Chapter 8 #2
But, she didn’t need to say, consider the evidential value of the fact that we’re sitting here talking, rather than my goons dragging you off the cart and kicking you to death. “How’s the Patriarch of Eipen these days?” I said. “Keeping well?”
She frowned. “Last I heard, he’s fine,” she said. “What about him?”
I felt a slight pain in my ankle. Something had hit against it. Just possibly, the toe of Svangerd’s boot. “Nothing,” I said. “Is she all right, trussed up like that?”
“She’ll be fine,” Grimhild said. “We use a strong narcotic to keep them sedated. It relaxes the body so much, the demon can barely use it. We use something else to keep the demon quiet, but I’m not going to tell you about that. Why didn’t you stay put and wait for my people?”
I realised that I’d run out of imagination. “Some lunatic woman calling herself the Loyal Opposition whacked the guard and cut me loose. She reckons you’re up to no good.”
“And you believed her.”
“No. I didn’t disbelieve her either.”
“You know about the Loyal Opposition, naturally.”
“I know what they’ve told me about themselves. I don’t believe a word of it.”
That made her grin, an unaccustomed action, like a rich man scrubbing his own floor.
“Not believing things is your speciality, obviously. It’s a rare gift, but right now it’s making you rather tiresome.
The Loyal Opposition are the devil’s servants on earth.
I strongly urge you not to have anything to do with them. ”
That made me burn a little, as if I had indigestion. “Usually I hit them,” I said. “But this one reckoned you’re going to use Svangerd’s demon to possess the Patriarch of Eipen.”
She didn’t reply for a moment. “Interesting,” she said.
“It’d be a brilliant tactical stroke,” I said.
“It would.” She was thinking, as if I wasn’t there. “I can honestly say, it hadn’t occurred to me, but, yes, it’d be quite brilliant.” She turned her head and looked at me. “And so, in their way, are the Loyal Opposition. Don’t you see? That’s what they want the demon to do.”
And they offloaded their intention onto Grimhild for my benefit, to make me believe. It made sense. That’s to say, the arithmetic worked, sitting on the box of a cart in the middle of nowhere, when I was still half-crazy with terror and exhaustion.
“I remember Svangerd when I first met her,” Grimhild said.
“She was completely out of control, after what she’d been through.
I think she was looking to get herself killed, just to be rid of herself.
You never met such a foul-mouthed, savage creature in all your life.
But just under the skin there was a soul desperate for the courage to believe what she knew to be be true.
And when I gave her permission to believe, it was like a dam bursting.
It was devotion and trust and gratitude and pure joy.
It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, watching that vicious little animal turning into an angel.
” She paused for a moment and looked at me.
“Do you really think I’d do anything to hurt her? I’d rather put my own eyes out.”
I thought about that. I didn’t put my thoughts into words.
“Just imagine,” she went on, “what it’s like for her, having that thing inside her head.
It’s the worst possible violation a human body can undergo.
And Svangerd’s been violated so often, had things put inside her, against her will.
It must be worse for her, for that very reason.
I can get it out, and then we can start to heal her, slowly and gently.
I can do it,” she repeated. “You can’t. There are very few people alive who can do it, but I can, if I can get her to Kouden Andron, where I’ll have the books and the materials I need.
And I can do it without hurting, without pulling her guts out with the arrowhead. Do you believe me?”
I knew the answer to that question. “The Loyal Opposition woman,” I said.
“What about her?”
“Do me a favour and let her go.”
She frowned. “It’s a bit late for that, surely. Oh, you hadn’t noticed.”
I stood up, so I could see. Two of Grimhild’s goons were digging a hole. I sat down again. “Good riddance?” I said.
She shrugged. “No great loss,” she said.
“But a loss nonetheless. Like Saloninus says, every man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
Unfortunately, my people aren’t as well trained in subduing violence as I am.
She could have been another Svangerd, but she never got the chance. ”
I stood up again. “Sorry,” I said.
“Don’t mention it. Can we give you a lift anywhere?”
I shook my head. “I’m going home,” I said. “I feel an overwhelming urge to copy out some books. I’ll probably make a whole bunch of mistakes, but at least nobody’ll die as a result.”
She reached out and gave my hand a squeeze. “You’re a good man, in your own way,” she said. “You do God’s work, even though you don’t believe in Him. That makes you either a saint or an idiot, I don’t know which.”
“Both,” I said firmly. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that it’s each man’s death, not every man’s, but I decided not to.
So instead I took my horse and rode away in the opposite direction, as if intending to follow the road back to the coast and get a boat to Draugarness, and home that way.
I rode slowly as far as the point where the road bends sharply, it’s probably got a name but I don’t know it.
Then I got off the road and into the woods.
I hadn’t seen any signs of anybody watching or following me, but that didn’t mean anything.
There’s a book, which I copied out for the Prior of Lisebbia years ago.
We don’t know who wrote it or the original title; we call it the Mirror of Pure Thought.
It’s one of those books that every library owns and nobody ever reads, because it’s ninety-nine-point-nine per cent garbage.
For instance; it’s got cures for every known illness, none of which work.
It tells you how to extract silver from lead ore, only don’t bother trying, it’s a dud.
It’s got recipes for purple dye and how to make silk out of coal, how to extract pitch from birch trees and build a machine that flies through the air; none of it works, it’s all unalloyed bullshit. Nearly all.
Book six, chapter nine, tells you how to distil an essence which neutralises demons.
One drop of this essence on the tongue of the possessed host will put the demon to sleep for seventy-two hours, guaranteed.
Among its many ingredients is sal draconis, an incredibly rare oil from Echmen which smells strongly of coriander.
Which is of no interest to anybody, except that Svangerd, lying in the bed of the cart, stank overpoweringly of coriander, and why would that be?
Just suppose, therefore, that the demon was asleep when Svangerd’s body made the enormous effort to kick my ankle when I mentioned the Patriarch of Eipen. And if they’d put the demon to sleep, why was she still tied up?
Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent garbage leaves scope for point-one per cent truth; roughly the proportion of powdered chalk to sal draconis in the Echmen cure for mountain fever, which actually does work, and has saved countless thousands of lives far away on the other side of the known world.
I hate having to make decisions. On this occasion, however, I didn’t see that I had any choice.
Kouden Andron, for crying out loud.
It wasn’t always called that. Once upon a time it was Hrabill, a ring of concentric ditches dug into the side of a steep hill to form a rudimentary fort, where people could drive their cattle and be safe.
The emperor Hildebert II stormed it, with colossal loss of life on both sides, and rebuilt it as Forum Andrapodizae, a thriving market town and a hub for the flourishing slave trade, which was the main industry in those parts immediately after the conquest. In time it became a great city, with a university and the biggest steel mill north of the White Mountains, until the Rosinholet came.
They turned it into potash, apart from a suite of stone buildings that used to be the Area Prefecture and the county jail.
Five hundred years later, Holy Mother Church took them over, whitewashed the walls and founded the Lighthouse monastery, aptly named.
Kouden houses the Order of Intervention’s library, a place I’ve often dreamed of visiting, usually after I’ve eaten strong cheese immediately before going to sleep.
There are more books of which only one copy survives in Kouden than anywhere else in the world.
But those books aren’t survivors of carelessness, neglect, war and entropy.
Kouden houses the one copy that was kept when all the other copies were heaped on a bonfire by the public hangman.
The name Kouden Andron is Permian for the Devil’s Pantry.
That sort of book. Kouden isn’t a library, it’s a prison.