Devices and Desires by K. J. Parker

Author:K. J. Parker [Parker, K. J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: SteamPunk, Fiction, Fantasy, General, Fantasy Fiction, Epic, Clockpunk
ISBN: 9780316003384
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2005-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

It took him a long time, and he had to check many cross-references in many books before he managed to get it all straight in his mind, but he got there in the end. As usual, it was nobody’s fault, both of them were sort of right and slightly wrong, and there wasn’t a clear-cut or obvious solution, because the law was outdated, contradictory and sloppily drawn, made up on the spot by his great-great-grandfather, probably because he was bored and wanted to go outside in the fresh air and kill something rather than sitting indoors. Wearily, Valens uncapped his ink-well, dipped the nib and started to write. It didn’t have to be fair copy; he had secretaries to do the bland, beautiful, cursive law-hand that needed to stay legible for centuries. But the sheer effort of writing made his wrist and forearm ache, and although he knew what he wanted to say, it was hard to keep everything in order; the points, facts and conclusions strayed like willful sheep and had to be chased back into the fold. He lost his way twice, had to cross out and go back; the pen dropped a big fat blot and he’d swept his sleeve across it before he noticed. When finally it was done he read it through twice (once silently, once aloud) for errors and ambiguities; made three corrections; read it through again and realized one correction was actually a mistake; corrected the correction, read it through one more time, sprinkled and blew off sand, put it on the corner of the desk for the copyist to deal with later. Last step: he made a note in the margin of the relevant page of his copy of the Consolidated Digest, in his smallest writing (can’t charge for heriot in 3d generation, statute barred after 2d, but reliefs apply in equity), to save himself the effort of doing all the research if the point happened to come up ever again. It was a good practice, recommended by several authors on jurisprudence, and he’d wasted more time looking for notes he’d made eighteen months ago but forgotten exactly where or under what than he’d have spent looking it all up from scratch.

(Just think, he told himself; men scheme and betray and murder so as to get to be kings and dukes, and this is what they end up doing all day long. Serves them right, really.)

Mercifully, the next three petitions weren’t nearly so bad. Two of them were points he knew, and there was already an annotation on the relevant page of the book for the third — not his writing, or his father’s; his grandfather, maybe, or his great-uncle, during his father’s short but disastrous regency. Possibly on a better day he’d have checked for himself rather than take the unknown writer’s word for it; possibly not. The fifth petition made up for the three easy ones; it was something to do with uses on lives in being and the perpetuity

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