by K. J. Parker
But it wasn’t in any hurry. Once again he lost track of how long he’d been walking, and he couldn’t help thinking that Shance Hill hadn’t looked anything like this high or steep when he’d seen it in the distance from the road that morning. He was wondering whether it wouldn’t be better after all to give up and retrace his steps when he came round a corner and saw a house.
Not just a shack or a shed, a real house, with a chimney and a porch, large enough to be a farmhouse or something of the sort. Better still, there was a cart outside, conspicuous in the small bald patch immediately surrounding the building. Monach got closer, and was rewarded with the sight of four horses tethered to a rail. It looked very much as though somebody was at home.
He knocked at the door – oak, grey with age but hanging straight and recently scraped clean of moss and lichen – but nothing happened. He couldn’t quite understand that; the horses hadn’t got there by themselves and tied their halters to a post, so it stood to reason that whoever had brought them here was still in the immediate vicinity. He pushed the door gently with the edge of his left hand, waited for a moment in case there was an ambush or booby trap, and walked quietly inside.
Ah, he said to himself, that would explain it.
There were two people sitting in chairs on opposite sides of a table, a man and a woman. The man had been killed by a single thrust to the heart, and was lolling backwards, his arms hanging down parallel with the legs of the chair. The woman’s skull had been split by a square-on overhead cut, delivered with a sharp weapon and a lot of force. He recognised them as the god in the cart and his priestess, the two frauds he’d interrogated in the prison at Sansory.
Well, they weren’t going to tell him the way out of the wood. He sighed, and made a closer examination. From the tone and texture of the dead flesh, not to mention the smell, he reckoned they’d been dead for two or three days, just conceivably longer since the house was more than a little chilly—
In which case that cart might well be their cart, but those horses weren’t their horses, or if they were, someone else had fed and exercised them recently. Monach frowned. There was a reasonable chance that this mystery was nothing to do with him, and he certainly didn’t have time to indulge his curiosity. On the other hand, if these two characters were spies or agents who’d been masquerading as frauds (a thoroughly unsuitable cover, but possible, and the manner of their deaths suggested something other than robbery or mere dislike), they might turn out to be very relevant indeed. Or not. He found he wanted very badly to know who’d been looking after the horses.
It was also curious, to say the least, that they were sitting facing each other, since the wounds that had killed them were the sort almost invariably inflicted from in front, and the table didn’t look ferocious enough to have killed both of them before either of them had a chance to run away. Deliberately propping up dead bodies in chairs so as to give someone else a shock, or a warning? Monach shook his head. There was a lot of evidence to be read here, but he wasn’t in the mood.
A horse, on the other hand, would come in handy. He shut the door quietly behind him and headed across the clearing into the trees, then made his way round in a circle through the briars and saplings and other tiresome undergrowth to a point where he could watch the horses for a while; the concept of bait was floating about in his mind, and he wasn’t in such a tearing hurry as all that.
True, he’d had an exhausting time of it lately and not nearly enough sleep, but his first reaction, on waking up with a crick in his neck and one leg completely numb, was self-disgust and shame. That was quickly followed by fear; he’d been woken up by the sound of something coming towards him through the wood, and with his right leg asleep he couldn’t move. Everything wrong, he told himself resentfully, all my fault. Of all the stupid things to happen—
He’d managed to crawl-hobble a few yards towards the edge of the wood when it occurred to him that he was going in the wrong direction. Out in the open, he’d be even more vulnerable, unless he had time to get to one of the horses – but even if he did make it that far, how was he proposing to get on the creature’s back with one leg out of commission? He stopped, leaning against a tree as the pins and needles surged up his leg as far as his groin. He couldn’t face going back, directly towards whatever was making the noise (more than one of it, whatever it was). Going forward didn’t appeal. Staying put was very probably a bad idea too, but he didn’t feel up to anything else. He closed his eyes and begged for it all to have been a dream.
They came out of the undergrowth around him as if by magic, like fish jumping up through the mirror surface of a still lake; eight men, armed. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ one of them asked.
Monach slumped a little against the tree he was standing by. ‘I could ask you the same question,’ he said. ‘I got fed up waiting for you, so I set off on my own. Bloody fine back-up squad you turned out to be.’
They were, of course, sword-monks, eight of the ten men he’d chosen specially for the job of tracking down and killing the commander-in-chief of an imperial field army. He’d posted their orders on the chapter door two hours before he was due to leave, and they hadn’t shown up. Now, apparently, they were here, having followed his trail and tracked him down in the depths of this impenetrable wood, where even he hadn’t a clue where he was. He couldn’t help feeling impressed. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘we’ll go into all that later. Which way is Shance?’
One of them grinned. ‘You mean to say you’re lost?’
‘Yes,’ Monach admitted, tentatively pressing the sole of his foot on the ground and wincing. ‘And we’re very short on time.’ He paused. ‘Do any of you know anything about the two dead bodies in that house?’
One of the monks shook his head. ‘We’ve only just got here,’ he said.
‘Oh.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You three, you’re coming with me. Get that cart spanned in, and you’d better know the quickest way to Shance. The rest of you, follow on as quick as you can. And keep your eyes open; somebody killed a man and a woman, possibly spies, in there; those are probably their horses.’
‘Our spies or theirs?’ one of the monks asked.
‘Haven’t a clue,’ Monach replied (define ours; define theirs). ‘Don’t get sidetracked, mind; if you see them, keep out of their way, that’s all. Understood?’
He didn’t explain why he had to hobble slowly to the cart, and they didn’t ask. Neither did he ask, or they volunteer, how they’d found him. He let one of the brothers drive; he wasn’t very good at it, never having had much experience.
The brother found it humiliatingly simple to get out of the wood; he just followed the road, which came out on the top of a ridge. Less than half a mile away was a walled town, coiled round a spur like a length of rope. Shance, presumably.
‘So,’ the brother said (nobody had said anything since they left the house in the wood), ‘what happens here?’
Monach, who’d been half dozing again, sat up sharply. His leg was fine now, but his neck was still painful. ‘We need to find a prefect or a duty officer, someone who can tell us where Cronan’s going to be coming from.’
‘Coming from.’ The brother thought for a moment. ‘So we know where he’s going, then.’
Monach nodded. ‘Cric,’ he replied. ‘Of course, there’s every chance he’s there already, but it’s worth a try. Certainly better than trying to get at him in the middle of a military camp.’
‘Agreed,’ said another brother in the back of the cart. ‘So how do we go about it?’
Of course, Monach hadn’t given it any thought. He wasn’t inclined to try barging in and beating it out of them, whoever they were. Far better to be subtle, using some persona or other – superior officer, government courier, spy, something from his usual repertoire. He half turned.
‘Scout around in the back there,’ he said, ‘see what you can find in the way of clothes and stuff. We’ve got to pretend we’re staff officers or messengers or imperial agents, s
omething like that, and right now we’re unmistakably scruffy monks.’
A little later, the brother reported back. ‘There’s clothes in here all right,’ he said, ‘but I don’t think they’ll really be all that suitable for what you’ve got in mind. This stuff is weird.’
He held a sample up for Monach to see: a black velvet robe embroidered with glass thread, further decorated with paste gemstones and sequins forming mystic-looking symbols. ‘Bloody hell,’ Monach sighed, remembering who the cart had formerly belonged to. ‘That’s no use, then, unless one of you jokers feels up to impersonating a god.’
The monk frowned. ‘Do gods wear this sort of thing, then?’ he asked. ‘I’d have credited them with better taste, personally.’
Monach laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘Not any gods I’ve ever come across, anyway. Well, if we can’t be gods, we’ll just have to be spies. All comes down to the same thing in the long run.’
The sword-monks looked at each other but didn’t say anything, and the cart rolled up to the town gate. A bored-looking halberdier waved them through – just as well, Monach realised; his imagination wasn’t up to the task of concocting a plausible explanation for a cartload of illegal divine vestments.
At least finding the prefecture wasn’t a problem. It was where it ought to be, in the old, thick-walled tower overlooking the road, at the weakest point in the town’s natural defences. A clerk told them the prefect wasn’t there; he was out with the garrison on exercises, and hadn’t said when he was likely to be back. No, he couldn’t see the duty officer, the duty officer was a busy man . . . Monach handed him the pass, signed by Father Abbot and wearing the Great Seal of the order. Suddenly, the duty officer’s schedule turned out to be far less hectic than the clerk had first believed.
‘I’m sorry,’ the duty officer said, plainly terrified at the thought of four sword-monks in the same town as himself, let alone the same small half-circular room at the top of the tower. ‘I really wish I could help, but I can’t, I’ve got specific orders not to release the general’s itinerary to anybody without—’
‘You idiot,’ Monach growled. ‘How many times have I got to explain this before it seeps through the cracks in your brain? They’re going to kill the general. They’re going to ambush him somewhere on the road, cut his head off and take it to Feron Amathy in a jar of spiced honey, unless you stop fooling around and tell me which road he’s going by, so we can get to him, warn him and fight off this ambush. Do you understand? If you don’t give me that itinerary, the general is going to die, and it’ll all be your fault.’
The duty officer looked as if the whole town had just been buried by a landslide and he was the sole survivor, the man who’d set it all off by throwing a pebble at the side of the cliff face. ‘Well, I suppose it’ll be all right,’ he said at last, ‘since you’re religious, after all; I mean, if you can’t trust a priest, it’d be a pretty poor show.’ He pulled a brass tube out of the jumble on his desk and fished out a roll of thin, crisp paper. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I don’t know much, no reason anybody should tell me, after all, but before he left the prefect got this.’ He unrolled the paper, which proved to be a map. ‘He had orders from Cronan to meet him with the garrison at this village here, Cric. The orders said that Cronan would be coming up the north-west road from Lesar’s Bridge – that’s down here, see, that squiggle; you can just make it out if you look closely. And here’s the road – well, it isn’t actually marked on this map, but it follows the line of this little river here; if you find the river, you’ll find the road.’ An unpleasant thought struck him, and his face changed. ‘What if you’re too late and they’ve already ambushed him? God, that’d be terrible.’
Monach requisitioned the map, together with another one that had rather more places and things marked on it, and left the tower as quickly as he could without drawing attention to himself. ‘Right,’ he said, as they clambered back into the cart, ‘here’s what we’ll do. You four, find whatever passes for a horsefair in this town, get yourselves four horses and cut up across the top here.’ He prodded the map. ‘If you get a move on and don’t stop to admire the scenery, you might just catch up with him. I’ll head for Cric and see what’s happening there. If he’s already arrived, of course – well, we’ll skin that goat when we get to it.’
The monks nodded agreement. ‘Just one thing,’ one of them asked. ‘Can you give us a few more details? I mean, all we really know about what’s involved is what you told the man back there; someone’s going to try and kill General Cronan, we’ve got to stop them—’
‘What?’ Monach looked up. ‘No, you’ve got that completely wrong. Didn’t anybody tell you?’
The monk looked puzzled. ‘We assumed—’
‘Don’t. Our orders are to kill General Cronan. Got that?’
There was a moment of complete silence. ‘Understood,’ the monk said. ‘Any other considerations?’
‘You aren’t monks, you don’t belong to the order, you’ve probably never even heard of the order. Try not to get captured or killed if you can avoid it. That’s it.’
‘Understood,’ the monk repeated, and it was as if his former impression, his misunderstanding of the object of the mission, had never existed. ‘We’ll need some money for the horses.’
Monach searched in his sleeve and took out a small cloth bag. ‘Twenty gross-quarters,’ he said. ‘While you’re at it – this is a long shot, so don’t waste too much time on it – see if you can lay your hands on at least one raider backsabre. You see them in markets sometimes. If you can get one, use it for the kill. A little confusion never hurt anybody.’ He looked at each of the monks in turn. ‘Does anybody have a problem with any of that?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ replied one of the monks, a newly ordained brother tutor. ‘It’s just that I can’t help wondering what all this has got to do with religion.’
Of course, Monach knew the answer to that, and recited it to himself several times as he drove the cart north towards Cric. In its simplest form:1. The order is the world’s most important centre for the preservation, study, teaching and development of doctrine; therefore –
2. The survival of the order is essential to religion; therefore –
3. Any steps taken to preserve, protect or strengthen the order are by definition beneficial to the order and acts of grace.
Simple. Even second-year novices could grasp the logic. As for ‘steps taken to preserve, protect or strengthen’, the only definition of the phrase that a brother tutor needed to know was ‘whatever a superior officer tells you to do’, the argument being that if the superior cleric was in error and the mission turns out not to qualify as an act of grace, the brother carrying out his instructions nevertheless enjoys as much grace and absolution as if the mission had been legitimate. Without a provision like that, the work of the order simply couldn’t get done; you’d have brothers and brother tutors and canons and possibly even novices questioning every instruction they were given, from kill the general down to it’s your turn to bale out the latrines on the grounds of imperfect doctrine and heresy. Religion in the empire would collapse inside a year.
In which case, why did his mind keep returning to the question, like a child picking at a scab?
It was the fault of these confoundedly slow carthorses, giving him too much leisure to worry away at things he shouldn’t even be thinking about. Religion, after all, was something quite specific and concrete as far as he was concerned. Religion was the ultimate grace expressed in the form of the perfect draw, in which there is no delay whatever between the infringement of the circle and the cut; the draw that is no draw, because it’s too fast to be perceived with the senses and therefore by any reasonable criteria doesn’t exist.
(So too with the gods; the gods are beings so perfect that they can’t be perceived with the senses and can therefore only exist inside the grace of impossible perfection; the eye can’t see everything at once, the ear can’t hear every voice s
imultaneously, the body can’t be everywhere at the same time; accordingly, the all-seeing, all-hearing, omnipresent must be divine, as invisibly real as the city just out of sight over the horizon, or land that can’t be seen from the crow’s nest; the faster the draw, the nearer to God, and to be impossibly close to God is to be God. Nothing could be more straightforward than that.)
Monach frowned. He’d made that speech to five years’ intakes of novices, and it had made sense even to them, implying that it had to be true. Now, though, it made him think about the god in the cart, what he’d heard from Allectus, and the two dead bodies in the wood. What is perfection, he asked himself, but the elimination of everything that isn’t the true essence, the fluxing off and purging away of all impurities from the meniscus of the molten metal (metal that’s lost its memory in the fire; the divine Poldarn, who doesn’t know he’s a god)? To become perfect, to become God, you must eliminate thought, fear, memory, anything and everything that lies between the sheathed and the unsheathed sword—
And instead, here he was out in the world, sitting in a cart behind four of the slowest horses in the empire, on his way to murder a general. Good question: what did all this have to do with religion? Except that instinctive, unthinking obedience is grace, just as much as the instinctive, unthinking draw. The hand doesn’t need to know why the enemy has violated the circle, or where the merits of the quarrel lie, and neither does the sword-monk. God draws us, and we cut.
One good thing about these speculations was that they kept his mind occupied all the way to Cric.
At first glance he didn’t recognise the place. For one thing it was full of soldiers. There were tents everywhere, and spear stacks and carts and shovels and pickaxes and mattocks leaning against the sides of half-finished trenches. There were portable forges for the farriers and cutlers and armourers; a stack of cordwood taller than any of the houses; rafts of posts, piles and rails from which the carpenters were building a corral for the horses; a big round tent that didn’t need a sign or board outside – the smell alone announced that it was the field kitchen. Above all there were men, each of them busy with some task or other. They made the place look like a city. A soldier came up and asked who he was and what he was doing there, but that was all right, because he’d prepared an identity. He told the soldier some name or other, ignored the rest of the question and asked if the general had arrived yet.
