The last thing he did before he dragged himself back to his office and fell asleep in his chair was to scribble a note for Daurenja and give it to one of the messengers. As he handed it over, as his fingertips lost contact with it, he felt a dreadful surge of fear, and knew he was making a terrible mistake; as if he'd written out a death warrant, and carelessly put in his own name instead of the condemned man's.
The mandrel's ready, he'd written. We can start whenever you like. He woke up. The messenger was standing over him, looking worried. "He said to give it to you right away," the messenger said defensively. "Said it was very important."
The messenger's tone of voice made it unnecessary to ask who he was talking about. "All right," Ziani grumbled. "Give it here, thank you."
Daurenja's handwriting-neat, pointed, sloping at an exaggerated angle-across the bottom of the scrap of drawing paper Ziani had used for his note.
As soon as possible. Now. G.D.
Ziani groaned, reached for the top of the ink bottle, stabbed about in the ink like a woodpecker in a rotten tree, and scribbled:
Don't be bloody stupid. I've had a long day and I'm going to get some sleep. We'll start the forging an hour after sunset tomorrow. Get everything ready for then.
"No rush," he said, as the messenger took the paper from his hand. "Make the bastard wait."
Then he dragged himself to his feet, went outside on to the gallery, climbed the spiral stone staircase to the tower room where he slept, and went to bed. Much to his surprise, he slept well, and woke up in daylight. His room in the tower was circular, with one small, strangely shaped window about a foot off the floor. After a month or so of wild speculation, he'd got around to asking someone about it, and was told that the factory building had once been the keep of the citadel, before Valens' great-grandfather built the ducal palace on the other side of town. The upper gallery, where his office was, used to be the intermediate defensive ring, where archers shot down at besieging enemies and pushed scaling ladders away from the walls with long poles. The room he slept in, his informant added, was the watch platoon garderobe.
"I see," he'd said. "What the hell's a garderobe?" Basically, military terminology for a toilet; which explained, among other things, the position and shape of what he'd taken for a window. Boiling oil and molten lead weren't the only things you dropped on besiegers' heads, apparently.
He changed his shirt and trousers and put on a heavy-duty leather apron, and boots with steel toecaps, then went down to the gallery and along to the corner tower, where there was usually something to eat. Today, it was salt bacon, more salt than bacon, a basin of grey slop under a thick knobbly skin, and grey bread you could've sharpened axes on. He was hungry, but he couldn't bring himself to burst the skin on the grey slop. An earlier diner had left a hacksaw beside the bacon. It got the job done, eventually.
A little later, his mouth tasting uncomfortably of salt, he went to his office and attacked the paperwork for an hour, at the end of which his early-morning freshness had all gone. He felt blunt, like a knife misused for cutting lead, and he still had far too much to do.
The foreman of shop eleven rescued him in the nick of time; something about the bearings on the reciprocating saw, which nobody else was allowed to touch if it went wrong. Ziani smiled, abandoned the paperwork and spent a pleasant couple of hours in the small toolroom, turning up new bearings on the little toymakers' lathe he'd built himself. He stretched the job out a little, pretending to himself that a mirror finish was essential for the smooth running of the saw. Once upon a time, he thought, there was a man who worked in a factory rather like this one, only better; he checked tolerances and fought his way through paperwork, and when something broke he fixed it himself, because that was quicker and easier than explaining to someone else how to do it; he didn't like the administration much, and when he found an excuse to get away from it for an hour or so and spend time actually cutting and shaping metal, he used to wonder why the hell he'd ever wanted to be the foreman instead of an ordinary engineer; once upon a time, in a distant land, and also here, now, where the avenging hero had finally settled down, made new friends and got a job. The difference, the tolerance, the margin of error, was something you checked with a simple piece of metal, a yes/no gauge. If you put the gauge over the finished component and it fit, the piece was good. If not, scrap. Yes or no; no tolerance.
The bearing fitted perfectly, which was how it should be. After all, he thought, I do good work, and everything I make fits and does its job; which is why I can't be satisfied with sleeping in a toilet in a watchtower, while my wife and daughter think I'm dead or never coming home again. No fit; scrap.
The rest of the day passed rather too quickly. He knew the sun was setting when the light through the arrow slits in the wall of shop nine blazed a garish orange in the freshly cut steel of the catapult ratchets. An hour to go. He went back to the corner tower and ate some more of the grit-hard bread.
Then Daurenja came for him, like an executioner. There was a big covered space at the back of the factory. In the old days, they'd told him, it had been the castle mews, where the hawks and falcons were kept, a dark, quiet place, suitable for savage, neurotic creatures in captivity. Now it was just a shell with a high roof and no windows. On Daurenja's orders, they'd cut a hole in the roof for a flue, rising up out of a broad funnel-shaped canopy, hung by wires from the rafters. Directly under it they'd dug a wide, shallow pit, lined it with firebrick and run in two-inch-bore clay pipes to conduct the blast from four enormous double-action bellows. Surrounding the pit like a moat was a channel, six inches deep and three wide, filled with water. Against one wall lay a mountain of charcoal.
Two heavy A-shaped iron frames stood a little to the right of the pit, supporting the two ends of the tool-steel mandrel Ziani had turned on the lathe. Next to that, two five-hundredweight double-horned anvils, and lying on the floor around them buckets of water, mops, bundles of cloth, wide-mouthed pails of water, with whole fleeces stuffed in them to soak, iron cans and dippers fixed on the ends of long poles. Two dozen men in aprons stood by the far wall, looking nervous.
"I've already hardened and tempered the mandrel," he heard Daurenja say, and for a moment he couldn't think what he was talking about. "It's going to be tricky keeping the frames from burning through. We'll just have to make sure they're damped down all the time."
A table, liberated from somebody's kitchen. On it lay eight pairs of tongs, sixteen sledgehammers, a big stone pestle and mortar, clay jars, rolls of three-sixteenth iron wire, a clutter of small, commonplace tools, a tinderbox, two fire-rakes, four wire brushes. "I think we've got everything," Daurenja was saying, and Ziani realised he sounded worried, the first time ever. It reminds me of something, Ziani thought, and realised it was two things, not one: preparations for an execution, and the midwife getting the kitchen ready, the day Moritsa was born.
"Swage blocks," Ziani said. "You've forgotten the swage blocks."
Daurenja shook his head. "Over there," he said, pointing into the shadows. "It's so dark in here you can't see them. Look, will somebody get some lamps lit, for crying out loud?"
It'd have to be dark once they started, of course; they needed to be able to see the fine differences in the blinding white of iron at welding heat, and the soft glow of a single candle might be enough to deceive them. "Get the blocks over here by the hearth," Daurenja was telling someone. "And have the staves laid out in order, we don't want to be fooling about dry-fitting once we're up and running. And then you might as well get the fire lit. The sooner we start, the sooner we'll see."