Chapter 9

Jildiz left the audience with the mysterious serf Vitaly fully intending to tell Master Yevgeny all about it the next morning. But her dreams were fitful and disturbed; who was really in the right? Gennady was a little strange, but they still didn’t know why so many of the Suslikov serfs had been mechanised. The life of a serf wasn’t exactly safe and danger-free; maybe there had just been a lot of accidents as they adjusted to operating the new steam machinery. Mechanical limbs were a little unsettling, but they were surely better than stumps and peglegs. Master Gennady might not have been as gentle with his serfs as Master Yevgeny, but he was still a better master than many boyars. Dmitri Kisaliev, for instance. Serf rebellion was fairly common; there were always malcontents. Were Vitaly and his zhiznik followers just troublemakers?

In the morning, it was Gennady who first greeted her, oozing charm in opposition to his earlier peevishness. Apparently while she was meeting with Vitaly, Yevgeny had been showing his brother her work on his mechanical horse, presumably in an attempt to get him to open up.

Whatever the cause, Gospodin Gennady was evidently more impressed than he had expected.

“I hope you don’t share my brother’s unreasonable prejudices against clockworks?” he inquired, his voice somehow smoother than the uncanny squeak she had come to associate with him. She refused to feel unnerved around him, but he looked so strange! And after Vitaly, it was difficult not to believe she was consorting with the enemy.

“I don’t know that much about clockworks,” she admitted. “Master Yevgeny has been teaching me steam machinistry.”

“Well, then let me open your eyes to the wonders of clockwork!” he smiled. “Like my brother says, the coiled metal spring does have its drawbacks as a power source, but it has its advantages as well, And it’s not like my brother’s beloved steam is as perfect as he claims!”

“How so?” Jildiz asked. Gennady smiled.

“Tell me what is wrong with the mechanical horse,” he said. “Why is it unsuitable for general production?”

“It’s a good mechanik!” she said defensively.

“I never said it wasn’t,” Gennady replied smoothly. “You have done well. I recognise several features that don’t look like my brother’s handiwork. But analyse. What are its main faults? What still needs to be worked on?”

Jildiz considered. “Uh, it’s a mechanik. We designed it with transportation in mind, so it will do that well, but it wouldn’t be able to pull a plough or tow a sleigh nearly so well. It has no, um, animal sense.”

“Instinct?” Gennady supplied the word. “Interesting thought. But go on. What else?”

“It’s heavy. It weighs more than an indrik stallion and it can’t pull as much as one. And that makes it slow; it’ll never outpace a horse. Though it can keep going all day as long as its fuel and water hold out.”

“Precisely,” Gennady said. “Between the weight of the boiler and the weight of the coal for fuel, steam mechaniks are always heavy. They are able to be made more powerful than our current clockworks, but that power comes with a price. With a clockwork mechanism, the machinery is its own fuel, and unlike steam it doesn’t need to be warmed up to temperature before you can use it. Which is no mean consideration in the Orousski winter.”

“But doesn’t a spring discharge its power all in one burst?” Jildiz asked, intrigued despite herself. “Boyar Yevgeny always says that springs are only useful for either low-power applications like pocket-watches in which you don’t need a lot of raw strength, or else for devices that do not need sustained power,”

She was quoting him almost directly, but she didn’t have the words to say it any other way. Gennady smirked.

“I hear my brother’s voice. I am not surprised. No, my dear Jildiz, with proper gearing and some of the new alloys discovered by V- currently in development, I should say, clockworks can be made almost as powerful as steam engines for only a fraction of the weight! Here, let me show you…”

He took Jildiz into his workshop, showing her how tricks of gearing could prolong the useful power of a clockwork spring, and how different metal alloys and tempering affected the strength of the mechanism. As he showed off his work, he became more animated and alive, showing her more and more until at last he handed her a small spring mechanism in a strange pale golden metal.

“What do you think of this?” he asked, with the air of someone showing off their best work.

“It looks small,” she replied. “It’s quite heavy for its size, though. How powerful is this one?”

“Would you believe me if I told you it can replace three of my biggest steel springs?” Gennady smiled.

Jildiz gaped. That was a phenomenal amount of power in this small spring!

“Three – what is this metal? I though it was brass, but no brass is even as strong as steel! This is… something else entirely!”

“No, it’s no brass. It’s… It’s a new development,” he said, blushing as if he suddenly realised he was revealing more than he intended. “Very expensive and difficult to obtain in quantity. We call it orikhalko.”

Gennady took the mechanism back and put it away in a hurry. “I would appreciate it if you would not tell my brother about this,” he muttered. “I would like to be the one to tell him.”

The plot thickened. Not only were there biomechanical constructs modified from living serfs stalking around with grudges, but now there was some kind of wonder metal able to make clockworks almost as powerful as steam! Build a mechanical horse powered by one of those orikhalko springs and you could make it as strong as an indrik and as swift as a wild ass. You could achieve a lot of freedom with that…

Something about the name bothered her, though, like it reminded her of something but she couldn’t think what.

Oraq was Alash for “sickle”, while Khalyq meant “the people”. Oraq-Khalyq? Sickle of the People? No, probably not. That made no sense. Perhaps Master Yevgeny would know. If she hadn’t agreed not to tell him.

She sighed. She hadn’t intended to promise, but it had just sort of slipped out. Now she felt bound. But she didn’t understand any of this. She needed to tell him, or at least tell someone, and who else was there? Hoping that the God would understand, she squared her shoulders and sighed again. She would just have to go back on her word. The Kisalievs’ serfs had maintained that lying to the boyar wasn’t lying, but she hadn’t really thought of Yevgeny as a boyar as such for a while, and Gennady was his brother. It just felt wrong.