The Belly of the Bow

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Machaera woke up from the dream she could never remember, the one with the smoke and the killing and the man calling her name… Gone again. She didn’t mind in the least not being able to remember that one. It wasn’t the sort of thing any sane person would want to carry about in her head.

She yawned and sat up. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep; she still had a third of Heraud’s Responsibility and Volition to prepare for Moderations, which were getting depressingly close. True, she was ahead of the rest of her year in Applied Science and Lesser Arts, but she’d spent so much time lately on projections and the like that she was weeks behind on her required reading, and Best Authors was the first test in Moderations. Even with all the practical work, she would have been able to cope if it wasn’t for all the wretched headaches. According to the lodge Orderly, they might well be something to do with reading in a bad light, in which case she’d only be rid of them if she did her reading during the day. Maybe it would be best if she gave up the practical work for a while, at least until after Moderations. After all, Applied Science was only fifteen per cent of the marks.

She tilted the water jug towards her and saw it was empty. With a sigh she picked it up and trotted down the spiral staircase to the rainwater tank in the courtyard to fill it. She was just straightening up with a full jug in her arms when she heard a voice behind her.

‘Hello,’ it said. ‘There you are. So where have you been hiding the last few weeks?’

She sighed. ‘Hello, Cortoys,’ she replied. ‘I’ve been working. But you wouldn’t know about that.’

‘Very funny,’ Cortoys Soef said. ‘As it happens, I’ve been working very hard.’

‘Really? Two-syllable words and everything?’

The young man’s face became uncharacteristically serious. ‘You bet,’ he said. ‘I’ve had this irresistible urge to study lately. Ever since,’ he went on, ‘I had my name pulled off the list for the Scona raiding party by Doc Gannadius because I was overdue on my Lesser Arts dissertation. It’s that sort of thing that reminds me just what a bookish type I really am, deep down. As far as I’m concerned, you can lock me in a good library and chuck away the key.’

Machaera’s eyes widened a little. ‘You were supposed to be on the raiding party?’ she said.

Cortoys nodded. ‘Uncle Renvaut pulled some strings, arranged for me to go along as his adjutant or his page or something. Pleased as punch, I was, till Doc Gannadius interfered.’ He looked away. ‘They’re saying the rebels have stuck Uncle Renvaut’s head up on a pole on the Strangers’ Quay. Apparently it’s the first thing you see when you walk up the promenade towards the customs house.’

Machaera shuddered. ‘It’s probably not true,’ she said gamely. ‘Most of these rumours are nonsense. Ramo says they’re deliberately put about by rebel spies, so as to worry us and make us think we’ll lose the war.’

Cortoys shrugged. ‘Well, if that’s what they’re trying to do, they’re doing a pretty good job where I’m concerned. All those people, Machaera. There were friends of ours on that expedition. Hain Goche. Mihel Faim. Very nearly me, too. And Mihel was younger than me; damn it, I’ve been teasing him about being six weeks younger than me ever since we were in letters school together. How can someone younger than me possibly be dead?’

Machaera thought for a moment. ‘Your cousin Hiro died when he was fifteen,’ she said, and immediately wondered why she should want to say anything so mindlessly tactless; after all, reminding him of the death of a much-loved cousin wasn’t going to make him feel better, was it?

‘True,’ Cortoys said dispassionately, ‘but he was ill for six months, at least we all knew he was going to die, we had a chance to get used to the idea. But Hain and Mihel weren’t ill. Damn it, Hain borrowed my Geometry notes only a few weeks ago to copy out the bits he’d missed. How the hell am I going to get them back in time for the test?’

Machaera was about to scold him for being so self-centred when he suddenly burst into tears. This was thoroughly disconcerting. Cortoys had never cried, not in all the years she’d known him; not even when he was just turned five and he’d fallen down the steps near the north cistern and taken all the skin off his knees. He’d wanted to cry; she’d stood there, watching him carefully as if observing an interesting astronomical phenomenon, waiting for him to cry, but he hadn’t, not then and not ever. It was one of the things about him that irritated her most.

‘Cortoys-’ she said.

‘Oh, damn all this to hell,’ he muttered through a big sob. ‘This is so stupid. And now you’ll go around telling everybody-’

‘Cortoys, I wouldn’t.’

He shrugged. ‘Doesn’t matter whether you do or not,’ he said, wiping his nose on his wrist. ‘You know what really worries me?’ he went on. ‘I know, really know, that if I’d been there, like I was supposed to have been, I’d have been so terrified I’d either have run or else been so scared I’d have just stood there. I don’t know, it’s just the idea of it, being in a battle, all that anger and danger. You know what I’ve only just realised? I’ve been a coward all my life and never knew it.

Machaera wanted very much to be somewhere else, but unfortunately she didn’t have that option. Part of her hated Cortoys more than ever for choosing her to break down in front of. Part of her wanted to hug him tight and tell him it didn’t matter; which was strange, because she really didn’t like him, not one bit. ‘Nonsense,’ she said, as briskly as she could (a bit like Master Henteil when he got impatient in Metaphysics tutorials). ‘You’re no such thing. Everybody gets these ideas from time to time, imagines they won’t be up to it when the moment comes. That doesn’t make them cowards.’

Cortoys shook his head. ‘From now on,’ he said, staring at the fashionably pointed toes of his shoes, ‘I’m going to make damned certain the situation never arises. And I don’t care what anybody says; the further away I stay from the fighting, the happier I’ll be.’

Machaera grinned in spite of herself. ‘You could start a new faction. The Don’t-Want-to-Fight faction. It’d be original, at any rate. I’m absolutely positive nobody’s thought of that one before.’

‘I’d be famous,’ Cortoys answered, looking up at her with a tearful smile. ‘The first all-new faction in Shastel for fifty years.’

‘Doing your bit for the Soef family name,’ Machaera added.

‘Oh, quite,’ Cortoys replied. ‘Uncle Renvaut would have been so proud.’

Gorgas Loredan slipped off his horse and handed the reins to the sergeant of his escort. ‘You lot had better make yourselves scarce,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Stay in earshot just in case I do need you for anything, but I don’t think that’s very likely.’

He approached the long barn from its blind side, stopping every now and then to look and listen, like an archer walking up a rabbit in long grass, just before the first cut of hay. He couldn’t hear anything that suggested activity; no smooth sshk of plane-blade on wood, no sounds of sawing or rasping, no voices. He’d assumed, reasonably enough, that Bardas would be in his workshop. After all, he was an artisan with a living to earn, so while the light was still good he ought to be at his place of work. That’s where working men are during the day.

Unless he’s out somewhere chopping down trees. Or dead. Or scared stiff by the raiders and run off into the hills somewhere. He frowned at this last speculation; men who have commanded armies and made their living as professional swordfighters don’t scamper away into the bushes like bunnies at the first sight of a halberdier’s greatcoat. All right, then, he’s out delivering, or buying materials. Or shopping, even.

He walked slowly round the corner of the long barn into the yard and paused for a moment to look round. No signs of life anywhere, and he didn’t have that nebulous but unmistakable feeling of being watched. Nobody home, his instincts told him, but there are several words to describe people who rely on their instincts in situations of this sort, most of them synonyms for ‘dead’. Unlikely, of course, that Bardas would plop an arrow between his shoulders or jump out from behind the water-butt with a sword in his hand, but the whole object of the exercise was to stalk the quarry, not flush it out; the more notice he gave his brother of his arrival, the smaller his chances of scooping him up and taking him back to Town. Gorgas allowed himself a little smile, thinking back to the days when he and his brothers were regularly landed with the loathsome and near-impossible chore of rounding up the ducks off the pond, stuffing them in great big wicker baskets and bringing them back to the long poultry-shed. There are few things quicker moving or less predictable then a startled duck, and the fun usually began when there were only ten or so left. Gorgas had never worked so hard or sweated so much before or since.

Three stone steps up to the barn door, and he put his head cautiously round the frame. The workshop was dark, shutters drawn. In theory, a man could hide behind the stacks of felled, trimmed timber, or behind the clay-pipe-and-brick contraption in the corner (Gorgas recognised it as a steamer, for steaming the limbs of a bow into a recurve; his father had tried to build one once and failed), but Gorgas only made a cursory inspection. At this range, he was prepared to go with his instincts. If Bardas was here he’d know it, and he wasn’t.

Gorgas sighed and sat down for a moment on the bench. Scruffy, he noted. Tools left lying about, shavings ankle-deep on the floorboards, whatever happened to Tidiness is the Mother of Efficiency? He picked up a drawknife and held it up to the light. There were spots of rust like raindrops already starting to form on the polished blade. Father would have had a fit.

He put the drawknife carefully back where he’d found it and brushed away a little pile of shavings, resisting the urge to sneeze. There was a three-quarters-finished bow in the vice, a straight, flat self-bow intended for military use. Gorgas ran a finger along the belly and was impressed by the quality of the finish. Someone had been to a lot of trouble to get it feeling so smooth and glasslike. Why? Where was the point in exceeding the level of quality prescribed by the standard military specification? No one would ever notice or appreciate it – correction, brother; nobody but you and me. Well, either you’ve shrivelled down into a perfectionist in your old age, or you’ve got an apprentice with not enough work to keep him fully occupied. Bad business, either way. Just as well you’ve got a brother who’s in charge of military procurement who makes sure you get paid twice the going rate, or you’d never have lasted as long as you have. Gorgas grinned at the thought of his brother’s naivety; no question but that Bardas hadn’t yet realised that he was being secretly subsidised; he’d have a fit if he knew. A fine man, Bardas Lordan, but just a little bit unworldly.

He left the barn, closing the door behind him, and crossed the yard to the house. That proved to be empty as well; not just of people, but of pretty well everything. It reminded Gorgas of his brother’s sparse, horrible apartment in one of the ‘island’ blocks in Perimadeia. Obviously, Bardas had some sort of hang-up about accumulating possessions, which was a new development since they were children, but understandable in the light of what had happened in between. Still, he reflected as he surveyed the main room, it takes a special skill to be sparse and scruffy at the same time.

He poked about for a while until he found what he was looking for – a cloth bundle tied up with hemp cord and shoved under the mattress, containing a rare and extremely valuable Guelan broadsword. No chance whatsoever that Bardas would go away for good and leave that behind. Quite apart from its monetary worth, it was one of the finest swords ever made and no fencer who’d once owned such a thing could possibly bear to be parted from it by choice. If the sword was still here, Bardas would be back. Gorgas sat in the solitary and uncomfortable chair – for a bowyer, brother, you’re a piss-poor carpenter – and settled down to wait.

What with one thing and another, Venart didn’t really feel in the mood for conducting business. Still, he didn’t have much choice; he had money to pay out and collect, loading to supervise, charter-parties and bills of lading to read through, provisions and chandlery to buy before he could leave Scona, and if he didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to get done.

It’s one of the immutable laws of trading life that the busier a man is and the less time he has, the more complicated every simple thing becomes. The people who owed him money weren’t at home; if he was quick he might just catch them at the Quay, or at the Golden Square, or on their way back from the Bank. His creditors, on the other hand, had no trouble at all in finding him, and he didn’t seem to be able to make them understand that the longer they kept him hanging about talking, the longer it would be before he’d be able to collect his money and pay them. Then he couldn’t find any porters to load his cargo, and when he finally managed to round up a gang of dead-beats and loafers who belonged to the necessary guilds, he arrived at the customs house to find that the portmaster was away for the rest of the morning and might be back later, or not, depending on how things went generally. Then there was a mistake in the cargo manifest that meant the whole thing had to be written out again (but the clerk who’d done it wasn’t in his office, and all the other clerks in Scona Town were all apparently too busy to take on a rush job), the provisioners were clean out of raisins, and the price of four-ply sailmaker’s twine had somehow managed to shoot up overnight from three quarters a roll to ten. All in all, for a town that apparently didn’t want him, it was making it very hard indeed for him to leave.

‘Wool grease,’ the last chandler in town muttered, stroking his chin thoughtfully. ‘Wool grease. I might have some. There’s not a lot of call for it.’

Venart waited long enough to count to ten. ‘Then would you mind looking for it?’ he suggested. ‘I need two gallons, minimum. I’ll take three if you’ve got it.’

The chandler shrugged. ‘If I’ve got any, it’ll be in the cellar,’ he replied, and Venart couldn’t tell from his tone of voice whether this was just a statement of fact or the chandler’s roundabout way of saying that the cellar was blocked off or he didn’t dare go in there because of the spiders.

‘Would you mind going down into the cellar and looking, please?’ Venart said.

‘I could do,’ the chandler conceded. ‘Can you come back tomorrow, say about midday?’

Venart released a sigh that had been building up inside him for the last twenty minutes. ‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘I’ll try somewhere else.’ He turned to go, but just as he was about to pass through the door, the chandler said, ‘Wait there, I won’t be long,’ and disappeared, apparently straight down through a hole in the floorboards.

Half an hour later he came back empty handed. ‘I’ve got olive butter,’ he said, in a slightly awed voice, ‘barrels and barrels of it. You can have as much of that as you like.’

Venart explained that he needed wool grease to proof his hull against shipworm, and olive butter would be not just useless but counter-productive. ‘You sure you haven’t got any?’ he asked.

‘I might have some in the roof,’ the chandler replied.

Venart drew in a deep breath; but before he could say anything, he heard a familiar voice behind him.

‘I can lend you some if you like,’ said Athli. ‘You can pay me back when I get home.’

For the first time in several days, Venart felt relatively happy. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’ he added.

‘You’re looking at the Zeuxis Commercial Bank,’ Athli replied smiling. ‘All five foot three of it. Come on, I’ll get you that wool grease. And you look like you could use a drink.’

‘I didn’t know your other name was Zeuxis,’ Venart admitted as they walked together towards the Quay. ‘Come to think of it, it never occurred to me to ask.’

Athli shrugged. ‘I don’t suppose the topic ever came up,’ she said. ‘You look harrassed. Things not going well?’

Venart pulled a face. ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘But don’t get me started on that subject. What’s all this about a bank, then?’

‘I’ve got the Island agency for Shastel,’ Athli replied. ‘Clinched it just the other day, in fact. And, since I was passing, I thought I’d stop off on Scona and see what the soft-furnishing market’s like here. To tell you the truth, I don’t reckon much to it. These people strike me as a miserable lot.’

Venart frowned. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed,’ he said,’ but there’s something of a war going on between Scona and Shastel. I’m not sure that makes you being here such a terribly good idea.’

Athli shrugged. ‘Nobody seems to mind,’ she replied. ‘As far as I can tell it doesn’t seem to work like that. Actually, if we’re going to be pedantic about it, there isn’t actually a war, just a series of unfortunate incidents that are being actively reviewed by representatives of both parties in the hope of reaching a meaningful settlement in the short to medium term. Which,’ she added, ‘is just a way of saying “war” in gibberish, but it does open up interesting possibilities for an imaginative trader.’

Venart looked at her. ‘Does it?’

‘Oh, yes. Think about it, Ven. Without imaginative traders, with a war going on, how are they supposed to do business with each other?’

‘I didn’t think they wanted to.’

Athli grinned. ‘It’s hardly a matter of choice. There’s at least five big merchant companies on Scona who’re heavily involved in joint ventures with Shastel houses, and the Faims – that’s one of the leading Poor families – have most of their working capital invested on Scona.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Venart objected.

‘True,’ Athli agreed. ‘But Niessa Loredan pays a better rate of interest. It’s one of the things I like about this part of the world,’ she added. ‘They don’t let war get in the way of sound commercial propositions.’

Venart couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and while he was recovering Athli asked after Vetriz. He closed his eyes for a moment. One good thing about the endless aggravations of doing business on Scona was that they could be made to occupy his full attention and keep his mind off other things.

‘She’s in trouble,’ he said. ‘Very bad trouble.’

‘Oh.’ Athli stopped walking. ‘What kind of trouble?’

Venart made a despairing gesture. ‘That’s the worst part of it, almost. I don’t know. As far as I can tell, it’s something to do with Patriarch Alexius, magic and Colonel Loredan. But as for trying to make sense of it all-’

‘Colonel Loredan,’ Athli interrupted. ‘You mean Gorgas Loredan.’

‘No, Bardas. You know, your Bardas. Him you used to work for. If you remember, he’s the Director’s brother, but they don’t get on. It’s all mixed up with some stuff about Perimadeia, but I couldn’t follow it.’

‘What’s Bardas Loredan got to do with it?’ Athli asked quietly.

‘Like I said,’ Venart replied, ‘it all went way above my head. At first, it looked like Triz and I had been arrested; then it seemed the Director wanted her help with something, and then Triz said it was all right, she wanted to stay and do whatever it is the Director wants her to. And here I am, worried out of my head about her – are you listening?’

‘What? Yes, of course I’m listening. Look, let’s get that drink and you can tell me all about it, right from the beginning. You never know, I might be able to help.’

Venart thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘My mind’s a complete blank, I’m afraid, so if you can suggest something, or make sense of what’s going on, that’d be wonderful. Gods, I wish we’d never come here,’ he added savagely. ‘This is the most awful place I’ve ever been in my entire life. If only we can get away and make it safely back to the Island-’

‘Yes,’ Athli said impatiently, ‘all right. Look, there’s a wine shop on the corner, we’ll go there. And for pity’s sake, pull yourself together and start again at the beginning.’

‘Six quarters,’ the old man repeated. ‘Take it or leave it.’

Bardas Loredan looked at the eel, then at the old man, then back at the eel. Pare off the man’s limbs and there’d be a strong resemblance. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but on balance I think I’d rather starve. You can’t get food poisoning from starvation.’

The old man blinked. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else.’

‘That’s crazy,’ Bardas replied. ‘A bunch of Shastel soldiers roam about the island for a couple of days and smash up some villages, and suddenly there’s nothing to eat on the whole of Scona?’

‘Six quarters. Take it or leave it.’

‘Four.’

The old man didn’t say anything. He had a knack of sitting perfectly still, like a lizard.

‘Five,’ Bardas said. ‘And that’s just because if I don’t buy it you might eat it yourself, and I don’t want your death on my conscience.’

‘Six quarters. Take it-’

‘Oh, for gods’ sakes.’ Bardas fumbled in his pocket and produced the money. The old man tucked the eel under the crook of his knee while he held the coins up to the light. Five of them he reluctantly passed after a thorough inspection. The sixth he laid on a flat stone beside him, fished a chisel and a small hammer out of his pocket and cut into the coin on the edge of the rim. Then he held it up again and moved it about in the sunlight until the nick he’d just cut caught the light and sparkled. He clicked his tongue and handed it back.

‘Plated,’ he said.

Bardas looked for himself. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘How the hell did you spot that?’

The old man looked at him. Bardas produced another coin, which passed muster. The old man lifted his knee and handed over the eel.

‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ he croaked.

Bardas found the boy, who was sitting in the village square beside the well, eating an apple. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.

‘Old woman gave it to me,’ the boy replied with his mouth full. ‘Want some?’

‘What? Oh, no, you carry on,’ Bardas said, looking wistfully at the apple. ‘Never could stand the things. Give me heartburn. Here’s supper, look.’

The boy took one look at the eel and backed away a little. ‘I’m not eating that,’ he said. ‘It’s gross.’

‘Don’t be stupid, it’s a perfectly good eel. Delicacy where I come from.’

‘Bet you’re glad you left, then.’

‘It’s this,’ Bardas said with his last drop of patience, ‘or I give you a bow and one arrow and you can go bunny-bashing. Your choice. No obligation.’

The boy looked at the eel and swallowed. ‘It might be all right,’ he said, ‘with some sage and chives and a lot of pepper.’

‘No sage. No chives. Certainly no pepper. If you’d rather have rabbit,’ he added, ‘again,’ he stressed, ‘then be my guest. We haven’t had it stewed yet, have we?’

‘Day before yesterday,’ the boy replied sullenly. ‘All right, we’ll have your rotten eel. But tomorrow we go into Town and buy some bread, all right?’

Bardas shook his head. ‘No. I’ve told you, I don’t like it there. We’ll try up around Seusa, there’s bound to be food out that way. Remember the time we made a delivery up there and had those doughnuts?’

The boy studied him carefully. ‘Why don’t you want to go to Scona?’ he said. ‘It’s much nearer than Seusa and there really is food there. And we won’t be ripped off like we’re being in the villages.’

‘I don’t like it there,’ Bardas repeated.

‘Why not?’

‘Because. Now jump in the cart and let’s go home before it gets dark.’

Bardas was being over-optimistic. By the time they got back it was pitch black and starless, and the boy had to walk in front of the cart with a lantern for the last two miles of the journey. When they reached the top of the lane, the boy stopped dead.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘There’s a light in the house,’ the boy called back.

Bardas thought for a moment, then jumped down and handed the reins to the boy. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘If you see anyone coming who isn’t me, run for it back to that old tower we were in and wait there a day.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a purse. ‘Don’t lose this, for gods’ sakes. There’s enough there to buy a passage to the Island. Find a woman called Athli Zeuxis and say I sent you. All right?’

The boy stared at him, his eyes wide with terror. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘If it’s something bad, why don’t we both just go away and hide till they’ve gone?’

Bardas shrugged. ‘You remember my brother sent some men to round us up and bring us in?’ he said.

The boy nodded. ‘You bashed them,’ he said.

‘That’s right. Well, figure it out for yourself. Whoever that is waiting for us down there, he doesn’t seem bothered about letting us know he’s here. I think that rules out thieves, or the odd stray halberdier. I don’t think it’s more of my brother’s soldiers, for the same reason. So, who else is left? A big party of halberdiers, possibly; and if so, I’ll see the sentries and come right back. But I don’t think so, If they’re wandering about openly and lighting fires, we’d have heard about them by now, with all the travelling round we’ve been doing. I think I know who that is.’

‘Your brother?’

Bardas nodded. ‘Or it could be someone completely harmless, I don’t know. Anyway, you wait here, and remember – Athli Zeuxis, on the Island. You got that?’

‘Yes,’ the boy replied. ‘Can’t I come with you?’

‘No. Stay here. Pay attention.’ He reached into the cart and took out the short heavily recurved ninety-pounder and the quiver of short reed arrows, looked at them and put them back. ‘The hell with it,’ he said, ‘I can’t shoot straight in broad daylight, let alone the pitch dark. Serves me right, I suppose.’

He walked quietly along the side of the barn as far as the woodshed. Fortunately, he knew everything there was to know about the woodshed door, including the precise way to lift it to stop the hinge squeaking. It was impossible to see anything in there, but he was able to find what he was looking for by feel: a hatchet-head fitted to a felling-axe handle, hanging from a strap from a hook in the centre beam. It was a weapon in the way rabbit was food; a significant improvement on nothing at all.

Why he felt so angry he didn’t know. If it was Gorgas in there, he was glad he’d had some warning. The way he was feeling right now, he’d have gone for him straight away, without even thinking about it, and since Gorgas was most probably better armed than he was, that would have been a bad mistake. The advance notice hadn’t changed how he felt; time to think about it had given him an opportunity to choose some semblance of a weapon, but it hadn’t cooled his temper. And that was odd. He’d spent so many years killing for money that he couldn’t imagine himself ever killing for free again. He hadn’t felt this way when he first came to Scona and was confronted with Gorgas and Niessa. He’d even managed to be civil to them both while making it clear that he wanted to be as far away from them as the cramped geography of the island would permit. He hadn’t enjoyed the interview and it had been hard work being in the same place with them, but he hadn’t felt this terrific urge to see their blood.

Since then, nothing in particular had happened. They’d left him alone, just as he’d asked. Once he’d turned away a few messengers with gifts of money and clothes and the like, Gorgas had taken the hint and stopped trying. Recently Bardas had been able to go days at a time without feeling their presence in this enclosed space they owned. He’d worked hard, very hard, at shutting them out of this mind; and although he knew it was all entirely artificial, this pretence that he was a simple artisan making a satisfactory living by honest toil, that his bows were of such exceptional quality that the procurement officers paid a premium for them and took whatever he could produce, nevertheless it was an illusion that he believed he could maintain for a while yet (as his mind slowly took a set, like a bow left strung and put away, until the wood forgets the tension in the back and the belly and follows the string in a permanent bend), perhaps even indefinitely. He wondered about the physics of it, and considered the old saying in his trade that a bow at full draw is nine-tenths broken. He concluded that all he wanted to do now was break, and the hell with everything; but why this should be he couldn’t quite grasp. Perhaps it was nothing more than this heavy-handed reminder of how shallow the illusion was, as simple as that; the act of walking into his home and lighting a fire. In Perimadeia, where houses quite often went without an owner (because someone had died childless and without family, or had gone abroad and not come back) it was the law that ownership was asserted by treating the property in some way as if one owned it – moving in furniture, whitewashing the walls, cleaning the curtains or even something as simple and ordinary as lighting a fire in the hearth. He’d have taken it without a word from a couple of stray Shastel halberdiers, even if they’d burnt the place down, because they’d have been passing through and wouldn’t have been asserting ownership. Gorgas lighting a fire in his grate was another matter entirely; that made it a legal issue, and he’d spent long enough in the lawcourts of the City to know what to do about that.

Or it could just be a couple of burglars. Gods, I hope so.

He knew which shutter-bolt was loose, fastened into rotten timber; the axe-handle between shutter and window-frame as a lever, and a gentle but insistent application of pressure, to rip the bolts through the crumbling wood without making a noise. I’d have made a good burglar myself; here I am, breaking in. Already I’m treating it as another man’s house. Once he’d got the shutter loose he paused and counted to twenty before slowly swinging it open, then another twenty before he carefully stepped though and into the pitch-dark back pantry. For all his care and attention to detail, he’d forgotten something; he remembered it just in time, when something dry and textured like skin batted him gently in the face. Two of those damned ubiquitous rabbits, skinned and hung to drain out the blood into a pudding-bowl placed under them on the flagstones; he let his breath out slowly, calmed himself down, and took a moment to remember exactly where the door-latch was, and where he’d put the bowls. Treading rabbit-blood footprints through his own house (yes, my house, damn it) would only serve to add another level of aggravation.

Another count of twenty after he opened the door an inch or so. The pale orange light was coming from the main hearth, no question about that. He was starting to feel horribly uncomfortable, as if the house had betrayed him somehow; as if it had been Gorgas’ paid spy ever since he first came here, and he’d only just realised it. He felt as if he was sneaking up on his wife and her lover, listening to them as he edged down the dark passageway. No pretence of trying to make himself calm down, not now that he could practically smell his brother here, like unfamiliar hair-oil on a pillow. All he could feel was the urgent physical need to swing the little axe, to split bone like splitting a newly felled tree (every tree will split if only you know where to hit, where to find the fault-line); it was something he couldn’t put away in his mind, insistent and distasteful like a full bladder or an upset stomach, something he’d rather not do but absolutely had to. And then we’ll be all square, he reflected, I’ll finally be on the same level as him, though perhaps without his minor plea of expediency. Or he’ll get me and be that much nearer the full set. Whatever. The outcome really doesn’t bother me; it’s getting it over with that matters.

Indeed. He relaxed, stood up straight, took a deep breath. No earthly reason why he should skulk about in his own house. He put his left hand against the dividing door and pushed.

Gorgas was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, with his back to him; a pair of broad shoulders hunched a little and the back of a bald head. He turned round and stood up in the same movement – there had always been a sort of grace about the way Gorgas moved; he’d never been clumsy or awkward, even as a boy – and stepped a little to one side, so that the light of the fire shone in his face.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’

‘Gorgas,’ Bardas said.

‘I was passing,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I lit the fire, I hope you don’t mind.’

Up till then, the axe in his hand had felt like an extension of his arm; now it was as if he’d been lying on it and it had gone to sleep. He could sense it was there, but he couldn’t feel it. He looked at his brother and said nothing.

‘I hope I didn’t startle you,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I guess it’s not a good time to be lurking about in someone else’s house, though I’m pretty sure we got all of them. Even if there were one or two we didn’t get, I wouldn’t give much for their chances of getting this far.’

Bardas narrowed his eyes, puzzled, and then realised his brother was talking about survivors of the raiding party. He heard himself say that he’d run into a stray halberdier on the road; but that was some time ago.

‘Oh,’ Gorgas said. ‘Well, that’s one less to worry about, I suppose.’

There was something in the way he said it, suggesting that if Bardas Loredan met a man on the road, he’d kill him, because that’s what he does, of course. Carpenters shape wood, peat-cutters cut peat, charcoal-burners make charcoal, Bardas Loredan kills people. Did any of them get away? Not to worry. It’ll give Bardas something to do, now that the evenings are drawing out.

‘Isn’t that apprentice of yours with you? Damn it, I can’t remember his name. He’s all right, is he?’

‘He’s fine,’ Bardas replied.

Gorgas nodded. ‘I gather he was the boy who gave the alarm at Briora. He did well.’

One step across the floor, slightly to the left to avoid tripping over the footstool; a two-handed feint to the right to draw his guard, in case he has time to draw his sword, then let go with the left hand and swing hard with the right for a point of impact just above the ear. He’d taught that as a basic gambit when he was running his fencing school; simple and fairly obvious, but in all the thousands of years that men have spent killing each other, nobody’s yet come up with a sure way to defend against it. Against an unarmed man, of course, it’s virtually satisfaction guaranteed, like the easy shot at a sitting rabbit from fifteen yards, where all the difficulty and skill is in the stalk, the actual loosing of the arrow being pretty much a foregone conclusion. Against an unarmed man who happens to be your brother and who’s trying to make conversation, no possibility of failure whatsoever.

‘What do you want, Gorgas?’ Bardas asked.

His brother grinned sheepishly. ‘This is going to sound bad,’ he said, ‘and I won’t insult you by trying to make it sound otherwise. Niessa told me to bring you back to Scona Town.’

‘I see.’

‘Actually,’ Gorgas went on, ‘she’s got a point. The war’s escalating, getting out of hand. You’re our brother, you live out here alone on the coast, a ship could easily slip in, they could grab you and be away before we could do anything. I’d never forgive myself-’

Bardas opened his mouth to say something, but thought better of it.

‘I know you don’t want to come to Scona,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Gods know, I can understand why. Niessa wants you safe, where she knows where you are. It wouldn’t be for ever; just till things calm down and this mess with Shastel sorts itself out. After all, this is our mess, it’s up to us to solve it without you getting hurt. We think we can see a way to deal with it without it turning into a full-scale war – nobody wants that, it’d be stupid, crazy. Then you could come back here, carry on as you are now-’

‘I’m not going to Scona,’ Bardas said.

Gorgas took a deep breath and sat down. ‘I knew you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Damn it, you’re my brother, I’m not going to bring you in on a rope like a stray calf. All right, here’s what we’ll do. There’s a ship from the Island in port; get on it, go where you like, I don’t care where. Just so long as you go somewhere where the Foundation won’t find you easily. And your apprentice, of course; and don’t worry about money or anything like that, we can sort something out-’

‘You’re joking,’ Bardas said. He felt as if the sky had fallen all around him, and there was nothing between him and the stars. ‘She’ll kill you,’ he said, in a voice that came from somewhere around twenty years ago.

Gorgas shrugged. ‘I can handle Niessa when I have to,’ he replied. ‘The trick lies in not doing it too often. The hell with her, little brother. Is it what you want, or isn’t it?’

‘You know I never wanted to come here,’ Bardas said, the words spilling out like a leak in a wineskin.

Gorgas nodded. ‘That was us being selfish,’ he said. ‘I suppose we both thought that somehow we could make things up to you, put everything right again.’ He made a wide gesture with his hands. ‘As if. Whatever we do always seems to screw things up even more, so maybe the only thing that might help is to stop trying. I don’t know. At least we should stop thinking about what we want.’

Bardas couldn’t think of anything to say. He sat down on the edge of the table and looked at Gorgas; with his back to the fire, in control, as if he was in his own house. He let the axe slip out of his hand.

The halberdier yawned. After everything he’d been through – the march up from the sea, the fighting in the villages, being holed up in that awful place with the leaky roof, and then the unexpected attack and the fire and the narrowness of his escape – more than anything else he wanted to go to sleep, if sleep was actually possible in this horrible country.

Just Ramo and himself, the only survivors. There could be no possible reason why they’d made it and nobody else had, it could only be something random, meaningless. Now, as if to make fun of them, everything seemed to be going their way. They’d stumbled on this house, nicely off the beaten track, with nobody home; a few scraps of cold roast rabbit and some flat beer on the table in the main room; a comfortable hayloft to sleep in, where he’d be relatively safe until such time as he and Ramo felt strong enough and brave enough to go and look for someone to surrender to. He thought of his fellow survivor, pacing up and down outside on sentry-duty (Ramo had insisted on setting a watch, just like the real army. Fair enough; if he wanted to play sentry instead of getting some sleep, good luck to him).

He stared with painful, gritty eyes into a patchy red sunrise. Before he’d been accepted into the armed forces of the Foundation he’d been the son of a hectemore, making some sort of a living off sixty or so acres of hillside and bog in the far west of the Shastel peninsular. The hayloft had always been a good place to hide, on a hot day when there was work to be done, or when his father was in a foul mood. It’s a basic rule of life that all haylofts are virtually identical, and this one had the same smells and sounds as the one he’d taken refuge in not so many years ago. So, although he was weary and aggrieved and painfully hungry, for the first time in a long while at least he felt reasonably safe.

Which was a mistake on his part; because, as he leant his halberd against the piled stooks and sat back with his hands behind his head, the noise he’d taken for a mouse scuttling about somewhere above his head suddenly got louder. He almost had time to grab his halberd, but not quite. A big man dropped down from the top of the stacked hay, landed beside him, grabbed his halberd just as his fingertips brushed the shaft, and stuck the spike into his windpipe.

Bardas Loredan twisted the blade to free it and pulled it out. Then he dropped down to a crouch and listened. But there was nothing to hear, and he allowed himself the luxury of a moment’s rest. He rolled the body along the stack, out of sight of the doorway, pulled off the dead man’s coat and draped it round his shoulders, then sat down where he’d been sitting, in case anybody happened to look that way. His knees ached, as well they might after two hours of crouching in the back of his own hayloft, listening to the sentry’s tuneless humming and waiting for first light.

One thing he’d had plenty of was time to think, and he’d decided on what he considered the most sensible course of action. He looked down at the halberd, wondering whether he’d have to fight anybody else before he got clear. He had no idea how many of them there were; presumably they were the survivors of the raiding party, but even that was just supposition on his part. If they’d done the job properly they’d have put a man up by the gate, maybe a patrol round the boundary wall. It’d be extremely bad luck if they’d managed to find the hole in the back hedge, so he could slip out through that and almost immediately be on the road down to Briora. But that would mean crossing the yard and walking straight past the workshop window, which would be asking for trouble. If he simply dropped down from here and followed the line of the barn up as far as the gate, he stood a better than average chance of not being seen until he was right on top of the gate sentry, who ought not to know what hit him. He felt the weight of the halberd, and stacked it against the hay; he’d be better off barehanded than trying to do any good with an overgrown staffhook.

He swung his legs out through the hayloft door, braced his hands on the floorboards and slid himself forward, landing quite comfortably on the soft grass. As he’d hoped, there was nobody about, and he walked fairly slowly and calmly up to the gate. Sure enough there was a sentry, and sure enough the sentry was leaning on the gate looking down the lane, where it was reasonable to expect any trouble to come from. He’d even taken his helmet off, just to make Loredan’s life a little easier. Just before he reached him, Loredan stooped and picked up the stone he used for propping the gate open. It was the perfect size and shape for the job; there was a crunch, like the sound you make when you put your foot through thick ice, and the sentry slumped forward over the gate, then slid backwards and sprawled on the ground. Loredan used his head to give himself a leg-up over the gate.

Well, that was easy; much easier than getting out of the City. Maybe it just seems easier after all the practice I’ve had. He walked briskly down the lane without looking back and kept going until he reached the main road, where there was an old mortgage-stone sticking out of the hedge. He sat down on that and took a deep breath. He wasn’t shaking or shivering. He felt fine.

Quick check; alive and walking, not cut about at all, no broken ribs or head injuries. Can’t complain about that, now can you? There’s a couple of dead men back there who’d give their right arms to be in your position. He stood up and started to walk down the road, for all the world as if he was off to the village to buy fish. And everything I am is coming with me, he thought. Like the last time, I suppose, except I’ve been spared a swim in cold water, and last time I ended up coming here. Won’t make that mistake again.

As he walked, he considered whether it was a true analogy. After all, it was absolutely certain that Gorgas and the Scona army would sooner or later come back, to starve or slash the survivors out of his house. If they chose the latter course, then it was fairly certain there’d be nothing to come back to; they’d set fire to the thatch and shoot them down as they came scampering out, like rabbits flushed out of a burry. But if they surrendered peacefully, there might not be too much damage done – except that then he’d have to go and be polite to his brother if he wanted his house back, and that was more effort than anything was worth. If he managed to find the boy, he could have the place, although he hadn’t seen or heard anything of him since Gorgas’ visit; either he’d got himself killed by straggling halberdiers, or he’d taken off to Town and caught a ship to the Island (as I told him to, being a melodramatic idiot. Oh, well.) It’d be bad if he’d got himself killed, after escaping from the City and the annihilation of all his family; for a while there, Bardas had fooled himself into thinking that there was some purpose behind his survival, that all the effort and luck expended on bringing him here must mean something. Truth is, I didn’t escape at all the last time, because I came here.

He stopped for a moment and looked back. Leaving home, saying goodbye for the last time, wasn’t something the Loredan family had ever done particularly well; their exits tended to be hurried, botched affairs, framed by fire and the sword and the imminent danger of getting caught. He crouched down on his heels, tucked into the hedge to disguise his outline, and tried to think of some way of doing it properly, but he lacked any sort of frame of reference and gave up. For him, of course, leaving home always seemed to carry with it unpleasant associations of his brother Gorgas; that first departure from the Mesoge, the strange and sudden appearances of Gorgas Loredan in the last night in Perimadeia, and now this pantomime in a dripping hedge. There seemed to be no end to the places he could render uninhabitable for himself, but always there Gorgas seemed to be, rolling up like the constable on market day to move him along.

I should have killed him while I had the chance.

Bardas listened to the echo of that sentiment in his mind, and grinned. It was true, he’d come very close, but that wasn’t the same thing as actually performing the irrevocable act. Home had been Gorgas’ fault, no doubt about that; Gorgas had turned him out of the Mesoge as surely as if he’d been the landlord’s bailiff, and as a direct result of that, he’d gone to war on the plainspeople with his Uncle Maxen. But there the chain was broken. He could blame Gorgas for putting him there, but not for what he’d done with his own hands, or for the consequences of those irrevocable actions. Whatever else he might have done, Gorgas hadn’t performed the act that burnt down Perimadeia. It’d be wrong, wrong on a Gorgas Loredan level of malfeasance, to punish Gorgas for something he’d done himself.

The chain was broken; but here he was, nevertheless. It was a part of it that he couldn’t make fit, as if a piece was missing or a page had dropped out. And yes, here he was.

Well, that was something he could alter. He cleared his mind, as if he was putting away his tools at the end of a long day, and considered where he should go next.

There were, of course, certain practical matters to be considered. Assuming he wanted to get off Scona, he’d need to find a ship and some way of paying for his passage. Since the only place where merchant ships put in was Scona Town, it’d mean having to go there, hang around until he found some way of getting money, or a ship’s captain who’d let him work his passage (remote chance, since it’d be obvious to anyone he didn’t know the first thing about working a ship), or a merchant who’d give him a job and take him back home with him. The third option seemed the likeliest bet; he knew at least two marketable trades, if only he could convince a trader of that with no examples of his work to show, no references or tools of the trade. It was his likeliest bet, but not very likely. Nevertheless, he welcomed the difficulty. Nothing like a horrendously difficult task and an empty stomach to take one’s mind off other things.

It’s more than that, though; I feel positively cheerful, as if it were the first day of a month’s leave. It’s because this is making me leave Scona, which is what I’ve been wanting to do ever since I got here. This is just an excuse. Well, at least it’s a good excuse.

The sun was well up now, and he decided to leave the main road. There was a chance that the Scona army would be bustling down this way fairly soon, and he had no desire to meet them. He took a track he knew – little more than the bed of a stream, now in spate and slippery under the soles of his badly worn boots – that bypassed Briora and brought him out on the cart-track between Ustel and the Town. It was a steep climb, rather more exertion than he’d have chosen after no sleep in a hayloft; but by the time he’d slipped and scrambled along it for about an hour, he was glad he’d chosen it, because as he pulled himself up a steep rise and skidded down the other side, he nearly trod on the dead body of a man, a Shastel soldier with an arrow in his back. He prised the body out of the mud and turned it over; a straggler from one of the various comings and goings there’d been over the last few days, not an ordinary halberdier but an officer, wearing a fine mailshirt and a belt with a gold buckle. There was a ring on one of the man’s fingers with a stone in it, and underneath where the man had fallen, nearly submerged in the mud, Loredan found a good-quality sword with a decorated hilt, worth thirty quarters of anybody’s money. He had no less than twenty quarters cash in his purse, and his boots were nearly new and, once padded with a few strips of cloth, a passable fit.

He stripped off the mailshirt and packed it up in the dead man’s satchel, which turned out to contain half a loaf of bread, an inch of sausage and an onion. Loredan sat down beside his benefactor and solemnly thanked him, with his mouth full, as he did some mental arithmetic – thirty quarters for the sword, twenty cash, say thirty for the mailshirt since it’s damaged, ten more for the ring, another ten for the belt-buckle makes a hundred, and he was home and dry, as good as on board ship, not counting another three for the satchel and one for his old boots, maybe even one for the arrow if the blade’s not bent; then he went back over the body in case there was anything he’d missed. The padded jacket under the mailshirt (not military issue) was still perfectly serviceable and the shirt was better than his own, despite the blood and the hole in the back, so he had them. He pulled off the trousers and held them up; they were torn at the knee and covered in mud, and a Shastel greatcoat probably wasn’t a sensible thing to wear in the streets of Scona Town, but in the coat pockets he found a small folding knife and a book – Pacellus on Ethical Theory. The owner’s name was scrawled on the flyleaf – Renvaut Soef, whoever he’d been before he became an exploitable resource. The book was crumpled and illegible in places where rain and blood had got at it, but there was space for it in the satchel, so he took that too. In fact, he realised as he left the naked body behind him, virtually nothing was wasted except the meat.

Machaera woke up with a scream, and opened her eyes.

The dream started to fade, and she was glad to see the back of it; there had been fighting, and men being trampled in the mud; her cousin Remo, thin and dirty, leaning against a gate with a halberd couched in his arms, a burning house with men running out and then dropping to the ground, a sky full of arrows hanging in the air and then falling towards her, a man stripping a corpse and many other unpleasant things she didn’t want to think about. She got out of bed quickly, as if she was afraid some of the horrible things might still be lurking under the pillow, and splashed cold water from the jug onto her face. That seemed to help; her mind was clearing, and when she looked out of the window she saw that the sun was already up. She sighed; twice in a row now she’d overslept and missed breakfast.

She scrambled into a gown and one sandal; the other one had vanished, and it took her several minutes to run it to ground behind the book-press. She was just fumbling with the straps when the bell went – definitely no breakfast, and only a minute or so to get down the stairs, across the courtyard, up the stairs of the Old Library and into the small lecture hall. She darted out and slammed the door behind her, realised she’d forgotten her wax tablets, went back for them, remembered to check for the stylus, found it wasn’t in the loop on the back of the tablets, hunted frantically for it, found it under the bed and this time made it down the stairs and into the yard, just in time to collide with the junior warden who was staggering along under a heaped armful of books, all of which inevitably ended up on the ground. Without daring to look him in the eye, she knelt down and started scooping them up and shovelling them back into his arms. When she’d gathered up the last errant scroll, she embarked on her apology, but the junior warden (who was eighty-two, as opposed to the senior warden, who was forty-one) scowled at her and said, ‘What?’ She decided to cut her losses and get out of the way as quickly as she could, before she did any more damage.

There wasn’t any point going to the lecture hall now; once the lecture started the door was bolted and nobody was allowed in. Nobody knew why this was done, though the favourite explanation was that, years ago, people who weren’t members of the Foundation used to sneak in once the lecture was under way and sit at the back, learning things they weren’t allowed to know. Machaera started to walk back to her staircase, her mind preoccupied with shame and guilt, and she nearly walked straight into the young woman who had already coughed and said, ‘Excuse me,’ at her. Fortunately, she avoided a second collision just in time.

‘Excuse me,’ the young woman repeated.

Machaera stared at her in awe. Creatures like this were never seen on the premises of the Foundation. She was dressed in a dark-blue buckram coat and matching breeches, with shiny black boots and a broad-brimmed black hat. Round her waist was a silk belt, with a purse and a pouch for a set of tablets, both in fine embroidered silk; and over her shoulder was a dark-blue baldrick from which hung a slim silver-hilted sword in a blue silk scabbard. To an Islander, it was just the runaway-princess-disguised-as-a-man-look, practically a uniform in the mercantile community (Vetriz had two such outfits in green, which Venart had forbidden her to wear on this trip), but to Machaera it was the most startlingly exotic thing she’d ever seen and she wasn’t quite sure whether she could cope with it.

‘Can you help me?’ the young woman asked. ‘I’m looking for a man called Gannadius.’ Her voice was faintly exotic too, although the City accent was familiar; but there was a faint overlay of something else. The Island, possibly? Machaera had never met anybody from there, but she’d heard somewhere that some Island women wore trousers and carried swords, just like the men. Then she remembered that the women who did that were generally pirates, so presumably this strange person was a pirate too. If so, the pirate life hadn’t had much effect on her fingernails.

‘You mean Doctor Gannadius,’ Machaera said, wondering what on earth Doctor Gannadius had to do with pirates. Perhaps they brought him rare manuscripts plundered from Southern argosies, or fragments of ancient inscriptions stolen from abandoned temples in the jungles of the West. ‘He might just be in his lodgings, if he isn’t lecturing. I’ll take you there.’

‘Thank you,’ said the young woman gravely, and followed as Machaera led the way, looking round nervously from time to time as if checking that the lady pirate was still there and hadn’t slipped away to loot the buttery.

‘Have you been here before?’ Machaera asked.

‘No,’ the young woman replied. ‘Which is unusual for someone in my line of work, I know.’

‘Oh?’ Machaera replied, and then wished she hadn’t. If the Foundation had intimate links with pirates, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. ‘Well,’ she recovered, ‘I hope you’re enjoying your visit.’

The young woman smiled. ‘There’s certainly a lot to see,’ she replied. ‘Some of it makes me quite nostalgic.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘It reminds me a lot of Perimadeia,’ the lady pirate translated. ‘All these courtyards, one opening into the next. And the fountains, too. There were ever so many fountains in the City.’

Machaera nodded. ‘Ah,’ she said, as if she’d just understood a great mystery. ‘Well, Doctor Gannadius’ lodgings are through here, turn left at the top of the staircase, the first door you come to.’ She hesitated for a moment, torn between fascination and a general desire to get away before somebody saw her in such bizarre company. ‘I can show you if you like,’ she said.

‘Please, don’t bother,’ the lady pirate said with a smile. ‘I’m sure I’ll find the way. Thank you for your help.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Machaera replied, trying to give the impression that she conducted heavily armed girls in trousers round the Cloister grounds every day of her life. ‘It was nice meeting you.’

I wonder how she manages not to knock things over with her sword, she mused as she made her way back to her room. It sort of sticks out when she walks. It must be a real nuisance in a crowded street.

The young woman found the first door on the left at the top of the staircase, knocked and waited. A familiar voice called out, ‘Come in,’ and she pressed down the latch and walked inside.

‘Hello, Gannadius,’ she said.

He was fatter than he’d been the last time she’d seen him, manhandling a heavy trunk up the gangplank of a twin-castle freighter called the Squirrel beside the Strand on the Island. His hair was shorter too, which probably explained why more of it seemed grey than she remembered. The long grey gown was presumably what Doctors wore in these parts; it wasn’t so different from the long brown robe he’d worn when they first met, in Perimadeia, a place that now existed only in a few people’s memories.

‘Athli,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Good gods, what are you doing here?’

Athli grinned, took off her sword and baldrick, and dropped into a chair. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I haven’t come for my money. You look well.’

‘Thank you,’ Gannadius replied, unstoppering the wine jug. ‘I’m ashamed to say this dreadful place suits me. And I’ll pay you back the money immediately. I’d have done so earlier, but finding someone reliable who was going that way-’

Athli waved the rest of the speech aside. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘Keep it for me, in case I need it some day. How’s business?’

Gannadius laughed. ‘I’m better at this than at the soft-furnishings trade,’ he replied. ‘Mind you, that’s not saying much. What about you? You look prosperous enough, but usually the more prosperous an Island trader looks, the more likely he is to be up to his eyes in debt. I hope that’s not the case.’

Athli shook her head and accepted the cup of wine. ‘And when she says, couldn’t be better, business is booming, you know she’s about to try and borrow money. But seriously, everything’s going very well indeed. I’ve got my own ship now,’ she added, ‘and it’s paid for, too. And I’ve branched out from soft furnishings; I’m now the Island agent for the Grand Foundation of Poverty and Learning; or I will be once I’ve sorted out some details, which is why I’m here. Who’d have thought it, Gannadius, a fencer’s clerk from Perimadeia, running a bank.’

Gannadius looked at her. ‘Congratulations,’ he said severely.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘But whatever else they may be, they’re also a highly successful international banking corporation, and getting their agency is rather better than finding large sums of money in the street. Besides,’ she added with a frown, ‘you work for them too, so you can’t talk.’

Gannadius shrugged. ‘There was a job for me here, and I couldn’t go on imposing on your good nature indefinitely. Admit it, I was a fairly incompetent clerk.’

‘True.’ Athli finished her wine. ‘Which isn’t to say that your old job isn’t still there for you if ever you do decide-It’s all right,’ she added, with a grin, ‘I’m only joking. What’s it like here, really?’

‘Very much like being back in the City,’ Gannadius replied. ‘I teach my own special brand of nonsense to innocent young things who still insist on believing that really it’s all about magic, and if they do their homework and pay attention in class they’ll end up being able to turn their enemies into frogs. I still play at research when I’m in the mood, but more for the sake of appearances than out of any desire to increase the sum of human knowledge. As far as I’m concerned, the less people actually know about that subject, the happier we’ll all be.’

Athli nodded a few times. ‘I tend to agree with you there,’ she said. ‘And if you ask me, you’d be better off back at your old desk in the counting-house; well, you know what I think about all that stuff. Still, that’s your business and not mine, I’m delighted to say. No, I won’t thanks,’ she said, as Gannadius offered to refill her cup. ‘I’ve got to go and talk business with hard-nosed businessmen in an hour or so, and it won’t create a very good impression if I slur my words and breathe fumes in their faces.’

Gannadius nodded. ‘It’s all dry bread and pure spring water with that lot,’ he said. ‘Miserable people, most of them; and this latest crisis hasn’t exactly improved their humour – oh, I don’t suppose you know,’ he added. ‘About the military situation, I mean.’

Athli shook her head. ‘You mean the Scona business,’ she said. ‘Why, has there been a flare-up or something?’

‘You might say that,’ Gannadius replied. ‘Without boring you with details, we’ve got several hundred soldiers and a few high-ranking members of the Poor either dead or trapped on Scona, and everybody’s going around with very grim faces. As far as I can tell, it counts as a pretty serious setback, and there are all sorts of gloomy predictions about mass defections among the hectemores, reprisals, naval blockades, even invasions. It’s fairly fresh news and they’re doing their best to keep it quiet, but obviously it’s not going to do confidence in the Foundation any good at all, so bear that in mind when you’re discussing commission rates and franchise agreements; you’re probably in a much stronger bargaining position than you think.’

Athli raised an eyebrow. ‘Assuming I still want the agency,’ she said. ‘Is it serious? I mean, really? The last thing I want is for the Foundation to go under and leave me holding a fistful of outstanding letters of credit.’

‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it,’ Gannadius replied. ‘In the long run, it must come down to a battle of resources; and the Foundation’s a great big bank and Scona’s a little one. I’m not saying the Foundation could lose three hundred halberdiers and not feel anything, but if the worst came to the worst, they’ve got fifty men for every one of the Scona people. The main headache has always been the fact that they’ve got quite a few ships and we haven’t got any. In fact, thinking about it, perhaps that might have something to do with their wanting to set up an agency on the Island. Where else would you go if you wanted to hire a fleet of say fifty warships, cash in hand and no questions asked?’

Athli smiled. ‘The same thought had crossed my mind,’ she said. ‘Some considerable time after it crossed the mind of every ship-owner on the Island. They’ve been talking to each other for years, but the long and the short of it is, it’d cost too much compared with the actual amount of aggravation the Foundation gets from Scona. I don’t imagine that’s really changed all that much, no matter what your friends in the sackcloth tunics are saying. But thanks for the advice,’ she added, with a smile. ‘At the very least, it’ll leave them wondering how I ever managed to find out. From what I gather, they’re quite paranoid about secrecy and security.’

Gannadius pursed his lips. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said. ‘But it wouldn’t be the first time a mob of ill-mannered upstarts managed to bring down a proud and mighty nation, as we both know. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘that’s enough about affairs of state and high finance. How are Venart and Vetriz? And the Buezon sisters? And did you ever manage to get rid of all that magenta lace I managed to lumber you with?’

Absent friends and old times on the Island filled in Athli’s spare hour quite comfortably and pleasantly, and she was feeling happy and relaxed when she got up to go off to her meeting. But as she turned to leave, Gannadius said, ‘There’s just one other thing,’ and the tone of his voice was somehow disturbing.

‘Yes?’ she said.

Gannadius looked down at his feet, and then at the wall. ‘I know what you think about, well, what I do-’

‘The expressions “mystical claptrap” and “charlatan” do tend to spring to mind, but please go on.’

‘That’s fine,’ Gannadius said. ‘But I have a young student who seems to have a depressingly advanced level of natural ability as far as mystical claptrap and charlatanry are concerned-’

‘The key word,’ Athli said quietly, ‘being “natural”. Carry on.’

‘Quite. And the other day she had one of her extremely tiresome visions, and as usual came to me with it, and I saw it too. And before you ask, it wasn’t something useful like the winners of a horse race. It was more to do with an acquaintance of mine and your former employer.’

‘Loredan,’ Athli said without expression. Gannadius grimaced.

‘That’s not a name to go saying too loudly in these parts,’ he said, ‘as you well know. But yes, this vision did have something to do with Bardas Loredan, which is why I decided to brave your overdeveloped sense of humour and tell you about it. Do you want to-?’

Athli nodded. ‘So what was it?’

Gannadius closed his eyes for a moment. ‘The girl has a cousin, Ramo or some such name, who was with the raiding party on Scona. She saw him leaning over a gate, apparently on sentry duty or something like that; it was early in the morning, and he was looking tired and bored. That’s all she saw – I get the impression she’s seen the same thing more than once, which technically speaking is quite significant. But when she showed the vision to me, I saw something else. I saw this cousin Ramo leaning on his gate, but I also saw Bardas coming up behind this man, hitting him over the head with something, scrambling over the gate and hurrying away down a track. And that’s not the end of it,’ Gannadius went on. ‘She – my student – also saw a man on a hillside taking armour and clothes from the dead body of a Shastel soldier, and when I saw that part of it, the man was Bardas Loredan. And that’s about it,’ he finished lamely. ‘I thought I’d tell you, just in case-’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Athli said, and Gannadius saw that her face had gone white. ‘Is there any way – I mean, can I see this vision too? Or isn’t that possible for non-believers or whatever you’d call it?’

Gannadius shook his head. ‘I know it was Bardas,’ he said. ‘He seemed perfectly sound and healthy, but I wouldn’t go further than that. He took the dead man’s shirt and boots in preference to his own, which suggests at the least that he’s down on his luck. There wasn’t anything in what I saw that confirmed the place was Scona, but that’s where Cousin Ramo is, or was. In my opinion, the visions must be either the recent past or the immediate future, for that reason. You see, I do know for a fact that Bardas is on Scona. In fact, he’s been there for some time.’

Athli looked at him with cold fury in her eyes. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me.’

‘It’s not like that, I only saw him for the first time quite recently. I know he’d been there a while because he had a house and a workshop, what looked like a fairly well-established business, something to do with woodworking; and that suggests-’

‘Yes, I see,’ Athli interrupted. ‘I’m sorry. So you’re saying he’s on Scona and probably in some sort of trouble.’

Gannadius nodded. ‘That’s what I make of it, anyway,’ he said. ‘And I thought – well, I’d better tell you. I know you were-’

‘Yes,’ Athli said. ‘Look, I must go. But thank you for telling me. I may not be able to stop by before I leave, so – well, keep in touch. How do I find the Secretary’s office, by the way?’

The door closed behind her, and not long afterwards Gannadius saw her from his window, walking briskly across the courtyard towards the Provost’s lodgings. He noticed that she’d forgotten to take her sword, and wondered whether he ought to send someone after her with it. He drew it from the scabbard, and saw that it wasn’t a sword at all, just a hilt and six inches of broken-off blade.

‘You did what?’ Niessa demanded.

‘I let him go,’ Gorgas repeated wearily.

‘But why? I told you-’

‘Because it was the only thing I could do in the circumstances, ’ Gorgas interrupted with a flash of irritation. ‘Think, Niessa. He was standing over me with an axe in his hand; I’ll swear he was this close to taking a swing at me.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘You weren’t there.’ Gorgas shivered a little. ‘Come on, look at the alternatives. If I’d tried to make him come back with me, either he’d have killed me or I’d have killed him. Either way, it wouldn’t have achieved the required objective. It wouldn’t have made things better. Agreed?’

Niessa frowned. ‘You had your escort with you, didn’t you? Four against one-’

‘Oh, sure.’ Gorgas sighed. ‘Three squaddies and me against the longest-surviving law-fencer in the history of Perimadeia, in a cramped room where numbers wouldn’t have helped anyway. It’s certain sure he’d have killed one or two of them. It wasn’t a military operation, Niessa, it was a private family matter. Soldiers would only have made things worse.’

‘It was Bank business,’ Niessa replied coldly. ‘The whole object of the exercise was to neutralise a threat to the Bank’s security. To that extent, yes, I’d rather you’d killed him. Then at least he wouldn’t be wandering about just asking to be grabbed and used against us as a hostage.’

The strain of Gorgas keeping his temper was almost audible. ‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said quietly. ‘I know you didn’t mean it. Look,’ he went on, relaxing a little, ‘the object was to get him out of harm’s way, right? Well, that’s what I’ve done. This time tomorrow he’ll be on a ship, heading off somewhere a long way away, probably somewhere they’ve never even heard of Scona. Problem solved, no violence and everybody’s happy; we may even have started him thinking that maybe we’re not so bad after all. You’d never have got that result if you’d had him dragged in here against his will.’ Gorgas leant forward. ‘And there’s one other advantage that I’ll bet you haven’t even thought of.’

‘Really? Do tell.’

‘It’s simple. My confounded niece. If Bardas has gone away, we can let her go. I mean, she can’t very well kill him if he isn’t here, can she?’

Niessa’s expression confirmed that no, she hadn’t even considered that. It was an interesting moment.

‘It’s what I do best,’ Gorgas went on. ‘I take a problem and I turn it into an opportunity to solve a couple more problems. Of course, it means you do have to be able to see the bigger picture and think in the longer term. But if my life stands for anything, it proves that there’s no problem so bad it can’t be sorted out somehow, even if it’s later rather than sooner, provided you never ever give in. Like Uncle Maxen used to say: never surrender while you’ve got one man still on his feet, you never know what may turn up.’