Chapter 5 #4
I resolved not to care. As far as I was concerned, I’d done my bit, and the official debriefing in front of the entire council was a good way of drawing a line under my involvement.
Besides which, I was genuinely and incontrovertibly wounded in action, therefore excused duty.
As soon as I was in a fit state to move, we were going home.
Vitimer’s speech got the inevitable standing ovation – I’d have stood and clapped too, if I’d been able – and someone signalled to a couple of clerks to take me away.
As they helped me up, someone started to clap, and then everybody joined in, which officially made me a hero, which was nice, or at any rate better than the other thing.
I suppose I should’ve enjoyed the moment, but I didn’t.
What spoiled it for me was catching sight of the individual who started clapping first. I recognised him. He was a short man.
Being a hero meant that Svangerd and I were moved out of the hayloft and into diplomatic guest quarters at the patriarch’s lodgings.
Nothing but the very best, needless to say.
The patriarch’s chamberlain met us at the cloister gate and escorted us up a huge wide stairway to the third floor, then along a gallery, with one side open, overlooking the nave of the basilica, then up another stair and along a corridor, whose walls and ceiling were covered in exquisite, mostly intact, barely faded Archaic-period frescoes – hunting scenes, episodes from Aelian mythology and highly debauched banquets.
The chamberlain noticed me gawping and explained; this whole wing had once been part of the imperial governor’s palace, a thousand years ago.
Amazing. I’d have been in heaven if my knees hadn’t hurt quite so much.
The room he showed us to was no larger than the chapter house of the abbey back home, but considerably better decorated. Then it occurred to Svangerd and me simultaneously that the chamberlain was expecting us to share it.
“Oh,” he said, when Svangerd gave him a look that should have frozen the marrow in his bones. “I thought you two—”
“No,” she said.
“Fine. In that case, I’ll see what I can find for the holy sister. This floor is a bit full, but we can probably squeeze you in somewhere in the annexe.”
When they’d gone, I lay on the bed and tried to read, but the light was going and there wasn’t a lamp, so I spent an hour or so trying not to think about all the things I had to think about, and then the door opened and Svangerd came in, holding a candle in a pottery holder.
“I’m in a sort of undersized hen coop up in the attic,” she said, sitting down on the window ledge. “He tried to apologise, but I told him to shut his face.”
“You just threatened the Lord Chamberlain,” I said. “Swell.”
“He’s an arsehole.”
“Probably.”
Something in her voice gave me the impression that she’d forgiven me for whatever it was I was supposed to have done. “Something’s been bothering me,” she said. “Why did someone try and kill us on the way here?”
“I’ve been wondering about that too. But it’s got pushed to the back of the queue.”
“It’s something about you,” she said. “No, shut up and listen. Someone tries to guzzle us on the way here. Then a monster shows up that only you know about, from a remote and godforsaken place that you come from, and does the job we were supposed to be doing. None of it makes a scrap of sense, but if there’s anything like a common theme, it’s you. ”
“Which is crazy,” I said. “I’m nobody.”
“True.” She thought for a moment. I like to watch her thinking. You can see every mental ripple and eddy on her face. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.”
It just came spurting out, before I could stop it. She looked at me. “Well?”
“But I didn’t say anything, because I was afraid you’d—”
“What?”
“Forget it,” I said. “Actually, there’s two things.”
“Oh for God’s sake.”
“But you’ve got to promise,” I said. “Look, you know me. We’ve worked together; you’ve saved my neck I don’t know how many times. I’ve done the same for you now and again. We’ve always trusted each other.”
“That was before you started keeping secrets.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, the hell with it,” she said. “I feel like I don’t know you any more.
Before you came here, yes, I thought I knew you.
But all this Mesoge stuff is a bit more than I can take, to be honest with you.
I look at you and I’m not sure I know who you are any more.
And you said,” she added. “It runs in families.”
Oh dear. I’m not a brave man. I hate taking risks.
You think it’ll work and turn out all right, and then you’re proved wrong.
I hate that. So, obviously I had to tell her, about my father, because it would tend to support her hypothesis: me as somehow the centre of attention, or at least a significant pawn in somebody’s game.
But the risk was that she’d get up and walk out of the room and never talk to me again.
I took the coward’s way out. Chickenshit and stupid, that’s me.
“Do you want to hear what I’ve got to say?”
She nodded.
So I told her about the short man. I could almost feel her heart stop.
It was like that moment when the smith takes the yellow-hot steel out of the fire and plunges it into the quench.
You see the colour and heat drain away into the water, dull grey spreading up the glowing workpiece at a brisk walking pace until the whole thing’s turned cold.
I’d said enough; too much. She looked at me and her eyes were terrified.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. I talked to him, all right? I talked to a normal, living human being. Not a very nice one, but a man, not the devil.”
“He knows all about us. Everything.”
“Admirable surveillance work,” I said. “He must have a dozen men working for him, at least. Which begs the question—”
“He knows what you’re thinking. What’s going to happen.”
“A sound knowledge of human nature, and a good guesser.”
“He knew about the bell.”
I shook my head. “Top-notch tactical instinct,” he said. “I think what he was trying to do was advise me. He’ll have figured out that the only thing in the basilica complex that could stop a walker was the bell. So he guided me to the spot under the bell-tower and hoped I had the common sense—”
“It was dark. You didn’t know it was a bell-tower. And how did he know where that thing would attack you?”
I shrugged. “Fine,” I said, “maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe I don’t know precisely how he’s doing it. But it’s all tricks and illusions. He is not the devil incarnate. He’s just a man.”
She wanted to believe me, but of course it doesn’t work like that.
Wasn’t it Saloninus who said that the three most desirable things – sleep, love and faith – can’t be deliberately acquired; you can’t reach out and grab them; they have to come over you when you’re least expecting it?
Something like that. “Why us?” she said. “Why you?”
“I don’t know. But we can think about it, based on what we know, and try and figure it out.”
She made a valiant effort, and nodded. “Go on, then.”
“Things we know,” I said. “One: on the way here, somebody tried to kill us. Two: whatever the big idea is, the object of the exercise wasn’t to stop us killing the princess, or at least if it was, they must be pretty useless, because the princess is dead. Three—”
“Hang on a moment,” she said. “Say that again.”
“Three.”
“Before that.”
“The object of the exercise wasn’t to stop us killing the princess—”
She closed her eyes and held up her hand. “What?” I said.
“Maybe the object of the exercise,” she said, “was just that. To stop us from killing the princess.”
You know how it is when it’s wet and the ground is squelching mud, and you put your foot in a particularly soft patch and it sinks in, holding it fast and bringing you up short. My instincts told me no, that’s not it, but I couldn’t get my foot out of the possibility. “Why?” I said.
“I don’t know, do I? But then, I don’t claim to know every damn thing.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s say for the sake of argument that someone wants to kill the princess himself, as opposed to just wanting her dead. Why?”
“Revenge,” she said. “Doesn’t just want her dead: wants to see the life drain out of her eyes.
Which would tie in with the way it was done.
Maximum possible effect. Or he wanted her killed by one of those things, because—” She paused, then said, “Because if one of them kills you, it damages your soul.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “At least, I’ve never heard that it does. Mind you, we don’t think a lot about souls in the Mesoge.”
“Maybe it does,” she said. “Or maybe he believes it does, or maybe she believed it, so he wanted her last moments to be filled with absolute despair, I don’t know. It’s the sort of thing you can imagine somebody doing.”
“Can you? I can’t.”
“You wanted explanations,” she said. “That’s an explanation. Maybe not a very good one, but it’s not impossible.”
“Three,” I said. “There’s a small man who wants me to believe he’s the devil, and he’s put a ridiculous amount of effort into trying to convince me. But I don’t think he wanted to stop us killing the princess, because of course he could’ve done that, easy as pie, just by going to the authorities.”
“He’s the one who sent the monster. Obviously.”
“Nothing obvious about it,” he said. “Also, according to your theory, he helped me kill it. Hardly likely, if it was his monster.”
“Unless he was finished with it and wanted it got rid of.”
Another foot stuck in the mud. “I don’t think so,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure. “If he could control it enough to get it here from the Mesoge and make it do what he wanted, which is absolutely unheard of and impossible—”
“Why? They’re both on the same side.”
“No,” I said, raising my voice, “they aren’t, because there’s no such side for them to be on.
And if they’re on the same side, why would he want to get rid of it?
” It. My father. But of course he wasn’t really dead.
He never would be. Now there’s irony, because one of the things you dread most in this lousy, love-infested world is your parents dying.
One less thing for me to worry about, I guess.
“Absolutely no need,” I went on, “to deprive himself of a key asset.”
“But he’s not,” she said. “Like you keep telling me, those things live for ever. So he’s just getting rid of it in the short term. The long game, remember?”
That’s the trouble with brainstorming with Svangerd.
She always needs to win. And when she gets like that, I need to win too.
A lot of valid points get made, but by that point nobody’s listening to them.
“This isn’t helping,” I said. “In fact, I don’t know why we’re bothering with it. We’re going home.”
“All this shit is about you,” she said angrily. “So what makes you think it’ll stop if you go home? It’ll go wherever you go.”
“No, it won’t. I’m nobody. I’m the most insignificant man who ever lived.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Hell of a question to ask someone like me. “Yes,” I said.