The Scar - China Mieville [123]
It was an artisanal factory. Each station was worked by an expert, a craftsperson of exquisite skill, passing his or her part-finished work to the next. The intruder knew how specialized each job was, what rare minerals had to be incorporated, the precision of the thaumaturgy necessary. Each of the finished articles was worth many times its weight in gold.
And there they were, in a locked cabinet like a jeweler’s, behind a desk at the back of the long room. The compasses themselves.
It took several minutes of careful effort for the man to open the case. The statue’s gifts were still strong in him, and he adapted well to his new perception; but still, it took a long time.
Each of the pieces was different. His hand trembling, he drew out one of the smallest: a simple, stark model, its edges picked out in polished wood. He clicked it open. Its bone face was marked with several concentric dials, some numbered, some etched with obscure sigils. Spinning loosely around the center was a single black hand.
On the compass’s back was a production number. The man noted it carefully and began the most important part of this mission. He searched for all records of this compass’s existence: in the book of records behind the display cabinet, on the list made by the metalworker who had finished the casing, in parts lists of incorrect and replacement fittings.
The man was thorough, and after half an hour he had found every mention. He laid them out in front of him and checked whether the timing worked.
The piece had been completed a year and a half ago, and it had not yet been assigned to any ship. The man smiled cautiously.
He found pens and ink, and examined the main record book more closely. Forgery was easy to him. He began to add, very carefully, to his compass’s details. In the column “Assigned To,” the man added a date, a year ago (rapidly calculating the Armadan quartos), and the name Magda’s Threat.
If anyone should, for any reason, look for information on compass model CTM4E, they would now find it. They would discover that it had been installed a year previously on the poor Magda’s Threat, a ship that had gone down months ago, with all hands and cargo, without a trace, in waters a thousand miles away.
When he had replaced everything, the man had just one task left.
He opened the compass, brooding on the intricacies of its metaclockwork entrails, stolen and adapted from a khepri design centuries before. On the tiny shaving of stone he knew was embedded at its core, bound in with homeotropic thaumaturgy. Its hand swing vaguely on its axis.
With ten quick twists the man wound it up.
He held it to his ear and heard its faint, almost inaudible ticking. He watched its face. Its dials spasmed and snapped into new positions.
The hand spun wildly, then set hard, pointing afore, back toward the center of the Grand Easterly.
It was not a conventional compass, of course. The hand was not pointing north.
This hand was pointing to a chunk of rock that was hemmed in by thaumaturgy, encased in glass, bolted under iron, depending on which rumor one believed. It had fallen from the sky, it was from the heart of the sun, it was from hell.
For the years until its clockwork ran down, the compass would point precisely toward the city’s lodestone, the godrock buried somewhere in the core of the Grand Easterly.
The man wrapped the compass very tight in oiled cloth and then in leather, and buttoned it into his pocket.
It must be almost dawn. The man was exhausted. He was finding it hard to see the room and its angles and planes, its walls and materials and dimensionality, other than as he usually did. He sighed, and his heart sank. He was losing the statue’s powers, but he had yet to get out of there.
And so, moistening his lips, flexing his tongue, surrounded by armed officers who would kill him for even knowing about the factory, the man began to unwrap his statue again.
Interlude