“But what do you sell?” Cassiterides Bone inquired.
Alphonsus Lung picked up one of the pamphlets and flipped through it. “These poor things? What sort of pathetic bookmonger are you?”
“I am no mere bookmonger, and those are not merely books,” Nerve retorted. He plucked the pamphlet from Bone’s fingers. “I am a catalog merchant. I don’t sell these. I sell what’s in them.”
“And what’s in them?” Ignis Blister asked over folded arms.
Drogam Nerve smiled again and pitched his voice so that everyone in the square could hear his answer—which, on this market day, was a lot of people. “Everything, my friends. These are catalogs, and with them you can find and order anything and everything imaginable.” And he bowed to the assembled people of the town.
Well, this was something new. The citizens pored over Nerve’s catalogs with their woodcut illustrations and discovered astounding goods they hadn’t even known existed. For some things, Nerve sold blueprints the purchaser could follow to build a house, a train station, a carriage; for others, he took orders and promised delivery of the actual item within a fortnight.
But the peddler called Nerve was not the only one to arrive that day. A ship docked, carrying news of coming danger: invaders from up the coast and over the hills were headed south. There was only one enemy likely to come from that direction, and it was the only enemy capable of striking fear into the town on the bay. An impromptu community meeting came together in the market square to discuss what should be done.
“That’s easy,” said the Yankee peddler called Lung. “You will need timepieces in order to coordinate your defense, and a great clock whose tolling can be heard throughout the town, so that all will know the hour of the attack.” And he opened his cart and showed them small pocket chronometers and enormous timepieces with bells that pealed like alarms. “I have heard tell of these people,” he warned. “You must not be caught unawares.”
“No,” said the Yankee peddler called Bone. “What good will knowing the hour do if you can’t defend yourself? What you need is fortification: a great and powerful perimeter strung from hilltop to hilltop to keep the invaders at bay. I, too, have heard of these people, and you must at all costs keep them from entering your town.” And he displayed lengths of fence and barbed wire with edges sharp as a razor’s.
“Those won’t work,” argued the third Yankee peddler, the one called Blister. “You need more than clocks and fences. I know these people. You must destroy them outright, or you haven’t a chance of survival. You must arm yourselves.” And Blister showed them weapons: cheirosiphons, fire lances, firepots packed with glittering incendiary powders, and bottles of Greek fire.
The fourth Yankee peddler waited until his fellows had finished. At last, the people of the town turned to look at him. He shook his head slowly.
“You may announce the hour of their coming with one of Brother Lung’s clocks,” he said. “You may hold them at bay for a while with Brother Bone’s fortifications, and you may even kill some with Brother Blister’s handiwork. But it will serve only to delay the inevitable. In the end, they will win, and they will take your city because they outnumber you and because they are stronger, rougher, madder than you. In the end, if anything can best them, it will not be you—you will all be gone, either fled or killed. Only the city itself will remain. In the end, only the city can stop them.”
“How can a city do this?” the mayor asked. “Do you know a way?”
Drogam Nerve took a catalog from his stall, opened it, and showed the mayor the page he had selected. “You must build this.” This was a sequence of designs that would turn the city itself into something like a combination of a clock, a fence, and a bomb all wrapped into one.
“How much?” the mayor asked.
Drogam Nerve smiled and pointed to the price printed in the bottom corner.
The city hurried to raise the money, bought the plans for Nerve’s device, and began to build. It was an infinitely complicated design. Some of the components—escapements and flashpans and fuses and assorted bits of metalwork—could be had from Lung, Bone, and Blister, but the design also required pieces the likes of which had never been seen in the town on the bay. These had to be ordered from Nerve as well, who hired the fastest riders to be found to undertake the journey to the warehouse of his partner, Octavian Deacon.
Piece by piece, the city was turned into an infernal device.
Finally, the time came to put the last part into place: a great steel spring. “Pass the word for the mainspring,” went the call through the town, but among the parts that had been ordered, there was no giant steel mainspring. “Pass the word for the mainspring,” went the call again, but the local engineers had no springs big enough to power the city-turned-weapon.
Time grew short. The mayor went to the Yankee peddlers. He found them sitting in the market square, playing cards. “Mr. Nerve,” he said, “we seem to have forgotten the mainspring, and we haven’t steel enough to make one.”
Nerve went for his catalogs, but the mayor shook his head. “There is no time,” he protested. “Our enemies will be here in a matter of days, surely.”
Alphonsus Lung looked up from his cards. “You have no steel, but what about whalebone?”
“Of course,” the mayor snapped. “Half of our citizens are whalers. But what good does that do?”
“Among my clocks,” Lung said, “there is one from China that uses a mainspring of whalebone. If you have enough whalebone, you can fashion your spring from that.”
The mayor looked to Nerve, who consulted the plans. “Well,” he said, “I wouldn’t be able to tell you how it might affect the mechanism.”
“You mean it might not work?” the mayor asked.
“Oh, it’ll work,” Nerve replied. “The question
