The Escapement Page 36

  “It was a mistake,” someone was saying, and Psellus fought to restrain a smile. In the old days, when Boioannes sat in this chair, nobody would have dared to talk like that. Progress, he thought; I’ve given them freedom of speech to criticise me with. If we survive this, that really ought to be worth a statue, or my head on the two-dollar coin. But I don’t suppose anybody except me has even noticed.

  “You could well be right,” he replied gently. “Some brave men lost their lives.” And some cowards too, he added to himself; and I feel guiltier about them, because I conscripted them to fight. There’s an argument for saying that brave men deserve what they get, but it’s a serious business forcing cowards to stand in harm’s way. “But you may recall, I said that the primary objective would be damaging the new trench, the one I feel sure is being built to shift heavy equipment. And on balance, we succeeded.”

  Someone else shook his head, rather dramatically. “Really, that’s beside the point,” he said. “That may be what you set out to do, and yes, you managed it. Congratulations. But the rather more important outcome is that they’re moving their artillery up and fortifying the trench bends. Which means they’re going to start bombarding the embankment very soon.”

  “True,” Psellus said. “It’s also true that if they can reach us, we can reach them. And they’re in the open, and we’re under cover.”

  “It’s still an unlooked-for escalation,” said the troublemaker (he chided himself for the instinctive characterisation; give them free speech, then brand them as troublemakers when they make use of it. Lucao Psellus, for shame!). “Furthermore, by prompting them to improve their defences, you’ve made launching further sorties much more difficult and dangerous.”

  This time, Psellus allowed his smile to show. “Actually, I wasn’t planning any further sorties,” he said. “We aren’t very good at them, after all. The purpose of this one was to cause delay, because they only have a limited time in which to sack the City before their food runs out. Actually,” he went on, “if you’ll excuse the digression, I’ve been thinking about that, and doing a few simple sums, and I’ve reached the conclusion – I’ll go through the figures afterwards with anyone who wants to see them – that they’re rapidly approaching a point of no return in that regard, the point where they either have to capture the City and our food reserves, or else give up and go away before they starve. If they pass that point, whenever it comes, and fail to take the City within the critical time period, they will run out of food. Even if they win, if they leave it too long, there won’t be enough food left in our stores to feed their army. Therefore, when that point in time comes, they’ll have to make a decision – do we have a realistic chance of victory within the time limits imposed on us by the supply problem? – and if the answer is no, logically they should abandon the siege and go away.” He paused, disengaging his mind from the train of thought these issues had set in motion. “As it happens,” he went on, “and I can’t claim credit for it, but it’s extremely useful nonetheless, the sortie was far more successful in this regard than I expected. Now that they’re guarding and fortifying the trench, their rate of progress will slow down significantly. If we can win the artillery battle – it doesn’t matter if we lose half our trebuchets and mangonels in the process, we can easily build more – to the extent where we can silence their batteries and use our artillery to slow up their progress even further, we’ll have done well for ourselves, very well indeed. We also have an advantage in the recent change of command, I believe. I know nothing about this General Daurenja, or at least nothing I’m prepared to believe without further and better evidence, but it seems to me that he is much more a soldier than the duke was. He thinks in strategies and tactics; models in sand-trays, if you like, or pieces on a chequerboard. He resents the losses we somehow managed to inflict on him, and has taken steps to stop us doing it again, because he’s a good soldier. Duke Valens’ instincts, on the other hand, would always be to make sure his people had enough to eat, regardless of the strictly military priorities. I think General Daurenja will be more likely to neglect the food deadline until it’s almost on top of him, which will lead him to panic and overestimate the danger out of guilt. Or he may turn a blind eye to the problem and ignore it, in which case his allies the savages will depose him, and quite possibly end the alliance.” He stopped talking and looked at their faces. They were watching him; listening, rather than planning out their next interruption. Remarkable. “I’m a firm believer in the merits of letting our opponents do themselves as much harm as possible, and in the situation we face, I feel sure that our enemies are our best allies.”

  He was glad to have reached the end of this impromptu speech. He found that sort of thing extremely draining: the physical effort of talking loudly for so long, the mental strain of intense concentration. Men like Boioannes had built up their stamina over a lifetime, but until very recently nobody had ever let Lucao Psellus get a word in edgeways, let alone talk uninterrupted for five minutes.

  “This point of no return,” somebody said eventually. “Just how long… ?”

  Psellus shrugged. “Without knowing their precise numbers, the quantity of food that makes up their daily ration, the true extent of their supply reserves, I can’t really put a date on it. My calculations are generalised; they tell me what’s almost certain to happen, but the margin of error is such as to make any prediction unreliable, verging on misleading. I think, though, that a great deal will depend on how quickly and easily they manage to bypass the flooded ditch, and whether we are able to force a conclusive victory in the artillery battle. Those two actions, I feel, will decide the outcome of this siege; which is why I’m pleased to have postponed the first and brought forward the second.”

  They had to think about that, which suited Psellus very well; it gave him a few moments’ grace in which to consider the issues, rather than keeping control of the debate. Of course, the flooded ditch and artillery supremacy were both side issues; he knew precisely what would win or lose the war, and it had precious little to do with sappers, siege engines or even food reserves Such a shame he couldn’t share it with them; but it was altogether too private, too intimate for discussion in committee.

  “I think we’ll leave it there for today,” he said accordingly. “Same time tomorrow, gentlemen, if you please, and we’ll consider trebuchet shot stock levels and production targets. Thank you for your time.”

  Time was, as it happened, foremost in his mind. The meeting had over-run (because of those confounded interminable speeches he’d ended up having to make), and the two men sitting in the corridor outside his office had already been waiting half an hour, ten minutes longer than he’d anticipated. He wanted them apprehensive, not worried and stressed into a position of defence in depth. He quickened his pace – the chairman of Necessary Evil never runs in corridors, even if the building is on fire – and tried to clear his mind.

  Of course, when you’re in a hurry, you always meet someone. Psellus saw him approaching in good time, but there wasn’t anywhere to hide in the narrow cloister.

  “There you are.” Livuo Barazus, permanent secretary of the accounts oversight commission. He’d been bombarding Psellus’ clerks with urgent requests for a meeting for days, something to do with a discrepancy in the reconciliations of the grain purchasing budget. A vital and necessary issue, of course, but not now. “You’re a hard man to find, Chairman. Now, in the provisional unaudited accounts for the week ending the seventh of—”

  Psellus held up his hand. “Excuse me,” he said, “but I’m late for a meeting. My chief clerk—”

  “This won’t take a moment, and then it’s done and out of the way.” Barazus smiled at him, all teeth. Magnificent teeth, they’d look splendid drilled and hung on a necklace. “There’s an entry here, five hundred and seven dollars, paid out on the—”

  “My chief clerk,” Psellus repeated, slightly louder this time, “has the file and all the relevant papers. He can help you. I can’t. I don’
t know any of the detail, and I’m late for a meeting.”

  “It’s just this one entry here.” Barazus was standing directly in front of him, a short, round roadblock. It’d only take the gentlest of shoves to move him out of the way, but that wasn’t allowed, not for the chairman of Necessary Evil. A junior ledger clerk or a messenger would get away with it, but not the most powerful man in the City.

  “Let me see that,” Psellus said.

  And there it was, curled up and cowering in among the great big numbers like a little nesting baby bird. He knew what it was the moment he saw it.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “Before my time, of course. Clearly some unlisted project of my predecessor’s. It’s such a shame he’s not here to explain it for us. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know now.” He shook his head sadly for a fact orphaned by time. “I suggest you annotate that as an unknown expenditure, reference Maris Boioannes. If you’d care to send me the finished account before it’s presented, I’ll sign the entry off, and that’ll cover it for you.”

  Barazus looked at him in horror, as though he’d just been made an accessory to a murder. Which, in a sense, he had. “Very well,” he said, in a quiet, subdued little voice. “Thank you for your time.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Psellus said, and walked away before Barazus’ conscience woke up and started barking at him.

  Well, he thought, as he walked. In a way, it was rather satisfying; like cleaning an old piece of silver and suddenly finding the mark of a famous silversmith lurking under the tarnish. And so neatly done; the amount just small enough not to be worth the effort of investigating, unless you happened to be an obsessive like poor Barazus. Presumably there were others just like it, tucked away in dark corners of other accounts, like truffles under the leaf-mould. You couldn’t help admiring the cool assurance of the man who’d arranged it. Under other circumstances, it’d be a challenge and a pleasure to track them all down; a hunt, the sort of thing the Vadani duke was supposed to be so keen on, and he could see the attraction – knowing where to look, following the trail, flushing them out one by one and bringing them down with the hawks and hounds of scrupulous accountancy. But that would be an indulgence, and he didn’t have the time. One was quite enough. He didn’t even need to be able to quote the reference. The simple fact that he knew it existed was quite enough; and, of course, it couldn’t conceivably have come to his attention at a better time. It was as though he was walking out into an arena to fight bare-handed for his life, and someone had just handed him a knife, hidden in a bunch of flowers.

  They were sitting on a bench in the corridor. They looked up as he approached; he smiled at them, apologised for keeping them waiting, asked them to follow him into the office and sit down.

  “I’ve just come from a meeting with Commissioner Barazus of the accounts department,” he said – perfectly legitimate to say that, after all – “and he drew my attention to an anomalous, unexplained payment out of consolidated funds: five hundred dollars, made on the authority of my predecessor.” He paused, taking a moment to observe the frozen look on their faces. “I won’t ask you if you can shed any light on that. I know it’s payment for your services – part of it, anyway – and I don’t need to be able to trace it back to you and obtain proof that’ll stand up in a court of law, because I don’t intend to prosecute. In return,” he went on, registering the tiny movements of their face muscles, “you will have to be completely honest with me, and then we can consider the matter closed.”

  Neither of them spoke, as expected. He went on: “You are both on record as being the investigating officers in the Ziani Vaatzes case. Your signatures were on the original indictment, your statements are listed in the index of pleadings and you both gave evidence at the trial. Now, as you know, I’ve been interested in the exact sequence of events for some time now. Before I was promoted to my present position, I wrote to you on a number of occasions asking if I could discuss the matter with you, but you never replied. When I approached your superiors, I was put off with vague promises of an interview, and nothing ever happened. When I came to find you, I discovered that you’d been relocated to new offices, and nobody seemed to know where you were. Then you were out of town on various assignments and couldn’t be contacted. I was assured I’d be notified when you returned, but I wasn’t. Meanwhile, all the files and records relating to the investigation seemed to have melted away; they’d been withdrawn to the archives, or they’d been taken out by someone else, or there’d be a brass tube on a shelf with nothing inside it. Of course, in a vast mechanism like the Guildhall, with its innumerable components constantly in motion, you come to expect a little slack and play here and there. Things go missing, people are inconveniently unavailable, people promise to do things and then forget, through pressure of work, the intervention of more important issues. At the time, of course, I was only a clerk and minor functionary, lacking the authority to make a nuisance of myself. I couldn’t insist, I could only make representations in the strongest possible terms. It was safe to ignore me, in the hope that I’d give up and find something else to do.”

  They were watching him, perfectly still. It must be a very deep-rooted instinct, telling you that if you didn’t move, the predator couldn’t see you.

  “Maris Boioannes, my predecessor,” he went on, “personally recommended me for co-option to fill a vacancy in the defence committee. At the time I couldn’t understand it: me, suddenly a member of Necessary Evil. I knew I had nothing to offer, and I was proved right, because they gave me nothing to do. It was a shrewd move, but based on a very rare misjudgement. Maris Boioannes assumed that I was an ambitious man – a safe enough assumption, because nearly everybody wants promotion, more money, more prestige. Men like me, who don’t care at all about such things, are very rare. Boioannes wasn’t to know that about me; why should he? To be honest, I didn’t know it about myself until I got the promotion, the money, the prestige, and found they gave me no satisfaction at all. Instead, I felt hopelessly uncomfortable. I wanted to know why I’d been promoted, and I felt sure it was because something, somewhere was wrong. But, as I’m sure you’re aware by now, I’m a very commonplace man, nothing at all remarkable about me. At that time, I’d never done anything noteworthy in my life. I thought it over, and reached the only possible conclusion. I was promoted because I’d been taking… well, an obsessive interest in Ziani Vaatzes, let’s call it what it was. I’d been ordered to make a report on how he’d come to do what he did. They gave me the job precisely because I’d always been such an ineffectual little man, who could be relied on not to get under the skin of the matter. Nobody could have predicted that I’d become obsessed with the detail, the inconsistencies. When I started asking questions, asking to see you two, risking making a nuisance of myself, Boioannes thought the easiest way to get me off the case was to promote me; and besides, it suited him to have a nonentity filling the empty seat on Necessary Evil. You can hardly call it an error of judgement on his part. It was just bad luck, I suppose.”

  So much talking in one day; he felt physically exhausted, as though he’d been lifting rocks or loading hay. Still, not much further to go now, and then it’d be over.

  “Now,” he said, “look at me. Maris Boioannes is a wanted fugitive, and I’m sitting in his chair. Suddenly, quite unexpectedly, I’m in a position where all my questions have to be answered; and here you are, sitting across the desk from me, wondering if you’re going to be able to get out of this in one piece. Well,” he said pleasantly, “I don’t see why not, assuming you tell me the whole truth, here and now. Boioannes will take all the blame. Now, I want you to tell me all about the Ziani Vaatzes case, everything you know, right from the beginning.”

  As he listened to them, he thought: how pleasant, above all, to hear voices other than my own, even if they’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. It’s still a kind of silence; it’s like reading only books you’ve read before, books you’ve written yourself. Before these people
can be made to talk to me, I have to figure out for myself what they have to say, but at least hearing it from them confirms it. Otherwise, I could be forgiven for believing I’m the only human being left in the world –

  At which point he smiled, to the bewilderment of the two witnesses. He was thinking: that’s right, isn’t it? I’m the only human left, and all these man-shaped things who exist only to listen to me speaking are lifesize mechanical dolls (aberrant mechanical dolls) made by Ziani Vaatzes. They can walk and sit and stand up and move their arms and legs, but they can only do what he’s designed them to do, and they’re all abominations anyhow; which presumably is why the City’s got to be burned to the ground. Looked at that way, it all makes sense. Silly of me not to have realised before. The crowning joke, of course, would be if Ziani himself was also a construct, a subprocess in someone else’s mechanism, a mechanical doll who makes other mechanical dolls. Now, wouldn’t that be a triumph of engineering?

  They told him everything. No surprises, though a few of the minor details were news to him. When they’d finished, he nodded, as if to say thank you, and then asked: “Do either of you happen to know why? Why he did it, I mean.”

  They looked at each other blankly, then shook their heads.

  “Ah well.” Psellus looked down at his interlaced fingers. “I imagine I should be able to work it out for myself.” He lifted his head and smiled reassuringly at them. “You’ve been most helpful,” he said. “In fact, it’s probably no exaggeration to say that you’ve saved the City.” He waited for them to ask him to explain what he meant by that. They didn’t. “You can go now,” he said. They stood up. “It goes without saying that if you tell anybody anything of what we’ve just been talking about, I’ll see to it that you’re assigned to one sortie after another until you’re both killed.” He said it so blandly that it took a moment for them to understand. Then they both looked very scared indeed. I meant that, Psellus suddenly realised. It was a crude, horrible threat, and I was perfectly serious. How depressing.