Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

“His eggs are always fresh.”

  He gave her three small coins. “There’s a man at work whose mother keeps hens,” he said. “I’ll ask him if there’s ever any spare. We’re not made of money, you know.”

  “That’s a good idea,” she said meekly. “Can I get you anything?”

  “What? No. Have you seen my small penknife? The little one with the black handle?”

  She nodded. “In the kitchen,” she said. “I used it to dress the fish.”

  “Oh for —” She could see him making an effort not to be annoyed. “Next time, couldn’t you use something else? That’s my special knife for sharpening pens.”

  “All the kitchen knives are blunt. You said you’d sharpen them.”

  “Yes, all right, when I’ve got five minutes.”

  You said that last week, she didn’t reply. “It’s in the drawer,” she said. “I washed it up carefully.”

  “Right, yes, thanks.” He stomped out into the kitchen; she bolted through the front door and shut it behind her.

  First, she put the money in the bottom of the crock. Only then did she look to see if it was still there. Seeing it was like a miracle. She palmed it quickly, squeezing her hand around it without closing her fingers. Then she crossed the yard, opened the outhouse door, sat down on the edge of the earthenware pot, shut the door and bolted it. Today, the bolt had to be stiff (he’d promised he’d see to that, too). She broke a nail working it into its keeper.

  My darling …

  She shut her eyes as the muscles of her stomach tightened.

  My darling,

  I know you must be very worried and upset. It hurts me terribly to think of you, not knowing what’s going on, or whether you’re in danger. I think about you all the time.

  I’m safe. That’s all I can tell you for now. I’ll come for you as soon as I can, but that may not be for a while. The people I’m with are going to look after me, but …

  She skipped a couple of lines.

  I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more, but I’ve got to be so careful. Trust me, my darling. I promise you, everything’s under control. I’ll be coming home, and it’ll be soon. I don’t care what it takes or what I have to do. The only thing that matters to me is being with you.

  I love you.

  She folded the parchment up again, putting him back into his little packet.

  “What the hell happened to you?” Valens hissed, as they brushed through the tent flap together into the darkness. “You look like you’ve been in a fight or something.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Ziani muttered back. “What’s … ?”

  “Ziani Vaatzes.” The thin, fragile voice startled him. He couldn’t see where it was coming from. “I am delighted and honored to meet you. The hero of Civitas Eremiae; and the armored wagons. Such a simple yet ingenious idea, but of course it was overtaken by circumstances. And a Mezentine; I think I shall indulge my curiosity and have some light.”

  Only a brief flicker, lasting hardly longer than a flash of lightning; a very old man, completely bald.

  “Thank you,” said the voice. “So it really is true; there are men in the world with brown faces. Remarkable. My apologies for staring at you so blatantly; but at my age, to see something new is such a rare thing. And the man who discovered the way across the desert. What a long way you’ve come, Foreman Vaatzes.”

  “Thank you,” Ziani said, for want of anything else to say.

  He could hear Valens breathing beside him; fast, nervous, like a man waiting for his bride’s veil to be lifted. As for himself, he could almost have wished that this moment would last forever. Almost.

  “Duke Valens thinks most highly of you,” the voice went on. “He believes that you might be able to find a way to bring down the walls of Mezentia. With the very greatest respect; do you really think you could do that?”

  (And Daurenja’s hand on his shoulder, forcing him to his knees … )

  “Yes,” Ziani said.

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  K. J. PARKER is a pseudonym. Find more about the author at www.kjparker.com.

  Introducing

  If you enjoyed

  EVIL FOR EVIL,

  look out for

  THE ESCAPEMENT

  Book Three of the Engineer Trilogy

  by K. J. Parker

  The Cure Doce ambassador was a small, wiry man with short white hair, enormous hands and a nose like a wedge. As soon as Psellus walked into the room he jumped up, as though the door was a sear that tripped the catch that held him in his seat. He spoke in snips, like a man cutting foil.

  “Thank you for seeing me on such short notice,” he said. “Time, obviously —”

  Psellus nodded vaguely. “Quite,” he said. “They tell me — please, sit down — they tell me the savages are nine days’ ride from here. Time is therefore very much on my mind at the moment.” He sat down and wondered, as he always did when he had to conduct a meeting with important people, what the hell he was supposed to do with his hands. He could fold them in front of him on the table, but that implied a level of briskness that he didn’t really feel capable of. And the only alternative was just to let them hang from his wrists, like coats in a cupboard. “If you have any suggestions to make, I’d be delighted to hear them.”

  The ambassador nodded, and folded his hands on the table. “My understanding,” he said, “is that at the moment you have no effective field army. Is that correct?”

  Psellus smiled. “Yes.”

  Perhaps the ambassador hadn’t been expecting a one-word answer. He flinched, as though Psellus had just said a rude word. “We can offer you twelve thousand archers, eight thousand men-at-arms and eleven hundred heavy cavalry,” he said. “We’ve already taken the precaution of mustering them at Liancor —”

  “Where’s that?”

  Another rude word, apparently. The ambassador took a moment to recover, then said, “It’s the closest point on our side to the road the savages are likely to take. We’ve mobilized simply as a precaution, to discourage them from trespassing on our territory.” He smiled. “We have no quarrel of our own with either the Vadani or the savages. However —” He snatched a little breath, and Psellus thought: Ah. He’s about to lie to me. “However, we feel that it would be impossible, ethically speaking, for us to stand idly by and watch while the savages overrun and destroy a great city crammed with helpless civilians, women and children. We are prepared to help you —”

  “Thank you.”

  The ambassador looked like a man trying to wrestle with an opponent made entirely out of water; there was nothing to get hold of, and it kept slipping away unexpectedly. “Provided,” he went on, “that you in turn recognize the nature of the commitment we’re making to you, and undertake to bear it in mind when the post-war balance of power comes to be reassessed. For a long time now, we’ve been actively seeking a closer relationship with the Republic, a relationship which you have hitherto seemed less than eager to pursue. We feel —”

  “Excuse me.” Psellus held up his hand (nice to find a use for it at last). “I’m very new at this, and I’m afraid I don’t speak the language very well. You’ve probably heard I didn’t want the job, I’m really not capable of doing it, by any stretch of the imagination, and I still don’t quite understand how I came to be given it. One minute they were going to execute me, the next — well, here I am.” He shook his head sadly. “But there we are, it’s done and can’t be helped, and now it’s all on my shoulders, whether I like it or not.” He looked up. “You don’t mind me telling you all that, do you?”

  The ambassador was staring at him. “No, of course not. Your frankness is —”

  “The thing is,” Psellus went on, looking over the ambassador’s shoulder at a mark on the wall, “I really do have to find a way of saving the City, because nobody else is willing or able, and so if I don’t do it — well, it’s not something that bears thinking about. So, I’ve got to manage it somehow, but I don’t know the f
irst thing about diplomacy, so I’m not even going to try. I’m going to ask you to bear with me while I do the best I can. Is that all right?”

  The ambassador nodded. He seemed to be having trouble finding any words.

  “Thank you,” Psellus said. “This is how I think matters stand, and perhaps you’ll be kind enough to tell me if I’ve got it all disastrously wrong. Now, then. Like me, you can’t really bring yourself to believe that the savages will be able to take the City, even though there’s a quite ridiculously huge number of them, and they’ve got the abominator Vaatzes helping them, which means if they haven’t already built siege engines as good as the ones we make, they’ll do so pretty soon. No, you look at our walls and the city gates, and you think — just as I used to do — there’s no power on earth that could ever crack that particular nut, engines or no engines.” He paused to draw breath, then went on. “But you know that we haven’t got any proper soldiers anymore; we have no army of our own, and so many mercenaries got killed fighting the Eremians and the Vadani that they simply don’t want to work for us anymore, especially now the savages have found a way of crossing the desert and have joined up with our enemies. You believe — quite rightly, of course — that we’re terrified, feeling helpless, we don’t know what to do, and so we’d be willing to pay anything and make any concessions you’d care to name in return for the loan of your army, just to make us feel a little bit safer until we’ve had a chance to pull ourselves together and figure out how we’re going to defend our city.” He paused again, smiled meekly and asked, “Is that about right, or have I misunderstood you entirely?”

  “That’s about right,” the ambassador said.

  “Splendid, I’m glad about that. It’s so important that people tell me when I make mistakes, or how will I ever learn better? Anyway, I’m sure you know much more about fighting wars than any of us do, so you must’ve assessed the position and decided that the advantages — the concessions you can screw out of us while we’re on our knees like this — outweigh the rather dreadful risk you’re running, picking a fight with a million savages. Oh, did you know that, by the way? Actually, it’s closer to eight hundred thousand soldiers, when you leave out the carters and drovers and all the people in the army who don’t actually fight, but that’s still an awful lot. You do know; excellent. Well, of course you do, now I come to think of it; I imagine you’re who gave us the figures in the first place, because we haven’t got any scouts, and who else would be out there counting?” Psellus smiled again, and continued. “Now I’m the last person to tell you that you’ve made a bad decision, and it’s very encouraging to know you’ve got so much faith in us, since you know so much more about these things than we do. I still can’t help thinking that in your shoes, the last thing I’d want to do is let myself get dragged into a war that’s none of my business, fighting against a vast army of savages who’ll wipe me off the face of the earth if they win. Still, if that’s a risk you’re happy to take, far be it from me to argue with you. We need you desperately and in return you can have anything you want.”

  There was a long, dead silence. “Anything?”

  Psellus nodded vigorously. “You name it. Money, land — you can have Eremia if we win, it’s no use to us, or the Vadani silver mines if you’d prefer, it’s entirely up to you. Just say what you want and I’ll have a treaty drawn up. And in return, you’ll lend us your army. Well?”

  The ambassador took a moment to clear his throat. “Agreed,” he said.

  “Splendid.” Psellus beamed at him. “There, we’ve made an alliance, and it was so much easier than I thought it’d be. When Boioannes was in charge, it used to take weeks to hammer out a treaty, and he knew a lot about diplomacy, unlike me. Now, how soon can your soldiers get here? Or —” Psellus frowned. “Here’s where it gets difficult again. I don’t know whether we need them here at the City, or whether they’d be more useful hindering the savages and making it hard for them to reach us. You’re the expert. What do you think?”

  Nothing in the ambassador’s long and varied experience had prepared him for a question like that. “It’s a complicated decision,” he said. “On the one hand —”

  “The way I see it,” Psellus went on, “an army of a million people is obviously a great advantage in a battle, no doubt about it, but until you actually get to the battlefield, it’s also a tremendous problem. Must be. Food and so forth, hay for the horses, clean water. Now, we’ve done a little research — dreadful, really, it’s taken something like this to make us realize just how woefully ignorant we are about everything other than making things and selling them — and we can’t see how the enemy can keep themselves fed and watered just from what they can find in the fields and villages, which means they must be having to bring in their food and so on from somewhere else. God only knows where,” Psellus added with a grin. “I mean to say, you increase the population of the mountain duchies by a million, the Eremians and the Vadani could only just about feed themselves at the best of times, so it’s not like there can be any huge granaries bursting at the seams with stockpiled sacks of flour. Probably some of your merchants have been trading with them — it’s perfectly all right, I quite understand — but from what little I know about your people, I don’t suppose that can have made much difference. No, the only source of supply I can think of is the savages’ own herds of cattle — they’re nomads, as I’m sure you know, that’s how they live, and they must have managed to bring their cattle with them across the desert when they came. Which is fine, of course, from their point of view, except that there can’t be all that much pasture in the mountains for all those hundreds of thousands of animals; and when the grass has all been eaten, and any hay that our men overlooked while they were there, they’ll have to slaughter most of them before they starve. And yes, they can salt down the carcasses, but even that won’t last forever. Time, you see. They’re almost as short of it as we are.” Psellus stopped talking for a moment, as if thinking about something, then added, “Of course, all this stuff is just what’s occurred to me while I’ve been thinking about it, and like I’ve told you already, I’m hopelessly ignorant about military matters, so I may have got it all completely wrong. But if I’m right — and if I’m not, do please say so — it seems to me that the best use we can make of your army is messing about with their lines of supply. Would you agree?”

  The ambassador hesitated, as though trying to translate what he’d heard into a language he could understand. “Of course,” he said. “It’s the only logical —”

  “Though of course,” Psellus went on, “there’s a bit more to it than that. The last thing we want to do is make them come here before we’ve done what we can to get ready for them. If your soldiers were to drive off all their cattle, it could force them to attack us straightaway, simply because the only reserve of food large enough to feed them and close enough to be any use is what we’ve got here — though I think you ought to know, we’re not exactly well provided for in that department ourselves. Of course, I’ve made arrangements for every ship we can buy or hire to bring in as much food as possible from across the sea — the old country won’t send us soldiers anymore, but they’re still happy to sell us wheat, thank goodness — but it’s all got to come in through Lonazep, and I understand it’s absolute chaos there at the moment. Still, they probably don’t know that, and if they do, it’s not as though they’d have a choice, if we somehow contrived to run off all their livestock. So, we don’t want to leave them starving. We just want to slow them right down, so we’ve got time to build up our walls and get in as much food as we can for a long siege. That’s our best chance, I reckon. If it’s a matter of who starves first, I think we can win. If it comes to fighting, we might as well not bother.” Psellus breathed out (he still wasn’t used to talking uninterrupted for so long), then added, “Do you think I’m on the right lines here, or have I got it all wrong? Really, I’d value your opinion. It’s been such a worry, trying to learn all this very difficult stuff in su
ch a tearing hurry. It’d be such a relief if an expert like yourself can reassure me I haven’t made a dreadful mess of it all.”

  The ambassador looked at him warily for a while, then said, “Can I ask you what you did before all this?”

  “I was a clerk.”

  “A —”

  Psellus nodded. “I was a records clerk for nine years, after I’d finished my apprenticeship. Then I got my transfer from the executive to the administrative grade. I was a junior secretary in the Compliance directorate for six years, and then general secretary for five years after that. And then,” he added sadly, “Ziani Vaatzes came along, and now look at me. Lord of all I survey. I met him once, did you know that? Vaatzes. He’s the key to it all, of course.” Psellus shook his head. “I’m terribly sorry, I’m rambling, and you’re a busy man. Now then, about this army of yours.”

  Later, in the ten minutes or so between appointments (he had his beautiful clock to thank for such an indecent degree of precision; he still loved it for its beauty, but it nagged him like a wife), he wrote down the minutes of his meeting with the ambassador and compared them with the plan he’d prepared beforehand. Well, he thought, now at least we have a few soldiers, thanks to the incredible stupidity of the Cure Doce. He still couldn’t quite believe it. But then, they’d been brought up to believe the Republic was invincible — invincible and gullible. Two mistakes, and they’d probably cost the Cure Doce their existence. Not that it mattered, if they could buy him time to turn the City into one of those extraordinary star shapes he’d seen in the book.

  He put the sheet of minutes on the pile of papers to be filed and spent his last two minutes of solitary peace going over his plan for the meeting with the architects. He would never be able to understand the book, but they might.

  Suddenly, he smiled. Wouldn’t it be a superb piece of irony, he thought, if we actually contrived to get away with it? A million enemies, and we beat them because there’s too many of them to take the city. The sheer perversity of it appealed to him enormously. They lose, because they sent a million men to do the job of fifty thousand; I beat a million men by fighting just one.