Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  “Or that,” he agreed.

  He gazed at his handiwork for several more seconds, then stretched, pushed up out of his chair, and began pacing around his office.

  “Styvyn Bruhstair’s turned out to be an inspired choice to head the Office of Inspectors. Mind you, I wasn’t happy losing my best instrument maker, and I have this unhappy suspicion Paityr’s going to take him away from me in the not-too-distant future. I even understand why he’s going to—God knows we need someone with Styvyn’s qualifications for the Imperial Bureau of Standards—but it’ll make a hell of a hole in my own operations. Fortunately, he’s just about finished training three deputies. Between the three of them, they ought to be able to almost carry the load he’s been carrying by himself for the last year or so.”

  His listeners nodded in understanding. Styvyn Bruhstair was even younger than Howsmyn himself and a master clockmaker. Safeholdian timepieces had been precision instruments from the very beginning of the human presence on the planet, although each of them had been individually built by master craftsmen like Bruhstair, without a trace of standardization. The Clockmakers Guild was highly respected, and master clockmakers commanded the sorts of incomes one seldom found outside the ranks of Church bureaucrats or star baseball players.

  Bruhstair himself was tall for a Charisian, only four inches shorter than Merlin, with a mind like quicksilver and agile fingers capable of incredibly delicate work. A bit nearsighted, he wore wireframe glasses to correct his vision, and he’d become a skilled lens grinder as well as a precision mechanic long before Howsmyn recruited him as his chief instrument maker. Indeed, he’d been fundamental to perfecting the new prismatic binocular “double-glasses” in conjunction with Doctor Zhain Frymyn, the fellow of the Royal College who was busy totally overhauling the Safeholdian understanding of optics. Those double-glasses were yet another item being produced here at the Delthak Works in the Instrument Shop Bruhstair had helped Howsmyn set up.

  In addition to his other accomplishments, however, Bruhstair had been put in charge of creating the tools—and skills—required for inspectors on the workshop floor to guarantee uniformity of components. Like so many other aspects of the industrial revolution, Charis style, simply grasping the reason inspection was absolutely essential had required mental flexibility by the dragonload. Figuring out how to accomplish that inspection had required even more, and the Empire of Charis was fortunate Styvyn Bruhstair had that something more. With only a very little help from Howsmyn (and, indirectly, from an AI named Owl of whom he’d never heard), he’d reinvented everything from the steel rule—including the end rule, the fillet rule, the hook rule, the depth rule gauge, the key seat rule, and the shrink rule—to spring calipers, firm-joint calipers, transfer calipers, the beam trammel, the combination square, and a dozen varieties of micrometer. Along the way, he and the Royal College had reinvented the vernier scale, as well, and also plug, ring, and snap gauges.

  All of which were designed to make sure that, as Cayleb was wont to put it, “an inch is an inch is an inch” in every manufactory in Charis.

  They were still well short of that goal, although they were closing in on it quickly, and Merlin found it interesting that while the Holy Writ stipulated so many things—from the rules for baseball to Pasquale’s dictates for public sanitation to how to terraform “unconsecrated ground”—in painstaking detail, the Church of God Awaiting had never attempted to enforce a truly standardized system of weights and measures. Oh, they were defined in the Writ, but never with the rigor of Pasquale’s rules, and Mother Church simply insisted that weight and measure must be “fair,” which left an enormous amount of room for variance between strictly local markets and manufactories.

  Given “the Archangel Langhorne’s” fanaticism, Merlin was pretty sure that hadn’t been a simple oversight. No, it was far more likely that—like Langhorne’s decision to reimpose Roman numerals on Safehold and revert to pre-metric units of measure—the lack of divinely directed standardization had been deliberately intended to encourage variation to further impede any rediscovery of advanced technology. It had taken even Charisians a while to realize how vital truly standardized units were for manufacturing. For that matter, more than a few of the Royal College’s scholars had needed time to recognize the importance of reproducible measurements to systematic inquiry and experiments, and Merlin regarded the creation of the Royal (soon to be Imperial) Bureau of Standards and Measurement as one of his more satisfying “stealth” accomplishments.

  Howsmyn had been at the heart of that effort from the beginning, and he’d brought Bruhstair into the process years ago. Although it was actually Owl who’d produced the master referents now housed in the BSM’s Tellesberg vaults, to which all Charisian measures were to conform, they’d first been applied at Howsmyn’s Delthak Works. The Delthak Works had also been commissioned to produce the duplicate referents which had been delivered to Cherayth, Eraystor, and Tranjyr. In fact, the new inch was referred to as “the Delthak inch” far more commonly than as “the Royal inch” or “the Charisian inch.” Eventually, Safehold would undoubtedly discover, just as Old Earth had, that “absolute” standards of measurement were chimeras by their very nature, but in the meantime it could get on with the first truly universal system of units in its history … and the industrialization it made possible.

  Making all the new measuring devices to the exacting standards required was far from easy, and the Instrument Shop remained a distinct bottleneck in Howsmyn’s production queue. Making them and ensuring their quality and accuracy was a painstaking process that simply could not be rushed. Bruhstair was busy training still more instrument makers to assist, and output was climbing, but it remained much lower than Howsmyn would have preferred.

  “We’re fortunate Rahzhyr and the College have had a couple of years to turn out graduates with a sound grasp of the new math,” the industrialist continued. “I really hate taking people with that kind of training out of the business of thinking of new and better ways to do things, but we need them out on the floor making sure we do the things we already know how to do right. And we’re using an apprentice program to train more of them on a sort of geometric basis. By the time we have the other works up and running, we ought to have the inspectors they need, and I’ve been discussing putting some of my inspectors into Parsahn Sylz’ manufactories.” He grimaced. “Mind you, people like that bastard Showail are going to be a lot farther down my list. I know we need all the production we can get, but since I have to prioritize anyway, I might as well concentrate on the relatively honest members of the business community.”

  “My goodness,” Merlin murmured. “And what has our good friend Stywyrt done to piss you off recently, Ehdwyrd?”

  “You mean aside from offering Master Bruhstair a fifty percent increase in pay to come work for him?” Howsmyn inquired acidly. “Or aside from the fact that by my count he’s now in violation of fifty-seven of my patents? Or that he’s still using underage labor on the side? Or the fact that my inspectors just rejected five hundred tons of his ‘first grade wrought iron’? Or the fact that one of his managers who was very careful never to say so in so many words offered those same inspectors a two-hundred-mark bribe to let the pile of crap pass anyway?”

  “That bad, is it?” Cayleb’s voice was suddenly very cold, and Howsmyn shrugged.

  “Look, this is what he’s been doing all along. I think he’s getting more blatant—probably because both you and Sharley are out of Old Charis for the foreseeable future and he figures the war in Siddarmark’s pushing us all so hard he can get substandard materials through in the rush—but it’s only a matter of degree, not a matter of kind. I’ve been letting the patent violations slide because even though my people have to spend twice as much time inspecting anything we buy from him—and Ahlfryd and Dahrail Malkaihy have to do the same thing on the Navy’s side—he does produce a lot of iron and a lot of wrought iron, and we need all of that we can get. But if you pressed me on it, I’d adm
it I’m just about over dealing with him. In fact, Ahlvyno Pawalsyn, Paityr, and I are going to have a little discussion about him when I’m in Tellesberg in a couple of five-days.”

  “Oh?” Sharleyan’s eyes had narrowed intently. Ahlvyno Pawalsyn, Baron Ironhill, was the Charisian Empire’s treasurer, and Paityr Wylsynn was both the Empire’s intendant and head of the Patent Office.

  “I’m going to file suit against the bastard for every single patent he’s violated,” Howsmyn told his empress grimly. “And then Lord Justice Hyrst will have a few things to say to him.”

  “Oh, my,” Sharleyan said in a rather different tone, the eyes which had narrowed rounding at the implications.

  Sir Abshair Hyrst, the Earl of Nearoak, was Old Charis’ lord justice, Cayleb’s equivalent of her own Baron Stoneheart, and the acknowledged senior magistrate of the entire Empire. He was approaching seventy-two years of age and even better trained than Stoneheart, since he’d been a Langhornite law master and about to be elevated to upper-priest when his older brother and his three children had died in a house fire. Sir Abshair had been forced to leave the Church, relieved of his vows to assume the title of earl, and he’d been Rayjhis Yowance’s close friend for decades. He was intelligent, dedicated, stubborn, and increasingly irascible as his rheumatism worsened, and despite—or perhaps because of—his clerical background, he was a fervent (one might almost have said rabid) Charisian patriot and a passionate supporter of the Church of Charis. If Showail was guilty of even half the offenses Howsmyn had just listed, Nearoak would go after him like a dragon through a cornfield.

  “Didn’t you just say he produces a lot of iron that we need badly?” Cayleb asked, and Howsmyn showed his teeth.

  “Yes, I did, Your Majesty. In fact, he has two new open-hearth furnaces about to come online, which’ll add appreciably to our steel production, as well.”

  “Then—forgive me if I seem a little slow, Ehdwyrd—but is this really the time to destroy his manufactory’s output?”

  “Oh, we’re not going to do that!” Howsmyn shook his head. “No, what’s going to happen is that between the restitution and punitive damages he’ll owe me for violating my patents, and the additional fines Paityr’s going to levy in his persona as Director of the Office of Patents, and the criminal fines Nearoak is virtually certain to levy over the child labor law violations, attempted bribery, and a few other minor irregularities I’m afraid are about to be brought to his notice, our good friend Stywyrt is about to find himself … I believe the technical term is ‘without a pot to piss in.’ In fact, the Crown’s almost certain to require him to liquidate his entire ironworks to settle those fines I mentioned, and when that sad state of affairs comes to pass it will just happen that a small cartel in which, by the strangest turn of events, your humble servant just happens to hold a sixty-five percent interest, will offer him a price he can’t refuse. At which point, those marvelous new hearths of his will go into production under my auspices and with my people operating them safely and effectively, with no more children getting caught in the damned gears and with somebody at least trying to keep the workers involved free of black lung. I’ve been waiting months to give him enough rope for this. Now the bastard can by God hang.”

  Merlin felt his own eyes widen at Ehdwyrd Howsmyn’s genuine anger and bitterness. He’d always known how deeply Howsmyn worried about the well-being of his workmen and women and their families. In that regard, he and his mentor Rhaiyan Mychail were quite unlike the majority of manufactory owners, even in Charis. Most Charisian manufacturers had long considered that as long as they paid the going wage, didn’t actively abuse their workers, paid their taxes, and made the occasional donation to Pasquale’s Basket to care for the indigent and the crippled, they’d done their part. And, to be fair, that had put them far ahead of the vast majority of manufactory owners elsewhere on Safehold. The policy of the House of Ahrmahk had helped to create the attitude that prevented deliberate abuse, but child labor and the toleration of dangerous work conditions had been deeply ingrained into the industrial matrix (such as it was and what there’d been of it before Merlin Athrawes’ arrival).

  Mychail and Howsmyn had been actively fighting to change that matrix for decades—over forty years, in Mychail’s case—and Howsmyn’s ferocious campaign to outlaw child labor had won him countless enemies among other manufactory owners. Both of them had believed that paying generous wages, providing medical care and education for their workers’ children, and seeing to it those workers were housed as decently as possible were not simply their moral responsibility but good business. Their labor costs had been higher than those of their competitors, but their output per man-hour had been even higher, and their employees had repaid them with a ferocious loyalty and reliability.

  By now, six and a half years after their first meeting with Merlin on Helen Island, the model they’d provided to the rest of Charis was so overwhelmingly successful that ever-increasing numbers of their fellow industrialists, like Parsahn Sylz, had adopted it enthusiastically. Even more satisfying, perhaps, most of the rest had been forced to adopt it as well, however reluctantly, if they wanted to retain the workers they required. Yet there would always be at least some like Showail—the sort who would always cut corners any way they could get away with to maximize short-term profits and damn the future.

  “Excuse me, Ehdwyrd,” Merlin said after a moment, “but would it happen you’ve decided to make an example out of Showail pour encourager les autres?”

  “I have no idea what you mean,” Howsmyn replied, but the fact that he didn’t ask for a translation of the French phrase suggested otherwise to Merlin.

  “Of course you don’t,” the seijin said affably. “Ah, would it happen you have similar tallies on other manufactory owners who might conceivably also be violating patents of yours or illegally employing underage workers?”

  “Are you suggesting I might’ve asked Owl and Nahrmahn to use the SNARCs to conduct industrial espionage on my behalf?”

  “Perish the thought! I’m merely suggesting the possibility that as a purely fortuitous consequence of the productivity surveys you’ve had Owl conducting for yourself and Ironhill you may have happened to come into possession of certain information which might lead Ironhill, Paityr, and Nearoak to seek, ah, sanctions against certain less savory elements among your competitors.”

  “You do have a way with words, Seijin Merlin,” Howsmyn observed.

  “But it’s an excellent question, Ehdwyrd,” Cayleb said, and the ironmaster shrugged. He turned to look back out his windows at the hive of activity.

  “I suppose I might as well admit I’ve been keeping track of those sorts of things. And Paityr already has copies of all of my notes, courtesy of Owl and Nahrmahn. We have to be more careful about how we get them to Pawal, since he’s not part of the circle, and neither of us is planning on actively using them to put the other Showails completely out of business unless we absolutely have to. It’s more a matter of Paityr quietly suggesting to the survivors after Showail’s destruction that they might want to clean up their own acts before he sends his examiners in to investigate certain rumors—remarkably detailed rumors, actually—which’ve come to his attention. I won’t pretend I wouldn’t love to see some of them smashed as thoroughly as Showail, Cayleb, but I’ll settle for having them provide decent working conditions and abide by the labor and worker safety laws you and Sharley’ve instituted. I can’t make them use the minds God gave them to realize how much more they can get out of a healthy, well-fed, educated workforce that believes its employers actually care about it, but I’m perfectly willing to drag them kicking and screaming into doing the right thing anyway.”

  “Remind me not to invite you to Chisholm to explain the virtues of Charisian-style manufactory operation to my House of Lords,” Sharleyan said after a moment, her tone dry. “I’m not sure the guild masters would make a properly appreciative audience, either.” She shook her head. “By most Chisholmian aristocrats’ sta
ndards, your Showail would be disgustingly softhearted. You’d terrify them … and probably rightly so, you crazed utopian!”

  “There’s nothing utopian about it,” Howsmyn said stubbornly. “It’s a matter of common sense and pragmatism.”

  “Of course it is.” Cayleb’s voice was almost gentle, and Howsmyn half glared at his image. But the emperor didn’t press him.

  “So how soon do you think this first production line of yours could actually be up and running?” he asked instead.

  “No sooner than the end of September, no later than the beginning of November.” Howsmyn shrugged once more, his tone thanking the emperor for the change of subject. “Most probably, somewhere around mid-October. Nowhere soon enough to have any real impact on this year’s campaigns, I’m afraid.”

  “And you’re going to go ahead and use the first one to manufacture Mahldyn’s revolvers?”

  “Probably.” Howsmyn dropped back into his chair. “Taigys just about has the bugs worked out of his centerfire cartridge. It’s not like we had to invent drawing operations all over again, and we’ve been producing quality brass for the apothecaries and food preservation for centuries. We’ve got good availability of zinc—and antimony, when we start casting the bullets—as well, so it was more a matter of figuring out how to seat the primers than anything else. After that, designing the machinery to do the job without oodles of hand labor wasn’t all that hard, assuming we get the damned pneumatic power to do its job. Now it’s time to start making weapons to use them, and even though revolvers will be less useful than rifles, the pistol shop’s a smaller operation. I’m still inclined to think it would make a lot of sense to use it as our pilot assembly line. We can get it up and running faster, and the lessons we’ll learn in the process will stand us in good stead when it’s time to put in the first rifle lines.”