Free The Escapement by K. J. Parker Page A

what we wish we had. I'm sure you'll cope. After all, you're experts."
    After two hours they stopped arguing and started writing down what they'd been assigned to do. Somehow it was harder to cope with them once they'd stopped fighting him. A fight is a dialogue, once you're used to it practically a conversation; he'd met married couples who had no other form of communication except fighting, and they seemed to get on pretty well. Silence broken only by the sound of his own voice was considerably more intimidating.
    And, he reflected nervously when they'd all gone, everything's based on the premise that what I've chosen to do is the right thing; and that's crazy. I've just commissioned the biggest building and engineering programme in the history of the Republic, on the authority of a two-hundred-year-old book I found in the library, written by someone I know nothing about, whose only qualifications for advising me are the fact that he wrote a book, and that it's survived two centuries without being cut up and used to mend shoes.
    We can't win this war by force of arms, or even by digging. Only one man can save this city, and he's the enemy.
    But Psellus didn't have time to sit thinking about one man; he had to figure out how to convince half a million men to drop everything and start digging trenches. And after that; well, he had the book.
    Under the piles of papers on his desk a single sheet lay hidden. He found it, made a space and laid it down. It was blank, apart from six words:
    Lucao Psellus to Ziani Vaatzes, greetings.
    He'd written that a month ago. Since then, whenever his mind was quiet for a moment, he found himself hunting for the words that should follow. He had constructed sentences and paragraphs in his mind, complex as the best Guild clockwork, phrases that were springs, cams, sears, pawls, hooks, lifters, escapements, pushrods and connecting rods, axles, bearings, flanges, shoulders, tumblers, flies and ratchets. He could see the shape of the letter when he closed his eyes, but when he came to assemble the components, he could find no way of fitting them together; because there was no standard, no specification for a letter like this. It wasn't a diplomatic communication, a commercial negotiation, a legal pleading, a dispatch from a spy or a note to a friend, a love letter or a challenge to a duel. There could be no precedent, because the circumstances were unique.
    Even so… He stood up and crossed the room to his small shelf of books—not the splendid and comprehensive personal library of the Commissioner of War, but his books, which he'd bought with his own money. He thought of them as his toolchest: tables of weights, measures and equivalents, epitomes of regulations and manuals of procedures, almanacs, forms and precedents of all manner of legal and official
    documents,
    mathematical
    tables,
    indices,
    bibliographies
    and
    prosopographies, the complete Specification (in nine volumes), and a shabby, home-made book that had once belonged to Ziani Vaatzes, the famous abominator. His hand lingered over that one, but he passed on and picked out a thin, red-bound book, patched on the spine with salvaged parchment. It was the first book he'd ever bought.
    The Scrivener's mirror, being the complete art and practice of all correspondence formal and private, by an officer of the Scriveners' Guild of the Republic of Mezentia; restricted.
    He opened it and smiled. It was more than a book; it was a whole living. The book, a pen, ink and some decent paper, Pattern Seven or better, your Guild ticket, and you need never think again.
    He turned to the back, for the list of contents:
    * From the directors of a company to a creditor, seeking indulgence
    * From the directors of a company to a debtor, refusing indulgence

** From a bank to the holder of an equitable mortgage on copyholds From a father to his son at the university, politely refusing money From a student to his father, passionately requesting money
    ** From