Colours in the Steel

CHAPTER SIX

Trawl the streets of the city, Gannadius had said. Walk down every thoroughfare and through every square till you feel that tug on the reins that means you’ve found the natural. It’s the only way.

Quite possibly true, Alexius muttered to himself, sitting on the steps of a fountain with his left boot in his hand, but my feet hurt. And what they’ll say if ever they find out I’ve spent the last three days walking the streets…

Was it possible, he wondered, that he’d got the whole thing completely out of proportion? True, he was still getting the sudden attacks – blinding headaches, sweating fevers, sharp pains in his chest and legs, vomiting and diarrhoea – but they were becoming less severe and less frequent, and he was at last beginning to sleep again, now that the dreams were fading. Triple-reinforced wards and protective fields were probably helping, though the strain of keeping them up was possibly worse for him than the attacks themselves, and even then he had the feeling they wouldn’t have done any significant good without Gannadius working virtually full-time on them as well. It was more likely, he felt, that the curse itself was slowly starting to decay, helped no doubt by Loredan’s miraculous survival of the fight with Alvise and the fact that he’d apparently quit the profession. As he became steadily less vulnerable to the curse, so it declined for lack of something to feed on. Indeed, Alexius was toying with the idea of trying to break it up altogether; feasible, he felt certain, although of course it had never been done before.

No, he reflected, pulling the boot slowly over his heat-swollen foot, that’s not the way. The only real hope lay in finding this dratted natural, and that was proving harder even than he’d expected. Maybe he had left the city, as Gannadius was sure he had. Alexius devoutly hoped he hadn’t; having to put up with all this for the rest of his life wasn’t an especially cheerful thought.

Wouldn’t it be nice, he said to himself, if I could really do magic? I’d have a locomotion spell to carry me about, for one thing, and the hell with all this walking. Or, better still, I’d scry the pest out from the comfort of my cell and drop a thunderbolt on him. Of course, if I could do magic, I wouldn’t need to be doing any of this; I’d just take the curse to bits and get rid of it, and everyone’d be happy then. Except that loathsome and elusive girl who got me into this in the first place; and her happiness no longer concerns me all that much. Should’ve listened to what my mother told me about talking to strange women.

In the workshop across the street, two men were building a mechanical saw, to be installed in the sawmills down by the flood stream. The blade was held vertically, linked to a waterwheel at the bottom by a crankshaft and suspended at the top from a thick stave of yew, cut like a bowstave so as to have sapwood on top and heartwood underneath; this acted as a spring, drawing the blade up to make its cut through a log fed horizontally against it along a platform of rollers. Each turn of the waterwheel drew the sawblade down again, and then assisted the cut as the crank drove it upwards on the return stroke, giving the cut the same measured force that two men would achieve on either end of a long handsaw. The two carpenters were finishing off the final stage, fitting two slanting struts to hold up the gallows on which the yew spring was mounted.

No engineer himself, Alexius could still appreciate the design, the like of which he hadn’t come across before. Another new machine, then, marking an improvement, most likely leading to increased productivity and cheaper, better-sawn planks. For a brief moment he felt incredibly jealous; why couldn’t he spend his life in a craft where things could be improved, made better by a little intelligent thought and practical application? All over the city, men were working on projects like this; you could see them in every square, marking out designs in the dirt with a stick or scratching them on the back of a board with a nail, forever seeking a better way, more economical, more graceful, more pleasing to the eye. But the Patriarch of Perimadeia spent his life explaining that magic didn’t work, the Principle was largely incomprehensible, and even the effects that could reliably be made to perform had no real practical use. And here he was in silk and linen, while the busy carpenters wore coarse wool and went barefoot.

Call themselves wizards? Frauds. Yah! Run the lot of ’em out of town on a handcart.

The two craftsmen finished driving in the last few dowels, and the older man sent his assistant to hand-crank the wheel for a test run. Hard work, it looked like, turning the handle; so much more sensible to make falling water do the job. Now here, if you liked, was an example of the Principle truly being put to good, productive use. The young man grunted, the wood groaned under the stress, and the wheel turned.

With an alarming crack, the yew spring snapped neatly in two. The saw-blade, no longer supported at the top, slowly toppled and fell sideways, ripping the crankshaft away from the wheel and sending the younger man diving frantically out of the way. He just made it; an inch or so more, and it’d have landed across his shoulders. At once the older man started swearing, and the young man swore back, shook his fist at his master, and gave the wooden frame a savage kick, which hurt his foot rather more than it did the machine. They were still yelling and cursing as Alexius, feeling rather more at peace with himself than he had been a minute or so ago, stood up and set off on his quest.

He was passing a locksmith’s shop in the next square over when he felt the tug. It was nothing like what he’d expected, but it was unmistakable; an urgent pressure on his mind, like the feeling in the air when a thunderstorm is long overdue, except that it was massively concentrated in the proportion of say, cider to applejack. The sides of his head began to ache.

He stopped at once, certain that the source of the feeling was inside the shop. A glance through the doorway revealed the locksmith, an elderly man Alexius had once bought a padlock from (not him, then) and a man and a woman who were obviously foreigners. Interesting; so Gannadius’ theory seemed to be correct after all.

The man was tall and thin, with high cheekbones and a friendly, slightly comical face. The woman, obviously his twin sister – he remembered something he’d read about twins and naturals a long time ago, an attractive theory about two minds with an inherent, spontaneous empathy somehow attracting the Principle, in the same way copper attracts lightning – was strikingly similar, yet at the same time beautiful where her brother was, at best, odd-looking. When Alexius glanced at her, the sides of his head throbbed painfully. So.

It would have been helpful, he realised, to have anticipated this moment and to have worked out in advance what he was going to say. There was, however, a reasonable chance that the locksmith would recognise him and greet him in a manner that would make it plain to a foreign visitor that they were in the presence of one of the local sights. He stuck his hand in his pocket, checked that he had some money with him and went into the shop.

It began well. The locksmith and the male foreigner had been engaged in some sort of complicated negotiation, and a distraction was apparently to the locksmith’s tactical advantage, for he immediately broke off and made a show of welcoming his distinguished visitor, pointedly asking Alexius if the padlock he’d bought from him had been satisfactory. The words By Appointment to the Patriarch of Perimadeia seemed to hang in the air like sea mist in the early morning.

The foreigners exchanged glances. It was working.

‘Don’t let me interrupt,’ Alexius said. ‘I’m in no particular hurry.’

After a moment’s hesitation, the foreigner and the locksmith resumed their duel, which seemed to be about a special rate for four dozen padlocks with keys and fixings. Alexius was just wondering how to start up a conversation with the female when he found it wasn’t going to be necessary.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but I was wondering. I’ve heard ever so much about you, and what you do. Is it really true you can do magic?’

It would have been better if his head wasn’t hurting so much, but he managed to tune out the discomfort. He smiled.

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘It’s true that the philosophical and scientific researches we engage in offer us some rather abstruse insights into principles of nature that, generally speaking, the layman cannot observe for himself; in consequence, and purely incidentally to what we actually set out to do, we can perform certain, well, let’s call them effects, which lay observers confuse with magic. But we can’t change lead into gold or men into frogs, or fly through the air or hurl lightning.’

It took her a while to translate all that; then she looked a little disappointed. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet a real magician. Oh, I’m sorry. That sounded awfully rude.’

Alexius’ cue to smile avuncularly. ‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I’ve always wanted to meet one too. But the nearest I’m ever likely to get to a real magician is what we call a natural.’

‘Oh? What’s that?’

Out of the corner of his eye, Alexius observed the state of the negotiation; if anything, it was getting more entrenched. His head was splitting-

She’s doing this. She wants to talk to me without being interrupted, so she’s making the deal get complicated. How-?

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I wish I knew. You see, naturals are very rare, and the chances of actually encountering one are very small, at least here, in the city. We just don’t seem to produce them locally.’

‘I see. Where do they come from, then?’

Alexius raised an eyebrow. ‘Oddly enough,’ he improvised, ‘a surprising number of the documented instances appear to have originated on the Island. Am I right in assuming that you-?’

The girl beamed. ‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘that’s where we’re from. Oh, I suppose it must be obvious,’ she added, ‘from our accents and clothes and such. It’s odd, though, because I’ve never heard of any of our people being able to do magic.’

‘That word again,’ Alexius said. ‘The point is that you could live in the same town as a natural for fifty years and never even guess. The most that a natural can do is make things happen – perfectly ordinary, everyday things, nothing anybody would notice; a slate sliding off a roof, two men falling out over the price of milk – but he would make them happen. Quite possibly,’ he added, involuntarily massaging his temples, ‘without even knowing it.’

‘Fancy,’ the girl said. ‘So I could be one myself and never even know?’

The pain was no longer an irritation; it was downright intolerable, and it was as much as Alexius could do to keep it from showing. Even so, he couldn’t help feeling that this was all too easy.

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘Extraordinarily unlikely, of course, simply because there are so few-’

‘That you know about,’ the girl interrupted. ‘What I mean is, if what they do is just ordinary things, as opposed to raising storms and turning people into frogs, how would you know? Or could someone like you recognise one if you met one?’

Perhaps, Alexius wondered, the pain is a sort of diversionary tactic, to keep me so preoccupied that I won’t realise I’m being led by the nose. But why would she want to?

‘Never having met one, I wouldn’t know. That’s the point, you see; the phenomenon is so rare that next to nothing is known about it. For all I know,’ he added, all too aware that potentially he was walking into the most desperate ambush – but all he wanted was for this to be over so that he could take his head away and stop it hurting – ‘For all I know, every one in six Islanders, or one in twelve, or any proportion you like; perhaps all Islanders have the ability to a greater or lesser extent. It’s possible, but of course nobody’s researched the point yet. It would be an interesting study,’ he added, with as much conviction as he could muster.

‘Would it?’ The girl looked interested, pleased. ‘Then how’d it be if – No, please forget I spoke. I’m sure you’re very busy.’

As he replied to the effect that if she was volunteering herself and her brother as specimens for study, he and his colleague would be only too delighted, Alexius could almost feel the hook catch in his lip. It was too late now, of course, and this damned headache-

‘Assuming,’ he added, ‘that your brother could spare the time-’

‘Oh, we hadn’t got anything planned for this afternoon. Venart,’ she added, nudging him in the ribs, ‘we aren’t busy this afternoon, are we?’

‘What? Oh, no. At least, weren’t we going to have a look round the second city? I thought you wanted to see the Academy and-’

‘In that case,’ Alexius said, and he could almost feel strings pulling him, like a wooden puppet in a children’s show, ‘please allow me to be your guide. There are a number of features of interest not open to the general public-’

‘Oh, how wonderful!’ The girl’s eyes were shining, and the pain in his head-‘Oh, Venart, do let’s! It’d be such fun.’

Not long afterwards, Alexius escorted his two new companions through the second-level gate. Every time he took a step, it was like jarring a broken bone. One small consolation: fairly soon, Gannadius was going to have a bad headache as well. On balance, he felt it would serve him right.

After a day’s ride, Temrai was stiff and sore, although he dared not admit it. He was, after all, the chief of a nation of horsemen.

‘We’ll stop here,’ he announced, when the pain at the base of his spine became more than he could bear. ‘There’s water, and we can camp under the trees.’

Jurrai shrugged. ‘There’s an hour more of daylight,’ he replied. ‘I was thinking we could make Okba ford before dark if we pressed on.’

‘We’ll stop here.’

‘All right.’ Jurrai reined in and slid off the back of his horse, landing easily on his toes. I could do that once, Temrai reflected in awe. Only a few months ago, I could do that. Instead, he waited until his companion’s back was turned before levering himself off the horse and alighting awkwardly on the side of his left foot.

Interesting, he reflected; I’ve known Jurrai since I was a kid and he was my father’s First Rider. Gods, how I looked up to him then; and now here he is, doing what I tell him to.

He decided to experiment.

‘Jurrai,’ he said, as casually as he could manage. ‘Run and fill my water bottle, would you?’ He held the bottle out, fully expecting a clip round the ear. Instead, Jurrai took it without a word and ran – yes, ran, after a hard day’s ride – down to the stream. Amazing, Temrai thought; I can order him about, almost as if I was my father…

Yes. Well, just because I can doesn’t mean I have to. ‘It’s all right,’ he called out, as Jurrai set about picking up sticks for the fire. ‘I’ll do that. You see to the horses.’

There was a grin on Jurrai’s face as he tied the hobbles and took off the bridles; of course, he knows me as well as I know myself, should do after all these years. Except he doesn’t know what happened while I was in the city. Not that there’s all that much to know.

‘Well, then,’ he said, once the fire was glowing (at least I can still light a fire; thank the gods for that) and they’d built the low wall of dry thorns that no traveller on the plains would think of neglecting when sleeping away from the caravan. ‘You’d better fill me in on what’s been happening.’

‘Apart from the main thing, not much,’ Jurrai replied, and at once embarked on a succinct but nonetheless interminable report that covered the state of the herd (including losses from wolves, disease, straying and beasts swept away in river crossings), old horses lost, new geldings broken in, milk yields, cheese production, the number of hides cured, tanned and in store; sundry quarrels, fights, conspiracies, adulteries, betrothals; the results of horse races, polo matches, chess games, archery tournaments and musical contests; a brief itinerary, with reports on the state of important roads, fords and mountain passes; old folk dead, children born, a few fatal accidents, injuries serious and trivial, illnesses lingering and likely to prove terminal; one man blinded for hamstringing his enemy’s horse; two tents blown away by a freak wind, all losses and damage made up by special dispensation of the chief from clan reserves; an abortive raid by bandits forestalled by an observant herd-boy (duly commended for his actions and rewarded with a horse from the chief’s own herd), a few arrows loosed, no stock lost or men hurt on either side.

‘And that’s about it,’ he concluded, taking a sip of water from his bottle. ‘How about you? I get the impression you got everything you went for.’

Temrai nodded. ‘If I say it’s going to be easy,’ he said, ‘the gods’ll hear and it won’t. Let’s say I’ve got a reasonable idea of what’s got to be done.’

‘And the city?’ Jurrai went on, avoiding his eye. ‘What about it? What’s it really like?’

‘Ah.’ Temrai shook his head. ‘Jurrai, you just won’t believe what it’s really like. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘It’s different,’ he said.

‘Just different?’

‘Really different.’ Temrai gestured despairingly. ‘In small ways mostly, except for the really big differences, of course.’

‘Lord Temrai,’ Jurrai interrupted, his voice low and faintly sarcastic, ‘I find it hard to believe that a mere three months among the enemy have made you forget completely how to file a coherent report.’

Temrai looked up; angry at first, then ashamed of his anger. The voice had been his father’s, the soft, sardonic tone that cut more deeply than a hazel switch. He nodded abruptly.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Very well, then. It’ll be good practice for when we get back.’ He paused, and concentrated for a moment. ‘The walls of the City of the Sword on the sides that face the confluence of the two rivers are approximately forty-two feet high, eighteen feet thick at the base and fifteen at the top, so that two carts can pass each other on the walkway. There are watchtowers every hundred and fifty yards, each tower rising a further twenty-four feet above the line of the ramparts and capable of providing full cover for a dozen archers, a siege engine and a full crew of engineers. Each tower carries a store of fifteen hundred arrows and fifty projectiles for the engine, and guards the stairway connecting the rampart walkway with the ground.

‘The four gates on the landward side are each flanked with bastions, capable of accommodating two hundred archers, five of the ordinary siege engines and one of the heavier sort for use against siege towers and rams. The bridges that cross the rivers end in drawbridges, and the water is something in the order of twenty feet deep, although the bottom is reasonably firm. The walls and towers are in good repair, the drawbridge mechanisms are well-maintained and adequately shielded, and the engines are frequently examined and used for target practice by permanently assigned crews…’

Jurrai nodded. ‘Carry on,’ he said.

‘Once inside the walls,’ Temrai continued, ‘an invading force would be faced with severe difficulty in making an orderly advance in the event that the lower city is diligently defended. The streets are narrow enough to be readily blocked, and the arrangement of side streets and alleys would make it a relatively simple matter for an insurgent force to be outflanked and surrounded with very little warning. Setting fire to the lower city would probably result in the insurgents being trapped and unable to escape.

‘The defences are designed to be held by a relatively small number of men, and any number significantly above the optimum would most likely prove a hindrance rather than a help. I would put the optimum at roughly five thousand archers and three thousand men-at-arms, which more or less agrees with the numbers of trained men on standby at any given time. This force can be mobilised and in position within twenty minutes of the alarm being raised; there are also reserves of some ten thousand able-bodied men with the relevant training and equipment. As for military stores of all kinds, I wasn’t able to get any definite information, probably because none exists; they’ve been stockpiling for many years, and for all practical purposes the stores can be regarded as infinite, leaving aside the daily production capacity of the city arsenal.’

‘All right,’ Jurrai grunted. ‘But will they fight?’

Temrai nodded. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘No question of that. They are not an overtly warlike people, but their history is full of sieges and attempted assaults both by land and sea. They are brought up from childhood to expect attacks – the most recent attempt was thirty years ago, when an armada of significant size and quality was dispatched by a coalition of states from the western cities, which was effectively destroyed by the long-range siege engines installed on the sea walls before the ships were able to come within bowshot. They claim to have sunk over two hundred vessels in the course of one day, and the claim is credible if you’ve seen the engines.’

‘So,’ Jurrai said, ‘suppose you’ve managed to force the lower city. What then?’

Temrai nodded. ‘The wall dividing the lower city from the second city is not as tall or as thick as the land wall, but the gradient on which it stands and the crowded nature of the buildings at its foot make it, if anything, a more daunting proposition. The watchtowers are of a similar pattern, and are placed at intervals of a hundred yards; they hold only a token garrison, but are fully supplied with arrows and other stores. The main granaries are all in the second city, as are the principal cisterns from which the lower city draws its water. In an emergency, there would be enough room for the entire population to withdraw to the second city should it prove necessary to evacuate, and plans for this contingency have been in existence for many years and are well-known to the citizens, although there hasn’t been a full evacuation drill for some years. About the upper city I have no information, as only a few high-ranking officials are allowed to go there; there are rumoured to be large rainwater tanks and separate granaries up there, and a permanent garrison of elite troops who form the Emperor’s personal guard.’

‘I see,’ Jurrai said, poking the fire with a long stick. ‘And you reckon you’ve worked out a way of prising this strongbox open?’

‘Not me,’ Temrai replied with a grin. ‘They did it themselves, years ago. Then they forgot they’d done it.’ He sighed, and lay back on his saddle. ‘That’s the Perimadeians for you. Too clever for their own good.’

‘So? Are you going to let me in on the secret, or have I got to wait till the council?’

‘You’ll wait rather longer than that,’ Temrai replied with a yawn. ‘You’ll know soon enough, believe me. Actually, it’s all pretty simple.’

Jurrai grunted, and broke off a handful of bread. ‘Beats me how they can live on this stuff,’ he said. ‘It bloats you out and then you feel hungry again soon after.’

‘You get used to it,’ Temrai said drowsily. ‘Only the rich can afford meat more than once or twice a month, and even then it’s salted and spiced to buggery. You can have all the cheese you can eat for two coppers, but it doesn’t taste of anything. Oh, and they eat fish.’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Jurrai replied, frowning. ‘I had fish once. Won’t forget that in a hurry. They’re welcome to it.’

‘Theirs comes from the sea,’ Temrai murmured, his eyes closed. ‘Mostly it’s dried and salted, or else they smoke it. You get used to that, too. It’s cheap.’

‘What about the drink? Wine and cider, isn’t it?’

‘You want to be careful of that stuff. It’s evil.’

‘And the women?’

Temrai snored.

‘Right,’ said Bardas Loredan, masking his true feelings, ‘let’s have a look at you.’

It wasn’t an inspiring sight. A long, straggly lad of about eighteen, with a jealously tended wisp of beard on what there was of his chin; another, similar, but without notional beard; an enormous sullen boy of maybe sixteen in an obviously new and slightly-too-small set of what the prosperous farmers of Lussa thought the city was wearing this season; a small, wiry kid with a baby face who might possibly have made the grade if he was six inches taller and forty pounds heavier; a girl who stared at him; a plump young man of good family, too old at twenty-four and plainly not really interested. Great.

He took a deep breath. ‘First things first,’ he said. ‘Names.’

In fact, he knew most of their names without asking. The huge peasant was called Ducas Valier; throw a handful of pebbles at a hiring fair in any of the market towns of Lussa, and be sure you’d hit at least three Valiers, one of them called Ducas. The lad with the beard was Menas Crestom – a city name, pottery or brickyards district, younger son of a second-generation affluent family with a depressingly misguided idea of what constituted giving a kid a good start in life. His beardless shadow was the same basic stock; Corrers were as thick on the ground in the foundries as piles of fluxed skimmings or splashes of waste metal, and a quarter of the kids his age in the city were Folas, after Folas Manhurin, champion boxer five years in a row a quarter of a century back. The wiry boy had the good eastern suburbs name of Stas Teudel and the rich kid was inevitably a Teo-something, though the variation was a new one to Loredan – Teoblept Iuven. When he heard the boy’s family name, Loredan cringed. A century back, the Iuvens had owned fifty of the best merchant ships in the bay; these days they still lived in one of the most prestigious houses in the second city, but their tailors insisted on something on account before they set shears to cloth. As for the girl, she was something nondescript that went in one ear and out the other; with any luck, she’d answer to ‘You’ and a nod in her direction.

‘Next,’ he said. ‘Money.’

Out came the purses, from under coats, off belts or out from where they hung round sweaty necks. Master Iuven offered a gold five-piece, apologising smugly for not having anything smaller. Loredan forgave him and kept the balance on account.

‘Good,’ Loredan said. ‘Now we can get down to business. Who’s got their own sword? Anybody?’

All except the girl, unfortunately; as offbeat a collection of ironmongery as you’d ever expect to meet outside a scrapyard. The peasant boy held up a two-hundred-year-old broadsword that would have been big medicine back in the days when men lumbered into battle under sixty pounds of steel scales and boiled leather. A collector would probably offer him good money for it, despite the heavy pitting and the missing point. The three city lads proudly offered for inspection the latest in cheap and shiny fashion accessories – young master Teudel looked deeply offended when Loredan took his pride and joy and bent it almost double over his knee without apparent effort. The sprig of the nobility had a genuine Fascanum, which Loredan immediately told him to put away and not look at again for six months, remembering a lean patch a while back when he’d lived for the best part of eight months on the sale proceeds of one of those. He could just picture the expression on Daddy’s face when the family heirloom came home after the first day’s parrying practice, with five notches in each edge and the exquisitely chiselled lion missing off one end of the quillon.

‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘I took the precaution of bringing a few practice swords, which I’ll issue you with when you’re fit to be trusted with them. For the time being, we’ll use wooden foils; with which,’ he added sternly, ‘it’s perfectly possible, not to mention fatally easy, to put someone’s eye out if you’re careless.’ He handed out the foils; two and a half feet of arrowshaft set in a simple wooden hilt, with a big button on the business end just in case anybody did happen to land a blow on his sparring partner. Luckily he’d managed to get a case of the things cheap; sure as anything, at least one of these idiots would contrive to break one in the course of the first day. On cold mornings he could still feel the cuff round the ear he’d had from Master Gramin for just such an offence.

It turned out to be a long day; but, by the time the Schools closed Loredan had taught his unlikely pupils the elements of both kinds of guard, the advance step and the retreat step, the crouched shuffle forwards and backwards along a straight line of the City fence, the straight-backed circular movement of the Old fence, until in spite of their natural ineptitude and individual deficiencies they bore a passing resemblance to fencers. The high-class schools, he knew very well, didn’t even touch on the Old fence until the end of the first week, and even then most of their scholars tended to move like old women taken short in the middle of the night.

Of his six, he reflected, as he slumped into a chair in the nearest affordable tavern (the new rule was No Taverns, but just this once wouldn’t hurt), the two tall, skinny lads did more or less what they were told and seemed desperately eager to learn. He knew their type; he’d killed enough of them over the last ten years. The peasant wasn’t as clumsy or as stupid as he looked, and with his obvious strength might make a good Zweyhender fighter, but Loredan was fairly certain he’d drop out after a week or so. The wiry boy from the suburbs had turned out to be a lost cause; he’d learnt the drills well enough by rote, but showed no indication at all of being able to think. It would be cold-blooded murder ever to allow him to practise law in Perimadeia. Master Iuven had proved irritatingly competent once he’d at last consented to pay attention, but Loredan already knew he’d never make a fencer, call it cowardice or call it enough sense to avoid a fight. Which left whatsername. The girl.

Nearly every one of the abominably numerous courtroom romances, churned out in such profusion by the hack professional poets and any number of talentless amateurs, had as the heroine the lovely swordmaiden, slender as a wand but quick and deadly, capable of skewering the mighty advocate or cutting a bloody path through any number of bandits, pirates or barbarian warriors. Once upon a time, Loredan had bothered to explain to lay acquaintances exactly why this poetic fancy was impossible; that without weight and reach and a strong enough wrist to turn the other man’s blade, all the speed and athleticism in the world wouldn’t save you from an early death. He’d told them how quickly the arms and knees tire, how a full-blooded slash from a fifteen-stone man would knock a sweet young thing off her feet even if her parry was textbook perfect; how, in short, the courtroom floor was no place for a woman, or any decent human being, come to that. He still believed it; nevertheless, the girl had talent.

Of course, she was no willow wand. She carried no superfluous weight, but she was strong and sure on her feet – clearly used to working, though not farm work, to judge by her hands. The only child of a craftsman, Loredan guessed; a daughter who did a son’s work because it had to be done and there was no one else to do it. (In which case, what the hell was she doing here?)

Mostly, though, she was determined. It wasn’t the boyish eagerness of the tall, thin twins; no sense of a childhood ambition being realised, no fun. It was almost as if this was something she had to do successfully, whether she liked it or not, as if her life depended on it. Thinking about her, Loredan shook his head and took a long pull at his cider. The ticklish feeling she gave him was more than his dislike of female fencers. It was-

– Personal.

He yawned, suddenly aware of how tired he was. Next day he’d have to teach these tiresome children the grip, more elementary footwork and the basic elements of the defence. The next day he’d have to drill them in the lunge and go back over everything they’d done so far and make them learn it all over again. That was assuming his voice held up and he didn’t get accidentally spitted or lose his temper and murder one of them. If he was really lucky, he’d educate this lot, get rid of them and start all over from scratch with another bunch of inadequates.

Really fallen on my feet this time.

Yes. Well, at least nobody was deliberately trying to kill him.

He really wanted another jug of cider. Instead he stood, gathered up his various props and kitbags and trudged home, across the city and up the stairs. There was someone waiting in the doorway.

He saw whoever it was before he/she saw him, and flattened himself against the wall just outside the meagre circle of light thrown by the sconce. Once he’d calmed himself down, it occurred to him that if the muffled and cloaked figure was an assassin he was a pretty incompetent one; besides, who could possibly be bothered to have him killed? A robber wouldn’t waste good darkness lurking outside a door in a fairly poor area on the off chance that the householder might come home and be worth robbing; in the unlikely event of there being anything worth stealing, he’d have pushed open the unlocked door, helped himself and gone away.

Nevertheless. Carefully and by feel, Loredan teased out the knot at the top of his sword case and let the canvas slip fall away. Then, as quietly as he could manage after climbing all those stairs, he edged up the last few steps and grabbed the torch.

‘Athli!’ he groaned. ‘You scared the living daylights out of me.’

‘Sorry,’ Athli said. Damn! It hadn’t even occurred to her. ‘I was just passing, and…’

‘Really?’ He knew that wasn’t true. ‘Well, you’d better come in. The door’s not locked.’

She was looking at the sword in his hand. He felt foolish. ‘You startled me,’ he said, replacing the torch in the sconce. ‘Been here long?’

‘No,’ she said.

He closed the door after them and fiddled with his tinderbox to get the lamp lit. The tinder was damp; like everything in this rat-trap.

‘Why do you live in a place like this?’ she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘You make good money.’

‘Used to,’ he replied, lifting the wine jug and finding it empty, as usual. ‘I’ve retired, remember. Now I’m nothing but a humble trainer, with precisely six pupils.’

‘At a silver quarter a day each, makes six quarters,’ she replied. ‘Most of the people in this place are lucky if they see that much in a month. What is it with you? You can’t have drunk it all – you’d be dead.’

Loredan grinned. He wouldn’t say anything about the gold five in his pocket; for which, incidentally, he’d had change. ‘My business,’ he replied. ‘Maybe I like it here. I mean, it’s such a picturesque district that people go out of their way just to stand in doorways.’

‘I-’ She was looking at the toes of her boots. ‘I was wondering how you were getting on, that’s all. Six pupils; is that good or bad?’

‘Pretty fair average, actually,’ he replied. ‘And, as you say, if I can keep it up it’s a fair living. Hard work, though.’

‘Are you any good at it?’

He shrugged. ‘Give me a chance,’ he said, ‘it’s my first day.’ He kicked off his boots and flexed his cramped toes. ‘I’ve been afflicted with five idiots and a Valkyrie, and I’ve taught them how to shuffle in a straight line without falling over. I reckon they had their money’s worth.’ He leant back in the chair and closed his eyes. ‘So what are you really doing here?’

Good question, at that. Of course, there was one reason why a young girl should fabricate an excuse to come and visit a man she hadn’t seen in three whole days – Athli was a young girl, after all, although it was something he’d not allowed himself to notice more than a handful of times in the three years they’d known each other. In fact, it was the only reason he could think of. Which could be – embarrassing.

‘You don’t think, do you?’ she replied petulantly. ‘Bardas, how many fencers do you think I clerk for? Have you ever stopped to wonder?’

He frowned. ‘You’re right, I haven’t. You’re good at it, no reason why you shouldn’t have a pretty good practice.’

‘One,’ she replied. ‘Until just recently. And then the selfish pig went and retired on me, leaving me out of a job.’

‘Oh.’ He opened his eyes. ‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘Well, of course, I should have said something. I should have said, Oh, no, you can’t retire, I need you to carry on risking your life at regular intervals so I can keep getting my ten per cent. Don’t be so…’

‘All right, point taken. In which case, if you’ll forgive me being ruthlessly logical, why mention it now?’

She gave him a nasty look. ‘Because I need to earn a living,’ she said. The nasty look evaporated, and was replaced by embarrassment. ‘So I was wondering. Trainers have clerks, don’t they? Have you got one yet?’

He shook his head. ‘Figured I could do that myself. But why would you want to give up the job you know just because I’ve retired? You’ve got regular clients who produce good work. There’s plenty of fencers who’d give anything for a client base like that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she replied, looking at him steadily now. ‘Including their lives. Use your imagination, Bardas. Why d’you think I only clerked for you?’

He frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted.

‘Because you never looked like getting yourself killed,’ she said quietly. ‘Bardas, I don’t want to send young men to their deaths. I don’t think that’d be a very nice way to live. I only stuck it out with you because…’

‘Because?’

‘Because I trusted you,’ she replied sharply. ‘Oh, I knew that the odds were that one day you’d – lose. But not needlessly. Not…’

‘Not until I absolutely had to?’ He smiled. ‘I’m flattered.’

‘Anyway,’ she said briskly, ‘I asked you a question. Do you need a clerk?’

He thought for a moment, or at least made a show of doing so. Apparently he’d been wrong about the reason, which made sense. He didn’t really need a clerk, and he couldn’t pay her less than twenty-five per cent. It’d cut into his earnings and still be a meagre living compared with what she’d been used to, even if he had been her only fencer. (And what about that? Think about it later…) On the other hand-

‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Provided you can pull in extra pupils and earn your keep that way. Based on my vast twenty-four hours’ experience of the training profession, I reckon I could train twelve as easily as six. What d’you reckon?’

‘How about a month’s trial?’ she suggested. ‘I’ve been in the training profession a whole day less than you, remember. I might not like it.’

Loredan grinned. ‘Oh, I think you’ll take to it all right,’ he said. ‘Because, when all’s said and done, it’s basically sending young men to their deaths. It’ll be like old times.’

‘Now then,’ Alexius said, ‘close your eyes, and then I want you to tell me what you see.’

The twins shut their eyes obediently; the male, Venart, with his face screwed up into that inevitable embarrassed-but-determined scowl a man always wears when he suspects he’s being made a fool of but daren’t give mortal offence by refusing; the female, Vetriz, with a rapt expression of pure bliss, as befits a nice girl having a wonderful adventure. Alexius shot a glance at his colleague; he looked scared half to death, and grey with pain. The Patriarch smiled thinly at him; he knew exactly how he felt.

‘Anything?’ he asked.

Venart said, ‘Um,’ obviously unable to decide what was expected of him. The girl shook her head.

‘Very well.’ That, of course, had just been mummery, to see if they were faking. Satisfied that they weren’t, Alexius took a deep breath, tried vainly to relax the steel clamps that were slowly squeezing his brain out through his ears, and-

The courtroom. This time, for some reason, the public benches were empty; no judge, ushers or clerks. Nobody there except the man he now knew to be Loredan, with his back towards Alexius, his feet nearly together and his right arm extended straight from his shoulder, holding out his sword in the guard of the Old fence; and the girl he’d done the curse for, all that time ago as it seemed; and-

‘Hello,’ Vetriz said. She had materialised quite suddenly in the small area of floor that separated the two motionless fencers. She walked round them as if they were statues in a square, admiring them.

‘I recognise him,’ she said at last. ‘He’s the advocate we saw the other day. Is the other one a lawyer too? I didn’t realise women did this as well as men.’

Alexius nodded. No sign of Gannadius either; but here at least his head didn’t hurt. ‘I don’t see your brother,’ he said.

Vetriz looked round. ‘He can’t have made it through, then. What about your assistant?’

Oh, what a pity he isn’t here to hear that! I’d never let him forget it. ‘Apparently not,’ Alexius replied, trying to conceal his apprehension. ‘You know, this is very interesting. Do you know how you got here?’

Vetriz shrugged. ‘No idea. Same way I’ve got no idea how I make my arms and legs work. They just do.’ She looked around again. ‘Are we really here, or is this just a dream or something?’

‘I don’t know,’ Alexius confessed. ‘Usually it’s not like this, that’s the strangest part of it. Usually – I say usually, makes it sound like I do this sort of thing every day, and of course I don’t – usually you come in just before some crucial piece of action, either in the future or the past depending on why you’ve come. As far as I can tell, this isn’t either. For all I know, it could just be a dream after all. Or, if you really are a natural, perhaps you do these things in a totally different way.’

Loredan, he observed, was definitely breathing; so was the girl. But their arms weren’t wobbling as they held the guard, and nobody, no matter how many thousands of hours they’d spent practising the manoeuvre, can stand with his sword-arm outstretched for more than a minute or so without moving at all…

That was it. That was what they were doing; not fighting but training… And this wasn’t the courts, it was the big exhibition arena in the Schools, deliberately modelled on the courts so that when students took their final examinations here, they’d be in the most realistic setting possible.

The girl’s sword-tip wiggled, just the tiniest amount.

Extraordinary, Alexius muttered to himself; she’s plucked the picture from my mind and taken it back – or forward? No idea – entirely of her own accord. I have absolutely no idea how you’d set about doing that.

The girl made a little grunting noise, which Alexius recognised as pure agony, and her sword-tip wobbled again. It was of course one of the most fundamental – and arduous – of the fencer’s training exercises, the holding of a position for a specified time. From what he’d gathered, it taught you all sorts of useful skills and toned up the muscles like nothing else. Alexius, who knew perfectly well he couldn’t do anything of the sort for more than a few seconds, winced at the thought.

A wider, more uncontrolled twitch this time; and then Loredan lunged at her, moving much faster than Alexius’ eyes could follow. She parried almost as quickly and they fenced two or three returns of strokes until he knocked the sword out of her hand with a short, apparently effortless flick of the wrist. That done, he bent almost double, hugging his forearm and swearing under his breath.

The girl looked furious with herself, and said nothing.

‘If it’s any consolation,’ Loredan gasped, ‘that was really quite impressive. You’re getting the hang of it just fine.’

‘I failed,’ the girl grunted back. ‘I let you beat me.’

Loredan looked at her oddly. ‘Be fair,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be your instructor.’

‘Being good isn’t enough,’ the girl said. ‘You can be very good and still die, if the other man’s better.’ There was an edge to her voice that Alexius definitely didn’t like; neither did Loredan, by the look of it.

‘You know,’ Loredan said, ‘I’m so glad I retired when I did. If there’s one thing I could never stand, it’s perfectionists.’

The girl just looked at him, resentfully. Definitely a menace, that one. Whatever possessed me to get involved with graveyard bait like that in the first place?

‘This is tremendous fun,’ Vetriz interrupted, ‘but shouldn’t we be doing something?’

Alexius looked up, startled. ‘What?’ he said.

Vetriz frowned. ‘When you were explaining all this stuff,’ she said, ‘you told me that when you go barging in on people like this-’

Alexius was about to say something, but didn’t. All in all, barging in on people was a very apt way of describing it.

‘-Isn’t the idea that you do something? You know, interfere. Right wrongs, set things straight. Or didn’t I understand it properly?’

‘Well, ordinarily-’ Somehow, Alexius couldn’t find the right words to explain. ‘You see, we aren’t here for anything like that. This is just an experiment, remember.’

‘Oh. Right. Only I thought, since I’d actually seen this man fencing, and here he is obviously in some sort of trouble with that truly ferocious creature over there-’

Once again, Alexius had the strangest feeling, as if he was being lifted up and frogmarched along a row of squares on a chessboard. ‘To interfere just for the sake of interfering would be terribly dangerous,’ he said gravely. ‘Not to mention, well, just plain wrong. We have no idea what the background to all this is.’

Liar, he told himself. And this is definitely getting out of control. Now it seems that dreadful girl’s enlisted in his fencing school; presumably she’s getting him to teach her how to kill him. If this turns out to be all my fault…

‘I see,’ said Vetriz. ‘So what would you like to do now?’

‘I suppose,’ Alexius said slowly, ‘we should be getting back.’

‘All right.’

– And he opened his eyes and found he was looking straight at Gannadius, who was almost comical in his terror. He scowled at his colleague to make him pull himself together, and glanced at Vetriz.

She still had her eyes shut.

‘Excuse me,’ Venart said diffidently, his eyes still screwed shut and his face still ludicrous, ‘but how much longer are we going to be?’

She still had her eyes shut. If she stayed behind, did something there after he’d left – oh, in hell’s name, what is going on?

‘Gosh,’ Vetriz exclaimed, opening her eyes and smiling.

‘That was amazing.’ She beamed at Alexius, her cheeks glowing. ‘You are clever,’ she added. ‘I knew you could do magic really.’

Alexius’ head was hurting more than ever.