by K. J. Parker
After the first hurtling outriders came the Serious Men. The idea was that the more Serious you were, the longer it took you to leave the hall, since all the real transactions were carried out in the corridors and courtyards after the meeting itself had ended. The slow walk of a Serious trader making his way from the chapter house to the front gate was one of the great sights of Weal Bohec, a magnificent exhibition of the art of walking as slowly as humanly possible without actually stopping. Conventionally, a Serious Man wouldn’t dream of covering the distance in less time than it takes to chop down a fifteen-year-old ash tree with a small hand-axe. Truly Serious men, such as the legendary Gransenier Astel Voche, or Huon Tage, six times president of the chapter, had been known to leave the chapterhouse at noon and not get outside until dusk without ever coming to an actual full stop.
The offcomer knew all of this, of course, so he leaned up against a pillar of the Portico of Probity and Diligence, made sure that he had a clear view of the gateway, took an apple from his sleeve and started to crunch. He ate slowly, savouring the rare and expensive flavour of a genuine Bohec Sweet Pippin, a variety carefully nurtured and interfered with over centuries to make it taste more like a peach than an apple; in other cities, when they wanted peaches they ate peaches, but that was never the Weal Bohec way. From time to time he had to dab the rather overabundant juice off his chin with his sleeve.
He was just worrying the last few fibres of edible flesh off the core when the first Serious Men sauntered out from between the worn, anthropomorphic pillars of the gateway (traditionally, they were supposed to represent Prosperity and prudence, but since their faces had been worn away centuries ago by itinerant shoe repairers sharpening their knives on them it wasn’t possible to be certain any more). The offcomer spared them a glance, but as he’d expected his man wasn’t one of them. He took a last nibble at the remains of his apple, folded it in a handkerchief (the Bohec city statutes prescribed savage fines for a man of quality who wilfully littered the streets, though of course these rules didn’t apply to the lower orders, who couldn’t be expected to obey them) and tucked it in his pocket. It was pleasant in the shade after a morning in the sun, and the justly famous aftertaste of the apple was well worth savouring.
In the event, he was looking the other way when his man finally came out, an uncharacteristic piece of carelessness that he could only attribute to the extreme comfort of his surroundings. It was the flash of the silver lining of the man’s gown as he pushed back his sleeve that caught the offcomer’s eye – a brief, subliminal moment of information that he absorbed unconsciously, the way a circling hawk notices the first, tiniest movement of his prey on the ground below. He pushed himself away from the pillar with his elbows and sauntered across the street on an interception course, delicately plotted so that he’d carelessly blunder into his man just before he turned the corner.
The man was deep in some complicated discussion with another, almost equally Serious trader; they were walking arm in arm like an old married couple (it was a tradition that tended to disconcert offcomers until they found out it was quite normal and simply indicated trust), and both men’s bodyguards were holding back a respectful three paces or so. Bodyguards were only for show in Weal Bohec, of course; one wore them in the same way that one wore a jewelled and enamelled sword or a lovely but useless wafer-thin gold breastplate. Cheapskates’ bodyguards were often just their clerks dressed up in fancy padded gambesons, but Serious Men hired serious thugs simply as an exercise in the art of wasting money gracefully.
The offcomer knew exactly what he was doing. The moment of collision gave him just enough time to grab his man’s sleeve with his right hand, as if stopping himself from going off balance and falling over, while the fingers of his left hand drew back the hem of his robe and the thumb located the hilt of his sword, twisted round in the sash so as to be unobtrusively hidden under his armpit without showing through the line of his coat. While he was graciously apologising to his man for his clumsiness, he was letting go of the mark’s lapel with his right hand, while his left thumb had found the guard of the sword and was easing it half an inch out of the tight mouth of the scabbard. At the precise moment that his man opened his mouth to say that it was an accident, perfectly all right, his left fingers tightened round the scabbard throat and gave the little sideways twist that brought the hilt to exactly the right angle for the best draw, and his right hand swooped, a perfect, totally economical gesture. He drew his knuckles down the hilt like a man stroking his lover’s cheek until his little finger encountered the guard. Then he flipped his hand over, wrapped his fingers round the hilt, and drew.
Moments make up everything, the way potsherds and bits of broken glass make up a mosaic, but the draw is the supreme moment, the one piece of the mosaic that incorporates the whole pattern, the ultimate fraction. In religion, the perfect draw doesn’t even happen. There is no interval between the sword’s quiet slumber in the scabbard and the start of the cutting process. In practice, of course, there has to be a moment, and a moment is a thing susceptible of quantification, capable of being measured with a pair of calipers. There has to be a moment between peace and violence, between one version of history and another, a piece of time in which the thing could go either way. The knack is to make it as small as possible.
The offcomer knew exactly what he was doing, and so his man was still talking at the moment when the top inch of the upswinging blade sliced through his throat, cutting his last word neatly in half.
Job done.
There remained the rather more demanding issue of getting away with it, so, as soon as he was certain he’d made the kill, he put the dead man out of his mind entirely and quickly assessed the remaining obstacles; this process took about as long as it takes for a raindrop to fall from your hair to your nose, or for a cat to hear a footstep.
While the blade was still following through, he moved his back foot through ninety degrees in the direction of the other Serious Man, so that he was lined up for the second-position downwards cut (‘dividing the earth from the heavens’, as the religious rather charmingly call it). The cut followed on from the initial slice so quickly and fluently that it looked to be part of the same movement, but of course it was an entirely separate moment, the clearing away of an inconvenient body. The third and fourth movements cut down the bodyguards before they’d noticed anything was the matter – three perfect diagonal slices, severing the neck to the bone. All four men were still standing when the offcomer, having flicked the blood off his sword blade, looped it back and slid it elegantly into the scabbard.
‘Thank you so much,’ he said in a calm, clear voice, then he nodded politely, took two steps back, and slipped back between the columns of the portico just as the dead bodies toppled over and slid to the ground. It was two or three heartbeats before anybody noticed, and by then the offcomer was on the other side of the street, having quietly snuck through the portico arcade and emerged in the gap between two stalls. By the time the first woman screamed he was examining the base of a small brass jar for casting flaws.
‘Yes, well,’ the stallholder replied, when he pointed them out, ‘they all have those. But you can’t see them, and what the eye doesn’t see the heart doesn’t grieve over. Tell you what,’ he added, suspecting that his moment was passing too quickly, ‘you can have them both for seven.’
The offcomer frowned. ‘Six and a half.’
‘All right.’ The stallholder nodded, like a guilty man accepting the court’s verdict. ‘You want them wrapped? Wrapping’s a quarter extra.’
The offcomer shook his head. He’d noticed a spot of blood, about the size of a small fly, on the back of his left hand, and he eased it off against his right wrist as he replied. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll have them as they are. Oh, and while I’m at it, what’ll you take for the inkwell? That’s north country work, isn’t it?’
When the fuss had died down, he walked back to the inn, bolted the door of his room behind him and lay dow
n on the bed. He didn’t get the shakes any more. That was an indulgence he’d gradually learned to do without by absorbing the trauma and filing it away in the back of his mind to be dealt with on a rainy day. Instead he calmly accepted the passing of the moment, the transition between one sequence of events and another, the comforting fact that he’d got away with it again. Already the fear had been contained and subdued and lived only in his memory, along with all those close shaves and embarrassing childhood misdemeanours that made him cringe when he thought about them. The ability to accept, to digest, to be nourished by one’s own fear was one of the great joys of religion, or so he liked to believe. It was, after all, rather more spiritually respectable than admitting he was just addicted to the draw, like some dangerous freak in a street gang.
Being classically trained and thorough, he hung around Weal Bohec for the rest of the day, keeping his ears and eyes open, gathering potentially useful background information and local colour. After a thoroughly enjoyable dinner at the Blaze of Glory, a place he’d always wanted to try but had never had time for during any of his previous visits, he went to bed early and slept well before making an early start the next morning. The innkeeper told him that he hoped he’d enjoyed his stay in Weal Bohec and would come again. He replied that it was more than likely.
His journey home was long and tiresome. For some reason, the rain had chosen to come nearly a month early, and the first big storm caught him out on the road in the back of an uncovered carrier’s cart halfway between Weal Bohec and Bealvoy. In the time it takes for a good cook to peel an onion his coat and hat were so completely saturated that he could feel the water trickling down his skin. The bed of the cart was flooded a finger-joint deep, and the smell of drenched cloth was overpowering. Fairly soon he stopped trying to cower under the brim of his hat – it was thoroughly waterlogged anyway, with the result that he was getting wetter wearing it than he would’ve been bare-headed. Instead he sat upright, blinked rain out of his eyes and tried to pretend he was in a nice, deep bath that he hadn’t had to pay for.
As usual, the first storm of the season only lasted a very short time, but its after-effects stayed with him for the rest of the afternoon. Since he had nowhere to rest his feet except the floor of the cart, he was still sitting with water seeping through the seams of his boots long after the actual rain had stopped. As for anything not made of metal in his pockets or his luggage, he resigned himself to the fact that it was ruined for ever. When the sun finally came out and started to dry him off, he was sure he could hear the creak of cracking boot and belt leather, and feel the hug of his clothes shrinking around him. A thin dribble of coloured water running across the back of his hand confirmed his suspicion that the stallholder who’d sold him the gown had indeed been lying when he claimed the dyes were waterfast.
Sudden heavy rain plays havoc with dry roads and baked earth. Lakes and rivers that hadn’t been there when he left Weal Bohec blocked the cart’s way, forcing tedious detours that themselves ended in obstruction. As a result they didn’t make Bealvoy until just after dark (rumbling and splashing down a rutted sunken track that had suddenly decided to be a riverbed instead with only the light of a single swaying coach-lamp to see by was rather more adventurous than he’d have liked) and of course all the inns were full up with wet, stranded travellers. Instead of a room to himself with a nice warm fire and a jug of hot wine and cinnamon, he had to make do with a corner of an overcrowded common room that stank of wet bodies, too far away from the fire to get dry. Even so he managed to get some sleep, out of which he was awoken just before dawn by the carter, who wanted to get on the road early before the rest of the previous day’s delayed traffic added to the misery. That left him with a headache that stayed with him all day, made worse every time the cart bumped over a pothole or slithered in a boggy patch. Early sunshine, oppressively hot and stiflingly humid, dried his clothes out, just in time for the noon cloudburst, which left him soggier than he’d been the day before. By the time the cart finally rolled into Deymeson he was in that last, most desperate stage of wetness where you just don’t care or notice any more.
What he wanted to do more than anything else was to crawl off to his quarters in the back cloister, bank up a big, unseasonal, totally non-regulation fire, and sweat out his incipient cold fever before it had a chance to get a grip. Instead he did his duty and dragged himself up six flights of deep, wide marble steps to the Father Tutor’s lodgings. Because the rains hadn’t reached Deymeson yet, the Father Tutor had the shutters and doors open so he wouldn’t suffocate in the heat of the night.
‘Where did you get to?’ the Father Tutor demanded. ‘You do realise it’s after compline; you should’ve been back here in time for morning chapter.’
‘It rained.’
The Father Tutor looked at him. ‘I’d gathered that,’ he said. ‘You’d better get out of those wet clothes, before you catch a chill. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘I know how things went in Weal Bohec. It’s a shame I had to hear about it from a travelling chair-mender rather than one of my own brothers, but at least I know.’
It occurred to him to explain how he’d decided to stay over an extra night, and how he’d been ambushed by the weather, whereas this chair-mender had obviously started earlier and escaped the rains altogether. He decided not to; he was too wet to be able to put over such a complex narrative coherently. Instead he nodded.
‘It’s also a pity,’ the tutor went on, ‘that you couldn’t get the job done without killing that other trader. I shouldn’t have to remind you that the whole purpose of the exercise was to send a nice clear message to the directors and the Guild; by killing someone who had nothing to do with it, you’ve muddied the waters. That chair-mender told me it was a simple robbery.’
‘I’m sorry.’ The brother tried not to notice the clammy texture of his gown across his knees. ‘I didn’t really have much choice in the matter. I had to go through him to get to the bodyguards; there simply wasn’t time to step round him.’
The tutor shook his head. ‘You’re missing the point,’ he said. ‘If this other trader spoiled the moment by being in the wrong place, you should have waited for another moment when it was all clear.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t want to have to dispose of another director, but if it’s all gone wrong I’ll probably have to, and you’ll have done all this for nothing. And we’ll be a week behind.’
He bowed his head, ashamed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I should have thought three times and cut once. It won’t happen again.’
‘It’s all right.’ The tutor’s lips twitched in a brief smile. ‘These things happen, and you aren’t the first to make a mistake like that. Certainly you won’t be the last.’ The smile broadened. ‘I did something very similar when I wasn’t much older than you are, but the world didn’t actually come to an end.’ He closed his large hands around the carved arms of his chair and pulled himself to his feet with a show of great effort (complete nonsense, of course, the brother knew; Father Tutor was as supple and strong as a man half his age, but he liked playing at being older). ‘Which reminds me,’ he went on. ‘Have you heard the news from Josequin?’
The brother thought for a moment, as a drop of water trickled out of his wet hair and slid down his forehead. ‘You mean about the council elections?’ he asked. ‘Well, yes. I feel they display a rather disturbing trend, if you ask me.’
‘Ah. You haven’t.’ The Father Tutor poured himself a very small glass of wine. ‘And it’s funny that you should mention disturbing trends.’ He took a little sip, more like a nibble. ‘Josequin was destroyed four days ago.’
The brother felt as if he’d just fallen off his horse. ‘Destroyed,’ he repeated.
‘Burned to the ground,’ the Father Tutor said. ‘Apparently no survivors – if that’s true, it’s quite remarkable, nobody at all left alive out of a population of nearly a hundred thousand. But our scouts in that area are generally very reliable, and they made a point of stressing the considerable numbers of
dead bodies they saw in the ruins. And it’s not unprecedented, of course, especially for a land-locked city, affording no easy means of escape by water.’
‘My mother’s family came from Josequin,’ the brother said.
‘Really.’ The Father Tutor frowned, but decided not to upbraid him for the breach of protocol. Members of the order were supposedly forbidden to refer to their mundane families on pain of extreme penance, but in this case he was prepared to overlook the lapse. ‘Now, you may be asking yourself how the fall of Josequin could possibly be relevant to the matter in hand.’
The brother looked up. ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said. ‘You were saying.’
‘Quite all right. What bearing, you may ask, do these events at Josequin have on the Weal situation?’ He nibbled a little more of his wine, and sat down again. ‘The connection is, I confess, tangential at best; possibly no more than a coincidence, or a combination of popular hysteria and poor reporting. However, I believe it’s worth following the matter up, if only to eliminate an extraneous factor.’
The brother straightened up a little, aware of his lapse from grace. ‘Please explain,’ he said.
‘A day before the attack on Josequin – at least, we think so; the exact order of events is necessarily vague, as you’ll appreciate in a moment – a man and a woman appeared in the small village called Sierce, a day’s ride from Josequin, and announced that they were, respectively, the god Poldarn and his priestess. After performing either a miracle or a conjuring trick, depending on interpretation, and purporting to cure a number of villagers suffering from respiratory disorders, they declared that they had business in Josequin, and left.’ He frowned very slightly. ‘You’ll understand why I feel this matter ought to be looked into, however trivial it may appear. For what it’s worth, at this stage I’m inclined to the view that it’s a coincidence and the two people involved are merely charlatans making a living from the gullibility of country people. That said, I’m committing the cardinal sin of forming an opinion on the basis of insufficient information. Your job, accordingly, will be to purge me of my sin by going to this village and compiling a full report, if possible finding and interviewing these people and ideally bringing them here for detailed questioning.’