Engn II

IOne hundred and seventeen years before the destruction of Engn… Aivan was tinkering with one of the broken clocks in the Director's workshop when the iron-clad guards of the Ironmasters Guild came for him. “You are needed at the Hub. Come quickly.” Three of them stood in the doorway, voices muffled, faces invisible behind leather and metal masks. Strictly speaking, they weren't allowed in the workshop, or in any of the Director's private chambers. And yet here they were. “What is it?” asked Aivan, annoyed at being interrupted but also alarmed at the intrusion. In his hand, he held a pair of tweezers, and in the tweezers, a tiny cog from the clock he was repairing. The cog glimmered as it caught the light. His hand was shaking. “What has happened?” “You must come now,” said the Ironmaster. “There is no time to lose.” Aivan set down his tweezers and stood. He didn't want to follow the Ironmasters. Could they force him to come if he refused? Perhaps, perhaps not. They always left the Director – and therefore Aivan, his apprentice – alone. But they also wouldn't obey direct orders. Or answer questions. The Director, despite his title, apparently wielded little control over the individual guilds. It was another thing that troubled Aivan. Another Engn mystery. Was the Director in charge, or wasn't he? Why was everything arranged like this? One day, when the current Director died or retired and Aivan took over, he'd find out. Find out everything. The purpose of the machine. The secret at its heart. The truth about what the Director actually did. The prospect of it all sent a familiar thrill of anticipation through him. It was just a shame the Director was so young and fit. It would be years – decades – before Aivan finally got to know the truth. “Come now. We must hurry,” said the iron-clad guard. “An engine awaits at the terminus. You are needed at the Hub.” The guards stood in the doorway, as if a barrier prevented them from coming inside. Aivan looked around at all the clocks. The cogs and pendulums of the broken mechanisms. The faces of the functioning clocks, ticking their way through the hours. He liked it in here. He felt safe. The air hummed with the purposeful whirring of all the tiny machines. The world made sense in this little room. Everything was ordered. He could refuse to go with them. Couldn't he? Still, for them to visit him was unheard of. It was an inversion of the natural order. Something serious had happened. “Very well,” he said. The guards turned and left in a hurry, pacing across the expanse of the pendulum floor of the Western Grand Tower. Clock seventy-two. As Aivan stepped from the room after them, the array of timepieces behind him awoke and began chiming the hour in a coordinated cacophony of clangs and alarms. It was, he thought, as if they were trying to warn him about something. Aivan had visited the Hub numerous times while shadowing the Director. There were clocks controlling each of the six steam-powered rams that met in the heart of the great cube, and the Director always paid these special attention. Checked their time every day. It was another mystery. The Hub was central, that was clear. Central to Engn physically, but also at the heart of the purpose. The secret. From what Aivan had managed to glean, Engn had been destroyed at least twice over the centuries. Rioters or invaders had wrecked the machinery, sending fires raging through Engn, triggering cascading explosions, levelling everything. Everything except for the Hub and one or two other important locations. It was the Hub the guards rushed to defend when conflagrations flared up. Always the Hub. Yet even they didn't seem to know why. He'd quizzed them, more than once, but had been met with shrugs and silence. But it was from here they always rebuilt Engn, working their way outwards, connecting everything back together. This was the foundation. The centre. So much in Engn was confusing and baffling that he'd long ago concluded it was deliberately built to be so. An attempt to confuse and dazzle, to obscure the true purpose. A baffling array of incomprehensible devices and meaningless customs. A machine so vast and all-encompassing people stopped seeing it, stopped asking why it was there. But he'd seen through that. Perhaps that was why he'd been picked out those years ago, plucked from his pointless hours of labour assembling valves to shadow the Director. On at least one occasion, he knew, the machine had been deliberately dismantled and rebuilt. An older, smaller Engn replaced with a new one: bigger, taller, more powerful. But even through that the Hub had remained untouched, the machine growing greater and greater around it, feeding more and more power into it. A thought came to him as he climbed from the moving engine whose rails had swept him across the machine at such eye-watering speed. Perhaps this, unexpectedly, was the day? Perhaps the Director had chosen this moment to pass on the secrets of Engn. Was it possible? The prospect was delicious and suddenly alarming. Was he ready for the responsibility? Was he ready for the truth? He suddenly wasn't sure. Aivan took a moment to look around, to calm his breathing. The familiar wheels and towers of the great machine gleamed. From the Hub, their arrangement was clear. Axles and belts and timing chains from all across the machine led here. This was what they were for. These six vast rams. Except, they didn't do anything so far as he could see. They just were. He was obviously missing something. And now, perhaps, he would find out what. Steeling himself, Aivan turned to follow the guards. They hurried underneath the axle of the eastern ram, its smooth metal shaft vast and shining above his head. He could feel the power thrumming through it, the concentrated force in that great piston up above him. If you stopped and studied them closely you could see the rams jerking backwards and forwards, almost too quick to discern. The power required to push each piston in and out was titanic. He'd never been able to work out what was doing the pushing, let alone why. His gaze followed the shaft towards the cube. A small crowd of people stood around the eastern entranceway. He faltered as he walked closer, seeing who they were. Not just iron-clad guards but those wearing gleaming silver, too: the soldiers of the Silversmiths Guild. Did they take orders from the Director or was it the other way around? There were three masters there, too. The Clockmakers, the Ironmasters, and the Silversmiths Guilds. The trio who ruled the Inner Wheel. And all of them waiting there. Waiting for him. Dread lurched within him. The three watched him as he approached, suspicion clear on their faces. The iron-clad guards stopped as they arrived at the group. Aivan wondered what he would say, how he would explain himself to these powerful and terrible people. But to his surprise, as he approached, they parted. Without anyone saying a word, they stood aside, granting him passage into the Hub. Looks passed between the masters, looks full of meaning he couldn't understand. Not looking at them, keeping his eyes fixed firmly ahead of him, Aivan the apprentice Director of Engn, strode inside. Light filtered into the cavernous space from the five openings in the walls and the one in the roof. Diagonal shafts of sunlight slanted through the western port, providing more shadow than light. Still there was no sound, save for the clacking of his own footsteps as he strode to the centre. The sense of suppressed, concentrated power was overwhelming in here. As it always was. The thrumming air was thick with it. The six steel shafts – one through each wall, one from the beam-engine above them and one thrusting up from the buried engine beneath their feet – glistened like a grounded star in the middle of the echoing chamber. The shafts tapered as they stretched towards each other, giving the room a confusing sense of scale, as if it contained vast distances. And at the very centre, where they met at a point and all that terrible power was focused there was – what? He had studied it from below often, craning his neck upwards, trying to understand. A small cube of some rock or metal, held there for no apparent purpose. Doing nothing, achieving nothing. The Director always refused to talk about it, dismissing him with a wave of his hand whenever Aivan asked. Up ahead he saw something that shouldn't be there. On the floor in the very centre of the chamber stood a clock. A wooden casement clock, one he knew well. What was it doing there? The Director never let it out of his sight, carrying it with him all about Engn as he checked the accuracy of all the timepieces and control mechanisms. Sleeping beside it so the gentle ticking sound was with him every second of the day. Yet there it was, abandoned, an oblong wooden box quietly counting out the seconds to itself, standing like a tombstone in the middle of the floor. Aivan slowed as he neared, trying to make sense of the sight, expecting some unnamed, terrible thing to happen at any moment. “Aivan. You are here at last.” The quiet voice seemed to come from nowhere, from beneath his feet. The steps down to the underground engine. The Director must have set his regulator clock on the floor before descending. Wary now, suddenly not wanting to reach the centre, Aivan shuffled forwards. The concentrated atmosphere of the room seemed to press down on his shoulders. “Aivan.” There, at the foot of stone steps, head and arms cramped against the walls, lay the Director of Engn. There was blood on his bald head, but the familiar glint in those eyes was bright. “What has happened?” asked Aivan, hurrying down the steps, the sight of his master filling him with alarm. The Director didn't speak for a moment, as if he was trying to remember how to make his mouth and throat work. “Fell,” he said finally, his voice little more than a whisper. Aivan put his ear close to the Director's. He couldn't escape the notion this was all some test, another part of his initiation. But the blood was surely real, and the Director's limbs and neck lay at very wrong angles. “You fell down the stairs?” said Aivan. “We can lift you up; take you to the Infirmary.” The Director shook his head, the movement almost imperceptible. “No. Too late for that. It's my heart.” “Your heart?” said Aivan, as if he didn't know the word. The Director nodded. “Ironic. Spent all my time worrying about the clocks in Engn. Never thought about the one ticking away in my own chest.” “You had a heart attack?” The Director grimaced as some agony cut through him. “Pain like you wouldn't believe, lad. Crushing my chest. That's why I fell down the stairs.” “But we can lift you up,” repeated Aivan, not knowing what else to say. “No. My heart's hammering away too fast. Stuttering like it's about to stop. That's why I sent for you; sent the others away. There isn't much time and a lot to tell you.” “Tell me? Tell me what?” But, of course, he knew. The day Aivan had long hoped for was here. And he suddenly wasn't ready. Wasn't ready at all. “You need to know the secrets,” the Director continued. “You're young, but there's no one else. Only the Director knows…” He stopped as more pain lanced through him, his face contorting into ugliness. “Secrets?” said Aivan. “The purpose of Engn. What it's all for. You must have wondered. Only I know, and now I must tell you.” “But there have to be others. The masters. There can't just be you.” “The knowledge is too dangerous. No one else must know the truth. They wouldn't stand for it, you see. If they knew what we'd done, they wouldn't stand for it. That's what we do, you and I. Director to Director, over the centuries, keeping the secret until the day it's needed.” “Tell me, then,” said Aivan. “Tell me what I have to do. Tell me the secret.” “Engn is…” Another spasm of pain. The Director clutched at his chest, his face creasing up in lines of agony. For a moment, Aivan thought he wasn't going to open his eyes again, that he was gone. “Director! Tell me. I don't know what to do!” The Director twitched. His mouth moved, whispering something inaudible. Aivan put his ear to the man's lips. “I didn't hear! Say it again.” “Engn,” whispered the Director. “Engn is … a weapon.” “A weapon?” said Aivan. “How can it be a weapon? I don't understand!” The Director spoke slowly, as if forming each word required the deepest concentration. “The ultimate weapon. Kept ready all these years for the final battle. The Clockwork War.” It made no sense. “But the war ended centuries ago. Everyone knows that.” “No, no. Not won yet. It's all still here. Ticking away. Counting down. People carry the war around in their heads, waiting to fight it again.” “But … how can Engn be a weapon?” said Aivan. “I don't understand. Is it something to do with this place? The Hub?” There was no reply. Aivan shouted now, shaking the Director, wringing the truth from him. “You must tell me! I can't be the Director without knowing. The secrets must be passed on. What does it do? How is Engn a weapon? Why is it needed?” Aivan's only reply was silence. The Director – the previous Director – didn't move or speak again. Aivan kneeled there for five minutes, ten minutes, trying to make sense of what he'd heard. But there was no sense to be made. Only scraps and glimpses. And what would he do, now, when his own time came? When he had to pass on the terrible secrets of Engn to the next Director? There was nothing he could do. The secret had been lost. And that, Aivan saw, had to become his secret. The secret he would carry instead. No one else must ever know. Everything had to go on as before. Anything else was unthinkable. The lie had become too large. Engn was life for so many people and he had to maintain the illusion. Play the part for the rest of his days. Finally, Aivan, the Director of Engn, stood. He climbed the stairs one by one back to the surface. At the top, he hefted the regulator clock onto his shoulders. The weight of it surprised him. It was a burden. He could feel the ticking clock kicking against his spine. Looking straight forwards, he strode towards the eastern doorway to confront the knot of waiting masters.