Sharps Page 12

  “I don’t suppose we’ll be having very much to do with them,” Tzimisces went on. “The actual number of Imperial troops in Permia these days is quite low, about five regiments, and two of them are engineers. Truth is, they just can’t afford them. Same with the Aram Chantat. They paid most of them off seven years ago, just to get rid of them. The majority of them left, but I gather there’s still a few units in the south, making trouble. Well away from where we’re going, I’m delighted to say.”

  “What about the Permians themselves?” Addo had become a great deal more talkative since they’d met Lieutenant Totila. Nice for both of them to have someone of his own class to talk to, Giraut supposed, even if one had a different colour skin and the other was the son of the Irrigator. He vaguely remembered that Flos Verjan had been an Imperial city, built before the Permians broke away from the Empire.

  “Oh, they’re all right, once you get to know them,” Tzimisces said. “Basically they’re the same as us, only they were an Imperial province for seven hundred years and we were never conquered. Let’s say we’ve got more in common than we’ve got differences.”

  “Even after seventy years of war?” Iseutz said. “I find that hard to believe.”

  “The War is something we have very much in common,” Tzimisces replied. “They didn’t want it, neither did we. It was the great families on either side who insisted on fighting. I think you’ll find it’s their own upper class they hold grudges against, not us.” He adjusted the blanket he’d spread across his knees; he looked disconcertingly like an old lady taking carriage exercise. “What’s made all the difference is the Regia process. That changed everything. It’s what led to the peace.”

  “The what?” Giraut asked.

  Tzimisces smiled. “The Regia process,” he repeated. “A discovery by natural philosophers in the Eastern Empire, whereby you can use some sort of chemical to get silver out of low-grade ore that couldn’t be refined using the traditional method. It means that it’s now cheaper for the Eastern Empire to produce silver domestically, instead of importing it from Permia. In response, the Permians have had to cut their silver prices dramatically. Their economy’s in ruins, which is why they can’t afford to fight another war. Also, the Empire no longer has a vested interest in propping up the old aristocratic regime, since they’re no longer dependent on Permia for their silver supply. As a result, the military aristocracy’s out of power and the mine owners have taken over the country. Our kind of people,” Tzimisces added, “people we can hold a reasonable conversation with. That’s why we need hearts-and-minds exercises like this one, to win over the working classes. Once they realise we’re just ordinary people, like them, there’ll be no appetite for another war.”

  Suidas woke up sweating, and opened his eyes. He was in the chaise. Everyone else was dead.

  No, that was another occasion. Everyone else was asleep, a subtle but important difference. Tzimisces’ head was lolling forward, his nose buried in his muffler. Iseutz had her head on Addo’s shoulder (worth seeing their reactions when they woke up). Giraut’s head was leaning against the panelling, his mouth open. Phrantzes was sitting upright, taking every precaution possible to avoid touching anybody, even in his sleep. Suidas breathed in deeply and blew the breath out again through pursed lips, as though he’d just had a lucky escape.

  He’d been dreaming; a new one this time, though thematically linked to the usual repertoire. He’d dreamt through yesterday’s fight, watching it from a distance, as though analysing the performance of a promising student. He saw the enemy, a one-eyed man in a scarecrow coat that had once been military issue, so a veteran, like himself. He was quite tall, and thin, and he’d got a messer.

  (Here they fight with messers. God help them.)

  Suidas hadn’t ever killed a man with a rapier before. It was child’s play. The opponent came at him in a crude, instinctive low back guard, presumably looking for an opening for an ascending cut in sixth. Suidas had obligingly opened his own low guard, provoking a closing of the measure. Then all he’d had to do was go in off the opponent’s right arm, in single time, punching a neat hole in the upper stomach. Then he’d stepped back, because dying men sometimes lash out. But this one wasn’t going to, so he closed the measure right up, carefully positioned the point on the hollow between his collarbones, and gently but firmly pushed the point in until it met bone. Piece of cake.

  As it should’ve been, of course, because the rapier, against soft-skinned game, is the best killing tool ever invented. He remembered looking over the dead man’s shoulder just before he toppled backwards; no additional targets. There had been a slight tug on the hilt as the body fell off the blade. At which point Suidas had taken a breath to scream with, and opened his eyes.

  Twenty-five thousand nomismata, he told himself.

  He breathed out again, slowly, consistently, to stop himself from hyperventilating. Twenty-five thousand nomismata was a good enough reason. It was a future, something he hadn’t had for a very long time. It was enough to set up a high-class fencing school in a fashionable district of the City, with a long panelled salle, practice rooms, a dining room and kitchen, and a comfortable apartment on the upper floor where she’d be happy to stay. It was a pleasant, honest retirement, no more sharps, not ever; just foils.

  He remembered how his stomach had lurched when they opened the crate, and all the swords inside it had been sharp. Weapons, not sports equipment. He’d toyed with the idea of simply disarming his opponent – easily done, if he’d got a rapier or a spear or a single-hand sword or even a longsword. But no, the bastard had to have a messer. Here they fight with messers. God help them.

  He’d picked it up, later, when it was all over. It was a typical blacksmith job: blade two feet long, inch and a half wide, curved, single very sharp edge. The blade was slightly twisted, the forging blemishes and the firescale marks hadn’t all been drawfiled out, and the single deep fuller hadn’t been ground smooth inside. You wouldn’t bother, for a tool that would mostly be used for cutting coppice, hedging and butchering the occasional pig. There was one in every barn, in Permia.

  He’d wrapped it in a scarf he’d taken from one of the dead bodies and shoved it in the packing case. Just looking at it made him feel sick, but you never knew when something like that might not come in handy. They always did, didn’t they?

  He tried to picture the salle, with its high windows curtained in figured brocade – everybody goes to Deutzel’s, it’s the only place to learn. He used to be rapier champion, you know. They’d say it with a slight hint of wonder, because who’d have thought the cheerful, bald fat man with the big welcoming smile and delightful manners had once been a professional fencer?

  He was in the War, you know. No, they wouldn’t say that. They’d have no reason to.

  What he wouldn’t give for a stiff drink right now. But he’d promised, and he knew that if he so much as looked at a bottle she’d know, and when he got back home there’d be an empty room and a short, well-phrased letter. He realised he was flexing his right hand over and over again, the way the doctor had taught him, to build up the strength in the tendons.

  So, he asked himself, by way of distracting his own attention, what was a Scherian highway robber doing with a Permian messer? Not a very taxing question, particularly since he’d also been wearing the ghost of an army greatcoat. He’d picked it up in the War, of course. Loads of men brought them back as souvenirs, trophies of war; that’ll come in useful round the farm, they’d thought, not like the swords and pikes and other dedicated military junk you found on battlefields. They’d even started doing home-made copies, because they were such useful things.

  Quite. He looked at the scar. It had been a Blueskin doctor who’d sewn it up. Marvellous people, the Blueskins, if you caught them on a good day.

  And now we’re going back to Permia, he thought. Of all the stupid things to do. For twenty-five thousand nomismata, which was quite ridiculous in itself. There had to be more to this than met
the eye. After all, nobody in their right mind …

  He wanted the others to wake up, to stop the thoughts churning round inside his head. It was no way to live, constantly besieged inside your own mind, like Flos Verjan before the Irrigator opened the sluices. He accidentally-on-purpose nudged Giraut’s foot, but he only grunted and carried on sleeping.

  But, he told himself, the past changes, like everything else. The further away you got, the vaguer it became, until you reached the point where your memories, unless corroborated by witnesses, were unreliable evidence. If there were no witnesses – well, a memory was property, after all. When there were no other witnesses to claim title to it, the memory belonged to you. It was no crime to bend it a little, to dull the edges, put a button on the point so it was no longer sharp. Only a fool would carry an unsheathed knife in his pocket.

  Which would be fine if you could live without sleeping; or if, like some incredibly lucky people he’d met over the years, you never remembered your dreams when you woke up. And only a fool would go back to Permia, even for twenty-five thousand nomismata, if he didn’t absolutely have to.

  He looked out of the window and saw the nodding white plume of a Blueskin helmet.

  Well, it could’ve been the Aram Chantat. From time to time, the people who lived in the tenement below cooked fish with saffron and garlic, and the last time they’d done that – he had no memory of it at all, but apparently Sontha managed to get past him and ran to the Guild house; it took four trained fencers to get the sword away from him, and one of them was cut up quite badly. All because of the smell of fish and saffron, mixed with the sweet air you get just after it’s rained. The Aram Chantat ate a lot of fish; odd, for an inland nomadic people, but apparently they traded furs for dried stockfish somewhere down on the coast; knowing they had a taste for it, the Permians had supplied it as standard rations. Of course, he’d been drinking back then, though not (as far as he could remember) on the night in question. The sword he’d used (this was one thing he could remember) had been a messer; a souvenir he’d brought back from the War, in case it came in useful for something. Needless to say, it wasn’t the only one, but he hadn’t told her about the others.

  The dead veteran’s messer was up on the roof, in the packing case, with the other weapons. He could almost feel it up there, watching him. Of course, a messer was basically just an overgrown knife. Nobody would think of fencing with one of the damn things. Except that there was a page of drawings, in Lecapenus’ True Art of Defence: two men, in ordinary street clothes, face off against each other with big, curved knives. Instead of the usual rubric, technical stuff about transitions between wards, footwork, possible defences and ripostes, there was just one line: Here they fight with messers. God help them.

  (In fact, now he came to think of it, there was a war souvenir in his carriage trunk right now, carefully wrapped in heavy blue cloth, under his clean shirt and the selection of rare and sought-after fencing manuals he’d brought with him to sell in Permia, which with any luck the Guild library would never miss. But his trunk had been dumped off the coach when the axle broke, and with all these bandits about, there was little chance he’d ever see it again. Probably just as well. Only a fool would take a messer into Permia, after all.)

  The chaise must have gone over a pothole or a rock in the road; there was a very slight lurch, barely noticeable, but it was enough to wake up Phrantzes. He opened his eyes and stared at the opposite side of the compartment, and a look of shock and great sorrow passed over his face, quick as a cloud across the sun on a windy day. Suidas reckoned he knew exactly how he felt.

  “Still here,” he said sympathetically.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s all right,” Suidas said. “You haven’t missed anything, by the way.” He glanced out of the window. “If I’m right, we’re about an hour from the border. This thing goes like the wind.”

  “Was I asleep for long?”

  Suidas nodded. “The best way to travel, in your sleep,” he said. “You miss out all the tedious sitting still. The worst way is walking, of course. I’ve always hated walking. It’s primitive.”

  “I enjoy a pleasant walk myself,” Phrantzes said mildly. “My wife and I like to walk beside the river in the evening. We have a dog, you know.”

  “Suit yourself,” Suidas replied. “Now, presumably there’ll be some of our people at the border. Then we can find out what’s really going on.”

  Phrantzes looked worried. “How do you mean?”

  “Well.” Suidas wasn’t quite sure where to start. But he’d been chewing at the various issues in the back of his mind for a long time; it was unreasonable to expect someone else to be as far along as he was. “Don’t you think it’s strange,” he said, “that we turn up at a way station in our own country – an important station, mark you, not just some branch auxiliary – and find it all shut up and deserted, with the road booby-trapped? Well?”

  “Inconvenient, certainly …”

  “First,” Suidas said firmly, “abandoning a military installation without express orders is gross dereliction, they can hang you for it. Second, they knew we were coming, right? You sent ahead. We should’ve been expected.”

  “That was what I was told.”

  “Quite. And everybody’s been going on about how important this mission is, haven’t they? But we get there – a bit behind schedule, but everybody who uses the road knows how you can get held up – and guess what, the place is all closed down, nobody there. Doesn’t that make you wonder, just a little bit?”

  “Well, yes,” Phrantzes said. “But you seem to be suggesting there’s something sinister about it. I’d be more inclined to put it down to a breakdown in communications.”

  “You think that’s a plausible explanation?”

  “Oh, definitely,” Phrantzes said. “During the War I was on General Carnufex’s staff. I was responsible for materiel shipments over several sectors. Nothing would surprise me after that. We used to have a rule, formulated by some wise man whose name temporarily escapes me; ninety-nine times out of a hundred, things that look like treason or malice turn out to be simple incompetence.”

  Suidas nodded calmly. “And a bunch of robbers turning up out of nowhere, at the precise moment we’re there,” he said. “That’s just coincidence.”

  Phrantzes considered his reply for a moment. “Not really coincidence,” he said. “I assume that they were – well, that was what they did for a living, and they’d been doing it for a while. They probably have lookouts on the road—”

  “They choose to mount their ambush,” Suidas said over him, “in the back yard of a government way station. Now, unless they knew it was all shut up, that’s about the most stupid thing they could possibly do; there should’ve been a garrison in that station, soldiers specifically to hunt down and destroy bands of highwaymen. There’s miles and miles of empty country where they could’ve attacked us. It makes no sense.”

  Phrantzes frowned. “Therefore,” he said, “they must’ve known the station was closed.”

  “Fine. But when you were making the final arrangements for our departure, you had someone send ahead to let them know we’d be coming. Nobody got back to you and said, actually, that station’s been closed.”

  “No,” Phrantzes admitted, “no, they didn’t.”

  “Fine. So, when you sent ahead, a couple of days before we set out—”

  “The day before.”

  “The day before. And at that time, the station was open, and nobody knew anything about any plans to close it. We get there twelve or so hours behind schedule, not that much later than we should’ve been, and the place is empty and the road’s blocked. And,” he added, “there’s a bunch of bandits hovering round the station; so they must’ve known it was closed, but the government didn’t. Well?” he added. “That’s not just some clerk screwing up in the transit office, is it?”

  “It could be,” Phrantzes said slowly, “a routine evacuation, due to rotation of pers
onnel. A junior officer in the relevant department failed to notify the central office.”

  “And your people, checking ahead? Even if the garrison was about to go off shift, wouldn’t they mention that? Oh, by the way, if your people show up here in two days’ time, the place’ll be all closed up?”

  “They may have assumed we already knew.”

  “And the bandits?”

  “They saw the garrison leave,” Phrantzes said, “and saw an opportunity. Coaches would stop at the station; much easier to attack a stationary coach than trying to stop one while it’s moving. Especially,” he added happily, “since they were on foot.”

  Suidas thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “It would then have been the bandits,” Phrantzes added, “who put the bar in the road.”

  “Ah yes,” Suidas said, “the bar. That punches a hole in your easier-to-attack-a-stopped-coach theory. All they’ve got to do is bar the road, like you’re saying they did, and the coach stops dead. No need for any running about.”

  Phrantzes shrugged. “Then perhaps the garrison put the bar there when they left the station,” he said. “For all I know, it’s standard operating procedure.”

  “In peacetime? Hardly.”

  “Then it must have been the bandits.”

  Suidas sighed irritably. “And then,” he went on, “who should show up but the Blueskins? On our side of the line. And they’re not even supposed to be in the DMZ, let alone on our side of the line.”

  “Oh, Lieutenant Totila’s explained all that,” Phrantzes said firmly. “And his papers are entirely in order. And lucky for us he did turn up,” he added. “Otherwise—”

  “And there’s him,” Suidas said quietly, nodding his head at Tzimisces. “Even you must’ve noticed how he always seems to melt away just before something bad happens.”