The Escapement Read online

  Shop thirteen was making the drills.

  Ziani had seen a picture in a book, fifteen years ago. It showed a machine like a battering ram on a wheeled chassis, but it wasn’t for bashing. Brick, the book explained, crumbles when hammered but doesn’t shatter like stone. To wreck a brick wall, the approved procedure is to drill in it a series of three-inch holes no more than eight inches apart. Before drilling the next hole, insert a log, three-inch diameter, steeped in tar or pitch. Light the log-ends; by the time you’ve withdrawn to a safe distance, the logs will have burned through, leaving the now-unsupported wall to collapse. The book had been written for builders and stonemasons needing to demolish old buildings, so of course the ordnance department had never heard of it. A friend of his who worked the same shift at the ordnance factory had won a copy of it in a game of knucklebones and sold it to him for two quarters.

  To make drills, he’d sent for the Vadani foresters. They knew exactly where to find what he needed: a stand of oaks planted on a steep hillside and neglected, never thinned out, with the result that they’d grown tall, straight and spindly, fighting to get above the forest canopy into the light. Ziani specified trunks seventy feet long, twelve inches in diameter at the base, eight at the top where the branches started to spread out. He had them cut off six inches short of that point, so that the end-grain would be tangled with knots and pins, and therefore resistant to splitting. The trunks were rolled down the hill to the river and floated to Civitas Vadanis in rafts of ten. The derricks and cranes built into the outside wall of shop thirteen lifted them easily and laid them down on the shop’s long central floor, where they were planed and dressed. The carriages were ash; simple rectangular frames, inside which the oak trunk lay on an extending trolley with a bed of rollers. A cat’s cradle of ropes running in pulleys turned it, and into its end was fitted a flat steel drill-bit three inches wide. The carriage had its own roof, tiled and sloping so that anything the defenders chose to drop or pour on it from above would slide or dribble harmlessly off. There wasn’t time to build a geared transmission to drive the wheels, so it’d need forty men to push it along and twelve more to work the windlass that turned the drill. Jobs for the Aram Chantat.

  With Duke Valens’ book under his arm and a small bundle of sketches in his hand, Ziani went to see the foreman of shop thirteen. Yes, they’d just finished making the drill bits the previous evening; as it happened, they were just about to start fitting them. Ziani told the foreman what he wanted done instead, pinned him down to a firm time estimate and promised him a dozen blacksmiths to do the additional work.

  Blacksmiths were, of course, in desperately short supply, but Daurenja’s personnel roster showed him a dozen men he could reassign with the bare minimum of disruption and chaos. The men reported to him in the empty lumber store at the back of shop nine. Its principal merit was a long, plain plastered wall, which he’d had whitewashed. By the time the men arrived, he’d already drawn out the diagrams on the wall with a stump of charcoal.

  He explained what he wanted, with reference to the diagrams. The men stared at him as though he was mad. But he was getting used to that sort of thing.

  “Fine,” he said. “All right, how many of you know how to forge a ploughshare?”

  Eleven hands went up; there is, of course, always one who never admits to knowing anything.

  “That’s all right, then,” he said. “Basically, it’s just a toy windmill with four ploughshares instead of sails, rotating round a hub with a spindle stuck in it. Now, anybody got any problems with that?”

  If they did, they kept quiet about it, so Ziani dismissed them and sent a note round to the stores, requisitioning fifteen of the large sheets of quarter-inch steel armour-plate. The quartermaster would, of course, scream and yell like mad and swear blind there weren’t that many sheets left, and if there were, they were already earmarked for shop sixteen and the armourers. Daurenja could sort all that out. No point keeping a dog and snarling yourself.

  Other calls to make. By the time he’d finished, the day shift had gone and the night shift had started up. He felt tired, so that his eyes itched and his knees ached, but he had six hours completely free; and, more to the point, nobody was using the toolroom at the back of shop seven.

  Forty-eight lamps, set up in four racks of twelve, lit the toolroom, which had no windows or skylight. Another borrowing from standard practice at the ordnance factory. Changes, even slight, in the angle of sunlight coming in through a window can distort the way the fine calibrations on a dial or handscrew stand out, which can in turn lead to error. A constant, controllable level of artificial light makes for consistent work.

  In the middle of the room stood the Vadani alliance’s one and only Type Twenty-Three engine lathe; seventy-two inches between centres, swinging twelve inches over the bed, back-geared, as specified, perfect. Sometimes he came here just to see it; other times, he couldn’t bear to look at it. How it had found its way to Civitas Vadanis he had no idea. It was at least ninety years since the Mezentines had stopped exporting them, on the grounds that nobody outside the Republic could be trusted with the potential of such a perfect artefact. Judging by the serial number, this one was at least a hundred and fifty years old. At some point, a blasphemer had oiled the bed, a crime to which the grooves scored in it by particles of grit and swarf embedded in oily paste bore silent, grim witness. Ziani himself had turned new headstock bearings for it and replaced the saddle shims. Apart from that, it had suffered no violations beyond the usual gentle, even wear of long, respectful use. Ziani had heard stories about the temples of the ancient heathens, in which the god was believed to be present, sublimated in the eucharist. Until he’d come here, he hadn’t really been able to understand what that was supposed to mean.

  There was a simple block-and-tackle hoist on the far wall, and he used it to lift the length of steel bar into position. He’d chalked his initials and his personal requisition code on it just before he left, to make sure nobody interfered with it; the chances of getting another one were practically nonexistent. It was round stock, six-inch diameter, eight feet long, best hardening steel; he’d tested it himself on the edge of a grinding wheel, and the shower of fat orange sparks had confirmed it: nothing less than a section of overhead shaft from one of the Republic’s own factories, and how it could possibly have found its way here, he couldn’t begin to guess.

  Very slowly and carefully, he guided it into place over the bed of the lathe. You and me, he thought; we shouldn’t be here, but here we are, and we’ve got work to do.

  He clamped it to the faceplate with cramps and dogs, set the tailstock live centre in the dimple he’d already drilled in the other end, slacked off the winch and unbuckled the sling. Then, hardly daring to breathe in case the whole thing shook loose and wrecked the lathe, he let in the drive and watched it start to turn. A minute studying it by eye, then the necessary checks with gauges; it was set up straight and running true. He wound in the compound table and set the screw for a five-thousandth-of-an-inch cut.

  Two cuts, two hours each; another two hours grinding, lapping and polishing. He’d been tired out before he started work. By the time he’d finished, winched the bar out of the machine and up on to its place in the long rack, he was in that rare but unmistakable state where exhaustion no longer matters. He was drawing his strength directly from the work, concentrating so intensely that he simply didn’t have attention to spare for anything else. Dimly he heard the sound of voices; the swing shift taking off their coats and changing their boots on the other side of the toolroom door. He tried to chalk on the bar, but the surface was too smooth, so he wrote on the rack instead.

  The last thing he did before he dragged himself back to his office and fell asleep in his chair was to scribble a note for Daurenja and give it to one of the messengers. As he handed it over, as his fingertips lost contact with it, he felt a dreadful surge of fear, and knew he was making a terrible mistake; as if he’d written out a death warrant, and carelessl
y put in his own name instead of the condemned man’s.

  The mandrel’s ready, he’d written. We can start whenever you like.

  He woke up. The messenger was standing over him, looking worried.

  “He said to give it to you right away,” the messenger said defensively. “Said it was very important.”

  The messenger’s tone of voice made it unnecessary to ask who he was talking about. “All right,” Ziani grumbled. “Give it here, thank you.”

  Daurenja’s handwriting – neat, pointed, sloping at an exaggerated angle – across the bottom of the scrap of drawing paper Ziani had used for his note.

  As soon as possible. Now. G.D.

  Ziani groaned, reached for the top of the ink bottle, stabbed about in the ink like a woodpecker in a rotten tree, and scribbled:

  Don’t be bloody stupid. I’ve had a long day and I’m going to get some sleep. We’ll start the forging an hour after sunset tomorrow. Get everything ready for then.

  “No rush,” he said, as the messenger took the paper from his hand. “Make the bastard wait.”

  Then he dragged himself to his feet, went outside on to the gallery, climbed the spiral stone staircase to the tower room where he slept, and went to bed.

  Much to his surprise, he slept well, and woke up in daylight. His room in the tower was circular, with one small, strangely shaped window about a foot off the floor. After a month or so of wild speculation, he’d got around to asking someone about it, and was told that the factory building had once been the keep of the citadel, before Valens’ great-grandfather built the ducal palace on the other side of town. The upper gallery, where his office was, used to be the intermediate defensive ring, where archers shot down at besieging enemies and pushed scaling ladders away from the walls with long poles. The room he slept in, his informant added, was the watch platoon garderobe.

  “I see,” he’d said. “What the hell’s a garderobe?”

  Basically, military terminology for a toilet; which explained, among other things, the position and shape of what he’d taken for a window. Boiling oil and molten lead weren’t the only things you dropped on besiegers’ heads, apparently.

  He changed his shirt and trousers and put on a heavy-duty leather apron, and boots with steel toecaps, then went down to the gallery and along to the corner tower, where there was usually something to eat. Today, it was salt bacon, more salt than bacon, a basin of grey slop under a thick knobbly skin, and grey bread you could’ve sharpened axes on. He was hungry, but he couldn’t bring himself to burst the skin on the grey slop. An earlier diner had left a hacksaw beside the bacon. It got the job done, eventually.

  A little later, his mouth tasting uncomfortably of salt, he went to his office and attacked the paperwork for an hour, at the end of which his early-morning freshness had all gone. He felt blunt, like a knife misused for cutting lead, and he still had far too much to do.

  The foreman of shop eleven rescued him in the nick of time; something about the bearings on the reciprocating saw, which nobody else was allowed to touch if it went wrong. Ziani smiled, abandoned the paperwork and spent a pleasant couple of hours in the small toolroom, turning up new bearings on the little toymakers’ lathe he’d built himself. He stretched the job out a little, pretending to himself that a mirror finish was essential for the smooth running of the saw. Once upon a time, he thought, there was a man who worked in a factory rather like this one, only better; he checked tolerances and fought his way through paperwork, and when something broke he fixed it himself, because that was quicker and easier than explaining to someone else how to do it; he didn’t like the administration much, and when he found an excuse to get away from it for an hour or so and spend time actually cutting and shaping metal, he used to wonder why the hell he’d ever wanted to be the foreman instead of an ordinary engineer; once upon a time, in a distant land, and also here, now, where the avenging hero had finally settled down, made new friends and got a job. The difference, the tolerance, the margin of error, was something you checked with a simple piece of metal, a yes/no gauge. If you put the gauge over the finished component and it fit, the piece was good. If not, scrap. Yes or no; no tolerance.

  The bearing fitted perfectly, which was how it should be. After all, he thought, I do good work, and everything I make fits and does its job; which is why I can’t be satisfied with sleeping in a toilet in a watchtower, while my wife and daughter think I’m dead or never coming home again. No fit; scrap.

  The rest of the day passed rather too quickly. He knew the sun was setting when the light through the arrow slits in the wall of shop nine blazed a garish orange in the freshly cut steel of the catapult ratchets. An hour to go. He went back to the corner tower and ate some more of the grit-hard bread.

  Then Daurenja came for him, like an executioner.

  There was a big covered space at the back of the factory. In the old days, they’d told him, it had been the castle mews, where the hawks and falcons were kept, a dark, quiet place, suitable for savage, neurotic creatures in captivity. Now it was just a shell with a high roof and no windows. On Daurenja’s orders, they’d cut a hole in the roof for a flue, rising up out of a broad funnel-shaped canopy, hung by wires from the rafters. Directly under it they’d dug a wide, shallow pit, lined it with firebrick and run in two-inch-bore clay pipes to conduct the blast from four enormous double-action bellows. Surrounding the pit like a moat was a channel, six inches deep and three wide, filled with water. Against one wall lay a mountain of charcoal.

  Two heavy A-shaped iron frames stood a little to the right of the pit, supporting the two ends of the tool-steel mandrel Ziani had turned on the lathe. Next to that, two five-hundredweight double-horned anvils, and lying on the floor around them buckets of water, mops, bundles of cloth, wide-mouthed pails of water, with whole fleeces stuffed in them to soak, iron cans and dippers fixed on the ends of long poles. Two dozen men in aprons stood by the far wall, looking nervous.

  “I’ve already hardened and tempered the mandrel,” he heard Daurenja say, and for a moment he couldn’t think what he was talking about. “It’s going to be tricky keeping the frames from burning through. We’ll just have to make sure they’re damped down all the time.”

  A table, liberated from somebody’s kitchen. On it lay eight pairs of tongs, sixteen sledgehammers, a big stone pestle and mortar, clay jars, rolls of three-sixteenth iron wire, a clutter of small, commonplace tools, a tinderbox, two fire-rakes, four wire brushes. “I think we’ve got everything,” Daurenja was saying, and Ziani realised he sounded worried, the first time ever. It reminds me of something, Ziani thought, and realised it was two things, not one: preparations for an execution, and the midwife getting the kitchen ready, the day Moritsa was born.

  “Swage blocks,” Ziani said. “You’ve forgotten the swage blocks.”

  Daurenja shook his head. “Over there,” he said, pointing into the shadows. “It’s so dark in here you can’t see them. Look, will somebody get some lamps lit, for crying out loud?”

  It’d have to be dark once they started, of course; they needed to be able to see the fine differences in the blinding white of iron at welding heat, and the soft glow of a single candle might be enough to deceive them. “Get the blocks over here by the hearth,” Daurenja was telling someone. “And have the staves laid out in order, we don’t want to be fooling about dry-fitting once we’re up and running. And then you might as well get the fire lit. The sooner we start, the sooner we’ll see.”

  Someone picked up the tinderbox, but Daurenja took it from him. They were laying kindling in the middle of the pit; first small dry twigs and hay, then thin splinters of scrap planed wood stacked in a cone. Daurenja turned the tinderbox handle, blew on it, swore, called for more dried moss and shavings (Ziani smiled; he always had trouble getting a fire going himself). Someone leaned over his shoulder, offering to help, and was pushed out of the way. A little curl of smoke from the box. Daurenja took a long stride towards the pit and dumped the smouldering rubb
ish out of the box into the hole in the top of the stack of kindling. One of the bellows wheezed gently. An orange glow swelled and burst, like over-ripe fruit, into flames.

  Two men started shovelling charcoal, sprinkling it slowly on to the fire as the second bellows started up. Apparently satisfied, Daurenja turned his back on the fire-pit and shouted something Ziani couldn’t catch over the huff and roar of the bellows. Four men dragged a long wooden box out of the shadows, and two of them stooped and lifted out an iron plate, bending their knees and straightening up under the weight. The plate was five feet long, about a handspan wide, two inches thick. They laid it down on the table and stepped back, as Daurenja darted forward to examine the edges.

  “Bloody rust,” he shouted. “I thought I told you to keep the staves dry.” He was scrubbing the edges with a small chunk of brick. “Got to keep the edges clean or the welds won’t take.” Someone handed him a clay pot, flux mixed with water to the consistency of thick porridge. He scooped out a thick blob with his finger, examined it and started smearing it on the freshly scrubbed edge.

  “In the fire,” he snapped; two men clamped heavy tongs on the plate, locking the handles shut with rings, and heaved it into the fire-pit, while other men raked orange-hot charcoal over it until it was buried. The bellows sighed, provoking the fire into a wild outburst of flame. Five men were dragging up the massive square iron swage block. A wide groove, like a gutter but shallower, was cut into the upper face. Daurenja nodded to two of the men, and they each took a sledgehammer from the table. Daurenja himself lifted the top swage, a half-round bar on a long handle; it must have weighed forty pounds, but he moved it easily. He rested it in the groove on the top of the block, and peered into the fire as the third and fourth bellows started to blow, stirring up six-foot plumes of flame.

  “Keep the charcoal coming,” Daurenja yelled. “Got to keep the heat even.” Sweat was pouring out of his face, as though he was melting or leaking. “Right, that’ll do, get it out.”