Evil for Evil (30 page)

"It'll do," Daurenja said, with a degree of relish verging on hunger. Stupid, Ziani thought, he's making me feel jealous. "This ought to save us two days' work, easily."

"Not far off that." Ziani looked away. Somehow, Daurenja had spoiled the moment. "I guess Valens wants this job done quickly. I'll write and thank him tonight, when I've got a moment."

"Good idea. While you're at it, you could ask if he could send us a trip-hammer." The next stage, punching the rivet-holes, was long, tedious and difficult. Each newly cut section had to be heated red in the forge and held over the hardy-hole on the back of the anvil while one of the six blacksmiths hammered a half-inch punch through it. If the hole was an eighth of an inch out of true, the section wouldn't line up with the others and would therefore be useless, and there wasn't exactly a wealth of spare material left over to make replacements from. The work went painfully slowly, even after both Ziani and Daurenja each took an anvil and joined in. Even so; it was better to be working again. Ziani was shocked by the sense of release he felt as he rested the punch on the mark and swung his hammer. He was at a loss to explain it, but it refused to be denied. It made him think of the frantic pace of work in the weeks before the assault on Civitas Eremiae; how, for a short while, he'd managed to give himself the slip as he plunged into the endless, sprawling, choking detail of building the scorpions. He thought about them, too. If he'd been classified as an artist, like a painter or a sculptor, they would have been acclaimed as his finest creation, the masterpiece he'd achieved at the height of his powers. That would be wrong, of course. Judged objectively, as though by a panel of his fellow engineers, the best thing he'd ever done had been the mechanical toy he'd made for his daughter, a long time ago in a place he was forbidden to go back to. (What had become of it, he wondered; had it been completely destroyed, smashed up and melted down, the metal once cool buried or sunk to the bottom of the sea; or did it still exist somewhere, locked away in a warehouse, or the cellars under the Guildhall? He could picture it still in his mind's eye; every detail, every brazed joint and polished keyway, every departure from Specification. He grinned; when they came to inspect it, they hadn't found all his modifications. Some of his best, variations too subtle and delicate for the naked eye, or even gauges and calipers, hadn't been mentioned in the list of charges read out at his trial. There were tiny but significant alterations to the pitch of the threads that fed the worm-drive. On the inside of the crank-case, he'd replaced a flush-set rivet with a setscrew. The teeth of the middle cog in the main gear train were beveled on top rather than plain. If the mechanism still existed somewhere, it bristled with unpurged abominations, which only he knew about and which they'd been too careless to notice. It was a slight victory, but an important one.)

The punching took a day. When it was finally finished (Ziani had insisted on working into the night; that hadn't made him popular), all he wanted to do was crawl away to his lodgings and go to sleep. He'd walked half the distance when he realized that Daurenja was still with him, talking at him, like a long, thin, yapping dog.

"It'd mean cutting the slot with a chisel," Daurenja was saying, "because you couldn't get in there with a milling cutter, not even a long-series end-mill, but if you went at it nice and slow, and finished it up afterward with a four-square file… After all, the dimensions wouldn't be critical, it's just got to guide the slider into the mortice…"

Ziani blinked, as if he'd just woken up. "Fine," he said. "You do it that way."

"You sound like you think there'd be a problem."

"What? No, really. I think it'd work. In fact, I'm certain of it."

"Excellent." Daurenja was beaming at him. Even though his back was to him, Ziani could feel the glare from his smile on the back of his neck. "Which really only leaves the question of how to make the receiver head. And what I was thinking was, how about making it in two parts? Dovetailed together, then brazed or even soft-soldered, it's not a load-bearing component…"

Ziani sighed, and stopped in his tracks. "Would it be all right if we talked about this tomorrow?" he said. "Only it's been a long day, I can't really think straight."

"Oh." Disappointment; the yapping dog finding out it wasn't being taken for a walk after all. "Of course, I understand. But if you're at a loose end and you felt like turning it over in your mind, I'm sure you could figure out a much better way of doing it."

"I'll see what I can do. Meanwhile—"

"Yes, right. Thanks, and see you tomorrow. We're making a start on assembling the frames on site, are we? Or are we going to do a trial run first, just to make sure everything fits before we lug the whole lot underground?"

Ziani hadn't thought of that, and it was a valid point. It'd be a nightmare if they dragged the components down the tunnels only to find that they wouldn't fit together. "Well of course," he snapped. "I'm not stupid, you know."

"Sorry. I didn't mean—"

"That's all right." Ziani drew on his last scratchings of patience and stamina.

"Yes, we'll do a dry run up here first thing, and if all goes well we can shift the bits and pieces down the mine say around mid-morning. See to it that everybody's there on time, will you?"

"Of course." Ziani was struck by the total absence of fatigue in Daurenja's voice. They'd both done more than a full day's work, but Daurenja sounded as fresh and insufferably bouncy as ever. "Well, if you don't need me for anything else tonight, I'll turn in. I can get a couple of hours' work done on my designs." Short pause. "It's very good of you to agree to take a look at them. I really appreciate that."

"No problem," Ziani yawned. He had no recollection whatsoever of agreeing to anything, but presumably he'd made some kind of grunting noise while Daurenja had been yapping at him and he hadn't been listening. In any event, too late now to go back on his word. Sliders, he thought, and hadn't there been something about a two-piece receiver head? He thought for a moment, but he couldn't begin to imagine what Daurenja's pet project could possibly be. "See you tomorrow."

"Later today, actually," Daurenja chirped. "It's past midnight already. Time flies, doesn't it?"

No, Ziani thought, and went to bed.

Needless to say, he was by this point far too tired to sleep. Instead, he lay on his back with his hands behind his head, his eyes shut, contemplating a design of his own. He'd reached the point now when it was there every time he closed his eyes, like the afterburn of looking directly at the sun. Too weary to think constructively, he contented himself with tracing the main lines, ignoring the details: the beginning, parts already made, fitted and in operation, beginning with his escape from the Guildhall, his infiltration of the Eremian court, the making of the scorpions, the betrayal and sack of Civitas Eremiae, the dual use he'd made of Duchess Veatriz. In his mind's eye, those parts of the design were dull gray, the remaining mechanisms in that section that had already been built but which weren't yet in service standing out in black or red. He considered them, as he'd done so many times before, and conceded that they were satisfactory. Next he contemplated the middle: not much gray here, plenty of black and red, and a few hazy clusters of dotted lines here and there where he knew a sub-rnechanism was needed but where he hadn't yet attended to the details of their design. As always, he picked up one or two slight errors, minor infringements of tolerance, parts that had moved or distorted slightly under load. There was Miel Ducas, for example; also the salt-trader's widow, Duke Valens, possibly the Mezentines. Fortunately the divergences were slight and he could take up the play easily by tightening the jibs.

As for the final section: thinking about it for too long was uncomfortable, because it was so hard to see past the tangles of dotted lines to the firm, strong black and red beyond. In particular, there was the huge gap just before the end. Having talked to the miners, he knew that the expedient he'd been relying on to plug that gap wasn't going to be up to the job; but as yet he hadn't been able to think of anything to take its place. There was something, he knew; he remembered hearing something, or reading it, a very long time ago, but he'd taken no notice at the time. Now, for some reason, whenever he contemplated the deficiency, his thoughts had a strange tendency to turn to Daurenja, as though he could possibly have something to do with it. But that was unlikely. When he'd outlined the final part of the movement, he hadn't even known that Daurenja existed.

Thinking about him made his head ache. The trouble was, he was infuriatingly useful; competent, more than competent, at anything he was asked to do. The more Ziani used him, however, the less comfortable he felt. What was it that Carnufex had been complaining about? Hanging round while people were working, asking strange and irritating questions. Well, that sounded plausible enough. Something about calamine, or pyrites, wasn't it? What the hell would any rational man want with garbage like that?

I could get rid of him, he thought, and then I wouldn't find myself relying on him anymore, and that'd be a good thing in itself. He felt the tug of that idea, but fought it. Appalling enough that he'd reached the point where he could comfortably think in disgraceful euphemisms:
get rid of
or
send to his death
. The simple truth was, he didn't like Daurenja, a man who apparently worshipped him as some kind of god of engineering, and who was working like a slave day and night to help him. Was that the difference, he wondered; because he'd liked Miel Ducas and Duke Orsea, and Duchess Veatriz and Cantacusene the blacksmith's wife; Duke Valens had started teaching him how to fence; come to that, he didn't even mind Carnufex the mine superintendent. All of them he'd taken to, as human beings; all of them he'd used, slotting them into the mechanism where they could do a job or two. Daurenja rubbed him up the wrong way, but he wasn't useful, not yet, to anything like the same extent. It'd be wrong to make him a sacrificial component; it'd be a waste of material, and murder.

Maybe, he thought, I shouldn't be doing this.

He sat up, suddenly wide awake. Before, whenever that thought had come to call, he'd summoned up the faces of his wife and daughter, like setting the dogs on a trespasser. Now, he could only see her hair, the curl as it touched her shoulder, the faint redness of its shine under lamplight. Her face had turned away into shadow, as though she couldn't bear to look at the thing he was making on her behalf, the abomination…

On her behalf.

His chest felt tight, and there was cold sweat on his forehead and neck. She hadn't asked him to build this machine; not this one.

Something Carnufex had said. The design faded from his mind like a reflection in water shattered into broken rings by a stone. Something he'd said in passing, and I told him I'd have to think about it; but he was getting on my nerves, pressing on them like an arrowhead broken off and healed over, and I made the thought go away. He made me tell a lie, to him and myself.

He scowled into the darkness, following the red and black lines of the thought; and then, as suddenly as the flash of inspiration that comes to a genius once in his life, the connection was made. The doll, the mechanical toy, the modifications he'd made that weren't on the list of charges at his trial.

It was like putting something in his mouth and finding it was too hot to swallow; just having the connection inside his head was an unbearable burning, a torment of dotted lines. Somebody else, he felt (the thought burned itself in, like heating the tang of a file to make it fit into a handle), there was somebody else involved. He fought, resisting the sudden understanding like a woman trying to stop herself giving birth. This changes everything.

No; it was a conscious decision. Changes nothing. Not as long as it's just intuition. Besides, it's probably just some stupid stuff—guilt, frustration, a long, hard day, the sort of horrible self-tormenting shit that keeps you awake in the early hours of the morning. And even if there's something there and it's true, it still doesn't change anything. Just one more bit to be fixed, at the very end of the job. That didn't help him sleep. He'd never felt more wide awake in his whole life.

It didn't bloody well fit. It was hopeless. It was never going to fit. The holes were all in the wrong places, and drilling them out two whole sizes wouldn't be enough to cure it. Neither would any amount of bashing with hammers, bending, drawing out, pissing around…

"All right," he heard someone say, "try it now." He put his weight on the bar, knowing it wouldn't line up enough for the rivet to go through. It was all hopelessly screwed up, and would have to be done again…

"There. Perfect. Piece of cake."

He looked down, stunned. The rivet was in the hole. He relaxed, gradually letting the bar go. It flexed a small amount, then stopped. It was in
fitted
. In which case, the whole ridiculous contraption fitted together, and they'd won, however unlikely that seemed. He could feel his face drawing into a huge, stupid grin.