Devices and Desires (7 page)

Every breath and heartbeat is an act of prevarication, a prising open of options.
It’d sounded good when the preacher had said it, but did it actually mean anything? Only one way to find out. The gardens
were infuriatingly formal, straight lines of foot-high box hedge enclosing neat geometric patterns of flowers, nothing wild
and bushy a man could hide in long enough to catch his breath, but there was a sort of trellis arch overgrown with flowery
creeper, a bower or arbor or whatever the hell it was called. He headed for it, and collapsed inside just as his legs gave
out.

Fine. First place they’ll look.

Breathing in was like dragging his heart through brambles. He got to his knees and peered round the edge of the arch. There
was the wall, a gray blur behind a curtain of silly little trees. He followed its line until he came to a square shape, almost
completely obscured by a lopsided flowering cherry. That would be a gate-house. He didn’t know what time it was and he couldn’t
see the sun through the arbor roof, so he couldn’t tell if it was the north or the south gate. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t
likely to get that far, and if he did the gatekeepers would be on him like terriers.

He plotted a course. Arbor to the line of trees; using the trees as cover, along the wall to the gatehouse. He could hear
shouting coming from several different directions, and he wondered whether they’d catch him and take him back to his cell
to be strangled, or just kill him on the spot.

I’ll escape, though, if only to be annoying.
He stood in the doorway of the arbor for a moment, until he saw two men running toward him. They were wearing helmets and
carrying halberds; there goes another option, snapping shut like a mousetrap. He lowered his head and charged in the direction
of the trees. They’d get him soon enough, but at least he was making an effort, and he felt it was better to die running toward
something, rather than just running away.

It was inevitable that sooner or later he’d trip over something and go sprawling. In the event, it was one of those ridiculous
dwarf box hedges that did the damage. He landed on his face in a bed of small orange flowers, and the two warders were on
him before he had a chance to move.

“Right.” One of them had grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. “What’s the drill?”

He couldn’t see the other warder. “Captain said get him out of sight before we do him. Don’t want the Membership seeing a
man having his head cut off, it looks bad.”

The warder he could see nodded. “Stable block’s the nearest,” he said.

Between them they hauled him to his feet and dragged him backward across the flowerbeds. He sagged against their arms, letting
them do the work; buggered if he was going to walk to his death. He heard a door creak, and a doorframe boxed out the light.

“Block,” said the other warder. “Something we can use for a block.”

“Log of wood,” his colleague suggested.

“How about an upturned bucket?” the first man said.

“Might as well.” The unseen warder trod on the backs of Ziani’s knees, forcing him down; the other man came forward with a
stable bucket, shaking out dusty old grain. Ziani felt the wood under his chin. “Grab his hair,” the second warder said, “hold
him steady. Halberd’s not the right tool for this job.”

A simple matter of timing, then. Ziani felt the warder’s knuckles against his scalp, then the pain as his hair was pulled,
forcing his cheek against the bucket. He heard the cutter’s feet crackle in the straw as he stepped up to his mark, in his
mind’s eye he saw him take a grip on the halberd shaft and raise his arms. A good engineer has the knack of visualization,
the ability to orchestrate the concerted action of the mechanism’s moving parts. At the moment when he reckoned the cutter’s
swing had reached its apex and was coming down, he dug his knees into the straw and arched his back, jerking his shoulders
and head backward. He felt a handful of his hair pull out, but he was moving, hauling the other warder toward him.

He heard the halberd strike; a flat, solid shearing noise, as its edge bit into the warder’s forearms, catching them just
right against the base of the iron band that ran round the bottom of the bucket. By the time the warder screamed, he was loose;
he hopped up like a frog, located the cutter (standing with a stupid expression on his face, looking at the shorn stub of
his mate’s left hand) and stamped his foot into the poor fool’s kidneys. It wasn’t quite enough to put him down; but the other
man had obligingly left his halberd leaning up against a partition. All Ziani knew about weapons was how to make them, but
he did understand tools — leverage, mechanical advantage — and the principles were more or less the same. With the rear horn
of the blade he hooked the cutter’s feet out from under him, and finished the job efficiently with the spike. The other man
was still kneeling beside the bucket, trying to clamp the gushing stump with his good hand. The hell with finesse, Ziani thought;
he pulled the spike clear and shoved it at the wounded man’s face. It was more luck than judgment that he stuck him precisely
where he’d aimed. In one ear and out the other, like listening to your mother.

His fingers went dead around the halberd shaft; it slipped through, and its weight dragged it down, though the spike was still
jammed in that poor bastard’s head. It had taken a matter of seconds; two lives ended, one life just possibly reprieved. It
was a curious sort of equilibrium, one he wasn’t eager to dwell on. Instead he thought: this is a stable, wouldn’t it be wonderful
if it had horses in it?

Of course, he had no idea how you went about harnessing a horse. He found a saddle, there was a whole rack of the things;
and bridles, and a bewildering selection of straps with buckles on, some or all of which you apparently needed in order to
make the horse go. He’d decided on the brown one; it wasn’t the biggest, but the other two looked tired (though he had no
idea what a tired horse was supposed to look like). Pinching the corners of its mouth got the bit in. He fumbled hopelessly
with the bridle straps, sticking the ends in the wrong buckles until eventually he managed to get the proper layout straight
in his mind. The saddle went on its back, that was obvious enough. There was some knack or rule of thumb about how tight the
girths needed to be. He didn’t know it, so he pulled the strap as tight as he could make it go. The horse didn’t seem to mind.

That just left getting on. Under better circumstances, he might well have been able to reach the stirrup. As it was, he had
to go back and fetch the bucket to stand on. It was slippery, and he nearly fell over.
I wish I knew how to do this,
he thought, and dug his heels into the horse’s ribs.

After that it was shamefully simple. The gatekeepers had seen him being caught and so weren’t looking for escaped prisoners
anymore; besides, he was on a horse, and the prisoner had been on foot. The horse wanted to trot, so the saddle was pounding
his bum like a trip-hammer. He passed under the gate, and someone called out, but he couldn’t make out the words. Nobody followed
him. Two murders, possibly three if he’d killed the secretary of the expediencies committee when he hit him with the lampstand,
and he was riding out of there like a prince going hawking. His head ached where the hair had been pulled out.

As soon as he was through the gate, he knew where he was. That tall square building was the bonded warehouse, where he delivered
finished arrowheads for export. The superintendent was a friend of his, sometimes on slow days they drank tea and had a game
of chess (but today wasn’t a slow day). He was in Twenty-Fourth Street, junction with Ninth Avenue.

Three blocks down Ninth Avenue was an alley, leading to the back gate of a factory. It was quiet and the walls on either side
were high; you could stop there for a piss if you were in a hurry. He contrived to get the horse to turn down it, let it amble
halfway down, pulled it up and slid awkwardly off its back. It stood there looking at him as he picked himself up. Nevertheless,
he said. “Thanks,” as he walked away.

The factory gate was bolted on the inside, but he managed to jump up, get his stomach on the top of it and reach over to draw
back the bolt. The gate swung open, with him on top of it. He slipped down — bad landing — and shut it behind him, trying
to remember what they made here. At any rate, he was back on industrial premises, where the rules were rather closer to what
he was used to.

He was in the back yard; and all the back yards of all the factories in the world are more or less identical. The pile of
rusting iron scrap might be a foot or so to the left or right; the old tar-barrel full of stagnant rainwater might be in the
northeast corner rather than the northwest; the chunky, derelict machine overgrown with brambles might be a brake, a punch,
a roller or a shear. The important things, however, are always the same. The big shed with the double doors is always the
main workshop. The long shed at right angles to it is always the materials store. The kennel wedged in the corner furthest
from the gate is always the office. The tiny hutch in the opposite corner is always the latrine, and you can always be sure
of finding it in the dark by the smell.

Ziani ducked behind the scrap pile and quickly took his bearings. Ninth Avenue ran due south, so the gate he’d just climbed
over faced east. He glanced up at the sky; it was gray and overcast, but a faint glow seeping through the cloud betrayed the
sun, told him it was mid-afternoon. In all factories everywhere, in mid-afternoon the materials store is always deserted.
He looked round just in case; nobody to be seen. He scuttled across the yard as fast as he could go.

The geometry of stores is another absolute constant. On the racks that ran its length were the mandatory twenty-foot lengths
of various sizes and profiles of iron and brass bar, rod, strip, tube, plate and sheet. Above them was the timber, planked
and unplanked, rough and planed. Against the back wall stood the barrels and boxes, arranged in order of size; iron rivets
(long, medium and short, fifteen different widths), copper rivets, long nails, medium nails, short nails, tacks, pins, split
pins, washers; drill bits, taps, dies; mills and reamers, long and short series, in increments of one sixty-fourth of an inch;
jigs and forms, dogs and faceplates, punches, calipers, rules, squares, scribers, vee-blocks and belts, tool-boats and gauges,
broaches and seventeen different weights of ball-peen hammers. At the far end, against the back wall, stood the big shear,
bolted to a massive oak bench; three swage-blocks, a grinding-wheel in its bath, two freestanding leg-vices, a pail of grimy
water and a three-hundredweight double-bick anvil on a stump. Every surface was slick with oil and filmed with a coating of
black dust.

It was the familiarity of it all that cut into him; he’d worked all his life in places like this, but he’d never looked at
them; just as, after a while, a blind man can walk round his house without tripping, because he knows where everything is.
All his life Ziani had worked hard, anxious to impress and be promoted, until he’d achieved what he most wanted — foreman
of the machine room of the Mezentine state ordnance factory, the greatest honor a working engineer could ever attain this
side of heaven. Outside Mezentia there was nothing like this; the Guilds had seen to that. The Eternal Republic had an absolute
monopoly on precision engineering; which meant, in practice, that outside the city, in the vast, uncharted world that existed
only to buy the products of Mezentine industry, there were no foundries or machine shops, no lathes or mills or shapers or
planers or gang-drills or surface-grinders; the pinnacle of the metalworker’s art was a square stub of iron set in a baked
earth floor for an anvil, a goatskin bellows and three hammers. That was how the Republic wanted it to be; and, to keep it
that way, there was an absolute prohibition on skilled men leaving the city. Not that any Mezentine in his right mind would
want to; but wicked kings of distant, barbarous kingdoms had been known to addle men’s minds with vast bribes, luring them
away with their heads full of secrets. To deal with such contingencies, the Republic had the Travelers’ Company, whose job
it was to track down renegades and kill them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. By their efforts, all those clever heads
were returned to the city, usually within the week, with their secrets still in place but without their bodies, to be exhibited
on pikes above Travelers’ Arch as a reassurance to all loyal citizens.

Ziani walked over to the anvil and sat down. The more he thought about it, of course, the worse it got. He couldn’t stay in
the city — this time tomorrow, they’d be singing out his description in every square, factory and exchange in town — but he
couldn’t leave and go somewhere else, because it simply wasn’t possible to leave unless you went out through one of the seven
gates. Even supposing he managed it, by growing wings or perfecting an invisibility charm, there was nowhere he could go.
Of course, he’d never get across the plains and the marshes alive; if he did, and made it as far as the mountains, and got
through one of the heavily guarded passes without being eaten by bears or shot by sentries, a brown-skinned, black-haired
Mezentine couldn’t fail to be noticed among the tribes of pale-skinned, yellow-haired savages who lived there. The tribal
chiefs knew what happened to anyone foolish enough to harbor renegades. Silly of him; he’d jumped out of check into checkmate,
all the while thinking he was getting away.

On the bench beside him he saw a scrap of paper. It was a rough sketch of a mechanism — power source, transmission, crankshaft,
flywheel; a few lines and squiggles with a charcoal stub, someone thinking on paper. One glance was enough for him to be able
to understand it, as easily as if the squiggles and lines had been letters forming words. Outside the city walls, of course,
it’d be meaningless, just hieroglyphics. A mechanism, a machine someone was planning to build in order to achieve an objective.
He thought about that. A waterwheel or a treadmill or a windlass turns; that motion is translated into other kinds of motion,
circular into linear, horizontal into vertical, by means of artfully shaped components, and when the process is complete one
action is turned into something completely different, as if by alchemy. The barbarians, believers in witchcraft and sorcery,
never conceived of anything as magical as that.