Evil for Evil (41 page)

"There we go," Ziani said.

The sand it flooded out onto crackled and popped, and a thin cloud of steam lifted and hung over it like a canopy. Ziani fancied he could see the heat in it moving about, vague dark flickers inside the searing brightness. It had the oily sheen of the melt. Someone approached it with a long stick, presumably to see if it had started to set cold. Ziani yelled at him to stay away.

"When it's this hot it'll take all the skin off your face if you get too close," he explained. "A puddle that size ought to stay white hot for a good long while." Valens nodded. "Well, your furnace seems to work," he said. "What happens now?"

"Nothing, for a minute or two. Soon as it's cooled down enough to be moved, the real work starts. Talking of which," he added, and turned round to give the signal to the smiths to light the forge fire. "Shouldn't be long now," he said, and he realized he was making it sound as though the delay was somehow his own fault. The laborers and most of the smiths were closing in, picking up tools. Daurenja, swathed in wet cloth, sidled forward like a nervous fencer and prodded the shining mass with a long poker.

"Ready," he shouted.

"Here goes," Ziani said, and the laborers stepped forward. They had long poles with hooks on, like boathooks. "They've got to drag the bloom—that's the puddle of hot iron—onto the logs. The awkward part is lifting it off the logs onto the anvil. That thing weighs over three hundred pounds, even after all the waste's been fluxed out in the furnace."

As soon as the bloom hit the rollers they began to smoke, as the dried bark of the logs caught fire. They did their job well enough, nevertheless, and it wasn't long before the bloom lay at the base of the big anvil, glowing like a captive star. Three men on one side drove steel bars under it and levered it up on its edge; three more men laid the ends of longer, heavier bars under it, then stepped back smartly as the levers were drawn out and the process was repeated on the other side. That done, men crowded round to pick up the bars and lift the bloom, like pallbearers raising a coffin. Four smiths with long hooks teased it carefully onto the anvil and jumped out of the way as their colleagues stepped in with sledgehammers.

The first blow shot out a cloud of white sparks—drops of still-molten metal, Ziani explained, scattered by the force of the hammer. A dozen smiths were striking in turn, timing their blows so that there was no gap between them. The sound was like the pattering of rain, the chiming of bells, the crash of weapons on armor. To begin with, it seemed as though they were having no effect at all. As Valens watched, however, the bloom gradually began to squeeze out at the edges, gradual as the minute-hand of a clock but constantly moving, like the flow of a very thick liquid. With each strike, the target area dimmed a little. The blinding white was starting to stain yellow, like snow made dirty, and the smiths were straining to strike harder. They were working in a spiral, starting at the edges and working inward to the center, then back out again, the same pattern in reverse. Each blow slightly overlapped each other, and as the hammer lifted, a vague blur of shadow appeared in the metal and faded, like a frown. Occasionally there was a crack and a sizzle, as sweat from someone's forehead landed on the surface. All twelve of the smiths were wringing wet, as though they'd been out in the rain.

"We're losing the heat," Ziani said, raising his voice over the incessant pecking clang of the hammers. "Once it drops from orange to red it's not safe to work it. That means it's got to go in the other fire."

Valens was frowning. "You're really going to bash it down to a sixteenth of an inch?" he said.

Ziani nodded, noticing that although Valens had hardly raised his voice at all, he could hear him quite clearly through the hammering. "As it spreads out, we can support the edges on the smaller anvils and work it on them," he shouted. "It'll be awkward, though, keeping the thickness consistent. We'll need to keep shifting it around so the bit we're working on stays directly over the anvil face. At the ordnance factory we had rollers and jigs and derricks to handle the weight, but of course we haven't got the time or the facilities for a setup like that."

Valens yawned. "But it's all going to plan, is it?" he asked. "You're pleased with how it's working out?"

He's had enough, Ziani thought, he wants to go away and do something else. "All fine so far," he said.

"Splendid," Valens said, and yawned again. "In that case, I guess you've proved your point. I'll want to see your accounts, of course, but in principle, yes, you carry on. Let me know from time to time how you're doing; if you need anything, see Carausius. I've told him this project's got priority." He fell silent and stared at the gradually flattening bloom for a moment. "You've done well," he said at last. "I've got no idea whether this'll help us fight off the Mezentines, but you seem to me to be making a good job of it. Sorry, but I've got to go now. That racket's giving me a headache."

That racket, Ziani thought; that racket's the sound of the trial you asked for, the miracle you want me to achieve for you. But it didn't matter. "Thank you for—" he started to say, but Valens nodded, smiled tightly, and walked quickly away, the courtiers scrambling behind him like chicks following a broody hen.

It was dark by the time the first full sheet was finished. It was horrible, no other word for it. Ziani didn't need his calipers to know that the thickness varied wildly, from a sixteenth up to a full eighth in places. But three such sheets, riveted to a frame or simply nailed to boards, would protect a wagon against fire, axes and arrows. Left unsupported at the top, it'd be too flexible to climb over or bear the weight of a ladder. Against cavalry, it'd be as effective as a stone wall. It was an affront to everything he believed in, but it was good enough; and besides, the others would be better. This was simply a demonstration, put on for the benefit of a man who hadn't even stayed to see it, because the ringing of the hammers made his head hurt. That didn't matter either.

"We did it, then." Daurenja's voice in his ear; he didn't bother to look round. There were times when he wondered whether Daurenja was actually there at all, or whether there was just a voice he could hear. "I trust the Duke was impressed."

"Impressed enough," Ziani replied (it was a word he was coming to hate). He took a deep breath, as though about to confess a mortal sin. "Thanks to you, mostly," he said. "You've been a great help."

"Me?" Genuine surprise. "I just did as you told me."

"Yes." Trying to find words to talk to him was getting harder all the time. "Just what I needed. I owe you a favor."

"Please, think nothing of it."

There were stories he'd heard when he was a boy, about the demons who tempted fools. Apparently they were the spirits of foxes—Ziani had never seen a fox until he ran away from Mezentia—who possessed human bodies, and they attached themselves to weak, ambitious men and gave them anything they wanted, in return for some unspecified future favor, which turned out to be the victim's body. When the process was complete, the fox simply drove the poor fool out of his own head and left him to die, like a snail out of its shell.

Ziani turned round sharply. One or two of the men lifted their heads to look. "No, I insist," he said, and his voice wasn't friendly. "You've done all this stuff for me, hard work, tedious chasing around that'd have driven me crazy. There's got to be something you want in return, but so far you haven't told me what it is. I think it's about time I found out what I'm letting myself in for."

Daurenja's face had gone completely blank; it reminded Ziani of dead bodies laid out for a wake, their faces nudged and prodded and molded by skillful fingers into a total lack of expression. "Not at all," he said. "It's a pleasure and an education to work for you. I've learned so much from this project."

"You're lying," Ziani said.

The bewildered look on Daurenja's face was completely false. "I promise you, I'm not. Besides," he went on, with an equally false simper, "even if I have got some weird ulterior motive that you don't approve of, it wouldn't affect you. All you'd have to do is say no."

Ziani breathed out slowly, hoping it would calm him down. It didn't. "That's right," he said. "That's all I'd have to do."

Daurenja smiled. It could have been a beautiful expression; friendly, open, reassuring. "In any case," he said, "you're far too smart to let anybody take advantage of you. Quite the reverse."

Ziani felt something twist in his stomach. "You reckon."

"Absolutely. Anybody who could manipulate Duke Orsea and Duke Valens so adroitly with nothing but a simple letter…" He shrugged. "And the salt merchant," he added. "A stroke of genius. Tell me: did you know about the secret road before you met her?"

After such a long time being in charge, making plans, carrying them out, bearing so much weight, it was almost a relief to be paralyzed. "What do you want?" Ziani said.

"Nothing," Daurenja said. "Trust me."

13

"You again," she said.

Psellus nodded, and sat down in the chair across the table from her. Politeness, he told himself. In the face of a resentful, angry witness, good manners are a shield.

"Thank you for coming in," he said. "I hope it's not too inconvenient." Her eyes were bright, and completely out of place in her mild, beautiful, insipid face. "It's not as though I had any choice," she said. "Soldiers on my doorstep at five in the morning…"

"They weren't soldiers," Psellus said pleasantly. "Guild security officers. I thought you might appreciate a lift, instead of having to walk." She folded her thin arms across her chest. "I like walking," she said. He copied her gesture, except that he kept his back straight in his chair. "That's fortunate," he said, "now that you live so far out of the center of town. Your old house was much more convenient."

She shrugged. She seemed to be trying to look behind her left shoulder. "There's nothing I need to go into town for," she said. "I can get all my shopping in the Eastgate market, and it's cheaper."

Psellus nodded. "That's true," he said. "Personally, though, I don't think I'd like living in the suburbs. I've lived my whole life in the center of the city." It was intended as a rest, an empty moment. She kept still and let it pass.

"Do you like your new house?" Psellus asked.

"It's all right."

"Just all right?" He smiled indulgently, like a kind old uncle. "It seems a lot of trouble to go to, all the aggravation of moving, if the new place isn't any better than all right."

"I hated living in the old house," she said coldly. "After everything that happened there."

"I can understand that," Psellus said soothingly. "A lot of painful memories, I'm sure."

She turned her head a little. A small chin, rounded, but not weak. "I didn't like living there by grace and favor, either," she said.

"You were allowed to stay there for as long as you needed to," Psellus reminded her. "True, it was a dispensation rather than a right—"

"Grace and favor," she repeated.

"I understand. And how's your daughter liking her new home? Settling in? Making new friends?"

She shrugged, as though she wasn't really interested.

"It must help," Psellus went on, "that she's living in a different neighborhood, where the other children don't necessarily know about what her father did. It must have been very hard on her, at the old house."

"Not really." She was, he conceded, superb in defense, using every aspect of her weakness to the full. Sympathy glided off her, like arrows off the best proof armor.

"We never mixed much with the neighbors anyway."

"Apart from your own family, of course." No response to that. "It must be hard on you, living so far from them."

"It's not all that far," she corrected him, almost scornfully. "Half an hour's walk."

"Indeed." Big smile. "Half an hour's walk is a
very
long way for me, but I'm old and fat." Pause; in his head, he counted to four. "All in all, then, things are working out well for you."

"I suppose so, yes."

"You suppose so." He raised an eyebrow, but she wasn't looking at him. "I'd say you've been quite fortunate—no, that's not quite the word, it does rather imply that you don't really deserve your good fortune. In your case, it's more like a just reward, or compensation at the very least."

That made her look at him. "What?"

He smiled broadly. "Finding true love," he said. "And in such difficult circumstances."

Her look should have punctured him like a bubble, but he'd been ready for it; invited it, like a fencer tempting his opponent with a feigned weakness. "That's right," she said.

"Actually, that's why I asked you here," he went on, as smoothly as he could in the presence of such brittleness. "Your application for a dispensation to remarry, even though your husband is still alive."

"Oh," she said. The same maneuver, mirrored; a feigned relaxation of her guard.