Clockwork
Clockwork is the visible technology of the Known World — on the facades, in the civic squares, inside the locks, instruments, and kitchen appliances. It is the first thing a traveler notices about a city. It is also more limited than it looks.
What drives what
Three things move machinery, and a maker chooses by what the job needs. Springs drive anything small or portable — a watch, a lock, a stove-feeder, an automaton, a wick adjuster — storing force and giving it back through an escapement, and wanting winding. Steam drives anything needing sustained force: pumps, mills, workshop mechanisms, a washing drum, the compressor in a cold cabinet. The plants are small — a boiler and engine in a back room with a belt to whatever needs turning and someone who lights it in the morning. Piles drive anything that must not stop and needs almost nothing to keep going: plates of two metals stacked with acid between them, giving a small steady current that does not vary or run down. A chronometer keeps time whether anyone attends to it; gauges, indicators, and timing triggers run on piles because they are not doing work, they are keeping something accurate. What a pile cannot do is turn something; more current means more plates and acid and space, so piles run instruments and never motors. A pile is a component, the way a spring is, and is not understood as a source of power because nothing in anyone's experience suggests it could be. Piles need renewing, which is exact, unglamorous work Clearhold documents in triplicate.
Difference engines
See Difference Engines.
The instruments
Forgegate makes the best and every other city makes them to the standard it can manage. Chronometers, for longitude and for anyone who needs time kept exactly. Sextants. Compasses in sealed brass housings. Hull monitors with float rods and indicator boards. Gun-aiming mechanisms. Rigging linkages. And watches, which ordinary people carry — wound, because a thing a person carries should depend on a thumb rather than acid, with the dial often painted with Glaera compound to be read in the dark, which is the only reason most people ever encounter the stuff.
Two trades
Making and mending are different work, and there are far more of the second. A clockmaker builds: cuts gear trains, fits escapements, cases the movement, and puts his mark on it, a guild craft learned over years. What separates him from a great maker is not whether it works but whether it still works in thirty years, and whether a stranger in another city can open it and understand what he did. A repairman services: he cannot build a movement and does not need to, knows how a hundred mechanisms come apart, carries spares, and cleans, re-oils, adjusts, and replaces in an afternoon. Every town has one and every city has streets of them, and this is who most people deal with when something stops. Which is why Kravoe matters as much as it does: every repairman in the world buys it, because no other oil will do for fine work, and Stormharbor is the only place it comes from.
Forgegate and everybody else
Forgegate's mechanisms are better and everyone knows it — a difference of scale rather than skill, with whole quarters of makers held to one standard where another city has a district. Clearhold matches it on the work it chooses to do and does not attempt the rest; everyone else buys, and a great many mechanisms in the world are local housings fitted around a Forgegate-marked component nobody else could make economically. Nobody enjoys this. A city that depends on Forgegate for its finest instruments is a city whose best work stops when the roads close, and the roads have closed before, and that is one of the reasons there is a Pact. Stormharbor minds it most: it has the one thing Forgegate cannot do without, and still buys its own harness buckles from the customer.
Prosthetics
Clockmakers build them and the work is among the finest anyone does. See Prosthetics.