Chapter 9 #4
It was a clay tile. No it wasn’t, it was a Sashan book; a clay tile, with Sashan writing on it. “You can read Sashan, can’t you?”
I grabbed it before he could change his mind. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
“No idea what it’s about,” he said. “It’s the only one I could find. I figured, there’s no way you can poison a clay tile. Probably it’s just garbage, but you did say you wanted something to read.”
Maybe I’d been wrong about Good all these years, and it does exist after all. “You’re a pal,” I said. “I owe you.”
“Yes, well.” He was embarrassed. “I dunked it in boiling water, then let it soak overnight, so it should be all right. Sorry the writing’s so small. That stuff is writing, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Looks like a bad case of chickenpox to me.”
The Sashan write by poking little wedge-shaped marks into wet clay, which they then bake in an oven.
I learned Sashan because the old archduke inherited a Sashan book from his great-uncle, and he wanted to know what it said.
It took me a year of intensive study, and the book turned out to be an oil merchant’s inventory.
I told the archduke it was the Psalms, literally translated. “No chance of a lamp, then.”
“Don’t push it,” he said.
Not that I’d have turned my nose up at an oil merchant’s inventory, after six days.
But it wasn’t anything like that. It turned out to be a Sashan version, at least seven hundred years old, of Artabyzes’ Garden of Entrancing Images, reckoned in imperial times to be one of the masterpieces of early classical Mezentine pornography.
I’m guessing it lost something in translation and of course there were no pictures. Still, it’s the thought that counts.
It was dark. I was lying on my back on the stone floor, looking up at where I knew the ceiling to be. I heard the door open.
Odd, because there was no light. When the guard brought me my food, light came in from the lamps outside. I thought about what my pal had told me, about certain people wishing me harm.
“Be quiet,” said a voice I recognised.
“Svangerd?”
“Quiet.”
Svangerd once told me that if you need to find someone in a pitch-dark room, you get them to say something. I closed my fist, then opened it again. If Svangerd wanted to kill me, it would be churlish to stay alive. “Over here,” I said.
A hand covered my mouth, an ambiguous action, in context.
I waited for the sharp edge against my throat.
Instead, she grabbed a handful of my hair and pulled, which I interpreted as an invitation to stand up.
So I did that, and she let go. Instead, she caught hold of my elbow.
“Not a fucking word,” she hissed in my ear. “Move.”
Svangerd has rescued me from prison cells so often it’s embarrassing, so I knew the drill.
Basically, for the duration of the operation, I’m luggage.
She’s in charge and my input isn’t wanted.
I knew when we went through the doorway because I banged my shoulder on the open door.
Then we turned left, down a corridor, and then there were some stairs.
Up the stairs, quiet as little mice. Then a door, which opened into pale moonlight.
I looked at her, but all I could see was a silhouette. “Where now?” I said.
“Shut your face.”
I knew where we were. Diagonally across the quadrangle to the stable yard, or right then sharp left to the cloisters, across the cloister gardens, scale the wall and down into the herb garden, with a low wooden gate we could climb easily. She tugged my sleeve. We were going left.
Which made very little sense. Left was the way to the chapel, the refectory, the library and the abbot’s lodgings. A thought occurred to me. “We’re going to kill someone, aren’t we?”
She kicked my ankle. “I won’t tell you again,” she said.
No, I thought, absolutely not. I rested my weight equally on both feet, to make myself harder to drag. “Who?”
“For God’s sake,” she said. “Not now.”
“Who?”
She gathered a double handful of my sleeve and tugged, but I’d braced myself and I weigh twice as much as she does. “You’re being totally unreasonable. If we get caught, we’re dead. Don’t be so stupid.” She tugged some more. The cloth tore. “Please,” she said.
Which was such an unSvangerdly thing to say that for a moment my heart froze. But it – the horrible cold thing – wasn’t there. I’d have known if it was. “Who?” I said.
“Tysapherna. It’s our only chance. If we leave it till the morning, that thing will make her do what it wants. We can’t let that happen. Trust me.”
Devastating choice of words. I’m always saying trust me to Svangerd, and as often as not she does, and we end up in jail, or hiding under heaps of old sacking. “We need to talk,” I said.
“Oh, for crying out loud. All right, then. But not here.”
I thought hard. “The chapel.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“The robing room behind the rood screen. Nobody ever goes there.”
“I hate you. You always make problems.”
The chapel door creaked as she opened it, loud enough to be heard in Choris Anthropou. One good thing about the chapel, we both know it so well we can navigate in the dark. The robing room is up a flight of six steps. There’s a lamp in there, but we’d have been crazy to light it.
“Well?” she said.
“Svangerd, what the hell is going on?”
She sighed. “You arsehole,” she said. “You left me with that thing in me.”
“I know.” When she didn’t interrupt, I went on: “I couldn’t see how to get it out of you without hurting you. I thought you’d die.”
“Bullshit. I heard you. You were flirting with it.”
I could lie, but that would only make things worse.
“I found it attractive,” I said. “The thought makes me sick, but I did.” I waited for a torrent of abuse, which didn’t come.
I wished it would, but it didn’t. “It was – fun to talk to. And really and truly, I was sure that if I tried to get it out, it’d kill you. And besides, I had no idea how.”
“It talked to you nicely,” she said. “So you let it have me.”
“Yes.” I waited, but still just silence. “I had no idea, not till it was inside me. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry. Swell.”
I have a certain degree of skill with words, which I’ve learned from books.
Over the years, I’ve absorbed a few rhetorical and forensic tricks, ways of making a weak case seem stronger than it is, ways of making lies sound like the truth.
I considered using them, but that would have been adding insult to injury.
“Fine,” she said. “I forgive you. You’re a complete and utter shit, but I forgive you. ”
It took a moment for that to sink in. “Why?”
“Because you’re a pathetic little arse and that thing is much stronger than you are, and it made you do all that stuff, and you haven’t got the guts to fight it.
Its fault, not yours. And then you thought, I’ll let it come inside me, that’ll be no big deal, it might even be fun, only it wasn’t, was it? ”
“No.”
“Serves you bloody well right.” I felt her hand on mine, giving it a squeeze. “At least you were smart enough not to believe what Grimhild told you.”
“Only because you warned me. Up till then—”
“Of course only because. Like I keep telling you, you’re an idiot.” She let go of my hand. “And now we’ve got to make sure that thing doesn’t get to use Tysapherna. And the only way to do that is to kill her. You do see that, don’t you?”
I tried to think clearly, but I seemed to have lost the knack. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You clown. Think about it. Tysapherna sends us to get the book. But of course, she doesn’t want the book, she wants what’s in it.
We’re supposed to bring her the book, so she can extract the demon and use it, as a weapon.
Of course it all goes tits-up. But all along, the demon wants to get here, to Tysapherna.
That’s the big idea, all along. The demon wants her.
Figures, doesn’t it? Just think how much damage that thing could do, with control over someone like that. ”
“Just a moment,” I said. “What about Grimhild?”
“She wants it, too. She thinks it can be a weapon.” She was quiet for a moment.
“That really shocked me,” she said. “I thought the world of her, I really did. But it turns out, she’s as dumb as the rest of them.
She honestly believes you can control those things.
She’d have killed me if, if you hadn’t—”
Neither of us wanted to go there. “You know that. For a fact.”
“Oh, yes. The demon knew it. It was terrified. I could feel it. Grimhild had this stuff that put the demon to sleep. I heard what they were saying, when the demon wasn’t there to stop me listening.
The process is ninety per cent reliable, but it always involves losing the host. That’s what she said, her very words.
I’d have died with my soul drenched in that thing’s sweat. ”
Luckily for me, I don’t believe in all that stuff. Svangerd does. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You keep on saying that. Look, it doesn’t matter any more, that’s all done with. But now it’s up to us to put a stop to it. Nobody else, just you and me. You know what it’s like now. We’ll be doing her a favour.”
Yes, I thought, probably we would. Would she be feeling it as cold or heat?
A matter of opinion, or perception, depending on where she was originally from, and which tradition she’d been brought up in.
Intolerable either way, of course. “If we kill her,” I said, “the demon will just fix her. They can do that.”
“Not if we kill her real good.”
The way she said it was totally Svangerd. It made me want to laugh, hearing her again. “Do you want to be forgiven or not?”