Chapter 3 #3
She made a sort of growling noise, and then the chaise went under an arch and we couldn’t see the citadel any more.
Instead we were in a fairly ordinary town, with wooden houses crowded together so their eaves touched, and streets that smelled of horse piss and rotting cabbage.
The arch we’d just gone through was stone, or at least flints mortared together with lime, but the wall was a wooden palisade built out of pine logs.
One good fire and there’d be nothing left of this place but nails and door hinges; and they wouldn’t be there very long, because even a fire-salvaged hinge is worth money.
“Wait here,” the captain told us. Not wait here, please or if you wouldn’t mind waiting.
We were in a big, empty timber-frame hall, with benches lining the walls ready to be pulled out for the evening meal, then put away again when it was time to go to sleep on the floor. A garrison house was my guess. Swell.
“Proving nothing,” I reassured her. “This isn’t Choris, they don’t have panelled anterooms with mosaic ceilings.
Nor do they get an endless stream of distinguished visitors.
Probably right now some poor bugger’s running around like a blue-arsed fly trying to find out what the proper protocol is.
Eventually someone will tell him there isn’t one, and he’ll have to make it up as he goes along.
Meanwhile they park us here and we wait patiently.
You know patiently? You can look it up when we get home. ”
“Piss off,” she said. “I vote we abort, right now. We get out of here, go to ground in Poor Town and figure out some way of breaking into the library. Your precious cover is obviously a bust, so we can’t just stay put and wait for them to hang us. I say we go now.”
I thought about it. Svangerd has a finely tuned instinct for trouble, violence and desperate action, which has saved my life on any number of occasions.
She’s also as nervous as a pheasant, liable to jump up squawking and clattering when there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.
Analysis: half the time when she gets in a state, it’s just nonsense.
The other half, it’s a real and present danger.
Half is a monstrous proportion. On the other hand, all that work – all that money – thrown away just because Svangerd gets the wind up?
And her idea of going to ground among the underprivileged of the pirate capital of the west while figuring out how to break into the most impressive citadel I’d ever seen…
The thing about Svangerd is, she’s a trier.
She won’t give up. When she’s not panicking like a startled fawn, she’s utterly fearless, that statement does actually make sense.
When she gets scared, she doesn’t run away, she retreats – then circles round, keeps her head down and her eyes open and figures out a new line of attack.
The question boiled down to: which was I more afraid of, being arrested, tortured and killed by the Angkolan secret police, or explaining to Mother Tysapherna why we’d come home empty-handed after spending all that money and trashing all those priceless artworks. No contest.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “Our cover is rock-solid. We are who we say we are.”
“No, we aren’t.”
“Prove it.”
She gazed at me as if I was sticking out of her gut, with feathers round my ankles. “Fine,” she snapped. “But when this all turns to shit and it’s up to me to cut our way out of it through a platoon of guards using nothing but a hairpin—”
“You’ll do it beautifully,” I said. “Or you would, if it ever came to that. But it won’t. We are who we say we are. Just remember that, and everything will be peachy.”
Eventually a clerk came to fetch us. He was a young man, twenty-one or two, somebody’s nephew. “If you wouldn’t mind coming with me,” he said. He was alone; no soldiers. He was smiling.
He led us across a courtyard, walking quite quickly. We came to a gate. It was huge: plain stone blocks, no effort to plane out the toolmarks. The gate itself was a triple ply of five-inch oak planks, held together with clinted nails. It was open just enough for us to squeeze through.
In through an archway, and then lots and lots and lots of stairs, the horrible spiral screwthread type with no handrail, not even a rope; but the treads were relatively new and unworn, something I’d never seen before.
At each landing our guide stopped and yelled, “Coming up” in a surprisingly loud voice.
Eventually a landing and a corridor, with heavy oak doors at regular intervals, like cells.
At the end of the corridor a very big door indeed, with two men in armour guarding it.
They knew the clerk by sight and opened the door for him.
Into a big, high-ceilinged square room, unplastered stone walls, oak floor (the boards were yellow rather than black, so they’d been down for no more than five years).
Inside the room, maybe sixty or so people, mostly men but some women, well-dressed, standing about because the only furniture was one chair, ivory, very old, in which a man was sitting: short, fat, about thirty, already nearly bald.
He had a little snub nose and very bright eyes.
The other people got out of our way as the clerk led us to the throne.
The man on it could only be Aviragus, son of Zeuxis, king of Angkola and hereditary general secretary of the Pirates’ Guild and Federation of Sex Workers.
“Is that them?” he said.
The clerk nodded.
“Get lost,” said Aviragus. “Right, let’s have a look at you. Papers.”
My cue. I took the unique and priceless roll from my sleeve and handed it over. He glanced at it, then poked the rolled-up letter out of it with his pinky finger. He unrolled it and frowned. It was upside down.
Nothing happened for about four seconds. Then he moved his head a tiny bit, and a silver-haired man in a long green velvet gown stepped forward, took my beautiful letter, turned it the right way up and read it.
“Well?” said Aviragus.
“It really is very good,” said the man in green. “If I didn’t know better—”
“But you do.” Aviragus snapped his fingers. The man in green handed the letter back. Aviragus crumpled it into a ball and threw it on the floor. “All right,” he said. “Clear off, the lot of you. Not you,” he added, looking at five men I hadn’t noticed before. “You stay. And the muscle.”
I hadn’t noticed the muscle, either, but presumably not being noticed was part of their job description.
As the room emptied they stayed behind, like rocks when the tide goes out.
There were a dozen of them, and they knew exactly where to stand to cut off all possible angles of activity – running for the door, jumping Aviragus and holding a knife to his throat, all that sort of thing.
Next to me, I sensed Svangerd get suddenly tense, then relax.
Not relaxed relaxing; more a sort of resignation.
“Right,” Aviragus said. “So who are you two, and what are you doing here?”
See above, on the issue of questions to which the questioner already knows the answer, and my attitude thereto. At the back of my mind, a tiny, half-witted voice was bleating we are who we say we are. I really wanted it to shut up and let me think, but it wouldn’t.
“Your majesty,” I said, just remembering in time to use the accent, “I really must protest. We are envoys from his celestial majesty Jovian—”
“No,” Aviragus said. “You aren’t. Are they, boys?”
The five dignified gentlemen didn’t like being addressed as boys. But they put up with it. “No, your majesty,” one of them said.
“And how does he know that? Because he’s a real live genuine envoy from Brother Jovian. How do I know that? Because Jarugi here—” A nod towards one of the muscle— “went all the way to Sammagene to fetch him.”
A tree fell on me once. Luckily it ninety per cent missed, and all I got was a sideswipe from a branch.
It wasn’t quite enough to knock me out, so I stood there, with this absolutely intolerable pain in my head, completely incapable of thought in any shape or form.
A bit like that, only worse. “Your majesty,” I heard myself croak, “there must be some mistake. We come from Plemyene, in the far north-eastern steppe—”
“No, you don’t,” said Aviragus. “You’re too tall, your skin’s the wrong colour and the shape of your eyes is all wrong. Isn’t that right?”
The real live genuine envoy nodded.
“Put them somewhere.” The muscle gathered round us, geometrically perfect. “Find out who they are.”
Time for Svangerd to spring into her unique brand of action – but a goon I hadn’t noticed before was standing right behind her, and as soon as Aviragus stopped talking he slipped a thin cord over Svangerd’s head and drew it tight, just under her jawline.
He crossed his hands behind the back of her neck, for maximum mechanical advantage.
It only took a fraction of a second, and before I could react I felt something tighten around my own neck, and realised I couldn’t breathe.
Slight exaggeration. I could breathe, but it was like lifting stone blocks or drawing a hundred and fifty pound bow. You could maybe do it once or twice, to win a bet or something, but you really wouldn’t want to make a habit of it.
Maybe five seconds at maximum tension, then the pressure slacked off.
At the same moment, a hand in the small of my back shoved me forward.
I had no alternative but to move in the direction skilfully indicated by the pressure.
The muscle, Aviragus had called them. Which was a bit like calling the finest Teremvasian brandy hooch, or describing the Third Social War as a difference of opinion.
“This is all your fault,” she croaked, barely able to raise her voice above a ragged whisper. “I told you. Didn’t I tell you? But you wouldn’t listen. You never fucking listen, and now look.”