by K. J. Parker
Everybody seemed to be cheering, as though all their problems were over. Obviously premature; there were any number of things that could still go wrong. Even so, and in spite of the fact that he’d contributed next to nothing to the project, Poldarn couldn’t help feeling relieved, even strangely proud. Crazy, he thought; or maybe he just liked seeing things burn.
The actual pour lasted less than a minute. Once the mould was filled and the leverman had cut off the stream of liquid metal, there was nothing to do except wait for the casting to cool down. It’d be hours before the mould could be chipped off the casting, and until then there was nothing anybody could usefully do. He sighed, and threaded his way back through the crowd, who seemed to be in no hurry to disperse.
So that’s that, Poldarn thought; big deal.
That was the moment when he made up his mind to get out. If there was any connection with what he’d just seen, he couldn’t pin it down: it wasn’t as though he’d cared enough about the project that he’d been waiting to see if it’d come out all right; he hadn’t been hanging on just in case they needed him for something. But it was as if someone else, for once, had taken the irrevocable step, so that now he had the unaccustomed luxury of proceeding safe in the knowledge that this time it wouldn’t be his fault— And where that came from, he had no idea.
Getting out of Dui Chirra wasn’t going to be easy. A very quick, low-key reconnaissance was enough to tell him that: a ten-foot-high stockade, sentries on the gate, further sentries patrolling the perimeter, still others pulling lookout duty from the surrounding high points. Stowing away in an outbound cart wasn’t a viable option; the sentries seemed to be working out their frustration at being cooped up in the lousiest posting in the Empire by spearing every handful of straw or bundle of rags that trundled through the gateway. The only vulnerable spot in the defences that Poldarn could see was the river, which came in and flowed out under two watergates at either end of the compound. But the idea of taking that route didn’t appeal to him; if he could spot it, it was too obvious. There was, he vaguely remembered, a precept of religion on the subject.
It took him a day of nonchalant strolling, admiring the depth and ingenuity of Brigadier Muno’s security arrangements, to remember that he had a stone-cold foolproof no-risk way-out buried in the pocket of his other coat – some kind of small badge or brooch, with a pin and a keeper on the back. Poldarn recalled what Muno Silsny had said about it: combination safe passage and get-out-of-trouble token; show it to a watch sergeant or a guard commander and unless he’s got specific orders to the contrary from the Emperor or myself, he’ll say sorry for troubling you and forget he ever saw you. Perfect, just what he needed – assuming that it was still valid, now that Muno Silsny was dead. He found it, stood it up on its pin on the palm of his hand and stared at it for a while. It looked like the sort of thing you could buy in Sansory market for a quarter, if you and your money were easily parted. Even so; only one way to find out.
It didn’t take him long to pack: his one change of clothes, hat, blanket, the sword he’d nearly finished making, the book Gain had given him, the little axe he’d brought from Haldersness, an issue water-bottle and as many ration biscuits as he could cram into a medium-sized feed sack. In the other pocket of his good coat was Muno Silsny’s other gift, the chunky gold ring that was supposed to be worth a nice, snug little farm. Having thought about it for a while, he decided that the best time of day for his departure would be somewhere around an hour before dawn, when the sentry on the gate would be thinking about being relieved and not getting involved in anything that might keep him from his bed a minute longer than necessary. The approach, he decided, should be as simple as possible—
‘Here,’ said the sentry. ‘Where d’you think you’re going?’
‘Out,’ Poldarn replied, raising his hand and opening his fingers.
‘What’s that supposed to be, then?’
Look of pained surprise. ‘You mean you don’t know? All right, then, we’d better go and have a word with your sergeant.’
Bad-tempered sigh from the sentry, who waved to his colleague outside the gate to come and take his place for a moment; then inside the guardhouse to wake up the sergeant, who was asleep under three blankets and a heavy non-regulation coat.
‘This one reckons he’s got leave to go out,’ the sentry said, ‘only he hasn’t got a pass or anything.’
The sergeant grunted and swung his bare legs to the floor. ‘All right,’ he said wearily, ‘what’s the story this time? It’d better be good, because—’
Poldarn held out his hand, opened his fingers once again. The sergeant stared, as if he’d just met his mother in a brothel.
‘Fuck me,’ he said softly. ‘Haven’t seen one of them since I was in Torcea.’ He frowned. ‘How do I know it’s genuine?’ he asked.
Poldarn clicked his tongue and dropped the brooch into the sergeant’s hand. ‘Mind you don’t stab yourself on the pin,’ he said. ‘It’s sharp.’
The sergeant turned it over a couple of times, then stood up quickly. ‘Very sorry to have bothered you, sir,’ he said. ‘Just doing my job.’
‘Fine,’ Poldarn grunted, holding out his hand for the brooch. ‘No need to tell anybody about this, is there?’
‘Understood,’ the sergeant snapped. ‘Anybody asks, I never seen you in my life.’
And that was that: the gates swung to behind Poldarn, the outside sentry stood aside to let him pass, just as the first red gleam of dawn diluted the sky. Where next? he asked himself, as if it mattered. Falcata, presumably, not that he knew anything about the place. But from what he’d heard it sounded as though it was on the way to somewhere, and that was all he needed it to be.
Chapter Ten
‘You know her, then?’ the driver was asking.
Pulling himself back out of his complicated train of thought, Poldarn shook his head; fat raindrops scattered from the sodden brim of his hat. ‘Met her a couple of times on the road, that’s all. Crazy old bat, but fairly harmless.’
The driver shrugged. ‘She didn’t seem to know you.’
‘Hadn’t seen her since I got myself all burned up,’ he replied. ‘Don’t suppose many people would recognise me after that.’
‘That’d be it, then.’ The driver was silent for a while, thinking; a slow process but not without a certain grandeur, like the turning of a giant waterwheel. ‘So why’d you help her out, then, if she’s just some old nutcase you met on the road?’
Good question. Poldarn’s turn to think for a moment. ‘I have this odd feeling she’s good luck,’ he replied. ‘Like a mascot or something. If I help her out, at some point I’ll get a slice of good luck myself when I need it, later on down the line.’
‘Fair enough,’ said the driver, in the manner of one humouring an armed lunatic. ‘Has it worked like that, then?’
It hadn’t actually occurred to him to consider the point, so he considered it. First time he’d met the daffy old woman with the little wicker cage, he’d also met Gain Aciava. Second time, he’d taken part in that ghastly botched robbery shortly afterwards, when he’d had to kill the vicious teenager. ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact. Only goes to show, intuition’s an arsehole.’
That went over the driver’s head like a skein of migrating geese, but he didn’t seem to mind. The driver was one of those people who seem to treat the intelligent and articulate as speakers of a foreign language; if he understood one word in twenty, he was happy. ‘Doesn’t seem much point to it, then,’ the driver went on. ‘I mean, if you get bad luck for helping her out instead of good, why help her out? Anyhow, that’s how I see it.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Poldarn sighed. ‘But she was headed for Torcea, so I don’t suppose I’ll ever see her again.’
‘Just as well, really.’
‘Just as well,’ he agreed.
It had happened on his last night in Falcata. He’d been there a whole week, instead of one night and one morning a
s he’d planned, but some river or other had flooded and washed away the causeway on which the main east road crossed some bog, or at least that was what he’d been told next morning at the stage office; the taproom of the Benevolence Rewarded had been thick with rumours about rebel armies, bandits, the Amathy house on the prowl again, the Mad Monk and all sorts. So he’d wandered up and down the damp grey city’s uninspiring main thorough-fare, wondering why half the shops were shut and the other half were empty; he’d spent money he couldn’t afford on needled beer he didn’t want; he’d stood looking over the parapet of the covered bridge, watching the fat brown river licking the doorsteps and windowsills of the bankside houses; he’d tried to sell Muno Silsny’s ring, but the goldsmiths were either closed and shuttered or weren’t buying in off the street. Finally, in desperation, he’d taken shelter from the rain in a grim, dusty building that had turned out to be the law courts and, having nothing better to do, had sat down in the back row of the public gallery while the three resident magistrates worked their way through the morning’s crop of drunks, debtors, vagrants, lunatics and inept thieves. Sleep was pressing down on him hard and he’d folded his arms and closed his eyes when he’d heard a voice he recognised – her, the mad woman, sounding dreadfully flustered and upset at being described as a vagrant; more concerned about her unidentified pets in their wicker basket than about her own fate as an indicted criminal. (The watch sergeant had taken the cage from her; she’d tried to grab it back and most unfortunately her elbow had gone in the poor man’s eye; of course it was an accident and she was most dreadfully sorry, nothing like this had ever happened to her before, and did their worships think she could possibly have the cage back, because her babies would be so dreadfully hungry after missing two feeds—) And, at some point in this wretched performance, he’d realised he was standing on his hind legs exchanging words with the clerk of the court—
‘No, sir,’ he’d said, ‘I’m not a relative, but I do know her.’
The clerk looked mildly disappointed. ‘And can you vouch for the truth of her account?’
Poldarn hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what she just said is pretty much what she told me the first time I met her, on the carrier’s cart out near Tin Chirra.’ (He changed the locale at the last moment; saying he’d been near Dui Chirra probably wasn’t a good idea.) ‘And I can’t see why she’d have wanted to lie to me back then; I mean, she wasn’t asking for money or anything.’
The magistrates were muttering to each other, and you didn’t have to be a lip-reader to make out the gist of it: if he wants to take responsibility for her, let him. After that, it was all nice and straightforward. He’d paid her fine (ten quarters for sleeping in a doorway; another ten for assaulting an officer of the watch) and hustled her out of the courthouse into the rain before she did or said anything that’d get them both arrested.
‘Thank you so much,’ she kept on saying over and over again. ‘You’ve been so kind and I don’t know how I can possibly ever repay you, but do you think you could possibly just nip back inside and see if you can find that watch sergeant and ask if he could let me have my poor darlings back? They’ll be so dreadfully frightened, not to mention hungry—’
Fuck, Poldarn thought. But she had enough strength of will to tame wild horses, and eventually he’d begged her to stay there, not move an inch, while he went back in and found the sergeant; recognising him wasn’t hard, he was the one with the spectacular black eye. The sergeant had been only too glad to give him the cage, which smelled disgustingly of rodent pee and was distinctly moist on the underside.
‘Now listen,’ he’d said to her over her grateful chirpings. ‘I haven’t got any money to give you this time—’
(‘That’s quite all right . . . Far too generous already . . .’)
‘But,’ he’d continued, raising his voice a little to make himself heard over her unwanted gratitude, ‘I’m going to give you this badge. No, listen please, this is very important. This is an army courier’s badge, they’re very rare and valuable, and if you ever get in trouble again or run out of money or anything like that, you’re to show this badge to a sergeant or an officer – don’t for pity’s sake try explaining anything, or he’ll think you’ve stolen it or picked it up in the street. Just show it to him, like this, and tell him what you want, and it’ll do the trick. Now, do you understand me, or do you want me to explain it again?’
Remarkably, she’d understood straight away; more useless thanks and not-worth-the-breath-they-were-uttered-with promises of recompense at some indefinite future date, and then he’d marched her over to the stage office and put down seven quarters of good Torcea money to buy her a seat on the carrier’s cart to Fort Cheir and the Torcea ferry. Which was why Poldarn was currently sitting outside on the box of the Tela Ixwa stage in the driving rain, when he could’ve been sitting inside, in the dry.
Almost as hard to account for as the act itself was the urge to tell the driver all about it. All the driver had done to unstopper this flood of reminiscence was to say it was a pity Poldarn couldn’t have paid the extra quarter and a half, since it was pissing it down and there was a perfectly good empty seat inside the stage; but for some reason, Poldarn had been moved to justify himself by telling this story. Maybe he was proud of what he’d done (though he’d left out the really generous bit, the gift of the courier’s badge, to save having to invent some tale about how he’d come by it in the first place); or perhaps it was something about barbers and carters that made you tell them stuff you wouldn’t normally tell your best friend; or maybe he was just getting chatty in his old age—
‘Pretty decent thing to have done, though,’ the driver said with less than absolute sincerity, ‘looking after a poor old mad woman like that. Just hope you don’t catch your death being out here, is all.’
—Or perhaps he’d done it in hopes that the driver would exercise his discretion and let him have the empty seat in the dry as far as the next stop; in which case he’d wasted his time.
‘Oh well,’ he heard himself say, bravely cheerful, ‘she’s probably somebody’s mother, bless her daft old heart.’
The driver shook his head. ‘Doubt it,’ he said. ‘Like, if she was my old mum I wouldn’t let her go wandering about like that, getting herself arrested and all.’
The subject was getting boring very fast. ‘Maybe her son died and that’s what drove her off her head,’ Poldarn said with a yawn. ‘Anyway, with any luck that’s the last time she’ll cross my path. How long before we reach the – what did you say its name was?’
‘The Piety & Fortitude,’ the driver grunted. ‘Maybe three hours, could be four if the ford’s up and we got to go round by the bridge. Assuming the bridge isn’t down.’
‘Fine,’ Poldarn said. ‘Tell me, why do all these inns have such god-awful self-righteous names?’
The driver frowned. ‘How do you mean?’ he said.
They arrived at the Piety an hour after dark, by which point Poldarn was so wet it hadn’t mattered for hours. Since he had very little money (apart from the magnificent gold-and-gemstone ring purportedly worth twenty times more than the inn and its contents) he had his dinner out of the kitchen stewpot and dossed down in the hayloft directly over a very noisy, flatulent horse. Sleep proving elusive in this context, he lay in the dark staring upwards, wondering if the mad woman was sleeping cosily in the guest quarters of the Fort Cheir prefecture; wondering also why he’d done such a bloody stupid thing.
He must have dropped off at some point, because the next thing he was aware of was a boot nudging him in the ribs. He opened his eyes and saw the head of a spear, mostly out of focus because it was so close to his face. Someone was telling him to get up.
The soldiers took him into the taproom; it was empty, and the fire was dying out. The man sitting behind the table told one of the soldiers to throw a scoop of charcoal on it before taking notice that Poldarn was in the room.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘You been swimming?’
>
Poldarn decided that the question didn’t need an answer. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.
‘Shut up and sit down,’ the man replied, by way of an explanation; then he caught sight of Poldarn’s face and shuddered, as though someone had just poured cold water down his neck. ‘Turn out your pockets on that table there. Sergeant, have you got his baggage there?’
‘Just the blanket roll, sir,’ the sergeant said. He put something down with a thump, just out of Poldarn’s line of sight. Poldarn did as he was told and emptied his pockets.
The man appeared to have recovered from his nasty turn. ‘Right,’ he said, with a predatory smile, ‘let’s see what we’ve got here. Bring that thing over here, sergeant, I want a good look at it.’
Not good; that thing was the nearly finished backsabre, possession of which was going to be very hard to explain away. The man studied it carefully, turning it over in his hands as if reading invisible writing, then laid it down next to him, well out of Poldarn’s reach. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Now let’s see that book.’
Concerning Various Matters didn’t interest the man nearly as much as the sword had done; he opened it at random a few times, shrugged and put it down. He also examined the blanket, the water bottle and the rest of Poldarn’s meagre kit before signalling to the sergeant to bring him the contents of Poldarn’s pockets: a small knife, an insignificant sum of money, and a gold ring.
From the expression on the man’s face, he’d been expecting to see the ring from the outset. ‘That’s all, is it?’ he said. ‘No, I’m talking to you, not Sergeant Illuta. Is this all of it, or have you got any more, squirrelled away somewhere?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Poldarn said. ‘I don’t quite follow.’
The man smirked and shook his head. ‘Makes no odds to me,’ he said. ‘It’s not the trinkets I’m after.’ He sighed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘here we go. My name is Lock Xanipolo, colonel, officer commanding Falcata garrison. Day before yesterday I get a report that some scruff with a burnt-off face’s been trawling round all the goldsmiths’ houses trying to sell an extremely valuable candidature ring with a Faculty of Arms crest. Stage office tells me a man answering the description caught the common stage for Tela Ixwa; so here I am. Now, do you need me to tell you how a tramp like yourself comes to have a ring that used to belong to General Muno Silsny, who was murdered by bandits on this very same road four months ago, or can we cut all that and get on to some of the stuff I don’t already know?’