The Proof House Read online

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Just as the woman had said, as soon as it got dark, it got cold. Fortunately, there was a spare oxhide folded up in a corner of the cart, and Loredan crawled into it. The outriders stopped and lit lanterns, then carried on at not much less than the pace they’d set during the day.

  ‘One advantage of a straight, flat road,’ the woman said. ‘Doesn’t really matter if you can’t see where you’re going.’>

  The government rations the woman had spoken so slightingly of turned out to consist of a long, flat coarse barley loaf flavoured with garlic and dill, some strong hard cheese and an onion. ‘They say you can tell someone who’s been on the post from several yards away,’ the woman commented, ‘just from the smell. You’ve got to admit, it’s a pretty obnoxious combination.’

  Bardas smiled, though of course she couldn’t see. ‘I like the smell of garlic,’ he said.

  ‘Do you? That’s – well, each to his own, I suppose. Mind you, in my line of business, you pretty well live and die by your sense of smell.’

  ‘That must be strange,’ Bardas said.

  ‘Oh, it is. I find it remarkable how most people just take it for granted. It’s definitely the laziest of the five senses, though that’s nothing a little training won’t cure. My name’s Iasbar, by the way.’

  ‘Bardas Loredan.’

  ‘Loredan, Loredan – I’ve heard that name, you know. Isn’t there a bank with that name somewhere in the – out your way somewhere?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Ah, well, that explains it. Does everybody have two names where you come from?’

  ‘It’s quite common,’ Bardas replied. ‘Does everybody where you come from have just one?’

  The woman laughed. ‘Oh, it’s a bit more complicated than that,’ she said. ‘Let me see, now. If I was a man I’d be Iasbar Hulyan Ap’ Daic – Iasbar for me, Hulyan for my father, Ap’ Daic for where my mother was born. Because I’m a woman, I’m plain Iasbar Ap’ Cander; the same idea, but Ap’ Cander because that’s where my husband was born. If I’d never been married, I’d still be Hulyan Iasbar Ap’ Escatoy, which was where I was born. Don’t worry if it sounds confusing,’ she added, ‘it takes foreigners a lifetime to get used to the nuances.’

  ‘You were born in Ap’ Escatoy?’ Bardas asked.

  ‘Yes indeed, while my father still had his shop there. I kept meaning to go back, you know, but now of course it’s too late. It was a strange place to grow up in.’

  ‘Really,’ Bardas said.

  ‘Oh, yes. They had an absolutely incredible thick soup made with lentils and sour cream; we used to go down to the market with one of those big curvy seashells and get it filled up for a half-quarter, then we’d sit on the steps of the market hall and drink it while it was hot. There was something about it, some special secret ingredient, and I’ve never been able to figure out what it was. Of course, if only I’d thought to ask my mother I’d know what it was, but it never occurred to me. Well it doesn’t, does it, when you’re that age?’

  Bardas fell asleep while she was still talking. When he woke up, she wasn’t there any more and the coach was just pulling away from the first stage of the day. She’d left him half a slice of the sticky cake, still in its vine-leaf wrapping; but the jolting of the carriage had knocked it down on to the floor, and it was covered in dust.

  ‘Temrai?’

  He came back in a hurry and opened his eyes. ‘What?’

  ‘You were dreaming.’

  ‘I know.’ He sat up. ‘You woke me up just to tell me I was dreaming?’

  His wife looked at him. ‘It can’t have been a very nice dream,’ she said. ‘You were wriggling about and making sort of whimpering noises.’

  Temrai yawned. ‘It’s about time I was getting up,’ he said. ‘Kurrai and the others’ll be here soon, and I always feel such a fool climbing into that lot with people watching.’

  Tilden giggled. ‘It’s quite a performance,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you bother, really.’

  ‘It’s to keep me from getting killed,’ Temrai replied, frowning. ‘I don’t wear armour for fun, you know.’ He swung his legs off the bed and hopped across the floor of the tent to the armour-stand.

  ‘People never used to bother with it,’ Tilden pointed out, ‘not before we came here. Not all that paraphernalia, anyway.’

  Temrai sighed. He loathed wearing the stuff at the best of times; it made his movements slow and awkward, and that made him feel stupid. He was convinced he made more mistakes these days just because he was buried under all that metalwork. ‘I don’t know about you,’ he said, pulling on the padded shirt that formed the first layer of his cocoon, ‘but anything that increases my chances of not getting killed is just fine with me. Now, are you going to help me, or do I have to do it all by myself?’

  ‘All right,’ Tilden said. ‘You know, I’d find it easier to take it seriously if it didn’t all have such silly names.’

  Temrai smiled. ‘Now there I agree with you,’ he said. ‘I’m still not sure I know what all the bits are called, either. According to the man who sold it to me, this thing’s a besegew, but everybody else calls it a gorget. Is there a difference, I ask myself, and if so, what is it?’

  ‘I imagine a besegew’s more expensive,’ Tilden said. ‘And why not call it a collar? That’s all it is, really, it’s just that it’s made of metal. Here, hold still. Why they can’t put bigger buckles on these straps I just don’t know.’

  The besegew – or gorget – made it quite hard to breathe. ‘It wouldn’t kill them,’ Tilden observed, ‘to put longer straps on.’ Temrai could have pointed out that if it wasn’t a tight fit there wasn’t much point in wearing it, but decided not to. Eventually he’d be able to take the wretched thing off again, and that would be nice.

  Kurrai, the chief of staff, and his fresh-faced young men arrived just as he was putting on his boots (‘But you mustn’t call them that, they’re sabatons’). Kurrai wore his armour as if he never wore anything else; which, Temrai reflected, might well be true.

  ‘They’re still there,’ Kurrai said. ‘As far as we can tell, they haven’t moved at all.’

  Temrai frowned. ‘I still reckon it’s too good to be true,’ he said.

  Kurrai shrugged. ‘I guess they’re just refreshingly stupid,’ he replied. ‘Honestly, if it is all a wonderfully cunning ruse, I can’t for the life of me see what it is. They’re in the middle of a plain with no cover, nowhere they can have hidden a couple of squadrons of heavy cavalry or anything else that’s going to put us off our stroke. As far as I can see, they’re just sitting there waiting for us to come and get them.’ He sat down on a chair, which creaked ominously. ‘There’s such a thing as being too cautious, you know.’

  Temrai shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘I’ve been trying to figure out what I’d do if I was in their shoes, and I admit, I couldn’t come up with anything clever. Mind you, I hope I’d never have got myself into that position in the first place.’

  ‘They believe in personal bravery,’ Kurrai said, scratching his nose, ‘and the justice of their cause. We’ll slaughter them, you’ll see.’

  Temrai smiled weakly. Somehow, he found it hard to get excited about slaughtering a small band of people who had, until a few years ago, been as much a part of the plains federation as he was. They’d been there with him when he burned Perimadeia; they’d helped build the torsion engines, lost their share of friends and family when Bardas Loredan poured liquid fire on them from the walls. He still didn’t really understand why they’d chosen to turn against him. For all he knew, they were right about whatever it was, and he was wrong. Like so many other things, it had changed once they’d burned the city and settled down on the comfortable pastures opposite the ruins; so it was his fault, when all was said and done. Somehow, that made the prospect of an easy victory rather unpleasant. The bit about the just cause bothered him a little, too; he’d won a great and famous victory a few years ago, and at the
time he’d believed he had a just cause. Since then, he’d come to wonder if there was such a thing, and if so, if it had ever been known to prevail.

  ‘Don’t let’s get cocky,’ he said, standing up and feeling the weight of his armour across his shoulders. ‘The worst words a general can ever utter are, How the hell did that ever happen?’

  Kurrai smiled dutifully. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Between over-cautious and cocky, how do people ever manage to win battles?’

  ‘They don’t, usually,’ Temrai replied. ‘As often as not, it comes down to who loses first.’

  Dear Uncle, she’d written. It had taken her a lot of time and effort, gripping the pen between the stumps of her fingers, and the writing looked like a small child’s school exercise.

  Dear Uncle. The thought made her smile. Mostly, she wrote to her uncle to annoy her mother, who wanted her to have nothing to do with any of her uncles; not the three recently come into a desperate hand-to-mouth kind of power in that place she’d never been to but which even her mother sometimes absentmindedly referred to as home; certainly not to her other uncle, the one she was still determined to kill one day, when she got around to it. The fact remained: the nearest she’d been to feeling at home anywhere had been her uncle Gorgas’ house on Scona, in that short space of time before everything had inevitably torn itself apart, with a little indirect help from herself.

  Dear Uncle. She looked out of the small, narrow window towards the sea. It was getting harder to find messengers to carry her letters, what with her mother’s attitude, various wars and the general stagnation of trade between the Empire and its prospective victims. While he’d lived, the truffle man had been the most reliable courier; but presumably he was one of the however-many-it-was thousand who’d died in the fall of Ap’ Escatoy, when her other uncle, the bad one, tunnelled under the walls like a mole and pulled them down on top of him. Nobody seemed to want to take over the truffle run between the Mesoge and Ap’ Bermidan; the great lords of the provincial office were getting their truffles from somewhere else now, cheaper, bigger and fresher. And without the truffle business, why the hell would anybody want to go from here to there and back again?

  Dear Uncle, nothing much has happened here since I wrote to you last. Could she really be bothered to go to all the trouble it would take her to write that? She thought about it, and decided yes, worth it just for that worried sideways look her mother gave her every time she suspected her of having sent a letter (What the hell could be in those letters? The little bitch must be spying on me, sending him secrets; but what could they possibly be? I hadn’t realised I had any secrets he might possibly want, but obviously I do or she wouldn’t be writing him letters . . .). And besides, it wasn’t as if she had anything at all else to do.

  Years and years ago, when she was a little girl, an old man who was a friend of the family (her other family, not this one; this family didn’t have friends) had told her stories about beautiful princesses who were locked up in towers by their wicked stepmothers. Inevitably, as night follows day, there was always a handsome young hero who tricked or slashed his way into the tower and rescued the princess; that was the order of things, and it explained why the princesses stayed calm and stayed put, knowing that sooner or later the prince would turn up and everything would work out as it was supposed to. When she was a little girl, she’d thought to herself how jolly it would be to be one of those princesses, with her own tower (nobody to scowl at her and tell her to get it tidied) and the reassuring knowledge that her own designated prince was probably already on his way.

  Stories like that had all died on the same day her bad uncle killed her other uncle, her father’s brother, the man she’d been betrothed to since she was a little girl listening to fairy stories. She’d given them no more thought after that, until suddenly she’d found herself in this tower, a tower of her very own overlooking the dark-blue sea at Ap’ Bermidan. Of course, properly speaking she wasn’t a princess, nothing like; her mother was just another merchant, albeit a very rich one (or she assumed she was rich; she had no way of knowing, cooped up here like a man buried alive). The situation was close enough, however, to put her in mind of the stories, and a make-believe wish that had come horribly true. Perhaps that was why it was so important to write to her uncle; if anybody was going to come to rescue her, it would probably have to be him; and, since she was a realist, she wasn’t holding her breath. Looked at dispassionately, the main motivation was annoying her mother. Anything else was just serendipity.

  It was also stretching the point a bit to call Uncle Gorgas a prince. True, he fitted the description in some respects; he was the ruler of the country he lived in (though technically that made him the king, not a prince); but there were a lot of other, nastier words to describe what her uncle Gorgas was. Or what he was to everybody else. Normal people.

  She heard footsteps on the stairs, and swore under her breath. With her mutilated hand it was painfully difficult to get the writing stuff out of sight in time; one slip and she’d drop the ink-horn, leaving a tell-tale splodge on the floor, or a pen would fall to the ground – there were any number of ways she could slip up and give herself away, finally give her mother the excuse she’d been looking for to tighten the chain; no more visitors, no more merchants and traders allowed to come to see her – which would mean no more paper, pens and ink, no more books. She’d just managed to get the paper out of the way under her bed when someone knocked at the door.

  ‘Just a moment,’ she called out. Well, it wasn’t her mother, at any rate. Mother never knocked before barging into a room. ‘All right, come in.’

  But it was just the porter; the big, dozy-looking man who sat between her and the rest of the world, when he wasn’t cleaning her shoes or making her soup. He was harmless enough, too stupid to recognise an ink-horn or a penknife if he saw one. ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘Man here to see you,’ the porter replied; and over his shoulder she could see one of Them, the Children of Heaven, in a fancy dark-blue travelling cloak with a gold pin that told you his rank if you understood about such things.

  ‘All right,’ she said.

  The porter got out of the way, and her visitor came in. He was old; long and thin, as many of Them were, with grizzled white hair sticking to his head like bits of cobweb. He looked round without saying anything, then sat down without being asked.

  ‘Iseutz Loredan?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Colonel Abrain. I have a commission from the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy.’

  He didn’t seem in any hurry to let her see it, and she couldn’t be bothered to ask. ‘You’ve come a long way, then. What does the prefect want from me?’ she asked.

  Her visitor looked at her again, as if she were a mathematical problem, a complicated diagram in algebra. ‘You have an uncle,’ he said, ‘Bardas Loredan. You’ve repeatedly threatened to kill him. The prefect would like to know more about him.’

  She frowned. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll tell you if you want me to,’ the man replied. ‘I assume you know about the fall of Ap’ Escatoy, and the part your uncle played in it.’

  ‘Of course. Everybody does.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Uncle Bardas is now a war hero, and you don’t want me to kill him after all. Am I warm?’

  She watched him puzzle out the unfamiliar idiom. ‘The prefect doesn’t see you as a threat, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied. ‘And although it’s true that Sergeant Loredan did distinguish himself—’

  ‘Sergeant Loredan.’

  He looked annoyed. ‘That is his current rank in the provincial office, yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re used to thinking of him as Colonel Loredan. Well, now, in the provincial office, rank is earned, not carried forward from an individual’s last employment.’

  ‘That sounds reasonable enough,’ Iseutz said. ‘So, what do you want to know about Sergeant Lo
redan?’

  He shifted in his chair in such a way as to suggest that he had a bad leg; it could just as easily be arthritis as an honourable war-wound. ‘The prefect would like to find out as much as he can about the relationship between your uncle Bardas Loredan and the barbarian King of Perimadeia, Temrai. He understands that their mutual antagonism dates back to before the Fall of the City. He is also interested in finding out about Bardas Loredan’s service with General Maxen; it seems likely that his experience in fighting the plains tribes might be helpful to the Empire in the event of war between themselves and us.’

  Iseutz shrugged her bony shoulders. ‘Why ask me?’ she said. ‘If you think we’ve had long, cosy evenings of niece-and-uncle chats by the fireside with him telling me all about his interesting life, you’ve got the wrong family. I didn’t even find out he was my uncle until after he did this.’ She held up her ruined hand; the Son of Heaven looked at it and frowned a little. ‘Yes, I know he fought against the tribes when he was in Maxen’s army; Maxen did a lot of really terrible things to them, which was why Temrai hated us so much. And yes, I would think Uncle Bardas probably knows more about killing the tribes than anybody else in the whole world. But you knew that before you came here.’

  The Son of Heaven nodded. ‘And you have nothing further to offer by way of insights or additional data?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  The small, precise gesture of his hands suggested that he forgave her. ‘I understand that you are on bad terms with your uncle Bardas,’ he said. ‘But I gather your relationship with your uncle Gorgas is rather better. You write to him regularly.’

  ‘Yes. How did you know that?’

  He indicated her hand with a tiny dip of his head. ‘Writing is obviously difficult for you, but you make the effort. Clearly you’re quite close to your uncle Gorgas.’

  She smiled. Most people looked away when she smiled at them, but not Colonel Abrain. ‘In a way,’ she said. ‘I’m the only family he’s got, really, since my mother betrayed him and Uncle Bardas murdered his son. Oh, there’s his other two brothers in the Mesoge, of course, I was forgetting them. They’re very easy to forget.’