Devices and Desires

Chapter Thirteen

Abominations, Ziani thought, looking down at his work. If I wasn't an abominator before, I'm definitely one now.

It was horrible; no other word for it. Instead of square-section steel the frame was built out of wood. The lockwork wasn't machined but pressed and bashed out of plate. The slider was no more than a square of thin steel sheet hammered into a folded box over a square mandrel. The spring had been wound by hand and eye out of junk-scrap pitchfork tines, of all things, drawn down and forge-welded together. Just looking at it made Ziani feel sick.

But it had taken him just three days to put together, and it worked: the first functional scorpion ever built outside the Mezentine ordnance factory. And he could make more of them, very quickly, which was all that mattered.

True, the timber frame would shake itself to bits under the savage force of the recoiling spring. The lock clunked and twanged into battery rather than purring and softly clicking. The slider rattled about in its slot, wasting precious energy. The spring wouldn't last, but that hardly mattered, since the frame would unquestionably disintegrate first. Without destruct-testing it he couldn't be sure, but his best guess was that it would last two thousand shots. Which would be enough.

(Enough; it was a word in Mezentine, but people tried not to use it if they could help it. It stood for the admission of defeat, the recognition of the inevitability of inaccuracy, breakdown and failure. Enough was an abomination. In the perfect world to which Specification was a gateway, there would be no more enough. Eremia, however, was about as far as you could get from the perfect world without supernatural help, and the prototype scorpion would be enough for Eremia.)

He sighed. When he shut his eyes, he could see the ratchet mechanism-a blank cut with a shear, teeth filed by eye to lines scribed with a nail, pivot-holes punched on an anvil, sear bent over a stake; it haunted his conscience like a murder. He hated it. But an Eremian blacksmith could make twenty of them in a day, during which time two Eremian carpenters could make a frame out of a log, an Eremian armourer could make ten sliders or a dozen locks, any bloody fool with another bloody fool to do the striking could make ten springs, and the garrison of Civitas Eremiae could drive the Mezentine army away from the walls with horrendous losses. That would be enough.

Someone called his name; that fool Calaphates, whose money had made all this possible. He looked up and there was the fool himself, leading a gaggle of suspicious-looking men across the yard. Ziani found a smile somewhere in his mental lumber-room.

'Gentlemen,' Calaphates was saying, 'allow me to present Ziani Vaatzes, until recently the foreman of the Mezentine state armoury. Ziani, I'd like to introduce you to…'

(The names slipped in and out of his mind like elvers through a coarse net. That level of detail-being able to tell one Eremian nobleman from another-was not required at this stage. All that mattered was that these six worried-looking men were here to see the scorpion; if they liked it, they would go to Duke Orsea and tell him he ought to buy as many of them as Ziani could make. A smile was a lot to ask of him, but on balance it was worth it.)

One of the men cleared his throat. He was trying to look sceptical, but he just looked nervous. 'So,' he said, 'this is it, is it?'

Ziani could have smiled at that free of charge, but he refrained. 'We call them scorpions,' he said. 'Of course, this is a very crude copy of the ones they make in the Republic, but it works just as well. I'll give you a demonstration in a moment.'

The man recoiled slightly. Probably he wasn't used to being spoken to so freely by someone whose grandfather hadn't known his grandfather. Unimportant; the machine would speak for itself. 'So this is what they used against us…' The man's nerves got the better of him and he fell silent. Ziani nodded.

'More or less,' he said. 'The Mezentine ordnance factory makes these at the rate of twenty a day when they're running flat out. I think we can match that, if we really want to. It'll cost a lot of money, but I think you'll agree it's worth it.'

One of the others was frowning, as though the subject was somehow obscene. 'You said you'd show us how it works,' he said.

'Of course.' Ziani took a breath, then pointed. 'Over there, see that lump of steel sheet set up on a stand? The distance is fifty yards, and the sheet is sixteen gauge, roughly one sixteenth of an inch; it's what the Mezentines use to make armour. Now,' he went on, 'if you'd all care to stand behind me.'

They were happy to do that; eager, even. He took the ratchet handle, fitted it into the square slot, and began to wind the winch. To show off, he used one finger to turn it; a mistake, because the ratchet wasn't beautifully engineered like the ones he was used to, and he had to use rather more pressure than he'd have liked, but it was too late to stop without losing the effect. The winch cable drew back the slider, compressing the spring, until the catch dropped into its detent. Ziani picked up the three-foot-long, half-inch-diameter steel pin that was leaning against the side of the frame and laid it in the loading groove, its butt end resting on the nose of the slider. He'd already set up the sights (if you could call them that; a small rectangular plate with a hole in it, mounted on two crude set screws for windage and elevation; a post on a bent-nail gate at the front end to line it up by). He paused, to check they were all watching, and flipped the catch that released the sear. The spring shot the slider forward until it slammed into the stop, the noise coinciding with the hollow clang of the pin against the target.

'My God,' someone said.

'Let's go and have a look, shall we?' Calaphates said in a rather embarrassed voice, as though he wanted everybody to know that this really wasn't his fault.

As Ziani had known it would, the steel spike had gone clean through the steel sheet; and the one behind it, and the two behind that; it was buried deep in the brickwork of the wall. He asked if anybody wanted to try and pull it out; no takers.

'Anyhow,' he said, 'that's what it does. The differences between this one and the ones they make in the Republic are mostly about durability; this one won't last nearly as long, it's more likely to break apart or get out of true, you can't aim it as precisely; it's heavier, too, and because it jumps about rather more when you let it off, you'll need to check the alignment after every fourth or fifth shot. On the other hand, it's a bloody sight better than what you've got at the moment, which is nothing at all.'

Galaphates looked like he wanted to crawl down a hole and die, but Ziani couldn't help that. His job was to create a strong impression, and he was doing just fine. 'You can make twenty of these a day?' one of them asked. Ziani nodded.

'I don't see why not,' he said, 'provided I can hire the workers I need. I've got a list of suitably skilled men who've agreed to join me. All I need now is a firm order and some money.'

'Money,' one of them repeated. 'How much are we talking about?'

Ziani looked at him, and then at the plate, with the steel pin stuck in it. 'Does it matter?' he said.

They didn't have anything to say to that. 'Of course,' Ziani went on, 'as and when I've got the time and the resources, I can make a far better machine. I can make pretty much anything you like, as cheaply or as well as you want. For now, though, what you need is a lot of these things mounted on the city wall and pointed down the road. As soon as you tell me I can get started, I'll have the first batch of twenty for you inside a week; twenty a day after that until you tell me to stop. How does that sound?'

They were looking at him again, their eyes bright and feverish with an uneasy blend of hope and fear. On one level, he could understand why. Here was a Mezentine, by his own admission the man who'd made the machines that had butchered their army only a very short time ago; a Mezentine, offering to build them machines with which to massacre his fellow citizens in return for an unspecified but presumably vast sum of money. They wanted the weapons, but having them would change everything and they weren't the sort of men who held with huge, irrevocable changes, particularly ones involving slaughter. Paying out money bothered them, too. They were simple but weak components and he wished he didn't have to rely on them, on his estimate of their tensile strength. But they would do what he wanted, because they had no choice, not even if he spat in their faces or cut off their beards with a sharp knife.

He felt mildly guilty when he saw the look on Calaphates' face; after all, Calaphates had done nothing except give him money and support, and now Ziani was dragging him into the world-changing business, which wasn't quite what he'd believed he was putting his money into. But he hardened his heart. Calaphates would get his money back, along with an enormous profit-it'd do him no good, but it was what he wanted, and Ziani would get it for him, no question about that. As to the larger scope of the mechanism; already been into that, not his fault. It'd be like feeling guilty about an earthquake or a tidal wave.

They went away eventually, and Ziani got back to some proper work. The angle of the ratchet sear, the diameter of the spring link retaining bolt, the depth of engagement of the slider lock pin; real issues, soluble and precise. Every step away from chaos towards perfection accrues merit, no matter what the context, and the line between them is straight. When you can devote yourself to one problem, with everything else subsidiary to it, you begin to understand.

'There you are,' she said, walking in across the polished threshold. 'I've been looking for you.'

Miel caught his breath; it was a sensation remarkably like fear in its symptoms and effects. He turned round slowly and smiled.

'What can I do for you?' he asked.

'Well.' She sat down on the window-seat, right next to the chest in which he'd imprisoned her letter. 'This is a bit awkward,' she said.

'Go on.'

'It's Orsea,' she said. 'I don't know. Ever since he came back from the war. It's like…' She frowned. She had the most precise face he'd ever seen; not sharp or pointy, but perfectly defined, as though it had been carefully designed by an architect. He knew it by heart, of course; it was there when he closed his eyes, it ambushed him when his mind wandered. He had learned it years ago, when they were both little more than children; he'd learned it the way a schoolboy prepares his lesson, because it was virtually inevitable that, sooner or later, they'd get married, thereby linking the Sirupat to the Ducas, with a view to breeding a superlative strain of nobleman. It hadn't turned out that way in the end. By a highly unlikely freak of chance, the Sirupat had suddenly been elevated from minor royalty to heirs to the Duchy; infelicity of timing had made her the carrier of the succession (as though it was some painful disease, passed down the female line to afflict the male) and the banalities of political expediency had made Orsea the only possible husband for her-Orsea his best friend, from back when they were safely outside the golden circle, married to the girl he'd never felt the need to fall in love with, because she'd been his practically from the cradle…

'It's like,' she said, 'that old fairy story, where the prince is kidnapped by goblins, and the goblin king turns himself into an identical copy and goes away to rule the kingdom, and everybody's fooled except the girl the prince is going to marry. It's like he hasn't come home yet, I don't know. It's awkward.'

Awkward, Miel thought; and he could almost see the letter, through an inch of oak board. 'I know,' he heard himself say. 'He's going through a rough patch. What happened in the war really smashed him up.'

She was looking at him; he knew, though he was looking the other way. He always knew when she was watching him. 'He seems quite his old self when he's with you,' she said.

Miel shrugged. 'Well,' he said, 'that's different. For one thing, I was there with him; also, we only ever talk about work-you know, affairs of state, all that.' He grinned; had he really said affairs of state? She was grinning too. She knew him too well. 'Boys' stuff,' he said. 'Things you can talk about on the surface without having to go to the bad places. I know he's tearing himself into little bits inside, but that's not…' He hesitated. She couldn't understand how his oldest friend could talk to him and not to her; it was, of course, because Orsea loved her. That single fact made everything different. Love, Miel had known for some time, is the most destructive force in the world, doing more harm than war and famine put together. 'Look,' he said. 'Have you actually talked to him about it? About what happened?'

She shook her head. 'I've hardly said two words to him about anything,' she said. 'And that's not how it used to be.' He could feel her come to the stop, the point beyond which she couldn't go with someone else. It was murderously frustrating; the two most important people in Orsea's life, and they couldn't talk about him beyond that point. 'I was wondering,' she said, 'if there's something we could do to-I don't know, snap him out of it. Which is why I thought of you.'

'Like?'

'He needs-I don't know, he needs to do something fun for a change, so he can forget about this terrible thing that's smothering him for a while; something frivolous and outdoors and energetic, nothing to do with the war or politics or-'

'Affairs of state.'

'Absolutely' She'd slipped into that mock scowl, with the furrowed eyebrows and the exaggerated pout. No matter how much her face changed as time passed, that expression always stayed the same, and when she wore it she was fourteen again, and so was he. 'So I thought, your cousin Jarec-'

'You mean Jarnac. Jarec was my uncle.'

'As though it mattered,' she said pleasantly. 'Your cousin, the great big tall one with the big shoulders and the impossible manners. Him. I think you should get him to take Orsea out hunting. Or hawking. Orsea used to love hawking, a few years ago, and your cousin whatever-his-name-is has got lots and lots of hawks. He showed them to me once,' she added. 'I've never been so bored in my life. But Orsea was sick with jealousy for a week.'

Miel frowned. 'It's not the season yet,' he said. 'Hawking doesn't start till the middle of next month.'

'Oh for heaven's sake.' She waved away a thousand years of immutable law with a wave of the fingers. 'Nobody's going to mind, and it'd do him so much good, I'm sure of it.'

'Will you come?' Miel said. 'If I can arrange it?'

She nodded. 'And I'll make it look like I'm enjoying myself,' she said. 'Just so long as I don't have to give bits of dead animal to anybody. There are limits.'

He smiled. 'That's boar-hunting,' he said, 'not hawking. And besides, it's a great honour to preside over the unmaking. You should be thrilled to be asked.'

'Should I really? I'll try to bear that in mind. Meanwhile, will you do it? Ask your cousin, I mean. I'm convinced it'd help.'

Miel shook his head. 'Jarnac won't fly his precious hawks out of season,' he said. 'Not for anybody. If I asked him, he'd just look down his nose at me and quote bits out of King Fashion and Queen Reason.'

She stared at him. 'Out of what?'

'The Venerable Dialogue of King Fashion and Queen Reason, Concerning the Proper Exercise of Huntsmanship,' Miel said. 'Good God, you mean you weren't made to read it as a child?'

'Never heard of it.'

'You lucky-' Miel shook his head. 'I had to learn the whole thing off by heart when I was nine.'

'Is it ghastly?'

'It's long,' Miel replied, with feeling. 'And the bit about how to tell the age of a roebuck by the shape and texture of its droppings is just a bit too graphic for my taste. Jarnac lives by it, you'd never get him to break the rules.'

'How about if I-?'

'But,' Miel went on briskly, 'Jarnac also keeps an excellent kennel, and it's still boar season, so we can go boar-hunting instead, and that'll do just as well, if you really think it'd help.'

'You aren't sure about that, are you?'

Miel shrugged. 'I don't think Orsea'd let himself have a good time, not the mood he's in at the moment. The trouble is, he's torturing himself because he believes the disaster was his fault, and to a certain extent he's right. Someone like him can't get round something like that.'

'I know.' She stood up, kicking at the hem of her dress. 'And it's so stupid, because nobody else would carry on like that, and people really don't blame him. They're so used to things like that happening, it's just a fact of life to them. That's something I don't understand,' she went on. 'I guess it's because I spent most of my childhood abroad, being a hostage. I can't see how you'd get to a state where thousands of people suddenly aren't there any more, and yet you carry on like nothing's happened. How can people live like that?'

Miel sighed. 'It was very bad in the war-the proper war, I mean, between us and the Vadani. We were within an inch of bleeding each other to death. That's why your father and Valentinian had to patch it up at all costs.' That, he didn't add, is why you had to marry Orsea instead of me. 'Anyhow,' he went on, 'back in those days-you weren't here-it was one hideous massacre after another, except when we were butchering them, and that wasn't often. Or often enough, anyhow.' He shook his head. 'That's where the trouble lay with this war,' he went on. 'We simply hadn't realised how weak we'd become, not till we'd committed to the invasion and it was too late to go back. We knew before we left the city, deep down, that the whole thing was a complete joke-us, fighting the Mezentines-but we didn't dare face up to it. Orsea should've, but everybody wanted to go, so we could feel good about ourselves, and he went along with it because he always does. It's remarkable the truly stupid things people can do just because it's expected of them, or they think it's expected of them.'

She gave him a look he didn't like. It said, You could have stopped him. He shook his head to say, no, I couldn't. He believed that was true, as an article of faith.

'I'll go and see Cousin Jarnac,' he said. 'There won't be any trouble about getting up a boar-hunt; any excuse, as far as he's concerned.' Miel clicked his tongue. 'And who knows,' he said. 'Maybe someone can get into a tight spot and Orsea can be terribly brave and save his life. That'd do him the world of good; it's a sort of blind spot with him, he's got no sense of perspective. So long as he does well and helps someone and does the right thing, it doesn't really matter whether it's something big and important, like saving the city, or something small and trivial, like rescuing an old woman's dog from drowning.' He paused. 'Did he ever tell you about that?'

'About what?'

Miel smiled broadly. 'You should get him to tell you, it's glorious.'

'You tell me. He's not talking to me, remember.'

Miel frowned, then went on: 'We were out walking once, when we were kids playing rovers, I think, or something like that. Anyway, there's this river, and there's this old woman kneeling on the bank, and two or three puppies splashing about in the water. Orsea immediately assumes they've fallen in by accident, so he hurls himself into the water to save them, forgetting in the excitement of the moment that he can't swim-well he can, but only a sort of feeble frogs'-legs-and-otters'-paws swimming, which is no good at all in a fast-flowing river. Luckily we've got a couple of my father's men along with us-thinking about it, I think we were shooting wild duck, not playing rovers; anyhow, they jump in and fish him out, and he makes them go back and rescue the puppies; they get two of them but not the third. He takes them to the old woman, and she looks at him like he's gone off his head: what did you want to go and do that for? she says. Turns out, of course, that they were the leftovers from the litter and she was drowning them on purpose. I'd figured that out pretty early on, of course, but Orsea had real trouble with the whole idea, he couldn't believe someone'd actually do that. Anyway, he caught one hell of a cold, and his father gave him a dreadful shouting-at for nearly getting drowned making a fool of himself. And he hasn't changed. I think he'd still do exactly the same thing if we walked in on some old woman and a dog in the water; just in case, if you see what I mean.'

She looked at him, and he wondered what she could see. 'Tell you what,' she said. 'Go somewhere where there's no rivers. For my sake.'

'No rivers,' he said solemnly. 'Right. I'll tell Jarnac.' A thought flitted across his mind, like a woodcock crossing a ride. 'It'll be good practice for him, hosting a ducal function and all that.'

'Will it?'

He nodded. 'Sooner or later the Vadani are going to want to celebrate the peace with a state visit, something grand with all the trimmings. We'll have to lay on a hunt for them, and Jarnac's our resident expert on all that stuff-the right way of doing things, you know. Their Duke's mad keen on hunting, I gather.'

'That's right,' she said. 'Which surprises me. I met him once, years ago when I was living there, and practically the first thing he said to me was how much he hated it. Hunting, I mean.'

'Oh,' Miel said. 'You've met him. What's he like?'

She shrugged. 'What he's like now I have no idea. Back then he was just a boy, of course. Shy, quiet, a bit introverted. Hardly surprising; his father was the big, noisy type. I suppose he was quite sweet, in a dozy sort of way'

Miel raised an eyebrow. 'He's not quite so sweet these days, by all accounts.'

'People change,' she said. 'And I suppose he's gone through a lot in a short time, losing his father and having to take control of the government and everything. That'd be enough to change anyone.'

'I don't know,' Miel said. 'Look at Orsea. He was made Duke at an early age, and he seems pretty much the same now as he was back when we were kids. A bit gilded round the edges, of course, but under the surface he hasn't changed a lot.'

'Well, I don't know,' she said. 'Like I said, I only met Valens once, and we were both very young.'

'Anyway.' Miel moved away abruptly. 'I'll certainly talk to Jarnac if you think it'll help.'

'Thanks,' she said, and smiled. The smile hit him unexpectedly, like a drunk in a tavern, and for a moment he was unable to think. Does she know? he wondered. All this time he'd assumed she didn't; he clung to that belief as an article of faith. It'd be too hard to bear if she knew and still treated him as though nothing had changed since they were children. (But of course, faith comes in different tempers: there's the hard, brittle faith that shatters when it meets an obstacle it can't cut through, and the tough, springy faith that bounces off unchipped.)

Just for once, Miel didn't go to his office, or a meeting, or Orsea's apartments; just for once, he went home. Not proper home, of course; proper home was a castle on top of a mountain in the Sabens, seventy miles away along narrow cliffside roads. Home in Civitas Eremiae meant the Ducas house down by the Essenhatz gate; a tall, thin house cut into the rock, with the finest Mannerist fresco ceilings in the city and virtually no windows. All there was to see from the street was a small, very old double gate, grainy grey wood worn smooth and shiny, studded with heavy nails, in a solid slab wall. Beyond the gate was the famous Ducas knot garden; a square courtyard with a formal garden in the middle, divided into twelve segments by low box and lavender hedges radiating out from a central fountain like wheel-spokes. Each segment was planted out with seventeen different types of white and yellow rose, all of them unique to this one garden (for centuries, kings, emperors and Mezentine Guild masters had pleaded and plotted in vain for cuttings; the Ducas gardeners were better paid than most goldsmiths and entirely incorruptible). Around the courtyard was the equally famous painted cloister, on whose ceiling the finest artists had recorded the glorious deeds of the thirty-seven Ducas, from Amadea I down to Garsio IV, Miel's father; there was still the underside of an arch and a portico left bare for Miel, as and when he ever got around to achieving anything. If he did well, and one day married and had a son who lived up to the family's glorious traditions, they'd either have to scrape off Amadea I's wedding for him, or build a covered walkway to the fountain.

At the left-hand corner of the north side of the cloister was the family door (as opposed to the visitors' door, which was twelve feet high, bronze-embossed with scenes of warfare and the chase), which opened directly on to the back stair, which in turn led up to the first-floor back landing. Only the Ducas and their inner servants ever permeated through the various filters to this part of the house, which was plain black oak floorboards and panelling, with not so much as a painted architrave in sight. Fifth door off the landing was the writing room (according to family tradition, the first sixteen Ducas hadn't known how to write and hadn't wanted to), where the head of the family could finally turn at bay like a hunted boar and be safe for a while from his guests, his dependants and his responsibilities. It wasn't a spectacular interior-the fireplace was plain and unadorned, apart from the monogram of the ninth Ducas cut into the upper panel, and the plasterwork on the ceiling was positively restrained by the standards of the time-but it had become sanctified over the centuries by its function, as the only place on earth where the Ducas could be sure of being alone.

Miel dropped into the chair-there was only one in the writing room-and stretched out his legs toward the cold fireplace. What had possessed him, he wondered, to raise the subject? He'd not so much dropped a hint as bombarded her with it, like the Mezentines with their scorpions; she must have guessed that he'd intercepted the letter and read it, and that could only make everything worse. He supposed he'd wanted to know how she felt about the man she was writing to, and he'd hoped she'd betray her emotions to his mercilessly perceptive eye. That'd be in character; he'd always been prone to doing stupid things on the spur of the moment. Now, of course, the next time he encountered her, the gates would be shut and the walls lined with archers; he'd never get past her calm stare again, or her smile. It had been a double betrayal too, because he should have gone to Orsea as soon as he saw her name on the little folded-up parchment square. All in all, he reckoned, he'd just reached a new pinnacle of achievement in a lifetime of making bad situations worse by getting involved.

He sat until it was too dark to see; then he crossed the landing to the lesser hall. He found a footman there, messing about with the flower arrangement on the long table.

'I need to send a letter to my cousin Jarnac,' he said.

The footman bowed and left, came back a few minutes later with a writing-slope, a pen (in its ivory box, with spare nibs), a sand-shaker, a penknife (blued Mezentine steel blade, silver handle in the shape of a heron), a small square gold ink-pot with lid, the Ducas private seal, sealing-wax, candle in a silver holder and twelve sheets of the finest newly scraped parchment. The Ducas did not scribble notes on scraps with feathers. Miel to Jarnac

I need you to do me a favour. The Duke-

The Duke? Orsea? No; Jarnac was third in succession to the minor title in the collateral line. The Duke would like to go hunting; he's been working very hard, as you can imagine, and he wants a day off. Could you organise something'? Nothing too formal, please; bow-and-stable, maybe, rather than a full parforce day. I expect you know where there's a nice, gentle, slow-witted boar who's tired of life. Obviously we'll have to liaise with the chamberlain's office as regards dates. There's no tearing hurry, any time in the next ten days ought to do.

He waggled the sand-shaker over the page, blew, folded the sheet twice and sealed it. The footman, who didn't seem to have moved at all while he'd been writing, put all the bits and pieces back into the slope, took the letter and glided away, swift and silent as a cloud riding a strong wind.

An hour later, Miel was in the small library, painfully refreshing his childhood memories of King Fashion and Queen Reason, when the reply came. Cousin Jarnac's handwriting had always annoyed Miel intensely; Jarnac was a great big tall, broad man with fingers like peasant sausages, but he had the most elegant, almost dainty handwriting. Jarnac to Miel Delighted.

Leave everything to me. Will sort dates out direct with chamberlain. Can offer trophy four-year-old abnormal in the Farthings, or possible record six-year-old feral cross in the Collamel valley; advise. Could do both in same day, but would involve early start and long ride in between; up to you.

Miel sighed. King Fashion had just reminded him that abnormal meant a boar with unusual-shaped tusks, but he had no idea what a feral cross was. PS What's the name of that Mezentine character who's just set up shop in town? I seem to remember you had something to do with him. If we're hosting the Duke, better get the kit overhauled, don't you think?

The footman brought back the writing-slope, the pen, the sand-shaker and all the rest of the panoply. Miel wrote: Miel to Jarnac

Leave it all to your discretion. The Mezentine is called Ziani Vaatzes; care of Sorit Calaphates ought to find him-they're in partnership. Don't know if he's actually trading yet, but you can try. Say I sent you if you think it'll help.

On second thoughts, not the one in the Collamel valley. I'm under strict orders: no rivers.

Sealed, handed over to the footman; done. That should have been that, but Miel found he couldn't keep still. It was like an insect-bite or nettle-rash, the letter, a speck of grit lodged in his mind's eye. All of his illustrious line had been fretters, prone to waking up in the early hours of the morning and scaring themselves to death with perilous thoughts. What if someone else got hold of it? Unlikely (his better self, fighting a doomed rearguard action), because it was locked up in his trunk in his office, and the trunk had a genuine Mezentine three-lever lock-his great-grandfather had brought it back from the City sixty-two years ago, the first Mezentine lock ever seen in Eremia-not to mention sides of inch-thick oak board and massive steel bands, hardened and tempered like a sword-blade. Yes, but three men with axes would take a quarter of an hour to get through that, and there the letter would be, nestling inside like a scorpion in a bouquet of roses. Suppose she'd realised he'd got it-how couldn't she, since he'd been so stupid?-and was feeling desperate; what would she do, she'd get her secretary or her maid's lover to hire some thugs from the marketplace to go and get it (she'd know where he'd keep it; she knew him too well); they'd make a botch of the job and get caught, be searched, the letter would be in Orsea's hands by morning, with full details of where it had been found. Leaving it there was next thing to pinning it up on the castle gate. Or maybe she'd already decided to cut her losses by going to Orsea, telling him about it-an innocent letter, I knew him years ago when we were just children, but Miel got hold of it and I think he means to make trouble, I thought you ought to know; and Orsea would know about the trunk-they'd tried to pick the lock together when they were kids, failed, of course; the world-famous Ducas chest with its legendary lock; he'd send his men with axes and big hammers, and God only knew what the upshot would be.

I've got to get rid of it, he thought, it's the only way out of this. No letter, no proof, no risk. But he knew he couldn't do that-because it was important, because he wasn't at all sure why it was important; because it was something of hers, and he had so very little of her, it'd be murder to kill something that had been made for her. So, can't burn it or bury it; he'd have to find a better place to keep it, which shouldn't be hard, surely. The Ducas house was full of places where a letter could be kept hidden. He'd spent enough weary, frustrating hours looking for things he'd put in a safe place over the years to know that the house guarded its secrets with grim efficiency. There were all sorts of places that only he knew about: the crack where the panelling was lifting away from the wall in the old chapel, the false front over the boarded-up fireplace in the flower still. At least it'd be here, under his eye. It'd be far more awkward for Orsea, or a bunch of hired muscle, to come looking for it here than in his office in the castle; there'd have to be explanations, scenes, offence given and umbrage taken, writs and warrants, enough delay that he'd have time to nip in, recover it and put it on the fire while the search party was still outside in the courtyard arguing the toss with the porters.

It was getting late, but the household was used to him slipping out to the castle at all hours. He let himself out through the postern, a small, secret door that led directly into the Essenhatz watch-tower. The duty sergeant knew him by sight, of course, and nodded respectfully as he hurried past, down the smooth spiral staircase into Essenhatz Street; across the Blind Bridge into Lepers' Court, down the twenty-seven steps of Cutlers' Stair into Desirat, across the open square with its seven orange trees into Farriers' Path and then Miraval, leading to the Ducas' private sally-port into the castle yard; across four quadrangles and down the west cloister to the foot of the stairs that led to his office, on whose floor rested the Ducas trunk with its famous but ultimately unreliable imported lock.

He'd remembered to bring the key with him, which was a blessing.

It was still there, where he'd left it, tucked into a report on waste and inefficiency in charcoal procurement. For a moment he weakened; wasn't he worrying unnecessarily, wouldn't it be safer to leave it where it was, the strongest box in Eremia Montis (apart from the other Ducas trunk in the treasury of Sabens Guard; it had not one but three Mezentine locks, and the head keeper's wolfhound liked to sleep on top of it; but of course that'd be the first place anybody'd think of looking)? His fingertips were slick with damp as he picked it up. Not for the first time, he wished he'd been born to a simpler life.

After a long and painful bout of indecision, he stuffed it into his left sleeve and buttoned the cuff down tight around it. There was nobody about-nobody he could see, at any rate-in the cloister, he heard no footsteps echoing his own across the quadrangles and the yard. He fumbled with the key to the sally-port, nearly dropped it as he locked up behind him. He went back home a different way, just in case.

Ziani was tempering a spring in the lead bath when the odd-job boy found him; he opened the door at precisely the wrong moment, when Ziani's concentration was fixed on the faint bloom of colour in the hot metal, visible only in the concentrated beam of light slanting through the narrow window into the darkened gallery. When the door opened, light flooded in like the sea overrunning the polder at Lonazep.

'Get out,' Ziani snapped.

But by then it was too late; the job would have to be done all over again (reheat to bright orange, quench in salt water, dry thoroughly, dip in molten lead till the blue smudge shows) and yelling at the workforce wouldn't help. It wasn't as if the boy had done it on purpose.

'Sorry,' he said, straightening up and lifting the tongs clear of the tank. 'Not your fault. What is it?'

The boy looked at him nervously. 'Man here to see you,' he replied. 'Said it's dead urgent. I told him you're busy but it's life and death, he said.'

Ziani frowned. 'Did he say his name?'

'Ducas.'

'Oh.' Ziani shrugged. 'Better show him in, then.' He banked the fire up with fresh coal to keep it alight, in case the emergency took more than a few minutes.

The man who pushed past the boy and strode in (not many people can genuinely stride; it's part breeding, part knack) was easily the biggest human being Ziani had ever seen. It was hard to gauge his height with any precision, because the breadth of his shoulders and the thickness of his neck skewed the proportions; at a guess, Ziani reckoned six and a half feet, a foot taller than the average Mezentine. It was only his size that made his head seem small; he had a clean-cut face, strong chin, high cheekbones, bright blue eyes, hair cropped very short; if he carried enough fat to fry a pigeon's egg, Ziani would've been most surprised. His fingers were huge but his hands were long, his forearms widening from a slim wrist to a massive swell of muscle above the elbow. He was smiling.

'You're Ziani Vaatzes,' the man said.

Well-informed, too. 'That's right,' Ziani said, letting the bad pronunciation go by. 'The boy said there's an emergency.'

'You can say that again,' the man said. 'I'm Jarnac Ducas, by the way. You know my cousin Miel.'

Ziani nodded. 'The emergency?' he said.

Jarnac Ducas sat on the table of the big anvil, his knee hooked over the horn. He looked like a hero on his day off. 'Pretty desperate,' he said, and his eyes actually twinkled as he smiled. 'I've been told to organise a hunt for the Duke and party in ten days' time and you should see the state the gear's in. Spear-blades blunt, rusty and bent, loose on the stem, hanging by their langets, some of them. Question is, will it be quicker to fettle the old ones or make, say, a dozen from scratch? You tell me,' he added, before Ziani could say anything, 'you're the expert.'

'Spear-blades,' Ziani repeated.

'That's right,' said Jarnac. 'You know the pattern, of course: broad leaf shape with a strong middle rib, flowing into a square shank with a slot for the stem, crossbar, langets on two sides. Don't get me wrong, the old ones are good bits of kit, been in the family since God knows when, but it's the look of the thing more than anything. I don't want any fancy engraving or anything, just a really good, strong tool that'll get the job done. Actually,' he added, 'better make it fourteen. Couple of spares won't hurt, and I'm not absolutely sure yet who'll be coming.'

Ziani looked at him for a moment before answering. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but I'm rather busy at the moment, and it's not really the sort of thing I do. I'm sure there's plenty of other smiths who'll do a much better job than I could.'

The wrong answer, evidently; Jarnac Ducas gave him a well-bred look and went on: 'Obviously, since it's a rush job, that'll have to be reflected in the price. I don't mind paying over the odds for the best. The main thing is to have them ready in time without skimping on quality. I'm sure you understand.'

Then Ziani realised he was being stupid, allowing his irritation to cloud his perception. He looked at Jarnac Ducas again and this time saw him for what he was. 'Of course,' he said. 'I think the best thing would be if you could have the old spears brought here, so I can have a look at them and decide whether they can be spruced up, or whether we'll need to make new ones. Would that be all right?'

'Of course. I'll see to it straight away.'

'That would be most helpful,' Ziani said.

Jarnac beamed at him; he'd forgiven and forgotten the earlier misunderstanding, where Ziani had misinterpreted his request as something capable of being refused, and now they understood each other. 'Oh, and another thing,' he said.

Half an hour later, Ziani crossed the yard to the materials store, where Cantacusene was marking out timber for scorpion frames. Cantacusene had joined him straight away, as soon as he asked; he'd left his workshop, locking the door behind him, and vowing never to return. It was like a religious conversion, a disciple following the master.

'What do you know,' Ziani asked him, 'about boiled leatherwork?'

'Ah.' Cantacusene nodded. 'You don't do that in Mezentia, then.'

Ziani shook his head. 'Not that I ever heard. But it'd presumably come under the Shoemakers', or maybe the Saddlers'. You know about it, then.'

Cantacusene nodded again. 'You take your leather,' he said, 'sole bends are best but it depends on what you're making. You cut it out a third bigger than you want it to be, nail it to a wooden former, and dip it in boiling water for as long as it takes to count fifty. Pull it out, it'll have shrunk to size and gone hard as oak. They use it for armour mostly. Why?'

Ziani frowned. 'Why not use steel?' he said.

'Steel's dear, leather's cheap. Also, for hunting armour, it doesn't clank or rattle. If you want to be really fancy, you can dip it in melted beeswax instead of boiling water; makes it even harder, but you got to be careful on a hot day.'

'You've done it, then?'

'Loads of times,' Cantacusene said. 'Very popular line with the gentry, specially those who can't run to a full set of steel. I got all the formers back at my place.'

'Fine,' Ziani said. 'Some clown called Jarnac Ducas wants a dozen sets of hunting armour in ten days: vambraces, couters, rerebraces, pauldrons, gorgets, plackets, cuirasses, taces, cuisses, cops and greaves. Plain, he said, not fancy, whatever that means.'

Cantacusene was staring at him. 'Ten days?'

'That's right. Problem?'

'I can't do all that. Not on my own.'

Ziani smiled; at least his lips parted, like a crack in an old post. 'Well of course not,' he said. 'You show me what to do and I'll help you. Doesn't sound like it'd be too hard, not if you've already got the formers.'

Cantacusene had that worried look; there was something doglike about it, Ziani thought. 'Me teach you?' he said.

'That's right. Now, presumably you know where we can get the material from, and you've got all the tools and stuff. The material won't be a problem, will it?'

Cantacusene shook his head. 'Sole bends,' he said. 'Got to be a quarter inch thick, good clean hides without scars or fly-bites. I always used to get them from-'

'I'll leave all that to you, then,' Ziani said. 'Let me know when you're ready to start. And, I nearly forgot, we'll need a thirteenth set, but I'll be making that one all myself.'

'For his lordship, is it?'

'No,' Ziani said. 'For me.' He smiled again; private joke. 'I'm going on this hunt as well.'

Cantacusene couldn't have been more surprised if Ziani had pushed him down a well. 'You're going hunting with the Ducas?'

'That's right. Jarnac invited me.'

'Invited you?'

'After I asked him, yes. I said I'd never done it, nothing like it where I come from. He was very pleasant about it; of course I could come along, he said. I suppose he's hoping for a good deal on the armour. Oh yes, and a dozen boar-spears as well, but I'll see to them.'

That was obviously as much as Cantacusene could take. He mumbled something about going to see the leather merchant, and stumbled away as though he'd been in a fight.

Ziani shrugged, and went back to tempering his spring. It came out well enough in the end; half as much power again as the Mezentine standard for a scorpion spring, with a modified hook linkage that should help with the awkward problem of stress fracture that the Guild had given up on two hundred years ago. It would increase the strain on the wooden frame, of course, reducing the machine's working life still further, but that hardly mattered. No point building anything to last, given who his customers would be.

Cantacusene came back two hours later; the material would be delivered early in the morning (he started to tell Ziani the price, but Ziani wasn't interested), and the carrier would pick up the tools and formers from his workshop later that evening; they could start work tomorrow, if that suited. Ziani thanked him and went back to his bench, where he was clearing up a few minor problems with a redesigned ratchet axis. He would have liked to have given it more thought, made a few more changes, but there wouldn't be time now. His mind drifted; he was contemplating a two-piece fabricated spear-blade socket, square section box drawn down so the tang of the blade could simply slot in (interference fit) and be retained by the crossbar-

'Are you busy? Could you spare a moment?'

It was the Ducas voice, but not Jarnac this time; quieter, politer. Which meant it had to be the more important one, Miel Ducas. Ziani put down his callipers, looked up and smiled.

'Of course,' he said. 'What can I do for you?'

Miel Ducas looked different; tired, that would account for some of it, but he'd also been worrying about something recently. His face wasn't exactly hard to read. 'I've got a message for you, from the Duke's council. They'll be writing, but I thought I'd come and tell you myself.'

There could be no doubt as to what the message would be; even so, Ziani found that his lungs were locked and he couldn't breathe. 'That was very kind of you,' he said. 'This is about the scorpions.'

Miel nodded. 'The council would like to place an order,' he said, in a guarded, level voice. 'Basically, as many as you can make, as soon as possible.'

Ziani nodded. He was afraid it'd look offhand, but he wasn't able to speak. Miel Ducas was having difficulties, too; he started to say something, hesitated, and started again.

'About the price-' he said.

'That's all right,' Ziani interrupted. 'I've decided I'll do it at cost-materials and what I'll have to pay my men. Calaphates doesn't know yet, but I'll talk to him.'

'That's-' Miel stopped; he reminded Ziani of someone searching for a word in a foreign language. 'That's very generous of you,' he said.

'Least I can do,' Ziani replied. 'After all, I owe you people my life. My way of saying thank you.'

A long moment, with neither of them knowing quite how to say what was in their minds. Then Ziani went on: 'We'll start straight away. I've been doing some preliminary work, a few improvements to the design. Nothing you'd notice, unless you knew what you were looking for. I've taken on twenty men so far, and there's fifteen more I'm waiting to hear from.'

'That's a lot,' Miel said, though he knew he was wrong as soon as he said it. 'I thought you were on your own here, actually'

Ziani smiled. 'That wouldn't be any good, not for a job like this. Actually, I won't be involved at all, once everything's up and running. In fact, I'll be busy with a job for your cousin.'

'Jarnac?' Miel scowled. 'Look, no offence, but this is far more important. I'll talk to Jarnac, tell him he'll have to find someone else.'

'It's all right,' Ziani said. 'Once everything's set up, I'm just another pair of hands. Besides, your cousin's job'll only take a week, and then I'll be free to muck in with the rest of the men. You'll have the first half-dozen scorpions finished and ready in three days, you've got my word on that.'

When the Ducas had gone and he was alone, Ziani allowed his knees to buckle, as they'd been wanting to do ever since he'd heard the words he knew he'd hear. He leaned against the wall and slid down it, until he was sitting on the floor. Strange; it was simply the moving into engagement of a component of known qualities, sliding along its keyway and coming to rest against its stop. Perhaps it was the scale of what this development meant that affected him so powerfully: the expenditure of lives and resources, the men killed (they were alive, presumably walking about, eating, talking somewhere, but they were already as good as dead, and Ziani had seen to all that); the destruction, the laying waste, the burning and breaking of well-made goods, the sheer effort he'd unleashed; like the man in the story who was given all the four winds tied up in a sack, and some fool untied it and let them go. There would be so much noise, and movement, and pain. A man with a keen imagination would have trouble with the thought of it.

But not yet. Before all that, he had a lot of work to do, a great deal to think about; and he had the hunt to look forward to. As yet, that was still a separate piece, little more than an unfinished casting waiting to be fettled, machined, drilled to accept moving parts. He would have to design a mechanism for it, once he knew what it was going to be for. A pity; the man was a clown, but he'd quite liked Jarnac Ducas. There was a straightforwardness about him that he shared with his cousin. Ziani had arrived in Eremia expecting to find the aristocracy difficult to work with-brittle like cast iron, or soft and sticky to cut, like copper-but so far at least they'd proved to be quality material, a pleasure to use. It had all come together very sweetly, though of course it was the easy bit; and making the parts was one thing, assembling them was something else entirely.

This is no time to be sitting on floors, he told himself, and stood up. As he put the finishing touches to the axis pin, he called Miel Ducas back into his mind, considering and analysing his manner, his appearance. Tired, a little nervous, and worried about something beyond the awkwardness of his mission; what would worry the Ducas, the second most important man in Eremia, to the point that it showed in his face to a stranger?

Of course he couldn't answer that, or even know where to begin speculating. You can't take the back off a man's head and examine the works for signs of damage and wear. The most you can do is make a note of where the visible flaws run, the line along which the material will eventually break once it's been flexed a few times too often.