Chapter 9 #5
Yes, I decided, even if it meant being caught by the guards and tortured to death; even if it meant making a horrible mistake that furthered the cause of Evil.
Not that Svangerd really would forgive me, if I fulfilled my side of the bargain.
Some things you can’t forgive. Instead, you have to be bought off, with something of equal or greater value than the wrong you’ve suffered.
Where I come from, they don’t hang people for murder.
Instead, the murderer pays the victim’s family a very large sum of money.
We may be savages, but occasionally we can be quite smart.
“What have you got in mind?” I said.
She had a plan. It wasn’t want you’d call sophisticated. We creep up to Tysapherna’s room, we scrag the guards, we kill Tysapherna and cut her head off. Simple.
Simple isn’t the same as easy. Take Harman the Dragonslayer.
Carefully analyse his character, as set forth in the Song of the Sword, and you’ll quickly realise that he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
All he’s fit for is simple tasks calling for superhuman strength and courage.
Accordingly he’s aces at slaying dragons, but incapable of tying his own shoelaces.
A slightly smarter man would’ve watched the dragon to see where it went to drink in the morning, then dosed its watering hole with a gallon of blue vitriol.
Same result, except that a little old lady with a bucket could’ve coped with the dragon just as easily as Harman, and with considerably less fuss and risk of collateral damage.
Given the choice, I’m a little old lady with a bucket, every time. “No,” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Don’t start.”
“Yes, but—”
“I mean it,” she said. “Do this one simple thing for me and I forgive you for everything you’ve put me through. Otherwise—”
“There’s a better way,” I said.
She hates it when I do that. She hates it because my way is almost always better, but somehow it never actually works. Something goes wrong and then we have to wing it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I was right, and my idea was much better than hers. “Go on,” she said.
“Mother Tysapherna’s got the big room at the top of staircase seven on the north-west corner of south quad.”
“I told you that.”
“And I believe you. Now cast your mind back. The year before we came here. When they had that really bad fire.”
If there’s anything that ruins Abbot Simocatta’s life of quiet, complacent indulgence, it’s the fire risk.
Our monastery is no more than four hundred years old, so it’s basically a brick shell round a timber frame.
Each of the twenty or so staircases that get you from the quad up to the hundred-odd rooms that form the monastery’s collegiate hub is effectively a chimney.
The staircases are oak, with oak-panelled walls.
The year before we came, nine senior faculty members were roasted alive when staircase three caught fire, and they came within a hair’s breadth of losing the whole quad.
“Actually,” she said, “that’s not a bad idea. ”
“Either she’s burned to a crisp in her sleep,” I said, “or she comes thundering down the stairs and out into the quad, and then you snuff her. Everybody’s going to be running round like lunatics, so getting away afterwards oughtn’t to be too much of a challenge.
Probably they’ll be so preoccupied with stopping the fire spreading, they won’t even notice the dead body till the morning.
By which time, we will not be here. We will be somewhere else. ”
She frowned. “I don’t like it,” she said. “So she comes running out and I stab her. That thing can fix puncture wounds, no trouble at all. I’d have to drag the body back into the fire, to make sure.”
“I’ll do that,” I heard myself say, “if it comes to it.”
“All right. So, how do we start the fire?”
Nothing but the best for Abbot Simocatta.
For the twin lamps that burn night and day in front of the altar in his chapel, he sends away to Rechio for the finest whale oil.
It costs thirty gulden a gallon, as opposed to three gulden for Mezentine walnut oil, or six gulden thirty for top-quality olive oil from Antecyrene.
Simocatta argues that the whale is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit.
A hideous sea monster carries inside its head the source of the Divine light.
Also, it burns faster, cleaner and considerably hotter than vegetable oil of any kind, so gives a purer light.
Mostly, of course, it’s because the archdeacon of Geritz lights his altar with palm oil from Blemmya, at fifteen gulden a gallon, a display of conspicuous consumption which Simocatta regards as tantamount to an act of war.
Because it’s a sanctified consumable, the oil for the altar lamps is stored in the vestry, not the buttery or the cellars. A six-gallon jar is enough to last a year, so Simocatta always has at least twelve gallons on hand. One jar each.
The vestry is at the other end of the chapel from the robing room.
The door is locked, with a thirty-year-old lock made by some blacksmith.
I had it open in the time it takes to say the Gloria, using only a splinter of wood and the darning needle I always carry in the hem of my sleeve. “Tinder-box,” I said.
“On the shelf above your head.” Svangerd used to have the privilege of trimming the lamp wicks, until she lost it by punching out brother sacrestan over some trivial dispute. “And you’ll want a bit of old rag, to light it with.”
Good point. I fumbled around and found something which I recognised by feel as a spare altar cloth. Also a sanctified item, but it was dark, so Svangerd couldn’t see. “Got it,” I said. “We’re good.”
It’s not like Svangerd to hesitate, once we’re tooled up and ready to go. “I’m not sure about this,” she said.
“Now what?”
“I don’t know. Something could go wrong.”
Luckily I’m a patient man. “Do you want to do it or not?”
She sighed. “You’re right,” she said. “Here goes.”
Outside, in the moonlight, I felt a tickle on the back of my neck that told me the wind was blowing from the east. Ideal. That would send the flames towards staircase seven, and away from the library.
Yes, I know. And the thought had crossed my mind, believe me.
I’d even gone so far as to wonder whether that was the big idea after all.
The purpose of the exercise, to bring the curse of fire down on Simocatta’s wonderful library, home and last secure fortress to dozens of unique and precious books; and the reason I’d been so carefully spared, so that I could be the one to destroy them.
If there really was such a thing as Evil, that was precisely the sort of thing it would do.
I considered the Loyal Opposition and their idea of the grand design, the long game, the sort of bejewelled golden sledgehammer they’d choose to smash the nut of my soul.
If I burned down Simocatta’s library, even by accident, I knew I’d go straight to hell, even though it doesn’t exist, so I’d have to build it myself.
But unless I killed Tysapherna, Svangerd wouldn’t forgive me. And if we tried to kill her Svangerd’s way, we’d fail. Would hell be a small price to pay for putting things right with Svangerd? Stupid question.
But the wind was from the east. At that moment I reckoned I could understand why gullible people believe in a good and loving God. The wind blows from the east (which it tends to do at that time of year, in our neck of the woods) and what other conclusion could you possibly draw?
Quiet as little mice, we opened the door to staircase seven and unstoppered the oil jars.
Three hundred and twenty guldens’ worth of oil, all over the floor and the walls and the first five steps of the staircase.
Abbot Simocatta insists on the oil being scented with lavender and frankincense.
I don’t know if he pays extra for that. Anyhow, the stairwell reeked like my dad’s goose house, as the volatile oils in the scent mixed with four hundred years of tar and beeswax.
I had the tinder-box. “Give it here,” she said. She doesn’t trust me with anything mechanical.
I handed it to her. She turned the little crank. Then the door flew open and three men started hitting us.
The chapter house at our monastery is a thing of great beauty.
The roof is domed, a passable imitation of imperial architecture – it keeps collapsing, falling in and having to be rebuilt, because nobody alive knows how to build a dome that doesn’t collapse, but Simocatta perseveres with it, because the abbot of Rachen has a genuine imperial dome, but Simocatta’s is bigger – and the wattle-and-daub walls are plastered over and painted in a workmanlike imitation of imperial fresco.
It always smells of wet plaster, because the damp gets in, the frescoes flake off and constantly have to be retouched, so the Invincible Sun and the Redeemer and Holy Wisdom often don’t have faces, or else look all runny and blistered, as though they’ve got leprosy.
But it’s a valiant effort and I ought to like the chapter house more than I do.
I think it’s probably because I only tend to find myself there when I’m in serious trouble. This was no exception.
Abbot Simocatta himself, dragged out of bed and not given enough time to do his face or comb his hair over the bald patch, sat in his big chair, where the sun would stream in through the stained glass and cover him in glory if it wasn’t still the middle of the night.
On either side of him, Mother Grimhild and Mother Tysapherna, in smaller but rather more valuable chairs, being walnut rather than oak and carved by someone who knew what he was doing.
Then Svangerd and me on stools in the middle of the floor, hands tied behind our backs and a dozen steelnecks with drawn swords standing over us, plus Grimhild’s three goons.
“What the hell,” Simocatta said, “is going on?”