Chapter 1 #5
The order to which I have the honour to belong is hopeless with money.
The stuff simply pours in from all sides, like floodwater, and it flows out again like a millstream, turning the wheels of the local and international economy and presumably doing far more good that way than if it had been left mouldering in the pockets of a bunch of tenant farmers on bleak, windswept moors and hillsides.
Accordingly, if the abbot sends you on a trip into the world for any reason, you get a ticket from your superior and the treasurer issues you with ridiculous amounts of money to spend along the way.
How this relates to the vow of poverty I’m probably too stupid to understand.
In practice it means that I’m forbidden to own anything – even the clothes I stand up in belong to the abbey – but when I’m on the road I can dine like a duke and sleep in the best rooms in the finest inns, assuming there are any.
Because of the way the accounting system works, it’s a piece of cake to draw out a hundred gulden, but the devil’s own job to pay anything back in.
If you try, the clerks will hate you for ever, and you really don’t want to get on the wrong side of them, so as often as not Svangerd and I come home with an embarrassingly large sum of money at our disposal, which we can’t give back and aren’t allowed to keep.
Usually we divide it between ourselves. I make the beggars in the Foregate very happy indeed.
What she does with her share I don’t know, but I suspect she’s endowing a college of nuns somewhere, to pray for her soul. No skin off my nose.
I forged a treasury docket on half of the scrap of parchment I’d been given; piece of cake for me, needless to say.
The other half I used to write out a ticket for the restricted artefacts store, more usually known as the Stack.
It gives me the creeps but Svangerd loves it, and often breaks in there just to fondle the weapons.
Amazing, the junk they’ve got down there.
Svangerd’s personal favourite is a rather fine codex-bound illuminated breviary with a spring mechanism concealed in the spine, which shoots tiny poisoned darts with enough force to penetrate light armour.
She’s never actually had the nerve to book the horrible thing out for a mission, but just knowing it’s there gives her a sort of warm glow.
Other favourites include cardinals’ rings that stick out tiny poisoned barbs when you kiss them; rosaries with beads moulded from fulminate of mercury, which explode like thunderbolts when you drop them in a flame or hit them with a hammer; priestly vestments with short daggers sewn into the seams; even a jewelled and enamelled reliquary which you can quickly take apart and reassemble into a functional short-range crossbow.
It also contains the knucklebone of St Abigazuus, whose intercession is particularly effective against snakebite, so all in all it’s a pretty handy piece of kit.
“We don’t need any of this,” I pointed out, as she stood there breathing in the aura. “Furthermore, if we get caught with any of this garbage on us, we’re screwed. You do realise that, don’t you?”
Fortunately she’s a professional, so she realises it just fine. But a girl’s allowed to dream. “The writing set,” she said. “Oh, go on.”
She knows I have my weak point, and the writing set is truly a wonderful thing.
It’s just your ordinary high-class travelling scribe’s best friend: ink bottle, pen holder, choice of nibs for italic, uncial, demotic just like my brother Kotkel, when my father punished him for being bad by not letting him slaughter the feast-day goose. “Fine,” I said. “One toy. Provided it’s something relatively inconspicuous and you promise faithfully—”
She darted forward, grabbed something off a shelf and tucked it down the front of her habit.
“What—?” I asked, but she scowled at me, so I didn’t press the issue.
The hell with it, I thought. What harm can one little artefact do, and presumably keeping it a secret was part of the thrill.
Also, I could go through her stuff while she was asleep along the road, and if it was too horribly compromising I could get rid of it. “Happy?” I said.
“Funny man. Let’s get out of here, before you start to annoy me.”
To the scriptorium, needless to say. Also, needless to say, the scriptorium in the early hours of the morning, when everybody else was asleep or at matins.
I have this lamp. Properly speaking it’s not mine, of course, since I can’t own anything, so it’s the Order’s lamp, but the Order doesn’t know it’s got it and hopefully will never find out.
It’s basically the front end of a cow horn, hollowed out, with a hole in the point for a wick, sticking up inside.
You fill it with oil and light it, and the light shines feebly through the translucent horn…
It’s marginally better than nothing, and if you position your hand just right you can see without being seen.
The joy of it is, if ever the Order decides it wants it back, I can make another one in ten minutes flat.
I don’t know how many different types of parchment there are; hundreds, thousands, as many varieties as there are places where they skin sheep.
The key word is “different”. A practised eye, like mine, can tell at a glance if the parchment something’s written on is right or not.
Did it come off a mountain shorthorn or a valley poll?
Was it skived from the head or the tail end?
Was it polished with bone, wood, steel or glass?
Don’t get me started, because I can be unimaginably boring about the technicalities of parchment.
Moral: if you want to do a convincing forgery, it’s more or less essential to get hold of the right parchment, meaning material from the scriptorium or office where the document is supposed to have been written.
Which is why, whenever I find myself in a scriptorium, office, library, counting house or any place where things get written, I have this wicked and sinful tendency to scarf up little scraps and offcuts of parchment, stuff with no monetary value, but which can make all the difference between life and death (my life and death, please bear in mind), war and peace, good and evil.
Parchment from our own scriptorium meant that I could forge such things as direct orders from a superior officer, or incriminating letters from a superior to a known enemy (always a useful bargaining ploy); because they’d be written on real parchment using the Order’s own ink in the Order’s own house penmanship by one of the Order’s own scribes, and sealed with the Order’s own seal (of which I have several unofficial but hundred-per-cent accurate copies), they’ll pass for genuine because they are genuine, except of course for the choice of words, and that’s usually not a matter susceptible of empirical proof.
The perfect lie is the absolute truth with just one thing added or left out.
Which makes you think about the nature of truth, or at any rate I think about it, quite often, and look where it’s got me.
“Who the hell is this woman?” Svangerd asked me, as we waited in a side chapel neither of us had ever been in before.
Under other circumstances, I’d have been all over it like a fly in a slaughterhouse.
The walls were covered in middle period Revelationist mosaic – I didn’t know any of it had survived north of Choris – and the ceiling was a breathtaking Ascension, by Rutimer of Nagel or someone very much like him.
I made a mental note to go back there and wallow in beauty, some time when I was capable of thinking like a human being rather than a quarry species.
“No idea,” I said. “One of Tysapherna’s goons, presumably.”
She gave me her I’d-gathered-that-much glare. “So why are we taking orders from her? We don’t report to the Diocese.”
Suddenly it was my fault. “We’re on loan,” I said. “Like a chain harrow or a pair of boots. We do as we’re told. See above, under obedience.”
Everybody has their function in the vast mechanism of the world.
Mine, quite often, is to be the object of Svangerd’s anger and frustration, which is fine.
After all, Svangerd is a valuable asset, and if she took it out on the people she’s really angry with, instead of me, she’d be dead or in jail, and no use to anybody.
“That’s not right,” she said. “We don’t even know who these people are, or what they’re up to.
This whole thing stinks to high heaven, if you ask me. ”