B00DW1DUQA EBOK (19 page)

The man turned to the longcase clock and reached up to tap its face, as if explaining to Graves what its function was. ‘Clock five-hundred and nineteen, acolyte’s stairwell, synchronized to master time,’ he said.

He dropped to his knees, his back to his burden, and hooked the leather straps over his shoulders once more. With a grunt of effort he straightened his knees and stood up, his back bent by the weight. He walked towards the boys who blocked his way out into the Octagon. It looked to Finn like they weren’t going to let him through.

But instead of trying to push through the door, the old man turned and began to ascend the stairs once more. Each step lugging the great clock was clearly a huge effort.

‘Do you need help carrying that?’ Finn called after him.

Most of the boys hooted and groaned. The old man glanced backwards. For the briefest moment, once again, Finn saw a different expression flash across his features. An intelligence, an appraising look. Then he shook his head and the look was gone, shaken loose.

‘Clock five-hundred and twenty,’ he said, nodding upwards with his head. ‘The Sixth Bell Tocsin.’

Finn watched as, step by step, the great square clock wobbled its way upwards on shaky legs.

The other boys looked at Finn, some grinning, some shaking their heads. Graves stood, inevitably, with Croft and Bellow. These three were not laughing. They scowled at Finn. He had spoiled their game. Twice this evening, he had spoiled their game. It meant trouble. Finn grinned at them but they didn’t smile back.

Master Owyn heaved open the wooden door from the Octagon, then, to find the boys all standing there. Anger coloured his face.

‘What are you all doing here? Didn’t you hear the Thirtieth Bell? You’re supposed to be upstairs. Are you too stupid to understand?’ He addressed his question to Graves, who said nothing.

Master Owyn stepped forward and jabbed Graves hard in the chest with his finger, knocking him backwards. They were of an equal height, Graves and the master. For a moment, Finn thought the boy would retaliate.

‘I asked you a question, boy. Why are you all still down here?’

‘Waiting for him to go up, Master.’ Graves nodded upwards towards the clock-winder.

‘Waiting for whom? There’s no-one there, boy. Do you think I’m stupid?’

The boys looked up together. It was true. The long, winding stairs were deserted.

‘Next time I give you instructions I expect you to obey them,’ said Master Owyn. ‘Perhaps I should put Smithson here in charge, instead, eh? Now get to bed.’

There was a murmured chorus of
yes, Master
. One by one, they began to file upstairs. Graves, as he stepped forward, glanced at Finn, a dark scowl on his face.

Finn knew well what it meant. There would be trouble again tonight.

Within two weeks, Finn had mastered the art of constructing the valves. He still wasn’t as quick as the older artificers, the woman who had trained him and whose name he still didn’t know, but his hands had learned all the necessary movements and he no longer had to think about what he was doing. The work had become boring and the long days in the Valve Hall with its thick, muggy air, wearied him to exhaustion each evening. At least calluses had formed on his fingers and he no longer felt any pain as he worked.

And also, despite the cramping pain in his neck and back as he bent over the table, he found he almost enjoyed the work. He was, at least, safe here from the taunts and blows of Graves and the rest of them. There was order here and a sort of peace. He could spend hours with his own thoughts, uninterrupted, while his hands worked. It was a rare luxury.

He thought about how his life had changed. It had, of course, always been understood he would take over the forge after his father. In a sense, Engn had freed him from that. He’d always known he would make a poor blacksmith. Matt had been right about that at least. He loved to understand mechanisms and contraptions, but he just wasn’t strong enough. The thought of bashing lumps of metal all day filled him with horror. When he’d helped his father, pumping the bellows to make the furnace glow white-hot, or lugging ingots of iron, he’d only ever made it through the day by being elsewhere in his mind, making up stories in his head, daydreaming.

He wondered whether his father had ever felt the same, whether he enjoyed the work he’d devoted his life to. Perhaps his father secretly did what Finn did, wandering in his mind while his great arms did the work of shaping the metal.

Finn would never know, now. That was all gone. His life consisted of constructing self-governing valves to keep the wheels of Engn turning. And that, at least, was something he
could
do. Sometimes he found himself settling into his new life, beginning to accept that
this was it
from now on. It really wasn’t so bad. He climbed the spiral stairs to the dormitory filled with dread each night, terrified at the thought of Graves and Croft and Bellow, but other than that he was alright. He had food and shelter. He survived.

At the same time, he knew these were dangerous, seductive thoughts. He
had
to get away. The figure in the dome window had beckoned to him. Engn had to be destroyed. Connor would have plans; would have laid a trail for him to follow. One way or another, he was being tested.

The problem was, as each day passed, it became harder and harder to remember his burning hatred of Engn and everything it had done. It was still unimaginable he would be here in forty years, like the man he’d replaced. The thing was, it
was
imaginable he’d be here for just one more day. And that was all it needed, of course. One more day would eventually become forty years, and some as-yet unborn master would be tapping him on the shoulder, telling him to go.

Finn sighed and glanced around the room, already so familiar. He knew hardly any of the other artificers but in his mind he’d already given many a name, judging them by their similarity to someone he knew, or some quirk of their features, or something in their actions. The woman who had trained him on the first day, for example, he thought of as
Scowl
, because that was all she did, working away in a cold, drawn-out fury. Next to her was an older man he thought of as
Sigh
. Each time he picked up the pieces of another valve he sighed audibly, as if uncovering some fresh piece of bad news.

On the other side of Finn sat Tanner. This, at least, was his real name. Or at least a part of it: his family cured and prepared animal-hides for a living. Tanner had become his name just as Finn had been transformed into
Smithson
when he’d arrived at Engn.

Finn had been very wary of Tanner at first. No-one would ever dare haul Tanner out of bed in the dark of the dormitory and kick him as he lay curled up in a ball. No-one would call his mother a cow or a sow to his face. But there was a vulnerability about him, too, if you looked closely. Something in the movement of his eyes that hinted at troubled events in his past. He wasn’t really like the others. And much to Finn’s surprise, he and Tanner had become friends of a sort.

No conversation was allowed, of course. But, as Finn had noticed on the first day, there was a great deal of unspoken communication around the table. Some of the artificers mouthed words. Others appeared to employ a more complex sign-language, subtle but quite clear if you watched closely enough. An extra flourish as they slotted some pieces of the valve together, fingers pointing or formed into shapes. There were two pairs of people who were clearly couples judging by the winks and smiles they flashed at each other. Elsewhere there was animosity. That was clear enough every time he caught Graves’ or Croft’s or Bellow’s glance. Either they would narrow their eyes and glare, or else they’d briefly mime out the blows they intended to land on him that night.

And also there were the whispered conversations between people sitting next to each other. It had taken Finn several days to notice it but then Tanner had spoken to him, not looking at him.

‘Fingers healing?’

Once, when Finn was younger, a travelling circus had come to the valley. One of the acts had been a voice-thrower, with brightly-painted wooden figures that he picked up and made talk. Finn had loved it. The man was able to hold whole conversations with them, so you soon forgot he was really just talking to himself. The skill you needed to talk to your neighbour was something like that. You had to speak without moving your lips. The trick was to speak in a tone that resonated with the background hum, hid within it. You had to keep one eye on the masters, too. After half an hour, Finn had replied. ‘Better, thanks.’ He’d seen Tanner’s nod from the corner of his eye, but the older boy had said nothing more.

The valves still puzzled Finn. He examined the one he was working on now, turning it around in his hands. He could not see how they functioned. One of the brass wheels you could turn was clearly not connected to anything inside the device. Was it left over from some earlier version of the design? No-one else appeared to have noticed, and he still dutifully attached the wheel to each valve he produced. He also couldn’t understand how the valve directed the flow of liquids around as Master Owyn had described. Although he couldn’t see inside the valves, he had formed a clear picture in his mind of the various cavities and springs that lay within. He pushed his calloused fingers inside now, feeling for the slot into which he had to attach a pair of jaw-like flanges. The holes in the valve interconnected but he could see no way in which a flow could be directed down three of them. Nor did it seem possible the various flaps and flanges would be water-tight or air-tight when they were in place.

Anxiety that he was constructing the valves incorrectly buzzed constantly in his stomach, making him feel sick. The day before, Master Owyn had made a boy stand up, showed him a valve, spat words into his face, then dashed him to the floor with a blow of his hand.

‘Made it wrong,’ Tanner had said.

The scene had played on Finn’s mind all night. Now, he could contain himself no longer.

‘What happens if you keep making the valves incorrectly?’ he asked Tanner. ‘What do they do?’

Tanner didn’t reply immediately. Had he perhaps worked it out too? Was he debating with himself what to say to Finn?

‘You can make one mistake,’ said Tanner. ‘One that doesn’t work. If you mess up another they take you through there.’ He indicated a small doorway in the corner of the room with a backward nod of his head.

‘Where does that go?’

‘It’s the postern gate. Takes you to the mines. Underneath Engn, where the coal and iron ore comes from. More people than they need there. They work you into the ground. Maybe nine months and you’re starved or crushed or you just drop dead from exhaustion.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Trust me. No-one who goes through the postern is ever seen again. If not the mines, it’s the furnaces. You’re used as fuel.’

Finn spent his days expecting Master Owyn to call his name out. He
must
be assembling the valves incorrectly because they couldn’t possibly function. The master strolled past behind his back now. Finn didn’t dare look up. He was merely aware of the looming mass of anger and threat as it floated behind him. The rustle of the cloak and the thoughtful, questioning clack of shoes. Finn imagined raising his hand and confessing what he’d worked out about the valves. But he dared not. Of course, he dared not. He wondered if the man whose seat he’d taken had worked it out, too. Had he spent forty years not daring to say something or had he spent forty years not aware his efforts were futile? Finn couldn’t decide which would be worse.

He set to work on his next valve. A trolleyman pushed a cartload of completed valves through the doorway behind him. Finn made a mental note of it. Several days ago he’d calculated how many valves were produced each day. A brass trolley held one hundred and forty-four completed valves. On the wall directly in front of him, over Bellow’s head, was the ancient metal clock that ticked and paused and ticked away at the eighteen hours they had to spend here each day. On average, four full trolleys were trundled through the doors behind him every hour. Finn took pleasure in performing the calculations in his head. That made five hundred and seventy-six new valves produced each hour. In an eighteen-hour shift that made ten thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight. Then with the night-shift that took over when their work was done for the day, that was a total of twenty thousand, seven hundred and thirty-six self-governing valves assembled each day. It was a colossal amount. Engn was vast, of course, but even so, did it really need over seven million - the exact figure eluded his ability to work out the numbers - of the valves each year?

He also knew they were all being watched. Not just by the masters that prowled around the edge of the room. There were others. Finn had discovered that if he pretended to yawn and stretch whilst waiting for a completed valve to be picked up, he could cover the naphtha lamp hissing away above him with his hand and glimpse what lay above the lights. The walls rose to a ceiling lost in the shadows but, high, high up, he could just pick out a fenced balcony or walkway that ran all the way around the walls. Catching glimpses as he came and went he had managed to ascertain that it ran the full circuit of the room, but also that there were no steps up to it from within the Valve Hall.

He had several times seen figures up there. They were indistinct, mere shadows, as tiny as small birds perched in the top of a tree. Occasionally there was a glint of light up there with them: a reflection from glass or polished metal. Finn was more and more sure they had telescopes up there watching them. It always put him in mind of the day he and Connor had seen the Ironclads down in the valley, hunting for Diane.

Were the watchers up there looking at the artificers or the masters? Were they aware he’d noticed them? He felt constantly self-conscious as he worked, not daring to glance away from his valve for more than a moment, feeling the glare of the unknown observers as a physical weight on top of his head.

Finn completed his twelfth valve of the day and waited for the trolleyman to come and give him the parts for the thirteenth. He picked up his set of feeler-gauges from the table, fanned out the blades, and held them up against the lights as if checking them. The thinnest blade, so flimsy that it was more like paper than metal, was badly creased and crinkled. He pretended to flatten it out, while really gazing up at the high balcony. There were people up there now, he could just see. He wondered if Connor was one of them.