Chapter 282 -275: The Accounting
Lord Arkhul’s hall, one hour later
Gruzzik had walked this corridor a thousand times in four hundred years and it had never taken so long.
The scholar came with him, one pace behind and to the left, satchel under his arm. Neither of them had spoken since the casting hall. There was nothing useful to say and both of them were saving what breath they had for whatever the hall wanted.
At the door Gruzzik stopped.
"If it goes badly," he said, "don’t argue with him about me. He’ll take it as insolence and you’ll be standing in the same fire I am, and there’ll be no one left who understands the problem."
"That is a remarkably practical instruction."
"I’m a practical man." He put his shoulder to the door. "It’s the only virtue I’ve got left this afternoon."
Arkhul was alone standing at the far end of his dek with his back to them and the heat coming off him had warped the air into a shimmer that made the wall behind him swim. The Lords were gone. The officers were gone. That meant this was not a spectacle. It was an inquiry, and inquiries ended in decisions.
"Foreman."
"My lord."
"Ninety-one paces."
"Yes, my lord."
"Indoors. On a flat floor. With nobody shooting at it." Arkhul turned around. "Malgrath will have told three Lords by nightfall and all seven by the week’s end. Kharvoss said nothing at all, which means he has already decided what he thinks and will not be spending it on me." He came down the hall. "So. Explain it. And understand before you begin that I will know a lie, and that I have very little use today for a man who wastes my patience protecting his own throat."
Gruzzik had spent the walk assembling three different versions of this. He immediately discarded all of them.
"The machine failed because I built it wrong, my lord."
Arkhul stopped.
"That is not the answer I expected."
"It’s the true one. I can dress it up. It’ll still be that underneath, and you said you’d know."
"Then undress it further. How wrong?"
"Every way there was," Gruzzik said, taking a breath. "The track came off because four hundred and six links slipped and only three held — Brakh’s own three, the ones he signed. The turret jammed because I cast it too big, and the ring beneath was built for the weight the mortals specified, not the weight I gave it. The hull cracked against a stone pillar at walking pace because I used emberglass where their alloy was called for, at the thickness their alloy required. And the engine ran away because I removed their governor and bound a spirit in its place, with cooling sized on their plans for their engine — which, by then, no longer existed."
He stopped. Arkhul waited.
"That’s the list," Gruzzik said. "There isn’t a sixth thing. There didn’t need to be."
"Every one of those was your decision."
"Every one. Nobody ordered them. I made each one on my own floor, with my own hands, and every single time I was certain I was improving on a mortal’s work." He met the Lord’s eyes. "I’d make the same choice again on any one of them in isolation and think myself clever. That’s what I’ve been sitting with for the last hour."
Arkhul stayed quiet so long that the room’s heat noticeably rose.
"At last," he said, "you were warned."
"Yes, my lord."
"By whom."
Gruzzik didn’t hesitate. "By him. Eleven times, by his count, and he’s the sort who keeps count. On the alloys, on the plate thickness, on the governor, on the cooling. And on the track links, in the hall, four minutes before they killed the man standing on them."
Arkhul’s gaze moved past him for the first time.
"Scholar."
"My lord."
"Eleven times."
"Twelve, if the hall counts. I chose not to say it a twelfth. The foreman had already heard it eleven times and the machine was already moving, and I judged that another repetition would achieve nothing except to make me feel better about what was coming." A pause. "That judgement was correct and I take no comfort from it."
"Why did he not listen?"
"Because I was arguing arithmetic against four hundred years of hands." The scholar shifted the satchel. "The foreman has poured armour since before my clan had a name. Everything he knows says a stronger metal makes a stronger plate, and everything he knows is right, in every hall on this continent, in every fight any of us has ever had. What I could not make him feel — because I could not make myself feel it either, until today — is that the mortals aren’t building metal. They’re building a fit. Every number on that drawing is holding hands with every other number. Pull one out, put a better one in its place, and you haven’t improved the machine. You’ve broken a hundred agreements you never knew were being made."
"That is philosophy."
"It’s carpentry, my lord. It only sounds like philosophy because none of us has ever had to think it before."
Arkhul turned away and walked the length of the hall and back.
"I have been told," he said, "at length and in writing, by your clan, that the drawings were the smallest part of what the mortals have. I dismissed it. I dismissed it in front of four Lords this morning, using the words ledgers and measuring sticks, and I was applauded." He stopped. "Say it plainly, and say it once, so that I have it from a mouth and not a page. What do they have that we do not?"
The scholar set his satchel down on the floor. It was the first time Gruzzik had seen him let go of it.
"They have sameness, my lord."
"Sameness."
"Four hundred and ninety-one bolts in the hull of that machine, and in the original every one is identical. Not near. The same. Any one goes anywhere, fits, holds. They achieve this not with any working we could copy, but with a system — the same ore, weighed; the same furnace, held at a stated heat for a stated time; the pour tested; the test recorded; the batch destroyed if the record comes out wrong." He let that sit. "The foreman laughed at that when I first read it to him. So did I. We both called it a religion. It is not a religion. It is the entire weapon."
"Metal is the weapon."
"Metal is what the weapon is made of. The weapon is that ten thousand men who have never met can each make one part, badly —but every part will fit every other. It also means the mortals can build a thousand machines that are all the same. It means a farm boy with a wrench can repair one in a field with a part cut two hundred miles away by a man he’ll never see." The scholar’s voice stayed flat. "We built one. It took three months, eleven of the finest smiths we have, and a Demon Lord’s attention and no two of its track links were alike, because our people are artists, and they signed their work, and one of those signatures killed the man who cut it."
Arkhul said nothing.
"Give us the drawings again tomorrow," the scholar said. "Give us a hundred years. We will build magnificent machines, each one different, each one a marvel, each one attended by the genius who made it and useless the moment he dies. That is what we are, and there is no shame in it. It has won a great many wars." He picked his satchel back up. "It will not win this one. Because the mortal duke isn’t building marvels. He’s building copies, and he can build them faster than we can build wonders, and every copy is as good as the last one."
The heat in the hall dropped, slowly, which frightened Gruzzik more than the rising would have.
"Foreman," Arkhul said.
"My lord."
"You have cost me a machine, three months, a smith, and my standing in front of four Lords and one clerk." He came to a stop in front of him. "Give me a reason not to burn you."
Gruzzik found, to his mild surprise, that he had one.
"Because I’m the only smith on this continent who now knows exactly why it failed," he said. "Not from a page. From standing on the floor while it came apart. Every man in that hall this morning learned that our way doesn’t work against theirs. I’m the only one who can tell them what to do instead, and be believed, because they watched me be wrong." He straightened up. "Burn me and you’ll appoint someone who’s read a report. He’ll do everything I did, my lord, because everything I did was the sensible thing for anyone to do. He’ll just do it a year later."
Arkhul studied him.
"And what would you do instead? Say it now. Quickly."
"Same ore. Weighed. Same furnace, same heat, held to the hour, and someone whose only work is watching the glass and writing the number." Gruzzik’s jaw tightened. "Test every pour. Throw away the ones that fail — good metal, my lord, thrown away, and I’ll want that order in your own voice because my own smiths will not obey it from mine. Every link off one pattern. No signatures. No man’s own better version of anything." He exhaled. "They’ll hate it. They’ll say it’s a religion. They’ll be right. And in three years we’ll have a hundred machines that are all the same machine, and none of them will kill the man standing near it."
The silence went on a long time.
"Do it," Arkhul said. "You have three years. The scholar stays with you, and he writes everything, and if he tells me you have skipped a composition I will take that as your answer to this conversation." He turned away. "Now get out. Both of you."
They were most of the way down the corridor before either spoke.
"He kept you," the scholar said.
"He kept the only man stupid enough to have learned it the expensive way." Gruzzik rubbed his face with both hands. "Three years."
"Three years is generous."
"Three years is impossible, and he knows it, and he gave it to me anyway, which means he’s decided its worth trying more than the burning." Gruzzik stopped at the mouth of the corridor and looked back toward the casting hall, where his people would still be working out what to do with sixty tons of jammed and split and ticking failure. "Brakh’s three links go in the wall of the new hall. As a lesson so nobody signs anything ever again."
"That will not be popular."
"Nothing about the next three years is going to be popular." He started walking. "Come on, scholar. Bring your satchel. You’re going to read me the compositions."
"All of them?"
"All of them," Gruzzik said. "Twice."