Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  Sure enough, there was a sack; two-thirds empty, but the man grunted as he lifted it onto his shoulder. “Mineral samples,” he explained, unasked. “Sulfur. That’s what I came here for, though it’s pretty well picked clean now. One of the few places you can still find clean, pure sulfur crystals; I got some mined stuff the other day, loads of it, but it turned out to be filthy, full of crud, no use at all.” He paused to let Cannanus catch up; he was racing ahead, as though there was no danger. “I expect you’re wondering,” he went on, in a cheerful voice, “why an Eremian should risk his neck to fish a Mezentine out of a bog.”

  Cannanus hadn’t, as it happened. He’d had other things on his mind.

  “Well, if you aren’t, I certainly am.” The man turned back and grinned at him, twisting the scar into a thin, angry line. “I don’t know, really. Well, the fact is, it’s not long since a passing stranger risked his neck to drag me out of one of these wretched bog-pools — not this one, another one a couple of miles further on. When I saw your tracks, I guessed you might be in trouble. It was only after I’d figured out a safe way in — you can see it, if you’ve been shown what to look for, it’s a certain way the light shines off the mud; pretty metaphysical stuff, though I guess there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Anyhow, I’d already done all the waiting around for the light to come up so I could see those special reflections, and then the dodgy part, charging in and finding out if I’d read the signs right, before I realized you’re actually one of the enemy; and by then it seemed a bit silly, really, to turn round and walk away. The fact is, the bloke who rescued me had every reason to leave me there, but he didn’t; so I guess I’m under a sort of obligation to repay the favor vicariously, if you follow me; even if you are a Mezentine. Stupid, really; if we’d met in a battle rather than a bog-pit, I’d have done everything I possibly could to kill you. Just goes to show how arbitrary the rules we make for ourselves really are.”

  The man certainly liked the sound of his own voice, although Cannanus charitably decided it was part of the rescue, keeping him distracted with cheerful chatter so he wouldn’t suddenly panic and trip into the mud; a wise, resourceful man who thought of everything. He prattled about minerals and where to find them, their properties, the difficulties that lay in refining them, the time and labor … One thing he said, however, was very interesting. “My name’s Miel, by the way. Miel Ducas.” Pause. “Quite likely you’ve heard of me.”

  Cannanus said nothing, though that in itself constituted a clear admission.

  “Fine,” Ducas said. “You know who I am. I don’t suppose there’s any point telling you I’m through with the resistance — well, the resistance is more or less done for anyway, it’s just that I chucked it in before it withered away and died, and I don’t think that was cause and effect, either. Truth is, I was in one fight too many. Oddly enough, I only realized that was the reason after I’d decided to give up. I got separated from them — well, lost, actually; the irony is, all this used to be my land, though I’d never even been out this far before. Well, I had my chance to hurry back and carry on with the noble struggle, but instead I thought, the hell with it, I’ll stay here. Now I’m in business with …” Just the slightest hesitation as he considered his choice of words. “With some people, and I’m doing something useful for once. Crazy, really. I spent most of my life ignoring all the good things I was born to, pursuing what I believed to be my duty to my country and my people. Plain fact is, when it really mattered I only ever did them more harm than good. Now I’ve lost everything, but found something I actually want to do — for myself, I mean, not because it’s expected of me. And no, I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except maybe because you’re a complete stranger, and sometimes you need to talk to someone.”

  Suddenly he stopped. Cannanus froze in his tracks, terrified that Ducas had come the wrong way, led them both into horrible danger. Instead, he turned round and said, “Well, here we are. Safe from here on; you can run up and down like an overexcited dog if you want to and you won’t suddenly disappear into a bog-pool. Which means,” he added, breathing in deeply, “that if you want to carry on going, get back to the Republic and tell your intelligence people you’ve found where the rebel leader’s hiding out, now’s as good a time as any. Just keep straight on up that mountain — Sharra, it’s called — and you’ll come to an inn, about a day and a half’s walk from here. Last I heard, your people don’t come out to the inn; too far for them to patrol and still be back in camp by nightfall. Even so, you ought to be able to send word to the nearest garrison camp to come and fetch you. If that’s what you want to do, I mean.”

  Cannanus could hear his own breathing. “You won’t …”

  Ducas laughed. “Now that really would be silly,” he said. “I risk my life to save you, and then risk it again killing you. No, the hell with it. You’re bigger than me, I don’t suppose I could subdue you by force and drag you back to our place. If anything, it’d be the other way round, you’d take me to the Mezentines. So, let’s avoid the issue, shall we? If you want to go, go.”

  Cannanus remembered something: practicalities. Not so long ago, he’d been resigned to a miserable death, and that was before he’d wandered into the bog. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve got no water, or food.”

  “I told you,” Ducas replied, with maybe a hint of impatience for feebleness. “Day and a half straight up the mountain, you’ll come to the Unswerving Loyalty. Basic home cooking and they won’t give you water, you’ll have to make do with beer, but it’ll keep you alive.”

  “I’d get lost,” Cannanus said wretchedly.

  “Probably you wouldn’t.”

  “Possibly I might.” As he heard himself say the words, he understood for the first time just how terrified he’d been, ever since the horse threw him and he became aware of how dangerous the world was for a mere pedestrian. In a way, it was a bit like what Ducas had said, about losing all his wealth and power, only in reverse. When he’d still had a horse, he could have done anything. It was all the horse’s fault — stupid Vadani thoroughbred — and it had got no less than it deserved.

  Ducas scowled. “If I take you back with me,” he said, “my partners are going to be so angry.”

  It hadn’t occurred to him that Ducas didn’t want him. He’d assumed … Unreasonable assumption, that just because someone rescues you, he’s prepared to put himself out even further on your behalf. “Straight up the mountain, you say.”

  “Follow your nose, you can’t miss it.” Ducas was bending over his sack, taking something from it. “Here,” he said, holding up a two-pint leather bottle. “If you’re so worried. I’ll have to tell them I dropped it somewhere. Hardware doesn’t grow on trees, you know.” He lobbed the bottle; Cannanus caught it clumsily on the second attempt, terrified it’d fall on the stones and split. “I can get home without a drink, assuming I don’t trip and do my ankle or something stupid. No food, I’m afraid, but you’ll last out, you don’t look exactly emaciated to me. Of course,” he added slowly, “a good man, someone with a bit of something about him, wouldn’t tell the authorities where he got that bottle from; who gave it to him, I mean. He’d feel a sort of obligation. At least, he would where I come from. I don’t know how duty works in the Republic.”

  Cannanus didn’t say anything.

  “Well, anyway.” Suddenly Ducas seemed in a hurry. “Straight up the mountain. If you hit a road you’ve gone too far west, but don’t worry, just follow it and go easy on the water, it gets you there eventually. If you go too far east you’ll come to a river, so that’s all right.” He grinned, as if at some private joke. “If I’d known that a few months ago, I’d be in Civitas Vadanis right now, with my cousin, paying off a few old scores of my own. Duty, you see. Horrible thing, but they tell you it’s important when you’re a kid, and like a fool you believe them. That was the motto of our family, you know: Masters of North Eremia, Slaves of Duty. Fifty generations of idiots, and then came me.” He turned and
started to walk away.

  Cannanus hesitated; Miel Ducas, the rebel leader, his savior. “Thank you,” he said.

  “My pleasure,” Ducas said, without looking back.

  17

  It was as though a volcano had erupted in the middle of Civitas Vadanis, and was blowing out carts instead of lava and ash. The streets were jammed with them, their tailgates crushed against the necks of the horses behind, their wheel-hubs jammed against gateposts and thresholds. Lines of backed-up carts flowed down the gate turnpikes like frozen rivers, while soldiers and gatekeepers strained to lift, push and drag the stranded and the stuck, to clear the bottlenecks. Under the thin, high-arched promenade bridge, which carried the elevated walkway over the main street, two hay wagons coming from opposite directions had tried to pass each other and had ended up fixed as tight as hammer-wedges; a group of hopeless optimists from the rampart watch were trying to lift one of them up out of the way, using ropes lowered from the bridge boardwalk. A free spirit who’d tried to jump the line by taking a short cut through the yard of the ducal palace was being taken, much against his will, to explain his reasoning to the duty officer.

  “We should’ve told them to muster in the long lists, under the east wall,” someone said gloomily, as Valens watched the mess from the top of the North Tower.

  “We did,” someone else replied. “But that’s the public for you, always got to know best.”

  Valens leaned his elbows on the battlements. “What we should have done,” he observed sourly, “is stagger the arrivals, so they didn’t all arrive at once; assemble them down in the valley, then send them up in batches of a dozen.”

  “We did that too,” said a young, dough-faced man, with a sheepish grin. “Unfortunately, the steelyard crews seem to have underestimated the time they’d need, so they’re way behind and all our careful timetabling’s gone out of the window. You can’t blame the yard workers, though. I went down to check on progress about an hour ago, never seen men work so hard.”

  Valens lifted his head. “Who did you get the time estimates from?” he asked.

  “That creepy chap, the thin one with the ponytail. He told me, half an hour per cart, start to finish. But it’s not all his fault, either. Apparently, they were kept hanging about waiting for a consignment of bolts from the forge.”

  Valens yawned. “I see,” he said. “In that case, we’ll hold up on the beheadings until we can be absolutely sure whose fault this is. Meanwhile, would it help if we sent some more men down to the yard, to clear the backlog?”

  The young man sighed. “Not really,” he said. “I offered earlier, but the creepy bloke said that extra bodies would just be in the way. Apparently, the problem is, they’ve only got a limited number of those drill things — sorry, I don’t know the right word. Curly steel thing like a pig’s tail, and you turn a handle like a wheel spoke.”

  “Augers,” Valens said.

  “That’s them,” the young man said cheerfully. “They’ve only got two dozen of the things, so Mister Creepy told me, and drilling the holes is the bit that takes all the time. Once that’s done, offering up the plates and bolting them down is a piece of cake. That Mezentine’s rigged up cranes and winches and things to move the plates about, and wooden frame things to show them where to drill the holes —”

  “Jigs,” Valens said.

  “Is that the word? Anyway, all highly ingenious stuff, but I guess he’s used to this sort of thing.”

  Valens shrugged. “We’ll get there in the end,” he said. “But I want Orchard Street cleared and kept open; we need one way in and out of the town, even if all the rest are blocked solid.”

  Someone nodded, accepting the commission, and disappeared down the spiral staircase. Valens groped for his name; an Eremian, from one of the leading families. Surprisingly knowledgeable about falconry, for an Eremian. “Who just left?” he asked.

  “Jarnac Ducas,” someone said. “You put him in charge of the day watch, remember?”

  “Did I?” Valens shrugged. “I’ve lost track of who’s doing what these days.”

  “He volunteered,” someone said, and someone else sniggered. “Very keen, the Eremians. Some of them, at any rate.”

  “I remember him now,” Valens said. “Annoying but highly competent. Well, at any rate he’ll get the traffic moving again, if he has to kill every carter in the city with his bare hands.” He frowned. “I shouldn’t joke about that,” he added. “I saw him fighting at the siege of Civitas Eremiae. Quite glad he’s on our side, really.” He looked up at the sky: well past noon. “I suppose I’d better go and do some work,” he said sadly. “Does anybody know where Mezentius has got to?”

  He found him in the exchequer office, sitting at the great checkered counting table, his head in his hands and a heap of silver counters scattered in front of him. “Bad time?” he asked.

  Mezentius looked up. “I’ve got a confession to make,” he said angrily. “I don’t know how to work this stupid bloody thing.”

  Valens frowned. “It’s not exactly straightforward,” he said. “I spent hours trying to learn when I was a kid, and I still have trouble.”

  Mezentius spun a counter on its rim, then flicked it across the tabletop. “No you don’t,” he said. “You can make it come out every time.”

  “True.” Valens picked up the counter and put it back with the rest of the pile. “I have trouble, but I overcome it, slowly and painfully. I find the key to success is not losing my temper.”

  Mezentius sighed. “Point taken,” he said. “But I shouldn’t be having to do this, there should be clerks.”

  “There were. But I had to promote them all, remember? So, for the time being, we all do our own tiresome and menial chores. I’m sorry, but there it is. Duty must be done, and all that.”

  “Quite. How’s married life, by the way?”

  “Delightful, thank you,” Valens snapped. “Now, when you’ve finished whatever it is you’re doing, I need to talk to you about who’s going to command the light cavalry decoy detachments. I did ask you for some names about a week ago, but I’m assuming you’ve been busy.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Mezentius said. “You know, I liked it better when we were soldiers.”

  “We still are,” Valens replied. “Unfortunately.” He turned to leave, then remembered something and paused. “While I think of it,” he said. “Have we heard back about the demands yet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Ah well. I thought we could play for time, but obviously they aren’t that stupid. Happy figuring.”

  Crossing the yard, he could hear the forges, the shrill, distant clank and bash of the trip-hammers and sledges beating out hot iron blooms into plate. What it must be like for people in the city, he didn’t like to think. They were working three shifts now. He hoped for his fellow citizens’ sake that after a while they got so used to it that they stopped noticing it; hoped, but doubted. It wasn’t a sound you could ignore.

  Next chore: he unlocked the little sally port that gave access through the back wall of the palace into the narrow lane that led down into the flower market. The steep gradient and pinched, winding alleys made it impossible for carts to get this far, and the congestion was keeping the traders from getting through, so the market was deserted. From the corner of the square, a long flight of steps took him down to a derelict block where the big tanners’ yard used to be, and from there he followed a spider’s web of snickets and entries until he arrived at the side gate of the old covered market where Vaatzes had set up his small-assemblies workshop.

  The noise was different there. The screeching and graunching of files was loud enough to blur out the beat of the hammers; it reminded him of grasshoppers, but there was a tension about the place that made him feel uneasy. He was getting used to it, however; he experienced it wherever Vaatzes had made his presence felt, a kind of sad, determined anger.

  Where the old market stalls had been, there were now rows of long, narrow benches, to which stout wo
oden vises were bolted at intervals of six feet or so. Behind each vise stood a man, his neck bent, his feet a shoulder’s width apart, his arms reciprocating backward and forward as he guided his file; each man just slightly out of time with his neighbor, so that the movements appeared sequential rather than concerted, like the escapement of a vast mechanism. Valens walked the length of one aisle and came to the drilling benches, set at right angles to the rest of the shop. He vaguely remembered Vaatzes complaining about something or other to do with drilling; there weren’t enough proper pedestal drills in the duchy, so he was having to waste valuable time and skilled manpower building them, badly, with wooden frames instead of cast iron. Presumably that was what the men were doing; they worked in teams of three, one man working a treadle, one man feeding a squared beam along a bed of rollers, the third man slowly drawing down a lever to guide a fast-spinning chuck. They stood up to their ankles in yellow dust; it spilled out of the holes they drilled like blood from wounds, and from time to time a spurt would belch up into the air, blinding them and making them cough. There was a clogging smell of dust, sap and burning, and the air was painfully dry. Beyond the drills were more benches, more processes, different shapes but the same shared movement, as though the whole building was powered from one shaft driven by one flywheel, hidden and turning imperceptibly slowly.

  A worried-looking man with a bundle of notched tallies cradled in his arms tried to step round him; a supervisor, presumably. Valens moved just enough to block him, and shouted, “Where’s Vaatzes?”

  The supervisor frowned, shrugged, said something Valens couldn’t make out through the noise.

  “Vaatzes,” he repeated, louder. The man tried to point, lost his hold on his tallies, and watched them slither out under his elbows onto the floor. It was probably just as well that Valens couldn’t make out what he had to say about that, as he stooped to gather them.

  “Vaatzes,” he said a third time, putting his foot on a tally so the man couldn’t retrieve it. That got him a ferocious scowl and a vague indication, somewhere beyond the banks of buffing wheels. “Thank you so much,” he said, and walked on.