Stragen did not even consider listening at the door. That was far too amateurish. He slipped into the room adjoining the lighted one, felt his way carefully to the wall, and set his ear against it.
He couldn’t hear a sound. He swore under his breath, and went back out into the hallway. Then he padded on past the door with the candlelight coming out from under it and entered the room on the other side. He could hear the two men talking as soon as he entered.
‘Our esteemed Prime Minister is slowly beginning to grasp the situation,’ a rusty-sounding voice was saying. ‘It’s a struggle, though. Pondia Subat’s severely limited when something new appears on the horizon.’
‘That’s more or less to be expected, your Excellency.’ Stragen recognized the second voice. It was Teovin, the Director of the Secret Police. ‘The Prime Minister’s almost as much a figurehead as the Emperor.’
‘You’ve noticed,’ the rusty-sounding man replied.
‘Subat’s not likely to ask too many questions. As long as he’s aware of the situation in general terms, he’ll probably prefer to let us handle things without personally learning too many of the details. That gives us a fairly free rein, and that’s what we wanted in the first place. Have you made any progress with the others?’
‘Some. I have to broach the subject rather carefully, you realize. The Elene strumpet’s made many friends here at court. They all listen to me, though. I hold the keys to the Treasury, and that helps to get their attention. Most of the ministries are ceremonial, so I haven’t wasted much time on the men who head them. The Ministry of Culture’s probably not going to be of much use – or the Ministry of Education either, for that matter.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that one, your Excellency. The Ministry of Education controls the universities. We have to think past the current emergency. I don’t think either of us wants whole generations to go through life believing that Interior and Exchequer are hot-beds of treason. Technically, we are acting contrary to the Emperor’s wishes.’
‘That’s true, I suppose, but the Ministry of the Interior controls the police, and Exchequer levies and collects the taxes. We’re neither one of us ever going to be very popular, no matter what we do. But you’re probably right. If the history professors at the universities start telling their students that we’re traitors, people might start claiming that it’s their patriotic duty to ignore the officers of the law or to stop paying their taxes.’
‘That raises an interesting point, Chancellor Gashon,’ Teovin mused. ‘You’ve got a sort of police force, haven’t you? – muscular fellows who accompany your taxcollectors to make sure that people pay what they owe?’
‘Oh, yes. One way or the other, everybody pays his taxes. I get money – or blood – from all of them.’
‘Follow me on this, if you will. The Elenes probably know that Interior – and most likely the army as well – are opposed to them, so they’ll try their very best to disrupt our customary operations. I’d like to conceal some of my more valuable people. Do you suppose I might transfer them into your enforcement branch? That way I’ll still have a functional operation – even if the Elenes start burning down police stations.’
‘I can manage that, Teovin. Is there anything else you’ll need?’
‘Money, Chancellor Gashon.’
There was a pained silence. ‘Would you accept eternal friendship instead?’
‘Afraid not, your Excellency. I have to bribe people.’ Teovin paused. There’s an idea. I could probably use some form of tax-immunity as an inducement in many cases.’
‘I don’t recognize the term.’
‘We give people an exemption from taxation in exchange for their cooperation.’
‘That’s immoral!’ Gashon gasped. That’s the most shocking thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life!’
‘It was only a thought.’
‘Don’t even suggest something like that, Teovin. It makes my blood run cold. Can we get out of here? Police stations make me apprehensive for some reason.’
‘Of course, your Excellency. I think we’ve covered the things we wanted to keep private.’
Stragen sat in the dark office listening as the two men pushed back their chairs and went out into the corridor. He heard Teovin’s key turn in the lock of his office door. The blond thief waited for perhaps ten minutes, and then he went back to the foot of the staircase. They’re gone now,’ he called up the stairs in a loud whisper.
Mirtai and Caalador came on down. ‘Who was it?’ Caalador asked.
‘The head of the secret police and the Chancellor of the Exchequer,’ Stragen replied. ‘It was a very enlightening conversation. Teovin’s enlisting other ministries to help him. They don’t know what he’s really up to, but he’s managed to convince several of them that it’s in their own interest to join him.’
‘We can sort out the politics later,’ Caalador said. ‘It’s almost midnight. Let’s get to burgling.’
‘There’s no need,’ Stragen shrugged. ‘I’ve found what we’re looking for.’
‘Isn’t that disgusting?’ Caalador said to the Atan giantess. ‘He tosses it off as if it weren’t really very important. All right, Stragen, stun us with your brilliance. Make my eyes pop out, and make Mirtai swoon with admiration.’
‘I can’t really take much credit for it,’ Stragen confessed. ‘I stumbled across it, actually. It is a secret room. I was right about that. We still have to find the door, though, and make sure that the documents we want are inside, but the room’s in the right place. I should have thought of it immediately.’
‘Where is it?’ Mirtai asked.
‘Right next to Teovin’s office.’
‘That’s the logical place, right enough,’ Caalador noted. ‘How did you find it?’
‘Well, I haven’t actually found it yet, but I’ve reasoned out its existence.’
‘Don’t throw away your soft shoes or your black clothes just yet, Caalador,’ Mirtai advised.
‘You hurt me, love,’ Stragen protested.
‘I’ve seen Elene reasoning go awry before. Why don’t you tell us about it?’
‘I wanted to do some constructive eavesdropping, so I went into the adjoining office to listen to Teovin and Chancellor of the Exchequer Gashon’s conversation.’
‘And?’
‘I couldn’t hear a thing.’
‘The walls are stone, Stragen,’ she pointed out, ‘and they’ve got sea-shells glued to them.’
‘There’s no such thing as a soundproof wall, Mirtai. There are always cracks and crannies that the mortar doesn’t seep into. Anyway, when I tried the office on the other side, I could hear everything. Believe me, there’s a room between that first office and the one Teovin uses.’
‘It does sort of fit together, dorlin’,’ Caalador said to Mirtai. ‘The door to that room would almost have to be in Teovin’s office, wouldn’t it? Those documents are sensitive, and he wouldn’t want just anybody to have access to them. If we’d just taken a little while to think our way through it, we could have saved ourselves a lot of time.’
‘It wasn’t a total waste,’ Mirtai smiled. ‘I’ve learned the art of burglary, and I’ve had the chance to absolutely wallow in your affection. You two have made me happier than I could possibly say. The office door’s certain to be locked, you know.’
‘Nuthin’ simpler, little dorlin’,’ Caalador smirked, holding up a needle-thin implement with a hook on the end.
‘We’d better get started,’ Stragen said. ‘It’s midnight, and it might take us the rest of the night to find the door to that hidden room.’
‘You’re not serious,’ Ehlana scoffed.
‘May muh tongue turn green iffn I ain’t, yer Queenship.’ Caalador paused. ‘Dreadful, isn’t it?’ he added.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ Sarabian confessed.
‘It’s a cliche, your Majesty,’ Stragen explained, ‘taken from a type of literature that’s currently very popular in Eosia.’
&n
bsp; ‘Do you really want to dignify that trash by calling it literature, Stragen?’ Baroness Melidere murmured.
‘It satisfies the needs of the mentally deprived, Baroness,’ he shrugged. ‘Anyway, your Imperial Majesty, the literature consists largely of ghost stories. There’s always a haunted castle complete with hidden rooms and secret passages, and the entrances to these rooms and passages are always hidden behind bookcases. It’s a very tired old device – so tired in fact that I almost didn’t think of it. I didn’t believe anybody would be so obvious.’ He laughed. ‘I wonder if Teovin thought it up all by himself or if he plagiarized. If he stole it, he has abominable taste in literature.’
‘Are books all that available in Eosia?’ Oscagne asked curiously. ‘They’re fearfully expensive here.’
‘It’s one of the results of our Holy Mother’s drive toward universal literacy during the last century, your Excellency,’ Ehlana explained. ‘The Church wanted her children to be able to read her message, so parish priests spend a great deal of time teaching everybody to read.’
‘The message of the Church doesn’t really take all that long to browse through, however,’ Stragen added, ‘and after the browsing’s done, you’ve got crowds of literate people with a skill they can’t really apply. It was the invention of paper that set off the literary explosion, though. The labor costs involved in copying aren’t particularly high. It was the cost of parchment that made books so prohibitively expensive. When paper came along, books became cheaper. There are copy-houses in most major cities with whole platoons of scriveners grinding out books by the ton. It’s a very profitable business. The books don’t have illuminations or decorated capitals, and the lettering’s a little shoddy, but they’re readable – and affordable. Not everyone who can read has good taste, though, so a lot of truly dreadful books are written by people with minimal talent. They write adventure stories, ghost stories, heroic fantasies and those naughty books that people don’t openly display in their bookcases. The Church encourages lives of the saints and tedious religious verse. Things like that are produced, of course, but nobody really reads that sort of thing. Ghost stories are currently in vogue – particularly in Thalesia. It has something to do with our national character, I think.’ He looked at Ehlana. ‘The business of getting the information out of Teovin’s hidey-hole is going to be tedious, my Queen. There are mountains of documents in there, and I can’t take whole platoons of people in over the roof every night to help plow through them. Mirtai, Caalador and I are going to have to read every document ourselves.’
‘Perhaps not, Milord Stragen,’ Ehlana disagreed. She smiled at the blond thief. ‘I had absolute confidence in your dishonesty, dear boy, so I knew that sooner or later you’d find what we were looking for. I struggled for a time with the very problem you just mentioned. Then I remembered something Sparhawk once told me. He’d used a spell to put the image of Krager’s face in a basin of water so that Talen could draw his picture. I spoke with one of the Pandions who came along with us – a Sir Alvor. He told me that since Sephrenia refuses to learn to read Elenic, she and Sparhawk devised a way round her deliberate incapacity. She can glance at a page – a single glance – and then make the whole page come up in a mirror or on the surface of a basin of water hours or even days later. Sir Alvor knows the spell. He’s a fairly young and agile fellow, so he’ll be able to creep across the roof-top with you. Take him along next time you visit the Interior Ministry and turn him loose in Teovin’s hidden closet. I rather imagine he’ll be able to carry that entire library out with him in a single night.’
‘Does it really work, your Majesty?’ Caalador asked her a bit doubtfully.
‘Oh, yes, Caalador. I handed Alvor a book he’d never seen before. He leafed through it in a couple of minutes and then printed it on that mirror over there – page after page after page. I checked what he was producing against the original, and it was absolutely perfect – right down to the smudges and the food-stains on the pages.’
‘Them there Pandion fellers is real useful t’ have around,’ Caalador admitted.
‘You know,’ she smiled, ‘I’ve noticed the exact same thing myself. There’s one in particular who does all sorts of useful things for me.’
Chapter 13
‘We don’t have any choice, dear,’ Vanion said to Sephrenia. ‘We’ve even tried turning around and going back, and we still keep moving in the same direction. We’re going to have to use the Bhelliom.’ He looked on up the gorge lying ahead of them. The mountain river was tumbling over the boulders jutting up out of its bed, sawing its way deeper and deeper into the rock with its white, roaring passage. The sides of the gorge were thick with evergreens which dripped continually in the swirling mist rising out of the rapids.
‘No, Vanion,’ Sephrenia replied stubbornly. ‘We’ll fall directly into their trap if we do that. The Delphae want the Bhelliom, and as soon as Sparhawk tries to use it, they’ll attack us and try to kill him and take it away from him.’
‘They’ll regret it if they do,’ Sparhawk told her.
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but then again, maybe not. We don’t know what they’re capable of. Until I know how they’re misleading us, I can’t even guess at what else they can do. There are too many uncertainties involved to be taking chances.’
‘Isn’t this what they call an impasse?’ Khalad suggested. ‘We keep going north no matter how much we try to go in some other direction, and we don’t know what the Delphae will do if Sparhawk tries to use Bhelliom to pull us out of these mountains. Why don’t we just stop?’
‘We have to get back to Matherion, Khalad,’ Sparhawk objected.
‘But we’re not going to Matherion, my Lord. Every step we take brings us that much closer to Delphaeus. We’ve been twisting and turning around through these mountains for two days now, and we’re still going north. If all directions lead to a place where we really don’t want to go, why keep moving at all? Why not find a comfortable camp-site and stay there for a while? Let’s make them come to us, instead of the other way around.’
‘It makes sense, Lord Vanion,’ Itagne agreed. ‘As long as we keep moving, the Delphae don’t have to do a thing except herd us in the right direction. If we stop moving, they’ll have to try something else, and that might give Lady Sephrenia some clues about their capabilities. It’s called “constructive inaction” in diplomatic circles.’
‘What if the Delphae just decide to wait us out?’ Ulath objected. ‘Autumn isn’t a good time to linger in the mountains. It wasn’t so bad in those foothills we came through when we left the desert, but now that we’re up here, time starts to get very important.’
‘I don’t think they’ll wait, Sir Ulath,’ Itagne disagreed.
‘Why not? They’ve got all the advantages, haven’t they?’
‘Let’s just call it a diplomat’s instinct. I caught a faint odor of urgency about them when they approached us. They want us to go to Delphaeus, right enough, but it’s also important to them that we get there soon.’
‘I’d like to know how you worked that out, your Excellency,’ Kalten said skeptically.
‘It’s a combination of a thousand little things, Sir Kalten – the tone of voice, slight changes of expression, even their posture and their rate of breathing. The Delphae weren’t as certain of themselves as they seemed, and they want us to go to Delphaeus as quickly as possible. As long as we keep going, they don’t have any reason to make further contact, but I think we’ll find that if we just sit still, they’ll come to us and start making concessions. I’ve seen it happen that way many times.’
‘Does it take long to learn how to be a diplomat, your Excellency?’ Talen asked him with a speculative look.
‘That depends entirely on your natural gifts, Master Talen.’
‘I’m a quick learner. Diplomacy sounds like a lot of fun.’
‘It’s the best game there is,’ Itagne smiled. ‘There’s no other that even approaches it.’
‘Are you cons
idering another career-change, Talen?’ his brother asked him.
‘I’m never going to be a very good knight, Khalad – not unless Sparhawk takes the Bhelliom and makes me about four times bigger than I am now.’
‘Isn’t this about the third occupation you’ve grown excited about so far this year?’ Sparhawk asked him. ‘Have you given up the notion of becoming the emperor of the thieves or the archprelate of larceny?’
‘I don’t really have to make any final decisions yet, Sparhawk. I’m still young.’ Talen suddenly thought of something. ‘They can’t arrest a diplomat, can they, your Excellency? I mean, the police can’t really touch him at all – no matter what he does?’
‘That’s a long-standing custom, Master Talen. If I throw your diplomats into a dungeon, you’ll turn around and do the same thing to mine, won’t you? That puts a diplomat more or less above the law.’
‘Well, now,’ Talen said with a beatific smile, ‘isn’t that something to think about?’
‘I like caves.’ Ulath shrugged.
‘Are you sure you’re not part Troll, Ulath?’ Kalten asked.
‘Even Trolls and Ogres can have good ideas once in a while. A cave’s got a roof in case the weather turns sour, and nobody can come at you from behind. This one’s a good cave, and it’s been used before. Somebody spent quite a bit of time building a wall around that spring in there so that there’s plenty of water.’
‘What if he comes back and wants his cave again?’
‘I don’t think he’ll do that, Kalten.’ The big Thalesian held up a beautifully crafted flint spearhead. ‘He left this behind when he moved out. I’d say that he’d probably be too old to give us much to worry about – fifteen or twenty thousand years too old, at least.’ He touched a careful thumb to the serrated edge of the spearpoint. ‘He did very nice work, though. He drew pictures on the wall, too – animals, mostly.’
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