by K. J. Parker
A short, bearded man was fiddling about with a tinderbox, trying to light one of the impromptu briar pyres. He gave up and handed the box to the huge, red-headed young man who’d been watching him struggle; a moment later there was a curl of smoke, then crackles and a spurt of flame. She noticed that Musen was looking very hard at the giant fire-raiser. “Know him?” she said.
“I think so.”
“That figures. They’re Lodge, aren’t they?”
Musen shrugged. “Well, he is if he’s who I think he is. Don’t know about the rest of them.”
The short man was heading towards them. At twenty-five yards she recognised him, though the name temporarily escaped her. But she’d seen him once, at a mission briefing.
“Sorry about this,” the man said, and his voice was familiar. “Now you’re Musen, and I’m guessing you must be Telamon. Sorry, I don’t know your friend.”
Musen did the little head shake that meant Not-Lodge. The short man turned to Bidens and gave him a pleasant smile. “Perhaps you’d like to go over there and join the others.”
By which he meant the men-at-arms. He didn’t like the sound of that; but the tall, red-headed man was now standing behind the short man; she couldn’t see his face, but Bidens could. He slumped and walked away.
“I think we’ve met,” the short man said.
Her memory stirred. “Myrtus.”
“Commissioner Myrtus,” he said. “I remember now, you did that job for us at Beloisa.” Then he turned to Musen. “You I’ve heard a lot about.”
Musen looked past him. “Hello, Teucer.”
The red-headed man didn’t answer. “Axio’s looking forward to seeing you again,” Myrtus said, and she realised he was talking to Musen. “I don’t know, is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“He’s my friend,” Musen replied, and she thought, that’s not an answer to his question. But that was none of her business. “Is Commissioner Axio near here?” she interrupted, raising her voice a little. “I need to see him.”
She’d reminded Myrtus of her existence. “Official business?”
“Very much so.”
“In that case, yes. Tell you what,” he went on, “we’ll use that fancy carriage of yours. Mind driving?”
That was apparently addressed to Teucer, the red-headed man. He nodded, his eyes still on Musen. Tact, she thought; if he’s driving, he doesn’t have to share space with Musen. Still none of her business. “Excuse me,” she said, “but weren’t you—?”
Myrtus grinned bleakly. “No need to rush,” he said, “but we might as well get on.”
Myrtus: appointed commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the Lodge, when they made their unilateral declaration of war against the two empires. Not heard of since; hardly surprising, since the Lodge’s army had melted away and Mere Barton had been evacuated without an arrow being loosed, because, of course, the war had turned out to be a very different kind of war. She wondered if they’d told him in advance and decided, probably not.
“The Lodge doesn’t hold with slavery in any shape or form,” he said, as the coach started to move. “Therefore, we intercept slave caravans wherever we can and set the slaves free.”
“In the middle of an uninhabited moor.”
Wry smile. “No, of course not, that’d be next best thing to murder. No, they’re coming back with us to Engoi, as soon as we’ve got the shackles off. We need them to do a little job for us, and then they’ll be free to go. Home, or wherever they like.”
“A little job.”
“You’ll see when we get there.”
He found talking to her boring and mildly irritating; he wanted to talk to Musen, but Musen didn’t seem to want to talk. Not that it mattered. The object of the exercise was to find Axio and give him the little box. After that – well, presumably there would be a return journey, but she hadn’t given it much thought. She’d be going back to Blemya – would she? No reason why she should, as far as anyone else was concerned, and quite possibly the Lodge, as represented by two Commissioners in one obscure moorland village, had some other use for her. Under normal circumstances she’d be resigned to that. She wondered what the bad blood was between Musen and the other Rhus – Teucer, though she’d have forgotten his name by this time tomorrow. If she knew Musen, she wouldn’t want to be the other man; except that he seemed to be in high favour with Commissioner Myrtus, loyal sergeant and right-hand-man, and Musen, whatever his faults, seemed to have a healthy respect for the Lodge’s chain of command. But if Teucer owned any small, portable items of value, he’d probably do well to keep them well hidden. And undoubtedly he knew that already, if he knew Musen. Still none of her business, but you can’t help being just a tiny bit curious.
You can’t tell from maps, but the picture of Engoi she’d formed in her mind was a single street, maybe a couple of dozen buildings, a single-storey thatched Brother’s house, possibly a village tower, for the villagers to huddle in during cattle raids. She hadn’t expected—
“That’s why we need carpenters,” Myrtus said. “And stonemasons – you had ten of them with you, didn’t you know that? And you can never have too many smiths on a major construction project.”
A fortress; or at least it would be one very soon, once they’d dug the spur from the river to flood the moat and capped off the walls with crenellated battlements. “People look down on mud brick for defensive architecture,” Myrtus said, “but actually it’s got a lot going for it, provided you think massive. We’re using stone for the gatehouse and the guard towers, naturally, but brick makes a damn good wall, soaks up a hell of a pounding. More give in it, you see, it crumbles rather than shatters.”
No shortage of raw material; they’d dug a huge ditch, made bricks out of the spoil and a moat out of the trench. “It’s a lousy position compared to Mere Barton, but so what? Who needs Nature when you’ve got manpower?”
And they had that all right. Slaves, naturally; but freed slaves, from both empires, doing one little job for the Lodge and then they were free to go. Myrtus wasn’t entirely sure how they were being fed (Axio was looking after supply) but he had an idea they were bringing stuff in down the river on barges, from stockpiles the empires had built up (without knowing it) shortly before all the supply clerks defected … “No,” Myrtus said irritably, when she plucked up the courage to ask him straight. “No, I didn’t. It was need-to-know, and they felt that if they told me, it’d cloud my judgement. So what? It’s all working out fine, isn’t it? And you’ve got no idea how relieved I was when they finally let me in on the secret. I was fully resigned to getting slaughtered.”
“You’re a Commissioner.”
Exasperated sigh. “Meaning nothing, as you well know. Commissioner means you get given five times as much work, that’s all.”
She’d been watching. Musen and the red-headed man, Teucer, hadn’t exchanged a single word since they’d got here. Teucer, apparently, was the best shot in the Lodge and both empires, but instead of training recruits at Beal he was here, running errands for the Commissioner. Apparently, if the Great Smith wanted to use a pair of tongs to drive in a nail, nobody was prepared to argue.
“Axio’s probably on site somewhere, shouting at the foremen,” Myrtus said. “He’s good at that. They’re all scared stiff of him, for some reason.”
The one thing she had left to do, and then the rest of the day was her own – would the end of the world be marked by a big, showy red sunset? Hard to say. Of course, someone might still have work for her. I want to go back to Blemya, she realised, and the sudden insight left her feeling giddy and stupid, like a blow to the head.
You’ll know him when you see him, Corason had told her: just look for the most handsome man in the world. Yeah, right, she’d thought; but, yes, actually, he was. She first saw him standing on a low stone wall, haranguing – no other word for it – a bunch of timid looking men in stonemasons’ aprons. She was too far away to hear what he was saying, but she didn’t need to. He finish
ed his remarks and the masons walked away quickly. He stayed on the wall, peering at a plan or diagram; he held it at arm’s length. Long-sighted, she diagnosed. He could do with one of those magic glasses the Mezentines used to make; you screw them into your eye and suddenly you’ve got close vision like a twelve-year-old.
She cleared her throat. He looked up and saw her. “You’re Telamon,” he said.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Exactly why he was so good-looking she couldn’t say. She’d read a book about that once. Apparently, someone had studied the subject in detail and with proper scientific rigour, and had concluded that the difference between butt-ugly and drop-dead gorgeous was a hair’s breadth short of a quarter of an inch. Well, then; move his nose up a bit and widen his mouth just a touch and round his chin off just a smidgeon and you’d have Oida.
“Sure,” he said, jumping down off the wall. “This way.”
He led her to a lean-to shack full of barrels. “Well?”
Her fingertips found the lid of the box. She took it out, put it on top of a barrel and opened the lid. He frowned. “A box of salt,” he said. “What about it?”
Her skin crawled as she brushed away the surface layer, but as soon as he saw the finger his eyes lit up. Then he looked at her. She said nothing. He emptied the box out, picked the finger up delicately, as if he was afraid it might break if he dropped it, and held it up to the light. Then he smiled the most beautiful smile.
“You did this?”
“Yes.”
“Good girl.” He put it down, fished about in his coat pocket and produced – guess what, a Mezentine glass; rather a good one, in a plain gold setting. “That’s him all right,” he said. “How did you know about it?”
Good question. “The scar? Oh, he told me.”
Big grin. “Of course, you knew him quite well, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“The one that kept getting away. I can see how that would’ve driven him wild. Did he tell you how he got it?”
“He said you had something to do with it.”
He laughed, then tucked the finger behind his ear, like a carpenter’s stick of chalk. “You know what,” he said, “this is probably the happiest day of my life. Allow me to buy you a drink. And a big house in town and a country estate. Unless you’d prefer a gold mine. Or both.”
Remember who you are, she told herself. Remember who your file says you are. “I’d rather have cash,” she said.
“Sure. How much?”
“How much have you got?”
The smile became a beam. The sun was never that bright. “Not nearly enough,” he said. “I can give you a hundred angels in your hand, but that could only be a token down-payment.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “Can I have it now, please?”
“Of course. Stay there. No, come with me, I don’t want you wandering off. This way.”
He walked quickly, with a bounce in his step. People got out of his way, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I gather you brought my friend Musen with you,” he said. “Was he any trouble?”
“No.”
“Splendid. He can be a bit of a nuisance if you don’t know how to handle him.”
A plain oilskin tent. He dived in and came out again with a cloth bag the size of a spring cabbage, but significantly heavier. “Thanks,” she said. “Do you want the box?”
He thought for a moment. “Might as well,” he said, “to be going on with. When I’ve got five minutes, I’ll have them make me one of those, what’s the word, what you keep saints’ bones in.”
“Reliquary?”
“That’s it, reliquary. I saw just the sort of thing once, it was a fair-sized box carved out of a lump of coal. Working hinges and everything. Of course, traditionally it ought to be a drinking cup made from his skull. Or I read in a book somewhere about someone who made a bow out of the bones and sinews of his enemy, which I’m not sure is actually possible, but it’d be great to hang on the wall.”
She gave him a bleak smile. “Wasn’t it a chair?”
“Different book.” Suddenly he liked her; shared taste in literature, presumably. “A chair would do fine, actually, though you couldn’t rely on it. A footstool would be better. You could always rely on my brother to fold up in a heap whenever the pressure was on.”
She held out her hand. He’d forgotten about the money. “Sorry,” he said, and gave her the bag. She needed both hands. “Don’t wave it about,” he said, “properly speaking, it’s six weeks’ wages for the masons, but let’s not worry too much about that. Shame you didn’t come a week earlier, before I paid the brickmakers.”
“Give me the reading glass,” she said suddenly, without knowing quite why.
His hand went straight to his pocket. “There you go,” he said, and held it out to her. She put the bag down on the ground, took the glass, slipped it into her sleeve and picked the bag up again. “Don’t you need it?” she asked.
“Yes, actually, but what the hell. I can get another one. There were more of them made than people think.” He closed his eyes, breathed out, opened them again. “And now let’s have that drink.”
“No thanks.”
“Sure? Sorry, forgot, you don’t, do you? Very sensible. If there were more people like you, the world would be a better place. You know, this is wonderful. I feel like an enormous weight’s been lifted off my shoulders. Thank you so much. You have no idea how much this means to me.”
The weight of the bag was making her arms ache. “I didn’t do it for you. I don’t even know you.”
“Of course not. Sorry, I’m just happy, that’s all.” He sighed. “Look, you must be worn out after your journey and everything, why don’t you cut along to the mess tent and get something to eat?”
She looked at him, and just for a moment she had a vision of his body on a butcher’s oak cutting table as she carefully jointed the carcass. It wasn’t the sort of image that haunted her as a rule, and she wondered if she’d caught something from him. Oddly enough, though, she realised she was hungry. “Mess tent?”
He pointed. “Down the midway, third on the left. It’s horrible, but you can eat as much as you like.”
Actually it wasn’t bad at all; there was a big all-day tureen of soup, all-sorts-of-things soup, with dry army bread that expanded to double its size when immersed in liquid, and rock-hard salt pork, and cartwheels of white crumbly cheese with a thick plaster rind. She ate till her jaws ached.
“There you are.” Myrtus; she’d been busy with food and hadn’t seen him coming. He looked round, then sat down beside her. “Something rather unpleasant has happened.”
She swallowed her last mouthful with an effort. “What?”
Myrtus hesitated, then said, “Commissioner Corason’s been murdered. They sent the news by special courier. Stabbed to death in his bed in Rasch.”
It wasn’t me, she very nearly said, because he was looking at her carefully. “That’s terrible,” she said. “Who did it?”
“That’s the thing: we don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. It wasn’t robbery or a street brawl, he had no personal enemies.”
“He was a Commissioner,” she said, without thinking.
“Nobody knew that outside the Lodge.”
“Then it must’ve been Imperial Security.”
Myrtus shook his head. “You know better than that.”
True; we’d have arrested him, not stabbed him in his sleep.
“You were the last Lodge officer to do business with him,” Myrtus went on. “Did he say anything to you? Tell you anything?”
She went cold all over. The man asking the question was a Commissioner of the Lodge, and she was just about to lie to him.
“We discussed the job I’d just done,” she said. “And he gave me my orders for this job.”
“That was all?”
She couldn’t bring herself to say yes, but she found she could nod.
Myrtus was tugging at his beard.
“Makes no sense,” he said. “People don’t just get stabbed for no reason.”
“Maybe there was something we don’t know about.”
That wasn’t worthy of an answer. “Presumably he helped you, with the job you did in Blemya.”
“Yes, of course. But that all went very smoothly.”
“He’d have had friends, though. Dangerous people.”
It took her a split second to figure out who he was. “No, actually, I don’t think so. Plenty of friends while he was alive, but nobody who cared enough about him to do anything about it after he was dead.”
(Except me, of course; and I have the perfect alibi.)
Myrtus sighed. “You’re probably right,” he said. “I never met the man, but I gather he didn’t have any really close friends, and no family. It’s a strange thing to say about the most popular man in the world, but I guess we can’t really look there for a motive. Anyway.” Myrtus took a deep breath, as if nerving himself to do something distasteful. “His death obviously leaves a vacancy, and you’re it.”
“What? Sorry, I don’t—”
“They’ve decided to make you a Commissioner,” Myrtus said. “Report to headquarters immediately for further orders. Oh, and congratulations, if you want them. Actually, it’s a bloody awful job. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
He stood up; he was just a blur, because her head was swimming. “Me?”
“Yes, you. It goes without saying, your fellow Commissioners had no say in the matter. I imagine it’s a reward for the Blemya thing, absolute loyalty and so on and so forth.” He gazed at her as though she was an ugly new building spoiling a famous beauty spot. “You’d better be on your way,” she said. “They don’t like to be kept waiting.”
She felt as though someone invisible was hitting her. “Headquarters?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s that?”
That got her a scowl of pure contempt. “Rasch,” he replied. “You do know where that is, don’t you?”
More news, delivered by a courier who died shortly afterwards from his wounds; Forza and Senza Belot had met in battle, sixteen miles south of Choris. They fought each other to a standstill; no reliable casualty figures yet, but the courier (who’d seen at least some of the action before running into a stray platoon of Eastern lancers, who left him for dead) reckoned that at least half, probably more, of both armies had been cut to pieces; later, on the road, he’d heard that Forza’s Iron Brigade had broken and run on the left wing, while Senza’s Immortals had done more or less the same on the right – impossible, because these were the great generals’ crack troops, the best soldiers in the world, who’d rather die a thousand deaths than run … In any event, there were uncorroborated rumours that Senza had withdrawn to the city, while Forza had been left with no alternative but to follow what was left of his retreating army, even though (strictly speaking, according to all the best scoring systems) he’d probably won the battle.
