Chapter 8 #5
While I’d been forging the documents, he’d gone away and come back with two monastic habits, precisely the right cut, fabric and degree of wear.
I asked him where he’d got them and he said, from the same place the seal matrix came from.
That reminded me of what he’d said about a man dying to get me that entirely unnecessary chunk of sealing wax, which in turn put me in mind of Eupraxia, the ridiculous chainmail girl, whose body would be bloated and purple by now, in a hole beside the road.
Let’s accept at face value the proposition that goons don’t matter.
One problem with that is, by any meaningful criteria, I’m a goon too.
I looked at him. “This is a truly terrible idea,” I said.
“You got a better one?”
Sloppy logic; not really logic at all, merely political dialectic. “No.”
“Fine. We’ll do it my way.”
We put on the habits. Mine fitted perfectly, even the boots.
Then he issued me with various props from a hessian sack: a missal; a purse containing sixteen gulden and some small change; a clerk’s travelling writing set; a small wooden tile with lines scratched on it, for playing pickstones; a bit of grubby rag, for wiping my nose; the sort of stuff they’d expect to find on me when I was searched.
“You’re Brother Orosian,” he said. “I’m Gerderic. Got that?”
“Can’t I be Gerderic and you be Orosian? If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s beginning with a vowel.”
“Write them in.”
Which is, of course, how it’s done. They write out a couple of dozen sets of credentials and leave spaces for the names.
So you have to do it that way, and let the ink dry before you fill in the blanks.
Men have died choking at the ends of ropes because they couldn’t be bothered with small details like that.
The duty officer at the porter’s lodge was a middle-aged man with one small, thin wisp of hair brushed with desperate care over a broad, shiny forehead. “Papers,” he said. We dug my masterpieces out of our sleeves and handed them over. He glanced at them. “Thanks,” he said, and handed them back.
“We need to report to the deputy precentor,” said the man whose name was now Gerderic. “Where do we go?”
The duty officer turned and pointed. “Across the front quad,” he said. “That big gateway over there, with the dragons. Through that, turn left, sixth door, up the stairs, third right. You’d better get a wiggle on, he’ll be going to lunch around about now.”
The front quad was imperial architecture, and the dragons were actually horses, carved in the late Decadent style by one of the great northern masters whose names are now lost. It caught my eye like a bramble catching the back of your hand, and tearing it as you pull away.
“What we need,” Gerderic muttered, “is the round tower.”
“Should be easy to find.”
“Yes, if you’re a bird. At ground level the entrance is inside a mess of other stuff that got built round it.
” He paused, on the pretext of knocking gravel out of his boot, and scanned the area.
“I saw a ground plan once, but I can’t remember the fine detail.
Obviously it’s somewhere in the top left-hand corner, but how you’re supposed to get at it I have no idea. ”
Not what I wanted to hear. “I thought you knew—”
“Yes, well, I don’t. We’re going to have to ask somebody.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, even with my perfect handiwork in my sleeve. “What business would Orosian and Gerderic from Choris have with the round tower?”
“Need to know,” he said, rather feebly.
“The hell with that,” I said. “Why don’t we stop for a moment and think about it?”
Five doors down was the door to the chapel, so we went inside and sank to our knees before the altar.
It was a glorious thing, even though it was entirely fake – middle-period Mannerist style, but no more than seventy years old, if that.
Whoever painted the triptych had obviously seen the real thing somewhere; more to the point, he’d seen it and understood.
If I could’ve painted that, I’d reckon my life had been worth something.
“There are three doors,” Gerderic mumbled, just like someone muttering his prayers, “in the top left corner of this quadrangle. We try each of them in turn. If anyone challenges us, we talk loudly in a foreign language.”
“I saw them,” I said. “The left-hand door quite obviously leads to the cloister, because otherwise there’s no way to get to it without going all the way round the back.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“There’s nobody else here.”
“Keep your voice down.” He made the sign of the Incarnation, then embarked on his next round of prayers. “All right, that leaves two doors. We try them both. Anybody we run into, we just say we’re lost.”
“Yes, all right, then. So we’re inside the tower. Then what?”
“We find Svangerd.”
“In a locked cell, guarded by ten steelnecks. Sorry, it doesn’t work.”
He glared at me. “All right,” he said, “try this. We have papers. An extradition warrant. Bearing the seal of His Holiness himself. His personal seal.”
I was on the point of rubbishing the idea when it struck me that that was exactly what I’d have come up with, if he’d only shut up long enough to allow me to think.
Yes, why the hell not? Which begged the question of why I hadn’t thought of it earlier, but that was easy.
I hadn’t thought of it earlier because I’m not very bright.
“Possible,” I said. “Or it would’ve been if I’d brought the rest of that sheet of paper, and the ink and the ink bottle and the pen and the ruler, and I had the use of a scriptorium desk for an hour with nobody breathing down my neck.
If only you’d suggested it earlier, we might actually have a plan. As it is—”
He was thinking. “Not a problem,” he said. “We go back to the inn, you write the papers, we come back.”
“That’s pathetic,” I said, though offhand I couldn’t see why.
I think I said it because it’s what Svangerd would’ve said, if I’d proposed it.
“Fine. We’ll do that. And while I’m writing the warrant, you can be thinking the plan through properly, like you should’ve done before we set out in the first place. ”
We stood up, bowed to the altar and walked back out into the sunlight.
A young man nearly barged into us on the chapel threshold, then jumped back and apologised.
Quite all right, I told him, and by the way, perhaps you could help us.
We’re from out of town. How do we get to the round tower from here?
The novice smiled, turned round and pointed; you see that doorway there?
Through that, down the passage, third door on your right, there’s a fresco of the Illumination by Hunderic directly opposite, actually it’s a copy.
Anyhow, through the door, straight on till you reach the foot of the stairs. Have a nice day.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Gerderic muttered, as we headed back to the porter’s lodge. “What if he’d suspected—?”
“He didn’t,” I said.
“Yes, but—”
“Because we were coming out of the chapel, and he’s a novice and we’re ordained brothers, and he nearly trod on my foot.”
He looked at me. You’re weird, he didn’t need to say. I couldn’t be bothered to explain because he wouldn’t have understood me. It would’ve called for a rough working knowledge of human nature, and I guess he was away sick the day they covered that in the course.
I was halfway through writing the warrant when the soldiers arrived. There were six of them, and the only way in or out of our hayloft was a single ladder.
I probably should’ve guessed Gerderic would have a sword hidden in his luggage.
If so, I’d have removed it when his back was turned, and it wouldn’t have been there for him to grab hold of and take a swing with, and then he wouldn’t have been killed.
Yet another failure on my part. I ask you, though. Am I my brother’s keeper?
His body hit the floor and I caught sight of his eyes, wide open and nobody at home. Fortunately I hadn’t moved a muscle. “That’s fine,” I heard myself say, “I give in.” They hesitated for a moment or so, then dragged my hands behind my back and tied them tight at the wrists.
“You again,” Grimhild said.
She was holding my half-finished warrant, so there was no need to bother trying to lie my way out. “Sorry,” I said.
She sighed. “What’s the matter with you? I’ve already explained it to you twice.” She folded up the fake warrant and handed it to one of her goons. “That’s really good work, by the way. Where did you get the seal?”
“From him,” I said.
“It’s genuine.”
“Actually, no. But it was cut by Vitimer’s own seal man. Don’t ask me how he got hold of it.”
“You do realise who he was.”
“Sort of,” I said. “I think I know what he thought he was. Of course, I don’t believe a word—”
“Don’t start that again.” She was sitting on a plain three-legged stool.
There was nothing else to sit on in the room, which was on the third floor of the round tower.
The directions the novice had given us were, of course, completely wrong and would’ve led us directly to the guardhouse.
“I really, really ought to have you killed,” she said. “You’re a damned nuisance.”
“Sorry.”
“You already said that,” she said, “and I’m not sure I believe you.
If you were sorry, you wouldn’t keep on doing it.
” She snapped her fingers, and the goon gave her back the warrant.
She looked at it and shook her head. “Really impressive,” she said.
“The thing I always look for is the very slight thickening of the inside of the loop, where you’ve got an O before a consonant.
It’s absolutely unique to the pontifical scriptorium, and you’re the only forger I’ve ever come across who can do it right. ”
“It’s the pen,” I said.
“Go on. Really?”