by Heide Goody
“Abington said hell was other people,” said Lorrika with a quiet emphasis.
Pagnell threw himself down on a bench. “Yeah, well he was a miserable old misanthrope,” he said and immediately regretted it. The man had been dead for no more than a couple of days, killed by a mix up of pouches on a belt, but killed by Pagnell’s hand nonetheless. “I’m sorry,” he said.
Lorrika’s attempt at a smile flickered for only an instant, like distant lightning. “It’s okay,” she said.
“No,” said Pagnell. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean … he meant a lot to you.”
Lorrika picked up a nectarine, the same nectarine she’d eaten in the last iteration of the room.
“He did mean a lot to me. But he was a miserable old misanthrope as you say, a horrible man. Everyone goes on about how he saved all the people in Dalarra from the plague.”
“I heard about that,” said Cope. “He found the cure.”
“Drapim,” said Pagnell.
“But what you need to know,” said Lorrika, “is that a month before plague struck the city, Abington bought up or harvested every shoot, root and leaf of Drapim in a hundred mile radius. You see?”
Cope nodded in awe. “He could see the future.”
Pagnell smiled charitably. “Cope, even for wizards, it’s easier to make something happen than to predict it.”
“You mean he made the plague happen?”
“And raised the price of Drapim to fifty times its ordinary value.” Lorrika shook her head. “He cured the people, but at such a cost. Now, if I could just reach out and turn back time to before that moment…”
“The past is fixed,” said Pagnell, “and full of regrets. None of us know what the right choice is until we look back and see if what we did was right or wrong. We’re not all like the followers of Buqit with a written list of things to do.”
Lorrika waved her half-eaten nectarine at Cope. “Cope’s got her little cards to tell her what to do.”
Cope placed a hand protectively over her jerkin pocket. “They’re for me.”
“I know they are,” said Lorrika. “I’m just saying. Why do you have them anyway?”
Cautiously, Cope took the bundle of creased, soft-edged cards and held them in front of her on the table. “Sometimes, I don’t understand people,” she said. “They say one thing and do another. They talk with their eyes and not their mouths. They can say the same thing twice and it means something different each time. People can be very cruel if you don’t understand their rules.”
“Cruel? To you?” said Lorrika and laughed. “You’re as big and scary as any man. You’re an ogre.”
“As I said. Cruel.” Cope tapped the edge of her cards. “I was lucky to enter the service of Master Jarden Orre and he taught me what I needed to know. And those lessons I struggled with, I wrote down.” She pulled one out at random and placed it on the table. Pagnell glanced at the heading: How to join in with games, group activities, etc. “What those lessons didn’t tell me,” said Cope, “was what to do with my life when Master Jarden Orre died. There was no card to tell me what to do next.”
“Oh, yes,” said Pagnell, “Lorrika mentioned you’re on some sort of holy mission for the High Shepherdess to find out your true purpose in life.”
“That is so. I heard people had visited the High Shepherds and High Shepherdesses in search of the answers to life’s great mysteries and so I travelled to the Aklan Plateau, through the forests of Gadzim, searching for High Shepherdess Gwell.”
“And you found her?”
Cope nodded solemnly. “I walked for weeks in search of her. The High Shepherdess moves with her flock and does not stay in one place for long. I followed rumours and guesses and walked until my feet were sore and my spirits were low.”
“You did a lot of walking. Got it. Move along,” said Lorrika. “Tell him the bit where you met Gwell.”
“I came upon a woman in a woodland clearing,” said Cope. “She sat on a smooth boulder, her long-haired sheep milling around her. She carried a shepherd’s crook and wore the cone-shaped headdress of the holy order of shepherdesses. Prayer ribbons were tied to every inch of her robes. And stitched to the front of her robes was the Aklan rune for the name Gwell.”
“You’d found her,” said Pagnell.
“So it would seem,” said Cope. She sheathed her now clean sword. “I knelt before her and said, ‘I have come a great distance, in search of guidance. I am ready to take on the challenges life has to offer and I hope you will lead me to my true purpose. I will undertake any labour required. I will complete any quest given to me. I will seek the answers to any question that is posed. Tell me, are you High Shepherdess Gwell?’”
“And was she?”
“She looked at her sheep, waggled her crook and tapped the rune on her robe and then gave me what I think is called a look and said, ‘Do bears shit in the wood?’”
“Well, I guess it was kind of obvious so…”
“So, I got up, thanked her and that was how my quest began.”
Pagnell pursed his lips, perplexed. “Your quest began…? Began to what? Sorry, what quest?”
“I am on a sacred mission to answer the High Shepherdess’s question.”
“Question? You mean?” Pagnell looked to Lorrika for assistance. She had turned away, politely hiding the smirk on her face.
“You mean,” said Pagnell, “that question?”
“Yes. I know it’s a vulgar sort of question and, superficially, one might think it has a simple answer.”
“—Yes.”
“Exactly,” said Cope. “But I know deep down there’s a deeper, more profound truth.”
Pagnell tried to pull a face which was anything other than mocking. “Cope, you know, sometimes, the deepest truth is the simplest truth. We think there is something more but the answer is the one staring you in the face.”
Something clicked in Pagnell’s mind. Thoughts fell into place and a door – not a big, or impressive, or exciting, but nonetheless very important door – swung open. He looked at the tomb chest. “Oh my good goddess,” he said.
He stood.
“What is it?” said Lorrika.
“Ink. I need ink.”
“What?”
“Ink, damn it!”
“There’s no ink here.”
He waved at the braziers. “Soot, wine, stuff. Make ink, Lorrika. Knife!” he said to Cope.
She passed him a butter knife.
“A sharp knife!”
Cope reached behind her and produced a short, whisper-edged blade.
“Where were you keeping that?” asked Lorrika.
“A friend of mine from the north told me you can never have too many knives. Always good to have a spare.”
Pagnell took the knife and hurriedly cut the end of his eagle feather down into a point. Excitement made his hands shake and he had to start afresh twice.
“What are you doing?” said Lorrika.
“It’s like the cards,” said Pagnell. “Cope, your cards. It’s what you’ve written down. A set of instructions. You write it, you do it. The carter who brought us to Ludens, he bought this stupid book in Qir. Cheap, tacky thing. He said to me—” Pagnell paused. He couldn’t whittle a feather down into a quill and remember what Thedo said at the same time. As a wizard he knew his limits. “He said: ‘If it’s not written down, it won’t happen.’ It’s just like that.” He pointed at the tomb. “The List of Things To Be Done. The written word becomes the act.”
“You are babbling,” said Lorrika.
“No. Not this time. Ink!”
Lorrika had poured wood ash and wine into a shallow bowl and made a quantity of pasty grey paint. It was possibly the world’s worst attempt at ink but it would do.
Pagnell scrabbled around for the last piece of dry paper on his person.
“I still don’t understand,” said Cope.
“It’s not just you this time,” said Lorrika.
“What are we here fo
r?” said Pagnell. In truth, he shouted it. He had become manic. He knew it and didn’t care. What maniac did? “Why did we come?”
“To … to…”
“What,” he demanded, “is the question before us?” Pagnell grinned and he probably looked like the biggest idiot in the world, but he was the world’s biggest idiot with immaculate teeth. He capered over to the tomb chest with quill and ink and paper and pointed at Hierophant Foesen’s own words carved into the side.
“What will you do today?”
He leaned on the tomb and took up his quill.
I will take the Quill of Truth and keep it.
He wrote it.
He said it.
He did it.
And then he giggled, which probably ruined the epicness of the moment but he really didn’t care.
10
The journey back to the surface was quicker than the descent, but it was still long and— Pagnell would have used the word arduous, except he could hear Spirry declaring it to be a fancy word and entirely unnecessary when the word difficult worked just as well. He thought a great deal about Spirry as they tiptoed past a sleeping bird, climbed stairs, carefully crossed through broken traps and followed Lorrika’s chalk arrows backward through the labyrinth. Cope drew her sword several times as unexpected sounds echoed ahead of them. They all feared remnants of the grimlock tribe, but none materialised. They stopped only to fashion fresh torches from discarded weapons and what materials they could spare. If they halted too long, the fatigued trio ran the risk of falling asleep and staying that way until the Hierophant’s returning army found them, or some wandering horror ate them.
They were unsurprised by the Surprising Pit on the reverse journey. A lip of stone ran along the edge of the pit at each side. Lorrika fairly scampered across the finger-thin ledge but Pagnell wasn’t so confident.
He was halfway along, dividing his attention between shuffling his feet forward and merging his body with the wall, when Cope said, “You should give me the Quill to look after. In case you fall in.”
“And you thought you’d mention this now?” huffed Pagnell with difficulty (his jaw was pressed right up against the rock face at the time).
“It just occurred to me,” said Cope.
“Yeah? Well, you’ll just have to wait, won’t you?”
“I don’t want it to get wet, that’s all.”
Pagnell laughed in mild hysteria and inched his feet along. “Wet, she says. Some of us are focusing on not dying!”
When he’d crossed, not died, and the Quill of Truth remained unwetted. Cope followed, with no more style or dignity than his effort, but with notably less whimpering.
“Maybe I should look after the Quill anyway,” she said.
Pagnell looked up at her. “Don’t you trust me, Cope?”
She tilted her head in thought and placed a hand unconsciously on the hilt of her sheathed sword. “No, I don’t think I do.”
Pagnell twisted his lips, gave her a mildly hurt look, produced the feather and passed it over.
11
They returned through the dusty, corpse-lined shelves of the crypt and out through the eagle’s head archway. The Amanni guards in the great under hall of the temple spotted their approaching torchlight, and one dashed off to report their return. At once, the three tomb raiders were escorted up the many flights of stairs to the Hierophant’s audience chamber, which General Handzame had made her base of occupation.
Pagnell felt oddly aggrieved they had been forced to suffer the trials and obstacles of Foesen’s tomb only to be made to climb eight floors – eight floors! – to deliver the prize. Tired and a little giddy with hunger, he felt they should, if anything, be carried aloft like the triumphant heroes they clearly were. However, when he suggested this to the chap behind him, he was only offered a choice between walking or a knife to the kidneys. The chap wasn’t overly clear on the matter, but since it seemed unlikely said knifing would be followed by being carried aloft like triumphant heroes, Pagnell decided not to pursue it further.
The Hierophant’s audience chamber sat near the top of the temple’s mighty ziggurat. Smooth walls angled inward, giving the room a sense of upward thrusting aspiration. It must be a devil to wallpaper, thought Pagnell. That thought alone made the wizard decide he’d better eat something soon, and maybe have a little nap, before he turned into a gibbering wreck. Beyond the wide balcony of the audience chamber lay the city of Ludens and the lands to the south. The sun was rising over the flat and featureless horizon.
In the light of day and in the company of Handzame’s finest, Pagnell realised what a shambles the three of them must look. All of them had been soaked, dried, rolled in the dirt and lightly singed all over. All of them were wounded or scarred to some degree. Lorrika’s arm was tightly bandaged; Cope had lost her armour in the tomb, received a bloody chest wound and a bunch of bruises; Pagnell had taken a nasty clout round the head from falling masonry, a painfully inconvenient eagle bite to the shoulder, and been thoroughly marinated in magic unguent and the digestive juices of a giant eagle.
He was gratified to see General Handzame didn’t look much better. The Amanni woman sat ramrod straight on the Hierophant’s throne, hands resting masterfully on the pommelled armrests: the very pose of a divinely appointed ruler in their seat of power. If Bez had been with them, he’d be committing the scene to paper already. However, despite her best efforts to appear magisterial and noble, worrisome days and sleepless nights were written deeply into the general’s face. Her black, spiky plate mail looked more like a torture device she had been forced into than armour. The ridiculous helmet with the horsehair crest weighed heavily on her. She could just take it off, thought Pagnell. Why didn’t she take it off? What was the point of being a conquering general if you couldn’t take your helmet off when you wanted to?
“What did you say?” demanded Handzame.
Pagnell shook himself. Had he said that out loud? He slapped his cheeks rapidly to wake himself up. “We’re here, general. We have returned.”
“The Quill of Truth?”
Cope stepped forward and presented the large quill feather to her. Handzame took it and twirled it between her fingertips. “Is this it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Cope.
Handzame pulled an expression, the sort which tried to be something other than disappointed, when disappointment was clearly the default option. “It’s certainly big,” she conceded. “I just imagined it would be a bit more…” She waved a vague hand.
“Magical?” suggested Pagnell.
“It is the Quill of Truth,” insisted Cope.
“We met the bird it was taken from,” added Lorrika.
In the shadows, there was an unhappy groan. Behind the row of Amanni soldiers, to one side of the chamber, stood a priest of Buqit: a round-faced (also bruised-faced) fellow in manacles. “What have you done?” he muttered despondently.
Handzame smiled. The condemnation of the priesthood gave it an additional air of authenticity.
“Where is Rantallion Merken?” she said. Demand the treasure first, notice your second-in-command was absent second. Setting your priorities the Handzame way.
“He’s dead, ma’am,” said Cope.
A ripple of disbelief and disquiet ran through the Amanni soldiers. Merken might have been a cruel and callous man, but he was a soldier’s man. The men he’d led into the city would have respected him. They’d have put their lives in his hands; not necessarily Handzame’s.
“How did he die?” she asked.
“We don’t know,” said Cope. “We think he stepped on a trap.”
“Think?”
“There was no sign of him afterwards. No body.”
Handzame gave a disgusted little sneer and ran her hand over the edge of the Quill. “And the artist? Where is he?”
Cope looked at Pagnell, who shrugged.
“He didn’t come back?” asked Lorrika.
“Should he have?” said Handzame.
“He fled,” said Cope. “We assumed…”
“Then he is still down there,” said Handzame with a shrug. “Let him rot.”
Pagnell imagined Bez wandering blindly through the twists and turns of the labyrinth, starving, dying by increments. The image didn’t seem right. Bez was an intelligent man. It was a sly and narrow intelligence, but intelligence nonetheless.
“And so you three emerge victorious. You will be rewarded,” spoke Handzame, attempting to sound magnanimous and, as with so many things, missing by a mile. “Gold, honours and a place in the sagas of the glorious Amanni.”
“Right now I’d settle for a cup of water and a slice of toast,” said Lorrika.
“Of course.” Handzame clapped her hands. “You! A breakfast for our champions. Bread, fruit, the finest baked goods.”
The Amanni warrior singled out by the command looked very much the picture of a soldier who had found himself demoted to kitchen maid and had no idea where the kitchen was, let alone the finest baked goods. He dithered and then scurried off.
“And you, wizard?” said Handzame. “Will it be gold, honours, or just a spot of a breakfast?”
“Where is Spirry?” asked Pagnell.
“Spirry? Oh, her.” It wasn’t pretence. For an instant, Handzame had forgotten she had Spirry as her prisoner.
If he had been a violent man, Pagnell might, at that moment, have decided to kill Handzame. He wasn’t a violent man; even so he decided the general would suffer.
Handzame clapped her hands imperiously at one of her men. He looked at her quizzically. Pagnell detected a contemptuous aura to the man’s expression, one he tried hard to conceal. Maybe two and bit days shut up with the general had soured any respect they might once have had for her.
“The girl,” said Handzame. “Fetch her.”
The man disappeared.
“And you?” Handzame said to Cope. “Your reward.”
“An answer from the Quill of Truth, ma’am.”
“Of course.” Handzame nodded graciously, twirling the feather in her hand for a moment. “How does it work?”
