the angel cast its light irregularly. He rested his head against the engine and left it there, like a rider letting a horse become accustomed to the presence of its master, then he grabbed hold of the end of the digger and pushed.
After the siege, Pedro had salvaged dozens of these abandoned diggers, the mechanised screws that made Concordian siege-craft legendary. Most were beyond repair, but he had rescued enough for Rasenna’s engineers to become familiar with their principle and to duplicate them, at least as far as they had the materials.
‘Put your back into it!’ shouted Levi, his voice weirdly distorted by competing echoes.
‘No,’ Pedro said to himself, then louder, ‘It’s good and stuck, Levi. The bit’s fixed deep in the stone. I’ll get the lads down to dig arouuaahh—’
Without warning the ground shifted, and great clumps fell away into the darkness. Pedro reacted instinctively, scrambling back. The digger’s back end hung precariously out over the new chasm, but it didn’t fall.
Levi grabbed Pedro in case the rest of the floor followed, but after a moment the strange creaks and rumblings subsided.
‘All right?’
‘I’ll let you know when my heart stops hammering.’
A wet wave of chilled air rushed up from below.
‘How deep do you think it goes?’ Levi threw a pebble and waited for the splash. And waited.
‘There’s a better way to find out.’ Pedro said, inserting silk plugs in his ear. He pointed the Whistler into the darkness and Levi covered his ears.
BeeeeEE beeeeEE.
Pedro had adapted the Whistler to work in other media than liquid; the strength of the beep’s echo revealed distance, but also what type of surface it had struck: rock, soil, ice, water and so on.
‘Well?’ said Levi with forced casualness. Though he considered himself far more cosmopolitan than most Etrurians, he still thought of Natural Philosophy as a Concordian tool.
Pedro was less superstitious. He might not have a Guild Hall education, but he had the equivalent. Like the Cadets, he’d been raised around machines – in his case, his father’s looms – and he had learned the craft from a Concordian engineer with an impressive lineage: Giovanni’s grandfather was the Stupor Mundi himself, Girolamo Bernoulli (though that was a secret that Pedro knew he must hide deeper than these tunnels).
‘These numbers makes no sense. This cavern’s about fifty braccia deep, but if I didn’t know better I’d say that’s water at the bottom – flowing water.’ He stared pointlessly into the darkness.
‘You mean that rumble isn’t the Irenicon? So what is it?’
He looked up to see Pedro smile in flickering light. ‘Let’s find out.’
The stars were coming out when they finally emerged from the tunnels and they might have been even longer if Levi hadn’t remembered Pedro’s appointment. By the time they got to Piazzetta Fontana, it was thronged with revellers. The blood from this morning’s fracas was washed away with vinegar, then forgotten with wine.
He looked about for other engineers in the Lion’s Fountain, and when he found none he was both gladdened and disappointed. On the one hand, his men had work to do; on the other, he wanted his engineers to be seen as part of Rasenna. Weird theories about Giovanni’s death showed the Rasenneisi suspicion of engineers hadn’t yet been exorcised; the very idea of a Rasenneisi Engineers’ Guild still made many nervous. That was why Pedro had agreed when they asked him to adjudicate the duel of li doi Ziganti.
The crowd made way and watched suspiciously as he tested the table’s balance with a spirit level and great ceremony. He measured its dimensions, and made his compass do an elaborate dance across the breadth. Then he put away his instruments, took a piece of chalk from behind his ear and drew a line between the contestants, and an X on either side. The two giants sat opposite each other, backed by their partisans.
Pedro pulled up a stool and stood on it to announce, ‘As Chief Engineer, I declare this table to be of sound mind and body. Gonfaloniere Bombelli, will you do the honours?’
Fabbro bowed. ‘All yours, my boy.’
Pedro did not demure, but leapt suddenly onto the table and called for a flag. One came flying and he caught it with a graceful flourish – which surprised those condottieri who didn’t know Pedro was a flagmaker’s son.
‘I declare this contest of strength between Jacques the Hammer and Yuri the—’
‘Rolling-pin!’ Sofia shouted.
‘—and Yuri the Rolling-pin ready to commence. Signori, on your marks.’ The giants slammed their elbows onto their respective Xs.
The