Shadow s-1

by K. J. Parker

  'Scout around in the back there,' he said, 'see what you can find in the way of clothes and stuff. We've got to pretend we're staff officers or messengers or imperial agents, something like that, and right now we're unmistakably scruffy monks.'

  A little later, the brother reported back. 'There's clothes in here all right,' he said, 'but I don't think they'll really be all that suitable for what you've got in mind. This stuff is weird.'

  He held a sample up for Monach to see: a black velvet robe embroidered with glass thread, further decorated with paste gemstones and sequins forming mystic-looking symbols. 'Bloody hell,' Monach sighed, remembering who the cart had formerly belonged to. 'That's no use, then, unless one of you jokers feels up to impersonating a god.'

  The monk frowned. 'Do gods wear this sort of thing, then?' he asked. 'I'd have credited them with better taste, personally.'

  Monach laughed. 'Don't you believe it,' he said. 'Not any gods I've ever come across, anyway. Well, if we can't be gods, we'll just have to be spies. All comes down to the same thing in the long run.'

  The sword-monks looked at each other but didn't say anything, and the cart rolled up to the town gate. A bored-looking halberdier waved them through-just as well, Monach realised; his imagination wasn't up to the task of concocting a plausible explanation for a cartload of illegal divine vestments.

  At least finding the prefecture wasn't a problem. It was where it ought to be, in the old, thick-walled tower overlooking the road, at the weakest point in the town's natural defences. A clerk told them the prefect wasn't there; he was out with the garrison on exercises, and hadn't said when he was likely to be back. No, he couldn't see the duty officer, the duty officer was a busy man… Monach handed him the pass, signed by Father Abbot and wearing the Great Seal of the order. Suddenly, the duty officer's schedule turned out to be far less hectic than the clerk had first believed.

  'I'm sorry,' the duty officer said, plainly terrified at the thought of four sword-monks in the same town as himself, let alone the same small half-circular room at the top of the tower. 'I really wish I could help, but I can't, I've got specific orders not to release the general's itinerary to anybody without-'

  'You idiot,' Monach growled. 'How many times have I got to explain this before it seeps through the cracks in your brain? They're going to kill the general. They're going to ambush him somewhere on the road, cut his head off and take it to Feron Amathy in a jar of spiced honey, unless you stop fooling around and tell me which road he's going by, so we can get to him, warn him and fight off this ambush. Do you understand? If you don't give me that itinerary, the general is going to die, and it'll all be your fault.'

  The duty officer looked as if the whole town had just been buried by a landslide and he was the sole survivor, the man who'd set it all off by throwing a pebble at the side of the cliff face. 'Well, I suppose it'll be all right,' he said at last, 'since you're religious, after all; I mean, if you can't trust a priest, it'd be a pretty poor show.' He pulled a brass tube out of the jumble on his desk and fished out a roll of thin, crisp paper. 'All right,' he said. 'I don't know much, no reason anybody should tell me, after all, but before he left the prefect got this.' He unrolled the paper, which proved to be a map. 'He had orders from Cronan to meet him with the garrison at this village here, Cric. The orders said that Cronan would be coming up the north-west road from Lesar's Bridge-that's down here, see, that squiggle; you can just make it out if you look closely. And here's the road-well, it isn't actually marked on this map, but it follows the line of this little river here; if you find the river, you'll find the road.' An unpleasant thought struck him, and his face changed. 'What if you're too late and they've already ambushed him? God, that'd be terrible.'

  Monach requisitioned the map, together with another one that had rather more places and things marked on it, and left the tower as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself. 'Right,' he said, as they clambered back into the cart, 'here's what we'll do. You four, find whatever passes for a horsefair in this town, get yourselves four horses and cut up across the top here.' He prodded the map. 'If you get a move on and don't stop to admire the scenery, you might just catch up with him. I'll head for Cric and see what's happening there. If he's already arrived, of course-well, we'll skin that goat when we get to it.'

  The monks nodded agreement. 'Just one thing,' one of them asked. 'Can you give us a few more details? I mean, all we really know about what's involved is what you told the man back there; someone's going to try and kill General Cronan, we've got to stop them-'

  'What?' Monach looked up. 'No, you've got that completely wrong. Didn't anybody tell you?'

  The monk looked puzzled. 'We assumed-'

  'Don't. Our orders are to kill General Cronan. Got that?'

  There was a moment of complete silence. 'Understood,' the monk said. 'Any other considerations?'

  'You aren't monks, you don't belong to the order, you've probably never even heard of the order. Try not to get captured or killed if you can avoid it. That's it.'

  'Understood,' the monk repeated, and it was as if his former impression, his misunderstanding of the object of the mission, had never existed. 'We'll need some money for the horses.'

  Monach searched in his sleeve and took out a small cloth bag. 'Twenty gross-quarters,' he said. 'While you're at it-this is a long shot, so don't waste too much time on it-see if you can lay your hands on at least one raider backsabre. You see them in markets sometimes. If you can get one, use it for the kill. A little confusion never hurt anybody.' He looked at each of the monks in turn. 'Does anybody have a problem with any of that?' he asked.

  'Not really,' replied one of the monks, a newly ordained brother tutor. 'It's just that I can't help wondering what all this has got to do with religion.'

  Of course, Monach knew the answer to that, and recited it to himself several times as he drove the cart north towards Cric. In its simplest form:

  1. The order is the world's most important centre for the preservation, study, teaching and development of doctrine; therefore 2. The survival of the order is essential to religion; therefore 3. Any steps taken to preserve, protect or strengthen the order are by definition beneficial to the order and acts of grace.

  Simple. Even second-year novices could grasp the logic. As for 'steps taken to preserve, protect or strengthen', the only definition of the phrase that a brother tutor needed to know was 'whatever a superior officer tells you to do', the argument being that if the superior cleric was in error and the mission turns out not to qualify as an act of grace, the brother carrying out his instructions nevertheless enjoys as much grace and absolution as if the mission had been legitimate. Without a provision like that, the work of the order simply couldn't get done; you'd have brothers and brother tutors and canons and possibly even novices questioning every instruction they were given, from kill the general down to it's your turn to bale out the latrines on the grounds of imperfect doctrine and heresy. Religion in the empire would collapse inside a year.

  In which case, why did his mind keep returning to the question, like a child picking at a scab?

  It was the fault of these confoundedly slow carthorses, giving him too much leisure to worry away at things he shouldn't even be thinking about. Religion, after all, was something quite specific and concrete as far as he was concerned. Religion was the ultimate grace expressed in the form of the perfect draw, in which there is no delay whatever between the infringement of the circle and the cut; the draw that is no draw, because it's too fast to be perceived with the senses and therefore by any reasonable criteria doesn't exist.

  (So too with the gods; the gods are beings so perfect that they can't be perceived with the senses and can therefore only exist inside the grace of impossible perfection; the eye can't see everything at once, the ear can't hear every voice simultaneously, the body can't be everywhere at the same time; accordingly, the all-seeing, all-hearing, omnipresent must be divine, as invisibly real as the city just ou
t of sight over the horizon, or land that can't be seen from the crow's nest; the faster the draw, the nearer to God, and to be impossibly close to God is to be God. Nothing could be more straightforward than that.)

  Monach frowned. He'd made that speech to five years' intakes of novices, and it had made sense even to them, implying that it had to be true. Now, though, it made him think about the god in the cart, what he'd heard from Allectus, and the two dead bodies in the wood. What is perfection, he asked himself, but the elimination of everything that isn't the true essence, the fluxing off and purging away of all impurities from the meniscus of the molten metal (metal that's lost its memory in the fire; the divine Poldarn, who doesn't know he's a god)? To become perfect, to become God, you must eliminate thought, fear, memory, anything and everything that lies between the sheathed and the unsheathed sword And instead, here he was out in the world, sitting in a cart behind four of the slowest horses in the empire, on his way to murder a general. Good question: what did all this have to do with religion? Except that instinctive, unthinking obedience is grace, just as much as the instinctive, unthinking draw. The hand doesn't need to know why the enemy has violated the circle, or where the merits of the quarrel lie, and neither does the sword-monk. God draws us, and we cut.

  One good thing about these speculations was that they kept his mind occupied all the way to Cric.

  At first glance he didn't recognise the place. For one thing it was full of soldiers. There were tents everywhere, and spear stacks and carts and shovels and pickaxes and mattocks leaning against the sides of half-finished trenches. There were portable forges for the farriers and cutlers and armourers; a stack of cordwood taller than any of the houses; rafts of posts, piles and rails from which the carpenters were building a corral for the horses; a big round tent that didn't need a sign or board outside-the smell alone announced that it was the field kitchen. Above all there were men, each of them busy with some task or other. They made the place look like a city. A soldier came up and asked who he was and what he was doing there, but that was all right, because he'd prepared an identity. He told the soldier some name or other, ignored the rest of the question and asked if the general had arrived yet.

  'Why do you want to know that?' the soldier asked. He had an accent that Monach couldn't quite place.

  'None of your business,' Monach said. 'Is he here or isn't he?'

  The soldier shook his head. 'He's expected,' he added. 'Any time now, in fact. What's it to you?'

  Monach pulled a face. 'All right,' he said, 'which direction is he coming from? I'd better go out to meet him, this can't wait.'

  'Messenger, are you?' Monach didn't answer that. All right, please yourself,' the soldier went on. 'He ought to be coming in up the east road.'

  Monach knew that already, of course. Still, it did no harm to verify. 'East road,' he muttered, 'that figures. Right, thank you, I'd better get moving.'

  An hour up the road, he was overtaken by a horseman riding dangerously fast on the sloppy, stony road. It turned out to be one of the sword-monks he'd sent after Cronan.

  He pulled up and waited for the monk to come back and talk to him. 'What the hell are you doing here?' he asked him.

  The monk was grey with exhaustion. 'Came back to find you,' he said. 'Bad information. Cronan wasn't coming this way after all. Wild-goose chase.'

  Monach scowled. 'Bloody hell,' he groaned. 'Where did you get that from?'

  'Courier,' the monk replied. 'Carrying a letter under Chaplain Cleapho's personal seal, telling Cronan to sit tight at the Faith and Fortitude till he's told otherwise. Here,' he added, pulling a rolled-up page from his pocket; he tried to hand it down and dropped it instead. Monach retrieved it and read it quickly.

  'Buggery,' he said. 'That screws up everything. Where did you find this courier, then?'

  The monk closed his eyes, struggling to find the words. 'Back along,' he said, 'maybe an hour up the road from here. Courier said he was coming down from Toizen.'

  'What? Toizen's on the north coast. What in hell's name is Cleapho doing all the way up there?'

  The monk had just enough strength to shrug his shoulders. Monach shook his head. 'I'm not sure about this,' he said. 'Yes, that looks like Cleapho's seal, and I've seen it once or twice before, but it could be a good fake. Then again, why would anybody want to fake a message like that? If Cronan's not at the Faith and Fortitude, he'll know that a letter telling him to stay there must be phoney. I don't get this at all.'

  The monk sighed impatiently. 'Well, he's not where you said he'd be. We've been up and down this road, no sign of him. Nobody's seen anything like a troop of cavalry, either. So, that letter may or may not be bad information; what you got from the captain in Shance definitely was. Go figure.'

  Monach thought for a moment. 'All right,' he said. 'Where's this courier now?'

  'Ah.' The monk grinned. 'That's more a matter of theology than geography.'

  'You mean you killed him?'

  'Wouldn't hold still,' the monk explained. 'It was that or let him get away.'

  Monach shook his head. 'Just for once,' he said, 'wouldn't it be nice if something turned out the way it's supposed to? All right, not your fault. Where are the others?'

  'Heading for the Faith and Fortitude,' the monk replied, 'Wherever the hell that might be. Brother Aslem reckoned he knows where it is.'

  'Halfway between Josequin and Selce,' Monach said. 'Please, tell me that's where they're headed.'

  'I think so. Doesn't mean a lot to me, because I haven't a clue where Selce is, either, but I'm fairly sure that's what Aslem said.'

  Monach sighed. 'That's something, I suppose,' he said. 'All right, here's what I want you to do.' He clicked his tongue. 'First,' he said, 'find a tree or a bush or something and rest; I'd say come with me back to the camp at Cric, but I don't think you'll make it that far in the state you're in. When you're feeling better, I want you to head back to Shance, find that little snot of a duty officer and put the fear of the gods into him-tell him he's a traitor, deliberately misleading us, put it on thick as you can, because I need to know where this CO got his false orders from; someone's playing games with someone else, and if we can find out who, we might stand a chance of figuring all this out. When you've done that, get back here to Cric; if I'm not there, you can bet I'll be at the Faith and Fortitude. If I'm not, get yourself back to Deymeson and tell them there's something very screwy going on, and to make ready for an attack, just in case. I don't think either Cronan or Tazencius has tumbled to what we're up to,' he added, as a look of fear crossed the monk's face. 'I certainly can't think of any way they could've found out, and we haven't actually done anything yet, so it couldn't be educated guesswork; still, better safe than sorry, and if all this is deliberately to mislead us, somebody must know what we're up to and they may just possibly consider a direct attack on the order. Not worth the risk. You got that?'

  'I think so,' the monk replied, yawning hugely. 'Sorry,' he added. 'And you're right. I've got to stop for a rest, before I fall off and break my silly neck.'

  Monach left him to it, turned the cart round and headed back to Cric. It was just his rotten luck, he reflected, to find himself in the middle of a situation that was far too complicated for him to manage, with responsibility for the survival of the order, possibly the empire as well, and nobody to tell him what to do or how to do it. All his life he'd been taught not to think for himself-better still, not to think, just draw and cut, guided by faith and instinct. All his life he'd been warned that the overall view, the big picture was not for the likes of him, at least not until he'd achieved enlightenment and been promoted to Father. All his life, he'd been trained to believe in the value of instinct and ignorance, two qualities which weren't likely to get him very far in his present situation. No wonder that he felt such a strong affinity with the divine Poldarn, harbinger of confusion, the god who didn't know he was a god.

  A bizarre thought occurred to him, and he laughed out loud. Maybe he was Pol
darn.

  The more he thought about it, the more obvious it became. Here he was, driving through the northern villages in a cart, liable at any moment to make a mistake that would plunge the empire into war, bring about the destruction of the order (which would mean the end of religion, since it was an article of faith in the order that nobody else knew the most fundamental bases of doctrine) and quite possibly open the gates to the enemy incarnate, the raiders-how they fitted into the picture he wasn't sure; but then again, if he was Poldarn, that was to be expected; that they were involved in some way he was absolutely certain.

  It started to rain, but he hardly noticed. Of course; that solved everything. Had Father Tutor known who he really was? Of course; Father Tutor knew everything, and that was why he'd chosen him for the mission, sent him to find out the truth about rumours of his own (false) appearances. Unfortunately, he'd been too stupid to make the obvious connections at the time, and Father Tutor had died before he'd had a chance to explain-or perhaps it was essential that Poldarn should remain ignorant of his true identity until the end of the world had been successfully encompassed-in which case something had gone wrong, he'd failed; had Father Tutor sent him on the mission on purpose to expose him to the truth and therefore make the end of the world impossible? Just the sort of thing you'd expect a father tutor of the order to do-frustrate destiny, save the world from its appointed doom. Had he always been Poldarn, he wondered, or was divinity something that happened to you later in life, like puberty or baldness; was it something you were chosen for, on merit, like the priesthood? If so, what had he done to deserve it? Had he been chosen out of all the world because he was the only man alive stupid enough to become a god and not realise it? Above all, what ought he to do next? As Poldarn, it was his duty to bring about the end of the world, but Father Abbot had ordered him to kill Cronan because that was the only thing that could save the world from ending. Which took precedence, his duty as a god or the direct orders of his superior officer? Or had Father Abbot sent him to kill Cronan because killing Cronan was the event that would bring about the end of the world-which would mean that Father Abbot had deliberately misled him; until recently, that would have been inconceivable, but now he knew that Father Abbot fornicated with loose women in the dead of night, he had to admit it was possible.