2

I don’t believe in an afterlife, but if I did it would probably be horribly like Simocat in summer. If you know Simocat, that ought to tell you how wicked I’ve been and how guilty I feel about it.

It’s one of those places where people run aground. You arrive there with something to sell, you end up selling it at a loss and find you haven’t got enough money to get out of town. Or you arrive there as merchandise; after Auxentia City, Simocat is the biggest slave market in the West. Only they don’t call it that. Simocat is nominally a Mezentine protectorate and slavery is strictly illegal in Mezentia, because it disadvantages the free worker. So Simocat is the regional centre of the indentures market, which is a completely different thing, except in practice.

Gombryas doesn’t like going there, because he was indentured once. He was only a kid at the time. His father couldn’t pay the rent on their miserable six acres of rock and mud, so he sold Gombryas for a seven-year stretch. The seven years quickly turned into fourteen by the subtle alchemy of the indenture system – the small print gives the master the right to charge the servant for board, lodging, clothing and tools, which can easily be made to add up to more than the servant’s services are worth; the longer you serve, the more you owe your master, and the only way you can pay off the debt is by longer service – until Gombryas, being Gombryas, smashed his master’s face in with a rake and ran away, and look what a success he’s made of his life ever since. Anyway, that’s why Gombryas doesn’t care all that much for Simocat. I, by contrast, don’t like it because it’s a dump. Just because we both arrive at the same conclusion from different angles doesn’t mean we can’t both be right.

I’d brought us to Simocat rather than Scona or Boc precisely because it’s Mezentine turf. If a war did break out, there was a 60 per cent chance the Mezentines would stay neutral, at least until the Sashan started winning major battles, so the risk of three dozen Sashan warships suddenly rearing up out of the morning mist was acceptably low. Albeit for the wrong reason, I’d chosen well. There were buyers in town when we got there, and they were paying silly money. I asked around and it turned out that they were Sashan agents, their mission being to scoop up all available military materiel on the open market, not because the Sashan wanted it but to stop anyone else getting it. So we sold out in no time flat and actually ended up making a profit.

“See?” Polycrates crowed at me, after I’d taken the buyers’ letters of credit to the Knights and cashed them. “And you were all for giving up and running away.”

“I was wrong,” I conceded nobly. “Maybe we should stay in this business after all.”

“At this rate we’d be mad not to,” he said. “You want to get out there and start bidding on a few jobs. There’s no knowing how long prices are going to stay this good.”

That’s another thing they do in Simocat: they broker wars. It’s a new development, and one I’m not exactly wild about, but I suspect it’s the direction the industry is going in. The idea is that instead of going to the governments direct and pitching for the rights to their latest spot of unpleasantness, you do all your bidding through an agent, entrusted by both parties with arranging all that sort of thing. It sounds crazy but it’s catching on. The advantage to the government is that the agent pays them a fixed sum up front, and there’s nothing like cash in hand when you’re planning and financing a military adventure. It’s not so great for us contractors, since naturally the agent slaps on his percentage, which comes out of our pockets. The only good thing about it from our point of view is that we’re dealing with one guy, a professional, as opposed to two civil servants. That removes the horrible risk of only buying one end of a war, which is of course worse than useless. Anyhow, most of the leading agents resolved to set up shop in Simocat, which gives you an idea of what sort of place it is, among other things.

Another chunk of proof that Simocat is horrible: my pal Erriman lives there, by choice.

Erriman and I go way back. He was the third son of my father’s steward, and we more or less grew up together. Then, when I was fourteen, Erriman’s dad got found out. My father had him tortured for a week, trying to get him to say what he’d done with all the money he’d stolen, but the interrogator (a freelance: he came with excellent references) made a pig’s ear of the job and Erriman’s dad died on the rack before the interrogator had got round to asking him any pertinent questions. It turned out that Erriman’s two elder brothers had squirrelled the money away in a Mezentine bank, where we couldn’t touch it; neither, after our lawyers had worked their magic, could they, and for all I know it’s still there. Erriman and his brothers, meanwhile, had legged it to Sueck, where my second cousin once removed the Margrave took them in, on account of some blazing row he’d had with my father. They did well for themselves in Sueck until Erriman fell out with his brothers over some trifling sum that couldn’t be accounted for and left town in a hurry. After a few adventures he settled in Simocat, where he has a talon in a number of pies: indentures, commodities, shipping. He’s probably not the saintliest man who ever drew breath, but we’ve always got on quite well, and over the years he’s done me a few valuable favours at practically cost.

“For fuck’s sake,” he said, as his doorkeeper showed me in. “You again.”

I smiled and sat down without being asked. Erriman scowled at me and poured me a drink. “All right,” he said. “What do you want this time?”

I shrugged. “Nothing much,” I said. “How’s business?”

He handed me the drink and sat down. “Terrible,” he said. “You do realise there’s going to be a war.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Maybe not.”

“There’s going to be a war,” Erriman said, “and I’m going to get wiped out. Everything I’ve worked so hard for all these years, gone, just like that.”

“Surely not,” I said. “You’re way too smart to let yourself get burned by something as trifling as a war.”

He glowered at me. “Don’t you believe it,” he said. “Anyhow, what are you doing in Simocat? You hate the place.”

“Business.”

The drink, incidentally, was Echmen peach wine. A bottle of it costs slightly more than a five-man fishing boat, complete with mast, rigging and nets. I don’t like it much myself, but my father thought it was wonderful. That made me wonder if Erriman had been expecting me.

“You must be laughing right now,” he said. “What with the Sashan paying crazy prices.”

I nodded. “We actually made some money the other day,” I said. “A strange experience. It’s left me feeling rather light-headed.”

He frowned. All his gestures and expressions are on a large scale, as if he was making sure they could see him in the gallery. “Tell you what,” he said. “How much do you want for that outfit of yours? Cash in hand.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“Not for sale,” I told him. “Besides, I wouldn’t sell it to you. We’re pals. You never did me any harm.”

“I’ll give you forty thousand for it.”

A curious feeling, like being punched in the solar plexus when you’re almost too drunk to stand. “Forty thousand staurata?”

“No, forty thousand toenail clippings. Well?”

I was trying to do the mental arithmetic, to see where that figure had come from, but my mind slipped off the numbers like your feet off ice. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “There’s a war coming, remember? It’s going to put all of us out of business.”

“Every disaster is an opportunity in disguise,” Erriman said. “What’ll happen is, all the competition will go bust and I’ll end up with a monopoly. Forty grand. Think about it.”

“I’ll have a stab at it,” I said. “Though that sort of figure’s a bit big for my imagination.”

“Push harder.” He grinned. “Hey, this is a bit of a turn-up, isn’t it? Me offering you money. Wasn’t that way when we were kids.”

Erriman always did know how to get at me. When we were kids, he had a whole armoury of pinches and armlocks and Echmen burns, which he was happy to teach me by example. He’s six months older than me, and he’s always been taller and stronger. When I was seven, I paid him three gulden to be my friend. On balance it was a good investment, but he’s never let me forget it.

“Times change,” I said. “I guess the better man won.”

That made him laugh. “I guess,” he said. “So, what was it you wanted? You did want something, didn’t you?”

“Just to say hello.”

He looked at me for a moment, then decided I was a puzzle that wasn’t worth solving. “Forty thousand staurata,” he said. “And I’ll undertake not to fire any of your pals for at least eighteen months.” He smiled at me. “You’re not going to get a better offer.”

“No,” I said. “Probably not.”

I was reminded, as I walked back to the Perfect Grace in Sheep Street, of a story I once heard, about a man who lost all his money gambling and ended up owing a fortune to a loan shark. To pay off the debt – he was an honourable man – he sold his body to his worst enemy, with a delivery date set a month ahead. Then he took the money and gambled with it and won a small fortune, but when he tried to buy himself back, his enemy refused. I can’t remember what happened in the end, but what sticks in my mind is the poor devil’s dilemma – more money than he’s ever had in his life, and his death ineluctably scheduled in a few weeks’ time. Forty thousand staurata. That, I told myself, is a great deal of money.

But not quite as much as I had put by in the Knights in Auxentia City. Put the two pots together, however, and suddenly the arithmetic comes alive – the big score, the mathematical definition of enough, all my dreams come true and all my troubles over. And it wouldn’t be betrayal as such. Erriman was a reasonably honourable man, according to his lights; if he said he’d keep my pals on, he’d do it. It made sense, after all. He’d need men who knew the business. And maybe he’d be sensible enough not to put them in a situation where they were in danger of being slaughtered like fatstock in autumn.

The Perfect Grace is a dump, but I rather like it. Before it was an inn it was a temple, a very long time ago (it’s a very old building) and nobody knows which religion built it or who was worshipped there. There’s still the base of a high altar in what’s now the buttery, and what used to be the nave has a small but rather lovely dome. These days it’s black with smoke, but if you crane your neck till it hurts, you can still make out flights of mosaic angels adoring some god or other who was knocked through to make a skylight about three hundred years ago. The chancel is now the public bar, and my favourite room is in the south transept, with a view over the cloisters, which are now stables. It’s a nice place to stay provided you don’t eat the food, drink the beer or sleep in the beds. I bribed one of the cooks to make me a pot of green tea and sat in one of the semi-derelict side chapels, trying very hard not to think about Erriman’s offer.

Erriman, of course, knows who I really am. Not many people do. That knowledge is worth a great deal of money, and Erriman could’ve sold me to my father or my sister at any point over the last twenty years, but so far he hasn’t, which says a lot about him. I assume it’s because nobody’s ever offered him the right price or tickled the soles of his feet with a red-hot iron; or maybe he’s saving me up as a sort of pension or rainy-day fund, I don’t know. In his position, I’d have cashed me in years ago, but the interesting fact remains, he hasn’t, not yet. I’ve tried and failed to account for it many times, and all I can come up with is the fact that, a long time ago, I paid him three gulden to be my pal. It’s either that or my having killed my brother and broken my father’s heart. Erriman doesn’t like my family very much. Neither do I. It’s the main thing we have in common.

I was drinking my tea (the bowl was dirty and there was grease floating on the top) when Polycrates came in. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“Tea?”

He looked at me as though I’d offered to pee in his ear. “Someone brought this for you,” he said.

This proved to be a letter. A tiny letter. Someone had taken the flyleaf of a very expensive book, written on it, then folded it up very small into a parcel and sealed it with a very expensive Mezentine intaglio seal. I looked at it, and felt like someone had pushed his arm down my throat.

“Who brought this, did you say?”

“No idea. Some kid.”

Why would he lie? “Thanks,” I said.

“Aren’t you going to read it?”

“Yes,” I said. “As soon as you’ve gone.”

He scowled at me. “Who did you go and see?”

“An old friend.”

“You haven’t got any friends.”

“An old acquaintance.”

“Business?”

Forty thousand staurata. “No,” I said.

“Oh, right. Some doll.”

“No. Yes. Look, will you please go away? I want to read my letter.”

He gave me his extra-special scowl and left. I waited, listening to his footsteps in the corridor. Then I broke the seal.

Hello, Florian. Bet you weren’t expecting to hear from me.

Many years ago, when I was a kid, my brother and I were out riding in the forest. Let’s race, he said. Too dangerous, I said. He laughed and charged off, so naturally I followed, and I’d just pulled ahead of him, flying like a bird, when I rode into a low branch. One moment I was absolutely concentrated on the job in hand and the path ahead; the next moment I was lying on my back, and everything hurt so much I couldn’t breathe.

A bit like that.

Hello, Florian, the letter said. Bet you weren’t expecting to hear from me.

The thing is, I’m in a hell of a mess. It’s all my own fault, needless to say. I wanted to be happy so I tried to be clever. Silly me.

I know we haven’t exactly seen eye to eye for a while. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn’t turn to you if there was anyone else. But there isn’t.

Help me and we’ll call it quits; how does that sound? I can’t ever forgive you. I don’t suppose you can ever forgive yourself. But you wanted to go on living after – well, that stuff – and I found out yesterday that I want to go on living too, after the stupid thing I did. Actually, for the first time I think I understood you. We both did a bad thing. But letting justice take its course or falling on your sword; no, not yet. What’s that line from Saloninus? The beating of the heart, the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open.

Help me, Florian. Please.

The man who’s carrying this letter knows all the details. Come quickly.

Fan.

My name isn’t Florian. It hasn’t been for a long time.

Fan, however, is short for Phantis, my sister, who married the Archduke-Elector Sighvat IV of Stachel-Nagelfest two years after I left home. It was a dynastic marriage, needless to say, but also by all accounts a love match. Fan was sixteen, Sighvat was twenty-one; they’d met at the wedding of Gotprand of Entzwei, a distant cousin of both of them, the year before. By all accounts they fell in love, and just for once love and politics coincided perfectly. It was Fan who persuaded Sighvat (who I never met) to put a seventy-thousand staurata bounty on my head, dead or alive – ten thousand more than my father was offering, which tells you something about how Dad and Fan got on. By all accounts, he gave it to her as a birthday present, and she was thrilled. Everything I’ve ever heard about Sighvat suggests that he was an unusually competent and enlightened ruler; he didn’t start wars or waste money on building pyramids, and by and large people liked him. It’s common knowledge that he was devoted to my sister, and they’d recently had their first kid. How old would he be, now? About six months—

Fan was a nice kid when we were growing up, and everybody adored her, me included. She had a bit of a temper, but only when she didn’t get her own way; and her own way and what everyone else wanted seemed to twine together perfectly, like the plies of a rope, so that was all right. There was only one real incident, when Fan was nine, and we never found out the truth of it. The nursemaid claimed that Fan had been impossibly rude to her, for which she’d got a smack; so Fan deliberately poured lamp oil on the maid’s hair and set light to it. But it turned out that the maid was a bit soft in the head and in the habit of cutting herself and talking to angels, and Fan said it had been an accident and everything the maid said about her was just lies, and under those circumstances, who would you believe? Anyway, Fan was devoted to my brother Scynthius, the one I killed, and he doted on her. All one big happy family, apart from me.

I realised something was missing, and went looking for Polycrates. I found him in the outhouse in the stable yard, squatting on the privy.

“Who brought that letter?” I asked him.

“Piss off, Saevus,” he yelled at me, tugging his pants up to his knees, which was as far as they’d go in that position. “What the fuck do you think you’re—?”

“The letter,” I said. “The one you gave me just now. Who brought it?”

“What?”

“The letter.” I realised I had my hands round his throat. Not sure how they got there. I removed them. Polycrates stared at me. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

“I need to know who brought that letter.”

He made an effort and dragged his mind back to the point at issue. “I don’t know,” he said. “Some kid.”

“What kid?”

“A kid.” He paused and tried to think. “This kid came into the inn and asked for the landlord. He was busy, so one of the tapsters came and the kid gave him the letter. I was in the parlour, and the tapster called me and said something like, this is for your boss. And I thought it might be important, so I looked for you and found you. That’s it. Look, do you mind not standing over me like that when I’m—?”

“Did you see him? The child.”

“Yes, out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t paying attention.”

“Boy or girl? How old?”

“Boy. Twelvish.”

“Which tapster?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

I realised that, on balance, strangling Polycrates wasn’t going to help much, so I left him and ran into the inn. There was somebody, a woman, fooling about doing something. “I want the tapster who got given a letter,” I said.

She looked at me. “What?” she said.

It was like when you wake up out of a dream, and you lie there helplessly as the dream fades away and you lose it all, irrecoverable for ever. “One of the tapsters was in here earlier, and some boy came in and gave him a letter to give to me. I need to talk to him.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know anything about that.”

There are times when I wonder why the Invincible Sun put it into our heads to invent money. It’s caused a lot of trouble over the years and the most you can say about it is that it’s a mixed blessing. But there are times when it comes in very handy. “If you find me the tapster who got handed the letter,” I said, “I’ll give you five gulden.”

“Wait there,” she said, and vanished. I sat down on a bench next to the door, trying not to think about how far the boy might have gone. Some time later, the woman came back with a man. She held out her hand and I put a five-gulden piece in it. She made herself scarce. “The boy,” I said.

“What about him?” said the tapster.

“I need to find him.”

The tapster frowned. “Never seen him before in my life.”

I took a stauraton out of my pocket and put it on the table. “Like I said,” I told him, “I need to find him.”

The tapster looked at the coin. It’d take him six months to earn that, including tips and stealing from the pantry. “Really?”

“Really.”

He pursed his lips. I guess he felt like a goatherd out in the wilderness who meets God, and suddenly he’s not a goatherd any more: he’s a prophet, whether he likes it or not. “I’ll find him for you.”

“You can do that?”

“No sweat.” He took another look at the coin, then charged out into the sunlight.

I sat and read the letter, over and over again. Her handwriting had hardly changed at all. She’d always written like that, quite beautifully, almost like calligraphy. She was proud of it, because it was something she could do really well, even though she didn’t have to. When you looked at a line she’d written you couldn’t help smiling, no matter what the words actually said. That’s Fan for you. Charm and grace swarm all around her, like crows.

The stupid thing I did. Justice taking its course. Another thing about Fan that everybody loved; when she broke the rules, which wasn’t often, she came straight out with it, no lies, no excuses. I broke a window. I saw a honeycake in the pantry and I ate it. I spilled ink on the carpet in the library. No lies; no guilt. The thing has been done, so let’s deal with it and move on. I can’t remember her ever trying to cover up or pretend or shift the blame on to someone else, or ever getting punished, because she’d been honest and owned up. You don’t feel guilty if you know you can do no wrong.

The stupid thing I did – what, for crying out loud? I had to stay put, because if I wandered off, the tapster wouldn’t know where to find me when he came back with the messenger, if he came back with the messenger. Therefore, at a moment when my life was burning down all around me, I was stuck in a small room in the Perfect Grace like a prisoner locked in his cell during an earthquake.

Gombryas came to find me. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been looking for you.”

“Why?”

“Didn’t know where you were.” He peered at me. “What?”

“Nothing to do with you or anyone else,” I told him. “Look, I’m waiting for somebody, all right?”

“Suit yourself,” he said, and left.

A lot of time passed, and I felt every second of it, and then the tapster came back with a boy. Money changed hands, and the boy told me he’d been paid to deliver the letter. Who by? This man, he said, but he wasn’t allowed to say who. That’s all right, I told him, the letter was for me, I’m giving you permission. That didn’t work, but ten gulden did. He’s hurt bad, the boy said, but I can take you to him.

I think Papinian could have saved him; the messenger, I mean. Echmen doctors know so much more than we do about infected wounds, and in this case the damage wasn’t all that bad. The arrow had gone straight through, an ordinary military bodkin by the look of it, no blades or cutting edges to carve a big hole and bleed you out. It was the infection that was killing him, and like I said, the Echmen can do wonders. But Papinian was dead. Shame about that.

He was a big man, fat, balding; he told me he was my sister’s hairdresser. He’d been with her for years, ever since she first came to Stachel-Nagelfest; she’d come to trust him, he told me, and of course he’d do anything for her, anything at all. So when she told him to take the letter he’d said yes, of course, and though he didn’t know it’d mean getting shot at, he didn’t regret it one bit – then he grabbed my hand. “Am I going to die?” he asked me.

He was lying on a heap of straw in a livery yard. I don’t imagine he was supposed to be there, but it was the sort of place where nobody seems to mind. “I’m not a doctor,” I said. “But I’ve sent for one. He’ll be here any moment now.”

“She told me to tell you,” he said. “You’ve got to help her. She’s in deadly danger.”

“What has she done?”

My sister, the hairdresser told me, had murdered her husband, so that she and her lover could seize the throne. The idea was that she would be regent for her baby son and her lover would marry her and be her prince-consort, and true love would overcome all obstacles and everything would be fine. But it hadn’t worked out at all well. A bunch of stuffy old noblemen on the Council had been very negative about the whole thing, and some cousin of her late husband had stirred up the city mob, and there had been riots and one thing and another, and she’d had to barricade herself in the palace; then her lover had betrayed her and gone to the Council, telling them he’d had nothing to do with it and accusing her of all sorts of dreadful things; she and a few of her servants had managed to slip out the back way, leaving the baby behind, and make a run for it; and now she was all alone with those horrible people looking everywhere for her—

“Where?”

He grabbed my sleeve and pulled me close, like a drunk pawing at a barmaid. “The Pearl monastery at Cure Hardy,” he whispered in my ear. “Do you know where that is?”

“I can find it.”

“You’ve got to be quick,” he said. “There’s men looking for her. One of them recognised me; that’s how I got hurt. You’ve got to help her. There’s nobody else.”

I removed him gently from my ear and tried to keep him calm till the doctor came. Nothing anyone can do, the doctor told me, and charged me half a gulden.

Simocat is that sort of town. If you’re careless enough to leave your stable door unlocked, you can’t expect any sympathy if strangers crawl in and die all over your straw. I left him and went back to the Perfect Grace. Polycrates and Gombryas were in the parlour, playing knucklebones.

“Where’s the Pearl monastery?” I asked.

Gombyras shrugged, but Polycrates said, “Crossroads of the Eastern Extension and the Great Southern, about twelve miles from here. Why?”

“No reason,” I told him. “Look, can either of you lend me ten staurata? I need some walking-around money and I’ve spent all mine.”

Gombryas gave me a startled look and turned out his pockets: two staurata, thirty gulden. Under normal circumstances, Polycrates wouldn’t lend money to God, not without a mortgage. “I’ve only got six,” he said.

“That’ll do. Thanks.”

I bought a horse for fifty gulden, which is the sort of price my father pays for a good hunter. As it turned out, I got a bargain. Second-best horse I ever rode, and that’s saying something. It got me to the Pearl in less than three hours; decent roads all the way, admittedly, but even so, not bad at all.

I’d worried about finding the place; silly me. The Pearl is fairly conspicuous. Trust my sister to hide somewhere that glows in the dark.

Really, it does. At some point, someone with rather more money than taste faced the front elevation with those stones they have in Permia, speckled like a hen’s egg, that soak up sunlight during the day and look like iron in the forge at night. Presumably it was an act of piety and he reckoned he’d be let off his sins as a result, though I’d be inclined to doubt it. If there really is an Invincible Sun, I don’t suppose he cares for show-offs. The most you can say for the result is that it makes the place easy to find, though since it’s right next to a busy military road, I don’t think there was a problem to start with.

It took a long time for the porter to appear. He opened a panel and scowled at me. “Don’t kick the door,” he said.

“Sorry,” I said. “Look, I need to see my sister.”

“Come to the wrong place, then, haven’t you? This is a monastery.”

“My sister’s staying here. She’s a guest.”

He looked at me. “What’s your name?”

“Saevus Corax.” I hesitated. “Florian met’ Einai.”

“That’s two names.” He sighed. “Wait there.”

I waited. A groom came out from the stables and took the horse. I sat on a bench in the porch, wishing I’d brought something to read.

I was miles away when the door opened. A monk came out. “Saevus Corax,” he said.

“That’s me.”

“This way.”

While I was waiting, I’d occupied my mind with questions to which I had no answers; among which was, why would Fan come here, and why would they let her in? I figured the first part had something to do with the Great Southern Road, which runs in a more or less straight line from Permia, across the isthmus and down the west coast of the Friendly Sea as far as Boc Bohec. If you were running away from Stachel, and you reckoned you could outrun the people chasing you because you had really good horses, the obvious thing to do would be to take the Imperial Post road, which would bring you out on the Great Southern at Spaher. Nine days, riding flat out; you’d need to change horses, of course, but there are way stations every fifteen miles on the Great Southern, and if you were fast enough you’d outrun the news of what you’d done, so your credentials would still be good. In that case, why stop at the Pearl? Why not keep right on to Boc, where you could get a ship to Scona, and from there across the sea to Sashan or Antecyrene and all points east? Pointless speculation; I realised, after I’d figured it all out, that I hadn’t come up with anything informative or useful. That’s just me, though. I prefer to run, but when I can’t do that I think instead.

“Hell of a place you’ve got here,” I said to the monk, as he led me through a cloister garden past a fountain in the middle of a carp pond.

He smiled at me. “We like it,” he said.

He led me up a few steps into a colonnaded portico. There was a big bronze double door, about twelve feet high; beyond that, a high-roofed lobby with black and white marble tiles and niches in the walls for statues. Impressive if you like that sort of thing. “Wait here,” the monk said. “I’ll let them know you’ve arrived.”

So many times over the years I’ve owed my life to my ear for pronouns. Them. There wasn’t anything to sit on, so I stood, occupying my mind with valuation and inventory. You could make a fortune plundering this place, but only if you had cranes and really big, sturdy carts. My guess was that it had been built within the last thirty years, very recent for a monastery, and nobody had got around to cluttering it with the small, portable items of value that you generally find in such establishments.

A side door opened and a man came out; tall man, lean, soldier written all over him. He was wearing a velvet gambeson (that’s the padded vest that goes under armour); it looked expensive but there were creases and rust stains. He stopped and looked at me. “You’re Florian,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I’m going to search you for weapons.”

I’d left in a hurry so I didn’t have any, apart from my last-chance knife, which of course he didn’t find. “Is it true?” I asked him, while he had his hand between my buttocks. “Did she really murder the Elector?”

“Yes,” he said. “All right, you’re clean. Put your trousers back on and follow me.”

That was Fan all right. She’d send a letter begging me for help, but she wouldn’t let me get close to her until I’d been thoroughly frisked. I followed him through a door, which opened into a panelled corridor which led to a small formal herb garden, with a fountain in the middle and a stone bench beside it. On the bench there was a woman, with her back to me. Facing me were two of the biggest men I’d ever seen in my life. They were bald and so densely tattooed they were practically illuminated, which made them Hus, from far away across the Friendly Sea. Practically nobody in the West speaks Hus, but I’m given to understand that if you can read the tattoos they tell you everything you need to know about the wearer – where he was born, what family he belongs to, whether he prefers his eggs poached or scrambled. As soon as I came through the doorway they sprang forward, grabbed my arms and lifted me off my feet: an original approach, but effective.

“Put him down,” Fan said. “He’s my brother.” They put me down. “Out, all of you,” she said. They left.

She turned round. “Hello, Florian,” she said.

I looked at her. I hadn’t seen her for eighteen years.

People – various aunts, friends of the family – always reckoned that Fan and I took after our mother, whereas my brothers, Scaphio and Scynthius, were just like Dad. I never saw it myself. For a start, Fan was a pretty child: round-faced, snub-nosed, great big eyes. Lots of pretty children grow up ordinary or downright plain, like me, but Fan had improved with age, in the same way that the Bohec starts as a dribble between two rocks and grows into a river a mile wide.

(A few notes on the subject of beauty. I’m not sure I approve of it. Mostly, I guess, because it offends my notions of justice. Beauty is probably the most unfair advantage you can have, after all. It amazes me that the idealists who crucify people in the name of social justice have never declared war on beauty, which is totally and irredeemably unjust. Wealth and power can be acquired, theoretically by anybody given the right circumstances. Beauty, on the other hand, is something you can’t attain to, no matter how hard you try. Instead, it’s broadcast recklessly by hopelessly irresponsible angels; a bit like turning up at the door of an asylum for the criminally deranged and handing out weapons. Worse than that; the lunatics in the asylum were already unbalanced when they arrived. Beauty, on the other hand, grows with you, distorting you from childhood, as though you’d been born possessed by a demon. And if I sound like I’m being a bit negative about beauty, it’s probably because I grew up with my sister, and was able to see at first hand what it can do to a person. There’s that story, isn’t there, about the foxes who stole a baby princess and replaced her with a fox cub, enchanted to look human; and only the little blind page boy knew the princess was a fox, because he couldn’t see but he could smell.)

“Hello, Fan,” I said. “My, how you’ve grown. Did you really kill your husband?”

“Don’t be nasty to me, Florian. I couldn’t bear it.”

I caught myself doing the geometry. One long stride forward, left hand to her chin, right hand to the back of her skull, a quick, sharp lift and twist. I’ve never actually done one of those, but I’ve seen it done maybe half a dozen times, and as far as I can tell there’s nothing to it. Eighteen years of persecution, resolved with one simple intervention. Papinian could pop back a dislocated arm or shoulder in the blink of an eye, and all that pain and helplessness was suddenly over, leaving you wondering what all the fuss had been about.

“Answer the question,” I said. “Did you kill him or didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Did you kill Scynthius?”

“Yes,” I said. “But that was an accident.”

“Was it?”

I looked at her, and she looked at me. There’s all sorts of legends about truth. In Echmen they’ll tell you about magic mirrors that reflect what people really are, not what they pretend to be. In Permia they reckon that if you taste the blood of a dragon, you hear the truth when people tell you lies. In Aelia somewhere there’s supposed to be this building within whose walls it’s physically impossible to tell a lie. “Yes,” I said. “He wanted to fence. I was tired out, but he kept on and on at me and I gave in. His stupid coach had told him it wasn’t proper training unless he fenced against sharps, so he had a foil and I had a real sword. He was trying out some new move he’d been learning and he got it slightly wrong. If I hadn’t been so tired, maybe I could’ve pulled the lunge, but it all happened so quickly, I don’t know. And then he was lying there dead and I was standing over him with a bloody sword in my hand, and this voice in my head said, Dad’s not going to believe you. So I ran. That’s it. That’s the truth.”

“But you did kill him.”

“Yes. No. It was an accident. Accident killed him. I’m no more to blame than the sword.”

She looked at me. Great big beautiful eyes that didn’t like me much. “Dad says you did it on purpose,” she said.

“He wasn’t there. I was.”

“I wish I could believe you.” Great big beautiful eyes filled with sadness. “You can’t imagine what it was like, Florian. Scynthius dead and you gone, and Dad in floods of tears. I’d never seen him cry before, did you know that? It was horrible. Noise and shouting and dogs barking and men crashing round the house looking for you, under the beds and in the cupboards. I get this recurring dream about it, only it’s not you they’re searching for, it’s me, and when they find me they drag me out by my hair, and I keep telling them, it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it, and they don’t believe me.”

“It was an accident,” I told her.

“Yes, well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?”

“Because it’s true.”

“Let’s not talk about it any more, all right?” She screwed her eyes tight shut, then opened them again. “I want to believe you, really I do, but it’s not as simple as that, is it? You can’t make yourself believe, if you don’t really.”

“And you don’t want to.”

“I don’t know what I want,” she said, turning away as though looking at me was like walking through cobwebs and getting gossamer caught in her hair. “I want it never to have happened, and then my life wouldn’t be all screwed up, and everything would be the way it should’ve been. But I can’t have that, can I? You know what, Florian? Just seeing you makes my skin crawl.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

“No.” That made me turn my head and look at her. In some country the far side of Echmen there are monks who spend their entire lives training to draw a sword as fast as it can possibly be done. The moment they perceive a threat, the sword flies from the scabbard, and the draw is itself a cut. There’s no time to think, it’s pure trained reaction. “No, you can’t leave me like this. I’m scared, Florian. They’re hunting me. If they catch me, I’ll be killed.”

Fan never told lies when she was a kid. She never had to. “Why the hell should I help you?” I said. “All my adult life you’ve been persecuting me. If they kill you, I’ll be rid of you at last. You have no idea how wonderful that would be.”

“You don’t mean that. You wouldn’t have come here if you meant it.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t suppose I would. You know me, Fan, always kidding around.”

She threw her arms around me and hugged me. She always was stronger than she looked. When she was twelve she punched one of the footmen in the stomach – he’d accidentally spilt apple sauce on her party frock – and he went down like a felled tree. I could feel the muscles of her arms tighten against me as she applied pressure. There are snakes in Blemya that kill their prey by wrapping themselves around it and squeezing. “You won’t let them hurt me, Florian. Promise.”

“Of course,” I said. I wanted her to let go, but she didn’t. She smelled of jasmine and lamp oil scented with rosewater. Boxers have this trick: if you’re getting beaten to a pulp by the other guy, grab hold of him and hug him until you’ve got your breath back. “I’ll do anything I can to help. I promise.”

She let go. “I knew you would,” she said. “You always protected me, when we were kids.”

I couldn’t remember anything like that, but I was prepared to take her word for it, so long as she stopped touching me. “You’re my sister,” I said. “All right, let’s get down to business. Why here?”

She sat down on the bench, hands demurely folded in her lap. “We’re patrons of the abbey, Siggy and me,” she said. Sighvat was her late husband. “We gave them a lot of money. They don’t know about Siggy yet.”

“Ah. So you don’t plan on staying here.”

“No, of course not. As soon as they hear about what happened, they’ll betray me. I can’t trust anybody but you; that’s why you’ve got to help me.”

“What about Dad? Surely—”

“He won’t help me.” So much pain in four monosyllables. “He says I’m not his daughter any more.”

See what I mean about my family? “Screw him, then,” I said. “There are plenty of places we can go,” I said. “I’m good at not being found. I’ve had the practice.”

“We need to go now,” she said. “You were ever such a long time getting here, I was worried sick. There are men looking for me. Not soldiers. Hired thugs.”

“Bounty hunters.”

“Is that what they’re called?” She gave me a sad smile. “I don’t know about that sort of thing. Siggy always dealt with it, when we were looking for you.”

“Bounty hunters,” I said. “How do you know?”

Clearly she didn’t like talking about it, and I felt bad for making her uncomfortable. “They nearly caught us,” she said, “at Lescoval. So my maid Altzi and three of the servants dashed off in the carriage, pretending to be me, while the rest of us hid in a cellar. The only one who managed to get away and come back was poor Euchryas. My hairdresser. You met him.”

I nodded. “And he could tell they were bounty hunters and not soldiers.”

“That’s what he said. They weren’t wearing uniforms; they all looked different. They did horrible things to poor Altzi and the men, trying to make them say where I was, but they wouldn’t.”

I shrugged. “It doesn’t actually make a great deal of difference,” I said. “Soldiers are better trained but the privateers try harder. The key thing is to keep moving and look like you’re somebody else. That’s always worked for me.”

“I knew you’d know what to do,” she said, and I swatted away the buzzing thoughts of irony. “How soon can we leave? I don’t want to stay here a moment longer than I absolutely have to. Florian, I’m scared. They’ll take me back and I’ll be crucified.”

“Just a minute,” I said. “I need to think. It may be that you’d be better off waiting here while I go and get my friends. I don’t want us to get caught out on the road with just me and your three bruisers. At least here there’s places to hide, and presumably the abbot wouldn’t just hand you over to a bunch of goons—”

“No,” she said quickly. “Don’t leave me. I couldn’t bear it.”

“Fine,” I said. “In that case, leave your people here and you come with me. So long as we don’t hang about, we can get to Simocat in three hours. Don’t tell them where we’re going. What you don’t know can’t be beaten out of you. Are you all right with that?”

“Anything you say,” she said.

Half of me wanted to wrap her in velvet, the other half of me wanted to stamp on her. I don’t know if it’s family or women or just people I’ve abused who’ve abused me; or maybe I simply lack basic social skills that everybody else takes for granted, I don’t know. To be honest, I’ve never had the luxury of sticking around in one place long enough to find out. “Fine,” I said. “I’ve got a fast horse; you can have that. Have you got anything decent I can ride?”

She thought for a moment. “Not really,” she said. “We were in the carriage, but we lost that. There’s a chestnut mare that Aristaeus usually rides. He’s my chamberlain. You met him just now.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. “If we get separated, just head for Simocat and find an inn called the Perfect Grace. Ask for a man called Gombryas and tell him who you are. He’ll look after you.”

“Gombryas,” she repeated. “All right. I’ll need a few minutes to get ready.”

“Are you kidding? I thought you wanted to go right now.”

She scowled at me. “Fine,” I said. “I’ll wait for you outside the gate.”

A monk told me how to find the stables. There was nobody about, so I saddled up my expensive grey and a huge brown monster with staring eyes which I took to be the chamberlain’s mare. She headbutted me three times before I could get the bit in her mouth. Then a groom came up and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, and I was just about to explain with my fist when Fan appeared. “Why are you taking so long?” she demanded. “I’ve been waiting for you for hours.”

She was wearing a blood-red riding cape, velvet, with seed pearls at the cuffs and a hood. The hood would make her invisible. Mind you, I don’t suppose the Archduchess of Stachel-Nagelfest is allowed to have any scruffy old clothes, by law. In her hand was a bag, also velvet but an incongruous blue. It looked heavy for its size, and I figured I didn’t need to ask what was in it.

The groom had made himself scarce as soon as she showed up. “Let’s go if we’re going,” I said.

Fan always was a good horsewoman. When we were kids she had a skewbald gelding, Bunny or some such name, to which she was devoted. One day Scynthius, Fan and I were out riding and Scynthius decided he wanted to race (he always wanted to race; it gave him an opportunity to win). We were up on top of the hill, where it’s flat. I wasn’t really in the mood, so when the other two pulled ahead I didn’t make a great effort to catch them up, but Fan was determined, and she managed to sneak in front and stay ahead, which drove Scynthius wild. The hilltop road is about two miles long, and then you go zigzagging down through the woods. Fan was still just about in front when they reached the end of the road, and she reckoned she’d won, but as she eased up Scynthius darted past her and went hell for leather down the forest track. Fan wasn’t having that; she hurtled after him, trying to force past him. The track was really the bed of a stream, stony and rutted and twisting backwards and forwards, not the sort of surface you want to go fast on. Scynthius didn’t give a damn. He was a superb rider and he knew it, and Dad would tease him for days if he let his sister beat him. I saw them charge off out of sight into the trees and slowed to a walk. Kids, I thought to myself.

A third of the way down the track, I found Fan. She was trapped under the horse, which had broken its leg. I yelled for Scynthius, but by that point he was long gone, making sure of his victory; he wouldn’t stop till he reached the stable yard. I managed to drag Fan out from under the horse, with her yelling at me the whole time not to hurt Bunny. I don’t think she realised she’d broken her ankle until I told her. I got her up on my horse and we walked back. She kept on and on at me; Bunny will be all right, won’t he? I knew precisely what my father would say. Scynthius and I would be to blame, for letting her race. You’re men, you should’ve known better, how could you have been so stupid, and that’s a perfectly good horse you two have cost me. Then Scynthius would be forgiven, because he’d done it in the name of Victory, and in a day or so it’d all be my fault. Yes, I told her, Bunny will be just fine, because if I’d told her the truth she’d have had hysterics, and I had to get her safely home.

My father sent a couple of men up the hill to kill the horse and bring it back on a cart. A few days later, my father and I were both taken ill. We had violent stomach cramps and couldn’t stop vomiting. Scynthius and Scaphio were fine. Whatever it was, it passed in a day or so, and when I was allowed out of bed I went and found Fan.

“What was it?” I said. “Mushrooms?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I bet it was mushrooms,” I said. “I remember when we were out in Long Meadow playing rovers, and you asked me what those mushrooms were, and I told you, they’re dangerous, don’t touch them. So you went back and picked some.”

“You’re mad,” she said. “Why would I do a horrid thing like that?”

“Good question,” I said. “I can see why you wanted to kill Dad, because he had your stupid horse put down. But why me? All I did was pull you out and take you home.”

“You lied to me,” she said. “You told me he’d be fine, and you knew it wasn’t true.”

“I told you what you wanted to hear,” I said. “That’s what I always do.”

Anyone who knows me will be aware of my need to have the last word. It’s pathetic, but it’s practically a point of honour. With Fan, though, you might as well not bother. You can have the last word till you’re blue in the face, but you’ll still lose. She just looks at you, and you know she’s won. Anyway, the point of the story is, she’s a very good horsewoman and she likes to go fast.

Fine by me. We made it to Simocat in no time flat and got there with her fresh as a daisy, me feeling like I’d just been threshed. When we got to the Perfect Grace, it was on fire.

Simocat is one of those places where fires are very bad news. The streets are narrow, the buildings are high and all the roofs are thatched. Luckily, the owner of the house opposite had plenty of manpower, being in the indentures business; he’d ordered out his entire stock in trade, and they were scrambling about with ladders and long hooks, pulling the thatch off all the roofs in the street. I guess if you live somewhere like that, you know what to do and have all the necessary kit stockpiled where you can get at it in a hurry. I grabbed a man with a bucket and made him hold still. “What happened?”

He shook his head. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “These men showed up, with knives and swords, looking for someone. Then some of the people staying at the inn started fighting back, so they ran for it. I think they set it on fire to keep from being followed.”

I had that cold feeling. “Anybody hurt?”

“Don’t know, I didn’t see it.”

I let him go, then got Fan down off her horse. “They’ve been here looking for you,” I said.

She gave me a horrified look. “Don’t let them get me,” she said. “You promised.”

Why is it that I keep getting forced to think when my head’s spinning? I grabbed the reins out of her hand and tied them to a rail. “This way,” I said.