by K. J. Parker
“Later today, actually,” Daurenja chirped. “It’s past midnight already. Time flies, doesn’t it?”
No, Ziani thought, and went to bed.
Needless to say, he was by this point far too tired to sleep. Instead, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head, his eyes shut, contemplating a design of his own. He’d reached the point now when it was there every time he closed his eyes, like the afterburn of looking directly at the sun. Too weary to think constructively, he contented himself with tracing the main lines, ignoring the details: the beginning, parts already made, fitted and in operation, beginning with his escape from the Guildhall, his infiltration of the Eremian court, the making of the scorpions, the betrayal and sack of Civitas Eremiae, the dual use he’d made of Duchess Veatriz. In his mind’s eye, those parts of the design were dull gray, the remaining mechanisms in that section that had already been built but which weren’t yet in service standing out in black or red. He considered them, as he’d done so many times before, and conceded that they were satisfactory. Next he contemplated the middle: not much gray here, plenty of black and red, and a few hazy clusters of dotted lines here and there where he knew a sub-mechanism was needed but where he hadn’t yet attended to the details of their design. As always, he picked up one or two slight errors, minor infringements of tolerance, parts that had moved or distorted slightly under load. There was Miel Ducas, for example; also the salt-trader’s widow, Duke Valens, possibly the Mezentines. Fortunately the divergences were slight and he could take up the play easily by tightening the jibs.
As for the final section: thinking about it for too long was uncomfortable, because it was so hard to see past the tangles of dotted lines to the firm, strong black and red beyond. In particular, there was the huge gap just before the end. Having talked to the miners, he knew that the expedient he’d been relying on to plug that gap wasn’t going to be up to the job; but as yet he hadn’t been able to think of anything to take its place. There was something, he knew; he remembered hearing something, or reading it, a very long time ago, but he’d taken no notice at the time. Now, for some reason, whenever he contemplated the deficiency, his thoughts had a strange tendency to turn to Daurenja, as though he could possibly have something to do with it. But that was unlikely. When he’d outlined the final part of the movement, he hadn’t even known that Daurenja existed.
Thinking about him made his head ache. The trouble was, he was infuriatingly useful; competent, more than competent, at anything he was asked to do. The more Ziani used him, however, the less comfortable he felt. What was it that Carnufex had been complaining about? Hanging round while people were working, asking strange and irritating questions. Well, that sounded plausible enough. Something about calamine, or pyrites, wasn’t it? What the hell would any rational man want with garbage like that?
I could get rid of him, he thought, and then I wouldn’t find myself relying on him anymore, and that’d be a good thing in itself. He felt the tug of that idea, but fought it. Appalling enough that he’d reached the point where he could comfortably think in disgraceful euphemisms: get rid of for send to his death. The simple truth was, he didn’t like Daurenja, a man who apparently worshipped him as some kind of god of engineering, and who was working like a slave day and night to help him. Was that the difference, he wondered; because he’d liked Miel Ducas and Duke Orsea, and Duchess Veatriz and Cantacusene the blacksmith’s wife; Duke Valens had started teaching him how to fence; come to that, he didn’t even mind Carnufex the mine superintendent. All of them he’d taken to, as human beings; all of them he’d used, slotting them into the mechanism where they could do a job or two. Daurenja rubbed him up the wrong way, but he wasn’t useful, not yet, to anything like the same extent. It’d be wrong to make him a sacrificial component; it’d be a waste of material, and murder.
Maybe, he thought, I shouldn’t be doing this.
He sat up, suddenly wide awake. Before, whenever that thought had come to call, he’d summoned up the faces of his wife and daughter, like setting the dogs on a trespasser. Now, he could only see her hair, the curl as it touched her shoulder, the faint redness of its shine under lamplight. Her face had turned away into shadow, as though she couldn’t bear to look at the thing he was making on her behalf, the abomination …
On her behalf.
His chest felt tight, and there was cold sweat on his forehead and neck. She hadn’t asked him to build this machine; not this one.
Something Carnufex had said. The design faded from his mind like a reflection in water shattered into broken rings by a stone. Something he’d said in passing, and I told him I’d have to think about it; but he was getting on my nerves, pressing on them like an arrowhead broken off and healed over, and I made the thought go away. He made me tell a lie, to him and myself.
He scowled into the darkness, following the red and black lines of the thought; and then, as suddenly as the flash of inspiration that comes to a genius once in his life, the connection was made. The doll, the mechanical toy, the modifications he’d made that weren’t on the list of charges at his trial.
It was like putting something in his mouth and finding it was too hot to swallow; just having the connection inside his head was an unbearable burning, a torment of dotted lines. Somebody else, he felt (the thought burned itself in, like heating the tang of a file to make it fit into a handle), there was somebody else involved. He fought, resisting the sudden understanding like a woman trying to stop herself giving birth. This changes everything.
No; it was a conscious decision. Changes nothing. Not as long as it’s just intuition. Besides, it’s probably just some stupid stuff — guilt, frustration, a long, hard day, the sort of horrible self-tormenting shit that keeps you awake in the early hours of the morning. And even if there’s something there and it’s true, it still doesn’t change anything. Just one more bit to be fixed, at the very end of the job.
That didn’t help him sleep. He’d never felt more wide awake in his whole life.
It didn’t bloody well fit. It was hopeless. It was never going to fit. The holes were all in the wrong places, and drilling them out two whole sizes wouldn’t be enough to cure it. Neither would any amount of bashing with hammers, bending, drawing out, pissing around …
“All right,” he heard someone say, “try it now.”
He put his weight on the bar, knowing it wouldn’t line up enough for the rivet to go through. It was all hopelessly screwed up, and would have to be done again …
“There. Perfect. Piece of cake.”
He looked down, stunned. The rivet was in the hole. He relaxed, gradually letting the bar go. It flexed a small amount, then stopped. It was in. It fitted.
In which case, the whole ridiculous contraption fitted together, and they’d won, however unlikely that seemed. He could feel his face drawing into a huge, stupid grin.
“Good,” he said, very low-key and matter-of-fact, though his heart was bursting with relief and joy. “Now get that last rivet set and we can all go home.”
10
“Sulfur,” Valens said with a scowl, dropping the paper on his desk and watching it roll itself back up into a scroll. “He’ll be lucky. Where the hell am I supposed to get sulfur from in the middle of a war?”
Carausius didn’t reply, which was sensible of him, and Valens took his silence in the spirit in which it was intended, as a mild and respectful rebuke. He made an effort and took a long, deep breath. “If by some miracle you can find a few barrels,” he said, “get them shipped off, with my compliments. After all, we’re stabbing the poor sod in the back, cutting off aid to the resistance. The least we can do is give him a nice retirement present.”
“Sulfur,” Carausius repeated, his voice carefully neutral. “I wonder if the salt woman might know where to find some. You know,” he added, “the merchant Ziani Vaatzes teamed up with a while back.”
Valens held still and quiet for a moment. Rather a leap, he thought, from salt to sulfur; not the sort of con
nection he’d have made himself. But someone who knew rather more about the salt woman’s business affairs than he’d disclosed to his duke might be in a position to make that connection. He noted the possibility in his mind and moved on.
“Bad timing, really,” Carausius was saying. “A week or so back, he could’ve had the stuff by the cartload; it’s one of the by-products of the silver mines. But now Vaatzes has shut them all down, I guess he’s out of luck.”
The subject, Valens gathered, had been officially changed. “He’s all done, is he?”
Carausius nodded. “The last shaft was sealed up two days ago, apparently, so that’s that part of the job done. Whether the other part’s come out all right we won’t know till we try and open them up again.”
Valens pulled a face. “Quite,” he said. “Still, on balance I’d rather be remembered as the idiot who trashed his own mines for no reason than the idiot who let them fall into enemy hands. Ziani’s on his way home again, presumably.”
“Last I heard,” Carausius confirmed. “Of course, it’ll take him a while, with all that salvaged plant and equipment he’s bringing back with him. Practically looted the place before he left, according to Superintendent Carnufex.” He smiled. “Are you worried he won’t get back in time for the wedding?”
“Absolutely,” Valens said. “It wouldn’t feel right, getting married without my senior engineering adviser there at my side. Actually, I was thinking about the move. It’s not long now before we have to get that under way, and I’ve got some ideas which I think he might be able to help with. Don’t look so sad,” he added, “you haven’t missed anything, they’re just ideas, quite probably completely impractical. If anything comes of them, you’ll be the first to know.”
“No doubt.” Carausius didn’t want to talk about the move. “While we’re on the subject of the wedding …”
Valens made a helpless gesture. “Now what, for crying out loud? Anybody’d think you’re my mother.”
“Fine, if you’re determined not to take an interest. In which case, I’d be grateful if you’ll refrain from yelling at me if it doesn’t turn out the way you want.”
Valens half rose from his chair, then sat down again. “I’m sure you’re doing a marvelous job,” he said, “and I wouldn’t dream of interfering. Just let me know where I’ve got to be and when. If you could possibly arrange for it to be in the morning, that’d be good, because then I’d have the afternoon free to take the hawks out. Joke,” he added quickly. “Honest.”
With the baffled air of a predator cheated of its prey, Carausius gathered up his bits of paper and went away. After he’d gone, Valens sat perfectly still for a minute or so; then he opened the ivory casket on his desk and took out a small square of tightly folded parchment.
Well, he thought.
Holding it with the tips of his fingers, he turned it over a couple of times. Duke Orsea’s seal, but not his handwriting. He took a closer look. Orsea’s seal was a running stag glancing back over its shoulder. This impression had a small bump on the stag’s neck, made by a tiny chip in the seal-stone. That bump was the only way you could tell Orsea’s second-best seal, the one he used for private correspondence, from the official one he used for state business. Somehow, both of them had survived the fall of Civitas Eremiae; but it was the slightly chipped one that lived in Orsea’s own writing desk, which he kept in his private chambers, unlocked. He’d seen that little bump many times before.
Courage was one of those virtues that Valens had but set little store by. As far as he was concerned, he was brave in the same way he was right-handed. By the same token, he treated fear like indigestion or a headache, just another annoyance that had to be overcome. He slid his finger under the flap and pressed gently upwards, until the wax cracked, splitting off the stag’s head and crumbling its neck into fine red powder, like blood.
Veatriz Sirupati to Valens Valentinianus, greetings.
Only myself to blame, he thought. Getting engaged to be married to someone else could only be construed as a hostile thing, an act of war. Besides, it’s not as though we were ever …
Just letters. Nothing more.
And here was a letter, its integrity guaranteed by the flawed stag he’d just snapped in half. He thought, unexpectedly, of Miel Ducas, the sulfur enthusiast, disgraced by another of these small packets of thought and feeling. Our fault; my fault. If Miel Ducas had commanded the defense of Civitas Eremiae … Wouldn’t have made any difference, since the city fell by treachery, and I’d still have done that one bloody stupid thing, which in turn led inevitably to the war, my desperate need for allies and manpower, a political marriage, this letter.
Courage is a virtue best not taken to excessive extremes; someone brave enough to stick his hand in a fire is an idiot by any criteria. I could leave this letter unread. Wouldn’t have to destroy it; just put it back in the ivory box and turn the little silver key.
(She’s got no right, in any event. She was the one who got married in the first place, not me. I, on the other hand, am paying the price for saving her life.)
Veatriz Sirupati to Valens Valentinianus, greetings.
I guess congratulations are in order.
It’s none of my business, in any case. Orsea explained it all to me; apparently, it’s mostly to do with light cavalry, and the Mezentines being scared stiff of the Cure Hardy, because there’re so many of them. He feels guilty, by the way, because he says he told you they’re all vegetarians, and they turned out not to be. It was, of course, exactly the sort of mistake he would make. The ones he met were, you see, so he was sure that what he told you was true. He was trying to be helpful. He told me once, there’s nothing causes more harm in the world than men like him trying to do the right thing. He knows it’s true, but he can’t understand why. I think that’s probably why I still love him.
Sorry; the L word. This is neither the time nor the place. Let’s talk about something else. Read any good books?
I haven’t. I do a lot of embroidery instead. I know you have a wonderful library full of books I’d give anything to read, but I can’t, because they’re yours. I used to be really jealous that you had so many books; I resented that, and you writing to me telling me things out of them. I also knew that reading the books for myself wouldn’t be the same as having you quote from them in a letter. Maybe at some point I got you and your library mixed up in my mind; what’s the word, I identified them with you. A bit like the way you identify a country with its ruler; you say, the Vadani did this and that when you mean the Duke did it, and the other way around. For instance, the Mezentines could say the Vadani declared war on them by attacking, when you came for me.
I have no idea what I’m saying, so excuse me. I think it’s just that I’m out of practice. It seems ever such a long time since I wrote a letter.
As well as embroidery, I daydream; which is silly. I have this fantasy about a girl who writes a letter to a prince. It’s pointless, because he’s married; but it’s all right really, they’re just letters. She has an idea he doesn’t really care much for his wife. The trouble is, she gets to depend on the letters; she sits waiting for them to come — and they do, but she can’t help wondering what it’d be like if they stopped coming, and she was stuck out there in the middle of nowhere, stranded in a tower embroidering cushion covers for the rest of her life. Sometimes I try and talk to her; I shout, but she can’t hear. I try and tell her it’s a very bad idea, and if I were in her shoes I wouldn’t do such a dangerously stupid thing.
The other day, I went for a walk. I don’t think I’m supposed to, but there’s only so much cross-stitch a woman can do before her brain boils out through her ears. I walked down some stairs and across a courtyard and up another flight of stairs and down a passage, and in through an open door. There was a maid in the room, cleaning something; as soon as she saw me, she ran away, which was a bit disconcerting. The point is, I remembered the room. It used to be my room when I first came here; you remember, when I was a hos
tage, during the peace talks. It was pretty much as I remembered it: same furniture, even the same mirror hanging over the fireplace. I looked in the mirror and you’ll never guess who I saw there. At first I was a bit taken aback — I’d heard she was dead, or had gone away. But then it occurred to me that she must’ve been there all this time.
No offense, but I don’t think the barbarian girl is quite right for you. She’s got a nice figure if you like them springy, but you could cut yourself on that mouth. Not that I’m feeling catty or anything. Still, who needs love when you can have cavalry?
I’m sorry, that was deliberate, not just an unfortunate slip of the pen. Who needs that thing that starts with L? Not me. You see, I’m married to a dear, good man who used to love me very much, though it’s rather slipped his mind lately, because of everything he’s had to contend with. You don’t; or maybe you do, but you can’t have it if it interferes with work. You’re identified with your country, remember, and countries can’t go around falling in love. Imagine what’d happen if Lonazep suddenly fell madly in love with the Eivar peninsula, and Lower Madeia got jealous and died of a broken heart. There’d be chaos, they’d have to redraw all the maps.
So, there we are. Eremia sends her best wishes, what’s left of her.
He took a moment to fold the letter up neatly, like a man putting away a map in a high wind. He dropped it into the ivory box, turned the key and lolled back in his chair. For a little while, he stared at the tapestry on the opposite wall; the usual stag at bay, confronting the usual hounds. It was so familiar that he scarcely ever saw it these days; once it had hung in his father’s bedchamber, and he’d come to know it well while he was waiting for his father to die. One of the first things he’d done when he became duke was have it brought up here.
