Devices and Desires (48 page)

“Like I said, she wouldn’t want to let the family down.”

Ziani didn’t answer, and he hunched his shoulders a little to show that it was none of his business. But Cantacusene didn’t
seem to be able to read body language. “You married?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Kids?”

“A daughter,” Ziani replied.

Silence; then Cantacusene said: “Must be hard on you, then.”

“Yes,” Ziani said. “And I don’t suppose I’ll ever see them again.”

“I couldn’t handle that,” Cantacusene said.

“No.” Ziani let go of the shear handle. It was important that the line be cut straight, since the lame had to sit true. “Nor
me.” He turned round slowly. “It’s difficult,” he said. “It’s fortunate I’m an engineer, really. Otherwise…” He shrugged.
“What time’s she due back?”

“Not till this evening,” Cantacusene said. “Look, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to upset you or anything.”

“No, of course.” Ziani smiled, though his face felt numb. “If you want to knock off early, you go ahead.”

“That’s all right. Like I said, she’s not back till late.”

“Suit yourself.” It felt like all the poison in his blood was sinking into his toes and fingers. “If you change your mind,
go on anyway.”

“Thanks.” Cantacusene frowned, as if considering a puzzle. “I’d better be getting on,” he continued. “If we lay into it, we
can have the greaves finished today.”

“Fine.” Ziani turned his back on him, laid his hand on the shear handle. He heard footsteps, and then the whistling, far away
and still terrible. He drew the handle toward him, feeling the slight spring in the leather as the blade cut it.

It was like an abcess: full of poison, under the skin, swelling, ready to burst. It was a disease lying latent in his blood,
breeding and eating him. It was the worst thing in the world. It was love, and that idiot Cantacusene had reminded him of
it, after he’d done so well to put it away where he couldn’t see it.

Almost certainly, he knew, Cantacusene would die because of him; and his wife, the ladies’ maid who spent so much precious
time away, not knowing how little there was of it left. Each nail the poor fool drove through the leather into the wood brought
his own death a little nearer. That wasn’t so bad, Ziani reflected. Only a coward is afraid of dying for himself; the true
terror in death, the fear that crawls into the mind and stays there forever, comes from the lethal mixture of death and love,
the knowledge that dying will bring unbearable pain to those we love, those who love us. Death is to be feared because of
the pain and loss it inflicts through love, and for no other reason.

Not the shear, after all. Reaching down to turn the half-cut lame, Ziani admitted to himself the preeminently obvious fact
that he’d been denying ever since Compliance came for him in the early hours of the morning when everything went wrong. All
the evil in the world, all the harm and suffering it’s possible to come to, are concentrated in one place; in love. If there
was no love, there’d be no fear in death, no pain in loss, no suffering anywhere. If he could string his steel bow and nock
an arrow and kill love with a single shot to the head, it’d go down in history as the day mankind was rescued from all its
torments and miseries; if he could meet love face to face down the narrow shaft of a spear, like a hunter standing up to the
charging boar, wolf or bear, if he could kill the monster and set the people free from all evil, then the Eremians wouldn’t
have to die, or the Mezentines, or the Vadani or the Cure Hardy or the Cure Doce or all the other nations of victims whose
names he didn’t even know yet. In old stories there are dragons who burn cities, gigantic bulls from the sea and boars with
steel tusks, terrible birds with the heads of women and the bodies of lions, and a hero kills them; it’s so simple in stories,
because once the monster is dead the pain is over and done with. The monster has a heart or a brain or lungs that can be pierced,
it’s a simple mechanical problem of how to get a length of sharp steel through the hide and the scales and the armor. But
love hovers over the dying, it lies coiled waiting to strike at the exile, the lover betrayed or unrequited, it chains men
to the places where they can’t bear to be, forces them to endure all tyrannies, injustices and humiliations rather than run
away and leave the ones they love, the ones who love them; it baits its trap with everything good in the world and arms it
with everything bad; and it survives, thriving on its own poisons, growing where nothing else can live; an infestation, a
parasite, a disease.

Cantacusene misses his wife, he thought; me too. And it’s likely I’ll never see her again, but because of love I’m building
a machine that’ll smash cities and slaughter nations and bring to an end the magnificent, glorious, holy Perpetual Republic
of Mezentia; all simply so that one day I might be able to go home and see her again, see them both, my wife and my daughter.
Such a little thing to ask, such a simple operation for a machine to perform. Every day in cities, towns, villages all over
the world, men come home to their wives and children. A simple thing, it’s nothing at all, for everybody else but not for
me. I’ve got to breach the city wall, bash through the gates, pick my way over the dead bodies of millions, just to reach
my own front door and get home. So much easier and more sensible to give up, start again, stay here in Civitas Eremiae and
get a job; but I don’t have that choice, because of love. Instead, I have the machine, and faith that love will prevail, because
love conquers all.

Someone came in and asked him to go and look at the scorpion frames. Ziani followed him, not really aware of who he was or
what he wanted. He saw them, squat and ugly and botched, inherently flawed, abominations in every sense of the word. He measured
a few of them at random with the yard and the inside calipers and the dogleg calipers. They were sloppy and only fitted where
they touched, but they were within tolerance (because he was working on a completely different set of tolerances now). He
looked at them, drawn up like a squad of newly levied troops, awkward, horrible. In his mind’s eye he gave them locks, springs,
sliders, winches, and saw that they were abominations, but they would do what had to be done. He loved them, because they
would slaughter the hireling Mezentine army by the tens of thousands, they would defend the citadel of Eremia for a time,
and then they would fail.

They were saying in chapter that the war had gone to sleep. They were saying that paying, feeding and sheltering forty thousand
men, keeping them away from the shops and the women, was a horrendous waste of effort, energy and money if they weren’t going
to be set loose against anybody any time soon. They were saying that Necessary Evil had lost its nerve, and its grip.

Psellus still hadn’t found out why everything had suddenly ground to a halt. The soldiers had arrived, Vaatzes was in Eremia
(up to no good there, by all accounts), and there was no earthly reason he could see why the war shouldn’t be over and done
with inside a month, if only they’d get it started. Some of the voices around the Guildhall were saying it was because there
were another forty thousand on the way (Psellus happened to know this was true); others that the enemy capital was impregnable;
that Eremia had signed a secret treaty with the Vadani, the Cure Doce, the Cure Hardy, all three simultaneously; that someone
in Ways and Means had made a mistake and there was only just enough food left in the country to feed the soldiers for a week;
that the real object of the war wasn’t Eremia after all; that the Carpenters and Joiners were planning a military coup, and
that’s what the army was really for; that the soldiers had found out about the defenses of Civitas Eremiae and were striking
for double pay and death benefit. Necessary Evil’s response was to look smug and stay quiet. As one of its members, trying
to guess which of the rumors was true, Psellus found this attitude extremely annoying.

Mostly, though, he was bored. He had nothing to do. Even the memos had stopped coming. There were no meetings. For a while
he’d sat in his office, afraid to leave it in case he missed a message ordering him to a briefing where everything would be
explained. Then he’d tried writing to his colleagues and superiors, asking what was going on, but they never answered him.
He tried a series of surprise visits to their offices, but they were never there. Finally he’d taken to wandering about the
Guildhall on the off chance of running into one of them. That was a waste of time, too. Nobody had seen them recently, or
knew anything about what they were up to. When he went out to the camp where the soldiers were billeted, he was turned away
at the gate by the sentries. Over their shoulders he could see the peaks of thousands of tents, thin wisps of smoke rising
straight up into the windless sky. He could smell the soldiers from two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see them. It was
like a party to which all the other children in his class had been invited.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the war wasn’t his fault.

After a while (he’d lost track of time rather) he decided to alter his perspective. He resolved to look at it all from a different
angle. After years of stress and overwork, he told himself, he was having a holiday. He still had his office, his rank, all
the things he’d fought for over the years — better still, he’d been promoted, from Compliance to Necessary Evil. If they needed
him, they’d find him. Meanwhile, until the call came, he was at liberty to indulge himself.

With what, though? He hadn’t had more than an hour’s continuous free time since he was twenty-one, and pleasure is something
you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice. Not that he’d exactly been a libertine in
his remote youth; you didn’t get to be a Guild official by drinking and chasing girls, so he hadn’t ever done any of that;
and it was simple realism to admit that it was probably too late to start now. He applied his mind, sitting in his office
one cold gray morning. What did people do for pleasure, apart from drinking and being obnoxious to women?

What indeed. In Mezentia, not much that he could think of. Abroad, in less favored countries, they rode to hounds, flew falcons,
jousted, fenced; but the Perpetual Republic had outgrown that sort of thing. What else? They read books, looked at works of
art, listened to music. That sounded somewhat more promising. There were works of art, he was pretty sure; the Sculptors and
Painters produced them, and (a quick glance at the relevant memo) their productivity had risen last year by an admirable six-point-three
percent. But (he remembered) four fifths of their output went for export, mostly to the Vadani and the Cure Doce, and wherever
the remaining one fifth ended up, it wasn’t anywhere he was allowed to go. Music: the Musicians amalgamated with the Ancillary
& Allied Trades a century ago. Their harp was still just about visible among the quarterings on the Guild’s coat of arms,
but he couldn’t remember ever having met a Guild musician. There were people who played pipes and fiddles and little drums
at private functions, but they were strictly amateurs, and the practice was officially frowned upon. That left literature,
by default. For literature, you had to apply to the Stationers and Copyists. Like the Sculptors, they catered mostly for the
export market, but the Guild had a retail outlet in a small alley off Progress Square. It was where you went to buy copies
of Guild decrees and regulations, set books for the further examinations, commentaries and cribs to the more complex specifications;
and, occasionally (usually as the result of a canceled export order), literature. He’d been there himself half a dozen times
over the years, most recently to look for a wedding present for a mildly eccentric cousin who liked poetry — it was very much
the sort of place where you went to buy things for other people, not for yourself.

His cousin had got married seven years ago, but the shop was exactly as he remembered it. The front part was given over to
stationery, both export and domestic quality. There were ink-wells in gold, silver, silver plate, brass and pewter; writing-sets,
plain, fancy and presentation grade, loose or boxed. There was paper in staggering quantities, all types and qualities, from
pads of four-times scraped scraps sewn up with sacking twine, to virgin linen-pulp contract-and-conveyance paper, to the very
best mutton and calf vellum. He counted thirty different inks before he lost interest and gave up; and if you didn’t like
any of them you could buy loose ingredients to make your own: oak-apple gall ready dried and powdered; finest quality soot,
candle not chimney, and any number of specialist pigments for emphasizing the operative words in legal documents or illuminating
capitals. There were trays of twenty different cuts of pen nib (types one to six export only; seven to thirteen restricted
to copyists only, on proof of good standing; the rest available to the public at large); goose-quills in gray, black, barred
or white and dainty little bronze knives to cut them with; sand-shakers, seals, wax-holders, seal-edge-smoothers (to round
off splodged edges), bookmarks, erasing pumice in three grades and four handy sizes, binding needles and the finest flax thread,
roll-covers in solid brass or tinplate with brass escutcheons for engraving book titles on. A few surreptitious glances at
the price-tickets showed that nearly all this stuff was not for domestic consumption, but then, very little of what the Guilds
produced was.

And in the back quarter of the shop there were books. Last time there had been five bookcases, but one of them had been taken
out to make way for a display of chains and hasps for chained libraries. Three of the shelves were Guild publications, carefully
divided up into numbered and coded categories. The fourth was marked
Clearance,
and half its shelves were empty.

A quick look round just in case somebody he knew was watching him; then Psellus began to browse.
The Mirror of Fair Ladies, newly and copiously illustrated;
tempting, but how would he explain it away if someone caught him with it?
A Dialogue of King Fashion and Queen Reason
caught his attention, mostly because of the pictures of animals being slaughtered in various improbable ways, but the text
was in a language he didn’t understand.
A Garland of Violets
turned out to be an anthology of inspirational verse by or about great Guildsmen from history; so did
A Calendar of Heroes
and
Line, Rule and Calipers,
but without illuminations or pictures. He was tempted by
Early Mannerist Lyric Poetry,
a parallel text in Mezentine and Luzanesc, but a previous owner had paved the Mezentine side of each page with clouds of
notes and extracts from the commentaries, presumably for some exam, so that it was barely legible. He was considering the
practicalities of re-covering
The Mirror of Fair Ladies
in plain brown paper when he caught sight of a name, and held his breath.