by K. J. Parker
“Maerving and me.” The Archdeacon covered his mouth with his hand for a moment. “We’d need a really good forger,” he said.
“There’s someone I’ve heard of in the Vesani Republic,” Aimeric replied. “Works for the academics at the University. They’re always wanting ancient manuscripts forged, to prove some point or other. Her work’s got to be good, it has to get past the best scholars in the world. I believe she uses genuine old parchment, the right inks, everything.”
“I don’t know,” the Archdeacon said. “The thing is, we’re not a superstitious nation. You could pull something like that on the Sashan. I’m not sure how it’d go down here.”
“It was just a thought,” Aimeric replied.
“Leave it with me, let me talk to some of the others.” Only some, Aimeric noted. “I think it could work, but we’d have to go about it exactly right, or it could all end in disaster.”
The waiter was back again. Aimeric looked at him thoughtfully, then beckoned to him. “I know you,” he said.
“Sir.”
“Didn’t you use to work for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s right.” Aimeric nodded. “I remember the foreman pointing you out, said you were a hell of a good worker, turn your hand to anything.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“What’s your name?”
“Raffen, sir.”
“That’s right. What are you still doing here? I thought all you people had gone home.”
“Not all of us, sir.”
“Ah well. Good luck, anyway. Yes, I think I’ll have one of the cheesy ones, and is that salmon?”
“I couldn’t say, sir.”
The waiter started to withdraw. On an impulse, Aimeric waved him back. “Look,” he said, “if ever you’re after a job, come and see me. I’m sure we can find you something.”
“Thank you, sir.”
The Archdeacon nudged his elbow. “All right,” he said, “we’ll try it.” He took Aimeric’s arm and towed him, like a barge, further out into the room. “Maerving’ll be a bloody nuisance, as always, but I can deal with him later. Where’s that bastard Mezentine got to? We need those documents.”
Aimeric glanced across the room. The Mezentine wasn’t hard to find, the only brown face in the room; but before he could point him out to the Archdeacon, a bell sounded and Chancellor Maerving strode out into an open space just under the rose window at the far end. Everyone was looking. Maerving held up his hand and smiled, and the room fell silent.
“Friends and honoured guests.” He wasn’t shouting, but his voice was perfectly clear. They’d understood about acoustics back in Florian’s time. “I’ve just been handed a letter from the emperor, which I would like to read out to you.” He paused, to give everyone time to settle into a posture of serious attention. “He says; I am sorry that my illness prevents me from being with you tonight. I would have liked to thank many of you personally for the important parts you played in ending the war and preserving the empire and our way of life.”
(Aimeric leaned close to the Archdeacon. “Nicely put.”
“Thank you.”)
“The threat we faced,” Maerving went on, “was nothing less than total annihilation. For three hundred years, it has been the avowed intention of the Sashan to wipe us off the face of the earth. The Great King boasted that he would stand on Gratian’s Watchtower and review his troops marching through the Perfect Square. I can report that his prophesy came true, after a fashion. The few survivors of the Royal guard were paraded in the Square yesterday morning. The Great King’s head hung by its hair from the tower battlements. I think it was Saloninus who warned that prophesies tend to take on a life of their own.”
General laughter; during which Aimeric whispered; “Oh dear.”
“We may have to leave that bit out of the published version.”
“We didn’t start the war,” Maerving went on. “We did, however, finish it, once and for all. It has been a terrible ordeal. It is during such times, however, that we find out who we truly are. The ore goes into the fire, the dross burns away, the pure metal is left behind. We are left with the genius and devoted service of general Calojan, the courage and endurance of our citizens, the undiminished glory of the empire. By this dreadful and traumatic struggle, we have not only defeated the Sashan, we have also vanquished war itself. To the west, we see only loyal and steadfast friends. To the east, we see the former subjects of the Great King, freed from centuries of tyranny and oppression by our courage and sacrifice. Quite simply, there is no-one left to fight; no-one with any possible complaint against us, no-one strong enough to pose us a credible threat. To our glorious dead, and those who sadly but proudly mourn them, I say this. To have saved the empire is a marvellous thing. To have ended not just this war but war itself is a gift for which future generations will praise and honour you to the end of time. The night is over. A wonderful day waits for us. Humbly and gratefully, we accept that the world is ours. Thank you.”
“Good stuff,” Aimeric said, raising his voice over the general applause.
“Not all mine,” the archdeacon confessed. “But who reads Didactylus these days? Quick, the Mezentine’s getting away. Be a good fellow, run across and head him off at the door.”
When the reception was over, the gallery had been cleared, the trash and uneaten food carted away, the floor scrubbed and waxed and the borrowed furniture put back where it came from, the deputy chief steward of the bedchamber sent a clerk and two kettlehats down to the back courtyard behind the stables, where the casual staff hired for the occasion had been rounded up and told to wait. They filed past a folding table, and each one was given a little twist of cloth holding fifty-five trachy, to include a five trachy bonus because everything went so well. “Don’t spend it all at once,” the clerk joked. Then the workers were herded out through the service gate, which was locked and bolted behind them.
Raffen sat down on the steps of the Recovery temple, unwrapped the cloth and spread the coins around on the palm of his hand. The sun was just rising. Yesterday afternoon, before reporting for work, he’d given her all the money he had left; four hundred trachy. You’re sure you don’t want to come with us, she’d said. He’d shaken his head. Then she walked away.
He looked up at the red edges of the clouds. All in all, he didn’t think he liked the City very much. At first he’d assumed it was just the noise, the confined spaces, the quite ridiculous number of people, jammed together for no obvious purpose—and the smell, let’s not forget that. But he hadn’t been aware of the smell for a month, just as he no longer noticed the stares and scowls of the people. It was the flooding that had done it, he decided. Such a very strange thing to do; drive the poorest and weakest people out of their homes for the sake of one day of pointless waste and killing. He reminded himself that something like that had happened to the other one, in another place, but it wasn’t quite the same. The city doesn’t like me, he thought, it’s as simple as that.
The great lord, the tall, broad-shouldered young man who owned the weapons factory, had offered him a job. Well, then. One good thing to be said about this place, it positively bristled with opportunities. Back home, outside of harvest and haymaking, a man could spend a month going from door to door before he found work, assuming he didn’t die of shame first.
Back home; no such place. He tumbled the coins back into the cloth and screwed it up tight. He still wasn’t entirely sure what thirty-five trachy meant. A man with a hammer and two feet of copper wire could make himself a sackful of the things, and nobody ever looked closely at them. Yes, but in the time it’d take, you could earn yourself a sackful of the real thing; and it’d still only buy you a loaf of bread and a beer.
He stood up. Nobody much about at this time of day. He walked towards the fountain, to drink and wash his face. He hadn’t gone ten yards when something hit him between the shoulder-blades, and he fell forward.
Not something, someone. Ther
e was a man, no, two men. At first he assumed they’d seen him go down and had come to help. Then one of them kicked him in the ribs. Luckily he wasn’t very good at it, and nothing broke. The other one had got hold of his right hand and was trying to prise it open. Suddenly it dawned on Raffen that they were thieves, trying to steal his fifty-five stupid trachy.
He opened his right hand wide. The thief snatched the scrap of cloth; he and his comrade-in-arms backed away. They looked terrified, Raffen realised, but he couldn’t help that. He gave them long measure, then sprang to his feet and took a long stride left, so that the left-hand man effectively shielded him from anything the right-hand man might choose to do. A fist swished through empty air a good six inches from his face as he stamped on the left-hand man’s knee. Then, as the man went down, he leaned over him, easily avoided an attempt to deflect his arm, stuck his thumb in the right-hand man’s throat (the hollow above where the collar-bones meet) clamped his fingers on the nape of his neck and closed his hand as hard as he could. He felt something squash and give way, so he took two short steps backwards, putting him in good position as the first thief started to get up. He kicked him very hard on the point of the chin, rocking his head back and snapping his neck.
Idiots, he thought.
He looked at them properly for the first time. One of them, the one who’d grabbed the coins, was a boy, fifteen or sixteen, short and skinny. The other was sixty-five to seventy, bald, tall; the skin had been loose around his neck, in flaps. The boy had dropped the money. He moved off to one side, just in case the boy was only shamming dead, and picked it up. No, not shamming. Presumably they’d seen him looking at the coins just now. In which case, surely, they’d have known he only had copper money, trash. Idiots.
I’m not a thief, he remembered someone saying. There are depths to which one does not stoop, no matter what. Back in the place the other one called home, you could make your peace with the family of someone you’d killed with a certain weight of silver (and you paid promptly and without haggling, regardless of whether you or the dead man was to blame) but thieves were slaughtered out of hand, immediately and with the minimum of fuss. It occurred to him to wonder if they did things differently here.
Just in case they did, he walked quickly away, down an alley, right at one intersection, left at another. He had no idea where he was, but he had a knack of finding his way again in these mazes; he guessed it came from living in the woods. He slowed down and turned himself into an aimless night-time stroller; plenty of those, in a place where you had to pay someone money in order to lie down and sleep.
All a question of value, he told himself. Nine ounces of silver is worth a farm worker, unmarried, under the age of twenty-one. A palmful of copper foil scraps is worth one day’s labour. Fifty-five copper foil scraps is worth dying for. Thieves are worthless. The use of eighteen inches of a wooden shelf in a tavern outbuilding for one night is worth the same as half a day’s unskilled labour in the arms factory or three quarts of really bad wine. Civilisation is worth the lives of a quarter of a million men, the homes of immigrant workers are worth fifty-two trachy a day but nothing as against one day’s worth of public spectacle. Seventy-six loaves of bread equal one cart horse, three days of a working man’s life are equivalent to a pair of shoes, three pairs of shoes make up a carpenter’s plane. Who decided all this, for crying out loud?
He’d heard someone say that if you didn’t have anywhere to sleep, there was a window round the back of the Golden Spire temple that didn’t close properly. The Golden Spire was in Oldgate, which was three-quarters of the way up the steep hill—easy to find your way around the city if you simply pretended the buildings weren’t there and thought of it as open country. He formed a mental picture and started to walk.
For once, something he’d overheard turned out to be perfectly true. He opened the window, climbed through and groped around in the dark until he found something that felt like a table, with a cloth over it. He lay down on the table, pulled the cloth over him up to his chin, and went straight to sleep.
The daylight woke him, flooding through an impossibly tall window made up of hundreds of little panes of coloured glass; he was lying in a pool of colour, his hands stained red, green and yellow, even a tiny splash of blue. He’d never been inside a temple before so he didn’t know what any of it meant, but every square inch of the cloth he’d been lying under was stiff with embroidery, gold and silver wire. He squirmed out from under it, before anyone caught him, and looked round anxiously. Nobody home. There were other, smaller tables grouped all round the one he’d been sleeping on, and they were covered in great big jugs, plates and bowls, gold and silver. Probably a good idea to get out of there quickly, before someone mistook him for a thief. He gazed round, but had no idea which way he’d come in by; there were doors everywhere in this enormous space, but (as far as he knew) only one defective window to get out through.
It wasn’t a good situation to be in. He tried half a dozen doors at random. Two of them led into small, narrow rooms with desks and stools and ledgers and inkwells. One of them was crammed with racks of the most extraordinary clothes. One of them was a latrine, and not a very good one. The other two were store-rooms, lined with shelves crowded with even more silver and gold tableware. None of them had any windows at all.
He was in the second treasury room when he heard voices, somewhere in the vast main hall. He froze. This wasn’t a good place to be found in. Voices, however, implied that someone had come in from outside, which in turn implied an open door leading to the real world. Very carefully he opened the door two fingers’ breadth and peered through the crack.
Five men. Immediately and instinctively he assessed them for their tactical value; four of them were old, fat or both, but the fifth looked big and strong. Then he looked again. The big, strong man was the owner of the arms factory, who’d offered him a job a few hours earlier. One of the other four was the man he’d been talking to.
He winced. Simply rushing past them, knocking them down if necessary, was no longer an option. The factory owner had recognised him at the reception, and therefore might well recognise him again, as the man who’d assaulted him while escaping from the temple he’d been discovered burgling. That meant he should stay put, but he didn’t like that idea at all; in here, with all this ridiculous gold and silver. He considered it, as best he could in the faint gleam of light that crept in through the thin slice between door and frame. Nothing to hide under, or behind. If they took it into their heads to come in here, he’d just have to bash them, run and take his chances. He knelt down, his eye to the door, and tried to breathe as quietly as possible.
Aimeric’s head was hurting. That was hardly fair; he’d made a point of not drinking at the reception. By contrast, the archdeacon, who’d displayed no such restraint, was being loud, cheerful and energetic. A morning person, evidently. Aimeric tried very hard to forgive him for that.
“Thank you for coming along at this appallingly early hour,” the archdeacon was saying. “I thought it’d be wise for us to get together before anyone’s up and about to see us.”
“We’re not minuting this, then,” asked the City Prefect.
“Good heavens, no. And perhaps it’d be as well if we don’t mention this meeting to those of our colleagues who aren’t here. This is a rather delicate matter.”
“I see,” growled Commissioner Astigern. “You’re up to something.”
“But in a good cause.” From inside his coat the archdeacon produced a short brass tube, so thick that his fingers didn’t quite meet round it. “As I said in my somewhat cryptic message, we’ve been handed a problem that’s also an opportunity, courtesy of the Mezentine charge d’affaires.”
“Ah, right,” said the Prefect. “That idiotic prophesy.”
The archdeacon smiled at him. “Scripture says, blessed are those that have not seen and yet have believed. This is more a case of those who have seen and yet have believed, if you get my drift.”
“Have you read it?” demanded the Commissioner.
“No,” the archdeacon replied, “and that’s why I’ve asked my friend and colleague suffragan Edgelath to join us.” The short, gloomy man gave them all a worried smile. “He’s kindly agreed to translate for us.”
The Prefect lifted his head. “Translate what?”
“Ah.” The archdeacon tapped one end of the tube. At the other end, the stub of a thick roll of parchment peeped out of the brass. The archdeacon tweezered it out with his fingernails, laid it down on the Middle Station altar and smoothed out eight inches or so at the top of the roll. The Prefect leaned across to look at it, then turned to the archdeacon and scowled. “It’s in bloody Mezentine,” he said.
“Precisely. It’s a Mezentine translation of the original. I’ve shown it to another colleague of mine, and he confirms that the type of parchment, the style of the handwriting and the types of ink and paint used are consistent with it being Mezentine, probably two and a half to three hundred years old. Isn’t that right, Edgelath?” The worried man gave a worried nod. “In particular, I’d invite you to look at this capital here. The inside curve is picked out in Mezentine blue. As I’m sure you know, that’s made by grinding up a semi-precious stone only found on the volcanic island of Scona, a Mezentine protectorate. Ever since its use was discovered six hundred years ago, the Mezentines have had an absolute monopoly of Mezentine blue; its export is forbidden on pain of death, so any document whose illuminations contain it must almost certainly have been written in Mezentia.”
“Agreed,” said the Prefect. “The question is, when?”
The worried man cleared his throat. “If you’d care to look at the gilding of this marginal decoration.” They craned their necks to see. “The Mezentines apply gold leaf in an oil base containing sal draconis. It’s an excellent fixative, but it does take a very long time to stabilise, anything between fifteen and sixty years. Until it’s stable, it remains very slightly tacky. The recognised test is to sprinkle a little very fine oilstone dust.” He had a little silver bottle in his hand; he drew out the cork stopper and twitched his hand over the parchment, then put his head down and blew. “You’ll see that all the dust’s gone. If the oil hadn’t stabilised, a few grains would’ve stuck to it. Therefore, the manuscript is at least fifteen years old.”
