Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Having realised he was still alive, Temrai opened his eyes and yelled. After a minute or so, his dead horse was pulled off him and he was lifted up out of the water. It occurred to him that he was shaking like a man having a fit, but there was nothing he could do about it.

‘What happened?’ he gasped. ‘I thought we’d won.’

‘We have,’ replied the man who was holding his right arm. ‘They’ve got away from us, and they’re running for it. Are you all right?’

Temrai nodded. ‘What happened?’ he repeated. ‘Everything went like we wanted it to, and then the next minute they were all over us.’ He shuddered, remembering the sudden terror that had paralysed him as the other man, the one who’d started it all, burst out through a solid wall of Temrai’s guard and came straight at him, his face so completely calm, almost serene, that for a moment Temrai had taken him for Death itself.

He remembered how there had been no time at all – the man was on him, his sword-arm through with the thrust before Temrai could even make up his mind what to do, but it had all gone so slowly, so that he’d had time to think all sorts of things before the other man’s sword-tip came out through the other side of his horse’s neck, and he’d felt both of them gradually toppling over into the water. He remembered the extraordinary feeling of calm and resignation after that – oh, well, here goes, that was that – as he waited to hit the stony bed of the ford, feel the hooves of the oncoming enemy landing on his face and chest-And here he was, apparently alive and not hurting, nothing broken, no blood he could definitely say was his own. Just like Jurrai had said: a mess…

‘Where’s Jurrai?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

‘Didn’t make it,’ the man replied. ‘Same man as got you got him. I think he was trying to save you-’

Nice thought, Temrai said to himself, but I was there, remember? He simply didn’t know what hit him, same as me. So Jurrai’s dead. Well, we’ll have to deal with that later. Dammit, the battle isn’t even over yet, I ought to be doing something-

‘Are they safely away from the camp?’ he asked.

The man nodded. ‘Far as I can see. They lit out for the upper ford; maybe we’ll catch them there, I don’t know. Do you want to stay here talking in the middle of the river or shall we move on?’

Temrai allowed himself to be frogmarched onto dry land. They had to step over bodies – some dead, rather more still alive but probably past saving. That was a bad thing; all these men in the most desperate moment of their lives, scrabbling with their hands for help because they’re too weak to cry out, their voices won’t work any more, and we step over them as if they were cowshit in the road. ‘Get a message through, call it all off.’ Temrai’s voice was harsh, as if he was attributing blame. ‘I want everybody back to the camp, and then let’s see about clearing this lot up.’

The man who’d hit him – hadn’t he seen that face before? Quite possible; after all, it as less than six months ago that he’d been working in the city arsenal, perhaps some of these swords that were lying discarded on the grass were ones he’d made himself. Maybe even the one that had killed Jurrai, and nearly done for him. That’d be an amusing coincidence; but all that seemed so long ago and far away as to be part of some dream-time, and he was as different now as the moth is from the caterpillar. The hell with all that, too. Right now, there was work to be done.

Someone brought him a fresh horse – oh, hell, Thunder’s dead, my poor old friend, and I didn’t even think of that until now; I used to cry myself to sleep about losing a horse when I was a kid – and he hauled himself up into the saddle, suddenly aware of bruises, wrenched muscles, traumatised and shredded skin where he’d been ground against the stony bed of the ford. As he looked round he was subconsciously collecting faces, every face recognised a further piece of salvage, one less dagger in his conscience when the time came for him to face up to what he’d deliberately set in motion. But there wasn’t time for all that now; too much to organise, so many things to be sorted out before he could say this day was over.

‘Kossanai.’ The Chief Engineer was a sorry sight; soaked to the skin, one of the shoulder straps of his boiled-leather breastplate flapping loose and a raw cut underneath. But he was a reliable man and still on his feet; someone else could do some work for a change. ‘Get yourself over to the higher ford, make sure we’re pulling out and nobody’s gone dashing off in pursuit. Tell whoever’s in charge up there I need those men down here now.’ Kossanai nodded, wearily hauled himself into the saddle. ‘Stilchai, you’re in charge of picking up the wounded. Get hold of Nimren, tell her to organise the healers. And put someone in charge of prisoners. The sooner they’re rounded up the better, just in case there’s any that don’t know the battle’s over yet. Maltai, get some scouts out and let’s know for sure where everybody is instead of guessing.’

It was some time before the scouts came back. The enemy were long gone; they’d doubled back behind the ridge and disappeared downriver, presumably heading for the lower crossing. Nobody had shown the slightest inclination to chase after them.

Casualty figures gradually came in; for the enemy, nine hundred killed and a further three hundred and fifty captured, half of them cut up to a greater or lesser extent, as against the clan’s losses, currently standing at a hundred and seven dead and seventy-odd wounded, twenty or so seriously. It was, by any standards, a glorious victory; and if it should have been more glorious still as regards the body count, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to dwell on that. On the contrary; for the first time in living memory, the clan had taken on the dreaded riders from the city and seen them off in no uncertain terms. Men and women whose mothers had terrified them into obedience with the threat of Maxen and his raiders had seen those same bogeymen pinned down and surrounded, caught in a pitfall and tethered for the slaughter. The fact that somehow they’d managed to slip away before their throats were actually cut was something the clan could afford to overlook; and besides, the more survivors who went home to tell the tale, the greater the panic and confusion of their enemies. A wholesale slaughter would only have served to stiffen their resolve, and made the rest of the job that much harder. As for Temrai; well, they’d always known he had the right stuff, hadn’t they? It was good to know they’d been right all along, but it came as no surprise.

(There was also the somewhat discordant note struck by the families and friends of the hundred and seven dead, and the rather ungrateful attitude of the badly injured, who would rather have had their legs and hands back than all the generous praise of a grateful nation; Temrai wondered if he had time to deal with all that yet, and decided it would have to wait until the burial details had reported in and the horses had been seen to.)

The final task of the day was to finish dismantling the last seven trebuchets, so as not to fall too badly behind schedule. There were any number of willing volunteers, most of whom got under the engineers’ feet and made the job take half as long again as it should have done. Once that was out of the way, everybody was at liberty to go back to their tents and campfires; except for Temrai and his heads of department, who had the long and tedious business of thinking the whole thing through and deciding what had to be done about it.

‘They may try again,’ Uncle Anakai said, ‘but I doubt it. Not immediately, anyway. They’ll be too busy deciding whose fault it was, if I know the city people.’

He was talking slowly because of the ball of cotton waste pressed to the side of his face; an arrow had slit his cheek open for three inches directly in line with his mouth. It had almost certainly been friendly fire, since the enemy had loosed off relatively few arrows.

‘Let’s assume they don’t,’ Ceuscai replied. ‘I had a good look at them, after all. They didn’t know what hit ’em.’ He shook his head, as if unable to accept what he’d seen. ‘That can’t be their real army,’ he went on. ‘For all we know, it could just have been some privateer outfit; you know, if the Emperor won’t do anything about it, we will. I can’t believe the city’s main field army’s as easy to beat as that lot was.’

Ceuscai was reasonably undamaged; slightly stiff in one knee after an awkward fall from his horse (he’d led the ambush party at the higher ford; his misadventure had come about when he was caught in the press of his own men surging forward to massacre the encircled enemy.)

Temrai grunted in agreement, nodded slightly. ‘I think you may well be right on the first count,’ he said, ‘not so sure about the second. Whether or not that was their proper army, I reckon we’ve got to expect some sort of attempt on the engines when we unload them at the final camp downstream. That’s what I would do; strike hard and close to home. We can’t rely on that, however. From now on we’ll have to work on the principle that they could come at us at any time, which’ll mean having to take people away from making and moving the engines and put them on escort duty. That’ll slow us down, and won’t that make us still more vulnerable?’

‘What about a punitive expedition?’ Shandren interrupted. ‘Think about it. They’ve just been badly beaten in the field, for almost the first time ever. Isn’t it likely they’ll want to set the record straight, if only for the sake of their own self-image? They’ll need to do something to restore morale.’

Anakai shook his head. ‘Far more likely to take it out on their own people,’ he said. ‘Punishing the General’ll make it so they can feel good about themselves again, and they won’t have to risk a second defeat. No, I think that if they want to intercept the engines, they’re most likely to do it while they’re on the water. There’s several places where the river’s pretty wide between here and the final camp, and they know how we feel about boats. If they launch a few barges full of soldiers, they could sink the rafts or tow them off without ever coming within bowshot. We’d pursue along the bank, and either fall into an ambush or leave the construction camp exposed for a hit-and-run attack. Thinking about it, that was the obvious thing to have done instead of what they actually did; more support for your theory, Ceuscai, about this lot not being the regular army.’

‘I don’t think there is a regular army,’ Temrai put in. ‘I’ve said this before and nobody’s paid any attention.’ He shifted his weight off his painful side before continuing. ‘There’s a few permanent guards on the walls, and a part-time levy who’re supposed to be trained men and aren’t. As far as most of them are concerned, the part-timers treat their training allowance as a sort of state handout to the needy and feckless, and the rest of them look on it as a sort of drinking club. Oh, I’m not saying they won’t do their best when the walls are actually under attack; I just don’t see them being used as a field army away from the city. It’d be lunacy, and they know it.’

‘Maybe,’ Ceuscai conceded. ‘But so was this.’

The glow of the fire lit up the ring of faces; twelve people who knew each other well, talking calmly and rationally about something that might well have been the end of the world. There were also places where someone should have been, but wasn’t; Jurrai as leader of the horse archers, Pegtai and Sorutai as members of the chief’s household – I broke Sorutai’s flute when we were children, and now I’ll never be able to make it up to him; he doted on that flute, and I broke it because I was jealous. Why did I do that? – but the gaps could be filled with others just as good, it was in the order of business for tonight’s meeting, together with formal thanks to the gods for letting our losses be so light. Had Sasurai ever had to do this, Temrai wondered, carry on as if nothing had happened, accept a loss because it couldn’t be helped and things might have been a whole lot worse? And what were his friends in the city thinking, as the first reports came in? Nine hundred empty beds in the city tonight; would they be filled so easily, and without the comforting reassurance of victory to let the rest of them declare that it had all been worthwhile? To die for one’s people is bad enough; to die for one’s people and lose as well must be a dreadful thing.

‘Let’s sum up then, shall we?’ Temrai said, swallowing a yawn. ‘We don’t think they’ll attack again, or at least not for a while, but it’d still be sensible to have a mobile reserve just in case. I’m not sure that’s quite the answer; a reserve that’s too small to make any difference is worse than no reserve at all, because it’s taking people away from the jobs they should be doing. My own view is that they’re not going to risk another humiliation by attacking us here, but they might have a go at the camp downstream, simply because it’s nearer, it’s got less people to defend it and – let’s face it – that’s where all the finished engines are, or will be soon enough. So I’ve decided that we’ll have a fairly strong force down at the bottom camp, which can serve both as a guard and an early-warning post to let us know if a substantial army’s on its way here. Ceuscai, I’d like you to think it over tonight and let me know tomorrow what you’ll want by way of men and supplies; once I know what you’re taking down there, I’ll be able to reassign people here to cover.’ He yawned again and stretched, wincing as his stiffening muscles protested. ‘I think that covers it, don’t you? Right, next, we’ve got vacancies on this council to fill. Nominations, please.’

Under any other circumstances there would have been a certain amount of debate, politicking, trading favours and remembering obligations; but it was too late in too overwhelming a day for anybody to have the patience or the stamina to play games. In consequence, the nominations were sensible and the debate mercifully short; even so, Uncle Anakai’s head was starting to nod forward by the time Temrai declared his decision, and the pad of bloodsoaked cotton fell from Anakai’s hand onto the rug, revealing the full ugliness of the wound, the crudeness of the chewed-sinew suture it had hastily been sewn up with. My fault again, Temrai reflected; all the sinew they’d normally have used had been requisitioned by the bowmakers for strings and back-facings, so the healers had to unwrap old stuff from tools and furniture and chomp it soft in their mouths in order to stitch up wounds.

That’s something else we’ll have to deal with; we can’t go into battle again with nothing to patch the casualties up with. He thought for a moment about the word casualties; a nice technical term, suitable for military use. You didn’t talk about people slashed open and bleeding, people with arms and legs missing, people with holes in them or scars that made their own children frightened of them; you said casualties, and after a while you talked about acceptable losses and then expendable forces, and pretty soon it all became a game of chess, observed from the top of a hill, part of a sequence of games, a tournament. And then you wonder why your friends don’t talk to you the same way any more, and after that you start worrying about conspiracies and treason; and after that, the chances are you’ll really have conspiracies and treason to worry about. And to think; there’s people who actually want this job. Crazier still; there are places where people who want this sort of job are allowed to do it.

Which is how wars start; or, at least, how they’re caused.

‘Next on the agenda,’ he heard himself saying, ‘is the formal vote of thanks to the gods for keeping our casualties down to an acceptable level. Uncle, if you’d care to do the honours.’

Loredan didn’t mind. If anything, he was glad of the peace and quiet, relieved to be on his own. He stretched out, hands behind his head, legs extended, feet crossed. The stone bench was cold, but not unbearably so. I could get to like this, he said to himself.

If he’d felt it was unjust, that he didn’t deserve to be here, it’d be a different matter. As it was, what had the Prefect called it? Culpable negligence, dereliction of duty, gross errors of judgement; he couldn’t really argue with that. A thousand men dead or in the hands of the enemy, because he’d been too busy sulking to notice that they were walking into a trap. Culpable negligence was putting it mildly; it couldn’t have been more obvious if they’d cut the word TRAP in eight-foot letters in the chalk. If Maxen was alive, he’d have pulled my lungs out for what I’ve done.

Yes, but Maxen was dead. Hence all this.

Held pending an immediate inquiry, the Prefect had said. Loredan hoped it wouldn’t be too immediate. A week or two here in the quiet and the dark would do him the world of good, let him get rid of the horrors before he had to go out and explain himself to people. Right now, a stone bed in a cell under the council chamber was infinitely preferable to getting yelled at in the chapter house; he could easily imagine the panic inside and the hysteria outside, the mobs baying for someone’s blood, rioting down at the docks as people fought for berths on outgoing ships, a wonderful pretext for another night of looting and breaking down the doors of unpopular neighbours.

As to what happened after that, he couldn’t really summon up the energy to worry about it. Maybe he’d be put to death, here in his cell or in some quiet guardroom on the wall. That kind of death he could accept; somehow it wasn’t nearly as depressing as the thought of dying in the courtroom had been, when he’d been facing the prospect of fighting Alvise for the greater glory of the charcoal people. That would have made very little sense, his last dying thought would have been, Gods, how stupid. This way? Well, fair enough, in context. He owed a death to the people of the plains. This way he’d been able to get four-fifths of the army home and still pay off his debt to the enemy.

Someone walked past in the corridor outside; heavy boots, a jangle of metal, keys probably. Were there other prisoners down here, or was he the only one? Other enemies of the state, out of sight and mind? He wondered what they’d done. You had to be pretty fair-average wicked to end up in the cells; mere piracy, rape or murder weren’t enough to get you free board and lodging in this town.

Fancy there being no Emperor, he said to himself, still not quite able to believe what he’d heard. The Prefect had been very matter-of-fact about it, as if he’d been talking about the tooth fairy or the headache elves, things you grew out of believing in when you turned seven. According to the Prefect, there hadn’t been an Emperor for the whole of Loredan’s lifetime – but didn’t we always pick flowers for his garland on his birthday when we were kids? What did they do with all those hundreds of flowery garlands that got handed in with such ceremony at the upper-city gate each year? Disturbing, somehow, to think of all that love going to waste, like water draining into sand.

When Callelogus IV died with no heirs and the succession stood to be disputed between three distant cousins, foreign princes who couldn’t speak the language and whose table manners alone would have rendered them entirely unacceptable to the city, it occurred to the City Prefect and his cronies that if the people weren’t told the Emperor was dead, then nobody would know, and what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them. Since then, the upper city had been empty except for a few caretakers and some officials who had offices there; Callelogus had lived to be ninety-six, and on his death the diadem passed to an entirely made-up nephew, the son of a wholly fictitious sister who’d supposedly been married off to an unknown princeling in a far-distant land just long enough ago that nobody could be expected to remember it happening. Meanwhile, the government of the city stayed in the hands of the people whose trade was governing cities, quietly and piecemeal; secretaries of state, officials, middle-city men who knew how to repair roads and negotiate trade agreements. The more Loredan thought about it, the more he favoured it as a system of government. They had, after all, done a good job.

Up till now, at least.

Gods, Loredan thought, what if the city is going to fall? Unthinkable; the wall still stood, after all, and nobody could ever get past that. But he’d seen siege engines in the plainsmen’s camp, catapults and trebuchets, sections of siege wall, mobile housings for battering rams, sections of siege towers, and he couldn’t help thinking that if they’d managed to make such things, homeless savages who lived in tents, then there was a will and a determination there that wasn’t going to be put off by the city’s reputation for being impregnable. That thought disturbed Loredan far more than the prospect of his own death.

And yet it would be fair enough, all things considered. It wasn’t a matter of right and wrong; even if such things existed, they had nothing to do with the life cycle of cities and nations. The city’s dealings with the people of the plain were no more reprehensible than the lion’s relationship with the deer, but that worked both ways. If it was the clan’s turn to be the lion, that was the way it was meant to go. You couldn’t disagree with something like that. All you could sensibly do was leave and find somewhere else to live.

More footsteps outside, coming this way, stopping outside the door, A slim blade of light slit the darkness, then turned into a flood. There were two outlines in the doorway.

‘Just give me a shout when you’re done, Father,’ said a voice Loredan recognised as the warder’s. ‘I’ll be right outside.’

The door closed, but the light stayed inside; yellow and warm from a small lamp. It turned the other outline into Patriarch Alexius. Taken aback, Loredan swung his legs off the bench and stood up.

‘Here,’ he said, ‘sit down.’

‘Thank you. I will,’ Alexius replied. In the melodramatic light of the oil lamp he looked like a corpse, and it took him a while to hobble the length of the small cell. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Just let me catch my breath, will you? Stairs,’ he added.

Loredan sat on the floor, his back to the wall, waiting for the Patriarch to say something. He didn’t want to be rude, but he was in no mood for small talk.

‘You’ll be out of here fairly soon,’ Alexius went on after a minute or so. ‘We’ve just had a rather annoying meeting, lots of foolish people saying stupid things; the gist of it is that I’m to address the crowd and tell them to calm down and go home, and they’re letting you go. You’ll have a chance to have a bath and a shave before the next meeting.’

Loredan’s mouth dropped open. ‘Next meeting?’ he repeated. ‘What, you mean I’m still-?’

Alexius nodded. ‘I had an idea at the time you wouldn’t be overjoyed about it. It’s all a matter of expediency, you see. We need scapegoats for the defeat, but we also need a hero for the people to trust.’ He sighed; the marks of fatigue on his face were as clear as the portrait on a newly minted coin. ‘That’ll be you,’ he continued. ‘I shall tell my fellow citizens that the five generals responsible for the disaster were the ones who died in the battle; Bardas Loredan, on the other hand, saved the day, snatched four-fifths of the army out of the jaws of death, turned a humiliating defeat into a moral victory-’

‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’

‘Don’t be so ungrateful,’ Alexius replied. ‘And besides, it’s near enough to the truth. And if you’re determined to be a martyr, you might yet get your chance. You haven’t heard the funny bit yet.’

‘Tell me the funny bit,’ Loredan said.

Alexius stiffened as a cramp came and went. ‘This is our illustrious Prefect’s idea of a compromise,’ he said. ‘At an unspecified date in the future, you’re to stand trial in a court of law.’ He paused, then continued: ‘Until then, you’re appointed Deputy Lord Lieutenant, with responsibility for organising the defence of the walls and the lower city. Don’t say it,’ he added quickly, ‘I think everyone thinks so too. It only goes to show: who needs an Emperor when we can be imbeciles all by ourselves?’

‘I think that’s the most glorious piece of idiocy I’ve ever heard in all my life,’ Loredan said, his eyes closed. ‘What if I refuse?’

Alexius shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s allowed,’ he said. ‘Put another way, if you don’t do it, it won’t get done. They didn’t like my idea,’ he added. ‘A pity. It was a good one.’

‘Really? What as that?’

‘I wanted you made Commander-in-Chief,’ Alexius replied. ‘I may not know anything about tactics and battles, but I can recognise a natural leader when I hear of one.’

Loredan didn’t say anything to that. ‘So when do I get out of here?’ he asked. ‘Not that I’m in any hurry.’

‘Once the crowds have been told you’re a hero. Until then, you’re better off here. There’s a mob several thousand strong demanding your head on a pole at the lower-city gate. If they get through and break in here-’

‘I see.’ Loredan nodded. ‘Your idea also?’

Alexius shook his head. ‘One of the pointy-faced types from the Office of Supply,’ he replied. ‘They’re all fools, but some of them are surprisingly cunning.’ He leant back and rested his head against the wall. ‘If I may,’ he said, ‘I’d like to stay here until it’s time for me to go and make my speech. It’s agreeably peaceful. How up to date are you with the news?’

‘Not very. What’s the situation outside?’

‘Quiet,’ Alexius said. ‘There hasn’t been any activity upriver; as far as we can tell, they’re carrying on with building engines and rafting them down the river. All they’ve done is put a cavalry escort – three or four thousand, no more – on the downstream camp where they’re landing the engines.’

‘That puts them no more than five miles from the city,’ Loredan said thoughtfully. ‘Gods, I wish we hadn’t mounted that stupid expedition. Now’s the time we should be making sorties, and of course we won’t, for fear of another good hiding.’ He looked up. ‘I assume the Lord Lieutenant’s in command of external operations.’ Alexius nodded. ‘What about what’s left of the task force? With four thousand men, provided we think about what we’re doing this time, we could still cut out those engines at the landing point without too much trouble-’

‘He won’t hear of it,’ Alexius replied. ‘And he has got a point. If we were to suffer another defeat, particularly one so close to home, the city’d be ungovernable. You can’t imagine what it’s like down there.’

‘So we sit tight and wait for a siege. What about supplies and the like? It won’t be long before the news crosses the sea, and then we’ll have the harbour crammed with people come to sell us grain at sky-high prices.’

‘Sky-high or not, we’ve authorised the Prefect to buy everything he can lay his hands on. Not that food and supplies will be a problem; there’s nothing the clan can do to interfere with shipping, so there’s no reason we can’t have business as usual. But it’ll reassure the people if they see us stockpiling, and then maybe they’ll stop looting the bakeries.’

Loredan shook his head. ‘They like looting bakeries,’ he said, ‘It’s only afterwards they start complaining, when they can’t get their usual orders because the place has burnt down.’ He smiled. ‘It’s times like these that bring out the best in people. What are they doing about recruitment? Has anything been organised yet?’

‘Not really,’ the Patriarch replied. ‘At the moment, we’ve got old men and boys by the thousand demanding to be allowed to volunteer, while most of the able-bodied men are busy smashing the city and beating up the guard. And of course everyone wants to know why the Patriarch isn’t using his arcane powers to avert the danger. I anticipate quite a lot of that when I go out to make my speech.’

‘Well, quite.’ Loredan grinned. ‘What’s the point in having all these wizards if they can’t even launch a few fireballs and turn the enemy into frogs? Makes you wonder whose side they’re on.’

‘I think the Prefect and the Lord Lieutenant are going to ask me that quite soon,’ Alexius said mournfully. ‘I’ve even started thinking that way myself, may I be forgiven. Thanks to my recent researches, I now know rather more about curses and the way they work. It occurs to me that if we had that girl from the Island here, the one we think might be a natural…’

Loredan held up his hands. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Not if you want me to leave this nice safe cell.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in all that.’

‘I don’t,’ Loredan replied. ‘But there’s healthy agnosticism and there’s sitting up and begging for trouble. Not for the city, I mean. For you, personally. You look as if you died a week ago and they gave you to the apprentice embalmer to practise on.’

Alexius laughed; more appreciatively than the joke deserved. ‘That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said about me in a long time,’ he replied. ‘I must confess, I’ve felt better. But it’s all right,’ he added, with a slight grin, ‘because it’s just honest-to-goodness ordinary illness, not any more of those confounded side effects from – let’s say – our little adventure into the unknown. Ordinary illness doesn’t worry me so much.’

Loredan nodded. ‘The enemy you can see is the least of your problems. That was a favourite saying of my old commander, rest his vicious soul. It’s like the joke about the two men in the middle of the battlefield; one of them gets hit by an arrow and falls to the ground moaning. The other one takes a look at the fletchings on the arrow and says, ‘It’s all right, mate, it was one of ours.’ What’s that expression they have for it these days? Friendly fire?’

Alexius nodded. ‘That’s more or less the way I feel,’ he said. ‘Physical illness might not be much fun, but at least you don’t feel it’s out to get you, in the same way the other stuff did.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you’d say it was a self-inflicted wound, and I should stop imagining things.’

‘No,’ Loredan replied, ‘because we’re going to be working together and I do still have a modicum of tact.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully before continuing. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I did give the matter a certain amount of thought, back when you first told me about it all. I still don’t believe in this all-pervading Principle of nature you people talk about – or at least I don’t disbelieve in it either, it just seems too wishy-washy to be of any importance…’

‘It is, usually,’ Alexius interrupted, smiling sadly. ‘Most of the time, in fact. All this business with curses and benedictions is just a minor and irrelevant by-product, like oak-apples on oak trees.’

Loredan nodded. ‘I’ll have to take your word on that,’ he said. ‘Another thing I don’t believe in, though, is coincidence; not on the grandiose scale we were getting back-along. I’m prepared to concede that something was going on; I just don’t reckon any of us had the faintest idea what it was.’

Alexius nodded his head. ‘There, my sceptical friend, I agree with you entirely,’ he said.

‘But why can’t I see him?’ Athli demanded for the sixth time. ‘I’m his clerk, he’s got a business to run. I’ve got students asking for their money back. If you’d care to explain to them why they can’t have the instruction they’ve paid for…’

The clerk frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but there are important matters of state involved; rather more important,’ he added unpleasantly, ‘than your colleague’s coaching practice. In fact, I would suggest that you refund any money you may be holding on account without further delay. I would think it highly unlikely that Colonel Loredan will be free to resume his private work for the foreseeable future.’ He stood up, to indicate that the audience was ended. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘if you’d be good enough to excuse me.’

‘All right,’ Athli said, not moving from her seat. ‘Could you pass on a letter for me, and forward the reply? I know he’s in the city,’ she added. ‘I saw him come back myself. And he wouldn’t have left again without letting me know.’

The clerk studied her objectively through dead-fish eyes, noting that she was young and attractive and exhibiting more concern for her principal than a normal business relationship would warrant. Athli read the interpretation in his face, made a mental note to have him horribly murdered at some convenient future date, and played up to what he was thinking. She simpered a little. ‘Please,’ she added. ‘It’d mean so much to me if you could.’

‘I might be able to send a message,’ he said, his voice lightly spiced with contempt and a little self-conscious compassion. ‘I’m not sure about a letter, though; it would have to be passed by the Committee for National Security, and there would inevitably be a delay. Any reply from Colonel Loredan would be similarly subject to-’ He paused, and smiled bleakly. ‘To review,’ he concluded. ‘If that’s not acceptable-’

‘That’ll be fine,’ Athli replied firmly. ‘Can I borrow your pen?’

The clerk sighed and sat down again. ‘Help yourself,’ he said. ‘But please, if you could hurry it up a little. I have to attend a meeting which will be starting very soon.’

‘Won’t keep you a minute,’ Athli said.

This is just to see if you’re all right, and if there’s anything you want me to do. We’ve got enough punters for two full classes now, presumably thanks to your recent publicity stunts, so I’m putting the charges up by a third. I’ve been to your apartment and made sure everything’s all right there; and I had a man put a lock on the door, so don’t be surprised if you can’t get in. I’ll send you the key if they’ll let me. Cheer up. It must be fun to be famous.

She hesitated. Should she add anything else? She wanted to say something to let him know that she understood how he must be feeling. (Not that she did, and they’d both know it.) No, she’d only embarrass him. Instead, she scribbled her name, folded the scrap of parchment and handed it to the clerk. ‘You’re sure you’ve got my address?’ she added.

‘We know where to find you,’ the clerk replied with a slight emphasis she was supposed not to like. ‘And now, I really must-’

She allowed herself to be shooed out of the office, and watched the clerk scuttle off at a dignified half-trot towards the main cloister; then she made her way slowly back towards the gatehouse. Nothing to do, and all day to do it in. Again.

Rather than mope about at home, she decided to go down to the stationers’ quarter and buy something. It was traditional that clerks should have something of a stationery fetish; good for business as well, since the tools of a clerk’s trade lent themselves to elegant splendour, and clients tended to assume that the costlier and more magnificent the pen and inkwell, the higher the quality of the words that issued from them. Athli was only too happy to conform to the stereotype. When she stopped to think about it, the amount of money she’d frittered away on such things appalled her (though, she reassured herself, since she’d only ever bought quality she could probably get her money back on them with no trouble at all if she had to.) Which reminded her of something else.

Odd, she mused as she strolled through the chairmakers’ quarter towards the Chandlers’ Gate, the fact that he never seems to have any money. The mathematics of it simply don’t make sense. I get twenty-five per cent of what he makes, and I can live in a nice part of town and afford to waste money on marquetry writing boards and solid-silver counters. He lives in the slums and owns nothing. I know he goes out drinking quite a lot and that must cost a bit, except he seems to go to places where you can drink yourself to death for the price of a glass of wine in a decent inn; what does he do with all his money?

Strange, to work with someone so closely for so long and now know the first thing about him. We get along all right; better than all right, in fact, it’s always been great fun. I’ve never known a man who I can talk to so easily, one who doesn’t make any difficulties… But what do I actually know about him? He was in the army – well, everybody knows that now, of course; in fact, everybody knows rather more than I did before all this started – and he was brought up on a farm and he’s got an unspecified number of brothers and at least one sister. He doesn’t talk about his parents, so maybe they’re dead; or maybe he just doesn’t talk about them. And he had lots of acquaintances, in the trade of course, but I’ve no idea if he has any friends. Of course, he knows all about me – not that there’s too much to know. He always seems quite interested when I tell him about things, can’t quite seem to understand why I haven’t got married and don’t see anybody. I don’t suppose he’s really interested, though. Why should he be, after all?

She frowned, remembering the clerk’s knowing leer. He’d been wrong, of course, though she’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind once or twice. But never seriously; not much future in a relationship with a man in that line of work. Worse than loving a sailor; at least they come back sometimes. Not that he’s in that line of work any more; except he’s Colonel Loredan now, and that’s scarcely an improvement.

She stopped opposite a stall selling rather garish painted wooden bowls. If he’s going to be Colonel Loredan for any length of time, she thought, he won’t be teaching people how to fence; and then what am I supposed to do for a living? That’s odd, too; when he was working in the courts, I always had my contingency plans ready, just in case anything happened. Now I’m at a loss to think what I’m going to do next. I can’t carry on the school on my own and I don’t think I could bear to go back to clerking for advocates. Oh, damn and blast, what is wrong with me?

Slowly and deliberately, Athli calmed herself down; and as she did so, a small but persistent voice in the back of her head began chanting, When all seems lost, buy stationery! It seemed like the best advice she was likely to get. She took it.

The atmosphere in the stationers’ quarter varied between picturesque bustle and hell on earth, depending on the time of day and year, supply and demand, the health of the economy and the mood of the city. The feverish intensity of the activity under the rich awnings reflected the influence of the last factor on the list; the clerks of Perimadeia had decided that the end was probably nigh, in which case they might as well indulge themselves while they still had money and their money was still worth something; and if it wasn’t the end of the world, they had cause for celebration, best effected by buying things. The stationery trade had risen to the occasion; Athli had never seen so much good stuff, or such high prices.

There were lignum vitae and rosewood writing boards and accounting boards, lavishly carved and inlaid with ivory, mother of pearl and polished lapis lazuli. There were inkwells; gods, the inkwells – silver inkwells, gold inkwells, inkwells with jewelled lids and little jewelled feet, patent inkwells with little ribs for knocking off the excess ink after you’d dipped your pen, inkwells hollowed out of elephant tusks and walrus tusks, inkwells in the shape of roses, pigs, kneeling figures, skulls, horses, the backsides of women and boys, the Patriarch’s ceremonial crown.

There were cedarwood tablets, hinged and inlaid, with the creamy yellow wax as inviting as sand on the beach after the tide has just gone out, crying out to be marked. There were styluses of breathtaking beauty and nauseating vulgarity, pens cut from the feathers of eagles and peacocks, so long that you wouldn’t be able to use them without wiping your eye with every stroke. There were counters (counters beyond number; joke) of silver and gold, tiny counters for the secretive, huge counters like saucers that probably took two men to lift, fancy counters with every conceivable kind of decoration, including some that were hastily whisked away before Athli could look at them (spoilsports!), plain counters on which your name, titles and favourite platitude could be engraved by our highly skilled craftsmen while you wait, counters that cost more than the sums they’d be used to calculate.

There were cuff protectors and eyeshades, magnifying lenses for the short-sighted, lamps and candle holders, abacuses and tiny sets of portable scales that came in the most delightful little ivory boxes. There was parchment – was there ever parchment! How could there be enough sheep in all the world to supply so much parchment – and every square inch of it scraped and pumiced smooth, thin and softly translucent, so that it glowed like a cloud at sunrise.

There were little jars of powdered ink in every colour you could dream of; turquoise and cobalt, crimson and purple, coroner’s green and government black, chamberlain’s azure, works orange, army blue, shipyards brown, even the incredibly expensive and highly illegal imperial gold – in theory, a clerk could have his hand cut off for using it without express authority; the way round that was to dilute it with a tiny amount of silver in vitriol, which cost as much as the gold ink and burnt you to the bone if you splashed it. There were tiny knives for trimming pens, their blades as thin as leaves and ten times sharper than the average Perimadeian razor; bigger versions, too, that swaggering young clerks liked to display on their belts as a way of getting round the prohibition on carrying arms in the council building.

There were enamelled ink stirrers and gold-wire ink strainers, parchment stretchers and beautifully wrought pumice scrapers for scraping parchment clean of old letters to use again. There were seals, seal-cases, sealing-wax cases, tiny chafing dishes and miniature spirit burners for melting wax, tiny thin blades for unlawfully lifting seals without breaking them, little pots of specially fine clay for taking impressions of seals for the purpose of forgery. There were portable writing chests and little cabinets to hold all your gear (the lid folding out into a writing and counting board, with little hinges and fine silver chains) that stopped your heart with the glory of the workmanship and cost slightly more than a fully equipped warship.

After a while, Athli had to stop looking and sit down, her eyes dazzled by so much glitter and sparkle. One of the things city people loved to boast about in front of foreigners was that in Perimadeia almost everybody could read and write. What she’d seen today made Athli wonder whether literacy wasn’t in fact some kind of vice.

Once she’d got her breath back she moved on to the bookstall, where you could buy any number of manuals of forms and precedents; letters for every occasion, every possible vicissitude of human life. She lifted down a small, squat volume and squinted at the minuscule writing on the title page:

Letters from creditors to debtors

Letters from debtors to creditors

Letters from superiors to juniors

Letters from juniors to superiors

Letters from poor students to rich uncles imploring

assistance

Letters from rich uncles to poor students refusing

assistance

Letters from lovers (male) to married women,

beseeching

Ditto, despairing

Letters from married women to lovers (male),

ambiguous

Ditto, encouraging

Letters from tradesmen respectfully demanding

payment

Letters from gentlemen to tradesmen tactfully

postponing payment

Letters from tenants of state farms to district

commissioners requesting leave to transport pigs

to winter pasture on public commons

Letters from district commissioners to tenants of

state farms declining leave to transport pigs to

winter pasture on public commons and reminding

said tenants of their obligations to provide said

pigs with adequate fodder during winter

Letters proposing marriage

Letters declining marriage

Letters to a beloved (female) threatening suicide

Letters to an unwanted suitor (male) encouraging

suicide

Letters from military officers informing parents of

death of a son

Other sundry letters.

– All with the first word of the title picked out in red, the page number, the appropriate cross-references, and the occasional scribbled addition where the previous owner had added in a few well-favoured precedents of his own; the whole thing for only one and a half gold quarters, guaranteed to make it so you’d never again have to think what to say, no matter how bizarre the circumstances. Athli couldn’t resist that, so she bought it, having first negotiated half a quarter off the price and bullied the stallholder into throwing in the carrying case for nothing.

She sat down on a stone bench in the shade of an awning and was just about to see what her guide recommended for Letter to unmarried niece politely declining request for contribution to dowry when a shadow fell across the page and she looked up.

‘Hello,’ said a voice coming out of a black shape silhouetted against the sun. ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you Master Loredan’s clerk?’

The voice was female, foreign and quite pleasant; Athli blinked and squinted a little. ‘I know you, I think,’ she replied. ‘You’re the na-’ She recovered in time and swallowed the rest of natural. ‘You’re the merchant’s sister, from the Island. We met in the tavern the day Loredan fought Alvise. Vetriz?’

‘That’s right,’ Vetriz nodded and sat down on the bench beside her. ‘Fancy you remembering.’

‘Necessary skill of the clerical profession,’ Athli replied, budging up a little. Ordinarily, of course, she’d have forgotten the dratted female completely by now; but Loredan’s account of his weird conversation with Patriarch Alexius in the Schools not long before the cavalry expedition had vividly refreshed her memory. Now, of course, she was filled with a strange mixture of instinctive revulsion and insatiable curiosity; unlike Bardas, she had no doubts at all about the existence and power of magic, and wasn’t this female somehow supposed to be the most powerful witch in the world? Something like that, anyway.

‘I came here to buy an inkwell,’ Vetriz said, with a trace of bewilderment in her voice. ‘But there’s such a choice I don’t know where to start. At home there’s plain inkwells and fancy inkwells, and that’s about it.’

Athli smiled politely. ‘So long as you remember never to pay the asking price, you won’t go far wrong,’ she said, and then remembered that this female was a merchant’s sister, probably a seasoned trader in her own right; certainly not the sort of person who needed advice on bargaining techniques from a fencer’s clerk. ‘How long are you staying?’ she went on.

‘I’m not sure,’ Vetriz replied. ‘We brought in a load of preserved fruit, and prices are extraordinary; because of the invasion, of course. If only we’d known, we’d have filled two ships. Anyway, we sold the fruit in no time at all, and my brother’s going round trying to decide what to take back. We spent all of yesterday and most of today looking at rope-’

‘Rope?’

Vetriz nodded. ‘Rope,’ she repeated. ‘And there comes a point where one shed full of coils of rope begins to look exactly the same as all the others, and Ven said that having me standing about looking bored and yawning wasn’t really helping him terribly much when it came to getting the best possible price, so perhaps I should go back to the inn and wait for him there. So I came down here to buy an inkwell.’

‘I see,’ Athli said. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you.’ Foremost witch of the known world she might be, but she’s starting to get on my nerves. Go away, witch. ‘There’s cheaper ones on the stall over there by the fountain, or some really nice carved ivory stuff on the one with the purple and white awning.’

Vetriz turned and smiled at her. ‘You obviously know about this sort of thing – well, I suppose you would, in your line of work. Would you mind awfully advising me? Otherwise I’ll have no idea whether what I’m getting is a bargain or a piece of junk.’

If only she hadn’t been painfully aware that she had absolutely nothing else to do, Athli would have made an excuse and left. As it was, she could truthfully have pleaded a slight headache. Instead, she muttered that of course, she’d be delighted, and led the way to the cheap stall. Once she’d started advising, however, she slowly found herself getting carried away by the excitement of the enterprise. When asked roughly how much she had to spend, Vetriz had named a sum which immediately caused Athli to transfer the search to the purple-and-white-striped stall; and the quiet thrill of serious shopping with someone else’s money soon blanked out her vague dislike of the female herself. In fact, she listened so attentively and seemed so genuinely interested in the valuable information she was getting that Athli gradually revised her opinion. The revision speeded up considerably when Vetriz, having secured a terrifyingly valuable and desirable gold and pearl inkwell for a sum that was only moderately obscene, insisted on buying Athli a small present by way of thanking her for her help. In Vetriz’s terms, a small present consisted of a chiselled steel and walrus-tusk penknife whose value would have fed a family for a month.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘It’s very nice.’

‘My pleasure,’ Vetriz replied, and she did seem genuinely pleased that her new friend liked the present. ‘Oh, aren’t there a lot of lovely things! I think we should get Venart down here and then you could tell him what to buy. You could name your own price for things like this back home; I’m sure they’d bring a much better return than mouldy old rope.’

‘Well…’ Athli started to say, visualising a new career as an assistant stationery buyer. ‘But I wouldn’t have the first idea about what’s saleable on the Island; I don’t know what they like.’ She massaged the side of her head with her fingertips; the headache was starting to annoy her. ‘I think that sort of thing’s better left to people who know what they’re doing,’ she said, realising as she said it that she was probably being insulting.

Vetriz shook her head. ‘If I’m to learn business, I’ve got to practise,’ she said. ‘Properly speaking, I’ve got a half-share in everything, and Ven’s only managing it on my behalf. I know I’ll never get the hang of sacks of flour and jars of oil and so forth, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t specialise in fancy goods; that’s just as much trade as bulk commodities, after all, and quite possibly there’s more profit in it. The only thing that was putting me off, now I come to think of it, was not knowing the markets here.’ She stopped, turned to Athli and beamed. ‘You know, I think it was fate or something, bumping into you like that. What do you say? You advise me, I’ll do the buying and we split the profit three parts to one.’

‘I’m not sure,’ Athli said. It was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate, because of the pain in her head; in addition to which, she had the strangest feeling of being pushed, or rather of drifting on a current that wanted to go downstream when she was heading up. On the other hand, it did seem like a sound commercial venture (though she wasn’t sure about the value of her proposed contribution). ‘I suppose so, if you’re really serious. But won’t you need to get some money from your brother first?’

‘Actually,’ Vetriz replied, lowering her voice and smirking slightly, ‘no. For heaven’s sake don’t tell Ven, but I brought a bit of my own money with me on this trip, just in case I happened to find something to invest it in. I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, in very general terms. No, what I think I’ll do is pretend to Ven that all the stock I buy this time is things I want for myself. Then if I do make a loss getting rid of it when we’re back home, he’ll never need to know. And if I make a go of it, I can plough the money back in – less your share, of course – and buy more stock the next time we come over; which ought to be quite soon, with prices the way they are. Come on, let’s shake hands like proper business partners and call it a deal.’

‘All right,’ Athli said, and as they shook hands, she couldn’t help wondering what on earth she thought she was doing. And what’s this strange fascination Loredan and I hold for these people? Here’s this woman I’ve only met once before, and already she’s freed him from a curse and taken me on as a business partner. And didn’t Bardas say something about headaches? I could probably remember if my head didn’t hurt so much.