The Escapement (40 page)

(This is stupid, he thought. I've seen dead and injured men. I've killed two men with my own hands, and I'm responsible for more deaths and wounds than I can begin to imagine. The duke means nothing to me beyond his usefulness. I didn't even see it, I just heard a description. It makes no sense…)

He realised he was running, and made himself slow down to a brisk walk. It was dark, but he didn't need light to find his way to the factory. As usual, people in the streets stopped and stared at him whenever he passed through a beam of lamplight spilling out of a doorway or window; his face, the colour of his skin. He knew what they'd be thinking—a Mezentine, no, wait, it's
our
Mezentine, so that's all right. In the fraction of a second that the train of thought took to pass through their minds, he changed from monster to hero. That made him smile. Monster and hero. Neither and both.

Number three shift was in full swing in number seven workshop. They all looked up as he walked in, presumably fearing a snap inspection. He ignored them, marched over to an empty bench, found a crumbly stub of chalk and a scrap of steel sheet, and began sketching.

An arrowhead has a hollow socket, into which the shaft fits. Impossible to get tongs or pliers to grip it on the outside, since that would mean enlarging the wound, risking serious damage to nerves and blood vessels. Therefore he had to grip it on the inside (no choice in the matter). He fished about on the bench for a small offcut of two-inch tube, stuck his index and middle fingers inside and spread them, until they pressed against the tube walls. As simple as that.

The shift foreman came up, to ask him if there was anything he wanted. He nodded. "Get this shop cleared," he said. "Stop all the machines, move everybody out, but leave a fire in the main forge." It was only later that he realised how harshly he'd said it; at the time, he was slightly puzzled by the scared look on the foreman's face. Three minutes later he had the place to himself.

Two spring steel fingers slide up into the socket; fine. How to make them spread. He scrabbled around in the trash bin under the bench until he found a little snippet of thin brass shim, scarcely thicker than paper. With a pair of tinsnips he cut a thin rectangular strip, punched a hole in the middle with a bradawl, and folded it lengthways. Let the strip be the two steel fingers. Further down in the trash he found two inches of eighth-inch wire; he straightened it, clamped it in the vice so that only an eighth-inch was showing, and peened it over with a hammer, giving him a disc on the end, like the head of a nail, He threaded the wire through the hole in the fingers, so that the disc pressed against them on the inside, gripped the folded shim at the base, and pulled gently on the wire. The disc slid down, pushing the fingers sideways; spreading them.

Then it was a matter of drawing, measuring, calculating, solving the inevitable small problems of application and fit; and for a while, the total concentration the process demanded acted as a kind of absolution. Let the hole be threaded and the shaft screw-cut; the disc, however, must float, therefore bore it five thousandths oversize. How thick is an arrow shaft? He could only guess; three eighths external diameter, so five sixteenths internal; five sixteenths decimal is three hundred and fifteen thousandths, therefore let the spread of the fingers at rest be two nine five to allow clearance; for strength, the fingers must be seventy thousandths thick; double seventy is a hundred forty, a hundred forty from two nine five is one five five, therefore let the shaft be one two five, an eighth, threaded standard Mezentine fine, forty-five turns to the inch; let the hole in the middle of the fingers be reinforced to one two five to keep it from stripping; spring steel throughout, tempered dark blue; a simple ratchet at the handle end, to maintain the tension; no time for that. Let the length of the fingers be eight seven five…

It was as though someone had crept up behind him and hit him over the head. For a moment, he couldn't think at all; then, instead of pain or fear, he was flooded with clarity. Numbers, he thought; numbers make up a specification, specifications define. That was the core of being Mezentine. A set of numbers encapsulates perfection in every circumstance where perfection is possible, and every such circumstance was reduced to numbers long ago, so that no progress or innovation is needed or possible. The only exception to the rule was war, and that anomaly had always puzzled him. It was clearly an important issue, this one exception; until now, he'd always assumed it was mere cynical expediency, but Boioannes, of all people, had shown him the true reason.
You can be the military governor
, he'd said,
the
king, anything at all, just so long as I can be the chairman of Necessary Evil, like I
used to be. Isn't that what you really want, after all
? It was highly unlikely that he'd meant anything profound by it, but that didn't matter. As soon as his mouth had shaped the words, Ziani realised, he'd understood, from that simple accidental juxtaposition: chairman of Necessary Evil, like I used to be; isn't that what you really want?

Presumably

it

had

been

intended

as

a

small,

sharp

joke;

an

affectionate-derogatory nickname for the seat of true power, to which they all aspired. Necessary evil; in Mezentine terms, that could only mean the permitted degree of error allowed for in the specification, the tolerance. That was implicit in the paradox, necessary evil. Good and evil, perfect and imperfect, the simple gauge used in every process to check whether a component is the right size; either it fits or it doesn't. Between the component and the edge of the gauge lies the infinite space of necessary evil (because nothing is perfect, nothing ever measures exactly five thousandths; the limitations of the measuring tool are necessary evil), and the truth of the matter, the point he'd never grasped before but which shone in his face now like a glaring light, was what Boioannes had said. If anything is to be made, necessary evil must span the gap between specification and reality, one foot on the numbers, the other in tolerance, forming a bridge between the work and the edge of the gauge. For Boioannes and himself, for Valens and his duchess, even for Daurenja, in love with the weapon of his dreams, war was the necessary evil, the evil necessary in order to put right something that should never have been, something that violated the numbers, some abomination. To be what I used to be is all I really want; but abomination distorted the specification beyond tolerance, and so evil is necessary to put it right again. The arrow in the duke's head, the unimaginable pain, were clear breaches of specification; in order to pull out the arrow, here he was engaged in an act of pure abomination, designing and building an artefact for which no numbers existed, arrogating to himself the power of creation, which was vested in the Convention of Guilds. For every wrong crying out to be put right, there was a necessary evil. The mistake he'd been making had been to grieve for it, resent it, when he should have been accepting it as a fact.

Well; now he understood. Curious, that saving a life should help him to see the true justification for taking, wasting, wiping out lives in incomprehensible numbers. Let the dead Mezentines be thirty thousand; let the dead Eremians be a quarter million, Vadani twenty thousand, Aram Chantat forty thousand, Cure Doce… Not that it mattered. To make anything, take the solid material and cut away the waste. Let the waste be what it needs to be, so long as the finished work is perfect. Necessary evil.

He found that he had something in his hand, and looked down at it. Just a pair of brass callipers, Mezentine, Type Two. He stared at them for a long time, trying to remember what they were for, how they'd come to be there. Something made in the City had no place here.

Spring steel, seventy thousandths thick. He could draw down a piece of bar stock on the forge, but that would take too long. Instead, he opened the drawer under the bench, where the valuable tools were kept, and found a six-inch rule, also Mezentine; therefore made of the finest-quality hardening steel. He measured the thickness, though he didn't need to. A Type One rule would always be seventy thousandths thick. He frowned, but it was necessary and expedient.

A few cranks of the bellows handle and the forge woke up, blades of orange flame piercing the crust of the fire like arrowheads. Gripping the rule in fine tongs, he poked it under the crust and drew the bellows handle smoothly up and down half a dozen times, then waited. When the steel was yellow-hot, he laid it on the anvil and rough-cut a strip about the right size with the hot chisel. It was, of course, an act of murder; he'd drawn the perfect temper of the steel, hacked off the length he needed and discarded the rest as waste. He could feel the weight of the sin, but it didn't matter, because it was necessary. He left the steel to cool slowly, while he found an eighth-fine nut to weld in the middle of the strip.

Then it was just bench work: filing to shape, threading the rod, cleaning up, before the last step, hardening and tempering. He worked calmly, having perfect confidence in the specification he'd made and the adequacy of his own skill. When the blue-hot steel dipped into oil for the last time, whipping up a brief tantrum of flames that subsided immediately, he smiled. Every perfect work is born in fire, just as every human being is born in blood and pain, but the evil is necessary. As simple as that.

He wiped the oil off the finished fingers with a bit of rag, and tenderly compressed them, feeling their gentle, confident resistance. Then he screwed the rod into the nut; it spun freely, spreading the leaves as it went down, until, when it bottomed out, they were stretched wide under full tension, close to their breaking point but in no danger at all. He remembered the truth about spring steel: a spring bent is nine tenths broken, but if it's tempered right it'll stay that way for a hundred years. Sad, really. He'd been making springs all his life, and never understood them till now.

There, he thought, that's that done. He knocked the handle off a file and wedged it on to the end of the rod, to give the doctors something to hold on to. They'd have to burn the stub end of the arrow shaft out of the socket with a white-hot skewer, which would have to go up inside the wound channel; but that was all right, since the heat would help cauterise the wound. Then they'd be able to introduce the tool he'd just made, and everything would be fine. As for the pain, that couldn't be helped. You can only hurt, after all, if you're still alive.

Finished. Really, he ought to get the tool to the doctors as quickly as possible, but he felt curiously lazy, unwilling to stir himself. He realised it was a desire to prolong the moment, to savour it. Partly it was pride, satisfaction with his work, but those were trivial things, feelings he could easily over-ride. What kept him there was the sense of peace, as the last component of the design he'd begun so long ago slid gently into place, fitted and locked; the mechanism that delivered the power of the drive to the assemblies that would achieve the desired result; the escapement. Foolish (he smiled indulgently at his own stupidity): he'd been searching frantically for it, and here it had been all the time, wedged inside his head like Valens' arrow, only needing a simple mechanism to draw it out, with the attendant necessary fire and pain.

The duke, they said, had been wounded by an arrow in an unprovoked attack by the Cure Doce. Following a successful operation by his doctors, he remained in a serious but stable condition, and the prognosis was extremely hopeful. Throughout the long and painful operation, they lied, the duke remained calm and stoical, never once crying out. The success of the operation was due in no small part to special apparatus designed and personally manufactured by the duke's director of military engineering, Ziani Vaatzes.

"We got the arrowhead out, eventually," Ziani told them. "It took an hour, just waggling the bloody thing from side to side like a loose tooth until it finally came away. They doped him up with henbane tea and slapped on hemlock poultices, but I guess the pain was too much; he started yelling and thrashing about, and the doctors weren't having that, they said that if he moved while they were working they could nick a major vein and kill him. So they tied him to the bed and got the strongest man they could find in the palace guard to sit on his chest and hold his head absolutely still. When they finally got the arrow out, they washed the mess they'd made with white wine and stuffed up the hole with bog cotton soaked in salt water, which I gather is supposed to make him better. Anyhow, that's all I know. If you want details, you'd better ask the doctors."

There was a long silence. Then the oldest Aram Chantat cleared his throat.