Devices and Desires

SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME

Wonderful epitaph for a wasted life.

In an hour or so, it wouldn't matter any more. He'd be out of it; the story would go on, but he wouldn't be in it any more. He'd be a sad memory in the minds of those who loved him, a wound for time to heal, and of course they'd never mention him to strangers, rarely to each other. A new man would take his place at work, and it'd be pretty uncomfortable there for a week or so until he'd settled in and there was no longer any need for his replacement to ask how the other bloke had done this or that, or where he kept his day-books, or what this funny little shorthand squiggle was supposed to mean. The world would get over him, the way we get over our first ever broken heart, or a bad stomach upset. Somehow, the idea didn't scare him or fill him with rage. It would probably be worse to be remembered and mourned for a long time. There'd be sympathy and condolences, tearing the wound open every time it started to scab over. That was always Ziani's chair; do you remember the time Ziani got his sleeve caught in the lathe chuck; Ziani lent this to me and I never had a chance to give it back.

If it had been a sudden illness, say, or a freak accident; if he'd been stabbed in the street or killed in a war; you could get angry about that, the stuff of tragedy. But to find yourself in the cells waiting to be strangled to death, all on account of a few measurements; it was so bewildering, so impossible to understand, that he could only feel numb. He simply hadn't seen it coming. It was like being beaten at chess by a four-year-old.

The door started to open, and immediately he thought, here it is. But when Bollo came in (still looking decidedly thoughtful), he didn't usher in the man in the black hood, the ends of the bowstring doubled round his gloved hands. The man who was with him was no stranger.

Ziani looked up. 'Falier?' he said.

'Me,' Falier answered. Bollo glanced at him, nodded, left the cell and bolted the door behind him. 'I came…'

'To say goodbye,' Ziani helped him out. 'It's all right, I'm being really calm about it. Sort of stunned, really. With any luck, by the time the truth hits me I'll have been dead for an hour. Sit down.'

His friend looked round. 'What on?'

'The floor.'

'All right.' Falier folded his long legs and rested his bottom tentatively on the flagstones. 'It's bloody cold in here, Ziani. You want to ask to see the manager.'

'It'll be a damn sight colder where I'm going,' Ziani replied. 'Isn't that what they say? Abominators and traitors go to the great ice pool, stand up to their necks in freezing cold water for all eternity?'

Falier frowned. 'You believe that?'

'Absolutely,' Ziani said. 'A chaplain told me, so it must be true.' He closed his eyes for a moment. 'Gallows humour, you see,' he said. 'It means I'm either incredibly brave in the face of death, or so hopelessly corrupt I don't even take eternal damnation seriously.'

'Right,' Falier said, looking at him. 'Sorry,' he said, 'I haven't got a clue what to say.'

'Don't worry about it. After all, if you really piss me off and I hold a grudge for the rest of my life, that's-what, three-quarters of an hour? You can handle it.'

Falier shook his head. 'You always were a kidder, Ziani,' he said. 'Always Laughing Boy. It was bloody annoying in a foreman, but you make a good martyr.'

'Martyr!' Ziani opened his eyes and laughed. 'Fine. If someone'd do me a favour and let me know what I'm dying for, I'll try and do it justice.'

'Oh, they'll come up with something,' Falier said. 'Well, I guess this is the bit where I ask you if you've got any messages. For Ariessa, and Moritsa. Sorry,' he added.

Ziani shrugged. 'Think of something for me, you're good with words. Anything I could come up with would be way short of the mark: I love you, I miss you, I wish this hadn't happened. They deserve better than that.'

Actually' Falier sounded like he was the condemned man. 'It's Ariessa and Moritsa I wanted to talk to you about. I'm really sorry to have to bring this up, but it's got to be done. Ziani, you do realise what's going to happen to them, don't you?'

For the first time, a little worm of fear wriggled in Ziani's stomach. 'I don't know what you mean,' he said.

Falier took a deep breath. 'Your pension, Ziani, from the Guild. You're a condemned man, an enemy of the state.'

'Yes, but they haven't done anything wrong.' The worm was running up his spine now.

'Neither have you, but that doesn't mean…' Falier dried up for a moment. 'It's the law, Ziani,' he said. 'They don't get the pension. Look, obviously I'll do what I can, and the lads at the factory, I'm sure they'll want to help. But-'

'What do you mean, it's the law? I never heard of anything like that.'

'I'm sorry,' Falier replied, 'but it's true. I checked. It's terrible, really wicked if you ask me. I don't know how they can be so cruel.'

'But hang on a moment.' Ziani tried to rally his scattered thoughts, but they wouldn't come when he called. 'Falier, what are they going to do? What're they going to live on, for God's sake?'

Falier looked grave. 'Ariessa says she'll try and get work,' he said. 'But that's not going to be easy; not for the widow of-' He stopped. 'I don't think I ought to have told you,' he said. 'Dying with something like this on your mind. But I was thinking.'

Ziani looked up. He knew that tone of voice. 'What? There's something I can do, isn't there?'

'You could make a deal,' he said.

That made no sense at all. 'How? I don't understand.'

'You could ask to see the investigator. There's still time. You could say, if they let Ariessa keep your pension, you'll tell them who your accomplices are.'

Accomplices. He knew what the word meant, but it made no sense in this context. 'No I can't,' he said. 'There weren't any. I didn't tell anybody about it, even, it was just me.'

'They don't know that.' Falier paused for a moment, then went on: 'It's politics, you see, Ziani. People they don't like, people they'd love an excuse to get rid of. And it wouldn't take much imagination to figure out who they'd be likely to be. If you said the right names, they'd be prepared to listen. In return for a signed deposition-'

'I couldn't do that,' Ziani said. 'They'd be killed, it'd be murder.'

'I know.' Falier frowned a little. 'But Ariessa, and Moritsa-'

Ziani was silent for a moment. It'd be murder; fine. He could regret it for the rest of his life. But if it meant his wife and daughter would get his pension, what did a few murders matter? Besides, the men he'd be murdering would all be high officials in the Guild… The thought of revenge had never even crossed his mind before.

'You think they'd go for that?'

'It's got to be worth a try,' Falier said. 'Face it, Ziani, what else can you do for them, in here, in the time you've got left?'

He considered the idea. A few minutes ago, he'd been clinging to the thought that it didn't matter, any of it. He'd practically erased himself, every trace, from the world. But leaving behind something like this-poverty, misery, destitution-was quite different. The only thing that mattered was Ariessa and Moritsa; if it meant they'd be all right, he would cheerfully burn down the world.

'What's the plan?' he said.

Falier smiled. 'Leave it to me,' he said. 'I can get in to see the secretary of the expediencies committee-'

'How?'

'I got in here, didn't I? Obviously there's not a lot of time. I'd better go.'

All right.'

Falier moved to the door, paused. 'It's the right thing to do, Ziani,' he said. 'This whole thing's a bloody mess, but at least there's still something you can do. That's got to be good.'

'I suppose.'

'I'll be back in an hour.' Falier knocked on the door; it opened and he left. Remarkable, Ziani thought; I've known Falier most of my life and I never knew he had magic powers. Always thought he was just ordinary, like me. But he can walk through doors, and I can't.

Hard to measure time in a cell, where you can't see the sunlight. Pulse; each heartbeat is more or less a second. But counting-sixty sixties is three thousand six hundred-would be too much effort and a waste of his rapidly dwindling supply of life. Ziani looked round; he was an abominator, apparently, but still an engineer. He thought for a moment, then grinned and pulled off his boot, then his sock. With his teeth, he nibbled a small hole; then he scooped a handful of the grimy grey sand off the floor and persuaded it into the sock. That done, he hung the sock from a splinter of wood in the doorframe, with his empty drinking-cup directly underneath. Then he found his pulse, and counted while the sand trickled through the hole in the sock into the cup. When it had all run through, he stopped counting-two hundred and fifty-eight, near as made no odds four minutes. He drew a line in the dirt beside him, and refilled the sock. There; he'd made himself a clock.

Eight fours are thirty-two; half an hour later, the door opened again. Falier was back. He looked excited, and pleased with himself.

'All set up,' he said. 'The secretary wants to see you in his office.' He frowned. 'For crying out loud, Ziani, put your boots on.'

Ziani smiled. 'Are you coming too?' he said.

'No.' Falier knocked on the door. 'Best of luck, Ziani; but it should be all right. He was definitely intrigued. Have you got a list of good names?'

Ziani nodded. 'I'm not too well up in politics, mind,' he said. Any suggestions?'

Falier fired off a dozen or so names, all of whom Ziani had already thought of, as the sand dribbled through into the cup. 'That'll probably do,' he went on, 'but have half a dozen more up your sleeve just in case.' The door opened; different warders this time. 'Well, so long,' Falier said. 'It'll be all right, you'll see.'

Not all, Ziani thought; but he didn't want to sound ungrateful. 'So long,' he repeated, and the warders led him out into the corridor.

Three flights of winding stairs brought him to a narrow passage, with heavy oak doors at irregular intervals; quite like the cells, he thought. Outside one of these, the warders stopped and knocked. Someone called out, 'Yes, come in.' A warder went in first; Ziani followed, and the other warder came in behind him.

He didn't know the secretary's name, or his face; but he was looking at a broad, fat man with huge hands resting on top of a wide, well-polished desk. 'This him?' the man asked, and one of the warders nodded.

'Fine.' The warder pulled out a chair, and Ziani sat in it. 'All right,' the man went on, 'you two get out. Don't go far, though.'

It wasn't easy to make out the man's face; he was sitting with his back to a window, and Ziani had been out of the light for some time. He had a bushy moustache but no beard, and round his neck was a silver chain with a big Guild star hanging from it. 'Ziani Vaatzes,' he said. 'I know all about you. Seventeen years in the ordnance factory, foreman for six of them. Commendations for exceptional work.' He yawned. 'So, why does a solid type like you go to the bad?'

Ziani shrugged. 'I don't know what came over me,' he said.

'I do.' The man leaned forward a little. The sun edged his dark head with gold, like an icon that's hung too long in the candle smoke. 'Thinking you're better than everybody else, that's what did it. Thinking you're so bloody clever and good, the rules don't apply to you. I've seen your kind before.'

'I admit I'm guilty,' Ziani said. 'But that's not what you want to talk to me about. You want to know who else was involved.'

'Go on.'

Ziani said four names. The secretary, he noticed, had a wax writing-board next to him, but wasn't taking any notes. He tried another four. The secretary yawned.

'You're wasting my time,' he said. 'You don't even know these people, and you're asking me to believe they all came round to your house, these important men you've never met, to see this mechanical doll you were making for your kid.'

'I'm telling you the truth,' Ziani said.

'Balls.' The man wriggled himself comfortable in his chair. 'I don't believe you.'

'You agreed to see me.'

'So I did. Know why?'

Ziani shrugged. 'I'm prepared to sign a deposition,' he said. 'Or I'll testify in court, if you'd rather.'

'No chance. I know for a fact you wouldn't know these people if you met them in the street. You didn't have any accomplices, you were working alone. All I want from you is who put you up to this. Oh, your pal Falier Zenonis, sure; but he's nobody. Who else is in on it?'

Ziani sighed. There was nothing left inside him. 'Who would you like it to have been?'

'No.' The man shook his head. 'If I want to play that sort of game, I decide when and how. You're here because obviously some bugger's been underestimating me.'

'All I wanted,' Ziani said, 'was for my wife to get my pension. That's all that matters to me. I'll say whatever you like, so long as you give me that.'

'Not interested.' The man sounded bored, maybe a little bit annoyed. 'I think you thought the idea up for yourself, all on your own. Trying to be clever with men's lives. You can forget that.'

'I see,' Ziani said. 'So you won't do what I asked, about the pension?'

'No.'

'Fine.' Ziani jumped to his feet and threw his weight against the edge of the desk, forcing it back. The man tried to get up; the edge of the desk hit the front of his thighs before his legs were straight-a nicely judged piece of timing, though Ziani said it himself-and he staggered. Ziani shoved again, then hopped back to give himself room and scrambled on to the desktop. The man opened his mouth to yell, but Ziani reached out; not for the throat, as the man was expecting, and so Ziani was able to avoid his hands as he lifted them to defend himself. Instead, he grabbed the man's shoulders and pushed back sharply. It was more a folding manoeuvre than anything else. The man bent at the waist as he went down, and his head, thrown backwards, smashed against the stone sill of the window. It worked just as Ziani had seen it in his mind, the angles and the hinges and the moving parts. Seventeen years of looking at blueprints teaches you how to visualise.

He was only mildly stunned, of course, so there was still plenty to do. Ziani had been hoping for a weapon; a dagger slung fashionably at the waist, or something leaning handy in a corner. Nothing like that; but there was a solid-looking iron lampstand, five feet tall, with four branches and four legs at the base to keep it steady. Just the thing; he slid off the desk, caught hold of the lampstand more or less in the middle, and jabbed with it, as though it was a spear. One of the legs hit the man on the forehead, just above the junction of nose and eyebrows. It was the force behind it that got the job done.

The man slid on to the floor; dead or alive, didn't matter, he was no longer relevant. Three flights of stairs, and Ziani had counted the steps, made a fairly accurate assessment of the depth of tread. It would be a long way down from the window and he had no idea what he'd be dropping on to; but he was as good as dead anyway, so what the hell? At the moment when he jumped, entrusting himself to the air without looking at what was underneath, he couldn't stop himself wondering about Falier, who was supposed to be his friend.

It wasn't pavement, which was good; but it was a long way down.

For a moment he couldn't breathe and his legs were numb. I've broken my bloody neck, he thought; but then he felt pain, pretty much everywhere, which suggested the damage was rather less radical. Somewhere, not far away (not far enough), he heard shouts, excitement. It was a fair bet that he was the cause of it. Without knowing how he got there, he found himself on his feet and running. It hurt, but that was the least of his problems.

Because he'd never expected to survive the drop, he hadn't thought ahead any further than this. But here he was, running, in an unplanned and unspecified direction. That was no good. The pity of it was, he had no idea where he should be heading for. He was somewhere in the grounds of the Guildhall; but the grounds, like the building itself, were circular. There was a wall all the way round, he remembered, with two gates in it. The only way out was through a gate. If they were after him, which was pretty much inevitable, the first thing they'd do would be to send runners to the gatehouses.

Every breath and heartbeat is an act of prevarication, a prising open of options. It'd sounded good when the preacher had said it, but did it actually mean anything? Only one way to find out. The gardens were infuriatingly formal, straight lines of foot-high box hedge enclosing neat geometric patterns of flowers, nothing wild and bushy a man could hide in long enough to catch his breath, but there was a sort of trellis arch overgrown with flowery creeper, a bower or arbour or whatever the hell it was called. He headed for it, and collapsed inside just as his legs gave out.

Fine. First place they'll look.

Breathing in was like dragging his heart through brambles. He got to his knees and peered round the edge of the arch. There was the wall, a grey blur behind a curtain of silly little trees. He followed its line until he came to a square shape, almost completely obscured by a lopsided flowering cherry. That would be a gatehouse. He didn't know what time it was and he couldn't see the sun through the arbour roof, so he couldn't tell if it was the north or the south gate. Not that it mattered. He wasn't likely to get that far, and if he did the gatekeepers would be on him like terriers.

He plotted a course. Arbour to the line of trees; using the trees as cover, along the wall to the gatehouse. He could hear shouting coming from several different directions, and he wondered whether they'd catch him and take him back to his cell to be strangled, or just kill him on the spot.

I'll escape, though, if only to he annoying. He stood in the doorway of the arbour for a moment, until he saw two men running towards him. They were wearing helmets and carrying halberds; there goes another option, snapping shut like a mousetrap. He lowered his head and charged in the direction of the trees. They'd get him soon enough, but at least he was making an effort, and he felt it was better to die running towards something, rather than just running away.

It was inevitable that sooner or later he'd trip over something and go sprawling. In the event, it was one of those ridiculous dwarf box hedges that did the damage. He landed on his face in a bed of small orange flowers, and the two warders were on him before he had a chance to move.

'Right.' One of them had grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back. 'What's the drill?'

He couldn't see the other warder. 'Captain said get him out of sight before we do him. Don't want the Membership seeing a man having his head cut off, it looks bad.'

The warder he could see nodded. 'Stable block's the nearest,' he said.

Between them they hauled him to his feet and dragged him backwards across the flowerbeds. He sagged against their arms, letting them do the work; buggered if he was going to walk to his death. He heard a door creak, and a doorframe boxed out the light.

'Block,' said the other warder. 'Something we can use for a block.'

'Log of wood,' his colleague suggested.

'How about an upturned bucket?' the first man said.

'Might as well.' The unseen warder trod on the backs of Ziani's knees, forcing him down; the other man came forward with a stable bucket, shaking out dusty old grain. Ziani felt the wood under his chin. 'Grab his hair,' the second warder said, 'hold him steady. Halberd's not the right tool for this job.'

A simple matter of timing, then. Ziani felt the warder's knuckles against his scalp, then the pain as his hair was pulled, forcing his cheek against the bucket. He heard the cutter's feet crackle in the straw as he stepped up to his mark, in his mind's eye he saw him take a grip on the halberd shaft and raise his arms. A good engineer has the knack of visualisation, the ability to orchestrate the concerted action of the mechanism's moving parts. At the moment when he reckoned the cutter's swing had reached its apex and was coming down, he dug his knees into the straw and arched his back, jerking his shoulders and head backwards. He felt a handful of his hair pull out, but he was moving, hauling the other warder toward him.

He heard the halberd strike; a flat, solid shearing noise, as its edge bit into the warder's forearms, catching them just right against the base of the iron band that ran round the bottom of the bucket. By the time the warder screamed, he was loose; he hopped up like a frog, located the cutter (standing with a stupid expression on his face, looking at the shorn stub of his mate's left hand) and stamped his foot into the poor fool's kidneys. It wasn't quite enough to put him down; but the other man had obligingly left his halberd leaning up against a partition. All Ziani knew about weapons was how to make them, but he did understand tools-leverage, mechanical advantage-and the principles were more or less the same. With the rear horn of the blade he hooked the cutter's feet out from under him, and finished the job efficiently with the spike. The other man was still kneeling beside the bucket, trying to clamp the gushing stump with his good hand. The hell with finesse, Ziani thought; he pulled the spike clear and shoved it at the wounded man's face. It was more luck than judgement that he stuck him precisely where he'd aimed. In one ear and out the other, like listening to your mother.

His fingers went dead around the halberd shaft; it slipped through, and its weight dragged it down, though the spike was still jammed in that poor bastard's head. It had taken a matter of seconds; two lives ended, one life just possibly reprieved. It was a curious sort of equilibrium, one he wasn't eager to dwell on. Instead he thought: this is a stable, wouldn't it be wonderful if it had horses in it?

Of course, he had no idea how you went about harnessing a horse. He found a saddle, there was a whole rack of the things; and bridles, and a bewildering selection of straps with buckles on, some or all of. which you apparently needed in order to make the horse go. He'd decided on the brown one; it wasn't the biggest, but the other two looked tired (though he had no idea what a tired horse was supposed to look like).

Pinching the corners of its mouth got the bit in. He fumbled hopelessly with the bridle straps, sticking the ends in the wrong buckles until eventually he managed to get the proper layout straight in his mind. The saddle went on its back, that was obvious enough. There was some knack or rule of thumb about how tight the girths needed to be. He didn't know it, so he pulled the strap as tight as he could make it go. The horse didn't seem to mind.

That just left getting on. Under better circumstances, he might well have been able to reach the stirrup. As it was, he had to go back and fetch the bucket to stand on. It was slippery, and he nearly fell over. I wish I knew how to do this, he thought, and dug his heels into the horse's ribs.

After that it was shamefully simple. The gatekeepers had seen him being caught and so weren't looking for escaped prisoners any more; besides, he was on a horse, and the prisoner had been on foot. The horse wanted to trot, so the saddle was pounding his bum like a triphammer. He passed under the gate, and someone called out, but he couldn't make out the words. Nobody followed him. Two murders, possibly three if he'd killed the secretary of the expediencies committee when he hit him with the lampstand, and he was riding out of there like a prince going hawking. His head ached where the hair had been pulled out.

As soon as he was through the gate, he knew where he was. That tall square building was the bonded warehouse, where he delivered finished arrowheads for export. The superintendent was a friend of his, sometimes on slow days they drank tea and had a game of chess (but today wasn't a slow day). He was in Twenty-Fourth Street, junction with Ninth Avenue.

Three blocks down Ninth Avenue was an alley, leading to the back gate of a factory. It was quiet and the walls on either side were high; you could stop there for a piss if you were in a hurry. He contrived to get the horse to turn down it, let it amble halfway down, pulled it up and slid awkwardly off its back. It stood there looking at him as he picked himself up. Nevertheless, he said. 'Thanks,' as he walked away.

The factory gate was bolted on the inside, but he managed to jump up, get his stomach on the top of it and reach over to draw back the bolt. The gate swung open, with him on top of it. He slipped down-bad landing-and shut it behind him, trying to remember what they made here. At any rate, he was back on industrial premises, where the rules were rather closer to what he was used to.

He was in the back yard; and all the back yards of all the factories in the world are more or less identical. The pile of rusting iron scrap might be a foot or so to the left or right; the old tar-barrel full of stagnant rainwater might be in the north-east corner rather than the north-west; the chunky, derelict machine overgrown with brambles might be a brake, a punch, a roller or a shear. The important things, however, are always the same. The big shed with the double doors is always the main workshop. The long shed at right angles to it is always the materials store. The kennel wedged in the corner furthest from the gate is always the office. The tiny hutch in the opposite corner is always the latrine, and you can always be sure of finding it in the dark by the smell.

Ziani ducked behind the scrap pile and quickly took his bearings. Ninth Avenue ran due south, so the gate he'd just climbed over faced east. He glanced up at the sky; it was grey and overcast, but a faint glow seeping through the cloud betrayed the sun, told him it was mid-afternoon. In all factories everywhere, in mid-afternoon the materials store is always deserted. He looked round just in case; nobody to be seen. He scuttled across the yard as fast as he could go.

The geometry of stores is another absolute constant. On the racks that ran its length were the mandatory twenty-foot lengths of various sizes and profiles of iron and brass bar, rod, strip, tube, plate and sheet. Above them was the timber, planked and unplanked, rough and planed. Against the back wall stood the barrels and boxes, arranged in order of size; iron rivets (long, medium and short, fifteen different widths), copper rivets, long nails, medium nails, short nails, tacks, pins, split pins, washers; drill bits, taps, dies; mills and reamers, long and short series, in increments of one sixty-fourth of an inch; jigs and forms, dogs and faceplates, punches, callipers, rules, squares, scribers, vee-blocks and belts, tool-boats and gauges, broaches and seventeen different weights of ball-peen hammers. At the far end, against the back wall, stood the big shear, bolted to a massive oak bench; three swage-blocks, a grinding-wheel in its bath, two freestanding leg-vices, a pail of grimy water and a three-hundredweight double-bick anvil on a stump. Every surface was slick with oil and filmed with a coating of black dust.

It was the familiarity of it all that cut into him; he'd worked all his life in places like this, but he'd never looked at them; just as, after a while, a blind man can walk round his house without tripping, because he knows where everything is. All his life Ziani had worked hard, anxious to impress and be promoted, until he'd achieved what he most wanted-foreman of the machine room of the Mezentine state ordnance factory, the greatest honour a working engineer could ever attain this side of heaven. Outside Mezentia there was nothing like this; the Guilds had seen to that. The Eternal Republic had an absolute monopoly on precision engineering; which meant, in practice, that outside the city, in the vast, uncharted world that existed only to buy the products of Mezentine industry, there were no foundries or machine-shops, no lathes or mills or shapers or planers or gang-drills or surface-grinders; the pinnacle of the metalworker's art was a square stub of iron set in a baked earth floor for an anvil, a goatskin bellows and three hammers. That was how the Republic wanted it to be; and, to keep it that way, there was an absolute prohibition on skilled men leaving the city. Not that any Mezentine in his right mind would want to; but wicked kings of distant, barbarous kingdoms had been known to addle men's minds with vast bribes, luring them away with their heads full of secrets. To deal with such contingencies, the Republic had the Travellers' Company, whose job it was to track down renegades and kill them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. By their efforts, all those clever heads were returned to the city, usually within the week, with their secrets still in place but without their bodies, to be exhibited on pikes above Travellers' Arch as a reassurance to all loyal citizens.

Ziani walked over to the anvil and sat down. The more he thought about it, of course, the worse it got. He couldn't stay in the city-this time tomorrow, they'd be singing out his description in every square, factory and exchange in town-but he couldn't leave and go somewhere else, because it simply wasn't possible to leave unless you went out through one of the seven gates. Even supposing he managed it, by growing wings or perfecting an invisibility charm, there was nowhere he could go. Of course, he'd never get across the plains and the marshes alive; if he did, and made it as far as the mountains, and got through one of the heavily guarded passes without being eaten by bears or shot by sentries, a brown-skinned, black-haired Mezentine couldn't fail to be noticed among the tribes of pale-skinned, yellow-haired savages who lived there. The tribal chiefs knew what happened to anyone foolish enough to harbour renegades. Silly of him; he'd jumped out of check into checkmate, all the while thinking he was getting away.

On the bench beside him he saw a scrap of paper. It was a rough sketch of a mechanism-power source, transmission, crankshaft, flywheel; a few lines and squiggles with a charcoal stub, someone thinking on paper. One glance was enough for him to be able to understand it, as easily as if the squiggles and lines had been letters forming words. Outside the city walls, of course, it'd be meaningless, just hieroglyphics. A mechanism, a machine someone was planning to build in order to achieve an objective. He thought about that. A waterwheel or a treadmill or a windlass turns; that motion is translated into other kinds of motion, circular into linear, horizontal into vertical, by means of artfully shaped components, and when the process is complete one action is turned into something completely different, as if by alchemy. The barbarians, believers in witchcraft and sorcery, never conceived of anything as magical as that.

He thought for a while, lining up components and processes in his mind. Then he slid off the bench, washed his hands and face in the slack-tub and headed across the yard to the office.

As he walked in, a clerk perched on a high stool turned to peer at him.

'Any work going?' Ziani asked.

The clerk looked at him. 'Depends on what you can do,' he said.

'Not much. Well, I can fetch and carry, sweep floors and stuff.'

'Guild member?'

Ziani shook his head. 'Left school when I was twelve,' he said.

The clerk grinned. 'Good answer,' he said. 'We're all right for skilled men, but we can always use another porter.' He shook his head. 'Crazy, isn't it? There's Guildsmen sat at home idle for want of a place, and the likes of you can walk in off the street and start immediately.'

'Good,' Ziani said. 'What's the pay?'

The clerk frowned. 'Don't push your luck,' he said.

Nice clear directions brought Ziani to the shipping bay. The factory made farm machinery-ploughs, chain and disc harrows, seed drills-for export to the breadbasket countries in the far south. How they got there, very few people knew or cared; the Mezentines sold them to dealers, who took delivery at Lonazep, on the mouth of the estuary. Ziani had never been to Lonazep, but he knew it was outside the walls. After five hours lifting things on to carts, he was asked if he fancied volunteering for carriage duty.

The answer to this question, in every factory in the world, is always no. Carriage duty means sitting on the box of a cart bumping along rutted tracks in the savage wilderness outside the city. It pays time and a half, which isn't nearly enough for the trauma of being Outside; you sleep in a ditch or under the cart, and there are rumoured to be spiders whose bite makes your leg swell up like a pumpkin.

'Sure,' Ziani said.

(Because the sentries at the gates would be looking for a Guildsman on his own, not a driver's mate on a cart in the long, backed-up queue crawling out of town on the north road. When a particularly dangerous and resourceful fugitive-an abominator, say, or a guard-killer-was on the run, they'd been known to pull the covers off every cart and scrabble about in the packing straw in case there was anyone hiding in there, but they never bothered to look at the unskilled men on the box. Guild thinking.)

God bless the city ordinance that kept annoying heavy traffic off the streets during the day. By its blessed virtue, it was dark when the long line of carts rolled out of the factory gate and merged with the foul-tempered glacier inching its way towards the north gate. Heavy rain was the perfect finishing touch. It turned the streets into glue, but as far as Ziani was concerned it was beautiful, because a sentry who has to stand at his post all night quite reasonably prefers to avoid getting soaked to the skin, and accordingly stays in the guardhouse and peers out through the window. As it turned out, they showed willing and made some sort of effort; a cart six places ahead in the line was pulled over, while the sentries climbed about on it and crawled under it with lanterns. They didn't find anything, of course; and, their point proved, they went back inside in the dry. Ziani guessed the quota was one in ten. Sure enough, looking back over his shoulder once they were through the arch and out the other side, he saw the third cart behind them slow to a halt, and lanterns swinging through the rain.

'You're new, then,' said the driver next to him. He hadn't spoken since they left the factory.

'That's right,' Ziani said. 'Actually, this is my first time out of town.'

The driver nodded. 'It sucks,' he said. 'The people smell and the food's shit.'

'So I heard,' Ziani said.

'So why'd you volunteer?'

'I don't know, really,' Ziani replied. 'Suppose I always wondered if it's really as bad as they say'

'It is.'

'Well, now I know.'

The driver grinned. 'Maybe next time you'll listen when people tell you things.'

A mile out from the north gate the road forked. Half the traffic would stay on the main road, the other half would take the turning that followed the river past the old quarries down to Lonazep. Ziani's original plan had been to try and get himself on a ship going south, maybe even all the way down to the Gulf, as far from the Eternal Republic as you could go without falling off the edge of the world. Seeing the scrap of paper on the bench in the storeroom had changed all that. If he went south, it'd mean he was never coming back. Instead, he waited till they stopped for the night at Seventh Milestone. The driver crawled under the tarpaulin, pointing out that there was only room for one.

'No problem,' Ziani said. 'I'll be all right under the cart.' As soon as he was satisfied the driver was asleep, Ziani emerged and started to walk. Geography wasn't his strong suit, but as soon as the sun came up he'd be able to see the mountains across the plain, due west. Going west meant he'd be away for a while, maybe a very long time, but sooner or later he'd be back.