Devices and Desires

Chapter Fifteen

They were saying in chapter that the war had gone to sleep. They were saying that paying, feeding and sheltering forty thousand men, keeping them away from the shops and the women, was a horrendous waste of effort, energy and money if they weren't going to be set loose against anybody any time soon. They were saying that Necessary Evil had lost its nerve, and its grip.

Psellus still hadn't found out why everything had suddenly ground to a halt. The soldiers had arrived, Vaatzes was in Eremia (up to no good there, by all accounts), and there was no earthly reason he could see why the war shouldn't be over and done with inside a month, if only they'd get it started. Some of the voices around the Guildhall were saying it was because there were another forty thousand on the way (Psellus happened to know this was true); others that the enemy capital was impregnable; that Eremia had signed a secret treaty with the Vadani, the Cure Doce, the Cure Hardy, all three simultaneously; that someone in Ways and Means had made a mistake and there was only just enough food left in the country to feed the soldiers for a week; that the real object of the war wasn't Eremia after all; that the Carpenters and Joiners were planning a military coup, and that's what the army was really for; that the soldiers had found out about the defences of Civitas Eremiae and were striking for double pay and death benefit. Necessary Evil's response was to look smug and stay quiet. As one of its members, trying to guess which of the rumours was true, Psellus found this attitude extremely annoying.

Mostly, though, he was bored. He had nothing to do. Even the memos had stopped coming. There were no meetings. For a while he'd sat in his office, afraid to leave it in case he missed a message ordering him to a briefing where everything would be explained. Then he'd tried writing to his colleagues and superiors, asking what was going on, but they never answered him. He tried a series of surprise visits to their offices, but they were never there. Finally he'd taken to wandering about the Guildhall on the off chance of running into one of them. That was a waste of time, too. Nobody had seen them recently, or knew anything about what they were up to. When he went out to the camp where the soldiers were billeted, he was turned away at the gate by the sentries. Over their shoulders he could see the peaks of thousands of tents, thin wisps of smoke rising straight up into the windless sky. He could smell the soldiers from two hundred yards away, but he couldn't see them. It was like a party to which all the other children in his class had been invited.

It wouldn't have been so bad if the war wasn't his fault.

After a while (he'd lost track of time rather) he decided to alter his perspective. He resolved to look at it all from a different angle. After years of stress and overwork, he told himself, he was having a holiday. He still had his office, his rank, all the things he'd fought for over the years-better still, he'd been promoted, from Compliance to Necessary Evil. If they needed him, they'd find him. Meanwhile, until the call came, he was at liberty to indulge himself.

With what, though? He hadn't had more than an hour's continuous free time since he was twenty-one, and pleasure is something you can easily lose the knack of, if you allow yourself to get out of practice. Not that he'd exactly been a libertine in his remote youth; you didn't get to be a Guild official by drinking and chasing girls, so he hadn't ever done any of that; and it was simple realism to admit that it was probably too late to start now. He applied his mind, sitting in his office one cold grey morning. What did people do for pleasure, apart from drinking and being obnoxious to women?

What indeed. In Mezentia, not much that he could think of. Abroad, in less favoured countries, they rode to hounds, flew falcons, jousted, fenced; but the Perpetual Republic had outgrown that sort of thing. What else? They read books, looked at works of art, listened to music. That sounded somewhat more promising. There were works of art, he was pretty sure; the Sculptors and Painters produced them, and (a quick glance at the relevant memo) their productivity had risen last year by an admirable six-point-three per cent. But (he remembered) four fifths of their output went for export, mostly to the Vadani and the Cure Doce, and wherever the remaining one fifth ended up, it wasn't anywhere he was allowed to go. Music: the Musicians amalgamated with the Ancillary Allied Trades a century ago. Their harp was still just about visible among the quarterings on the Guild's coat of arms, but he couldn't remember ever having met a Guild musician. There were people who played pipes and fiddles and little drums at private functions, but they were strictly amateurs, and the practice was officially frowned upon. That left literature, by default. For literature, you had to apply to the Stationers and Copyists. Like the Sculptors, they catered mostly for the export market, but the Guild had a retail outlet in a small alley off Progress Square. It was where you went to buy copies of Guild decrees and regulations, set books for the further examinations, commentaries and cribs to the more complex specifications; and, occasionally (usually as the result of a cancelled export order), literature. He'd been there himself half a dozen times over the years, most recently to look for a wedding present for a mildly eccentric cousin who liked poetry-it was very much the sort of place where you went to buy things for other people, not for yourself.

His cousin had got married seven years ago, but the shop was exactly as he remembered it. The front part was given over to stationery, both export and domestic quality. There were ink-wells in gold, silver, silver plate, brass and pewter; writing-sets, plain, fancy and presentation grade, loose or boxed. There was paper in staggering quantities, all types and qualities, from pads of four-times scraped scraps sewn up with sacking twine, to virgin linen-pulp contract-and-conveyance paper, to the very best mutton and calf vellum. He counted thirty different inks before he lost interest and gave up; and if you didn't like any of them you could buy loose ingredients to make your own: oak-apple gall ready dried and powdered; finest quality soot, candle not chimney, and any number of specialist pigments for emphasising the operative words in legal documents or illuminating capitals. There were trays of twenty different cuts of pen nib (types one to six export only; seven to thirteen restricted to copyists only, on proof of good standing; the rest available to the public at large); goose-quills in grey, black, barred or white and dainty little bronze knives to cut them with; sand-shakers, seals, wax-holders, seal-edge-smoothers (to round off splodged edges), bookmarks, erasing pumice in three grades and four handy sizes, binding needles and the finest flax thread, roll-covers in solid brass or tinplate with brass escutcheons for engraving book titles on. A few surreptitious glances at the price-tickets showed that nearly all this stuff was not for domestic consumption, but then, very little of what the Guilds produced was.

And in the back quarter of the shop there were books. Last time there had been five bookcases, but one of them had been taken out to make way for a display of chains and hasps for chained libraries. Three of the shelves were Guild publications, carefully divided up into numbered and coded categories. The fourth was marked Clearance, and half its shelves were empty.

A quick look round just in case somebody he knew was watching him; then Psellus began to browse. The Mirror of Fair Ladies, newly and copiously illustrated; tempting, but how would he explain it away if someone caught him with it? A Dialogue of King Fashion and Queen Reason caught his attention, mostly because of the pictures of animals being slaughtered in various improbable ways, but the text was in a language he didn't understand. A Garland of Violets turned out to be an anthology of inspirational verse by or about great Guildsmen from history; so did A Calendar of Heroes and Line, Rule and Callipers, but without illuminations or pictures. He was tempted by Early Mannerist Lyric Poetry, a parallel text in Mezentine and Luzanesc, but a previous owner had paved the Mezentine side of each page with clouds of notes and extracts from the commentaries, presumably for some exam, so that it was barely legible. He was considering the practicalities of re-covering The Mirror of Fair Ladies in plain brown paper when he caught sight of a name, and held his breath.

Elements of Chess, by Galazo Vaatzes.

It was an ancient, tatty book, perhaps as much as thirty years old. The lettering on the spine wasn't Guild cursive or italic, and the binding was rough and uneven: pitched canvas stuck on to thin wood (packing-crate lath, maybe) with rabbitskin size, the sort they used in the plaster works. A home-made book, rather like one he'd seen recently. It fell open at the flyleaf: Elements of Chess: being a memorial of various innovations and strategies collected or invented by Me, Galazo Vaatzes; herein recorded for the benefit of my son Ziani, on the occasion of his fourth birthday. Followed by a date; he'd been out by a year. The book was thirty-one years old.

Back in his office he laid the two books on his desk, side by side: two acts of love, one by a father to his son, the other (he assumed) by a husband to his wife. Between them they were trying to tell him something (the purpose of a book is to communicate) but he wasn't quite sure what it was.

One of them, the abominator's awkward and laboured love poetry, had a nice, clean provenance, but how had the other one got here? Someone had brought it in, on its own or together with other books, and sold it. His first thought was the liquidator of confiscated assets; but there had been a specific order against confiscation in the Vaatzes case (why was that?), and all the chattels at the Vaatzes house had reverted to the wife as her unencumbered property. So; maybe Ziani Vaatzes had sold it himself at some point, when he needed money, as so many people did from time to time. Entirely plausible, but he doubted it (unless Ziani hadn't got on with his father, and therefore had no qualms about getting rid of the book). He could have given it to a friend as a present, and the friend disposed of it.

He looked again. The younger Vaatzes was a better craftsman than his father, but at least the old man hadn't purported to write poetry. Just for curiosity's sake, he played out one or two of Galazo Vaatzes' gambits in his mind (memories of playing chess with his own father, who never managed to grasp the simple fact that children need to win occasionally) and found them unexpectedly ingenious. After the first four or so, they became too complicated for him to follow without a board and a set of pieces in front of him, but he was prepared to take their merits on trust. The seventh gambit was annotated, in handwriting he knew. At some point, Ziani had found a flaw in his father's strategy and made a note of it to remind himself.

Do engineers usually make good chess-players? He thought about that. He could think of one or two-his father, his uncle-but he'd never been any great shakes at the game himself; the data was inconclusive. The effort involved in making the book; there was something in that, he felt sure. Was it a family tradition, the making of books out of scrounged and liberated materials? Interesting if it was (and had the person who sold this one also disposed of further generations of the tradition; only one shop in Mezentia, but perhaps all the rest had already been bought by the time he got there). He found himself back at that strange moment of disposal. Who had sold the book, and why?

Wherever I go, he thought, he follows me; like a ghost haunting me, trying to tell me something. As to why he would choose me to confide in; mystifying, but perhaps simply because there's nobody else with the inclination-and, of course, the leisure-to listen. He closed his eyes, and found himself watching a chess game, father against son; father winning, unable to defy his principles and lose on purpose, angry that his son is such a weak opponent; he wants his son to beat him, but refuses to give anything away. The father is, of course, Matao Psellus, and the son is poor disappointing Lucao, who never really liked the game anyway (and so he applied himself to a different but similar game, whose gambits and ploys have brought him here).

Matao Psellus never wrote a book for his son. It would never have occurred to him to do anything of the sort. Yet here were two books, two acts of stifled love, like water bursting through a cracked pipe and soaking away into the dirt. As he studied them, Psellus felt sure he could sense the presence of a third, whereby the chess-book had come into his hands, but he couldn't quite make it out-he could see the end result, but not the workings of the mechanism by which that result was achieved.

Ariessa Vaatzes; she needed money, and she knows he's never coming back. Even so, he thought, even so. She might have sold his clothes, which were replaceable, or the furniture, or anything else. What would she have got for it? He'd paid two doubles and a turner, the price of three spring cabbages; suppose she'd got half of that, or a third. You can eat cabbages but not a book, said a small, starved voice in his mind. It had a point, he was prepared to concede, but he was sure there was more to it than that.

It was all beside the point, since Vaatzes would be dead soon, along with all the Eremians and quite a few of those invisible soldiers he wasn't allowed to see. He put one book away, opened the other, put his feet up on the desk (holiday, remember) and tried to visualise a chessboard.

'Lucao.' The voice came from above and behind. 'I'm glad to see we're not working you to death.'

He sat up sharply, dragging his feet off the desk. The book shot on to the floor, and the spine burst. 'Zanipulo,' he said. 'There you are at last. I've been trying to talk to you for ages.'

'Quite,' Staurachus replied. 'Well, here I am. Meeting in ten minutes, in the cloister. Perhaps you didn't get the memo.'

'Memo?' Psellus looked up at him stupidly, as though he'd never heard the expression before. 'No, I haven't seen any memos.' As he said it, he caught sight of a piece of paper on the desk that hadn't been there when he left to go shopping. It said MEMORANDUM at the top in big square letters. 'Sorry, I-'

'Just as well I checked,' Staurachus said, and left.

Psellus snatched at the paper; his sleeve fanned up a breeze that wafted it just beyond the reach of his fingers, off the desk on to the floor. He sighed, stooped and retrieved it.

The war had woken up, apparently. No explanation, just as there'd been none when it was cancelled, or adjourned. He read the memo again, just in case he'd missed something. Ten minutes; he could just about reach the cloister if he ran.

'Splendid,' said Jarnac Ducas. A big smile split his handsome, suntanned face, curling the ends of his moustache down over the corners of his mouth. He tapped the lower plate of a gorget with his knuckle; it sounded like someone knocking at a door.

'There's still two sets of cuisses to do,' Ziani said, watching him, 'but they'll be ready in plenty of time. I'll bring them with me on the day, shall I?'

Just the faintest of frowns, until Jarnac remembered that Ziani was invited to the hunt. 'Yes, why not? That'll be fine. Excellent work. You must let me know how much I owe you.'

Behind him, Cantacusene was standing awkwardly, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, as though being in the presence of a scion of the Ducas was more honour than he could endure. Extraordinary, the attitude of these people. What puzzled Ziani was the fact that he himself had never shown the slightest degree of deference or respect to any of them, not even Miel Ducas or the Duke, and nobody had seemed to notice. Because he was a foreigner, presumably.

'I've been reading the books you lent me,' Ziani went on-another slight frown; Jarnac had forgotten he'd sent round copies of King Fashion and the Mirror. 'Fascinating stuff. I'm looking forward to it.'

'Splendid.' Jarnac's smile widened. It was entirely possible that he genuinely enjoyed giving pleasure to others less fortunate than himself, provided it was one of his own pleasures, and he wouldn't have to go without in order to do so. 'So we may make a huntsman of you yet, then.' He looked away, back at the sets of newly buffed and polished armour laid out on the long table. He really did seem pleased (why am I surprised? Ziani thought).

'I'll have it sent round this evening, if that's convenient,' he said. 'Obviously there may need to be a few adjustments for fit and so forth.'

Jarnac nodded; probably he wasn't listening. It was difficult being in the presence of somebody this large. He wasn't just taller and broader than anyone Ziani had ever seen before; it was as though he used space in a different way, as though he was used to a much bigger world and hadn't quite adjusted to living among midgets. 'Excellent work,' he said, 'first rate. And I'll be seeing you on the day, of course. Can't promise anything-you never can, in hunting-but I've been setting aside the beeches up above the long lake, we haven't been in there with the lymers or the wolfhounds, and the farmers reckon there's been at least one big boar rootling about round there. I'll be sending someone up to feed the outer covers, see if we can't draw a hog or two out from the thick stuff in the middle. They won't stick around during the day, of course, but at least there'll be a trail for the dogs to follow.'

Ziani smiled pleasantly. He had an idea that Jarnac talked mostly to himself, through the medium of his listeners. It would be nice, however, if he could make him go away, so he could get on with his work. 'Would you like to see round the factory?' he said. 'We've just finished putting in a new treadle saw; I believe it's the only one of its kind outside Mezentia.'

Infallible. It's a curious fact that boring people seem to have a mortal fear of being bored by others. Jarnac thanked and congratulated him once again, reminded him to send in his bill as soon as possible, and strode away, ducking to avoid the beams and the doorframe.

'Pleasant enough man,' Ziani observed. 'But I prefer his cousin, the other Ducas. Doesn't talk quite so much.'

Cantacusene looked at him. 'He's the cadet branch,' he said. 'Jarnac Ducas, I mean.'

'Ah,' Ziani said. 'Is that a good thing? I don't understand about nobility.'

'Means Jarnac won't ever be in line to be head of the family, not unless all the other branch get wiped out before he does.'

'I see. So really, Jarnac isn't anyone special.'

A look of disgust and horror flitted across Cantacusene's face, and Ziani realised he'd committed yet another abomination. He wasn't all that interested, anyway. He wanted to get the last few bits of leather cut out, so he could go and look at the scorpion locks. Cantacusene walked away, clearly not trusting himself to speak.

In the main shop, they were cutting quarter-inch plate on the big shear. It was, if anything, worse than the leather shear he'd been using himself. It wasn't even Mezentine-made, and the handle was a broken-off stub with a length of bent iron pipe peened over it. Luckily, the tolerances for the lock plates were broad. He didn't recognise any of the faces around him, but they'd all know who he was, the only brown-skinned man in Eremia. Some of them looked up, others looked in the opposite direction. All in all, he'd met with far less resentment and hatred than he'd expected, given that his people had only recently massacred the flower of the Eremian army. An Eremian wouldn't last a day in the ordnance factory at home.

He left them to it and wandered over to the filing bench, where two men were cutting teeth into gear-wheels. They were better at it than he'd expected. They were standing right, weight on both feet equally, square to the bench, holding the file level and true. He'd marked out the pattern piece himself; all they had to do was scribe round it on to each wheel, then follow the scribed lines as closely as they could. Back home, of course, a machine would be doing this job, a hundred times faster and much more accurately.

One of the men was old. His thin, wiry forearms ended in broad, clenched hands with huge knuckles, and he bent close over his work to be able to see the scratched line. Ziani saw that he'd rubbed the piece over with candle-soot mixed with spit, to make the line show up better. At home they used a special dark blue paste.

'How's it going?' he asked. He noticed that he was speaking a bit louder than usual; either because he assumed the old man must be deaf, or because subconsciously he was imitating Jarnac Ducas.

The man didn't look up. 'This file's no good,' he said. 'Blunt.'

'Chalk it,' Ziani said.

'Done that,' the old man said. 'And carded it. No good. It's not clogged, it's blunt.'

'Let me see,' Ziani said. It was a Mezentine three-square file, with a Guild mark; the letter next to the stamped lion's head told him it was no more than a year old. He ran the pad of his forefinger over the teeth. 'You're right,' he said. 'Funny. Have you been cutting hardening steel with it?'

The old man shook his head. 'My best file,' he said. 'Only ever used it for brass and latten.'

For some reason, Ziani couldn't help taking it personally; his Guild had made the file, to Specification, so it ought to be perfect; but it had failed before its time, and that was wrong. The foreman of the tool works ought to be on charges for something like that. 'I'll get you a new one,' Ziani said and went to go, but the old man grabbed his arm.

'Where are you going with my file?' he said.

'But it's no good,' Ziani said. 'You said so yourself.'

'It's my file. Give it back.'

Ziani put it down on the bench, went to the tool chest in the corner and found a three-square file, brand new, still in its grease. 'Here,' he said to the old man. 'Yours to keep.'

The old man scowled at it, took it, rubbed his fingertip over the base of the tang, where the Guild marks were. 'Needs a handle,' he said.

Ziani picked a file at random off the bench, knocked the handle off against the bench-leg and handed it to him. He tapped it into place, then put the file carefully away in his apron pocket.

'Fine,' Ziani said. 'Apart from the blunt file, how's it going?'

The old man shrugged. 'Foreman said file out the notches in these wheels, so that's what I'm doing. Don't ask me what they're for, I don't know.'

'How many have you managed to get done today?' Ziani asked; but either the old man hadn't heard him, or the question was too offensive to be answered. 'Carry on,' Ziani said, and moved away.

On the next bench they were bending ratchet sears over formers in a vice. Nice simple work (at home, the sears would be machined from solid and case-hardened in bonemeal and leather dust) and the three men who were doing it had filled one box with finished pieces and half-filled another. He watched them open the vice, clamp a strip of shear-cut plate between the former and the jaw, tighten up the vice and bend the piece with thumps from a hide mallet until it lay flat against the former. At the end of the bench, another man worked a long-lever punch, drifting out the pivot holes. The punch was pretty deplorable too, but he had only himself to blame for it; he'd made it himself, in a tearing hurry, and he knew it'd break soon and the hinge-pin would need replacing. It wounded him to think that something he'd made himself would inevitably fail.

The day wore on. For the first time since he'd escaped from Mezentia, Ziani was aware of being very tired. Everything he did cost him effort, and he couldn't settle to anything. He remembered, just as the men were leaving for the day, that he hadn't made arrangements for taking the finished pieces of armour to Jarnac's house. By then, he and Cantacusene were the only people left in the building. Fine.

'Do me a favour,' he said, leaning against the doorpost of the small foundry, where Cantacusene had set up his leather-boiling cauldron.

Cantacusene was sitting cross-legged on the floor, a chunky oak log gripped between his knees. Over it he was hammering a cuisse, stretching the leather back into shape where it had crinkled slightly in the boiling water. 'What?' he said.

'Give me a hand delivering this lot,' Ziani replied.

He hadn't been expecting it, but Cantacusene nodded without argument, or even face-pulling. 'All right,' he said. 'Just let me finish this before it cools down.'

So Ziani watched for a while as Cantacusene tapped and poked and wheedled, then dunked the cuisse into a bucket of cold water to set it. It came out dripping; he wiped it over with his sleeve and stood it against the wall to dry off. 'Nearly all done,' he said. 'Should finish off tomorrow.'

Together they packed the armour in straw and loaded it into six barrels, which they lugged out into the yard and dumped in the cart they used for fetching iron stock and charcoal. Cantacusene harnessed up the two mules while Ziani locked up; then they set out. They had to go a very long way round, because the straight way was too narrow for the cart and there were stairs and bridges. They rode in silence most of the way, but Ziani could sense that Cantacusene was winding himself up to ask something. When it came, it came in a rush.

'You didn't tell me you were going on this hunt.'

'Yes I did,' Ziani replied. 'You remember, when this Jarnac character came round to order the stuff.'

Cantacusene frowned. 'Why?'

'I don't know,' Ziani said. 'I guess I thought it'd be good to see how it's done. If there's a market for hunting gear, it's a good idea to see for myself what goes on. And I'm curious,' he added. 'There's nothing like it at home.'

'Did he invite you?'

'Sort of.' Ziani grinned. 'I dropped some heavy hints. You ever been?'

Cantacusene shook his head. 'Strictly for the gentry' he said. 'Except if you're beating or carrying or picking up and stuff. Mostly, though, the household does all that, they only hire in casuals for the really big meets. And it's country people that tend to get hired, not anyone from the city.'

'Right,' Ziani said. 'I think this is going to be a big occasion, with the Duke going.'

'You can be sure of that,' Cantacusene said. 'Orsea's not a great one for hunting, mind; he likes it, but they reckon he never finds the time. His father Orseola was big on the falcons but not riding to hounds, but of course they never had the money for a decent pack, or good horses. Costs a fair bit, see.'

Ziani nodded. 'But Jarnac can afford it, obviously'

'Well, the Ducas,' Cantacusene said, with a subtle mixture of respect and contempt, 'they got all the money you can think of, even the cadet line. Though they reckon that with what Jarnac spends, he cuts it a bit close sometimes.'

It was amusing, Ziani thought, how Cantacusene the dour and silent became so animated when he got on to the subject of the nobility. It wasn't anything like the attitude he'd have expected. Resentment, he'd have thought, maybe even downright hatred-after all, the nobles did no work and lived off the sweated labour of others, wasting enough on their idle and vicious pleasures in a month to feed fifty working families for a year. He'd have expected someone like Cantacusene to froth at the mouth when talking about such people. Apparently not. The closest thing in his experience was the way people back home talked about the dog-racing or handball teams they supported. Get a Mezentine Guildsman started on his team and he'd tell you every minute detail-life histories and career statistics of every player, arcane details of rules and form, which tracks favoured which pitchers, more than any rational man could possibly want to know about anything. In the same way Cantacusene seemed to come alive talking about the Ducas, with whom he had nothing in common except occasional commissions and a wedge of unpaid invoices for work delivered. It was touching and revolting at the same time, this vicarious enjoyment of the gentry's lifestyle. For some reason Cantacusene supported the Ducas (and the Phocas and the Stratiotes, and up to a point the Callinicas), which somehow gave him the right to refer to them by their first names, as though they were his own family, and to preen himself on their ridiculous achievements (hunting, politicking, marrying and giving in marriage, bickering over land and dabbling disdainfully and half-competently in trade). For a long time, all the way from Lantern Street to Wallgate via Shave Cross, he gabbled about genealogies and lawsuits, trophy stags and champion destriers, with a counterpoint of scandals, infidelities and indiscretions in which he seemed to take an equal pride. By the time they came out into Fountain Street and started to climb the long, cobbled ride up to the old lists, where the cadet Ducas had their town house, Ziani reckoned he'd learned enough about the family to fill two epic poems and nine books of commentaries.

'The only other one of them I've actually met,' he broke in, during a brief lull, 'is Miel Ducas. He's the head of the family, isn't he?'

Cantacusene nodded vigorously. 'Ever since his uncle died, old Acer Ducas. Mind, he was only head because his first cousin Celat died young-bust his neck riding in the forest, the bloody fool. If it hadn't been for that, Acer wouldn't have been nobody. 'Course, he was seventy if he was a day when he came into the honour; up till then he'd just been collateral in the main line, and everybody expected him to peg out and Celat to take over when Jiraut died. But Celat died, what, seven years back; Jiraut went on the year after that, which meant Acer took over, and he only lasted six months, and then it was Miel. Youngest Ducas this century.'

Ziani frowned. 'So Miel wasn't really anybody important till six years ago.'

'Oh, he was important,' Cantacusene snapped, as though Ziani had just insulted his mother. 'Leading collateral heir, he'd have copped for the minor honour in the main line when Acer died. But actually being the Ducas, that's something else entirely. I don't suppose you can understand that, not being from here.'

Ziani shrugged. 'He's always come across to me as a pleasant enough man,' he said. 'Quite quiet, very polite. I'm starting to see that that's what I should have expected, but I'd been assuming the head of the family would be more like Jarnac, and the also-ran would've been like Miel. But really, it's got to be the other way round, hasn't it?'

Cantacusene was torn, he could see, between two powerful forces: on the one hand, extreme discomfort at Ziani's disrespectful attitude; on the other, the glorious opportunity to tell an ignorant foreigner all about the Ducas. Luckily, the opportunity won the day. 'It's something you got to understand about the good families,' Cantacusene said. 'What they live by is duty. Duty to the family, traditions and stuff; duty to the Duke and the country. Nothing means more to them than that. So, the higher up they are, the more the duty sort of weighs on them, if you see what I mean. Really, all Jarnac's got to do is keep up to what's expected of him; like, he's got to dress well, he's got to hold big fancy banquets and dinners, he's got to have the best stables and hounds and hawks-this is in peace-time, of course-and generally have the best of everything and be the best at everything, if you get me. It's not his place to be getting into politics and government and all, or being a counsellor or a minister or anything. Cadet branch, see. But Miel, it's different for him. If he was to go putting on a big show, talking loud and that stuff, it wouldn't be suitable, it'd be out of place. Not the right way for a senior man in the state to go on. He's got to be a serious man, you see. Polite, quiet, all that, like you said.'

'I see,' Ziani said. 'Part of the job, then. Well, he's very good at it.'

Cantacusene laughed. 'Didn't use to be,' he said. 'Of course, he got that scat in the face, which spoilt his looks. But before he got the honour, when he was more like Jarnac is now, if you follow me, he was a real bright spark. Specially with the girls.'

Ziani frowned. 'Because it was expected of him.'

'Got to be the best at everything,' Cantacusene said. 'And I suppose you could say he was, back then. Oh, I could tell you stories.'

'I'm sure,' Ziani said.

It was dark by the time they arrived at the list gate. They were directly under the shadow of the highest point of the keep wall. Being the cadet branch, the lesser Ducas lived outside the inner castle; being Ducas, they lived as close to it as they could possibly get. Cantacusene turned off the paved highway down a narrow alley-the wheel-hubs fouled the brickwork on both sides simultaneously as they turned a corner-that twisted to and fro up a slope between high walls until it came to a small door in a dark stone frontage. If it hadn't been a dead end, Ziani wouldn't have noticed it. Cantacusene jumped down and clubbed on the planking with the heel of his fist.

'You've been here before, then?' Ziani said.

'Been here delivering. Never gone inside, of course.'

The door opened, just enough to give them sight of a pale blue eye and a wisp of grey hair. 'Ziani Vaatzes,' Ziani said. 'Delivery.'

The owner of the eye and the hair came out and looked at him for a moment. 'You're to fetch it in to the Great Hall,' he said. 'He's in his bath, but he'll be down soon as he's ready.'

For a moment Ziani was sure Cantacusene would refuse to pass the door, like a horse shying at a jump. Curiosity must've got the better of awe for once; he shuffled along after Ziani, holding up one end of the first barrel and muttering something under his breath.

The courtyard that separated them from the inner gate was laid out as a formal garden, with neatly trimmed knee high hedges of lavender and box surrounding square or diamond-shaped beds, where closely mustered ranks of roses quartered with lilies and some kind of blue flower they didn't have in Mezentia filled out the shape of the Ducas family arms. The effect wasn't immediately obvious from the ground, but if a god happened to look down from the clouds, he'd be left in no doubt as to who lived there. A fountain dribbled quietly and unheeded in the exact centre of the arrangement, feeding a small pond that probably housed small, inedible fish.

While Ziani and Cantacusene were manhandling the barrel along the gravel' path, someone had opened the inner gate, which led into a cloister; a roofed-over hollow square enclosing a larger garden, with a lawn and an almond tree. The cloister itself was paved with polished limestone slabs; the walls were painted with scenes of Ducas family history, including one involving a small, pig-like dragon (up against a huge, bearded Ducas cap-a-pie in armour, it didn't stand a chance). Ziani and Cantacusene toiled round three sides of the cloister, and arrived at a set of broad, shallow steps leading up to a massive studded oak door, which opened inwards as they approached it.

The hall they found themselves in was smaller than the Guildhall, or the main gallery of the ordnance factory; it was the height of the roof that set Ziani's head swimming. He couldn't begin to guess how far up the sheer walls went, until they sprouted a jungle of beams, plates and purlins (all painted and gilded, carved and embossed with flowers, animals, birds, gargoyles, severely frowning heads of the ancient Ducas, stars, suns and moons). He might have been able to cope with the sheer size, if it hadn't been for the fact that every available square foot of wall was adorned with trophies of the hunt. There were forests of antlers, dense as an orchard; heads, skulls, escutcheons of boar-tusks, bear-claws and wolf-fangs arranged in circles, half-circles and spirals; claws, paws, tails, hoofs, enough spare parts to build a herd of composite monsters. Stuffed herons, partridges, rock-grouse, pigeons swung overhead on wires suspended from rafters, frozen in perpetuity in desperate flight from stuffed peregrines, goshawks, merlins and buzzards, their shadows huge and dramatic in the yellow glare of twelve hundred-candle chandeliers. At the far end of the hall, flanking the high table on its raised platform, stood two enormous bears reared up on their hind legs, their forepaws raised to strike. Directly behind the massive, high-backed chair in the dead centre of the table hung a wooden shield, on which the skull of an absurdly large wolf bared its fangs at all comers. Underneath each trophy, in lettering too small to read, was an inscription, painted on a billowing scroll.

'Leave it here,' someone said; a short, bald man with a gold chain round his neck, some kind of steward. 'More to come?'

Ziani nodded. 'Five more,' he replied. The steward nodded, as if to say he'd feared as much. 'No, you stay there,' he added, as Ziani turned to go back out the way he'd just come. 'I'll send a couple of the men to get them. You sit down, I'll get someone to fetch you a drink.'

He went away (hospitality, service, disdain; the Ducas for you). Cantacusene sat down on the nearest bench, but Ziani strolled across the floor to get a better look at some of the trophies. Closest to him was a group of roebuck skulls, and he noticed that their antlers were all malformed; one horn normal, the other looking as if it had been melted, squashed or worn away. King Fashion had prepared him for that; abnormals, the King called them, and they were far more highly prized as trophies than larger, regular specimens. The Ducas clearly had an outstanding collection; every conceivable irregularity, deformation and variation from the orthodox was represented, from great splayed fans of horn to pathetic little needles. He grinned in spite of himself, because here (honoured and treasured in death) was a glorious gallery of abominations, enough to make the whole Compliance directorate die of revulsion. It reminded him of the fairy-stories about lovely women pursued by amorous gods, rescued and set among the stars as constellations; just as dead as any other mortal, but on show for ever, trophies of the hunt. That in turn made him think of Miel Ducas (a great chaser of women in his day, according to what he'd heard).

He owed that mental leap, he knew, to King Fashion's insufferably arch consort, Queen Reason, whose job it was to point up each of the King's pithy hints with a parallel from the world of courtly love. To Queen Reason, the fleeing doe was the coy maiden, glancing back over her shoulder as she fled, no doubt, and the hunter was the amorous youth, armed with sighs and tears and vows everlasting, his nets and snares and arrows. Ziani had skipped most of her side of the dialogue, on the grounds that life was too short, but occasionally the Queen had succeeded in ambushing him; the hunter lying in wait in bow-and-stable is the young lover lurking in the rose arbour, sonnet properly braced, its blade smeared with honey; the boar at bay among the hounds is the nymph beset by eligible suitors (reaching somewhat there, he felt); the partridge circling to avoid the swooping goshawk is the minx playing hard to get; and so on, interminably, while her husband the King politely ignores her and lectures earnestly on the shape of droppings. The only explanation Ziani could think of was that Reason was a mistranslation of the wretched woman's name.

Sullen-looking men lugged in the other barrels, and there was no longer any reason for Ziani to stay. He stood up-the drink had never arrived, but he hadn't been expecting it to; in a week's time, he imagined, a footman would approach the bench with two cups on a tray, and find nobody there to take them-and nodded to Cantacusene to follow him like a dog.

'So,' he said, as they got back into the cart, 'what did you make of it?'

'What?'

Ziani frowned. 'Jarnac's house. Was it as magnificent as you'd imagined?'

Cantacusene shrugged. 'It was very nice,' he said.

He dropped Cantacusene off on the way, and drove home alone; he was starting to get the hang of managing horses, and luckily they knew the way. He managed to get the harness off them without drawing blood, threw them some hay, and went back to his cellar. He didn't feel so tired now. Maybe it was the fresh air, or the melodrama of the lesser Ducas. The steel bow was leaning against the wall where he'd left it, and he practised for over an hour, until the scars on his fingers were raw again. Then he climbed the stairs to the tower and put in a session with The Mirror of the Chase, which was slightly less turgid than King Fashion, but which also had a love interest. It put him to sleep until just before first light. He woke up with a crick in his neck, and went down the stairs to look at the scorpions.

A day and a half, and the first batch would be finished. They were drawn up in rows, like vines in a vineyard, and he walked up and down between them. All that was left was basic assembly and fitting, and although he hated them for being crude, he loved them for being there at all, against the odds; like a farmer who's raised a thin crop in dry stony soil where by rights nothing should grow at all.

The night before the hunt, after he'd tried on the leather armour made by the foreigner, looked in on the kennels and the stables, given a final briefing to the huntsmen, heard the most recent reports from the harbourers concerning the last known movements of the quarry, Jarnac Ducas left the main hall by a small door in the top left corner of the room, climbed a long circular stair, walked down a narrow corridor and eventually came out on the rampart of the castle wall. When he was a boy, he'd loved the thrill of this genuine secret passage (only male Ducas over the age of twelve knew about it) that linked the house with the castle itself. He'd imagined himself escaping down it while savage enemies looted below, fighting every step of the way until he reached the narrow sally-port and safety. He must've killed a dozen imaginary goblins or Vadani for every yard. Now he was older and the house belonged to him, he valued it as a means of getting some air, peace and quiet without the risk of meeting anybody.

The sentry on duty knew him by sight, of course. Officially the passage wasn't there, so the soldier looked straight through him, as though he didn't exist either. At this time of night, he knew he'd have this stretch of rampart to himself. It was a valuable privilege, one of many, and naturally he knew better than to abuse it by overuse. He turned his back on the castle, leaned his forearms on the battlements and stared out over the city toward the mountains. All he could see of them was a ridge of shadow against the paler darkness of the night sky, but he knew they were there.

He heard someone behind him; a boot-heel scuffing the stone. Whoever it was seemed not to have noticed him, standing still in the dark. The steps moved away, then stopped. Not the sentry, then. He stepped away from the battlement.

'Jarnac?'

The voice was easily recognised. Duke Orsea had always had a tendency to be a little high-pitched when he was surprised or nervous. Understandable that he should be slightly apprehensive, coming across someone lurking in the shadows on a wall where nobody was supposed to be. Of course he knew about the nonexistent secret passage; he'd been led down it when he was an unimportant boy, a tag-along, allowed to join in because he was cousin Miel's friend. Now, however, Jarnac considered protocol. 'My lord' would be inappropriate here, since they were alone and Orsea had greeted him by his private name.

'Hello, Orsea,' he replied. 'Sorry, did I make you jump?'

Orsea came a step closer; still wary, like a dog approaching an unidentified object. When he was close enough for his face to be visible, Jarnac saw the worried frown relax, though not completely.

'Came up for a breath of air,' Jarnac explained. 'Hope you don't mind.'

'No, of course not.' Orsea had never been more than a moderately competent liar at best. 'It's just that I wasn't expecting anybody to be up here, that's all.'

'Me too,' Jarnac replied with a grin. 'So, looking forward to tomorrow?'

Orsea smiled. 'I expect you've got something special lined up.'

'You can't line up wild animals,' Jarnac replied. 'All you can do is hope they'll be there. No promises, but we'll see.'

Orsea nodded gravely. 'Thanks for arranging it all,' he said. 'Veatriz has been keeping on about me needing a day in the fresh air.'

'Quite right,' Jarnac said. 'You're looking a bit peaky. Too many council meetings and state receptions and not enough healthy exercise.' He saw Orsea stiffen slightly, and remembered that he'd always been quick to take offence. Probably, too, he was thinking about a certain occasion fifteen years ago when Jarnac and Juifrez Phocas had pushed him into the old disused cesspit behind the Lesser Phocas stables. Offhand Jarnac couldn't recall the reason, but he was sure there'd been one.

'That's right,' Orsea said, maintaining his smile with a degree of effort. 'It's what comes of getting mixed up in politics, you know.'

Jarnac nodded. 'Glad I stayed clear of it, then,' he said. 'Always struck me as a mug's game. Glad to leave it to you and cousin Miel. He's coming tomorrow, isn't he? Only I hadn't heard back from him.'

'Oh yes, he's coming.' Orsea reinforced the statement with a brisk nod, just to clear up any ambiguity. 'And Ferens Bardanes and your cousin Erec, apparently. I haven't seen either of them for ages.'

Now Orsea mentioned it, Ferens had also been present during the cesspit incident. Not Erec, though; he'd been off snogging with Sospiria Miletas out behind the old lime-kilns. Orsea had been rather keen on Sospiria round about that time, he fancied; wasting his time, of course.

'If Miel's coming we'll be a field of thirty,' Jarnac said. 'No, scrub that, thirty-one. I invited that Mezentine, the blacksmith. He kept dropping hints, so I thought, why not?'

Orsea shrugged.

'I believe you've met him,' Jarnac went on.

'A couple of times, yes.'

'Strange man,' Jarnac said. 'Very much the oily tradesman one minute, cold as a snake the next. That's Mezentines for you, I suppose. How's Veatriz?'

'What? Oh, she's fine.'

'Is she coming?'

'No.'

'Didn't think she would be,' Jarnac said. 'Not really her thing. I remember, she did come out with us once, years ago.' That would be when everybody expected her to marry Miel, of course; not long after she came back from playing hostage with the Vadani.

'Oh,' Orsea said.

'She didn't like it much,' Jarnac said. 'Well, it was a foul day, lashed down with rain; we didn't find all morning, lunch went to the wrong place so she didn't get anything to eat, and then we had a long, hard chase in the afternoon, and I think she was with the party that went the wrong way. Don't blame her for thinking it's an over-rated pastime, really'

Orsea laughed, a sound like the last drops gurgling out of a bottle. 'She thought about coming, actually,' he said. 'But she decided she'd rather stay at home and catch up with writing letters or something.' He looked away. Something bothering him, Jarnac thought. Just for a split second, he caught himself remembering Veatriz Sirupati as she'd been when she was sixteen; definitely worth stopping to look at back then, though in his opinion she'd gone off quite a bit since she married Orsea. Not that he'd ever looked too closely, since she'd always been earmarked for Miel. They'd have gone well together, he'd always thought, Miel and Veatriz Sirupati, if it hadn't been for the politics.

He decided it'd be a good idea to change the subject. 'So,' he said, 'do you think there's going to be a war?'

Orsea looked at him as though he'd let slip a deadly secret. 'I hope not,' he said. 'We're still picking up the pieces after the last one. And the one before that.'

Jarnac shrugged. 'Some of us were talking about it the other day' he said. 'About Duke Valens just happening to be there on his side of the Butter Pass when you were on your way back from Mezentia. Bit of a coincidence, we thought.'

For a moment, Orsea looked like he didn't follow, and Jarnac realised he'd misunderstood; he'd been thinking about a possible war right enough, but not against the Vadani. Well, that was interesting in itself. 'I think that's all it was,' Orsea said, sounding a little bit awkward. 'And very lucky for us, the way things turned out.'

'Oh, quite right. And they helped us out, no question about it.' Jarnac paused. Probably not a good idea to be harping on about the disastrous Mezentia expedition, given that he hadn't been there. The stupid part of it was, he'd really wanted to go, he'd been furious about missing it. But people got funny about that sort of thing, after a disaster. 'Well, I'm glad to hear you don't think there's a danger,' Jarnac said. 'We could do without any major excitements for a while.'

'I think I'll go and get some sleep,' Orsea said, 'if I'm getting up early in the morning. First light, I think Miel said, in the stable yard.'

'A bit before, if you can manage it,' Jarnac corrected him. 'I want to be up on the mountain while the dew's still on the grass.'

'Right,' Orsea said, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm. 'Bright and early. I'll say goodnight, then.'

'Sleep well,' Jarnac replied. 'Wish I could. But I get a bit wound up before a big day.'

Back down the secret passage into the long corridor; halfway down the circular stair, Jarnac remembered that it hadn't been Sospiria Miletas that Erec was with that time, but Sospiria Poliorcetes. Not that it made any odds; Orsea had fancied her, too.

He didn't bother going to bed; instead, he called for a lamp and sat alone in the great hall, under Uncle Dara's record wolf, with a big cup of hot milk and cinnamon and a copy of Isoitz's The Complete Record of the Hunt, where there was something about mid-season three-year-old boars and how you could track them on stony ground, except that he couldn't recall offhand where it came in the book. He found what he was looking for two hours before dawn, when the first light blue stain was starting to soak through, but it was just the same old stuff out of Varrano rehashed. He stood up, yawned and stretched. It was tomorrow already, and his big day had begun.

Ziani rolled off his mattress, got up and ate the crust of the stale bread. Not, he decided, a civilised hour of the morning. But he'd feel stronger once he'd washed his face and put on a fresh shirt.

He hadn't slept well. Partly nerves; partly because a bad dream had woken him up in the small hours, and he'd found it hard to get back to sleep again; or he'd been afraid to, because he always reacted badly to nightmares.

It wasn't a new dream, by any means. Originally, it had been his grandfather's fault, because the old fool was one of those people who believed that children enjoy being scared out of their wits. Accordingly, when Ziani was six or seven, he'd told him the legend of the storm-hunt, and the horrible thing had lodged in the back of his mind ever since. Easy enough to guess why it had come back out of the shadows tonight, when his mind was stuffed with King Fashion and the Mirror and similar garbage, all that stuff about hounds and lymers and brachets, the baying of the pack and the horn-calls. In Grandad's story, of course, the hounds were red-eyed and black as coal, the horns were blown by dead men riding on dead horses, and the hunt was led by King Utan the Terrible, who'd rode away to hounds five hundred years before and never came back, except on dark nights, when the wind was high and the wild geese were flying low. Ever since then, in his dream, King Utan had worn a deep black hood and ridden a huge black horse; and sometimes Ziani had been running away from him, and sometimes he'd been riding beside him, so close that the cloak's hem flicked his face, and he could smell the rain-soaked cloth. The end was always the same: horns blowing wildly, rain stinging in his eyes, the hounds pressing round in a circle over something lying on the ground, while the King reached up with his old, swollen hands and started to lift the cowl away from his face.