Inversions c-6

by Iain Banks

  The doctor considered bleeding the King, in effect the only thing he could think of which he had not tried, but bleeding somebody with a weakening heartbeat had proved worse than useless in the past, and on this occasion, thankfully, the urge not to make matters worse overcame the need to be seen to be doing something. The doctor ordered some exotic infusions to be prepared, but held out little hope that they would be any more effective than the compounds he had already administered.

  It was you, master, who said that Doctor Vosill would have to be summoned. I am told that Duke Ulresile and Duke Quettil took you aside and that there was a furious argument. Duke Ulresile flew from the room in a blinding rage and later took a sword to one of his servants such that the poor fellow lost one eye and a pair of fingers. I find it admirable that you stood your ground. A contingent of the palace guards was sent to the questioning chamber with orders to take the Doctor from there by force if necessary.

  I am told that my mistress walked calmly in to the terrified confusion that was the King's chamber, where nobles, servants and, it seemed, half the palace were assembled, crying and wailing.

  She had sent me, with a pair of guards, to her chamber for her medicine bag. We surprised one of Duke Quettil's servants and another palace guard there. Both looked anxious and guilty at being caught in the Doctor's rooms. Duke Quettil's man held a piece of paper I recognised.

  I have never, I think, been so proud of myself for anything I have done in my life as for what I did next, for I was still half terrified that my ordeal had merely been postponed rather than cancelled. I was shaking and sweating with the shock of what I had witnessed, I was mortified at the callow and cowardly way I had felt in the torture chamber, ashamed of how my body had betrayed me, and my mind was still spinning.

  What I did was take the note from Quettil's servant.

  "That is the property of my mistress!" I hissed, and stepped forward, a look of fury on my face. I grabbed the note from the fellow's fingers. He looked blankly at me, then at the note, which I stuffed quickly into my shirt. He opened his mouth to speak. I turned, still quivering with rage, to the two guards who had been sent with me. "Escort this person from these apartments immediately!" I said.

  This was, of course, a gamble on my part. In all the excitement, it had been quite unclear whether the Doctor and I were still technically prisoners or not, and therefore the two guards might rightly have concluded that they were my jailers, not my bodyguards, which was the way I was treating them. I would modestly claim that they were able to recognise something transparently honest and true about my righteous indignation and so decided to do as I commanded.

  The Duke's man looked terrified, but did as he was told.

  I buttoned up my jacket to further secure the note, found the Doctor's bag and hurried to the King's chamber with my escorts.

  The Doctor had turned the King on to his side. She knelt by his bed, stroking his head in a distracted way, fending off questions from Doctor Skelim. (A reaction to something in his food, probably, she told him. Extreme, but not poison.)

  You stood, master, arms crossed, near the Doctor. Duke Quettil lurked in a corner, glaring at her.

  She took a small stoppered glass vial from the bag, holding it up to the light and shaking it. "Oelph, this is the salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. Do you know it?"

  I thought. "Yes, mistress."

  "We'll need more, dried, within the next two bells. Can you remember how to prepare it?"

  "Yes, I think so, mistress. I may need to refer to our notes."

  "Just so. I'm sure your two guards will help you. Off you go, then."

  I turned to go, then stopped and handed her the note which I had taken from the Duke's man. "Here is that paper, mistress," I said then quickly turned and left before she had time to ask me what it was.

  I missed the uproar when the Doctor pinched the King's nose and clamped a hand over his mouth until he turned nearly blue. You, master, held back the protestations of the others, but then grew concerned yourself, and were about to order her away at sword point when she let the King's nose go and thrust the powder which the vial had contained under his nostrils. The ruddy powder looked like dried blood, but was not. It whistled into the King as he took a huge, deep in-drawing breath.

  Most of the people in the room took their own first breath for some time. For a while, nothing happened. Then, I am told, the King's eyes flickered and opened. He saw the Doctor and smiled, then coughed and wheezed and had to be helped to sit up.

  He cleared his throat, fixed the Doctor with an outraged stare and said, "Vosill, what in the skies of hell have you done to your hair?"

  I think the Doctor knew she would not need any more of salts solution number twenty-one, herbed. It was her way of trying to make sure that she and I were not brought to the King, made to cure him of whatever had befallen him and then promptly led away again back to the torture chamber. She wanted people to think that the course of treatment required would be longer than what amounted to little more than a quick pinch of snuff.

  Nevertheless, I returned to the Doctor's apartments, with my two guards in escort, and set up the equipment necessary to produce the powder. Even with the help of the two guards — and it was a refreshing experience to be able to do the ordering around, rather than to be subject to it myself — it would be a close-run thing to produce a small amount of the substance in less than two bells. At least it would give me something to do.

  I only heard later and at second hand about the outburst of Duke Quettil, in the King's chamber. The sergeant of the guards who had released us from the cell in the torture chamber spoke quietly with you, master, shortly after the King was brought back to the land of the living. I am told you looked a little shaken for a moment, but then went, grim-faced, to inform Duke Quettil of the fate of his chief questioner and his two assistants.

  "Dead! Dead? By fuck, Adlain, can you arrange nothing right!" were the Duke's precise words, by all accounts. The King glared. The Doctor looked unperturbed. Everybody else stared. The Duke attempted to strike you, and had to be restrained by two of your men, who acted, perhaps, before they thought. The King inquired what was going on.

  The Doctor, meanwhile, was looking at the piece of paper I had given her.

  It was the note that purported to be from you and which had lured her to the trap that had killed Duke Ormin and was supposed to dispose of her. The King had already heard from the Doctor that Ormin was dead, and that she had been meant to appear to be the killer. He was still sitting up in bed, staring ahead and trying to digest this news. The Doctor had not yet given him the details of what had supposedly happened in the questioning chamber, but merely said that she had been released before being put to the question.

  She showed him the note. He called you over and you confirmed that it was not your writing, though it might be said to be a decent attempt at it.

  Duke Quettil took the opportunity to demand that somebody be brought to justice for the murder of his men, which may have been a little hasty, as it raised the question concerning what they had been doing there in the first place. The King's expression darkened as he gradually took in all that was revealed, and several times he had to tell people trying to interrupt others to stop, so that he could get clear in his still slightly befuddled head what had actually happened. Duke Quettil, reportedly breathing heavily and with staring eyes and spittle on his lips, at one point attempted to grab the Doctor's wrist and pull her away from the King, who put his arm round her shoulders and ordered you to keep the Duke distant.

  I was absent for all that passed over the next half bell. What I know was passed to me by others, and so must surrender the toll which information tends to pay when it passes through the minds and memories of others. Even so, without having been there, I believe there was some quick thinking done in that chamber, principally by yourself, though Duke Quettil must, at the least, have calmed down sufficiently to consider things in a more rational manner again and accept
the path you were mapping out, even if he could contribute little of the cartography himself.

  The brief of it was that Duke Ulresile was to be blamed. The writing on the note was his. The palace guards swore that Ulresile had commanded them on your authority. Later that night one of Ulresile's men was brought before the King, sobbing, to confess that he had stolen the scalpel from the Doctor's apartments earlier that day and that he had killed Duke Ormin, then run away and out of a back door of the Suitor's Wing shortly before the Doctor entered by the front door. I was able to play my part, averring that the fellow could well have been the man who had rushed towards me in the dim corridor in the Suitor's Wing.

  The fellow lied about the scalpel, of course. Only one of the instruments had ever gone missing and that was the one I had stolen two seasons earlier, the day we had visited the Poor Hospital. Of course, I delivered it into your hands, master, though not in the literal sense in which it was later delivered into the body of Duke Ormin.

  Duke Ulresile, in the meantime, had been prevailed upon to remove himself from the palace. I think a more mature mind might have thought this through and realised that to fly so was to appear to confirm any accusations that might be levelled at him, but perhaps he did not think to compare his predicament or possible actions with one so base as poor, dead Unoure. In any event, he was funnel-fed some story about the King's displeasure being great but brief and largely a matter of a misunderstanding which Quettil and yourself, master, would need a short period to sort out, but a short period which absolutely required the young Duke's absence.

  The King made it very clear that he would take any further attempt to traduce the Doctor's good name very ill indeed. You promised that everything would be done to clear up the remaining points of confusion in the matter.

  Two of the King's own guards were stationed outside our apartments that night. I slept soundly in my cell until woken by a nightmare. I think the Doctor slept well. In the morning she looked well enough. She completed shaving her head, making a neater job of it than Master Ralinge.

  I assisted her in this, in her bedroom while she sat on a chair with a towel round her shoulders and a basin on her knees in which warm suds and a sponge floated. We were due to attend another meeting in the King's chamber that morning, the better to give our side of the events of the previous night.

  "What did happen, mistress?" I asked her.

  "Where and when, Oelph?" she asked, moistening her scalp with the sponge and then scraping at it with a scalpel — of all things — before passing it to me to complete the job.

  "In the questioning chamber, mistress. What happened to Ralinge and the other two?"

  "They fought over who would have me first, Oelph. Don't you remember?"

  "I do not, mistress," I whispered, with a look round at the door through to her workshop. It was locked, like the one beyond and the one beyond that, but still I felt frightened, as well as a sort of anguished guilt. "I saw Master Ralinge about to…"

  "About to rape me, Oelph. Please, Oelph. Steady with that scalpel," she said, and put her hand on my wrist. She lifted my hand away a little from her naked scalp and looked round with a smile. "It would be too ironic to survive a false charge of murder and be delivered from the very brink of torture only to suffer injury by your hand."

  "But mistress!" I said, and I am not ashamed to say that I wailed, for I was still convinced that we could not be surrounded by such fatally cataclysmic events and such powerfully antagonistic personages without attracting extreme harm. "There was no time for a dispute! He was about to take you! Providence, I saw him. I closed my eyes a heartbeat before… there was no time!"

  "Dear Oelph," the Doctor said, keeping her hand on my wrist. "You must have forgotten. You were unconscious for some time. Your head rolled to one side, your body went limp. You fairly drooled, I'm afraid. The three men had a fine old argument while you were out of your senses, and then just as the pair who had killed Ralinge slashed at each other, you woke up again. Don't you remember?"

  I looked into her eyes. Her expression was one I found impossible to read. I was reminded suddenly of the mirror mask she had worn at the ball in Yvenir palace. "Is that what I ought to remember, mistress?"

  "Yes, Oelph, it is."

  I looked down at the scalpel and the gleaming mirror-surface of its blade.

  "But how did you come to be released from your bonds, mistress?"

  "Why, in his haste, Master Ralinge simply did not secure one of them properly," the Doctor said, releasing her grip of my wrist and lowering her head again. "A woeful lapse of professional standards, but perhaps in a way a flattering one."

  I sighed. I picked up the soapy sponge and squeezed some more of the suds on to the back of her head. "I see, mistress," I said unhappily, and scraped away the very last of the hair on her head.

  I decided, as I did this, that perhaps my memory had been playing tricks on me after all, because looking down at the Doctor's legs, I could see her old dagger sticking out from the top of her boot as usual, and there, quite plainly, was the little pale stone on the top rim of the pommel I had been so convinced had been absent yesterday, in the torture chamber.

  I think I knew already then there was no going back to the way things had been before. Even so, it was a shock when the Doctor paid a visit to the King by herself two days later and came back to tell me that she had asked to be released from the post of his personal physician. I stood and stared at her, still standing in the midst of unpacked crates and boxes of supplies and ingredients which she had continued to collect from the apothecaries and chemicalists of the city.

  "Released, mistress?" I asked, stupidly.

  She nodded. I thought her eyes looked as if she had been crying. "Yes, Oelph. I think it is for the best. I have been too long away from Drezen. And the King seems generally well."

  "But he was at death's door not two nights ago!" I shouted, unwilling to believe what I was hearing and what it meant.

  She gave me one of her small smiles. "I think that will not occur again."

  "But you said it was caused by some — what did you call it? — some allotropic galvanic of salt! Dammit all, woman, that could-!"

  "Oelph!"

  I think it was the only time either of us spoke to each other in quite such tones. I shrank from my fury like a punctured bladder. I looked down at the floor. "Sorry, mistress."

  "I am quite sure," she told me firmly, "that will not occur again.

  "Yes, mistress," I mumbled.

  "You might as well pack this lot back up again."

  A bell later I was in the depths of my misery, repacking boxes, crates and sacks on the Doctor's orders, when you came to call, master.

  "I would speak to you in private, madam," you said to the Doctor.

  She looked at me. I stood there, hot and sweating, dotted with little lengths of straw from the packing cases.

  She said, "I think Oelph can stay, don't you, Guard Commander?"

  You looked at her for a few moments, I recall, then your stern expression melted like snow. "Yes," you said, and sat down with a sigh in a chair which temporarily had no cases or their contents balanced upon it. "Yes, I dare say he can." You smiled at the Doctor. She was just in the act of tying a towel round her head, having finished one of her baths. She always tied a towel round her hair after her bath, and I remember thinking, stupidly, Why is she doing that? She has no hair to dry. She wore a thick and voluminous shift which made her denuded head look very small, until she tied the towel round it. She picked a couple of boxes off a couch and sat.

  You took a moment to seat yourself just as you wanted, moving your sword so that it was comfortable, placing your booted feet just so. Then you said, "I am told you have asked the King to release you from your post."

  "That is correct, Guard Commander."

  You nodded for a moment. "That is probably for the best."

  "Oh, I'm sure it is, Guard Commander. Oelph, don't just stand there," she said, turning to look at me
. "Continue with your work, please."

  "Yes, mistress," I mumbled.

  "I would dearly love to know quite what happened in the chamber that evening."

  "I am sure you already do, Guard Commander."

  "And I am equally sure I do not, madam," you said, with a resigned sigh in your voice. "A more superstitious man would think it must have been sorcery."

  "But you are not so deceived."

  "Indeed not. Ignorant, but not deceived. I think I can say that if I had no other explanation I would be sorrier the longer the matter went unexplained and you were still here, but as you say you are going…"

  "Yes. Back to Drezen. I have already inquired about a ship… Oelph?"

  I had let drop a flask of distilled water. It had not broken, but the noise had been loud. "Sorry, mistress," I said, trying not to burst out crying. A ship!

  "Do you feel your tithe here has been a success, Doctor?"

  "I think so. The King is in better health than when I arrived. For that alone, if I can take any of the credit, I hope I may feel… fulfilled."

  "Still, it will be good to get back amongst your own kind, I imagine."

  "Yes, I'm sure you can imagine."

  "Well, I must be going," you said, standing. Then you said, "It was strange, all those deaths at Yvenir, then good Duke Ormin, and those three men."

  "Strange, sir?"

  "So many knives, or blades, at any rate. And yet so few found. The murder weapons, I mean."

  "Yes. Strange."

  You turned at the door. "That was a bad business the other night, in the questioning chamber."

  The Doctor said nothing.

  "I'm glad you were delivered… unscathed. I would give a great deal to know how it was accomplished, but I would not trade the knowledge for the result." You smiled. "I dare say I will see you again, Doctor, but if I do not, let me wish you a safe journey back to your home."