Chapter 1 #2
You wouldn’t immediately think that that’s difficult, dangerous work; but it is, believe me.
The archduke’s fellow collectors – especially Abbot Simocatta, the archduke’s greatest rival and my current boss – take a special pride in uniqueness.
Partly that’s basic business sense. If you’ve got the only copy of Saloninus’ Downfall of the Gods, you know it’s worth a great deal of money.
If there are two copies, it’s suddenly worth considerably less than half.
Accordingly, the man who breaks into your library and copies it is robbing you of the price of three fully equipped warships, or a duke’s country estate.
But it goes deeper than that. For the real hardcore collectors, it’s the exclusivity of possession that lights their candle; the same sort of exclusivity that married people expect as of right as regards their spouses, so maybe it’s not so weird after all.
I wouldn’t know about that, for obvious reasons.
In any event, my vocation has landed me in some very awkward situations over the years, a deplorable proportion of which have led to violence, bloodshed and death.
Usually, the violence, bloodshed and death get perpetrated by my colleague, Sister Svangerd, that being her special God-given talent.
I would far rather thump someone and run away than maim or kill, whereas Svangerd – Well, now.
In fairness, my height and strength mean I can handle the majority of fraught encounters with a fist or a boot.
Svangerd is small and slight, though she’s got a wicked right cross that I keep begging her to teach me, but she won’t.
Accordingly, she needs to use artificial aids, with sharp points and edges, so inevitably she does more lasting damage than I do.
It has to be said, however, that Svangerd – no, belay that.
It doesn’t have to be said, especially since there’s an outside chance she might one day read this.
She’s brave, smart, loyal, sincerely pious, genuinely good-hearted and the best friend anybody could ever ask for, but she does tend to take offence at the slightest thing.
Talking of Sister Svangerd. When we get sent on undercover missions, we have to act the part, naturally.
This means we get issued with appropriate clothes and props, together with ridiculous amounts of spending money.
So much for my vow of poverty. Obedience, unfortunately, has never been one of my strong suits (and when you consider some of things I’ve been ordered to do, and the trouble I’ve had oiling out of actually doing them, maybe not such a bad thing at that).
Which leaves one out of my three vows, and one out of three isn’t marvellous but it’s better than nothing.
Sister Svangerd has been invaluable to me in preserving my integrity in this regard.
I’m not in love with her, I keep telling myself, but I have eyes and ears.
Compared to her, all the other temptations to disregard my vow are of no account whatsoever, and if I ever suggested anything of that sort to Svangerd she’d break all my fingers.
There’s nothing like love for a good woman to keep you honest. Theoretically, of course.
“Seriously?” Svangerd said.
“Seriously. We go to Angkola, we present our credentials in the usual way—”
“Fuck that,” she said. “You can go if you like. I won’t.”
Oh dear. “Poverty,” I said. “Chastity, and what was the third one?”
“I am not,” she said, “going to Angkola. No way in hell.”
“Fine,” I said. “In which case, she’s going to boot us both out of the Order. And what will the robin do then, poor thing? I suppose I could always go back to the Mesoge, but you—”
She glared at me. “Don’t.”
“You,” I went on, “could walk into any job you like as somebody’s assassin-in-chief or enforcer-in-ordinary, but is that what you really want?
In your shoes, I wouldn’t hesitate, but of course I haven’t got an immortal soul to worry about, since I know there’s no such thing. You, on the other hand—”
“Shut your face.”
“Come on,” I said, as pleasantly as I could manage. “She’s got us nailed, she knows that. If it helps to take out your anger and frustration on me, go ahead, I really don’t mind. But you’re going to Angkola, and so am I. I really wish we weren’t, but we are.”
I think it dawned on her at this point that smearing my nose all over my face wouldn’t actually achieve anything, and she let it all go in a long, sad sigh. “Bloody woman,” she said. “All that for a stupid book.”
I winced, though I don’t think I let it show. “Not just any book.”
“And that’s another thing. What in God’s name does she want with something like that?”
“Good question,” I said. “To which I’m grateful I’m not allowed to know the answer. Fortunately, we’re bound by our vows.”
She scowled at me. “You’re not. You’re a fucking heathen.”
“Atheist,” I amended coldly. “And you’re being extremely unfair. I take my vows very seriously.”
“Yes,” she conceded, “you do, which is really weird. I mean, why would you do that if you don’t actually believe? It doesn’t make sense.”
No, it doesn’t, does it? All I can say in my defence is, I may not believe in the Invincible Sun, but I have a deep and unshakeable belief in Holy Mother Church. Which is plainly half-witted, until you stop and think about it.
“Nobody’s perfect,” I said firmly. “And there’s no point talking about it any more, because we’re going, and that’s that. Ours not to reason—”
“Just a minute.” She was looking at me. “What’ve you done?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“You arsehole,” she said. “That bloody woman chose you for the job, because you can write fast and you know languages. And you said something like, I’ll do it, but only if I can choose who goes with me.”
“Absolutely not.”
“You arsehole.”
Bitterly unfair, of course. What Tysapherna actually said was, I suppose you’ll want to take that slut Svangerd with you; and I’d said, well, we do work quite well together, but – and I hadn’t been allowed to finish the sentence.
Not the same thing at all. Of course, I could have said, I’ll do it, but on condition that you don’t partner me with that lunatic, I never want to work with her again.
I should have said that, shouldn’t I? Only at that stage, I didn’t know where we were going.
Slut was also bitterly unfair. It’s like talking about the kingdom of Mezentia.
True, the Mezentines had a king, centuries ago, but they fought an incredibly long and bloody civil war to get rid of him, and since then they’ve never wavered in their devotion to republican government.
By the same token, Svangerd quit her previous profession by sticking a meat skewer in her pimp’s ear, which if nothing else argues a genuine eagerness to put that stage in her development behind her and move on.
Calling her a slut is like calling me a Mesoge tenant farmer, only to my mind not quite so insulting.
“It wasn’t like that at all,” I said. “She asked me a whole lot of questions about Choris, so clearly she knows we make a great team.”
“No, we don’t. What happens is, you make godawful fuckups and I rescue you.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Teamwork. Look, you can believe it’s all my fault if you insist. I know how important your beliefs are to you, even when they’re just plain dumb.
But the fact is, we just got lumbered with this horrible job, and tearing each other to bits isn’t exactly positive.
Do you want to be slung out on your ear, or don’t you? ”
“Bastard,” she said. In context, a form of grudging agreement. “What does she want that book for?”
I shrugged. “Beats me.”
“If it was Simocatta, I’d understand,” she said. “He’d want the devil’s left ball if someone told him the cardinal had the right one. But she’s supposed to be—”
“I know,” I said.
“Righteous. Holy. A living exemplar of virtue. Practically a saint.”
“You haven’t met her yet, have you?” I didn’t give her an opportunity to answer that.
“I don’t know, do I? Maybe she needs to know what’s in it so she can fight it, or rebut it, or devise a counter-strategy.
You know, like the doctors in Echmen. If you want to cure leprosy, first you need a whole bunch of lepers. ”
“Presumably,” she said, though her face suggested she was presuming no such thing. “I think that book needs to be burned. In fact—”
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
That got me one of her special glares. “You always were chickenshit,” she said.
“Think about it. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try, the best of us fail. The job’s just too difficult, or something crops up that nobody could possibly have foreseen.
So, we break into the library but something goes horribly wrong, we do our absolute best but in spite of that, a fire breaks out and the library burns to the ground.
Shit happens. If they chucked out every operative who fails in a mission, pretty soon they’d have nobody left. ”
“No,” I said. “Rule one, we don’t burn down libraries.”
“Don’t be such a girl. All right, maybe we wouldn’t have to torch the whole building. Probably we could get away with just stealing the book and then burning it later. Then we could tell her we broke in, as ordered, but the horrible thing wasn’t there.”