5

Anticonessus is called that because it’s on the opposite side of the Conessus river. Opposite to what? To us, of course; us in this context being the Robur Empire. The Robur, bless them, saw the whole world in those terms: us, and savages. One of the consequences of that mindset is that, if you want to see one of the great Robur cities, like Auga or Civitas, you need to take a sharp hook with you to chop away the brambles.

Certainly, living next to the Robur was one of the things that made the Anticonessians turn out like they did. The Conessus is a big river most of the time, but it’s fed by torrential rains in the Epsa Mountains, and once in a lifetime the rains don’t fall, and you can cross the Conessus relatively easily at one of a dozen points. This the Robur did, every chance they had, and what they got up to doesn’t bear thinking about, even for someone in my profession. The idea was to teach the savages a pre-emptive lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. On one level, sound thinking: what’s the use of a punitive expedition, after all? You can slaughter a quarter of a million savages and burn their houses and their crops, and drag away the relatively few you don’t kill to work your slate quarries, but that’s not going to bring back the poor devils the savages scalped and murdered. No, the sensible thing is to do it to them first. “Let them hate so long as they fear” is one of the few genuine Robur quotes everybody knows, and you can see where they were coming from. And where it got them, in the end – provided, as I said, you bring a hook.

Moral: getting into Anticonessus is a drag, except when it doesn’t rain in the mountains. You can’t just wait till it’s dark and slip across the border, because the border is a roaring river a quarter of a mile wide – except, of course, at Ennea Crunoe, where it’s squeezed between two mountains into a nightmare of foam and violence, tumbling vertically down the world’s biggest waterfall. At Ennea, the river is only three hundred yards wide. Piece of cake.

But there’s always the tunnel. Amazingly, the Anticonessians dug it themselves, thousands of years ago, using antler picks and stone hammers to chip away the sandstone, and they’ve kept it clear and open ever since, except while the Robur were around. They did it because they believe that Ennea is the gateway between the real world and the land of the dead, so when you die you go through the tunnel, after which you’re reborn as a – there’s no simple translation for the Anticonessian word. It means foreigner, ghost, revenant, monster. You can see why the Robur blockade stressed them out so much. When the Robur closed off their end of the tunnel with massive blocks of stone, it meant that the dead (malevolent, by definition) were prevented from leaving Anticonessus for four hundred years. You can also see why the Anticonessians take a dim view of anyone coming up the tunnel the other way.

Accordingly, there are guards at their end. The task devolves on an order of monks, chosen in infancy and trained all their lives in religious orthodoxy and hand-to-hand combat. Even the First Emperor and the Robur were reluctant to mess with the Gatekeepers.

However—

It’s an expression, isn’t it? News from Anticonessus; or else you can say cold fire, dry water or rocking-horse shit. There is no news from Anticonessus. But the news from Anticonessus was that during the late unpleasantness, the Gatekeepers (for the first time in history) were kidded into taking sides in a civil war; and they picked the wrong side. Silver medallists in an Anticonessian civil war tend to cease to exist. Therefore (if the news was accurate) there were no more Gatekeepers and the tunnel was wide open. You could just stroll on through and there’d be nobody to hinder you.

Provided, of course, that the news was accurate. “It’s true, I keep telling you,” Gombryas said. “I had it from a bloke who’s been there. He walked all the way through the tunnel and came out the other side, and all he saw was bats.”

“Sure,” I said. “I believe that that’s what he told you.”

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Stauracia said. “It was in an intelligence report from the Sisters’ station in Gordula. One of their agents—”

“Gordula’s a thousand miles from Ennea Crunoe. What the hell would they know about anything?”

“The agent wasn’t from Gordula. It was a round-robin to all heads of station. If the Sisters say the tunnel’s open, the tunnel’s open. You can take that to the bank.”

“It may have been open then,” I objected. “Doesn’t mean it still is. How long ago was this report?”

“My man went through three months ago,” Gombryas said.

“How long?”

Stauracia shrugged. “Six months,” she said, “something like that. It was a few months after the end of the civil war.”

“Fine,” I said. “Look, these people are lunatics. They think that unless there’s someone minding the door, the dead are going to come swarming back in and start eating them. Therefore, just because the gate may have been open six months ago—”

“Three months,” Gombryas said.

“Six months ago, we can’t assume it’s still clear now. And since we know the Anticonessian definition of someone walking up the tunnel—”

“We’ll go there,” Stauracia said, “and take a look. Carefully. If the tunnel’s guarded, we’ll turn round and come back. If it isn’t, we’ll go on. Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

I waited till Gombryas went for a shit, then turned on her. “You’ve got to stop encouraging him,” I said. “On his own, I can handle him. With you egging him on—”

“Think about it,” she said. “The First Emperor’s gold armour.”

“Don’t say it. Please.”

“The big score.” She looked at me. “Just think about it, that’s all I’m saying.”

“You’ve already had your big score, you stupid bitch,” I yelled at her. “One hundred thousand staurata. Silly money. You can’t possibly want more than that. Not even you.”

“Yes, but you haven’t.” She was looking at me as if I was the storm and she was the eye. “I know you, Saevus. You need to find somewhere safe. The only safe place in this world is a large amount of money. And don’t forget, there’s a war coming. Everything’s going to be different after that. I don’t think a hundred thousand’s necessarily going to be enough. But in Sashan or Echmen, with the First Emperor’s gold armour—”

It’s the way her mind works. And that mind has a proven track record as an inspired tactician; just ask the Sisters and the Knights, who don’t hire just anybody. “You’re crazy,” I said.

“No, you are. You’re crazy if you think everything’s just going to chug along the way it always has, because the war really is coming this time, and when it gets here—” She was actually scared. “You’ve stopped it twice now, dead in its tracks, but you know what they say, third time’s the charm. The simple fact is, the Sashan and the West want to rip each other to pieces, and you darting in between them and snatching away their latest flashpoint doesn’t actually solve anything. And you know what happens if you try and stop two dogs fighting. They both bite you. It’s serious, Florian.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“She does. It happens to be your name.” She was giving me that big sister look of hers. “The big smash is coming, so we need to get out of the way, fast as we can. And like I just said, the only safe place to hide in the whole world is behind a huge amount of money, so much money that we can be a couple of Westerners living deep inside Sashan or Echmen, and nobody will bother us. You’ve got to understand that, while there’s still time.”

The big smash, the big score. A lot of people genuinely think in those terms. Me, I’ve been to a lot of places and seen a ludicrously huge amount of suffering and misery, the result of too many people trying to make the small score and avoid the small smash – wars over borders and trade routes and access to water, wars over who gets to be king, duke, chief, bishop, wars over relatively small amounts of money, wars over matters of principle, for crying out loud. Chusro Asvogel says that the human race needs a continual succession of small wars, because if we had peace for more than fifteen years, the upshot would be a really big war and none of us would survive. I think he’s probably right, but I deny the assumption behind it, not because I don’t think it’s true but because for all my faults I’m human, and I don’t want to believe that kind of truth about a species I belong to. But did Stauracia think that way – big scores, big wars, the world and all the people changing for ever? Or was she trying to kid me into something? And on that question hung all the law and the prophets, and I wasn’t sure I knew the answer.

“Look at me,” I said. “And tell me you think going to Anticonessus is a good idea.”

She rolled her eyes. “Of course it’s not,” she said. “It’s incredibly dangerous and stupid. But I think the gold exists, and the civil war means we’ve got an opportunity. And, yes, I think we need that money, or we’ll be screwed.”

There was always, of course, the possibility that she knew stuff I didn’t. A woman who’d worked for the Sisters and the Knights, with a habit of reading documents carelessly left lying around in locked strongboxes; a woman who liked to keep her best cards up her sleeve. The latter is a deplorable habit, of which I’m guilty every time I’ve got anything remotely resembling a good card. If I knew something really hot in this situation, would I tell her?

“You know the gold is there, don’t you? You knew before Gombryas talked to his horrible friend.”

I knew she’d only look at me, and she did.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s all go to Antifuckingconessus.”

Easier said, of course, than done. It’s a long way, even if you go by sea, and we were coming up to the time of year when the wind does something technical and only lunatics sail east of the Pillars of Gratian; if we went by land, we’d have a hideously long trudge on vile roads and then we’d reach Sashan territory, a neck of which we’d have to cross, and for various reasons to do with the stuff that happened on Sirupat, setting foot on Sashan turf isn’t a good idea for me. There was also the small issue of money—

“Not a problem,” she said. “I’ve got lots of it, remember?”

“Yes, but that’s yours.” I looked at her. “You’re offering to finance this bloody stupid trip, out of your nest egg?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Saevus. If we succeed, we’re all so rich that nothing matters. If we don’t succeed, we’ll be dead. I think I can run to five hundred staurata.”

Which wasn’t like her at all. “Fine,” I said. “Thanks.”

And I meant it, too. It’s nice to be coerced into a suicide mission at someone else’s expense for a change, instead of having to foot all the bills myself.

So we headed for the coast and wound up at Port Sancres. Don’t know if you’ve been there; you’ve probably forgotten it if you have. It’s one long, narrow street running down a steep hill to a smallish bay. Nothing much happens there unless the weather turns bad, at which point ships on the Beloisa−Auxentia run make for it to ride out the storm. The Invincible Sun’s sense of humour means that there are often nasty bits of weather at that end of the Friendly Sea shortly after the harvest and the vintage, around the time when the big freighters are carrying their bulkiest loads; as I said just now, Sancres is a small harbour, so it’s a matter of luck whether there’s room when you get there. If there isn’t, you have to stay outside and get smashed into matchwood on the rocks, along with all the food you’re carrying to the hungry folks back home. The rest of the year, there’s nothing in Sancres apart from a few lobster boats, something you might like to consider next time you give thanks to your omnipotent, loving God.

We were in luck (good luck or bad luck: depends on your perspective, I guess). There was a small fleet of Denyen barges in the harbour, talking Scona marble to Antolbia, where they would load up with lumber for the return journey. Great big barges have to hug the coast and they move pretty slowly, so they make a habit of stopping at all the little out-of-the-way places, where the crew can sell and buy stuff on their own account. It’s a recognised perk of barge work, to make up for the boredom, the length of time you’re away and the murderous hard work loading and unloading at either end. There’s always room for casual passengers on a stone barge, and they’ll happily give you a ride so long as you’re prepared to pay them silly money for it.

I know several members of the business community in Sancres, since we’re in basically the same line of work. I pick up leftovers from battlefields; they scavenge the coves and beaches for flotsam every time a big ship comes for sanctuary in the bay and finds there’s no room. Since it’s seasonal work, some of my associates aren’t above helping ships find the rocks even when there isn’t a storm, by lighting beacons and signal fires at the wrong times in the wrong places. If you ask me, this is unethical, but they’ve been doing it for a long time in Sancres, so there can’t be anything really bad in it.

Which is how I came to be knocking on the door of my old friend Catapygaena. She looked at me and scowled, like my friends usually do, and told me to go away. Just kidding, naturally.

“I was wondering,” I said, “if you’d like to buy some stuff.”

That was different. “What stuff?”

“Everything we’ve got, basically. Stock from our last job, picks, shovels, sacks, weapons, gloves, baskets—”

Catapygaena can smell a buyer’s market the way sharks smell blood. “Come in and have a drink. What’s all this about, then?”

“Going-out-of-business sale,” I said. “And there’s a slight but real chance that some of my lads might be interested in leaving me and joining your organisation. In which case, I’d be sorry to see them go, but I wouldn’t want to stand in the way of them improving themselves. Sensible prices,” I said. “No reasonable offer refused.”

She studied me for a moment, trying to see the trap for which I was the bait. “Bollocks,” she said. “Everybody knows, you’re the great survivor. Other grave robbers come and go but you go on for ever. So what’s really—?”

I shook my head. “Not this time,” I said. “Long story short, I got the lads into a bit of bother, and Polycrates and some of the others decided they’d had enough and quit on me. Now there’s not enough of us left to do the job, and I can’t be bothered to start all over again. So I’m selling up.”

“And?”

I shrugged. “Haven’t made my mind up yet. I’m torn between mercenary soldiering and joining a monastery.”

“So there really is going to be a war. What’ve you heard?”

“I didn’t say that. Would you like to see an inventory, or just make up a figure out of your head?”

We discussed numbers for a while, and then I went down to the harbour and spoke to the lads. Catapygaena, I told them, had jobs for anyone who wanted them; decent wages, paid regularly, plus a modest but acceptable signing-on bonus. I’d had to fight like a cornered wolf to get them that, but I got it, which made me feel quite proud. It showed that Catapygaena acknowledged that anyone who’d worked for me had been trained, starved and battered into a superior category of worker.

“Does this mean you’re breaking up the company?” one of them asked: Brocian, been with me for years, one of the best bent-sword-straighteners in the trade.

“No,” I said. “But you’ve probably heard by now, we’re headed for Anticonessus. You’d have to be out of your mind to go there. So I thought it’d be nice if I found you an alternative.”

No, they hadn’t heard anything about Anticonessus. When the yelling died down enough for me to make myself heard, I repeated Catapygaena’s offer. Then they told me some things about myself which I already knew. This went on for a while, and I admit I was surprised by the warmth of their feelings – how could I do something like that, turning them loose after everything we’d been through together, didn’t any of that mean anything, and so forth. Some of them were actually in tears. Rather a shock. I genuinely didn’t know they cared. I wouldn’t have, in their shoes.

“It’s all right,” I told them, “you can still be together; the only thing missing will be me, so that’s all right. Oh, and Gombryas: he’s quitting, too. And Catapygaena’s a much better boss than me, she hardly ever gets her people killed, and you get to stay in the same place instead of all the travelling around. Sorry, but my mind’s made up.”

“Fuck you,” said Sigister, one of the boot patchers; been with us six years or so. I never really liked him much. “Gombryas said we were going for the big score. You’re doing this to cheat us out of our rightful share.”

“In Anticonessus,” I said. “Ask him if you don’t believe me. And if you want to come along, you’re more than welcome.”

“Bullshit. Nobody chooses to go to Anticonessus. That’s just lies to get rid of us.”

“Ask the skipper of the barge. He’ll tell you Gombryas and me are booked as far as Lachsar. What happens at Lachsar, anyone?”

No answer; because the answer is, at Lachsar, the Conessus river reaches the sea, and that’s all.

“Like I said,” I told them, “it’s entirely up to you, but the offer’s open. Come with me if you like, stay here, whatever. But make your minds up quickly, because—”

“What are you going to Anticonessus for?”

“Gombryas reckons he’s on to some bones. He thinks they may be worth money. I promised him I’d go with him, soon as my sister was safe.” Big shrug. “Who knows, he might be right and there’s a small fortune in relics. Or maybe not. In any case, I’m honour-bound to go. You aren’t.”

“Here,” someone called out. “Come and look at this.”

I didn’t recognise the voice, but there was a special sort of urgency in it that was hard to ignore. The lads began scrambling up the stairs that led to the top of the sea wall. I followed.

The sea was full of ships. I’ve never seen anything like it, except once. Big ships, all more or less identical; long, low in the water, I believe the technical term is galleass, though everybody calls them runners. They have five banks of oars and three masts; they can make eight knots under sail and six under oars, with a ramming speed of ten knots – I have no idea what that means, but apparently it’s better than the Sashan quinqueremes can manage, and that was all that mattered when they were designing the things. They were black with new tar, and heading from west to east. I counted a hundred and six. Nobody said a word. I don’t know about such things. I do know that the standard crew of a runner is three hundred men, plus fifty or so marines to do the actual fighting once the ships have grappled to the enemy, assuming the enemy hasn’t rammed and sunk them first – thirty-five thousand men were on those ships, a cityful, a number too huge to have any sort of meaning.

We don’t get that sort of job, but Daresh Asvogel told me once about the time he and his brothers cleared up after the battle of Duain Cerauno. It nearly put them out of business, he said, because the numbers, the scale was so impossibly huge, twenty-eight thousand dead bodies, and the penalty clause in the contract was savage. They were camped out on the battlefield for three weeks, lugging, shucking and shovelling, and the stink and the flies were something else; after the first week they stopped stripping and looting the dead and simply dug big pits to shovel them into; a total dead loss, from a business point of view, but all they wanted was for the job to be over so they could get out of there, and even then it took them fifteen days to move all that earth and shift all that rotting meat. Complete and utter waste of fucking time, was how Daresh put it, and he solemnly urged me never to undertake a battle with more than eight thousand dead. More than that, he said, and it’ll end up costing you money, and where the hell’s the point in that?

“That’s not enough,” Stauracia said. I hadn’t seen her come up on to the wall.

“A hundred and six,” I said.

“Not enough. The Sashan galleys are smaller, but last I heard the Sashan fleet was over three hundred. Presumably the plan is to smash through by sheer weight, but that’s not going to work. You see, those things have too much draught; they need deep water. The Sashan galleys are shallower, so they can go closer inshore, get in round the sides, outflank, encircle. Fuck it,” she went on. “They must have realised that. If I can figure it out, so can they. But they carried on building runners nevertheless. Why would you do that, when you know you’re going to lose?”

I decided if she didn’t know the answer to that, there was no point telling her. “Who says that’s the whole fleet?” I said. “For all we know, that’s just the advance guard.”

She didn’t bother to contradict me. “You’re looking at thirty-five thousand dead men,” she said. “Pity about that. Still, the sea war isn’t everything. They’ll still have to slug it out on land; that’s what these grand strategists never seem to realise. It all depends on what the Sashan want to achieve, I guess.”

Achieve struck me as a funny word to use, in the context. Mostly, what war achieves is carrion. “Has it occurred to you,” I said, “that those ships are going in the same direction as us?”

She shrugged. “It’s a big sea. And a runner’s a hell of a lot faster than a barge.”

Which was, of course, true. A while back I had to listen to some bore in a bar explaining to me precisely why the runner was going to be the finest, most perfect war machine ever built. Always assuming, he added at the end, that it’s used properly, because in the wrong place at the wrong time it’s just a floating coffin. “Ah, well,” I said. “Not our problem. Are we still going to Anticonessus?”

“Why not? I don’t really see how that changes anything.”

“We’ve decided,” Sigister told me, about an hour later. “We’re staying here.”

“I think that’s the right decision,” I said. “Well, good luck, and I hope things work out. Like I said, Catapygaena’s a doll once you get to know her. Better than working for me, anyhow.”

“Fuck you,” Sigister said. “You’ve screwed up all our lives, and now you’re dumping us. I hope you can sleep nights, after what you’ve done to us.”

I nodded. “But at least I’m not going to get you all killed,” I said. “That’s got to count for something.”

I hadn’t expected it to feel like that, sailing out of Sancres Bay and leaving them all behind, knowing I’d probably never see any of them again. It was like I’d been carrying twice my own weight on my back uphill for as long as I could remember, and now it wasn’t there any more, and I could breathe. “What are you sighing about?” she asked me, joining me at the rail. “Come on, Saevus. Admit it, you were never any good at the salvage business.”

“I buried a lot of bodies.”

“Never made any money, though.”

“True.” I walked away from the rail and sat down on a barrel. “You know about sea stuff,” I said. “Aren’t they taking a hell of a risk, sending the fleet out at this time of year? I thought it was getting to the time when it’s too dangerous—”

“Warships are different,” she said. “It’s about weight distribution and keel-to-beam ratios. Basically they don’t flip over as easily as tubs like this. And going late in the season can be a tactical advantage. You’re sort of daring the enemy to come out and do a bloody stupid thing. Either he risks his fleet getting blown on the rocks and smashed up, or you’re going to come along and burn it down to the waterline before it’s even left the dock.” She frowned. “Fact is, they’ve got to be imaginative if they want to stand any chance of winning, because of the horrible disadvantage they’re starting with. Like I told you. Not enough ships.”

I don’t like being on boats. You’re floating on the surface of certain death, and everything is out of your control. “How much longer before we get there?”

“We’re making about four knots. That’s good. Two days, maybe three.”

Three more days on a boat. Every time I set foot on one of those things, I make myself a promise: never again. “You were right,” I said. “There’s going to be a war.”

“Not necessarily.” She was looking out to sea. There was nothing out there except grey water. “The fleet may have been a show of strength at exactly the right time. Could be, someone in intelligence has heard something about, oh, I don’t know, divisions in the Sashan court, with a war party and an anti-war party, and maybe they’ve timed sending the fleet out just right, and the anti-war party will win. Or it could be a disastrous mistake and just the excuse the hawks need. Without knowing what’s really going on, you’re always just guessing. You have to trust the people in power to do the right thing at the right time. Or you need to get your hands on a stupid amount of money and buy yourself an island.” She turned and looked at me. “Three guesses which choice I’d make.”

Thirty-five thousand men going to their deaths, or maybe they’d already got there. I could see her point. It would take an astounding amount of money to insulate yourself against people who do things like that. “What are you going to do with your hundred thousand?” I asked, mostly to make conversation.

“Already done it,” she said. “There’s an agent for the Golden Hand in Sancres, so I opened an account. I was just in time: he was packing up to leave.”

The Golden Hand is the third biggest bank in the Sashan Empire, with its headquarters in the wonderful city of Suda, where the streets are paved with lapis lazuli, and even the beggars have slaves to trim their toenails for them. “Not a bad idea. Remind me,” I said. “Can you speak Sashan?”

She nodded. “Not so bad,” she said. “I have trouble remembering when to use the subjunctive. I know you’re fluent. I’ve heard you.”

“I once met a Sashan I really liked,” I said. “I have no idea if the rest of them are like him.”

She frowned at me. The man I was talking about was the Great King, in exile. Presumably, if things were happening and war was now feasible politically, he was dead. I felt sorry about that. “They’re just people,” she said. “Some of them are saints, a lot of them are bastards, and then there’s about a million shades of grey in between. If you’re worried about fitting in once we go and live there, I don’t really think it’s going to matter.”

We, she’d said. I felt sorry for her. Years ago when I was in Choris, this dog followed me home. I kept trying to shoo it away, but it just barked at me. When I shut the door in its face, it howled. I tried to tell it, following me is a really bad idea, but I guess it didn’t believe me.

Welcome to Lachsar. The Conessus flows out into a lagoon, all mud banks and sandbars; the way in is marked with a row of piles driven into the seabed, and God help you if you drift off line, because nobody else will. But the barge crew were anxious to go there, because they’d bought lemons and dried coriander to sell in the market, or, better still, trade for tortoiseshell and amber. They can’t get lemons or coriander in Lachsar, but if you carry on thirty miles up the coast to Pellora, they’re as cheap as apples in autumn; but the tides are against you, so sailing from Pellora to Lachsar is certain death, except for six weeks in spring. Tortoiseshell and amber are practically worthless in Lachsar. You can just wander down to the beach with a basket and help yourself, provided you’re a resident. Try it if you’re a foreigner and they’ll hang you.

The crew, therefore, were more than happy to risk their lives tracing their way through the lagoon channels; in fact, if we’d objected, they’d have thrown us over the side. We landed just as the sun was going down. Half an hour later and we’d have had to ride out the night in the channels, a stupid thing to do because there’s nothing for an anchor to bite into.

“The rest of the way we can walk,” Gombryas said, as we trailed up the muddy beach. “Happy now?”

“Yes.”

Gombryas and Stauracia had had some kind of falling-out on the ship. Neither of them was prepared to tell me what it was about. It wasn’t quite at the tell-your-friend stage, but it wasn’t far off it. Precisely what I needed most before setting out to penetrate Anticonessus.

“We’ll need a cart,” I said, “and supplies, and spare clothes, and I imagine you two will want weapons, though where we’re going I reckon they’d cause more problems than they’d solve. How much money have we got?”

“Plenty,” she said. “And too bloody right we need weapons. The absolute minimum would be swords, shields, bows—”

“What we want is a good knife each,” Gombryas said. “Sort of thing you can tuck in the back of your waistband, so it’s not obvious but you can get at it in a hurry. Anything else is just extra weight to carry. Like this.”

He produced a big knife out of nowhere. I think I was supposed to admire it. “And new boots,” I said. “This pair I’m wearing came off an artilleryman in Antecyrene, and they’re starting to let in water. Let’s be wild and reckless just for once in our lives and buy something nobody’s died in.”

“I get my footwear from the Stenea brothers in Beloisa,” she said. “Ninety gulden, but it lasts. And I don’t have to look like I’ve just escaped from the slate quarries.”

I resisted the urge to look at her feet, which was suddenly very strong. “Fine,” I said. “When we get to Lachsar, we’ll each of us do our own shopping. But we will need a cart, and a couple of mules. I’ll see to it.”

“I’ll do it,” she said. “You’ll just buy the first thing you see.”

Stauracia bought the cart. She chose well and bargained ruthlessly. Gombryas sat in the back, with the flour barrel and the sacks of dried fruit, muttering something about giving us love birds some space. It was probably just as well that Stauracia had decided she couldn’t hear anything he said.

“It’s twelve miles up the road,” Stauracia was saying. “Then you reach a crossroads, and you take the left-hand turn, then follow the road for a day until you hit a cattle-drove going north—”

“What you want to do,” Gombryas said behind me, “is keep on the road out of town, past the crossroads, till you come to a lake. There’s a ferry, and you keep on for about six hours, and then you come out on the old Imperial road which goes straight to Ennea Crunoe. Otherwise you’re going all round the houses.”

I stopped listening to them and amused myself with the thought that I was in a cart with the only two people I had left in the world, the only two people who cared about me and I cared about. I’d have jumped out and made a run for it, only I didn’t have the faintest idea where we were.

Thanks to all the expert navigational advice I was getting, we ended up following the Conessus river for two days as it snaked around through a big slab of couch-grass-and-thorn-sapling wilderness. We were on one side; on the other side was Anticonessus, the forbidden country. As far as I could tell, both sides of the river were identical and equally deserted, which was a blessing.

“Something nobody’s given any thought to,” I said to nobody in particular, “is how we’re going to transport ten thousand suits of gold armour across this lot, and then get it on a ship to Auxentia or Scona. It’s a bit late, I know, but I suggest we treat this as a reconnaissance mission. We go there, we find out there’s no armour and it’s all been a waste of time, and we come back. Or, in the incredibly unlikely event that there actually is something there—”

“A barge,” she interrupted. “We load it on a barge and float it down the river to the sea. Obviously.”

I’d been about to suggest that, honest. “Of course,” I said. “Presumably you’ve got one of those handy-dandy collapsible barges that fold away in your pocket when not in use. Alternatively, we’re going to need at least two dozen wagons, plus oxen, plus drivers. Have you the faintest idea of what ten thousand suits of gold armour are likely to weigh?”

“Six hundred tons,” Gombryas said immediately. “So what we’ll need is a really big raft. We could build it ourselves, but I figure we’d be better off getting it made for us. There’s logging camps in the mountains over there somewhere.” He made a vague gesture on our side of the river. “They must float lumber down the river all the time. Course, we don’t tell ’em what we want it for, or they’d cut our throats.”

“Make that six dozen wagons,” I said. “Which means hiring a hundred and forty strangers, on the Anticonessus border. If only either of you had stopped to think this thing out just a little bit before dragging me out here into the armpit of the universe—”

“Coal barges,” Stauracia said. “Two of them ought to do it. We charter them from the charcoal burners at Philargyron. While we were in Lachsar I took the trouble to ask around, and I got the name of the man who handles organising the barges at the Philargyron end. For three hundred staurata, we can have two barges waiting for us at Ennea Crunoe, and a hundred of his men, though we’ll have to pay them separately. The big problem will be finding something to crate the stuff up in, so the handlers won’t realise what they’re shifting. I admit I haven’t figured that out yet, but you would insist on rushing into this job without giving me time to think.”

If I’d had a hat I’d have taken it off to her. “That’s a hell of a lot of crates,” I said. “And just the three of us to shift six hundred tons of heavy metal. It’s just as well there won’t be anything there, because if there had been, we’d have killed ourselves trying to move it.”

And so on and so forth for two days, with the Conessus river roaring and crashing so loud over on our left that we had to shout to make ourselves heard. Looking back, two of the happiest days of my life. Or at least, two of the least unhappy, which isn’t quite the same thing.

Nothing in your life, or even mine, could prepare you for Ennea Crunoe. You plod up a very long, flat rise, where you don’t realise you’re going uphill until you look back and see that the sky is somehow below you; and then you go over the top of the crest and look down, and there’s a steep slope, and, at the bottom of it, Ennea Crunoe.

I guess it started out as gently sloping moorland, down which water trickled. These days it’s a deep and unexpected ravine. The Conessus, about a quarter of a mile wide, falls off the edge, like a drunk walking along the top of a wall, into a rocky trench at right angles to the flow of the river, then storms its way round a hairpin bend and carries on downstream as though nothing had happened. The wall it falls off is about as high as the river is wide, so call it a quarter-mile, give or take. I’m trying to describe it as prosaically as I can, because if I started using words like stunning and breathtaking, you’d assume it was just a traveller’s tale and I’d never been there. But the biggest things about it were the noise and the smell. The smell was just water, like when it rains after a long, dry spell. The noise was – I guess it was like being deaf, because you couldn’t hear anything else, not people talking or the creak of the cartwheels or the crunch of your boots when you jumped down off the box. It was a bit like when your leg goes to sleep, and you move it with your hand but you can’t feel anything.

No point trying to have a conversation, that’s for sure. Gombryas grabbed my arm and pointed at something. He’s got amazing long-distance eyesight. His mouth was moving so presumably he was telling me what he’d seen. I hoped it was the gateway to the tunnel, and followed him.

And that was precisely what it was. When we got closer, it wasn’t hard to spot at all. Someone had gone to the trouble of building a magnificent classical gatehouse, with a colonnade, architrave and triangular pediment, and thirty granite steps leading up to it. Someone showing off – and a hiding to nothing, because compared to the falls it was tiny and ludicrous, but presumably it was only public money, so who gave a damn? Up close I could see that there had once been a long inscription, in elegant foot-high Robur capitals. Completely illegible now, of course.

If anything, it was louder inside the building than outside. I was starting to get a bit sick of having my head crushed in, so I stuffed my ears with some scraps of sheep’s wool I’d picked off a thorn bush a few days earlier. It helped, a little: still deaf, but not so painful.

At least finding what we were looking for wasn’t difficult. You go through the doorway in the magnificent façade and you find yourself in a square stone box. It would’ve been as dark as a bag in there if the roof hadn’t fallen in at some point. In the middle of the floor of the box was a grand staircase, going down. It was wide enough for a platoon of soldiers to march down in battle formation; probably that was the original idea. Of course, nobody had seen fit to bring a lantern.

It was like some sort of horrible negotiation with death. In return for the noise abating just enough that we could hear each other shout, we had to give up light, and being able to see where the hell we were going. After half an hour of being deafened, it was a deal I felt I could live with. We found a wall, which was smooth, with grooves at regular intervals, so presumably built out of dressed stone blocks, and felt our way along it. The floor under our feet was smooth, with maybe an inch of water. For some reason all I could think about was that line from the catechism they made me learn when I was a kid: on the third day, He descended into hell. Quite, except that I don’t suppose He had to walk, unless someone like me was handling the travel arrangements.

A bit like death, though, which is presumably why the Anticonessians think the way they do; doesn’t seem quite so silly when you’ve actually been there and walked through it. For one thing you’re blind, deaf and dumb, heading away from everything familiar into the unknown; assuming you come out the other side, you must be changed in some way, or else what’s the point of all the overpowering stage effects and the melodrama? No, it’s not unreasonable, in context. Imagine you’re the first man to see it, ever. You say to yourself, there’s got to be a reason for all that, and you set yourself to trying to figure out what the reason can be. Then the penny drops, and it’s obvious. Well, it was obvious to me, groping my way along a carefully finished wall in the pitch dark and the deafening noise, going away from my sister and my old life towards a promise of unlimited wealth and a new beginning; and since you’d be hard put to find anyone more mundane and unimaginative than me, imagine the effect on a sensitive person, with ordinary decent human feelings.

I came to the end of the wall. At right angles to it, there was a blinding light. So I’d always gathered, from people who’ve nearly died and then come back; but this light came from a door, nearly closed but not quite, and the dazzling beam that hurt my eyes turned out to be nothing more than the boring old everyday Invincible Sun. A silhouette that reminded me of Gombryas gave the door a shove and I saw the world outside, bubbling with fiery gold like the runoff from a volcano. Welcome to Anticonessus.

We didn’t hang around to admire the monastery buildings, though they looked amazing. Instead we got as far away from them as we could as quickly as we could go, until eventually we could hear ourselves think.

“Lunatics” was Stauracia’s verdict. “Imagine being a monk, and spending your entire life getting hammered by that fucking noise. Though I don’t suppose it lasted very long. Pretty soon you’d be stone deaf and there’d be nothing to notice.”

Stauracia was angry more than anything, as if the whole thing had been a studied insult to her personally. Gombryas looked as though he’d been beaten up by experts, who’d pulped his soul without leaving a mark on his body. Odd, because I’d never imagined Gombryas with a soul before.

“You do realise,” I said. “We left all our stuff behind.”

Gombryas gave me a sad stare. “Don’t blame me,” Stauracia said. “One minute we were poking about exploring, and then we were in the tunnel and all I could think of was keeping going and getting to the end. It’s that damn noise, you can’t think.” She paused. “I suppose we could go back and get the stuff, now we know it’s safe.”

I looked back down the slope, to the gatehouse of the monastery: four hundred yards, if that. A stroll. “You can go back if you like,” I said. “Besides, we’d never get the cart down those steps.”

Gombryas looked at me. “It’s ninety miles to where we need to get to,” he said. “What are we going to eat, for crying out loud?”

It struck me as a stupid question, almost childish. Dead people don’t need to eat, everyone knows that. “Go on, then,” I said. “I’ll wait for you here.”

He glared at me. “I’m getting sick of you,” he said. “You’ve done nothing but try and screw this job up from the get-go. You send away all the lads, so we’ve got nobody to haul the stuff—”

“That wasn’t me. They decided they’d had enough.”

“Bullshit. But you figured we wouldn’t need them because you don’t think there’s anything there. And now it’s just you and me, and her, so what I’m asking myself is, what do I need you for anyhow? You don’t think it’s there, and one extra pair of hands isn’t going to make shit difference. Why don’t you just piss off back down the tunnel and leave me alone?”

“Because I’m your friend, Gombryas,” I said. “Also, I’m not going back down there again, not for anything. At least, not until I’ve had plenty of time to get my head back together.”

“Excuse me.” Stauracia was using her ice-cold voice. “I’m here, too, remember? And, I believe, I’m just as much use as he is. More so. Can we please stop fighting and get a grip?”

The upshot of which was that Gombryas and Stauracia went back down the tunnel to fetch as much of the gear as they could manage, leaving me behind to keep guard and, if needs be, hold off the entire Anticonessian nation until they got back. To be fair, they spent a long time making torches out of dry reeds twisted and plaited thickly together, but with no oil to drench them with I don’t suppose they burned worth a damn, assuming they ever managed to get them lit in the first place. I didn’t ask, and they didn’t tell. But there was a perfectly good lantern in the cart, so their return journey was no bother at all.

“What I heard about the Anticonessian civil war,” Gombryas said, as we came down the far side of the slope, leaving Ennea Crunoe behind us in the dip, as though it had never existed, “was that nobody actually won; they just ran out of people to do the fighting.”

So far, Anticonessus looked exactly like the country on the other side of the river: bleak, useless, above all empty. In fact, emptier. On the other side, at least there had been a few sheep scattered about in the far distance. This side, nothing but larks that got up from right under your feet and rocketed away shrieking, a few buzzards circling a mile away, and one snake, which Stauracia discovered by nearly sitting on it. Stauracia doesn’t care much for snakes.

“Another thing,” I said. “Assuming we get there, assuming there really is a First Emperor’s tomb. It’s not going to be standing proudly in the middle of neatly tended parkland, with a well-oiled front door and signs saying, ‘This Way to the Mausoleum’. I imagine there’s going to be digging involved, and there’s only the three of us, and I notice that neither of you two saw fit to bring a shovel.”

Stauracia wasn’t talking to me at that particular moment. “We’ll get there,” Gombryas said, “and we’ll see what we’ll see. One step at a time, all right?”

Walking all day with two people who tend to sulk, you have time to think. The trouble is, you don’t necessarily think about the right things. Essentially it’s a variant form of Saloninus’s Third Law (any human being is capable of doing any amount of work, always provided it’s not the work he’s supposed to be doing). I should have been thinking about the mess I’d got myself into, how I came to be there and what I could do about it. Instead I thought about my sister, and that horrible letter. I kept taking it out and reading it when the other two weren’t looking; just in case I’d misunderstood it, I guess, and really it was about something quite other.

Fan was perfectly capable of writing a load of lies out of pure spite, hoping to plant a tiny seed of doubt in my mind that would eventually drive me mad. She’d do that because I’d made her give Stauracia some of her jewels, or because I’d ditched her in her hour of need, or just because she didn’t like me very much. Or it could be true, which would explain why Fan hated me so much. No matter how cunningly I wove the strands of reasoning or how tirelessly I traced and retraced them, it all came back to what I could actually remember about the quarter of a second between Scynthius making his ill-judged lunge and the point of my sword piercing his skin. I was there. I saw it. I ought to be able to remember. I remembered, you bet. But what was I remembering, the truth or a construct?

Truth is the consensus of all the reliable witnesses. There were no reliable witnesses to my brother’s death. Therefore there could be no truth.

The hell with it. They taught me logic when I was a kid, including syllogisms, of which the above is an imperfect example. The fallacy lies in the conclusion, which should be: therefore there is no way of ascertaining the truth. But I like my version better, flawed or not. It wasn’t that the truth was irrecoverably hidden: there simply wasn’t one. What happened that night was an event which could only exist subjectively, depending on whose side you’re on. I murdered him or it was an accident. There being no truth, I choose it to have been an accident, and my opinion is as valid as anybody else’s – more so, in fact, because I was there. And because I’ve paid for that moment every second of my life, and what you pay for, you own.

There are far too many irrevocable moments in human life, and it’s high time something was done about them; from the moment when your father realises it’s too late to pull out, to the moment when you look down at the hole in your body and it comes home to you that you’re not going to get away with it this time, and a million others in between. If my life, with its traumas and its capers and its many unintended consequences affecting a lot of other people – if it stands for anything, it’s fending off the irrevocable moment – not permanently, naturally, but at least long enough for me and a few others to get away free and clear, until the next time. I fended off the war, twice. Now it was back, and this time there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. The fleet was at sea, and had already passed Lachsar. Out of my hands, therefore not my fault; but it meant that the acts on which I based my appeal for redemption had been futile and achieved absolutely nothing. Pity about that. I heard once about a scholar, a mathematician who spent forty years formulating a theorem, and everybody loved it to bits and they made him professor of this and that; and then one of his students found the flaw in it, and his entire life suddenly died. They let him go on being a professor, because he still knew more about the private life of numbers than any man living, but from that moment onwards he would only ever be the man who was wrong about whatever-it-was. In his shoes, I think I’d have hanged myself, but I gather he had more moral fibre than me, because he stuck it out to the bitter end, three years later. An irrevocable moment; a line in a page of mathematical notations; a failure to move the point of a sword four inches to the left.

Moral: don’t go for long walks with nobody to talk to, or you’ll end up filling your brain with garbage. Instead, I told myself, why not dwell on the sunny side of things? Namely: your sister is now many miles away and you don’t have to see her ever again; you no longer have to take responsibility for the lives of five hundred men; a war is coming, and the nice thing about the worst happening is that nothing quite as bad is likely to happen thereafter; and if we somehow manage to get out of this alive, the rest of your life is your own.

Fallacy in the last line, it was getting to be a habit; even so.

It was three days before we saw another human being. On the fourth day, we came to a burned-out village, the first settlement we’d seen since we crossed the river. I know a thing or two about how you burn villages, including the technical term for it, which is chevauchée. Whoever had done it was no amateur. He’d known that you light thatch from the eaves, not the apex, and how to bar a door so that the people inside can’t get out, no matter how hard they try. He’d known about all the places people run and hide: root cellars and cisterns and turnip clamps, where the fire burns itself out over your head and then you come out unscathed. He’d been round afterwards pulling out his valuable arrows so they wouldn’t go to waste, and he’d killed all the livestock he didn’t need to feed his men and chucked them down the well. Clearly a capable officer who could be trusted to carry out his orders, no matter how distasteful. And where would we all be without people like that?

I left Gombryas ferreting about in the ashes – force of habit, I guess – and went looking for some clean water. Thanks to our friend the conscientious young lieutenant I had to go a long way, up a hill and down into a little combe where there was a spring without a dead sheep in it. I filled up the jug I’d brought with me, and I was just walking back the way I’d come when someone jumped out at me from behind a bush and took a swing at me with some kind of farm tool.

I dropped the jug, caught hold of the hoe or mattock or whatever it was and twisted it out of his grip; and then he tried to kick me, so I tripped him up and put my foot on his windpipe. “Calm down,” I said, in Sashan. “I’m not the enemy. Can you understand what I’m saying?”

“Murdering arsehole,” he replied, in Sashan but with a strong accent. “Go on, then. Do it.”

“No thanks,” I said. “Is there another village round here? Only my friends and I need to buy some food.”

“Piss off, you murderer.”

I kept my foot where it was. “Piss off you murderer yes, or piss off you murderer no? Only we do need to eat, and living off the land doesn’t look like it’s an option around here. No offence,” I added, in case he was patriotic. He was about forty, I guess, though he looked older: thin and starting to go bald on top, skinny arms and big hands and an Adam’s apple the size of my fist. Probably an honest man and a good neighbour once you got to know him, but I didn’t have time. “Please,” I added. “I can pay you a lot of money, if that would be any help.”

The penny had dropped: I wasn’t Anticonessian. His eyes widened, and a look of abject terror covered his face. He started mumbling something very quickly, under his breath; his version of the catechism, presumably. Bother, I thought, or words to that effect.

“Fine,” I said. “Now I’m going to take my foot off your neck, but please don’t bother trying to kill me, because I can’t be killed. I’m dead already, and I don’t want to hurt you if I don’t have to. On three, then. One, two, three. There,” I added, as he lay there perfectly still. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He stared at me. That made me feel rather foolish.

“Out of interest,” I said, “you didn’t happen to notice which direction the men who burned your village went, did you? Me and my friends, we can slaughter the lot of them for you, if you’d like us to.”

He shook his head; he knew, but he wasn’t telling. I guess even the enemy didn’t deserve that.

There was no point giving him food; he wouldn’t eat it. “Fair enough,” I said. “Well, so long. Nice meeting you.” I picked up my jug, which was now empty, of course, and headed back up the slope.

“Where the hell did you get to?” Gombryas asked. “Did you find any?”

“No,” I said. He shovelled some things off the ground into his pocket and stood up. “We’d better be going,” I said. “No point sticking around here, and for all I know, these people’s friends might be on their way. Or the enemy might come back.”

He didn’t seem too worried. “I don’t think there’s anybody much left around here,” he said. “Which is peachy for us. Still, you’re right, we might as well move on. Sooner we get there the better.”

We carried on walking, in what we hoped was the right direction. Gombryas kept pointing to a distant range of mountains, though I was fairly sure they weren’t what he thought they were. Stauracia was having problems with her boots, which I tried to fix with the needle and thread I’d thoughtfully brought with me, but failed. I kept thinking about the man I’d seen at the village: was he all right, had he found something to eat, had anyone turned up to rescue him or had the enemy come back and got him? None of my business, I tried to tell myself, but apparently I wasn’t listening.

We came across two more burned-out villages – no survivors in either of them – and a third which wasn’t burned, just abandoned. They’d taken everything with them, all the food and the clothes and the boots (much to Stauracia’s disgust), and they’d put a dead dog down the well. And this wasn’t even the war, just some trifling local dispute in a faraway place of which we knew little. Soon, all the places I knew, Scona and Beloisa and Choris and Auxentia City, Olbia and Mezentia and Sirupat, they’d be like this, just as quiet and peaceful and safe to walk about in. The Sashan aren’t colonists; they have enough trouble populating their own turf, which is vast and empty because of the wars they had to fight to get it, so they wouldn’t be filling up the gaps with their tired, their poor, their huddled masses yearning to breathe free. No, what the Sashan like is a cordon sanitaire of empty desert, or its temperate-climate equivalent, where the only substantial communities are anthills. In ten years’ time, say, a man could go there and clear away the brush and chop down the thorn trees to build a modest cabin and live like a king, or at least the monarch of all he chose to survey. Provided, of course, that he had the energy and the optimism, which more or less ruled me out. There it is; one man’s graveyard is another man’s brave new world, and all it takes to make it tolerable is a comprehensive ignorance of history.

“You could try packing it out with a bit of the lining of your coat,” Gombryas suggested, which made Stauracia turn and stare at him. It was the first civil or constructive thing he’d said to her since Lachsar, even if it was patently impractical. “Then at least it wouldn’t chafe your toe.”

“Nothing left to pack,” she said, looking down at her boot. “God, I hate this place. That last village we came to – no, I tell a lie, it was the one before that – there was a wagon with its wheels staved in and nine horses in a stable with their throats cut. What a stupid fucking waste. We could be riding instead of walking. We’d probably be there by now.”

“Talking of which,” I said, “do we have any idea of how much further it is? All I know is, it’s something to do with those mountains you keep looking at. Assuming they’re the right mountains.”

Gombryas gave me a superior grin. “Nothing at all to do with it,” he said. “I’m navigating by the stars.”

“It’s daylight.”

“I look at the stars at night, and then I remember the direction, and in the morning I look for landmarks. Where we’re headed is a straight line through that hill over there with the three pine trees, then keep on till we reach the river.”

“What river?”

“Don’t think it’s got a name, but there’s a river. It was on a map. I know exactly where we are, I promise.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Stauracia said, sinking to her knees for the maximum effect. “We’re going to die out here, all because of him.”

“You be quiet,” I said. “Gombryas is a born navigator. We’ll be fine.”

I gave some serious thought to waiting till they were both asleep, then taking my share of the food and heading back the way we’d come; but I hadn’t really been paying attention, so I was just as likely to get lost and die in the wilderness without them as with them. Also, I told myself, there was the remote possibility that Gombryas knew what he was doing and we’d get there. After all, geese and swallows find their way across vast distances, and Gombryas isn’t that much stupider than a goose.

On the ninth day, another trashed village; but this one had been fought over rather than burned or abandoned, and nobody had been round to clear up, so there were bodies to loot. Stauracia’s shriek of joy when she found an intact left boot was enough to warm the hardest heart, and I found a dead man with a string of sausages packed in the hollow of his shield. It’s a pity we’re not birds and can’t eat flies. There were plenty of those, enough for a banquet.

“This is good,” Gombryas solemnly assured me, when he emerged from some shack or other, cherishing the end of a mouldy loaf. “This village was on the map. I was expecting it to be here. We’re definitely on the right road.”

There was, of course, no road. “Splendid,” I said. “In that case, now you’ve got your bearings, how much further?”

“About two days,” he said. “Over there, see that big, flat hill with the trees? Other side of that.”

I stared at him. “Really?”

“Really. What’re you looking at me like that for? I told you I know exactly where we are.”

“Yes, but I didn’t—” I shrugged. “Fine,” I said. “Well done, you. I never doubted you for a second.”

“Arsehole. Yup, we carry on in a straight line from here, down into that dip, up the other side, through those trees there and it’s down in a valley. There’s a lake, call it a lake, it’s a big pond, with a sort of island in the middle. About two miles on from that, there you are.”

He was giving me a headache. “You’re amazing, Gombryas, you know that? You did all that just looking at the stars. That’s brilliant.”

That got me a scowl. “Piss off, Saevus. It’s not exactly catapult science, walking in a straight line. And I saw a map.”

Stauracia was standing behind him. I could see the look on her face. She was as stunned as I was. “Fine,” I said. “Nearly there, then. Didn’t I say you’re a born navigator?”

Gombryas stomped off to sulk and poke around among the dead bodies. Stauracia came and sat down beside me. “He actually got us there, then,” she said.

“I don’t know about that. He could be wrong, or making it up.”

“He seemed pretty definite about it. I believe him.” She paused. “He’s going to be terribly disappointed.”

That didn’t sound right. “I thought you believed.”

“In the First Emperor’s gold armour? Give me some credit.”

“But you made me—”

“I didn’t make you do anything,” she said. “Except let me tag along.” She took off her new boot, turned it over and examined the sole. “I think there’s a nail sticking up through,” she said, “but damned if I can find it. Funny, isn’t it, how something so small you can’t see it can give you such hell.”

I took the boot away from her. “What are you playing at?” I said.

“Give it back.” She took it before I could stop her. “And I’m not playing at anything. I knew you had to do this because you promised him you would. So I came along to keep you safe. I do a lot of that, only you never seem to notice.”

I looked at her, trying to make-believe it would ever be possible for me to see her as she really is. “Thanks,” I said. “But I don’t need looking after.”

“The hell you don’t.” She suddenly looked very tired, as if whether or not she won didn’t matter any more. “These days I’m a woman of independent means,” she said. “I can do what the fuck I like. If that’s traipsing around after you, what of it? You always were a stupid, ungrateful arse, Saevus. Saevus,” she repeated, “not Florian. I really can’t see you as a Florian. A stupid, ungrateful arse who wanders through life pissing on people and feeling superior. And one of these days you’ll get yourself killed and I’ll be free of you, but I don’t suppose it’ll do me much good. Meanwhile, you’re this really bad habit I can’t seem to shake off, and sooner or later you’re going to ruin my health, but I can’t do a thing about it. But you know what, I just keep on and on, doing it to myself, until I’m so tired I could cry. Too late to do anything about it now, of course. It’s just a matter of keeping on going until it all plays itself out.”

She stood up, realised she was only wearing one boot, put the other one on and walked away.

It didn’t take two days; it took three and a half. We went through the trees on top of the hill, out the other side and down into a valley, where there was a lake (more of a large pond, really) with an island in the middle. On the north shore of the lake was a burned-out village, a substantial one in its time, but its vicissitudes had no bearing on our navigation, no pun intended, so we didn’t bother to stop.

“See that hill over there?” Gombryas said, pointing. He knows his eyesight is about a million times better than mine. “You can just make out a building there, on the western slope.”

“No I can’t. You know I can’t.”

“Well, it’s there. That’s where we’re headed. Told you I knew where it was.”

Stauracia was peering, too. “I can see it,” she said.

I doubted that, but she hates to be left out of anything. “Right,” Gombryas said. “I say we stop here for the night and press on in the morning.”

“Really? I’d have thought you’d have wanted—”

“It’s been there a thousand years,” Gombryas said sagely, “it’ll still be there tomorrow. And it’s further away than it looks, and we don’t want to be stomping about in that heather in the dark. It’d be bloody stupid to come this far and then bust a leg at the last minute.”

Fair enough, and maybe the closeness of the big score was making Gombryas use his brain, for once in his life. “What is that building?” I asked.

“Temple,” he said. “Something like that. My man told me, the entrance to the tomb is directly under it. The locals won’t go near it because they think it’s haunted or bewitched or something.”

As soon as the sun set, the temperature dropped. Stauracia feels the cold. “We should light a fire,” she said. “There was a dead thorn tree back there. There’s nobody alive except us; it won’t be a problem.”

“The hell with that,” I said, but Gombryas agreed with her, though I suspect he was just trying to get on her good side. “Oh, come on,” she said. “It’s not exactly like we’ve been making ourselves inconspicuous the last ten days, and nobody’s come near us. And if I freeze to death, I won’t be any use to anybody.”

“Fine,” I said. “You’re the expert tactician. Excuse me if I lie awake all night listening out for the slightest noise. I won’t mean it as a criticism.”

I didn’t, though. I slept right through till dawn, at which point Gombryas nudged me awake with his boot. “Come on,” he said. “Today’s the big day.”

It nearly broke my heart to see how happy and excited he was, because of course there wasn’t going to be any buried treasure, and then he’d be depressed and miserable. But then we could leave Anticonessus, so that was all right. “Yes, fine,” I snapped at him. (I’d woken up with a headache.) “Only for crying out loud, try not to be so bouncy. Next thing, you’ll be bringing me sticks to throw for you.”

Stauracia was sleepy, too, which wasn’t like her. “You know what,” she said, as we started off up the slope, “I’m actually starting to wonder if there might not be something there after all. I mean, this building’s turned out to be exactly where he said it’d be. Maybe he really is on to something after all.”

“Don’t you start,” I said. “Listen to me. The very most we can hope to find is an empty cellar. If there ever was a First Emperor’s golden army, it’ll have been looted by the locals years ago. But there wasn’t, because it’s all just a stupid myth: it always is.”

“In which case,” she went on, “we really do have a problem, because how in God’s name are we going to shift all that heavy metal back the way we’ve just come without hiring a small army, who’ll undoubtedly turn on us and cut our throats the moment they see what we’ve got? We might just have pulled it off if you’d still got your old crew, but you had to be all noble and send them away for their own good. I guess we’ll just have to find them all again and get them back. And it would have to be in Antibloodyconessus of all places. That’s going to be a real turnoff if we have to start recruiting.” She sighed. “Probably the sensible thing to do would be to bring the Sisters in on it. We’d have to settle for a percentage, like a finder’s fee, but I guess ten per cent of more money than you ever thought possible is better than nothing. He won’t see it that way, of course, idiots never do, so we may have to deal with him—”

“Stauracia,” I said, “shut up. There’s nothing there. We’re wasting our time.”

“On second thoughts, the Knights rather than the Sisters, because I know the station chief at Chasarene, and he’s got discretion for up to two hundred men and fifteen ships purely on his say-so. Maybe we could do a deal with him personally without bringing the Order in per se. He’s a greedy son of a bitch, but I know a few things about him he wouldn’t want his bosses to hear, so I’m pretty sure I can handle him. Of course, soon as he hears the word Anticonessus he’s going to stick his fingers in his ears and start humming very loudly, so we may have to fix things so he doesn’t have any choice but to help us, if you catch my drift.”

When she’s like that, it’s generally easier to let her run on till she stops. So I did.

A temple, Gombryas had said, but it clearly wasn’t. It was a blockhouse, that unambiguous statement of early Imperial policy; let them hate, and so forth.

You can’t fault the reasoning. Blockhouses are big, square and absolutely identical wherever you go, thereby demonstrating that the bastards who now run your country have infinite power and endless resources. Instead of building a castle out of the local stone, they ship in a special sort of magic grey dust from somewhere inconceivably far away, and cast the whole thing like it was a brooch or a lampstand. That strikes you as an incredibly difficult way of doing it, but you know they must have their reasons, and their reasons are far too deep and complicated for a yokel like you to understand – resistance, therefore, is futile, and bashing your head against a wall isn’t likely to hurt the wall one bit. And there the blockhouse is, on top of a hill where everybody can look on it and despair, and you see it every day until it sinks deep into your mind, like a barbed arrowhead. They built the horrible things so well that most of them are still there. They’re too tough to be broken up by the neighbouring farmers to build barns with, and there was something in the mixture they cast them out of which poisons the ground they stand on so comprehensively that nothing ever seems to grow there ever again.

Which set me thinking: if I was an Anticonessian, knowing for a fact that foreigners built that thing and all foreigners are actually dead people with an irreconcilable grudge against the living, and I saw it standing there, without even a bramble daring to poke its head up out of the ground, would I want to go poking around inside in case there was something nice in there, or would I stay well away? And if I was the First Emperor, anxious for a degree of peace and quiet to spend eternity in, wouldn’t I figure that under a blockhouse in Anticonessus might just be what I’m looking for?

“Stands to reason,” Gombryas was saying, “that someone’s already found a way inside, because someone fished out that couter my pal showed me. So there’s got to be a way in, and all we’ve got to do is find it.”

I let him burble on. It seemed to make him happy. I was having mixed feelings myself. There was an Imperial blockhouse on my father’s land when I was growing up. My father used it as a vast wine cooler – he had a vast amount of wine – and servants were in and out of it all the time, fetching bottles and laying down new acquisitions, making sure the temperature was just right, changing the straw and turning every single bottle through forty-five degrees eight times a year. The cellar underneath, which the Imperials used to store supplies, was our ice house. In winter, the entire staff turned out to smash the ice in our lake into big chunks, which were then carted up the hill and dumped in the cellar; the temperature never changed down there, so in the heat of midsummer my father had ice water to shave with and little cubes of ice to put in his mint juleps. For some reason I hated the place and never went near it if I could help it, but Scynthius and Fan made me go there to play pirates and Pellion-and-Eudocia. I was always the captain of the guard, so I had to stomp about in corridors making growling noises, until Scynthius got around to jumping out on me and killing me. I died lots of times in the cellars of that blockhouse, though I always came to life again afterwards, since I was needed for the game. But you’re a lot more resilient when you’re a kid, and maybe the game didn’t need me any more. In any event, I had a pretty fair idea of the layout of a blockhouse, and like I said just now, they’re all identical wherever you are. In which case, I knew more or less where to look for a passageway going straight down, if there was one, which there wouldn’t be.

“There’ll be a door at the end of this corridor,” I told them. “It’ll be a bronze door, and if it’s still there we’ll know that the locals truly believe in spooks, because that’s the only possible reason for not smashing it up years ago and melting it down into ingots. If it’s there and it’s locked, we’re screwed, of course.”

But it was there, a huge green slab, embossed with Imperial lions, and it was ajar, just enough for a man to slip past if he didn’t mind leaving some skin behind. Lying next to it was a wooden beam, which some enthusiast had used as a lever to prise it open on its seized hinges. Just the thought of it made me feel tired. “Someone’s been here,” I said, rather redundantly. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

I think my constant negativity was starting to get on Gombryas’s nerves. “It’s there,” he said. “Stop whining and let’s find the way in. It can’t be far now.”

This time we’d brought a lantern. Gombryas had found it, snuffling about in dead people’s houses. “I’ll go first,” he said, and I wasn’t inclined to argue. There was no truth in all the old stories about the emperor’s tomb being riddled with devilish booby-traps, because the tomb was supposed to be the emperor’s palace for all eternity, and who wants to be for ever tripping over tripwires and getting squashed by massive stone blocks when you’re groping your way to the toilet in the middle of the night? Even so. “You should be standing in a room about thirty foot square,” I called out after him. “At the far end, there’ll be an archway. Got that?”

“Come and see this,” he called back. “You really want to see this.”

So Stauracia and I squished ourselves past the bronze door, and it was as dark as a bag; odd, because, like I just said, Gombryas had a lantern. “Gombryas?” I called out, and then something bashed the back of my head, and I went to sleep.