by Paula Guran
She was starting to annoy me. “No idea,” I said.
“Rough guess.”
“All right,” I said. “If you put everything together, the land and the houses and the ships he owned and everything, something to the tune of half a million. But that’s different.”
“Is it?” She smiled at me. “That’s what you should’ve had,” she said. “That should’ve been yours by right. So, five thousand angels isn’t enough. Is it?”
“Now you’re being stupid,” I said. “We can’t steal half a million angels. It’d take us the rest of our lives.”
She just grinned at me.
So we carried on, cleaning out goldsmiths and silversmiths, merchants, on one occasion the army payroll. Needless to say, people were beginning to notice. They set up a watch committee, hired guards; poor fools weren’t looking out for fleas and cockroaches. We filled our fourth trunk. The prefect issued a statement flatly denying that there was a critical shortage of gold currency in Podarga, which was as good as an outright admission. There were runs on the banks, which only served to highlight the fact that they had no money, because some bastard had taken it. I told her, this isn’t fun any more, it’s got to stop. We’re causing an economic crisis here, and people will get hurt. All she ever did was grin at me and haul me into bed. We were spending practically nothing, maybe three thalers a week, and we had most of the money in the city sitting in huge boxes on the floor of our room. I got a pair of scales and did some rough calculations. Then I told her, there’s over a million angels here, that’s twice what you reckon the world owes me, can we stop now, please? She started laughing at me. I put my hands round her throat and squeezed.
I remember how her face turned blue, just before she died. It was the most extraordinary thing. Her eyes glazed over, in that moment of transition when she stopped being a person and turned into a thing, that special sort of reverse alchemy. I knew she was dead when I felt her entire weight on my wrists. It was only then, I think, that I realized what I was doing. No, make that what I’d done.
Nobody could’ve been more surprised, I think, than I was. After I killed the goldsmith’s son, I think I told you, I gave up the burglary side of things; I never wanted to put myself in that position again, where I’d be in danger of killing someone. It’s a question of knowing what you’re capable of. Ever since then, I’d made a point of playing safe. No weapons, no situations where that sort of conflict could arise. With her on the team, so to speak, there’d been no risk of that. It was so easy, so safe. She could see through doors and walls, so we always knew if there was a guard in there waiting for us. So. I was stunned. I’d done it again.
If there’d been something sharp handy, I swear I’d have killed myself. I actually tried smashing a pottery dish, to make a sharp edge; stupid thing wouldn’t break, even when I stamped on it with my boot. Not fit to live was the only thought running through my mind. On balance—I was clear-headed enough to make the distinction—I preferred to kill myself, in my own time and with dignity, than wait for the watch to show up—public trial, public execution, I still had my finer feelings at that point. But it wasn’t what you’d call a deal-breaker. The rope would do just fine, if I couldn’t manage anything better. People will tell you that capital punishment is barbaric. Me, I’m all for it.
(Except, I don’t think they should’ve hung my poor father. He was guilty, all right—high treason, no less, conspiracy to overthrow the Republic. We’re always guilty in my family. But what actually happened was, he got sucked into this stupid idea of cornering the grain market by the Stamen brothers, and needless to say it all went yellow, and my father was cleaned out, everything, and it turned out the Stamen boys hadn’t actually put in any of their own money, so they were all right. My poor, stupid father went in with a bunch of lunatic idealists from the Phocas and the Tmiscas—cousins of ours, about a thousand times removed, everybody is, at that level—who wanted to get shot of the government and go back to the old days. They fondly believed they had the army on their side, but it was all nonsense, really. I don’t suppose anything would’ve come of it, if the Coalition hadn’t been tearing itself apart over the Agrarian Reform Bill, and they desperately needed a crisis to take everyone’s mind off things. My father and his idiot friends were a gift from heaven, as far as they were concerned. Two of the conspirators managed to worm their way out by turning state’s evidence (we dealt with them later, I’m proud to say) but the rest went to the gallows, including my poor father. I wasn’t there, of course, didn’t dare show my face, but I gather he made a wild, rather incoherent speech about how he could die proud, having for once in his life stood up for something worthwhile, even though it had come to nothing—Well. He was a clown. But they shouldn’t hang clowns. Not when there are really bad people walking free, like me.)
So there I was, trying frantically to smash a clay dish that wouldn’t break, with the dead body of my beautiful girl lying at my feet. Running through my head, so loud that I couldn’t think, was the phrase the consequences of his actions. Fair enough, I told myself. You do something really bad, you pay for it. Note the word pay. There’s a deeply rooted commercial streak strongly embedded in our notion of morality. You buy a crime with punishment; you do a bad thing, and you pay for it—but not with a good thing, please note, but with another bad thing, a death for a death. Not sure of the logic there, because surely it ought to be—you pay for a bad thing with a good thing: murder someone, pay for it by giving all your money to the poor and spending the rest of your life in a monastery. But apparently not. Anyway, back then I was profoundly conventional in my ethical outlook. I’d killed two people, so I deserved to die. Only I couldn’t break the stupid dish.
The hell with it, I thought. I’ll turn myself in to the Watch, and they can deal with me. After all, that’s what we pay our taxes for. I knelt down and put my fingers on her neck, just in case I’d got it wrong and there was a faint pulse. Nothing. She was getting cold, and her face was as white as really good quality wax. I closed the door behind me and went out into the street.
Turn myself in to the Watch. Did I know where the Watch House is in Podarga? Did I hell. I thought I knew; I thought it was the big white building in Constitution Square, but that turned out to be the Provincial Legislature. There was a kettlehat on duty at the gate and I tried to surrender myself to him, but he looked at me and told me he wasn’t allowed to leave his post until the end of his shift. I’ll wait, I said, I don’t mind waiting. Piss off, he told me. All right, I said, could you please give me direction to the Watch House? Out of the square and take a left, he said, then down North Parade till you’ve got the Golden Flea on your left, there’s a courtyard on your right, you can’t miss it.
I found it, eventually (I’m hopeless with directions). They’ve got this really impressive set of wrought iron gates, and standing in front of them, there she was.
I stared at her. “There you are,” she said. “I thought this is where you’d come.”
“You’re alive,” I said.
“No thanks to you.”
“Oh thank God,” I said. “I thought I’d killed you.”
She frowned at me. “You did,” she said.
Things you never knew about witches.
She explained it to me. Apparently, the universe is sort of like a house. There are different rooms. What you and I think of as the world is just one of them; we live in it, and when we die, we go upstairs to another one, and there we stop. But witches have keys to a lot of other rooms where we can’t go, and where things don’t work the same. That’s how they do magic. They just pop next door, to where the impossible is a piece of cake, and then (I never followed this part) they sort of walk back in as something else. So, when she was on the point of death, with my hands clamped tight round her neck, she slipped away into another room until her body was stone dead, then came back again. It’s not pleasant, she said, climbing back into your dead body. It’s freezing cold and you have to get everything working ag
ain, it’s a bit like putting on a suit of dripping wet clothes. But death, she told me, is no big deal. The least of her problems.
As you can imagine, things were a bit strained between us for a while after that. She kept telling me she’d forgiven me and I wasn’t to think about it any more. I kept telling her I was no good, I was evil, a murderer. She told me not to be so self-indulgent. You lost your temper, she said, that’s all. No harm done. No, I said, but the intention— She gave me a funny look. Intention doesn’t matter, she said. Nothing matters, really. I told her I was going away. Fine, she said, I’m coming with you.
So one night, when she was fast asleep, I left her. I didn’t dare fumble around in the dark for my coat, because she was a light sleeper and the slightest sound woke her up. I walked out in just my shirt and trousers. For the first time in my life, my pockets were empty, not a coin to my name. Strange feeling, that. I remember, as I emerged from the inn doorway into the street, this weird sort of freedom, as if for the first time I was really myself, shorn of all the inherited and acquired junk; just me, my strengths, weaknesses, qualities, flaws, character. I scratched the back of my neck and walked down to the harbor.
Stowing away on board a ship is easier than you think. It’s staying stowed that’s the problem. I swam out and climbed the hawser; there was nobody about, and I scrambled up on top of a big stack of barrels and lay down. I guess I fell asleep, because I remember opening my eyes and seeing a broad blue sky, and feeling hair brushing my cheek.
She kissed me. “Hello,” she said.
I didn’t move. I couldn’t. I was frozen.
“This is fun,” she said. “Where are we going?”
Later we climbed down and gave ourselves up to the captain, who was delighted to accept five angels and take us on as passengers. He didn’t ask why we’d come aboard without telling anyone, sort of got the impression it wasn’t the first time. He lent us his cabin, for an extra two angels, and they did their best to make us comfortable. The ship was going to Laerna, with a cargo of vinegar.
Anyway, where were we? Oh yes. Kuvass City.
When I first met her, I was twenty-three. That was thirty-five years ago. How old am I? I simply don’t know. When I see myself in a mirror, I look about nineteen, though I learned not to trust mirrors a long time ago. But people assume I’m—well, the same age as she is, and she looks about twenty. What a charming couple, people say, him so handsome and her so very beautiful.
Did I mention the sawmills? Big business is Kuvass City. They float lumber down the river in huge rafts. It’s only softwood, pines and firs, so nearly all of it gets sawn into planks. The mills are powered by waterwheels driven by the Kuvass River. They can handle any size of tree you care to name. The circular saw-blades are the size of a cartwheel, and they have five or six running in parallel—you feed in a tree at one end, it comes out all planked out at the other, about a minute later. Quite an impressive sight.
I made a special point of not looking too closely at the sawmills. Instead, we went to see the silver mines. Foul place. They’d torn a mountain in half, so that one side was an artificial cliff-face, with ridiculous rickety wooden galleries scrambling up it like ivy. God help the poor devils who work there. They scoop away the mountain with picks, winch down the ore in buckets, and then the stuff goes into the separation process, which is a real mess. I don’t know how it actually works, but there’s this delta of open sewers, to wash the mud off the ore, and huge furnaces belching out thick, stinking smoke. You can tell where the idea of Hell came from; noise and ooze and stench and smoke, from time to time great jets of flame as they open and close the ports and vents. The soot gets in your eyes and your hair, the fumes get up your nose and you choke, and every footstep in the ankle-deep mud is a horrible effort. Sort of a metaphor, really, because that’s where money comes from, that’s how money is made.
We were rich investors thinking about buying into the mine. We’d come to see for ourselves, my sister and I. The mine captain was shocked that nobody had told him to expect distinguished visitors. He kept apologizing and yelling for duckboards for us to walk on.
We were terribly impressed with what we saw. It was all quite fascinating, and clearly the mine was wonderfully productive. Just one thing, though. All that valuable silver bullion—what was it? Three tons a day? What was there to prevent it from getting, well, you know, stolen?
“Easy,” she said, as we squelched back to town in our ruined footwear. “The guards aren’t a problem, obviously. You wait round the back, where there’s that blind spot beside the water-chute, did you notice it? I can crawl in through the gap under the eaves, make an invisible hole in the back wall and just pass the ingots out to you. Then I come out again and we make the ingots weightless and float them over to the road and onto the cart. By the time they open up in the morning, we’ll be in Scheria. Piece of cake.”
Indeed. It always was a piece of cake. That was the point.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll do that, then.” I was trying to sound bored and sullen. It was getting harder and harder. She was so quick to suspect, and I’m not that good an actor. “Tonight?”
“Might as well. No point in hanging around for the sake of it.”
She always argues; I’m a thief, it’s my nature. Stealing is what I want to do. Not for the money, because money’s never interested me, the same way fish aren’t interested in water. It’s the stealing that I enjoy. Therefore, that’s what we’ll do, one robbery after another, for the rest of our indefinitely prolonged lives. Happy ever after.
Just so long as you’re happy, she says, that’s all I want. Isn’t that what love means?
“Tonight, then,” I said. “I’ll need to see about a cart.”
She nodded. “That’s fine, then,” she said. “I’ll see you back at the inn.”
Thought I was being really clever. I left her at the corner of Coppergate and went on down North Reach as far as the livery, then doubled back up Old Side, through the lanes and out onto the wharf, then up the towpath until I reached the ingates of the mill sluice. I picked my way along the top of the narrow wall and climbed down into the sawpit yard. The noise of the saw-blades was deafening, and the air was full of coarse shreds of sawdust, like a snowstorm. The man working the saw benches saw me and yelled, get away, you fool. I felt sorry for him. Believe it or not, I don’t like to make trouble for people, but sometimes it just can’t be helped.
Did I mention I was in the army? Oh yes. I was a captain. Not a proper one, of course. I’d have been a major, only I look too young, even with this ludicrous system they have in the Empire of buying commissions. Still, a captain’s pretty hot stuff, particularly a captain in the House Guards. I’d set my heart on them, because I happened to know they were about to be sent off to the Southern front, where the fighting was pretty grim.
I don’t suppose you’ve heard of that war. It was never anything much. Either the Sashan launched a sneak attack on one of our outposts, or we launched one on one of theirs; can’t remember, don’t particularly care. But at one point it got a bit out of hand; we slaughtered their expeditionary force, they ambushed our relief column, there was going to have to be a full-scale pitched battle to sort things out, or the whole thing would degenerate into hit-and-run all along the frontier, and that kind of thing can drag on for years.
Nothing to do with me, of course. I was dead set on getting in on it because I figured, the army, forced marches across the desert, all that; there was no way she could follow me there, not as a girl, at any rate. And I reckoned she’d quickly get tired of being a flea all the time. She’d lose interest, maybe find someone else to pick on; she’d be gone and I could get on with my life.
How naïve. I turned up one evening at the camp gate, introduced myself, handed over my commission to the CO—a nice piece of work, that; I use a forger in Seuma Eris, extremely reliable and really quite reasonable. He gave it a cursory glance and poured me a drink, and that was that.
I knew ab
solutely nothing about soldiering, needless to say. That was just right, because most of the young officers sent out to the front in that war were straight up from their country estates, never seen a parade-ground in their lives. I took the color-sergeant on one side, gave him ten angels. “What do I have to do?” I asked him.
He grinned at me. “That’s all right, sir,” he said. “You ride at the front and try not to run away when the fighting starts, and you leave the rest to me and the other sergeants. We’ll look after you, sir, we know the score.”
Fine by me. Actually, that sergeant was a fine fellow. He told me to dump all the shiny new armor I’d bought at the outfitters’ (he had a sideline, selling it back to them) and got me fitted out in the proper stuff, worn in and comfortable. He got me a pair of boots that actually fit. They were Sashan, needless to say; they make the best army boots anywhere. Every day I’d get on my beautiful white horse and ride out, and when it was time to stop he’d tell me well in advance. There were papers to sign after dinner, but that was all. I could’ve done without the searing heat, needless to say, and it had been a few years since I spent quite so long in the saddle. But I’d had my share of living rough before she came along, very rough indeed at times, so all in all it wasn’t too bad. Best of all, no sign of her whatsoever. Not even a bite on my neck or an itch anywhere. They do say it’s too hot for fleas in the desert. Flies are another matter, of course. But I’d never known her be a fly.
Then, one night, I was sitting outside my tent watching the men gathered round the fire, and I saw this dog. It was great big thing, pure white. The men were throwing bones for it. I called my friend the sergeant. “What’s that in aid of?” I asked.
He grinned. “Oh, that,” he said. “Don’t know where she came from, sir, just showed up one day. The men like her, reckon she’s good luck. Funny thing, coming across a dog in the middle of the desert. Tame as anything, though.”
“Maybe she was with a salt caravan and wandered off,” I said.