The roof collapsed, filling the gallery with dirt. It was like being inside an hourglass as it’s turned upside down. Gannadius choked, felt a timber crash into the side of his head and opened his eyes.
‘Uncle?’
‘Theudas,’ he said. ‘What’s going on? Where are we?’
‘You were having a nightmare,’ Theudas said, bringing the lamp close. ‘It’s all right. We’re with the plainspeople, remember? Temrai’s summoned us, and he’s going to send us home.’
Gannadius sat up, shaking his head. ‘He was wrong,’ he said. ‘You can change it, if you find the right place and sort of push. We did it ourselves, with Bardas and that girl.’ He looked up at Theudas’ face, as if examining whether it was genuine. ‘Coriander,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t that mean the enemy?’
Theudas put down the lamp. ‘Stay still,’ he said, ‘I’m going to see if I can find that lady doctor. You’ll be just fine, you’ll see.’
Gannadius sighed. He’d woken up with a splitting headache. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it was just some leftovers from the dream I was having, I haven’t gone mad. Sorry, did I frighten you?’
Cautiously, as if afraid of an ambush, Theudas came back. ‘It was another one of those dreams, was it?’ he said. ‘I thought the silverwort tea had sorted them out.’
‘Not really,’ Gannadius said. ‘But it tasted so disgusting I stopped telling you about them, so you wouldn’t make me drink it any more.’ He breathed out and lay back on the bed. ‘Now that I think of it, I seem to remember reading somewhere that silverwort’s a slow poison. Well, it’s bad for you, at any rate. Does things to your kidneys.’
Theudas scowled. ‘Go back to sleep,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a long day tomorrow, and you need your rest. In fact, I’m going to have a word with the drover; you can’t be expected to rattle along in a cart all day at your age.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t fret about it.’ Gannadius smiled bleakly. ‘I happen to know that I survived to a ripe old age, all my hair fell out and half my teeth as well. So did you; survive, I mean. Probably you died of pneumonia, but don’t hold me to that; I’m extrapolating from associated data.’
‘Uncle-’
‘I know, I’m talking crazy again. I’ll stop.’ Gannadius yawned conscientiously and turned over, his eyes still open. ‘Put out the lamp,’ he said, ‘I promise I’ll try to get some sleep.’
Theudas sighed. ‘I worry about you, I really do,’ he said.
‘So do I,’ Gannadius answered, trying to sound drowsy. ‘So do I.’
‘You’re cured then, are you?’
Bardas smiled. ‘Apparently,’ he replied. ‘At least, I’m no crazier than I was to start with. Also, I was making the infirmary look untidy, so they threw me out.’
Anax, the ancient Son of Heaven who ran the proof house, nodded sagely. ‘It’s not the sort of place you’d want to hang about in,’ he said. ‘What they’re best at is sawing off limbs – they make a wonderfully neat job of it, probably because the surgeon used to be the foreman of the joinery shop, until he got too much seniority and had to be promoted. You should see some of the false legs he’s fitted; they turn them out of whalebone on the big pole lathe they’ve got down there. Works of art, some of them.’
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ Bardas replied.
While Bardas packed his few belongings into a kitbag, Anax sat perched on the end of the bed, reminding Bardas of a pixie in a story he’d heard when he was very young. To the best of his recollection, the pixie occupied its time by making marvellously detailed and complicated lifesize mechanical dolls that were well nigh indistinguishable from real boys and girls, and substituting them for the children he stole from poor families in the dead of night. The story had horrified him so much that he hadn’t slept for weeks afterwards, and (rather illogically) had got into the habit of tapping his arms and legs to make sure they weren’t made of metal.
‘So you’re off, then,’ Anax said, after he’d been silent for a while.
‘Apparently,’ Bardas replied. ‘It’s a shame, really. I was getting used to being here.’
Anax smiled. ‘Getting used to,’ he said. ‘That’s about the furthest anyone could ever go, unless of course they happened to love bashing sheet metal with hammers. Don’t laugh, some people do. Bollo here, for instance; don’t you, Bollo?’
Anax’s enormous young assistant pulled a face. Bardas laughed.
‘Don’t let him fool you,’ Anax went on. ‘Secretly he loves his work. When he was a child, he was always getting yelled at for breaking things – and something that size in a small peasant cottage is bound to break something every now and again, it’s inevitable. Here, he can break things all day long and get paid money for it.’ Anax looked down at his fingers, then up again. ‘If you’re going to the wars, what are you going to do for equipment? You don’t seem to have much kit of your own.’
Bardas shrugged. ‘They’ll issue me with some, I suppose,’ he replied. ‘At least, I assume-’
‘Seems a bit long-winded,’ Anax interruped. ‘After all, we make the stuff here. Why take pot luck with some provincial quartermaster’s clerk when you can have the pick of the production run? Better still,’ he added, hopping down from the bed, ‘you could have some made bespoke. At least that way you’d know it was proof.’
‘I haven’t really given it much thought,’ Bardas replied, holding a shirt against his chest to fold it. ‘From what they’ve told me, my main function’s going to be to stand up on a high point where Temrai can see me and look terrifying. Which’ll suit me fine,’ he added. ‘Gods know, I’m in no hurry to get involved in any fighting.’
Anax sighed. ‘He hasn’t given it much thought,’ he repeated. ‘Deputy inspector of the proof house, or whatever he calls himself, and he’s prepared to make do with any old piece of junk off the shelves in the QM stores. We can’t have that, can we, Bollo? Imagine how it’d reflect on us if he got himself killed, or lost an arm. Some people just don’t think, is their trouble.’
‘All right,’ Bardas replied, smiling. ‘You choose some for me, then I’ll know who to blame.’
‘We’ll do better than that,’ Anax replied. ‘We’ll make it for you, ourselves.’
Bardas raised an eyebrow. ‘I thought you only smashed it up,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know you could make the stuff too.’
Anax made a show of looking affronted. ‘Do you mind?’ he said. ‘I was a tin-basher for twenty years.’
‘Until you got too much seniority and they had to promote you?’
Anax slapped him on the back. ‘It’s a pity, you know,’ he said. ‘The man’s just starting to get the hang of how this place works, and he’s getting posted. It’s a waste, if you ask me.’
Before Bardas could object, Anax had marched out of the room. He walked so fast that Bardas had trouble keeping up with him, especially in the maze of corridors and galleries under the main shop, which was where he was headed. Bollo lumbered along some way behind; he wasn’t built for speed or agility, and he knew the way already.
‘Good,’ Anax said, peering in through a doorway, ‘nobody’s found it yet. One of these days I’ll come down here and it’ll be full of equipment and people working, and that’ll be my private workshop gone. Where’s Bollo with the lamp? We need to get a fire going so we can see what we’re about.’
When there was light, Bardas was able to look round. In the middle of the floor stood an anvil, the full-sized three-hundredweight type, bolted to a massive section of oak beam to dampen the shock of the blows. Next to it on the beam was a swage block, a large square of heavy duty iron into which were cut holes and grooves and cups of various sizes and profiles, half-round and square and three-square; into these recesses the sheet metal could be hammered, to mould a variety of shapes, such as flutes and raised edges. At the end of the beam a cup-shaped hole had been chiselled out, about half a thumb’s length deep at its deepest point (it was shaped rather like a scallop shell, sloping gently at one end, steeply at the other). Bardas noticed that the fibres of the wood had been hammered smooth, hard and shiny.