Chapter 7
I can’t remember how I got out of the council chamber into the cloister, or what happened after the motion was carried.
I remember wandering down a corridor that eventually led to a door, which was bolted.
I turned round and walked back the way I’d come, and by the time I reached the main cloister it was deserted.
I think I ambled around for a while longer and then drifted back to my room.
Mercifully, Svangerd wasn’t there. I don’t think I could have stood it, her going all to pieces because her beloved Church had just slit its own throat, and presumably blaming me for the whole thing.
I’d probably have had to agree with her.
If I hadn’t bought that stupid box; if I’d told someone about it; if I’d gone back and got it out from among the rafters before Kotkel had a chance to get his huge purple fingers on it.
My fault: none of my doing, but all my fault.
Technically speaking, that would make it a second-degree sin of omission, punishable by eternal damnation, if you happen to believe in all that stuff.
I don’t, but Svangerd does. Her faith tells her to forgive evildoers; it also stipulates that you don’t have to be alive to be forgiven, since it’s the soul that receives the benefit of mercy, not the body.
Stab first, forgive afterwards is perfectly all right, if circumstances so demand. Just as well she wasn’t there.
But it wasn’t my fault, not really. In which case, whose fault was it?
The box was hidden in the rafters last time I saw it; therefore, Kotkel must have taken it.
Really? No. The short man had known about the box, he’d been at pains to let me know that, and he’d rented our hayloft while the hay was still practically warm.
Presumably the incentive hadn’t been the fleas or the view over the stable yard.
Then Kotkel killed him; but was it robbery with violence or just plain ordinary murder?
That corridor led to a bolted door, so I went back to the start and tried again.
Who could I think of who’d want a schism?
Who’d go out of their way to achieve that lamentable outcome?
Common-sense answers: the Sashan, the Echmen, heathens, enemies foreign rather than domestic.
They’d love to see Holy Mother Church collapse in blood and fire.
Wouldn’t they? Would they hell as like. We’re taught to believe that the pagan empires are wolves howling at the gate, waiting in impatient readiness for the slightest opportunity to invade and slaughter us all in our beds.
Actually, that’s not the case at all. They have their own problems, just like we do, and a major war of aggression against the West would be expensive and dangerous and what would they stand to gain?
A load of countries that are poorer and far less sophisticated than the territories they already control; from their perspective, nothing we’ve got is worth having, except us as slaves – slaves who don’t speak their language, which is hugely inefficient, and who’d almost certainly prove to be more trouble than they’re worth.
The simple fact is, the Sashan haven’t invaded and conquered the West because they don’t want to.
If they’d wanted to, they’d have done it years ago. But they haven’t, so they don’t.
Which left enemies domestic. I like to think of myself as a cynic, always ready to prise open people’s professed motives to find the pearl of disreputable truth lurking within.
Try as I might, though, I couldn’t see how anyone in the West would be better off for a schism.
Since the empire fell, Holy Mother Church is the only thing we have in common, the way fish have water: mackerel and sharks together, we can’t do without it.
Destroying the Church would be like fish draining the ocean.
Which left— No, really. I wasn’t having that. There is no God, no angels, no devils, no Good, no Evil. Therefore …
Yes, I thought, but there’s a bunch of lunatics running about, apparently, who think they’re Evil.
I’d met one of them: a short man, who knew about the box and subsequently rented my hayloft.
If you sincerely believe that your object in life is to further the cause of a non-existent entity (in this case, the devil), and dumb luck handed you the chance of striking a deadly blow at the heart of the people you believe are the Other Side – I groaned out loud.
Because in that case, it really was all my fault, for finding and recognising that stupid box –
Hang on just a moment. I bought the box, from a man who plainly didn’t know what it was.
Thereafter I kept it a deadly secret. I didn’t even tell Svangerd.
But the short man knew about it, and that I’d got it.
Therefore – Saloninus’ razor – he must have known about the box before it came into my possession.
In which case, why in God’s name didn’t he go into the shop himself and buy the bloody thing before I showed up on the scene?
A lot of things in this world make no sense, and since this is the only world that exists, I guess we have to make the best of things or give up and go under.
Even so, at that moment, I think I’d have given pretty much everything I had or could’ve laid my hands on at short notice to find out who knew the tune to my brother’s favourite song, and where he’d learned it. If I knew that …
But I didn’t, and even Saloninus couldn’t get very far speculating in the total absence of data.
So instead of following a chain of logical premises, like someone following white stones through a bog, I allowed my mind to go off on frolics of its own, like boisterous staghounds in a chicken run, scaring out bizarre hypotheses for the sheer hell of hearing them cluck.
You can’t do that for very long without drifting off into sleep, so I did.
I was woken by a sustained and ear-splitting racket. Shouting, roaring, boots clattering on floors, doors slamming, heavy objects being moved around. Oh, for crying out loud, I thought. Not again.
I’d fallen asleep in my boots, so I didn’t have to put them on again. I had a crick in my neck and my back hurt from dozing in an unsuitable chair. I stood up, looked round for something I could use as a weapon if needs be, realised the utter futility of that, and went out into the corridor.
I emerged just as they brought out the body. A corpse with no intact bones is an awkward thing to handle, particularly when it’s fresh and hasn’t had time to stiffen. The nearest thing to it would be a very large wineskin. There was no head, needless to say.
“Who is it?” I asked the officer.
“Good question,” he replied, in that particular sort of raspy voice you get when you’ve only recently thrown up. “But the room he was in belongs to a delegate called Ordovic, from out west somewhere. Why, do you know him?”
I shook my head. “Any sign of the—?”
“No. We came running soon as we heard the scream, but it was long gone.” He paused, then looked at me. “You’re him, aren’t you? The one who knows about these things. From the Mesoge.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“You were supposed to know what to do about them.”
My fault, in other words. “This one doesn’t follow the rules,” I said. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
He looked at me. “Apparently not,” he said. He moved away, then hesitated. “Actually, there’s one thing.”
“What?”
“How long is this going to go on for?” he said. “I mean, when does it stop?”
I didn’t answer. That bothered him a lot. “That’s terrible,” he said. “How can people live like that?”
“Welcome to the Mesoge,” I said, and went back to my room.
The hell with it. There was once a man called Glam, away out east in Vopnadale, who got rid of a walker by cutting its head off with a billhook.
That was well over a hundred years before my time and quite probably there were special circumstances not preserved in the oral tradition, but never mind.
Bright and early, I walked down through Coppergate into Poor Town and asked the way to the smiths’ quarter.
I stopped at the third forge I came to, where a fat man was sitting on an anvil, trying to tease a splinter out of his thumb with a small pair of tongs.
Sure, he said, he could forge me a billhook.
Good steel? He looked at me as though I was a keyhole.
Sure, he said. He had a bit of old cart-spring that someone had dug up.
That got my attention. How old? Very old.
Show me. He showed me. The secret of making spring steel died with the empire. That’ll do nicely, I said.
That’s the difference between steel and flesh (except in the Mesoge).
You can bury a piece of steel in the wet earth, and five hundred years later about half of it will be flakes of useless rust, and the inner half good as new; brush and rasp and grind off the dead stuff, put it in the fire and get it really hot, and it comes back to life, ready to be reborn as whatever you need it to be.
I watched him draw out the nose of the hook over the horn of his anvil, then form the bevel, packing the cutting edge at dull red; back in the fire to a bright orange, then edge down in the quench for a second at a time, to let the residual heat temper the hardness.
You want it ground, or just sharpened? Just sharpened, I told him.
I don’t care what it looks like. Three deniers.
I gave him five, and he threw in a bit of rag to wrap it in.