Chapter 6 #2
An hour or so later we presented ourselves at the door of the secretariat, where a bored-looking guard told us to go away and come back in the morning. I gave him a look, then took a signet ring off my little finger. “Know what this is?” I said.
Fortunately he didn’t, or he’d have arrested me for stealing it from the dead body of a salt merchant.
Instead he snapped to attention and allowed us to pass through the door.
Inside was dark, apart from a flickering bubble of light cast by a single oil lamp, standing in front of a highly polished steel helmet, serving as a reflector.
A man looked up from a writing slope. It was scriptorium-style, tall and narrow, and the man was perching on a high stool.
I cleared my throat. “Are you the chief clerk?”
“Me? God, no. Who are you?”
I was Brother Athanaric and she was Sister Eudocia.
We were agents of the archduke’s private scriptorium, returning from a long and extremely difficult undercover mission in hostile territory.
We’d achieved our objective, which was classified, but barely escaped with our lives; accordingly, we didn’t have our papers any more, so couldn’t use them to prove our identities.
But that didn’t matter, I went on, because I could prove who we were quite easily by telling the chief clerk our special secret codes, which he would immediately recognise.
“That’s awkward,” the clerk said. “The chief’s not here. He had to go to Auderborn—”
“For the quarterly audit,” Svangerd interrupted. “Of course. That’s now, isn’t it?”
“So it is,” I conceded. “Damn, I forgot about that. All right, who’s in charge?”
The clerk looked unhappy. “Me.”
“Then you’re it. I need you to write us new credentials. Do you know the correct form of words?”
He looked even less happy. “No.”
“Just as well that I do, then. I Waltharius, by the grace of the Invincible Sun Archduke of – you’re not writing it down. What’s the matter?”
“Hang on,” the clerk said, and I felt sorry for him. “I can’t just go writing out tickets without some sort of proof.”
“Such as?”
“Well—”
“A set of credentials,” I said. “If we had credentials, we wouldn’t need you to write them for us.
Only, as I think I just explained, our credentials were lost in the course of a dangerous and highly classified operation in hostile territory, from which we barely escaped with our lives.
We need credentials so that we can take the results of the operation to His Grace, who needs them in order to make a decision on a crucial and extremely urgent matter of foreign policy.
I’m sorry, what did you say your name was? ”
His handwriting was excellent, for a junior way-station clerk. As soon as the ink was dry and the sealing wax had cooled, we left Fesseln and rode south in the pitch dark (fortunately, I know the road south like the back of my hand) –
“You’re a bastard,” she said, in the dark, to the back of my head. “Why couldn’t we stay at that inn? I was really looking forward to a bed and a hot meal.”
“We needed to get out of town right away,” I said.
“Obviously the clerk will have ordered a couple of men to follow us, to find out if we’re really who we say we are.
They’ll have seen us talking to the landlord and giving him money, presumably for a room, at which point they’ll have gone away with a view to coming back early in the morning.
And pressing on and not wasting time is entirely consistent with our characters.
At the inn we met a contact who’d been sent to wait for us there.
He told us there’s no time to lose, we’re needed at court straight away, so we skipped out and carried on going. ”
There was a brief silence. Then she said: “You know, at times I reckon you actually believe in all that stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“The lies you make up when you’re being someone. You invent yourself. Like the Creation.”
“That’s blasphemy.”
“Like you care.”
“No, but you should.” I chalked a point up to me, then went on: “Of course I believe. You have to, or you won’t fool anyone. When I’m being someone, I am them. It’s the only way.”
“I see. Sort of like a demon possessing a body. Only, of course, it’s your own body, dressed up in costume.”
“Svangerd knows what I mean. Ask her if you don’t believe me.”
“Not sure we’re on speaking terms right now. Anyway, no big deal. It’s just interesting, that’s all.”
Like a demon possessing a body. I chalked up five points to her.
Yes, I told myself, but it’s the only way.
Grimhild and the Order of Intercession would kill Svangerd out of hand, just to drive out the demon.
There are supposed to be tried and tested procedures for exorcism, but I had a nasty feeling they were like the cures for kidney stones, septicaemia and the plague: officially recognised by the college of surgeons in Choris, but with a ninety-six per cent mortality rate, because the real cures were lost when Styraeus’ Practical Medicine burned to ashes in the siege of Ap’ Escatoy.
I made a point of thinking loud and clear, so she’d know my rationale, which would mean she could trust me.
“I do,” she said. “I know how you feel about her, that’s all I need.” Pause. “It must be extraordinary to have someone care about you like that. She’s a lucky girl.”
I felt like I was biting iron.
The archduke is an atheist, like me. It’s my fault that he’s that way.
A few years back, when his uncle was still alive (the previous archduke: my and Svangerd’s boss, at the time), she and I rescued the last surviving copy of Saloninus’ Genealogy of Morals for the archducal library.
The nephew – the present archduke – read the book and was completely blown away by its arguments, so that when he succeeded to the title he disestablished Holy Mother Church, dissolved all the monasteries, expelled the monks and nuns (Svangerd and me included) and closed the borders of the duchy to all foreign clergy.
It’s not against the law in the duchy to be a believer, but they make it as awkward and inconvenient as possible.
I guess I should be pleased with myself for accomplishing all that, but I’m not.
It means, among other things, that if I’m recognised on duchy soil by one of my old associates, the local watch or guard commander is within his rights to lynch me from the nearest tree, without trial or appeal.
That’s the triumph of Reason over the retrograde forces of ignorance and superstition for you, and I’m not sure it’s worth all the fuss.
Hence the need for absolutely genuine rock-solid credentials if we were going to swan about in hostile territory; but I’d seen to that, and now the duchy was actually a relatively safe place for us to be.
The duchy has some of the most efficient secret police in the known world.
None of the various talons and tentacles of Holy Mother Church, not even the Order of Intercession, are brave enough or stupid enough to operate there.
Instead, they hire local contractors – conscientious, hardworking men and women who do their best to give value for money, but a match for Svangerd and me?
Not likely. As for the risk of bumping into someone we knew in the old days; it bothered me, but that’s because I worry too much.
Most of the people we knew back then were monks and nuns, too, so they were all long gone.
As for the corrupt officials and career criminals we had to associate with for business reasons, I doubted very much that they’d be inclined to turn us in out of a feeling of civic duty.
And if they did, we’d simply flash our credentials and say they were lying, and that would be the end of it.
I don’t like to say this, but nobody else is going to, so I might as well; I’m rather good at what I do, and some of my ideas are pretty smart.
Which was why I was sitting on the floor of a semi-derelict barn seven miles north of Schlechthaben, trying to do convincing demotic cursive on a tiny scrap of parchment by the light of a bulrush dipped in tallow.
The bulrush, the parchment, the pen and the ink had come from our pal the clerk’s desk while his attention was elsewhere: they were absolutely authentic.
Which meant that by the time the ink was dry, the words I was writing would be absolutely authentic, too, or at least no human being on earth would be able to prove otherwise.
She was peering over my shoulder. “There’s only one L in illustrious,” she said.
“Actually, there are two. Please don’t do that, I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Suit yourself.” Pause. “What are you doing?”
“Writing us some credentials.”
“We’ve got credentials.”
“These are better ones.” I stopped and lifted the pen clear of the parchment.
I’d nearly made a false stroke: a loop on the end of a certain letter, which would be all wrong for clerical demotic cursive.
“The credentials we got from the clerk in Fesseln are just our cover. These are our real credentials.”
“Let me see.”
“No, you’ll smudge it.” I shielded the parchment with my arm, like a mother with her baby. “This makes us Knights of the Wardrobe.”
“Scary.”
“Terrifying. Those people don’t give a damn what they do, and they report directly to the archduke. If we wanted to, we could walk in to the next garrison town we come to and requisition an army.”
“Are we going to do that?”
“No. This is for just in case. It’s the equivalent of the short knife strapped to the inside of Svangerd’s thigh. Only more civilised.”
“I got rid of it,” she said. “It chafed like you wouldn’t believe. Also, the pommel—”
I expressed a disinclination to hear about that. “Please,” I said, “go and sit down and be quiet till I’ve finished. It’ll only take me a few minutes more.”
She was quiet for an uncharacteristically long time. Then she said, “You know about the knife, then.”
“Yes.”
“You peeked.”