Chapter 10
There was a fountain in the courtyard. I went and stuck my head in it. It didn’t help.
All right, then, I said to myself. The story so far.
For some reason, somebody saw fit to plant on me a fake copy of the true true gospels, which the short man got hold of a short time before Dad flattened his head; the Loyal Opposition, meanwhile, didn’t want a schism, but the angels did.
No, it still didn’t make any sense. But Rotlaug of Unnsvik was in town (he’d killed my father, but nobody’s perfect) so pretty soon we wouldn’t have the walkers to worry about, just the collapse of Holy Mother Church and the very real prospect of a slew of civil and religious wars –
“Why are you all wet?” she asked.
I hadn’t seen her. “I stuck my head in the fountain,” I said.
“Ah. Like that, was it?”
“You betcha. Worse. The copies are fake but the gospels themselves are probably true. Or true lies, depending on your point of view. Oh, and I think the devil was having a heart attack as I was leaving. I didn’t think devils could do that.”
She sat down beside me. “Say that again,” she said. “Slowly.”
So I told her. Her frown got deeper and deeper as I talked. “So,” she said, “that doesn’t really change anything.”
“No,” I said. “Well, yes and no. It means it all comes down to a question of faith. Do you believe the true gospels are true gospels, or don’t you?”
“That’s bad.”
“The worst,” I said. “The way that lot were yelling and carrying on—” I stopped. A thought had just struck me. “What?” she said.
I took a deep breath. “There’s something I didn’t tell you.”
“Oh for crying out loud. Not another one.”
“Afraid so. Look, the man who says he’s the Loyal Opposition told me to get up during that session and tell everyone that I’d faked the gospels. Otherwise, he’d set Kotkel on you, and you’d die.”
All traces of expression drained out of her face. To those who know her, a bad sign.
“I didn’t do it, obviously. I don’t know if I would or not if Rotlaug hadn’t shown up, but I didn’t do it.”
Not a word. Very bad.
“So what I’m wondering now is,” I blundered on, “did whoever put that stupid box there for me to find do it on purpose, with a view to blackmailing me into pretending I’d forged them?
No, wait a second, I’ll try and explain.
Because if the texts are fake and you want people to accept them, one good way to do that is to have someone stand up and say, I faked them, when he didn’t.
Because then you can prove that he’s lying, because he is, and it’ll look like you’ve won.
” I stopped for a moment. “I think what’s what I was trying to say.
It’s all getting a bit too complicated, to be honest with you. ”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot,” she said.
“Probably.”
“Though,” she went on, “you might have something there. Sort of pre-emptive defence. No, let me think about this. If you say you faked them, and then they prove you can’t have done, because you never had the opportunity, or access to the resources you’d have needed—”
“Which I didn’t.”
“Shut up. In that case, proving you didn’t fake them would look like proving the horrible things were true. Or at least it’d be enough to stir up a lot of trouble, which is what these bastards want to do.” She looked me straight in the eye. “Why did we get picked for this job? Do you know?”
I tried to think. “Someone else wasn’t available,” I said. “Something like that.”
“Oh, that’d be easy enough to arrange, if you were in charge of the assignment roster. Actually, that’s quite a good point. It sort of answers the question, why you? Because everybody knows you’re a red-hot forger.”
“Everybody does not know that,” I pointed out. “It’s supposed to be a secret. If it wasn’t, I’d never be able to work again. I’d be useless.”
“Enough people know,” she said airily. “Makes you the perfect man for the job. Though it doesn’t explain why those men tried to kill us on the road. Because if I’m right, that could only have been the angels, and they wouldn’t have failed. They’d have succeeded.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “God doesn’t rely on assassins.
He just waves a magic wand or something.
Or He would if He existed, which He—” I stopped talking.
A broken jaw wouldn’t help matters. “I don’t think it works like that,” I said.
“And maybe you’re right. It does make a sort of sense, me being involved. ”
“Too damn right it does,” she said. Clearly she’d forgotten it was my idea to begin with. “But it turns out they didn’t need you after all. Except to collect the stupid box and bring it to Choris.”
I wasn’t sure if that made me feel better or worse. Both, probably. “If they’re who you think they are, surely they’d have known—”
“What?”
I paused for a moment. What would they have known? “That the books were fake. It came as a real shock to that man in there, believe me.”
She shook her head. “No,” she said. “We’re saying they knew they were fakes, and they planted them on you so they could discredit you when you confessed—”
She stopped. She was looking at something. I turned my head and saw a small procession coming out of the council chamber. Four men were carrying what looked like a door, on which was something that could easily have been a dead body, dressed in a monk’s habit, with the cowl drawn up over the face.
“Like I said,” I muttered. “It came as a bit of a shock to him.”
She looked mildly stunned. “Tell you what,” she said. “Nobody lasts very long in that job. Looks like you were right: he wasn’t expecting that. In which case—”
“I give up,” I said. “Oh, while I think of it, there was something else.”
She knows me too well: every pathetic attempt to bury bad news, every unintended tremor in my voice. “What?”
“That man who just had the heart attack,” I said.
“He told me he wasn’t Loyal Opposition; he was an angel.
Or on the side of the angels, something like that.
But clearly he was lying, because angels don’t die.
Presumably demons do, or else he wasn’t really a demon either.
Personally,” I added, with feeling, “I think he was a nutcase, but that’s just my opinion.
Or what I believe, if you prefer it in those terms. And you’ve said it yourself a million times: you can’t argue with faith. ”
“Piss off.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Really? He said that?”
“Yes.”
“It can’t have been true. He must’ve been lying.”
“Really?”
She looked at me. “Go away,” she said. “I need to think.”
“Sure,” I said, standing up. “I think I’ll take a stroll down the hill and find out about ships going north. After all, a man can dream.”
I got as far as the main gate, then turned back. Ships going north were all very well, but what I needed was the best library in the world. Which, fortuitously, just happened to be about a minute’s walk away, across a quadrangle and turn right.
I wasn’t allowed in it, of course. It’s a closed library, meaning you need a pass to get in.
Originally it belonged to the Poor Sisters of Ap’ Escatoy, and in the middle to late empire it became the custom for a copy of every newly written book to be deposited there, along with every new scholarly edition of every old one.
When Ap’ Escatoy was besieged by the Aram no Vei, the Sisters smuggled out the entire library – about six thousand books, can you believe it?
– in wicker baskets, which they loaded on barges and punted through the vast underground sewers, emerging eight miles away under the waterfall at Lake Timo.
The Aram saw them doing it, put two and two together, found the outflow and used it to break into the city and slaughter every living thing inside the walls, but by that time the Sisters were well along on their way to Beloisa with their precious cargo.
There the library was split into two halves.
One half was sent to Olbia – I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time; the other half ended up in Choris, and what’s left of it is still there, to this day.
There was a fire, and quite a few of the rarer books were quietly stolen and sold, and about five hundred were declared anathema during the Purge and burned by the public hangman, and of what was left, about a quarter simply fell to bits before they could be recopied; even so, it’s the biggest and best library in the world, so naturally nobody gets in there without a ticket and a very good reason.
I had neither. What I did have was a piece of parchment, which I’d picked up off the floor of the council chamber when some fool carelessly dropped it (or maybe it was on the point of falling out of his sleeve and I sort of eased its fall, I can’t remember) and somehow I hadn’t got around to handing it back.
What made this piece of parchment rather special was the seal; a big chunk of lead about the size of my thumbnail, stamped with the matrix of the Precentor in Ordinary – a busy man; as well as hiring all the head office clerks and auditing all the finances of Holy Mother Church and presiding over the probate and shipping divisions of the ecclesiastical court, he’s responsible for granting access to controlled areas, such as the library.