Chapter 8 #4
It involved him and me presenting ourselves at the porter’s lodge, brandishing a set of impeccably forged credentials identifying us as duly accredited scholars sent by His Holiness Vitimer to consult a book – not one of the naughty books, because even His Holiness can’t go browsing anathema without a very good reason; something rare and abstruse and totally innocuous, of which the Lighthouse happened to have a copy.
“Which would at least get us through the door,” he said. “After that, we’ll just have to be resourceful.”
“Piss off,” I said. “Grimhild knows me.”
“Grimhild doesn’t sit in the porter’s lodge vetting every single visitor.
Besides, we know exactly where Grimhild’s going to be.
She’ll be in the torture chamber, making sure all the equipment’s been set up right.
Once we’re inside, we get hold of a couple of habits and we can move about freely.
It’s a big monastery, a hundred and fifty monks and three hundred lay brothers, plus servants, guards, what have you.
Nobody knows everybody by sight. Besides, we’ll have papers.
We find where Svangerd’s being held, we get her out, we leave. ”
Exactly what Svangerd would do. I took a moment to look at him. He was shorter than me, but so are most people: squarely built, about five years older than me, with a short black beard, shoulders like a stonemason’s and big, hairy hands. “Are you any good at that sort of thing?”
“You mean fighting? Yes.”
A hell of a time to have to take a complete stranger at his word. At least he wasn’t wearing inside-out chainmail next to the skin. If he had been, of course, he’d have been arrested. They set great store by the monopoly of force in Kouden.
“The brilliant part of the plan is,” he went on, “everybody knows you’d have to be mad to try and get past the lodge here on forged papers.
Everybody and his mother wants to get in here to steal or copy the books, so the security’s specially trained to spot fake documents.
In fact, there are only four, possibly five people this side of Sashan capable of producing a set of false credentials that’d get them past the duty officer.
One of them being you.” He did the big fake grin again, as a barmaid went by collecting empty crockery.
“We all know about you,” he went on. “Standing orders, you’re not to be harmed, and no harm is to come to you, because you’re needed for a very important job at some point in the future.
Goes without saying, nobody knows what that job is, because that’s classified thirty ways to buggery.
But I can’t help wondering if this is it.
Because being realistic, you’re the only man living on the face of the earth who could do this.
The other three forgers are too old or too feeble for field operations, so it’s got to be you. It would make sense.”
I felt like I was nine years old and my brother Kotkel had just put a spider down my back.
“I’d need exactly the right parchment,” I said.
“And exactly the right ink, and exactly the right pen, and probably a genuine seal matrix from a really prestigious monastery. Not a reverse casting, because you can spot them a mile off if you know what you’re looking at. ”
I’d said the wrong thing. He turned his head and grinned at me; a real grin, not camouflage. Then he put his hand inside his shirt and brought out a small cloth bag, pulled together at the neck with a drawstring. As soon as I’d seen it, he put it back. “Funny you should mention that,” he said.
There was no room at the inn, so we had to make do with a corner of the hayloft, for which we were charged sevenpence halfpenny. Fortunately the Loyal Opposition appears to have more money than it knows what to do with.
I have to confess, the parchment impressed the hell out of me.
I recognised it, because I’d seen the exact same stuff when I took my trip to Choris.
It was, quite literally, the finest money could buy.
Milk-white sheepskin, astonishingly even thickness, immaculately sized, glazed and burnished, I had to look twice to see which was the hair side.
Somehow that lunatic had managed to get hold of a whole foot-square sheet of the stuff, five times what I’d need for two sets of documents, and presumably I’d get to keep the offcut –
I wrenched my mind away from that thought and considered the ink, in a little glass bottle.
Glass is essential; if you keep oak-gall ink in clay, even baked and glazed, it affects the consistency and the viscosity (there’s a word I never thought I’d have occasion to use in this bleak, post-Fall world we live in) which in turn makes it hard to get the fluency when you’re trying to write quickly, which is what the clerk writing these documents would be doing.
I glanced at the bottle and recognised the shape, which is unique to the scriptorium of His Holiness’ private office.
They have their own in-house glass blower, would you believe.
I dipped the nib of the pen in the ink and drew a squiggle on the back of my hand.
Ink all the way from Choris Anthropou, for crying out loud.
“How did you manage—?” I asked. That got me a scowl.
And then there was the seal. I hardly liked to touch it. “Genuine,” I said.
“No,” he said. “But it was cut by His Holiness’ own diesinker.” He glared at me. “One of these days, you’re going to have to start taking us seriously.”
“I’d rather die,” I said. “Wax?”
He nodded. “Melted off an archiepiscopal bull.” He prodded a dark red blob I’d overlooked. “It cost a man his life to get you that.”
I winced. You can fake His Holiness’ personal sealing wax easy as pie; just take ordinary Church issue and add the tiniest pinch of gypsum dust.
Who knows what’ll happen. It’s possible, though incredibly unlikely, that some day, something like the empire will come again.
Great cities will be built, generating vast sums of tax revenue, enough to pay for scholars and libraries and the rebirth of Learning.
People will start writing books again – new books, not the same old ones copied out – and a new race of giants will spread out, tame and repopulate the weary, cynical old earth.
Everything that was lost will be rediscovered, science will drive out ignorance, superstition and Holy Mother Church, and everybody will be well-fed, healthy, educated, safe and happy.
And in some monastery somewhere, in this brave new world, a scholar will sit down to write the standard reference work on the history of art; and one chapter will deal with manuscripts.
He’ll discuss in great and knowing detail all the masterpieces of the ancient scribes, or at least the pitiful handful that managed to survive into his own time.
Most likely he won’t know the names of the old masters, so he’ll call them something like the Schanz Painter or the Master of the Eichenbaum Codex – and, who knows, one of them could well be me.
Fact is, I’m good at what I do. That explains why I’m still alive and not in jail, given the horrendous number of really bad things I’ve been caught up in.
Very rarely am I actually guilty of anything, but when something truly ghastly happens, there I usually am on the sidelines, connected to or associated with the bad people and the dreadful happenings, which really ought to have been the death of me, except that I’m useful.
And profitable, let’s not forget that. A simple missal illuminated by me is worth good money, and if you want a psalter or a book of hours to give to My Lord’s wife or sister on her birthday, my work is as good as any and better than most. Also, I have this rare and exceedingly useful knack of being able to fake, forge and falsify any piece of writing you care to name.
Cut a long story short, I’m good. Really good.
Now if you’re the sort of person I’ve had in mind while I’ve been writing this, it’ll have occurred to you to wonder: this brave new world, the empire restored, this new empire, this kingdom of heaven on earth.
Did it come about because the Invincible Sun ordained that it should be so?
Or is it yet another stage in the long game, engineered by the Loyal Opposition simply and solely so that, after a thousand years of peace, enlightenment and joy, the whole lot will come crashing down in flames at the hands of some new strain of Rosinholet or Aram Chantat?
If I was the Prince of Darkness (not that he exists) that’s the sort of big score I’d be working towards.
Build back better until you reach the pinnacle of human mortal potential, and then stamp it into the dirt.
Maybe that’s what happened the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.
Dunno; not my department. What I do know is how to form letters with a pen or brush so that they look precisely the way they’re meant to.
I should add that I take very little pride in this accomplishment, for the simple reason that, if I can do it, it can’t be worth anything, except in money, to idiots.
He examined them, holding them up to the light of a brass lamp, magnified through a glass bowl. He took a long time over it, which of course was all wrong. The duty officer in the porter’s lodge wouldn’t go about it that way. He’d glance, and he’d know or be fooled.
“They’ll do,” he said.
I swore at him under my breath. “Sure?”
He nodded. “They’d fool me,” he said. “So, there we are, then. We’re ready to go.”