The Last Witness

by K. J. Parker

  He looked at me as though I was mad. We need you, he said. Things have taken a turn for the worse. My father is seriously concerned.

  He’d interrupted me while I was driving in a fence post. I’d been working since dawn, and the sledge felt like it weighed three hundredweight. I’m retired, I repeated. Sorry, but I don’t do that stuff any more.

  My father says you’ve got to come now, he said. Maybe I haven’t made myself clear. This is important.

  So’s this, I told him. And I retired. Sorry.

  He scowled at me. We’ve been doing some research, he said. About you. We found out some interesting things. He grinned; it made him look like a dog. You’ve led an eventful life, haven’t you?

  I thought about smashing his skull with the hammer, and decided against it. Probably it was a weak decision. If I’d killed him and melted away into the countryside (wouldn’t be the first time I’d done that) I’d have had to give up the money and the farm and my apotheosis, but I’d have been free and clear, for a little while. I could have gone anywhere, been anybody, done anything. A weak and tired decision; I traded freedom and infinite potential for a little comfort.

  Who told you? I said.

  He shook his head. I’m hardly likely to tell you, am I? Anyway, there it is. You can refuse if you like, but if you do, you’ll regret it. Come on, he added. We can’t afford to waste time.

  I put it to him that blackmailing me would be a very bad idea, given that I knew enough about him and his father to destroy the entire world. But he just gave me an impatient look, because he knew as well as I did that if I went to the authorities, I wouldn’t live long enough to testify; and, as a relatively new, arriviste god, with no friends or connections among the senior pantheon, my absence wouldn’t arouse much comment.

  He’d come in a covered two-seater chaise. It wasn’t designed to carry two people long distances on poor roads. I comfort myself with the reflection that he must have suffered even more than I did, every time we went over a pothole.

  * * *

  Consider it this way. The present is a split second, so tiny and trivial as to be immaterial. Everything else, everything real and substantial, is a coral reef of dead split seconds, forming the islands and continents of our reality. Every moment is a brick in the wall of the past, building enormous structures that have identity and meaning, cities we live in. The future is wet shapeless clay, the present is so brief it barely exists, but the past houses and shelters us, gives us a home and a name; and the mortar that binds those bricks, that stops them from sliding apart into a nettle-shrouded ruin, is memory.

  I had no way of knowing, of course, exactly which of my past misdemeanours he’d contrived to unearth. But—last time I counted, and that was a while back, thirty-six of them carried the death penalty in the relevant jurisdiction, and I’d long since lost count of the things I’d done which would land me in jail or the galleys or the hulks or the slate quarries if anyone ever brought them home to me. The issue is confused, of course, by all the crimes I remember vividly but didn’t do; even so, I was and am uncomfortably aware that my past (so long as memory sustains it) isn’t so much a city as a condemned cell. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not fundamentally a bad person. They’ll hang you for any damn thing in some of the places I’ve been, Boc Auxine or Perigeuna; failure to salute the flag, sneezing during the Remembrance Festival. But I’ve had my moments. As previously noted, no angel.

  * * *

  Someone opened the chaise door and I poked my head out. Not somewhere I recognised, though it was fairly obvious what sort of place it was. Mile-high tenement blocks crowded round a little square yard; two single-storey sheds north and south, and in the middle a circle of black ash ringed with big sooty stones; to the right a fifty-gallon barrel with one charred side. You’ve got it; a wheelwright’s yard, of which there are probably forty in the City, maybe more—the ruts in the streets are hard on wheels and axles. I guessed we weren’t there to have the chaise fixed, however.

  The young man led me into the shed on the north side. The shutters were down, but there was a big fire still glowing on the forge hearth. The old man was sitting awkwardly on an anvil, with five men standing behind him; they needed no explanation. Opposite the old man, kneeling on the hard stone floor, was a little thin man, anywhere between forty and fifty-five. He had a black eye and a cut lip, ugly bruise on his cheek, hair matted with blood from one of those scalp wounds that just keep on bleeding. He was nursing his left hand in his right; someone had flattened his fingertips on the anvil with a big hammer. He had that still, quiet look.

  The old man glanced up as I came in, then turned his attention back to the poor devil kneeling on the floor. This man, he said, stole from us. He was a clerk in the counting-house, we looked after him, trusted him, and he stole from us. And he won’t tell us what he’s done with our money.

  I looked at the clerk, who shook his head. It’s not true, he said (it was hard to make out the words, his mouth was too badly damaged), I never stole anything. The young man rolled his eyes, as though the clerk were a naughty boy with jam round his mouth insisting he knew nothing about the missing cake.

  Fine, I said, we can settle this quite easily. I braced myself; it was going to be a difficult, nasty job, and I was out of practice.

  I did the old man first. I’m ashamed to admit that I was a bit cavalier about going in. I’ve found you can modulate—is that the word?—the level of discomfort you cause when you look through the side of someone’s head; on this occasion, I didn’t bother too much. The memories I wanted were easy enough to find—half of the things he’d found out about me weren’t even true. I bundled them up, wiped the memory of the pain, and got out fast. Same for his son. Then I did the clerk. Then out again. By this time I was feeling shattered, sweat running down my face and inside my shirt, as though I’d just run up a steep hill with a hay bale hanging from each hand.

  “He’s telling the truth,” I said. “He never stole from you, and he hasn’t got your money.”

  The old man opened his mouth, then closed it again. The young man called me a liar and various other things; his father sighed and told him to be quiet.

  The clerk’s head had rolled forward onto his chest; he was asleep. “You’d better untie him and dump him in an alley somewhere,” I went on. “I’ve taken away all his memories of what you’ve done to him, he’ll wake up and have no idea how he got in this state, it’ll save you having to kill him.” I smiled. “Now, then,” I said, “I don’t think we discussed my fee. The usual rate?”

  The old man gave me a puzzled look, then wrote out a draft for three hundred angels. I didn’t argue. “Well,” I said, “it’s been a pleasure working for you, but as I told your son, I’m retired now, so we won’t be seeing each other again. Rest assured you can rely on my discretion. Don’t bother giving me a lift, I can walk.”

  I got out of there as quickly as I could, and headed straight for the Sword of Justice, simply because it was nearest and I badly needed a drink. So badly, in fact, that I stuck to black tea with honey and pepper, because some things you need you shouldn’t always get. I was sipping it when a man I used to know came up and told me they’d got a game going out back, if I was interested.

  I looked at him and grinned. “Sorry,” I said, “I’m broke. Look at me,” I added.

  He did so, noting the farm clothes and the worn-out boots. “Screw you, then,” he replied pleasantly, and left me in peace.

  * * *

  How was it, I hear you ask, that I came to develop my unique talent and establish a career as the Empire’s leading consulting memory engineer?

  It’s a classic success story. There I was, an ignorant farm boy on the run from the law, turning up in the big city with nothing but the rags on his back and a dream of a better life. An early but significant demonstration of my powers came about when hunger drove me to the back door of the old Industry and Enterprise in Sheep Street—remember it? It’s gone now, of course, pulled down to
make space for the new cattle pens. The door was open, and I could see through into the kitchen, where they were roasting chickens on a spit. There didn’t seem to be anybody about, so I nipped in and helped myself.

  I was cheerfully stuffing my face when the landlord loomed up out of the shadows and kicked me halfway across the room. Then he picked up a cleaver. I swear it was instinct; I stared right through his skull, picked out the sight of me tiptoeing in and grabbing a chicken, and darted back out again. There was the landlord, cleaver in hand, puzzled frown on face. Who the hell are you? he asked me. Got any work? I answered. No, get lost. I nodded (I’d stuck the chicken down the front of my shirt) and headed back into the street as fast as I could go.

  For someone who’d had to work for his living, this episode was a revelation to me; a flawless modus operandi, fully formed and perfected, like suddenly waking up one morning to find that you’d learned the silversmith’s trade overnight, in a dream. I refined it a bit, of course. I know, they say if it ain’t broke don’t fix it, but I modified the original pattern to leave out the getting-kicked-across-the-room stage, and in the event it worked just as well without it. Instead, I’d go into teashops when there were no other customers, eat and drink as much as I liked, then cause the owner to forget me completely. Same with dosshouse-keepers and landladies of furnished accommodation; as soon as they asked me for rent, they’d never seen me before in their lives. I got into a few scrapes, it’s true, but that’s all done and forgotten about now. In due course, I refined my business model and started getting jobs that actually paid money; eventually, lots of money, which somehow never stayed with me very long, but that’s not the point. I was a success. I made something of myself, and there’s not many men from my background who can say that.

  * * *

  So why, I hear you ask, did I turn my back on all that, a lifetime of achievement, not to mention the money, in order to go scurrying back to my grubby roots and relapse into peasant farming?

  Actually, I should think that was obvious. I was terrified. Ever since I’d done that job on the girl who was raped, I knew something was terribly wrong. I’d tried to figure out what had happened, couldn’t—no matter. I’m not a scholar or a scientist, just an honest artisan practising his trade. But when the trade gets dangerous and not worth the risk, I stop. Simple; if I don’t go back there, it can’t hurt me. And I was horribly sure that if I did go back, I’d get hurt.

  I could remember it all perfectly; the skinny girl, standing next to me. She had a long, thin nose, and no lobes to her ears. She was staring at me—not eye to eye, she was gazing at the side of my head. Get out of it, I shouted at her—I mouthed the words but could make no sound. Stop doing that. Get out of my mind. She turned her head and looked at me, frowning, as if I were a spelling mistake. She said something, but I couldn’t hear it. Her lips were thin and practically colourless, and I couldn’t read them. It’s for your own good, you stupid girl, I tried to tell her. She couldn’t understand me. She reached for the scroll in my hand, but I pulled it away. I could feel her looking through the wall of my skull. It hurt like hell. I yelled, and got out quick—

  * * *

  So what’s the chance, I kept asking myself, that there’s someone else out there with the same knack or talent I’ve got; a skinny girl, nobody really, but she can see through the walls of skulls into the library inside? Except that wasn’t what I’d encountered, was it? I met her inside her own head, conscious of me; she’d tried to get at my memories, but I’d been too quick for her and got away before she could break in. Conclusion: she could do what I can do, but there was more to it than that. She was aware of me gatecrashing her mind; she was actually there, in person, and nearly managed to snatch the scroll out of my hand.

  And still only young, twenty or so; not much older than I was when I started. Give her a few years to come to terms with her ability and put on a bit of mental muscle—what other tricks could she do, I wondered? What sort of monster had I blundered into?

  * * *

  I owed her a drink, of course. If it hadn’t been for the scare she’d put into me, I’d never have found the strength to quit the job and get out of the City. That change was definitely an improvement, no question at all about it.

  I cashed the old man’s draft and got them to write a letter of credit to the Social and Beneficent; another couple of hundred couldn’t do any harm, after all, even if I was highly unlikely ever to need it. Then I caught the carrier’s cart to my village and walked the rest of the way. It had been raining, and the wet grass soaked my trousers up to the knees. I walked past the ruin—they’d roofed it over with wooden shingles, over which I’d specified a single continuous sheet of burnished copper, but they hadn’t got round to that yet. I peered at it from a distance, too far away to make out what the builders’ men were saying, and cut through the woods to get home. The smell of the wet grass was wonderful. It was nearly dark by then. The back door was slightly ajar, just as I’d left it. I went inside and groped for the lamp and the tinderbox. I was just about to wind the tinderbox handle when light filled the room.

  Two of them; I can picture them to this day—one lifting the shutter of a dark lantern, the other rising gracefully to his feet and levelling the crossbow he’d been cradling on his knees. He was the one who messed it all up, of course, because as he stood up he got between his target and the light, giving me plenty of time to back out and slam the door in his face; I felt it quiver as the bolt hit it. I was almost as stupid as he was. I wasted a good second looking round for something to wedge the door with, instead of legging it straightaway into the friendly, conspiratorial dark. But I got smart as soon as I felt his weight slam against the door; I let go, allowing him to sprawl out and trip over his feet, while I scampered across the yard toward the hay barn. The only reason I went that way was a vague memory of where I’d left a hayfork, which was the only weapon I had that wasn’t in the house.

  The trouble with a vague memory is it doesn’t help you find things in the pitch dark. Furthermore, while I was groping about in the hay, I trod on that damned loose floorboard, the one that creaks like a soul in torment. The sound carried wonderfully in the still night air. I froze; not tactics, terror. Then I heard the scrape of a hobnail on the slate lintel.

  * * *

  It reminded me of a night, many years earlier, when I’d crept through a dark garden towards the wall of a house and looked up at a narrow window. The architect who built that house had no daughters, or he wouldn’t have allowed the window of the best east-facing bedroom, looking out over the rose garden, to be so easily accessible by drainpipe.

  I was quite athletic in those days, but just as clumsy as I am now. The heel of my boot dragged on the stone windowsill, making a noise that sounded like morning shift in the slate quarries. I froze and counted to twenty; her mother’s maid slept in the next room, and was no friend of mine. But twenty came and went, no banging doors or raised voices. I hauled myself over the sill and got my feet down on a good, discreet Vesani rug.

  But something was wrong. She should have been there. I was alone in someone else’s house. Suddenly, I felt like a burglar.

  Fortuitously, I knew about burglary, thanks to a paying customer. I knew how to walk quietly, and what to watch out for. I crept through the dressing room into her bedroom. It was dark. I knew its geography, of course. I have a blind man’s memories of how to navigate in the dark. I found the bed, and my fingertips told me it was made up. I stood there, feeling incredibly stupid. Then the door opened, and the light almost blinded me.

  I should explain that I’d been away for nearly six months, for my health. I hadn’t dared write, and all the time I was away I’d been out of my mind with worry. The first thing I did when I got back was leave the agreed sign—a hand-and-flower, chalked on the foot of the sundial at the end of the rose garden; when I came back the next night, her countersign was there, with two crosses, meaning in two days’ time. So she was still there, still wanted to see me; b
ut her room was empty.

  Framed in the light was a man I knew only too well, though we’d never met face to face or spoken to each other. At that time, her father was a senator and a wealthy merchant, doing extremely well in the cotton and linen business; this was several years before the crash came and it turned out that the only money he had was what he’d embezzled from Party funds. He was a big man, bald, with the arms and shoulders of a country blacksmith, and his attitude towards me, as far as I could gather, was basically agnostic; he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe that I existed, but he had lurking suspicions. He was alone, but all that signified was a sensible disinclination to share the next few minutes with any witnesses.

  I’d already turned to run for it, but he said, “No, wait,” and there was something in the way he said it—not anger, just sadness. I stayed where I was and he came up close and held the lamp so he could see my face. “You’re shorter than I expected,” he said.

  “Where is she?”

  For a moment I thought he was going to go for me. The little, isolated part of my mind that arranges tactical details was busy taking note of the fact that he was holding the lamp in his right hand and his left hand was empty; no weapon, so either he was unarmed or he’d have to shift the lamp to his left to draw; or if he planned on killing me with his bare hands, he’d have to lead with his left, and his feet were all wrong for that, unless he was a natural southpaw—But then he shook his head, and the look on his face made me go cold. “She’s dead,” he said.

  It’s so easy to say; in that moment, I died. Grand overstatement. Melodrama. I wish I had the words, but I don’t.

  He went on: “There was a problem with the pregnancy. It was blood poisoning.”

  All I could do was repeat: “Pregnancy.”