by Iain Banks
"You are predictable," Perrund told him softly. "Your obsession with the Emperor — with the Protector — is a weakness. Lose the Protector and one of the Generals takes its place. You treat it as though its loss would be the end of the game. I was wondering… Did you ever play 'A Kingdom Unjustly Divided' before you learned 'Monarch's Dispute'?" she asked. "Do you know of it?" she added, surprised, when he looked blank. "In that game the loss of either King does indeed signify the end of the game."
"I've heard of it," DeWar said defensively, picking up his Protector piece and turning it over in his hands. "I confess I haven't played it properly, but-"
Perrund clapped her good hand on her thigh, attracting the frowning stare of the watchful eunuch. "I knew it!" she said, laughing and rocking forward on the couch. "You protect the Protector because you can't help it. You know it's not really the game but it would hurt you to do otherwise because you are so much the bodyguard!"
DeWar put the Protector piece back down on the board and drew himself up on the small stool he sat upon, uncrossing his legs and adjusting the positions of his sword and his dagger. "It's not that," he said, pausing to study the board again briefly. "It's not that. It's just… my style. The way I choose to play the game."
"Oh, DeWar, Perrund said with an unladylike snort. "What nonsense! That is not style, it's fault! If you play like that it's like fighting with one hand tied behind your back…" She looked down ruefully at the arm in the red sling. "Or one hand wasted," she added, then held up her good hand to him as he went to protest. "Now just you never mind that. Attend to my point. You cannot stop being a bodyguard even when playing a silly game to pass the time with an old concubine while your master dallies with a younger one. You must admit it and be proud — secretly or not, it's equal to me — or I shall be quite thoroughly upset. Now, speak and tell me I'm right."
DeWar sat back, holding both hands out wide in a gesture of defeat. "My lady," he said, "it is just as you say."
Perrund laughed. "Don't give in so easily. Argue."
"I can't. You're right. I am only glad that you think my obsession might be commendable. But it is just as you say. My job is my life, and I am never off-duty. And I never will be until I am dismissed, I fail in my job, or — Providence consign such an eventuality to the distant future — the Protector dies a natural death."
Perrund looked down at the board. "In a ripe old age,
as you say," she agreed before looking up at him again. "And do you still feel you're missing something which might prevent such a natural end?"
DeWar looked awkward. He picked up the Protector piece again and, as though addressing it, in a low voice said, "His life is in more danger than anybody here seems to think. Certainly it is in more danger than he appears to believe." He looked up at the lady Perrund, a small, hesitant smile on his face. "Or am I being too obsessive again?"
"I don't know," Perrund said, sitting closer and dropping her voice too, "why you seem so sure that people want him dead."
"Of course people want him dead," DeWar said. "He had the courage to commit regicide, the temerity to create a new way of governing. The Kings and Dukes who opposed the Protector from the start found him a more skilled politician and far better field commander than they'd expected. With great skill and a little luck he prevailed, and the acclamation of the newly enfranchised in Tassasen has made it difficult for anybody else in the old Kingdom or indeed anywhere in the old Empire to oppose him directly."
"There must be a 'but' or a 'however' about to make its appearance here," Perrund said. "I can tell it."
"Indeed. But there are those who have greeted UrLeyn's coming to power with every possible expression of enthusiasm and who have gone out of their way to support him in most public ways, yet who secretly know that their own existence — or at the very least their own supremacy is threatened by his continued rule. They are the ones I'm worried about, and they must have made their plans for our Protector. The first few attempts at assassination failed, but not by much. And only your bravery stopped the most determined.of them, lady," DeWar said.
Perrund looked away, and her good hand went to touch the withered one. "Yes," she said. "I did tell your predecessor that as I had stepped in to perform his job he ought to do the decent thing and attempt to fulfil mine one day, but he just laughed."
DeWar smiled. "Commander ZeSpiole tells that story himself, still."
"Hmm. Well, perhaps as Commander of the Palace Guard, ZeSpiole does such a good job keeping would-be assassins away from the palace that none ever achieve the sort of proximity that might call for your services."
"Perhaps, but either way they will be back," DeWar said quietly. "I almost wish they had been back by now. The absence of conventional assassins makes me all the more convinced there is some very special assassin here, just waiting for the right time to strike."
Perrund looked troubled, even sad, the man thought. "But come, DeWar," she said, "is this not too gloomily contrary? Perhaps there are no attempts on the Protector's life because no one of moment any longer wishes him dead. Why assume the most depressing explanation? Can you never be, if not relaxed, then content?"
DeWar took a deep breath and then released it. He replaced the Protector piece. "These are not times when people in my profession can relax."
"They say the old days were always better. Do you think so, DeWar?"
"No, lady, I do not." He gazed into her eyes. "I think a lot of nonsense is talked about the old days."
"But, DeWar, they were days of legends, days of heroes!" Perrund said, her expression indicating she was not being entirely serious. "Everything was better, everybody says so!"
"Some of us prefer history to legends, lady," DeWar said heavily, "and sometimes everybody can be wrong."
"Can they?"
"Indeed. Once everybody thought the world was flat."
"Many still do," Perrund said, raising one brow. "Few peasants want to think they might fall out of their fields,
and a lot of us who know the truth find it hard to accept."
"Nevertheless, it is the case." DeWar smiled. "It can be proved."
Perrund smiled too. "With sticks in the ground?"
"And shadows, and mathematics."
Perrund gave a quick, sideways nod. It was a mannerism that seemed to acknowledge and dismiss at the same time. "What a very certain, if rather dismal world you seem to live in, DeWar."
"It is the same world that everyone inhabits, if they but knew, my lady. It's just that only some of us have our eyes open."
Perrund drew in a breath. "Oh! Well, those of us still stumbling around with our eyes tightly shut had best be grateful to people like you then, I should think."
"I'd have thought that you at least, my lady, would have no need of a sighted guide."
"I am just a crippled, ill-educated concubine, DeWar. A poor orphan who might have met a terrible fate if I had not caught the eye of the Protector." She made her withered arm move by flexing her left shoulder towards him. "Sadly I later caught a blow as well as a glance, but I am as glad of one as the other." She paused and DeWar drew a breath to speak, but then she nodded down at the board and said, "Are you going to move, or not?"
DeWar sighed and gestured at the board. "Is there any point, if I am so deficient an adversary?"
"You must play, and play to win even if you know you will probably lose," Perrund told him. "Otherwise you should not have agreed to begin the game in the first place."
"You changed the nature of the game when you informed me of my weakness."
"Ah no, the game was always the same, DeWar," Perrund said, sitting suddenly forward, her eyes seeming to flash as she added with a degree of relish, "I merely opened your eyes to it."
DeWar laughed. "Indeed you did, my lady." He sat forward and went to move his Protector piece, then sat back again and with a despairing gesture said, "No. I concede, my lady. You have won."
There was some commotion amongst the group of concubines neare
st to the doors which led into the rest of the harem. In his high pulpit, the chief eunuch Stike wobbled to his feet and bowed to the small figure bustling into the long chamber.
"DeWar!" the Protector UrLeyn called, hauling his jacket on over his shoulders as he strode towards them. "And Perrund! My dear! My darling!"
Perrund stood suddenly, and DeWar watched her face come alive again, the eyes widening, her expression softening and her face blossoming into the most dazzling smile as UrLeyn approached. DeWar stood too, the faintest of hurt expressions vanishing from his face, to be replaced by a relieved smile and a look of professional seriousness.
3. THE DOCTOR
Master, you asked to know most particularly of any sorties which the Doctor made outside the Palace of Efernze. What I am about to relate took place the afternoon following our summons to the hidden chamber and our encounter with the chief torturer Nolieti.
A storm raged above the city, making of the sky a darkly boiling mass. Fissures of lightning split that gloom
with an eye-blinding brightness, as though they were the concentrated blues of the everyday sky fighting to prise the blackness of the clouds apart and shine upon the ground again, however briefly. The westerly waters of Crater Lake leapt against the city's ancient harbour walls and surged amongst the deserted outer docks. It made even the ships within the sheltered inner quays roll and shift uneasily, their hulls compressing the cane fenders to make them creak and crack in protest, while their tall masts swung across the black sky like a forest of disputing metronomes.
The wind whistled through the streets of the city as we made our way out of the Blister Gate and headed across Market Square towards the Warren. An empty stall had been blown over in the square and its sack roof flapped and tore in the gusts, clapping against the cobblestones like a trapped wrestler slapping the ground as he begs for mercy.
The rain came in blustery torrents, stinging and cold. The Doctor handed me her heavy medicine bag as she wrapped and buttoned her cloak more tightly about her. I still believe that this — along with her jacket and coat should be purple, as she is a physician. However, when she had first arrived two years earlier the doctors of the city had let it be known that they would take a dim view of her pretending to this badge of their rank, and the Doctor herself had seemed indifferent in the matter, and so as a rule she wore mostly dark and black clothes (though sometimes, in a certain light, in some of the garments she paid to have made by one of the court tailors, I thought one could just catch a hint of purple in the weave).
The wretch who had brought us out into this awfulness limped on ahead, glancing back at us every now and again as if to make sure we were still there. How I wished we were not. If ever there was a day for curling up by a roaring fire with a cup of mulled wine and a Heroic Romance, this was it. Come to that, a hard bench, a tepid cup of leaf and one of the Doctor's recommended medical texts would have seemed like bliss to me, compared to this.
"Filthy weather, eh, Oelph?"
"Yes, mistress."
They do say the weather has been much more violent since the fall of the Empire, which is either Providence punishing those who helped overthrow it, or an Imperial ghost exacting revenge froze beyond the grave.
The cur who had lured us into this absurd mission was a hobble-legged child from the Barrows. The palace guards hadn't even let her into the outer bastion. It had been sheer bad luck that some fool of a servant, bringing the guards a note of instruction, had overheard the brat's preposterous pleadings and taken sympathy on her, coming to find the Doctor in her workshop — mortar and pestling her pungently arcane ingredients with my help — and report that her services were requested. By some bastard from the slums! I could not believe it when she agreed. Couldn't she hear the storm groaning round the lanterns in the roof above? Hadn't she noticed I'd had to light all our lamps in the room? Was she deaf to the gurgle of drain water in the walls?
We were on our way to see some destitute breed who were distantly related to the servants of the Mifelis, the chiefs of the trader clan the Doctor had worked for when she had first come to Haspide. The King's personal physician was about to pay a call in a storm, not on anyone noble, likely to be ennobled or indeed even respectable, but on a family of slackwitted all-runt ne'er-do-wells, a tribe of contagiously flea'd happen-ills so fundamentally useless they were not even servants but merely the hangers-on of servants, itinerant leeches on the body of the city and the land.
Coinless and hopeless, to be short about it, and even the Doctor might have had the sense to refuse but for the fact that she had, bizarrely, heard of this sickly urchin. "She has a voice from another world," she'd told me as she'd swirled on her cloak, as though this was all the explanation required.
"Please hurry, mistress!" wailed the whelp who'd come to summon us. Her accent was thick and her voice made irksome by her disease-dark snaggle teeth.
"Don't tell the Doctor what to do, you worthless piece of shit!" I told her, trying to be helpful. The lame brute ducked and hobbled away in front, across the glistening cobbles of the square.
"Oelph! Kindly keep a civil tongue in your head," the Doctor told me, grabbing her medicine bag back from me.
"But mistress!" I protested. At least, though, the Doctor had waited until our limping guide was out of earshot before chastising me.
She screwed up her eyes against the lashing rain and raised her voice above the howl of the wind. "Do you think we can get a cab?"
I laughed, then turned the offending noise into a cough. I made a show of looking around as we approached the lower edge of the Square, where the lame child had disappeared down a narrow street. I could just make out a few scavenging people scattered along the eastern side of the Square, flapping back and forth in their rags as they collected the half-rotted leaves and rain-sodden husks which had been blown there from the centre of the Square, where the vegetable market had been. Not another soul to be seen. Certainly not a cabbie, rickshaw puller or chair carrier. They had more sense than to be out in weather like this. "I think not, mistress," I said.
"Oh dear," the Doctor said, and seemed to hesitate. For one wonderful moment I thought she might see sense and return us both back to the warmth and comfort of her apartments, but it was not to be. "Oh well," she said, holding the top of her cloak closed at her neck, settling her hat more firmly on her gathered-up hair and putting her head down to hurry onwards. "Never mind. Come on, Oelph."
Cold water was creeping down my neck. "Coming, mistress."
The day had passed reasonably well until then. The Doctor had bathed, spent more time writing in her journal, then we had visited the spice market and nearby bazaars while the storm was still just a dark brew on the western horizon. She had met with some merchants and other doctors at the house of a banker to talk about starting a school for doctors (I was consigned to the kitchen with the servants and so heard nothing of consequence and little of sense), then we walked smartly back up to the palace while the sky clouded over and the first few rain squalls swept in over from the outer docks. I fondly and quite mistakenly congratulated myself for escaping back to the comfort and warmth of the palace before the storm set in.
A note on the door to the Doctor's rooms informed us that the King desired to see her and so it was off towards his private apartments as soon as we'd put down our bags full of spices, berries, roots and earths. A servant intercepted us in the Long Corridor with news that the King had been wounded in a practice duel and — hearts in our mouths — we made quickly for the game halls.
"Sire, a leech! We have the finest! The rare Emperor leech, from Brotechen!"
"Nonsense! A burn-glass veining is what is required, followed by an emetic!"
"A simple letting will suffice. Your majesty, if I may-"
"No! Get away from me, you wittering purple rogues! Away and become bankers the lot of you — admit what you really love! Where's Vosill? Vosill!" the King cried up the broad stairs as he started up them, left hand clutched round his right up
per arm. We were just starting down.
The King had been injured in a duelling round and it seemed as if every other doctor of repute in the city must have been in the duelling chamber that day, for they were clustered round the King and the two men at his side like purple-coated chasers round a beast at bay. Their own masters followed at their heels, holding duelling swords and half-masks, with one large, grey-faced individual isolated near the rear presumably being the one who'd cut the King.
Guard Commander Adlain was to one side of the King, Duke Walen on the other. Adlain, I will record only for posterity, is a man the nobility and grace of whose features and carriage are matched only by our good King, though the Guard Commander's appearance is swarthy where King Quience's is fair — a faithful, loyal shadow ever at the side of our splendid ruler. But what monarch could wish for a more glorious shadow!
Duke Walen is a short, stooped man with leathery skin and small, deeply recessed eyes which are slightly crossed.
"Sir, are you sure you won't let my physician tend to that wound?" Walen said in his high, grating voice, while Adlain shooed away a couple of the harrying doctors. "Look," the Duke cried, "it's dripping! The royal blood! Oh, my word! Physician! Physician! Really, my lord, this doctor fellow is quite the best. Let me just-"
"No!" the King bellowed. "I want Vosill! Where is she?"
"The lady would appear to have more pressing engagements," Adlain said, not unreasonably. "Lucky it's just a scratch, eh, my lord?" Then he looked up the steps to see the Doctor and myself descending. His expression became a smile.
"Vo-!" the King roared, head down as he bounded up the curve of steps, briefly leaving both Walen and Adlain behind.
"Here, Sir," the Doctor said, stepping down to meet him.
"Vosill! Where in the name of all the skies of hell have you been?"
"I-"
"Never mind that! Let's to my chambers. You." (And the King addressed me!) "See if you can hold off this pack of bloodsucking scavengers. Here's my duelling sword." The King handed me his own sword! "You have full permission to use it on anyone who looks remotely like a physician. Doctor?"