Chapter 8 #3
I know for a fact that Kouden’s got a copy of Rotbrand’s Symmetries, and Priscennius’ Origins, and all three volumes of Hrafnbert’s Dialogues Concerning the Soul.
I’d bet you anything you like they’ve got Segimerus’ Metaphysics and the original uncensored version of Saloninus’ Daybreak, including the four chapters he was compelled to burn in front of the Third Ecumenical Council.
That’s Holy Mother Church for you, and that’s why I love her so dearly.
She’s a bit like my uncle, the one who could never bear to throw anything away.
When Holy Mother Church declares a book to be anathema, she torches all the copies except one, and sends that one to Kouden.
You never know, she’s saying: it might come in handy for something one of these days, and there’s always the one-in-a-million chance that we might have been wrong about so-and-so.
It’s a capital offence to copy a book in Kouden.
It’s also instant death to remove one from the library building, or to deface it in any way.
Wild horses couldn’t drag Svangerd over the threshold of Kouden library.
All that heresy, malignant, contagious; accidentally brush the spine of one of those books with the hem of your sleeve, and your soul goes straight to hell.
Me, I’d dearly love at least a week in there, alone and undetected, with a dozen rolls of parchment and a gallon of ink.
In theory. The alone-and-undetected part would be difficult to arrange, and even the missing pages of Daybreak aren’t worth dying for – as I told the previous archduke to his face when he ordered me to break in there and make him a copy.
He wasn’t the sort of man you said no to lightly, so you can tell how terrified I was.
Three days ride to Kouden. I didn’t hurry.
In theory, I could have galloped like mad and taken shortcuts, in the vain hope of getting ahead of Grimhild and ambushing her on the road – me on my own, without even the annoying, useless and now dead warrior-princess woman as backup.
It’s what Svangerd would’ve done, with me moaning and making difficulties every step of the way, and either she’d have succeeded or she’d have ended up like the warrior princess, shovelled into a hole at the side of the road, because tidiness is next to godliness.
I really did my best to feel bad about that woman’s death, but I couldn’t quite manage it.
God (who doesn’t exist) only knows, I’m not perfect.
In other words, I’d ruled out the military option: rescue Svangerd by brute force of arms. I think that was the sensible choice, even though I had no other option to go with.
Get to Kouden, then think about it; because, of course, my creativity and imagination work so much better when I’m breathing in smog than out in the fresh air.
Didn’t I mention that? Kouden is a foundry town.
Not the way it used to be, under the empire, when they felled the entire Leirwald forest to make charcoal to smelt iron.
These days, the charcoal has to travel up the Brown River on barges, but there are still twelve furnaces at Kouden, big enough to give the air a foul, bitter taste in the back of your mouth, and when you blow your nose, the snot comes out grey.
That’s because of the Brown River, in the bed of which lurk nuggets of a special sort of bog-iron.
What’s special about it is, it’s not iron but naturally occurring steel.
Interesting stuff, steel. You need it for all the really useful life-and-death tools – knives and axes, shovels and ploughshares, scythes and sickles, hammers, chisels, saws, weapons.
You can get by without it, but steel is so much better.
Under the empire they had a process for making it in a sort of oven; blister steel, they called it.
It was quick, easy and cheap, so even poor people could have steel tools and every soldier in the army had steel weapons, and that’s how the empire grew and became strong.
These days, we still get over half our steel from digging up rusty imperial ploughshares and hayknives, and spearheads from battlefields.
The other half comes from the bed of the Brown River, and it takes two bushels of riverbed gravel to make a scythe blade, except that you don’t make a scythe blade out of solid steel, not unless you’ve been commissioned by a marquis to make a birthday present for an earl.
You make the blade out of ordinary soft iron, and forge-weld onto it a thin ribbon of steel, to form the cutting edge.
That sort of work is one of the very, very few things we do well where I come from, in the hill country, where we also have a river whose bed is rich in natural steel, which is how come I know so much about it.
And what I know, I’m resolved that you should know, too, whether you want to or not.
Welcome to Kouden. The furnaces stand on the bank of the Brown River, and downstream the river water is so filthy that not even pond slime can live in it, and no trees grow on the banks.
Surrounding the furnaces is a small cluster of slate-roof houses, in which the furnace workers live (though not for very long), and then half a mile away, upwind, you’ve got the white tower and golden sandstone walls of the Lighthouse monastery.
At least it’s relatively quiet these days.
Under the empire they had enormous trip-hammers pounding away day and night, powered by undershot waterwheels seventy feet tall.
There’s a detailed description of them in Collodius’ Concerning Metallurgy – which was lost centuries ago, but part of the bit about the waterwheels was quoted in Ortigern’s Elements of Robur Grammar, which means we know what the waterwheels looked like but not how they worked.
The furnaces and the bed of the Brown River as far as Surtmere all belong to the Lighthouse, as part of its permanent endowment, which is why the Lighthouse is probably the richest monastic institution in the known world.
There are seven taverns in the tiny settlement around the steel works. They make their beer with water from the river, naturally. “You wouldn’t happen to have any wine?” I asked.
“No. Just beer.”
“Milk?”
The milk comes from goats that graze along the riverbank. It was a pale fawn colour, and a pint cost me a penny three-farthings. I ate about half of my bowl of lentil stew, mostly because I was ravenously hungry.
“You should try the Sun in Splendour up the road,” said a man in a brown coat, sitting down beside me on my bench. “They do onion soup. There’s something in onions that filters out all the shit.”
I looked at him. “Noted,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“Keep your voice down,” he said pleasantly. “We’re old friends who just happened to bump into each other.”
“No, we’re not.”
“Yes we are. Just like you’re one of the archduke’s Knights of the Wardrobe.”
Oh, I thought. “Piss off,” I said.
He smiled, for the benefit of the landlord, who chanced to glance in our direction. “Where’s Eupraxia?”
“Who?”
“Young, pretty, got a thing about chainmail. She should be with you.”
“She’s dead.”
He froze, just for a moment. Something horrible and unexpected had happened to him, and he had no choice but to take it in his stride; as though he was a burglar creeping about in someone’s house, and he’d just impaled his foot on a four-inch nail. “How?”
“She thought it’d be a good idea to ambush Grimhild and her men. It wasn’t.”
He smiled again, as though I’d just said something mildly amusing. “That explains that, then. You survived, obviously.”
“Grimhild has no quarrel with me. She said so.”
He was bursting to cry, like an old man desperate for a pee, but he couldn’t, with people watching. “Grimhild arrived early this morning. I saw a cart.”
“Two-wheeler,” I said. “Svangerd was in it.”
“In that case, she’s now inside the Lighthouse.”
My turn to feel the way he was feeling. “That’s it, then,” I said.
“Don’t be so bloody stupid,” he said. “You don’t know the first thing about the process, obviously. It takes hours to set it up and get everything ready. We’ve still got time.”
“To do what? You can’t just walk into the Lighthouse.”
He stretched his face into a wide grin, to mask his anger. It was an unnerving sight. “Fuck you,” he said. “Eupraxia gave her life for this mission. I’m not about to let that be for nothing just because you’re chickenshit.”
There was still time… I remember when my mother died.
I won’t pretend I liked her very much, but she was my mother, and I loved her.
She died very slowly, and I remember sitting on the floor beside her bed, watching her breathing, shallow, light as a feather; thinking she’s still alive with every breath she took, for days and nights on end.
She’s still alive, it hasn’t happened yet, there’s still time – although I knew perfectly well that nothing was ever going to get better and there was no room for hope or anything like that.
But it wasn’t over yet. Her shrivelled neck and chest were still moving, the light was still faintly glowing before the irreversible onset of darkness.
Years later, when I read about the last fifty years of the empire in exile in Olbia, I thought about her.
When the rest of the empire had fallen and everything had been lost, Olbia still held out behind its colossal walls, guarding the books and the scholars and a hundred thousand terrified people, until a day came when the Aram no Vei eventually broke in and killed every living thing.
And then it was all over and there was no more time.
Despair isn’t so bad, it’s just being realistic as the noose brushes your ears. It’s hope that’s intolerable.
“Don’t tell me,” I sighed. “You’ve got a plan.”
“As a matter of fact…”
He had a plan. It sucked.