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  He wondered if he ought to say something; but while he was considering the matter, Tazencius spoke first.

  ‘You’re him, then.’

  Ciartan couldn’t think of a reply to that. He tried smiling politely, but he was pretty sure it came out as an idiotic smirk.

  Just a moment, he thought. Something strange about the way Tazencius had said it; suddenly he realised what it was. He remembered that disconcerting lie he’d participated in earlier: I also gather that you’re quite the linguist. Tazencius had been talking to him in his own language, the one he hadn’t heard since he’d left Haldersness; the one that nobody on this side of the ocean was supposed to know about.

  He had to think quite hard to remember how to say it. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘How do you know—?’

  Tazencius’s grin showed that he was genuinely, absurdly pleased about something. ‘You make it sound like you hadn’t guessed. Hadn’t you? It’s why you’re here, boy. Do you know who I am?’

  What a question. He hesitated.

  ‘I know who you are,’ Tazencius went on. ‘You’re Ciartan Torstenson of Haldersness. And I know why you’re here. And may I say, I’m delighted to meet you at last.’

  ‘Likewise,’ Ciartan replied cautiously. ‘Look; excuse me and I’m not meaning to be rude, but . . .’ And then it suddenly dropped into focus: a memory, of a conversation he’d had on the ship, shortly before he’d landed on this side of the world—

  You wait till they make contact with you. They’ll find you, don’t worry about that. Just bide your time, there’s no hurry.

  Who should I be looking out for? he’d asked.

  Haven’t the faintest idea. Somebody pretty important, that’s all we know. When they find you, remember, you’re to do exactly what they say: they’ve got it all worked out.

  How will I know it’s the right one?

  Oh, that’s easy. He’ll be the only man in the whole Empire who can talk our language.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s me.’

  Prince Tazencius was looking at him. The amused contempt was still there, but also a little caution, a little disappointment. He felt the urge to explain, to justify himself, to restore the Prince’s faith in him. He had no idea why this should be important to him, since the rest of him reckoned Tazencius was a creep.

  ‘When I was on the boat,’ he said, ‘coming over here; I came across with a raiding party, and stayed behind—’ He hesitated. Tazencius nodded very slightly.

  ‘I know why,’ he said. ‘No need to embarrass yourself explaining.’

  Ciartan could feel himself colouring, but he ignored the sensation. ‘On the boat,’ he said, ‘they explained. Grandfather – that’s Halder, he brought me up when my dad died – he made all the arrangements. Since I was going to be living over here permanently, or at least for a good long time, it was only reasonable for me to do something to help. Well, I couldn’t argue with that – everybody should have a job to do, otherwise they’re just outsiders, offcomers. Anyway, my job was to meet up with some people on this side who’d pass on useful information: stuff about where the garrisons are and how many soldiers are billeted at each camp, the roads, how a raiding party could get from one place to another without being noticed, the defences of the cities, which ones were worth taking out, all that sort of thing. Then, when the raiding parties landed, I’d pass all this on, and they’d find life ever so much easier – after all, it’s been a couple of hundred years since our lot were thrown out of the Empire, and we don’t have any maps or anything like that, so when we land we’re just blundering about.’ He paused, feeling nervous about something; but the look on Tazencius’s face made him carry on. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘when I arrived I waited around – I suppose I was expecting whoever it was to come and find me. But after a week or so I didn’t have any food or anywhere to sleep, no money – I didn’t even know about money, because we don’t use it back home, I had to figure it out for myself as I went along. Had to learn the language, too, but it turns out our people are pretty good at that sort of thing, because of the mind-reading stuff: if you can see people’s thoughts, it’s not hard to relate them to the sounds they make with their mouths. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’d more or less come to the conclusion that the grand plan had gone all wrong and nobody was going to make contact with me, so I’d better start looking out for myself, earn a living, settle down. And that’s when I bumped into this other kid, Gain Aciava; and when he said, right out of the blue, why didn’t I come along and try out for this school he was at, of course I thought he must be him, the contact, or else why would a perfect stranger suggest something as dumb as that? So I went along, and they gave me a place at Deymeson, but of course I’d got it all wrong, it was nothing to do with spying for raiding parties—’ He hesitated. Tazencius was slowly shaking his head. ‘It was?’

  ‘Of course,’ Tazencius said. ‘You don’t seriously believe something like that would just happen, out of the blue? The governors of Deymeson aren’t in the habit of enrolling street urchins who happen to be able to wave a sword around without cutting off their own toes.’

  ‘Oh,’ Ciartan said.

  ‘On the contrary.’ Tazencius suddenly grinned; very disconcerting. ‘You’re right about one thing; we were planning to meet you off the boat, but it didn’t make landfall where it was supposed to, and we missed you. It took us weeks to track you down. Fortunately, you were so crass, you behaved so conspicuously oddly that we managed to pick up your trail. Then young Aciava – his family have worked for my family for generations, I’m sponsoring him through Deymeson – he staged the little comedy you referred to, and to our amazement you appeared to take it at face value. Needless to say, we’d arranged for a place for you at Deymeson. I made out you were some by-blow of our family, a little dark secret who had to be provided for. It’s happened often enough over the years, so there was no difficulty there. Since then, we’ve been keeping our eye on you, helping you along where necessary, getting you ready against the day when it suits us for you to start doing the job you were sent here to do.’ He paused, suddenly thoughtful. ‘It’s just occurred to me,’ he said, ‘that you don’t know about the connection between myself and your people. Correct?’

  Ciartan nodded.

  ‘Dear me.’ Tazencius sighed. ‘Then I suppose I’d better tell you.’ He pulled a jug of wine towards him, filled two silver cups and pushed one across the table. ‘For reasons that don’t concern you, but in which a certain General Cronan features significantly, it suits me for your extremely destructive kinsmen to cause a certain degree of havoc inside the Empire. The problem that faced me when I was framing my long-term plans, however, was that nobody, myself included, had any idea who you people are, where you come from – or, indeed, why you keep picking on us and doing so much damage. I had to find out; and then I had a stroke of luck. Three members of one of your pirate bands somehow managed to get themselves captured, by a junior officer loyal to myself: young lieutenant Muno – I’m telling you his name because you’ll be doing business with him sooner or later. Muno had the wit to keep quiet about his prisoners and hand them over directly to me.’ Tazencius sipped his wine, then went on: ‘It took a year, with the best linguists in Torcea working on the project, to reconstruct your people’s language from what we got out of the prisoners. Tough customers, all three; but unfortunately two of them didn’t survive the process. The third one, when at last we were able to talk to him in his own language, was absolutely stunned to learn that instead of wanting to find out where he came from so we could send an armada and exterminate the lot of you, we wanted to join forces and actually help your people against our own. A not unreasonable reaction, I suppose; but in any event, we finally managed to get through to him, just in time to reunite him with another raiding party that took him back home. There he eventually passed on my request to your grandfather, who in turn chose you.’

  ‘I see,’ Ciartan said.

  Tazencius smiled. ‘You don’
t, actually,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot more to it. It was only through my good graces and unstinting support that you ever saw your precious homeland in the first place. You are, of course, only half an Islander. Your mother was born a few miles from Mael Bohec. She was raped by your father, a raider, and she killed him. I found out what had happened as a favour to Halder – he was the overlord or whatever you call it of the man I’d captured: Scaptey, his name was. Halder wanted to know the circumstances of his son’s death, and he sent Scaptey back to ask me to investigate, as a mark of good faith. So, as I said, I found out the whole sorry story, found the woman who’d killed his son – your mother, of course – and discovered that in the meantime she’d had you. I let Halder know that you existed; he begged me to find you and send you back, which I duly did. About that time, things over here took a turn that I hadn’t predicted, which prompted me to shelve for the medium term my plans for disrupting the Empire. In the end, I had to wait sixteen years – by which time, of course, you’d grown up and contrived to get yourself into mortal trouble (I wasn’t in the least surprised, considering how you’d come into the world) and both Halder and I agreed that you’d be ideally suited for the purpose. As indeed,’ Tazencius continued, almost fondly, ‘you are. As a half-caste, your appearance is sufficiently nondescript that you can pass for a native both over here and over there. You have to a certain limited extent your people’s bizarre ability to read other people’s thoughts; but it’s incomplete, which means you can’t read minds well enough to see what I’m thinking right now – which is undoubtedly just as well; in other words, you’ll never be a danger to me because of it, only an asset. You can never go back home; you can never be at home here. Accordingly, your loyalties will inevitably lie with the only man who’ll ever be on your side, effectively your creator – myself. I’m the only person in the world you’ll ever be any use to, and in a short space of time you’ll make yourself practically indispensable to me, which is why I’m marrying you to my own daughter – who, I should point out, I love devotedly. I trust that by now you understand,’ Tazencius continued, leaning forward a little, ‘exactly how close are the bonds that tie us together. Consider the extent to which you are indebted to me. I found you; I saved you from the life of a mad, penniless whore’s brat in a stinking little village in the Bohec valley. Because of me, you were reunited with your family, your people, you were brought up in your own country. Through no fault of mine, you chose to shit in your own nest; thanks to me, instead of becoming an offcomer – that’s your word for it, isn’t it? – and spending the rest of your life as a vagrant day-labourer hated by everybody you came into contact with, you were able to come here and start a new life – as a sword-monk, no less, just as if you were a nobleman’s son, receiving the finest education that money can buy anywhere in the world. Now, because of my continuing benevolence, you’re about to marry a beautiful girl and join the Imperial family; you’re looking forward to a life of wealth, privilege and power, to a degree that your poor grandfather could never begin to understand. You see, don’t you, that entirely because of me you’re absolutely the darling of heaven, the luckiest, jammiest, most blessed man who ever lived – it’s as though I’m God and you’re the first-ever human being, created by me in my image for our mutual grace.’

  He stopped, and looked at Ciartan, clearly expecting an answer. ‘I guess so,’ Ciartan said.

  ‘You guess so,’ Tazencius repeated. ‘How beautifully put. But never mind; now you know who you are, and how you came to be that way. Now it’s time for you to be acquainted with the obligations that make up your part of the contract. You do agree, I trust, that you owe me your duty, absolute and wholehearted?’

  ‘I suppose I do,’ Ciartan said; then – ‘Sorry, that sounds pretty ungracious too. But it’s come as rather a shock, all this. I mean, I was always told my dad fell nobly in battle and my mum died of a broken heart—’

  Tazencius nodded slowly. ‘I’m not completely insensitive,’ he said. ‘To be honest, I’d always assumed – foolishly– that you’d know at least part of the story already. It never occurred to me – but, of course, it should have, and I apologise.’ He grinned again. ‘A gentleman always assumes the blame for the shortcomings of his inferiors, always provided that they know as well as he does that in doing so, he’s lying.’

  That sounded uncomfortably like an Expediencies essay title. Ciartan wondered if Tazencius had been educated at Deymeson too; the best education, hadn’t he said, in the whole world? In which case, presumably he had. And as for the rest of the stuff – the obligations, he’d called it, the being a spy, helping his people conquer and murder and burn – well, he hadn’t thought twice about agreeing when he’d been asked about it on the boat, because back then he didn’t know a damn thing about the Empire: as far as he was concerned they were nothing but malevolent pests to be destroyed where necessary, just like crows on the pea field. He asked himself if anything had really changed since then.

  Not really, he decided.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Please tell me what you’d like me to do.’

  He sat up in bed, his eyes suddenly open, his mouth open to shout, yell a warning to himself, no, don’t do that—

  A bit late, unfortunately; however many years ago it’d been, there was nothing he could do about it now. A pity– assuming, of course, that the Tazencius in his dream had been telling the truth. Having met the flesh-and-blood Tazencius on two occasions, he decided that this was a fairly major assumption; if anybody was capable of telling lies even though he wasn’t actually there, it’d be Tazencius. Or himself. Whichever.

  He realised that what had woken him up wasn’t in fact the dramatic revelations of his dream, but the guard, banging on the door. He remembered: today they’d be going to Falcata, and from there on to Dui Chirra, where he’d have the embarrassing job of explaining his unauthorised holiday to Brigadier Muno (who was, presumably, the same as the Lieutenant Muno who’d been on Tazencius’s payroll back when he first got off the boat; was that useful information, or just another potential danger? Past caring . . .) He pulled on his boots, grabbed his hat and called out that he was ready.

  The guards must’ve heard something about him overnight, because they treated him as if he could kill with a glance, like the character in the fairy tale he couldn’t quite remember; they made a point of staying well outside his circle, watching his every move in case he took it into his mind to grab a spear from someone’s hand and start slaughtering everyone in sight. Thinking about it, they had a point; but today his shoulder was playing him up and his left knee ached, and he felt a bit too fragile to live up to their dire expectations. Furthermore, it was beginning to dawn on him, in the light of what memories he’d been able to salvage from his dreams, that the palisade and sentries around Dui Chirra weren’t just there to keep him in, but also to keep the rest of the distinctly hostile world out; in which case, maybe he ought never to have left in the first place.

  Colonel Lock, it turned out, wasn’t going with him after all. No doubt there was some pressing reason, work to be done, meetings that couldn’t be cancelled; instead, he was handed over to an escort led by a burly middle-aged sergeant with a deep scar running slantwise across his face, from just under the right eye to the middle of the top lip.

  ‘You,’ he said, as soon as he saw Poldarn. ‘Well, bugger me. It is you, isn’t it?’

  I shouldn’t really, Poldarn said to himself, but what the hell? ‘You have no idea how good a question that is,’ he said.

  The sergeant didn’t know what to make of that. ‘It’s you, all right,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t sure just now, not with your face all fucked up like that, but I never ever forget a voice. So, they caught up with you at last, did they? Bloody good job, too.’

  Poldarn shrugged. ‘I’m a foundryman from Dui Chirra, I went AWOL and I’m being taken back. As far as I know, that’s all there is to it.’

  The sergeant laughed. ‘And the bloody rest,’ he said. ‘Maybe you k
idded Tadger Lock and the rest of ’em but you damn well don’t fool me. I know you.’

  Oh, for pity’s sake, Poldarn thought, as he hauled himself clumsily into a rickety four-wheeled cart. ‘Really,’ he said. ‘I don’t know you from a hole in the ground, but there’s a good reason for that.’

  The sergeant glared at him. ‘Don’t suppose you do recognise me,’ he said. ‘Expect you’ve lost count of the poor bastards you’ve cut about over the years. But I know you,’ he said, pressing a fingertip to his scar. ‘Gave me this, didn’t you?’

  Fuck, Poldarn thought. ‘I have no idea,’ he replied. ‘Truth is, I lost my memory a couple of years ago, and I can’t remember a damn thing from before then. So what I’m saying is, if we have met before, me not remembering you is nothing personal—’

  ‘Lost your memory?’ The sergeant grinned. ‘That’d be right. Dead handy, that’d be.’

  ‘Not really,’ Poldarn said mildly. ‘In fact, it’s a bit of a nuisance.’

  Long silence. In front of them, the road was a thin ridge of mud and rock between the deep, water-filled ruts. Behind them, the troopers talked in lowered voices, like people at a funeral.

  ‘Is that right, then?’ the sergeant said eventually. ‘You lost your memory?’

  ‘Yes,’ Poldarn said. ‘As far back as a couple of years ago. I found out a few things about myself since, but there’s still some pretty huge gaps.’

  ‘That must be – strange,’ the sergeant said slowly. ‘Not knowing the things you’ve done. Like being lost in a fog, not knowing if you’ve come on a way or you’re just going round in circles.’

  ‘You get used to it,’ Poldarn said. ‘But you say I gave you that scar. What happened?’

  When he replied, the sergeant sounded thoughtful; embarrassed, even. ‘It was a long time ago, mind,’ he said. ‘And in this game, well, everything’s always right up to the edge, right? I mean, if you and me’s fighting, either I’m going to get you or the other way about, someone’s going to get hurt. Doesn’t really mean anything – like, it doesn’t mean I’m better’n you, or you’re better than me. Just luck, half the time, or one of you’s got a headache or a pulled muscle, gives the other bloke an edge.’