Chapter 4 #4
Never mind. There’s a lock on her trunk, but it’s one of those barrel-and-pin jobs run up by a blacksmith; I can pick those any day of the year in less time than it takes to recite the Lesser Confession.
She’d be bound to have something I could use, unless she was trotting round out there with her entire travelling armoury concealed about her person – in which case she was in grave danger of toppling over and not being able to get up again.
No dice. I found six or seven knives in among her underwear, but they were all slim, elegant things, designed to make small, deep holes, or slice effortlessly into soft-skinned game.
What I wanted was an axe, or better still a beanhook.
What I did find among the small clothes and cutlery was an icon, crudely painted on a piece of wood; I’m guessing it was a chunk from an old shutter, using home-ground pigments and laughably poor draughtsmanship, the Absolution.
There was something about it, don’t ask me what, that told me she’d painted it herself.
It’s an exercise they make you do in the Reformatory, so I gather.
The idea is, you take your faith and externalise it, so that when the doubts and horrors come back, you’ve got a reserve, like the pots of money people bury during an invasion.
She’d wrapped it in half a yard of genuine Echmen silk, worth thirty deniers.
In my line of work you need to be able to paint, to do the illuminations in the margins and the decorated initial capitals.
I’m quite good at it, though I say so myself.
In my time I’ve done Absolutions and Ascensions and Transfigurations and Raisings of the Dead that have brought tears to the eyes of the most miserable priors and precentors this side of the Hog’s Back.
Meaningless to me; it’s just art, a skill, a trade.
It never occurred to me that it could be good for anything, until then.
I wound the silk carefully around it and put it back where I’d got it from, and closed the lid and reset the lock.
Then I nipped out to the stables, poked around for a while, and stole a hatchet.
Now then; it’s all very well fighting and winning the internal battle that allows you to permit yourself to do a very stupid thing.
That still leaves the practicalities. How was I going to get myself and my little hatchet inside the basilica, and from there to the guest lodge, where my fellow-countryman was most likely to turn up?
Security – a term which encompasses everybody from the Lord Chamberlain down to the expendables with the padded jacks and the halberds – isn’t much good at anticipating, but very good indeed at reacting.
I imagine that their credo is: lightning always strikes twice in the same place.
Therefore, since Svangerd had been at pains to suggest to the officer we met that the bad guys had at some point been inside the cloister garden, I was prepared to bet my liver and kidneys that the cloister garden would be crawling with armed men; likewise the basilica and the cloisters.
If my homeboy ran into them, he’d go through them like a wolf in a hen coop, but that didn’t help me particularly.
I wanted to be alone with him, for as long as it took to ask one quick, civil question.
Walkers seem to enjoy fighting by all accounts, but it’s ancillary to their main objective, which is killing.
They’re also smart. On balance, therefore, I decide to work on the assumption that he’d prefer to sneak in round the back to smashing and crushing his way through a company of the household guards.
Accordingly it followed that I needed to get inside the guest wing of the lodge: precisely the task that Svangerd had addressed and given up on as too difficult, hence our attempt to waylay her in the cloister on the way to matins. Nuts, I thought.
Because my weaknesses are so very weak, I tend to play to my strengths. Or rather strength: penmanship. Stick a sharpened goose feather in my fist and I’m ready to take on the world.
While I was around and about looking for the short man, I’d happened to pass an open door in a cloister.
Through the door I’d caught sight of a desk and a high stool, carefully situated to catch the light through a tall, narrow window.
That told me a clerk lived there; better still, as it turned out, the clerk was away from his desk.
I nipped in and secured a sheet of parchment, a bottle of ink and a pen.
Examining my haul in my hayloft at the More Joy, I discovered how lucky I’d been.
The parchment wasn’t new; it was hard, rough and thin, the result of being sanded down with brick dust to get rid of what had been previously written on it – second- or third-grade stuff, the kind of material used for internal memos, requisitions, dockets, chits and passes.
Likewise the ink: thin and greyish, watered down.
Every office and scriptorium has its own recipes for adulterating ink to make it go further, when used for ephemeral purposes.
Practical upshot: if you try and fake a routine internal document like a pass using parchment and ink bought from a stall in the market, the result will look all wrong.
What you need is the stuff the real clerks use, which you can’t buy.
You have to steal it. Which, it turned out, I’d done.
Next stage in the process was using my imagination, a tool I despise and distrust. I imagined that I was an overworked, underappreciated member of the clerical staff, hauled out of bed in the middle of the night to carry a message to some nob in the nobs’ lodgings.
Now then; who am I, what am I doing and what does the writing on my scrap of parchment say?
One side of the page was easy enough. It said: Allow access for the bearer to all parts of the inner lodge, signed X. Who X was, I left till later. Now then, the other side. A happy thought struck me, like heavy rain falling on a man dying of thirst. The other side would be written in code.
That just left the identity of X. Now the problem with X is that if you forge his signature and they catch you and take you to him, and he says, I never wrote that, you’re screwed.
In which case, let X be dead. To be precise, let X be lying in state in the Mercy Chapel of the basilica with her head roughly the shape and thickness of the Book of Common Prayer.
Ask not what you can do for your princess, but what your princess can do for you.
In my case, she could have written a secret message, in code, and arranged for it to be delivered by some clerk.
The fact that death had intervened wouldn’t necessarily vitiate or frustrate his errand.
It wasn’t perfect by any means but it would probably do; always assuming I could get sight of a copy of the princess’s signature.
I nearly gave up at that point. But then I remembered that early on the first day of the council, she and a dozen or so other ecclesiastical swells had signed an Act of Anathema, condemning Nauseric’s Nine Propositions as heresy, and that Acts of Anathema are published by being nailed up on the door of the basilica for thirty days.
The outside door, please note, not the inside.
Anybody, any member of the public, can stroll up Hill Street to the main door and stand there gawping till the guards move him on, and I, though you may not think it to look at me, am a fully qualified member of the public.
It wasn’t really light enough to see by at that point, but there were a couple of guards on the door, helpfully holding lanterns. I stood there for as long as it would take a slow reader to mumble his way through the Act, concentrating on the signature, then walked away.
“Excuse me,” I said to the guard sergeant, “I’m wondering if you could help me. I’m lost.”
He gazed at me, as if wondering how creatures like me could be permitted to exist. “Restricted area,” he said.
“So I should hope, with all these dreadful things going on. I’ve got a message for His Grace the Precentor of Neidhol. They gave me directions but I seem to have got turned around. I’ve been wandering about in these corridors for ages, so I was hoping—”
He held out his hand. I gave him my beautiful forgery. Guard sergeants can’t read, of course. “Wait here,” he said.
“All right. But please don’t be too long. I understand it’s quite important.”
Two troopers in padded jacks and kettle hats moved into place in front of me, like chess pieces. They looked worried, as well they might. I’m not sure I’d have wanted sentry duty the night after someone got their head flattened.
The sergeant came back with a boy lieutenant, who was plainly terrified. He had my forgery in his hand. For a moment I thought he’d seen through it, and I was going to have to do something stupid.
“Who did you say you wanted to see?” he said.
“Sigbrand, Precentor of Neidhol,” I said. “You wouldn’t happen to know—”
“I’ll take you to him.”
Nuts. All I wanted to do was get past this checkpoint.
I knew Sigbrand was at the council, because I’d heard him speak, but I didn’t know him and he didn’t know me from a hole in the ground.
“Thank you,” I said, “but if you tell me where he is, that’ll be fine.
I don’t want to waste your time or give you any trouble. ”
“No unescorted civilians beyond the inner gate,” he said. “Come on, this way.”
I followed. Hard to know what to do for the best. I could slip away, run and hide, but then they’d come looking for me and that would spoil everything.
I could put the boy lieutenant to sleep and hide him in a dark corner, but at some point he’d wake up and start yelling bloody murder – same outcome.
Whatever I was going to do, I needed to do it before we woke up the precentor, and I had no idea, obviously, when that would be.
I’d more or less decided to bash the lieutenant and abort the mission when we turned a corner and I found myself face to face with a short man.
“Hello,” he sang out, “what the devil are you doing here?”
It was a cheerful, sing-song voice, suggesting an old friendship forged in beer. “Hello,” I said.
“It’s great to see you. Why the hell didn’t you tell me you were coming to this bash?” He turned his head and beamed at the lieutenant. “Old pal of mine,” he said. “Haven’t seen in him God knows how long.”
The lieutenant did a little nod, such as you’d use to acknowledge superfluous information from a superior officer.
“Look,” the short man went on, “are you in a hurry? Only I’ve got half a bottle of some really good stuff, and you look like you could use a couple of belts.
” Before I could think of an answer, he turned back to the lieutenant and said, “It’s all right, you can leave him with me. You get on.”
“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said, and stalked off, leaving me alone in a lantern-lit corridor with the short man. “You,” I said.
“Correct. Don’t look at me like that. The wind might change and you’ll stick like it.”
“Why do the guards take orders from you?”
“Oh, everybody around here knows me.” He grinned. “Lucky for you I happened to turn up,” he said. “That fake pass of yours wouldn’t fool a blind man.”
“Who are you? Really?”
“You know perfectly well,” he replied. “Since when did you get to be so very brave?”
“I don’t know what you—”
“Single-handedly seeking out an afterwalker, armed only with a little hatchet. Very Mesoge. Isn’t that what Slipnir the Strong does in Gamling and the dragon?”
I took a deep breath. “I won’t need to, if you’ll give me a straight answer.”
He nodded. “No. No, I didn’t send the afterwalker, I didn’t scoop it up off the fells in Einarsness and bring it here, I didn’t train it or anything like that.”
“It’s nothing to do with you.”
“I didn’t say that exactly.”
“Then you’re—”
“That’s why they call it the long game,” he said. “Sooner or later it finds its way into everything, like bindweed. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. Forget about the heroics. Go to bed. Enjoy the rest of the debates and go home.”
“Or?”
“Or risk the frustration of trying to find something out and failing. That’s a bitch, believe me.”
“Just that?”
“Well.” He beamed at me. “Right now, you’re also in danger of getting your head turned into a roof-tile. But don’t let me stop you if your heart’s set on it, because strictly speaking that side of it’s none of my business. I’d hate to see anything happen to you, but you’re not my responsibility.”
For a moment I reckoned I knew how the Aram Chantat felt when they stood underneath the walls of Choris Anthropou.
What they wanted was inside there, but because they didn’t have siege artillery they knew they couldn’t get at it.
Of course, the Aram Chantat had more sense than me. They gave up and went home.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
He grinned. “Your privilege,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I never tell lies. But I guess you’ll have to find that out for yourself.
All right,” he went on, “since you insist, your best bet would be to go up this corridor, turn right, brings you out onto a sort of landing. There’s a stairwell – duck under that and sit tight, he should be along at some point between now and the matins bell.
Properly speaking it’s not in the interests of the long game for me to give you any hints, but you might like to bear in mind that the staircase leads to a bell tower.
” He slapped me on the shoulder, so hard it hurt.
“Take care of yourself. Enjoy the speeches.”
He lifted the lantern off the hook in the wall and walked away, leaving me in darkness.