The Proof House Page 4

  When the evening was over and their guests had gone home, Vetriz kicked off her shoes and poured herself the last of the wine. ‘I can’t figure those two out,’ she said. ‘Are they or aren’t they?’

  Her brother shrugged. ‘Both,’ he replied. ‘Which is odd, I’ll grant you. I mean, it’s obvious what he sees in her but not the other way round. Not in a million years.’

  Vetriz raised an eyebrow. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘I’d have said it was the other way round. Oh, well, I suppose that means they were made for each other after all. In which case, I can’t help wondering why they spend so much of their time trying to do each other down in business.’

  Venart yawned. ‘Their way of expressing affection, I suppose,’ he said. ‘But what she was saying about the Empire, it makes sense, you know, in a way. Mind you, so does what Hido said. This Ap’ Escatoy thing’s really brought it home.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Vetriz replied, slowly getting up. ‘I’m going to bed while I can still move.’

  ‘All right.’ Venart hesitated for a moment, then continued, ‘When I was down at the Nails this afternoon, I did hear one thing about Ap’ Escatoy.’

  ‘Hm? Tell me in the morning.’

  Venart shook his head. ‘Really,’ he said, ‘I should have mentioned it earlier, except of course it’s just a rumour, and I haven’t the faintest idea where it comes from or if there’s anything to it. I was waiting to see if Hido or Eseutz had come across it too, but apparently not.’

  Vetriz yawned. ‘Oh, for pity’s sake, Ven,’ she said. ‘Stop hamming it up and tell me.’

  ‘All right.’ Venart looked away slightly. ‘What it is, someone was talking about the end of the siege, how it actually happened, and he said the man who finally broke through in the mines and brought down the wall was called Bardas Loredan.’

  Vetriz didn’t turn round. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘I thought you should know,’ Venart said. ‘Well, there it is. Like I said, there’s absolutely no confirmation or anything like that, just a rumour.’

  ‘Of course,’ Vetriz replied. ‘Well, I’m off to bed. Good night.’

  After that snippet of information it was inevitable that her dreams should return to the mines – she knew every inch of them by now, so that her knees and the palms of her hands ached at the thought of them – and the darkness and the stale air and the smell of clay and herbs. Once again she was crawling blind towards the source of the noise, the indecipherable confusion of steel and voices; this time she hoped she’d be able to pick out one voice among them, but that was completely unrealistic. Perhaps what she’d learned explained why she had to keep coming back here, but nothing else made sense. It was just a dream where she crawled along tunnels in the dark, and sometimes the roof caved in on her and sometimes it didn’t. Maybe she’d been right the first time, and it really was divine retribution for eating blue cheese just before going to sleep.

  But this time she called out his name; though whether she was telling him she was coming to help him or asking to be rescued herself, she wasn’t quite sure. All night she slithered and stomped and crawled her way through the galleries and spurs of her dream, sometimes having to squeeze past and crawl over men who’d been dead a long time, sometimes people she’d known all her life, sometimes people she recognised for the first time; but the noise never got any closer and the voices stayed confused. She woke up sweating, the bedclothes twisted round her, the pillow on the floor where she’d thrown it after thanking it for its forbearance.

  When Temrai opened his eyes, the light appalled him.

  He shook his head like a wet dog, as if trying to get the dream out of his mind. Beside him, Tilden grunted and turned over, pulling the covers off his toes. She could sleep through anything, even the stifled yell he’d woken up with. If Tilden dreamed strange and terrible dreams, they were of casseroles spoiled by overcooking, or long-awaited tapestries which, when they finally arrived, didn’t go with the cushions after all. The thought made him smile, in spite of himself.

  He sighed and sat up, carefully shifting his weight so as not to disturb her. In fact, the light was nothing more than a gentle smear of moonshine leaking through the smoke-hole; remarkable that it could have seemed so unbearably bright a moment ago.

  Methodically, like a conscientious witness in front of the examining magistrate, he recalled the dream. He’d been in darkness, in some cave or tunnel underground; he’d been scrabbling frantically along, trying to get away from something, or someone, either the roof caving in or a man with a knife, and most of the time it had been both together. When his pursuer had caught up with him, and he’d felt a hand gathering his hair and pulling his head back to expose his throat to the cutting edge, he’d heard a voice thanking him, and another saying that the dead man was Sergeant Bardas Loredan, sacker of cities, bringer-down of walls, responsible for the deaths of thousands –

  - Which was all wrong, of course. He, King Temrai the Great, was the sacker of cities and slayer of thousands; he was the one who’d brought down the walls of Perimadeia, after first burning to death all the thousands and hundreds of thousands of people trapped in there when he burst in. The wise and expensive Shastel doctor he’d sent for when the dreams he’d had since the fall of the City made him dangerously ill had told him that it was all perfectly natural, that it was hardly surprising that in his dreams he should put himself in the place of one of the people he’d burned to death; somehow, the wise and expensive doctor had left him with the impression that it was so normal as to be positively good for him, like drinking plenty of milk and taking regular exercise. He wondered what he’d have made of this new development; the caves, the man with the knife who was Bardas Loredan, the sacker of cities. He could work some of it out for himself; his guilt and self-loathing had made him identify himself with the most frightening and destructive man he’d ever encountered, so that in his mind he’d become Loredan, the ultimate degradation. No need to spend good money to be told that.

  He yawned. Absolutely no chance of getting back to sleep; what he really wanted was company. Gently he slid off the bed, feeling with his toes for his soft felt shoes, pulled on his coat and crept out of the tent.

  Who would be awake at this time of night? Well, the sentries, for a start (or else they were all in trouble) and the duty officer and the duty officer’s friend – there was a specific military technical term, but he hadn’t a clue what it was; basically, the job consisted of staying up all night playing draughts with the duty officer to keep him from falling asleep. Fairly soon the bakers would be up and about, starting off the next day’s bread. Almost certainly, somewhere in the camp, there’d be a bunch of young fools who’d stayed up all night drinking, and here and there a few men unable to sleep for worrying about whether they were going to die in the battle tomorrow. Quite likely he wasn’t the only man in twenty thousand who’d been turfed out of bed by a bad dream. A short walk through the streets of the camp would find him someone to talk to.

  He yawned again. It was a warm night, with a smell of rain. To his surprise, he realised he was feeling hungry. What he really needed, in fact, wasn’t human companionship or someone to pour out his troubles to. What he really needed was a couple of white-flour pancakes smothered in sour cream and honey, preferably with a sprinkling of redcurrants and nutmeg. For a king spontaneously accorded the epithet Great by a devotedly loyal nation, that oughtn’t to be too much to ask.

  He also had the advantage of inside knowledge. The best pancakes in the world, he happened to know, were made by Dondai the fletcher, a spry, toothless old man who spent his life pulling carefully selected feathers out of the wings of the increasingly resentful geese that formed the supplementary fletchings reserve. That was all he did. Someone else sorted the feathers into left side and right side; someone else again split them down the pith, trimmed them to shape and delivered them to the workers who actually served them to the arrowshafts with thin threads of waste sinew. When h
e wasn’t pulling feathers, though, Dondai made an awe-some pancake; and, being too old to need much sleep, there was a good chance he’d be awake right now.

  Dondai’s tent wasn’t exactly hard to find, even in the middle of the night; all you had to do was follow the smell and sound of geese. Sure enough, at the entrance to the goose pen there was a small fire, beside which a man sat, with a furious goose struggling in his large, capable hands. The man had his back to Temrai, and it was only after he’d tapped him on the shoulder and the man had turned round that he realised it wasn’t the man he’d been looking for.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was looking for Dondai.’

  The man looked at him, frowning slightly.

  ‘Dondai the fletcher,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Is he asleep?’

  ‘You could say that,’ the man replied. ‘He died three days ago.’

  ‘Oh.’ For some reason Temrai was shocked, out of all proportion. True, he’d been eating Dondai’s white-flour pancakes since he was a boy, but that was all the old man had meant to him, a sure hand with a pottery bowl and a flat iron pan. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  The man shrugged. ‘He was eighty-four,’ he replied. ‘When people get that old, they tend to die. It’s not as if it’s unfair or anything. I’m his nephew, by the way, Dassascai. You were a friend of his, then?’

  ‘An acquaintance,’ Temrai replied. ‘You haven’t been in the army long, have you?’

  ‘I’m not in the army,’ Dassascai replied. ‘Until recently, I had a stall in Ap’ Escatoy market, selling fish. Lived there most of my life, in fact.’

  ‘Really?’ Temrai said. ‘It must have been terrible, these last few years.’

  Dassascai shook his head. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It was a port, remember, and the provincial office couldn’t spare any ships. There were never any shortages, people were spending money; it was a good war as wars go.’

  Temrai nodded slowly. ‘So what happened to you?’ he asked. ‘I’d sort of gathered that not many people made it out alive.’

  ‘That’s quite right,’ Dassascai said. ‘Fortunately, I wasn’t there when it happened; I was on my way here, to see my uncle like a good nephew and then on to the Island to buy salt cod. In fact, I left two days before it happened, so you can see I’m a very lucky boy. Except,’ he added with a sour grin, ‘that I never take my wife and family with me on business trips. Plus, there’s the small matter of a lifetime’s accumulated property, though you aren’t really supposed to mention that in the same breath as family. But the truth is, I know which I miss more.’

  Temrai sat down on the ground, keeping the fire between them. ‘So what are you going to do? Follow in your uncle’s footsteps?’

  ‘Pulling wing-feathers out of live geese for the rest of my life? Hardly.’ Dassascai stood up, a furiously struggling goose hanging upside down by its legs in one hand, a small bunch of feathers in the other. ‘For one thing, goose down makes me sneeze. For another, they stink. I’m doing this now because if I don’t work, I don’t eat. But something else’ll come along, and when it does I’ll be on my way.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ Temrai said. ‘Any idea what form this something might take? In my line of work I occasionally come across good opportunities that need good people; I could keep my eyes open for you.’

  Dassascai looked at him through the flames. ‘And your line of work is?’

  ‘Administration, mostly,’ Temrai replied. ‘And I hang about at staff meetings. That sort of thing.’

  ‘A man of power and influence,’ Dassascai replied. ‘Well, I’d better tell you what I’m good at. I can buy, and I can sell; I’m used to travelling, I can bargain, usually get a good deal. My mother used to say I’ve got an honest face. That’s about it.’

  Temrai smiled. ‘You’d probably have made a good Perimadeian,’ he said. ‘Or an Islander. How did you come to be in Ap’ Escatoy, anyhow?’

  Dassascai made a sudden swoop and stood up again, cramping another struggling goose to his chest. ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, sitting down. ‘When I was a kid I fell out with my father about something or other. He got angry, I walked away and kept going. Some time later I found myself in Ap’ Escatoy, hiding behind a row of barrels with a basket of stolen crayfish. Next thing I knew, I’d sold the crayfish and bought some more at the wharf. After that it was all reassuringly boring for a while. I like life better when it’s boring.’

  Temrai rubbed the tip of his nose with his knuckle. ‘Do you?’ he said.

  ‘You don’t, obviously.’

  ‘I’m very hard to bore,’ Temrai answered. ‘Nearly everything interests me. For instance, I’d find building up a fishmonger’s business from scratch very interesting indeed.’

  Dassascai shook his head. ‘Don’t be so sure,’ he said. ‘You stand behind a trestle in the market all day, wondering how the hell you’re going to shift the stock before it starts to smell if nobody ever stops and buys anything. You do this for most of the day, even on days when you sell out. Your feet hurt. You stare at the faces of dead fish and they stare back at you. Ten years later, you rent a covered stall with a torn awning. Five years after that, you worry about how much money your wife’s spending on carpets, and try and figure out how exactly the hired help’s ripping you off without it showing up in the accounts. Five years after that –’ he lifted his head and smiled ‘- some bastard saps the walls of your city and you get another job plucking geese. The boring bits were the best, no doubt about it.’

  Temrai stood up. ‘I think you may well be right,’ he said. ‘If I hear of anything really dull, I’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dassascai replied. ‘I’d like that.’

  When he got back to his tent, Temrai found Bossocai the engineer and Albocai the captain of the reserves waiting for him, sitting on little folding stools just outside the flap. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘have you been waiting long?’

  ‘No, not at all,’ replied Albocai, who was a rotten liar.

  ‘I’ve just been talking to a most interesting spy,’ Temrai went on, pushing open the flap and waving them through into the tent. ‘Keep your voices down, by the way, my wife’s still asleep.’

  ‘How do you know he was a spy?’ Bossocai asked.

  Temrai grinned. ‘If he’d had SPY tattooed on his forehead it couldn’t have been any plainer,’ he replied. ‘He was a nice man. I knew his uncle for years.’

  Albocai frowned. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we’d better have him arrested. What’s his name?’

  ‘No need for that,’ Temrai replied. ‘It’s not as if we’ve got any secrets worth stealing. In fact,’ he continued, with a smile the other two couldn’t understand, ‘being a spy in our camp must be the most boring job on earth, so that’s all right. I’m not sure who he’s spying for, but my guess is that he’s been sent by the provincial office. That’s interesting, don’t you think?’

  ‘I think you’re either wrong or taking this far too lightly,’ Albocai said. ‘Are you sure he’s a spy?’

  Temrai nodded. ‘When a man passes himself off as the nephew of a man I’ve known all my life and who never had a brother or a sister, let alone a nephew, and sits there knowing perfectly well who I am while pretending he doesn’t know me, and then, in a not-so-roundabout way, asks me to employ him as a spy, I draw the logical conclusion. That reminds me – Albocai, I want you to find out what happened to a man called Dondai—’

  ‘The goose-plucker? He died.’

  ‘Ah, right. Find out more about it, would you? If he was murdered, you can have your spy with my blessing, and the next time I see him I’ll expect him to be in several pieces. Anyway, that’s enough about that. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Well,’ said the engineer, and launched into a detailed technical enquiry about torsion-engine rope settings, a subject about which Temrai knew more than anybody else in the army; after he’d got his answer, Albocai chivvied him about finalising the order of battle for the reserve light infantry. When they’d both gone, Temrai looke
d at the bed and yawned; he felt sleepy, and it was far too late now to go to bed. He picked up his quiver, sat down on the clothes-press and began whetting the blades of his arrowheads on a leather strop.

  Back at the goose pen, meanwhile, Dassascai the spy was plucking feathers and going over in his mind the first contact he’d made with the man he’d been sent to kill.

  ‘Watch out,’ the boy said. ‘Go careful, or you’ll—’

  Too late. Gannadius tripped over the fallen branch and fell forwards into mud; nasty, thick mud under a thin layer of leaf-mould. He felt his legs sink in, right up to the knees, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to free them but he tried anyway. All he succeeded in doing was to pull his foot out of his boot. The feel of the mud on his bare foot was disgusting.

  (Just a minute, he thought.)

  ‘Hang on,’ the boy said behind him. ‘Don’t thrash about, you’ll just make it worse.’

  The boy grabbed him under the arms and lifted. He angled his other foot so as not to lose that boot as well.

  (Oh hell, I remember this. And I don’t think I’m going to like . . .)

  ‘There you are,’ the boy said. He could turn his head now; he was looking at a young man, no more than eighteen but enormously tall and broad across the shoulders, with a broad, stupid-looking face, wispy white-blond hair already beginning to recede, a small, flat nose, pale-blue eyes. ‘You really should look where you’re going,’ he said. ‘Come on, it’s time we weren’t here.’

  Gannadius opened his mouth, but his voice didn’t work. He stooped down and tugged at his boot till it came free. It was full of mud and water. The boy had started lumbering off through the undergrowth (a dense forest overgrown with brambles and squelching wet underfoot; yes, definitely the same place) and he had to hurry to keep up. By following the boy exactly and walking where he’d trampled a path, he was able to pick his way through the tangle.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this, Uncle Theudas,’ the boy said; and a moment later, men appeared out of the mess of briars and bracken, stumbling and struggling, wallowing in the mud and ripping their coats and trousers on the thorns. It would’ve been hilariously funny to watch, but for the fact that in spite of their difficulties they were clearly set on killing him and the boy and, unlike the two of them, they were in armour and carrying weapons.