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  Behind him, someone was muffling a sob. He made the time to glance round: Copis, huddled in her chair with her tablecloth around her, was crying because now there were only three of them left. (And where was Gain Aciava? Or did his absence mean that the class of '56 was now down to two?) Poldarn decided that it was just as well he didn't have the memories that were presently filling Copis's mind, quite possibly hers alone now. It must be terrible to be the only one left, he thought, the last crow of the flock, the one suddenly forced to stand for the whole.

  'Fine,' Tazencius said suddenly. 'Ciartan, will you please put that horrible thing away? You have my word, nobody's going to bother you now.'

  I have your word, do I? Lucky, lucky me. Poldarn righted an overturned chair, pulled it out into the open where he could see most of the room, and sat down, the backsabre across his knees. (It was wet and sticky, but his absurd red velvet trousers didn't show the marks. Functional, after all.)

  'Right, then,' Tazencius was saying. 'One last bit of carnage, and then will someone clean up this mess?'

  Someone who'd been standing at the back, leaning against the wall since the first course was served, now took five steps forward. He was holding a wide silver tray, on which rested a black cloth bag about the size of a large cabbage. It held a man's head, which the servant held up by the hair. Poldarn had no idea who it was supposed to be, but there was a general mumble of satisfaction from the dinner guests; particularly from the Amathy house contingent.

  Tazencius cracked a thin smile. 'Gentlemen,' he said, 'Feron Amathy is dead.' Someone handed him a goblet; he took it without looking round. 'A toast, then,' he went on, suddenly looking straight at Poldarn, 'to our good friend Feron Amathy.'

  Poldarn felt an urge to look round, in case there was someone behind him he hadn't seen. But he knew there wasn't. Instead, he stared at Tazencius 'You, you idiot,' Tazencius explained.

  Chapter Nineteen

  'Me?' Poldarn said.

  Tazencius smiled. 'You,' he said. Mostly silence; the only sound was Copis's muted sobbing somewhere behind him. Everybody else in the room was either dumbstruck with horror or frozen with embarrassment. Welcome home, he thought.

  'You don't look pleased,' Tazencius went on, grinning affably. 'I was sure you'd want your old job back. I was trying to be nice.'

  Poldarn doubted that. On the other hand he still had the backsabre, and if he made up his mind to a straightforward, businesslike exchange of lives, he had no doubt at all that he could carve Tazencius from ear to collarbone before anybody could stop him. He was surprised at how little he wanted to do that, all things considered.

  'I don't understand,' he said.

  Gentle murmuring from the Amathy house contingent, who clearly weren't impressed. Tazencius raised his voice over the sound and went on, 'Years ago the Amathy house realised that its most valuable asset was the prestige-not the right choice of words but you know what I mean-of the name Feron Amathy. For as long as I personally can remember it's been a byword for efficiency, ruthlessness and duplicity. So, when the original Feron Amathy died, they didn't let on; their new leader took the name, made out that the rumours of his death were just wishful thinking, and carried on as before. Easily done, since very few people outside the House had ever seen the great man, and for most of those who did he was the last thing they ever saw. Then, when I was looking round for a suitable wedding present for my future son-in-law and decided to give you power equal to that of the Emperor himself, the replacement was duly replaced by you, and the name came with the job. And,' he went on, 'when everybody was sure that you were dead and I needed to find a substitute to fill your place, he became Feron Amathy in turn. Then the House found out that you were still alive, changed its mind and wanted you back. He's dead,' a curt nod towards the thing lying on its side on the silver tray, 'which serves him right for annoying the rank and file; as I understand it, he had delusions of authenticity, actually started believing he was the commander of an army, not the chief executive of a bunch of thieves.' The Amathy house contingent didn't react to that. 'He was fighting a war, he thought: devising strategies, sending expendable units to die for the sake of the grand design. That's not how the House functions: they kill people, they don't get killed themselves. So they decided he had to go, and now-' He pointed at the object on the tray with his little finger. 'You, on the other hand, were perfect for the House; they only allowed me to replace you because I insisted-it was a condition of the contract. They gave me you, and I gave them Josequin, and a licence to plunder every city in the Bohec valley. A bargain, from my point of view; I got the whole Empire in exchange for a few of its cities.' He frowned. 'Unfortunately, it all went wrong without you, and now we have to clean up the mess.'

  Poldarn lifted his head and tried to say something. Fortunately, his input wasn't required, since he appeared to have run out of words.

  'You'd like me to begin at the beginning,' Tazencius said. 'Very well.'

  He leaned back in his chair. Someone took the silver tray away, out of his sight. Someone else brought him a fresh drink. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'when I was young and foolish, a dimwitted cousin of mine fell out with a promising young army officer by the name of Cronan Suilven. My cousin was a coward; he didn't feel up to attacking the soldier directly, so he persuaded me to pick a fight with him, over some trivial matter. I did as he wanted; the duel was a fiasco, I was humiliated, finished at Court. I was determined to make Cronan pay, but by the time I was in any fit state to take him on, he'd been promoted to commander-in-chief; if I was going to destroy him, I'd have to become Emperor first. So that's what I resolved to do.' He paused and sipped his wine, taking a moment to savour it. Theatre, Poldarn thought contemptuously. 'I knew that in order to get rid of Cronan I'd have to create a threat to the Empire, something so terrifying that anybody who managed to get rid of it would be able to have anything he wanted; also, anybody who tried and failed would be broken, ruined, disgraced. It was about that time that your horrible relations began making serious trouble in the coastal districts; but of course nobody knew who they were or where they came from, nobody knew their language or how to communicate with them. I needed them, of course, as my threat. I needed them to extend their operations from mere seaside vandalism to full-scale acts of war: burning down cities, butchering whole populations. Fortune smiled on me; I found you.'

  Poldarn glanced round the room. None of this seemed to have come as a surprise, either to the Amathy contingent or to the domestic nobility.

  'You were my link with the savages,' Tazencius went on. 'I had you trained at Deymeson, and gave you my daughter, to secure you; you were, after all, my key component, the most important single piece in the mechanism. You had to be perfect, and you had to be completely, indubitably mine. That's why I gave you everything I ever really cared about-apart from destroying Cronan, of course. I gave you my daughter. All can say is, I've been punished appropriately ever since.'

  Lysalis looked up at her father, her face blank, just for a moment. Then she went back to staring at Copis, who wasn't listening at all.

  'But that wasn't all I gave you,' Tazencius went on. 'As well as the savages, I needed a strike force, something closer to home and easier to control. I never controlled the savages, you see; all I could do, through you, was make it possible for them to attack deep inland, come and go unharmed and with their terrifying anonymity undamaged. You've seen them, Ciartan, you know what they're like. Ferocious, certainly, and they have this bizarre ability to share each others' thoughts; but they aren't actually superhuman. If they started making raids deep into the Empire, it was only a matter of time before Cronan caught up with them and cut them to ribbons, and then I'd lose everything. But I needed them to be superhuman, invulnerable, unbeatable; so I made sure that Cronan and the government troops never got near them, or else I arranged for them to fall into perfectly planned ambushes, so that the savages could wipe them out to the last man.

  'So much effort, you see; and there was
always the risk that something would go wrong, someone in the government I'd bought would let me down or betray me. I needed a second weapon: one that I could control directly, one that could be trusted on its own without my having to think of every little thing. So I bought the Amathy house, and had you installed as heir presumptive to its leader. Then I got rid of him, and you became Feron Amathy.

  'For a while, everything went very well. On my behalf, you led the House on a series of raids, burning and butchering, leaving no survivors, all the blame being laid on the savages. At the same time, you were coordinating operations with the savages-I thought I was being so wonderfully economical, using you for both functions; since I had to trust someone besides myself (which I hated doing, for obvious reasons), at least I only had to trust one man, and I'd done everything humanly possible to make you secure. I trusted you. That was-' He frowned. 'A pity.'

  Poldarn nodded slowly. 'What happened?' he said.

  'You betrayed me,' Tazencius replied. 'Unfortunately, I'd overlooked a detail or two. I'd underestimated the Deymeson Order, and its self-appointed mission as guardian of the Empire. But one of the Order's senior officers-your former tutor, indeed-worked out what I was up to and resolved to stop me. It was while you were still at school, which only goes to show how perceptive your old tutor was, and how patient, too. It was fortunate for him that you were part of a small clique of friends-almost unheard of at Deymeson, where friendship is understandably fraught with problems-who'd formed one of those unshakeable adolescent bonds of loyalty that tend to last for life. He recruited two of your clique; their devotion to the Order was the only thing that was more important to them, you see. One of them was this woman here, Xipho Dorunoxy. You were in love with her, and would be, for life. The other-wonderful serendipity-was the boy whom everybody else in your gang was sure you'd callously murdered when a prank went wrong: Cordomine. Understandably, he now hated you almost as much as he loved the Order. Your tutor forged him, so to speak, into a weapon to use against me; he was to become the Chaplain in Ordinary, in effective control of the civil administration, just as my other enemy, Cronan, was in charge of the military. Meanwhile, as you were going about my business in an admirably efficient way, Cordomine wrote to you.

  'He wasn't dead, he told you, and he was prepared to forgive you for what you'd tried to do when you'd stabbed him in the library. All he asked in return was that you should betray me, wreck my plans, and deliver me into the hands of my enemies.

  'You were delighted to oblige, since you were being eaten alive by guilt for what you thought you'd done-and also by the knowledge that you could never have Xipho Dorunoxy because you'd murdered her friend; but if he came back to life and forgave you-well, who knows?'

  Poldarn looked round at Copis. She lifted her head and looked back at him. It was like staring down a well.

  'Cordomine arranged for you to send the savages-your flesh and blood-into an ambush. Cronan would slaughter them like sheep, and the survivors would confess and incriminate me as the most unspeakable traitor in history. You would also lead the Amathy house into a similar trap, and they'd be wiped out too.'

  Tazencius paused, and grinned. 'Betrayal comes easily to you, Ciartan; I'd never fully appreciated how easily. I sincerely believed that once you were mine, you'd be mine for ever. I think that was the worst mistake I ever made; because look at you, my dear boy. I know you can't answer this because you can't remember; but is there anybody in the world you haven't betrayed at some point in your distinguished career? Your dearest friends: when Elaos Tanwar found out that you were passing military secrets to the savages, you killed him. When you were faced with disgrace and expulsion because of your foolish escapade in the library, you stabbed your friend Cordomine. Your own people: you'd have sent them to be wiped out by Cronan. Likewise the Amathy house, who'd followed you with absolute loyalty, done everything you'd asked of them. Me-after I'd given you everything. You've never made a promise you didn't break, been loved by anybody you haven't hurt or been the death of. There are clear definitions of evil; I suppose I meet most of the criteria, in that I've caused the deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands of innocent strangers in furtherance of my ambition and my hatred for Cronan Suilven. I chose my path and followed it single-mindedly, loyally, without any illusions about myself. That, I believe, is why you're worse than me, more dangerous, capable of doing more damage. Because, you see, you hardly fit the criteria of evil as established in dictionaries and textbooks. You sided with me because the Empire was your people's ancient enemy-you were sent here in the first place to spy on them, help your people to punish them, and steal the precious materials your people so desperately need, marooned on an island with no metal and precious little timber. You did your duty cheerfully; and when it became apparent that my interests coincided perfectly with theirs, you joined me. Soldiers do worse things in a war; you were a spy, and spies cause the deaths of thousands. It doesn't matter, because the thousands are the enemy. But then, because of one terrible error of judgement, in the Deymeson library, when you were trying to do the best for your friends whom you'd led into disaster, you were chained by guilt to one man, Cordomine. Guilt never bothers me, we evil men are immune to it. Guilt made you abandon your people, your followers, your wife, me, without a moment's hesitation.' He smiled, wide and bleak. 'If you'd been an evil man like me, Ciartan, thousands of people who died in pain and fear would still be alive. But you're worse than I am, because you're part evil and part good-as most people are, I suppose. Still, in their cases, it doesn't matter.'

  Tazencius shrugged; so much for all that.

  'Anyway,' he went on, 'you made the usual arrangements with the savages for the coming season; and then you reported back to Cordomine. The idea was, as I've told you, that you would send them strolling blithely into an ambush. But by this stage, I'd found out, from spies of my own in the Amathy house, that you'd turned traitor on me. I gave orders for my agent in the House to kill you-his reward was to be Feron Amathy in your stead-but he failed. You escaped and turned to Cordomine for protection. He was in an awkward position. Needless to say, he hadn't dared to let Cronan in on the secret; Cronan was far too straightforward to play the game out quietly, he'd have told the Emperor all about me and the Amathy house being in league with the savages, and I'd have been forced to mobilise both of my allies against the government in a straightforward civil war-and together, the House and the savages would probably have won, but not conclusively; we'd have seized the Bohec valley, perhaps, and I'd have set myself up as a rival Emperor, hated as a despicable traitor in the city, and everything would have descended into a chaotic mess. So although Cordomine needed you to deliver the savages and the House into Cronan's hands for execution, he couldn't save you openly from your outraged followers in the House. The best he could do was smuggle you to safety, using the resources of the Order; he sent his bodyguards to escort you from Josequin to Torcea, and Father Tutor sent his best agent, Xipho Dorunoxy, just in case something went wrong.

  'Something did go wrong: the House's trackers, who'd been following you, caught up with you and your escort beside the river. There was a fight; the trackers and the escort wiped each other out, you were knocked over the head and lost your memory. Xipho Dorunoxy found you and sent a message to Deymeson for instructions. That was the moment when everything began to fall apart.'

  Tazencius stopped talking and took a long drink. Poldarn took the opportunity to study distances and angles, make estimates of time.

  'The consequence were as follows,' Tazencius went on. 'You failed to turn up at your rendezvous with the savages, to give them the information they needed to carry out the plans you'd previously outlined for them. They knew they had to attack certain places-Deymeson was one of them, I'd decided to get rid of the Order once and for all-but they didn't even know where these places were, let alone the safe and inconspicuous ways of getting there and getting safely back. They decided to set out anyway, hoping to find you, or that you'd catch up with t
hem along the way. Your people are amazingly stupid, Ciartan.

  'The new leader of the Amathy house, meanwhile, had bought acceptance as your replacement by promising them a major prize, namely Josequin. They collected their payment, but the savages didn't show up to give them the support they'd expected. Things weren't right, and they were terrified of being found out. They withdrew in confusion and therefore weren't on hand when I needed them, later.

  'Then things got worse, rapidly. Your old tutor changed his mind about what had to be done. I think it was some horrible coincidence, some prophecy accidentally fulfilled; he always was a mystic at heart, with far more faith than is good for a priest. In any event, he was suddenly convinced that you were none other than the God in the Cart, harbinger of the end of the world-I think it was the fact that you'd lost your memory, but I'm just speculating-and that it would be sacrilege to impede your disastrous progress in any way. He sent word to his most faithful servant, Xipho Dorunoxy (who by this time had retrieved you from where you'd got lost), and told her that her duty was henceforth to act as your priestess and acolyte, in accordance with the scriptures that foretell Poldarn's second coming. She coped splendidly, I suppose. She knew that the whole point about the God in the Cart is that He doesn't know who He is; by sheer fluke, she'd been using the cover of the fraudulent god as she followed you around. When you accidentally killed the false Poldarn, she made you take his place-the true god pretending to be Himself in order to cheat rustics out of loose change; no wonder the delicious irony of the whole thing was enough to unhinge your erstwhile tutor's brain. Cordomine had him killed as soon as he could, of course; but not before the old priest had sent his other faithful servant, another classmate of yours whose name escapes me, first to confirm that you really were the god (which apparently he did, to Father Tutor's satisfaction) and then to wreck Cordomine's plans for saving the Empire from you and me by murdering General Cronan.