Read Online Devices and Desires by K. J. Parker - Free Book Online Page B

leg-vices, a pail of grimy
     water and a three-hundredweight double-bick anvil on a stump. Every surface was slick with oil and filmed with a coating of
     black dust.
    It was the familiarity of it all that cut into him; he’d worked all his life in places like this, but he’d never looked at
     them; just as, after a while, a blind man can walk round his house without tripping, because he knows where everything is.
     All his life Ziani had worked hard, anxious to impress and be promoted, until he’d achieved what he most wanted — foreman
     of the machine room of the Mezentine state ordnance factory, the greatest honor a working engineer could ever attain this
     side of heaven. Outside Mezentia there was nothing like this; the Guilds had seen to that. The Eternal Republic had an absolute
     monopoly on precision engineering; which meant, in practice, that outside the city, in the vast, uncharted world that existed
     only to buy the products of Mezentine industry, there were no foundries or machine shops, no lathes or mills or shapers or
     planers or gang-drills or surface-grinders; the pinnacle of the metalworker’s art was a square stub of iron set in a baked
     earth floor for an anvil, a goatskin bellows and three hammers. That was how the Republic wanted it to be; and, to keep it
     that way, there was an absolute prohibition on skilled men leaving the city. Not that any Mezentine in his right mind would
     want to; but wicked kings of distant, barbarous kingdoms had been known to addle men’s minds with vast bribes, luring them
     away with their heads full of secrets. To deal with such contingencies, the Republic had the Travelers’ Company, whose job
     it was to track down renegades and kill them, as quickly and efficiently as possible. By their efforts, all those clever heads
     were returned to the city, usually within the week, with their secrets still in place but without their bodies, to be exhibited
     on pikes above Travelers’ Arch as a reassurance to all loyal citizens.
    Ziani walked over to the anvil and sat down. The more he thought about it, of course, the worse it got. He couldn’t stay in
     the city — this time tomorrow, they’d be singing out his description in every square, factory and exchange in town — but he
     couldn’t leave and go somewhere else, because it simply wasn’t possible to leave unless you went out through one of the seven
     gates. Even supposing he managed it, by growing wings or perfecting an invisibility charm, there was nowhere he could go.
     Of course, he’d never get across the plains and the marshes alive; if he did, and made it as far as the mountains, and got
     through one of the heavily guarded passes without being eaten by bears or shot by sentries, a brown-skinned, black-haired
     Mezentine couldn’t fail to be noticed among the tribes of pale-skinned, yellow-haired savages who lived there. The tribal
     chiefs knew what happened to anyone foolish enough to harbor renegades. Silly of him; he’d jumped out of check into checkmate,
     all the while thinking he was getting away.
    On the bench beside him he saw a scrap of paper. It was a rough sketch of a mechanism — power source, transmission, crankshaft,
     flywheel; a few lines and squiggles with a charcoal stub, someone thinking on paper. One glance was enough for him to be able
     to understand it, as easily as if the squiggles and lines had been letters forming words. Outside the city walls, of course,
     it’d be meaningless, just hieroglyphics. A mechanism, a machine someone was planning to build in order to achieve an objective.
     He thought about that. A waterwheel or a treadmill or a windlass turns; that motion is translated into other kinds of motion,
     circular into linear, horizontal into vertical, by means of artfully shaped components, and when the process is complete one
     action is turned into something completely different, as if by alchemy. The barbarians, believers in witchcraft and sorcery,
     never