Evil for Evil

by K. J. Parker

  19

  A tolerably civilized chaise as far as the Lonazep turnpike. A basic but acceptable mail coach from there to the edge of the plain. A night on a plank bed in a rather sparse post-house. A military stage, overcrowded with junior officers, very rudimentary suspension, all day, all night and the next morning with only half a dozen stops up the Butter Pass to the camp in the ruins of Civitas Eremiae. A ride with the quartermaster’s clerk on a solid-chassis supply cart as far as the frontier post at Limes Vadanis. Four days away from the Guildhall, Psellus staggered off the box of the cart and stood in a dusty, rutted road under a disturbingly broad sky, staring apprehensively at mountains. If this was the world he’d heard so much about when he was growing up in the suburbs of the city, they could stuff it.

  “I don’t know,” the garrison captain said in reply to his urgent question. “I got a letter this morning to say you were coming, but that’s all. Didn’t say who you are or what we’re supposed to do for you. Always happy to oblige the central administration,” this said with a confidence-diminishing grin, “but you can see for yourself, we’re just a border post, not a diplomatic mission.” He paused, thought, frowned. “I suppose you might be able to hitch a ride with a trader,” he suggested. “Strictly speaking it’s a closed border, but we turn a blind eye if it’s just ordinary commercial traffic. You may have to wait a week or so, but I expect you could find a corner of the guardhouse to crash in.”

  It’s all right, Psellus urged himself, I’m equipped to handle this. I have the magic letter. He took it from his pocket, observing that it was rather more dog-eared and crumpled than it had been four days ago. Still, what mattered was the blob of red wax at the bottom, into which was impressed the great corporate seal of Necessary Evil. He smoothed the letter out and handed it to the captain.

  “If you’d just care to read that,” he said.

  The captain glanced at it. “Like I told you,” he said, “we aren’t set up here to do escorts for civilians.”

  Psellus clicked his tongue; supposed to be authoritative verging on majestic, came out petulant. “You’ll notice,” he said, “that it’s signed personally by Commissioner Boioannes.”

  “Who?”

  In the event, they were quite kind to him; they fed him on bean porridge with bacon and lentils, which was what they ate themselves, and gave him a fairly clean blanket and a reserved-for-officers-only pillow. The guardhouse floor wasn’t actually any harder than the bed in the inn at the post-house. He was, he reminded himself, right out on the very edge of the world. If he got up in the night for a pee and wandered a yard too far, he’d be across the frontier and in enemy territory, an accidental one-man invasion. The thought made him cross his legs until morning.

  Breakfast — bean porridge with bacon and lentils — and a stroll round the compound. Six troopers in disconcertingly full armor failed to notice him, presumably for some valid military reason. He found an upturned packing case in the shade of the wall, and sat on it for an hour or so, his back resolutely turned on the view. Too many mountains, not enough tall buildings. My beautiful office, he said to himself, my beautiful small office.

  “Good news.” The garrison captain had somehow materialized next to him while he wasn’t looking. “Actually, it’s something I’d clean forgotten about, until you made me think of it. I’ve got orders to send a survey team to map the road between here and …” He hesitated, scowling. “Some river,” he said, “can’t remember the name of it offhand. But if you want to go with them, they’ll take you most of the way to where you want to go. It means walking, of course — they measure distances by counting footsteps, apparently — but at least you won’t be on your own. Mind you, there’s always the risk that a party of our lot wandering about in Vadani territory’s going to attract unwelcome attention from the locals; you may feel you’d stand a better chance of sneaking in unnoticed on your own.”

  So that’s good news, is it? “Can I think about it?” Psellus asked.

  “Sure.” The captain smiled. “No rush, they won’t be leaving till this evening. Best to cover the first twenty miles under cover of darkness. Just in case.”

  Psellus agonized over his decision for a full five seconds. “You said something about traders,” he ventured.

  Another night on the cold, hard floor; but the thought that he could be spending it scampering along mountain tracks in the dark with a company of military surveyors made the stones a little softer. Breakfast next day was a pleasant treat: bean porridge with bacon and lentils. A man could get to like life in a frontier post; as opposed to, say, death a few hundred yards beyond it. The morning passed. Early in the afternoon, one of the soldiers actually spoke to him. Evening ebbed in, trailing its hem across the mountains like a weary child dragging his heels. They hadn’t told him what dinner would be, but he was prepared to hazard a guess.

  “You’re the Mezentine.” A woman’s voice, somewhere in the shadow of the guardhouse tower. He looked round sharply, but all he could see was a slightly denser patch of darkness. The voice itself was middle-aged, provincial and coarse.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Who … ?”

  “Lucao Psellus?”

  “Yes.”

  She stepped forward into the torchlight ring; a tall, stout woman, fishbelly-white face, Eremian or Vadani, dyed copper-beech hair heaped up on top of her head like a lava flow, clashing horribly with her loudly crimson dress. Her bare forearms were both fat and muscular, the muscle quite possibly built up by the effort of lifting so much monolithic gold jewelry.

  “Well?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” Psellus said cautiously. “I don’t think I know you.”

  “Quite right, you don’t.” She made it sound as though only sheer all-conquering magnanimity was keeping her from holding it against him. “You wanted a ride into Vadani territory.”

  Merchants; of course. Among the savages, it was quite usual for women to be merchants. “That’s right, yes,” he said quickly.

  She looked at him, as though she’d bought him sight unseen and was regretting it. “I’m headed for Civitas Vadanis, more or less direct,” she said. “Are you carrying diplomatic credentials?”

  Psellus smiled. “I’ve got a letter …”

  “Let’s see.”

  After a moment’s hesitation he took it out and handed it to her; she rubbed her hands on her thighs before taking it. “Boioannes himself,” she said, “impressive. So why isn’t the military giving you an escort?”

  Well, why not? “I’ve been asking myself that,” he said.

  She grinned; sympathy and contempt. “Don’t take it to heart,” she said. “If they weren’t completely clueless, they wouldn’t have pulled garrison duty. Anyway, isn’t the whole big deal about Necessary Evil how shadowy and secret it is? Hardly surprising they’ve never heard of Boioannes.”

  “You have,” he pointed out.

  “Yes, but I’ve got a living to earn. I don’t wait for briefings, I find things out before I need to know them. Talking of which: sixty thalers.”

  Psellus blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “My fee,” she explained. “For getting you across the border and all. Practically cost,” she added, with a practiced sigh. “Meaning, the donkey you’ll be riding could be carrying merchandise that’d earn me that much. Plus extra food and water to keep you alive, taking up more space. Say yes quickly, before I put it up to a hundred.”

  “A donkey.”

  “Yes. Well, what do you expect, a carriage and four?”

  Psellus looked at her. “I’ve never ridden a donkey before.”

  “Easy. You just sit. If you can ride a horse, you can ride a donkey.”

  “I’ve never ridden a horse.”

  “Look, if you’re just going to make difficulties …” But then she paused, made an effort, got the grin working again. “Put it this way,” she said. “You’re a Mezentine, right? The superior race, masters of the known world? Well, then. If a poor benighted savag
e like me can do it, so can you.”

  Now I understand, Psellus said to himself: she’s been sent — and paid — to collect me. If she goes back without me, she’ll have to refund the fee. Otherwise, by now she’d have written me off as more trouble than I’m worth and told me to get lost. “A wagon,” he said, “or no deal.”

  She scowled horribly. “Out of the question. The way we go, you can’t take wagons. It’s a donkey or walk.”

  He shrugged. There’d been a hint of panic in her voice, implying that as far as wagons were concerned she was telling the truth. “Fair enough,” he said. “Sixty thalers; half now, half when we get there. When are you leaving?”

  Later, when he thought about that journey, Psellus found it hard to remember it clearly: the sequence of events, the constant terror, the agonizing pain in his backside and thighs. It was, he supposed, the same mental defense mechanism that caused him to forget his worst nightmares as soon as he woke up. The only impressions that lingered were the smell of drenched wool and the sight of the rocks that littered the ground on either side of the miserable tracks they followed, rocks on which he was convinced he would fall and split his head open like a water jug. One thing he knew he would never forget, however, was the first sight of Civitas Vadanis, glimpsed for a moment through a canopy of birch branches as they scrambled up a scree-sided hill. Really, it was nothing more than a gray blur, too big and regular-shaped to be yet another rocky outcrop. To Psellus, however, the mere fact that it was manmade lent it a beauty that no mountain, hillside, combe, gorge or valley could ever aspire to. Buildings; houses; people. It didn’t matter that the people were hostile savages, as likely as not to kill him and eat him on sight, and to hell with the fact that he carried universally recognized diplomatic credentials. Two days and a night of spine-jarring across bleak, empty rocks had left him with an overpowering need for human contact, even if it took the form of a lethal assault.

  “That’s it all right,” the woman in red assured him. “Not much to look at from this distance, but when you get up close it’s a bit of a dump, really. You’d never think the Vadani were rich as buggery just from looking at their architecture.”

  Psellus didn’t reply. Even from three miles away, he’d noticed something that set his teeth on edge.

  “No smoke,” he said.

  It took her a moment to figure out what he’d meant by that. “There never is,” she replied. “Not by your standards, anyhow. I gather your city looks like it’s in permanent fog, because of all the forges and kilns and whatever.”

  He shrugged. “That’s all right, then,” he said.

  But it wasn’t. There was more to it than that, and as they got closer the apprehension grew. There should have been specks on the road, carts carrying things to and from the city, riders, people walking; even savages needed to eat, so there should have been constant traffic bringing food to town. On the other hand, plague was a possibility, but surely they’d have heard rumors. Plague aside, how else could a city be empty? The answer was that it couldn’t be, and his impressions were false. But the city looked all wrong; it looked dead, like the still, flat corpse of an animal beside the road. While he’d been marooned in the frontier station, had the war come here, been and gone, without anybody bothering to tell him? Possible, he had to acknowledge. After all, he was always the last to know everything.

  A mile out, even the woman in red fell silent and looked worried. They were on the main turnpike now, a straight metaled road that looked down at the city like an archer’s eye sighting along an arrow, but they had it entirely to themselves. Furthermore, there was no sign of livestock in the small, bare fields, divided up neatly into squares by low, crude dry-stone walls. Plague wouldn’t have killed off all the sheep and cows as well as the people; or if it had, surely there’d be bodies lying about, bookmarked by mobs of crows. Eventually, after not saying a word for nearly half an hour, the woman cleared her throat and said, “This is odd.”

  “There’s nobody here,” Psellus replied.

  She appeared not to have heard him. “I heard your lot sent a cavalry raid not long back,” she said. “My guess is, they’ve cleared everybody out of the outlying villages and farms and barricaded themselves inside the city, to be on the safe side.” She made it sound as though Psellus had planned and led the raid himself, and therefore this desolation was all entirely his fault. “Could make it tricky for us getting in. We’ll have to play it by ear, that’s all.”

  It turned into something of a farce. The woman in red insisted on acting inconspicuous, even when it was obvious that there was nobody to see. Her idea of inconspicuous shared several key elements with Psellus’ definition of low pantomime — talking in a loud voice about deals she was planning, deals she’d recently made; stopping every fifty yards or so to check the loads on the donkeys; bawling out each muleteer in turn for imaginary offenses; retreating demurely behind every third bush for a mimed pee. The city, meanwhile, grew nearer in total silence and deathly stillness. She was giving the performance of her life in an empty theater.

  A quarter of a mile from the main gate, Psellus lost his patience.

  “Do me a favor,” he said, slithering awkwardly off the donkey and wincing as he landed on a stone. “Wait here.”

  She scowled hideously at him. “Out in the open?” she hissed. “You can’t be serious. We’ll all be arrested.”

  “Thank you so much for your help,” he said politely, without looking back, and limped painfully on his wrenched ankle up the road to the main gate.

  A hundred yards away, he saw that it was open, which finally put paid to her theory about the Vadani barricading themselves inside the city for fear of a repeat of the cavalry raid. Gate open, no guards; but a single chicken pecked busily in the foregate. It scuttled a yard or so as he approached, then carried on feeding.

  Through the shadow of the gatehouse, out into the light on the other side. He walked a few yards, then stopped. He had no idea what he was supposed to do next. He will meet you, the instructions had said, and Psellus had been too preoccupied with the other prospective horrors of the journey to think too closely about that part of it. Subconsciously, he’d never had much faith in his chances of getting this far, so there hadn’t seemed much point.

  But now he was here, by the looks of it the only living creature in Civitas Vadanis, apart from the chicken. He drew in a breath to call out “hello” with, but the sheer scale of the silence overawed him and he breathed out again.

  Cities don’t just empty themselves, like barrels with leaky seams. Either everybody was dead, or there’d been an evacuation. Either way, it looked as though he’d wasted his time. He was struggling to come to terms with that when he saw something move, in an alley on the other side of the square. At first he was convinced it was just a stray dog; but when it came out of the shadows he saw it was a man; a dark-skinned man, like himself.

  Well, then, he thought. This must be Ziani Vaatzes.

  Shameful to have to admit it to himself, but he was shaking; not with fear, because his city’s worst living enemy was striding toward him in an empty place. The last time he’d shaken this way was when he was seventeen, and the girl who’d agreed to come with him to the apprentices’ dance had stepped out of the porch of her father’s house into the lamplight, and the rush of mingled joy and fear had crippled his knees and crushed his chest.

  “Lucao Psellus?”

  The voice startled him. He’d been expecting a deep, powerful sound, something like the first low roll of thunder before the first crack of lightning. The voice that called out his name was high, rather tentative; and the embodiment of complicated evil shouldn’t have a whining downtown accent.

  “That’s me,” he heard himself say. “Are you Ziani Vaatzes?”

  A slight nod. He came to a halt about three yards away; about average height for a Mezentine, stocky, square; thin wrists and small hands, unusual in an engineer; a weaker chin than he’d expected, a rounded nose, hair just starting to t
hin on the top of his head. Such an ordinary man; the only way to make him stand out was to empty the city. Painfully hard to believe that this was the man who’d caused the war, slaughtered the mercenaries, betrayed Civitas Eremiae, written the atrocious poetry. Had he really come all this way to meet such an ordinary little man?

  “Where is everybody?” Psellus asked.

  Slight grin. Just a tuck in the corner of the mouth, but quite suddenly Vaatzes’ face changed. He said, “There was a general evacuation.” The grin said, I sent them away. Psellus realized that he had no choice but to believe the grin.

  “Why’s that?” he asked.

  Vaatzes shrugged. “I think it might have something to do with the war,” he said. “Anyhow, you can be the first to pass on the news. That on its own ought to be worth a promotion.” He adjusted the grin into a small smile. “I’m forgetting my manners,” he said. “You’ve been traveling, I expect you’d like to sit down, have something to eat.”

  Thanks to a donkey with a backbone like a thin oak pole, the last thing Psellus wanted to do was sit down, ever again. “Thank you,” he said, with a formal nod.

  “I’m sort of camping out in the gatehouse,” Vaatzes said. He raised his hand, and Psellus noticed for the first time that he was carrying a basket, the sort women bring shopping home from market in. “I’ve been scavenging,” he went on. “All the bread’s gone stale, of course, but I found some apples and a bit of cheese, stuff like that. There’s water inside, and a bottle of the local rotgut.”

  So many years in politics; Psellus was used to the airy politeness of enemies. Vaatzes, he realized, was talking slightly past him; hadn’t looked at him once since the first encounter. That was faintly disturbing. Is he going to kill me, Psellus wondered; is that why he won’t meet my eye?

  Back into the dark shade of the gatehouse; through a doorway into a bleak stone cell of a room; a plain plank table and two benches; on the table, an earthenware jug, a bottle and two horn cups. With a whole city to plunder, this was the best he could do? Not a man, then, who cared too much about creature comforts. He waited for Psellus to sit down, then slid onto the bench opposite and started cutting the pitch off the neck of the bottle.