Patience, Ziani ordered himself. The idiots'll be beating the sheets out to any old thickness, and quite probably cracking and splitting them as well; a day's production, only fit to go back in the melt. "Wonderful," he said, and he quickened his pace. He always seemed to be rushing about these days; not good for someone who didn't really like walking, let alone running.
Nothing wrong with the drop-hammers that a blindfolded idiot couldn't have fixed in five minutes; but the Vadani foundrymen were standing around looking sad, still and patient as horses in a paddock. He put the problem right-a chain had jumped a pulley and mangled a couple of gear-wheels, but there were spares in the box-shouted at the men whose names he could remember, and scampered off to get on with some real work.
He was building a punch, to cut mounting holes in the plates, to save having to drill each one. It was nothing more complicated than a long lever bearing on cams, bolted down for stability to a massive oak log, but he was having a little trouble with the alignment of the bottom plate, and the sheets were coming out distorted after the holes had been punched. All it needed was shims, but that meant laboriously hacksawing, drilling and filing each one by hand, since such basic necessities of life as a lathe and a mill were unknown in this godforsaken country. He clamped a stub of two-inch-round bar in the vise, picked up the saw and set to work, pausing after every fifty strokes to spit into the slot for lubrication. He was three-quarters of the way through when he heard footsteps behind him, a pattern he recognized without having to turn and look.
"Daurenja?" he called out.
Immediately he was there: long, tense, attentive, unsatisfactory in every way. Today he had his ponytail tied back with a twist of packing wire, and there was something yellow under his fingernails.
"Where the hell did you wander off to?" Ziani asked.
"I had some errands to run," Daurenja answered. "I'm very sorry. I gather there was some bother with the-"
"Yes. Two hours lost. You should've been here to deal with it."
Being angry with Daurenja was like pouring water into sand; he absorbed it, stifling the healthy flow of emotion.
"You know we're in a hurry," Ziani went on. The default had been trivial enough; two hours' lost production wasn't the end of the world, or even a serious inconvenience. If it hadn't been for Daurenja's energy, initiative and enthusiasm, the whole project would probably have stalled by now and be in jeopardy. "You know you can't leave these clowns on their own for ten minutes, but you bugger off somewhere without a word to me; they could have trashed the place, wrecked all the machinery, blown the furnace…"
"I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
Ziani put the hacksaw down on the bench and wiped sweat and filings from his hands. "It's not bloody well good enough, Daurenja," he said, and the thin man's pale eyes seemed to glow at him as Ziani took a step forward, balling his right fist. "I never asked you for help; you came to me, remember. You came begging me for a job."
"I know. And I'm grateful, believe me."
"Yes, you are." Ziani grabbed the front of Daurenja's shirt with his left hand and pulled, forcing Daurenja to come close. "You're always so very grateful, and then when my back's turned…"
He'd learned how to punch in the ordnance factory; not a scientific philosophy of personal combat, like the rapier fencing Duke Valens had tried to teach him, more a sense of timing refined by desperation into an instinct. You don't have to teach a dog or a bull how to fight; it comes by light of nature and works out through practice. He jabbed his fist into Daurenja's solar plexus, making him fold like a hinge; as his head came down, he let go with his left hand and bashed him on the side of the jaw. It felt hard and thin, like hammering on a closed door. Daurenja staggered sideways, and as his balance faltered, Ziani kicked him hard on the left kneecap, dropping him on the ground in a heap.
"Get up," he said. "Oh come on," he added, "you're a fighting man, you held off the entire Mezentine army the other day, armed with nothing but a bit of stick."
Daurenja struggled to his knees; Ziani kicked him in the ribs and put his foot on his throat.
"Fine," he said. "Don't fight if you don't want to. I'll break your ribs one at a time."
There was something about the way he lay there; it took Ziani a moment to recognize what it was. Practice, because this wasn't the first time, not by a long way. He was enduring the beating the way a chronic invalid endures some painful but necessary treatment he's been subjected to many times, holding still so as not to inconvenience the doctor as he goes about his work, tilting his head sideways or holding out his arm when he's told to. To test the hypothesis, Ziani lifted his foot off Daurenja's throat and swung it back for a kick; sure enough, Daurenja moved his head a little to the side, anticipating the attack, not trying to avoid it but seeking to minimize the damage it would cause without being too obvious about it. Ziani stepped back. "Stand up," he said. "Beating's over."
He held out his hand, caught hold of Daurenja's bony wrist and pulled him to his feet; Daurenja swayed a little and rested his back against the bench. He hadn't even tried to ask what the attack had been for.
"Now we've got that out of the way," Ziani said pleasantly, "maybe you could tell me what it is you want."
"I don't-"
Ziani frowned, and punched him on the side of the head, just above the ear. His skull was just as bony as he'd imagined it would be. "Yes you do," he said. "You understand perfectly well. You want something from me, something really valuable and important, and there's nobody else you can get it from." He took a step back, a unilateral declaration of ceasefire. "I'm not saying you can't have it," he said, reasonably. "I just want to know what it is, that's all."
Daurenja looked at him. "Do you mind if I sit down?"
"Be my guest."
"Thanks." Daurenja slid one buttock onto the top of the bench; he seemed to hang as well as perch.
"Something," Ziani hazarded, "to do with sulfur."
"In a way." Daurenja sighed. It was, Ziani realized, the first indication of weariness he'd ever seen from him. "I'd better begin at the beginning, hadn't I?"
Ziani shrugged. "If it's a long story."
"It is." Daurenja paused for a moment, as if composing himself before giving a performance. "Some years ago," he said, "I met a man who was trying to set up a pottery business. He'd found a seam of a special kind of clay, the sort you need to make the fine wares that people pay a lot of money for. It's always been a Mezentine monopoly, and everybody's always believed they controlled the only sources of this special clay. Well, he convinced me, and it turned out he was right. The stuff he'd got hold of was the right sort of clay, or at least it turned out the same way when you fired it. We thought we'd got it made. After all, making pottery's no big deal, peasants do it in villages. All we needed to do was find out how you decorate it-make the pretty colors you get on the genuine article. We thought that'd be the easy bit."
"But it wasn't."
Daurenja nodded slowly. "We could produce colors all right, reds and greens and blues. You can find out how to do that from books, anybody can do it. But they weren't quite the right colors-very close, but not quite. It was pretty frustrating, you can see that. We worked at it for a long time, experimenting, fine-tuning the mixes, trying everything we could think of, but we could never quite get there. Anyhow, I'll skip all that, it's not relevant. One day, I was messing about with some of the ingredients, grinding some stuff up together in a mortar, and there was an accident." He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a scar, a handspan of smooth, melted skin. "That's where this comes from," he said, with a wry grin. "There's another one like it right across my chest. Burns. The stuff I was mixing suddenly caught fire and went up; it was like when you let a drop of water fall onto molten metal. The mortar I was using-big stone thing the size of a bucket-smashed into a dozen pieces, and the heat was amazing, just like leaning over a forge at welding temperature. All from a few spoonfuls of this stuff I was grinding."