by Paul Hoffman
“Why would his sword have anything to do with this?”
“It wasn’t exactly his sword.”
“Meaning?”
“It was really Marshal Materazzi’s sword. The one they call The Edge.” The silence was much deeper this time.
“After I dropped Conn, I jammed it between two stones and snapped it.”
The silence from IdrisPukke was deep and cold. “A particularly mindless act of vandalism, if I may say so. That sword was a work of art.”
“I didn’t have time to admire it while Conn was trying to use it to cut me in two.”
“But the fight was over by then—that’s what you said.”
The truth was that Cale had been regretting his impulse from the moment he snapped the sword.
“Do you want my advice?”
“No.”
“I’ll give it to you anyway. If you’re going to kill someone, then kill them. If you’re going to let them live, then let them live. But don’t make a meal of it either way.”
Cale turned his back on IdrisPukke and lay down.
“While you’re sleeping, dream on this: everything you did, particularly breaking the sword, means you should be in the Doge’s hands. None of it explains why you’re here.”
Half an hour later the sleepless Cale was disturbed by the sound of his cell door being unlocked. He sat up to see Albin and Vipond entering. Vipond looked at him balefully.
“Evening, Lord Vipond,” called out IdrisPukke cheerfully.
“Shut up, IdrisPukke,” replied Vipond, still looking at Cale. “Now tell me—and I want the whole truth, or by God I’ll hand you over to the Doge this minute—tell me exactly what happened; and when you’ve finished, then tell me exactly who you are, and how it was possible that you beat Conn Materazzi and his friends so easily. I mean it—the truth, or I’ll wash my hands of you as quick as boiled asparagus.”
Cale did not, of course, know what asparagus was. The only difficulty was going to be in deciding how much he would have to tell Vipond in order to persuade him he was being completely honest.
“I lost my temper. That’s what people do all the time, isn’t it?”
“Why did you break the sword?”
Cale looked awkward. “That was a stupid thing to do—it was in the heat of a fight. I’ll apologize to the Doge.”
Albin laughed. “Oh well, as long as you’re sorry.”
“Where did you learn to fight so well?” said Vipond.
“At the Sanctuary—all my life, twelve hours a day, six days a week.”
“Are you telling me that Henri and Kleist can fight like that?” This was awkward for Cale.
“No. I mean, they’re trained to fight, but Kleist is a zip . . . a specialist.”
“In what?”
“The spear and the bow.”
“And Henri?”
“Supply, mapmaking, spying.” This was true, but not entirely true.
“So neither of them could have done what you did today?”
“No. I told you.”
“Are there others with the same skill as you in the Sanctuary?”
“No.”
“What,” asked Vipond, “makes you so special?”
Cale paused in order to give the impression he was reluctant to answer.
“When I was nine years old I was good at fighting—but not like now.”
“So what happened?”
“I was in a training fight with a much older boy—no holds barred, real weapons, except the points and edges were blunted. I got the best of him, got him down on the ground—but I was too cocky and he managed to pull me down. Then he hit me on the side of the head with a rock. That was that. The Redeemers pulled him off me, which is why he didn’t beat my brains out. I woke up a couple of weeks later, and two weeks after that I was back to normal except for a dent in my skull.” He reached up and pointed with one finger to the left side of his skull toward the back. Then, again, he stopped as if reluctant to go on.
“But you weren’t like before?”
“No. At first I couldn’t fight as well as before. My timing was all wrong, but after a while whatever happened when he cracked my skull open, I got used to it.”
“Used to what?” asked Albin.
“Every time you strike a blow it means you’ve already decided where it’s going to land on your opponent. And you always give yourself away—where you’re looking, the turn of your body, how you bend to stop from overbalancing as you strike. All of that tells your opponent where you’re going to strike, and if he reads these signals badly then the blow lands; if he reads them well, he blocks it and avoids it.”
“Any fighter, anyone who plays games, knows that,” said Albin. “A good fighter, a good ball player, they can disguise a strike or a throw.”
“They can’t hide it from me, no matter what they do. Not now. I can always read whatever move someone is about to make.”
“Can you show us?” asked Vipond. “Without hurting anyone, I mean.”
“Ask Captain Albin to put his hands behind his back.”
Albin looked uneasy at this, something not lost on the, until now, silently watching IdrisPukke.
“I wouldn’t trust him if I were you, Captain, darling.”
“Shut your mouth, IdrisPukke.” Albin looked closely at Cale and then slowly put his hands behind his back.
“All you need to do is decide which hand to point at me as quickly as you can. You can do whatever you want to make me guess wrong— feint, move your body, try to make me choose the wrong way. It’s up—”
Before Cale had finished his sentence Albin lashed his left hand toward him, only for Cale to catch it in his right hand as gently as if it were a ball thrown by a clumsy three-year-old. Six more times, try as hard as Albin might, the same thing happened.
“My turn,” said Cale as Albin, peeved but mightily impressed, gave in. Cale put his hands behind his back and they began the same process in reverse. Cale struck out six times and six times Albin made the wrong choice.
“I can read what you’re going to do,” said Cale. “The instant you start to move. It’s just a fraction faster than before my injury, but it’s always enough. No one can read what I’m going to do, no matter how quick or experienced they are.”
“And that’s all there is to it?” said Albin. “A bang on the head?”
“No,” replied Cale, angry and not sure why. “All my life I’ve been trained to do one thing. I could have taken Conn Materazzi anyway, good as he is, just not as easily and not four others at the same time. So no, Captain, that’s not all there is to it.”
“How did the Redeemers react when they realized what had happened?”
Cale grunted, a kind of laugh but without amusement.
“Not the Redeemers—one Redeemer: Bosco, the Lord Militant, responsible for all training in the martials.”
“The martials—like our martial arts?”
Cale laughed, this time genuinely amused.
“There’s no art in what I do—ask Conn Materazzi and his pals.” Vipond ignored the mockery. “This Bosco, what did he do when he found out the result of your injury?”
“He tested me for months, against others much older and stronger. He even brought in five veterans, skirmishers from the wars in the Eastern Breaks under sentence of death, he said.” Cale stopped.
“And what happened?”
“Four days in a row he put me in a fight with them. ‘Kill or die,’ was all he said to both of us. Then, after the fourth day, he stopped.”
“Why?”
“He’d seen enough to be sure about me. A fifth time would be an unnecessary risk.” He smiled, not at all pleasantly. “After all, you never know with a fight, do you? There’s always a chance, isn’t there—a sucker blow.”
“And then?”
“Then he tried to copy me.”
“How do you mean?”
“He spent days measuring the wound in my head and matching it with some skulls he�
�d taken from the graveyards. Then he made a clay model. Then he spent six months trying to make it happen again.”
“I don’t follow. How?”
“He took a dozen acolytes the same age and size as me and he tied them down and struck a chisel he’d had made the same shape as my wound—he struck it with a hammer into the same point on their skulls. Harder, then softer, then softer again.”
For a moment no one said anything.
“What happened?” asked Vipond softly.
“What happened was that half of them died pretty much straight-away and the rest—well they weren’t themselves afterwards. Then no one ever saw them again.”
“Taken somewhere else?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And then?”
“Bosco started taking my training sessions himself. He’d never done that before. Sometimes he’d keep me going for ten hours a day—finding any weakness, giving me a good hiding when I failed and then putting it right. Then he disappeared for six months, and when he returned, it was with seven Redeemers who he said were the best at what they did.”
“And that was?”
“Killing people mostly—people with armor, without, with swords, sticks, bare hands. How to organize a mass killing . . .” Cale paused.
“Of prisoners?”
“Not just prisoners—anybody. Two of them were sort of generals—one did tactics—battles, retreats, big set pieces. The other did the bandit stuff: small groups fighting in enemy territory, assassinations, how to terrify the locals into helping you and not your enemy.”
“And what was all this for?”
“You know, I was never stupid enough to ask.”
“Was it to do with the Redeemer wars in the East?”
“I told you, I didn’t ask.”
“You must have formed an opinion.”
“Formed an opinion? Yes. That it was something to do with the wars in the East.”
Vipond looked long and hard at Cale, who stared insolently back. Then it was as if the chancellor had made up his mind about something. He turned to Albin.
“Bring the other two to my house as soon as possible.”
Albin signaled the jailer and then they were gone.
Cale sat down on his bed, and IdrisPukke moved next to the bars.
“Interesting life,” he said to Cale. “You should write a book.”
16
Once Lord Vipond had finished talking to Vague Henri and Kleist, he made his way over to the palazzo of Marshal Materazzi, Doge of Memphis.
The Doge had many advisors because he was a man who loved to consult, to talk things over and at great length. The fact that he seldom took the advice was just a peculiarity of the kind that often afflicts those born into positions of enormous power. The one exception to this rule of talking without listening was Lord Vipond, who was himself immensely powerful by virtue of his own network of spies and informers and a hard-to-defy talent for being right. As the popular rhyme had it:Chancellor Vipond is either reaping or sowing,
And what he doesn’t know it isn’t worth knowing.
It wasn’t much of a rhyme, but it wasn’t far wrong either. Marshal Materazzi was a man of considerable ruthlessness who had come to rule the largest empire the world had ever known. To have maintained control of it without challenge for twenty years required great military prowess, a talent for politics and considerable intelligence. But having had Vipond as his chancellor through nearly all of this, he had never quite managed to understand how Vipond had himself become almost as powerful. One day, about three years into his reign, he began to realize, to his horror, that Vipond had become indispensable. At first he became deeply hostile to Vipond—such a thing was intolerable and left him exposed to assassination or, even worse, to his becoming some sort of puppet. But Vipond had made it clear to the Marshal that he would always be a loyal servant as long as he did not interfere with his role as chancellor or continue to be a damned nuisance. Their relationship since then had been not uneasy exactly, but, as the peasants around Memphis say, more frit.
Shown into Materazzi’s presence, Vipond nodded and was invited to sit.
“How are you feeling, Vipond?”
“Very well, my lord. And yourself ?”
“Oh, fine.”
There was an awkward pause; awkward for the Marshal because Vipond simply sat there smiling benevolently.
“I understand you met with the Embassy from the Norwegians today.”
“Indeed.”
One of the border races conquered by Materazzi more than fifteen years before, the Norwegians had enthusiastically seized upon the advantages offered by occupation—roads, centrally heated palazzos and luxurious imports—without abandoning their ferocious appetite for fighting. Five years ago the now war-weary Marshal, increasingly irritated by the expense of maintaining his vast empire, had decided that it should expand no more. The Norwegians, while touchingly loyal to their conqueror, were always stirring up trouble and trying to expand their own territory northward whenever they could and despite repeated orders to do no such thing. Endlessly devious, the Norwegians provoked their neighbors and generally used every trick they could to claim they were being attacked and that they had no choice but to protect themselves by invading their aggressors. As Vipond well knew, these attacks were in reality made by Norwegian soldiers disguised as the forces of such of their neighbors as they were keen on plundering.
“What did they have to say for themselves?”
“Oh,” replied Vipond, “the usual claim to be the victims—peaceloving victims, merely defending themselves and the empire of which they are such loyal subjects.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told them that I wasn’t born yesterday and if they didn’t return their army to barracks, we might consider offering them independence.”
“And how did they take that?”
“All six of them went white with horror and promised the army would withdraw within the week.”
Materazzi looked carefully at Vipond.
“Perhaps we should offer them independence anyway, and to a fair few others as well. The cost of governing and policing is bloody ravenous. More than we get in taxes, am I right?”
“Very nearly—but then you’d have to either reduce our army and have a great many bad-tempered soldiers wandering about the place looking for mischief, or pay for them yourself.”
Materazzi grunted.
“Between the devil and a hard place.”
“Quite so, my lord. But of course, if you’d like me to do a proper study . . .”
“Why did you take the boy who broke my sword?”
These sudden changes of tack were an old tactic of the Marshal’s to unsettle anyone who annoyed him.
“I am responsible for security in the city.”
“You’re responsible for matters dealing with sedition—you’re not a policeman. This is nothing to do with you. He broke my sword—it’s priceless—and he seriously wounded my nephew and the sons of four members of the court. They want his blood and, I’ll tell you this for nothing, so do I.”
Vipond looked thoughtful.
“It may be possible to repair The Edge.”
“You don’t know anything about it. Don’t pretend you do.”
“Indeed not—but I know a man who does. Prefect Walter Gurney has returned from his embassy in Riben.”
“Why hasn’t he reported to me?”
“He is unwell—not likely to last the year, I’d say.”
“What’s it got to do with my sword?”
“Gurney’s report included a long section on the Ribens’ mastery of metal. He says that he has never seen such work. I talked to him briefly, and he said that if The Edge could be repaired, the Riben sword makers could be the ones to do it.” He paused. “This would, of course, be under my guarantee of its safety and at my expense.”
“Why?” asked Materazzi. “What’s this boy to you that you’d go to all this t
rouble and cost?”
“In your perfectly understandable annoyance at what has happened to a prized possession and the injuries to your nephew, you have, if I may be frank, overlooked the fact that a boy of fourteen managed to beat the living daylights out of five of the Materazzi’s most promising soldiers, including one who’s supposed to be the greatest in a generation. This isn’t a matter of concern for you?”
“All the more reason to get rid of him.”
“You’re not interested in how he acquired his extraordinary talent?”
“How, then?”
“This young man, Cale, was trained by the Redeemers at the Sanctuary.”
“They’ve never given us any problems.”
“Not in the past—but what this boy tells me is that in the last seven years there’s been a great change in the life and training at the Sanctuary. They are training more soldiers, and more ruthlessly.”
“You’re afraid they’re going to attack us? They’d be very foolish if they did.”
“Firstly, it is my duty to be afraid of such things. Secondly, how many kings and emperors thought the same about you thirty years ago?”
Materazzi sighed, irritated and uncomfortable: a bloodthirsty holy terror while he was building his great empire, the truth was that in ten years of peace he had lost his appetite for war. The ruthless soldier who was once a byword for rapacious conquest had became a man in late middle age who wanted a quiet life where he would never have to be freezing cold one week, dying of thirst the next, or dreading, as he once had drunkenly admitted to Vipond, having his guts waved about on a billhook by some spavined peasant who managed to get in a lucky blow. He had never confessed as much to anyone, but his real distaste for war had set in after a winter spent starving in the ice fields of Stetl, where he had been reduced to eating the remains of his much-loved regimental sergeant major.
“So, what’s your plan? I’m sure you have one—and it had better include some way of getting my brother off my back about Conn.”
Vipond put a letter on the table. It was from Conn Materazzi. The Marshal opened it and began reading. When he finished, he put the letter back on the table.
“Conn Materazzi has many admirable qualities; I didn’t realize a willingness to be the bigger man was one of them.”