by K. J. Parker
– And Vetriz opened her mouth to reply, but Venart was still talking, finishing the sentence he’d just started when the strange interview began. Niessa Loredan let him finish, and then clicked her tongue. ‘If you can’t lie better than that,’ she said abruptly, ‘I suggest you quit commerce and find some other way of making a living. Anyway,’ she went on, with a dismissive gesture, ‘that’s all very well. I think you, Master Venart Auzeil, would be well advised to get off this island within – oh, let’s see, I don’t want to make life too difficult for you, let’s say forty-eight hours. Your sister will stay here, with me. We have other matters to discuss.’
For a moment, Vetriz was afraid that Venart would do something stupid, such as grab her and make a run for it, or hit Niessa. Instinctively she grabbed his arm. He shook it free.
‘That’s not acceptable,’ he said, trying valiantly to sound firm. ‘If you’re trying to detain a citizen of the Island against her will-’
‘It’s all right,’ Vetriz heard herself saying, ‘I’ll be fine. You go. Don’t worry.’
Venart looked as if he’d just been bitten by a chair. ‘No, it’s not fine,’ he said petulantly, struggling vainly with his bewilderment. ‘You don’t want to stay here, with her-’
‘Yes, I do,’ Vetriz said.
‘You don’t-’
‘You can go,’ Niessa interrupted, ‘or you can both stay. But if you stay, Master Auzeil, you won’t enjoy it. Now stop bickering with your sister, and go and conclude your business.’
Venart looked at her, then at Vetriz; he felt as if he was staring at two strange monsters in human disguise. He tried to think of something to say, but couldn’t.
‘Please,’ Vetriz said. ‘Really, I will be all right. There’ll only be a problem if you make a fuss.’
Venart took a deep breath. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, with feeling.
‘You amaze me,’ Niessa said. ‘The officer will show you out.’
What Gorgas really wanted to do was go home. Instead, he trudged through the corridors and up and down the stairs, and finally found himself in the hall with the hammer-beam roof and the tasteless pink pillars. He buttonholed a clerk, who told him that the Director was busy.
‘No, she’s not,’ Gorgas replied. ‘If there’s anyone in there with her, tell her to get rid of them. This is important.’
The clerk gave him a long, hateful look and went into the Director’s office. He came out again a moment later with an expression on his face that only just avoided being a smirk.
‘I’m afraid the Director isn’t here,’ he said.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ Gorgas replied. ‘The Director lives here. If she isn’t in her office she must be in her lodgings. Go and tell her – oh, the hell with that, I’ll go myself. It’s all right,’ he added, as the horrified clerk tried to stop him, ‘I know the way.’
He barged past the clerk, shouldering him out of the way, and closed the office door firmly behind him, then crossed the room to a small, almost invisible door in the wall. He banged on it once with his closed fist, then shoved. The door swung open sharply and Gorgas strode through.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘Hello, Niessa,’ Gorgas replied.
It was a tiny room, smaller than the cell her daughter was locked up in; cleaner, but rather more sparsely furnished. There was a stone shelf in the far corner which served as a bed, and a plain oak chest in the other corner, its lid padlocked shut. In a small crevice in the wall above the bed, an oil-lamp flickered on a short wick. There was no fireplace and no window, just a small grille under the low ceiling to provide ventilation. Niessa Loredan lay on the shelf, stark naked, darning the heel of a threadbare stocking that was already mostly composed of darning wool.
‘Get out.’
‘All right,’ Gorgas said. ‘I’ll see you in the office in five minutes.’
Rather less than five minutes later, Niessa bundled out of her room. She was wearing a purple silk robe, and her feet were bare. ‘If you ever do that again-’ she started to say, but Gorgas interrupted her.
‘There’s a problem,’ he said.
‘Well?’
He sat down in the visitor’s chair and drew one knee up onto the other. ‘The hostages are dead,’ he said, in a flat, expressionless voice. ‘While I was here nattering with you, my men tried to smoke them out. They burnt down the village and,’ he added, with a grimace, ‘the Albiac plantation, which is a real blow. I thought you ought to know at once, so I came here straight away.’
Niessa stared at him for a moment as if she hadn’t understood what he’d been saying, then started to swear. She swore well and fluently, like a man. When she’d finished, she swilled down what was left in her cider-mug and crammed a small cake in her mouth.
‘Well?’ Gorgas asked.
‘You tell me,’ Niessa replied with her mouth full. ‘You were the one who wanted to kill them.’
Gorgas scowled impatiently. ‘That’s right, I did,’ he said. ‘And then you explained why it’d be a really stupid thing to do. Come on, pull yourself together. I really need to get some sleep soon,’ he went on, reinforcing the point with a huge yawn.
Niessa rubbed her face briskly with the cupped palms of her hands. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘let’s try and think this through logically. First, what do you think the chances are of keeping it quiet? After all, there’s no rule says we’ve got to tell them the hostages are dead; we can say they surrendered and we’ve put them somewhere safe in case of further rescue attempts. We could even say we’ve shipped them off Scona, quietly and without any fuss. It’d get us off the hook in the short term.’
Gorgas shook his head. ‘First, we’d have to come clean sooner or later,’ he said. ‘Second, I don’t reckon it’d be possible. The gods only know how many agents the Foundation’s got among our people; I can name you thirty without even looking at my notes, and you can bet your life there’s three we don’t know about for every one we do. I say forget that option.’
‘All right,’ Niessa replied. ‘Let’s have another look at your original idea. As I see it, there’s two ways we can play it. First, we could make a big thing of it – so perish all invaders – and hope the factions’ll do the rest. But I don’t think that’s how these things work. The factions that were against the original expedition will be the ones calling for all-out retaliation, and the ones who were for it won’t dare oppose that. My guess is, the factions’ll end up holding an auction, and the side who proposes the biggest and most powerful expeditionary force will win.’
Gorgas nodded. ‘That makes sense,’ he said. ‘So what’s the other option?’
‘Well,’ Niessa said, pulling at the tip of her nose, ‘there’s your idea. The pro-raid factions really don’t have anywhere to go. If they call for reprisals they’re agreeing with the enemy. If they oppose them, they’ve lost their nerve and are weak and spineless. The question is whether they’d still be strong enough to ride it out, or whether we really could panic them into making a deal with us. What do you think?’
Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘My instinct, bearing in mind what you said yesterday – gods, was it only yesterday? – is no, forget it. True enough, there’s a few in the factions crazy enough to open the gates just to keep the enemy from winning, but not enough. I think we have to look longer term. They’re going to have to go along with the retaliations, yes? So in that case, their only real hope is for the new expedition to do even worse than the original one; and that’s where I see scope for talking to them.’
Niessa nodded. ‘It’s still a very big step for them to take,’ she said. ‘I grant you, it’s covert treason rather than open treason, but they’re still dead if they get caught and it doesn’t work.’
‘Fair point,’ Gorgas conceded. ‘But consider this. For the opening-the-gates thing, we’d need pretty well the whole of two factions to come in with us. For the revised version, we only need a handful of individuals – the real faction cr
azies, if you like – to pass us useful information and help out with sabotage on the supply and strategic fronts. I can almost guarantee you ten or so of those.’
Niessa shook her head. ‘We’re still both assuming there’s got to be an invasion, and the best we can hope for is faction support to help us defeat it. I don’t like those odds. I believe that even with inside information and our supporters doing their best to sabotage the raid, we’re still just too damn small and weak to stand up to a full mobilisation of Shastel. In the end, numbers would win. And even suppose we did manage to defeat them heavily enough, short of wiping them out to the last man, isn’t that just inviting an even bigger and better army the next time round?’
Gorgas yawned again. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘what about trying the same thing from the other direction? Posit this. The hectemores suddenly realise that the Foundation’s not invincible after all. The legendary Shastel halberdiers humiliated by the archers of Scona-’
Niessa laughed harshly. ‘Romance,’ she said dismissively. ‘They’re peasants, they aren’t suddenly going to rise up and rebel. Or at least they might, but it’d be a fluke, a special combination of events that snowballs and gets everybody caught up in the excitement, until they’re all a bit crazy and ready to do anything. These things happen, but you can’t rely on it happening, and you can’t make it happen. No, I was thinking of trying to make a deal.’
Gorgas raised his eyebrows. ‘I can’t see it myself,’ he replied. ‘We aren’t talking about rational people, remember, basically we’re dealing with faction members, hooligans. Even talking to us visibly would be suicide.’
‘Maybe,’ Niessa said. ‘Unless we can put together a deal they can’t resist. Try this. First, we say the deaths of the hostages was a tragic accident, the result of a forest fire. We sincerely and deeply regret the loss of life. Now obviously,’ she went on, as Gorgas tried to interrupt, ‘they won’t go for that unless we make it worth their while. What we’ve got to do is think of what it’d take in the way of incentives to make them stop and think. And that’s where we’ve got to be completely realistic. Let’s face it: we’re looking at complete annihilation here, unless we can come up with some way of avoiding a war.’
‘I agree,’ Gorgas said. ‘So where do we pitch the offer.’
Niessa picked up a pen and fiddled with it. It was, Gorgas noticed, a typical Niessa object – a plain trimmed white goose quill fitted with a small gold nib. ‘We can’t start off too low,’ she said, ‘but we don’t want to give them more than we have to, naturally.’
‘Just plain money won’t do it,’ Gorgas said. ‘Their capital reserves are so vast, money doesn’t matter to them. It’s got to be land, and probably something else on top.’
‘Fine. I say we offer them all the mortgages we hold on the mainland. Every last one. After all, that’s what they’ve really wanted all along, so why not give it to them? If they can have that without a fight, what the hell else could they possibly want from us?’
‘Fine,’ Gorgas replied calmly. ‘And what do we do for a living after that?’
‘Oh, we’ll think of something. And I’ll tell you this for nothing, we won’t be doing anything for a living if we’re dead.’
Gorgas nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘What you’re saying makes sense. And as far as I’m concerned, the hectemore business wasn’t getting us anywhere in the long run anyway. You know that for a long time now, I’ve been saying we should be looking at trade and manufacturing rather than just running the old racket. Mind you, I’m not saying we’re ready, but-’
Niessa grinned. ‘It’s your big Scona-the-new-Perimadeia thing, isn’t it?’ she said. And I’m not trying to put that down, believe me; it’s something we’ve been working towards and putting a lot of effort into. So, just as well, really.’
‘That’s right,’ Gorgas said. ‘And of course, we’ll still have the ships.’
Niessa shook her head. ‘Not so fast,’ she said. ‘I said land and something on top, remember. Look at it from their side: they can take the land for themselves if they take us out, and have all the fun of wiping out the shame of the defeat – and I reckon it’ll take something quite special to make them pass up on that. Bear in mind, their whole culture’s based on the notion that it’s good to fight. We’re asking them to pass up the chance of a good war, with a guaranteed victory at the end of it. If we’re asking them to do that, we’ve go to make it worth their while.’
‘So?’ Gorgas shrugged. ‘What’s your idea?’
‘We give them the fleet,’ Niessa replied. ‘It’s the one thing they badly need which we’ve got and they haven’t, which they can’t just take by force of arms. We give them the ships, and we supply men to train their people and sail the ships in the meanwhile. Look at it from their point of view, and it makes sense. Of course, we’d have to make them force it out of us as a last desperate concession; but I think that’s the way we should be looking to go.
Gorgas scowled at her. ‘It’s also goodbye to any hope of making a living on this rock,’ he said angrily. ‘All right, perhaps some ships, some men. But why the hell should they want them all?’
‘You’re missing the point,’ Niessa replied. ‘It wasn’t Perimadeian ships that built up City trade; it was quality goods at the best prices. The way I see us going is along the lines of those workshops of yours, where you make all the stuff for the army. Get all the people you’ve got making arrow-nocks and put them on making buttons. The same with your armourers; if they can make helmets and swords they can make brass pots and shovels and any damn thing, cheap and quick. Just think; if every button in the world is made on Scona, we’ll bless the day we got out of the mortgage business. And we won’t need an army and we won’t have to fight any wars. We’ll have Shastel to do that for us.’
Gorgas looked at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘You lost me.’
‘Think,’ his sister replied. ‘Shastel has a fleet of ships. Shastel has nothing to sell. So they carry our goods on their ships. Suddenly they need us, they start to rely on us for a lot of easy money.’ She smiled broadly. ‘We might just end up running Shastel, and without loosing a single arrow.’
Gorgas thought for a moment. ‘It’s a hell of a big step,’ he said.
‘So was coming here in the first place,’ Niessa said equably. ‘Compared with what we’ve already done, it’s nothing; it’s what you’ve been saying we should be looking towards doing anyway. And we don’t fight a war and we don’t get killed. That’s the main thing. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like a war for destroying money. Even if we had a signed contract with Death saying we’d win hands down I’d do anything rather than get us into a proper war. A little war for you to enjoy as a hobby is something I can put up with, but if you expect me to indulge you in a great big war, you’re sadly mistaken.’
Gorgas sat still and quiet for a long time, thinking. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘And suppose they just won’t play? No deal, under any circumstances-’
‘Which is a very real possibility,’ Niessa interrupted, ‘given the sort of people we’re dealing with.’
‘Well, quite. So what do we do then?’
Niessa pulled a wry face. ‘Simple,’ she said. ‘We load as much of the capital as we can on a couple of decent ships, go to the Island and let them get on with it, let them have their stupid invasion. After all,’ she added with a sad smile, ‘we’ve both cut our losses and run away from home in our time, we can handle it. And we’ll be a damn sight better off than we were the last time.’
Gorgas stood up. ‘I’m going home to bed,’ he said. ‘You think it over and let me know what you’ve decided in the morning. One thing, though.’
‘What?’
‘Bardas. How does he fit into all of this?’
Niessa shrugged. ‘We take him with us, of course. Which reminds me, that job I gave you. I don’t suppose you’ve even started it.’
‘Niessa.’ Gorgas frowned. ‘I’ve been busy.’
‘
I’d noticed,’ Niessa replied. ‘Well, damn well make sure you get on with it, or I’ll have to do it myself. And remember,’ she added, ‘I won’t mess about trying to be like you.’
Gannadius?
No answer. Nothing. It was almost like being a small boy again, and standing in front of a door being towered over by someone’s mother; No, Gannadius can’t come out to play today, he’s helping his father with the chickens. He sighed and opened his eyes. In theory, the headache should signify contact with the Principle. In reality, Alexius felt that it probably had more to do with sitting with his eyes screwed shut and his head at a funny angle. Natural? Call yourself a natural? And the rest.
It had been a long day, what with his first magic lesson with the Director and his complete and utter failure to get his newly acquired techniques to work. According to the Director, sitting cross-legged on the floor with your eyes shut and your head lolling on your shoulder like a dead man swinging from a gibbet was supposed to focus the mind, turn it into a sort of burning-glass to concentrate the stray wisps of Principle that (apparently) waft around the place like dandelion seeds. So far, however, he hadn’t seen one shred of ev-
– He was sitting on a barrel on the deck of a ship, in the middle of a calm, flat sea. Judging by the light and the position of the sun, it was very early in the morning; there were red streaks in the sky, and a pleasant fresh smell, but he felt extremely tired, as if he’d sat up all night to see the dawn. He appeared to be alone on the deck of this ship, which suggested that the crew were all still asleep.