Evil for Evil (55 page)

(Later, it occurred to Valens that Vaatzes didn’t ask him why he’d taken his cavalry to Civitas Eremiae. Perhaps it was diffidence,
or simple politeness.)

“Well, that’s all right then,” Vaatzes said, and Valens felt as though he’d been released, on bail. “You’ll excuse me for
asking, but you’ll understand my concern. Especially after the attack.”

After he’d shown the Duke out, Vaatzes came back to his cellar and sat down at his table. For a while he didn’t move, almost
as though he was bracing himself for something unpleasant. Eventually, he reached for a sheaf of drawings, picked them up
and put them neatly on one side. Under them was a small sheet of parchment, marked by fold-lines.

I enclose a notarized copy of the marriage certificate. You know as well as I do that a Mezentine notary wouldn’t falsify
a certificate …

He frowned. Notaries; he’d never given them much thought before, but now their code of professional ethics had suddenly become
the most important issue in the world. He cast his mind back, trying to remember everything he could about notaries.

… a Mezentine notary wouldn’t falsify a certificate for anybody, not even the Guilds in supreme convocation. But if that’s
not good enough for you, ask for whatever proof you need and I’ll try and get it for you.

He had, of course, already sent his reply.

But so what; so what if the certificate was genuine, and she really had married Falier? It didn’t necessarily mean anything.
If they’d told her he was dead … She had their daughter to think of; maybe they’d told her he was dead and they were going
to throw her out of the house, she’d need somewhere to go, someone to look after them both. Falier had been taking care of
them, he’d have felt the obligation. If she thought he was dead, marrying Falier would be the practical, sensible thing to
do; and on his part, no more than the logical extension of his duty to care for his friend’s wife and child. There was a raid
on the Vadani capital, they’d have told them; we sent a squadron of cavalry to kill him, and we succeeded. Oh, the savages
won’t admit it, they’ll probably make out he’s still alive; but you can believe it, he’s dead, he’s not coming back. So she
married Falier; why not? She’s got to take care of herself, of them both.

Think about what you’ve already lost, permanently and beyond hope of recovery, and what you may still be able to salvage from
the wreckage.

He smiled at that. Where everybody went wrong was in assuming that he was some kind of complex, unfathomable creature, full
of deep, subtle motives and enigmatic desires, when all the time he was the simplest man who ever lived.

But supposing … He winced at the thought. Supposing she really had married Falier, and that with him she’d found some sort
of quiet, comfortable resolution. Wife of the foreman of the ordnance factory … All he wanted to do was get back what had
been lost; for her, for himself, for the three of them. Supposing she’d already done that (believing he was dead, of course)
— quietly, without needing to slaughter tens of thousands, throw down cities, rearrange the whole world just to put back one
small piece where it belonged. Suppose, just suppose, that the mechanism was complete, functional, all except for one component
that suddenly was no longer necessary to its operation …

Just suppose.

He picked the letter up. It would, surely, be the height of stupidity not to accept the mechanism simply because it no longer
needed him. If she was all right; if she didn’t need him anymore; to have married Falier — the symmetry couldn’t be mere coincidence,
could it? And if he carried on with the design, wasn’t there the danger of wrecking the whole machine just to accommodate
the bit left over at the end, after it’d all been put back together? He laughed, because that was an old joke among engineers.

The question was simple enough. When he’d escaped from the Guildhall, as soon as he was outside the walls and free again,
he’d known what he had to do. It had been quite obvious, no ambiguities, compromises, no choices at all. Now the question
arose: who was he making the mechanism for? Up till now, that had been the most obvious part of it:
for us,
because the three of them were inseparable — the assumption being, she couldn’t survive without him, just as he couldn’t
exist without her. But that was an equation, the variables susceptible to revaluation; if she could survive without him —
no great effort to calculate — his existence wasn’t necessary anymore. He could simply drop out, and then both sides would
balance.

Drop out. He stood up and listened; the sound of the files was faint and far away. If there was something he could gain for
her by ending the war, that would be justification enough for having started it. Give them what they wanted — the Vadani,
himself — any bargain would be a good one, since what he had to give them had no value other than what it might buy her. He
smiled at the thought:
promote Falier to superintendent of works, and I’ll betray Valens to you and give myself up.
It doesn’t matter how much you pay, if the money’s what you’ve stolen from the buyer in the first place. It would be a relief,
as well, if nobody else had to die or have their lives ruined to serve the mechanism. All in all, it was unfortunate that
it had proved so demanding, in terms of effort and materials; it had taken on a life of its own, the way great enterprises
do. Being rid of it would be no bad thing, in itself.

Assuming she believed that he was dead.

But there were too many assumptions: that one, and the assumption that the certificate was genuine, that she really had married
Falier. Maybe, when the Mezentine got here, he could ask to see Falier, hear it straight from him. Could this Psellus arrange
that? he wondered. But that could be a mistake, since presumably Falier too believed he was dead, or he’d never have married
her. Assuming he had. Assuming.

Bad practice; making the components before you make the frame. How soon could Psellus get here? Nothing quite as frustrating
as waiting for parts to arrive from the contractor, before you can get on.

Slowly he pulled open the drawer under his table, and took out a plain rosewood box. It wasn’t even his. Daurenja had lent
it to him, when he’d been moaning to nobody in particular about not having a decent set of measuring and marking-out instruments.
He flicked the two brass hooks that held it shut and leaned back the lid. Inside, the gleam of steel, burnished and mirror-polished,
astonished him, as it always had. Silver’s too pale; gold and brass distort the light with their sentimental yellow glow.
But steel — filed, ground, rubbed patiently on a stone until the last toolmark and burr has vanished, rubbed again for hours
on end with a scrap of leather soaked in oilstone slurry, finally buffed on a wheel charged with a soap of the finest pumice
dust — shines with a depth and clarity that stuns and shatters, like the sun on still water in winter. The reflection is deep
enough to drown in, the image perfect, free from all distortion. A scriber, a square, dividers, straight and dog-leg calipers,
a rule, thread gauges, gapping shims, transfer punches, and a three-sided blade, six inches long, tapering to a needle point,
for reaming off burrs from the edges of newly drilled holes.

He lifted out the burr reamer and tested its point against the ball of his thumb.

Think three times before cutting once;
they’d told him that on his first day. The wisdom of the ages — taking metal off is easy, putting it back is fraught with
difficulty, sometimes impossible, and even more so, of course, with blood. A sharp point placed against an artery, gentle
but firm pressure to punch a small, neat hole; any fool of a junior apprentice on his first day in the workshop could be trusted
to do it. Even a Vadani.

He thought for a moment about the thing he’d built, which would survive him. Too late now, of course, to do anything about
it. He’d brought war down on the Eremians, decimated them, moved on to the Vadani, marked them out for cutting, set the feed
and speed, engaged the worm-drive and started the spindle running; if he dropped out now, who would he spare? The Cure Hardy
— well, who gave a damn about them? — and the Mezentines, of course. A little gentle pressure on the handle of the burr reamer
would save the lives of tens of thousands of his fellow Guildsmen, turn away the siege engines and the sappers from the city
walls; so much could still be saved, even at this late stage, if he only saw fit to modify the design a little, just enough
to take out one process, the evolution that restored one small component to its original place. Surely, if there was a cheaper,
quicker, easier way of getting the job done, even if it meant sacrificing one function, it would be good design and good practice.

He grinned. Been here before. If he’d learned one lesson, it was not to try and improve on the specified design. There was
a good old-fashioned Mezentine word for that, and only a complete idiot makes the same mistake twice.

He saw his face in the shimmering flat of the burr reamer, with the Mezentine maker’s stamp neatly in the middle of his forehead.
He wasn’t a great one for omens in the usual course of things, but he wasn’t completely blind to serendipitous hints. With
all proper respect he put the reamer back in the box, straightened the tools so the lid would shut and flipped the catches
back. Wait for Psellus, check the assumptions, consider the implications, and then cut.

They sent someone to call him, and he climbed up out of the cellar into extraordinary silence. No screech of files or pounding
of triphammers, nobody shouting to make themselves heard, no clatter of chains or grinding of winches, and the man they’d
sent to fetch him wanted him to be quick, because everybody was waiting. As he hurried through the workshop he saw men standing
beside their benches, arms folded or by their sides, nobody working. Outside in the crisp, cold air people stood about in
groups, turning to look at him as he passed, as though he was the guest of honor. A cluster of men he didn’t know were waiting
for him at the gate, like runners in a relay race. They led him through the city to the yard, which was jammed with men and
carts; and each cart had a square plate of sheet iron bolted to one side, supported by a frame of wooden battens, loads shifted
to the other side to counterbalance the weight. “Is there a problem?” he asked several times, but maybe they were too far
ahead of him to hear. They were walking fast, and he had to make an effort to keep up.

He saw the cranes, jigs and fixtures, but nobody was doing anything. There was one cart drawn up in position, one iron sheet
dangling from a crane. A man was leaning on the crossbar of an auger; another held a long spanner for tightening the retaining
bolts; and standing next to him, Daurenja.

He guessed before Daurenja spoke. “Thought you might like to be here when we finished the last cart,” Daurenja said, beaming
like an idiot. They’d already drilled the holes, done the alignment, inserted the bolts. Some kind of ceremony, then. Well,
presumably it was good for morale, or something like that. He looked round and saw Duke Valens, looking uncomfortably cold
in a long gray coat, surrounded by bored-looking officials. He hoped there wouldn’t be any speeches.

Daurenja nodded to someone he couldn’t see. The crane winch creaked as it took the strain, lifting the iron sheet a few inches.
Two men pressed against it, moved it slightly to line up the projecting bolt-ends with the holes in the sheet. The man with
the spanner stepped forward; someone passed him the nuts and he wound them on — finger-tight to begin with, then tightening
them all in turn with the long wrench. Nobody seemed particularly inspired or overawed, even when the spannerman put his weight
on the long handle for the last time, straightened his back and stepped away. The job was finished, successfully and on time.
So what?

The Duke stood up and began to speak. Not a speech, any more than his own mumbled, preoccupied words to his workers were speeches;
he was giving the order for the evacuation to begin, commands without explanations — schedules, details of who should report
where and when, rules and prohibitions. The Vadani listened in complete silence.

“… utmost importance that we shouldn’t take anything with us we won’t immediately need; food, clothes, blankets, tools, weapons,
and that’s it. For security reasons I can’t tell you which direction we’ll be heading in. You’ll find that out soon enough
in any case. Don’t worry about how long the food’s going to last. We’ve got supply points already in place, plenty for everybody
so long as we’re careful; don’t go loading your wagons down with a year’s supply of salt fish and dried plums, you’ll only
slow yourselves down, and anybody who can’t keep up the pace is going to get left behind, as simple as that.”

The silence was amazement, fear, a little anger (but not at Valens), but mostly they were listening carefully so they could
do exactly as they were told. Remarkable, Ziani thought. Just think about that for a moment. He stands up and says they’re
going to have to leave their homes, all their things, all the places they know, their work, all the components that make up
the mechanisms of their lives. Prospects of ever coming back: uncertain at best,probably none. Some people, of course, couldn’t
accept something like that. Some people would refuse, or at least they’d go with the full intention of coming back, even if
they had to make a bit of trouble along the way.

(He thought of the rosewood box and the burr reamer; there’s more than one way of refusing to go along.)

Yet here were the Vadani; careless, inept craftsmen, the sort of people who can’t be taught why it’s morally wrong to use
a chisel as a screwdriver, but so flexible, so trusting that they’ll pack up a few scraps of their lives in a steel-plated
cart and take to the cold, windy road, just because the Duke thinks it’s the best idea in the circumstances. It could only
be faith; and hadn’t he had faith, in the Guilds, the doctrine of specifications, the assertion that perfection had been found
and written down? Could you get the Mezentines to leave their city, pile onto wagons and leave everything behind to be burned,
looted, trashed by savages? Of course, the Guilds would never give such an order. They’d prefer to stay in the city and burn
with it. In the end, for a Mezentine, it comes down to place: knowing one’s place and staying there, if the worst comes to
the worst fighting to the death to get back there. For the Vadani, it must be different somehow, presumably because they’re
primitives, more pack animals than men. That had to be it. No other explanation could account for it.