“Jalan Kendeth.” The thing’s voice came out higher and more musical than I had been expecting. In truth I hadn’t been expecting it to speak at all, but if I had I would have imagined something deep and final, like lead blocks falling from a height. “Come.”
“Amazing.” I stood to measure myself against the construction and found I didn’t reach to its shoulder. The soldier unsettled me. A mechanism, lifeless and implacable, and yet it walked and spoke my name. Apart from there being something deeply unnatural and wrong about a heap of cogs aping life itself I felt most uncomfortable at the thought of something so dangerous, and so near, that lacked the usual levers by which I manipulated potential opponents, such as flattery, pride, envy, and lust. “And they can bend swords? Punch through shields like the stories tell?”
“I’ve not seen such,” Yusuf said. “But I did see one carry a vault door into a bank being refurbished. The door could not have weighed less than fifty men.”
“Come,” the soldier repeated.
“I’m sure it can ask better than that, can’t it? Or has its spring for manners unwound?” I grinned at Yusuf and rapped my knuckles on the soldier’s breastplate. “Ask me again, properly.” My knuckles stung so I rubbed them with my other hand. “Fifty men, you say? They should build more and take over the world.” I walked around the thing, peering into the occasional chink in the filigreed plates of its armour. “I would.”
“Men are cheaper to make, my prince.” Again the black smile. “And besides, the art is lost. Look at the workmanship on the left arm.” He pointed. The arm was larger than its counterpart, a thing of brass and iron, marvellously worked, but on closer inspection the gears, pulleys, cables and wheels, though ranging from tiny and intricate to large and chunky, never became smaller than something I might just about imagine a very skilled artisan producing.
“It’s driven from the torso, and lacks any strength of its own,” Yusuf said. “Most soldiers are part replacement these days, and the clock-springs that were wound to give them power are winding down-the knowledge required to rewind such mechanisms was lost before the clans took ownership of the Mechanists’ legacy.”
As Yusuf spoke my eyes fixed upon an indentation between the soldier’s shoulders, a complex depression into which many metal teeth projected. Perhaps a winding point, though how one might work it I had no idea.
“Come, Prince Jalan.” The soldier spoke again.
“There.” I walked past it into the open space of the hall. “You see, you can address me properly if you try. I advise that you study the correct forms of address. Perhaps you might master them before you unwind completely and become an interesting drawing room ornament.”
Iron fingers flexed and the soldier came toward me on heavy feet. It brushed past and led on through the crowd. I took some measure of comfort knowing the thing actually did appear to have attitude and that I’d managed to get beneath its metal skin.
I followed the mechanism up a flight of marble stairs, along a broad corridor with offices to either side in which a great number of clerks sat at desks checking through rolls of figures, tallying and accounting, and up a second flight to a polished mahogany door.
The office behind the door had that mix of Spartan design and money that the very richest aspire to. When you’ve moved past the stage of needing to show everyone how wealthy you are with gaudy displays of your purchasing power you reach a stage at which you return to simple and purposeful design. With cost being no object, each part of your environment will be constructed of the absolute best that money can buy-though it may require close inspection to determine it.
I of course still aspired to the stage at which I could afford my gaudy displays. I could however appreciate the utilitarian extravagance of the paperweight on the desk in front of me being a plain cube of gold.
“Prince Jalan, please take a seat.” The man behind the desk didn’t bow, didn’t rise to greet me, in fact he barely glanced up from the parchment in front of him.
It’s true that the niceties of courtly etiquette are rarely offered to me outside the confines of the palace, but it does pain me to have such conventions ignored by people who should know better. It’s one thing for some peasant on the road to fail to recognize my station, but a damned banker with not a drop of royal blood in his veins and yet sitting on a pile of gold, metaphorically, that would dwarf the value of some entire countries. . well that sort of injustice practically demands that the man smarm all over any person of breeding to make up for it. How else are they to persuade us not to damn their eyes, march our armies into their miserable little banks and empty the vaults out to serve some higher purpose? It’s certainly what I plan to be doing when king!
I took the seat. A very expensive one and not the least bit comfortable.
He scratched something with his quill and looked up, eyes dark and neutral in a bland and ageless face. “You have a letter of deputization, I understand?”
I lifted the scroll Great-uncle Garyus had sent me, drawing it back a fraction as the man reached for it. “And you would be Davario Romano Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives?” I let him chew the consequence of failing to introduce himself.
“I am.” He tapped a little nameplate angled toward me on his desk.
I passed the scroll across, lips pursed, and waited, staring at the dark and thinning hair atop his head as he bent to read.
“Gholloth has placed a significant trust in your hands, Prince Jalan.” He looked up with considerably more interest, a hint of hunger even.
“Well. . I guess my great-uncle has always been very fond of me. . but I’m not entirely clear how I’m to represent his interests. I mean they’re just ships. And they’re not even here. How far is it to the nearest port? Thirty miles?”
“To the nearest port of consequence it is closer to fifty miles, prince.”
“And, between you and me, Davario, I’m not fond of boats of any kind, so if there’s any setting sail involved. .”
“I think you rather miss the point, Prince Jalan.” He couldn’t help that smug little smile that people get when they’re correcting foolishness. “These vessels don’t concern us except in the abstract. We’ve no interest here in ropes and barnacles, tar and sailcloth. These ships are assets of unknown value. There’s nothing finance likes to speculate about more. Your great-uncle’s ships are no common merchant ships hopping along coasts. His captains are adventurers bound for distant shores in ocean-going vessels. Each ship is as likely never to return, sunk on a reef or the crew eaten by savages, as it is to limp into an empire port groaning with silver, or amber, or rare spices and exotic treasures stolen from unknown peoples. We trade here in possibilities, options, futures. Your paper. .” Here he held it aloft. “. . once the seals are checked by an expert archivist against our proofs. . gives you a position in the great game we play here in Umbertide.”
I frowned. “Well, games of chance and I are no strangers. This trading in papers. . is it a bit like gambling?”
“It’s exactly like gambling, Prince Jalan.” He fixed me with those dark eyes and I could imagine him sitting across a poker table in some shadowy corner rather than across his exquisite desk. “That’s what we do here. Only with better odds and larger wagers than in any casino.”
“Splendid!” I clapped my hands together. “Count me in.”
“But first the authentication. It should be complete by tomorrow evening. I can give you a note of credit and have the soldier outside escort you back to your residence. The streets are safe enough but one shouldn’t take unnecessary risks where money is concerned.”
I didn’t much like the idea of the clockwork soldier following me back to Madam Joelli’s. A touch of caution I’d developed on the road made me want to let as few people as possible know where I lay my head, and besides, the thing made me uncomfortable.