Devices and Desires by Parker K. J

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

15

They were saying in chapter that the war had gone to sleep. They were saying that paying, feeding and sheltering forty thousand men, keeping them away from the shops and the women, was a horrendous waste of effort, energy and money if they weren’t going to be set loose against anybody any time soon. They were saying that Necessary Evil had lost its nerve, and its grip.

Psellus still hadn’t found out why everything had suddenly ground to a halt. The soldiers had arrived, Vaatzes was in Eremia (up to no good there, by all accounts), and there was no earthly reason he could see why the war shouldn’t be over and done with inside a month, if only they’d get it started. Some of the voices around the Guildhall were saying it was because there were another forty thousand on the way (Psellus happened to know this was true); others that the enemy capital was impregnable; that Eremia had signed a secret treaty with the Vadani, the Cure Doce, the Cure Hardy, all three simultaneously; that someone in Ways and Means had made a mistake and there was only just enough food left in the country to feed the soldiers for a week; that the real object of the war wasn’t Eremia after all; that the Carpenters and Joiners were planning a military coup, and that’s what the army was really for; that the soldiers had found out about the defenses of Civitas Eremiae and were striking for double pay and death benefit. Necessary Evil’s response was to look smug and stay quiet. As one of its members, trying to guess which of the rumors was true, Psellus found this attitude extremely annoying.

Mostly, though, he was bored. He had nothing to do. Even the memos had stopped coming. There were no meetings. For a while he’d sat in his office, afraid to leave it in case he missed a message ordering him to a briefing where everything would be explained. Then he’d tried writing to his colleagues and superiors, asking what was going on, but they never answered him. He tried a series of surprise visits to their offices, but they were never there. Finally he’d taken to wandering about the Guildhall on the off chance of running into one of them. That was a waste of time, too. Nobody had seen them recently, or knew anything about what they were up to. When he went out to the camp where the soldiers were billeted, he was turned away at the gate by the sentries. Over their shoulders he could see the peaks of thousands of tents, thin wisps of smoke rising straight up into the windless sky. He could smell the soldiers from two hundred yards away, but he couldn’t see them. It was like a party to which all the other children in his class had been invited.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the war wasn’t his fault.

After a while (he’d lost track of time rather) he decided to alter his perspective.

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