by K. J. Parker
When at last the letter was finished (written, written out and fit to send; Valens had beautiful handwriting, learned on his father’s insistence at the rod’s end), he sent for the president of the Merchant Adventurers, with instructions to show her into the smaller audience room and keep her waiting twenty minutes. The commission cost him two small but annoying concessions on revenue procedure; he’d been expecting worse, and perhaps gave in a little too easily. Just as she was about to leave, he stopped her.
“Writing paper,” he said.
She looked at him. “Yes?”
“I want some.” He frowned. “First-quality parchment; sheepskin, not goat. Say twenty sheets, about so big.” He indicated with his hands. “Can you get some for me?”
“Of course.” Behind her smile he could see a web of future transactions being frantically woven; a maze, with a ream of writing paper at the center. “When would you be —?”
“Straight away,” Valens said. “To go with the letter.”
“Ah.” The web dissolved and a new one formed in its place. “That oughtn’t to be a problem. Yes, I think we can —”
“How much?”
“Let me see.” She could do long multiplication in her head without moving her lips. In spite of himself, Valens was impressed. “Of course, if it’s for immediate delivery…”
“That’s right. How much?”
She quoted a figure which would have outfitted a squadron of cavalry, including horses and harness. She was good at her job and put it over well; unfortunately for her, Valens could do mental long multiplication too. They agreed on a third of the original quote — still way over the odds, but he wasn’t just buying parchment. “Would you like to see a sample first?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I’ll have it sent over in an hour.”
“Bring it yourself,” Valens replied. He noticed she was wearing a new diamond on the third finger of her right hand; I paid for that, he thought resentfully. Of course it should have been a ruby, to match her dress, but diamonds were worth twice as much, scruple for scruple, and she had appearances to think of. Thank God for the silver mines, he thought.
“Certainly,” she said. “Now, while I’m here, there was just one other tiny thing…”
They were a force of nature, these traders. Even his father had had to give them best, more than once. This time he put up a bit more of a fight (the hunter likes quarry with a bit of devil in it) and she met him halfway; most likely she was only trying it on for wickedness’ sake, and never expected to get anything. Of course, he told himself, it’s good business all round for them to have a way of manipulating me; otherwise they’d push me too far and I’d have to slap them down, and that’d be bad for the economy. He was delighted to see the blood-red back of her.
Once she’d gone, however, the world changed. The brief flurry of activity, the tremendous draining effort of concentration, the feeling of being alive, all faded away so quickly that he wondered if it had been a dream. But he knew the feeling too well for that. It was the same at bow-and-stable, or the lowly off-season hunts, where you sit and wait, and nothing happens; where you perch in your high-seat or cower in your hide, waiting for the wild and elusive quarry that is under no obligation to come to you, until it’s too dark or too wet, and you go home. While you wait there, impatient and resigned as a lover waiting for a letter, your mind detaches, you can for a little while be someone completely different, and believe that the stranger is really you. It’s only when you see the flicker of movement or hear the muffled, inhuman cough that the real you comes skittering back, panicked and eager and suddenly wide awake, and at once the bow is back in your hands, the arrow is notched, cockfeather out, and the world is small and sharp once again.
(Hunters will tell you that patience is their greatest virtue, but it’s the other way about. If they were capable of true patience, they could never be hunters, because the desire for the capture wouldn’t be enough to motivate them through the boredom, the suffering and the cramp. They would be content without the capture, and so would stay at home. The hunter’s virtue lies in being able to endure the desperate, agonizing impatience for the sake of the moment when it comes, if it comes, like an unreliable letter smuggled by a greedy trader in a crate of nectarines.)
One of the doctors, his tour of duty completed, reported in on his return. The Eremians, he said, were a mess. It was a miracle they’d lost as few people as they had, what with exhaustion and exposure and neglect of the wounded, and starvation. For a while the second-in-command, Miel Ducas, had managed to hold things together by sheer tenacity, but he was shattered, on his knees with fatigue and worry, and with him out of action there wasn’t anybody else fit to be trusted with a pony-chaise, let alone an army. Duke Orsea? The doctor smiled grimly. It had been a real stroke of luck for the Eremians, he said, Orsea getting carved up in the battle and put out of action during the crisis that followed. If he’d been in command on the way up the Butter Pass… The doctor remembered who he was talking to and apologized. No disrespect intended; but since Ducas’ collapse, Duke Orsea had taken back command; one had to make allowances for a sick man, but even so.
Now, though; now, the doctor was pleased to report, things were practically under control. The Eremians had been fed, they had tents and blankets and firewood. As for the wounded, they were safe in an improvised mobile hospital (twenty huge tents requisitioned from markets, the military, and traveling actors) and nine-tenths of them would probably make some sort of recovery. It was all, of course, thanks to Valens; if he hadn’t intervened, if he’d been content to let the Eremians stumble by on their side of the border, it was more than likely that they’d all be dead by now. It had been, the doctor said in bewildered admiration, a magnificent humanitarian act.
“Is that right?” Valens interrupted. “They’d really have died? All of them?”
The doctor shrugged. “Maybe a few dozen might’ve made it home, no more than that,” he said. “Duke Orsea would’ve been dead for sure. One of my colleagues got to him just in time, before blood-poisoning set in.” The doctor frowned. “Excuse me for asking,” he went on, “but they’re saying that they didn’t even ask us for help. You authorized the relief entirely off your own bat. Is that really true?”
Valens nodded.
“I see,” the doctor said. “Because there’s terms in the treaty that mean we’ve got to go to each other’s assistance if formally asked to do so; I’d sort of assumed they’d sent an official request, and so we had no choice. I didn’t realize…”
Valens shrugged. “To start with, all I was concerned about was the frontier. I thought that if they were in a bad way for food, they might start raiding our territory, which would’ve meant war whether we wanted it or not. I didn’t want to risk that, obviously.”
“Ah,” the doctor said. “Because I was wondering. After all, it’s not so long ago we were fighting them, and if they hadn’t made a request and we’d just let well alone…” He sighed. “My son fought in the war, you know. He was killed. But if it was to safeguard our border, of course, that’s a different matter entirely.”
Valens shook his head. “Just, what’s the phrase, enlightened self-interest. I haven’t gone soft in my old age, or anything like that.”
The doctor smiled weakly. “That’s all right, then,” he said.
Other reports came in. The Eremians were on the move again; Valens’ scouts had put them back on the right road, and they were well clear of the border. The mobile hospital had been disbanded, the serious cases taken down the mountain to a good Vadani hospital, the rest judged fit to rejoin the column and go home. Miel Ducas was back in charge; the Vadani doctors had warned Duke Orsea in the strongest possible terms of the ghastly consequences that would follow if he stirred from his litter at all before they reached the capital — not strictly true, but essential to keep him out of mischief. Details of what had actually happened in the battle were proving hard to come by. Some of the Eremians were
tight-lipped in the company of their old enemy; the vast majority would’ve told the Vadani anything they wanted but simply didn’t have any idea what had hit them out of a clear blue sky. They hadn’t known about the scorpions, still didn’t; but (said a few of them) that’ll all change soon enough, now that we’ve got the defector.
The what?
Well, it was supposed to be a dark and deadly secret; still, obviously we’re all friends together now, so it can’t do any harm. The defector was a Mezentine — some said he was an important government official, others said he was just a blacksmith — and he was going to teach them all the Mezentines’ diabolical tricks, especially the scorpions, because he used to be something to do with making them. He was either a prisoner taken during the battle or a refugee claiming political asylum, or both; the main thing was, he was why the whole expedition had been worthwhile after all; getting their hands on him was as good as if they’d won the battle, or at least that was what they were going to tell the people back home, to keep from getting lynched.
Valens, meticulous with details and blessed with a good memory, turned up the relevant letter in the files and deduced that the defector was the Ziani Vaaztes whom he was required to send to Mezentia. The old resentment flared up again when he saw that fatal word; but he thought about it and saw the slight potential advantage. He wrote to the Mezentine authorities, telling them that the man they were looking for was now a guest of their new best enemy, should they wish to take the matter further; he wished to remain, and so forth.
And then there were the hunt days; days when he drove the woods and covers, reading the subtle verses written on the woodland floor by the feet of his quarry better than any paid huntsman, always diligent, always searching for the buck, the doe, the boar, the bear, the wolf that for an hour or two suddenly became the most important thing in the world. Once it was caught and killed it was meat for the larder or one less hazard to agriculture, no more or less — but there; the fact that he’d caught it proved that it couldn’t have been the one he was really looking for. He’d been brought up on the folk tales; a prince out hunting comes across a milk-white doe with silver hoofs, and a gold collar around its neck, which leads him to the castle hidden in the depths of the greenwood, where the princess is held captive; or he flies his peregrine at a white dove that carries in its beak a golden flower, and follows it to the seashore, where the enchanted, crewless ship waits to carry him to the Beautiful Island. He’d been in no doubt at all when he was a boy; the white doe and the white dove were somewhere close at hand, in the long covert or the rough moor between the big wood and the hog’s back, and it was just a matter of finding them. But his father had never found them and neither had he, yet. Each time the lymers put up a doe or the spaniels found in the reeds he raised his head to look, and many times he’d been quite certain he’d seen it, the flash of white, the glow of the gold. Sometimes he wondered if it was all a vast conspiracy of willing martyrs; each time he came close to the one true quarry, some humble volunteer would dart out across the ride to run interference, while the genuine article slipped away unobserved.
6
Duke Valens’ letter rode with an official courier as far as Forza; there it was transferred to a pack-train carrying silver ingots and mountain-goat skins (half-tanned, for the luxury footwear trade), as far as Lonazep. It waited there a day or so until a shipment of copper and tin ore came in from the Cure Doce, and hitched a ride with the wagons to Mezentia. There it lay forgotten in a canvas satchel, along with reports from the Foundrymen’s Guild’s commercial resident in Doria-Voce and one side of a fractious correspondence about delivery dates and penalty clauses in the wholesale rope trade, until someone woke it up and carried it to the Guildhall, where it was opened in error by a clerk from the wrong department, sent on a long tour of the building, and finally washed up on the desk of the proper official like a beached whale.
The proper official immediately convened an emergency meeting. This should have been held in the grand chamber; but the Social & Benevolent Association had booked the chamber for the day and it was too short notice to cancel, so the committee was forced to cram itself into the smaller of the two chapter-houses, on the seventh floor.
It was a beautiful room, needless to say. Perfectly circular, with a vaulted roof and gilded traces supported by twelve impossibly slender gray stone columns, it was decorated with frescos in the grand manner, briefly popular a hundred and twenty years earlier, when allegory was regarded as the height of sophisticated taste. Accordingly, the committee huddled, three men to a two-man bench, between the feet and in the shadows of vast, plump nude giants and giantesses, all delicately poised in attitudes of refined emotion — Authority, in a monstrous gold helmet like a cooper’s bucket, accepted the world’s scepter from the hands of Wisdom and Obedience, while a flight of stocky angels, their heads all turned full-face in accordance with the prevailing convention, floated serenely by on dumplings of white cloud.
At ground level, they were way past serenity. Lucao Psellus, chairman of the compliance directorate, had just read out the Vadanis’ letter. For once, nobody appreciated the exquisite acoustics of the chapter-house; the wretched words rang out clear as bells and chased each other round and round the cupped belly of the dome, when they should have been whispered and quickly hushed away.
“In fact,” Psellus concluded, “it’s hard to see how things could possibly be any worse. We take a man, a hard-working, loyal Guild officer who happens to have made one stupid mistake, and in trying to make an example of him, we coerce him into violence and murder, and drive him into the arms of our current worst enemy; a man whose technical knowledge and practical ability gives him the capability of betraying at least thirty-seven restricted techniques and scores of other trade secrets. Result: it’s imperative that he’s caught and disposed of as quickly as possible, but now he’s in pretty much the hardest place in the world for us to winkle him out of. I’m not saying it can’t be done —”
“I don’t see a problem,” someone interrupted. “We know the Eremians’ve got him, surely that’s more than half the battle. It’s when you don’t have a clue where to start looking that it’s difficult to process a job. Meanwhile, I’m prepared to bet, after what’s just happened I don’t see this Duke Orsea giving us much trouble, provided we put the wind up him forcefully enough. He’s just had a crash course in what happens to people who mess with us. And besides, what actual harm can he do? The Eremians are primitives; if Vaatzes was minded to betray Guild secrets, how’s he going to go about it? They’re in no position to exploit anything he tells them, they’ve got no manufacturing capacity, no infrastructure. They can barely make a horseshoe up there in the mountains; Vaatzes would have to teach them to start from scratch.”
Psellus scowled in the direction the voice had come from; because of the annoying echo he couldn’t quite place the voice, and the speaker’s face had been lost against a background of primary colors and pale apricot. “For a start,” he said, “that’s entirely beside the point. If we don’t deal with this Vaatzes straight away, it sets a dangerous precedent. Troublemakers and malcontents will see that here’s a man who broke the rules and got away with it. Furthermore, you know as well as I do, a trade secret is a negotiable commodity. The Eremians may not be able to use it, but there’s nothing to stop them selling it on to someone who can. No, we have to face facts, this is a crisis and we’ve got to take it seriously. This is exactly the sort of situation we were put here for. The question is, how do we go about it?”
There was a brief silence, just long enough for his words to come to rest in the vaulting, like bees settling in a tree full of blossom.
“Well,” someone said, “it’s obviously not a job we can tackle ourselves, not directly. Any one of our people’d stick out a mile among the tribesmen. I say we put a tender out to the traders. It wouldn’t be the first time, and they’ll do anything for money.”
That was simply stating the obvious, but at least they
were getting somewhere; no small achievement, in a committee of political appointees. Psellus nodded. “The Merchant Adventurers are clearly the place to start,” he said. “We’ve got a reasonable network of contacts in place now; at the very least they can do the fieldwork and gather the necessary intelligence: where he is exactly, the sort of security measures we’ll have to face, his daily routine, the attitude of the Duke and his people. As regards the actual capture, I’m not sure we can rely on people like that; but let’s take it one step at a time. Now, who’s in charge of running our contacts in the company?”
Manuo Crisestem stood up; six feet of idiot in a purple brocaded gown. Psellus managed not to groan. “I have the file here,” Crisestem said, brandishing a parchment folder. “Anticipating this discussion, I took the trouble to read it through before we convened. There is a problem.”
There was a grin behind his words. Crisestem (Tailors’ and Clothiers’) had only joined the committee a few months ago, replacing one of Psellus’ fellow Foundrymen as controller of intelligence. If there was a problem, it’d be the Foundrymen’s fault, and Crisestem would be only too delighted to make a full confession and abject apology on their behalf. “I regret to have to inform this committee,” he said, “that our resources in Eremia Montis are unsatisfactory. We have agents in the cheese, butter and leather trades and among the horse-breeders, but at relatively low levels. Furthermore, our resources are such that, after the recent incursion, they can no longer be relied on. It won’t take the Duke long to figure out who gave us advance warning of his adventure; those agents will be exposed and presumably dealt with, and it will be exceedingly difficult to recruit replacements as a result. The fact is that all our people in Eremia have been used up — in a good cause, needless to say; but now that they’re gone, we have nothing worth mentioning in reserve.”
