The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 12.1

For the occasion of his sixth birthday, by a combination of outright begging and making several promises he had no intention of keeping, Keynish Helg convinced his parents to commission for him a dissecting microscope from the finest lens maker in Oridos.

Lord and Lady Helg had taken some convincing. Not, as one might expect, due to the outrageous price of such equipment, nor to the idea of a six year old boy engaging in activities inappropriate for his age. Money was not in short supply for House Helg in those days, and Key was an unusually bright child whose value, to his father in particular, lay primarily in his potential to join the family business.

Valkin Helg was a dour man, of good breeding but from an old house long into its decline, who had made the decidedly non-aristocratic decision to take what little inheritance he'd received and invest it in industry. It wasn't that his wealthier peers kept all of their money in vaults; quite the contrary. But unlike most of the boys he'd gone to school with, Valkin had only two real options: live off of the income from a dwindling estate and slide inevitably into genteel poverty, or take the principal and build a business with it.

He didn't have enough capital, nor the right instincts, to gamble with his money on the trading floor of the stock house the way his friends did. What he did have was exactly the kind of stolid, unswerving mind to succeed in manufacturing.

Valkin bought into an idea being pushed at the time by a small group of merchants and tradesmen, some of whom had trained at the University, that many every day objects, rather than being produced by the hands of a single, highly trained craftsman, could more easily and efficiently be constructed en masse by many, less competent workers arranged in such a way that raw materials went in one end of the "line" and a finished product came out the other. All it took was a keen mind able to deconstruct a product into easily understood components to design the process, and in two days a factory owner could turn a street urchin into a maker of cabinets.

A chair or a candlestick built and assembled in this manner might lack the fine quality of a comparable item created by a master craftsman, but, as Valkin saw immediately, the target marketplace for this new industrial enterprise was not the ivied manors of the aristocracy. It was the shop-owner, the baker, and the lesser merchant that would appreciate cheaply made items cheaply sold: men who could never afford to set their wife's table with handmade silver, but who just might afford to set it with the new stamped pewter being rolled out by the pallet in the Forge.

Part of Valkin's fitness for this business came from his own complete lack of interest in the opinions of the other members of his class. He ignored the chiding of his parents' contemporaries, turned a deaf ear to the disapproving looks cast his way by his old tutors and retainers, and embraced it when his friends started calling him "the Foreman," despite the epithet's obviously disdainful intention.

He bought a textile mill, first, a crumbling red brick monstrosity that he set up to weave lightweight wool from sheep grazed south of the Inner Sea. After purchasing two more, he started building his own, knocking down older structures to make room for new construction.

The Revolution in the Forge, as it came to be called, had no shortage of enemies, and not only on grounds of caste: the craftsmen's guilds saw it, rightly so, as a threat. The old ways were being made irrelevant, or at least that was the feeling: who would buy a hand-turned wooden bowl it took a master carver a day to make when a manufactory could make three hundred in the same amount of time? What use was the knowledge and experience of a lifetime of apprenticeship and training when the lowest ditch digger could now call himself woodworker, tinsmith, or tailor? Tensions rose until violence seemed inevitable, and it was only after hours and days of backroom negotiations involving the exchange of stock, cash, and no small amount of vigorously consumed tobacco smoke, as well as a number of lawyers, that a tentative peace was worked out.

This was later, of course, and never of much concern to Valkin, who always concerned himself with his own bottom line and the growth of his business. Let the established titans war it out with the guilds. Not to mention the fact that he was generous with the "consulting fees" he made to guildsmen to evaluate and design the processes used in his factories. In the mean time he would quietly expand and fill his coffers.

Suffice it to say that Valkin, soon the richest man in his family in generations, perhaps ever, became of the opinion that his son Keynish had a duty to build upon the foundation his father had laid, to inflate the name of Helg and the bank accounts upon which it rested to greater and greater size.

So it was with trepidation and increasing scorn that he observed his son's growing interest in the sciences, giving in to Key's desires only after having extracted certain promises that he must always put the good of the family before himself, and that he understand that his future lay in the brick bowels of the Forge district, not amongst the cloistered academics at the University.

Key, for his part, was too young to care about anything greater than the tangible buzz of excitement he got when he opened a rat from throat to tail and looked at its vital organs under the lamp-fed light of his microscope.

What he forgot was that all promises, eventually, come due.

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