Shadow (Scavenger Trilogy Book 1)

by K. J. Parker

  Awkward, Poldarn thought, but he had the presence of mind to appear pleased and grateful. He did it very well, and that seemed to disconcert the monks. No bad thing, needless to say.

  ‘Talking of which,’ he asked as a diversion, or the equivalent of a rest in music, ‘how is the war going? Has anything much been happening?’

  The abbot smiled. ‘That’s a very good question,’ he said. ‘If you mean battles and sieges and the like, then no, not much. It’s what’s not been happening that’s so confusing.’

  It wasn’t just the abbot who talked like that, of course. These monks all seemed to have the annoying habit of being gratuitously cryptic. He wondered what it was like in the dining-hall, when the grand prior wanted to ask the dean of the archives to pass the horseradish.

  (You graduated with honours from the Academy of Arts and War at nineteen, the voice had said, the youngest officer ever to join the service. Your first command was a platoon of pioneers attached to a frontier station on the Morevich border – no accident that you were given such a miserable assignment, you’d made enemies as well as friends at the Academy. That was the year the raiders sacked Malevolinza; with the main provincial garrison wiped out to a man, your station was the only Imperial resource left between the mountains and the sea. The Morevich rebels and the mountain tribesmen saw their chance; a dawn attack came within a hair’s breadth of forcing the gates. They were beaten back, but all the station’s command staff were killed in the first hour, leaving you in charge of a desperate, impossible defence—)

  ‘When do you think I should leave?’ he asked. ‘From what you’ve just told me, it’d better be sooner than later, surely.’

  The abbot dipped his head in agreement. ‘Quite right,’ he said. ‘There are a few things we’ll need to sort out in due course, and when you get back we’ll have to give you a quick refresher course on being a sword-monk, and a good bit of additional background material on Brother Stellico, to make up for what you can’t remember yet. But there really isn’t time for any of that now.’

  What if they were telling the truth, and the voice in the night had been lying?

  He let the thought sit quiet for a moment, afraid of waking it up. ‘What about my—’ Involuntary hesitation; couldn’t think of the right word. ‘Wife’ wasn’t true; ‘friend’ was fatuously coy. ‘What about my business partner?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t seen her since this morning.’

  The abbot frowned. ‘Oh, she’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘it’ll be awkward for her, losing her associate so suddenly, but we’ll see to it she’s not out of pocket.’

  That was the first time that it occurred to Poldarn that there wouldn’t be a place for Copis in this new old life of his. Was he still married? He didn’t know; oh, he knew all manner of things about himself just from having overheard them in inns and bakers’ shops, besides what the voice had told him, but the things he wanted to know weren’t the sort of thing that anybody else could possibly know.

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘So what’ll you do? Let her go back to Sansory?’

  The abbot nodded. ‘If you like, we can provide her with an escort,’ he said. ‘Probably just as well, if she’s carrying a large sum of money and with the roads as they are.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that,’ Poldarn said, wondering if he’d just made a serious mistake. They couldn’t help but have heard the note of concern in his voice, the one that proclaimed, I care about this person, who would therefore make an ideal hostage, loud enough that they’d probably heard it in Boc. If he’d kept quiet and not mentioned her, perhaps they’d have forgotten about her and left her alone – no, precious little chance of that. He had an idea that the order made a virtue of scrupulous attention to detail. Still, going on about her now would only make things worse, and it wasn’t as if he was in any position to do anything constructive for her.

  (Your first marriage, to Bolceanar Hutto, was purely a political affair, and ended in divorce once you achieved your first prefecture, to the great satisfaction of all parties. When you were twenty-six, however, and just about to leave Torcea to assume command of the expedition against the Fodrati, you made the drastic mistake of marrying for love. Sornith Eollo was the daughter of a prosperous building contractor rather heavily involved in bidding for military contracts – not to put too fine a point on it, for a master tactician you were either blind or deliberately obtuse. It didn’t help that your feud with the young princes was just starting to become a major annoyance – it was the year of your infamous duel with Tazencius, which led to his disgrace and earned you the undying hatred of the entire Revisionist faction—)

  ‘Well,’ the abbot said, ‘I think that’s more or less everything. Welcome back to the order, Brother Stellicho, and the best of luck for your mission.’

  That signified the end of the interview; he could feel them turning over his page and moving on to the next item of business. He allowed himself to be politely shooed out of the room by the four sword-monks who hadn’t left his side since early that morning, and went with them across the yard, through a couple of arches, past the stables and the coach-house—

  He didn’t stop, because he didn’t need to. When a man’s been jolting and rattling along muddy, rutted roads in a cart for any length of time, he gets to the point where he can recognise that cart by the thickness of its tyres or the degree of warp in the side panels. Definitely his cart, their cart, but it was backed in and surrounded by a dozen others in the coach-house, suggesting it had been subsumed into the transport pool, to be booked out and assigned to the duty carter next time a load of charcoal needed to be fetched or two dozen crates of chickens brought up from the market.

  Attention to detail, just as he’d guessed. Easy enough to reconstruct what had happened. A monk would have come back from the lower town that morning and sent for a carter, explaining that there was a cart down at the inn, and that its owners wouldn’t be needing it any more; if it stayed there, the innkeeper might get to wondering what had become of the man and woman who’d brought it in – he wouldn’t say anything out loud, of course, but loose ends like that are bad for morale. So the monk would have given the carter some kind of warrant or letter of authority, and the carter would have given it to the innkeeper, and the innkeeper would have told his groom to get the cart ready, and the carter would have turned it over to the transport officer or the duty officer, who would have told him to put it away with the others (waste not, want not; men and women die every day, but a functional cart is valuable property), and the cart itself would henceforth serve the order, purged of its identity and memory, because a piece of equipment is there to serve and be used by whoever has a right to it.

  ‘Just a moment,’ he said, slowing down without stopping. ‘I left some things in my cart last night. Would it be all right if we stopped off at the inn and picked them up?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ one of the monks replied. ‘We’ll arrange for all your stuff to be collected and kept for you till you get back. If there’s anything you need, we can stop by the quartermaster’s.’

  They were in perfect position, two in front and two behind, just outside his circle. If they’d been closer or there had only been three of them, he’d have given it a try. But the order wouldn’t make a mistake like that. Poldarn shrugged. ‘No, the hell with it,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t anything important.’

  ‘There’ll be a horse waiting for you at the gate,’ the monk continued. ‘You’ll have three days’ rations, money for expenses in the saddlebag, change of clothes, blanket, water bottle, all the usual kit. Is there anything else you might need, do you think?’

  Poldarn didn’t smile, though he felt moved to do so. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s my book. Normally I wouldn’t go anywhere without it, but just this once won’t hurt.’

  The monk was curious. ‘Book?’

  Poldarn nodded. ‘Marvellous thing,’ he said, ‘contains all the wisdom in the world. Still, I won’t b
e needing it for this job, I don’t suppose.’

  ‘All the wisdom in the world,’ the monk repeated. ‘Must be a big book, then.’

  ‘Quite big,’ Poldarn replied. ‘Not as big as the recipe book, but it makes a good pillow.’

  The cavalry escort was waiting for him: fifty sword-monks, in dark brown and grey coats drawn from the quartermaster’s bin marked ‘Riding Coat, Civilian, Nondescript’. Would they be wearing armour under them, he wondered, or didn’t sword-monks feel the need of steel rings and scales when they had their invisible circle of sharp steel around them at all times? If getting away from four monks on foot was beyond him, escaping from fifty of them on fast horses wasn’t going to be any easier. Falx Roisin would have been delighted to give any one of them a job riding dangerous cargo.

  On an impulse he turned to the monk he’d already talked to and asked him, ‘What do you know about a god called Poldarn?’

  The monk hesitated for a moment, then grinned. ‘Bit late to be asking that now, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Besides, it should be me asking you, shouldn’t it?’

  Poldarn shrugged. ‘Well, you know,’ he said. ‘I always like to know who I’ve been.’

  ‘You were pretty good at it, by all accounts,’ the monk replied. ‘But really, she should’ve known better, or else she didn’t know. Talk about tempting providence.’

  ‘I don’t quite follow,’ Poldarn said quietly.

  ‘Oh, no, of course,’ the monk said. ‘I forgot, sorry. The thing about Poldarn is, you see, that anybody who gets up in the cart with him always dies.’ He made a vague gesture with his right hand. ‘You could just about come up with a worse omen, but it’d take some fairly serious research. Still, there you are.’

  ‘Quite,’ Poldarn replied. The monk had moved very slightly out of position, no more than a single step, but enough. He could see the sequence perfectly clearly in his mind’s eye, as if he was remembering something that had already happened. From the draw, he cut the side of this monk’s neck and carried on, so that the curved tip sliced into the soft skin under the second monk’s chin as he stepped away and left. By this time the two monks behind him had drawn and were one step of the right foot forward, which was why his turn pivoted around his left heel, bringing the overhead diagonal slash perfectly in line with the left-side monk’s right wrist; then the clever move, dodging left to keep the wounded man between himself and the fourth opponent, just long enough for a feinted lunge to make him shy backwards into a right-side rising cut to the chin; the wounded man, dealt with at his leisure, completed the pile of bodies, all four dead before the first hit the ground. And Father Tutor, looking on with grudging approval—

  ‘Is something the matter?’ the monk asked him.

  Poldarn looked up sharply. Last time he’d looked, the monk had been toppling over backwards with the white of his spine showing through the red lips of the cut. Then he remembered: that hadn’t actually happened, or not yet. On the other side of the yard, three birds pitched on the ridge of a roof. He looked again, and saw that they were pigeons.

  ‘This may sound like a silly question,’ Poldarn asked slowly, ‘but do we know each other?’

  The monk actually smiled. ‘You’re remembering, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Go on, see if you can . . .’

  ‘No,’ Poldarn snapped. ‘You tell me.’

  ‘All right.’ The monk was still smiling. Three of them were now out of position, as good as dead; in another part of his mind he could see a fine mist of a few drops of their blood, hanging for a tiny moment in the air. ‘My name’s Torcuat. Ring any bells?’

  Poldarn shook his head. ‘Names don’t mean anything to me. Tell me how long we’ve known each other.’

  ‘Since sixth grade, actually,’ Torcuat replied. ‘At least, we were in the same class, but so were a hundred other kids. You were always the high flyer, of course; four months in sixth grade and then straight on to seventh. I was stuck in sixth for another two years, and by then you were a junior proctor. Then you were my—’

  ‘Tutor in swordsmanship for six months,’ Poldarn said. ‘You were clumsy. In fact you were worse than clumsy, you were a menace to yourself and others. You even dropped your sword once, I wanted to have you thrown out of the school—’

  The monk grinned, and pulled up the left leg of his trousers to show his ankle. ‘There,’ he said, ‘see it?’

  Poldarn saw it very clearly indeed: a crescent-shaped pink scar, just above the bone. He could remember the same mark when it was gushing blood; how he’d almost panicked, for just a moment convinced himself that one of his students was going to bleed to death right there in the schools, and that’d be the end of his teaching career. He looked up at Torcuat’s face.

  ‘I remember you,’ he said. ‘You used to keep—’

  He couldn’t say the words.

  ‘A crow in a cage,’ Torcuat said. ‘Horrible, mangy old thing, and it wouldn’t eat table scraps – just my luck, a gourmet crow; I had to go scrabbling about in the cellars hunting mice for the useless bloody creature, and even then it wouldn’t touch them till they were three days old.’

  Poldarn took a step back and to the side, putting all four monks back into position, like a king granting a reprieve to condemned men already standing on the gallows drop. ‘It had a gold ring round its neck,’ he said.

  Torcuat laughed. ‘Brass, actually,’ he said. ‘It was a curtain ring, from the big hall at home. About the only thing I ever had to remember home by, actually; I left when I was six. It was you held that damned crow still while I shoved that ring down over its head—’

  ‘Poldarn. It was supposed to be Poldarn’s crow.’

  Torcuat was beaming now. ‘You do remember,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s right. We had that southern kid in the dormitory with us, we wanted to scare him out of his wits because he believed in Poldarn, and seeing the crow . . . You know, I’d forgotten that myself till you reminded me.’

  Poldarn took a step forward and left. ‘The woman I came with,’ he said. ‘What’s happened to her?’

  The abrupt change of subject seemed to take Torcuat a little by surprise. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, fluently enough. ‘I guess she’ll be going back to Sansory, unless she feels like staying here for a while. Weren’t you two doing a good trade down in the town? Maybe she’ll be hanging on for a day or so, carrying on the good work.’

  That would, perhaps, explain the cart. ‘I think I’d like to go back for my book now,’ Poldarn said.

  Torcuat shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he replied, ‘but we’ve kept the escort hanging about long enough as it is, standing around chatting like this. Under the circumstances, of course—’ His eyes lit up. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘What if I were to change places with the escort sergeant? Then we could carry on talking about old times, and you—’

  He didn’t draw. Instead, he swung his fist, smacking Torcuat so hard on the point of the chin that the monk dropped immediately, like a sheaf thrown out of a hayloft. For a moment the other three hesitated, unable to cope with an assailant who hadn’t drawn and therefore couldn’t be restrained with deadly force. The moment was long enough for Poldarn to take four quick, short steps backwards, clearing their circles.

  ‘What the hell do you . . . ?’ one of them shouted, and the captain of the escort lifted his head and stared. By then, though, Poldarn was standing beside the horse so thoughtfully provided for him (but there would always be a horse standing by when he needed one, and a sword ready to his hand when he felt the inclination to spill blood). He mounted awkwardly, his foot slipping out of the stirrup at his first attempt, but he still had time in hand when he grabbed the reins and pulled the horse’s head round, facing it away from the gate and towards the inner yards. Tactically it was a mistake – not running to any place in particular, just running away – but just for once, when he wanted choices there weren’t any.

  As he passed under the gate arch, a monk with a staff stepped out of the shadows about twelve yards in front of
him. He pitied the poor fool as he reached for his sword, but the monk took a step forward, turned sideways and threw the staff at him like a javelin. The squared-off point hit him in the middle of his chest; he felt his feet drop out of the stirrups, then all he saw was dancing sky, until something very broad and fast-moving slammed into his back.

  The monk put a boot across his throat before he could move. Neither of them said anything.

  ‘Well done.’ He couldn’t look round, of course, but he recognised Torcuat’s voice. ‘Is he damaged?’

  The monk shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t be,’ he said.

  ‘That’s all right then. Bastard nearly broke my jaw,’ Torcuat went on, his voice suggesting that he found it hard to understand how anyone could bring himself to resort to violence. Someone stooped down and relieved Poldarn of his sword. So this is what losing feels like, he said to himself. Actually, it’s even worse than I’d imagined.

  They lifted him up, and two monks held his hands behind his back while a third tied his wrists together with thin, sharp cord. ‘What was all that about, anyway?’ Torcuat asked. ‘One moment we were talking about the Poldarn legend, the next you were trying to ram my teeth down my throat. Was it something I said?’

  They turned him through ninety degrees so that he was facing the main gate. Of course, the fifty horsemen, his cavalry escort, had been watching the whole time. Most of them hadn’t moved. He wondered what they were making of all this.

  ‘I told you,’ he replied. ‘I want to go back for my book.’

  ‘What? Oh, there really is a book, then. I thought you were joking.’ Torcuat rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Why didn’t you just say so?’

  ‘I did. You didn’t seem to be listening.’

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake.’ Torcuat shrugged, then turned to one of his colleagues. ‘Be a good man, run up to the provost’s office, get him to open up our friend’s locker and find this book of his.’ He looked back at Poldarn. ‘You haven’t got more than one book, have you? I wouldn’t want him fetching the wrong one.’