Devices and Desires

Chapter Ten

A satisfactory meeting, in many respects; no significant disagreements between factions, for once, no disruptive intrusion of party agendas. How pleasant, to be able to get useful work done without anything getting in the way.

Commissioner Psellus' report was well received, and the debate on his recommendations was perfunctory, since nobody really disagreed. Commissioner Crisestem, whose nose might have been put out of joint now that his own role had been largely superseded, was one of the first to welcome the initiative, while Psellus made a point of stressing that Crisestem's contribution was still entirely relevant, and should be carried through as a matter of priority. Crisestem in turn advised the committee that he'd made substantial progress in recruiting and briefing agents, and was confident that he'd be in a position to report a successful outcome at the next meeting.

The motion was put to a formal vote and carried unanimously. In view of the possible leakage of restricted Guild secrets, it stated, the Eremians posed an unacceptable threat to the security of the Perpetual Republic, and should be wiped out. A memorandum was composed by the appropriate subcommittee and dispatched to the Commissioners of War, with copies to the General Council, the Guild Assemblies, the Finance Department, the foreign and manpower directorates and the managing councils of the individual Guilds. No further business arising, the meeting was adjourned.

Psellus went back to his office. The chair was still there, and the desk, and the empty cup and plate. It made no sense, but he didn't want to sit in that chair again just yet; he perched in the window-seat instead, and looked out at his view (the back end of the glass factory; a blank brick wall with three doors in it). About an hour later, a clerk came to tell him that he was wanted at the War Commission.

I should have prepared better for this meeting, he rebuked himself, as he followed the clerk across the quadrangle to the west cloister, where the commission's offices were. They'll want all the specifics about Vaatzes, and I haven't brought the file. He considered going back for it, but decided not to bother. Most of it he had by heart, and they'd all be getting copies of the relevant documents in due course.

The War Commission liked to refer to themselves as the Department of Necessary Evil (there were other names for them around the Guildhall, none of which were used to their faces). As befitted an anomaly in an otherwise standardised world, they cultivated a slightly eccentric manner; accordingly, it was their custom when the weather permitted to meet in the open air, in the cloister garden. It was an undeniably pleasant spot: a square garden enclosed by the cloister walls, with a fountain in the centre of the lawn, and raised flowerbeds at the edges. Grapevines and wisteria were trained on the walls, and a quincunx of elderly fig trees provided shade in the middle. According to people who knew about such things, the garden was one of the oldest parts of the Guildhall complex, dating back to before the Reformation. That made sense; it had a distinctly effete feel about it. You could picture the nobles and scribes of the old Republic strutting on the lawn, waited on by obsequious footmen in extravagant livery.

Necessary Evil didn't indulge itself to quite that extent; there were no brocade coats or powdered wigs, no string quartet scratching out incidental music in the background. Instead, the fourteen commissioners sat in a semicircle of ornately carved chairs facing the fountain. Secretaries and clerks hovered around them, setting up folding desks, topping up inkwells, sharpening pens. Two flustered-looking men were trying to stand up an easel for a large framed map; two more were struggling with a huge brass lectern that must have weighed four hundredweight. There was a pleasant hum of chatter, like distant bees.

The only member of Necessary Evil that Psellus knew by sight was the assistant secretary, who was also vice-chairman of the Foundrymen's standing committee on doctrine and specifications. He was easy to spot from a distance by his perfectly bald, slightly pointed head. In the event, he saw Psellus first and beckoned him over. His name was Zanipulo Staurachus, and Psellus had disliked him for thirty years.

'Well,' Staurachus said, in a loud whisper, 'a fine state of affairs you've landed us in.'

Ever since they were apprentices together, Psellus had been trying to figure out a way of coping with Staurachus. Being an optimist at heart, he still hadn't given up hope.

'Presumably I've got to brief you about Vaatzes,' he said.

'Formality, really. We need to be able to minute having interviewed you. But tell me, why did the bloody fool do it? I've read his assessments, and I'm pretty sure I met him once. Wouldn't have thought he was the type.'

Psellus thought for a moment. 'I'm not entirely sure there is a type,' he replied. 'I think that what people do depends a lot on what's done to them first.'

'I'm not talking about the defection,' Staurachus said. 'Really, that's our fault for letting him get away. But what possessed him to go fooling about building stupid mechanical toys in the first place? If he was that way inclined, someone should've picked up on it years ago, and we could've done something about it, and all this nonsense would've been avoided. You realise this war business is playing right into the Consolidationists' hands, just when there's three seats on General Council up for grabs.'

Psellus frowned. 'I didn't know that,' he said.

'Of course you didn't. It's not the sort of thing someone like you ought to know. But I'm telling you now, because obviously this stupid war is going to change everything, and I need all our people to focus on the issues. I mean, Eremia doesn't matter, in the long run, but if Consolidation manages to get an overall majority on General Council, that's a disaster.'

Psellus hated having to agree with Staurachus; insult to injury. 'But assuming we win the war-' he said.

'Of course we'll win,' Staurachus interrupted. 'It's how we win that matters. Frankly, it couldn't have come at a worse time, with me being the only Foundryman on this commission. Which,' he added, scowling, 'is where you come in.'

'Me?'

Staurachus nodded. 'I know you won't have figured it out for yourself, because you've only got ten fingers for counting on; but the rules say there should be sixteen commissioners in time of war, and we're two short. I'm proposing we co-opt you for the duration.'

'Me?' Psellus repeated. 'Why?'

'Well, because you're Foundry, obviously. And you know the background, you've researched the Eremians, specialised local knowledge and so forth. That's what I'll tell the others, anyhow. There shouldn't be any bother. The other co-optee will probably be either Ropemakers' or Linen Armourers', and we've got to be seen to be even-handed in appointments.'

'It's a great honour,' Psellus said flatly. 'But I don't think… What about Curiatzes? Or Crisestem,' he added, in a burst of happy inspiration. 'He's got the background, and he's ambitious.'

'Exactly. So I chose you instead. Because,' Staurachus explained, 'you're not bright enough to be a nuisance, and you generally do as you're told. Now get over there and make your presentation. Try and make it good; I want something decent from you, if I'm going to get them to accept you.'

Up to that point, Psellus hadn't really hated Ziani Vaatzes, except in an objective way. The abominator had inspired in him more curiosity than hatred. Now, though…

Mostly through force of habit, he made the best job he could of presenting the facts to the commission and fielding their awkward questions. There wasn't anything he couldn't handle, and the only overt hostility came from a Ropemaker and was therefore to be expected. He disarmed the annoying man by admitting that Compliance had indeed made several reprehensible errors of judgement in their handling of the case. Since this wasn't true and everybody knew it, the Ropemaker wasn't in any position to make capital out of it; he accepted the admission with a grunt and sat down again. As soon as Psellus had been dismissed and had sat down in the chair set out for him next to the fountain (a fine spray, deflected off the marble rim, fell on his collar, but he managed to ignore it), Staurachus got up and proposed that he be co-opted. The motion was seconded by a Carpenter and passed, twelve to one with a Shipwright abstaining. Duly elected, Psellus was led by a clerk across the lawn to a fortuitously empty chair next to Staurachus, on the left wing of the semicircle. The chief commissioner got up and recited a formal welcome. It was all as smooth and quick as slipping on ice.

Psellus spent his evening clearing out his old office and moving to his new one, which was just off the main gallery of the cloister, and about a third smaller than the one he'd just vacated. That meant there wasn't room for his old desk and chair, but somehow he wasn't heartbroken about that. It was a ghastly mess, of course; inevitably, Crisestem would get his old job at Compliance, at least until this ridiculous war was over. He tried to focus on the fact that his promotion was good for the Foundrymen and for Didacticism in general; somewhat marginal, once you'd balanced a seat gained on Necessary Evil against control of Compliance lost to the Tailors and Consolidation. If the war went wrong, needless to say, he'd be finished (which was rather like saying that if the sun failed to rise one morning, the world would be very dark. The Republic's wars never went wrong. Hadn't ever gone wrong yet.).

It was just after midnight by the time he'd finished arranging his books and sorting his files, and it occurred to him that he hadn't had anything to eat for a very long time not since he was in Compliance, in fact, and that was easily a lifetime ago. He wasn't in the least hungry, but he knew what missing meals did to his digestion. The dining room would be closed by now, but the buttery over in Foundrymen's Hall stayed open all night; stale bread, thick, slightly translucent yellow cheese and a small soft apple if he was lucky. Probably Necessary Evil had its own private, secret canteen where you could get plovers' eggs and mashed artichoke at three in the morning, but nobody had mentioned it at the meeting. Presumably you had to serve a probationary period before you were trusted with a map reference and a key.

Foundrymen's Hall was two quadrangles down and one across. It was twenty-five years since he'd first walked under its modest arch, knees weak and guts twisted into a knot. He'd got used to it since then; now it was just a building, ever so slightly shabby if you knew where to look. He didn't get lost in the corridors any more, and when nervous young men asked him the way, he answered clearly and immediately without having to think, the way you move your hand. A day would come when his name would be written up on one of the honours boards in the downstairs lobby-he'd never see it, of course, because he'd be dead-and some terrified youth waiting to be collected and shown to his new desk would stare up at it and wonder without really caring who the hell he'd been, and what he'd done. When that day came, he'd be the sixth Psellus on the boards, and of course the last. There were no annotations beside those gilded names, so nobody would ever know, unless they had occasion to delve back through ancient minute-books and cross-reference with the archives of memoranda, that he was the man who destroyed Eremia Montis by getting up out of a chair; a neat trick, though he wasn't quite sure how he'd come to achieve it. It's something to ensure that your name will live for ever, even if the reason why gets lost along the way.

There were half a dozen men in the buttery when he got there; he recognised the faces of two sessions clerks but couldn't remember their names, and the other four were strangers. He declined the vegetable soup (twenty-five years, and he'd never seen or heard of anybody having the vegetable soup; it was universally shunned, like leprosy, but all day every day there was a black cauldron full of it, simmering like a dormant volcano over the fire) and risked a pear instead of an apple.

'Congratulations,' someone said in his ear. He looked round.

'Thank you,' he said gravely. 'You're having the salt pork.'

'I always do when I come in here. It's disgusting, but I'm too set in my ways to change.'

They sat down at a table in the corner furthest from the hatch. 'What are you doing up at this hour, Stall?' Psellus asked. 'You're never up late.'

'It's all your fault,' replied Stali Maniacis, his oldest and only friend. 'You get it into your head to declare war on some tribe nobody knows anything about, so naturally they send for the treasurer, and he sends for me. I've spent the last eight hours shuffling jetons around, trying to find some money for you to hire your soldiers with.'

'Ah,' Psellus replied. 'Any luck?'

Maniacis nodded. 'Pots of money,' he said. 'It's there, you can go down the cellars with a lamp and look at it, all heaped up on the floor. The problem's finding it on paper. Backdated appropriations and contingency reserves and five-year retentions and God only knows what. Your best bet, if you really want this war of yours, is to hire a bunch of pirates to break in and steal it. Cut through all the formalities, and we can write it off as hostile action, make our lives a whole lot easier. So,' he went on, 'rank and power at last. How did you manage it?'

Psellus shrugged. 'I didn't get out of the way quick enough, I suppose.'

'Balls. The lightness of the foot deceives the eye. One moment you were the failure responsible for a fuck-up in Compliance, next thing you're magically transfigured into a god of war, and nothing will be your fault ever again. Don't tell me you haven't been cooking this up for months.'

'If only,' Psellus said. 'It was nothing to do with me.'

'All right. So who, then?'

'Staurachus.'

'Oh.' Maniacis pulled a face. 'Him. Fine. So presumably this is all part of some magnificently intricate manoeuvre on behalf of the greater glory of Didacticism.' He shook his head. 'Don't see it myself, but then I wouldn't expect to. What's your new office like?'

'Small.'

'View?'

'You can just about see a corner of the cloister garden, if you lean out and crane your neck a bit.'

'Better than the glassworks, though.'

'True.'

Maniacis frowned. 'You really aren't very happy about this, are you? What's the problem? Feeling out of your depth?'

'I'm used to that,' Psellus said. 'I've been a politician now for fifteen years, I wouldn't know my depth if I fell in it. But I'm sure there's something I've missed, and I don't know where.'

'You always were a worrier.'

'Yes,' Psellus said. 'But it probably doesn't matter. That's what's so good about war, it papers over all the cracks. If we scrape Eremia Montis off the map, none of the fiddling little details will matter any more.' He yawned. 'I think I'll go to bed,' he said. 'I expect tomorrow is going to be a long and interesting day'

'Going home?'

Psellus shook his head. 'I'll sleep in the lodge,' he said. 'I can't face all those flights of stairs at this time of night.'

'Count yourself lucky,' Maniacis grumbled. 'I've still got three projections to do. I don't imagine I'll be finished much before dawn. Next time you declare war, do you think you could do it around nine in the morning? Some of us have to work for a living, you know.'

'If you call shuffling brass discs round a chequerboard work,' Psellus replied. It was, of course, an old debate between them, as thoroughly rehearsed as a wedding dance. It could be started with a word, or stopped immediately and put on one side, bookmarked, to be continued later at some more opportune time. 'Now I suppose you're going to say it's all my fault that you've got to go scrabbling about trying to find the money to pay for all of this.'

Maniacis frowned. 'All of what?'

'The war, of course.'

'Oh.' Somehow Psellus felt he'd said something unexpected. 'No, we're used to that,' Maniacis went on. 'You politicals say the word, all we've got to do is click our fingers and the money appears out of thin air. I mean, it's not like we've got anything else to do.'

It was synthetic, because it was always synthetic between them, like an exhibition bout between prizefighters; this time, though, he noticed a certain edge in his friend's voice, a slight reluctance to look him in the eye. But that was strange, since Stali wouldn't ever be genuinely upset with him because of work. Something he'd said was rattling about in his mind loose, but he couldn't place it. Because he was so tired, probably.

'Bed for me,' he said, standing up. 'Have fun with your projections.'

Maniacis said something vulgar, and he left. All the way down the stairs and across the back courtyard he tried to work out what it was that didn't fit. Something was wrong; something small and trivial, of course.

The lodge porter opened up a guest room for him; slightly smaller than a prison cell, with a plain unaired bed, a wash-stand, an empty water jug, one elderly shoe left behind by a previous visitor. He undressed, snuffed the lamp and lay down on top of the threadbare coverlet, his hands folded on his chest like a corpse laid out for embalming. Directly overhead was the old dorter, a survival from the days when the Guildhall was still a religious house; in consequence, the ceilings of these rooms were all vaulted, though of course you couldn't see anything in the dark. One of the rooms still had traces of the old painted stucco, devotional scenes from a religion nobody remembered any more. Probably not this one; Psellus had seen them once, years ago, but they were just people standing about in the flat, stylised poses of pre-Reformation religious painting. Authentic but entirely lacking in artistic merit; it'd probably be kinder to chip them off and whitewash over the top. It'd be miserable, he reckoned, to be the ghost of a god, pinned to the mortal world by one crumbling and indistinct fresco.

(And in Eremia shortly… Did the Eremians have any gods? He had an idea they'd believed in something once, but they'd grown out of it. Just as well, probably. If you eradicated a religious people, would their gods survive even with nobody to pray to them? And if so, what would they find to do all day?)

He closed his eyes, like a fencer moving from First guard to Third.

'Civitas Eremiae,' said the expert, 'is the highest city in the known world. It's built on the peak of a mountain; the walls are founded on solid rock, so you can forget about sapping, undermining or tunnelling your way in. They have an excellent system of underground cisterns, with never less than six months' supply of water. There's also a substantial communal granary, likewise underground. That means a siege would present us with enormous difficulties as regards supply. They have plenty of water and food in store at all times; if we wanted to lay siege to them and starve or parch them out, we'd have to carry water and food for our men up the mountain. There's just the one road, narrow and winding back and forth. Even if we kept up a continual relay, we couldn't shift enough supplies in one day along that road for more than seven thousand men, way too few to maintain an effective blockade. To be blunt: we'd be dead of hunger and thirst long before them, and we'd also be outnumbered two to one. Unless someone can think of a way round those problems, a siege is out of the question. If you want to take Givitas Eremiae, it'll have to be by way of direct assault; and the longest an army capable of doing that could last up there would be forty-eight hours. Talking of which; the very least number of defenders we'd be likely to come up against would be fifteen thousand infantry on the walls. The city has never been taken, either by siege or storm. If you contrived somehow to get through the gate or over the wall, that's where the fun would start. The whole place is a tangle of poxy little alleys and snickets; from our point of view, one bottleneck and ambush after another. There are some thatched roofs, a handful of wooden buildings; not enough for a decent fire to get a foothold on. Artillery isn't going to be much help to you. In order to get it up the approach road, you'd have to break it down completely and rebuild it once you're in position, but you'd be wasting a lot of sweat and effort for nothing. The slope's so aggressive, you'd be hard put to it to find a level footprint for anything bigger than a series five scorpion; but nothing less than a full-size torsion catapult's going to make any kind of a mark on those walls. The same goes for battering rams and siege towers-and maybe this is an appropriate moment to point out that the main strength of the Eremian military is archers. Put the picture together and I think you'll agree, you've set yourself a difficult job.'

Thoughtful silence. After a nicely judged pause, the expert went on: 'Maybe you're wondering why a poor and relatively primitive bunch like the Eremians have gone to such extraordinary lengths to fortify their city. It's worth dwelling on that for a moment. Consider the drain on national resources, both material and manpower, involved in building something like that. The Eremians keep a few slaves, true. Not many, though; all that work was mostly done by free Eremian citizens, in between their daily chores and the seasonal demands of the sheep and goats. Why bother? you're asking yourselves. They must've been afraid of somebody, but it wasn't us.'

Another pause, and everything so quiet you could hear the patter of water-drops from the fountain. 'The answer,' the expert said, 'is of course their neighbours, the Vadani. Eremia Montis has just emerged from a long and particularly nasty border war with the Vadani; and that's the direction I'm asking you to look in for help in cracking this nut. There may be peace right now, but the Eremians and the Vadani hate each other to bits, always have and always will. If you want the Eremians, you're going to have to get the Vadani on your side first. At the very least, they've got generations of experience of fighting the Eremians. They also have money, from the silver mines. The first stage, therefore, will have to be diplomacy rather than straightforward military action. Everything will depend on the Vadani; and the only way you can do business with them is through their chief, Duke Valens. He's your first objective.' The expert relaxed slightly, aware that he'd done his job and not left anything out. 'To brief you on him, I'd like to call Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service.'

Psellus sat up a little straighter. He knew Boioannes, or had known him a long time ago. A man stood up in the front row of seats, but he could only see his back; he had to wait until he'd made his way up to the lectern before he could get a look at his face.

Curious, how the changes of age surprise us. The Maris Boioannes he remembered had mostly been objectionable on account of his appearance: a tall man, with a perfect profile, a strong chin and thick black hair, a revoltingly charming smile, deep and flashing brown eyes. You knew you never stood a chance when Boioannes was around. This man oddly enough, the smile was still there, although the chin had melted and the hair was thin, palpably flicked sideways to cover a bald summit as prominent as Civitas Eremia as described by the previous speaker. Deprived of its natural setting, however, the smile was weak and silly. You could easily despise this man, which would make you tend to underestimate him. Probably why he'd done well in the diplomatic service.

'Duke Valens Valentinianus,' Boioannes said (his voice was the same; still rich and warm. He looked different once he'd started to speak), 'is almost certainly the most capable duke to rule the Vadani in two centuries. He's intelligent, he's firm, decisive; he's a good leader, highly respected; still very young, only in his early twenties, but that's not so uncommon among the mountain tribes, where life expectancy is short and prominent men tend to die young. He's well educated, by Vadani standards, with a firm grasp of practical economics; he reads books for pleasure-we know what he reads, of course, because his books all come from the Republic; we've compiled a list from the ledgers of his bookseller, and it'll be worth your while to take a look at it. He has an enquiring mind, maybe even a soul. He's not, however, an effete intellectual. We're still working on a complete schedule of all the men he's had executed or assassinated since he came to power, but I can tell you now, he's quite ruthless in that way. Not a storybook bloodthirsty tyrant, shouting "off with his head" every five minutes; there are several well-authenticated instances where he spared someone he really ought to have disposed of, gave him a second and even a third chance. It's notable, however, that in each of these cases he took full precautions to make sure that the offender couldn't do any serious harm while on licence, so to speak. He's an excellent judge of character, and he has great confidence in his own judgement. He believes in himself, and the people believe in him too. All in all, a most efficient and practical ruler for a nation like the Vadani.'

Boioannes paused and drank a little water. He still had that mannerism of using only his index and middle fingers to grip the cup. 'As far as weaknesses go,' he went on, 'we haven't found any yet, though of course we're working on it. He's depressingly temperate as far as wine and women are concerned; his only indulgence appears to be hunting, which is a big thing among both of the mountain nations. Buying him isn't really an option, since the revenue from the silver mines is more than a tribal chief would know what to do with; also, he doesn't seem to show any interest in conspicuous expenditure-no solid gold dinner services, priceless tapestries, jewel-encrusted sword-hilts. He draws only a very moderate sum from the profits of the silver mines, and lives well within his means. Currently, therefore, the most productive line of approach would seem to be intimidation; but we have an uncomfortable feeling that it could go badly wrong, and force him into a genuine alliance with his neighbour. What we need to find, therefore, is a crack in the armour. We're confident that there is one-there always is-and given time we know we can find it. Much depends, therefore, on how much time we have available. That's for you to tell us. What we're fairly certain we can't do is simply rely on his instinctive hatred for the Eremians. Common sense would seem to be the keynote of this man's character, and an ability to ignore or override emotional impulses that conflict with what his brain tells him is the sensible thing to do. He'll know straight away that if we come to him and propose an alliance against Eremia, the whole balance of power in the region will be irrevocably changed. Remember, his father started the peace process with Eremia and he saw it through; not through fear, or because he doesn't hold with war on principle, but because he realised that peace was the sensible thing, in the circumstances.'

Psellus' attention started to wander; he wasn't really interested in the Vadani Duke. Instead, he opened his mind to a picture of a mountaintop (he'd never seen a mountain, except as a vague fringe at the edge of a landscape, hardly distinguishable from banks of cloud) with all those impossible defences-the walls, the narrow spaces, above all the desperate gradient. He knew that Civitas Eremia would fall, because the Republic had promised that it would, but as an engineer he could only see the problems, not the solution to them. He felt as if he'd heard the beginning of a story, and the end, but not the middle. Not by assault; not by siege; if they wanted to get inside the gates, they'd have to persuade someone in the city to open them for them.

He allowed himself a little smile. Of course, how silly of him not to see it earlier. The old saying: no city, however massively fortified, is impregnable to a mule carrying chests of gold coins. Treachery, that old faithful, would see them through.

Boioannes had stopped talking; people were standing up and chatting, so the meeting must be over. He wished he knew a bit more about Necessary Evil protocols; at the end of a meeting, were you supposed to hurry straight back to work, or did you linger, mix and network? He wished he was back somewhere where he knew the rules.

'Good briefing, don't you think?' Staurachus had materialised next to him, like a genie in a fairy-tale popping up out of a bottle.

He nodded. 'I've certainly learned quite a bit,' he said.

Staurachus rubbed his eyes. Of course, he wasn't getting any younger, and all this extra work would be tiring to a man of his age. Somehow you don't expect frailty in your enemies, only your friends; you imagine that their malice makes them immune. 'So how do you think we should proceed?'

'Get hold of someone inside the city and pay them a lot of money'

Staurachus smiled. 'Very good,' he said. 'And who do you think would be a good prospect?'

Psellus shrugged. 'I don't know a lot about them,' he said, 'but from what I've heard, I'd say the Merchant Adventurers. Mind you,' he added quickly, 'that's just off the top of my head. I'd need to know a bit more in the way of background. I mean, do the Eremians allow their women to go wandering about the place at night on their own?'

'Who knows?' Staurachus raised his hands in a vague, all-purpose gesture of dismissal. 'We have people working on that side of things, cultural issues and what have you. It's standard operating procedure to compile a complete profile in these cases.'

Reassuring, Psellus thought; we'll wipe them out, but the file will be preserved for ever somewhere in the archives. A kind of immortality for them, every aspect of their culture scientifically recorded in the specified manner. 'That's good,' he heard himself say. 'At any rate, we've got to try it before we risk an assault against those defences.'

Staurachus shrugged. 'If it comes to that, I don't think it'll prove to be beyond our resources. We're blessed with advantages that few other nations have in war; we have the best engineers in the world, and our armies are made up of well-paid foreigners. Arguably, the harder the assault proves to be, the better the demonstration to the rest of the world.'

'I suppose so,' Psellus said. 'But it'd probably be better to try treachery first. For one thing, we could forget all that business about having to get the Vadani on our side.'

'Ah yes.' Staurachus smiled a little. 'You knew Boioannes at school, didn't you? Or was it later, in vocational training?'

'Both.'

'The diplomatic service see things from a slightly different angle,' Staurachus said tolerantly. 'They have their pride, same as the rest of us. They like to believe they're useful. We listen to what they can tell us, but we don't usually tend to follow their recommendations.'

At the end of his first day in Necessary Evil, Psellus felt an overwhelming need for a bath. As a Guild officer of senior executive rank, he was entitled to use the private bath in the main cistern house, instead of having to pitch in at the public bathhouse on the other side of the square. It was a privilege he valued more than any other, since he'd always been diffident about taking his clothes off in front of other people (I have so much, he often told himself, to be diffident about: so much, and a little more each year); and besides, the water in the cistern house was always pleasantly warm, instead of ice-cold or scaldingly hot.

His luck was in; nobody else was using it, and quite soon he was lying on his back lapped in soothing warmth, gazing up at the severely geometrical pattern of the ceiling tiles. As he relaxed, he mused on treachery. Staurachus had sounded as though he already had a plan for the betrayal of Civitas Eremiae; probably involving the Merchant Adventurers, either directly or indirectly. His question, therefore, had been by way of a test; fair enough, since Staurachus was his sponsor, and one likes to reassure oneself that one's protege is worth putting one's name to. But there'd been something about his old enemy's manner that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and it referred back, he was sure, to the big question: why had Staurachus chosen him, of all people?

There was a saying-Cure Hardy, he rather thought-that when making a sacrifice to the gods, you should offer the best animal in the herd, preferably someone else's. He paused his train of thought, and tried to work out which herds he belonged to. Foundrymen's; Didactics; no enlightenment there. Compliance; yes, but he wasn't Compliance any more. What else? Who would his failure and disgrace reflect badly on? When he failed-

But how could he possibly fail? He couldn't, because the Republic couldn't lose a war. It might just conceivably lose a battle. It might even, under circumstances too far-fetched to be readily imagined, lose an army. The war might drag on for a year, or twenty years. The Republic would, however, inevitably win. Furthermore, as Staurachus had said himself, a military disaster wasn't necessarily a failure. A nation that wins a great victory frightens its neighbours; a nation that suffers a devastating defeat and then goes on to win the war, hardly noticing its losses, terrifies them to the point where both aggression and resistance are unthinkable. It wouldn't matter to the Republic if it lost fifty thousand men in one engagement, since all its armies were made up of hired foreigners. Indeed, the simple fact that dead men don't need to be paid had helped the Republic on several occasions in the past to regard bloody defeats with a measure of equanimity. No, failure wasn't possible. No matter how hard one tried, it simply couldn't be done.

After he'd finished his bath, Psellus went to his room. He slumped on the bed (his calves and knees ached pitifully, because of all the unaccustomed standing and walking) and put his hands behind his head. Normally he'd read a little before going to sleep; a few pages of early Mannerist poetry, perhaps, or Pogonas' On Details; something wholesome, orthodox, approved and gently soothing in its familiarity. Tonight, anything like that would be too bland to have any effect. He sat up again, scanned the titles on the shelf that stood against the wall and, on a whim, pulled down a very old, fat, squat book he hadn't looked at in years.

He made up for that now with a brief inspection. The covers, bound in plain off-white vellum gradually losing its translucence with age, were about the size of his palm; width, the length of his thumb. On the spine a previous owner had written, in ink now brown and faded with light and age, Orphanotrophus, concerning the measurement of small things, between the first and second backstraps of the binding. It was, he reflected, an accurate but misleading description. He let the book sit in his palm. The binding, still tight after four hundred years, nevertheless allowed a slight gap between the pages about a third of the way in. He opened it at that point, and stared for a moment at the tiny, precise handwriting. He'd forgotten that the book was written in what he believed was called copy minuscule-perfect, but very, very small, so that although he could read it without difficulty it made him feel dizzy, as if gazing too long at something a very long way away. He read: In considering this same virtue which we call tolerance, namely the virtue that seeks ever to diminish and make small its own substance, we should most diligently consider wherein lies the true end of an endeavour: whether it be the perfection of the act of making, or of the thing made. For to value and cherish fine small work in the making of a worthless thing were folly, and but little to be regarded against the making of an useful thing, though basely and roughly done, save that in such act of making there is an effect of making fine worked upon the maker: so that each thing made small and fine by such making refines the hand that wrought it. Thus a man of great arts continually exercising his skill upon the perfection of fine things, though they be but idle and nothing worth, gains therefrom, besides material trash, a prize of great value, namely that same art of making small and fine, or rather the augmentation thereof by practice and perfection. Let a man therefore turn his hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys, so that thereby he shall make good his skill for when he shall require of it to serve a nobler purpose.

Psellus lifted his head and rubbed his eyes. Thirty-five years ago, he remembered, he'd sat in a badly lit room the size of an apple-crate, staring dumbly at this very same page on the eve of his Theory of Doctrine exam. Addled with too much concentration and too little sleep, he'd read it over three or four times before he finally got a toehold in a crevice between its slabs of verbiage, and hauled himself painfully into understanding. Not long afterwards he'd dozed off, woken to see the sun in the sky, and run like a madman to the examination halls just in time to take his place… But the great force of providence that looks after idle students in the hour of their trial had been with him that day. Out of the whole of that fat, dense book, which he'd been meaning to get around to reading for two years and opened for the first time the previous evening, the learned examiners had seen fit to set for construction and comment the one and only paragraph he'd managed to look at before sleep ambushed him. Accordingly, he scored ninety marks out of a hundred, thereby earning his degree and with it the chance of a career in Guild politics.

Maybe that was why the book had fallen open at that page. He frowned, as a tiny spark flared in his memory. Vaatzes the abominator had owned a copy of this book, and had, apparently, misunderstood it. In spite of everything, he leaned his head back and grinned like a dog. Let a man therefore turn his hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys, the book said, and the poor literal-minded fool, striving to improve his mind to the level of his betters by reading the classics, had gone away and done as he'd been told, and got caught at it into the bargain. As a result, he'd earn himself a footnote in history as the man who brought about the eradication of an entire tribe by his failure to construe an archaic usage in a set text. It'd make a good joke, if it wasn't for all the deaths it would cause.

He put the book back in its place and took down Azotes' Flowers of Didacticism instead.

The next morning there was another meeting in the cloister garden. It wasn't on the schedule, which was posted every week on the chapterhouse door; half a dozen pages had spent a nervous hour just after dawn scurrying through the Guildhall rounding up Necessary Evil and shepherding them here, puzzled and irritable and speculating about the nature of this urgent new development.

When the stipulated quorum had gathered, Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service asked leave to address the meeting. Before he started to speak, however, he picked a sack up off the ground, balanced it on the ledge of the rostrum while he opened it, and took out of it something the size and shape of a large melon, wrapped in dark brown sailcloth. It wasn't a melon.

'This,' he said, letting the thing dangle from his hand by the hair, 'used to be Auzida Razo, our chief of section among the Merchant Adventurers in Eremia.' He paused. The thing was dripping on to the neat, short grass. 'I have reason to believe,' he went on, 'that the covert stage of this operation is over.'