The stone flies straight up, and when it lands it smashes the machine that launched it. Well of course, Ziani thought, as he trimmed the wick. That's what it's supposed to do. No choice. Shop thirteen was making the drills.
Ziani had seen a picture in a book, fifteen years ago. It showed a machine like a battering ram on a wheeled chassis, but it wasn't for bashing. Brick, the book explained, crumbles when hammered but doesn't shatter like stone. To wreck a brick wall, the approved procedure is to drill in it a series of three-inch holes no more than eight inches apart. Before drilling the next hole, insert a log, three-inch diameter, steeped in tar or pitch. Light the log-ends; by the time you've withdrawn to a safe distance, the logs will have burned through, leaving the now-unsupported wall to collapse. The book had been written for builders and stonemasons needing to demolish old buildings, so of course the ordnance department had never heard of it. A friend of his who worked the same shift at the ordnance factory had won a copy of it in a game of knucklebones and sold it to him for two quarters.
To make drills, he'd sent for the Vadani foresters. They knew exactly where to find what he needed: a stand of oaks planted on a steep hillside and neglected, never thinned out, with the result that they'd grown tall, straight and spindly, fighting to get above the forest canopy into the light. Ziani specified trunks seventy feet long, twelve inches in diameter at the base, eight at the top where the branches started to spread out. He had them cut off six inches short of that point, so that the end-grain would be tangled with knots and pins, and therefore resistant to splitting. The trunks were rolled down the hill to the river and floated to Civitas Vadanis in rafts of ten. The derricks and cranes built into the outside wall of shop thirteen lifted them easily and laid them down on the shop's long central floor, where they were planed and dressed. The carriages were ash; simple rectangular frames, inside which the oak trunk lay on an extending trolley with a bed of rollers. A cat's cradle of ropes running in pulleys turned it, and into its end was fitted a flat steel drill-bit three inches wide. The carriage had its own roof, tiled and sloping so that anything the defenders chose to drop or pour on it from above would slide or dribble harmlessly off. There wasn't time to build a geared transmission to drive the wheels, so it'd need forty men to push it along and twelve more to work the windlass that turned the drill. Jobs for the Aram Chantat.
With Duke Valens' book under his arm and a small bundle of sketches in his hand, Ziani went to see the foreman of shop thirteen. Yes, they'd just finished making the drill bits the previous evening; as it happened, they were just about to start fitting them. Ziani told the foreman what he wanted done instead, pinned him down to a firm time estimate and promised him a dozen blacksmiths to do the additional work.
Blacksmiths were, of course, in desperately short supply, but Daurenja's personnel roster showed him a dozen men he could reassign with the bare minimum of disruption and chaos. The men reported to him in the empty lumber store at the back of shop nine. Its principal merit was a long, plain plastered wall, which he'd had whitewashed. By the time the men arrived, he'd already drawn out the diagrams on the wall with a stump of charcoal.
He explained what he wanted, with reference to the diagrams. The men stared at him as though he was mad. But he was getting used to that sort of thing.
"Fine," he said. "All right, how many of you know how to forge a ploughshare?"
Eleven hands went up; there is, of course, always one who never admits to knowing anything.
"That's all right, then," he said. "Basically, it's just a toy windmill with four ploughshares instead of sails, rotating round a hub with a spindle stuck in it. Now, anybody got any problems with that?"
If they did, they kept quiet about it, so Ziani dismissed them and sent a note round to the stores, requisitioning fifteen of the large sheets of quarter-inch steel armour-plate. The quartermaster would, of course, scream and yell like mad and swear blind there weren't that many sheets left, and if there were, they were already earmarked for shop sixteen and the armourers. Daurenja could sort all that out. No point keeping a dog and snarling yourself.
Other calls to make. By the time he'd finished, the day shift had gone and the night shift had started up. He felt tired, so that his eyes itched and his knees ached, but he had six hours completely free; and, more to the point, nobody was using the toolroom at the back of shop seven.
Forty-eight lamps, set up in four racks of twelve, lit the toolroom, which had no windows or skylight. Another borrowing from standard practice at the ordnance factory. Changes, even slight, in the angle of sunlight coming in through a window can distort the way the fine calibrations on a dial or handscrew stand out, which can in turn lead to error. A constant, controllable level of artificial light makes for consistent work.
In the middle of the room stood the Vadani alliance's one and only Type Twenty-Three engine lathe; seventy-two inches between centres, swinging twelve inches over the bed, back-geared, as specified, perfect. Sometimes he came here just to see it; other times, he couldn't bear to look at it. How it had found its way to Civitas Vadanis he had no idea. It was at least ninety years since the Mezentines had stopped exporting them, on the grounds that nobody outside the Republic could be trusted with the potential of such a perfect artefact. Judging by the serial number, this one was at least a hundred and fifty years old. At some point, a blasphemer had oiled the bed, a crime to which the grooves scored in it by particles of grit and swarf embedded in oily paste bore silent, grim witness. Ziani himself had turned new headstock bearings for it and replaced the saddle shims. Apart from that, it had suffered no violations beyond the usual gentle, even wear of long, respectful use. Ziani had heard stories about the temples of the ancient heathens, in which the god was believed to be present, sublimated in the eucharist. Until he'd come here, he hadn't really been able to understand what that was supposed to mean.
There was a simple block-and-tackle hoist on the far wall, and he used it to lift the length of steel bar into position. He'd chalked his initials and his personal requisition code on it just before he left, to make sure nobody interfered with it; the chances of getting another one were practically nonexistent. It was round stock, six-inch diameter, eight feet long, best hardening steel; he'd tested it himself on the edge of a grinding wheel, and the shower of fat orange sparks had confirmed it: nothing less than a section of overhead shaft from one of the Republic's own factories, and how it could possibly have found its way here, he couldn't begin to guess.
Very slowly and carefully, he guided it into place over the bed of the lathe. You and me, he thought; we shouldn't be here, but here we are, and we've got work to do.
He clamped it to the faceplate with cramps and dogs, set the tail-stock live centre in the dimple he'd already drilled in the other end, slacked off the winch and unbuckled the sling. Then, hardly daring to breathe in case the whole thing shook loose and wrecked the lathe, he let in the drive and watched it start to turn. A minute studying it by eye, then the necessary checks with gauges; it was set up straight and running true. He wound in the compound table and set the screw for a five-thousandth-of-an-inch cut.
Two cuts, two hours each; another two hours grinding, lapping and polishing. He'd been tired out before he started work. By the time he'd finished, winched the bar out of the machine and up on to its place in the long rack, he was in that rare but unmistakable state where exhaustion no longer matters. He was drawing his strength directly from the work, concentrating so intensely that he simply didn't have attention to spare for anything else. Dimly he heard the sound of voices; the swing shift taking off their coats and changing their boots on the other side of the toolroom door. He tried to chalk on the bar, but the surface was too smooth, so he wrote on the rack instead.