The Proof House (25 page)

So they’re going to attack Temrai, are they?
She should be pleased; delighted, in fact, that the monster who destroyed her home and butchered her people was only a few months away from defeat and death. The good man loves his friends and hates his enemies; wasn’t that what she’d been taught as a child? My enemy’s misfortune is my good fortune - confound it, if they’d come to her and asked for the loan of her ship, free of charge, for a holy war against the plainspeople, that’d have been straightforward enough;
Yes
, she’d have said,
with my blessing
. But this way, revenge and a substantial profit - somehow she wasn’t sure the world worked like that.

Not that a substantial profit would go amiss; not if her poor
Fencer
was at the bottom of the sea, and Gannadius and his nephew with her. Even if they were still alive, lost somewhere between the Empire and Temrai, chances were she’d never see them again. She found it hard, almost impossible, to feel anything about that; not because she didn’t want to, but simply because she couldn’t. When Perimadeia had fallen and she’d come here, she’d started making herself armour, good armour proof against such things - a helmet of business, a breastplate of friends, pauldrons (whatever they were) of possessions, success, prosperity. When she’d taken Bardas Loredan aboard the
Fencer
to visit his brothers in the Mesoge, and had come back with his sword and his apprentice but without him, she’d closed up the rivets and planished the exterior, making this armour of hers good enough to pass any proof; the death of an old friend and the boy Loredan had given her to look after were blows she acknowledged but couldn’t actually feel. That’s the merit of good armour; the blows either glance off the angled contours or waste their energy against the internal tensions of the metal, which are so much more powerful than any force likely to be applied from the outside. To be good armour, to be proof, it must have its own inner stresses, those of constricted metal trying in vain to push outwards, so that pressure inwards is met, force against force, and repelled. She had those internal tensions, those inner stresses; now here was an act of proof, and look, her armour had turned the blows easily. The prospect of some money, some business, an opportunity to find more clients and increase her prosperity had quite taken away the force of the attack.

So that’s all right, then.
As for her ship, her poor little ship, the Son of Heaven was quite right: it was insured, so heavily that it was a wonder it had ever managed to float under all that weight of money. Once the insurers stopped squirming (only a matter of time, plus a certain amount of effort) she’d do rather well out of the loss of the
Fencer
.

Well, of course. That’s what insurance is for, to turn the blow. And if she hadn’t been expecting, deep in the darker galleries of her mind, to lose it some day, she probably wouldn’t have called it the
Fencer
in the first place.

Being an orderly, methodical person (by practice if not by nature) she made a note of her meeting with the Sons of Heaven, filed it in the proper place and went back to reading the report, which was, of course, all about armour. She managed to get to the end of the seventh section before her eyes filled with tears, making it impractical to try to read further.

 

‘Really?’ Temrai stopped what he was doing and looked up. ‘Perimadeians? I didn’t think there were any left.’

‘A few, here and there,’ the messenger replied. His name was Leuscai, and Temrai had known him for years, on and off. How someone like Leuscai came to be running errands for the engineers building siege-engines down on the southern border he had no idea; chances were that he simply hadn’t wanted to get involved. It was a problem with a lot of his contemporaries; though they’d never have considered supporting the rebellion, let alone joining it, they weren’t happy with the direction Temrai seemed to be leading the clans in, and they manifested this unease by taking part as little as possible. It was profoundly irritating, to say the least. But Temrai couldn’t be bothered to raise the issue with an old friend like Leuscai; it’d probably result in falling out, bad temper and the end of a friendship, and he had few enough of those left as it was.

‘Oh, well,’ Temrai said. ‘Now then, how does this look?’

‘Unintentional,’ Leuscai replied. ‘That is, I wouldn’t insult you by thinking you meant it to look like that.’

‘That bad?’ Temrai sighed. ‘I’m getting cack-handed in my old age, that’s what it is. It’s not so long ago I was able to earn my living bashing metal around.’

‘In Perimadeia,’ Leuscai pointed out, ‘where presumably their standards weren’t so high. All right, put me out of my misery. What’s it supposed to be?’

Temrai grinned. ‘There’s a technical term for it,’ he said, ‘which escapes me for the moment. But basically it’s a knee-guard. Or rather it isn’t.’

‘Not unless you’ve got really unusual knees,’ Leuscai agreed. ‘But it’s just as well you told me, or I’d never have guessed. To me it looks like a slice of harness leather pretending to be a pancake.’

‘Yes, all right.’ Temrai let the offending item fall from his hand. ‘It’s frustrating, really,’ he said. ‘While I was in the City, I read about how you’re supposed to do this, and they made it sound really easy. You just get thickish leather, you dip it in hot melted beeswax, you shape it, and there you are; cheap, strong, lightweight armour, made out of something we’ve got lots of. I don’t know,’ he went on, sitting on the log he’d been using to beat the thing into shape over. ‘Making things used to come so easily to me, and now I seem to have lost the knack. Anyway, tell me more about these stragglers of yours. Any idea who they are?’

Leuscai smiled. ‘You mean, are they spies? Well, it’s possible. From what we’ve been able to gather so far, one of them was a wizard - well, assistant wizard - and they’re both something to do with the Island and the Shastel Order.’

‘Really?’ Temrai sounded impressed. ‘Wizards and diplomats. We’re honoured.’

‘That’s not the best bit though,’ Leuscai continued, the smile quickly fading from his face. ‘The kid spent several years on Scona. He was Bardas Loredan’s apprentice. ’

Temrai sat perfectly still for a moment. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘Then I think we’ve met. Briefly, but memorably. How do you know all this?’

Leuscai pulled up a log and sat down beside him. ‘Pure chance, really. You remember Dondai, the old bloke who used to make the pancakes?’

Temrai nodded. ‘He died a short while back,’ he said.

‘Apparently. And his nephew, you’ve come across him? Dassascai, his name is. Doesn’t know a lot about pancakes, but he’s surprisingly well informed about commercial activity on the Island. Says he has contacts from when he was in business in Ap’ Escatoy, though if you ask me that doesn’t quite tie up. Anyway, for some reason, this Dassascai—’

‘He’s a spy.’

‘Oh, really? Well, that explains what he was doing snooping round our yard, where we’re raising the trebuchets. This Dassascai, he happened to see our two guests, recognised them (so he says) and went to the camp commander about it.’

‘Goscai.’

‘That’s right. Nice enough man, but he worries; and he got into an awful state over this, as you can imagine. First he was going to have them strung up on the spot; then he thought he’d better not, in case he started a war, so he was going to have them put in chains instead; then it occurred to him that they might be
our
spies (don’t know where he got that from) - finally, he got himself into such a tizzy he didn’t know what to do, so we said the best thing would be to ask you. He hadn’t thought of that; but as soon as we suggested it, he was delighted. So here I am.’

Temrai rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. ‘Any idea how they got there?’ he asked. ‘Or did they just show up, saying,
Hello, we’re spies, mind if we look around?
’

‘Hardly.’ Leuscai laughed. ‘Though if they had, I for one would’ve said,
Go ahead, help yourselves
. The way I see it, some solid intelligence work by the provincial office might do us a power of good.’

‘Quite possibly,’ Temrai replied, ‘but let’s not get into all that now.’ He breathed in deeply, then breathed out again. ‘How did they get there? Any ideas?’

‘Some of our people found them in the swamp,’ Leuscai replied, ‘when they were out looking for ducks. In a pretty bad way, apparently. The wizard’s no spring chicken. If they are spies, they went to a hell of a lot of trouble to look like dying men. Their story was that they were on their way to Shastel from the Island, got run aground by the Imperial coastguard and were on the run from the foot patrols. Plausible enough, I suppose.’

‘All right,’ Temrai said, picking up a bossing mallet and putting it down again. ‘You send them here; I’ll look them over, frighten them politely for a day or so and send them on their way. If they really are spies, I’ll give them the guided tour; that’ll confuse them so badly they won’t know what to think.’ He looked round at the mess left over from his experiment in armour-making. ‘You don’t happen to know of anybody who can do this?’ he asked. ‘It’s got me beaten, but it can’t really be all that difficult. It really annoys me when I know I’m on to something but I can’t make it work.’

Leuscai shrugged. ‘Can’t help you there, I’m afraid. Of course, you could always write a letter to Bardas Loredan, care of the Imperial state armoury service. I’m sure he’d be delighted to help.’

Temrai scowled, then laughed. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘he bumped into me in the street once, in Perimadeia. He was drunk, obviously he hadn’t got a clue who I was. Everywhere I go, there he seems to be; and I can’t figure that out for the life of me. I mean, why should there be this horrible connection between us? He’s a farmer’s son from the Mesoge; by rights he should be hoeing turnips in the mud right now, not lurking in the shadows everywhere I go, waiting to jump out at me. I wonder, what the hell could it have been that tangled our lives up together like that?’

‘You make it sound like you’re in love,’ Leuscai said. ‘Star-crossed lovers, like in some old story.’

‘You think so? In that case, I reckon it’s high time we got a divorce.’

 

When the messenger eventually found him, Gorgas Loredan was at the farm, helping his brothers patch up the floor of the long barn.

‘Bloody menace,’ Zonaras had said in passing, when Gorgas asked him why he wasn’t using it any more. ‘Planks rotten right through. You could break your leg.’

‘I see,’ Gorgas had replied. ‘So you’re just going to abandon it, are you? Let it fall down?’

‘Haven’t got time to fix it,’ Clefas had put in. ‘It’s a big job, and there’s only the two of us.’

Gorgas had grinned at that. ‘Not any more,’ he’d said.

And so there he was, muddy and bad-tempered, standing astride a newly felled sweet-chestnut tree with a hammer in his hand, blood trickling down from his knuckles where he’d scraped them carelessly while manhandling the timber.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Sergeant Mossay sent me,’ the messenger replied defensively. ‘Letter for you, from the provincial office.’ He held the little brass cylinder out at arm’s length. ‘The courier arrived last night at Tornoys.’

‘Is he waiting for the answer?’ Gorgas asked, wiping his hands on his shirt.

‘No,’ the messenger replied. ‘No answer expected, he said.’

Gorgas frowned and took the cylinder, flipping off the carefully fitted lid with his thumbs.

They’d started by felling the tree; the last of the stand of chestnut trees that their grandfather had planted shortly after their father was born. It hadn’t been an easy tree to fell. The wind had twisted it, so when they tried to saw through, the timber clented on the saw-blade until finally it broke (it was old and rusty, like all the other tools about the place). So they’d got out the felling axes; and after they’d blistered their hands, and Clefas had taken his eye off the cut and knocked the head off his axe as a result, they thought better of it and dug out the other saw, which was even older and rustier. But Gorgas made them rope the tree back, and they used a block and tackle to put some tension on it, opening the cut to allow the blade to move freely. When they were three-quarters of the way through, they realised that if they carried on the line they were following, the tree would drop on the roof of the old pig-house and flatten it. Of course, the old pig-house hadn’t been used for years except as a miscellaneous junk store; but Gorgas made them drive in another post and rope the tree back another way so that they could chop a wedge out and alter the direction of the fall. Eventually they cut through and the tree fell; not the way Gorgas had intended, but it nearly cleared the pig-house, only sweeping off a few cracked slates with an outlying branch. It had taken them the rest of the first day to trim the trunk and cart off the loppings to the wood-shed (which was too damp to store wood in now that half the thatch had blown away); now, finally, they were splitting the trunk to make the planks they’d need for the barn floor.

‘Bastard,’ Gorgas said, scowling and crushing the letter in his fist. ‘You know what? That bastard Poliorcis, he’s made them reject the alliance.’

The messenger took a step backwards, trying to look as if he wasn’t there. Clefas and Zonaras stood still, apparently unconcerned.

‘No material advantage to the Empire,’ Gorgas went on. ‘Well, the hell with them. Come on, let’s finish this. You,’ he added as an afterthought, as the messenger stood unhappily by, waiting to be dismissed, ‘you go back, find that courier and bring him here. I’ve got a reply all right.’

The messenger nodded doubtfully. ‘What if he’s already left?’ he said.

‘You’d better hope he hasn’t,’ Gorgas replied. ‘Because if he has, I might be inclined to ask why it took a day for this to reach me, if the courier got in last night as you just told me.’

The messenger hurried away, his feet squelching on the waterlogged grass of the yard.