The Escapement

16

His authority confirmed, General Daurenja held a briefing for the sappers and miners. It was dark by the time it finished, which fitted the schedule perfectly. While the meeting was going on, the quartermasters' division went round the camp gathering up every lantern they could find, filling them with fresh oil and trimming the wicks. Another detail reported to the foot of the machine trench, where the carpenters had spent the day putting up a large holding pen. At dusk, the stockmen drove in four hundred draught oxen. A rumour quickly spread that the oxen were going to be slaughtered, butchered and salted down to supplement the dwindling meat ration, and a crowd gathered, firmly convinced they'd be giving away offal and tripe. Instead, they were pressed into service yoking the oxen into one enormous team. It soon turned out that nobody knew how this was to be done; the general had given the order, presumably in the belief that someone had the knowledge and the necessary equipment, and it was only when the animals had been paired up and driven under their individual yokes that the full depth of the problem became apparent. The drovers pointed out, loudly and often, that oxen had to be yoked to a rigid beam, such as a cart-pole. The staff major who'd just discovered, much to his annoyance, that he was apparently in charge of this stage of the operation pointed out that he didn't have a pole or a beam or a tree-trunk long enough to yoke two hundred pair to, because it was impossible that such a thing should exist. The drovers asserted that that wasn't their fault; if someone had asked them earlier, they'd have told them it couldn't be done. The major replied that it could be done, because it had to be done, because the general had given an order; then, rather more calmly, he said that he was sure he'd heard somewhere about huge teams of oxen being used to drag enormous stone blocks on sledges, so it was possible, and presumably a stonemason would know about that sort of thing. Consulted on the point, the stonemasons said that they'd heard of such a thing, but none of them had done it themselves or talked to anybody who'd ever seen it done. One mason, dissenting, said that he'd heard that six hundred oxen had been used to drag the lintel stones when they built the municipal flour-mill in Mezentia; if the major wanted advice, all he had to do was take a walk down the trench, swim the ditch, climb the embankment, knock on the City gates and ask to speak to the clerk of works.

The discussion was interrupted by the arrival of a colonel of engineers from the general's staff, who wanted to know what the hold-up was. On being told the reason, he ordered the major to think of something, and left quickly.

At this point, someone remembered the chain.

Nobody knew what it was or what it had once been used for. They'd found it in the ruins of a burnt-out transport depot beside the Lonazep road, and the most popular theory was that the Mezentines had made it for their customers in the Old Country, part of the payment for the services of the mercenaries they'd hired for the attack on Civitas Eremiae. For some reason it had never got to Lonazep; instead, it had been left in a shed, as often happens to awkward consignments, until the war overtook it and deprived it of significance and purpose. General Daurenja had read about it in some report and ordered that it should be sent to Civitas Vadanis to be broken up for scrap; it was four hundred yards long, each link weighing fifty pounds, all steel, so hard a file could scarcely cut it. The problem of shifting it had been passed around the transport executive like a hot coal until the commander of an Aram Chantat infantry division, with a point to prove in some long-forgotten argument, undertook to see to it. He sent two regiments to the depot site, where his men struggled for five days with rollers and levers to lay the chain out in a straight line. Then the regiments lined up beside the chain, and on the word of command, each man bent down and lifted up one link. It took them two days to get the chain back to the camp, at which point the commander, who'd forgotten about his undertaking, reassigned the regiments to other duties.

The major wasn't keen on the idea. For one thing, there was the obvious problem of shifting the thing. Furthermore, there was the matter of the weight, which he anticipated would burden the oxen so much that they wouldn't be able to do the job they'd been brought there for. Also, how were the yokes to be attached to the chain, and who was going to lift it up while it was being attached? In any case, the chain was, by definition, not a rigid beam; if a flexible beam would suffice, they might as well use rope and have done with it.

By now, however, the idea of the chain had taken hold in the minds of the senior engineers, who started suggesting solutions to the problems he'd raised, disagreeing with each other and all shouting at once. Why not a flexible beam, they wanted to know; and the drovers, when this question was put to them, replied that they'd specified rigid beams because that was all they'd ever used, but for all they knew a flexible beam might work, though they wouldn't be held responsible if it didn't. The stockmen disagreed fundamentally among themselves on the weight issue, one faction maintaining that an extra hundredweight or so was nothing to a good ox, the other asserting that it'd take six hundred oxen just to pull the chain. Bringing the chain and lifting it was dismissed as a trivial concern, especially by the Vadani miners. The camp was overflowing with Aram Chantat, they said, who sat around all day doing nothing while brave Vadani dug in the trenches and got shot at. Let them do it, and make themselves useful for a change.

Faced with this difference of opinion, the major referred the matter to General Daurenja, who expressed deep concern that the issue hadn't been addressed earlier, deplored the fact that they were now severely behind schedule, and ordered the major to use the chain. Taking this order as his authority, the major sent for three regiments of the Aram Chantat and an additional hundred oxen.

It was now pitch dark, and every third man in the Aram Chantat contingent was issued with a lantern, so he could walk beside the chain-carriers and light the way. The shortest, straightest route was right through the middle of the camp, and the Mezentine observers on the embankment reported that the enemy were holding some kind of festival, involving a torchlight procession. This was taken as an indication that it would be a quiet night, and four of the five artillery batteries were allowed to stand down and go home.

Shortly after midnight, when the chain was finally in place and lashed securely to the yokes with requisitioned cart-reins, a small party of sappers slipped quietly into the trench, dragging behind them trolleys mounted with large spools for paying out rope. The Mezentines' attention, what there was of it, was concentrated on the lights of the presumed festival, so they weren't observed as they fed the rope ends through the pulleys attached to the stakes they'd planted and cemented in a few days earlier. They checked the pulleys were greased and running smoothly, then led the ropes back up the trench. One end they tied to the last link of the chain. The other went round the towing hitches bolted to the fronts of the worms.

There was a young Mezentine artilleryman, Lucazo Boerzes, a member in good standing of the Wiremakers', and for some reason (his motivation has not been recorded) he decided to climb down the embankment and creep up behind the trench bank to get a closer look at the enemy festival. Anticipating trouble, or maybe simply because he was the sort of young man who made the most of any opportunity to carry a weapon, he took with him his bow, a quiver of arrows and a sword. It was later remembered that he'd been an enthusiastic member of the lunchtime archery club, and had twice scored a verified hit. Crawling most of the way, he eventually reached the head of the trench, where he'd seen a large concentration of moving lights. He was bewildered to see a long column of cattle, and his first thought was that these animals were being driven off to be slaughtered, either as part of some Aram Chantat religious ceremony or to feed the festival-goers. As he came closer, however, he couldn't help noticing that the cows (he'd never left the City before in his life, and didn't appreciate the difference between an ox and a cow) were wearing collars, which were somehow attached to what he recognised as a naval blockading chain, designed to be stretched across the mouth of a harbour to prevent ships from entering. It was, in fact, the chain he himself had worked on-his shift had drawn the bar stock from which the links had been formed-and he was entirely at a loss as to how to account for it being there, when it should have been spanning a harbour mouth somewhere in the Old Country. Fortunately, there was plenty of light, although he himself was safely outside it and therefore to all intents and purposes invisible; he carefully worked himself in closer, and saw that the chain was connected to a series of ropes lying in the trench. He couldn't help noticing too a number of large and completely unfamiliar-looking machines, also with ropes attached to them.

It was at this point that Boerzes came to the conclusion that what he was looking at probably wasn't a festival at all, but something rather more sinister. He therefore crawled in closer still (according to the report; some commentators have found it hard to credit much of what follows), and actually climbed up the blind side of the nearest machine and looked inside for some clue as to its function and purpose.

He saw (if the report is to be believed) a mechanism by which the weight of a heavy lead block suspended from a rope wound around a spindle turned a driveshaft connected to a gear train, which in turn drove a headstock to which were fixed four curved and twisted blades. From the shape and profile of these blades, he deduced in a sudden flash of insight that they were designed to cut and scoop earth. Furthermore, the sear that released the weight, allowing it to descend and thereby drive the mechanism, was connected to an elaborate system of wires and levers leading to a pressure point on the front of the machine, just above the tow-hitch; the implication being that when the machine crashed into a solid obstacle, such as a bank of earth, the weight would be tripped and the blades would start to turn, without the need of a human operator.

At this point (so the report states) Boerzes found himself torn between his perceived duty and his personal desire to engage the enemy and single-handedly thwart what he recognised as an entirely viable plan to breach the bank of the flooded ditch and thereby drain it. Again, his true motivation can only be guessed at; the report records that he settled himself on the top of the machine, nocked an arrow on his bowstring and started shooting.

If this is indeed what happened, it's easy to imagine the bewilderment and panic it caused. It's entirely plausible that the drovers and sappers believed they were being attacked by a sortie in force from the embankment. Allied accounts of the incident confirm the Mezentine report's assertion that at least one of Boerzes' arrows hit an ox, which shied, broke its traces and plunged into the crowd of sappers and lantern-bearers. Many of them understandably sought the nearest cover, some of them crowding behind the worms; Boerzes asserted that, having by this time run out of arrows, he killed two of them with his sword before making his escape back to the Mezentine lines. In any event, the allies halted their operations, and Boerzes, having made a frantic report to the watch captain, urged him to start an artillery bombardment at once, to smash down the posts cemented in at the foot of the trench.

The watch captain pointed out that most of the artillery crews had been sent home, and the only men available were partially trained general infantry, incapable of working the engines, let alone aiming with sufficient precision to take out the posts. Instead, having sent a message to Chairman Psellus, he took the decision to launch a sortie with the forces at his command.

Psellus' reply, forbidding him to leave his position under any circumstances, came too late, and the sortie, no more than sixty men strong, scrambled down the embankment into the flooded ditch. Since none of them had been trained to swim in armour, it was inevitable that a number of them soon got into difficulties and were drowned; others were saved by their fellows or managed somehow to get across, but the commotion they made soon drew the attention of the allied sappers, who by now had realised that they were no longer under attack and were hurrying to get the operation back on schedule.

The surviving members of the sortie, meanwhile, had reached the trench; but they were leaderless, the captain having drowned in the flooded ditch, and most of them had only a very vague idea of what the purpose of the sortie was supposed to be. Instead of breaking down the posts or cutting the ropes, they advanced slowly and warily up the trench, apparently expecting to meet a raiding party of allied infantry.

Instead, they met the worms. General Daurenja, directing this stage of the operation in person, had given the order for the oxen to be led forward, pulling on the ropes fed through the pulleys at the far end of the trench and thereby drawing the worms on their wheeled carriages down the trench towards the already weakened wall of the flooded ditch. The sortie took them for some kind of siege tower and, displaying a remarkable degree of courage in the circumstances, charged them and clambered aboard. Instead of finding them full of armed men, however, they quickly realised they were unmanned, and moving at a slow but steady rate towards the ditch. The sortie's nerve finally broke; they jumped down behind the worms, still not having the wit to cut the ropes, and tried to climb out of the trench over the gabion wall. In the dark, however, they had no idea how tall it was; they appeared to have concluded that it was too high to scale without ladders, and dropped back into the trench; for some reason, it didn't seem to have occurred to them to try the other side, where there was no wall and they could have scrambled out relatively easily. As a result, they were still in the trench when the worms hit the bank and set off their blade-spinning mechanisms.

Ziani Vaatzes had of course tested a prototype before shipping the worms to the camp; it helped, as well, that the weight of the ditch-water was pressing in from the other side. Even so, the speed and efficiency with which they bored through the bank surprised everybody, including the general. The bank collapsed and the water flooded out into the trench, sweeping before it a tumbled mess of gabions, shield trolleys, fascines and other equipment. Most probably it was the debris, rather than the floodwater, that accounted for the Mezentines in the trench; only six of them escaped to report back to Psellus on the embankment. The worms, on the other hand, remained firmly tethered to the posts, cemented into the trench floor, and when the water had drained away and the first allied troops arrived at the foot of the trench, they found them substantially intact, ready for use in the next stage of the operation. Psellus' head was still full of sleep as they bundled him, in his frayed nightgown and slippers, into the Guildhall yard, where a covered sedan chair was waiting. He protested: he hated being carried around in those things, he'd far rather walk. They ignored him as though he hadn't spoken, which put him in his place.

He particularly hated it when one of the four chairmen was a few inches taller than the others. It meant that one corner of the chair was always higher, while the man diagonally opposite was taking more than his fair share of the weight, which meant he stumbled on cobbles.

As a result, Psellus found it impossible to concentrate on what he'd been told, as the chair lurched and wobbled through the back alleys, heading for the Ridgeway gate. That was unfortunate; he needed time to clear his mind, before people started talking at him in loud voices. All he'd managed to grasp while they were waking him up and putting his slippers on his feet was that the enemy had somehow managed to burst the banks of the flooded ditch; there was also some ridiculous talk about a sortie-he'd sent a runner ahead to forestall that-and other stuff about monstrous unmanned digging machines. He'd let it flow over him; he'd have to deal with it when he got there, and the world stopped swaying.

The first face he saw as the chair stopped and he yanked back the curtains was Dilao Zosoter, colonel-in-chief of the artillery; a pompous, braying man who'd bounced his way up the hierarchy of the Pipemakers'; but when he saw him, Psellus couldn't help feeling sorry for him. He looked empty, as though someone had tapped his ear and siphoned out his personality.

"Dilao." He felt gingerly with his foot for the folding step, and scrambled out of the chair on to blessed motionless earth. "What's all this about draining the ditch? What's going on?"

Zosoter told him. To do him credit, he was clear and concise, an indication of how badly shaken he must be. He ended his narration with the admission that he'd told the artillery crews to go home. "I've sent runners to fetch them back," he added wretchedly, "but it's got to take time. I can't understand, actually, why the enemy haven't started bombarding us. If they're going to press home an attack tonight…"

Tempting providence. While Zosoter was speaking, Psellus felt the ground shake under his feet, and heard the dull, soft thump of a round shot landing. There was silence for one second, before everybody on the embankment started shouting at once. Typical Mezentines, Psellus thought; they're telling everybody else to take cover while standing perfectly still themselves.

Which reminded him. He dropped to his knees-mercifully, the earth where his troublesome left knee landed was soft and free of stones-as another shot passed by, close enough for him to feel the slipstream and hear the unmistakable swish-swish-swish noise of the spinning stone ball. The thump shook him up like a coughing fit.

Zosoter had been knocked off balance by the shaking of the ground under his feet, but he scrambled up again straight away. He was screaming orders, but Psellus couldn't make out a word of what he was saying over the background noise. Psellus looked past him, to the edge of the circle of light thrown by the palisade lanterns. He saw four men frantically spanning the windlass of a scorpion, as a round shot dipped out of the sky and landed no more than five yards away from them, lashing them with a hail of dirt and smashed brick. Another shot skimmed overhead and crashed into the wall behind him, and Psellus suddenly thought: that's not possible, they can't reach the wall, it's outside their maximum range. So they must have advanced their batteries, quietly, while all the commotion was going on. In which case, we'd better drop our sights, or when we get going again we'll all overshoot…

Another groundquake and thump, further away this time; and then a thought hit him, unexpected as shrapnel. They couldn't have advanced their batteries, or else the hero who'd raised the alarm, Boerzes, would've noticed them as he came back to the Mezentine lines. In which case…

He scrabbled himself upright and grabbed Zosoter by the shoulder. "Listen," he shouted (shouting always made him hoarse, very quickly), "whatever you do, when you return fire, don't lower your sights. Got that? Keep the solutions exactly as they are now."

Zosoter was shaking his head. "We've got to drop our aim," he said. "Their shot's hitting the wall, which is seventy yards further than they were able to reach last time. They must've moved up, which means-"

"They haven't moved," Psellus croaked back. "Trust me, I know exactly what they've done. Don't change the solutions, do you understand?"

It was beautiful, in its way: simple, patient, the perfect moment so perfectly chosen. In all the previous artillery exchanges, the enemy had been dropping short deliberately, to give the Mezentines the impression that their engines were less powerful than they actually were. Maybe they'd lowered their elevation, they may even have slackened off the torsion springs, and lightened the counterweights of the trebuchets; however they'd done it, their motive was suddenly and blindingly clear: to fool the Mezentine batteries into thinking they'd moved up, at this crucial moment in the assault, and make them alter their solutions and so drop short.

Briefly, he considered trying to explain that to Zosoter, at the top of his voice, with huge rocks falling out of the sky. Instead, he grabbed the nearest part of him he could reach, his knee, and shook him, bawling, "Do you understand?" Zosoter gave him a look of terrified fury, and nodded. If we're still alive in the morning, Psellus vowed to himself, I'll explain it to him. But not now.

"All right," Zosoter was yelling. "So what do you want us to do? Can we return fire?"

"Yes, of course."

"You're sure?"

Psellus had often wondered about violence: why some men chose to initiate it when they didn't have to. Now he could cheerfully have smashed Zosoter's face in. "Yes. Get on with it. Please," he added, on the off chance that politeness might succeed where a succession of direct orders had apparently failed. Zosoter gave him a last resentful look, and darted away to talk to the engine crews.

With only a fifth of the engines manned and operational, it wasn't much of a return volley; but the enemy weren't expecting it. The bombardment stopped for two minutes, almost but not quite long enough for the Mezentines to span and loose again. Instead, the allies' next shot fell just as the crews were loading their projectiles into their slings and sliders, an operation that could only be done standing up. This time, the allies had loaded with junk instead of finished shot-bricks, rocks, chunks of smashed shot, bits of broken timber, gabions filled with flints and small stones which burst on landing and shredded anybody within ten square yards down to the bone. They learned that from us, Psellus thought, staring at a dead body a few feet away. Chips of flint had torn away one side completely, and a tangled mess of guts hung out, spoiled with patches of dust. He thought about the hundreds of cartloads of broken masonry his side's engines had hurled at the allied lines over the past few weeks. He thought: war is a curious sort of reciprocal mirror. We never see the slaughter and injury our shot causes, only the results of the inevitable retaliation. Hardly any wonder, therefore, that we fall into the error of believing that it's the enemy who are to blame, rather than ourselves…

"The ditch is empty," someone was shouting in his ear. He vaguely recognised the voice, but couldn't put a name or a job description to it. "All the water's drained away down their big trench. What do you want us to do?"

What did he want them to do? What a very challenging, complex question. He wanted to say: stay here, defend the embankment against the attack in force which should be along at any moment, die (but keeping within the parameters of politically acceptable losses) and give me a few hours while I save the city by doing something so terrible, you wouldn't believe me if I told you about it. That's all.

Instead, he replied, "Keep up the bombardment and get as many armed men up here as you can." Then, as he noticed blood on his ridiculous nightgown, and realised (he felt surprised, bemused even, because he hadn't felt anything when it happened, and it wasn't hurting at all) that his left leg had been sliced open just above the knee, he added, "And find my sedan chair and get it over here as quickly as possible. I'm going back to the Guildhall."

The look in the man's eyes hurt him. "If you're leaving, who's in command up here?"

Psellus smiled. "My dear fellow, you are. Now, please hurry up and find my chair." They were shooting round shot rather than scatter, which meant they were trying to take out the engines rather than simply kill artillerymen. The general wasn't happy about that, coming as it did on top of the failure of the carefully planned undershooting ploy. He'd been banking on getting artillery superiority before sending the sappers up to start work on the embankment. By now, the scorpion batteries should have given up or been pounded into the dirt. Instead, they were maintaining a slow but steady fire-shooting blind in the dark, true enough, but they were still able to blanket a significant area. That left him with a choice between moving forward and thereby betraying his numerical strength, and staying where he was and taking thirty per cent more casualties than he'd budgeted for. He had no option but to choose the latter course, and he was quite obviously annoyed about it. Needless to say, it couldn't possibly affect the outcome, but it was sure to spoil his projected casualty ratio; and all for nothing.

He joined the sappers, and went up the trench with them,. It was hard going. The floodwater from the ditch had turned the loose soil in the bottom of the trench into thick glue which tugged at their boots, like scavengers after a battle stripping the dead. There were no lanterns to spare, so they followed the gleam of faint moonlight reflected in puddles. Enemy shot whistled and twittered overhead, urging them to hurry, trip and sprawl. Occasionally they trod on dead men partially buried in mud and silt. As they approached the ditch, the lights on the embankment seemed almost welcoming-the friendly inn at the end of a long night ride-but they could hear the sharp clack of the scorpion sliders hammering against their stops: not friendly at all.

Crossing the ditch was a problem nobody had considered. The mud was knee-deep and aggressively sticky. The only way to get through it, once both your legs had sunk in and there was nothing firm to push against, was to lay your shovel sideways on the surface and lean over it, pushing against it with your arms until you'd levered one leg out of the mud; get a knee on the shovel handle and drag up the other leg; half crawl and half swim a yard ahead, then repeat the process. It was easier once your boots had been sucked off your feet, but the sheer effort was exhausting, harder work than anything the sappers had ever done in the trenches or the mines.

When the general arrived and saw the problem, he sent some men back to pull fascines off the trench wall. The first fifty or so sank into the mud without a trace, but gradually they were able to build a sloppy, dangerous causeway that could be crossed on hands and knees; and someone had the wit to fetch a rope, which was stretched across the ditch for a handrail.

By now, however, the Mezentines had seen what was happening, and they were shooting arrows down into the ditch. It was too dark to aim, but that scarcely mattered. A wound was as good as an outright kill, if it was enough to hinder the use of an arm or a leg. The effect, however, wasn't what the Mezentines would've wanted; bodies, shot or drowned in mud, made better duckboards than bundles of brushwood, and once the ditch bottom was nicely clogged with dead men, crossing was much easier.

Once they were across the ditch, the sappers were safe from the Mezentine arrows. They had no choice but to rest for twenty minutes or so; then they started to work. It was perfectly straightforward: dig out the base of the embankment, throwing the spoil back into the ditch, until they'd undermined it enough to cave it in. The earth was relatively soft and loose, and they propped as they went with spars and planks. The Mezentines were rolling masonry blocks down the embankment at them, but all that achieved was to help fill in the ditch and make it easier to bring up timber and fresh digging crews. The Aram Chantat had brought archers to shoot at the helpfully backlit defenders; the palisade took most of the arrows, but that hardly mattered; the intention was to make the enemy keep their heads down, and it worked well. The bombardment continued, of course, and observers at the ditch were able to send more accurate solutions back to the artillery captains; the priority now was to smash up the palisade and loosen the embankment directly above the sap, to make the job of undermining easier. The Mezentines were still shooting blindly into the dark, trying to find the allied artillery. They were doing a good job of it, but it really didn't matter: for every mangonel and trebuchet Daurenja had deployed in the artillery park, he had two more in reserve, to be brought up for the final assault. The machines the Mezentines were shooting at were really nothing more than bait. Vadani observers out in the plain noticed a concentration of lights moving about on the embankment. They took this to mean that the enemy had brought up as many men as could be crowded in, to defend against an assault in force. When he was told about it, the general didn't seem unduly bothered; in fact, he said, that would make the job easier rather than more difficult. He then sent an order back to the quartermasters, who queried it. He sent it again, ordering them to do as they'd been told. As it happened, Ziani Vaatzes was in the quartermasters' store when the confirmation came through. He grinned when he heard it.

"Flour," the quartermaster repeated. "Twelve tons of flour. What's he planning to do with it, feed the buggers to death?"

"Is it in sacks or barrels?" Ziani asked.

"Both," the quartermaster replied. "We've got fifty tons in barrels and a hundred and seventy-five tons in sacks. What's that got to do with anything?"

"Send the barrels," Ziani said. "And they'll want lamp oil, say thirty gallons. Did they ask for that?"

"No."

"Ah." Ziani looked smug. "Just as well I'm here."

The quartermaster looked at him blankly. "You know what he's up to, then?"

"Yes," Ziani said. "It makes no sense," Psellus repeated furiously, dismissing the bearers who'd brought him back from the Guildhall. They were glad to go, pushing a way through the crowd of soldiers and artillarymen crowding towards the line of craters where the palisade had once been. "It'd take them a week to dig in far enough to undermine this position effectively. And he must know that as soon as the sun comes up and we can see to aim…"

He realised he was shouting, and he didn't even recognise the man he was shouting at: some junior infantry officer, reporting the arrival of his unit. But he wanted to shout; because his whole view of the assault was founded on the assumption that General Daurenja was a good commander who'd do the right thing, sensibly and predictably; and yet here he was, making an obvious mistake. If you can't trust your enemy…

"Ignore me," he said calmly, and that seemed to alarm the poor young man more than the yelling. "I'm just thinking aloud. You go ahead and get your men in position. But be prepared for a long wait. I really can't see what he thinks he's playing at."

The young man bounded away, clearly relieved to have escaped from the leader of his people, who'd finally broken his spring and was raving. Not, Psellus had to admit, an entirely inaccurate assessment. I'm doing no good at all up here, he realised, I'm just getting in the way and upsetting people. I'm being self-indulgent, playing at being a king or a duke. And not making a very good job of it, he added. A king or a duke wouldn't be crouched in a shot-crater in a muddy nightgown and slippers.

Besides, he knew what was going to happen here, sooner or later. Nothing he could do about it; and he had a war to win, in his office at the Guildhall.

A slab of rock about the size of a horse's head had turned the hated sedan chair into kindling. Not to worry, he thought cheerfully, I'll walk back. People I pass in the street can stare at me, it'll take their minds off the war.

On his way down, he stopped a half-platoon of soldiers en route to the front. "Excuse me," he said, "do you know who I am?"

Embarrassed horror; I've done it again, he thought. "What I mean is," he went on, "do you recognise me?"

"Of course. You're Chairman Psellus."

He smiled. "Excellent," he said. "I'm sorry, I'm still not used to being able to order people about. I keep expecting them to ask me who the hell I am, issuing orders. Very well. Come with me." He wiped the smirk off his face and added, "This is very important, do you understand me?"

He was relieved to find that the streets were empty. He'd sent someone to issue a proclamation that everybody not on active service should go home and stay there, but he hadn't really expected it to be obeyed. He made it as far as the Guildhall gates, but then his knee gave way and he couldn't walk any further.

"I'm very sorry," he said, "but you'll have to carry me."

He'd been quietly dreading something like this, but the soldiers didn't seem at all put out. Two of them held a spear at approximately knee height, and he sat on it like a child on a swing, his arms round their shoulders to stop him falling off backwards.

The stairs were rather tricky, but eventually they got him to his office and into his chair. The familiar feel of it revived him to a remarkable extent, and he gave them the names and locations of the people he wanted them to go and fetch. "And do please be quick," he added. "I know it seems unlikely, but this is the most important thing in the City right now."

They left; and for five minutes or so he leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He'd never thought of himself as an old man, as so many of his colleagues and contemporaries did, as soon as they passed fifty. In fact, he realised with a jolt, he had no real idea of himself at all. If he was anything, he was simply an observer, a point of view drifting through events great or trivial, hardly able to distinguish between them from his off-centre, ill-informed standpoint.

Until now, he thought. If it's true that you're as old as you feel, I'm well over ninety.

The soldiers must have believed him, because they assembled the prisoners (he called them that in his mind for want of a better word; "witnesses" wasn't quite right, "guests" was absurd) in no time at all. Psellus couldn't resist opening the door a crack and peering at them, sitting in a row on a bench in the corridor. She was in her nightdress; the two investigators were wearing the heavy padded jerkins that went under armour (he could never remember the technical term), so they must have been pulled in from the embankment. The politicians were still in their formal daywear, as if reluctant to get undressed just in case someone came by in the middle of the night wanting them to form a government. He closed the door carefully, so as not to make a noise.

Now he was waiting for just one more… witness? He felt comfortable with the word in this context. The delay chafed him, of course, but it was only to be expected: the witness would inevitably be hard to find. Until then, it'd do the rest of them no harm to sit in a draught on a cold bench.

A messenger burst in about half an hour later. He'd come from the embankment. As far as anybody could tell, the enemy were still digging. All the surviving siege engines were now manned and operational, shooting round shot at the last known position of the enemy artillery, whose rate and quantity of fire was materially though not substantially (Psellus liked that distinction) reduced. There were now seven divisions of general infantry in place on the embankment to resist an assault in force. It was still too dark to see what the enemy were doing, but there were no reports of the movement of lights except in the main trench; however, the machines that had breached the ditch had been moved up, and so presumably were back in service undermining the embankment. There was, the messenger concluded reluctantly, no other news.

"Thank you," Psellus replied gravely. "How long till it gets light?" He smiled, and added, "There aren't any windows here, as you can see."

"Three hours, more or less," the messenger replied.

"Three hours," Psellus repeated. "That's about right. You couldn't just ask my chief clerk to come in for a moment, could you?"

He sent the clerk to chivvy the men who were searching for the witness; then, since he had nothing else to do that really mattered very much, he picked up the book he'd been reading-how long ago, exactly? He found it hard to remember. He'd been immersed in Stamnus' Lives of the Great Administrators, an old favourite, and someone had interrupted him with some important business; he'd marked the place with a scrap of paper and put it down, expecting to pick it up again in a moment or so. Three days ago, he realised; and yet it felt as though it was only minutes, and he could remember the last line he'd read. I don't actually believe in any of this, he suddenly thought. I don't really believe I'm the head of state of the Perpetual Republic, or that there's a war going on twelve minutes' walk away, or that the savages are about to burst through the defences we all thought were impenetrable. He frowned. Not the right attitude, he told himself. But it didn't matter. Any minute now, as soon as the missing witness was brought in, he'd do the only thing he could to save the City; and if it failed, everything would then be out of his control, and in any case, he'd be dead. He found that thought almost comforting. "You came," Daurenja said.

He's pleased to see me, Ziani thought, genuinely pleased that I'm here. "That's all right, isn't it?" he asked. "Only I've finished my work now, there's nothing left for me to do. So I thought I'd come and watch."

Daurenja smiled, nodded enthusiastically. He was covered in mud from head to foot; in the lanternlight he looked like some curious mythical creature, shaped like a man but with a cracked grey skin, unfinished face and strange pink eyes. He'd been digging when Ziani found him, kicking the blade of a shovel into the fine dirt of the embankment like a man cutting up a whale. There'd been something about him that made Ziani stare for a long time, trying to figure out what it might be: the energy, the purpose, but it wasn't a hero in battle or a great king leading his people to victory. Daurenja reminded him, he realised with astonishment, of a small boy playing in a sandpit, and the strange aura that surrounded him, incongruous and bizarre, was happiness.

"Delighted that you're here," Daurenja said. "After all, this is your victory, not mine."

True, Ziani thought; but you don't know that. You're just trying to be nice. "They're bringing up the flour," he said. "Should be here any minute. And you forgot the lamp oil."

Daurenja winced, then grinned. "But you didn't."

"No."

"Thanks." Such warmth in his voice. How often do you meet someone who's truly, sublimely happy? "I knew I could rely on you. I want to say it right now, before we go any further, how grateful I am. I couldn't have done it without you."

"Don't say that till it's over," Ziani replied. "We aren't home yet."

"Doesn't matter. If we fail, it'll be my fault, because I've got something wrong. Everything you've done has been perfect."

"But it wasn't me," Ziani said, smiling. "All along, ever since you first came sniffing round me asking for a job. You've been using me, like you use everybody who could conceivably be useful."

Daurenja laughed. "Well, of course," he said. "You're trying to make it sound negative for some reason, but that's exactly right. I see the potential in people, just like I see it in things. I bring together, I plan ahead, I expedite-that's a good word, don't you think?-but that doesn't make the individual components' contributions any less valuable. Really, Ziani, I'm very, very grateful for everything you've done for me. For the cause. And I know you didn't do it for my reasons, but who cares about motives, really? Who'll care a hundred years from now, when every army in the world will be using my invention, and all this stuff, all the digging and mining and hand-to-hand fighting's a thing of the past? And it's not just war that's going to change." His eyes were glowing like coals. "That's what's so special about it. Everything's going to change, that's why it's so important. There'll be no more walled cities, so no more great city states, no more empires, no more war. Hadn't you worked that out for yourself? If you can't defend a secure place, you can't fight a war, not the way we think of it. And pitched battles-impossible. My weapon will sweep all those massed armies, all the pikemen and cavalry and infantry formations right off the field; who'd be crazy enough to stand out in the open and be smashed to a pulp by rocks thrown from a mile away? No more war, Ziani; and no war, no nations, no governments, because all authority relies ultimately on force of arms; we'll do away with all the evil, corrupt systems that crush people like you and me, people who just want to be different. My weapon will do all that. Oh Ziani, I thought you understood, I was sure of it. I was convinced you must've seen it for yourself, when you got them to give me the command." He looked sad, but only for a moment. "It doesn't matter," he said. "We're here now, and everything's going well, it won't be much longer now. They'll bring it up as soon as we've dealt with the embankment. You will promise me, though; you'll be there when we use it the first time."

Ziani had to make an effort to speak. "Of course," he said. "After all, it's going to get us into the City, isn't it?" A man pushed past him, rolling a barrel. "And that's all I've ever wanted." She looked at him.

He'd thought he understood her; the argument being, if you know everything that's inside someone, nothing that looks out through the eyes can surprise you. Not so, apparently.

"I know what you're thinking," he said. "Haven't I got anything better to do? The City's being attacked, they've drained the ditch, they're digging under the embankment like rats in a corn bin, shouldn't I be out there leading something, instead of harassing poor harmless civilians. Well?"

Shrug, nod. Well, her words had always been precious, bought at great cost.

"Listen to me." He leaned forward across the desk. "The enemy are coming. They're savages. We don't understand them; we think they want to kill us all and burn down the City so they can turn this country into pasture for their animals, but we don't even know that. But I'm fairly certain that if I don't do something very soon, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of people will die in pain and fear. Do you understand me?"

Her eyes were defences; too high to scale, too hard to batter down, too deep to undermine. She said, "What can you do?"

"Me? Not a great deal. I can't fight, and I'm not clever enough to come up with a brilliant strategy. And we're none of us soldiers. So," he added with a faint smile, "that just leaves me with you."

She sighed. "What's that supposed to mean?"

He thought: even this is too difficult for me, I simply don't have the strength. But he said, "We think the enemy has a secret weapon, something that can tear down walls or smash through gates. Most likely it's something your husband made for them, he seems to have a flair for that sort of thing. But I'm not too worried about that, because I know for a fact that I've got an even better secret weapon. I've got you."

Another sigh, and she looked away.

"Listen to me," he said again. "I know what you did. Outside in the corridor are the investigators, the men Falier reported the abomination to. They've told me how he told them what to look for. I've also got Falier. He's told me about your agreement, how you both decided Ziani had to go. He says you told him about what Ziani was doing-indirectly, of course, but you put the idea into his head. It was your plan, the whole thing."

"That's stupid," she said. "I couldn't have done anything like that. I'm not an engineer."

"No." He nodded. "But you asked Ziani to build the doll, for Moritsa. You told him it had to be the kind that could move its arms. And you knew that if you asked him to do something, he'd do it. He'd have no choice, no matter how terrible it was, because he loved you."

"Rubbish," she said. "How would I know about types and mechanisms and stuff?"

He smiled. "Thank you," he said. "For giving me my cue. You wouldn't know, unless somebody told you. Somebody who also wanted to get Ziani out of the way. Someone you were in love with-you never cared anything for Falier-and who, for a time at least, was infatuated with you."

"You're a very strange man," she said. "You're sitting here telling me all this garbage when the savages-"

He held up his hand. "But that wasn't the only reason," he went on. "He loved you-I suppose you could call it that, though I should imagine it was more of an obsession on his part; the usual thing with a middle-aged upper-class man and a young low-class woman: the thrill, the sin, the exhilaration of breaking the rules and getting away with it. And I'm assuming the physical side was at least adequate. After all, he chose you, and a man like that could've had practically any woman in the City."

She said nothing.

"Although," he went on, "from what I can gather, he wasn't like that. Usually, as I understand it, when a man of Boioannes' stature and position gets obsessed with sex, a large part of the pleasure is the number and variety of conquests. Curiously, all my researches have only turned up six verifiable liaisons, all of them brief and fairly low-key. The rest of the time, he seems to have been a contentedly married man, until he found you. Now, looking at you, I really don't see-"

She yawned. "What was that name you said?"

"Maris Boioannes." He steepled his fingers. "Your lover. It was Boioannes who came up with the idea of tricking Ziani into breaking the law. He told you to nag and wheedle Ziani into making the doll with arms that moved; he'll have said it was so Ziani could be got out of the way, and then you'd pair off with a nonentity-Falier, who happened to be smitten with you anyhow-and after a decent interval he'd find a way of getting rid of Falier as well, and then you could be together. I wonder," he went on, "how he explained how Falier fitted into the plan, why he was needed. My guess is that if anybody came snooping round-me, for instance-they'd assume it was all Falier's idea; that Ziani started building the doll off his own bat, Falier noticed the abomination and turned him in to Compliance to get you for himself. Something like that? I'll take that as a yes. I expect the way he explained it made a whole lot of sense. Whatever else he was, Boioannes was a wonderfully persuasive man."

"Maris Boioannes," she repeated. "I've heard of him. Isn't he some grand politician?"

Psellus smiled. "You're forgetting something," he said. "I don't need to prove a word of this to anybody else. I just need to know it, and make you do what I want you to."

She was still for a long time; then she nodded, a tiny movement. "All right," she said. "What's that?" "Barrels?" the colonel repeated.

"That's right." The staff major shrugged. "Beats me, too. But that's what they've been doing. According to my best observers, all those lights we've been watching come up the trench are men rolling barrels."

The colonel sat down on a smashed beam and rubbed his cheeks with his palms. "What do you make of it?" he said. "I guess they could be using them to prop up the roof of the sap, but it seems like a lot of effort to go to."

A thump, and the ground shook. Neither man seemed to notice. After four hours of the bombardment, they were getting used to it. "We ought to dig a countersap," the major said. "If we dig under their sap and undermine it-"

"I suggested that two hours ago," the colonel replied. "He didn't even answer my note."

"He's not a soldier."

The colonel grinned. "Neither are we. So, no countersap. There's probably a very good reason," he added wearily. "Probably it'd damage the embankment even more than what they're doing."

"Not if we shored it properly."

"You know how to do that?" The major shook his head. "I don't, either. Their sappers are mineworkers, they know what they're doing. If we go digging bloody great big holes in the ground, we'll probably bring down the City walls. No, leave well alone, sit tight and do as we're told. And no sorties," he added quickly. "Leave it all up to Chairman Psellus and whoever does his thinking for him. Then, whatever happens, at least it's not our bloody fault."

The major drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. "As you say," he said. "Actually," he went on, "you didn't let me finish. What I was going to say was, they were bringing in barrels, but now they've stopped. In fact, there's nothing going on in the trench at all, as far as we can see."

The colonel frowned. "But the sappers are still there," he said. "They haven't gone back down the trench."

"We don't know that. They might have gone back, it's still too dark to see."

Now the colonel was rubbing his temples with the tips of his fingers. "Chairman Psellus himself told one of my junior officers it'd take them a week to dig in deep enough to bring down this embankment. It'll be daylight soon, and then we'll be able to see what's going on, and presumably the chairman and his advisers will have a plan of action. Meanwhile, we stand to, as ordered, and resist the temptation to think for ourselves. As I understand it," he added, "that's what being a soldier's all about."

The major left to report back to whoever he reported back to, and the colonel sat still for a while, watching the red stains seeping through the crack between the horizon and the sky. Daylight, he thought; soon it'll be daylight, we'll be able to see what's going on, and everything will be just that little bit easier. He closed his eyes, and he could still see red streaks. Bad omen, he thought, so he made a conscious decision to think about something else. For example: what could the enemy possibly want with several hundred seventy-gallon barrels?

That, however, was too much for him; he managed to come up with several explanations, but they were all equally improbable, with nothing much to choose between them, and none of them was he inclined to accept. His mind drifted away, slipping through tunnels of memory to the time when his grandfather had taken him to see where he worked, in the varnish factory (that was the connection, because the cellars of the factory had been crammed with barrels full, of varnish waiting to be shipped, and he'd got into the most terrible trouble because he hadn't left the lamp outside the door as he'd been told; one mistake with a lit lamp in here, Grandad had told him, and they'd have to redraw all the maps)…

He jumped up, his mouth open, barely aware that he was yelling. A round shot landed a few yards away, and he felt the spray of dirt it kicked up hit him like a slap across the face. Someone was screaming, but that didn't matter. He listened to himself; he was howling, "Clear the embankment, evacuate," but nobody was listening; there were men scrambling round a collapsed redoubt, trying to pull some poor devil out from under the heaps of shattered brick. He ran up to the nearest man and started tugging at his arm; he was shouting, "No, no," at the top of his voice, but the man didn't seem to understand, which was ridiculous, because there just wasn't time to explain; but he had to try, so he bawled, "If that lot goes up, they'll have to redraw all the maps." But the man still didn't seem to have understood, and now there were at least two other men he couldn't see, grabbing his elbows from behind, pulling him back. But that was ridiculous, because they had to listen to him and get away from the embankment, quickly, now, before whatever was in those barrels blew up… "Have you thought," Ziani said suddenly, "how you're going to light it?"

Daurenja grinned. The mud had dried on his face and was beginning to crack and peel, like flaking skin. "Actually, yes," he said, and he slipped his hand down the front of his breastplate, fished about for a moment and pulled out a cloth bag about the size of a shoe. "I think it's only fair that you should be the first man to see it in action, so to speak. I think you deserve that."

He untied the cord round the neck of the bag, and started sprinkling some kind of coarse black powder. It reminded Ziani of the dust left behind in a cellar after all the coal had been used up.

"Is that it?" he asked. "Your magic powder?"

"Hardly magic," Daurenja replied, not looking up. "Just plain science. And also, incidentally, my life's work and my gift to all mankind. When I say the word, get ready to run like buggery."

He'd used up the last of the powder, and shook out the bag. He'd made a line about two yards long, starting under the nearest oil-soaked barrel. "It looks like ordinary soot," Ziani said. "Is that what it's made from?"

Daurenja turned his head and smiled at him. "No," he said. "Ready?"

Ziani nodded, and Daurenja picked up the lantern and threw it on the floor where the powder line ended. "Run!" he heard Daurenja shout, but he ignored him; the sight of the burning powder was too interesting. That little trail of dust wasn't just burning. It was like watching a blossom unfurl; he simply couldn't believe that so much fire could come out of a little trail of powder, and the noise it made, and what was that smell?

Daurenja must have grabbed his arm and yanked him; he felt himself stagger, then found his feet and scrambled to keep from falling over. Then the force of the oil catching fire hit him in the back like a door, and a stripe of burning pain licked across his shoul-derblades. So that's why he said run, he thought, and ran.

He had no idea how far he'd gone, but Daurenja stopped suddenly and he stopped too. They'd reached the first zigzag, where the trench folded like an elbow. He felt himself being pushed to the ground, but he took no notice; he was staring at the huge orange rose of flames bursting out of the side of the embankment. It was an extraordinary sight, flames at least twelve feet high reaching out like a trapped man's waving arms, but he thought, That's not enough, surely. It's got to get really hot to make the flour-

Then the noise came. It slammed into him, and suddenly there was dead silence as his ears overloaded; but he didn't really notice that, either. He was watching the embankment, as much of it as he could see, move-as though it had been lying down and was now standing up, yawning and stretching, taking its time, until it filled the sky. And then it came down again.

Stones, timbers, whole machines and bits of machines, and so very many people. He saw them scrabble in the air as they fell, and when they hit the ground they crumpled, as the force of the fall squashed them against the ground. Then the dirt and the dust came down, dropping over the tumbling mess like a veil. Out of nowhere, a chunk of brick hit him on the point of the elbow. He yelped with pain, and debris fell on him, hard enough to push him down on his face. His eyes were clogged with dirt and grit. He closed them, rubbing furiously at his eyelids. He tried to congratulate himself, to feel pleased; after all, he'd been the one who remembered what happened to the shed full of flour back at the camp, when the Cure Doce set fire to it. His idea, his fault; but it didn't seem to want to fit. Might as well try and claim the credit for a volcano or an earthquake.

"Shit," he heard Daurenja say, and the way he said it was almost comical: awed, afraid and very deeply impressed, the tone of voice men use when making lewd remarks about women. He tried to peer through the dust, but it was too thick in the air.

"Right," Daurenja said shakily, "that worked pretty well. Now we'd better get moving."

Ziani remembered: the next stage in the plan. Any moment now, the flower of the Aram Chantat would break cover and advance at the double across the plain, to swarm up through the breach and start clearing the defenders off what was left of the embankment. That wouldn't take very long. He thought about the people he knew, the men he'd worked with in the factory, trying to be soldiers and fight hand to hand with sharp weapons: ludicrous. He could picture them in his mind, lying on the ground like things spilt from a broken crate, skin sliced open, skulls crushed-he remembered a bad accident in the machine shop, some fool letting his hand get too close to a spinning chuck; flesh ripped open (like an impatient man opening a package), a glimpse of white bone before the blood oozed up to cover it; he thought of the blank horror that emptied the minds of the bystanders, how they shrank away, as though physical damage on that scale was somehow contagious. Since he'd escaped from the City, he'd seen more violence and injury than all the rest of them put together: he'd seen men gutted in fighting, Jarnac Ducas paunching and skinning deer, all the conventional horrors that only doctors and savages saw. Now, if he applied his mind to it, he could look at skin, blood and intestines and see only casings, hydraulics and components, and to him all human beings were simply mechanisms, subassemblies of his design. That was a better perspective, he'd come to believe. After all, whoever heard of a mechanic who got squeamish at the sight of a box of gears?

He looked up at Daurenja. The rising sun was behind him, so that he looked like a man wearing a burning hat; his eyes were wide open, fixed on something nobody else would ever see, and the dried mud was peeling off his skin in small, square patches. Let him have his moment of joy, he thought. One moment is all we need, and generally all we deserve.

It was a messy sunrise, like a wound clogged with mud, and as the light soaked into the plain, men started to appear, stumbling forward out of pools of shadow. They were the Aram Chantat, and they were on their way to slaughter the Mezentines. A man he'd never seen before burst in through the door. His face was bleeding, and he'd wrapped his left hand in a bit of rag.

"They've got in," he said. "They did something with fire, and the embankment just flew up in the air. They're killing people everywhere, and-"

Psellus held up his hand, palm facing outwards. "Are the City gates shut?" he asked.

The man nodded. "We've got to open them and let our people get in," he said. "Otherwise the savages'll kill them all. There's nowhere they can go."

"No." The word came out in a voice he didn't recognise. "On no account are the gates to be opened, is that perfectly clear? On no account." He paused, just to catch his breath (and he remembered signing the report that started the Eremian war; just one man doing one little thing). "Our soldiers on the embankment will just have to look after themselves. We can't risk opening the gates. Do you understand?"

The man was staring at him, as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. "They sent me to ask you-"

"Yes," Psellus said, "and now I'm giving you an answer. The gates must stay closed. Tell the City wardens to get as many men as possible on to the walls and man the tower batteries. They're to target the enemy artillery, only the artillery. Have you got that?"

A little nod, but he was still staring wildly. As well he might.

"Thank you," Psellus said gravely. "Report back to me once the message has been delivered. And tell my clerks, no more interruptions, no matter what happens. That's very important. Do you understand?"

When the man had gone, she looked at him. "They're going to take the City," she said, "and you're not doing anything about it."

He closed his eyes, just for a moment. "Wrong," he said. "I will do something about it very soon, and as a result, they will not take the City. We have an ally who will save us, just as Duke Valens saved Duke Orsea and his wife at Civitas Eremiae."

The look she gave him made him want to laugh, or to smash her face in. "Really?" she said. "Who's that, then?" He kept his face still and straight, but under the table he clenched his fists till they hurt. "Ziani," he replied.