The man looked at him as though he was blight on winter barley. Behind him loomed the eight-foot-high frame of the hammer; green oak instead of cast iron, already starting to warp in the heat. Two months, and the tenons would spring out of the mortices. If it happened while the hammer was under load, it'd tear itself apart and be completely wrecked. In two months' time, of course, they'd have finished and wouldn't need it any more. He hated the sight of it. "Do I stop what I'm doing now?" the man said. "Only I've got the top on this anvil casting to do, and it's taken an hour to get it up to welding heat. If I leave it and let it cool down, I'll be standing around idle the rest of the morning while it heats up again."
Ziani tried to think, but couldn't. "This is more important," he said, uncertain whether it was true or not. "Get it done and fetch it over to me as soon as it's ready. I'm late enough for the duke as it is."
There was a fairy-tale, every kid in the City knew it. The gods made angels, moulding them out of sunlight. The dark elves saw the angels and were filled with jealousy, wanting shining servants of their own. They tried to make some themselves, but of course they didn't know how to mould sunlight, so had to make do with clay, That was how the first men came to be created; an ignorant fake, so wide of the mark it was almost a parody, but it worked, for a little while. Ziani looked down the long, high shed. It still stank of pine sap and tar. The engines, designed by him from memory, built by hastily trained Eremians and Vadani-even a few savages, they were so short of manpower-certainly worked, for the time being. The cupolas melted the bog-iron and scrap into brittle, impure blooms for the trip-hammers to beat out into sheet or form into round or square bar, or wire for the nail makers' draw-plates. The water-driven circular saws slabbed the newly felled pine trunks into beams and planks, cut them to size ready for the chisels and twybills of the joiners. The end product was an engine capable of hurling a two-hundredweight stone four hundred yards. You'd get fifty shots out of them, maybe half a dozen more if you were lucky, before the crossbeams split under the pounding of the arms and the stubs cracked in their sockets and the dovetails sprang and the dowels sheared and the nails pulled through and the hand-cut screws stripped out of the spongy green wood. That was as it should be. The main difference, according to the story, wasn't that men were ugly and stupid and bad and angels were beautiful and wise and good. The real difference, which defined them both, was that men were mortal. The Republic built machines that lived for ever.
He thought about that, and decided it was a viable hypothesis, though of course impossible to prove conclusively; the gods had made engineers, but Ziani Vaatzes had made Gace Daurenja.
(He examined one of the clapped-out bushings. From memory, he'd made them out of melted-down Eremian coins, in theory pure silver but in practice eighty-five parts bronze. It was the purest, most consistent bronze he could lay his hands on. Not good enough, though.)
No, that didn't work. He hadn't made Daurenja, he'd found him and used him, because he needed an engineer, and Daurenja was competent, more than competent. He was also resourceful, tireless, efficient, highly accomplished, extremely brave; in his own abominable way, even principled. And, like Ziani, he had a simple purpose to fulfill that left him no choice of action. Was it just a coincidence that he was practically impossible to kill, like the angels in the story?
The hammerman brought him his swaged bronze bar; he turned it down and faced it off on one of the wooden-framed treadle lathes, drilled the hole, parted off four bearings, fettled and fitted them. That got the Mezentine lathe up and running again, and he used it to make another eight bearings, naturally much rounder and tighter; four of them to replace the treadle-made stopgaps, and four spares. He tested the result by fixing a half-inch round bar in the chuck and measuring the runout as it spun. Five thousandths of an inch at nine inches from the chuck; a criminal offence in the City, but good enough for Duke Valens and the Aram Chantat.
In the stories, of course, when the dark elves rebelled against the children of the Sun, it was inevitable that they'd lose and be thrown into the Pit, while their trashy, built-in-obsolescent handiwork was turned out to graze the Earth's rocky surface, since Heaven couldn't quite bring itself to put the wretched creatures out of their misery. But supposing the stories had got it the wrong way round? Supposing the dark elves rebelled, and won?
Well; he had the lathe back up and running, which meant he had no excuse for not going to see Duke Valens, as ordered. Get it out of the way and then it's done.
He left the factory, heading for the southern gatehouse, where the messenger had told him there'd be a carriage waiting. Since he was already hopelessly late, he took a short cut through the outer gardens of the palace. Pleasant enough if you liked that sort of thing; a gravel path ran through a series of star-shaped knot gardens, some raised, some sunken, edged with box and lavender. At least the shapes were neat and tidy, though the gravel looked as though it hadn't been raked for a week. Gardeners away at the war, presumably.
A woman's voice called out his name.
It took him a moment to find her. She was sitting in a small bower scooped out of a large privet bush. He hadn't seen her for weeks, not since he'd come back to the city to start up the factory. He'd been invited to the wedding, of course, but he'd been too busy to go.
(He tried to remember the proper way to address a duchess, but couldn't, so he improvised a small, respectful gesture, somewhere between a nod and a bow.)
"Sorry, did I startle you?" She was smiling awkwardly. He didn't reply; she went on: "I gather you're going south to join my husband. Do you think you could give him a letter from me?"
He repeated the gesture. "Of course," he said.
She handed him a small square of folded parchment. She knew, of course, that it had been him who had intercepted the letter that disgraced Miel Ducas. "I'll make sure he gets it," he said.
"Thank you. Usually I use the courier service, but I always feel guilty about it. It's supposed to be for important official business only, and I'm sure I don't come under that heading."
Fishing for compliments? Unlikely. He had no reason to linger, but he sensed she didn't want him to go just yet. Of course, he'd saved her life at the fall of Civitas Eremiae. Had she ever wondered about that, in the long hours of futile leisure that made up most of her life: how he'd come to be in the right place to lead her to safety out of the dying city, through the tunnels and cisterns that people who'd lived there all their lives didn't know about, but which he'd navigated with ease?
"If you've got a moment," she said.
"Of course." There was a stone bench. He perched on the edge of it, just close enough to be able to hear her without having to lean forward. For a man who'd spent his life among trip-hammers and mills, he had excellent hearing.
"About the war." She stopped, as though compiling an agenda. "What's going to happen? They don't tell me, you see."
"I don't know." Which was true. "Quite soon now, your husband will advance on the City and start the siege. He'll go through the motions of a direct assault, but I don't suppose he'll keep it up for very long. He won't want to waste lives pointlessly. An assault will tell him how many defenders there are, where the artillery batteries are positioned, their range, weight of shot and rate of fire. He'll need to know all that, and it doesn't come free, he'll have to buy it with dead bodies. Once he's got the information, he'll start the siege operations. That's a very specialised branch of military science and I don't know anything about it. The engines I'm building will be important. Given time, they could knock down the walls. But he hasn't got that long; he'll be limited by food supplies, mostly, and other stuff like that. My guess is, he'll use artillery to distract them while he uses sappers to dig under the walls. That's even more scientific than artillery, but he's got the advantage of having skilled men who know the work, the silver-miners. My people don't dig holes if they can help it. If he can undermine a gatehouse or bring down a large enough section of wall, he's won. Once his soldiers get inside the City, it'll all be over. If he fails, and the food runs out, he'll have no choice but to fall back, and I don't suppose the Aram Chantat will be pleased if he does that. I suppose everything really hinges on how badly they want to take the City." He paused. "Does that answer your question?"