Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  ‘Well,’ the man said, ‘in case you don’t know, though I’m pretty certain you do, my name is Feron Amathy. What’s yours?’

  Good question, and it occurred to him that if he didn’t answer the man might kick him in the ribs again. He didn’t want that. He couldn’t remember his name, but he knew a name he’d called himself once or twice, when on a mission using a persona. He opened his mouth – his jaw hurt like hell – and managed to make a noise that sounded like ‘Monach’.

  ‘Yes,’ the man replied. ‘I know. Just wanted to see if you’d tell me the truth. It’s what we call a control; ask questions you know the answer to, it helps you get a feel for whether the subject’s likely to lie or not. So,’ he went on, sitting down in the chair whose feet Monach could just make out in line with his nose, ‘you’re the famous Monach, are you? Bloody hell, you’re a mess. What on earth did they do to you?’

  He hoped that was a rhetorical question, because he could-n’t remember. Generally speaking, if you want an accurate description of a fight, don’t ask the man lying on the ground getting kicked and stamped on. All he can see is boots and ankles, and his concentration is apt to wander.

  ‘Looks like you must’ve put up a hell of a fight,’ the man went on. ‘Which did neither of us any favours, of course. You got beaten into mush, I can’t get a sensible word out of you. If you’d given up and come quietly, think how much better it’d have been for both of us.’ He heard the chair creak, and the feet in front of his eyes moved. ‘Let’s get you sitting up,’ he said. ‘We might have better luck if you’re not sprawled all over the floor like a heap of old washing.’

  The man was strong, and not fussed about what hurt and what didn’t. When he opened his eyes again, his mind washed clean by the waves of pain, he was sitting in a chair. Opposite him was the man who’d been talking.

  ‘Better?’ the man asked. ‘All right, now, you’re going to have to make an effort and answer my questions, because it’s very important and there’s not much time. If you don’t, I’ll take this stick and find out which of your bones are broken. If you understand, nod once.’

  Nodding wasn’t too hard. He managed it. That seemed to please the man, because he nodded back and sat down in his chair, a three-foot thumb-thick rod of ashwood across his knees. He was younger than Monach had expected, no more than forty, with plenty of curly brown hair and a slightly patchy brown beard, thick on the cheeks and jaws but a little frayed-looking on the chin itself. He had a pointed nose, a heart-shaped face and bright, friendly brown eyes.

  ‘Splendid,’ the man said. ‘All right, pay attention. Do you know where General Cronan is?’

  Apparently he did, because his head lifted up and then flopped back, jarring his jaw and making him shudder. The name Cronan didn’t ring a bell at all.

  ‘Yes? And?’

  He felt himself trying to say something. ‘At the Faith and Fortitude,’ he heard himself say, ‘on the road from Josequin to Selce.’ That didn’t make any sense. He’d never heard of any inn called the Faith and Fortitude, or a place called Selce. The man was nodding, though, as if the answer made perfect sense to him. Then he remembered the two crows, one with something in its beak. Thank God for that, he thought, it’s just another dream. A real pity it’s so vivid, though. A dream kick to a dream broken rib only causes dream pain, but dream pain hurts just as much as the real thing, apparently.

  ‘I know where you mean,’ the man said. ‘Very good, now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: have you sent some of your people to kill him?’

  Just a dip of the head this time, to indicate Yes.

  ‘Buggery. When?’

  The answer, apparently, was that morning, two hours before noon.

  ‘Which means . . . How were they going? On foot, horseback, wagon?’

  He opened his mouth to reply but started coughing instead. Coughing was a very bad idea. The man didn’t approve, either, because he repeated his question, loudly.

  ‘Riding,’ he managed to say. ‘Not hurrying. Can’t risk.’

  ‘Were they taking the main road?’

  A nod.

  ‘That’s something, I suppose. All right, stay there, don’t go away.’

  The man left the tent, shouting a name, and left him alone. That was wonderful, he’d have a chance to relax, to catch up with the pain, which was racing ahead of his thoughts and blocking their way. He closed his eyes – it was better with them shut, in spite of the dizziness. At the back of his mind something was protesting: no, you mustn’t close your eyes, you’ll fall asleep or pass out. This is your only chance; look, there’s a knife on the map table, you can reach it if you tilt the legs of the chair. You can hide it under your arm, and when he comes back you can stab him or cut his throat, and that’ll make up for the rest. Must do it, can’t afford not to. You’ve done very badly, but you still have one chance. Won’t get another. Must—

  He stayed still, put the voice out of his mind. Maybe if he knew what was going on it’d be different; if he knew why it was so important to kill this man – Feron something, Feron Amathy, and didn’t that name sound familiar from somewhere? – then maybe he might just have made the effort. As it was, no incentive. Nothing outside his body mattered, outside his body and the invisible circle of pain that surrounded it. The pain defined everything.

  A while later Feron Amathy came back. He looked unhappy. ‘I’ve sent thirty light cavalry up the old drovers’ trail, so if the Lihac’s fordable they ought to get there an hour or so before your assassins. Still, it’s cutting it fine.’

  He sounded like a senior officer briefing a delinquent subordinate, not one enemy telling another how he’d frustrated his plans and made the sacrifice of his life to the cause meaningless. It wasn’t cruelty, Monach figured, just a busy man thinking aloud, as busy men so often do. Probably he found it useful having someone to talk to, even if it was only a defeated, humiliated opponent. Monach could feel his weariness, the tremendous weight of responsibility clamping down on his shoulders. ‘Now then,’ he said, flopping back into his chair and letting his arms hang down. ‘What are we going to do with you, I wonder? My instinct says send your head back to Deymeson with an apple stuck in your mouth, to let them know I’m perfectly well aware of what they’re up to. On the other hand, why give them any more information than necessary? So long as they aren’t sure whether I’ve worked out that they’re involved, they’ll have to cover both contingencies, which’ll slow up their planning. In which case, I can either have you strung up here, make a show of it, issue double rations, give the lads something to cheer them up; or I could keep you for later, assuming you survive. God only knows what sort of useful stuff you’ve got locked up in your head, but will prising it out of there be more trouble than it’s worth?’ He sighed. ‘Truth is,’ he went on, ‘nobody else is fit to interrogate you; even in the state you’re in you’re probably too smart for them, and I can’t afford to let you muck me about with disinformation. I haven’t got the time or, let’s face it, the energy. Besides, you’ve caused me a real headache, and until those cavalry troopers get back from Selce I can’t be sure you haven’t really screwed everything up.’ He sighed. ‘I think I’ll knock you on the head now,’ he went on. ‘Anything else is just wasting valuable time.’ As he said that, he stood up, drawing a short knife from the sash round his waist. One step forward, finger and thumb tightening on his face, a sharp twist sideways, the knife starting to slice the skin of his neck—

  Poldarn woke up, his right hand pressed hard against his neck. Usually the dreams didn’t bother him once he’d woken up; they slid away, like ducks launching themselves on to a pond, and left nothing behind. But this dream had been different, much more real and immediate, so that the pain had hurt. He’d already forgotten what had caused it, but the memory of the pain was still with him, an uncomfortable twitch every time it burst into his circle.

  ‘You do that a lot,’ Copis said.

  He’d forgotten she was there. ‘Do what?’ he m
umbled.

  ‘Sleep with your hand under your ear like that,’ she replied. ‘I wish you wouldn’t, it makes you snore.’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t snore, do I?’

  ‘When you sleep with your hand under your ear, yes.’

  ‘Oh.’ For some reason, that bothered him a lot. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Did I wake you up?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m used to people making noises in their sleep,’ she explained, with a slight narrowing of the eyebrows that made it clear that the subject wasn’t to be pursued further. ‘It’s fairly moderate snoring, actually; cutting-damp-wood-with-a-blunt-saw snoring, not monsoon-winds-in-Morevich snoring. Are you going to lie there all day, or would you care to get up so we can go and earn a living?’

  He remembered where he was: an inn called the Divine Moderation, a third of the way from Sansory to Deymeson. They were on the road, selling buttons. Yesterday had been a good day; they’d sold fifteen dozen buttons at four hundred and fifty per cent mark-up, and all the women in the village had told them how reasonable their prices were.

  ‘This place we’re going to,’ Copis said, as he sat down beside her on the box, ‘ought to be pretty good. Never been there myself, of course, but I’ve heard quite a bit about it. Apparently they’ve got wonderful soil, so they grow garden stuff for Sansory – fruit and vegetables, mostly, and a lot of flowers. Should mean there’ll be some money about.’

  The name of the place turned out to be Mestory, and it was almost large enough to be a town. The Sansory road brought them in on the south-west side, where there was a sprawl of new houses and fences that were hardly weathered at all, with the gates still hanging straight and held closed by their latches rather than lengths of fraying twine. The thatch on the roofs was still nearer yellow than grey, and all the buildings looked pretty much the same.

  ‘Interesting,’ Copis observed. ‘New building. Definite sign of prosperity. We could do well here.’

  More surprising still was the marketplace; that was all new, too. There was a small but handsome corn exchange in the middle of the market square, so new that the edges of the stone blocks were still sharp and clean. Opposite the corn exchange there was even a temple – a miniature temple, with a toy portico and one self-conscious-looking half-life-size statue outside, but a temple nevertheless. The scaffolding up the side of the east wall suggested it wasn’t finished yet.

  ‘All right,’ Copis said, ‘I’m impressed. So where is everybody? ’

  As soon as she said it, Poldarn realised that that was what was wrong with the place: no people. There was a fine market, but no stalls. There were temple steps, but nobody sitting on them. Half the shops in the pristine-looking traders’ row had their shutters up, and there were no more than a dozen people standing outside the shops that were open. The few people he could see appeared to be acting normally – drifting, chatting, window-shopping – but there was only a sparse handful of them, and it was an hour before noon.

  ‘There’s probably a simple explanation,’ Poldarn said. ‘Maybe everybody’s out fetching in the asparagus harvest or something.’

  ‘Fat lot you know about asparagus,’ Copis replied accurately, but she was clearly just as bewildered as he was. ‘Maybe they’re all indoors. Could be a seasonal thing,’ she added. ‘Maybe, because they grow different stuff to most places, they have their midday meal at a different time.’

  Poldarn hadn’t thought of that, mostly because it wasn’t a very convincing explanation. The place felt empty.

  ‘We’d better ask somebody instead of guessing,’ Copis said. ‘Quick, ask that woman over there.’

  Poldarn pulled a face. ‘You ask her,’ he said.

  ‘Oh for . . . Excuse me.’ The woman stopped and looked round. ‘Excuse me,’ Copis went on, ‘but where is everybody?’

  The woman looked at her. ‘Where’s who?’ she said.

  ‘Everybody. The people who live here.’

  The woman shook her head and walked away. ‘Just my luck,’ Copis said, not lowering her voice. ‘I have to ask the village idiot.’

  ‘Maybe they aren’t used to strangers,’ Poldarn suggested, without any real enthusiasm.

  ‘Maybe they’re just ignorant,’ Copis replied sharply. ‘Anyway, we’re here; we might as well set up the stall, just in case. They’ve got a temple, perhaps they’re all in there, singing hymns.’

  Poldarn listened for a moment. ‘Pretty quiet singing if they are,’ he said.

  The stall was little more than the side of the cart, which was hinged and swung down; two posts for the awning went in the canopy-rod holes, with two more rods leaning forward at forty-five degrees to support the front. All that was needed after that was a trestle table and trays for sample buttons. The rest of the stock was in jars and barrels in the back of the cart. They took their time setting up, to give the word a chance to spread. When they couldn’t spin it out any longer, they sat on the bed of the cart and surveyed the empty streets.

  ‘If we’re quick,’ Copis said, a short while later, ‘we could be in Forial by early evening.’

  ‘Where’s Forial?’

  ‘Next village down the road from here. I don’t know anything about it except the name, but it’s got to be better than this.’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘I can’t be bothered,’ he said. ‘Besides, you never know, it could pick up. I’ve always fancied running a stall must be a lot like decoying rooks – you know, where you find where they’re feeding, hunker down out of sight and put out a few dead birds stuck up on sticks to draw the others in. Then when they pitch you pick them off with a sling.’

  Copis clicked her tongue. ‘So far,’ she said, ‘I don’t get the similarity. Or are you saying we should kill and impale the next person we see? The idea does appeal to me, I’ll grant you, but not on commercial grounds.’

  Poldarn grinned. ‘The point is,’ he said, ‘you can sit there in your ditch or under your tree for the best part of the day and never see anything; and then, just when you’ve finally decided to give it away and go home, suddenly the sky’ll turn black with rooks, and next thing you know you’ve run out of slingstones. Patience is the key to this lark, you wait and see.’

  Copis turned thoughtful for a while, as Poldarn fiddled with the trays of buttons. Eventually she looked up and said, ‘Where do you get the dead ones from?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The dead ones you put out in sticks, for decoys,’ she said. ‘Where do you get them from?’

  ‘They’re the ones you killed the previous day,’ Poldarn explained.

  ‘All right,’ Copis conceded. ‘But in that case, how do you start off? I mean, if you need a dozen dead rooks before you can start killing rooks, how do you kill a dozen rooks in the first place?’

  ‘No idea,’ Poldarn said. ‘I suppose I must know the answer, since I seem to be pretty well clued up about the subject, but I can’t remember offhand.’

  ‘Fine,’ Copis said. ‘In that case, let’s change the subject. The thought of dead rooks really isn’t one I want to hold in my mind for very long.’

  Noon came and passed, during which time two old women walked past the stall, apparently without noticing that it was there. Copis made a point of standing up and staring at them as they passed, explaining that she wanted to see if they were wearing any buttons. ‘They were, too,’ she added. ‘Which makes it odder still. Unless there’s a special tree in these parts that grows buttons instead of nuts.’

  Not long after that a young woman with a baby in her arms walked by the stall, stopped and leaned over to look at one of the trays. Poldarn and Copis snapped to attention like a couple of farm dogs hearing a bowl scraping on the cobbles.

  ‘Can we help at all?’ Copis cooed.

  ‘I was just looking,’ the woman replied, taking a step backwards as though she’d been caught out doing something wicked. ‘Very nice,’ she added.

  Copis smiled at her. ‘Anything in particular you liked the look of?’ she asked.
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  The woman hesitated and glanced down at the baby, which was fast asleep. ‘Well,’ she said, hesitating. ‘Those ones there, the quite big ones with the rim on them.’

  ‘Gorgeous, aren’t they?’ Copis replied, exaggerating rather. ‘Made in Sansory, Potto house. You won’t find better this side of the bay.’

  It was clear that the woman was tempted, and that she was fighting the temptation. ‘Those other ones,’ she said tentatively, ‘the little ones on the bottom row. Are they cheaper or dearer than the big ones?’

  ‘All the same price,’ Poldarn said quickly before Copis frightened her off. In his mind he had a picture of a black bird putting its wings back and circling in a glide towards him. ‘Two quarters a dozen.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the woman replied. ‘Shouldn’t the smaller ones be cheaper?’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘If anything they should be more expensive,’ he said. ‘Harder to make, you see. Fiddly.’

  ‘Oh.’ The woman rubbed her cheekbones thoughtfully with thumb and forefinger. ‘If I take two dozen, would it be cheaper?’

  ‘No,’ Copis said. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Oh. Have you got any others, or is this everything?’

  That took Poldarn rather by surprise, since he couldn’t begin to imagine what need there could possibly be for the two hundred and forty different styles of buttons mounted on the display board. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘but that’s the lot. What sort of thing were you looking for?’

  The woman shrugged. ‘I won’t know what it is till I see it,’ she replied. ‘Thanks very much.’

  Poldarn was too bewildered to persevere, and let it go with a smile and a dip of the head. Copis waited till the woman was about fifty yards away then stuck her tongue out in her general direction. ‘Time-waster,’ she explained.