Chapter 4 #2
I was gazing at the title page of Hildestark of Eipen’s Cosmology.
Every copy of Hildestark was burned by the public hangman, on the orders of Holy Mother Church, because of certain abominable heresies about the movements of the stars.
But apparently a bunch of murderous thieves had managed to preserve what His saints had tried to obliterate.
Enough to make a cat laugh, except it wasn’t actually very funny.
Heaven and hell, I was thinking; I’m in both of them simultaneously –
“Found it,” she said.
In a flat, rather matter-of-fact way. I spun round. “What?” I said.
“This is it,” she said, “definitely. We can go home now.”
I took the book from her. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “This is just Bausa of Chasetz on metallurgy. It’s probably the only surviving copy, but it’s garbage. Back in the day, he was a joke.”
“We’re done here,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Crazy. Bausa of Chasetz didn’t even know the first thing about metallurgy.
He was a monk from adolescence, like me, who spent his life in a scriptorium, copying bits out of ancient books he didn’t understand so as to compile a set of standard reference for his master the abbot, who presented the finished Universal Guide to Everything to the newly crowned elector on his sixteenth birthday.
It’s highly unlikely that the elector ever read the book, since he almost certainly couldn’t read.
Of the twenty-seven volumes in the series, only the books on viticulture, astronomy and demonology have survived, and most of the information contained in them is simply untrue.
More to the point, what would that deranged sensualist monster Gratian III have wanted with an inaccurate book about extracting and refining copper? “What’s the matter with you?” I said. “This can’t possibly be what we were sent to get, it’s junk.”
“We’re leaving. Now.”
Then she put the book back on the shelf, which made absolutely no sense at all.
We’ll pause here, just for a moment, and take stock.
It’s a suitable place and an appropriate moment.
For the time being we’re safe, although outside the door are forces ready and waiting to tear us into shreds, given the opportunity.
We can’t stay here, but leaving will engage us with those dangerous forces, in whose favour the odds are overwhelmingly stacked.
In here is everything I always dreamed of, everything I know I’ve been missing out on, all my life.
I know I can’t stay, enjoy, take possession; and as soon as I walk out of the door, I’ll have lost it all.
I’ll have lost everything. Inside the room, the Fall never happened.
Outside the room, all the bitter consequences of the Fall are waiting like a besieging army.
One other thing: I was led to the room by the Loyal Opposition, to whom the expression the Fall has a rather different meaning. I happen to believe they’re just a bunch of deluded wankers, but I’m prepared to admit that I’m not always a hundred per cent right about absolutely everything.
A viable working hypothesis is that the Loyal Opposition brought me here because they want to send me to hell, and (according to Saloninus, Doctor Felix, act 1, scene III) hell is the absence of heaven, the loss of a heaven you only know to be real at the moment of being deprived of it.
That would be spiteful, nasty, and really rather clever – and none of my dealings with the Loyal Opposition ever led me to associate any of those three qualities with them.
It wasn’t their style. They’d cheerfully wipe out an entire civilisation, but pulling the wings off flies would, in their view, be pointlessly barbaric.
Right. I’ve got my breath back. Let’s get on with it.
“What’s the matter with you?” I repeated, as she opened the door and looked up and down the corridor. “Get back in here right now. We haven’t—”
She stepped out into the corridor. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought, and followed her.
“Have you gone mad?” I was about to ask, when someone shouted; who goes there, or words to that effect. “Don’t just stand there,” she hissed at me, then darted off like a rabbit.
Running about isn’t really my thing. I can do it if I have to, but I’m not exactly built for speed, or endurance either, come to that.
The steelnecks, on the other hand, were excellent runners.
Presumably they practised all the time, hounded by their drill sergeant; fifteen miles in heavy boots before breakfast, all that sort of thing.
Which is why I never, ever wanted to be a soldier.
Svangerd runs elegantly, like a deer. She takes long strides and between them she almost seems to float in mid-air; she’s fast and never gets tired. When I run, the floor shakes. “This way,” I heard her say, and then she vanished.
I stopped dead. I had no idea where she’d gone. The steelnecks were closing up fast. Oh, for pity’s sake, I thought, and swung round to face them.
The lead steelneck more or less ran into my fist. I felt his jaw break, which made me feel pretty bad, and then I was too busy to think.
There were four of them. I don’t happen to believe that the ability to hurt people is something to brag about, so I won’t go into details.
I got a nasty cut on my thigh, and a punch in the face that made my head spin.
I decked all four of them and left them groaning, then went to try and find out where Svangerd had got to.
I can’t honestly say how long I spent hobbling up and down corridors, trying to figure out where the hell I was.
The mental diagram of the layout of the citadel, which Svangerd and I had spent so much time contrapting, no longer seemed to apply.
Suddenly the floorplan seemed infinitely variable, endless passageways one minute, nothing but dead ends the next.
I tried to figure it out, but all I came up with was the absolute conviction that the inside of the building was much too big to fit into the outside.
And, of course, every frantic step I took was shifting me further and further away from where I’d parted company with Svangerd.
“If I were you—”
The man with the nose stepped out in front of me from behind a doorframe. For a split second I gawped at him. Then I swung.
I learned the basics of punching back on the farm, from my brothers, mostly in the capacity of punchbag, but I owe the refinements of my style to Svangerd.
Oh, for crying out loud, she said to me once, after a fraught encounter with law enforcement in the course of some job or other; you hit like a girl, here, let me show you.
And she did. From her I learned to drop my shoulder and do that cute little twist and shuffle with my right leg that makes all the difference.
The full force of my strength and her tuition connected with the nose, which really was too big to miss, and I heard something snap.
The nose’s owner slammed back against the wall, then slid down it in a heap.
For a moment I thought I’d killed him, but, no, he was just out cold.
I’d taken all the skin off my knuckles. The gash on my thigh was beginning to stiffen up.
I looked at him again. Why did I do that, I asked myself.
Because, I decided. On the other hand, there was a chance he’d been about to tell me something useful. Ah well.
“What the hell are you playing at?” Svangerd’s voice, directly behind me.
“Where did you get to?”
“You’ve been fighting. Is that your blood?”
“Yes.”
“Come on,” she said. “We need to get out of here, now.”
Back the way I’d just come. She darted off before I could tell her, that’s no good, it doesn’t go anywhere. Fairly soon she came to the same dead end that had stymied me half an hour earlier. The only difference was, now it was full of soldiers.
Full is an exaggeration. There were six of them, a standard quarter-platoon. They looked up to see a blood-spattered monk and a nun running straight at them. I imagine we could probably have talked our way out of it, under more favourable circumstances. But Svangerd didn’t seem inclined to try.
She brought down the lance corporal with a flying kick, then sort of bounced off him into the next man’s solar plexus.
It was his spear she used to deal with the remaining four.
She got them penned up in a corner, poor bastards, and her hands moved so fast I couldn’t keep track of what she did.
Neither could they. She disposed of the spear by driving its point into the ear of the man she’d floored earlier, and left it standing upright like a flagpole.
“Have you gone mad?” was all I could say.
“Back the way we came,” she replied. “I think we’ve been going south when we should be going north.”
I looked at her, and I thought, I was in love with that, once. Not, I realised, any more. “What?” she snapped at me. I took a long step sideways to let her go past me.
Halfway down some passageway or other we ran into more soldiers.
I turned round. Another half-platoon, coming up the other way.
Swell. “No,” I remember saying, in a loud, firm voice, but I might as well have saved my breath.
She’d acquired a knife at some point, and she kicked off by throwing it into some man’s eye.
He bequeathed her his sword, actually it was one of those short jobs, I believe the technical term is hanger; very handy for use in confined spaces such as narrow passageways, which is presumably why they issue them to guards.
Anyhow, she tugged it out of the dead man’s belt and made very good use of it. If good’s the word I’m looking for.
I took no part in that conflict. I wasn’t needed, which was probably just as well. It was all over very quickly, and then she scrambled over the dead bodies and raced away up the passage. I followed. I remember treading on someone’s face in the process, not that he was using it any more.