Devices and Desires (67 page)

As he wrenched the door open, the light burned him. The gap between door and frame was almost wide enough to give him clearance,
but it wouldn’t grow. He’d botched moving the body, and it was fouling the door. The urge was to glance over his shoulder
and take a look at the beater’s face but he hadn’t got time. He crushed himself through the gap (like drifting a badly filed
hole square with the big hammer), found the bottom step with his foot and pushed himself into a sprint. Breath was a problem,
he’d squeezed too much of it out of himself getting through the doorway; his current plan was firmly based on yelling as loud
as possible, so that people would come and rescue him before the beater could catch him. But the best he could manage was
a soft woof, like a sleepy dog.

Best estimate was that the beater was in the doorway, while he was only four steps up the stairs; there were twelve steps,
and if the beater grabbed his ankle and pulled him down, it’d all have been a waste of effort and ingenuity. He heard the
beater say something — just swearing, probably — which suggested that luck had given him a little more time. He cleared the
top step, filled his lungs, and yelled.

After the silence, where a soft crunch had been so loud, the echo of his voice in the stone stairwell made his head swim.
But he felt fingertips brush the calf of his leg, gentle as a tentative lover. Even as he lunged toward the open air he was
calculating: assuming the hunter had arms of average length and taking on trust his estimate of the length of his lower leg,
from heel to knee-joint, he was safe from a dagger of no more than twelve inches, but a riding-sword, falchion, hanger or
hand-axe would be the death of him.

He was in the courtyard; and here was where his plan foundered and crashed. He’d been working on the strict assumption that
once he was clear of the stairwell he’d be safe, because the courtyard would be thronged with his stalwart employees, hurrying
to answer his shout of distress. Accordingly, he hadn’t troubled to plan beyond the threshold of the light. Foolish; here
on the level, in the light, it was his ability to run against his enemy’s. As if in confirmation, he felt a hand tighten on
his shoulder like a clamp, drawing him back and slowing him down.

He hadn’t expected to feel anything else, because the knife or the short sword would be properly sharp, and he’d be dead before
his body could register the pain. Wrong; instead, he felt the buttons of his shirt give way, and the lapel pulling back over
the ball of his shoulder. He could have laughed out loud for joy if he’d had time and breath. It was only a moral victory,
of course. The courtyard was empty; they were all hard at work at their anvils and benches, as of course they should be. He’d
trained them too well.

The next thing he registered mystified him. It was the paving-slabs of the courtyard floor rushing up to meet him, and the
solid, painful contact of stone on his face. He’d fallen; he was lying face down on the ground. Not that it mattered, but…

He heard grunting, then a yell of pain, swearing, shouts, another yell, and the bump of a dead weight falling fairly close.
He pushed at the ground with the palms of his hands, bounced himself upright and swung round.

He saw a face that was vaguely familiar, one of the carpenters, whose name there’d been no point using up memory on. The carpenter
was kneeling on something; on a man’s body, his knee was on the man’s neck, and other men whose faces he couldn’t see were
bending or kneeling over the same body, trying to do something to it that called for effort and strength. “Are you all right?”
the carpenter asked; he looked shocked and bewildered, and his face was cut. Vaatzes widened the scope of his vision and saw
a short sword (to be precise, a Mezentine naval hanger) lying about a foot from the body’s outstretched hand. Strange; more
than twelve inches, so he ought to be dead. But (it occurred to him, as a flood of fear and shock swept through him) he wasn’t.

“Don’t kill him,” he heard himself say, “I want him alive.” At the same time, he rebuked himself for melodrama; also, what
did he want with a Mezentine Compliance assassin? Nothing; correction, he wanted the names of his inside men, the ones who’d
told him about the charcoal cellar. It was very important not to let those names get away.

One of the men whose faces he couldn’t see mumbled an apology, and Vaatzes noticed that the assassin had stopped moving.

“Is he dead?” he asked.

“Fell on his own knife,” someone replied. Knife? He’d had a knife as well as the hanger; a whole new variable he’d omitted
to consider. Negligent. Really, he didn’t deserve to be alive.

“What the fuck was all that about?” someone asked.

Later, sitting in the window of the main gallery recovering from a horrific bout of shaking and nausea, Vaatzes decided there
couldn’t have been a knife, because he’d felt the hunter’s left hand grabbing at him on the stairs. That helped the world
make sense again. He sent someone to fetch the man who’d answered his question. While he was waiting for him to arrive, he
called half a dozen men off the bloom anvil and told them to form a half-circle facing him, about five yards back.

When he saw the man again, he recognized him. He even knew his name — Fesia Manivola, second foreman in the grinding shop.
A pity, because he was a good worker.

“You wanted to see me?” Manivola was relaxed, inquisitive, friendly.

Vaatzes nodded; it was the cue for the six bloom-hammerers to close in behind Manivola. “You killed him, didn’t you?” he said.
“He didn’t fall on his own knife like you said. You stabbed him so he couldn’t give you away.”

Manivola denied it, twice, and then one of the bloom-workers broke his neck. They dragged his body out into the yard, laid
it next to the two assassins to wait for the arrival of the examining magistrate, who was needed for various formalities.
Once they were over, the magistrate asked him the question he’d been asking himself: why did you have him killed straight
away? For all you know, there could’ve been more than one.

“I know,” he replied. “But that was enough. If there’s more, they’ll know they’re safe now, but it’s too dangerous to try
again.” He pulled a face. “I’ve already lost one key worker and there’s a war on. If I found out the foundry chief and the
foreman of the tempering shop were in on it as well, I’d have to close down a shift.”

Either the magistrate saw the logic in that or he knew better than to argue with the man who made the scorpions that had won
the great victory. He wrote things in his little book and went away. Shortly after dark a cart came for the bodies; according
to the magistrate, they’d be tipped down a disused drain, and nobody need ever know.

In the middle of the first night shift, a messenger came to take him to see the Ducas. He’d been expecting that. He rode in
a cart up to the shabby door of the Ducas house, and followed the messenger across courts, quadrangles and cloisters to a
small room, by his calculations leading off the northeast corner of the great hall. He told Miel Ducas about Compliance, though
he was fairly sure he knew the salient points already.

“The only surprise,” he went on, “is that they waited so long. Usual procedure is to kill a defector as soon as possible.”

Miel Ducas nodded. “How do you account for the delay?” he asked.

“Not sure,” Vaatzes replied truthfully. “My guess is, once they heard about the scorpions we shot up the wagon train with
and realized they were homemade, they knew they needed to put me out of action. But that doesn’t explain why they haven’t
tried before.”

The Ducas frowned. “So that’s it, then. It’s a mystery.”

“Yes.” Vaatzes smiled grimly. “And I’m not complaining. But I was very lucky indeed. I don’t know anything about hand-to-hand
combat, or any of that stuff.”

“Maybe you should learn,” the Ducas replied, as anticipated. Vaatzes acknowledged and moved on.

“We’ll need guards now, obviously,” he said. “It’ll slow up loading and unloading, and it won’t actually do any good. If they
had Manivola helping them —”

“That’s the accomplice?”

Vaatzes nodded. “Wouldn’t have thought it of him,” he said.

“But we’ll have guards anyway, just for the hell of it.”

“All right. Do you want visitors searched for weapons?”

“In a factory?” Vaatzes laughed. “He could pick a tool off any bench that’d serve as well as any weapon; hammer, saw, whatever.
And it’d take too much time. No, I was thinking of a different approach.”

The Ducas waited, then said, “Well?”

Vaatzes said: “Normally, I’d make my own, but there isn’t time. Do you happen to have such a thing as a brigandine coat?”

The Ducas dipped his head briskly. “Several,” he said. “About three dozen, actually. Mine wouldn’t fit you, but I’m sure I
had a short ancestor at some point in the last three centuries. Wonderful how much useless junk you inherit; and of course
we never throw anything away, because everything we acquire is nothing but the best, far too good to part with. I’ll have
it sent round as soon as possible.”

“Thank you,” Vaatzes said. “And nobody must know, of course, or there’d be no point.”

“Naturally. And you really should find time for some simple lessons: single sword, sword and buckler, bare hand and dagger.
My cousin Jarnac’s sergeant-at-arms is the man you need. I’ll talk to Jarnac when I’ve got a moment.”

“That’d be kind of you,” Vaatzes replied. He was looking hard for some sign in the Ducas’ face, but what he saw there, in
the eyes and the line of the mouth, could have been simple stress and fatigue from running a country at war. “You’ve been
doing things for me ever since I came here. I’m grateful.”

The Ducas shrugged. “It’s thanks to you we’ve got a chance in this war,” he said. “The scorpions…” He shook his head. “A chance,”
he repeated. “I don’t know.”

Vaatzes studied him for a moment, and saw a man in two minds. Half of him knew that Civitas Eremiae would inevitably fall;
the other half couldn’t see how it possibly could. Mostly, though, he saw a man who’d been tired for so long he was getting
used to it. “The Republic’s never lost a war,” he said, “but there’s always a first time. I think our best hope are the Potters
and the Drapers; and the Foundrymen, of course.”

It took the Ducas a moment to realize he was talking about Guilds. “Go on,” he said.

“The Foundrymen are more or less in the ascendant at the moment,” Vaatzes explained, “or at least they were when I left. There’s
never a deep underlying reason why one Guild gets to dominate. It’s about personalities and political skill rather than fundamental
issues; mostly, I think, because there’s virtually nothing we don’t all agree about. But the Foundrymen have been on top for
longer than usual, and the Potters and Drapers have been trying to put them down for a while, and they’re annoyed and upset
because so far they’ve failed. The Foundrymen will have wanted this war because victory always makes the government popular,
and we always win. But if we don’t win, or at least not straight away, so it’s costing lots of money and interfering with
business, there’s a good chance it’ll bring down the Foundrymen. The Drapers and Potters will therefore want to make out that
any major reverse is a genuine defeat — they’ll say the Republic’s been beaten for the first time in history, and it’s all
the Foundrymen’s fault, and we should never have gone to war in the first place. Meanwhile the Foundrymen will be unhappy
because they’ll be taking men off civilian work to increase the production in the ordnance factory, so that’ll be costing
them money; they’ll want to get rid of the present leadership and end the war so as to limit the damage before the Drapers
and Potters have a chance to overthrow them. Also, the Drapers and Potters will have a fair degree of support, because most
of the Guilds do a lot of export business with the old country, where the mercenaries come from. If thousands of mercenaries
are killed in the war, it’ll be very bad for their trade over there. It’s possible to win this war, provided you can do as
much damage as possible; kill as many men as you can, destroy as much equipment, cost them as much money as possible. As long
as they want to fight you, they’ll never give up; but if you can make them decide that the war isn’t worth the cost and effort,
you’re in with a chance. It’s not like your war with the Vadani, where you hated each other. Hate doesn’t come into it with
the Republic, that’s the key as far as you’re concerned. They make war for their own reasons. It’s always all to do with them,
not really anything about you. You’re like the quarry in a hunt, rather than a mortal enemy; you don’t hate the animals you
hunt, you do it for the meat and the glory. When you’re not worth hunting anymore, when you’re more trouble than it’s worth,
they’ll call it a day and go home.”

Needless to say, the Ducas was as good as his word. The brigandine coat arrived the next morning, in a straw-filled barrel.
The first thing Vaatzes looked for was a maker’s mark, and he found it, in exactly the right place; the fifth rivet-head in
from the armpit, right-hand side, second row down, was stamped with a tiny raised letter F, for Foundrymen. That meant it
was Guild-made, and therefore complied exactly with the relevant specification.

The specification for a brigandine coat consists of two thousand, seven hundred and forty-six small, thin plates of best hardening
steel, drawn to a spring temper. The plates are sandwiched, overlapping each other, between two layers of strong canvas, held
in place by one-sixteenth-inch copper rivets; they’re also wired and riveted to each other to make sure they move perfectly
with every action of the wearer’s body, so that at no time is it possible to drive the point of an ordinary sewing needle
between the joints. The jacket is covered on the outside with middle-weight hard-wearing velvet, and lined inside with six
layers of linen stuffed with lambs-wool and quilted into one-inch diamonds. The finished coat contains ten thousand, nine
hundred and eighty-four rivets, weighs six pounds four ounces, will turn a cavalryman’s lance or an arrow from a hundred-and-twenty-pound
bow, should be as comfortable as a well-cut gentleman’s doublet and shouldn’t be noticeable when worn under an ordinary day-jacket.
The Linen Armorers’ Guild produces a hundred and twelve of them a year, of which ninety-six go for export.