Evil for Evil (34 page)

Sulfur, he thought. No earthly good to anybody, surely.

He looked round for the boy, then remembered he’d paid him to go away. No matter. He got down, left the stable and went back
to the tap room.

There he saw an old man, presumably the carter. He was holding a big mug of beer, using both hands. Miel sat down opposite
him and waited until he’d taken a drink.

“Is that your wagon outside?” he said.

The old man looked at him. “Who’s asking?”

“My name’s Miel Ducas,” Miel replied, “which is what it says on your delivery note.”

The old man grounded his mug, carefully, so as not to spill any. “Ah,” he said.

Miel smiled. “Let me buy you another of those,” he said.

“No thanks. This’ll do me. I got a long drive ahead of me, I need a clear head.”

“Talking of which.” Miel edged a little closer. “Are you in any hurry to get anywhere? I need someone to deliver that lot
for me, and nobody around here seems to have a cart for hire. It’s not far,” he added, “five days there and back. Ten thalers.”

The old man thought about that. “All right,” he said. “Give me a couple of hours to catch my breath, mind.”

“Fine. I’ll go and get my things together. I’ll meet you back in the stable.”

Just to be on the safe side, he bought provisions for seven days. Finding the inn from Framain’s hidden combe hadn’t been
a problem; all he’d had to do was keep his eyes fixed on the mountain. The return journey, by contrast, called for a higher
level of navigational skill than he had any reason to believe he possessed. He’d taken note of landmarks along the way, of
course, but by the very nature of the country those were few and far between. No wonder the Mezentines had left this region
well alone. The map Jarnac had given him was pure fiction, needless to say. The only halfway accurate maps of these parts
had been the old estate plans compiled over the years by the Ducas bailiffs, stored in the map room at the estate office at
the Ducas country house. They were all ashes now. As the cart lumbered out of the inn courtyard on a half-remembered bearing
into the dust and rocks of his birthright, Miel wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he thought he was playing
at.

“Do you know this country at all?” he asked the old man hopefully.

“No,” the old man replied. “Not once you’re past the Loyalty. Nobody lives there,” he explained, reasonably enough. Miel stirred
uncomfortably and looked across at the boy. He was cutting bits off a piece of old frayed rope with his knife, and humming
something under his breath.

“Not to worry,” Miel said. “I know the way.”

Two days’ ride southeast of Sharra Top; true, but lacking in precision. There had been a road; he remembered that, but of
course he’d had to be clever, and he’d abandoned it on the second day of his ride from the hidden combe. Well, it had always
been a fool’s errand. If he rode southeast for two days into the bleak, featureless moor and then gave up, turned round and
headed back to the Unswerving Loyalty, would the Ducas honor be satisfied on the grounds that he’d done his best? No, but
never mind.

After a long, silent day they stopped nowhere in particular. The boy jumped down, unharnessed and hobbled the horse. The old
man curled up on the box like a dog and went to sleep. The boy crawled under the cart. Miel climbed down, propped his back
against a cartwheel, and closed his eyes. He was weary and sore from the incessant jolting of the cart, but he’d dozed off
too often during the day to be able to fall asleep. A fox barked once or twice in the distance. He tried to remember all he
could about his previous visit to Framain’s house, but the most vivid images had no bearing on matters of navigation. So,
unwillingly, he thought about other things.

The war: well, as far as he was concerned, it was over. He had no idea how many of his men were still alive, or whether they
were still trying to fight the Mezentines. It didn’t really matter. According to Jarnac, Duke Valens had withdrawn his support,
and without help from the Vadani, it was pointless going on. If the war was effectively over, where did that leave him? Interesting
question. Under other circumstances, he’d already be in Civitas Vadanis, with Orsea, doing what little he could as a leader
of the Eremian government in exile. But Orsea didn’t want him. On that score he’d been left in no doubt whatever. Orsea had
known for some time that he was still alive, but he hadn’t recalled him, or dropped the charges against him, or written him
a single letter. He’d asked Jarnac, back at the inn, if Orsea had said anything about him. Jarnac had looked unhappy and tried
to change the subject, until Miel forced him to admit that Orsea hadn’t mentioned him once.

That shouldn’t have been a surprise. Orsea and his wretched, all-destroying sense of right and wrong, his fatal compulsion
to try and do the right thing; and, needless to say, he applied the same rules to those closest to him. Apparently he was
convinced that Miel had betrayed him, and therefore he could never forgive him. He’d recognize, of course, that this meant
wasting an ally, a valuable one, though he said so himself; it meant that, because Miel was organizing the resistance, Orsea
could have nothing to do with it. That hadn’t passed unnoticed; why, his men had asked him over and over again, isn’t the
Duke out here with us; why hasn’t he even sent us a message of encouragement? Men who’d asked him that question and received
the inevitably vague and unsatisfactory replies he’d managed to cobble together generally deserted a day or so later. Why
fight for their country if their country had no use for them? Poor Orsea, he thought, still trying to do the right thing.

Which left him, the Ducas, with no master to serve, no work to do, no purpose … That was an extraordinary concept. The Ducas
can’t exist without duty, just as a flame can’t burn without air. Take it away and you’re left with a man — thirty-odd, moderately
bright but with no skills or abilities relevant to his own survival; thinner, permanently cured of any dependence on his customary
affluence and luxury, an adequate rider, swordsman and falconer, just about capable of boiling an egg. Worse specimens of
humanity managed to stay alive and make some sort of living, but why would anybody bother to live without a function? The
Ducas without duty was no more than a mechanism forturning food into shit and water into piss, and a cow or a pig could do
that just as well, if not better.

But here I am, he reflected; here I am, sitting beside a cart in the middle of a desert I used to own, in company with an
old man, a boy and a quantity of powdered sulfur, trying to find a man called Framain and his daughter. I owe my life to Framain,
who found me and pulled me out of a bog. The sulfur is my way of repaying the debt. But I wouldn’t have been alive to contract
that debt if the scavengers hadn’t found me after the battle, and I repaid them by killing two of them and stealing their
only horse. Ah, but they were going to sell me to the Mezentines, so that makes it all right. Except that it doesn’t. I was
theirs to sell, and I stole myself from them; and now it’s too late to make it up to them, because Jarnac slaughtered them
for daring to lay violent hands on the Ducas. It’s a funny old world.

At one point he slid into a doze; woke up some time later to find it was still dark, and he had a crick in his neck. The problem,
however, had managed to solve itself while he’d been asleep. Silly, really; it was as plain as the nose on his face. If he
was no longer the Ducas, then nothing he did mattered anymore. There were no more rules. When he’d fallen asleep he’d still
been an Eremian nobleman and the slave of duty, but he’d woken up a free man, worthless and burdened by no obligations of
any kind.

The first thing he did was feel in his pocket and count his money. Twenty-seven Vadani thalers, not counting what he owed
the old man and the boy for the cart-ride. Hardly a fortune, but most people in the world start off their lives with considerably
less. He also owned a stolen horse (but that was back at the Unswerving Loyalty; he doubted whether he’d ever see it again),
some clothes, two boots and a hanger. Not entirely without value, therefore; not, at least, until someone crept up and robbed
him in his sleep.

For no reason, he remembered the book he’d glanced at, back in Framain’s house. A technical manual of some kind; lots of different
formulae for mixing up paint.

His brief nap might have played hell with his neck, but apparently it had done wonders for his brain. Paint recipes; the locked
barn, and other buildings with chimneys, all hidden away in a dip in the ground where nobody would think of looking. Eremia
had fallen to the Mezentines, but Framain hardly seemed to have registered the change of management. Miel laughed out loud,
and into his mind drifted a memory of the pantry at the Ducas house in Civitas Eremiae, at any time before the siege and sack.
Also the table in the main hall, set for a formal dinner, or any of the bedrooms that had a window-seat, which would always
be decorated with a vase of fresh flowers. Every morning, someone had got up before dawn with a basket and walked down to
the market to buy them — no, not a basket, there were twenty-seven windows facing the inner courtyard, they must’ve had to
take a wheelbarrow, or a small cart, to shift all those flowers. He tried to call to mind the occasions on which he’d noticed
the flowers in his house, and managed to think of four. The rest of the time they’d been there — they must have been, because
it was a rule of the house — but presumably nobody had noticed them, once the chambermaid had pulled the dead stalks out of
the vase and replaced them with the fresh ones. So much duty done, so little notice taken.

Never mind; he was through with all that now, and at least he had an idea what Framain and his daughter were up to in their
secret lair, and why they needed sulfur. The only annoyances were that it had taken him so long to figure it out, and that
he’d never find the place again and have the satisfaction of knowing he’d been right.

But if he did manage to find them … Well, he had power over them, simply by virtue of having guessed their secret. It was
a thing of value in itself; quite possibly valuable enough to the Mezentines to buy him his life, if he chose to sell it to
them, as the scavengers had proposed selling him. Alternatively … Well, he was a tolerably quick learner, and he had nothing
better to do.

As he turned the possibility over in his mind, he became aware of someone standing over him. He lifted his head and opened
his eyes. Not yet broad daylight, but enough to see the old man by.

“Soon as you’re ready,” he said.

“I’m ready,” Miel replied.

“Fine.” The old man didn’t move. “Which way?”

Miel grinned. “Look for smoke,” he said.

It was as though he’d told the old man to keep a sharp eye out for dragons. “Why?” he said. “Nobody lives here.”

Miel shook his head. “Yes they do,” he said. “And every morning they light a big furnace. My guess is they burn peat mostly,
because it costs them money to bring in charcoal, so they save it for special occasions. I’m guessing that you can’t see the
smoke from Sharra; that’s why they live where they do. But we’re a day closer, so we’re in with a chance.”

The old man looked rather taken aback, and Miel could sympathize; something of a shock to the system to realize that you’ve
been dragged out into the middle of nowhere on the whim of a lunatic. But he was under no obligation to consider their feelings,
as the Ducas would have been. He was paying them to do as they were told, and that was all there was to it.

It was the boy who saw the smoke. At first, he muttered the news to the old man, who assumed he was making it up and ignored
him. It was probably only pique at not being believed that induced him to mention it out loud. What mattered was that he was
right. Just the faintest smeared line, like a woman’s smudged eyeliner. Miel looked at it for a moment, then grinned.

“That’s the place,” he said.

As they got closer, Miel started to recognize things that had imprinted on his mind the first time: a shallow, dusty pit scraped
out of the heather by sheep rubbing their necks against a large stone; a thorn tree wrenched sideways by the wind, its roots
standing out of the soil on one side like fingers; a brown pool in a dip fringed with bog cotton; a single wooden post, gray
with age, leaning at an angle, tufts of wool lodged in the splinters of its gaping grain. For some reason, all these were
as familiar as sights he’d seen since childhood but somehow depressing, so that he felt like a man returning to a home he’d
been glad to leave, many years earlier.

When they were half a mile from the smoke, it began to rain. It was no more than a few fat wet drops, but the wind slapped
them into his face so that his eyes fogged as though he was crying, and he had to keep wiping them with his fingers. The old
man pulled his collar round his face and shrank back into his coat — he reminded Miel of an animal in a field, stoically miserable.
The boy scrabbled about with some old, bad-smelling sacks and crawled under them. They, of course, would be turning round
and going back this way as soon as the barrels had been unloaded. They’d have the rain on their backs, if it settled in, tapping
them on the shoulder like an annoying acquaintance you’d prefer to ignore.

Just like last time, the house came as a complete surprise, standing up out of the combe as though the creaking of the wagon
had startled it. Miel smiled. This time, he had a fair idea what the man and his daughter were so busy with that strangers
could creep up on them without them noticing. He told the old man to pull up outside the barn and wait, then jumped down and
ran up the broad stone steps. The door was shut but not padlocked; he thumbed the latch and walked in.

Framain was standing on the other side of a long, massive plank bench, covered with jars, pestles, trays, pots and small metal
tools. For a moment he froze, a stunned look on his face, as though Miel had walked straight through the wall instead of the
door.