by K. J. Parker
But if Xipho had lied to him – and if Ciartan had been here; and now Monach was here and they weren’t, they’d skipped out on him and left him in possession of a deadly secret but useless unfinished weapon, and the most strategically important facility in the Empire—
Which should have been the most heavily guarded facility in the Empire, if it was really so confoundedly important. But, instead, it had been left in the care of Brigadier Muno and a couple of hundred infantry, a force so slight and negligible that the Earwig had been able to put them to flight practically by accident. As if someone had set up the Poldarn’s Flute project and then left it lying about, where the first passing bandit chief or Mad Monk who happened to be in the area couldn’t help acquiring it. As if they’d wanted him to have it.
(But in that case, wouldn’t the weapon itself, the Flute, have been finished, ready and waiting for him to collect? Or maybe that was the bit of the plan that’d gone wrong, thanks to Spenno and Galand Dev scratching each other’s eyes out over the right way to build a drop-bottom cupola furnace?)
The more I think about it, the harder it gets; except, why would Xipho lie to me?
Not that Monach gave a flying fuck about them, but he hunted down Spenno in his lair and asked after the six newly cast tubes.
‘No idea,’ Spenno replied, looking up and marking his place in his book with a small piece of rag. ‘They won’t be cool enough to break out of the moulds until this time tomorrow, and until then there’s no way of knowing. Could be absolutely fine, could be cracked to buggery and riddled with air pockets. You need patience if you work in a foundry.’
‘Fine,’ Monach grunted. ‘So what about the other one? How’s the drilling coming along?’
‘Ah,’ Spenno said. ‘Now there things are looking a bit more hopeful. They’re over two-thirds of the way down, and so far it all seems to be working out. Course, we won’t actually know till we load the thing up with Morevich powder and set fire to it. Then, if it blows up and kills us all, we can probably interpret that as meaning we’ve still got a few bugs to iron out.’
Monach nodded slowly. ‘It’s behind schedule, isn’t it?’ he asked.
Spenno laughed. ‘You could say that. According to old Muno, we should’ve had a dozen Flutes all polished up and ready to ship by now. Which might’ve been possible, if I hadn’t had to fight that arsehole Galand Dev every bloody step of the way.’ He frowned. ‘Not that that’s any of your concern, is it?’ he asked. ‘I mean, why would you be worried about what the Torcea government wants?’
Not knowing the answer himself, Monach ignored the question. ‘I just found out that the order to arrest that sword-monk came from Chaplain Cleapho. Did you know that?’
Spenno shrugged. ‘News to me,’ he said. ‘Talking of which, surely he’s one of us. What does he think of your holy war?’
‘I don’t suppose he even knows we exist,’ Monach replied, uncomfortably aware that he was probably lying. ‘So what’d it take to pack up the unfinished Flutes and that lathe contraption of yours, and set them up somewhere else?’
Spenno smiled, revealing missing teeth. ‘A miracle,’ he said. ‘Which is your department, not mine. Like I told you, Father Tutor always reckoned I sucked at religion.’
‘What if I made that a direct order?’ Monach ventured.
‘Then I guess I’d be in even more trouble than I am already,’ Spenno answered, yawning. ‘But it’s like they say: when you’re drowning, getting spat on isn’t such a big deal.’
Which was about as much Spenno as Monach could take for one day, particularly on an empty stomach. Which reminded him: he had over a thousand people on his hands still, and enough food to feed them for maybe three days. Small administrative details like that.
(Cleapho, he thought, for crying out loud. And Cordo, unaccountably returned from the dead. And Ciartan had been here; but Cleapho had sent orders to arrest the Dui Chirra blacksmith, and they’d taken the other man instead. And where had Xipho got to, when she was most desperately needed?)
Eventually they found Monach in the grain shed, counting the sacks of flour for the fifth time and still not managing to come up with a more reassuring total. There was good news, Mezentius told him, and bad news: which did he want first?
Well, the good news was that the monthly supply train was coming up the west road. It’d been held up, apparently, by the stinking horrible weather – bridges washed away, fords impassable, roads that swallowed carts whole, the usual stuff – but it was definitely on its way and should arrive the day after next.
The bad news, on the other hand, was that there was an Imperial army coming up the east road, which ought to get here at roughly the same time as the supply train. It could quite easily be a dead heat; in which case, Brigadier Muno and his seven thousand men would be able to celebrate their recapture of Dui Chirra with a hearty breakfast.
Chapter Twelve
‘Don’t ask me,’ the sergeant was saying, not for the first time, ‘I don’t know what to do, I’m not a bloody officer. Far as I’m concerned, I got my orders and I’m going to carry them out. Nothing to do with me, Falcata.’
‘But that’s so stupid,’ someone else broke in. ‘You can’t just carry on as though nothing’s happened. I mean, what if HQ doesn’t know about it yet? What if nobody knows? What if the bastards attack somewhere else, and everybody’s killed, just because you failed to raise the alarm?’
‘Look.’ The sergeant was getting angry. ‘I don’t remember anything in Standing Orders about having a vote every time a decision needs making. For all we know,’ he went on, lowering his voice a little, ‘getting this prisoner to Dui Chirra’s more important to the Empire than saving half a dozen bloody cities. Besides,’ he added, with the harsh enthusiasm of someone who’d just picked up on a previously overlooked good point, ‘there aren’t any more cities left round here they could burn, it’s all poxy little villages and coach stops and charcoal burners.’
It wasn’t a good enough argument to stay up for, so Poldarn lay down beside the fire and tried to go to sleep. They’d made hardly any progress all that day, what with the sergeant and his council of advisers bickering and the road in an even worse mess than usual; not that he was bothered, since the last place he wanted to go was Dui Chirra. If his people had really come here and destroyed Falcata, and if they knew there was a bronze foundry in the neighborhood, with enough raw material to supply the forges of a hundred farms for a century, he knew exactly where they’d be headed next. He was almost tempted to slip away – he didn’t really want to meet a raiding party from home, which might include friends and relations of Eyvind or some other of his victims; or, worse still, relatives of his own, who’d probably want to take him back to Haldersness – but he didn’t have the energy to play hide-and-seek in the dark and the mud with a platoon of already bad-tempered soldiers. The plain fact was, he didn’t really care where he went, mostly because no matter where he ended up, he’d have no chance, outside of being killed, of getting away from himself, and the seething mess of memories, half-memories and suspicions he’d been collecting in his mind ever since the man calling himself Gain Aciava had turned up on the cart to Dui Chirra. Compared with sharing his own company, nothing that could happen to him on the Tulice levels was worth getting worked up about.
Eventually he did fall asleep, soothed by a lullaby of querulous voices, and by some miracle or merciful dispensation he didn’t have a dream or it didn’t stay with him when he woke up, cramped and drenched in dew, at first light the next morning.
Either the soldiers had sat up arguing all night or they’d resumed bright and early: the debate was still going on, though he didn’t seem to have missed anything in the way of exciting new arguments. The sergeant, though, was now the only proponent of carrying on to Dui Chirra. The opposition was more or less equally divided between turning round and going back to camp, or heading into the forest and finding the nearest colliers’ camp, in the hope of scrounging some food.
That put a different complexion on all the relevant arguments. True, he’d still be whoever he was, as much so at a colliers’ camp as on the road or back at Dui Chirra. The difference was that, during the days and weeks it took for a big pile of cordwood to cook itself into charcoal, the colliers’ idea of work was to sit on the edge of the stack and drink their revolting home-brewed beer. Getting rid of himself by drowning his conscious mind in booze was an approach that Poldarn couldn’t remember having tried; between intoxication and dysentery, he doubted whether he’d have much opportunity to brood. Ideal.
That was that, then. Unfortunately, it was now too late for him to sneak away in the dark without being noticed; another opportunity neglected. On the other hand, nobody showed the slightest interest in getting up and moving on. It looked as if they’d be perfectly capable of staying here arguing all day, until it was dark enough for him to sling his hook without being seen or missed. But that wasn’t so good; waking up to find they’d lost their prisoner might just be enough to snap them out of their differences and bring them along after him. He could always join in the debate and add his support to the pro-food faction; much easier to fake his own disappearance once they were at the colliers’ camp, whereupon the soldiers would light out into the forest looking for him, and he could stay behind and ask if there was any work going. He decided against that, however; in the mood the sergeant was in, he’d be certain to veto any suggestion coming from his human cargo. Poldarn gave the matter some more thought, and came to the conclusion that the deciding factor in the debate was bound to be the realisation that they had enough food left for one meal, just possibly two.
So he waited until just after noon, when the soldiers had opened the ration sacks and been reminded of how very little they contained; then he wandered over to the fire, waited for the next tense, gloomy silence, and said in as conversational a tone as he could manage that as far as he could recall, there was a large and well-supplied colliers’ camp just across the way from where they were, and maybe they could spare a bit of flour and a drop of beer. When the sergeant started to object, Poldarn added that when he’d been here the last time, the colliers had put him on a good worthwhile short cut back to Dui Chirra, which had shaved at least a day off his return journey—
That put paid to any further resistance from the sergeant, and Poldarn found himself promoted from high-security prisoner to navigator-in-chief. That was fine, the only drawback being that he didn’t have more than a vague idea of the way to Basano’s place, not without the annoying old man to guide him, and his sense of direction seemed to be allergic to trees in quantity. Annoyingly, the first major landmark he recognised was the filthy, muddy swamp that the old man had called Battle Slough; and he only realised he knew where he was once they’d blundered into it up over their knees.
For some reason, the soldiers didn’t seem too pleased about that. Probably because of the rains, the swamp was even stickier and more treacherous than it had been the last time Poldarn had been out that way; and he couldn’t help recalling the incident from which, according to his guide on that occasion (Corvolo: he dragged the name out of the back of his mind, with roughly the same level of effort as it was costing him to take one step forward), the place had derived its name. Fairly soon, if Corvolo hadn’t been embellishing for dramatic effect, they could expect to come across the mildewed skeletons of the soldiers who’d got themselves hopelessly stuck here, and stayed put until they starved to death—
At least it took his mind off brooding over whether Gain Aciava had been telling the truth. Instead, Poldarn forced himself to concentrate on what he could remember of his first visit, with particular reference to such points as which direction the shadows had been pointing, the time of day, whether the slope had been with or against them. In the end he wasn’t sure whether he found the way out of Battle Slough or whether it found him; in any event, by nightfall they were on the faint pattern of bent bracken stems and trampled leaf mould that was the best the forest could furnish them with by way of a road, and on their way to Basano’s camp – assuming, of course, that it was still there.
As their circles collided, he drew and so did she.
There was a moment during which time was the circular room in which the examination was taking place. In the middle of the room he stood facing her: at his back was the past – Elaos, Cordo, Gain, the Earwig, the rest of his year, Father Tutor and the two external examiners, draped in heavy black robes like a crow’s plumage; behind her was the future, but she was standing in the way and he couldn’t see it clearly. But he saw her hand slip down onto the sword hilt, saw the blade sliding smoothly out over her sash, rising to meet him, until its bevelled side collided with its mirror image, his own sword, like the reflection of a face in a still, shallow pool.
There are no moments in religion; no present, only past and future waging war over a disputed frontier. As her hand dropped to her waist, he saw both of them draw, and then the blades smacked together, flat on flat.
A voice inside his head was telling him what to do; and he knew it was his own voice, calling to him from across the border, where he’d already watched the fight and knew what had happened. The voice directed his moves as he cut, parried, lunged, sidestepped – you tried a cut to her right temple but she anticipated and cut to your left knee – so he moved across and back as he slashed at her head, and when her counter-attack came, his knee wasn’t there any more; and then you tried a draw-cut across the inside of her elbow, but at the last moment you pulled it and turned it into a jab to her throat, but she dodged back and feinted at your chin, you fell for that and she swung at your wrist, so he dropped his wrist as he jabbed and her cut missed him by the thickness of a leaf. And then she recovered before you did and tried for a lunge straight at your neck—
He opened his eyes, but it was still dark. Something was pricking his throat.
‘Easy,’ said a voice behind and above him, very softly. ‘Perfectly still or you’ll do yourself a mischief.’
(But that wasn’t right; because he’d woken up, so Xipho should’ve been left behind, in the dream. Or had she stayed behind just a moment too long, and the dream had left without her?)
‘Now then,’ Copis’s voice whispered, ‘nice and slow, I want you to stand up. I will kill you if you try anything.’
(But that was wrong too, because he remembered that term-end duel as if it had only finished a minute ago. She’d lunged at his neck, actually pricked him and drawn a single tiny drop of blood; but he’d expected it, that was the bait in his trap, and a split second later he’d kicked her legs out from under her and ended the fight, the first ever bloodless victory in a sixth-grade year-end duel in Deymeson’s history—)
He did as he was told. The violation of his circle told him she was shifting, sidestepping carefully round him like a cat walking along the top of a door. The pressure behind whatever it was that was pricking his throat remained perfectly constant, very nearly hard enough to pierce the skin but not quite. You had to admire the control.
‘Walk forward,’ the voice went on. ‘Keep going till I say stop. Then turn sixty degrees left.’
Once he’d performed the manoeuvre, the pressure lightened a little, enough so that he wouldn�
��t kill himself if he moved his throat muscles sufficiently to speak. ‘Are you going to kill me?’ he asked. No answer. He carried on walking, one slow step at a time.
Fifteen paces; and then Copis’s voice said, ‘Not yet. Not unless you make me, like by stopping unexpectedly or turning round. Keep going.’
By his reckoning, another two dozen paces would take him outside the circle of firelight, out of the clearing where they’d pitched tents for the night, and back into the forest. If he tripped along the way – too many tree roots and fallen branches for blind dead reckoning – the sharp thing pressing into his neck would be the death of him. All the more reason, then, to go nice and steady.
His eyes were getting used to the dark, which meant he could make out the larger obstacles under his feet (a big brown and grey flint, a fungus-covered tree trunk, a single deep rut in the path). ‘Copis,’ he said, statement rather than question. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes.’
At the edge of the clearing, just as he’d anticipated, the pricking under his chin stopped. But his spy from the future had either gone off duty or looked the other way, because he wasn’t expecting the bash on the back of his head with something thick and heavy—
He woke up and opened his eyes.
He wasn’t quite sure what he’d been expecting to see, being uncertain whether the episode where he’d felt a knife at his throat and thought he’d heard Copis’s voice was just a coda to the dream about some school fencing-match, or whether it had actually happened. In the event, what he saw was a man standing over him, holding a spear.
(Another dream? Eyvind had stood over him with a spear, that time when he turned them all out of Ciartanstead. And there were crows, two of them, sitting in the high branches of a rowan tree on his right—)