Was it Virtue who laughed in her chaste home, or was the laughter that of her demicolleague, Iniquity?
I still waited for the three hundred royals promised for Burgoyne. If I ever received it, I would divide it evenly between Toland, Merton’s family, and Ethlebight’s fund for redeeming prisoners.
At least the Roundsilvers did not shun my company—they moved in a circle so grand that the whims of the monarch barely mattered. I had been invited to the foundry at Innismore where the duke intended to cast his two great siege cannons, and if I had not been so angry at Berlauda and her court, I might have found it interesting. Instead, I found the business intolerable.
The twenty-four monks, who sat in a gallery built specially for them, sat with their backs to us, so the purity of their hearts and prayers would not be distracted by the activities of the profane. Their droning was maddening, like that of an audience bored with the play, and I felt like an actor on the stage before that audience. So frustrated and miserable was I that I wondered if my mere presence would negate weeks of chanting.
Nearer at hand, the engineer Ransome and the Abbot Ambrosius, who I had met at that dinner at the Roundsilver Palace, competed with one another in smug self-satisfaction. Rather than listen to them, I kept my mind on the details of the casting.
The cannons had been first created in wax, tons of the stuff molded into vast effigies that modeled the great guns in every detail, from the cascabel to the chase. Also modeled were the many ornaments, from the royal arms, the royal cypher BR, the handles in the shape of leaping dolphins, the laurels of victory that gracefully twined the breech, the images of old gods hurling thunderbolts, and goddesses puffing out their cheeks to blow the cannonball toward its enemy, the inscription and date ascribing the casting of the cannon to the duke, and sorcerous formulae that promised strength and destructive power. The duke had not abandoned his worship of Beauty, even in so deadly an instrument as a cannon.
The effigies had been packed in clay and then heated, so that the wax melted and ran out, leaving a hardened clay mold behind. The molds were set upright in a pit, near the great crucibles that held the molten bronze.
Ransome urged us to withdraw so that we would not be spattered with hot metal when the pour began. He had been bustling over the last hour, supervising the melting metal, sprinkling his alchemical powders into the crucible. I drew back and found myself standing next to a white-haired man in a worn leather jerkin and a cloth bonnet that bagged out about his ears, and failed to entirely conceal his baldness.
“If yon fellow scurries much faster,” he said as he nodded at Ransome, “he may accidentally leave behind his conceit.”
“Or the cannon may crack. That will dent his vanity.”
He shook his pointed white beard. “If the cannon cracks, he will blame the monks. One of them may have harbored an impure thought or two during in the last twenty-odd days, sure, and spoiled the spell.”
The man had the accent of the northwest, with its lilt and lolling r’s. I looked at him.
“Do you work here at the foundry?” asked I.
“Nay. I am a master cannoneer. I represent the guild, which requires that one of its masters be present at the creation of every gun destined for the royal armory.”
In my rambles about the city, I had passed by the hall of the Loyall and Worshipfull Companie of Cannoneers, and marked the sheer aggression of its facade, with genuine if venerable pieces of artillery mounted on the roof parapets, and aimed casually down the street, or at neighboring houses.
“I have seen your guild hall,” said I. “I know of no other hall that so successfully threatens an entire neighborhood.”
He grinned at me with crooked, yellow teeth. “We are a formidable crew, to be sure. No element of a contract goes unenforced.”
“I shall examine your contract carefully, then, should I ever require some artillery.”
“Ah! Look! Something is afoot.”
Abbot Ambrosius walked purposefully to the monks, sat in front of them—facing both the monks and the rest of the building—and in silence signaled for a change in the chant. The monks began a new incantation, raising their voices to echo more forcefully off the great wooden beams of the ceiling.
The alchemist Ransome hardly waited for the new chant before he waved an arm to begin the pour. The foundry’s journeymen tipped the great crucible, and ninety hundredweight of brilliant, white-hot bronze poured into a channel that led straight to the cannon’s mouth. Smoke, steam, and sparks shot upward, and there was a growling dragon’s roar as superheated air began to hiss from the channels of the clay mold. I held out a hand to shield my eyes from the glare.
Bronze filled the matrix and began to overspill from the funnel-shaped depression on the end of the mold. Sparks danced on the foundry floor. Ransome gave a shout and a wave, and the journeymen returned the crucible to its upright position and began throwing into it ingots of copper, tin, and zinc, all in proportions to Ransome’s alchemical formula. Other apprentices readied themselves to shift the channels so that the next pour would be directed into the matrix of the second gun.
The monks lowered their voices and began a less strident chant. It would be hours before the cannon cooled, and some time before the metal intended for the second gun was ready, and so I congratulated the duke and duchess on their new destructive power, and left the foundry’s blazing heat for the crisp November day outside.
The wan winter sun hung over the yardarms of the ships clustered at Innismore’s wharves. The air was filled with the scents of tar, smoke, and the abundant richness of the flowing tide. From somewhere, over the cry of gulls, I could hear the clack of capstan pawls along with the song and stamp of a chantey and the cheerful song of a pennywhistle.
At the sights and sounds of the harbor I felt the onset of a great homesickness, and suddenly I yearned to be in Ethlebight. I had done what I could for my city during my stay in the capital, and could do no more. I could not advance here, and I might as well be home.
But I knew that I longed not for the blackened, looted Ethlebight as it was now, but the safe, homely Ethlebight of my boyhood, which was gone forever. My yearning was useless. I could not go home even if I tried.
“Like you my work?” said Orlanda.
I had half expected to see her ever since I’d received word of my banishment from court, and so I managed not to leap out of my skin, though my heart still thrashed in my breast like a wild animal. I turned to face her, and tried to master my whirling mind.
Orlanda was dressed in the blue velvet skirt and dark scarf in which I’d first seen her, and didn’t look out of place on the waterfront. Her deep green eyes glimmered in triumph.
“I knew of the conspiracy against Broughton,” said she. “I knew that bland bitch Berlauda would not welcome the news that her mother was in league with her closest friend and a hired murderer.” A cruel spirit tugged at her lips. “And I knew you, Quillifer. I knew that you could not refrain from trying to get to the bottom of the affair. You would never hold back, not when there was a chance of flaunting your superiority in front of the whole court.” She stepped close. “I know you well, Quillifer. I know that there is one thing that you simply cannot do, and that is to do nothing.”
“In that case,” said I, “you yourself did nothing. You simply let events take their course.”
“No. I confronted you the previous night, and told you that I would be concerning myself with you. I knew that would spur you into action. I knew that you would leap into this business in order to prove to yourself that you were your own master, and not my pawn.” Her cruel smile returned. “It was a fine piece of handiwork, think you not?”