to open his mouth here if he could help it.

  “You can see where the shaft runs underground by the line of wheels,” Carnufex went on. He was pointing at a row of wooden towers, each one directly under a branch of the millrace, which gushed in a carefully directed jet to turn the blades of a tall overshot waterwheel. Each wheel’s spindle turned a toothed pulley which drew a chain up out of what looked like a well. Piles of ore were heaped up beside each well-head; men were loading it into wheelbarrows and carrying it away to be smashed. As well as the clacking of the wheel and the ticking of the chain, he could hear a wheezing noise, like an overweight giant climbing stairs. “Bellows,” Carnufex explained, “inside the tower, they’re powered by cams run off the wheel-shaft. They suck the bad air out of the galleries and blow clean air back in.”

  Bellows, Ziani thought; they’ll come in handy. He nodded, careful not to exhibit undue interest or enthusiasm. “Where’s the actual entrance?” he asked.

  “This way. We might as well dismount and walk from here,” Carnufex added. “It can be a bit tricksy underfoot, what with all this rubble and stuff.”

  The entrance was just a hole in the hillside, five feet or so high and wide, with heavy oak trunks for pillars and lintel. There were steps down, and a lantern on either side, flickering in the draft that Ziani guessed came from the constant pumping of the bellows. Their light showed him two plank-lined walls vanishing into a dark hole. He let Carnufex lead the way.

  For what seemed like a very long time, the shaft ran straight and gently downhill. Carnufex had taken down one of the lanterns, but all Ziani could see by it was his own feet and the back of Carnufex’s head, his white hair positively glowing in the pale yellow light. To his surprise it was cool and airy, delightfully quiet after the hammering outside. Even the smell — wet timber and something sweet he couldn’t identify — was mildly pleasant. But his neck and back ached from walking in a low crouch; he felt like a spring under tension.

  “This is the main gallery.” Carnufex’s voice boomed as it echoed back at him. “Spurs run off it to the faces, where the ore’s dug out. We’re always having to open up new ones, of course.”

  “What’s holding the roof up?” Ziani asked, trying not to sound more than mildly curious.

  “Props,” Carnufex answered crisply. “Thousands and thousands of them; it’s a real problem getting enough straight,uniform-thickness timber. Without them, of course, this whole lot’d be round your ears in a flash.”

  “Right.” Ziani knew that already. “So if it’s the props that keep it from collapsing, how do you dig the tunnels to start off with; before you have a chance to put the props in, I mean?”

  “Slowly,” Carnufex replied, “and very, very carefully. Ah,” he added, stopping short, so that Ziani nearly trod on his heels. “We’ve reached the first spur. Do you want to go and have a look?”

  “No thanks,” Ziani replied quickly. “I think I’ve seen enough to be going on with, thanks.”

  “Really?” Carnufex sounded disappointed, like a musician who hasn’t been asked for an encore. “Suit yourself. Do you want to go back now?”

  Yes, Ziani thought, very much. “Not yet,” he said. “I need to take measurements first.”

  With Carnufex holding the end of the tape for him, he measured the height and width of the shaft at ten-inch intervals, starting at the point where the spur joined the gallery and going back about a dozen feet toward the entrance. As Carnufex called them out, he jotted down each set of figures with a nail on a wax tablet, unable to see what he was writing in the vague light from the lantern. “All done,” he said, when they’d taken the last measurement. “Now can we go back, please?”

  As they headed back the way they’d come, Ziani asked Carnufex how long it’d take to dig out the gallery, if it collapsed.

  “Not sure,” Carnufex replied. “Let’s see: ten feet a day, double that for two shifts, so let’s say a month. No big deal, if we can get timber for the props.”

  Ziani nodded, not that the other man could see him do it. “And the ventilation shafts?”

  “Trickier. They’re lined with brick, you see.”

  “That’s all right,” Ziani replied. “With luck I should be able to brace them the same way I’m planning on doing the gallery.” Of course, he reflected, that would mean they’d have to be measured too; someone would have to go down each shaft, presumably lowered down in the ore bucket. All in all, not a job he wanted to do himself; but it would have to be done properly, by someone who knew how to take an accurate measurement. Fortunately, though, he knew just the man for the job.

  “Certainly.” His face hadn’t changed at all.

  Ziani looked at him, but the dead-fish eyes simply looked back, expressionless except for the permanent, faintly hungry look that made Ziani think uncomfortably of a patient predator.

  “You sure?” he asked. “It won’t be much fun hanging down there in a bucket.”

  Gace Daurenja, his absurdly thin, ludicrously tall, appallingly flat-faced self-appointed apprentice and general assistant, shrugged. “I’ve done worse things in my time,” he said. “And confined spaces don’t bother me, if that’s what you were thinking. I was a chimney-sweep for a time, and a chargehand in a furnace. And this won’t be the first time I’ve worked in a mine, either.”

  Ziani tried not to frown. He believed him; ever since he’d turned up in Ziani’s room with the marvelous winch he’d made to his order, he was prepared to believe anything the thin man told him, though he wasn’t quite sure why. Possibly, he’d thought, it was because it was such a huge leap of faith to believe that this extraordinary creature could exist at all. If you could accept that, anything else was easy in comparison.

  “Fine,” Ziani said. He reached out and pulled a sheet of paper across the table. Immediately, Daurenja’s attention was focused on it, to the exclusion of everything else. “Here’s the general idea; it’s the same for the vent shafts as well as the gallery.”

  Daurenja nodded slowly. His expression showed that the diagram was the most wonderful thing he’d ever seen in his entire life.

  “Steel girders,” Ziani said, trying not to let Daurenja’s manner bother him. “Really, it’s just a steel cage. We build it where we want the cave-in to stop
, if you follow me —”

  “Perfectly.”

  Ziani ignored the interruption. “So we stuff the shaft with trash wood, charcoal, old rags soaked in lamp oil, set light to it — those bellows are a stroke of luck, we can get a nice burn going with a bit of air — and that’ll burn out the timber props but leave the steel cage intact; it’ll look like we’ve caved in the whole lot, of course, and then when the war’s over, they’ll only have to dig out as far as the cages; beyond that, the props should be unharmed. Quite simple, really, assuming it works.”

  “Brilliant.”

  Ziani ignored that, too. “The problems I can foresee are with what the heat might do to the cage. If it gets too hot we could warp the girders or even melt them, so we’ll have to be careful not to get carried away. I’m hoping, though, that as soon as the props are charred halfway or three parts through they’ll give way, and the falling rock’ll snuff out the fire, or at the very least act as a heat-sink. The cage in the gallery ought to be straightforward enough, but I haven’t made up my mind yet how best to anchor them in the vent shafts. They’ll have a huge weight bearing directly on them from overhead, even if they’re only ten feet or so down the shafts. We’ll have to drive pins into the brickwork to take the weight; that’ll be a fun job, swinging a sledge in such a tight place.”

  “I’ll have a go if you like,” Daurenja said immediately. “Back when I was working in the slate quarries —”

  “They’re miners,” Ziani said, “let them do it. I’ll want you with me in the fabrication shop, setting rivets. Not the most exciting job in the world, but it’ll have to be done right. Then more riveting, of course, once we’ve got the bloody things into position.”

  “Not a problem,” Daurenja said, as full of confidence as a lion roaring. “I did a great deal of riveting when I was working in the foundry, and —”

  When Ziani had eventually managed to get rid of him, he put on his coat, drew a scarf over his face to filter out the worst of the dust, and went for a walk. He had pictured this place in his mind as long ago as his conversation with Miel Ducas, back in the Butter Pass, but back then it had been nothing but a geometrical design of wheels and levers. It was the ferocity of it that bothered him, the sheer brutality of falling iron-shod beams pounding rock into rubble. He wondered; he’d never seen a flour mill, even. He could feel the cracking and grinding and splintering in his bones, every time the cams tripped and the beams fell. It reminded him too much of things he’d only considered so far in the abstract, rather than in practice. Even the slaughter of the Mezentines, shot down in their thousands by the scorpion-bolts he’d made, hadn’t affected him as much as this place did. There was a ruthlessness about it that he was reluctant to come to terms with. On the other hand, he was very close to resolving a number of issues that had been bothering him for some time, areas he’d left blank in the design, knowing they were possible but lacking the precise knowledge of detailed procedure and method. Not a comfortable place, but enlightening.

  Daurenja, he thought, and he could feel his skin crawl. With any luck, the rope might break while he was dangling down a vent shaft in a bucket, and that’d be one fewer set of calculations to bother about. He tasted dust in his mouth, in spite of the scarf, and spat.

  He walked toward the mine entrance, pausing to look up at one of the wheel towers. Crude, compared to a Mezentine waterwheel. There were no bearings to ease the turning of the spindle, and a significant amount of the water slopped past or over the blades, wasted. But he was here to sabotage the mines, not improve them. He shrugged. Fine by him.

  A miner passed him, struggling with a wheelbarrow loaded with too much ore. As he went by he must’ve caught a glimpse of Ziani’s face; he hesitated, the barrow wobbled and ran off line, making him stop. Ziani made an effort not to grin. He was getting used to being stared at, the only dark-skinned Mezentine in the duchy. It usually saved him the bother of having to explain who he was; everybody knew that already.

  “Hang on a second,” he called after the miner. “Can I ask you something?”

  The man let go of the barrow handles and straightened up. “You’re him, right?” he said. “The Mezentine.”

  Something else he was getting used to. Curious, to be known only for a quality he was no longer authorized to have, the thing that still defined him but had been taken away. “That’s me,” he said. “Ziani Vaatzes. Who’re you?” he added.

  The miner frowned, as if dubious about answering. “Corvus Vasa,” he said. “I’m not anybody,” he added quickly.

  Ziani smiled. “It’s all right,” he said. “I just wanted to ask something, if you’re not too busy.”

  Vasa shrugged. “Go ahead.”

  Ziani sat on the edge of the barrow. “I was talking to Superintendent Carnufex,” he said, stressing the name and rank only very slightly, “and he was saying a man can dig ten feet of tunnel a day, average. Is that right?”

  “Dig and prop, yes. I mean, usually there’s at least four of you to a face, two digging and two propping, and four blokes’ll usually do twenty foot a shift, two shifts a day, forty foot. So we say ten foot a man a day, as a rule of thumb, like. That’s in earth,” he added, “a bit less in clay. Plus, of course, you’ve got another two blokes coming up behind you to load the spoil, and another bloke to carry it. Teams of seven’s the rule.”

  Ziani nodded. “Fine,” he said. “What if you’re cutting through rock?”

  Vasa grinned sourly. “We don’t,” he said, “not if we can help it. You hit rock, best thing you can do is go back and work round it. Plus, you give the surveyor a right bollocking afterward.”

  “All right,” Ziani said, “but supposing there’s no way round and you’ve just got to cut through. That happens sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  Vasa nodded. “Sometimes,” he said. “And it’s a bastard. Then it’s a man on the drill and another man to strike for him, cutting slots to fit wedges in. Two or three foot a day, depending on what sort of rock it is.”

  Ziani clicked his tongue. “What about granite?”

  “Wouldn’t know,” Vasa replied, “never had to find out, luckily. I heard tell once that you can shift hard rock by lighting a bloody great big fire, get it really hot, then chuck water on it to split it.” He grinned. “Sounds fine when you say it, but I wouldn’t like doing it myself.”

  “I bet.” Ziani smiled. “No granite in these parts, then.”

  “Never come across any. What d’you want to know about that stuff for, anyhow?”

  “Oh, just another job I’ve got to do, sooner or later. Thanks, you’ve been a great help.”

  Vasa hesitated for a moment, then said, “They’re saying you’re here to block up the mine, because of the war. Is that right?”

  “Afraid so. Means you’ll be out of a job for a while, but think about it. If the Mezentines got hold of the mine intact they’d be wanting men to work it for them, and I don’t suppose they’d be planning on paying any wages.”

  He could see the point sinking in, like water soaking away into peat. Then Vasa shrugged. “Let’s hope the war’s over soon, then,” he said. “It’s not a bucket of fun, this job, but it pays good money. I’d rather be here than on wall-building, like my brother-in-law. That’s bloody hard work, and the money’s a joke.”

  Ziani dipped his head in acknowledgment. “Vasa, did you say your name was?”

  “Corvus Vasa. And there’s my brother Bous, he works down on the faces, if ever you’re looking for men for this other job of yours.”

  “I might well be, later on,” Ziani said. “So if your brother works on the faces, he must know a thing or two about cutting rock.”

  “Him? Yeah, I should think so. I mean, that stuff ’s not hard like granite, but you don’t just scoop it out with a spoon.”

  “Thanks,” Ziani said, smiling. “I’ll bear you both in mind.”

  “No problem.” Vasa picked up his wheelbarrow, nodded over his shoulder and went on his way.

  (And
why not? Ziani thought. I will be needing skilled miners, when the time comes. Assuming I can figure out the last details … He shook his head, like a wet dog drying itself.)

  Two days, and he was so sick of the place he’d have given anything just to walk away. Simply staying was like trying to hold his breath, an intolerable pressure inside him. Two days did nothing to acclimatize him to the noise and the dust; if anything, their effect was cumulative, so that he noticed them more, not less.

  Unfortunately, the job wasn’t going well. The steel turned up exactly on time, as Carnufex had guaranteed, but not the anvils, the tools or the ten Eremian blacksmiths he’d been promised faithfully before he left Civitas Vadanis. Even Carnufex had no luck trying to track them down, and without them, nothing could be done. On the evening of the second day, Carnufex told him the adjutant would be arriving tomorrow and maybe he’d be able to get it sorted out; he seemed uncharacteristically vague and tentative, which Ziani reckoned was a very bad sign.

  There’d been some progress, however; mostly due, it had to be said, to Gace Daurenja. He’d taken measurements in nine of the twelve ventilation shafts, hanging out of the winch bucket with a lantern gripped in his teeth, with seventy feet of sheer drop waiting to catch him if he happened to slip. Ziani could hardly bear to think about it, but Daurenja didn’t seem bothered in the least, while the plans he produced (working on them at night after an eighteen-hour day in the bucket) were masterpieces of clear, elegant draftsmanship, and annotated in the most beautiful lettering Ziani had ever seen (when he asked about that, Daurenja attributed it to the time he’d spent copying manuscripts for a society bookseller). The only thing he seemed bothered about was how long the job was taking him, and Ziani had to tell him to stop apologizing for being so slow.