12

I was dreaming, I remember, about a certain incident in my past. I reached a familiar bit, then woke up and found it wasn’t a dream.

That would explain, I thought, why the men in the dream were Dejauzi, not Robur. “On your feet,” they said, and someone produced a knife and showed it to me, just close enough to my nose to be out of focus. “You’re coming with us.”

They were Maudit by the sound of it, though Dejauzi accents are notoriously hard to pin down, and I’d never dare try and do one. The Rosinholet flattened A, for example, is almost but not quite the same in Aram Chantat; you need a really good ear to distinguish between them. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “What did I do?”

“Shut up.”

Not likely. With my mouth shut, I’m nobody, I don’t exist. “Is this the king’s orders?”

“We haven’t got a king any more.”

Ah, I thought. “Let me put some clothes on, for crying out loud.”

“No. Move.”

They shoved me out of the tent into the bright sunshine. Served me right, I guess, for oversleeping. I could feel the knife pricking the small of my back. Here we go again, I thought. But it was fun while it lasted.

There was a crowd of Maudit standing around, closely packed so I couldn’t see past them. They looked scared and angry, in that order. When they caught sight of me, some of them started yelling things, mostly self-evidently accurate references to my anatomy. People telling me things about myself. I ought to get YES, I KNOW tattooed on my forehead.

A man I vaguely recognised seemed to be in charge. He was sitting on a three-legged stool, formerly the property of the king. He scowled at me with a melodramatic thunder face, but I could see he was as frightened as I was. “So you’re a prophet, are you?” he said.

“People keeping saying I am.”

“Prove it. Prophesy something.”

I took a deep breath. “I can do that,” I said. “Question is, do you want to hang around here till it comes true? Only it’s about your grandson.”

At the back, someone laughed. I like the Maudit. They’re easily amused.

“You’re no prophet,” the scared angry man said. “You’re just some bloody chancer.”

“Your king didn’t think so.”

“He’s dead, isn’t he? For listening to you. And her.”

“You murdered your king.”

“For selling us out to the Echmen, too bloody right we did.”

“Are you going to kill me, too?”

He didn’t answer. It was the question he didn’t want to be asked. “I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. “That’s fine. I’ve been killed once, it doesn’t hurt.” I jerked my arms free and folded them in front of me. Something warm and wet was trickling down my leg. “Get on with it, then. I won’t bite you.” I paused, mostly because my throat was full of reflux. Then I added: “It’s not me you need to be worried about.”

Apparently I’d played right into his hands. “You mean,” he said, “the Queen of Heaven.”

There was a sort of sigh when he said it, as though he’d picked up a turd and bitten into it. I made a show of wincing. “You tell me,” I said.

“I’ll tell you something, you lying bastard,” he said. “That wasn’t the queen we saw that night. It was some blueskin whore called Hodda.”

The truth, I’ve found, is like an annoying little dog that takes a fancy to you in the street and follows you home, barking. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been glad to be confronted with the truth. “What makes you say that?”

He grinned so much I thought the corners of his mouth would split. “There’s one of the Echmen soldiers who can talk Pirzoi,” he said. “And so can one of our lads. The Echmen told him that your fucking Queen of Heaven is some blueskin tart who came to the city doing singing and dancing. Name of Hodda, he said. Well? What do you say to that?”

It’s going to hurt, I told myself, but it’ll be quick, with so many of them joining in. “And you believed him. An Echmen.”

“He saw her, he said. In a singing and dancing place in the Echmen city.”

“You killed your king on the word of an Echmen prisoner of war.”

“Too right. And now we’re going to do you as well.”

“No, you’re not,” I said. “Let’s do this properly.” I turned to the man closest to me, who I’d never seen before. “In my tent,” I said, “there’s a stool next to the bunk. On the stool there’s a wooden box. Fetch it.”

He looked at the angry, scared man, who said, “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“In that box,” I said, “is the writing She gave me. I need it if we’re going to do this properly.”

Left to himself he’d have ignored me, but he wasn’t by himself, not by a long chalk. “Fine,” he said. “Get the liar his box. We’re not fooled. He thinks we’re stupid but we’re not.”

Someone brought the box. I touched it to my forehead and opened it, not looking inside. “Here’s how we go about it,” I said. “This scroll is my witness, before Her. I’m now going to stab myself. If I die, I was lying and you were right. If I don’t, the Echmen soldier was lying, trying to make trouble. Does that sound fair to you?”

I’d made it sound so calm and reasonable that he couldn’t refuse. “Go ahead,” he said. “You’ll save us the trouble.”

I reached into the box, not drawing attention to my hands by not looking down, and felt for the trick theatre knife, which Hodda had palmed on me to get rid of it on the night of the big show. Bless her, I thought, I owe her so much. I found the knife, took it out, placed the point in the hollow of my throat, where the collarbones meet, and pushed it as far as it would go. It was an awkward moment for me – I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I have this thing about knives getting close to me – but I kept my eyes fixed on the sad, angry man, even when I toppled over. I lay still, counted to ten, then got up again.

Perfectly still and quiet. My skin tingled where the tip of the blade, slightly rounded, had almost broken through. The scared, angry man had jumped up off his stool. He was staring. He’d seen the knife go in, up to the hilt.

“It’s a trick,” he said. “There’s something funny about that knife.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Let’s test it, shall we?”

Years ago, there was this accident at the theatre. I remember hearing about it. An actor was stabbed and nearly died. With those trick knives, if you jam your thumb against the base of the blade, you can stop it sliding up into the handle. Not enough to stab someone properly, but you can use the edge to cut something. I’d put a good edge on the blade, in my spare time. One of the books I’d read in the Imperial library was an anatomy textbook. There was a useful drawing showing all the main arteries.

At the last moment I remember thinking; I can’t do this, me of all people. But it takes much less pressure than you think to cut human skin. The blood squirted out right into my face. I was blinded and staggered back. I wiped my eyes clear with the back of my wrist. Then I cleaned the blade quickly, got the knife back in the box out of sight and closed the lid. Everybody was looking at me.

“You murdered your king,” I said loudly, “on the word of an enemy soldier. You said the Queen of Heaven is a blueskin whore. Anything that goes wrong from now on will be your fault. I thought you ought to know that.” I looked down at the body. “We don’t have to wait to see if the prophesy about his grandson comes true. The prophesy was, he won’t have one. Now, if you wouldn’t mind getting out of the way. You make me sick, the lot of you.”

I went back to my tent, pulled the flap closed, fell onto the bunk and lay there shivering. That man’s blood on my skin was like spiders walking up and down, but I couldn’t make myself wash it off, even though there was water in a jug and a cloth right next to me. I felt like I was the one who’d been cut up, again. I really don’t understand why people go on about how wonderful the truth is. In my experience, all it does is make trouble.

After some indeterminate period of time, I heard rustling at the tent flap, and someone bustling in. When someone’s standing in the doorway it blocks out the light, so you can’t see who it is. “Are you all right?” she said.

“Fine,” I replied. “Where the hell were you?”

“The Maudit wouldn’t let us through, and nobody wanted to pull a weapon on a Maudit. I had to get some of the Echmen.”

“Bad move,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Fuck you,” she yelled. “They could’ve killed you.”

“Give me a minute and I’ll come out and deal with it. Is their king really dead?”

She nodded. “He refused to believe what they were saying about you, so they kicked him to death.”

I closed my eyes. “That’s a shame,” I said.

“He really believed in you.” She hesitated. “What happened?”

“Excuse me?”

“They’re saying you did a miracle. What happened?”

I looked up at her. “I’m not entirely sure,” I said.

“What do you mean, you’re not sure? What fucking happened?”

She knew about Hodda, but I hadn’t bothered to tell her the details, such as the trick knife. “I stabbed myself,” I said. “Then I cut that man’s throat.”

“You stabbed yourself.”

“That’s where all this blood came from, presumably. I haven’t looked to see.”

“Stand up.”

“Do I have to? I’m tired, I want to rest.”

“Fucking stand up.”

So I did that. “There’s not a mark on you.”

“Really?” I looked down at my neck. “You’re right. Now there’s a thing.”

She was so angry I thought she’d burst. “Did you stab yourself or didn’t you?”

“Oh, I stabbed myself all right. Ask anyone. But you’re right, there doesn’t seem to be a mark.” I frowned. “That’s crazy.”

“Where’s the knife?”

“What? Oh, that. I don’t know, I must have dropped it out there. Why’s there no mark? I don’t understand.”

“Show me the place.”

I pointed. She looked closely.

“I don’t understand,” I repeated. “I thought, if I stab myself, at least it’ll be quick, better than being kicked to death or watching my guts rolled out on a stick. Then I wasn’t dead, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to get rid of that bloody nuisance, while I had the chance. Then I came in here. I didn’t realise—” I sat down, with my best gormless look on my face. Don’t pull faces, my mother used to say, you’ll stick like it; then, Too late, you’ve stuck. And I’d rush to find a mirror, in case she was telling the truth. She never was, though. Did that make her a bad person?

“Did you really stab yourself?”

“Oh, for crying out loud.”

“Did you?”

“Yes.”

She was staring at me, scared and angry. Strange. All I want is a quiet life, albeit on my terms. “It’s true, then. You’re a prophet.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What happened that night? I saw it. She stabbed you, but you didn’t die.”

I frowned. “I assumed it was sleight of hand.”

“I saw the knife go in.”

“Don’t ask me,” I said, “I wasn’t looking. I assumed—” I stopped. “I honestly don’t know,” I said. “That woman was an actress. I thought she was an actress.”

I stopped there and let her do the rest. She duly did it, I could see it happening in her face. “You told me,” she said, “you told me you saw her once.”

“Yes, on the stage, when I was a young subaltern.”

“Not her, the queen. You said, in a dream.”

“I saw someone,” I replied. “In a dream. I see all sort of weird shit in dreams. So do you, I imagine. Doesn’t mean you’re a prophet, too.”

“I saw it go in. I thought it was a trick.”

“Pull yourself together,” I said, “for pity’s sake. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve got a crisis on our hands. Who’s the new king of the Maudit?”

“What?”

“The Maudit,” I said. “Who’ll be the new king?”

She frowned, forcing herself to concentrate. “His son, I guess. But he’s a kid. Five years old.”

“That’s no bloody good,” I said. “We need somebody now. Close relatives?”

“He had a brother.”

“Had?”

“You just killed him.”

That was the king’s brother. Oh boy. “So there’s a five-year-old kid out there who’s just lost his father and his uncle, both because of me, and we’re supposed to do business with him. Wonderful.” I scowled at her. “These lunatics are your people, you tell me. What are we going to do?”

“I don’t know, do I?”

“Think.”

So she did that. “We need a regent,” she said.

“Great. Who?”

She shook her head. “The Maudit have to decide that for themselves,” she said. “All the heads of families get together and they choose.”

“See to it,” I snapped. “In case you’ve forgotten, we’re in the middle of a war. This is not a good time to be holding elections.”

“It doesn’t work like that. I’ll see what I can do.”

After she’d gone I felt bad, of course. I felt bad about deceiving her, manipulating her, killing the Maudit king’s brother, getting the Maudit king killed because he believed in me; various other things, too, but not nearly everything I should’ve been feeling bad about, because there’s only so many things you can hold in your mind at any one time. I felt bad, really I did. Bad enough to do anything about them? Maybe not. But I washed the dead man’s blood off me, before the stink of it drove me crazy. That blood smell; very familiar. Made it seem just like old times.

As to whether it would be safe for me to leave the tent, or safe to stay in the tent, I really had no idea. I’d pulled what I’d have said was a blatant and pretty unconvincing stunt, but of course I know all about theatres and trick daggers. Therefore I believed that what I’d done was all a lie; and the Maudit had seen the same thing, and believed it was the truth. It occurred to me that maybe they knew something I didn’t know, or at least could perceive something I wasn’t capable of perceiving. Just because I think something I tell you is a lie doesn’t mean it isn’t actually true. What do I know, after all? I’m nobody.

I don’t know how long I stayed in the tent. I was thinking about various things, so I guess I lost track of time. I was still thinking when the tent flap was pulled back and the light was blotted out again. It’s a design fault with tents. Someone ought to do something about it.

It was General Alyattes. He’d brought his own stool to sit on. You can see why he was such a firebrand as a supply officer.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Some of your people have got one of my men,” he said, in a sad, I-shouldn’t-have-to-deal-with-this voice. “They’ve got a rope round his neck and they say they’re going to hang him. There’s some more of your people trying to stop them. You seem to be very popular right now. I was wondering if you’d come and sort it out.”

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

He smiled bleakly. “Apparently they think you’re so holy they don’t dare disturb you. So I elbowed my way past them and came in. They didn’t stop me, and here I am.”

I nodded. “You’ve got a translator.”

“No,” he said. “The man with the rope round his neck can talk some strange foreign language which one of your lot can understand, so everything’s having to go through them. Hardly ideal. Unfortunately, nearly all our chaps who can talk Dejauzi were assigned to the labour camp, and when you broke out, you killed them. It makes communication rather difficult.”

“Just as well I’m here.” I stood up. “What do you want to learn Dejauzi for, they told me, you’ll never find a use for it.”

Something in his expression made me feel we’d never really be friends, but I’m used to that. “If you don’t mind,” he said.

“Sure. Lead on.”

The Echmen soldier was terrified, reasonably enough. “What’ve you been telling people?” I asked him.

It wasn’t his fault, he told me. He’d been sitting in a bar, just before he came on this expedition. He got talking to someone, who told him that someone had told him that the Dejauzi goddess who’d sparked everything off was really a Robur actress. They’d had a good laugh about it. How do you know? he’d asked. Because the actress is going round telling everybody. Apparently she didn’t get paid and she’s mad as hell about it. That was what he’d heard. Then, when he found there was a Dejauzi who could talk Pirzoi, he thought it’d be a laugh to tell him about it, just to see the look on his face when he realised he’d been made a fool of.

“I see,” I said. “And now the Dejauzi want to hang you.”

“They told me there’s been a miracle or something. Look, I didn’t mean any harm. I just wanted to put that guy in his place.”

“Of course you did,” I said. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. Just for the record, though, it’s not true. I don’t know any Robur actresses.”

He looked at me. “Straight up?”

“Cross my heart and hope to die in a cellar full of rats.”

He grinned through his terror. Why would he lie to me, he was thinking, I’m not anybody. I turned away from him and held up my hands. “This man hasn’t done anything wrong,” I said loudly. “Let him go.”

Someone called out something about blasphemy. I shook my head. “He repeated a lie somebody told him,” I said. “He wasn’t to know. Let him go. We all make mistakes. And if you lynch him, it’ll only piss off the Echmen.”

Nobody said anything. I lifted the noose from off the poor fool’s shoulders, then gave him a shove. The crowd let him through. They did the same for me, which was a blessing.

“If I’d known being a prophet was going to be like this,” I told her in Echmen, “I’d have been something else. A military genius, something like that. Much more of this and all my hair’ll fall out.”

“I wish you wouldn’t say things like that. You think it’s funny and smart, but it isn’t.”

You can’t help but admire someone who can turn even a declaration of faith into a telling-off.

“We had a meeting,” she told me later. “The kings and the Maudit heads of families.”

“Good,” I said, pulling my boots off. “Who did you choose?”

“You.”

So help me, I really didn’t see that one coming. “You did what?”

“As regent,” she said, “till the prince comes of age, in nine years. It had to be someone everybody trusted and respected.”

For crying out loud.

We caught a couple of Echmen scouts. I got hold of some pig bones and had them put in a big brass cooking pot. “See those?” I said.

They told me they could see them just fine.

“That,” I said, “is you, unless you’re absolutely straight with me. The Dejauzi aren’t nice people. Do you understand?”

They understood. Among the interesting facts they were only too pleased to share with me was the news that General Alyattes and his army had formally been declared traitors and sentenced to death for treason and cowardice. I frowned. “That’s no way to talk about your emperor,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

By rights, I explained, Alyattes was the emperor. It was a little-known fact, covered up by the corrupt and treacherous regime, that Alyattes was the true son of the previous emperor’s sister; furthermore, she and her brother were both poisoned by the present incumbent to clear his path to the throne. Alyattes was therefore the rightful emperor, and all we were doing was helping him take back what was his. They’ve probably been telling you, I went on, that this is a barbarian invasion. Nothing of the sort. This is justice in action. Please pass it on when you get back. I also gave them a letter to give to their commander, saying the same thing but peppered with a few uncheckable allegations masquerading as evidence. Time to get the ball rolling, I thought.

We followed the course of the Spring and Winter River, bypassing the large towns, which were undefended, and helping ourselves to the supply stores in the Imperial roadhouses, maintained for the benefit of the provincial army. Well, that was all right because the provincial army, what was left of it, was now part of us, so we were entitled.

At station 27 we were met by a small group of horsemen, unarmed and in civilian clothes. They’d been sent by General Carcamela, who’d been ordered to seek us out and destroy us. Carcamela, they told us, didn’t know the secretary of state who’d assigned him the mission, because there had been a major upheaval at the palace and all the old familiar faces had disappeared. But he did know Alyattes, who’d been his adjutant fifteen years ago, and he knew which of them he preferred to trust. Alyattes read them a prepared statement, all that stuff about being the old emperor’s nephew, and added a personal message to Carcamela; rather nicely phrased, though I do say so myself. There was a lot about change we can believe in and draining the swamp and yes we can, and the messengers trotted away looking cheerful, having met someone they felt they could do business with.

Carcamela joined us four days later with twenty thousand lancers and a supply train. I let Alyattes’ men have their weapons back. Half of them now believed that I was a prophet, and the other half were looking forward to looting the Imperial palace. Emperor-elect Alyattes appointed Carcamela commander-in-chief of the Imperial army in exile, and his first job after the fake emperor had been deposed was to be dealing with the Suessonians, with the proviso that his loyal troops would get to keep anything of value they found in the hilltop stronghold; six million in gold, for example, things like that.

By this point we were deep into Echmen territory. Supply wasn’t a problem, thanks to Alyattes’ splendid reorganisation of the Imperial commissariat. We also had full use of the Imperial intelligence network, since news of Carcamela’s defection, though common knowledge on the ground, hadn’t yet filtered through official channels; which is to say, the joint chiefs in the capital knew about it just fine, but the orders rescinding his commission were still percolating through to divisional level. Until that happened, district intelligence officers still reported to him, and they did, volubly. From them we learned that the northern governor and the Imperial guard were still loyal to the old emperor, and the other three governors were sitting on the fence, waiting to see what would happen.

“Saloninus,” I told her, “says that there are basically two kinds of invasion. There’s conquests, where you get hordes of savages streaming across a frozen river, cities burned to the ground, every living thing slaughtered right down to chickens, the end of civilisation as we know it, followed by a dark age, followed by something very much like what you had before. The other kind is called a takeover. That’s where you clear out the people at the top and take their place and everything else goes on as normal. Takeovers are better because you inherit all the nice things your predecessors had, which is why you wanted to rob them in the first place. Otherwise it’s like breaking into a rich man’s house, smashing everything up and torching it, then walking away empty-handed. I think this ought to be a takeover, don’t you?”

She gazed at me. “You’re really into all this, aren’t you?” she said. “Right now you’re telling yourself, this is what I was born for.”

“Maybe I was.”

“There you go,” she said. “Actually, I have a horrible feeling you were. It’d explain a lot. Like, why everything’s been set up perfectly for you, waiting for you like a pile of neatly folded clothes.”

I thought about that. It worried me. “I don’t follow,” I said.

“Yes you do.” She poured herself a drink. The Hus drink wine, beer, mead and something really disgusting made from fermented quinces, which they distil through copper pipes in the bright sunlight. She’d been doing a lot it lately. “It’s like all of history has been leading up to you, making sure everything’s ready for when you turn up.” She nibbled her drink and pulled a face; definitely the quince liqueur. “You’re going to argue, so let me lay it out for you. Once upon a time there were three empires.”

“Four,” I said. “You’re forgetting Blemya.”

“Fuck fucking Blemya. Three empires; and they bash into each other over and over again, until they’re like three rocks hanging on a clifftop, and one little shove will set them toppling. Even a little kid could set them rolling. Even you.”

“I had nothing to do with what happened to the Robur.”

“Never said you did. That was the rock that pushed you. But the point is, everything’s perfect. Everything’s just right. It’s like the Echmen went out of their way to engineer their stupid empire so it could be collapsed by pulling one simple lever. Now you can quote Saloninus and tell me how it got that way because of the course of history and loads of problems they never got around to fixing until they’d gone too far to fix, but that’s not the point. And I’ll bet you anything you like that when you’ve finished with the Echmen and you start beating up on the Sashan, it’ll all fall beautifully into place like – what’s that stuff they had in the palace with little spiky wheels that made things go round?”

“Clockwork.”

“Clockwork.” She nodded. “There you go.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I think things got that way because that’s what things do. I think I saw what nobody else had seen, because nobody else was looking.”

“Bullshit.” She swallowed her drink, had a coughing fit and poured another. “I don’t think that’s how it is at all.”

“Tell me,” I said, “how you think it is.”

“I will.” She paused for a moment and took a sip of disgusting quince liqueur. This time she didn’t pull a face. “That wheels-going-round thing.”

“A clock.” I nodded. “Invented a hundred and seventy years ago in Scona by Prosper of Schanz. The example in the Imperial palace is one of only seven complete units completed by Prosper before his death. What about it?”

“Suppose,” she said, “a Dejauzi’s walking along the riverbank, and he finds a what you said, a clock. He looks at it and realises that the steel finger goes round in a circle precisely twenty-four times every day. What’s he supposed to think? Maybe he thinks that what he’s found is a stone that’s been in the river for hundreds and hundreds of years, and the water’s bashed the stone against other stones and chipped bits off and eaten away the soft parts, and by sheer coincidence the result just happens to behave in that funny way. Or maybe he thinks, somebody made this so he could tell the time.”

“I think,” I said, “that you’ve got a wonderful imagination.”

“You did see her, didn’t you? That time when you thought you were bleeding to death and you were going to die.”

“No,” I said. “I made that up.”

She shook her head. “You think,” she said, “that just because you don’t believe in her, she doesn’t exist. Well, fuck you. I don’t know if this needle believes in me or not, but if I want to sew something, I use it. I couldn’t give a shit whether the needle has faith.”

She was really starting to get to me. “Pull yourself together,” I said. “You know perfectly well that what you saw was a Robur actress called Hodda with no clothes on.”

“Do I?” She grinned at me, like I’d just made a stupid chess move. “Explain to me, I’m just an ignorant savage. What’s an actress?”

“You know perfectly well—”

“Explain to me.”

“Fine. An actress is a woman who plays a part in a theatre.”

“I don’t know what that means. Explain some more.”

“All right. A man writes a play. He writes out what all the actors are going to say. They learn it by heart. Then they stand up in front of an audience and pretend to be the people in the play.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “So, when your Hodda goes out in front of the people watching, she’s not Hodda any more. She’s someone else.”

My head was starting to hurt. “She’s pretending.”

“Really.” She glared at me. “You go to one of these plays and you see a woman stand up and say and do things. Has she got a name?”

“Yes.”

“And the other people in the play. They can see her?”

“Well, yes.”

“And hear her?”

“Yes, unless she’s mumbling.”

“And you can see and hear her?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s a woman standing there, and you can see and hear her and she’s got a name and she talks and does things. So she’s real. Not pretend.”

It was like trying to argue with a small child. “Hodda is not the Queen of Heaven.”

“Maybe not. But maybe the Queen of Heaven was Hodda. For a little while.”

“That’s stupid,” I said. “So where was the real Hodda all this time, while the queen was using her arms and legs?”

“Where’s the real Hodda when she’s being someone in a play?”

“You’ve got that back to front,” I said, then realised she hadn’t. “Look, it’s not like that. It was all a trick.”

“But when you got stabbed, that wasn’t a trick. I saw the knife go in. Right up to the hilt.”

I came this close to telling her, but then I thought; no, better not. “I can’t explain that,” I said.

“Of course you can’t. But I was there. I saw it. And I think I saw the Queen of Heaven. Not some blueskin tart in shiny paint.”

I drew a long breath so I could point out to her all the fallacies in her argument, but then I thought; why? Out of an overwhelming duty to the truth? Fuck, as I may have observed before, the truth. If it was here, would it go out of its way to defend me? Unlikely. The truth is utterly selfish and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else. Serving the truth is like serving the empire. Nobody thanks you for it and you die poor.

Besides, what is the truth, anyway? In a court of law, it’s the testimony of credible witnesses corroborating each other. She’d been a witness and she knew what she saw. So was I, but even my mother wouldn’t say I was credible. And there’d been hundreds of people there, all rock-solid upright pillars of Dejauzi society. And when I stabbed myself, there were loads of people watching, and they saw what happened with their own eyes. And, come to that, Alyattes was now the nephew of the old emperor and the rightful heir to the throne. He hadn’t been until quite recently, but pretty soon anyone who could testify against his claim would be dead or singing a very different tune, and what was once a lie would become the truth, official, carved on the lintels of triumphal arches; and if you can’t believe what you read on a government arch, what can you believe? All the books would tell it that way, and in a thousand years’ time it will be the truth, just as what was once the bottom of the sea is now a mountaintop. Ask the wise men at the university what truth is and they’ll tell you it’s the consensus of informed and qualified scholars, based on the best evidence available. Availability is governed by what gets burned in the meanwhile, but I see no real problem with that. All living things change or else they die, and why should the truth be any different?