6

“It’s got to be the books,” I said. “I’m working on the assumption that it’s the books.”

Stauracia had been giving me a hard time about being chained to the cart, reasonably enough, so I’d relented. Instead of a long chain wrapped three times round the cart axle, she now wore a short chain attached to a staple driven into a sixty-pound log, which she was free to carry about with her, cradled in her arms like a baby. This arrangement gave her back her mobility, or as much of it as was good for her, together with a degree of basic human dignity. “I’m not talking to you,” she said. “You’re an arsehole.”

“It’s got to be the books,” I said. “I’ve been all over this castle, and there’s nothing else.”

“And you’ve been all over the books and they’re dogshit,” she pointed out. “Admit it: you’re beaten. You had a good idea but it turned out to be wrong. On this occasion, your much-vaunted insight into other people’s cunning schemes simply hasn’t worked. You gambled everything on your theory, and it turned out to be drivel. You’re just not as smart as you think you are, that’s all.”

Two minds with but a single thought. “I’m going to have one more look,” I said. “You can come, too, if you like. Bring the log.”

Up all those flights of stairs. “This is pointless,” she said, as I pulled down a book at random and opened it. “We’ve looked, both of us. There’s no scribbled marginalia, no pinpricks next to keywords for a code, nothing slid between the pages or stuck down the spines. You’re barking up the wrong fucking tree, and that’s all there is to it. You know what you are? Stupid.”

She was sitting in the windowsill, the log balanced awkwardly in her lap. I think I must be attracted to difficult women. “I think I know where these books came from,” I said.

She looked at me. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “I think these are some or all of a load of books stolen from the Silver Apple monastery on the island of Ogyge, not long before the Sirupat thing blew up.”

“Interesting. What makes you think that?”

“I was there,” I said. “At least, we were the first ones on the scene after the robbery, or at least I think we were.”

“I remember.”

“Of course you do. The thing is, I noticed some books were missing from the library and I had a pal make a list of everything that should’ve been there but wasn’t.”

“And you’ve got this list with you.”

“No,” I said. “And my pal’s dead. But a couple of the titles ring a bell; Marcian on viticulture and Thenderic’s Principles of Metallurgy.”

She nodded. “Why did they ring a bell?”

“Because there were copies of them in my dad’s library at home.”

And now she smiled. “Proving that they’re commonplace, the sort of thing you can find anywhere. Admit it, Saevus, you’re wrong. All right, these may be the books that were lifted from the Silver Apple, but so bloody what? They’re still not worth having, and meanwhile a bunch of lunatics has got my son, and they’re going to kill him unless you give me back this castle.” She stopped talking, and a sort of pale glow lit up in her eyes. “Tell you what,” she said. “You’re right, of course.”

“Am I?”

I don’t think she’s aware of the pale glow; well, why should she be? “Absolutely you’re right. It must be the books; it can’t be anything else. Like Saloninus says, once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—”

“Yes, thank you.”

“In which case,” she went on, “you take the books and give me back the castle.”

I looked at her. Two minds and all that; having distracted my attention with an interesting proposition, she was figuring out the geometry of throwing the log at me, knocking me out and using me as a hostage. It all depended on the length of the chain and how far away I was. I knew how long the chain was; oddly enough, it was thirty inches shorter than the distance separating us at that precise moment. But if she were to hop down from the windowsill and take a long step forward – I took a long step back.

“That way,” she went on, “I get what I want, and you’ve got what your precious Praeclara wants, and everybody’s happy. Well? How about it?”

I shook my head. “If I’m wrong, I’m screwed. If you’re wrong, you’re screwed. Oh, and have you allowed for the weight of the log?”

She scowled at me. “I’ve got a better idea,” she said. “We join forces. Your people and my people against my lot and Praeclara. We shut the gates, barricade the two rocks and let them sort things out among themselves. A nice three-cornered siege, just like Sirupat. You’re good at that sort of thing, remember.”

She was making my head hurt, undoubtedly on purpose. “I’m trying very hard to see things from your point of view,” I told her. “Look, I’ve got the castle. I’ve achieved all my objectives. I’ve won. It’s your stupid neck I’m trying to save. So will you please stop giving me a hard time, because it makes it difficult for me to think straight.”

“Poor baby.” She glared at me. “All right, take this stupid thing off me and maybe I’ll consider it.”

“No, because the moment I do you’ll be off and away, and then I’ll have you to contend with as well as everything else.” I sighed. “It’s not fair,” I said. “I’m trying to do what’s best for both of us, and you’re only interested in yourself.”

She shrugged. “It’s not ideal, I grant you,” she said. “Look, if it’s any consolation, I really wish it had been the stupid books. But obviously it isn’t, and meanwhile we’re in the shit and I can’t see a way out that includes both of us. And neither,” she added, “can you. So do the decent thing for once in your life and let me go. Please. It’s my son.”

It had to be the books. But it couldn’t be. “The hell with you,” I said. “They’re my friends.”

“I know. It’s a cruel world sometimes.”

We went back down the stairs, her first, naturally. I yelled for Polycrates and Eudo. “Get the stuff ready,” I said. “We’re leaving.”

“You what? Are you out of your—?”

“Yes,” I said. “Eudo, I want you to take a couple of men and a trunk or a big box or something. Go up to the top of the tower, you know, the room I showed you. Pack up all the books and load them on the big six-wheeler cart. Pack them up carefully with plenty of straw, and look sharp about it. It’s time we weren’t here. Polycrates, I want a word with you. Over here.”

He scowled at me. “What? And what the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

I grabbed his arm and moved him out of the way. “You remember Ogyge,” I said. “The Silver Apple. When we got there and the place had been ransacked?”

“Sure. What about it?”

“We got there and all the monks had gone,” I said. “And whoever did it left all the gold and silver plate and the money, and all they took was a few books. Remember?”

“Of course I remember, I’m not stupid. What about it?”

“What if someone stole the books before the monastery got turned over? Did you ever consider that?”

He looked at me as if I was simple. “No,” he said. “Why should I?”

I sighed. “No reason,” I said. “All I’m asking is, do you remember anything that would be inconsistent with the books having been stolen before the place was raided and all the monks were herded away? It’s important.”

Blank stare. “No,” he said. “But I wasn’t paying attention, so that doesn’t mean spit.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now go and load the carts.”

He gave me a long look, because there were no words to express what he was thinking about me at that precise moment, then stumped off to do as he’d been told. I looked round and she was where I’d left her, the log in her arms like a rich woman’s lapdog. “What?” she said.

“It’s the books,” I told her. “It’s got to be. Which means, when your lot gets here, you’re going to be in so much trouble. But I can’t help that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

A terrified look crossed her face. “You really think it’s the books?”

“Only one way to find out,” I said. “And if I’m wrong and it was the castle after all, I guess I’ll have to come back and capture it.” Artless shrug. “I’ve done it once. I can do it again. It might not be quite so ludicrously easy the second time, but that’s a risk I’m prepared to take.”

I think I know her. That’s a weapon she can and does use against me. “If it’s the books,” she said, “are you going to give them to her?”

I smiled at her. “Depends,” I said. “See you around.”

We withdrew to our original position. I had a few preparations to make; they didn’t take long. Which was just as well, because I’d only just finished them when Praeclara arrived.

She loves dramatic entrances. You can see it as a brilliantly intuitive tactician thinking outside of the box, or you can call it showing off. I find the way to deal with it is not to be surprised. Expect the unexpected, and then when it arrives it’s just another day at the office. Very well, then. I’d anticipated a dramatic coup de théâtre; no idea what it would be, just absolutely sure there’d be one, so plan accordingly. In practice, that meant keeping it simple and, as far as possible, watertight.

I was sitting on a folding stool reading a book when there was this godawful yelling noise, coming from every side. We were surrounded. I yawned and marked my place in the book with a dock leaf. Out of the corner of my eye – over the years I’ve trained my peripheral vision – I saw a crowd of armed men springing out from behind trees or jumping up out of the long grass. They wore hoods and masks, and they were making as much noise as they possibly could. I figured, without actually looking, that there were roughly as many of them as there were of us; possibly slightly fewer, definitely not significantly more. Hence the amateur dramatics, to draw attention away from the fact that we weren’t outnumbered—

Praeclara strode out of the ring towards me. No mask or hood for her. I kept my eyes on the book closed on my knee. “That’s far enough,” I said.

She stopped. The reason she stopped was a big stack of wood, all nice dry stuff, on top of which the books from the castle were neatly stacked. The wood was soaked with lamp oil. To hell with the expense; I’d used two jars of the expensive perfumed stuff, formerly the property of a political officer who’d neglected to leave before the battle started, now deceased. The stuff reeked to high heaven of violets or something such. You could smell it half a mile away. Evidently she had.

Slowly and carefully I put the book down on the ground and picked up a lantern. I opened the little window, gave the wick a gentle puff, closed the window again, rested the lantern on my knee. One little flick of the wrist would send the lantern sailing through the air. It would hit the pile of firewood and the glass would break. A good, steady archer might be able to shoot me before I had a chance to throw it, but then again he might miss, or not kill me instantly; it wasn’t a shot I’d fancy taking, if I knew how much was riding on it.

I heard her sigh. “It isn’t going to work,” she said.

“Yes, it is.”

“I’ve got you surrounded. There’s only about an hour’s worth of oil in your stupid lantern. I can wait.”

The lantern had a little wire handle. I put my finger through it. “Surrounded.”

“Yes. See for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

“I refer you to book six of the Principia Mathematica by Prosper of Schantz,” I said. “To refresh your memory, it’s the bit about concentric circles.”

Very short pause, then the penny dropped, hitting her like a meteorite. Praeclara is smart, but she lacks the rigorous clarity of mind that would make her great, or terrible, if only she had it. Her greatest shortcoming in that respect is a lack of attention to detail.

“You’re bluffing,” she said.

I can do quite a few clever and useful things: whistling isn’t one of them. So I’d forearmed myself with a little silver bell, hidden in my left sleeve. I took it out and rang it. “See for yourself,” I said.

She didn’t bother. If she had, she’d have seen three hundred of my men coming out from behind trees or standing up in the long grass, directly behind her lot. Attention to detail would have revealed that there were only two hundred of my boys in the camp, doing their best to look like five hundred. She’s smart; where she goes wrong is in assuming that everybody else is stupid.

I stood up. “Let’s talk,” I said.

She breathed out through her nose. “Why is it,” she said, “that you can never do as you’re damn well told?”

“Conflict of interests,” I said. “Here’s the deal. You give me back my people, I don’t burn the books. This offer is time-limited.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

I shook my head. “Actually, I would,” I said. “There’ll be a fight and some of my boys will get hurt, but all of yours will be killed. I’d like to avoid that, which is why we’re talking. The word you’re looking for,” I added, “is yes.”

Her eyes were fixed on the lantern, which is where I wanted them. I had, of course, exaggerated slightly. The strategic position I’d engineered was very much in my favour, but it was far from conclusive. If there was a fight, it could just conceivably go her way. But she wouldn’t figure that out, because her attention was focused on a naked flame perilously close to a heap of flammable material. “Fuck you,” she said.

“Fuck me meaning yes?”

“No.” She hesitated, and I felt a sharp pang of unease. There are people in this world who don’t go into a fraught confrontation with a knife hidden in the calf of their boot. Praeclara isn’t one of them.

“Spit it out.”

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she said. “There’s one thing I may not have mentioned.”

I stood up. The main danger was that if I threw the lantern too vigorously, the wick would blow out. A gentle lob was what was needed. I mimed the backswing for a gentle lob.

“She’s not dead.”

It was the little wire handle that saved me. If my finger hadn’t been looped through it, I’d have dropped the lantern. I stared at her. Stupidly, I’d forgotten how to talk.

“She’s alive,” Praeclara said. “And I know where she is.”

You think you’re so clever, she didn’t say, so I said it for her, under my breath. I couldn’t have said it out loud because my tongue had gone to sleep. Luckily she was in a chatty mood, so I wouldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if I’d wanted to.

“She’s not dead,” she said. She took a step forward. I remembered the lantern in my right hand. She stopped where she was. “I’m afraid I lied to you.”

You know what it’s like – possibly you don’t, in which case I envy you – when someone hits you in exactly the right spot, and all the air is forced out of your lungs, and the blood stops flowing in your head, and you’re vaguely aware that you’re alive, but that’s about it. A sort of dumb reflex was telling me to throw the lantern if she got closer than a long double stride, but apart from that I was the proverbial blank sheet of paper.

“Your friend Gaularia,” she went on, “was my friend first. She owed me a favour.”

Who the hell was Gaularia? It took me a while, like a librarian who’s lost the catalogue, looking for a book by going along the shelves painstakingly taking down each book in turn and squinting at the flyleaf. Gaularia: my friend in some place or other who’d promised to look after Apoina while I was away on business. She’d written me a letter telling me Apoina was dead. Got you: that Gaularia.

“You think you’re so clever,” Praeclara went on, “but actually you’re as stupid as a little kid. You thought you could take my daughter away from me. Like I’d let you.”

A little voice in the back of my head was yelling she wants the books. It made me realise I was still in the game. I took a long step forward, closer to the pile of firewood. It was all I could do, and it wasn’t very much. She appeared to take no notice.

“So there you have it,” she said. “Give me the books and I’ll tell you where she is.”

Pins and needles, right? First your hand or your foot or whatever goes numb. Then, as it slowly comes back to life, it starts hurting like hell. The slightest pressure on it is agony. At that moment I was all foot. “I don’t believe you,” I lied.

“Why the change of heart?” She shrugged. “Let’s just say she’s been a big disappointment to me. For which, incidentally, I blame you. You ruined her. I thought if I could get her away from you, I could straighten her out, but apparently not. So, yes, you can have her back and the hell with it. But I want the books.”

Just out of interest. “Why?”

“None of your business. I want the books.”

There were various issues for me to consider at that moment, if I was to make the right decision. One of them was Polycrates. He whines all the damn time, usually with good reason. He, after all, tags along with us in the hope and expectation of making money, not out of love or loyalty to me. He’d gone along with this whole capturing-the-castle business because Gombryas and Olybrius were his friends, too. Was he likely to stand for a radical change of plan, possibly involving fighting and danger, to help me with my own purely personal problems? Him and four hundred and ninety-odd like him. Maybe, but more likely not. Quite apart from the practicalities, I was duty bound to consider his interests and point of view, and I flatter myself that if only I’d had time and the mental resources to think the thing through, I’d have done just that. But I didn’t. I recognised a valid claim on me, but I had to ignore it, simply because my brain had just come back from being numb and was now packed full of very sharp spikes. “All right,” I said, “let’s do this sensibly. Baby steps. First, you give me back my friends. Then I put this lantern out. Then we talk.”

She laughed at me. “Saevus,” she said, “you’re so pathetic it’s almost endearing. You’ve lost. Give it up. Give me the books.”

My head hurt so much I nearly threw the lantern then and there, just to be rid of the whole thing. She must have seen a tiny movement in my arm, the precursor to the gentle lob. “Fine,” she said. “You can have your friends back. Then you give me the books. Then we talk.”

Baby steps, I told myself. I transferred the lantern from my right hand to my left. This meant I could take the little silver bell from my left sleeve and ring it.

A gamble on my part, since I hadn’t actually briefed my men on what to do if the bell rang a second time. But she didn’t know that. I rang the bell; she assumed it was the signal for my boys to close in, disarm her goons and tie them up. She gave me a scowl that would’ve curdled milk. “All right,” she called out, in a loud voice, slightly unsteady, “let them go.”

A gap appeared in the front rank of her people, and through it some men came stumbling. I recognised Gombryas, Dodilas and Athanaric; I couldn’t see the others’ faces. I yelled for Polycrates, and he came pushing through the cordon with a dozen or so of my lads. They secured the hostages and marched them away, and Polycrates gave me a nod: all secure. I looked past him and saw Eudo, who also gave me a nod. I had no idea what it was supposed to signify.

“Eudo,” I called out. “Get over here.”

He came bounding towards me like a happy dog. “All done,” he said.

“What are you talking about?”

He gave me a slightly puzzled look. “You gave the signal,” he said. “So I moved in and neutralised the bad guys. That was right, wasn’t it?”

I like Eudo, but I can’t always anticipate what he’s capable of doing. “Neutralised?”

“We came up behind them and took away their weapons.” He saw me staring at him. “What? We can give them back if you want.”

“No,” I said quickly, “that’s fine. That’s marvellous. Well done. Now don’t do anything until I tell you to.”

He nodded and went back to where he’d come from. Then I looked at her. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much anger on a human face. “Sorry,” I said, “I’ve changed my mind. New deal. I keep the books, you tell me where she is, your men don’t get slaughtered like sheep.”

A hundred fun ways of playing with fire. Still, she’d asked for it. Also, as a very bad man once said, when you have them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow. “No deal,” she said.

“Fine.” Suddenly I felt very tired, and sick of her company. “In that case we’ll hamstring all your men, take the books and go somewhere. I expect you’ll be able to find us when you’re feeling more reasonable.”

If only there was a prize for making enemies. I’d win it every year. It’d look nice on my mantelpiece, if I had one, which I don’t, and in a life otherwise devoid of lasting achievements it’d be something I could be proud of.

“Sorry to rush you,” I said. “But fairly soon your mortal enemies will be showing up to relieve the siege. I don’t suppose you’ll want to be around to meet them, with no weapons and all your men trussed up like chickens. Tell me where she is and once I’ve verified it I’ll let you have the books. Now I can’t say fairer than that, can I?”

Come on, my little voice was telling me, this is Praeclara, you know she’s got a third knife tucked down inside her third boot. But as usual I was out of options. “I don’t trust you,” she said.

“Why should you? We hate each other and I just stitched you up. But you want the books and you can’t have them unless you do as you’re told.” I could feel my dislike of her soaking into my judgement, like broken eggs in a basket of shopping. She’d be counting on that, of course. “The hell with it,” I said. “Why don’t I just burn these books and slaughter all your men and get on with my life? Getting rid of you would make me feel so much better about myself.”

We both know why, she didn’t have to say. “Fine,” she said. “The place you’re looking for is a village called Deisidaemon. There’s only one street. Go up the hill to the top and on your left there are two towers. You want the smaller one. Say Mimo sent you.” She stopped. I waited. “That’s all you’re getting,” she said.

“The hell with that. Where is this village?”

She smiled at me. “Two miles from another village called Cynosoura. They’re both on the map.”

“Which map?”

She shrugged. “The relevant map,” she said. “Come on, Saevus, you’re supposed to be smart.”

I opened the door of the lantern and blew on the wick, making it glow. No effect on her. I could burn the books and kill her and her men; nothing to stop me except the thought of getting to Deisidaemon, wherever the hell it turned out to be, and finding nothing there. I looked at her. I know her quite well. What should have been giving me pause for thought was getting to Deisidaemon and finding something I wouldn’t like one bit. The third knife, tucked into the third boot, is always going to be the sharpest, because it’s the one you’re most likely to end up using.

I licked the tips of my thumb and middle finger and pinched out the flame in the lantern. “Who’s Mimo?” I asked.

“No idea.”

“Enjoy your books,” I said. “Oh, one thing I neglected to mention. My scouts tell me they saw a large body of men coming through the mountain pass the day before yesterday. About fifteen hundred, they reckon, possibly more. I’m guessing they’ve come to relieve the castle. They should be here by tonight, maybe early tomorrow morning.” My turn to smile. “You can try and bash your way into the castle, but I wouldn’t recommend it. There used to be a weak link in the defences, but I expect that’s been dealt with by now. If I were you, I’d make myself scarce.”

She looked at me as though I’d just stamped on her toe. “Don’t believe you.”

“Good,” I said. “In that case, stick around. I’ll enjoy watching what they do to you.”

I was, of course, lying. On the balance of probabilities she knew I was lying, but there was something like a twelve per cent chance I wasn’t. I can quite see why she hates me.

“Maps,” I said. “Where do they have maps?”

“Fuck maps,” said Polycrates. “We need to get this stuff to Beloisa and sell it. You nearly got us all killed with your stupid games. We’re not going through all that again.”

I didn’t say anything. Neither did any of the other heads of department, gathered under a large beech tree in a forest through which passed the Southern Military Road. It was one of those trees that had been there before the forest grew up; you can tell them because their branches spread wide, like a tree in a hedge, rather than reaching up towards the light. We’d chosen it because it gave superior shelter from the rain, which was bucketing down. Polycrates looked round at the other heads. “Well?” he said. “You tell him. If he wants to go charging off on some stupid adventure, let him. We’re not going.”

I felt sorry for him. Here he was, trying to talk some common sense into a bunch of idiots, and they were refusing to listen, out of misguided loyalty to the man who’d just saved their lives. The fact that he was now about to get them all killed ought to outweigh their gratitude, but because they were stupid, it didn’t. I think my friends the heads of department could see the force of his argument, which was why they said nothing, but he wasn’t going to change anybody’s mind. It must be so annoying to be right and have nobody listen to you.

“There’s the military cartulary in Sosis,” Eudo said, closing the book he’d been reading and slipping it into his sleeve. It looked like the same book I’d seen him with quite often over the last few days, and every time he saw me looking at it, he shoved it away out of sight. That sort of book, presumably: badly written and lots and lots of pictures. “They’ve got maps of pretty well everywhere.”

“The what where?” asked Dodilas.

“The military cartulary,” Eudo said. He’s the sort of man who believes repetition constitutes explanation. “It’s the biggest cartulary this side of Choris.”

“Place where they store bits of paper,” I said. “And you’re probably right and we could be there in a week, but we’d be wasting our time. They don’t let just anyone in there.”

“That’s all right,” Eudo said, beaming. “I could go. I’ve got clearance.”

Stunned silence, as though he’d announced he was the crown prince of Sashan in disguise. “No,” I said, “you haven’t.”

“Yes, I have. I’m a captain in the Guards. Well, I was, but I’ve still got this.” He fished inside his collar and brought out something on a bit of string. “And my name’s still on the roll. Bound to be.”

He lifted the bit of string over his head and passed me the whatever-it-was. It proved to be a lead seal, folded over the string and stamped flat. The design was a double-headed eagle, a bit the worse for wear from rubbing against Eudo’s chest for God knows how long. On the back were two columns of tiny numbers. A security pass, issued to junior adjutants assigned to the general staff. I’ve got an oil jar full of them in a shed somewhere.

“Sorry,” I said, handing it back, “but that’s useless. You can buy them anywhere.”

“I know that,” Eudo said. “But like I said, my name’s on the roll. That and a letter from General Alcidas ought to do fine.”

Gombryas laughed. He’s got one of Alcidas’s ribs; he used to have two, but he swapped one for the nose of Marshal Droizen, preserved in honey. I waited. Eudo looked at me. “It’s no bother,” he said. “I was his secretary when I was a second lieutenant. I can do his handwriting, no problem.”

I looked at Gombryas, who grinned. “He’s dead,” he said.

“Doesn’t matter. The letter would still work.”

Sudden thoughtful silence, which lasted until Olybrius said, “He’s right, you know.”

“Of course I’m right,” Eudo said. “And, actually, it’s perfect, because eight years ago, when I was on Alcidas’s staff, if you wanted a letter from him it’d have been written by me. Pretending to be him, if you see what I mean. And all those letters were perfectly valid, or we’d have had complaints. And if they were valid then, they’d still be valid now: that’s how the system operates. So anything I write now will be as good as the real thing, because to all intents and purposes—”

I raised my hand to shut him up. “Well,” I said. “It’s worth a try. Better than climbing in through a window.”

“We could sell the stuff in Sosis,” Athanaric pointed out. “There’s always factors from the big combines hanging around, because of the army base.” Polycrates pulled a scornful face, with good reason; if you sell that way, you tend to get no more than two-thirds of what stuff fetches at a fair. “It’d probably work out about the same as lugging it all the way to Beloisa, when you take off the shipping and the harbour dues.”

Not strictly true, but nobody seemed inclined to take the point. I got an eerie feeling of people bending over backwards to be helpful, which I really hadn’t expected. “Good point,” I said. “And while we’re there, we can see what’s coming up to bid on. No reason why we shouldn’t do some paying work while we’re—”

I stopped, but not in time. Polycrates gave me a look that would’ve poisoned a river. “You’re all idiots, the lot of you,” he said, and stormed off.

Negativity. I seem to run into more than my fair share of it, maybe because I’m always asking people to do stupid, dangerous things they didn’t sign up for. I tell myself that this isn’t through my choice. Life delights in loading me down with stupid, dangerous things I didn’t sign up for, and I’m simply passing them on. The way I see it, misery is like caviar or plovers’ eggs. It isn’t something you greedily keep to yourself. It’s something you share with those you love.

I made various excuses for hanging round a mile or so from the castle; we had a long journey coming up, so it’d be a good idea to overhaul the carts – which was true, incidentally; every now and again life tricks me into telling the truth and doing the sensible thing. So we jacked the carts up on piles of stones, pulled off all the wheels, took the tyres off, cut them, shrank them and put them back on again; we repacked the hubs and fettled the axles and cut new planks to replace the split or perished boards, all the sensible things you’re supposed to do but never get around to doing. We were patching the canopies, for crying out loud – when did you last patch a canopy before it started letting in water? – when one of the scouts came bustling up and told me there was a column of horsemen coming up the valley. A couple of hundred, he reckoned, armed but not military. I played it cool. Fine, I said. That’ll be the relief column for the castle. We won’t bother them and they won’t bother us.

Another thing about Eudo: he’s an idiot, but also a natural leader of men. It’s like the old soldier’s joke: his men would follow him anywhere, if only out of curiosity. In his department he’d got a hardcore of a couple of dozen men who were clearly into playing soldiers; he barked military-type orders at them and they snapped to it, almost but not quite saluting. This gave a certain degree of harmless amusement to everybody else, and I let him carry on, just in case it might be useful. It was now useful. “Eudo,” I said. “Get your private army fell in. Job I want you to do for me.”

Eudo likes to do things properly. He’d been through the stock and picked out twenty matching sets of everything and dressed his pet soldiers up in them. They were practically in uniform. “What’s the plan?” he asked me. Note: not, what are we doing or what the hell do you think you’re playing at? No. Just, what’s the plan?

“We lie up in that small copse on the left of the road,” I said. “Sooner or later, there’ll be either a covered chaise with outriders or a small group of horsemen. We intercept them and rescue someone, trying not to kill anybody or get killed in the process.”

He nodded. “Got you,” he said.

Mind you, Eudo is an idiot but he’s not stupid. He’d probably figured out what I was planning to do about the same time I did. I made sure everybody else had plenty of work to be getting on with, and then we slipped away and went quietly down the hill to the fortuitously placed copse.

“We need to saw through that tree there,” Eudo was saying, “leaving just enough of a hinge so that when the riders show up, we can give it a little nudge and it’ll fall over and block the road. Then you attack frontally with eight men while I engage them in rear echelon with the remaining twelve. How does that sound?”

I hadn’t really been listening. “Aces,” I said. “See to it.”

It was the small group of horsemen rather than the covered chaise. I can’t be right all the time. It was a big tree, and when it suddenly came screaming down and hit the deck with a loud thump, it scared the horses witless and they shied. While the riders were trying to get them back under control, we all jumped out and started pulling them out of their saddles. The horses rearing and bucking all over the place made that distinctly awkward, but in the end they did the job for us, throwing eight of the ten riders, who we promptly set on. Eudo killed the ninth in broadly defined self-defence. The tenth, keeping her seat superbly well in spite of all the fuss and having her hands chained to the saddle, was Stauracia.

“It was the least I could do,” I told her, after she’d called me an arsehole and a lunatic. “If I hadn’t taken the books, your employers wouldn’t be pissed off with you. True, you wouldn’t believe me when I told you it had to be the books…”

“I could have been killed,” she said. “Jumping out like that, shooting arrows everywhere. I could’ve been thrown off my horse. I could’ve been shot—” She took a deep breath and forgave me. “They should have told me it was the stupid books,” she said. “How the hell was I supposed to know if they didn’t tell me?”

“They didn’t trust you not to walk off with them,” I said. “Quite rightly so. Anyway, no harm done and you’re safe now.”

She shot me a furious look. “No, I’m bloody well not. I’ve been captured by the fucking enemy.”

“What? Oh, you mean me.” I made a sort of vague gesture. “In a sense, yes. But that’s all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. Look at it this way,” I said, talking over her protests. “You made a bad judgement call, you lost, they were sending you back to HQ to be found guilty and executed. Luckily for you, you had a friend who was prepared to put himself out to save your life.”

She looked at me. “What do you want?” she said.

“I was coming to that.”

Time to go. Our beautifully maintained carts made good progress on the road, with me looking over my shoulder every two minutes in case we were being chased by a couple of hundred angry cavalrymen. That was bad luck; I’d been anticipating foot soldiers because what sort of an idiot sends cavalry to relieve and reinforce a garrison? If they’d come after us we’d have had a bit of a scrap and people would’ve got hurt. Luckily, Stauracia’s head on a pike wasn’t sufficiently important to them to be worth the effort.

“We’ve got a plan, naturally,” I told her, as we rode together on the lead cart, “but it involves my man Eudo and he’s an idiot. Also, I don’t altogether trust him.”

“You don’t? Fancy that. He’s the tall one with the weak chin, isn’t he?”

“He reckons he can just stroll into the cartulary using his old military ID,” I said. “I think that’s highly unlikely. But that’s fine. If he succeeds, I’ll know for a fact he’s up to something. If he fails, I’ll be rid of him, problem solved. Meanwhile, I need a proper plan. One that’ll work.”

She gave me a sour look. “Involving me.”

I nodded. “Simple little job,” I said, “won’t take you very long. And then you’ll be free as a bird and you can go about your business.”

“I don’t like it,” she said. “If it all goes wrong, I’m going to be left with my leg in a bear trap. Couldn’t you just burgle the place or something? Much easier.”

“No.”

I could understand her attitude. As far as she was concerned, things weren’t going well for her. She’d screwed up her mission so she wasn’t going to get paid. Her crew, who she’d always looked out for and trusted (up to a point), had deserted her and gone over to the bad guys on the paper-thin pretext that she’d made a series of disastrous mistakes and nearly got them all killed (my heart really did bleed for her on that score) and, besides, they hadn’t been paid for six months… She was alone in the world with nowhere to go and no goons to do her bidding, and I was asking her to do something stupid and dangerous, simply because I’d got her out of the ghastly mess I’d got her into in the first place. Fair enough. I didn’t expect gratitude. In fact, the only thing I could offer her was summed up in the two words or else. Even so.

“I need your help,” I said. “Please?”

“Go fuck yourself,” she said. “Look, have you been listening to a single word I’ve said? Those maniacs have got my son.”

I sighed. “While we’re on the subject,” I said. “Your son. How old is he?”

“Four. Why?”

“Thought so.” I paused, relaxed my shoulders, took a deep breath and let it go slowly. “You forget, I know quite a bit about you. Four years and nine months ago you were six months into a life sentence for dealing in counterfeit currency in Oudei City. You managed to wangle a pardon, and here you are now without a stain on your character, but the fact remains. Four years and nine months ago you were in an all-female prison on a rock in the middle of the sea. Barring immaculate conception, I don’t see how it’s possible.”

She closed her eyes. I think she was trying to turn on the tears, but she was too angry for that to work. “Fine,” she said. “It’s not my son, it’s my nephew. But he’s all the family I’ve got left.”

I shook my head. “You have one surviving sister,” I said. “Three children, all girls. One of them’s married to a corn chandler in Zeugma, one of them works in a cathouse in Busta Sagittarum and the third—”

“All right.” She gave me a scowl that nearly broke my heart. “They were going to pay me a great deal of money. And you were involved, and I know you’re a soft touch. It’s what you’d have done.”

“Absolutely not. You know my family history. You’d never have believed me.”

“Saevus, I really need that money.” She paused, as her mental librarians consulted the catalogue of lies: twelve massive volumes bound in tooled leather and chained to the desk. “It was my chance to get out,” she said. “Retire. Stop doing this ridiculous stuff. Maybe even live to be forty.”

I nodded. “But they neglected to tell you it was the books, because if you’d known, of course you’d have stolen them. Some people.”

Just after the Sirupat business, I’d robbed her of half a million staurata. That was the bounty she could have got for me if she’d turned me in, but she didn’t. Morally, therefore, I owe her that half-million, plus interest. It’s a debt I take seriously. If only she’d said that in the first place, we’d have understood each other. “I never seem to win,” she said. “I don’t know why. I create the most amazing opportunities, and then you come along and they go all to pieces, like picking up a sheet of thin, wet paper. You just keep on doing it to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Oh, you don’t do it on purpose,” she said. “You don’t set out to screw up my life, it just happens. It’s sad, though. All I ask out of life is the one really big score, that’s all. Just one really good hit, and then I’ll settle down and be good and not be a nuisance to anybody. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

“Certainly not,” I said.

We rode on in silence for a while. Then she said, “So, what’s all this about?”

I told her. It took a bit of time. When I’d finished, she turned a stone-cold face to me and said, “You want her back.”

“Yes.”

“What in God’s name makes you think she’ll want you, after all this time?”

I told her what Praeclara had told me, shortly before we parted. While I was away on business, Praeclara had gone to visit her daughter at our mutual friend Gaularia’s house. She’d told Apoina that I wasn’t coming back. I’d found someone else. She had proof. She had witnesses.

“Did she?” Stauracia asked.

“No. It was all lies.”

“Really? Of course, you would say that.”

“She told Apoina the other woman’s name. It was you.”

She went bright red. “All lies, then.”

“Exactly. But her witnesses must’ve been convincing. She told my wife that now I’d found you, the next thing I’d need to do was kill her. Apparently you insisted on that.”

She didn’t say anything. Language is useful but often inadequate.

“So Praeclara arranged a new life and a new identity for her in Deisidaemon—”

“Where?”

“Good question. And now she’s living there, with my daughter, firmly convinced that I want her dead so you and I can be together. According to Praeclara. Who may well be lying, but I’ve got to know. If that makes any kind of sense.”

She looked as though I’d just slapped her across the face. “It sounds like a trap to me,” she said.

“Of course it’s a bloody trap.” I hadn’t meant to shout, or swear. “Yes,” I said, “I think you’re probably right. Praeclara wouldn’t tell me something like that just to get a load of books, even if they’re worth a million staurata. But there’s a ring through my nose and she’s got a rope tied to it. I don’t see what else I can do.”

“Forget about it,” Stauracia said. “Forget the whole stupid thing. Get on with your life. Help me get hold of those stupid books and make the big score. Fifty-fifty, on my word of honour. I mean it.”

Something in the way she said it made me catch my breath. “That would be the sensible thing to do,” I said. “Unfortunately, I’m an idiot. Can’t be helped, it’s just the way I am.” I hesitated. For some reason I didn’t like what I was about to say. “I’m not asking you to come to Deisidaemon,” I said; “Just help me to find out where it is.”

“Thanks a lot.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “Funny how things work out. I was in Sosis only recently. I got offered a job.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “Abbess of the Iron Rose priory. They own forty thousand acres of prime arable land, two copper mines and the biggest rosewater distillery outside of Mezentia. My job would’ve included keeping the books. But I turned it down.”

“Ah. Because of the big score.”

“Precisely.”

I nodded. “Still,” I said, “it was nice to have been asked.”

That got me a foul look and stony silence as far as Baul Cross. No bad thing.

“I don’t get it,” Eudo said, reasonably enough. “You want to go with my idea, but you’re sending her in as well.”

“That’s the plan,” I said. “Two bites of the cherry.”

He looked confused, but I didn’t mind that. “You’re the boss,” he said. “I’ve written the letter.” He pulled a thin brass tube out of his sleeve. It was an old tube, polished mirror-bright by constantly rubbing against cloth in someone’s knapsack, and the embossed decoration was mostly worn away. “I used old parchment,” he went on. “I bought a bundle of old letters in the market and scraped one down and went over it with sand. They reuse parchment in the military until it’s so thin, the ink soaks into it like a sponge.”

He insisted on showing me his handiwork. “Shouldn’t there be a seal?” I pointed out.

“Properly speaking, yes. So I tore the end, look, where the seal ought to be. It happens all the time and nobody cares.”

Shocking. Your tax money at work. “Very nice,” I said. “Right, you know what you’re looking for.”

A brisk nod saves words. “Deisidaemon, location of. Now there should be a general gazetteer in the catalogue room, which’ll tell me which map to look at in which archive. Of course, there could be more than one place called Deisidaemon, in which case I cross-verify by looking for an adjoining village called—” He paused and glanced down at the palm of his hand. “Cynosoura. If I can, I’ll draw a sketch, though you’re not supposed to without prior written authorisation. It’ll depend on whether there’s an archivist on duty in that particular room at that particular moment. Probably not, but you can’t be sure. If there is, I’ll memorise it thoroughly.”

“You do that,” I said. “All right, carry on.”

He’d dressed the part to perfection. It helped that we’d picked up several hundred as-issued pourpoints, only one unlucky owner, at the last battlefield. He went through them and chose the one with exactly the right degree of use and staining for the character he’d invented for himself; ditto officer’s cloak, cavalry breeches and ammunition boots bulled to a blinding sheen. In an army base he’d be so normal as to be practically invisible. “Your hair’s too long,” I told him.

“You what?”

“Think about it. You’ve been on active service for months, what’s the first thing you do when you get back to civilisation?”

He nodded gravely. “You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’ll find a barber’s shop on my way to the base.”

Stauracia had also prepared thoroughly. She’d spent ninety gulden of my money on a snow-white floor-length gown with ruffed sleeves, which together with the wreath of white roses in her hair made her look like one of the angels in an Assumption. No rings, earrings or jewellery of any kind, no rouge or eye shadow. Luckily, she can get away with it. “You’ll be fine,” I said. “Knock ’em dead.”

So Sister Stauracia asked the cartulary commandant for a few minutes of his valuable time. He was delighted to oblige the army’s favourite angel of mercy, and she was in. Four hours later she came out again with a little metal tube: silver, not brass. “Piece of cake,” she said.

“Told you.”

“Only,” she went on, “the commandant was a bit puzzled why I wanted to know about a place a hundred and seventy miles the wrong side of the Hetsuan border.”

One of those moments. “You what?”

She pulled a bit of paper out of the tube. “See for yourself,” she said.

I got shot once: did I ever tell you? My own silly fault. I was on a job; we’d just arrived at the battlefield; I went ahead to check it out. It was cold, so I grabbed the first coat that came to hand. It proved to be an Aelian officer’s greatcoat, and the battle had been a major victory for the Aelians against the Aram Chantat. A wounded Aram trapped under his dead horse took me for one of the bad guys and shot me. The arrow hit a rib, which according to Doc Papinian is why I’m still alive; an inch to the left, et cetera. I can clearly remember the shock, which is like absolutely nothing else. No, belay that. There is one thing that’s very much like getting shot. Namely, hearing that your next destination is in Hetsuan.

Nobody knows anything about the Hetsuan Confederacy because nobody’s been there; or, more accurately, nobody’s been there and come back. About fifteen hundred years ago, the Hetsuan arrived in an endless caravan of ox carts. They came from somewhere north-east, they were starving and desperate, every man’s hand was against them and all they wanted was somewhere to go. The generally accepted view is that they picked up the habit of cannibalism on the Great Trek, out of necessity, and once they’d found their new home they carried on with it, either because it had acquired a strong degree of cultural symbolism or because they liked the taste. Everyone who’s studied the very little we know about the Hetsuan agrees that they’re not savages; perish the thought. They’re the heirs of a rich and mature civilisation, forced by circumstances to abandon their homeland and heritage and do the best they could in an implacably hostile world. More sinned against than sinning, is the scholarly consensus, by a ratio of roughly 51:49.

The Hetsuan live a long way away and since their arrival they’ve shown no interest whatsoever in expanding their territory, which is why you and I can sleep at night. One thing we do know about them is their language: they’re basically Sashan-speaking, like our dignified neighbours to the south-east of the Friendly Sea.

There are slight variations in dialect. One of them is to do with strangers. In Hetsuan, foreigner belongs to the subset of linguistic terms that differentiate living things from food. For example, we talk about sheep, pigs, cows, deer and chickens when they’re alive, but mutton, pork, beef, venison and poultry when they’re for dinner. In Sashan, stranger and foreigner are the same word but pronounced with a different tone. Stranger in the Hetsuan dialect means someone you haven’t met before. Foreigner means something best served with lentils on a bed of wild rice.

I’d hired warehouse space for the stock. Actual warehouses are at a premium in Sosis and they want you to pay silly money, so I opted for a derelict tannery instead. There were two long sheds next to what used to be the tanks, which stank to high heaven, and we piled the stuff in there and hoped it wouldn’t rain. There was a third shed with only a vague memory of a roof. We pitched our tents in it. Sosis is an expensive town.

Eudo came back – ah well – in a state of high excitement. “You’ll never guess where Deisidaemon is,” he said.

I proved him wrong. He looked at me.

“Well, anyway,” he said, nobly masking his annoyance, “while I was there I pulled the latest dossier on the Hetsuan and made a few notes. Actually, we know rather more about them than we let on.”

I really wish I could like Eudo more than I do. “Brilliant,” I said. Then (an afterthought is better than no thought at all), “You got on all right, then. No problems with the pass or anything?”

“What? No, piece of cake. I told you they’d go for it. I know how their minds work.” He paused and looked at me again. “You’re not seriously thinking about going there, are you?”

“Depends,” I said. “What did you find out?”

We know more about the Hetsuan than we did, Eudo said, because about fifty years ago the Serica, an offshoot of the Aram no Vei, got sucked into a border dispute with them; realising that they’d made a serious mistake, the Serica appealed for help to their allies the Sashan. The Sashan refused, but not before they’d got as much information as they could out of the Serica, who subsequently lost the war and were exterminated; these days there’s about two dozen of them living in a valley somewhere deep in Sashan territory, and that’s it. Anyway, some clerk copied out the report and sold it to someone, who sold it to someone else, and after a considerable sum of money had changed hands a copy ended up in the archives at Sosis, where it’s been kept very quiet, for reasons that should become obvious.

The main things to bear in mind about the Hetsuan, according to the report, are that they’re a deeply spiritual people, and there are a lot of them. An exact figure is hard to arrive at. The Serica encountered them nearly two generations ago and their mathematics was of the one-two-three-lots variety; the report gave a figure of ten thousand times ten thousand, which happens to scan a perfect dactylic hexameter in Aram and is used in their epic poetry to convey any number greater than forty. Anyway, the Hetsuan are a numerous people, and their territory is extensive.

Their deep spirituality takes the form of being in tune with nature (they use the same word to mean God). They believe in reincarnation, a process that applies to all animals (defined as creatures capable of moving themselves from one place to another); consequently, with one notable exception, they follow a strictly vegetarian diet. The cycle of reincarnation, they believe, is broken when a human being (not a lower animal) eats and digests flesh; essentially, what happens is that the soul of the eaten gets turned into shit – the Hetsuan are passionate about cleanliness and hygiene – and is lost for ever. If you eat a sheep or a fish, you may well be destroying the soul of your mother.

But the Hetsuan have a vindictive streak. The Sashan officials who transcribed the report speculated in comments in the margin that this probably derived from their experiences during what the Hetsuan call the Great Trek, their traumatic emigration from wherever the hell they came from to where they live now. During the Trek they got no help from any of the people whose territory they passed through; they were attacked, shot at, moved on with extreme prejudice; crops were burned and wells deliberately stopped up in attempts to starve and parch them to extinction; they had to fight literally every step of the way. This made them into exceptionally efficient fighters, a tradition they have since maintained, and left them with a jaundiced view of everyone who isn’t Hetsuan. A fundamental credo in their society is that the good man loves his friends and hates his enemies. Accordingly, no Hetsuan ever goes hungry or lacks shelter; they are the most benevolent and egalitarian nation on record, according to the Sashan scribes. By the same token, their rage against their enemies knows no bounds. And, since the worst thing you can do to an enemy is to kill his soul, they eat them.

Only their enemies. Cows, pigs, sheep and chickens are not the enemy. Murderers, rapists, traitors, blasphemers, heretics and foreigners are. Just as you gain a reward in Heaven for nursing a leper and giving a tithe of your income to the widow and the orphan, you earn absolution for all your sins by turning an enemy’s soul into shit through the wondrous alchemy of the digestive tract.

A system that offers complete remission of sins in return for a simple act is, of course, open to abuse, so there are rigidly enforced checks and balances. Their legal system, for example, is scrupulously fair, to make sure that innocent people aren’t convicted of capital crimes simply in order to provide a supply of soul food. Likewise, a declaration of war can only be made by both kings (they have a dual monarchy) and has to be endorsed by all three chambers of the popular assembly with a majority of not less than seventy-five per cent. Even then, it can still be vetoed at any stage by the college of priests, and requires a positive omen from both of the Great Oracles, situated at opposite ends of the country. It takes at least a year to start a war, during which time most diplomatic emergencies tend to have worked themselves out. Furthermore, a king who proposes a war which is not approved by the people and the church is guilty ipso facto of treason, leading to death and the casserole dish. The Sashan archives record only fourteen instances in fifteen hundred years when the Hetsuan have gone to war, the elimination of the Serica being the most recent. They won all their wars, and their opponents no longer exist.

The Hetsuan have the highest standard of living of any nation this side of Echmen and the highest proportion of adult literacy. Life expectancy is eight years longer than in the Sashan Empire, therefore fifteen more than in the West. Their closed-border policy means they’ve never experienced the plague or most of the epidemic diseases that sweep through the rest of the world from time to time, killing millions. Next to nothing is known about their literature, art, religion or philosophy, except that all of these elements are very highly prized in Hetsuan society, and the handful of Hetsuan artefacts that have drifted across the borders over the last fifteen centuries are uniformly exquisite in design and excellent in function. The Echmen emperor drinks his noonday tea from a Hetsuan porcelain bowl; entirely plain and unadorned, its perfect form makes it the most beautiful object in the Empire, and the emperor himself washes and dries it after use because nobody else is worthy to touch it.

Being a foreigner is a capital offence, strict liability, anywhere in Hetsuan territory. Because of the highly integrated and benevolent nature of the society, foreigners are very easy to identify. Everyone in a Hetsuan community knows everyone else, and there are no beggars, vagrants or refugees. Merchants and government officials travel freely throughout the country, but the settled nature of society and the fact that trades and professions are hereditary means that they are rarely strangers in the places they go to; a newly appointed official will make his first visit accompanied by his predecessor, and a merchant will introduce his sons and daughters to his regular customers as soon as they’re old enough to accompany him on his rounds. There’s no Hetsuan equivalent of the bands of wandering lepers and lunatics we’re used to west of the Friendly Sea; it’s a solemn duty in Hetsuan to look after the physically and mentally ill. There are no gangs of seasonal labourers roaming the countryside, and slavery is both illegal and impractical in a country where there are no outsiders to enslave. Consequently, any foreigner rash enough to attempt to infiltrate the Confederacy is quickly detected, restrained and eaten. The number of defectors who have voluntarily left Hetsuan can be counted on the fingers of one hand; leaving the country is by definition treasonable, and, besides, nobody wants to.

“Which means,” Eudo concluded, “that you’re screwed. Well, doesn’t it?”

Hard to argue with that. “Not necessarily,” I said. “There’s bound to be a way, if we apply our minds.”

“Besides,” Stauracia pointed out, “surely it means Praeclara was lying. Your stupid ex can’t be living in Hetsuan because if she’d gone there she’d have been eaten as soon as she crossed the border. This is just Praeclara trying to get you killed.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I think that’s where she is. And if she got there, so can I.”

“Hang on,” Stauracia said. “If nothing’s known about this godawful place, how come Deisidaemon is on the map?”

“Ah,” Eudo said, and that quiet plonking tone came back into his voice. “It’s a very old map. Or at least it isn’t, but it’s copied from one. Deisidaemon was the name of the village fifteen hundred years ago, before the Hetsuan arrived. As there’s been no new information since then, the current maps are just the old ones traced over dozens and dozens of times. I don’t suppose Deisidaemon is called that now, assuming it still exists.”

“That’s mad,” Stauracia burst out. “There isn’t even a village. You’re talking about trying to get to a place that was probably burned down fifteen hundred years ago. Come on, Saevus, use your tiny brain. It’s a trap. She wants you to get eaten: that’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, I imagine so,” I said. “But not straight away. I’m fairly sure she wants me to do something first.”

“Do what?”

Big shrug. “I expect I’ll find out when I get there.”