Arcanum (87 page)

“We’ll be as ready as we can be. When they come down the valley, we’ll meet them with everything we have. We’ll win, and all of Europe will talk about us the same way they talk about Alaric.”

“The dwarves aren’t ready yet, either. We should be making sure they never are, rather than wait for them.” She reached out her right hand and found his left, catching his fingers in hers. “How can we harry them, when we don’t have soldiers to spare?”

“Perhaps we do. That night in the library; remember those who attacked it?”

“You marked them, and then arrested them later.”

“I’ll free them from the mines if they’ll fight for me. They can go back to their families – if they want them – and wear their crosses with pride rather than shame.” Felix looked pleased with himself. “Two letters to write, then. One to the Franks, and one to the mines. Master Wess can make copies of the second with his press printer thing.”

“Who will you send with the first?” she asked. “We can’t spare Peter Büber.”

“Master Ullmann? Or some of his men? There’s the two he took with him to Simbach.” Felix played with the ends of Sophia’s fingers. “Have you seen a woman around Master Ullmann recently?”

She thought it an odd question. “No, I don’t think so. Apart from the witch, on occasions.”

“He needs to tell me everything: that’s part of his job. I shouldn’t have to find out from someone else.”

“Then ask him,” she said. “You can’t have your spy master hiding things from you.”

“Aaron,” said Thaler. “Be careful.”

“The devil take your care. My hands are perfectly steady.” Morgenstern stood at the trestle with a funnel and bored-out wooden tube. “And your chattering won’t help one jot.”

It didn’t stop Thaler from fussing. They’d set up a system to try and stop stray sparks from igniting the mixtures, from the grinding to the mixing and the graining and the storing. For more delicate operations, trestles like Morgenstern’s were surrounded by hessian screens, but were otherwise open to the sky. As a result of all their caution, they’d lost only one of their sheds, and none of their millers. It helped that they knew what they were dealing with: the books salvaged from the hexmasters made the powder’s quixotic nature quite clear. But an accident was inevitable, the further they went. Everything was an experiment, every time was the first time.

They were making fuses. Paradoxically, these would make their detonations safer, but only if the fuses were reliable, and burnt at the same rate. Mistress Tuomanen could be of no further help. They’d outstripped her knowledge weeks ago: she knew what she knew. Trying something to see if it worked hadn’t been a habit the Order had encouraged, and there was a lot of unlearning to do. She was mortally afraid of making mistakes.

Unlike Aaron Morgenstern, who revelled in novelty and flew the flag for danger.

“All the same,” said Thaler. “Please be careful.”

“Is this what being married to you would be like?” countered Morgenstern. “Let me get on with it.”

Thaler knew that Morgenstern only had a few ounces of powder – enough for his task. Perhaps he was worrying unnecessarily. “Call me when you’re done.”

The field in which they were working was across the river, under the shadow of Goat Mountain and the White Tower. It was close enough to the Witches’ Bridge to make access easy, while being far enough away to … well: if they were going to lay waste to Juvavum, they’d need a lot more powder.

The meadow was dotted with flapping hessian screens and small sheds. Every once in a while, a door would open and a man or woman would come out, carrying a small pot of something or other, and take it to a storage area. At times, someone would go and collect some ingredient, or draw another bucket of water. Otherwise, everything was quiet.

Bastian’s great iron pot sat on a series of boards at one edge of the field, pointing northwards. Next to it were smaller versions in the same style, resembling not only the mortars found in every kitchen, but the mortars in which they combined the white, the yellow and the black to make the powder itself.

They may have been small, but these little ones worked; honest-to-gods worked. They could lob a ball of iron high into the air and across the width of the practice range. It took an age to load them, though, and aiming them was painfully slow. Also, the projectiles would only kill a dwarf if they hit one square on the head.

In other words, they were next to useless. Thaler wasn’t in the business of producing a curiosity. He could picture in his mind what he wanted, how it would work if only they could build one not just bigger, but better. Which is where Bastian’s latest pot came in, and where the next in the series would come, too; a real beast of war, he hoped.

“Mistress?” he called, and was answered by a wave, a tattooed hand that appeared over the top of a screen.

He stepped around it and inspected Tuomamen’s work-bench. She wasn’t working with the combined black powder, just the white nitre. She had lengths of wick hanging from a frame, and various bowls and jars set out in front of her. There were stains down the front of her grey robes, and Thaler discovered how they’d got there: her first instinct was to wipe her hands down her front.

“Master Thaler. Success, of sorts.”

“Ah, that is good news. Show me.”

She took one of the long wicks and opened the lantern she had on the table. “It’s not what you wanted, but it’s useful all the same.”

She applied one end of the wick to the flame, then withdrew it, holding it out to Thaler.

He took it and held it close to his face. The very end of the wick was alight, not with a flame, but with a tiny red coal. He waved it around, then looked at it again. The glowing ember was still there.

“It won’t go out,” Tuomanen said. “You can pinch it off, or wet it, but it’ll burn otherwise.”

“Just not quickly,” he noted. The wick wasn’t noticeably shorter than when she’d first lit it.

“A length of your height will burn for half a day.”

“Impressive.” Thaler handed the cord back. “But, as you say, it’s not what we want.”

“It is, however, enough to light the black powder.” She squeezed the lit end between her fingertips, making a rubbing motion as she did so. It must have hurt, but she showed no pain. “It won’t blow out like a taper, and no one will have to carry a lantern along with the powder.”

She was right. It wasn’t what he’d hoped for, but it was useful all the same.

“We know that we can make a line of powder, set it alight at one end, and the flame will travel along it until it reaches the other, but” – he wagged his finger – “it burns too quickly; which is the point of Aaron’s wooden quill fuses. Packing the powder in tightly makes them burn slower. It makes no sense at all, but we’ll have to work out why later.”

“I’ve tried soaking the wicks in a slurry of black powder. The fuse just flashes to ash no matter the length.” She shrugged and turned back to her table to pack away her jars.

Thaler was left with his chin on his chest, thinking aloud.

“Wood isn’t flexible, though joining quills together would allow us to change the timing quickly. We’d need half a tree-trunk for a long fuse, though.” He huffed. “Sausages.”

“Master Thaler, it’s mid-morning.”

“Sausage
skins
. No, too big. Like sausage skins, but thinner, like cord.”

Tuomanen put down her alchemical equipment and turned to Thaler, a strange expression on her face. “If I was to take a knife, and cut you here, and here” – she touched him twice, once on the inside of his arm, under his arm-pit, and again on the fold of his wrist – “I could draw out one of the vessels along which your blood flows. It’s the whole length of your arm, and as thin as a quill.”

“I’m rather attached to my arm, Mistress,” said Thaler. He clasped his hands behind his back.

“The same vessels exist in pigs and cattle.” She smiled. “That was all I meant.”

There were times when he forgot who she used to be,
what
she used to be. Then she would remind him. “I’ll call on the butcher’s shortly,” he said, and blinked away the image of himself, prone on the floor, and her, astride him with a bloody knife, opening him up like a side of beef.

Aaron Morgenstern, clutching his fuses, came across them, and wondered why his friend had grown so pale. “Frederik?”

“Nothing, it’s nothing.” Thaler applied a mask of calm. “Are you done, Aaron?”

“I am. Let’s light up these devils and see how they burn.”

Thaler took one from him: the drill hole in the cylinder of wood was packed tight with fine powder, tamped down and pressed in. There was very little actual powder in the device, but if it worked, then they would be on their way at last.

All three of them went to another hessian-shrouded table, one supplied with black powder, and the mistress brought one of her slow-burning wicks rather than the lantern. Thaler poured a small pile of loose powder onto the table, enough to support the upright tube, and Tuomanen touched the tiny coal to the end of the fuse.

It sparked and fizzed. Smoke jetted from the open hole. And the loose powder did not immediately flash into flame.

Thaler counted, and reached five on the first attempt, before fire and smoke belched out. Morgenstern did a little jig, and looked uncommonly pleased with himself.

“Again?” he grinned.

“Oh, most certainly.” Thaler swept away the residue and reset the experiment. “We need to be certain of the burn rate, or we’ll be losing our lives soon enough.”

Each one they tried burnt through between a count of four and six. Morgenstern skipped away to make more, his speed belying every year of his age.

“This is progress,” Thaler announced. “We should try and test-fire a shell.”

He hadn’t dared do so before, as he’d had no reliable way of setting it off from a distance, even though the idea was one of the first things he’d thought of: to deliver a charge of exploding powder, right into the heart of the enemy. He wasn’t martial, like Sophia. He wasn’t cunning, like Max Ullmann. He wasn’t, gods preserve him, like Peter Büber. The only contribution he could make to the war lay in this field.

At a push, he could hold a spear, and blunt an axe with his bones which seemed a waste of his life, and indeed of anyone’s life. The dwarves hadn’t needed to pick a fight with them; Felix had offered them a share of both land and gold, but they, greedily, wanted it all.

“Master Thaler?” said Tuomanen.

“Sorry. I’m angry. Angry with having been put in this position, of having to design machines that kill rather than ones that save. Everything we do is bent towards war: if it has no military application, we have to put it to one side. But do you suppose this’ll be the end of it? We’ll fight the dwarves of Farduzes this year, the Protector of Wien the next, and the Doge the year after.”

“You’re a peaceable man, Master Thaler, because a thousand years of peace breeds a peaceable people.” Tuomanen glanced at the wick she was carrying, still smouldering away. “It was a peace that was won with fear. Fear of hexmasters like me.”

“Yes, but—”

“There are no buts here. You’re trying to do with these powder weapons what we did with our spells; make your enemies afraid to face you, and leave you alone to your books and your brass.” She pinched out the ember with no more thought than before. “Peace is not the absence of war. I understand this – this world of fire and smoke – far better than you do, and King Ironmaker is an idiot for risking everything on a single throw of his dice.”

“He tried to kill Felix, Mistress. In response to a friendly treaty.”

“So we are at war. What happens if we win? News of these great powder-driven monsters will be broadcast from Hibernia to Persia. Everybody will have them soon enough. We’ll build better weapons and have more of them, of course. We’ll have exchanged the white robes of the Order for the black robes of the library. That’s all.”

“So what do we do?”

She shrugged, and went back to packing away her materials. “Prosperous people, content with their lot, never went to war willingly. What can you do about that? Can you abolish famine and disease? Can you say when the rivers rise and the snow falls? Can you meddle in the affairs of kings and princes so that they don’t cast envious eyes on their neighbours?”

“Perhaps.” He answered without thinking. “Yes. Why not?”

She laughed, and she rarely laughed. “Hubris, Master Thaler. The gods have made you mad.”

“Why not?” he repeated. “It’s not me who shoulders the burden alone, but us and all Carinthia. All are equal before the law. The earls’ estates are broken up. We hold no slaves. We choose our civic leaders. We haven’t even pressed anyone since Felix came to the throne.”

“You believe it.” Her laughter died. “Yet Ironmaker will sweep you off the map, and you’ll either flee or be enslaved. Resist and you’ll be killed. Within a generation, Carinthia will be forgotten, except in old maps.”

“He won’t win.”

“Which is why we devise ever more intricate ways to kill. See why I wear grey robes?” Tuomanen looked down at her stained and burnt front. “It doesn’t matter what we aspire to. This is the way things are from now on.”

Thaler tasted sourness, and screwed his mouth up. “I believe it does matter. I believe it matters a great deal.”

A cry went up from across the field, and they both turned, expecting to see a roil of smoke and hear a crack of thunder. Instead, it was Bastian and some carters, dragging his latest piece to the proving grounds.

“We have a new toy,” said Tuomanen, going to join the crowd that was gathering around the cart, and Thaler had to accept that she was, at least for the time being, right.

He eased his way through his powder-makers and called up to the smith, who rode on the cart with his new creation. “Come on then, sir, unveil it. Let’s all see what you’ve brought us.”

A waxed cloth sheet was draped artfully over the piece, and Bastian gripped one corner of it.

“Master Thaler. I beg your indulgence,” he started, and Thaler’s gaze went straight from the blond-haired giant of a man to the shape of the hidden pot. It was too long, like a felled tree. Certainly not squat and fat as it should have been.