Chapter 6
The Order of Intercession is a serious outfit.
I applied to join, years ago, before I met Svangerd.
They didn’t actually laugh in my face, which was nice of them.
They approached Svangerd, several times, but she turned them down.
Svangerd isn’t afraid of anything mortal or substantial, but the supernatural creeps her out and turns her into a quivering mess.
I keep telling her, there’s no such thing as the supernatural, only natural critters we don’t know very much about any more. She doesn’t believe me.
The Order of Intercession firmly believes in the supernatural.
Their remit is demons, unclean spirits, witches, werewolves, vampires and things that go bump in the night.
They stab, hang and burn a lot of people, which I guess is only to be expected.
What I find curious is the high percentage of their agents who die on active service, and the even higher percentage who end up in secluded monasteries with high walls, where they seem to spend most of their time in complete darkness, sobbing their eyes out.
It’s a surprisingly high attrition rate for men who fight an imaginary enemy, and all in all I’m really quite glad I failed to measure up to their requirements.
“If they’re following us,” I said, “they’re making a really good job of it, because I can’t see any sign of them. If you don’t believe me, look for yourself.”
We were standing just below the skyline on the top of Terfing Beacon, the highest point between Laugar and the Ochsen forest. From there, on a clear day, you can see everything that moves, on or off the road.
I could see about a hundred sheep, twenty-six deer, nine buzzards, two dog foxes and a hare. No people of any kind.
“They’re out there somewhere,” she replied, not even bothering to look. “Maybe they’re hiding up during the day and following us by night. They’ve got those dogs that can follow a scent anywhere, over anything.”
“That woman at the inn didn’t say anything about dogs.”
“You didn’t ask her. Actually, they don’t need dogs. That woman’s got a better sense of smell than any dog, when it comes to us.”
Unlikely, I thought but didn’t say. The idea of a middle-aged nun running along on all fours with her nose pressed to the ground would have been mildly entertaining under other circumstances, but context is everything.
“Right,” I said, “it’s time for a policy decision. Do we carry on towards home, or what?”
“Yes.”
“Bearing in mind that, if Grimhild really is on our trail, it stands to reason she’ll have sent ahead to Simocatta and Tysapherna, in which case home is the last place on earth we want to go.
You want to go,” I amended, but my heart wasn’t in it.
Those three incredibly versatile words, aiding and abetting, were constantly in my mind, like the garish coloured blurs you get when you close your eyes after you’ve been looking at the sun.
Besides, I couldn’t just leave Svangerd with that thing inside her (I told myself), I had to be there to see that nothing bad happened to her. Nothing else bad.
“My orders are, I’ve got to be presented to Tysapherna,” she said.
“That’s all I’ve been told. After that, presumably, I won’t need this body any more.
Your girl can have it back, and welcome.
No harm done. If Grimhild and her button men show up ten minutes later, I really couldn’t care less.
I’ll have done my job, and that’s all that matters. ”
“Really?”
She shrugged. “Presumably I’ll receive further orders once I’ve carried out the orders I’ve already been given. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. That’s the way we do things, one small step at a time.”
“What if your new orders are to kill Tysapherna?”
“I kill her. So what?”
“Not in Svangerd’s body you don’t.”
“If it comes to that, feel free to try and stop me. But there’s absolutely no reason to assume that that’s what I’m going to be told to do.”
“I will stop you, if it comes to that.”
“How, by breaking her neck?” She made an exasperated noise, very similar to but not exactly the same as the one Svangerd makes when I’m annoying her.
“Look,” she said, “if you’re going to be hanged for aiding and abetting, you might as well aid and abet, instead of just standing there making difficulties all the time. We need to get home.”
True. I’d given it a certain amount of thought, and I could see no other way.
The only safe way to get her out of Svangerd was to let the mission play itself out.
Grimhild and the Order of Intercession were out of the question, and the only other alternative – quite.
Don’t even think about it, particularly when little miss bat ears could hear every word I thought.
“In that case,” I said, “we need to go due south.”
“In the opposite direction to where we want to go.”
“Precisely. Fifty miles south of here is Fesseln, which is on the border between Aelia and the archduke’s country.”
“Which you know like the back of your hand because you and she used to work for the archduke. I’m not sure how that helps.”
“Not this archduke,” I said. “His uncle. The new archduke, as you must surely know, is a heretic. He hates Holy Mother Church, and Holy Mother Church hates him. Grimhild and her two enforcers would be persona non grata on his turf.”
“So will we. And all they’ll do is dump the habits and get some ordinary clothes, same as us.”
“They won’t have the support network, is all I’m saying.
They’ll find it much harder to send ahead of us to watch the roads we’re likely to be travelling by, or the towns and villages where we’ll need to buy stuff.
It’ll be us two against the three of them, as opposed to the three of them and every priest, monk, clerk and soldier in the kingdom.
Also, as you pointed out, I know the archduchy quite well.
I still have contacts here, assets, even a few friends.
So does Svangerd. More to the point, there are people south of the border who are more scared of Svangerd than anything else in the whole world.
That could well prove useful, don’t you think? ”
She thought about it, then beamed at me. “Absolutely right,” she said. “And as soon as we can find you a few scraps of parchment and a bottle of ink, we can be whoever we need to be. We could be the archduke’s secret police and have them arrested.”
I nodded. “I know all the official forms and precedents they use in the duchy, and I can do the local court hand easy as pie. I could forge a couple of warrants standing on my head,” I said.
“Also diplomatic passes to get us seats on the government mail coach and berths on the first ship across the straits. It’s got to be better than sleeping in ditches and splashing upstream through rivers.
Also, we stand a chance of making it, which I don’t think we do otherwise. ”
“What a very useful man you are,” she said. “Talented and resourceful and highly intelligent. And there was me thinking your sort had died out with the empire.”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t do that.”
“What?”
“Say nice things. It makes my skin crawl.”
“Because it’s her saying them, you mean?” She laughed. “I’m sorry, that was very inconsiderate of me. It won’t happen again.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re an idiot. I never heard a more ridiculous idea in my life.”
“Better,” I said.
“But still not quite right. I need to say it like I mean it. Trouble is, I don’t.”
Oftentimes, to bring us to our harm – the hell with it.
I know the country around Fesseln like the back of my hand. How often, in the course of an average day, do you study the topography of your hands? That well.
“Are we nearly there yet?” she asked.
“Yes,” I lied. “Besides, you know everything. Or if you don’t, ask your inner voices and stop bothering me.”
It was getting dark, and the brow of the hill that led up to the magnificent vista of the Fesseln valley, with the river winding sinuously through hedgerow-quilted fields interspersed with shadowy ancient forests hadn’t shown up yet.
It was just possible that I’d gone the wrong way at Blachen, or else the crossroads I’d assumed was Blachen was in fact the junction of the Eastern Mail and the now semi-abandoned Southern Military Road, in which case Fesseln was the far side of the other range of hills, the ones we were in fact riding away from, not towards.
The test would be when we reached the top of the hill, with the vista and the unmistakeable stone cairn of Fesseln Beacon.
Trouble was, this hill didn’t seem to have a top.
“Admit it,” she said. “We’re lost.”
“No we aren’t.”
“You should have asked that man.”
In the course of the previous day, the back of my hand had acquired three new scratches from brambles and a deep graze from a hawthorn branch.
By the same token, the hinterland of Fesseln could easily have changed since I’d been there last, which would account for me not seeing the landmarks I’d been looking out for.
Or maybe I should’ve asked the way when I had the chance, which was unlikely to recur on the top of a desolate moor where even sheep couldn’t grub a living.
The main reason why Fesseln Moor isn’t part of the duchy is that successive archdukes haven’t wanted it.
Then quite suddenly we reached the top of the hill, and there below us in the gathering dark were the lights of the hearths and windows of Fesseln, a substantial town housing a garrison of three hundred soldiers and a small administrative hub consisting of five clerks and a supervisor.
“About time, too,” she said. “How long have we been riding for? Her bum is killing me.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “We need to think about this.”
She sighed. “Go on, then.”
I thought. “Not bad,” she said. “That ought to cover it.”