by K. J. Parker
“Not to worry,” Miel said. “I know the way.”
Two days’ ride southeast of Sharra Top; true, but lacking in precision. There had been a road; he remembered that, but of course he’d had to be clever, and he’d abandoned it on the second day of his ride from the hidden combe. Well, it had always been a fool’s errand. If he rode southeast for two days into the bleak, featureless moor and then gave up, turned round and headed back to the Unswerving Loyalty, would the Ducas honor be satisfied on the grounds that he’d done his best? No, but never mind.
After a long, silent day they stopped nowhere in particular. The boy jumped down, unharnessed and hobbled the horse. The old man curled up on the box like a dog and went to sleep. The boy crawled under the cart. Miel climbed down, propped his back against a cartwheel, and closed his eyes. He was weary and sore from the incessant jolting of the cart, but he’d dozed off too often during the day to be able to fall asleep. A fox barked once or twice in the distance. He tried to remember all he could about his previous visit to Framain’s house, but the most vivid images had no bearing on matters of navigation. So, unwillingly, he thought about other things.
The war: well, as far as he was concerned, it was over. He had no idea how many of his men were still alive, or whether they were still trying to fight the Mezentines. It didn’t really matter. According to Jarnac, Duke Valens had withdrawn his support, and without help from the Vadani, it was pointless going on. If the war was effectively over, where did that leave him? Interesting question. Under other circumstances, he’d already be in Civitas Vadanis, with Orsea, doing what little he could as a leader of the Eremian government in exile. But Orsea didn’t want him. On that score he’d been left in no doubt whatever. Orsea had known for some time that he was still alive, but he hadn’t recalled him, or dropped the charges against him, or written him a single letter. He’d asked Jarnac, back at the inn, if Orsea had said anything about him. Jarnac had looked unhappy and tried to change the subject, until Miel forced him to admit that Orsea hadn’t mentioned him once.
That shouldn’t have been a surprise. Orsea and his wretched, all-destroying sense of right and wrong, his fatal compulsion to try and do the right thing; and, needless to say, he applied the same rules to those closest to him. Apparently he was convinced that Miel had betrayed him, and therefore he could never forgive him. He’d recognize, of course, that this meant wasting an ally, a valuable one, though he said so himself; it meant that, because Miel was organizing the resistance, Orsea could have nothing to do with it. That hadn’t passed unnoticed; why, his men had asked him over and over again, isn’t the Duke out here with us; why hasn’t he even sent us a message of encouragement? Men who’d asked him that question and received the inevitably vague and unsatisfactory replies he’d managed to cobble together generally deserted a day or so later. Why fight for their country if their country had no use for them? Poor Orsea, he thought, still trying to do the right thing.
Which left him, the Ducas, with no master to serve, no work to do, no purpose … That was an extraordinary concept. The Ducas can’t exist without duty, just as a flame can’t burn without air. Take it away and you’re left with a man — thirty-odd, moderately bright but with no skills or abilities relevant to his own survival; thinner, permanently cured of any dependence on his customary affluence and luxury, an adequate rider, swordsman and falconer, just about capable of boiling an egg. Worse specimens of humanity managed to stay alive and make some sort of living, but why would anybody bother to live without a function? The Ducas without duty was no more than a mechanism forturning food into shit and water into piss, and a cow or a pig could do that just as well, if not better.
But here I am, he reflected; here I am, sitting beside a cart in the middle of a desert I used to own, in company with an old man, a boy and a quantity of powdered sulfur, trying to find a man called Framain and his daughter. I owe my life to Framain, who found me and pulled me out of a bog. The sulfur is my way of repaying the debt. But I wouldn’t have been alive to contract that debt if the scavengers hadn’t found me after the battle, and I repaid them by killing two of them and stealing their only horse. Ah, but they were going to sell me to the Mezentines, so that makes it all right. Except that it doesn’t. I was theirs to sell, and I stole myself from them; and now it’s too late to make it up to them, because Jarnac slaughtered them for daring to lay violent hands on the Ducas. It’s a funny old world.
At one point he slid into a doze; woke up some time later to find it was still dark, and he had a crick in his neck. The problem, however, had managed to solve itself while he’d been asleep. Silly, really; it was as plain as the nose on his face. If he was no longer the Ducas, then nothing he did mattered anymore. There were no more rules. When he’d fallen asleep he’d still been an Eremian nobleman and the slave of duty, but he’d woken up a free man, worthless and burdened by no obligations of any kind.
The first thing he did was feel in his pocket and count his money. Twenty-seven Vadani thalers, not counting what he owed the old man and the boy for the cart-ride. Hardly a fortune, but most people in the world start off their lives with considerably less. He also owned a stolen horse (but that was back at the Unswerving Loyalty; he doubted whether he’d ever see it again), some clothes, two boots and a hanger. Not entirely without value, therefore; not, at least, until someone crept up and robbed him in his sleep.
For no reason, he remembered the book he’d glanced at, back in Framain’s house. A technical manual of some kind; lots of different formulae for mixing up paint.
His brief nap might have played hell with his neck, but apparently it had done wonders for his brain. Paint recipes; the locked barn, and other buildings with chimneys, all hidden away in a dip in the ground where nobody would think of looking. Eremia had fallen to the Mezentines, but Framain hardly seemed to have registered the change of management. Miel laughed out loud, and into his mind drifted a memory of the pantry at the Ducas house in Civitas Eremiae, at any time before the siege and sack. Also the table in the main hall, set for a formal dinner, or any of the bedrooms that had a window-seat, which would always be decorated with a vase of fresh flowers. Every morning, someone had got up before dawn with a basket and walked down to the market to buy them — no, not a basket, there were twenty-seven windows facing the inner courtyard, they must’ve had to take a wheelbarrow, or a small cart, to shift all those flowers. He tried to call to mind the occasions on which he’d noticed the flowers in his house, and managed to think of four. The rest of the time they’d been there — they must have been, because it was a rule of the house — but presumably nobody had noticed them, once the chambermaid had pulled the dead stalks out of the vase and replaced them with the fresh ones. So much duty done, so little notice taken.
Never mind; he was through with all that now, and at least he had an idea what Framain and his daughter were up to in their secret lair, and why they needed sulfur. The only annoyances were that it had taken him so long to figure it out, and that he’d never find the place again and have the satisfaction of knowing he’d been right.
But if he did manage to find them … Well, he had power over them, simply by virtue of having guessed their secret. It was a thing of value in itself; quite possibly valuable enough to the Mezentines to buy him his life, if he chose to sell it to them, as the scavengers had proposed selling him. Alternatively … Well, he was a tolerably quick learner, and he had nothing better to do.
As he turned the possibility over in his mind, he became aware of someone standing over him. He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Not yet broad daylight, but enough to see the old man by.
“Soon as you’re ready,” he said.
“I’m ready,” Miel replied.
“Fine.” The old man didn’t move. “Which way?”
Miel grinned. “Look for smoke,” he said.
It was as though he’d told the old man to keep a sharp eye out for dragons. “Why?” he said. “Nobody lives here.”
Mie
l shook his head. “Yes they do,” he said. “And every morning they light a big furnace. My guess is they burn peat mostly, because it costs them money to bring in charcoal, so they save it for special occasions. I’m guessing that you can’t see the smoke from Sharra; that’s why they live where they do. But we’re a day closer, so we’re in with a chance.”
The old man looked rather taken aback, and Miel could sympathize; something of a shock to the system to realize that you’ve been dragged out into the middle of nowhere on the whim of a lunatic. But he was under no obligation to consider their feelings, as the Ducas would have been. He was paying them to do as they were told, and that was all there was to it.
It was the boy who saw the smoke. At first, he muttered the news to the old man, who assumed he was making it up and ignored him. It was probably only pique at not being believed that induced him to mention it out loud. What mattered was that he was right. Just the faintest smeared line, like a woman’s smudged eyeliner. Miel looked at it for a moment, then grinned.
“That’s the place,” he said.
As they got closer, Miel started to recognize things that had imprinted on his mind the first time: a shallow, dusty pit scraped out of the heather by sheep rubbing their necks against a large stone; a thorn tree wrenched sideways by the wind, its roots standing out of the soil on one side like fingers; a brown pool in a dip fringed with bog cotton; a single wooden post, gray with age, leaning at an angle, tufts of wool lodged in the splinters of its gaping grain. For some reason, all these were as familiar as sights he’d seen since childhood but somehow depressing, so that he felt like a man returning to a home he’d been glad to leave, many years earlier.
When they were half a mile from the smoke, it began to rain. It was no more than a few fat wet drops, but the wind slapped them into his face so that his eyes fogged as though he was crying, and he had to keep wiping them with his fingers. The old man pulled his collar round his face and shrank back into his coat — he reminded Miel of an animal in a field, stoically miserable. The boy scrabbled about with some old, bad-smelling sacks and crawled under them. They, of course, would be turning round and going back this way as soon as the barrels had been unloaded. They’d have the rain on their backs, if it settled in, tapping them on the shoulder like an annoying acquaintance you’d prefer to ignore.
Just like last time, the house came as a complete surprise, standing up out of the combe as though the creaking of the wagon had startled it. Miel smiled. This time, he had a fair idea what the man and his daughter were so busy with that strangers could creep up on them without them noticing. He told the old man to pull up outside the barn and wait, then jumped down and ran up the broad stone steps. The door was shut but not padlocked; he thumbed the latch and walked in.
Framain was standing on the other side of a long, massive plank bench, covered with jars, pestles, trays, pots and small metal tools. For a moment he froze, a stunned look on his face, as though Miel had walked straight through the wall instead of the door.
“You again,” he said.
“I’ve brought your sulfur,” Miel said quickly.
Framain stared at him. Not anger, or fear, hatred or suspicion. Horror. “What do you know about sulfur?” he said quietly.
“What’s he doing here?” Miel hadn’t noticed the girl, in the shadows at the back of the barn. She came forward like an animal preparing to defend her young from a predator, and Miel had taken a step back before he realized he’d done it.
“The sulfur you asked for,” he said to her. “I brought it, just like I said I would.”
Framain didn’t say anything, but the silence wasn’t hard to interpret. Now it was the girl’s turn to look horrified.
“You brought it,” she repeated.
“Yes.” Miel grinned. Too late now to worry about being popular. “Not the three cartloads you asked for, I’m afraid, because there wasn’t that much to be had, but there ought to be enough to be going on with.”
“You asked him to get us sulfur?” Framain said.
“I didn’t think he’d actually …”
Just a slight adjustment of his shoulders, but Framain conveyed with exquisite precision the information that as far as he was concerned, his daughter no longer existed. “That was very kind of you,” he said, his eyes fixed, as far as Miel could gather, on his throat. “But really, you shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble,” he went on, in a voice that made Miel want to get out of there as quickly as possible. “My daughter is inclined to prattle away when we have visitors, says the first thing that comes into her head. People who know us have learned to ignore her. I suppose I should have warned you, but I was hoping you wouldn’t run into her.”
Miel had to remind himself that in his time he’d faced down charging boar and Mezentine heavy cavalry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to intrude. But I was sure you’d be glad of the sulfur. I assume you need it for making the glaze.”
There was a knife on the bench, about eight inches from Framain’s hand. It was short, with a blade hooked like an eagle’s beak and a plain bone handle. Miel watched Framain look down at it and think for a moment.
“What are you talking about?” he said.
“The glaze,” Miel repeated, his eyes fixed on the knife. “I know what it is you’re doing here. She didn’t tell me,” he added quickly, “I figured it out for myself. You’re trying to work out the formula for the glaze the Mezentines use on their translucent white pottery, the stuff that sells for twice its weight in silver.” As well as the knife, he could see Framain’s hand on the bench. It was perfectly still. “I’m guessing that you discovered a deposit of the right kind of china clay somewhere on the lower slopes of Sharra. That’s why you stayed here, even when the war came and anybody with any sense cleared out. Nobody anywhere in the world can make that stuff except the Mezentines, because they control the only source of the clay. If you’ve found another deposit, or something that’ll do instead, I can well understand why you wouldn’t leave here, no matter what the risk. But of course it’s no good being able to make the pottery if you can’t glaze it, and that’s what you haven’t quite figured out yet; which is why you’re still tinkering with ingredients rather than churning the stuff out by the cartload from that huge, expensive kiln you had built out the back there.”
“Actually, I built it myself.” Framain had a crooked smile on his face. “Just me and my son, who’s dead now, and the man who used to be my business partner. It took us five years. I don’t think there’s a better one anywhere, not even in the Republic.”
Miel nodded toward the knife. “Are you going to kill me or not?” he asked.
Framain slumped a little against the bench, and sighed. “It crossed my mind,” he said. “Actually, it was quite close for a moment. If the knife had been longer or a bit closer to hand, I’d definitely have been tempted. But I weighed up the relevant factors. You’re younger than I am, probably quicker and better at fighting; and by then, I realized killing you would undoubtedly cause more problems than it’d solve, because if you managed to get sulfur you must have friends, probably among the Vadani, and …” He shrugged. “I contemplate a lot of things I never actually do,” he said. “I’m not sure whether it’s a strength or a weakness.”
Miel could feel the moment draining away, and allowed himself to relax a little. “So I was right, then,” he said. “Good. I’d have felt rather stupid if I’d made that speech and it turned out I’d jumped to entirely the wrong conclusion.”
The girl took a step forward, but Framain shifted just a little and she stopped, as if the line of his shoulder was a barrier she knew she wasn’t allowed to cross. She stepped back, and her father’s shadow obscured her face. “Quite right,” Framain said. “And you’re right about the other thing, too. It’s an obsession with me, I admit it. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t recognize my name; I’d have thought the Ducas would know such things.”
“Sorry,” Miel said.
Fram
ain smiled. “That puts me in my place. We were never nobility, you understand. My father was really just a farmer, though he’d have hated to admit it.” He leaned forward until his elbows were resting on the bench, his head hanging down as if in shame. “When he died we lost the farm as well; there was some money left, enough for a reasonable man, but not for me. My father had a Mezentine dinner service; it was about the only decent thing he had left, at the end. When I sold it, I was amazed at how much it was worth; I found out how valuable the stuff was, and I thought, if only I could discover how it was made, I could get some money and buy back our inheritance. Typical muddle-headed thinking, just what you’d expect from a spoiled middle-aged man suddenly taken poor; nothing would’ve come of it, except that I met a man who told me he’d worked out the formula and found a deposit of the clay.” Framain scowled, and waited for a moment, as though he had heartburn. “When he was able to prove he was telling the truth, we became partners; we came here, built this place, everything was going beautifully well. Within a few months we’d fired our first batch. It came out perfect; all we needed was the glaze, and we’d be in business. But …” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “We gave up trying to find the glaze formula and built the kiln; we were still experimenting, of course, but failure was so frustrating that we felt the need to accomplish something tangible, and building a kiln was hard work but at least we could do it. And then …” He stopped. The girl turned away. “My partner and my son quarreled about something; it was trivial, a technical matter to do with our experiments. I’d always known my partner was a vicious man with a murderous temper, but I was sure he’d learned to control it. Apparently not. He killed my son and nearly killed me, and then he went away. Unfortunately …” Framain smiled. “Unfortunately, he was the clever one, the scientist. He taught me a great deal, a very great deal, but probably not enough; either that or I simply don’t have the spark of genius that he had, and all the hard work in the world won’t make up the deficiency. My daughter, however, shows promise, even if she hasn’t learned discretion — for which, of course, I have only myself to blame.” Framain yawned, and Miel got the impression that it had been a long time since he’d talked so much; he seemed tired, the sort of fatigue that comes from unaccustomed exertion. “And there you have it,” he said. “You can understand why it’d be plain foolishness to kill you, just to preserve a secret that isn’t really worth anything.”
