Evil for Evil (27 page)

"Yes."

He nodded. "I tried it myself once, but I failed. I kept it awake for three days and nights, and then I fell asleep. I knew it was going to beat me in the end. Then I turned it over to the austringer, and he had it coming in to the lure in less than a week. I think they can tell if you've got the strength of will or not."

"I followed the directions in a book," she replied. "I didn't find it particularly difficult."

Plausible, Valens thought. Perhaps the hawk was stupid enough to try telling a joke, and she looked at it. Fifty years of this, or let the Mezentines have the duchy. Too close to call, really.

They'd put her wretched bird in the dark room at the end of the mews. She approved; after the trauma of the journey, a day in complete darkness and silence would settle it down. It should not be fed until midday tomorrow, she said; then it should be flown to the lure for no more than five minutes, and after that it should be given two-thirds of its usual ration. She would feed it herself tomorrow evening. Now, perhaps he'd be kind enough to show her the other hawks.

Even so; as they walked back to the main building, he couldn't help wondering how she'd felt, when they came to her and told her she'd be marrying the Vadani duke. Unless it had been her idea in the first place, of course; but assuming it hadn't. (Come to that, how had Veatriz felt when they told her she was to marry Orsea? But she loved him, so it was quite different.) Had she frowned and asked, who? Had she made a scene, or just nodded her head? Had she asked questions, or waited for the briefing? She must have known she was going to marry someone foreign and strange, or else why had they sent her away to be educated and refined? Had she complained about that, or welcomed it?
As part of your training, you will be
required to tame a hawk
. He thought of himself, shuffling and stretching up and down the chalk line in the stables, learning to fence like a gentleman, his fingertips still raw after an hour's rebec practice. His education had taught him to excel at those things he hated most; at some point, he'd struck the balance between detesting them for their own sake and taking pleasure in his hard-won skill and accomplishments, to the point where what he did no longer mattered, so long as he did it well. They'd trained him, and then been surprised because he'd never fallen in love. (Or that was what they thought. Likewise, they'd never found out that, all the time he was learning to fence elegantly with the rapier, the smallsword and the estock, he was paying a guardsman with his own money to teach him how to fight properly with a Type Fourteen infantry sword. When they'd sent her away to the university, had she asked,
How will learning civil and mercantile law help me make the Vadani
duke fall in love with me
? She could probably fence, too. At least, he wouldn't put it past her. The question was, had someone had to sit up with her three days and nights in a row before she mastered the basics of the high, low and hanging guards?) For want of anywhere else to go, Valens led them back to the formal solar. As he opened the door, he surprised half a dozen servants busy cleaning. They froze and stared at him for a moment, like crows taken unaware on carrion, or thieves caught robbing the dead; then they retreated backward, clinging fiercely to their brooms and dusters, and let themselves out through the side door.

"If it's convenient," the bald man said, "now might be a good time to discuss exchange rates."

9

The first thing he saw was smoke. It rose in the air like a feather stuck in the ground, a black plume fraying at the edges, a marker pointing down at the exact spot. Ziani had grown up with smoke, of course. In Mezentia, every morning at six sharp, fifteen thousand fires were laid in and lit in forges, furnaces, kilns, ovens, mills and factories in every street in the city; by half past six, the sky was a gray canopy and the alleys and yards stank of charcoal and ash. Every sill and step had its own soft blanket of black dust, every well and sewer had a gray skin, and everybody spat and sneezed black silt. The smell of smoke was something he'd missed without even realizing.

There had to be a river, of course. He saw it eventually, a thin green line dividing the mountains from the flat brown plain. A little further on, he could make out towers, which were probably no more than planked-in scaffolding, and the spoil heaps. He'd never seen a mine before in his life.

Before long, he began to see tree stumps; hundreds of them, thousands. A few wore sad garlands of coppice shoots, their leaves grimy with black dust. Others had died long ago, and were smothered in grotesque balls and shelves of bloated white fungus. Deprived of the shelter of the canopy of branches, the leaf mold that had once carpeted the floor of the lost forest had dried out into powdery dust, which the wind was diligently scouring away. Soon it would be down to bare rock, like a carpenter stripping off old varnish. Nothing much seemed able to take root in it, apart from a few wisps of yellow-white grass and the occasional sprawl of bramble.

"All this was cleared years ago." Carnufex, the man Valens had sent along to look after him, had obviously noticed him gawping at the tree stumps and figured out his train of thought. "I can't remember offhand exactly how much charcoal they get through every day, but it's a lot. Something of a problem, actually. We aren't marvelously well off for trees in this country at the best of times. In the old days, of course, they could supply all the charcoal we needed just from coppicing, but when Valens' father made us double our production, the only way we could keep up with our quotas was clear-felling. I think they're carting the stuff in from Framea now—which is also a problem, since it's only a few hours from the Eremian border, and if the Mezentines wanted to come and cause trouble…" He shrugged. "Not that it matters much anymore," he added.

"All I was thinking," Ziani lied, "was where we're going to get our timber from; for building the frames, and the firewood for burning out the props."

"Ah." Carnufex nodded. "All taken care of. It'll be along in a day or so; twelve cartloads, and there's more if you need it. The only problem was getting hold of a dozen carts. Anything with wheels on is a problem right now, for obvious reasons." Considering what he was and who'd sent him, Carnufex could have been a lot worse. He was a short, stocky man, about fifty-five years old, with a great beak of a nose, a soft and cultured voice, small bright eyes and snow-white hair. He was never tired, hungry, frightened or angry (come to think of it, during their three-day journey Ziani had never once noticed him fall out of line for a piss, or take a drink of water from his canteen). Most of the time he hung back with the escort cavalrymen (he had been a soldier himself before he was transferred to the mines) and kept up an unremitting torrent of the filthiest jokes Ziani had ever heard, including some he couldn't begin to understand, even with an engineer's instinct for intricate mechanisms. He was, of course, there to watch Ziani as much as to help him, but that was understandable enough.

"We won't need that much in the way of lumber," Ziani replied. "How about the steel I asked for? I know that's likely to be difficult."

Carnufex smiled. "Not likely. By a strange coincidence, my wife's kid brother's the superintendent of the steel depot at Colla Silvestris. At least," he added innocently, "he is now; used to be a clerk in the procurement office, but he got a surprise promotion about two hours after I got this commission. A buffoon, but he does as he's told. With any luck, your steel should be there waiting for you when we arrive."

Ziani was impressed. When he'd talked to the previous superintendent, he'd been told there wasn't that much steel in the whole duchy. "That's handy," he said.

"I always knew young Phormio'd come in useful for something eventually," Carnufex replied. "I could never begin to imagine what it might be, but I had the feeling. Oh, while I think of it," he added, "you were asking about skilled carpenters. I've found you some."

"That's wonderful," Ziani said. "How did you manage that?" The smile again. "I had a dozen seconded from the Office of Works, thanks to the new chief clerk there. My brother-in-law, actually."

Ziani nodded. "Your wife has a large family."

"Bloody enormous."

An hour later, Ziani could see gray patches standing out against the sandy brown of the mountain; also he could hear faint tapping noises, like an army of thrushes knocking snail-shells against stones. The closer to the mountain they came, the louder the noise grew, and before long he could see them, hundreds of tiny moving dots swarming up and down the side of the slope. "How many men work here?" he asked.

"Between eight and nine hundred, usually," Carnufex replied. "Just over two hundred underground, the rest breaking up, cleaning and smelting ore, maintenance, supply, that sort of thing. In fact, we're short-handed, we could do with half as many again. It's a pity nobody pointed out to Valens' father that if you want to double output, it might be a good idea to take on a few extra hands. But there," he added, with a mildly stoical shrug, "we have a curious idea in this country that anything can be achieved provided you shout loud enough at the man in charge."

"I see," Ziani said. "Does it work?"

"Oddly enough, yes."

The tapping was getting steadily louder. It seemed to be coming from every direction (the sound, Ziani rationalized, was echoing off the mountainside) and he wondered if it was like that all the time. "What are those big timber frames?" he asked, pointing.

"They're the drop-hammers," Carnufex replied. "You see where the streams come down off the mountain? They're banked up into races, and they turn those big waterwheels you can just see there, behind those sheds. The wheel trips a cam which lifts and drops a bloody great beam with an iron shoe on the end, which smashes the ore up into bits; then it gets carried down onto the flat—you can see the big heaps of the stuff there, look—and it gets broken up even finer by a lot of men with big hammers. Then it's got to be washed, of course, so it's carted back
up
the hillside and shoveled into the strakes—look, do you see the lines of conduits coming down the slope? They're open-topped, made of planks, and they carry the millstreams downhill to turn the wheels and eventually join up with the river. You can see they're dammed up at various stages; the dams are called strakes, and as the ore's washed down by the stream, each one filters out different grades of rubbish, so that when it reaches the bottom it's mostly clean enough to go in the furnace. That's the trouble with this seam; there's plenty of it, but it's full of all kinds of shit that's got to be cleaned out. Biggest part of the operation, in fact, preparing the ore." He grinned. "I expect this all looks a bit primitive to you, after what you're used to." Ziani shrugged. "We don't do anything like this where I come from," he said.

"The materials I used to use came in rounds or square bars or flat sections, we didn't mess about breaking up rocks. This could be the state of the art for all I know."

Carnufex looked mildly disappointed. "Ah well," he said. "I was hoping you could give us a pointer or two about improving the way we go about things before you show us how to pull it all down."

Closer still, and the tapping was starting to get on Ziani's nerves. He was accustomed to noise, of course; but this was different from the thumps and clangs of the ordnance factory, where the trip-hammers pecked incessantly and the strikers hammered hot iron into swages. It was sharper, more brittle, a constant shrill chipping, and he doubted whether it was something he could get used to and stop hearing after a while. The men swinging hammers stopped work to stare at the newcomers; the leather sleeves and leggings they wore to protect them from flying splinters of rock were caked with dust, their hair was gray with it and their eyes peered out from matt white masks, so that they looked like actors playing demons in a miracle play. Eventually someone yelled something and they went back to work, bashing on the chunks of rock as if they hated them. No, Ziani thought, this isn't like the factory at all. There's no grace here, no patient striving with tolerances in the quiet war against error. This is a violent place.

"The actual workings are over there a bit," Carnufex was saying, as calm and matter-of-fact as if he was showing someone round his garden. "I don't suppose you'll need to bother with anything above ground. I mean, no point sabotaging it; anybody who wanted to could replace the whole lot from scratch in a month or so." Ziani nodded. He didn't want to open his mouth here if he could help it.

"You can see where the shaft runs underground by the line of wheels," Carnufex went on. He was pointing at a row of wooden towers, each one directly under a branch of the millrace, which gushed in a carefully directed jet to turn the blades of a tall overshot waterwheel. Each wheel's spindle turned a toothed pulley which drew a chain up out of what looked like a well. Piles of ore were heaped up beside each well-head; men were loading it into wheelbarrows and carrying it away to be smashed. As well as the clacking of the wheel and the ticking of the chain, he could hear a wheezing noise, like an overweight giant climbing stairs. "Bellows," Carnufex explained, "inside the tower, they're powered by cams run off the wheel-shaft. They suck the bad air out of the galleries and blow clean air back in." Bellows, Ziani thought; they'll come in handy. He nodded, careful not to exhibit undue interest or enthusiasm. "Where's the actual entrance?" he asked.