6

“You fucking watch him,” someone was saying. “He’s dangerous.”

I opened my eyes. There was light in the room, which was just like the one at my dad’s house, only without the racks of wine. I could see a dozen men lining the wall opposite me. The voice was coming from behind me. It sounded familiar.

“He’s awake, look. For fuck’s sake, keep your eye on him.”

It sounded a bit like Gombryas. I tried to say something to him, but my mouth was full of linen. It tasted of sweat.

“Stop worrying,” someone else said. “He’ll be fine.”

“Fuck that,” Gombryas said. He sounded terrified. “I’ve seen him in action. You think he’s trussed up safe, and two seconds later he’s on his feet and slitting your throat. What you’ve got there is the most dangerous man who ever lived.”

“Sure,” said the other man. “He doesn’t look too dangerous to me right now.”

“You’re an idiot,” Gombryas said. “I know him. You should’ve cut his head off like I told you to.”

I was tied up with rope, hands behind my back, feet together. “The hell with that,” someone said. “The punter wants him alive. If he’s dead, we don’t get paid. Stop moaning, he’s not going anywhere.”

Oh, I thought, and various things that had been bugging me made sense. The campfire, and me going fast asleep and waking up with a headache. The fire was to let them know we’d arrived. The headache was something Gombryas had put in our drinking water, so he could go ahead and make arrangements. I really wanted to know where Stauracia was, but I couldn’t see her and I couldn’t move.

“He doesn’t look all that dangerous to me,” someone said.

“Don’t say that, you’ll set him off again.”

“You’re all stupid, the lot of you,” Gombryas said. “Here, you, check the ropes again. Bet you he’s already got the knots loose.”

One of the men on the wall straightened up, sauntered over, peered down at me and gave me a kick in the ribs. “They’re fine,” he said. “Come and look for yourself.”

“I’m not going near him.”

The man laughed. “Suit yourself,” he said, and I saw him walk away. “Obviously he did something to you sometime: that’s why you’re so shit scared of him.”

Gombryas didn’t reply to that. “Come on,” said someone else I couldn’t see, “let’s get him shifted and out of here. I don’t like this place, it’s too boxed in.”

“Be careful, for God’s sake,” Gombryas said. “He’ll wait for just the right moment, and then he’ll make his move and you won’t know what hit you. He’s got it all planned out in his head, you bet your life. He calls it doing the geometry.”

Gombryas, I was thinking; I really hadn’t seen that coming. Maybe you did, but that’s because you don’t know him the way I thought I did. I really wanted to know where Stauracia was; had they killed her, or was she in on it, too, or was she trussed up in the other corner of the room where I couldn’t see her?

They put a bag over my head before they lifted me up off the ground. Gombryas insisted on that. So I didn’t get a chance to look for Stauracia. “Skinny little bloke, isn’t he?” someone said, as I felt myself being carried lengthwise. “Mind his head on the door. Ah well, not to worry.”

Having nothing better to do, I kept myself entertained figuring it out. Anticonessus: because it was a sure way of getting rid of the last remaining loyalists in our crew, the ones who’d stick with me through thick and thin, except if it meant going to Anticonessus. And here because there was a blockhouse, with its massive walls, few doors and fewer windows; a perfect killing bottle, for someone determined not to take any chances. Even so, it seemed like a lot of trouble to go to. Was I really that scary? The most dangerous man who ever lived. I thought about that, and maybe it wasn’t so far off the mark, at that. I’d never ever thought about myself in those terms, after a lifetime as a hunted fugitive, but Gombryas was plainly terrified of me, of what I might do when cornered, and he doesn’t frighten easily. Over the years I’ve killed a lot of people because I was as terrified as a hunted fawn and there was no other way to get round them. I guess some people would be flattered to be called the most dangerous man in the world. I just found it depressing.

I listened as carefully as I could, but nobody said anything about bringing the woman or being careful not to bump her head on the doorpost. That probably meant she was dead. That would make sense. Gombryas knew what Stauracia was capable of, and if they didn’t need her for anything, why take the risk of keeping her alive? And if she was one of them, she’d have said something by now. She’d be the one giving the orders, you could be sure of that.

And if she was dead, nothing mattered anyway. And the sooner I was dead, too, the better. But if she wasn’t—

The beating of the heart, Saloninus says in one of his tiresome Eclogues, the action of the lungs, are a useful prevarication, leaving all options open. I needed to stay alive until I knew what had happened to Stauracia, and everything after that depended on the answer to that question. But the punter wanted me alive, so that was all right. And, yes, I’d been doing the geometry ever since I opened my eyes, but as yet I couldn’t make it work. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t, and it’s because sometimes it doesn’t that we need things like graves and cemeteries.

After a bit, I could feel daylight permeating the bag over my head, and the air didn’t smell of blockhouse. A nasty bump to the back of my head suggested I’d been put in a cart. “Watch him, for fuck’s sake,” from Gombryas, and a bored sigh from someone who could no longer be bothered to tell him to piss off. No second bump on the cart floor, no references to the other piece of cargo. Nothing conclusive as yet, but it was starting to look (on the balance of probabilities) that my life was now over.

After that, a lot of time went by during which nothing much changed. It was dark and I couldn’t move, the cart bumped over rocks and potholes, breaking my concentration into tiny bits the size of gravel as I tried to figure out all the possible sequences of events, from the moment I stepped into that horrible room. They’d grabbed her, or they’d tried to and she got away. Unlikely that she’d got away, because I’d heard no references to chasing after her, catching her, not catching her, searching the place till they found her because, after me, she was the most dangerous human in the world – leave the possibility open, but assume for now that they’d grabbed her – then what? Gombryas didn’t like Stauracia, so when he slipped out the night before to make the final arrangements, he’d have said: soon as you’ve got him, cut her throat, she’s a fucking menace. That was almost certainly the sort of thing he’d say; I know him, and he has a robust attitude to problems and dangers, nail them before they nail you. They’d go with his suggestion, because they had no pressing reason not to.

Or had she ever walked into the horrible room? Maybe not. She was behind me when I walked in. Maybe she stopped short on the threshold, by prior agreement. I’d slept the previous night like a log, dosed with Gombryas’s sleeping draught. Maybe she hadn’t. Maybe she was the one who put it in my drink.

Gombryas and Stauracia, allies to betray me? I couldn’t see it myself, but, then again, I’m really stupid a lot of the time. Stauracia had been uncharacteristically eager to come on the trip, and the love stuff had struck me at the time as harder to swallow than a square apple. On the other hand, why bother? She could’ve sewn me up at any point since I ambushed her in the woods, and no need to share the payoff with Gombryas or anyone else. Unless Gombryas only suggested the deal to her relatively late – after we’d brought Fan to Ogiv, maybe. Getting rid of my crew first made sense, but after that she wouldn’t need Gombryas. I could see Gombryas needing to set up this perfect killing bottle, if he was that scared of me. But Stauracia could’ve handed me over to the bad people anytime and anywhere. Also, Gombryas could do with the money, but Stauracia had already made her big score, in the form of Fan’s jewels. On the balance of probabilities, therefore—

The hell with the balance of probabilities, because in that case, if she hadn’t sold me down the river and betrayed me to my enemies, she was most likely dead, and I couldn’t bear that. It’s no good, I decided, I really need to know: facts, not conjectures. And I wasn’t going to get any facts with a gag in my mouth and a bag over my head. Therefore the gag and the bag had to go. Simple as that.

What was the only lever I had against these people? They needed me alive, or they wouldn’t get paid. Big lever.

The simplest and most convincing way, I’ve always found, is just to breathe out and not breathe in again. I said simple, not easy. Not breathing until you’re a hair’s breadth away from dying isn’t easy, but it’s uncomplicated, you don’t need specialist training or equipment. You don’t need to understand how to do the frantic kicks and jerks, they come naturally, no previous knowledge required; and if you genuinely empty your lungs, instead of faking it, you can’t help but be convincing.

“He’s having a fit,” someone said.

“No he’s not, he’s doing it on purpose,” Gombryas yelled. “Don’t touch him. Leave him.”

“Stop the cart.” Then they were fumbling with knots, and the bag came off my head, and the gag came out of my mouth.

I was in no fit state, but that couldn’t be helped. I dragged air into my poor abused lungs, made my best guess at where Gombryas was, because I couldn’t see worth a damn, my vision was all blurry, and used the convulsions in my stomach and legs to throw myself in what I hoped was the right direction. I connected with someone, got an elbow round his neck under his chin, and groped at his waist for a knife in a sheath. Gombryas always has one, unless the authorities take it away from him, and I know without having to look where it’ll be.

There was a knife where a knife should have been. Therefore the man I was strangling was Gombryas. Fine. I allowed myself the luxury of another deep, deep breath, which felt like swallowing a porcupine, and touched the knife to his throat. Just a touch. I didn’t dare press any harder, because my hands and arms still weren’t under proper control.

Nobody seemed to be doing anything, which was probably just as well. I couldn’t speak, needless to say. All I could do was cling desperately to my old pal and only hostage, hoping I didn’t accidentally crush his windpipe or pierce his jugular vein, until gradually my eyes came back into focus and the roaring in my ears faded enough to allow me to think.

“Where is she?” I said.

Gombryas, of course, couldn’t reply, because I was strangling him. But someone else had the presence of mind to answer for him. “She’s dead,” he said.

That was all I wanted to know. I let go of Gombryas and dropped the knife. No point in anything now.

“Break his arms and legs,” Gombryas was saying, as they tied me back up again. “Even he can’t do much with two broken arms and two broken legs, and he’ll still be alive.”

Sound advice, and probably what I’d have done, but they ignored him. My guess is, they’d had about as much of Gombryas as they could take. I don’t blame them. He’s an acquired taste.

I don’t remember much about the rest of the cart ride. From time to time the cart stopped and they unwrapped me and stuffed food in my mouth – much to Gombryas’s disgust; he doesn’t need feeding, he tried to tell them, he can go days without food, he’s unnatural – and then they tied me back up again, replaced the gag and the hood, double-checked the knots… If I’d been capable of giving a damn, I’d have told them they didn’t need to worry. I wasn’t going anywhere. Why bother?

There was one tiny point on which I was still slightly curious. So, about the tenth or eleventh time they fed me, I asked, “Who’s the punter? My dad?” The man feeding me nodded. I’d guessed as much, but it was nice to have it confirmed. Once that was settled, that was it as far as I was concerned. Even the pain of being cramped and trussed stopped bothering me, and I barely noticed it. No further interest in the proceedings. None of my business.

They had to dump the cart and carry me to get through the tunnel. Gombryas was absolutely terrified. “This is when he’ll make his move,” I heard him tell them. “He’ll have been planning it for days; he’s got it all worked out.” Someone told him to shut the fuck up, which made me smile around the gag. “Watch out for his feet,” Gombryas went on. “For God’s sake don’t get where he can kick you.”

I’d been trying to scare myself with the thought of what my father would do to me; a bit like sticking pins in your leg when you’ve lost all sensation in it. Agonising pain would be blissful, because it’d mean the leg was still alive. But it wasn’t. I dreamed up the most sadistic tortures I could imagine, but the thought had no effect on me whatsoever, apart from a vague feeling of bring it on. The sooner it was over and done with, the better. Not looking forward to it exactly, but anticipating the relief of not having to be alive any more; not to mention not being trussed up, or having to shit in my trousers, or the sheer boredom of lying in the dark with nobody to talk to and nothing to read.

They’d got another cart at the end of the tunnel. It had slightly worse suspension than the other one.

“Been thinking,” someone said, as I woke up out of a rather unpleasant dream. “While we’re at it, we could pick up the sister. We’re practically passing the door.”

“What’s the point in that?” someone else said.

“Bet you the old duke would pay money to get his little girl back safe. And, if not, there’s bound to be somebody who’ll want to buy her. But we’re headed for the duke anyhow, so it’s worth a shot.”

“Fuck that,” I heard Gombryas say. “You need to get him delivered soon as possible. I keep telling you, he’s dangerous. You’ve seen what he’s like.”

“I don’t know,” someone else said. “I don’t like working on spec. There’s always the risk of pissing someone off, for one thing.”

“It won’t be any bother,” said one of the earlier speakers. “We just scoop her up while we’re passing. Then we say to the old man, we’ve got your daughter, if you want to see her alive again, it’ll cost you so much. Put it like that, he’ll come across all right, you bet.”

“I heard she’s worth money,” someone else said.

“Good money,” said yet another voice. “And nobody seems to know where she is apart from sunshine here. It’s worth thinking about.”

“How much are we talking about?”

Pause. “Got to be worth seventy, eighty thousand. I just thought, since we’re going that way anyway, it’d be dumb not to, if you get my drift. Two birds with one stone.”

“Well?”

That must have been addressed to Gombryas, because after a minute he replied, “She’s got money, too. Lots of it. On her. Jewellery. But first things first. If you want to go after the sister, you’ll have to break his legs, at the very least.”

“How much jewellery?”

“Loads,” Gombryas said. “But break his legs first. Or cut off his hands.”

“If there’s loads of money, how come you never said anything about it?” Somebody laughed; a question not needing to be answered. “Don’t worry, sounds like there’ll be plenty enough for all of us. Of course, we could knock you on the head soon as you’ve shown us where the sister is. Specially if you keep on nagging.”

“You’ve got no fucking idea who you’re dealing with,” Gombryas said. “Otherwise you’d have broken his legs and cut his hands off. So don’t go blaming me if you all end up dead.”

They talked it over, slowly and calmly, for the next two days, then took a vote. As far as I could gather, Gombryas didn’t have a vote. They decided in favour of grabbing Fan as well. It would mean a detour, and possibly some violence at the convent but nothing serious, just a door or two to smash in and a few women. One of them took the view that it would be like finding money in the street.

I didn’t have a vote either, but if they’d offered me one I’d have abstained. None of my business, not any more.

“Somebody needs to clean him up,” somebody said. “He stinks to high heaven.”

“You do it, if you’re so bothered,” someone else replied. “Don’t you start,” he added, no guesses who he was talking to. “Yes, all right. You, sit on his head while you change his trousers.”

I was gradually piecing together a few facts about the voices, more from force of habit than any actual will to do anything with the information. There were three leaders, I couldn’t quite figure out the power structure between them, and maybe a dozen others who did as they were told. I knew which ones talked a lot, which ones only spoke when they had something useful to contribute, the smart ones and the ones who were tolerated because they were occasionally useful. I also kept track of the deterioration of their relationship with Gombryas, who was gradually transforming from a joke into a pain in the arse. If I’d still been capable of any feeling, I’d have been worried about Gombryas. He wasn’t making any friends, and now he’d told them the name of the convent and the fact that Fan had a stash of valuable jewellery, they really didn’t need him any more. I’d have warned him if I wasn’t gagged and hooded, but there: if wishes were horses, and all that.

I think I made myself listen and take an interest, because it was something, a thing. Otherwise I’d have had nothing to occupy myself with except the fact that Stauracia was dead.

Had I seen that coming? Obviously not. Before I got Fan’s letter, there we were in Count Theudebert’s country, quietly going about our business, not a care in the world. Then the Fan business, finding her, getting over the shock and the unpleasantness. And then suddenly there Stauracia was, involved, back in my life and filling all the available space in my head, though I honestly believe I didn’t realise it at the time. Fair enough. You don’t notice the moment you catch the plague; it’s only later that you know you’ve got it, when the symptoms start to show. Maybe it was Fan suddenly showing up again; the resolution of unfinished business, maybe, or the way she stuck around even though there was nothing in it for her. Correction: no money to be made out of it. My guess is, the idea of me being in love was so wildly implausible that it never crossed my mind until it had happened, and I only really found out about it in that room in the blockhouse, when it dawned on me that she was probably dead.

Love, for crying out loud. It was something I hadn’t given a thought to since I was a kid, before Scynthius and the accident. I’m not saying I didn’t believe in it. By the same token I believe there’s such a place as Essecuivo, where the lemons come from, a million million miles away across the deep blue sea; but I’ve never been there and I can’t really imagine myself ever going there, and I couldn’t care less. Maybe it’s because of all the stupid things stupid people say about love: it’s the sweetest thing; it makes the world go round; love is all you need. You get the idea that it’s like honey or silk or those sweets the Sashan make out of eggwhite and rosewater, and of course it isn’t.

Love is actually the cruellest thing, because it can cause more pain than anything else. The worst thing you can do to someone is have them love you, and then you die. Or you can kill someone who someone loves, that’s a really dirty trick. Or you can love someone and then they stab you in the back, or sell you to your father’s hired goons. If Fan hadn’t loved Scynthius, she wouldn’t have hated me as much as she does. If my father hadn’t loved me, he wouldn’t have put a price on my head when I killed his other son, who he loved even more. If I hadn’t loved my father and my brothers and my sister, running away would just have been a detail of geography. And if I hadn’t loved Stauracia, I expect I’d have made some sort of effort to stay alive, instead of lying peacefully in a cart in trousers bulging with my own shit. Now then: tell me that love isn’t the cruellest thing, and try and keep a straight face. Love is crueller than what the Echmen do to prisoners, or famine or plague or even war. Love makes things matter, and for that I can never bring myself to forgive it.

“Stop whining,” someone said. “We’ve got a ship. It’s tied up at the dock at Sunelonti. It’ll be fine.”

Gombryas had been fretting about what was going to happen when we got there, wherever there was. Now at least I knew that. Sunelonti Eipein, a fishing town on the west coast of the Friendly Sea, formerly a significant port but sadly come down in the world; a bit like me. Ideal for the purpose, because at that time of year you could sail south-east across the sea to somewhere like Axen or Vestris (they’d want to avoid a big place like Beloisa, just in case), and then hike fifty miles or so inland to my father’s country, with only one fairly straightforward river to cross. Clearly I was in the hands of intelligent, sensible people.

If we were heading for Sunelonti, and we’d been on the road for – what? Fourteen days or was it fifteen? – at thirty miles a day. I cared just enough to do the arithmetic. We were nearly there.

I tried to be scared, but I couldn’t. There’d be a boat trip (I hate boats) and then two days on a cart, then a fraught interview with my father and presumably my brother Scaphio, and then a great deal of pain, and then I’d be free and clear, unless I’d been wrong about the Invincible Sun all along, in which case my troubles were just about to start, but I didn’t think so. No, hang on a minute, we were stopping off on the way to collect Fan from Ogiv, weren’t we? Actually, I didn’t know. The issue had been decided, but not where I could hear it. People can be so thoughtless.

Maybe where I’ve gone wrong all my life is being impatient, proactive, bustling about doing stuff instead of lying on my back in my own shit waiting for stuff to come to me. Because the question was solved, without me having to lift a finger, around the middle of the next morning. The cart stopped, someone told someone else to wait there, keep an eye on him for fuck’s sake. Then we waited for a very long time, and then I heard Fan’s voice, swearing and arguing and very, very angry. Among the many things she said was, You give that back, it’s mine, how dare you, my father will do this and that when I tell him. Then the sound of the flat of a hand being applied to a face, then a short pause in the flow of passionate speech, and then a lot of stuff about how someone or other was a dead man; then, eventually, a declaration that she wasn’t getting in there, with him.

Well, at least I knew where I was. From Ogiv to Sunelonti, three days.

Three days, but with a cabaret. I don’t think Fan drew breath the whole way. Why they didn’t stick a gag in her mouth I really don’t know. Maybe her threats had got to them, or maybe they got a kick out of listening to the pampered kitten yowling – not something you get to hear every day, in the social circles in which they moved, and I guess if you played it as comedy, it could go down well, especially at the Lyric or the Arcade; not at the Gallery, but we were always strictly a burlesque house. Maybe it was just that with Fan at full volume, they couldn’t hear Gombryas drivelling on about how if they let me blow my nose I’d kill them all. In which case, fair enough.

I wasn’t really inclined to play it as comedy. I remembered what Stauracia had said: try and understand her, get inside her mind. And what she’d said, in the letter. Ideally I’d have liked to talk to her about it, but it wasn’t possible, so that was that. So, instead I used my imagination. I tried to imagine what it would be like for Fan meeting my father again, after what she’d done. He’d disowned her, she’d told me; never wanted to see her again, in this world or the next. It’d take a great deal of anger to make my father say that to his daughter, of whom he’d always been so fond and proud. I’d go as far as to say that he was fonder and prouder of her than of his deer park, or the folly he’d had built on top of the hill overlooking the house, and that’s really saying something, if you knew Dad.

No, really. He’d grown up in that house, needless to say, and practically every day of his life he used to wake up and look out of his window and see that hill, and think to himself: all it’d take to make this house the most perfect house in the world would be a folly on top of that hill. He’d nagged my grandfather to death about it, but the old man was adamant. No, because it’d mean cutting a bloody great clearing in the woods, and that’d scare off the deer and the boar, which would fuck up the last drive of the day, and then the people that really matter won’t want to come here to hunt any more, and if that happened we might as well not exist. So, shut up about your stupid folly, it’s not going to happen. Until at last the old man died; and my father was pretty cut up about that, but at least it meant an end to forty years of waiting, and a week later the architect arrived from Choris with enough drawings to cover the walls of a palace. And, five years later, it was finished; and as far as my father was concerned, the last and greatest imperfection in the way Creation was organised had finally been resolved, and everything was now for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And then, six months later, his stupid son murdered his clever son, and everything collapsed around him in a thunderstorm of shit and piss—

But at least he’d seen his clever, pretty daughter married to an archduke, and not just any old Archduke, an Elector as well. That would’ve been something to cling on to, on the dark days when even the view from the window wasn’t cutting it any more. The power, the importance, the relevance, the knowledge that his blood would be pumping through the veins of the next Archduke Elector; something to show for a life that probably hadn’t turned out quite the way he’d planned, in terms of honour and achievement and love. Then a day when a letter came; no, it’d have been a messenger, a very apprehensive messenger who’d spent three days in a fast coach on bad roads trying to figure out exactly how he was going to phrase it. Your daughter and her lover just murdered her husband, and now she’s a wanted fugitive. I can see how even the perfect folly in precisely the right place wouldn’t have been much of a consolation, in the circumstances.

And Fan, coming home to face all that. Women are red hot on multi-tasking, so my guess was that while she was yelling and moaning and making threats at the men in the cart, she was thinking about that meeting, planning her strategy, choosing her words carefully, and her gestures and facial expressions, trying to anticipate the areas in which she’d have to defend, and determining how best to exploit the areas in which she’d have scope to counter-attack. Doing the geometry, in other words, although my father always quoted that line from Saloninus, tuning your instrument at the door, which is actually much neater. Yes, the meeting promised to be a dialectic treat, and a small part of me was alive enough to hope that I’d be around to see it, or hear it at the very least, though I reckon you’d lose a lot of the subtext if you couldn’t see the looks on their faces. Andronica at the Gallery was absolutely the best at that sort of thing. You could write her a page of tripe, and with a few glances and head movements and subtle adjustments of her shoulders and feet, she could turn it into the funniest thing you ever saw in your life.

Andronica always figured that comedy was much harder than tragedy. I’m not sure I agree. Both Fan and my father had always been pretty straightforward to play for comedy, as you will by now have appreciated. Doing them straight would call for a degree of genuine human insight and feeling that I don’t think I possess, on account of having had my sensibilities stunted in adolescence. Andronica once told me that the funniest thing I ever wrote was Charity; funny, she called it, without being vulgar. It was, of course, my one and only attempt at genuine human drama.

The hell with it, I thought; not my problem, because it wasn’t my fault, just a ridiculous freak accident brought about by my brother’s reckless enthusiasm for playing with weapons. And who knows, the two of them might even now be able to reconcile and find common ground in the sight of me being slowly tortured to death; in which case, to be fair, my living would not have been entirely in vain.

Andronica kept me on the payroll because although I wrote tripe, I wrote the sort of tripe she knew she could turn into pure gold. Moral: I can’t actually think of one, but that’s probably because I’m too stupid.

You can smell the sea at Sunelonti, even through a miasma of your own bodily excretions. I think it’s because the wind blows inland at just the right angle across the very wide, open beach, which is usually ankle-deep in decomposing seaweed. Anyway, you can smell it as soon as you go through the gap in the hills, about four miles from the coast. Nearly there, I told myself. Nearly over.

Except that I guess I was starting to heal, the way you do, the way you can’t help doing even if you don’t particularly want to. Possibly it was something to do with dwelling so much on the past, in the dark inside the bag over my head, with nothing but Fan to listen to. I wasn’t scared of dying, or even the pain, but – to be honest with you, I really didn’t want to see my father again, the look on his face, the disappointment, the hatred. That was something I wanted to skip.

So. I could escape. More realistically, I could try and escape and get killed. Happy – no, not happy, not in the least, but satisfied with either option. Just so long as I didn’t have to go home.

Time to start doing some very belated geometry.

I’m no soldier, but I’ve pulled rings off the cold, pulpy fingers of enough soldiers to know that in a tactical situation there are tipping points, moments, fulcrums; this is the place where the application of a little pressure can achieve a result, here and only here. The key to the art of soldiering is figuring out a point where circumstances neutralise all the enemy’s advantages and turn his strengths into weaknesses, his superiorities into vulnerabilities.

Numbers have a lot to do with it. The greatest victories in history have been where a smart guy, monstrously outnumbered, has turned the other man’s bloated superiority in numbers into a liability, a killing bottle. Take one example of many: Carnufex the Irrigator at Fons Bandusiae, where a simple outflank and surround meant that the enemy’s seventy thousand heavy infantry were pinned between a cavalry onslaught and a river in spate, with no room to manoeuvre, herded like cattle, panic, slaughter, 90 per cent of the casualties in that battle either drowned in the river or were trampled to death by their own side. And that’s why Carnufex was a genius, and people like Gombryas wet themselves at the thought of getting their hands on a splinter of his jawbone.

Numbers, and a confined space, and if at all possible a natural hazard. Like, for example, the gangplank of a ship.

Think about it. A gangplank is a plank: narrow, insecure. People can only cross it in single file. Two of them are carrying a dead weight. On either side and directly below them, the most hostile natural hazard in the world, namely water.

Of course, I wouldn’t risk it, in their shoes, not in a million years. I’d have me rowed out in a boat and hoisted on to the ship with a crane. But a boat’s not so different from a plank. Talking of planks, I’d have me strapped to a board so I couldn’t kick out with my feet. But there, I’d have done what Gombryas suggested and broken my arms and legs, and they’d neglected or wilfully refused to do that, so clearly they weren’t nearly as smart or sensible as they thought they were. Neither was Carnufex’s opponent at Fons, whose name escapes me, and nearly everybody else, because he was too dumb to deserve remembering.

The other thing a great tactician needs is flexibility. Focus on the moment, and the possibilities that it brings. Visualise the possible outcomes, as clearly as if you were sitting in the front row at the Gallery watching the show; see how they play out, eager to seize on any point at which you can insert the blade of a crowbar. Create a sequence of events in your mind, and test it to make sure it’s feasible; once you’ve imagined it, it exists, it’s a written script, and all you need to do then is act it out – simple job, piece of cake, even actors can do it and you know what they’re like. Above all, do the geometry: distances, timings, at the precise moment when A is at point B, where will C be and will he be able to reach? I’m a lousy chess player, which surprises me, since I can do this sort of complicated time-and-space planning with comparative ease. A great deal depends on how much you know about the variables – mostly, the people involved. Either you know them personally, the way I know Gombryas, or you know the type (soldier, officer, hired goon, sentry, warder) well enough to figure out how they’ll react, which vector they’ll move on, how quickly, with what degree of experience, skill and confidence. Like fencing: you know that if you lunge, he’ll take a step back and raise his hand into Fourth, so you anticipate that and turn your wrist over at a specified time (by which point your hand is in a specified place) so that your sword is pointing at his navel instead of his head; but he’ll have anticipated that, so you need to use that knowledge to plan a refinement that he won’t have considered… As I would do if, for example, I was fencing with a superior opponent who I happened to know very well, for the sake of argument my own brother, and I wanted to kill him and also – why does everything have to be so complicated? – make it look like an accident.

I really, really wished I could get a chance to talk to Fan about that, if only for a few minutes.

Maybe that was it. Perfectly happy to go to my death, but first I needed to ask her about a few things. But she wouldn’t want to talk to me, even if the goons were to allow it. Therefore I had to escape, then make an opportunity for a private talk with my sister. After that – who gives a damn about after that? It’s important to a tactician to look ahead, but not too far ahead, or you get lost and lose your way. Do one thing at a time and do it supremely well, I always say.

One thing at a time. A gangplank (or a small boat). Water on three sides. A kick and a wriggle. They drop me. I fall in the water.

They would have been thinking: he won’t try anything on the gangplank, he’s too smart for that, he’ll realise that if we drop him he’ll go splash in the sea, and he’s trussed like a chicken so he won’t be able to swim, he’ll sink like a stone. Carnufex the Irrigator or Senza Belot, in my shoes, would therefore be concentrating on a way of not sinking like a stone the moment he hit the water. Tricky; but consider the career of Senza Belot, who won all those battles by doing the apparently impossible at precisely the right moment. And the impossible turned out to be possible because Senza had thought about it in advance. A simple conjuring trick.

Talking of which, I knew a conjurer once, only he called himself an illusionist. Andronica hired him for the Gallery, a half-hour spot between the farce and the burlesque, so I got to know him reasonably well, hanging around in the green room while the farce was grinding through its grimly inevitable permutations. His best trick was escaping. They’d truss him up like a chicken with ropes and chains and a bag over his head, and five minutes later he’d be free, not a mark on him, taking his bow while the audience talked to their neighbours or ate apples. Escaping being something of a hobby of mine, I asked him how he did it. Easy, he told me. When they tie you up, you tense certain muscles in a very specific way. Then, when you relax, the ropes will be loose and you can scriggle out of them. Here, he said, the eleventh or twelfth time I expressed scepticism, I’ll show you.

The illusionist didn’t last long at the Gallery. The audience chatted among themselves or ate apples during his act not because it wasn’t spectacular – actually it was pretty amazing – but because they knew it was all a lie, and the only possible interest in it would be if one night he made a mess of it, which would be amusing. But he never did, he was flawless, you knew he’d be out of there in no time flat, so no point in watching, no fun. Fortunately, the only member of my audience who properly knew me was Gombryas, and he’d made such a nuisance of himself that nobody was interested. The more he warned, the less inclined they were to listen. The only question remaining, therefore, was whether I could hold my breath under water for three minutes twelve seconds.

No, probably not, but you can extend the time quite a lot by practising, like pearl divers and people like that. So, since I had nothing better to do, I spent the next day learning to hold my breath. When the time came for me to be fed and my trousers to be cleaned, I did the things the conjuror told me. Like me, he’d learned how to do the geometry, precisely and fluently, until it came as naturally as breathing. Or not breathing, as the case may be.

Inside my bag there was no day or night, but I could hear seagulls, smell rotting seaweed and feel the cart bouncing over cobbles. Welcome to Sunelonti Eipein.

“My father,” Fan was saying, “is going to have you flayed alive and nailed up on a barn door for the crows to peck at. He did that once, to a man who raped one of the kitchen maids. Guess how long it took him to die. Go on, guess.”

No reply, or the man was mumbling.

“Two days. Two days, with no skin. The crows pecked his eyes out. Just think what it’d be like, seeing the crow’s beak coming straight at you, and then not being able to see anything any more. I thought he’d have passed out from the pain, but, no, he was awake all through. Made the most awful fuss. My brother pleaded with my father, put him out of his misery, it’s upsetting the gardeners, but once my father’s decided to do something, he does it. Of course,” she went on, “you could give me my jewellery back and let me go, and then we’ll say no more about it and pretend none of this happened.”

She was telling the truth about the man who raped the kitchen maid. I was the brother who pleaded. I don’t suppose it was a coincidence that she chose to remind me of it. I’d be pleading again soon enough, and to the same effect. Like I cared. Having my skin ripped off would be a bit like realising that Stauracia was dead, only not quite as bad. Nevertheless, I did need to have that conversation with my sister. I kept reminding myself about that, just in case I forgot.

“Shut your face,” someone eventually said. “Before I shut it for you.”

“You’re going to wish you hadn’t said that,” Fan said. “You’re going to wish it a lot.”

The cart stopped. Geometry time.

I saw it clear as day, in spite of the bag. One of them gets down off the cart, wanders off to find the ship, talk to the captain – first he’s got to find the captain, who’s probably busy shouting at someone for buying the wrong grade of biscuits, or why the hell isn’t that loaded yet, we’ll miss the tide. He talks to the captain – we’ve got cargo to load, yes, fine, you don’t need any help, do you? No, fine, no worries. He comes back. They lift me out of the cart, and then it’s either the gangplank or the boat. Gombryas is nagging them about breaking at least one of my limbs while there’s still time. They ignore him; he’s turned into a buzzing mosquito, they don’t bother listening any more. In any case, Fan is droning on about flayings and disembowellings, making it hard for them to think straight. I’ll feel their boots on the plank, or the boat swaying gently under my weight as they load me on it. Then, showtime.

“Nobody move.”

Everything changed. I knew that voice.

Someone said, “I thought you told me you’d—” and then stopped talking, abruptly, at exactly the same moment as something went thump. I knew that sound, too; an arrow, suddenly dumping all its terminal velocity into flesh. Then a scream – Fan: a world-class screamer since she was a wee tot. Then a lot of yelling and bashing, lasting fifteen seconds at most. Then dead silence.

Everything had changed. I’d know that voice anywhere.

“God, you stink,” she said, and pulled the bag off my head.

I tried to say her name, but my voice wouldn’t work. Two weeks or whatever it was, on your back with a gag in your mouth; also, I’d never expected to say that name ever again. “You two, over here. Gently, for fuck’s sake. No, stuff it, leave him where he is, we’ll take this cart. Move it, for God’s sake, there’ll be soldiers along any minute.”

I was looking at her: Stauracia, alive.

Not that it mattered one tiny bit, but she wasn’t looking her best. There was a scar, a big one, running diagonally from her hairline on the left, across her forehead but missing the eye socket, then down through the bridge of her nose across the right-hand corner of her mouth. Nobody had got around to stitching it up; probably too late for that now, through Doc Papinian might have been able to do something, if he’d had the decency to stay alive until he was needed. Still, you know what they say. More than just a pretty face; which was probably just as well.

“Leave them,” she was yelling. “Yes, and leave her, we don’t want her. Just leave everything and let’s go.”

Three hundred thousand staurata in finely wrought gemstones. Trouble was, I couldn’t get my mouth to work, and there was still a gag in it. “Florian,” I heard Fan squeal, “you’re not going to let her leave me here, are you? For God’s sake, Florian.”

The cart was moving. All I could see was sky.

“Seventy-five staurata,” Stauracia said. “For this bunch of inadequates. You get what you pay for, I always say. Still, they did the job.”

They’d been all she could get, at short notice, in Sunelonti, bearing in mind she was paying with a draft on a Sashan bank rather than actual clinking money. Dock hands, mostly, and a couple of chuckers-out from the brothel. Angels of mercy, I told her, and worth every trachy.

“This isn’t so bad,” she said, tracing the scar with her fingertip. “Just a flesh wound, really, where your mate Gombryas slashed me. The hole in the gut was the nasty one. But I packed it with moss and spider’s web and tried not to think about it, and here I am. I learned how to do that from that Echmen doctor of yours. No magic, he said, just clean moss, spider’s web and a bit of stick to poke it in with. Then wait for it to mend, clean it out and cauterise it with a hot iron. That wasn’t a lot of fun, actually. Did the job, though.”

“Gombryas,” I said. “Is he—?”

She nodded. “Arrow clean through his head and out the other side.” She paused and grinned. “I wish there’d been time to harvest his fingers and a couple of toes, but I didn’t want to hang about in case the law turned up.”

“Shame,” I said. “He’d have liked that.”

Poor Gombryas, I thought: my pal, my friend. A good man in his way, and he only ever let me down once. Still, it didn’t matter one little bit, because Stauracia was alive. “You do realise,” I said. “Fan’s jewels. The boss goon had them. You could’ve—”

She shrugged. “Knowing your sister, I don’t suppose they were still there when the authorities turned up. Don’t worry, there’s no extradition in Sunelonti. She’ll be fine.”

The thought had crossed my mind, and it was kind of Stauracia to have checked, so she could set my mind at rest. Of course, she could have been lying. But that would be rather sweet, too.

She paid off the goons and drove the cart to a barn, out in the middle of nowhere, which she’d noticed on her way in; instinctive strategic thinking, typical. “I got lucky,” she was explaining. “I found the cart we came out in, you remember, the one we left at that gatehouse, by the waterfall. Of course it was no fucking use for going fast, but I happened to come across a farm with actual living people in it, and I traded the cart and team for a horse. Well, a pony, actually, but what the hell, it got me to Sunelonti, and I was pretty sure that’s where they’d be headed for. I felt as sick as shit gambling on that, so it was lucky I was right.”

Not only had she hired two dozen killers, at an excessively high price; she’d also thought to buy provisions for two for six weeks, blankets, basic medical supplies, a change of clothes and footwear for me and a small portable stove. “There’s a stream down there in the dip,” she said. “For fuck’s sake, go and wash.”

That night, we made love on a heap of straw, black with mould and crawling with spiders, carefully, so as not to rip open her scars. It had been a long time since I’d done anything like that, and I made rather a hash of it, but she didn’t seem to mind. It’s the thought that counts, she told me.

“Auxentia City,” I said firmly. “That’s where my rainy-day money is.”

“Fuck Auxentia City,” she said. “Too dangerous.” She gave me that how-can-you-be-so-stupid look. It was different with the scar; in fact, the effect was rather cute. “Look, we don’t know how much Gombryas told your dad’s people. It’s quite possible he told them about your stash in Auxentia, because it’d mean you’d be likely to go there at some point. Very likely, in fact, if this scheme proved to be a washout. Think about it. It’s exactly what you’re contemplating doing, after all.”

That didn’t take very long to sink in. “Marvellous,” I said. “That means my life savings—”

She shrugged. “It’s only money,” she said. “And guess what, I’ve got loads of money. We’ve got loads of money. Which is why we’re going to Suda.”

I knew I wasn’t going to win the argument, but I felt obliged to try. Stauracia likes winning. It would be churlish to deprive her of even a small pleasure. “You must be out of your mind,” I said. “There’s a great big war about to start. You can’t just hop to and fro across the border any more. We’re the enemy.”

She grinned. “You may be,” she said. “I’m not. Little friend of all the world, I am. Besides, I can get us a couple of diplomatic passes. Genuine Sashan ones. I know a man in Toris: it’s on our way.”

I loved her for that, too. Beauty is only skin deep, but having a corrupt official in Toris at the precise moment you need one the most – that sort of true spiritual beauty is very rare. “In that case,” I said, “it’s a deal.”

“Suda?”

“Suda,” I said. “Never been there. What’s it like?”

She smiled, and lay back on the bed. “Hot as buggery,” she said. “Lots of old buildings, with carvings and stuff. The people stink of garlic. Far as I can remember I’m not wanted for anything there.”

“It sounds like heaven,” I said.

“Four hundred thousand staurata,” she replied. “My stash, and your sister’s contribution. What’s four hundred thousand in darics?”

I did the maths. “Just shy of a million,” I said. “Assuming you got the good exchange rate.”

“It’ll just have to do,” she said.

So we turned around and went south until we reached Chambia, where the Northern Trunk crosses the old Military Express, where we turned east. The Express dates back to the last big war against the Sashan. It was built in a tearing hurry to get supplies to the fortified cities on the east coast, to stock them up in case they came under siege. In the event, all the cities surrendered as soon as the Sashan fleet rounded the Cape, but the road is still there, and it’s held up remarkably well, all things considered. If you’re one of those ungrateful people who ask, what did war ever do for us, there’s your answer.

Two days on the Express. She found me sitting on the ground next to the cart. “What the hell are you doing?”

“What does it look like?”

“You’re crying.” She kneeled down beside me. “For fuck’s sake,” she said, “what’s that in aid of?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Gombryas.”

“You clown.”

I nodded. “But he was my friend,” I said. “And I never had a chance to tell him, no hard feelings. He’d have wanted to know that.”

“No hard feelings? He sold you to—”

“Yes, all right. But no hard feelings. That’s important.”

She looked at me. “You know what, Saevus,” she said, “you’re the most fucked-up man I ever met in my life.”

“No hard feelings,” I said. “Except he cut up your face. I’d have had to pay him back for that.” Then I couldn’t say any more, because of the stupid blubbering. She put her arms around me and called me a moron, and I remember thinking: maybe I was wrong about love. Maybe it is all you need, after all.