“So they say. The only inmate to have been born within the city walls to make it to adulthood. Newborns generally don’t last long in here with the air the way it is.”
After a hundred paces the shaft opened out into a circular chamber. Lizanne assumed it must have been a junction of some kind at one point, noting the three other passages that split off into different directions. The space was filled with dismembered machinery, cogs, wheels and chains all arranged in neat stacks alongside racks of tools. Tinkerer had taken a seat at a work-bench and begun working on some kind of device, his eyes narrowed in concentration as his nimble fingers made fractional adjustments to the workings with a screwdriver.
“What do you want, Melina?” he asked, not looking from his work. His voice was a curious amalgam of different Corvantine accents, the varying inflections no doubt picked up from the inmates over the years. But there was also a precision to it, as if each word was crafted with the same care he afforded his devices.
Melina took off her mask, nodding at Lizanne to do the same. She found the air inside the shaft musty but still a considerable improvement on the stench outside.
“Someone set off a bomb outside the Miner’s Repose,” Melina said, placing the book on the work-bench. “Bomb with a timer. Wondered if you had some thoughts on the matter.”
“I do not make bombs,” Tinkerer replied. “And have refused numerous lucrative offers to do so.”
Lizanne’s gaze roamed the chamber, eyes alive for anything familiar, any scrap of paper that might bear some resemblance to the work of the Artisan. At first glance it appeared simply a much more well-ordered version of Jermayah’s workshop, but without a single document of any kind. Not one doodle, she thought, scanning the bare walls and finding the absence of blueprints or diagrams a stark contrast to her father’s. Graysen Lethridge had an aggravating tendency to pin his designs to the wall of his workshop for any pair of thieving eyes to see.
“What are you looking for?”
Lizanne’s eyes snapped to Tinkerer, finding him subjecting her to an intense scrutiny. She might have taken offence at the way he tracked her from head to toe, but for the lack of lust in his eyes. Careful, she cautioned herself. This one sees everything you do.
“A lever escapement modified to trigger a mercury-based detonator,” Lizanne replied.
Tinkerer’s mouth twitched in what Lizanne took to be a potential sign of irritation. “You imagine I would craft anything so inelegant?” he asked.
“Function is more important than elegance,” she said, quoting her father.
“Not to me.” His gaze flicked to Melina. “She is very dangerous. You should be careful.”
“Always am, you know that.”
“Not always.” He turned back to his bench, picking up his screwdriver and device once again. “Otherwise you would still have both eyes.”
Melina’s face betrayed a grimace of accustomed annoyance before she forced a conciliatory smile. “You know we have to look around. If we don’t the Electress’ll send people who won’t be so polite.”
Tinkerer’s lips twitched again but he voiced no objection, merely waving his screwdriver in irritated dismissal before returning to his task.
“Don’t break anything,” Melina warned Lizanne, moving towards one of the side passages.
The other chambers proved to be as spartan and well-ordered as his workshop, one contained a neatly arranged cot complete with precisely folded blankets, another held two buckets, one for ablutions and another for bodily functions, the contents sprinkled with lye to mask the smell. The third chamber was different and her initial sight of it provoked an excited quickening in Lizanne’s pulse. Books. They filled the space from floor to ceiling, each arranged in stacks of equal height. Moving closer, Lizanne saw they were mostly technical manuals like the one Melina had brought. She angled her head to scan the spine of a book sitting atop one of the stacks: A Treatise of the Correct Operation of Steam Condensers in Maritime Propulsion Systems.
“Don’t,” Melina warned as she reached out a hand to pluck the book from the stack. “He gets awful agitated if he finds anything even a fraction out of order.”
Lizanne shrugged and let her hand fall, continuing her survey and finding only the kind of reading that would have delighted Jermayah and her father but left her mostly cold. She might have inherited some of the famed Lethridge understanding of engineering matters, but none of the passion. Her studies of such things had always been driven mainly by need and rarely coloured by genuine interest.
“Where did he get all of these?” she wondered aloud.
“This is the sum of his wealth,” Melina said. “He fixes things, pumps and winding-gear mostly, and trades the ore he earns for books supplied by the constables. Weird thing is, he only ever reads them once.”
Although, I suspect he could recite every word without fault, Lizanne added inwardly, eyes tracking over each volume. She had hoped to find something related to the Artisan, but instead saw just more references to efficient drive-shaft alignments and differential gears. History, it seemed, was not amongst Tinkerer’s interests.
“Waste of time,” Melina said, drawing her gaze away from the library. “If there’s anything to be found, it’ll be here.”
Melina stood with her arms crossed as she regarded a broad rectangular patch of the chamber wall. The surface differed from the others in being mostly smooth, Lizanne judging it to have been chiselled and sanded down over months or years to provide a usable writing surface. It was covered in a matrix of white chalk: lines, curves and numbers combined into an abstract and indecipherable jumble.
“What is that?” she asked, moving to Melina’s side.
“The product of Tinkerer’s mind,” she replied with a slight shake of her head. “Keeps most of it in his head but even he has to let it spill out sometimes. See anything here that might be taken for your escapement thing-a-bob?”
Lizanne peered closer, eyes flicking from one calculation or grid pattern to another. Some of the lines were faded with time, whilst in other places the chalk was fresh and bright. It appeared Tinkerer felt no need to erase his prior work, simply overlaying it with new insights to produce this oddly fascinating but meaningless tapestry. She studied it closely for several minutes, eyes alive for anything familiar, or bomb related, but finding nothing. She was about to turn away when she glimpsed a very small diagram at the edge of the rectangle. Three overlapping circles of different sizes arranged so as to sound a chime in her head, a chime she hadn’t heard since Jermayah’s workshop in Carvenport. Three circles . . . three moons. The Alignment.
“Found something?” Melina asked with pointed impatience.
“Just a fragment of calculus I learned in school,” Lizanne said, stepping back. “I suppose he must have picked it up from one of his books.”