The Escapement

13

On the twelfth day of the assault, the allies' approach trench came within range of the forward batteries on the point of the northernmost bastion. An engineer by the name of Tuno Belias of the Foundrymens's Guild, deputy night-shift foreman at the pipe and stove factory, loosed the first shot from a Type Nine scorpion. Later, he admitted that he'd neglected to allow for the moderate easterly sidewind; but that was all right, because he'd laid three degrees too far left in any case, and the wind drew the bolt straight and pitched it precisely in the heart of the sapper standing next to the man Belias had been aiming at. This early success was celebrated noisily all across the City, and Belias' colleagues at the stoveworks immediately launched a subscription to raise money to buy a suitable trophy or memento to mark the occasion. By the end of the shift, the fund stood at fifteen dollars, and a Type Seventeen commemorative silver salver was commissioned from the Silversmiths', to be engraved with Belias' name and a brief account of his notable deed. The rest of the shots loosed from the battery missed, and within the hour the sappers had raised a wall of gabions that protected the trench-head completely. They waited until it was dark to take the dead sapper's body back to the camp. The stretcher party was met by General Daurenja in person; he took the front handles and helped carry the body to the fosse, where a grave had already been dug. He made a short but powerful speech to the crowd of soldiers and sappers who'd gathered there; the dead man, he told them, was only the first of many, and the priorities of siege and battle would mean that not every body would be retrieved or decently buried. Therefore, he said, it was important to mark their first loss calmly, solemnly, making no attempt to belittle the ugly realities of war and death. Every man lost was one too many, he told them, and every death would stay with him for the rest of his life, since he was their commander, responsible for everything that happened. Nevertheless, he went on, the war had to be fought, the power of the enemy had to be broken and made safe, if the horrors of Eremia were not to be repeated. As they buried their dead, so they must bury fear, misgivings, doubt and even compassion. They should mourn now, he concluded, for themselves and their enemies, and have done with it. From tomorrow, there would be no place in the army for sorrow or regret, only for courage, resolution and grim determination.

When the body had been buried and the crowd had broken up, Daurenja went back to his tent. He drank three glasses of wine and ate a little rye bread and cheese; then he got up and went quietly, without guards or staff, and climbed down into the assault trench. He moved so quietly that the sappers of the night shift weren't aware of him until he tapped the rearguard on the shoulder.

"It's all right," he said, as the man raised his lantern and recognised him. "I just came by to see for myself. How's it going?"

They stopped work and explained. There were five of them, they said (he could see that for himself, but he said nothing): four sappers, and a guard. The front sapper dug a trench eighteen inches wide and twenty inches deep. To protect himself from the enemy's shot, he pushed ahead of him a shield of half-inch steel plate, mounted on a wheeled carriage. As he dug, he threw the spoil to his left into a stout cylindrical wicker basket four feet high and two feet in diameter, known as a gabion; filled with earth, it was dense enough to stop a scorpion bolt. The line of filled gabions formed the core of the trench's defensive bank. The second sapper followed on behind, doubling the depth and width of the trench and helping to fill the gabion with his spoil. The third and fourth sappers deepened and widened the trench still further, until it was three feet deep and four feet wide, but they threw their spoil over the line of gabions to form an earth bank beyond it, to reinforce and stabilise it. The guard fetched empty gabions from the supply cart and topped off the bank with tightly bound faggots of coppice-wood, called fascines. The resulting combination of ditch and bank meant that a column of men two abreast could march upright along the completed trench, almost entirely safe from the enemy's tactical artillery. Each team of four worked for an hour, and was then replaced. So far, they'd been averaging a hundred yards in twenty-four hours, but they felt sure that a hundred and sixty yards was possible, maybe even more. At the angles, when the zigzag line bent back on itself, they were exposed and in danger, as had been demonstrated earlier that day. To deal with that threat, they proposed to double-sap, building a gabion wall on both sides of the trench; assuming, of course, that that met with the general's approval. He then asked them where they were from, and they said they were Vadani, formerly miners from the silver mines. Most of the sappers were from the mines, though there were also some northern Eremians, experienced in building terraced fields on the sides of their thin-soiled hills, and a few peat-diggers from the marshlands of the Vadani-Eremian border. They had all the equipment they needed, though it was hard for just one man to keep them supplied with gabions and fascines; sometimes they had to stop and wait, and so it'd be a good idea to assign an extra guard. Daurenja nodded and said he'd see to it; then he slipped off his coat, rolled up his sleeves and took the front position for the rest of the hour, sending the lead sapper back to help with the gabions, as they'd recommended. As he left, he made them promise not to tell anybody that he'd been there. Back at his tent, in front of a warm stove, he dragged and peeled off his muddy clothes and changed into a blue velvet gown edged with gold lace at the neck and wrists. It came from the Aram Chantat. Properly speaking, that style, cloth and level of ornamentation was restricted to counsellors, generals and members of the royal family. It had been meant as a gift for Duke Valens, but he hated that sort of thing and had packed it away at the bottom of a chest, where Daurenja had found it and taken an instant liking to it. He only wore it at night, so nobody would see him in it and tell the savages, who'd be sure to be offended. At dawn the next morning, Secretary Psellus made an unannounced tour of inspection of the forward batteries. He was there when the first shot of the day was loosed, and he followed its long, looping trajectory, from the moment it left the slider to its rather anticlimac-tic impact in the bank of earth that hid the trench from view. He thanked the artillery crew and praised them for their diligence, then went back to the Guildhall.

"Useless," he said sadly to the assembled joint chiefs. "I saw it myself. It wobbled through the air and stuck in the big pile of dirt. We could bombard them all day long and they probably wouldn't even notice."

Orosin Zeuxis of the Linen Drapers', colonel-in-chief of the artillery, shook his head violently. "The plan is," he said, "to keep up a constant, hammering fire which will inevitably smash up those wicker basket things, loosen the earth and send it sliding down into the trench. We've run tests using donkey panniers, and-"

"Useless," Psellus repeated mildly. "We need to do a whole lot better than that. The scorpions are accurate, I grant you, but it's no good being able to pitch five shots in a foot square if they don't actually do anything. No, I think it's time we brought up the trebuchets and mangonels. I know," he added, raising his hand in a rather weak gesture; they stopped arguing at once, even so. "We were planning on keeping them in reserve, we don't want to let them know the true range we can achieve, so that when their main army gets close enough, we can take them by surprise. And no, ideally we wouldn't want to commit them to the embankment in case it's over-run, and there wouldn't be time to move them back again. All perfectly true. The fact remains that they're digging their wretched trench at an appallingly fast rate, and our only hope is to slow them down until their food runs out. Therefore," he said softly, so they had to shut up just to be able to hear him, "we will deploy the heavy artillery straight away. Orosin, that's your department. If you need help with transport and installation, feel free to use whatever resources you like. I know it's asking a lot, but I'd quite like to have at least one full battery in place and working by this time tomorrow."

Zeuxis glowered at him, then nodded stiffly. "I'll do my best," he said.

"I'm sure you will," Psellus replied. "And with any luck, that'll put a stop to their confounded tunnelling, for a while at least. Meanwhile, though, we need to do something else. I had a good look at the new trench they started the day before yesterday."

"Oh," someone said, "that. You know, I'm not too fussed about it. It's moving very slowly, compared to the others."

Psellus smiled. "That's because it's three times as wide," he said. "Which suggests to me that it's not for bringing up soldiers or sappers. I think that trench is going to be used for machinery of some sort. Artillery, perhaps, or some kind of digging or battering engine."

Someone else shrugged. "Maybe it is," he said. "But it's still a long way away. Out of range, even for the Type Twenties."

"Quite," Psellus said, dipping his head in graceful acknowledgement. "Which is why I think we ought to try a sortie."

This time they weren't so easily quelled. As their voices rose in protest and complaint, they merged, cancelling each other out, so that Psellus couldn't make out a word anybody was saying. He didn't need to, of course.

Manuo Phranazus, commander-in-chief of ground forces (not so long ago he'd been chairman of the Cabinetmakers' standards and quality control committee; war's strange alchemy, Psellus thought), eventually managed to make himself heard over the buzz, and the chorus gradually subsided. "We've been through this before," he said aggressively, "dozens of times. A sortie simply isn't practical. My men may be kitted out in the finest armour money can buy, but they're not soldiers. They've never seen action, their drill's still shaky, and the officers and NCOs have a long way to go before they're fit to be trusted to command a serious action. And on top of all that, trying to keep them in some semblance of order at night, in the dark-"

"I wasn't thinking of a night sortie," Psellus said mildly.

Now they were so stunned they couldn't even speak. "You can't be serious," Phranazus said at last. "You're actually thinking of attacking in daylight?"

"That's right, yes." Psellus' chin tended to wobble when he nodded. He'd noticed it in the mirror for the first time a few days ago, and was still painfully self-conscious about it. "Noon, to be precise."

"That's-"

"Recommended," Psellus interrupted. "In the book. It gives a whole host of excellent reasons: technical stuff, mostly, about shift timings. I've had someone keeping an eye on them, and there's always a shift change about a quarter of an hour before noon. The men coming off shift are worn out after working, and they tend to stop a little early. Meanwhile, it takes the new shift at least ten minutes to come up the trench and relieve them. And of course the last thing they'll be expecting is a sortie, in broad daylight, in the middle of the day." From the bottom of his pile of papers, he drew out a sketch. "If we come out of the sally-port and bridge the ditch here," he explained, "we'll be out of their line of sight until we actually round the point of this bastion; then it's only, what, six hundred yards, in a straight line, and then you're in the trench. At least, one unit goes in and kills the poor sappers. A second unit follows the line of their wall, bank, whatever you care to call it; the point is, they'll be out of sight from the enemy camp, so when the new shift come rushing up to take on our men in the trench, this second unit can drop in behind them as they pass and attack them from the rear. We can then use the trench as cover and rush ahead to sabotage the new trench, which'll be the real object of the sortie. The only point at which we'll be fighting them on equal terms is here"-he pointed-"where we'll need to send up a couple of platoons to hold them off while the rest of us do as much damage as possible in the new trench. I'm afraid this holding party probably won't be coming back." (He looked away as he said it.) "Still, the loss of two platoons will be a small price to pay if we can stop them bringing up heavy machinery for a while." It took a moment for the joint chiefs to realise that it was actually rather a good plan; an excellent plan, in fact, and afterwards they spent some time discussing among themselves where on earth the old fool could possibly have found it. Not from any of the approved texts, which several of them knew by heart; it must be that mysterious bloody book that he wouldn't let anybody else see. The thought that Psellus had dreamed it up all by himself never occurred to them. Even so, they said: a sortie. When will he get it into his head that we aren't proper soldiers? The point that the joint chiefs had overlooked, though it hadn't escaped Secretary Psellus, was that the Vadani sappers weren't proper soldiers either. When the sortie burst into the trench, they couldn't understand what was happening. They'd been expressly told that the Mezentines had no infantry; their mercenaries had all gone home, and the citizens themselves were far too effete to fight. Who the men in armour pouring into the trench could be, therefore, they had no idea; nor had they any intention of staying around to find out. They dropped their picks and shovels and tried to scramble up the blind, unbanked side. Some of them made it.

To begin with, the Mezentines were, as one of them put it later, like a widow killing a chicken. They slashed wildly at the sappers' heads and arms, frantically trying to get the loathsome job over and done with, desperate not to touch or come into contact with the scrambling, wriggling bodies of their enemies. As a result, they killed few of the sappers but wounded all of them; long, slicing cuts to the scalp that sprayed blood like a cow pissing, chunks hacked out of shins and elbows-the pain revolted them, and made them flail even more furiously, their arms held out straight to maximise the distance (which meant more cuts were made with the tip than the edge; the wound the fencing books called a stramazone, designed to hurt and infuriate an enemy into making an error). Some Mezentines hit hard enough to sever hands or feet, others struck at too shallow an angle, so that the blade skipped off the scalp and sliced off an ear or a nose; results so grotesque that the Mezentines were sick with horror at what they'd done, and lashed out even more to put an end to the nightmare as quickly as possible.

All of which took time; rather longer than planned. Also, the relief shift (not being soldiers) failed to rush to their comrades' assistance, as they were supposed to do. Instead, as soon as they realised what was happening, they scampered back to the camp and called out the guard. The Mezentines waiting in ambush didn't know that, of course, and the ambush itself went flawlessly. Their attack (in rear, in the cramped trench) went home exactly as planned, but the Eremian and Aram Chantat infantry who'd answered the relief sappers' call were adequately armoured, though not as well as the Mezentines, and knew in a matter of seconds what was going on. They turned and fought back. The Mezentines, suddenly finding themselves facing line infantry instead of men in thin shirts with shovels, immediately tried to back away, but the sides of the trench were too steep for heavily armoured men to climb. After half a dozen had been cut down without making any effort to fight back, they rallied and launched a wild, completely unscientific counter attack. They did relatively little damage with their weapons, but their armour was too strong to be easily penetrated or smashed open, particularly in a crowded, narrow trench with no room for a really good swing. Accordingly, the allies jabbed and bashed at them but couldn't actually kill them, and they flailed and walloped back to more or less the same effect. Only when they were too tired to keep up their windmill assaults could the allies get close enough to find the weak joints and hinges in their armour; and by then, the Mezentines behind the fighting line had had the wit to pile up a few empty gabions into a makeshift stair, to get them out of the trench.

Because the guard was busy elsewhere, the two platoons sent to die nobly for their country got to the mouth of the trench and found nobody there to meet them. They stood about for a while, horribly afraid they'd messed up and gone to the wrong place. Then their nerve broke, and they ran back the way they'd just come, meeting up with the first gush of fugitives from the ambush party; who in turn assumed they must be reinforcements, and (bravely and with agonising reluctance) tried to climb back into the trench and continue the fighting. The result would have been very bad for them if a handful of men from the two platoons hadn't looked down on the helmeted heads milling around in the trench below them, and promptly started pelting them with rocks. Fortuitously (it could have gone either way), the heads they battered were Eremian and Aram Chantat rather than Mezentine, and the shock of the unexpected hail of missiles from a quarter they'd not expected trouble from prompted the allies to pull back out of the fighting, letting the surviving Mezentines in the trench get out safely.

None of which mattered, of course. The real objective of Psellus' plan was to let an assault party loose undisturbed in the new trench, which he correctly guessed was being built to take heavy machinery up to the ditch. Well aware that their time was limited, they set to with the ferocious determination of very frightened men. They smashed gabions, cut open fascines, scattered the brushwood in big heaps and set fire to them; they grabbed shovels or pulled off their helmets to scoop dirt with, and remarkably quickly managed to undermine the supports of the earth bank, so the spoil slid back into the trench and filled it. They even rolled back into the trench a huge boulder, which had taken two shifts of sappers a whole day to prise up and haul out of the way. As they were doing this, it occurred to them that they'd been rather longer than they'd anticipated. The two platoons should've been shredded and swept aside by now, and enemy soldiers should be pouring into the parallel, their cue to stop work and run. But no soldiers came, and they started to worry. Did the absence of the enemy mean that the plan had been wholly subverted; was there an enemy force waiting to intercept them on their way back, rather than engage them in the trench? By this point they'd done as much damage as they could without additional equipment. They had no idea what was happening, only a vague feeling that something had gone wrong and they were in a different danger than the one they'd been expecting to face. After a brief, slightly hysterical discussion, they decided that they couldn't trust their planned escape route any more, which meant they had no choice but to go back the way they'd come, down and along the approach trench…

By the time they ran into the enemy, the bombardment with rocks from outside the trench had stopped, and the allies were trying to make up their minds whether to press on and try and rescue the sappers, as they'd originally intended to do before the ambush hit them, or call it a day and go back. The sudden appearance of yet more Mezentines, coming up the trench, was rather more than they could cope with. The Eremian lieutenant who was now the ranking officer (the Aram Chantat captain had been one of the few allied casualties who'd actually died on the point of a Mezentine sword) ordered his men to pull back, intending to form a shield-wall at the point of the zigzag, where there was rather more room to deploy. But the surviving Aram Chantat officer took this for cowardice in the face of the enemy and ordered his own men to push the Eremians out of the way and attack the Mezentines at once. What happened next was never quite clear. The Eremian lieutenant maintained that a party of the Mezentines outside the trench, the ones who'd thrown the rocks, crept up along the bank while the two allied contingents were scuffling and contrived to undermine the gabions and loose spoil, bringing the bank down on the allies' heads. Other survivors maintained that in the course of the scuffle, the gabions at the base of the bank were dislodged, and that was what caused the bank to collapse. In any event, a good third of the allies were under the landslip, and when the dust settled, both sides found themselves separated from the enemy by a solid wall of earth.

All this time, the Mezentine detachment who'd started the sortie by attacking the allied forward shift were wondering what had become of the ambush party, who were supposed to come down the trench and join them after they'd finished dealing with the relief shift. The original detachment were in comparatively good spirits, once they'd got over the horrors of victory. They interpreted the ambush party's failure to arrive as evidence that they were in trouble and needed help; so they set off down the trench to find them.

Needless to say, they ran into the allies, taking them by surprise, in rear, while they were still effectively stunned by the disaster of the collapsing bank. As a result, the Mezentines caught them entirely unaware and began the engagement by killing half a dozen of them. This was, of course, the worst thing that could have happened for the Mezentines; it encouraged them to press home their advantage, so that when the allies realised they were being attacked again, by yet another separate enemy unit, they pulled themselves together and fought back with full professional savagery. It was only the speed with which the narrow trench clogged up with bodies that saved the third of the Mezentine detachment that made it out over the bank and escaped. The remaining two thirds never had the satisfaction of knowing they'd blocked the trench as effectively as the landslip.

Just over three fifths of the sortie made it back to the City embankment; rather fewer than planned, rather more than Psellus himself had dared to hope. For the allies, the aftermath was almost as chaotic as the action itself. The Mezentines, according to the report the Eremian lieutenant made to General Daurenja that evening, were unorthodox but nonetheless fearsome opponents. Their offensive and weapons skills were negligible, but their sheer grim determination, the way they kept on attacking, wave after wave of them, made them worthy of cautious respect. On the other edge of the camp, meanwhile, the advance-shift sappers who'd managed to get away were having their horrific wounds treated by the Vadani surgeons, and were telling anybody who'd listen that the Mezentines were vicious, sadistic savages who fought to inflict pain rather than kill, and if the general thought they were going back down in the trench again without proper infantry support, he was very much mistaken.

General Daurenja spent the night reflecting on what he'd been told, and called a full staff meeting at dawn. The situation, he told them, was not good. The approach trench for the heavy machinery was so badly damaged as to be useless; it'd be quicker and easier to start again. The main trench was blocked in three places. Casualties had been unexpectedly heavy-due mostly, admittedly, to the cave-in of the trench wall, but even so, it was clear that Duke Valens had underestimated the enemy's fighting spirit, if not their military competence. Sorties, contrary to what the duke had told them, were likely to pose a real danger to siege operations. Furthermore, the sappers were now deeply worried at the prospect of further attacks-understandably so, considering the horrific nature of the wounds their colleagues had suffered-and were refusing to go back to work until satisfactory arrangements for their defence had been made. Strictly speaking, this was mutiny; however, the sappers were civilian labourers rather than soldiers, and they had a genuine grievance, which no responsible general could afford to ignore. Accordingly, he had decided to advance the artillery to the point where it could lay down suppressing fire on the enemy embankment, and to station archers, sheltered by pavises, at the points of the zigzags, which would also be fortified with redoubts built of gabions and sandbags. Finally, each redoubt would be garrisoned with a platoon of heavy infantry to provide a rapid response in the event of future sorties. It was true, he conceded, that advancing the artillery would bring them in range of the enemy, quite possibly leading to an artillery duel, which Duke Valens had been anxious to avoid. But that, the general said, seemed to him to be ducking the issue. Victory would only be possible if the allies could establish clear artillery superiority. If that meant a protracted artillery duel, the loss of siege engines and trained crews, it was a price that had to be paid. As he saw it, they really had no choice in the matter. "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.

As they left the room he asked them to tell the back-office clerk to bring him a glass of milk. It took an infantry division to move up the siege engines; Aram Chantat, because they were expendable. Some of them pushed, the rest hauled on ropes, while an advance squad with picks, shovels and long steel crowbars prised up and cleared away all the rocks, bushes and other obstructions. Moving the engines was like pulling teeth.

The Mezentines waited till they were on the move before opening up with all batteries. The result, seen from a distance, was spectacular and encouraging. Before the bombardment started, the artillery crews had tightened the mangonels' cord tensioner ratchets and topped up the trebuchets' counterweights to full capacity. Up till then, the machines had been downtuned, to shoot at less than their true maximum range, thereby misleading the enemy into believing that they were safely out of shot. The densely packed columns of men pulling on ropes provided fat, rewarding targets. From the embankment palisade, each shot as it landed looked like a flat stone skimmed across still water; on its first pitch, it splashed down, sending up spray. The it bounced, two, three, four times, each time splashing casualties into the air. The idea was that the fifth bounce should drop the shot on to the engine itself, wrecking it. The artillery crew commanders weren't expecting it to happen like that; the most they'd been hoping for was two, perhaps occasionally three splashes before the shot deflected and fell harmless. It was remarkable how often their expectations were exceeded.

At the other end of the trajectory, the stone at first appeared in the sky like a small, dark moon. To begin with it seemed to be hanging quite still in the air. Only as it dropped and the regularity of the curve of its descent began to decay did the men watching it suddenly realise how fast it was moving, and how impossible it was to predict accurately where it was going to fall. It was quite perverse how often a column of men decided, unanimous and unprompted, to move five yards to the right or left, only to realise (too late) that they'd put themselves directly under the falling stone. When it pitched, it scooped up a mess of torn and bruised turf, dirt, crushed and smashed bodies. A remarkable number of men were killed by splinters of rocks pulverised by the impact of the pitching shot; others had arms and legs broken when dead men fell on them. As the great stone balls bounced, they picked up extra spin from their contact with the ground. Some survivors spoke about the shot kicking up, darting inexplicably right or left, jumping up on the first bounce, then shooting low on the second. When a ball hit a siege engine, the result tended to be a shower of shattered beams, joists, iron fittings, along with blade-sharp chips of stone from the ball itself. The smaller flying debris struck with the force of a hard punch; at first the shock of the impact numbed you; it could be twenty or thirty seconds before you looked down and saw the blood, or tried to move a limb that wasn't there any more. Nearly all the survivors stressed the effect of the noise of the ball landing, saying that they'd never heard anything as loud before. Louder than thunder was a frequent comparison, followed by the qualification: so much louder, it wasn't really like thunder at all. It was a noise you felt rather than heard.

On the embankment, as soon as the sears were dropped, the crews stood still and watched the fall of shot. When they saw the first volley go home so beautifully true, they assumed it was all over; instead of bustling to span the windlasses for another shot, they were cheering, shouting congratulations to each other. It took a while for anybody to notice that, instead of scattering and running for their lives, the enemy (the surviving enemy) were still there, still grimly hauling on their ropes or heaving against their frames, as though nothing had happened. There were two or three seconds of complete silence; then the captains began yelling, and the crews jumped at windlass handles, frantically winding up for a shot they'd assumed they wouldn't have to take. That was perfectly understandable. From the embankment, they couldn't see individual men. The hauling parties merged into dense black shapes, so that you could imagine you were shooting at something like a huge beached jellyfish; and once you'd hit it fair and square, it was perfectly reasonable to assume you'd killed it, and that was that.

The second volley was a mess, as the captains themselves admitted afterwards. Mostly it was because they neglected to take up the elevation, to allow for the short but crucial distance each target had moved since the first volley. Most of them overshot; not by much, ten or fifteen yards. The few that hit something mostly scored direct hits on the engines themselves; extremely satisfying, to see an enemy trebuchet dissolve into a cloud of splinters, but a skidder splattering dead savages would've been better still. The third volley was better, although there were still more partial hits and outright misses than there'd been first time around. A good start, then, but spoilt somewhat by a failure to follow up.

The Mezentines were spanning for a fourth volley when the enemy started shooting back. They shouldn't have been able to do that. According to all the best estimates, the enemy line was still over a hundred yards out of range. They were, after all, supposed to be using copies of the obsolete and superseded Type Twenty-One heavy trebuchet, Type Seventeen light trebuchet and Type Twenty-Seven mangonel. It was only when the sky suddenly filled with small hanging moons that it occurred to anybody that Ziani Vaatzes may have made some improvements of his own.

Afterwards, the blame was placed squarely on the commissioners of the topographical and geological survey. They should have pointed out, it was held, that the enemy might be expected to have quarried stone for their shot from the limestone deposits at Veraiso, so conveniently adjacent to their predictable line of march. Given this important information, the ordnance and fortifications subcommittees would have known in advance that Vaatzes' engines would be likely to use smaller shot (because limestone was denser than the sandstone from the City quarries), which would fly faster, hit harder and-most important-shatter and disintegrate on impact into clouds of wide-dispersal shrapnel, liable to inflict serious casualties among closely packed groups of men. If only they'd known, the fortifications subcommittee could have specified more effective cover on the embankment-pavises, sidewalls of gabions and fascines, a half-roofed covered way. Casualties would still have been unavoidable, but the appalling carnage inflicted by the first and second allied volleys could certainly have been mitigated, possibly by up to forty per cent. Night fell, and the artillery captains could no longer see to aim. Finished round shot was too precious to be wasted on random bombardment. By torchlight, the Mezentines counted forty-six of their engines wrecked beyond repair, including nine of the fifty heavy trebuchets. A further twenty-eight were taken apart and carried back to the factory to be rebuilt. It was hard to establish the number of the dead, let alone identify them; a preliminary estimate, based on responses to an emergency roll call, came to a hundred and sixty dead, as many again too badly injured to resume their duties. Around midnight, the bombardment started up again. The allies were launching unshaped rocks at random, to disrupt the salvage and repair operations, damage the embankment and stop the defenders getting even a few hours' sleep. Repeated impacts on the same spot had the effect of scooping out large holes in the embankment; when dawn came, it looked for all the world as though it was infested with giant rabbits. Nothing could be done to repair the breaches, or prevent further deterioration as the disturbed earth settled.

Chairman Psellus was awake when the messenger came. He received the news calmly, thanked the messenger and sent him away. As the door closed, the messenger saw him bend his head over a book, a little book which he shielded in his cupped hands, like a man cradling an injured bird. As soon as the messenger had made his report, General Daurenja called a meeting of the full general staff, including the Aram Chantat liaison and his entourage. Losses, he announced, had been heavy: thirty-seven engines destroyed, nine others likely to be out of action for a day or more. He'd budgeted, he told them, for fifty or more engines lost, so the damage was less than he'd anticipated. On the other hand, he'd hoped to have won the artillery battle by now, and it was quite evident that he hadn't. The continuing bombardment was very much a fallback option, since it meant that each crew would have to work a full extra shift; as well as the machines themselves, they'd lost ninety-two trained artillerymen killed or put of out action, which meant he'd had to commit all the standby crews. That would inevitably lead to a loss of precision and efficiency when the battle resumed tomorrow, but he felt he had no choice but to take that risk. The advantages of keeping the enemy under pressure outweighed the drawbacks, and he firmly believed that the stress and loss of sleep the night bombardment would cause would more than make up for his own crews' likely inability to function at peak efficiency. The Aram Chantat liaison was quick to voice his support for the general's immediate tactical judgement and broader strategic vision. He would see to it that Aram Chantat volunteers were available at dawn to take over the unskilled tasks-shifting and loading missiles, spanning windlasses and so forth-thus reducing the load on the trained Eremians and Vadani. He also took the opportunity to commend the general for the vigour, energy and resourcefulness with which he was prosecuting the assault.

When the meeting broke up, the Aram Chantat went back to their tents; all but one of them, who took a horse and set off on the road to Civitas Vadanis. In spite of the danger, he took the border road, the same route Duke Valens had been following when he was attacked; the urgency of his mission outweighed the danger, and besides, there had been no reports of Cure Doce activity in the area ever since the ambush. He had memorised one message and carried another, written on a scrap of thin rawhide cut off the handle-wrapping of a broken bow. It read: Gace Daurenja to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.

You need to upgrade the Type Three; it hasn't got the range. Can you modify all the pieces you still have at the city and send them immediately. Also send more finished shot. When will the worms be ready? Send prototypes as soon as they're serviceable. The horesehair you've been using for the mangonel springs hasn't got the strength for the top setting. Use four plies instead of three; also send spares, since they've been breaking. Most important: get the weapon ready to ship. Box it up so nobody can guess what's in there, and send it with at least 2 squadrons Vadani cavalry escort. Things here are going well. GD.

The verbal message was duly delivered to the Aram Chantat privy council. It made them very angry for a while. Then they calmed down and composed a reply.