by K. J. Parker
Now she was looking away.
“Well,” Psellus said, after making a show of clearing his throat, “that was my clever theory. Next I started wondering how on earth I could prove it. And then I thought of a way. I thought, I’ll send someone, a nice friendly lady, to ask Moritsa herself. Not straight out, of course. She’d start talking about a mechanical doll she’d seen, and observe how the girl reacted. Splendid idea, I thought, so I made the arrangements. But when I got the results, it seemed like they contradicted my whole theory. You see, when the nice lady started talking about dolls, Moritsa got quite upset. She hated them, she said. Well, the nice lady said, was that because of what happened to Daddy? And do you know what she said? She said she didn’t understand, because Daddy did a bad thing and ran away from home, but it didn’t have anything to do with dolls. No, she hated dolls because they’d seen one at the fair, and it frightened her. The way it moved its arms and legs was creepy and scary, and she never wanted to have to see one ever again.”
He looked at her face. Frozen. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” she said, “bullying a little girl like that. I don’t suppose she knew what she was saying, if you had your people persecuting her, asking her questions about her father.”
It was all he could do to stop himself grinning and clapping his hands. It was a counterattack, but a frightened one, hurried, snatched, deficient in timing and direction. Instead, he said, “Of course you’re angry, what mother wouldn’t be? But I knew you wouldn’t tell me the truth if I asked you; and I promise you, it was done very carefully so as not to upset her.”
“So you say.” Anger, yes, bitter anger, but nothing to do with the way her daughter had been treated.
“Be that as it may.” Oh, but he enjoyed saying that. “That’s what she said, and I believe her. In which case,” he went on, taking his time, savouring it, “the whole idea of making a doll, let alone an illegal one, must have come from you. From you or through you, anyway. Clearly the girl didn’t ask him for one, and I very much doubt he plucked the project out of the air, he’s not that imaginative. So it must have been you,” he said. “Mustn’t it?”
He couldn’t help admiring the sheer still force she was putting into her defence. But it’s one thing to be impressed by a performance, quite another to be convinced by it. She was tiring rapidly, like someone who’d lost a lot of blood. “Really,” she said – beautifully done – “you’ve got to have something more important to think about than that. They’re saying the savages are about to attack the City, for God’s sake. Shouldn’t you be up there doing something about it?”
He smiled. “Mustn’t it?” he said.
She shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “All right, I admit it. I put the idea into his head. I just wanted to get rid of him, so Falier and I could get married. But I couldn’t just walk out of the house. He’d have gone to law, they’d have taken Moritsa away and given her to him. I wasn’t having that.”
“So you decided to murder him, then.”
A very wan, faded smile. “I suppose so,” she said. “If you want to look at it like that. I never loved him, you know. But he just sort of took delivery of me, like I was a load of materials, to be signed for. That’s really not very fair, is it?”
Psellus nodded slowly. “You trapped him into committing a crime which you knew carried the death penalty, just so you’d be rid of him.” He looked carefully at her face. “So you could marry Falier.”
“Yes.”
He shifted again. The pins and needles were spreading up his leg, above the knee. “I suppose Falier thought up the idea of the mechanical doll. Being an engineer himself, of course. He’d have known about the two types, all the technical stuff.”
She nodded. “He’s a smart boy,” she said.
“Quite.” He smiled pleasantly. “And very brave. Like you. I mean, you must both have known what a terrible risk you were running.”
She seemed perfectly relaxed, but the knuckles of her left hand, clamped around a handkerchief, were white. “Not so terrible,” she said.
“Heavens,” he replied, “you really are brave, aren’t you? I mean to say, you must have known there was a very real chance that you, as the wife of an abominator, would’ve been executed yourself, or at least put in prison. And Moritsa too, of course. Well, I suppose I can credit you having that sort of nerve, but I wouldn’t have thought Falier would’ve wanted to risk it. After all, he stood to lose the girl he loved. If you were both that desperate, why not just poison him? That way, you’d only have been punished if you’d been found out.”
Winning is one thing. Daring to exploit the victory… “We didn’t see it like that,” she said.
“Obviously not.” Psellus sighed, closed his eyes for a moment. “And you got away with it, so really, you were right all along. But, like I said, very brave. And by rights, nobody should ever have suspected anything. You’ve got no idea how much effort I’ve had to put in, just to get this far.”
A grin. “Well, I hope it was all worth it.”
“Absolutely. The truth is always valuable. My father used to say, you can’t plan a journey unless you know where you’re starting from.” He tried to stand up, and found he couldn’t. The pain of the pins and needles made him grunt, and just for a moment he panicked. He couldn’t get up.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m sorry to be a nuisance, but would you mind giving me a hand to stand up? My leg’s gone to sleep.”
She laughed. “You’re pathetic,” she said.
“Yes,” he replied mildly. “Aren’t I just? The ruler of the Perpetual Republic, and I can’t even get myself up off the floor.”
She got off the bed and held out her hand. He gripped it and hauled himself to his feet, wincing at the pain. “Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been a tremendous help.”
She hadn’t let go of his hand. “What’s going to happen to me?” she asked.
“Oh, you can go home now,” he said. “I’ll get them to bring Moritsa back in the morning.”
He felt her fingers slacken and let go. “That’s it, then. All this was just to make me own up.”
“Yes.” He took a step, and ended up leaning heavily against the wall. “And it doesn’t really change anything. I mean, Ziani’s still guilty. He committed the crime. He shouldn’t have made the doll, no matter what pressures were brought to bear on him. I just needed to know why, that was all. And now I do know, so I know where my journey has to start from. Extremely valuable. Thank you.” He reached out and banged his fist on the door. When he heard the handle turn, he added, “You know, you really have been most helpful. In fact, you’d have helped me far less if you’d told me the truth. You can learn so much more from lies, I always find.”
They brought Falier to see him, before he left. He looked terrified, which was, of course, perfectly understandable. Not, he decided, a young man burdened by a dangerous excess of courage. Even so, it was probably just as well he didn’t realise quite how much he had to be scared about.
“Thank you for agreeing to this,” Psellus said gravely. “You realise I can’t put you fully in the picture. But it is really very important.”
Falier shuddered. Even now, though, Psellus could see in his mind the tiny grub of the thought, how can I get something out of this, for me? “I’ll do my best, you can rely on me,” Falier said, in a rather shaky voice. “And if, well, anything bad happens…”
“Oh, it won’t, I’m quite certain of that.”
“Yes, but if it does.” Pretty to watch, the way he smothered the frown of annoyance. Like the old joke: there’s far less to this young man than meets the eye. “You will see to it that Ariessa’s looked after, won’t you? And the kid.”
“Of course.”
“Thanks, you’ve set my mind at rest. I’m really not bothered about myself, but…”
Psellus smiled. The effort hurt his jaw. “Off you go, then. You’ll be back again before you know it.” And he thought, she must have loved him very much,
to put up with having this buffoon in her bed. A remarkable young woman, that. But then, we’ve always made superb weapons here in the City.
They took Falier to the sally-port in the palisade of the front gate bastion. He couldn’t have a horse, they explained, because there was no way of getting it down to ground level; and besides, how would it get past the ditch, ten feet deep, flooded, the bottom mined with sharpened stakes? Falier appreciated that, but how was he supposed to get across the ditch himself? Swim, they said.
“I can’t swim,” he pointed out.
You’re an engineer, they replied. Resourceful. You’ll think of something.
Their faith in him was entirely justified. He paddled across on an empty nail-barrel, which stayed afloat nearly the whole distance. As he squelched out of the torchlight into the darkness, he wondered why they’d all been so hostile. They think I’ll desert, he realised. The thought hadn’t actually crossed his mind before, but now they’d put it there, it’d be wasteful just to throw it out.
Not, he told himself as he walked, that he actually believed for one moment that the City could possibly fall. There were savages, primitive, superstitious, who believed that the sun was a cart driven across the sky by a god, and gods were forgetful creatures; if they didn’t remind him with prayers every evening, maybe the sun wouldn’t come up tomorrow. But Falier believed in the inevitability of the sun, and he believed in the inviolability of the City. Damn it, they’d never get past the ditch, let alone the bastions, let alone the walls. It simply wasn’t possible that such a vast, extravagant expenditure of strength, effort and materials should go to waste (and besides, the enemy were savages, primitives, sun-worshippers or something equally ludicrous). He shivered as water ran down the inside of his trouser legs, and plodded on towards the dim glow ahead.
The light grew brighter. It reminded him a little of the glare on the skyline just before dawn. As he grew closer to it, he realised how big it was; a line of fires where the enemy camp was reported to be. With every step he took, it grew longer, and he thought: that’s not a camp, it’s a city; a city of fire, a city on fire, maybe he was walking across the present to the future, and what he was looking at was actually the City itself, Mezentia, captured and burning, a reflection in time as in water. Then he remembered that the inhabitants of the fiery city weren’t the whole enemy army, just a relatively small force of sappers and diggers, twenty-five thousand. A quarter of a tenth of the full strength they were bringing against the walls of his home. In the dark, of course, you couldn’t judge scale very easily. Behind him, the lights on the embankment were just a small glow, whereas the light ahead of him stretched out like a vast orange boulevard; and he thought, there’s so many of them, such a huge army, the ditch and the bastions and the wall won’t hold them up for more than five minutes. We haven’t done nearly enough, and now they’re here.
“Falier?” A voice from nowhere. In the dark, distances can’t be measured, there’s no scale, nothing to calibrate by, either in space or in time. The voice came from the infinite space between two lights in darkness, and from the past. “Falier, is that you?”
“Ziani?”
“Keep still. I’ll come to you.”
He froze. Gradually a scoop of darkness thickened into a human shape. When it was just close enough to make out its outlines, it stopped. “Thanks for coming,” it said.
Ludicrous, talking to a shadow, in a place like this. “That’s all right,” he heard himself say. “Where are we going?”
“Here’ll do.” The shadow changed shape, got shorter and thicker. No magic, he realised. Ziani had sat down on the ground. He did the same, hating the feel of wet cloth.
“How’s Ariessa?” Ziani asked.
“She’s fine.”
“Moritsa?”
“She’s fine too. If she’d known I was going to see you, I’m sure she’d have sent her love.”
It was a stupid thing to say, and a lie as well. Of course, he couldn’t see Ziani’s face, to judge the effect of his error of judgement. “What did you want to see me about?” he asked.
“I want you to cast your mind back,” Ziani said. Unnecessarily; hearing Ziani’s voice had done it for him. Just the voice, no face; voices don’t change the way someone’s appearance does. “When I was arrested,” he went on. “You knew all about it, of course.”
He dragged back the impulse to lie. No point. “Yes.”
“You and she.” He was finding it difficult. “You told Compliance.”
“Yes.”
“To get rid of me. So you and Ariessa could…”
“Yes.”
Silence, and the block of clotted shadow didn’t move. Then, “It’s all right,” Ziani said. “I’m not going to attack you. That’s why we’re meeting like this. If I could see you, I don’t think I’d be able to keep from killing you. But knowing the truth’s more important.” Pause. “I need to know exactly how it happened,” Ziani said. “The details. For instance, what made you choose a mechanical toy?”
That didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand,” Falier said.
“Really?” No movement; and suddenly Falier panicked and thought: what if what I’m looking at isn’t Ziani after all? What if I’m looking at a rock or a tree-stump, and Ziani’s coming up behind me with a knife? But then the outline shifted a little and reassured him. “Let’s get this straight. You and Ariessa wanted me out of the way. You, or you and she, decided to trick me into making something illegal, so you could inform on me. Why a doll, is all I’m asking. Why not a clock, or—?”
Falier couldn’t help frowning. “It wasn’t like that,” he said.
“Really?”
“No.” This was stupid, Falier thought. He’d been made to come here like this because Ziani knew, because he’d figured it out and needed confirmation; and presumably Psellus thought that once he’d had it confirmed that it was his best friend Falier who’d betrayed him and not the Republic arbitrarily condemning him to death for a misdemeanour, he’d relent and give up seeking his terrible revenge. But that didn’t work if Ziani didn’t actually know the truth. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t like that at all. It was my idea, all me. Ariessa told me what you were doing. She said we’d be able to have more time together because you were so busy, making a doll for the kid. I must’ve said something like, what sort of doll – meaning, how long’s it likely to take, how much time will it give us? And she told me you were making a special mechanical doll that could move its arms and legs and dance. And then it just sort of came to me: I knew you were doing something illegal, and if you were caught… I didn’t think of it in terms of you dying, I promise you. I just thought, he’ll be out of the way, like a piece in a board game. You know how you say, I’ll take your castle, you’ve taken my knight. It’s ambiguous, isn’t it? So you don’t feel guilty. You sort of assume they’re captured, not killed, and when the game’s over they all get to go home again, so no harm done really. Like fishing, when you catch them and throw them back. I just thought, here’s a piece blocking me, but if it gets taken—”
“That’s all right,” Ziani said softly. “I told you, it’s all right. But listen.” His voice had changed: soft, but more urgent, the voice of a man who wanted something. “Tell me the truth. Was that really how it was? Your idea, to go to Compliance?”
“Yes. I promise.”
“Quite. You wouldn’t lie to me. After all, you promised me you’d take care of Ariessa and Moritsa, and you have.”
There was no answer to that, so he didn’t reply. After a moment, Ziani went on: “Just to get it straight in my mind. Ariessa happened to mention the doll. You realised it was illegal, and you told Compliance.”
“Yes.”
“Did you discuss it with her first? Did she know? Did she approve?”
He considered lying, but could see nothing to be gained by it. “Yes.”
“Thank you. You’ve been most helpful. You can go now.”
That was it? It didn’t feel right
. “Ziani…”
“One last thing, before you go. Tell Secretary Psellus there’s only so much I can do, but I’ll try my best. Tell him…” Hesitation; a tired man searching for a form of words. “Tell him, he and I have got to trust each other, no matter what. Will you do that? Those exact words?”
“Yes, of course. Ziani, I’m really sorry. What I did, it was very bad, it was evil…”
For some reason Ziani was laughing. “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “There’s no such thing. No evil, no bad people, they’re just a myth. Do you want to know something, Falier? Everything we do in this world, everything that matters, we do for love. It’s always love, when you peel away the shell. There’s that old song, it’s love that makes the world go round. Well, it’s true. Who’d have thought it? They didn’t want us to know the truth so they hid it where nobody’d ever think of looking, in some stupid old song. It really is true, you know. Apart from mad people, and they’re sick and can’t be blamed, apart from them, everything bad – I don’t mean just greedy or spiteful things; everything really bad that was ever done was done for love. You and me, we love Ariessa. The Eremian duke, Orsea, he loved his country. Even Maris Boioannes loved the City; he wanted what was best for it, and he really believed that he was the best. That’s why there’s no such thing as evil, Falier. Evil’s just love in action, love on the move between wanting and getting. I mean, look at you. A man and a woman love each other, they’ve got no choice but to do whatever needs to be done. No, you mustn’t blame yourself, really. Believe me. I’ve only just realised this, and it changes everything. You do see that, don’t you?”