Colours in the Steel

OF WHOM IT MAY TRULY BE SAID

‘Perhaps he was in the wrong line of work,’ he said. ‘Presumably it was another advocate-’

‘His name’s Bardas Loredan,’ the girl said promptly. ‘I think he’s quite famous. Can you tell me the words now, please?’

Alexius sighed. ‘It really isn’t as simple as that,’ he said. ‘For a start, there aren’t any special words; in fact, you can curse someone perfectly well without saying anything. What you really need is a picture-’

‘I’ve got one,’ said the girl, reaching into her sleeve.

‘In your mind,’ Alexius continued. ‘A strong mental image of the act that makes you want to lay the curse.’ He gritted his teeth; better in the long run to explain it now, it’d be bound to save time. ‘The way it works is that a qualifying act – something violent or hurtful – causes a disturbance in the forces we refer to as the Principle.’ That, he knew, was putting it very badly, but he couldn’t be bothered. The girl seemed to understand. ‘It’s like when you drop a stone into water. For a split second, the water is pushed away and there’s a sort of gap where the water used to be. Then the water comes back into it, but the ripples carry on spreading. What we can do – sometimes – is catch hold of that gap and put into it something of our own. That’s what we call a curse.’

‘I think I see,’ the girl said. ‘So what happens to the water? The water that should have gone back into the gap, I mean?’

Alexius smiled, impressed. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘By interfering where there’s already been an interference, you see, we always make things worse – no, that’s a bad way of putting it. We increase the level of the disturbance, and inevitably there’s a reaction. More to the point, the reaction tends to be much more intensive than the curse itself.’

‘It hits you harder than you hit the victim?’

Alexius nodded gratefully. ‘You’ve got it,’ he said. ‘Which is why, before you learn cursing, you have to learn how to deflect curses. Otherwise you might succeed in making your enemy break a leg, but you’ll break your own neck.’

The girl shrugged. ‘I’m not bothered about that,’ she said. ‘Will you tell me how to go about it?’

Alexius drummed his fingers on his knee. One thing the adepts of the Principle did not do was to hire themselves out as metaphysical assassins, cursing perfect strangers to order. Quite apart from the social implications, there was the danger. The reaction to a curse in your own mind’s eye was bad enough; warding off the reaction when you were inside somebody else’s head was next to impossible unless you knew exactly what you were doing. And the Patriarch was perfectly willing to admit that he wasn’t sure about that.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s out of the question. All I could do is try and lay the curse for you, but-’

‘Would you?’

The carefully phrased explanation he’d prepared faded away inside his mind. ‘It’s very difficult,’ he said. ‘And it probably wouldn’t work. You see, I’d have to try and look at what’s inside your mind.’

‘Can you do that?’

The Patriarch tugged at his beard. It would be easy to say no, it’s impossible; because it was, or at least it was a simple matter to prove it wasn’t possible. In three weeks’ time, he’d do just that in the lecture hall. One thing you had to learn, however – the so-called fourth assumption – was that just because a thing’s impossible doesn’t mean to say you can’t do it if you really try. But to try, you have to want to.

‘Sort of,’ he replied.

‘How does that work?’

Alexius grinned rather feebly. ‘I’m not sure that it does,’ he replied. ‘It happens sometimes, but that’s not quite the same as something working. A clock works if you wind it. Sometimes a clock that’s wound down happens to tell the right time.’

The girl looked at him. ‘What’s a clock?’ she asked.

Alexius made a vague gesture. ‘I’ll try if you like,’ he said. ‘But I’m not promising anything.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You’re welcome. Now then, I’ve got to try and visualise exactly what happened; I’ve got to see that stone hitting the water. And not just any stone; that particular one and no other. Do you understand?’

‘I think so.’ The girl pressed her chin with her hands, her brow furrowed. ‘You want me to tell you what happened.’

The Patriarch shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want you to tell me what you remember, there’s a difference. When you think of it, or when something reminds you, isn’t there a picture that immediately comes into your mind?’

‘Yes. Like a single moment, frozen.’

‘Very good.’ Alexius took a deep breath. ‘Tell me what you can see.’

The girl looked up at him. ‘Uncle was trying to hit him – sort of cutting rather than thrusting. He pushed Uncle’s sword away and stabbed him, and then his sword broke. I can see the broken-off bit in Uncle’s chest. It looks so strange, a big bit of metal like that stuck in a person. Reminds me of a pin cushion, or the knife standing in the butter.’

Alexius nodded. ‘And what about the look on his face? Your uncle’s, I mean. Can you see that?’

‘Oh, yes.’ The girl looked down at her folded hands. ‘He was cross.’

‘Cross?’ Alexius repeated.

‘That’s right. It’s like when you do something clumsy, dropping a cup or tearing your sleeve on a nail. He was cross because he’d got his fencing wrong. He was very proud of his fencing. He knew he wasn’t that good, but he practised for hours. He used to hang a sack full of straw from the apple tree and bash at it with a stick; and he knew the names of all the different strokes, and he’d call them out as he did them. When he made a mistake, he was cross. I think that was all he had time for.’

‘I see,’ Alexius said, and then added irrelevantly, ‘You must have been very fond of him.’

The girl nodded. ‘He was eight years older than me. They say twenty-three’s a good age for a bad fencer.’

Well, now, the Patriarch thought. Twenty-three. In the western suburbs, it’s quite usual for uncles to marry their nieces. Helpful; nothing like love to help you get a grip on a fleeting image. He closed his eyes-

‘Are you doing it now?’

‘Yes. Don’t interrupt.’

‘But I haven’t told you what I want the curse to be yet.’

Alexius’ breath came out in an exasperated gasp. It wasn’t enough that he was expected to do a curse once-removed; it had to be a specific curse. This was turning out to be quite a performance.

‘Well?’

‘I can see him,’ the girl said. ‘He’s in the court, and I’m facing him. We’ve both got swords, and he stabs at me. And then-’

Alexius waved his hands in alarm. ‘Stop,’ he said, ‘or you’ll do it yourself, and then the reaction’ll bring the roof down on both of us. Trust me; I think I know what you’ve got in mind.’

He closed his eyes again; and there, as if painted on the inside of his eyelids, was the court, with its high domed roof, the rows of stone benches encircling the sandy floor, the judge’s platform, the marble boxes where the advocates waited for the command. He could see Loredan’s back, and over his shoulder the girl; older now, grown up, extraordinarily beautiful in a way that made him uneasy. He could see the red and blue light from the great rose window burning on the blade of her sword, a long, thin strip of straight steel foreshortened by the perspective into an extension of her hand, a single pointing finger. He saw Loredan move forward, his graceful, economical movement; and the girl reacts, parrying backhand, high. Now she leans forward, scarcely moving her arm at all except for the roll of the wrist that brings the blade level again. Loredan’s shoulder drops as he tries to get his sword in the way, but he’s left it too late, the sin of the overconfident man. Because Loredan’s back is to him, Alexius can’t see the impact or where the blade hits; but the sword falls from his hand, he staggers back and drops, bent at the waist, dead before his head bumps noisily on the flagstones. The girl doesn’t move, the blade points directly at him. He realises he never saw the man’s face, or asked the girl her name…

Wait for it. Here it comes.

Imagine the fly that buzzes round your head, or the moth that flutters aggravatingly in your study at night as you crouch over the flame of your lamp. You reach out, your huge fist dwarfs the insect as your fingers close to crush it. Either it gets out of the way in time, or it doesn’t. If it does, the disturbance in the air as your enormous hand goes past flings the insect aside, and it wobbles helplessly for a moment, out of control. Alexius could feel the enormous hand sweeping down on him from behind, though he couldn’t see it; he could feel the displacement of air, buffeting him like a big wave at sea. There was nothing he could do; either the hand would catch him, or it wouldn’t.

It didn’t; but the slipstream slammed him down, like a door slamming in his face. He tried to make a noise but there was no air left in him. He opened his mouth, and fell off the bed.

‘Are you all right?’

‘No,’ Alexius replied. ‘Help me up.’

The girl grabbed his sleeve; she was very strong. ‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Did it work?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ the Patriarch grumbled, rubbing the back of his head with rather more vigour than the slight bump warranted. ‘In my mind’s eye, or our minds’ eyes, I killed him. Or you did, rather. Whether or not it’ll actually-’

The girl let go of him abruptly. ‘But that’s wrong,’ she said. ‘That’s not the curse I wanted.’

Alexius glowered at her; the whole thing had stopped being a pain and was getting ludicrous. ‘But you must have,’ he said. ‘It’s revenge you’re after, isn’t it?’

‘I told you I don’t believe in killing,’ she replied, coldly furious. ‘What good’s killing him going to do? If only you’d let me tell you-’

Alexius let his head fall back onto his one hard pillow. ‘Then what did you want, if you didn’t want him killed?’ he asked wearily. ‘Be fair. The two of you, in open court-’

‘I wanted to cut off his hand,’ she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. ‘I was going to cut his hand off and then walk away, leaving him standing there, in front of everybody.’ She turned away, her hair falling across her face. ‘Getting killed isn’t a punishment for him, it’s part of his job. I wanted him to hurt.’

‘Well, tough,’ Alexius snapped. ‘You’ll just have to make do, that’s all. Assuming that it works, of course. As I told you, there’s a good chance that it won’t.’

The girl stood up. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. She walked towards the door.

Why is it, Alexius asked himself, that young people are simply incapable of saying thank you? She was just about to vanish into the sharp blade of light she’d come in through when he remembered.

‘What’s your name?’ he called out.

‘Iseutz.’ Her voice, in the dark. ‘Iseutz Hedin.’

‘See you in class,’ he called out as the door closed. He knew he wouldn’t. One down, four hundred and ninety-nine to go.

When the hall steward came to lower the chandelier, Alexius threw a book at him.