Trivialities, Banjacs knew. None of it mattered. Only his work, his grand work.
Nobody understood artifice like he did, or at least nobody in Collegium. There were no like minds. Those engineers and mechanics to whom he had attempted to expound his theories had backed away from him as though he carried a plague. He had scoured the city for like minds, and found only technological pygmies. The journals he read were likewise a waste of wood pulp, ignorant men writing on small matters. Trivial, trivial! Was all of Collegiate artifice come to this?
He had once obtained a few brief papers by the Imperial artificer Dariandrephos. The man had shown promise. That was the best that Banjacs would say — more promise, anyway, than the doubting, naysaying small minds of his own people, who had cast him out, laughed at him, declared him mad and then mostly forgotten him.
He would show them, though. That was his maxim. There would come a time when the whole of Collegium would sit up and acknowledge the genius of Banjacs Gripshod.
The family at least had money: being cut off from the College had not denied him his research, only freed him from its constraints. If the masters back then had been men of vision, then a little devastation could have been overlooked. So he had destroyed one of their precious workshops. Did they not understand that innovation mandated risk? It had cost him years of rebuilding inside his own townhouse to reconstruct the equipment that the College had denied him.
He had grown used to being alone in the world, surrounded by people who could not share his vision. His time was growing short, though. He carried more than eighty years on his spare frame, and his patchy hair and beard were white against the dark of his skin. He could no longer fetch and carry as he once had, and a succession of assistants had been hired, tried, argued with and dismissed over the last few years, each one departing to spread the word that old Banjacs was madder than ever.
His current assistant was Reyna Pullard, and she was different, he realized. He had railed at the difficulties of working alone. Now he wished to be more alone than he was. She was an efficient worker, he had to admit. Her understanding of engineering was rudimentary by his standards, perfectly acceptable by the atrophied lights of the College. She kept his workshops clean — he had three of them, two taking up the wings of the house, and the special central chamber that reached all the way from cellar to central skylight — and she obeyed instructions without all the vexing questions that most of his prior assistants were prone to. He should have been delighted.
He had made a mistake, though. He had let her into the cellar, and since then he had lived in an agony of worry because he had misjudged her. He had always been misjudging people, back when he still had much to do with the rest of humanity, but long abstinence from company had blurred the memories. He had forgotten they were not crisp and clean like machines.
The cellar laboratory had taken some ingenuity to design, mostly because it had required practically coring the old family townhouse, removing an ascending column of floors and ceilings all the way up to the special round skylight that Banjacs had designed and had had installed. The machinery he had painstakingly constructed filled almost half the available height in a great reaching flurry of bronze and leaded glass, the transparent tubes like colossal organ pipes, the globes of the capacity chargers, the awesome spinning wheels of the accumulators. Beneath the laboratory floor was still more: the differential vats, seething with corrosion, that stored his life’s work.
It was all locked away, even the skylight capped, and Banjacs had made sure that his assistants could busy themselves in the other two workshops without even suspecting the house’s main secret. He had thought Reyna Pullard might be different, though. She had been so accommodating, not complaining about the hours or the pay or the conditions. He had thought to find in her a kindred spirit driven by the same dreams.
Standing on the circular gantry that ran around the laboratory wall at what was ground level outside, he now looked down at her. She was cleaning the charger globes, which always attracted dust and soot from everywhere else in the room: just a solidly built Beetle woman of twenty-five or thirty, and nothing in her manner or actions should have raised his suspicions, but he knew… he knew.
She was betraying him. After she had seen the cellar laboratory, something had changed in her. He was not skilled at reading people, but he had registered it nonetheless: it was unmistakable. Then she had been absent, just once or twice, but he had not believed her excuses. Banjacs knew he had enemies. He could not have necessarily said who they were, or perhaps their identity changed from day to day, simply remembered faces and imagined fears from years before. That he had enemies, though, was a point of faith for him, and now he knew that Reyna Pullard was their servant. She was telling them his secrets. She would sabotage his machine. She was working for them.
And there was a storm coming, Banjacs knew. He felt it within himself, as though it was the only thing still keeping him alive. There was a storm coming, and he was the only man who understood.
He was going to show the city, he was certain, but his enemies would do their best to stop him. It was his world against theirs. What was he to do?
Reyna Pullard continued with her work brightly and efficiently, and the sight of her sickened him. Betrayed! Betrayed! rattled about in his head, so that he could barely think. He had to act now. Another day, another hour even, and she would act on her treacherous thoughts, and then all his years of work would have been for nothing. He would be lost — and his city would be lost. There was a storm coming, and he would be needed. All those years ago he had looked into the future as if he had been a Moth-kinden. He had known the path that history — artifice — would take, and now that moment was almost upon him. He could not allow anything to stand in his way.
He had seen her making notes, taking measurements. He knew she was passing his secrets on to… it didn’t matter who. She was a spy. She was the enemy.
His hand tightened on the lever.
The machine was not ready yet. The great accumulator wheels were barely turning, and the skylight was closed off. Still, it was a very grand machine, colossal power penned into every bolt and bulb of it, the greatest lightning engine ever made. It was dangerous, he knew. The device that had destroyed the College’s workshop had been a fraction of the size.
Accidents happened.
Not taking his eyes off Reyna Pullard, he threw the switch.
For the next few days after Aagen’s speech, Collegium was foreign to itself, a place haunted by a spectre that everyone had been talking about before, but that now must not be named, lest the naming call it closer; superstition hung about the city as if the Moths were back in charge. Business deals were broken off, or hurried to a conclusion. Buyers demurred or paid over the odds, whilst sellers hoarded or let go their goods for a song. Some even spoke of leaving the city, but where was there to go? Collegium was where people came to in times like these.
Straessa the Antspider had just finished a one-to-one with te Mosca regarding her progress in Inapt studies. The little Fly-kinden taught a measure of the histories of the Moth-kinden — or their myths, as the two were often inseparable — and Straessa was sharp enough that she could crib during the tenday before and produce accomplished essays as a result, especially if she could confer with Gerethwy, whose facility with the subject was as notable as his prowess with artifice. What Straessa could not master was the rest of the course, the curious hints and paradoxes and platitudes that were supposed to go some way towards explaining the Moths’ belief in magic. Gerethwy again could set it all down effortlessly, but this time Straessa could not follow him. Her Spider blood was mute on the subject.