dozen.'
'We did that too,' said a young, dough-faced man, with a sheepish grin. 'Unfortunately, the steelyard crews seem to have underestimated the time they'd need, so they're way behind and all our careful timetabling's gone out of the window. You can't blame the yard workers, though. I went down to check on progress about an hour ago, never seen men work so hard.'
Valens lifted his head. 'Who did you get the time estimates from?' he asked.
'That creepy chap, the thin one with the ponytail. He told me, half an hour per cart, start to finish. But it's not all his fault, either. Apparently, they were kept hanging about waiting for a consignment of bolts from the forge.'
Valens yawned. 'I see,' he said. 'In that case, we'll hold up on the beheadings until we can be absolutely sure whose fault this is. Meanwhile, would it help if we sent some more men down to the yard, to clear the backlog?'
The young man sighed. 'Not really,' he said. 'I offered earlier, but the creepy bloke said that extra bodies would just be in the way. Apparently, the problem is, they've only got a limited number of those drill things-sorry, I don't know the right word. Curly steel thing like a pig's tail, and you turn a handle like a wheel spoke.'
'Augers,' Valens said.
'That's them,' the young man said cheerfully. 'They've only got two dozen of the things, so Mister Creepy told me, and drilling the holes is the bit that takes all the time. Once that's done, offering up the plates and bolting them down is a piece of cake. That Mezentine's rigged up cranes and winches and things to move the plates about, and wooden frame things to show them where to drill the holes-'
'Jigs,' Valens said.
'Is that the word? Anyway, all highly ingenious stuff, but I guess he's used to this sort of thing.'
Valens shrugged. 'We'll get there in the end,' he said. 'But I want Orchard Street cleared and kept open; we need one way in and out of the town, even if all the rest are blocked solid.'
Someone nodded, accepting the commission, and disappeared down the spiral staircase. Valens groped for his name; an Eremian, from one of the leading families. Surprisingly knowledgeable about falconry, for an Eremian. 'Who just left?' he asked.
'Jarnac Ducas,' someone said. 'You put him in charge of the day watch, remember?'
'Did I?' Valens shrugged. 'I've lost track of who's doing what these days.'
'He volunteered,' someone said, and someone else sniggered. 'Very keen, the Eremians. Some of them, at any rate.'
'I remember him now,' Valens said. 'Annoying but highly competent. Well, at any rate he'll get the traffic moving again, if he has to kill every carter in the city with his bare hands.' He frowned. 'I shouldn't joke about that,' he added. 'I saw him fighting at the siege of Civitas Eremiae. Quite glad he's on our side, really.' He looked up at the sky: well past noon. 'I suppose I'd better go and do some work,' he said sadly. 'Does anybody know where Mezentius has got to?'
He found him in the exchequer office, sitting at the great checkered counting table, his head in his hands and a heap of silver counters scattered in front of him. 'Bad time?' he asked.
Mezentius looked up. 'I've got a confession to make,' he said angrily. 'I don't know how to work this stupid bloody thing.'
Valens frowned. 'It's not exactly straightforward,' he said. 'I spent hours trying to learn when I was a kid, and I still have trouble.'
Mezentius spun a counter on its rim, then flicked it across the tabletop. 'No you don't,' he said. 'You can make it come out every time.'
'True.' Valens picked up the counter and put it back with the rest of the pile. 'I have trouble, but I overcome it, slowly and painfully. I find the key to success is not losing my temper.'
Mezentius sighed. 'Point taken,' he said. 'But I shouldn't be having to do this, there should be clerks.'
'There were. But I had to promote them all, remember? So, for the time being, we all do our own tiresome and menial chores. I'm sorry, but there it is. Duty must be done, and all that.'
'Quite. How's married life, by the way?'
'Delightful, thank you,' Valens snapped. 'Now, when you've finished whatever it is you're doing, I need to talk to you about who's going to command the light cavalry decoy detachments. I did ask you for some names about a week ago, but I'm assuming you've been busy.'
'I'll see to it,' Mezentius said. 'You know, I liked it better when we were soldiers.'
'We still are,' Valens replied. 'Unfortunately.' He turned to leave, then remembered something and paused. 'While I think of it,' he said. 'Have we heard back about the demands yet?'
'Nothing.'
'Ah well. I.thought we could play for time, but obviously they aren't that stupid. Happy figuring.'
Crossing the yard, he could hear the forges, the shrill, distant clank and bash of the trip-hammers and sledges beating out hot iron blooms into plate. What it must be like for people in the city, he didn't like to think. They were working three shifts now. He hoped for his fellow citizens' sake that after a while they got so used to it that they stopped noticing it; hoped, but doubted. It wasn't a sound you could ignore.
Next chore: he unlocked the little sally port that gave access through the back wall of the palace into the narrow lane that led down into the flower market. The steep gradient and pinched, winding alleys made it impossible for carts to get this far, and the congestion was keeping the traders from getting through, so the market was deserted. From the corner of the square, a long flight of steps took him down to a derelict block where the big tanners' yard used to be, and from there he followed a spider's web of snickets and entries until he arrived at the side gate of the old covered market where Vaatzes had set up his small-assemblies workshop.
The noise was different there. The screeching and graunching of files was loud enough to blur out the beat of the hammers; it reminded him of grasshoppers, but there was a tension about the place that made him feel uneasy. He was getting used to it, however; he experienced it wherever Vaatzes had made his presence felt, a kind of sad, determined anger.
Where the old market stalls had been, there were now rows of long, narrow benches, to which stout wooden vises were bolted at intervals of six feet or so. Behind each vise stood a man, his neck bent, his feet a shoulder's width apart, his arms reciprocating backward and forward as he guided his file; each man just slightly out of time with his neighbor, so that the movements appeared sequential rather than concerted, like the escapement of a vast mechanism. Valens walked the length of one aisle and came to the drilling benches, set at right angles to the rest of the shop. He vaguely remembered Vaatzes complaining about something or other to do with drilling; there weren't enough proper pedestal drills in the duchy, so he was having to waste valuable time and skilled manpower building them, badly, with wooden frames instead of cast iron. Presumably that was what the men were doing; they worked in teams of three, one man working a treadle, one man feeding a squared beam along a bed of rollers, the third man slowly drawing down a lever to guide a fast-spinning chuck. They stood up to their ankles in yellow dust; it spilled out of the holes they drilled like blood from wounds, and from time to time a spurt would belch up into the air, blinding them and making them cough. There was a clogging smell of dust, sap and burning, and the air was painfully dry. Beyond the drills were more benches, more processes, different shapes but the same shared movement, as though the whole building was powered from one shaft driven by one flywheel, hidden and turning imperceptibly slowly.
A worried-looking man with a bundle of notched tallies cradled in his arms tried to step round him; a supervisor, presumably.
Valens moved just enough to block him, and shouted, 'Where's Vaatzes?'
The supervisor frowned, shrugged, said something Valens couldn't make out through the noise.
'Vaatzes,' he repeated, louder. The man tried to point, lost his hold on his tallies, and watched them slither out under his elbows onto the floor. It was probably just as well that Valens couldn't make out what he had to say about that, as he stooped to gather them.
'Vaatzes,' he said a third time, putting his foot on a tally so the man couldn't retrieve it. That got him a ferocious scowl and a vague indication, somewhere beyond the banks of buffing wheels. 'Thank you so much,' he said, and walked on.
In the end, he found Vaatzes standing at a bench, cutting a slot in a steel plate with a file. He tapped him on the shoulder; Vaatzes turned, hesitated for a moment and put the file down, saying something Valens couldn't
