Academic Exercises (29 page)

I am, above all, a scholar. Just because I’m a bad human being, it doesn’t necessarily follow that my scholarship is proportionately deficient. I can analyse evidence, draw conclusions and formulate plausible hypotheses.

So; as I think I mentioned, I have one of those see-it-once-and-it’s-there memories. What I must’ve done was remembered, deep in some remote part of my mind, which letters were illuminated red in the original manuscript. When I came to make my true-as-possible-in-the-circumstances copy, I remembered which letters to start the paragraphs with.

The duke’s theory about Aeneas’ cypher was correct. The place we went to was Essecuivo. A lot can happen in three hundred years. Think about it. Three hundred years ago, Macella was a mighty kingdom, as big and strong as the Republic. What’s there now? The bases of a few statues, what’s left of a handful of buildings, after the locals plundered the worked stone to build pigsties.

As for our incredible luck in running into the carrack; when we asked the captain where he’d come from with all that valuable stuff, at first he refused to tell us, quite properly. But then we explained how big and wet the sea was, and asked him if he was a really good swimmer; and he told us he was returning from the annual spice harvest at Mas Agiba, an Imperial outpost whence the Empire derived the bulk of its spices. It had been Imperial property for well over two hundred years, and no, he wasn’t going to tell us the map reference, not even if we threw him to the sharks.

Mas Agiba could just about be the same word as Essecuivo, phonetically speaking; or, more likely, they’re both corruptions of the real name. Now, if the Imperial carrack had started from a different point on the same land mass as we had, going in more or less the same direction, it’s rather more likely that we’d have run into each other in the way we did. It was still an exceptional piece of luck—good for us, bad for them—but at least it’s possible. Imperial occupation would, of course, be a good reason for the destruction and abandonment of Aos and Eano. When the Empire makes a new friend in the colonies, it likes to play rough games. I imagine the captain is still being interrogated, somewhere in the State House cellars, assuming he’s still alive. I am therefore quietly confident that additional data will become available in due course, and the matter will be cleared up to everyone’s satisfaction.

There was another expedition. Not the duke; he sold the Company to clear his debts from the wheat speculation, and a consortium of City merchants took over. They went to Essecuivo in an orderly, businesslike manner, with precisely one object in mind, and were more or less successful. They’d heard the story of the rose window and the appalling smell and taken a chance, which proved to be entirely justified. The smell, they guessed, was guano (bat-shit, as it turned out; the very best material for the manufacture of saltpetre, which as you know is the prime ingredient of gunpowder). They brought back a caravel filled with the stuff, and they plan on going back every year until it’s all gone.

That worked out well for me. Leafing through my copy of Emulaeus one day, I found a sheet of paper I’d folded to use as a bookmark, many years ago. It was my father’s certificate for ten shares in the Company, which he’d bought on a tumbling market as an act of solidarity shortly before the crash. I sold my shares to the consortium for two thousand angels. So I’m all right.

One piece of evidence I nearly suppressed; but I find I can’t. It wakes me up in the night sometimes, and I have to drink rather too much brandy to get rid of it.

I said that the carrack’s cargo included fruit. So it did. What I neglected to mention was that it was carrying three tons of premium, freshly-harvested lemons.

The door wasn’t locked. “Is he in?” I asked.

She looked at me. “Depends.”

I nodded. “I’ll go on up,” I said.

I hate border towns. They have that insubstantial something-and-nothing quality, to be expected in a settlement that exists precisely because it’s neither one thing nor the other. Aperesia Apoina was my seventeenth posting; twelve out of seventeen, border towns. I have mentioned my feelings on this issue, but I don’t think anybody cares much.

The stairs were pine, chipped white paint, shows the dirt. His door was shut. I knocked, not that it mattered. No reply, so I thumbed the latch and let myself in.

Nobody behind the desk. It was a small room, mostly full of biscuit-boxes crammed with paper. There was a low, broken chair for visitors. I fixed it with
choris anthropou
, which I’m not particularly good at, and sat down. It creaked, but held.

A form, even something as mundane as
choris anthropou
, would put him on notice, as effectively as the ringing of a bell. I settled down to wait. It was only boredom that made me pick up a letter from the desk.

“You put that down,” he said, materialising in the chair and scowling at me. “Restricted.”

I grinned at him. He’s three grades my senior but I was a year ahead of him in school. “Balls,” I said. “It’s the office copy of last month’s charcoal requisition.” I glanced at it again. “What a lot of charcoal you get through in this small building,” I said. “I’m surprised. It’s quite chilly in here.”

He glared at me. He can’t resist small, pointless scams and fiddles. He was pulling the charcoal dodge back when he was a junior prefect, in sixth year. “That’s still restricted,” he said, snapping the paper out of my hand and stuffing it in a box on his desk. “Hence the red seal in the corner, which you can’t have failed to notice. What do you want?”

“You sent for me.”

“Did I? Why would I do that?”

I shrugged. “How’s things, anyway?”

“Dismal.” Yes, but they always are. If he dies and goes straight to the Court of the Sun, he’ll complain about the cold. And probably put in a spurious charcoal requisition. “Studium’s on my back about the Clearwater case, I’m two men short and nobody ever
does
anything around here except me. Did I really send for you?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must’ve had a damn good reason.” He opened the big book on his desk and made a show of examining it closely. All theatre, of course, to put me in my place. I made a better show of yawning. I’d have put my feet up on the desk, only I didn’t trust the chair.

“Oh, right,” he said, and closed the book with a thump. “What’s your view of compliance work?”

“I hate it,” I said. “I’d rather cut turf.”

He nodded. “How about mentoring?”

“Worse.”

“Thought so.” He was writing something on a scrap of paper, a corner he’d torn off some old letter. “Got a job for you. Compliance
and
mentoring. As soon as it came in, I immediately thought of you.”

I’m what you might call something of an under-achiever. I was recognised when I was six years old, immediately admitted to the Temple under-school, won an open scholarship to the main school, straight on to the Studium after that, came fifth in my year out of a class of forty-six. Everybody said I had a remarkable natural talent, that I’d sail through my induction year, qualify before I was thirty and get a research post by forty. It didn’t turn out that way. I struggled through induction, failed, retook twice, scraped through, interviewed badly for all my chosen postings, got one rubbishy job after another and ended up here, a freelance on the reserve list. When people ask me what someone like me is doing in a place like this, I must confess I find it hard to explain. Usually I hint at a scandal or a disastrous error of judgement; it’s easier than telling the truth, and people are so ready to believe it. Fact is, I do have a remarkable natural talent and on my day I’m as good as any adept in the College. But my days don’t come round as often as I’d like, and the rest of the time, I flounder. Silly little mistakes, inattention to detail, failure of concentration, that sort of thing. People tell me it’s because my heart isn’t in it, and when I’ve finished slandering them under my breath I have to admit they’ve got a point. I just don’t care much for the work. I’d rather not have the gift and do something else. Not an option, of course. Anyway, I’m too old now to start on a new profession, so it’s this or unskilled manual labour.

“Sweet of you,” I said. “So, what’s it involve?”

He grinned at me. “Here’s the address,” he said. “They’ll explain when you get there.”

There is no such thing, they tell you on your first day in school, as magic. Instead, there’s natural philosophy, science; logical, provable facts and predictable, repeatable reactions and effects. What the ignorant and uninformed call magic is simply the area of natural philosophy where we’ve recorded and codified a certain number of causes and effects, but as yet can’t wholly explain how or why they work. Research is, of course, ongoing, and in due course it’ll all seem as simple and straightforward and ordinary as the miracles of procreation, metallurgy or fermentation. Until then, foolish country people insist on calling it magic and calling us wizards. Meanwhile, since we can do all this useful stuff and they can’t, we get to charge them large sums of money for exercising our strictly controlled and regulated powers. The cynic in me wonders whether the research that will finally strip away the curtain, explain it all and make it so that anyone can do it would be a bit further along if we didn’t hold such a profitable monopoly.

I say ‘we.’ I have no profitable monopolies. I don’t even have a job. I have jobs, from time to time, and that’s another thing entirely.

Compliance is bread-and-butter stuff to failures and no-hopers like me; I guess I just don’t like bread and butter terribly much, or at least not for every meal. It’s boring, it’s repetitive and the pay’s garbage. Mentoring, though, is worse. Mentoring is taking some pushy young kid under your wing for a fortnight, knowing that once the ordeal’s over, he’s going on somewhere better and you’re stuck here. That makes it so much worse, somehow. Besides, I don’t like young people. I didn’t like them when I was one, and I like them even less now I’ve grown out of it.

You can’t really comment on how close laughter is to tears without sounding trite, so I won’t bother. By a supreme effort of mental strength and discipline I managed to avoid both. And they say there’s no such thing as magic.

“That’s it?” I asked.

He looked at me. “That’s it. You want the job or not?”

Want, no. Need, yes. “When do I start?”

“Now.”

And that’s how I came to be there, at that time, in that place. Fundamentally, I believe, comedy and tragedy are the same thing, right up to the end. At the end, in comedy they get out of the mess they’re in and live happily ever after. In tragedy, they all die. But there’s a tipping point, a moment when it’s so evenly balanced it could go either way.

Dogs; that’s what the job was. Our wonderful empire is blessed with many old and distinguished noble families, who among other things love to hunt. The best hunting dogs come from Razo, on the other side of the border from Aperesia Apoina. Razo’s one of those mountain towns; desperately poor, can’t grow anything, can’t keep any useful livestock apart from goats, and nobody ever got rich, or even comfortable, raising goats. Can’t be done. They graze so close that they wreck the pasture. Result: either you severely limit the size of your herd (so no expansion, no surplus, no wealth) or you overgraze and end up stripping your ground down to bare rock. Luckily for the Razoans, they have the dogs, for which our gilded nobility are prepared to pay silly money. Every Razoan is therefore a full or part-time dog breeder, and twice a month they bring a convoy of the stupid animals over the mountain passes to Apoina, where dealers buy them for a fraction of what the end users will eventually pay. My part in all this? It’s a legal requirement (I’m not making this up) that every dog coming into the country from abroad is examined by a Studium-qualified practitioner for signs of demonic possession.

I know. I agree. But it started a long time ago, back when serious people seriously believed in all that stuff. Apparently, four hundred years ago or thereabouts, Apoina and the neighbouring countryside was afflicted by an outbreak of the dancing plague. There hasn’t been a case in I don’t know how long, but it’s a recognised disease, properly documented. The symptoms are uncontrollable shaking, groaning, thrashing about, inability to keep still, eventually leading to a rather horrible death from mental and physical exhaustion. The Apoina outbreak finally burnt itself out, but not before close on a hundred people had died. The city fathers ordered an enquiry, and the examiners came to the conclusion that the plague had been caused by a demon or malign spirit, who’d entered the country from Razo inside the body or mind of a hunting dog. Hence the requirement (city statute D&K47, 106(ii)) which is still very much in force, even though the plague’s never been back and not one demonically possessed dog has been impounded in all that time. Of course, the Apoinans say the plague’s never returned precisely because of the inspections, and the evil spirits don’t even try to sneak in that way because they know they’ll be detected and cast out. They’re a quaint, old-fashioned lot in Apoina, and their national dish is pigs’ feet on a bed of pickled cabbage.

Now perhaps you can see the true evil of the pit that had been dug for me. Under normal circumstances, I’d have spent my two weeks’ secondment daydreaming, surreptitiously reading or writing a paper for one of the learned journals. No chance, because I’d also be mentoring. Pitiful though it may seem, I was actually going to have to see into the tiny minds of thousands of dogs, so that my temporary apprentice could watch me and learn how it’s done. In other words, I was going to have to take this awful job seriously, or else risk being informed on by a credit-hungry student.

The shed was huge, about fifty yards long, and bitterly cold. Outside dog season it was where they penned up sheep waiting to be sold at market. The whole of the back end was divided up with hurdles, against which the dogs jumped and pawed and scrabbled, barking all the damn time; I tried
ouden menei
to lay down an invisible barrier in the hope it’d keep the sound out, but it didn’t work so I gave up. Meanwhile, the owners led their wares past me, one at a time, while I executed the pointless, demeaning but really rather difficult form that allows you to climb inside the mind of another living creature.

It’s really just
epoiesen noon
scaled down and differently keyed, without a verbal access-point. You need to climb in though the third Room, but if you’re doing hundreds of subjects in a single day, obviously you can’t move from there to here and back again every single time, you’d boil your brain trying. So you have to do it in Separation, which in theory is less demanding, but I find that more than an hour in Separation gives me the most appalling headache. Of course, most practitioners who do these forms are working with humans, dangerously ill, in comas. They go in, find the problem, fix it and lead the patient out; five minutes perceived time, practically instantaneous in real time, and then a lie-down being crooned over and abjectly thanked by a grateful family, until you’re feeling strong enough to write a receipt for your four-figure fee. Actually, I think dogs are harder than people. True, all you do is poke your head round the door, so to speak, to make sure nobody’s home who shouldn’t be. But the dog mind is so wretchedly
small
. It’s like crawling into a house up the coal-shute rather than walking in through the front door.

I was on my own for the first day, which was a relief; the young hopeful hadn’t shown up (they muttered something about bad roads and flooding) so at least I was able to flounder about getting the hang of it unobserved. Just as well. It had been a long time since I’d done anything even remotely similar, and needless to say I made a lot of stupid mistakes before I managed to figure out a reliable and efficient way of doing the job. Even then it was a hell of a strain. I was so determined not to show myself up in front of the kid the next day that I actually did a proper examination on every single dog, and there were hundreds. When they eventually let me go, I crawled off to the quarters they’d prepared for me (three sacks stuffed with straw and a horse-blanket in a mostly-swept-out feed store) and collapsed, my head full of dog, too tired to face the stale bread and crumbly cheese they’d so thoughtfully provided for my evening meal. I seem to remember turning round three times before finally settling down to sleep.

I woke up with a growl and found myself looking at a pair of shoes.

Let me tell you something about them. If I close my eyes, I can picture them still. For a start, they were red, sort of half-way between blood and a good apple. They shone; not like gold or burnished steel, it was a warmer, deeper glow, such as comes from the application of wax and a great deal of work. The toes were quite savagely pointed, and they arched, like a cat stretching, on account of the three-inch heels. They were quite small, and they did up on one side with a row of tiny silver buttons.

“Excuse me,” said a voice, “but are you Master Chrysodorus Alexicacus, from the Studium?”

Hadn’t been called that in a long time. These days it’s Manuo, which is what my father called me, usually coupled with an unflatteringly apt epithet. The use of my academic name, together with the shoes, made me wonder if I was still asleep and dreaming.

“Mm,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Comitissa Aureliana,” the voice said. “I think you’re supposed to be mentoring me.”

Well, it’s not unheard of. Every now and then, you get a female with the talent. In my time, I may have come across half a dozen—and very competent practitioners they were too, though limited in the range of their abilities, as most of us are. Five of them were exclusively healers, and the sixth was the best water-diviner I’ve ever worked with. Women can do the job, no question about that, if they happen to have the gift. It’s just that very few of them do; the same way that not many women have genuine moustaches. Also, in women it tends to surface much later, usually around puberty. Compared to men, that’s very late, which means that by the time a woman’s finished her training, even assuming she hasn’t had to repeat a year or do retakes, she’s likely to be in her late twenties or early thirties, by which time her male contemporaries should (unless they’re no-hopers like me) be three or even four grades up the ladder. By and large, the few women we do have in the profession have a pretty rough time of it, though I can’t say I’ve lost too much sleep because of it over the years.