Irys looked into those huge brown eyes and something—some last, cold residue of fear and distrust—melted as she saw nothing but truth looking back at her. That recognition didn’t magically fill her with confidence for the future, nor did she think all the goodwill in the world, however sincere, could guarantee what the future might bring. Any ruler’s daughter learned those realities early, for the world was a hard instructor, and her lessons had been harsher than most. Only time could tell what political demands she and Daivyn would face, what decisions might yet force them into fresh conflict with the House of Ahrmahk, and she knew it. But unlike Zhaspahr Clyntahn, Cayleb and Sharleyan Ahrmahk were neither monsters nor liars. Enemies they might yet be, or become once more, but honorable ones. They meant what they’d just said, and they would stand by it in the teeth of hell itself.
“I’d like that, Your Grace,” she heard herself say, and her own lips trembled just a bit. “We’ve made Him weep more than enough,” she went on, and saw recognition of her deliberate choice of words flicker in Sharleyan’s eyes. “Surely it’s time we made Him smile a bit, instead.”
.V.
The Delthak Works, Barony of High Rock, Kingdom of Old Charis, Empire of Charis
“Well, it certainly looks impressive, Ehdwyrd,” Father Paityr Wylsynn said dryly. “Now if it just doesn’t blow up and kill us all.”
“I’m crushed, Father,” Ehdwyrd Howsmyn told the Charisian Empire’s intendant in a composed tone. “I’ve shared all of Doctor Mahklyn’s calculations with you, and Master Huntyr and Master Tairham do excellent work. Besides, we’ve had the smaller model running for over two months now.”
They stood side by side under the canopy of smoke rising from what had become known as the Delthak Works in order to differentiate it from the additional complexes Howsmyn had under construction on Lake Lymahn in the Barony of Green Field. Or, for that matter, the two he was expanding near Tellesberg and the entirely new complex going up outside Maikelberg in Chisholm’s Duchy of Eastshare. No other man had ever owned that much raw iron-making capacity, but the Delthak Works remained the biggest and most productive of them all. Indeed, no one before Ehdwyrd Howsmyn had ever even dreamed of such a huge, sprawling facility, and its output dwarfed that of any other ironworks in the history of the world.
Howsmyn didn’t really look the part of a world-shaking innovator. In fact, he looked remarkably ordinary and preposterously young for someone who’d accomplished so much, but there was something in his eyes—something like a bright, searching fire that glowed far back in their depths even when he smiled. It was always there, Wylsynn thought, but it glowed even brighter than usual today as he waved one hand at two of the men standing behind them.
The men in question smiled, although an unbiased observer might have noted that they looked rather more nervous than their employer. Not because they doubted the quality of their handiwork, but because for all of his open-mindedness and obviously friendly relationship with Howsmyn, Paityr Wylsynn was the Empire’s intendant, the man charged with ensuring that no incautious innovation transgressed the Proscriptions of Jwo-jeng. He’d signed the attestation for the device they were there to observe, yet that could always be subject to change, and blame (like certain other substances) flowed downhill. If the intendant should change his mind, or if the Church of Charis overruled him, the consequences for the artisans and mechanics who’d constructed the device they were there to test might be … unpleasant.
“I’m well aware of the quality of their craftsmanship, Ehdwyrd,” Wylsynn said now. “For that matter, I’ve already ridden in your infernal contraption of a boat. And I have considerable faith in Doctor Mahklyn’s numbers. But ‘considerable’ isn’t quite the same thing as absolute faith, especially when I can’t pretend I understand how all those equations and formulas actually work, and this ‘engine’ is an awful lot bigger than the one in your boat. If it should decide to explode, I expect the damage to be considerably more severe.”
“I suppose that’s not unreasonable, Father. I won’t pretend I really understand Rahzhyr’s numbers—or Doctor Vyrnyr’s, for that matter. But I do have faith in them, or I’d be standing far, far away at this moment. For that matter, the model tests for this one have worked just as well as for the single expansion engines, you know.”
“And weren’t you the one who told me once that the best scale for any test was twelve inches to the foot?” Wylsynn asked, arching one eyebrow and carefully avoiding words like “experiment,” which weren’t well thought of by the Inquisition.
“Which is exactly why you’re here today, Father.”
Wylsynn smiled at the man known as the “Ironmaster of Charis,” acknowledging his point, and both of them turned back towards the hulking mass of iron and steel they’d come to observe. It was certainly impressive-looking. The open triangular frame of massive iron beams—at least twice Howsmyn’s height and almost as long as it was tall—was surmounted by a rectangular, boxlike casing. Three steel rods, each thick as a man’s palm, descended from the overhead structure at staggered intervals. Each of them was actually composed of two rods, joined at a cross bearing, and their lower ends were connected to a crankshaft four inches in diameter. The entire affair was festooned with control rods, valves, and other esoteric bits and pieces which meant very little to the uninitiated.
Its very existence was enough to make anyone nervous. Before the Group of Four’s attempt to destroy the Kingdom of Charis, no one would ever have dreamed of testing the limits of the Proscriptions in such a way. Not that there was anything prohibited about it, of course. Father Paityr would never have been here if there’d been any chance of that! But every one of those watching men knew how unlikely the Grand Inquisitor in far-off Zion was to agree about that. All of them also had a very clear notion of what would happen to them if they ever fell into the Inquisition’s hands, and that was enough to make anyone nervous, even if he’d had no qualms at all about the work to which he’d set his hands and mind. And, of course, there was always the possibility that even Father Paityr could be wrong about those potentially demonic bits and pieces. So it wasn’t surprising, perhaps, that most of the onlookers looked just a bit anxious.
The man standing directly beside it, however, seemed remarkably impervious to any qualms anyone else might be feeling. He’d never taken his eye off the bizarre structure for a moment—or not off a sealed glass tube on one side of it, at any rate.
Stahlman Praigyr was a small, tough, weathered man with extraordinarily long arms and a nose which had obviously been broken more than once. When he smiled, he revealed two missing front teeth, as well, but he wasn’t smiling today. He stood mechanically wiping his hands again and again with an oily cloth, his cap pulled down over his eyes as he stared at the slowly climbing column of liquid in that tube, watching it like a cat lizard poised outside a spider rat burrow.
Now he straightened abruptly and looked over his shoulder.
“Pressure’s up, Sir,” he told Howsmyn, and the foundry owner looked at Zosh Huntyr, his master artificer.
“Ready?”
“Aye, Sir,” Huntyr replied. “Nahrmahn?”
Nahrmahn Tidewater, Huntyr’s senior assistant, nodded and raised his right hand, waving the flag in it in a rapid circular movement. A bell clanged loudly, warning everyone in the vicinity—and especially the crew clustered around the base of the nearest blast furnace—that the test was about to begin.
“Any time, Master Howsmyn,” Huntyr said then, and Howsmyn nodded to Praigyr.
“This is your special baby, Stahlman. Open her up.”
“Yes, Sir!” Praigyr’s huge grin displayed the gap where teeth once had been, and he reached for the gleaming brass wheel mounted on the end of a long, steel shaft. He spun it, still watching the gauge, and steam hissed as the throttle valve opened.
For a moment, nothing happened, but then—slowly, at first—the piston rods from the huge cylinders hidden in the rectangular box at the top of the frame began to mo
ve. They pivoted on the cross head bearings where they joined the connecting rods, whose lower ends were connected to the cranks, the offset portions of the crankshaft. And as they moved, they turned the massive crankshaft itself, much as a man might have turned a brace-and-bit to bore a hole through a ship’s timber. But this was no man turning a drill; this was the first full-scale, triple-expansion steam engine ever built on the planet of Safehold.
The piston rods moved faster as steam flowed from the high-pressure cylinder into the mid-pressure cylinder, expanding as it went. The mid-pressure cylinder’s piston head was much broader than the high-pressure cylinder’s, because the lower-pressure steam needed a greater surface area to impart its energy. And once the mid-pressure cylinder had completed its stroke, it vented in turn to the low-pressure cylinder, the largest of them all. It was a noisy proposition, but the crankshaft turned faster and faster, and one of the workmen by the base of the blast furnace began waving a flag of his own in energetic circles.
“All right!” Huntyr exclaimed, then clamped his mouth shut, blushing, but no one seemed to care, really. They were all too busy listening to the sound coming from the blast furnace—a sound of rushing air, growing louder and louder, challenging even the noise of the steam engine so close at hand. The steam-powered blowers of the forced-draft system were bigger and more powerful than anything the Delthak Works had built yet, even for the furnaces driven by the hydro-accumulators, and Howsmyn beamed as Tairham slapped Huntyr on the back while they blew steadily harder and harder in time with the engine’s gathering speed.
“Well,” Wylsynn said loudly over the sound of the engine and the blowers, “it hasn’t blown up yet, at any rate.”
“I suppose there’s still time,” Howsmyn replied, still beaming. “But what say you and I retreat to the comfort of my office while we wait for the inevitable disaster?”
“I think that’s an excellent idea, Master Howsmyn. Especially since I understand you’ve recently received a shipment from Her Majesty’s favorite distillery back in Chisholm.”
“Why, I believe I have,” Howsmyn agreed. He looked at his employees. “Zosh, I want you and Kahlvyn to keep an eye on it for another—oh, half an hour. Then I want you, Nahrmahn, and Brahd to join me and the Father in my office. I think we’ll all have quite a few things to discuss at that point.” He flashed another smile. “After all, now that he’s let us get this toy up and running, it’s time to tell him about all of our other ideas, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Sir,” Huntyr agreed with just a shade less enthusiasm than his employer, and Howsmyn bowed to Wylsynn.
“After you, Father.”
* * *
“I must confess I really did feel a moment or two of … anxiety,” Paityr Wylsynn admitted ten minutes later, standing at Howsmyn’s office windows and gazing out across the incredible, frenetic activity. “I know the design was approved by Owl, and I know his remotes were actually monitoring quality control all the way through, but all joking aside, it would’ve been a disaster if that thing had blown up! Too many people would’ve seen it as proof of Jwo-jeng’s judgment, no matter who’d attested it. I hate to think how far back that would’ve set the entire project, not to mention undermining my own authority as Intendant.”
“I know.” Howsmyn stepped up beside him and handed him a glass half filled with amber liquid. “And, to be honest, I’d’ve felt better myself if I’d simply been able to hand Zosh a set of plans and tell him to build the damned thing. But we really needed him to work it out for himself based on the ‘hints’ Rahzhyr and I were able to give him.” He shrugged. “And he did. In fact, he and Nahrmahn did us proud. That single-cylinder initial design of theirs worked almost perfectly, and the two-cylinder is actually a lot more powerful than I expected—or, rather, it’s turned out to be a lot more efficient at moving a canal boat. Propeller design’s more complicated than I’d anticipated, but with Owl to help me slip in the occasional suggestion, they’ve managed to overcome each problem as it made itself known.
“But the really important thing—the critical thing—is that I’ve got a whole layer of management now, here and at the other foundries, who’re actually coming up with suggestions I haven’t even so much as whispered about yet. And best of all, we’ve documented every step of the process in which Zosh and Nahrmahn—oh, and let’s not forget Master Praigyr—came up with this design. We’ve got sketches, diagrams, office memos, everything. Nobody’s going to be able to claim one of Shan-wei’s demons just appeared in a cloud of smoke and brimstone and left the thing behind him!”
“Oh, don’t be silly, Ehdwyrd! Of course they are.” Wylsynn shook his head. “Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s never let the truth get in his way before—what makes you think he’s going let it happen now? Besides, when you come down to it, that’s almost exactly what did happen. I mean, wouldn’t you call Merlin one of Shan-wei’s ‘demons’? I use the term in the most approving possible fashion, you understand. And while I’d never want to sound as if I’m complaining, just breathing out there does put one firmly in mind of ‘smoke and brimstone,’ you know.”
“Yes, I do know,” Howsmyn sighed, his expression suddenly less cheerful as he gazed out at the pall of coal smoke which hung perpetually over the Delthak Works. It was visible for miles, he knew, just as he knew about the pollution working its way into Ithmyn’s Lake despite all he could do to contain it. “In fact, I hate it. We’re doing everything we can to minimize the consequences, and I’m making damned sure my people’s drinking water is piped down from upriver from the works, but all this smoke isn’t doing a thing for their lungs. Or for their kids’ lungs, either.” He grimaced and took a quick, angry sip from his glass. “God, I wish we could go to electricity!”
“At least you’ve given them decent housing, as far from the foundry as you can put it,” Wylsynn said after a moment, resting his left hand on the other man’s shoulder. He didn’t mention the schools or the hospitals that went with that housing, but he didn’t need to. “And I wish we could go to electricity, too, but even assuming the bombardment system didn’t decide to wipe us all out, daring to profane the Rakurai would be the proof of our apostasy.”
“I know. I know!”
Howsmyn took another, less hasty sip, savoring the Chisholmian whiskey as it deserved to be savored … or closer to it, at any rate. Then he half turned from the window to face Wylsynn fully.
“But I’m not thinking just about health reasons, either. I’ve done a lot to increase productivity per man-hour, which is why we’re so far in front of anything the Temple Loyalists have, but I haven’t been able to set up a true assembly line, and you know it.”
Wylsynn nodded, although the truth was that his own admission to the inner circle was recent enough he was still only starting to really explore the data stored in Owl’s memory. The AI was an incredibly patient librarian, but he wasn’t very intuitive, which hampered his ability to help guide Wylsynn’s research, and there was a limit to the number of hours Wylsynn could spend reading through several thousand years of history and information, no matter how addictive it might be. Or perhaps especially because of how addictive it was.
“I know you and Merlin’ve been talking about that—about ‘assembly lines,’ I mean—for a while,” he said, “but I confess I’m still more than a little hazy on what you’re getting at. It seems to me you’re already doing a lot more efficient job of assembling things than I can imagine anyone else doing!”
“Not surprising, really,” Howsmyn replied, looking back out the window. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot longer than you have, after all. But the truth is that all I’ve really managed so far is to go to a sort of intermediate system, one in which workmen make individual, interchangeable parts that can be assembled rather than one in which a group of artisans is responsible for making the entire machine or rifle or pair of scissors or disk harrow or reaping machine from the ground up. My craftsmen produce parts from templates and jigs, to far closer tolerances than anyone ev
er achieved before, and we’re using stamping processes and powered machinery to make parts it used to take dozens of highly skilled artisans to make by hand. They can produce the components far more rapidly, and I can put more of them to work making the parts I need in larger numbers, or making the parts that take longer to make, so that I’m turning out the optimum number of parts to keep the actual assembly moving smoothly, without bottlenecks. But each of those fabricating processes is separate from all the others, and then all the pieces have to be taken to wherever the final product’s being put together and assembled in one place. It’s not bad for something fairly small and simple, like a rifle or a pistol, but the bigger and more complex the final product, the more cumbersome it gets.”
“And it still makes your workforce many times more efficient than anything the Church has going for it,” Wylsynn pointed out.
“Yes, it does, and more and more of my fellow ironmasters are starting to use the same techniques. Some of them are clearly infringing on my patents, of course.” Howsmyn grinned at the intendant, who was also the head of the Imperial Patent Office. “I’m sure several of them—like that bastard Showail—wonder why I haven’t already taken legal action. Wouldn’t do to tell them how happy I am about it, now would it?” He shook his head. “Eventually, I’m going to have to take some action to defend the patents, if we don’t want them asking questions about why a mark-grubbing manufactory owner such as myself isn’t complaining about people robbing him blind. But even with the new techniques spreading, we’re still a long way from where we could be. And frankly, we need to crank our efficiency an awful lot higher if we’re going to compensate for the sheer manpower, however inefficient it may be, the Temple can throw at the same sorts of problems now that it’s finally starting to get itself organized. According to Owl’s SNARCs, Desnair and the Temple Lands are beginning to build new water-powered blast furnaces and rolling mills, for example, with Clyntahn’s blessings and Duchairn’s financial backing. It won’t be long before they start improving their drop hammers, too, and however good that may be for Merlin’s overall plans, it’s not the kind of news the Empire needs. We’ve got to stay as far ahead as we can, and that’s especially true for me, since my foundries and manufactories are the Empire’s cutting edge. That’s where a real assembly line would come in, if we could only make it work.”