The Escapement

12

The announcement that Major Gace Daurenja had been appointed supreme allied commander was greeted with stunned amazement, rapidly followed by the special blend of loathing and respect unique to the military. As one career officer on the Vadani staff remarked, the bugger was everywhere. He never slept; according to his staff, he sat up all night, sweeping through paperwork like a scythe through corn. When reveille sounded (an innovation of his own; hitherto, the military day had begun with a slouch and a crawl rather than the blare of trumpets), he held court in his tent, parcelling out the day's meticulously detailed assignments, all written in his own spiky, legible hand; in the morning he went through the camp like a ferret in a warren, suddenly appearing and asking the most difficult questions imaginable, ferociously well-informed, his disapproval oppressive but never voiced, his suggestions and recommendations admirably, infuriatingly sensible. At noon precisely he ate a basic infantry ration-bread, bacon, beans-while the heads of department reported to him. In the afternoon, five in-depth meetings of exactly one hour. The evening ration. Two hours kept free for matters arising. Three hours of briefings, policy debates, disciplinary and commissariat business. Then everyone else went to bed, leaving him alone to do the real work of the day, as he liked to call it. His final chore, meticulously observed, was the composition of a detailed report for Duke Valens, sent off at dawn each day by duke's messenger, with a dozen cavalry troopers as escort: and another, similar but even longer and more detailed, for the Aram Chantat liaison.

"We must admit," the liaison told him one evening, after an exhaustive discussion of the problems and practicalities of large-scale military laundry, "that had Engineer Vaatzes not recommended you for this post, we would not have considered you for it. True, we were greatly impressed with your skill and enterprise in the matter of the fortress on the Lonazep road. But we believed that you lacked military experience. Clearly that was not the case."

Daurenja smiled. "I'm fortunate," he said. "I've done a bit of nearly everything in my time. My rule is, always learn a new skill if you can, it'll come in useful sooner or later."

The liaison nodded gently. "You would appear to have had ample opportunity," he said. "We have been making enquiries about you." He paused, face expressionless. "An interesting life, so far."

"Yes," Daurenja said.

A slight movement of the head. "It's not for us to pass judgement," the liaison went on, "particularly as regards crimes-alleged crimes-committed by foreigners against foreigners outside our jurisdiction, long before this alliance was formed. They do not concern us, except insofar as they provide insights into the nature and character of the man accused of them. Any future misconduct, however…" (He paused: one, two seconds.) "…will be regarded as very much our business. In such matters, we are not tolerant people. There is almost no crime in our society. Murder, rape, theft are things we know about only by report; we find them impossible to understand, because we have no experience of them. You will ensure that from now on, your behaviour conforms to our standards and expectations."

Daurenja lowered his head; like a dog, the liaison thought, recog-. nising the authority of the pack leader. "Of course," he said. "You have my word."

"Excellent. In that case, the subject is closed." He shivered a little, pleased to have got that out of the way. "Now," he went on, "we shall discuss your progress towards the next stage of the siege." Twenty-five thousand men, with shovels.

The watchmen on the embankment saw them a long way off, and sent frantic messages to Secretary Psellus at the Guildhall. A vast army, they said, a cloud of dust that blotted out the sun. Anticipating the order, the colonel of the hastily formed first Mezentine cavalry commanded his terrified men to muster and saddle up. No order came.

Secretary Psellus came instead, puffing hoarsely as he climbed the steps up on to the top of the embankment (or glacis, as he called it; he used a lot of weird-sounding words, which people said he got out of old books). He didn't seem particularly concerned. "It's all right," he told them, after ten minutes of silent peering into the dust. "They aren't going to attack. There's not enough of them, and they haven't brought heavy equipment. Could somebody tell Colonel Sporades to let his men get off their horses, please? They'll only become restive if they're kept standing about like that."

Psellus was right. The column halted about fifty yards outside the extreme range of the heaviest trebuchets. They appeared to be doing something, but nobody could make out what. After an hour of agonising suspense, the watch officer sent out three observers, mounted on the fastest horses in the City. They walked out and galloped back.

"They look like they're digging a trench," was all they had to say for themselves. "Thousands of them, with picks and shovels, and there's a bunch of them unloading timbers off wagons."

The watchers on the embankment relaxed a little. The enemy had come, but they weren't going to attack; instead, they were digging a trench-a latrine, perhaps, or graves for their own dead, victims of a highly contageous outbreak of plague (wouldn't that be nice), or maybe they were planning on planting some climbing beans. Like it mattered. They weren't going to attack. Nothing to worry about.

But Psellus was worried, though he tried, hard and successfully, not to show it. He knew exactly what they were doing. The trench they were digging would run parallel with the embankment frontage for something like a hundred yards; it would be six feet deep by three feet wide. By the time they'd finished it, the watchers on the embankment would have lost interest, and so wouldn't notice when the line of the trench began to change, creeping gradually slantwise, approaching the embankment, one yard forward for every twenty leading away. Then it would stop and angle sharply back-thirty degrees would be best practice, though it depended on how stiff and rocky the ground was-and begin its slow zigzag approach to the City: forty yards, an angled turn, another forty yards, and so on. Being mostly side-on, the trench would be sheltered from artillery fire (if it came on straight, at right angles, an expert artilleryman could shoot down into it), and the spoil would always be heaped on the side facing the City, to give additional cover. He'd seen it all, reduced to neatly ruled lines in diagrams, in the old book. Once the trench came within easy shot of the engines on the embankment, he'd start to see pavises (tall, broad wicker shields, mounted on wheeled carriages) put out to guard the sappers from arrows and catapult shot lobbed up high. Once the pavises appeared, of course, they'd begin their own artillery bombardment; its purpose not to kill men or damage machines or structures, but simply to keep heads down and rule out any risk of a sortie from the gates to force the trenches and kill the sappers. In all likelihood, if his enemy was proposing to do the job properly, when this trench was halfway another one would start off, aimed at a different point on the embankment; one of them would be a blind, to leave him no choice but to divide his forces. The other would be the real thing, and when it eventually sidled up to the base of the mound…

He didn't want to think about that. From the forward point of the leading bastion he could see nothing but small, teeming shapes, the very occasional flash of light on a shovel blade fresh from the forge. According to the old book, an acceptable rate of progress would be a hundred yards every twenty-four hours; so, with a scale map, an abacus and a protractor, it'd be an easy enough job to calculate exactly how long it would be before the trench reached the flooded ditch at the foot of the embankment, on which, he knew, his people were placing so much fragile hope. They hadn't read the book, of course. With cruel impartiality, the book told you how to build an uncrossable moat in chapter six, and how to cross it with minimal casualties in chapter nine. In chapter ten it gave instructions on how to disrupt the assault on the moat, to the utter discomfiture of the enemy-but not if they'd read chapter thirteen, counter measures against disruption. So detailed, so clearly written, so authoritative; you could read the whole history of the siege there, from the first spade stuck in the ground to the collapse of the last undermined wall. You could figure out a precise schedule, with estimates of killed and wounded accurate to within five per cent plus or minus. Simply by reading to the end of the book, you'd know what was going to happen. Curious, that: a hundred years before Ziani Vaatzes was born, before Boioannes decided that the best way to advance his career was a war, before the minor clerk Psellus took the decision to invade Eremia and slaughter its people, the book had already foreseen and planned it all. The schematics, the working drawings, every detail of the design, the exact specifications of the death of the City of Mezentia had been there, pressed like dried flowers between the book's covers, all along.

Well, Psellus thought, I've been condemned to death by a man writing a book a century before I was born, and according to the specification there's nothing at all I can do about it. But (he smiled to himself) I've got something he never anticipated, which might yet render all this digging and building and piling up earth and burning completely irrelevant. I've got Ziani Vaatzes.

"Any idea what all this is in aid of?" Someone was talking to him. Oachem Phrazus, superintendent of mid-range artillery; an idiot, but too noisy not to be put in charge of something. The book-writer would've known all about him. Psellus pulled a grave face, and shrugged.

"Your guess is as good as mine," he said.

"Well, if it keeps them happy and out of mischief," Phrazus replied indulgently. "They can dig their little molehills all they like. Soon as they come in range of my Type Seventeens, they'll wish they'd never been born."

(No; because by then they'll be shovelling the earth from the trench into stout wicker baskets, called gabions, and stacking them five deep and three high on the lip of the trench. Your catapult stones will smash the baskets and spray dirt and gravel all over the place, but you'll be wasting your time. I know this, because to all intents and purposes it's already happened.)

"Let's hope so," Psellus said cheerfully. "Would you mind very much staying here for a while and keeping an eye on things? There's a job I've got to do back at the Guildhall. If anything important happens, send someone to let me know."

Phrazus nodded, looking over Psellus' shoulder at the swarming black dots in the distance. "Of course," he said. "But nothing's going to happen, I can promise you that. My guess is, they're building a bunker. Somewhere safe where their leaders can cower once we start bombarding the hell out of them."

Psellus smiled and left him. A covered chair was waiting to carry him back to the Guildhall, but he waved it on, preferring to walk. One good thing: he'd had more exercise in the time since he'd succeeded Boioannes than in the whole of the rest of his adult life. By the time the savages killed him, he ought to be splendidly fit and healthy.

"Falier's wife," he said to the Guildhall guard captain. "Which cell is she in?"

The captain gave him a number; a specified cell in a particular row in a block on the third floor of the west wing. "I'll have her brought up to your office, shall I?" he said.

Psellus shook his head. "I think I'd rather go to her," he said. "Thank you for the offer, though."

The captain looked surprised, but he couldn't be expected to understand. The reproachful look on his face said, why would anybody want to go visiting in a dirty, smelly prison? But, of course, he had no choice.

It was the first time he'd been in a place like this, and naturally he had no idea what it was like. He'd anticipated darkness, filth, damp, stench, rotting straw, the white leach of saltpetre streaking the walls, the olive-pit shapes of rat droppings. Instead it was well-lit, savagely clean, not a speck of dust or a cobweb anywhere. Of course. In real terms, the jailers were prisoners too. They swept and dusted and scrubbed because there was nothing else to do in their warehouse crammed with toxic human waste. That was the truly horrifying thing about it: the sense of time as an enemy, to be fought tooth and nail (but there was so much of it; you killed an hour, but what good did that do when there were thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions more hours just waiting to take its place? Like a siege).

The corridor his directions led him to had been whitewashed recently. It glared at him, and the sound of his heels on the brick floor was embarrassingly loud. The duty warder asked him if it was his first visit to the cells, as though he was here to cut a tape and open something. It took three keys to open the steel door.

She looked up as he came in. "Oh," she said. "It's you."

"Me," he confirmed. "Is it all right if I sit down?"

Whitewashed brick. Twelve feet by eight. A brick ledge stuck out of the wall, covered by a thin mattress. A water jug sat on the floor. That was it. All scrupulously clean, of course.

She sat down on the bed. "What on?" she said.

He conceded the first scratch. "The floor, I suppose," he said, and made the effort of folding his legs and back, settling himself as best he could into the corner by the door. "Are you warm enough in here?" he asked without thinking.

She nodded. "It's always the same," she said, and he thought: well, it would be. Just cold enough to be mildly uncomfortable, if you're wearing a plain white cotton bag with holes for your head and arms, and you have no blanket, but not cold enough to do you any harm. Everything always the same. Nothing, no defence, standing between you and infinite time.

"I expect you're wondering why you're here," he said.

"No," she replied.

He let that go. Just by being there, he knew, he was giving her the victory; every minute he spent with her was a massacre of her enemy. The almost impossible task he faced was turning that fact to his advantage.

"Moritsa's fine," he said. "I made sure. She's been well looked after, at the orphanage."

A tiny glow of anger in her eyes, quickly fading. "That's good," she said.

"I can get you out of here, you know," he said gently. "One word from me, and you can go home."

"I know."

He'd forgotten just how formidable she could be; and he'd made a mistake, he realised, by bringing her here. A place like this would only make her stronger. "I just need you to tell me a few things, that's all."

"You can ask."

He watched her closely. There was more to see in the whitewashed wall behind her head. "It's about your husband-your former husband, I mean, Ziani."

"I thought it might be."

He nodded. "I've thought about him a great deal," Psellus went on, "about the sort of man he was-good heavens, listen to me, I'm talking about him as though he's dead; the sort of man he is. I feel I've got to know him quite well. I met him; did I tell you that? Anyway, I've studied him quite carefully, ever since this whole wretched business began, and every time I try and make sense of it all, I keep coming up against a solid wall. You see, I can't for the life of me figure out why he did it."

Not a flicker. "Did what?"

"Why he built the doll. No," he corrected himself, "that's not it. He built the doll because Moritsa wanted one. What I can't understand is why he changed the design, improved it the way he did. That was so wildly out of character for such a sensible, law-abiding man. And there was no need for it, no need at all."

She shrugged, and he thought of a lizard on a wall, so frugal with its movements. Of course, he realised, it's no wonder she's adapted so well to this environment. She's been in one kind of prison or another all her life. "It's all right," he said pleasantly, "I quite understand. You don't have to say a word if you don't want to. I'll just tell you what I think, the conclusions I've reached, and maybe you'll feel like commenting. All right?"

Another shrug. "If you like."

"Thank you." He shifted a little; his left leg was going to sleep. When had he last sat on a floor? he asked himself. When he went to Civitas Vadanis to meet Ziani Vaatzes, of course. "Yes," he went on, "it's a mystery, isn't it? It's been haunting me, you might say, ever since I first looked into the case. Everything I've learned about Ziani-I mean Vaatzes-leads me to believe he'd be the last man on earth who'd ever do such a thing. He isn't a free thinker, a born rebel, the sort who breaks rules just because they're there. I think he genuinely believes in the Guild system, the inviolability-is that a word, I wonder?-of the specifications, all that rather high-flown theoretical stuff. I was so puzzled," he went on, deliberately allowing his voice to drone, "that in the end I turned to the charge sheet, just to have a look at these terrible illegal modifications he risked everything to make."

He paused. Of course she said nothing, gave no sign that he was there in the cell with her.

"At first glance," he said, "to a non-specialist like me, they simply didn't make any sense. An awful lot of work, the risk, needless to say, but they didn't actually achieve anything. What I mean is, they didn't improve the doll at all, make it work any better. I was starting to think I'd never understand when at last it came to me, the proverbial flash of lightning. When Compliance raided your house, the doll wasn't finished. The modifications didn't seem to do anything because they weren't complete. There," he added with a smile. "What do you make of that?"

She frowned. "Like I keep telling you," she said, "I don't know anything about it."

"Ah well." He nodded a couple of times. "In that case, I'll have to explain my theory. It's only a theory, of course; I can't prove any of it."

He took a deep breath, organised his mind; then he said: "Once I'd got that assumption, I started reading up in the Guildhall library, about design theory. Desperately complicated stuff, needless to say, and very difficult for an elderly clerk like me to understand. But I kept at it, whenever I had a spare half-hour or so, and eventually I knew enough about how mechanisms work to hazard a guess at what Ziani was up to. I think he was modifying the doll so it'd move its arms and head up and down, possibly its legs as well. Maybe it'd even dance, I don't know. Anyway, once I'd got that far-well, you don't need me to tell you what that suggested to me, do you?"

He got a cold stare for that. It was almost as good as a round of applause.

"All right," he said, "maybe you do. I think Ziani is a man deeply, deeply in love: with you, with his daughter. The two of you mean literally everything to him; a glib enough phrase, but when you look at it and try and think what it actually means…" He sighed. "Now, you aren't going to comment on that one way or the other, so it's just an assumption. So let's assume. Ziani's love for you is his entire world; but he's not a naturally romantic or outgoing man. In spite of the strength of his feelings, he doesn't know how to express them. That's why he spent hours and hours writing love poems about you, but never actually showed them to you. It's like an invisible barrier he can't cross. He can't tell you how much he loves you; so he goes away somewhere on his own and makes something instead, because making things is all he knows how to do. He made those poems. He even made a book to write them down in. And he wanted so very much to make something for his daughter. Really, it gives a whole new meaning to the expression 'making love'. Rather literal-minded, of course, but that's a sort of occupational hazard for an engineer."

She yawned; but not very well.

"He wanted to make something for Moritsa," he went on. "Probably he'd mentioned it a few times, asked you what you thought she'd like. And one day, you told him: she'd like a mechanical doll, like the one we saw at such-and-such a fair. He'd have thought, that's fine, I can do that, and the basic type's not a restricted design. And then you said it again, I expect; in passing, probably not looking him in the face: like the one we saw at the fair, just like that one. But the doll you were referring to wasn't the basic type. It was the advanced model-I ought to know the type number, but it's slipped my mind. But I do know that the advanced model moves its arms and legs and head, and it dances."

She was looking at him.

"Well," he continued, managing to drone although his heart was racing, "that must've been a blow to him, because the advanced model's a restricted design. He couldn't just go to the specification tables and copy it down. He probably said as much to you; and I expect you pulled a very small sad face and said, oh what a shame, she'll be so disappointed. You won't have made any big deal about it. You'll have touched his mind ever so gently, because you knew that'd be the best way to make him do what you wanted. Quite probably he doesn't even remember you saying it; he'll believe it came from him, not you."

"I'm sorry," she said, in a voice as brittle as glass. "You've lost me, I'm afraid."

He ignored her. "I imagine he let it prey on his mind for a week or so," he said, "like an arrow in a wound slowly going rusty, until it poisons the blood. Then he'll have made up his mind. He can't get access to the approved design, but he won't let that stop him. He's an engineer, isn't he? He's even submitted modifications to military designs-all done properly, of course, through channels-and a couple of them have actually been accepted. He knows he can adapt the basic model to make it do all the things he believes Moritsa wants. And why shouldn't he? Nobody will ever know, after all. He probably blotted the risk out of his mind; in fact, as I see it, he must have felt he had no choice, risk or no risk. His little girl wanted him to do it, and it was the only way he knew to show her how much he loved her. No choice at all, really."

Now she was looking away.

"Well," Psellus said, after making a show of clearing his throat, "that was my clever theory. Next I started wondering how on earth I could prove it. And then I thought of a way. I thought, I'll send someone, a nice friendly lady, to ask Moritsa herself. Not straight out, of course. She'd start talking about a mechanical doll she'd seen, and observe how the girl reacted. Splendid idea, I thought, so I made the arrangements. But when I got the results, it seemed like they contradicted my whole theory. You see, when the nice lady started talking about dolls, Moritsa got quite upset. She hated them, she said. Well, the nice lady said, was that because of what happened to Daddy? And do you know what she said? She said she didn't understand, because Daddy did a bad thing and ran away from home, but it didn't have anything to do with dolls. No, she hated dolls because they'd seen one at the fair, and it frightened her. The way it moved its arms and legs was creepy and scary, and she never wanted to have to see one ever again."

He looked at her face. Frozen. "I hope you're proud of yourself," she said, "bullying a little girl like that. I don't suppose she knew what she was saying, if you had your people persecuting her, asking her questions about her father."

It was all he could do to stop himself grinning and clapping his hands. It was a counterattack, but a frightened one, hurried, snatched, deficient in timing and direction. Instead, he said, "Of course you're angry, what mother wouldn't be? But I knew you wouldn't tell me the truth if I asked you; and I promise you, it was done very carefully so as not to upset her."

"So you say." Anger, yes, bitter anger, but nothing to do with the way her daughter had been treated.

"Be that as it may." Oh, but he enjoyed saying that. "That's what she said, and I believe her. In which case," he went on, taking his time, savouring it, "the whole idea of making a doll, let alone an illegal one, must have come from you. From you or through you, anyway. Clearly the girl didn't ask him for one, and I very much doubt he plucked the project out of the air, he's not that imaginative. So it must have been you," he said. "Mustn't it?"

He couldn't help admiring the sheer still force she was putting into her defence. But it's one thing to be impressed by a performance, quite another to be convinced by it. She was tiring rapidly, like someone who'd lost a lot of blood. "Really," she said-beautifully done-"you've got to have something more important to think about than that. They're saying the savages are about to attack the City, for God's sake. Shouldn't you be up there doing something about it?"

He smiled. "Mustn't it?" he said.

She shrugged. "Fine," she said. "All right, I admit it. I put the idea into his head. I just wanted to get rid of him, so Falier and I could get married. But I couldn't just walk out of the house. He'd have gone to law, they'd have taken Moritsa away and given her to him. I wasn't having that."

"So you decided to murder him, then."

A very wan, faded smile. "I suppose so," she said. "If you want to look at it like that. I never loved him, you know. But he just sort of took delivery of me, like I was a load of materials, to be signed for. That's really not very fair, is it?"

Psellus nodded slowly. "You trapped him into committing a crime which you knew carried the death penalty, just so you'd be rid of him." He looked carefully at her face. "So you could marry Falier."

"Yes."

He shifted again. The pins and needles were spreading up his leg, above the knee. "I suppose Falier thought up the idea of the mechanical doll. Being an engineer himself, of course. He'd have known about the two types, all the technical stuff."

She nodded. "He's a smart boy," she said.

"Quite." He smiled pleasantly. "And very brave. Like you. I mean, you must both have known what a terrible risk you were running."

She seemed perfectly relaxed, but the knuckles of her left hand, clamped around a handkerchief, were white. "Not so terrible," she said.

"Heavens," he replied, "you really are brave, aren't you? I mean to say, you must have known there was a very real chance that you, as the wife of an abominator, would've been executed yourself, or at least put in prison. And Moritsa too, of course. Well, I suppose I can credit you having that sort of nerve, but I wouldn't have thought Falier would've wanted to risk it. After all, he stood to lose the girl he loved. If you were both that desperate, why not just poison him? That way, you'd only have been punished if you'd been found out."

Winning is one thing. Daring to exploit the victory… "We didn't see it like that," she said.

"Obviously not." Psellus sighed, closed his eyes for a moment. "And you got away with it, so really, you were right all along. But, like I said, very brave. And by rights, nobody should ever have suspected anything. You've got no idea how much effort I've had to put in, just to get this far."

A grin. "Well, I hope it was all worth it."

"Absolutely. The truth is always valuable. My father used to say, you can't plan a journey unless you know where you're starting from." He tried to stand up, and found he couldn't. The pain of the pins and needles made him grunt, and just for a moment he panicked. He couldn't get up.

"Excuse me," he said. "I'm sorry to be a nuisance, but would you mind giving me a hand to stand up? My leg's gone to sleep."

She laughed. "You're pathetic," she said.

"Yes," he replied mildly. "Aren't I just? The ruler of the Perpetual Republic, and I can't even get myself up off the floor."

She got off the bed and held out her hand. He gripped it and hauled himself to his feet, wincing at the pain. "Thank you," he said. "You've been a tremendous help."

She hadn't let go of his hand. "What's going to happen to me?" she asked.

"Oh, you can go home now," he said. "I'll get them to bring Moritsa back in the morning."

He felt her fingers slacken and let go. "That's it, then. All this was just to make me own up."

"Yes." He took a step, and ended up leaning heavily against the wall. "And it doesn't really change anything. I mean, Ziani's still guilty. He committed the crime. He shouldn't have made the doll, no matter what pressures were brought to bear on him. I just needed to know why, that was all. And now I do know, so I know where my journey has to start from. Extremely valuable. Thank you." He reached out and banged his fist on the door. When he heard the handle turn, he added, "You know, you really have been most helpful. In fact, you'd have helped me far less if you'd told me the truth. You can learn so much more from lies, I always find." They brought Falier to see him, before he left. He looked terrified, which was, of course, perfectly understandable. Not, he decided, a young man burdened by a dangerous excess of courage. Even so, it was probably just as well he didn't realise quite how much he had to be scared about.

"Thank you for agreeing to this," Psellus said gravely. "You realise I can't put you fully in the picture. But it is really very important."

Falier shuddered. Even now, though, Psellus could see in his mind the tiny grub of the thought, how can I get something out of this, for me? "I'll do my best, you can rely on me," Falier said, in a rather shaky voice. "And if, well, anything bad happens…"

"Oh, it won't, I'm quite certain of that."

"Yes, but if it does." Pretty to watch, the way he smothered the frown of annoyance. Like the old joke: there's far less to this young man than meets the eye. "You will see to it that Ariessa's looked after, won't you? And the kid."

"Of course."

"Thanks, you've set my mind at rest. I'm really not bothered about myself, but…"

Psellus smiled. The effort hurt his jaw. "Off you go, then. You'll be back again before you know it." And he thought, she must have loved him very much, to put up with having this buffoon in her bed. A remarkable young woman, that. But then, we've always made superb weapons here in the City.

They took Falier to the sally-port in the palisade of the front gate bastion. He couldn't have a horse, they explained, because there was no way of getting it down to ground level; and besides, how would it get past the ditch, ten feet deep, flooded, the bottom mined with sharpened stakes? Falier appreciated that, but how was he supposed to get across the ditch himself? Swim, they said.

"I can't swim," he pointed out.

You're an engineer, they replied. Resourceful. You'll think of something.

Their faith in him was entirely justified. He paddled across on an empty nail-barrel, which stayed afloat nearly the whole distance. As he squelched out of the torchlight into the darkness, he wondered why they'd all been so hostile. They think I'll desert, he realised. The thought hadn't actually crossed his mind before, but now they'd put it there, it'd be wasteful just to throw it out.

Not, he told himself as he walked, that he actually believed for one moment that the City could possibly fall. There were savages, primitive, superstitious, who believed that the sun was a cart driven across the sky by a god, and gods were forgetful creatures; if they didn't remind him with prayers every evening, maybe the sun wouldn't come up tomorrow. But Falier believed in the inevitability of the sun, and he believed in the inviolability of the City. Damn it, they'd never get past the ditch, let alone the bastions, let alone the walls. It simply wasn't possible that such a vast, extravagant expenditure of strength, effort and materials should go to waste (and besides, the enemy were savages, primitives, sun-worshippers or something equally ludicrous). He shivered as water ran down the inside of his trouser legs, and plodded on towards the dim glow ahead.

The light grew brighter. It reminded him a little of the glare on the skyline just before dawn. As he grew closer to it, he realised how big it was; a line of fires where the enemy camp was reported to be. With every step he took, it grew longer, and he thought: that's not a camp, it's a city; a city of fire, a city on fire, maybe he was walking across the present to the future, and what he was looking at was actually the City itself, Mezentia, captured and burning, a reflection in time as in water. Then he remembered that the inhabitants of the fiery city weren't the whole enemy army, just a relatively small force of sappers and diggers, twenty-five thousand. A quarter of a tenth of the full strength they were bringing against the walls of his home. In the dark, of course, you couldn't judge scale very easily. Behind him, the lights on the embankment were just a small glow, whereas the light ahead of him stretched out like a vast orange boulevard; and he thought, there's so many of them, such a huge army, the ditch and the bastions and the wall won't hold them up for more than five minutes. We haven't done nearly enough, and now they're here.

"Falier?" A voice from nowhere. In the dark, distances can't be measured, there's no scale, nothing to calibrate by, either in space or in time. The voice came from the infinite space between two lights in darkness, and from the past. "Falier, is that you?"

"Ziani?"

"Keep still. I'll come to you."

He froze. Gradually a scoop of darkness thickened into a human shape. When it was just close enough to make out its outlines, it stopped. "Thanks for coming," it said.

Ludicrous, talking to a shadow, in a place like this. "That's all right," he heard himself say. "Where are we going?"

"Here'll do." The shadow changed shape, got shorter and thicker. No magic, he realised. Ziani had sat down on the ground. He did the same, hating the feel of wet cloth.

"How's Ariessa?" Ziani asked.

"She's fine."

"Moritsa?"

"She's fine too. If she'd known I was going to see you, I'm sure she'd have sent her love."

It was a stupid thing to say, and a lie as well. Of course, he couldn't see Ziani's face, to judge the effect of his error of judgement. "What did you want to see me about?" he asked.

"I want you to cast your mind back," Ziani said. Unnecessarily; hearing Ziani's voice had done it for him. Just the voice, no face; voices don't change the way someone's appearance does. "When I was arrested," he went on. "You knew all about it, of course."

He dragged back the impulse to lie. No point. "Yes."

"You and she." He was finding it difficult. "You told Compliance."

"Yes."

"To get rid of me. So you and Ariessa could…"

"Yes."

Silence, and the block of clotted shadow didn't move. Then, "It's all right," Ziani said. "I'm not going to attack you. That's why we're meeting like this. If I could see you, I don't think I'd be able to keep from killing you. But knowing the truth's more important." Pause. "I need to know exactly how it happened," Ziani said. "The details. For instance, what made you choose a mechanical toy?"

That didn't make sense. "I don't understand," Falier said.

"Really?" No movement; and suddenly Falier panicked and thought: what if what I'm looking at isn't Ziani after all? What if I'm looking at a rock or a tree-stump, and Ziani's coming up behind me with a knife? But then the outline shifted a little and reassured him. "Let's get this straight. You and Ariessa wanted me out of the way. You, or you and she, decided to trick me into making something illegal, so you could inform on me. Why a doll, is all I'm asking. Why not a clock, or-?"

Falier couldn't help frowning. "It wasn't like that," he said.

"Really?"

"No." This was stupid, Falier thought. He'd been made to come here like this because Ziani knew, because he'd figured it out and needed confirmation; and presumably Psellus thought that once he'd had it confirmed that it was his best friend Falier who'd betrayed him and not the Republic arbitrarily condemning him to death for a misdemeanour, he'd relent and give up seeking his terrible revenge. But that didn't work if Ziani didn't actually know the truth. "No," he said, "it wasn't like that at all. It was my idea, all me. Ariessa told me what you were doing. She said we'd be able to have more time together because you were so busy, making a doll for the kid. I must've said something like, what sort of doll-meaning, how long's it likely to take, how much time will it give us? And she told me you were making a special mechanical doll that could move its arms and legs and dance. And then it just sort of came to me: I knew you were doing something illegal, and if you were caught… I didn't think of it in terms of you dying, I promise you. I just thought, he'll be out of the way, like a piece in a board game. You know how you say, I'll take your castle, you've taken my knight. It's ambiguous, isn't it? So you don't feel guilty. You sort of assume they're captured, not killed, and when the game's over they all get to go home again, so no harm done really. Like fishing, when you catch them and throw them back. I just thought, here's a piece blocking me, but if it gets taken-"

"That's all right," Ziani said softly. "I told you, it's all right. But listen." His voice had changed: soft, but more urgent, the voice of a man who wanted something. "Tell me the truth. Was that really how it was? Your idea, to go to Compliance?"

"Yes. I promise."

"Quite. You wouldn't lie to me. After all, you promised me you'd take care of Ariessa and Moritsa, and you have."

There was no answer to that, so he didn't reply. After a moment, Ziani went on: "Just to get it straight in my mind. Ariessa happened to mention the doll. You realised it was illegal, and you told Compliance."

"Yes."

"Did you discuss it with her first? Did she know? Did she approve?"

He considered lying, but could see nothing to be gained by it. "Yes."

"Thank you. You've been most helpful. You can go now."

That was it? It didn't feel right. "Ziani…"

"One last thing, before you go. Tell Secretary Psellus there's only so much I can do, but I'll try my best. Tell him…" Hesitation; a tired man searching for a form of words. "Tell him, he and I have got to trust each other, no matter what. Will you do that? Those exact words?"

"Yes, of course. Ziani, I'm really sorry. What I did, it was very bad, it was evil…"

For some reason Ziani was laughing. "Don't be stupid," he said. "There's no such thing. No evil, no bad people, they're just a myth. Do you want to know something, Falier? Everything we do in this world, everything that matters, we do for love. It's always love, when you peel away the shell. There's that old song, it's love that makes the world go round. Well, it's true. Who'd have thought it? They didn't want us to know the truth so they hid it where nobody'd ever think of looking, in some stupid old song. It really is true, you know. Apart from mad people, and they're sick and can't be blamed, apart from them, everything bad-I don't mean just greedy or spiteful things; everything really bad that was ever done was done for love. You and me, we love Ariessa. The Eremian duke, Orsea, he loved his country. Even Maris Boioannes loved the City; he wanted what was best for it, and he really believed that he was the best. That's why there's no such thing as evil, Falier. Evil's just love in action, love on the move between wanting and getting. I mean, look at you. A man and a woman love each other, they've got no choice but to do whatever needs to be done. No, you mustn't blame yourself, really. Believe me. I've only just realised this, and it changes everything. You do see that, don't you?"

Falier didn't reply, and it occurred to Ziani that maybe he'd gone, leaving him to make his fine speech to empty air. Not that it mattered. If you tell the truth, does the fact that nobody's listening make it a lie?

He should be getting back, he thought. He had a long, miserable ride back to Civitas Vadanis ahead of him, and there'd be no time to rest once he got there. Too much to do. He was grateful for the darkness, which kept him from seeing Psellus' new defences. The more a dying thing wriggles, the less willing you are to finish it off. But he'd heard everything he needed to hear: solid data, measurements, specifications, numbers. Now he had that information, he knew he'd done enough. The ditch wouldn't be a problem, and neither would the bastions, and as for the wall, that was already taken care of. He looked towards the City, a vague blob of firelight, and thought, it'll be that much brighter when the whole City's burning. A man sitting where I am now should be able to read a book by that light. He smiled. No evil, except necessary evil; and what's more necessary than love?

He closed his eyes for a moment. A blind man could find his way back to the camp from here just by following the smell of woodsmoke. To pass the time as he walked, he compiled a mental nomenclature of parts. Daurenja. Secretary Psellus, Duke Valens, that Aram Chantat liaison whose name he couldn't pronounce. Maris Boioannes. In order to get this far, he'd had to rely to a certain extent on luck. He'd had to leave a few blank spaces in the design, vaguely labelled: transmission, gearing, escapement. It was a practice he despised. Instead of having the whole thing drawn out before you start cutting metal, leave the tricky bits till later and hope you'll think of something. Of course, he'd had no choice. Now that the design was complete, he reckoned he hadn't done so badly, considering the prototype had also to be the finished product.

He was close enough now to see men silhouetted against the firelight. He thought of her; at least, he tried to call her into his mind, but all he could see was someone standing in a doorway with the light behind her.

He stopped walking. I've failed, he thought. The design was good, I made the parts well and fitted them together all right, but the job turns out not to be possible after all.

No, there was no point thinking like that. Everything was possible. He considered the example of Duke Valens, who killed Duke Orsea so he could marry his wife. Now, she loved Orsea, but when he died, she loved Valens just as much, or more. Everything was possible, provided you arranged the course of events.

A sentry yelled at him. He called back his name, and walked slowly into the firelight with his hands on his head. Luckily, the sentry knew him by sight.

"I've been to look at the defences," he explained, when the sentry asked what he'd been doing. "Too risky in daylight."

The sentry nodded and let him pass. He walked slowly up the main roadway that ran through the middle of the camp, until he found Daurenja's tent. The flap was down; yellow light glared under it, seeping out like a spillage. There was a guard outside it, of course.

"I'm sorry," said the guard. "Orders. He's not to be disturbed."

"He'll see me," Ziani replied.

Daurenja was sitting behind a table; actually, a wide board resting on two sawhorses. On it was one large sheet of paper, covered with dozens of tiny drawings, columns of figures, notes, tables of parts.

"That's uncanny." Daurenja grinned at him. "The man I most wanted to see in the whole world. Come in, sit down. Tell me what you think of this."

It was a design, but at first Ziani couldn't make out what it was supposed to be. A main drive unit, clockwork, powered by four coiled clocksprings in parallel. The takeoff connected to a complex gear train, supplying power to five spindles at three different ratios of conversion. A gearbox-why was it stuck right up there, requiring those long, fragile linkages? Cams and camshafts, with lifters and interrupters. By the spacing of the eccentrics and the complicated but ingenious travelling arm running down a series of zigzag keyways…

He realised what he was looking at. Not a machine after all. It was a plan of the defences, with the offensive trenches, saps and mines superimposed on it. A machine for defending and attacking a city. As he looked down at it, he realised why he'd made the mistake. Both functions, defence and attack, were part of the same mechanism. This machine was designed to do both.

Except that it wasn't a machine, of course. But it worked just like one.

"What do you reckon?" Daurenja asked anxiously. The fool, Ziani thought, he really does value my opinion. Of course, he was another example of the same principle: a device for being the hero and the villain simultaneously.

"You need to cap the approach trenches at the turns," he said. "Gabions'd do it, but you might want a few heavy steel pavises as well. Otherwise, a battery of scorpions here"-he pressed the paper with his fingernail, hard enough to leave a mark-"could shoot down into all your main trenches here, here and here, look."

"You're right," Daurenja said, scrabbling for his pen. "Thanks for pointing that out." He dipped the nib in ink and wrote PAVISES in big letters at the point of each angle of the zigzags. "Anything else?"

"Give me a moment," Ziani replied mildly. "There's a lot to take in."

Now there was a thought. Defence and attack working together to achieve the foreseen result; the machine wouldn't work without both of them, acting and reacting on each other. You could say the same about good and evil. He traced the sequence of events through the various stages and processes-the flooded trench, the bastions, the embankment, the walls. Then he stopped, and grinned. "It's not finished," he said. "No escapement."

"Sorry? I don't follow."

Ziani leaned back in his chair, which creaked. "You've got past the new defences, under the wall, but now you're stuck. You need to bring the wall down, and bring up foot soldiers right away to force the breach. But there's nothing about that here. Did you forget, or haven't you got around to figuring that step out yet?"

This time, Daurenja smiled. "Actually," he said, "you haven't read it quite right. All that bit there" (he pointed) "is really just a feint, to draw off their forces. But we're getting into the City through this gate here."

The Westgate; the strongest and the best defended of the five main gates. But it opened on to Guildhall Street, the widest, straightest thoroughfare in the City, leading directly to the Guildhall itself. Carry the Westgate with sufficiently overwhelming numbers, and a half-mile sprint up an unblockable, indefensible road would get you to the seat of government before anybody, even the best professional soldiers, could stop you.

"You're way ahead of me, I can see that," Daurenja said happily. "Once we've taken the Guildhall, we hold it until the sappers have brought down the walls here, here and here. While all the defenders are rushing towards the centre of town, three support parties are coming up behind them to take them in flank and rear. Then it'll just be a matter of clearing the walls themselves and mopping up. Well?" he added anxiously. "What do you think?"

It was a superb piece of engineering. A ram, a scoop and a pivot, then just tighten the collet and grip, equalising the inside and outside pressure. But he had to say something, so: "You're very laid back about breaking down the Westgate," he said. "I take it you're thinking of using a battering ram, presumably in a covered frame, but I suggest you may have overlooked the gradient of the embankment. You'd need, what, thirty couple of draught horses…"

"Nothing like that." He'd never seen Daurenja happier. "I mean, yes, you're right. You'd never get a ram up that incline under fire, and even if you could, it'd take too long. By the time you'd got through, they'd have had a chance to barricade the main drag, and then you're fighting every step of the way instead of making a quick, decisive dash to victory. And before you say it, I know the gatehouse is built on heavy clay, so undermining it'd be a nightmare. No, the hell with that. What I've got in mind…"

Ziani knew what he was going to say. The stone-throwing pot, Daurenja's great invention. It was, of course, the answer, assuming it could be relied on. He watched Daurenja's face as he talked about it, like a young boy talking about his first girl, eyes bright, unable to keep the love from seeping past the seal of his mouth. He thought: this is a remarkable man, by any standards. Engineer, soldier, murderer, rapist, scholar, traitor, thief, hero, a man of ingenuity, resource, courage, determination, intellect; a passionate man, driven in everything he does by a ferocious pressure of love, like the poison under an abscessed tooth. He understood him now, clearly for the first time, his characteristics and properties. Daurenja was the two different kinds of love, the good and the evil. His life had been spent in search of a worthy object for his unlimited ocean of love, and he'd found it at last, in the weapon he'd conceived and brought to life. Well, Ziani thought, that's all right, I can handle lovers. Lovers are easy to use.

But, again, he had to say something; so he asked, "Have you tested it yet?"

Just a brief flicker; pain, fear. "Not yet, no. I want to keep it a secret, you see. The whole point is, it's got to come as a complete surprise. You and me, and the duke, of course, we're the only ones who know what it does or how it works. If I test it, the enemy'll find out about it, you can bet your life on it. Besides," he added, with a slight waver in his voice, "it doesn't need testing. It'll be just right, you'll see."

He'd heard that flicker in men's voices before, when they said things like, Besides, I trust her, I don't need to know where she is all the time or what she's doing, there'll be a perfectly reasonable explanation, you'll see. And that made him think of the cold spot. Love welds together, but a cold spot is where the seams and joins begin to tear apart. Poor Daurenja, he thought; he couldn't see it, just as I couldn't see the cold flaw in my own weld. Perhaps love blinds you to it, and only a stranger can see it.

"I hope so," he said gently. "Everything'll be depending on it. If it goes wrong…"

"It won't." Admirable, the way Daurenja dragged back the anger and replaced it almost instantly with gratitude for friendly concern. "Trust me," he added, smiling, "I've been really thorough. I did years of experiments, remember, I've thought about nothing else for-well, as long as I can remember, really. It's funny, when something like this comes into your life, it gradually takes over, and everything else gets pushed to the edges. It's all right," he added, "I won't let you down. I know you persuaded them to give me this chance because you believe in it too. I knew you'd come round, you see, once you realised what an amazing thing this is. You can feel it too, can't you? The sense that something incredible's about to happen."

Ziani nodded. He understood. The old contradiction: you want everybody, all your family and friends, to realise how wonderful she is, but nobody else is allowed to love her, only you. "So," he said briskly, "that'll take care of the gate, then. And everything else should go smoothly after that." He nodded, his seal of approval. "Yes, I think it'll work. You've done well."

A big smile spread over Daurenja's face. "I couldn't have done it without you," he said. "I mean that, I'd never have got this far on my own. And I'm sorry; I mean, I know I've not…" He pulled a face. "I've not exactly behaved well towards you, at times. I've pushed and nagged, and I've bullied you, done things I really regret."

"That's all right," Ziani said quietly. "You had no choice."

"Yes, exactly," Daurenja said excitedly, "I knew you'd understand. There were things that had to be done, so I did them. But all the same, I do feel bad about it. I mean, using people to get what you want, like they're tools or bits of a mechanism, it's deceitful. I can't help feeling bad about it, the way I've manipulated so many people, and you especially."

"No big deal," Ziani replied. "It's actions and outcomes that matter, not intentions. And when something's got to be done, it's no good killing yourself with guilt about it."

Daurenja laughed. He was happy. "I must say," he said, "I wish all my victims took such a pragmatic view of things."