The Company

by K. J. Parker

  “Pirates,” Muri said. “Well, you’ve got to cover every contingency, however remote. And if we were to get raided by pirates, bloody fools we’d look if we had nothing better than pitchforks and brush-hooks.”

  Alces nodded slowly. “You really think that accounts for the trebuchet?”

  “Maybe he got carried away in the shop,” Aidi said. “All it takes is a smart window display and a good salesman.”

  “Speroio’s first law,” Kudei said. “Force, to be effective, must be overwhelming.” He shrugged. “You don’t get much more overwhelming than heavy artillery.”

  “We need to ask him about it,” Alces said. “It’s no earthly use us guessing in the absence of hard data.”

  “For one thing,” Aidi said, “who does he think’s going to work the bloody thing? How many in a standard trebuchet crew, Fly? It’s six, isn’t it?”

  “Depends on the size of the counterweight,” Alces said. “But a minimum of six, yes.”

  “There’s other stuff too, don’t forget,” Kudei said. “Two springals, two Type Six field catapults and an onager. That’s enough for a brigade.”

  Aidi shook his head. “We’ll have to ask him,” he said.

  Nobody spoke for a long time after that. Eventually Muri said, “I don’t think there’s anything sinister about it. Bear in mind that the colony’s going to grow; the bigger it gets, the more prosperous we all become, the more inviting we’ll start to look to pirates. Sooner or later we’ll have to deal with that by getting some serious armaments. So why not start out with what we’re bound to end up with?” When nobody reacted, he scowled. “Fine,” he said. “If anybody’s got a more plausible theory, let’s hear it.”

  “Come on, Muri,” Kudei said. “Even you’ve got to admit, it’s a bit strange.”

  Muri shrugged. “If you think so, you’d better do as Aidi says. Ask him.”

  Alces shifted in his seat. “I think Muri may be right,” he said. “After all, it sort of fits in with how Teuche’s mind works. And if you look at the rest of his shopping list, he has covered every single possible contingency. Look at this one here: sixteen rolls of quarter-inch-thickness lead foil. Two hundredweight of copper nails. One hundred and forty-four pewter spoons. I’ll bet you he’s thinking: what if the ship gets wrecked and we’re stuck there without a line of supply? So he’s stocking up on everything we’re ever likely to need that we couldn’t readily make for ourselves. Into which category,” he added, “field artillery definitely falls. Well? Any of you know how to go about building a Type Six catapult from things you find at home?”

  “I think Fly’s got a point there,” Kudei said. “Remember how he used to pack for a three-day pass? Only man I ever knew who took a tent with him on leave.”

  Alces grinned. “God, I remember that. He just looked at me and said, ‘But what if it rains, and all the inns are full?’ That’s got to be the funniest thing I ever saw.”

  “And that huge sack he carried his books round in,” Aidi put in. “He always took every book he owned to every class, whether he was going to need it or not. And no one ever dreamed of taking the piss about it, because anybody who could lug that sack around all day without slipping a disc was obviously someone you didn’t want to get mad at you.”

  When Kunessin got back from the shipyard, he showed them the map. He was pleased by their enthusiasm, but couldn’t help noticing that it hadn’t been where he’d left it.

  Chapter Five

  Cadet Nuctos Di’Ambrosies was invariably in the top three of every class, which probably accounted for the fact that he was never quite expelled, in spite of a record of misdemeanours and honour violations unparalleled in the history of the College. The authorities, who’d naturally seen it all before, were inclined to take a broadly tolerant view of Di’Ambrosies’ activities, arguing that his sort of brilliant but unconventional cadet quickly knuckled down once they took their commissions and began active service. They were rather less sanguine about the effect and influence he was having on the other members of the Faralia gang: good students, all of them, but not good enough for their offences to be so lightly overlooked. There was the additional danger that Cadets Kunessin, Achaiois, Alces, Gaeon and Proiapsen might come to believe that, so long as they associated with Di’Ambrosies and followed his lead, they were untouchable as far as the authorities were concerned. College loyalties and allegiances were one thing; they had their well-attested uses in active service, reinforcing the usual bonds of loyalty between officers. A junior officer with his own private army, on the other hand, was quite another. The dilemma was, therefore, how to bring the lesser lights of the Faralia gang back into line without serving out equal justice to Di’Ambrosies, which must inevitably lead to his expulsion. Efforts to split them up having failed dismally, the faculty finally arrived at a viable solution. Di’Ambrosies was appointed a college proctor - the youngest in a hundred and twenty years - with immediate day-to-day responsibility for the conduct of his classmates.

  In time, of course, Di’Ambrosies and his cohorts found enough loopholes and grey areas in the regulations to allow them to continue their activities to a certain muted extent - the faculty would have been profoundly disappointed in them if they hadn’t - but the Faralia gang’s excesses were curbed sufficiently to allow the faculty to declare victory and look the other way. As for Di’Ambrosies himself, once he’d got over his resentment at being outmanoeuvred by an authority for which he’d come to have little respect, he professed himself grateful for a valuable lesson in both strategic thinking and military politics; it was certainly one he would never forget.

  “Losing,” Nuctos said, “is a matter of opinion.” He pressed his ear to the door, turned the wire in the lock, and as he heard the soft click of the tumblers, his smile was as bright and as broad as the sunrise. “They think they’ve got us beat. I beg to differ.” He got up off his knees, put two fingers on the latch lifter, and gently opened the door.

  “Now what?” Teuche said.

  Nuctos shook his head. “That’s on a need-to-know basis,” he said. “Muri, you’re on watch. The rest of you, with me.”

  Once they were inside the room, Nuctos prised open the slats of the dark lantern just a little, revealing—

  “Shit, Nuctos,” Fly said, his voice hoarse. “How the hell did you ever—?”

  “Foul language, Fly,” Nuctos said. “Honour misdemeanour.”

  The reserve armoury. The most secret, the most secure room in the College. Rumour had it that only the principal and the dean even knew where it was. “What are we doing in here?” Kudei asked warily.

  “Burgling it, of course,” Nuctos replied, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

  “Are you sure this is such a good idea?” Aidi asked. “Only, I think they may take rather a dim view—”

  “I should hope so,” Nuctos said. “If they think they’ve beaten the Faralia boys, it’s time they got a practical lesson in Rule Three.”

  Zeuxis’ third law: never underestimate an enemy. “What do we want with any of this stuff ?” Teuche said, though the distinct hint of passionate desire in his voice tended to undermine his implied objection. “You planning on starting a war, Nuctos?”

  “Starting be damned,” Nuctos replied. “They started it.”

  Weapons, beyond even the wildest dreams of Teuche Kunessin. The dim yellow light of the dark lantern made them glow like the gold of a dragon’s hoard, perilous and precious. “The objective,” Nuctos said, barely lowering his voice, “is to take something they’ll be absolutely sure to miss. No earthly point in going to all this trouble if it’s three years before they even notice.”

  He lifted the lantern, scattering light like a duke throwing coins into a crowd. Aidi was frowning. Teuche was balling his fists, locked in a desperate personal battle against temptation.

  “The key thing,” Nuctos said, “is to put yourself into the other guy’s mind. So, if I was the principal, which of these delightful toys would
I least want to fall into the hands of an unreliable and quite possibly disturbed student? To which question,” he added, with a sudden smile, “there can only be one answer.”

  He reached out his hand, and from its place on the rack lifted down a small steel crossbow. It was no more than a foot long, ten inches between the nocks of the bow, which was easily half an inch thick in the middle. The string was steel wire, and it had its own built-in cranequin for winding it up. “Illegal to own in seven provinces,” Nuctos said. “Come to Daddy.”

  “You really don’t want to mess with that thing,” Aidi said nervously. “Just looking at it’s enough to get us all sent down.”

  “Trust me,” Nuctos said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  He was looking for the arrows. He found them: a dozen barrelled steel bolts, like pins, bundled up with twine. “Attention to detail,” he explained. “If you look closely, you’ll see they’re grooved along the top, so the retaining spring can stop them falling out. With ordinary arrows, it wouldn’t be half such a threat to public safety. Right, I think we’re all done here. Pass me the sack, Fly. Kudei, you take the lantern.”

  Nuctos left the door open. The others were in a hurry to get away, but Nuctos insisted that they wait while he poked about in the keyhole with a small, complex-looking gadget, something like a miniature outside calliper, with vernier scales and exquisitely fine set-screw threads. As he took each reading, he muttered the number three times to himself to secure it in his memory. “That ought to do it,” he said at last, dropping the calliper back in his pocket. “Now then, let’s take it nice and slow and easy. Nothing’s more suspicious than a bunch of people walking fast.”

  So they strolled along the corridor and down the back stair, meeting nobody, observed from no vantage point, until they came to one of the garderobe ports: small doors in the wall that opened on to the chutes that conveyed the contents of chamber pots down into the covered drain and thence the soakaway. Smiling, Nuctos opened the port, then mostly closed it again, leaving it just slightly ajar. The impression, masterfully conveyed, was that someone had slammed it shut in a hurry, applied too much force and overridden the catch, so that it hadn’t shut properly.

  “They’ll see that,” Nuctos explained, “and they’ll assume that the thief panicked and dumped the loot into the shit-pit. Which means,” he went on, his voice practically a song, “that the prog’s bogies are going to have to climb down in there on a long ladder and scrabble about in two hundred years’ worth of vintage doodoo until they find it. Which they won’t, of course, but most certainly not for want of trying. Economy of applications, my children, as expressed in Zeuxis’ fifteenth precept.”

  Muri and Fly were grinning, but Aidi said, “Here’s an idea, Nuctos. Why not dump the stupid thing down there for real? Look, we’ve got this far free and clear, let’s for fuck’s sake not push our luck.”

  “Your objection is noted, Lieutenant,” Nuctos said, shouldering the sack. “Right, onwards. We’ve still got a lot to do today.”

  They walked in silence for a while, then Teuche said: “I realise the answer’s obviously no, but I’m going to ask anyway. You’re not thinking of actually using that thing, are you?”

  Nuctos nodded. “It’d be a shame not to, don’t you think?” he said.

  “Nuctos . . .”

  “Use your head,” Nuctos said, firm and quiet. “Any one of you - on a good day, mind - any one of you could’ve found the reserve armoury, picked the lock and stolen the bow. So, if we dump it, you’re all in the frame. But I want them to know it was me.”

  They knew better than to argue further. Nuctos had found the perfect hiding place: at the back of the gardener’s shed in the dean’s garden. Everybody passed its door at least twice a day, and behind the agglomeration of ancient and obsolete tools and junk, it was completely hidden from casual discovery. From there they made their way back to the dormitory, where Nuctos paused to write down a string of measurements on a scrap of paper, which he tucked into the toe of his shoe.

  That night, at some point between the second and third watches, someone climbed the walls of the principal’s garden and shot his wife’s cat. Details of the crime spread quickly. The angle of incidence of the entry wound, for example, suggested that the shot was taken at extreme range, upwards of forty yards; a remarkable piece of marksmanship, given that the only light available was the glow from the parlour window of the lodge. Rather more sensational was the nature of the missile, an arrow unique to a special kind of miniature crossbow, very rare and highly illegal. This led in turn to the discovery that the College’s legendary reserve armoury had been broken into, and the murder weapon stolen therefrom. All in all, it quickly became the most excitingly scandalous incident in living memory.

  An exhaustive search of the entire College revealed nothing, even after the dean’s officers dragged the cesspool and the drains, to the vast amusement of the student body. The student proctors were summoned to the principal’s office and ordered to use all means necessary to find the missing weapon, and if possible to identify the thief. After a fortnight of frantic activity, however, no reliable leads had emerged and the weapon was still missing. It was at this point that Proctor Di’Ambrosies made the suggestion that the principal write to the postmasters of all the students’ home towns; since the weapon clearly wasn’t on the premises, he argued, the thief must somehow have got it outside the wall. Since everybody knew that breaking out of the College after curfew was quite impossible - he’d learned this from personal experience, he admitted with disarming candour; he’d just spent three years trying - and nobody would be reckless enough to carry the thing out in broad daylight past the needle-sharp eyes of the porters, the only way to get rid of it was to break it up into its component parts and mail it home.

  By this stage the principal was desperate enough to try anything, no matter how far-fetched, or how tainted the source. Letters went out by express government mail, which meant they stood a better than even chance of reaching the postmasters before the regular mail from the students. The search was made, and proved successful. The disassembled parts of the bow were found hidden in a large mechanical clock sent home by Cadet Haimatoenta, purportedly as a birthday present for his father; also inside were found a home-made key that fitted the armoury lock, and a specialised lockmaker’s tool used for taking internal measurements. Further investigations revealed that Haimatoenta had bought the clock in the town the day before the robbery, and the cadet could give no alibi other than a fanciful-sounding story about receiving an anonymous note containing a mysterious summons to a rendezvous at the back of the archery butts, at which nobody in the event turned up. Haimatoenta’s motive was easily supplied, since his resentment at Di’Ambrosies being made a proctor when he felt he was next in line for that honour was no secret. A disciplinary tribunal found him guilty on all counts, and he was immediately given a dishonourable discharge.

  “Of course they know it was me,” Di’Ambrosies said, after the assembly at which Haimatoenta’s disgrace was formally announced. “Quite apart from anything else, they know Haima and his boys have had their knives into us ever since we got here. The old man had me in his office and told me he knew it was me; guess he thought he could make me break down if he yelled loud enough, but I just smiled sweetly and asked him for some proof. And since they’d got to nail somebody for it because of the scandal, they dumped on Haima; job done, and we won’t have to see his ugly face around here any more. All in all,” he concluded, as they collected their books from the common room, “I call that a satisfactory piece of work all round. One thing’s for sure: they’ll think twice before picking a fight with me again in a hurry.”

  “You reckon,” Aidi said bitterly. “I don’t think so. I think they’ll have us for it, probably sooner than later, and it’ll be your fault when we end up in the stockade.”

  But Nuctos only smiled. “You don’t understand the way their minds work,” he said. “Bear in mind, this is a military coll
ege. Stuff like this has always happened here; it’s a sort of rough-and-ready way of choosing the brightest and the best. If you pull an outrageous stunt and get away with it, they know you’ve got the right stuff. Of course, if you try something and screw it up, they’re down on you like a ton of bricks. Nobody loves a loser, see; but a winner can get away with anything. And that’s all right, because one of these days, that winner’ll go on to pull a stunt on the enemy general and win us the war, and that’s the whole object of the exercise.”

  Whether what happened next proved or disproved Nuctos’ theory was, essentially, a matter of opinion. On graduation (Cadet Di’Ambrosies was placed third in the year; Proiapsen was fourth, Kunessin sixth, Alces and Achaiois tied for ninth place, with Gaeon achieving a still entirely creditable twelfth), the Faralia gang were assigned to special operations, where they soon learned that they had been chosen, on the principal’s recommendation, to be trained as linebreakers.

  Clea Andron refused to marry Muri Achaiois, and nothing would make her change her mind. Even Gorgo Alces, who’d never had a failure in forty years, couldn’t persuade her. She admitted as much to General Kunessin, who replied that it simply wasn’t good enough. Each of them had to have a wife, or the whole project would fall apart.

  Gorgo went home and thought about it; and in the middle of the night, on her way to the outhouse with a severe case of stomach cramps, she found the answer.

  Clea wouldn’t have to marry Achaiois; she could marry the youngest Gaeon boy instead. And Achaiois could have the Aeide girl, the one she’d lined up for Kudei Gaeon. Perfect.

  Clea Andron shouted and cried and slammed doors and demanded to know if she was a human being or chopped liver, and then agreed quite cheerfully. Kudei Gaeon accepted the rearrangement with a shrug. Muri Achaiois asked, “What’s she like?” and Gorgo replied that she was a nice girl, very quiet, brought up on a farm, very hard-working. Menin Aeide was told of the change of plan.