Devices and Desires

by K. J. Parker

  Now he could begin to work out the logical pattern. Someone must’ve told the hunter where to find him, so it was reasonable to assume the hunter knew the shape of the room. He recalled the dimensions, twenty feet by ten, with one door in the southwest corner. The pattern would therefore be from side to side. A man zigzagging down the length of the room with his arms outstretched would have a fair chance of touching another man in the dark, even if the prey was flat to the wall. Logical behavior for the prey would be to crouch and become as small as possible; logical meant predictable, and so that was what he couldn’t do. Instead, his best course of action —

  He’d moved too far, two steps to his enemy’s one, because his own crunch wasn’t echoed. He cringed at his own stupidity, caused by a failure to concentrate. Instinct yelled at him to make a charge, either to find and kill or to escape. He made an effort and wrestled the instinct down.

  His best course of action was to become the hunter instead of the prey (because the first question the assassin would ask his inside source would be, is he likely to be armed? and the answer would’ve been no). It was unfortunate that he knew absolutely nothing about fighting; the last time he’d fought, he’d been nine, and he’d lost conclusively. Mezentines didn’t fight. Of course, he wasn’t a Mezentine anymore.

  But he had the darkness on his side; also the fact that the last charcoal delivery had been late, and two night shifts had had to take their fuel from the reserve store. Obviously, they’d have loaded from nearest the door; but if they shoveled in a straight line, as reasonable men might be assumed to do, would there not be a clear, therefore silent path a shovel’s breadth up the line of the southern wall? The enemy was between him and the door, there was no real chance of slipping by except by fluke, but if he could walk unheard…

  Time was running low; he made a fair estimate of how long the pattern would take to execute, based on an average length of stride and his own progress. By now, both of them had to be fairly close to the middle of the room, but if he could make it across to the south wall, he’d have a little advantage, which would be all he’d need.

  He moved with the crunch, and as his foot came down he heard another grunt. But it was in the wrong place, too far back. There were two of them.

  Well, of course, there would be. The Perpetual Republic were no cheapskates, they wouldn’t send only one man, like a lone hero charged with slaying a dragon. That made the south wall essential to his chances of survival, because the man on the door would be stationary; King Fashion would’ve called him the stop, while his colleague would be the beater. The crunch came and he moved with it, but his foot made no sound. He reached out with his right hand, a desperate risk but forced by necessity, and felt stone.

  Now he had to stay still. If, by sheer bad luck, the hunter’s pattern happened to bring him here, all he could hope for was the random advantage of the encounter. He wondered how perceptive the hunter was; would he notice the absence of the double footfall, and would he interpret it correctly? On balance, Vaatzes hoped his enemy was clever but not brilliant.

  He heard two more steps, then a long pause. The missing sound had been noticed and was being duly considered. Because he was standing still, at last he could use his enemy’s sound to place him. Excellent; he was nearer to the middle than the south wall, so the pattern should take him clear away, northeast or northwest didn’t matter. Very carefully, as though he was scribing a line, Vaatzes began to edge down the south wall toward the door.

  Tactically, of course, he was taking a substantial risk, now that he was in the middle between his two enemies. If he couldn’t get through or past the stop quickly enough, the beater would be on him from the flank or the rear. He’d never read any military manuals so he was working from first principles, but he could see all too clearly how a clever plan badly or unluckily carried out must be worse than simple, stolid standing and fighting. Too late to be sensible now, though.

  Four more crabbed paces, by his calculations; then he stooped, careful of his balance, and groped for a fair-sized chunk of charcoal. He found one and tossed it high in the air. The noise it made when it landed was all wrong, of course — it sounded like a lump of charcoal landing on a charcoal-covered floor — but all he needed to achieve was a moment’s bewilderment.

  A moment, of course, was all he had. He allowed enough time for the stop to turn and face the noise; that’d be instinct, and now he knew fairly well how his enemy would be standing, the direction his head and shoulders would be facing in. He took a long stride forward and another to the left, crunching his foot down hard in the murrain of charcoal beside the cleared path. Then he brought his right arm across in a wide, fast arc.

  He felt an impact, and something hot and wet splashed in his face. It was all he could do not to shout in triumph, because he’d plotted it all out so precisely, inch-perfect, making the target turn so his neck-vein would be presented at the optimum angle to his sweeping cut, and here was his enemy’s blood on his face to prove he’d got it right. No time for that now; with his left hand he reached out, grabbed, felt his fingers close on empty air, quickly recalculated allowing for the dying man falling to the ground, grabbed again and felt his fingertips snag in loose cloth. All the dying man’s weight was pulling on his fingers, mechanical advantage was against him, but he managed to find the brute strength to haul the mass across and behind him. The knife was no good to him now. He opened his fingers and let it fall as his right hand groped for the door. He found the bar handle just as loud crunches behind him told him that the beater was coming for him. Now it was just running, something he’d never been any great shakes at.

  As he wrenched the door open, the light burned him. The gap between door and frame was almost wide enough to give him clearance, but it wouldn’t grow. He’d botched moving the body, and it was fouling the door. The urge was to glance over his shoulder and take a look at the beater’s face but he hadn’t got time. He crushed himself through the gap (like drifting a badly filed hole square with the big hammer), found the bottom step with his foot and pushed himself into a sprint. Breath was a problem, he’d squeezed too much of it out of himself getting through the doorway; his current plan was firmly based on yelling as loud as possible, so that people would come and rescue him before the beater could catch him. But the best he could manage was a soft woof, like a sleepy dog.

  Best estimate was that the beater was in the doorway, while he was only four steps up the stairs; there were twelve steps, and if the beater grabbed his ankle and pulled him down, it’d all have been a waste of effort and ingenuity. He heard the beater say something — just swearing, probably — which suggested that luck had given him a little more time. He cleared the top step, filled his lungs, and yelled.

  After the silence, where a soft crunch had been so loud, the echo of his voice in the stone stairwell made his head swim. But he felt fingertips brush the calf of his leg, gentle as a tentative lover. Even as he lunged toward the open air he was calculating: assuming the hunter had arms of average length and taking on trust his estimate of the length of his lower leg, from heel to knee-joint, he was safe from a dagger of no more than twelve inches, but a riding-sword, falchion, hanger or hand-axe would be the death of him.

  He was in the courtyard; and here was where his plan foundered and crashed. He’d been working on the strict assumption that once he was clear of the stairwell he’d be safe, because the courtyard would be thronged with his stalwart employees, hurrying to answer his shout of distress. Accordingly, he hadn’t troubled to plan beyond the threshold of the light. Foolish; here on the level, in the light, it was his ability to run against his enemy’s. As if in confirmation, he felt a hand tighten on his shoulder like a clamp, drawing him back and slowing him down.

  He hadn’t expected to feel anything else, because the knife or the short sword would be properly sharp, and he’d be dead before his body could register the pain. Wrong; instead, he felt the buttons of his shirt give way, and the lapel pulling back over the
ball of his shoulder. He could have laughed out loud for joy if he’d had time and breath. It was only a moral victory, of course. The courtyard was empty; they were all hard at work at their anvils and benches, as of course they should be. He’d trained them too well.

  The next thing he registered mystified him. It was the paving-slabs of the courtyard floor rushing up to meet him, and the solid, painful contact of stone on his face. He’d fallen; he was lying face down on the ground. Not that it mattered, but…

  He heard grunting, then a yell of pain, swearing, shouts, another yell, and the bump of a dead weight falling fairly close. He pushed at the ground with the palms of his hands, bounced himself upright and swung round.

  He saw a face that was vaguely familiar, one of the carpenters, whose name there’d been no point using up memory on. The carpenter was kneeling on something; on a man’s body, his knee was on the man’s neck, and other men whose faces he couldn’t see were bending or kneeling over the same body, trying to do something to it that called for effort and strength. “Are you all right?” the carpenter asked; he looked shocked and bewildered, and his face was cut. Vaatzes widened the scope of his vision and saw a short sword (to be precise, a Mezentine naval hanger) lying about a foot from the body’s outstretched hand. Strange; more than twelve inches, so he ought to be dead. But (it occurred to him, as a flood of fear and shock swept through him) he wasn’t.

  “Don’t kill him,” he heard himself say, “I want him alive.” At the same time, he rebuked himself for melodrama; also, what did he want with a Mezentine Compliance assassin? Nothing; correction, he wanted the names of his inside men, the ones who’d told him about the charcoal cellar. It was very important not to let those names get away.

  One of the men whose faces he couldn’t see mumbled an apology, and Vaatzes noticed that the assassin had stopped moving.

  “Is he dead?” he asked.

  “Fell on his own knife,” someone replied. Knife? He’d had a knife as well as the hanger; a whole new variable he’d omitted to consider. Negligent. Really, he didn’t deserve to be alive.

  “What the fuck was all that about?” someone asked.

  Later, sitting in the window of the main gallery recovering from a horrific bout of shaking and nausea, Vaatzes decided there couldn’t have been a knife, because he’d felt the hunter’s left hand grabbing at him on the stairs. That helped the world make sense again. He sent someone to fetch the man who’d answered his question. While he was waiting for him to arrive, he called half a dozen men off the bloom anvil and told them to form a half-circle facing him, about five yards back.

  When he saw the man again, he recognized him. He even knew his name — Fesia Manivola, second foreman in the grinding shop. A pity, because he was a good worker.

  “You wanted to see me?” Manivola was relaxed, inquisitive, friendly.

  Vaatzes nodded; it was the cue for the six bloom-hammerers to close in behind Manivola. “You killed him, didn’t you?” he said. “He didn’t fall on his own knife like you said. You stabbed him so he couldn’t give you away.”

  Manivola denied it, twice, and then one of the bloom-workers broke his neck. They dragged his body out into the yard, laid it next to the two assassins to wait for the arrival of the examining magistrate, who was needed for various formalities. Once they were over, the magistrate asked him the question he’d been asking himself: why did you have him killed straight away? For all you know, there could’ve been more than one.

  “I know,” he replied. “But that was enough. If there’s more, they’ll know they’re safe now, but it’s too dangerous to try again.” He pulled a face. “I’ve already lost one key worker and there’s a war on. If I found out the foundry chief and the foreman of the tempering shop were in on it as well, I’d have to close down a shift.”

  Either the magistrate saw the logic in that or he knew better than to argue with the man who made the scorpions that had won the great victory. He wrote things in his little book and went away. Shortly after dark a cart came for the bodies; according to the magistrate, they’d be tipped down a disused drain, and nobody need ever know.

  In the middle of the first night shift, a messenger came to take him to see the Ducas. He’d been expecting that. He rode in a cart up to the shabby door of the Ducas house, and followed the messenger across courts, quadrangles and cloisters to a small room, by his calculations leading off the northeast corner of the great hall. He told Miel Ducas about Compliance, though he was fairly sure he knew the salient points already.

  “The only surprise,” he went on, “is that they waited so long. Usual procedure is to kill a defector as soon as possible.”

  Miel Ducas nodded. “How do you account for the delay?” he asked.

  “Not sure,” Vaatzes replied truthfully. “My guess is, once they heard about the scorpions we shot up the wagon train with and realized they were homemade, they knew they needed to put me out of action. But that doesn’t explain why they haven’t tried before.”

  The Ducas frowned. “So that’s it, then. It’s a mystery.”

  “Yes.” Vaatzes smiled grimly. “And I’m not complaining. But I was very lucky indeed. I don’t know anything about hand-to-hand combat, or any of that stuff.”

  “Maybe you should learn,” the Ducas replied, as anticipated. Vaatzes acknowledged and moved on.

  “We’ll need guards now, obviously,” he said. “It’ll slow up loading and unloading, and it won’t actually do any good. If they had Manivola helping them —”

  “That’s the accomplice?”

  Vaatzes nodded. “Wouldn’t have thought it of him,” he said.

  “But we’ll have guards anyway, just for the hell of it.”

  “All right. Do you want visitors searched for weapons?”

  “In a factory?” Vaatzes laughed. “He could pick a tool off any bench that’d serve as well as any weapon; hammer, saw, whatever. And it’d take too much time. No, I was thinking of a different approach.”

  The Ducas waited, then said, “Well?”

  Vaatzes said: “Normally, I’d make my own, but there isn’t time. Do you happen to have such a thing as a brigandine coat?”

  The Ducas dipped his head briskly. “Several,” he said. “About three dozen, actually. Mine wouldn’t fit you, but I’m sure I had a short ancestor at some point in the last three centuries. Wonderful how much useless junk you inherit; and of course we never throw anything away, because everything we acquire is nothing but the best, far too good to part with. I’ll have it sent round as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you,” Vaatzes said. “And nobody must know, of course, or there’d be no point.”

  “Naturally. And you really should find time for some simple lessons: single sword, sword and buckler, bare hand and dagger. My cousin Jarnac’s sergeant-at-arms is the man you need. I’ll talk to Jarnac when I’ve got a moment.”

  “That’d be kind of you,” Vaatzes replied. He was looking hard for some sign in the Ducas’ face, but what he saw there, in the eyes and the line of the mouth, could have been simple stress and fatigue from running a country at war. “You’ve been doing things for me ever since I came here. I’m grateful.”

  The Ducas shrugged. “It’s thanks to you we’ve got a chance in this war,” he said. “The scorpions…” He shook his head. “A chance,” he repeated. “I don’t know.”

  Vaatzes studied him for a moment, and saw a man in two minds. Half of him knew that Civitas Eremiae would inevitably fall; the other half couldn’t see how it possibly could. Mostly, though, he saw a man who’d been tired for so long he was getting used to it. “The Republic’s never lost a war,” he said, “but there’s always a first time. I think our best hope are the Potters and the Drapers; and the Foundrymen, of course.”

  It took the Ducas a moment to realize he was talking about Guilds. “Go on,” he said.

  “The Foundrymen are more or less in the ascendant at the moment,” Vaatzes explained, “or at least they were when I left.
There’s never a deep underlying reason why one Guild gets to dominate. It’s about personalities and political skill rather than fundamental issues; mostly, I think, because there’s virtually nothing we don’t all agree about. But the Foundrymen have been on top for longer than usual, and the Potters and Drapers have been trying to put them down for a while, and they’re annoyed and upset because so far they’ve failed. The Foundrymen will have wanted this war because victory always makes the government popular, and we always win. But if we don’t win, or at least not straight away, so it’s costing lots of money and interfering with business, there’s a good chance it’ll bring down the Foundrymen. The Drapers and Potters will therefore want to make out that any major reverse is a genuine defeat — they’ll say the Republic’s been beaten for the first time in history, and it’s all the Foundrymen’s fault, and we should never have gone to war in the first place. Meanwhile the Foundrymen will be unhappy because they’ll be taking men off civilian work to increase the production in the ordnance factory, so that’ll be costing them money; they’ll want to get rid of the present leadership and end the war so as to limit the damage before the Drapers and Potters have a chance to overthrow them. Also, the Drapers and Potters will have a fair degree of support, because most of the Guilds do a lot of export business with the old country, where the mercenaries come from. If thousands of mercenaries are killed in the war, it’ll be very bad for their trade over there. It’s possible to win this war, provided you can do as much damage as possible; kill as many men as you can, destroy as much equipment, cost them as much money as possible. As long as they want to fight you, they’ll never give up; but if you can make them decide that the war isn’t worth the cost and effort, you’re in with a chance. It’s not like your war with the Vadani, where you hated each other. Hate doesn’t come into it with the Republic, that’s the key as far as you’re concerned. They make war for their own reasons. It’s always all to do with them, not really anything about you. You’re like the quarry in a hunt, rather than a mortal enemy; you don’t hate the animals you hunt, you do it for the meat and the glory. When you’re not worth hunting anymore, when you’re more trouble than it’s worth, they’ll call it a day and go home.”