Chapter 1 #2
This was a miniature crossbow, not much bigger than a handspan, all steel, with a screw mechanism to span it.
She’s been dying to play with it ever since she first saw it.
I keep telling her, the effective range could only be about ten feet (less if the target’s wearing anything more substantial than linen), it’d take ten minutes to reload and she’d be much better off with a heavy stone in a sock, but she refuses to listen.
“You could hollow out a book,” she said, “and hide it in that.”
“You’d stand a much better chance of hurting someone if you just hit him with the book,” I said. “Admit it, you do have a tendency to overcomplicate things, just because you enjoy playing with the kit.”
“Piss off,” she replied cheerfully. “They never had stuff like this when I was growing up.”
Svangerd has saved my life seventeen times, usually with a weapon. When she’s in the Stack, she acts like she’s twelve years old. I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge her a few simple pleasures. “Let’s think about what we’re actually likely to need,” I said.
“All right.” She’d found one of her favourites, a garotte made to look like a rosary. She explained to me once how the additional surface area of the beads increases the mechanical advantage. “It’d help if we knew what we were supposed to be doing.”
“We know,” I told her. “We murder the princess.”
She made an impatient noise. “Yes, but when? Is it supposed to look natural, or are we making a statement? Are we making it look like someone in particular did it? All that stuff makes a difference to what we’re going to need.”
“What we need,” I said, “is probably a cushion. Or a flight of stairs.”
“Why do you always insist on spoiling everything?”
At which point we heard footsteps on the staircase, and Brother Artaphernes came bustling in, asking what we thought we were doing there and did we have a docket from Supply?
We did (I’d forged it myself), so he pulled an evil face and told us to take the stuff we’d been issued and get out.
She stuck her tongue out at him, but only when his back was turned.
Forging documents is dead easy, and I’m good at it. It’s all about honesty. In order to create a successful forgery, you need to tell the truth, the whole truth, and practically nothing but the truth.
The practically is the thing you want to achieve.
Thus, in order to fake a restricted articles docket, I’d sneaked into Supply when the clerks were all at matins and helped myself to a sheet of their parchment, one of their pens, a bottle of their ink, and a genuine docket to use as a template.
Therefore, when I’d finished, everything about it was genuine apart from the choice of words.
I crept back there during nones and sealed it with the departmental seal, than which nothing on this earth is more authentic.
Result: a perfect forgery, though I do say so myself.
I needn’t have gone to all that trouble, of course.
If Brother Artaphernes had caught us in the Stack without a docket, all he’d have done was moan at us, and Svangerd would have called him a rude name, and that would’ve been that.
But I’d forged the perfect docket because that’s how I do things.
The way I see it, life should be smooth, organised, predictable and not marred by unpleasantness, such as conflict and displays of emotion.
Also, the more I practise, the better I get.
She comes at life from a different angle.
When she wants something from the Stack she waits till the wee small hours, when everybody’s in the chapel singing lauds, and creeps down the stairs dressed all in black with burnt cork smeared on her face and hands.
Why? I ask her. Because I don’t want the whole world knowing every bloody thing I do, she says.
Now I come to think of it, I don’t think either of us has ever been down there with a genuine docket, obtained by going to our operations controller and asking.
Other members of the Mission Militant do that, all the time, but not Svangerd and me.
My boss – the young man we met earlier – reckons that’s what makes us different – not better, he hastens to add, but different, definitely.
He calls us his knights. I used to think that was a compliment until he explained it.
A knight in chess, he pointed out, doesn’t zoom along a straight line, like normal pieces.
Oh no. If it wants to get somewhere, it insists on going three steps straight and then one sideways, and if it gets to jump over someone’s head during the process, so much the better.
That’s Svangerd and me, he said. Right, I said, thank you so much. Don’t mention it, he said.
I unrolled the mission briefing. “The princess,” I said.
She yawned. She accepts briefings as a necessary evil, stuff you need to know before you can wade in and start slaughtering guards, but a bit tedious and old-womanish. “I know about the princess,” she said. “Everybody does.”
“Good for you,” I said. “Now pay attention. Here’s what we know.
She was born Hildigund daughter of Ingvar, fifty-two years ago, in her father’s castle at Hrafnsvik.
Earl Ingvar was the high king’s second cousin, nobody special; he had about ten thousand acres of rock and puffin guano, and forty-odd ships—”
“A pirate.”
I nodded. “But a very well-connected one,” I said.
“Hildigund was the younger of two daughters. The elder, Irmengard, married the Count Palatine, which was a hell of a match for a pirate’s daughter, but by all accounts she was pretty.
Hildigund hung around at home until her father couldn’t stand the sight of her any more, then he packed her off to a convent, where she stayed for twenty years. ”
“Packed off,” she repeated resentfully. “I wish someone had packed me off to a convent when I was seventeen. You know what I was doing when I was seventeen?”
“Yes,” I said. “Anyway, then the Social Wars came along, and eventually Gratian became high king, but not before his entire family had slit each other’s throats, all except for Earl Ingvar, Sister Hildigund, and Countess Irmengard and her son.
That made Hildigund a princess. By this time, she was prioress of the Flawless Diamond in Segwald—”
“Was she? I didn’t know that.”
I smiled. “Fancy,” I said. “Anyhow, Gratian’s only kid died in a riding accident, so Earl Ingvar was suddenly the heir to the throne. He died—”
“Gratian had him killed.”
“There’s no proof of that,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter if he did or not. What matters is, the current heir is Sighvat, son of the Count and Hildigund’s sister Irmengard, who’s delicate—”
“Wrong in the head,” she said. “Has to be kept in a darkened room, with guards on the door round the clock.”
“Delicate,” I repeated. “If anything happens to him, the count and the countess, Hildigund is it. That would be very bad news, obviously, because she’s well past child-bearing, so there’d be no succession and we’d be looking at civil war.”
“I don’t know why people make such a fuss about civil wars,” she said. “Really they’re no different from any other sort of war, and everyone seems to be dead keen on those.”
“War is an abomination,” I told her, “it says so in the scriptures. You ought to know that, being a true believer.”
“Piss off,” she said equably. “So we guzzle Hildigund to make sure she can’t ever be high queen, which is fair enough. Sort of begs the question, though: Why now?”
I shrugged. “That’s not in the memo.”
“Don’t suppose it is. I’m guessing someone’s planning on taking out the nutcase and the count and countess directly afterwards, but that’s just speculation.” She stretched out in her chair and put her hands behind her head. “None of our business, right?”
“Right,” I said. “Anyway, Hildigund isn’t called that any more, she’s Mother Eugenia and she’s the abbess of the Teardrop.
That means she’s got more land in her own right than the Ischian Confederacy and more money than anyone north of the Bitter Sea.
” I paused for a moment. “Talking of which,” I went on, “how come you never chose a name in religion?”
She shrugged. “Never really felt I deserved one, since you ask.”
Sometimes she can surprise me. “Really?”
“Yup. Choosing a name is supposed to be like a baptism; you’re getting rid of all the junk and shit from your previous life. Truth is, I don’t think I’m ready.”
That shut me up for a few seconds. “I suppose you can look at it that way,” I said. “I got given mine when I was a novice, so it just sort of happened. And I always hated my real name, so—”
“What is your real name?”
“None of your business. Anyway, if that’s your reason I suppose it does you credit.”
“Glad you approve,” she said, “not that I give a damn. Is the lecture over now?”
“No,” I said. “We need to go over what we know about her principal actions as abbess, known views and opinions, connections and antecedents—”
“Later,” she said. “Right now I’ve got pins and needles in my foot and I need a pee. You can go away or you can stay and watch, entirely up to you.”
I left.
The briefing document I’d just gone through with Svangerd was written by my pal Egil. These days he’s the abbot’s acting deputy head of Research, but we go way back. I went to see him in his office just off the south cloister.
“You again,” he said. “Go away.”
I sat down on the window seat. That was, of course, tactical.
Egil worked like mad to get an office with a window, which in a nominally egalitarian order is a recognised mark of status.
When he’s not working, which is a lot of the time, his greatest joy is to sit on his stool and look out of his window, seeing with his mind’s eye the vast distance between where he started and where he is now. “Why me?” I said.
“Why you what?”