The Escapement

8

Sixty siege engines, dismantled, left Civitas Vadanis, heading for the war. They rode, like princesses sent off to be married, in great canopied wagons borrowed for the occasion from the Aram Chantat, escorted by a troop of Vadani cavalry with polished breastplates and banners. At the head of the convoy rode Gace Daurenja, seconded from the factory to supervise their reassembly and installation. Somehow he'd managed to get hold of a nobleman's blue cloak, extravagantly embroidered with gold thread and seed pearls. At his side he wore an ivory-handled sword in a scabbard covered in red velvet, while on his left wrist he carried a hooded goshawk, a present from the duchess to the duke. The inhabitants of the few remote villages the convoy passed through turned out to stare and cheer; and if some of them mistook the strange, magnificent creature leading the column for the duke himself, there was probably no harm done.

Because of the size of the wagons and the weight of their loads, it would have been foolhardy to try and force the pace on the soft, rutted roads. Progress was accordingly slow, and Daurenja (a captain was nominally in charge of the cavalry escort, but he had the common sense not to press the point) sent out scouts and outriders to watch for any signs of hostile activity. On the evening of the third day, one scouting party reported having seen horsemen in the distance, keeping pace with the convoy. They were too far away to identify, but there was no reason why Vadani or Aram Chantat riders should act in such a fashion, and the convoy was significantly close to the Cure Doce border.

Daurenja held a brief council of war, making a point of seeking the captain's approval before issuing his final orders. The next day the convoy moved on as usual, but conscientious spies should have noticed that the escort was riding in rather more open order than before, without taking up any more space on the road.

Shortly before mid-morning, the convoy approached a sharp bend in the road, where it followed the bottom of a steep-sided combe. Without warning, two parties of armed horsemen appeared on the crests of the combe and rode frantically down the slopes to take the column in front and rear. The escort halted immediately, dismounted, turned the front and rear wagons side on to form barricades, and opened up from cover with their bows. At least a dozen attackers were killed; the rest wheeled to withdraw along the road, only to be taken in flank and rear by a detached squadron of the escort, who'd left camp in the middle of the night and looped round, following the contours of the combe. Caught between arrows and lances, the attackers crumpled in a few minutes. The few survivors were interrogated by Daurenja in person and told him they were Cure Doce, in the service of the Perpetual Republic, and that they'd been sent to capture or destroy the siege engines before they could be brought to bear on the City. After a brief consultation with the captain and his staff, Daurenja gave the order to kill the prisoners, since it would be irresponsible to burden themselves with encumbrances on such a hazardous road. Only one survivor was sent back, his nose and ears slit, to advise the Cure Doce of the dangers involved in carrying out unprovoked acts of war against the Alliance. "For God's sake," Valens said angrily. "You're not defending him, are you?"

On his wrist, the goshawk bated, startled by the tone of his voice. Thoughtless of him. He remembered King Fashion; never shout in the presence of the hawks, or display strong emotion. A calm and quiet demeanour soothes the hawks and befits the huntsman.

"Maybe it isn't what I'd have done," Colonel Nennius replied cautiously. Valens noticed that he was watching the hawk nervously. He suppressed a smile. Unless you'd been brought up with them, they could be rather alarming. "But in the circumstances it's understandable. For all he knew, there were more raiding parties waiting for him on the road; he couldn't really spare the men for a prisoner escort. And we did try being nice to the Cure Doce, after that farce when they burned the flour shed, and it doesn't seem to have worked. A more robust approach…"

Valens sighed. All perfectly true; and if Nennius had done it, or one of the regular-army captains, he probably wouldn't be working himself up into such a state. He'd done worse things himself, of course. "What the hell was he doing giving orders in the first place?" he said irritably. "He's really only a jumped-up blacksmith in any case, not a commissioned officer."

Nennius dipped his head in acknowledgement. "Mind you," he said meekly, "it was a textbook response, neatly carried out. He didn't lose a single man, he made a real mess of the enemy, and the cargo was never in any danger. But you're right, he shouldn't have done it. Strictly speaking, though, it was Captain Brennus' fault for letting him. So, if there's going to be any charges…"

Valens shook his head. "We can't go punishing people for winning victories," he said. "All right, formal reprimand for Brennus but buy him a drink afterwards, and I expect some idle bugger in the clerks' office will forget to put it on his record." The goshawk shifted, tightening and relaxing its grip. "And we'd better have more patrols, just in case the Cure Doce are really bad at taking hints. I'm a bit concerned that they were able to get that many men across the border without us knowing about it." He yawned. It was a fine day, bright and fresh after the rain, and he had a new hawk he hadn't flown yet. He'd seen pigeons in the forest, feeding on the first of the acorns and beech mast, and the day before yesterday he'd fancied he'd heard a cock pheasant calling as it flew up to roost. Instead, he was going to have to talk to Daurenja about deploying the siege engines.

But not yet. With the goshawk had come a letter:

… Saw the doctor again today. He said…

Valens frowned, folded the scrap (she still wrote very small on tiny bits of parchment) and put it in the rosewood box on his desk, then turned the key and took it out. It was a long time before he managed to divert his attention back to the war. Later, after he'd seen Daurenja, he sent out five scouts. They were Eremians, from the cavalry squadron he'd assigned to Miel Ducas. He tried not to let the word expendable into his head as he gave them their orders.

They rode along the Eremian-Vadani border as far as the Butter Pass, then branched off, following a succession of droves and sheep tracks until they reached the plain. No cover there, so they put on speed, crossing the battlefield where Duke Orsea's men had once been cut to pieces by the Mezentine artillery. The bodies had gone, but there were still thickets of steel scorpion bolts, brown with flaking rust, all leaning at their angle of impact, so that they looked like a cornfield in the wind. The scouts had to slow to a walk and thread their way through them.

After that, a fast gallop until they came to the Lonazep road. If the Mezentines were sending out cavalry patrols, they were in trouble. But the straight, flat road was empty in both directions for as far as they could see. They crossed it, heading over the downs for the long, slowly rising hog's back separating them from the broad plain and the City.

No soldiers; nobody at all. Near the top of the ridge, they stopped, dismounted, hobbled their horses and walked to the skyline, where they'd be able to look down on the City. They went slowly and carefully, like burglars in an unfamiliar house, as if any noise they made would wake the sentries on the walls a mile away.

The duke had shown them a map, with the shape of the City marked in red. Being skilled at their trade, they'd memorised it at first glance, along with the contour lines and the location of coverts, rines, drains and outcrops big enough to provide cover. What they saw now bore no resemblance to the red outline in their minds.

The first thing they noticed was a river, where no river should be. It was broad, curving gently in a wide loop, the sun's dazzle on the water blurring the line where it merged with the bottom of the sky. Beyond it, they saw hills where no hills should be; sharply sloping banks of newly dug earth, escarpments partially tiled with turf, topped by a perfectly flat plateau. The curious thing about the banks was their shape. Not circular; great wedges stuck out at regular intervals, like the legs of a starfish; at the point of each wedge, a five-sided finial, like excessively ornate decoration. On each finial, a palisade of thick stakes masked building work still in progress, the scaffolding frames of guardhouses or redoubts.. Further back, where the banks lay against the city walls, they saw a black swarm of men, some digging a ditch, others heaping the spoil up into a rampart. At that distance it was impossible to attempt any sort of accurate assessment of the number of workers. All they could make out was a dark, moving shape on the ground; at a guess, hundreds rather than tens of thousands. Behind them, the City itself squatted under a frayed black cloud, the smoke from thousands of chimneys. They stared at it for a long time before sitting down to make their detailed sketches. Those sketches lay on the table in the vast Aram Chantat pavilion, as Duke Valens briefed his allies on the defences of the City.

"First," he said (he was aware of the catch in his voice, but didn't make the mistake of trying to override it with mere volume), "there's the ditch, here." He pointed at one of the sketches, realising as he did so that only two or three of the men in the front row could see anything at all. It was the Aram Chantat's custom in such gatherings for the important men to sit at the back, so as not to get sprayed with spit by impassioned speakers. The front row was filled up with retainers, aides, younger sons and other makeweights. "It's roughly seventy-five yards wide. We can only guess at how deep it is, but since the earth taken out of the ditch is what they used to build the banked-up platforms under the walls"-this time he didn't point at the sketch-"we can assume the ditch is something like twenty-five feet deep. They've flooded it by diverting the river Mesen, which rises in the chalk downs facing the city."

He paused, looking for a reaction. Waste of time.

"These banks," he went on. "Actually, the proper word for them is bastions. You'll notice" (no, not from back there they won't) "that the bastions are triangular, sticking out all round the walls like the points of a star. Our scouts counted forty of them, and they estimate that they're something in the order of eighteen feet high. The purpose of a bastion is to give their defensive artillery the widest possible field of fire. I think that's pretty self-evident. At any point where our forces approach the walls, they'll come under fire from both sides, more than doubling the firepower that can be brought to bear on them. The bastions also cut out the blind spot at the base of the walls. I'll just explain that: with an ordinary straight wall, once you get up close to it, you're reasonably safe, because the engines can't shoot vertically downwards. The base of the wall is a very sensitive area, because if you can get right up to it, you can dig under the wall and collapse it. The bastions make this impossible. Basically, anything within seventy yards of our side of the ditch is in range, and is likely to be shot to pieces in a matter of seconds."

Still no reaction.

"The bastions serve another purpose," Valens continued grimly. "As I'm sure you know, our best bet isn't storming the city walls with ladders and siege towers, or even getting sappers to the foot of the wall to dig it away. The most promising approach will be to dig tunnels twenty feet or so under the foundations of the wall and collapse them; the resulting subsidence should then make the wall fall in under its own weight. The bastions mean that if we want to do this, we're going to have to dig much longer tunnels than anticipated to reach the walls. If they detect our mining operations-which isn't difficult: you just fill bowls with water and put them on the ground; if someone's digging twenty feet directly under one of these basins, the vibrations ripple the surface of the water-all they've got to do is dig straight down and break through the wooden props of the tunnel. The tunnel roof collapses, earth from the bastion pours in, the tunnel's blocked, the miners working forwards of the breach are trapped. Simple and effective."

His throat was dry from all this lecturing. He looked round for a jug of water, but there wasn't one.

"Storming the bastions," he said, "wouldn't be easy. Apart from their sheer height, by the time we get there they'll be fringed all round with a palisade of sharpened stakes. If we get over that and go hand-to-hand with them on the flat top of the bastion, we'll find ourselves facing another ditch, with a palisaded bank on the far side of it, not forgetting constant artillery fire from the scorpions on the City wall. Trying to knock the bastions down with artillery would be a waste of time. Masonry shatters when you pound it with rocks, but a great big mound of dirt is soft and absorbs the shot. Tunnelling under the bastions won't be easy, as we've already seen.

"Behind the bastions, there's the wall itself. We know the wall's twenty feet thick at the top, thirty feet thick at the bottom. There are artillery towers at fifty-yard intervals, as well as a range of ingenious devices to guard against ladders, siege towers, rams and all the other usual stuff. The city has four main gates, which ought to be the weak spots in the defences. Not so. Each gateway is flanked with massive square towers and topped by a gatehouse. The gates themselves are eighteen inches thick, made of six layers of three-inch oak ply, each layer running crosswise to stop it splitting. Behind the gate is a hardened steel portcullis. Each gatehouse is fitted with an unpleasant device called a wolf; basically, a very large iron frame like a harrow, fitted with lots of long spikes, hinged, so all you've got to do is release a catch and it swings down, crushes or impales anybody standing in front of the gate, trashes battering rams, siege drills and so forth; then it's hauled back up again with chains and winches ready for the next wave of attackers. As well as the wolf, there's other machinery for dropping rocks or boiling water, there's cranes and hooks that pick up rams and pavises, haul them up in the air and then drop them, other things like that. Even if our artillery manages to smash the gatehouse into rubble and we succeed in bringing up rams, by the time we've bashed through the gate and portcullis, they'll have had plenty of time to build a stone block wall across the inside of the gateway, dig trenches, raise barricades, and anything else their ingenious minds can think of. All in all, I believe the gates are probably the hardest points to crack, and I propose leaving them well alone."

Some reaction, at last. A certain amount of muttering at the back, restlessness at the front. Valens leaned forward on the table and waited. As he'd anticipated, a man in the back row stood up.

"With all due respect" (a tall, thin man with a bald head, very plainly dressed; Valens was sure he ought to recognise him, but didn't), "your information is admirably detailed and thorough, and your scouts are to be commended. By ascertaining the scale and nature of the defences, they have undoubtedly saved many hundreds of lives. I feel, however, that I might be forgiven for forming the impression that you are trying to persuade us to abandon the attempt on Mezentia by stressing the difficulties and dangers. I would like to remind you that the logical approach, starving the City into submission, is not available to us, thanks to your delay in cutting the Lonazep road and allowing them to lay in supplies for a long siege. This, I feel sure, you would not have done without a reason, but I confess I am unable to guess what that reason might be. Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain it."

Valens hid most of his smile. "Starving them out was never an option," he replied. "Our supply lines are tenuous, and even if they held, there simply isn't enough food and fodder to be had to supply our forces for that length of time. Put simply, if we'd tried that game, we'd have been the ones who starved first, even if I had cut the road as quickly as I possibly could. Which brings me, in fact, to my next point. Whatever we do, we've got to do it quickly. At the moment, I can't tell you precisely how long we can keep the army in front of the City. It depends on too many factors. Even if everything goes as well as possible, though, I can tell you for certain it won't be any longer than three months."

"Three months," the thin man said. "That's not very long. Why three months?"

Valens shrugged. "It's an educated guess."

"Perhaps you'd care to share your reasoning."

Valens paused. He could hear the patter of rain on the pavilion canopy. Somewhere outside, someone was hammering steel on an anvil, a flat, harsh sound like the warning cry of a bird. He looked at his allies, with whom he had so little in common, apart from a number of deaths. "The country on our side of the desert is quite different to what you're used to," he said. "As I understand it, your country is big and empty. You drive your cattle in a wide circuit across broad plains, going where there's grass for them to graze. On this side, we've got little fields and meadows in among the mountains. Over the years we've reached a balance, a certain number of people living on land that can just about feed that number. True, a lot of people have died in the war and don't need feeding any more; by the same token, there's fewer people to sow and reap corn and cut hay. You brought close on a million more people across the desert, and over a million head of cattle. There's only so much grain and hay on our side, even in peacetime. We can't ship food in from overseas as the Mezentines do. A maximum of three months, after which we either crack open the city and feed our people from their stores, or we starve. I left the Lonazep road open because the Mezentines can accumulate food faster than we can, and they've got sources of supply we can't access. Gentlemen, we've reached the point where taking the City isn't a matter of avenging the death of your princess or my late wife. It's not even about stopping Mezentine aggression against the Vadani or liberating Eremia, or finding a new homeland for the Aram Chantat. We have to beat them and break into their city because either we steal their food or we die. You don't know about winter in the mountains. Possibly you could feed your people till the spring by slaughtering your cattle, but that'd just make the problem worse; we can't grow enough grain to feed all of you, and without cattle you have no livelihood. If we'd taken the city a month ago, we'd have signed our own death warrants. Three months, gentlemen; if we haven't captured the City granaries intact by then, we won't survive the winter. Really, it's as simple as that. To be honest with you, compared with seeing to it that your people and mine have enough to eat, breaking open the City is a trivial problem, the sort of thing I'd normally delegate to someone else who's not got as much on his mind as me. Which, in fact, is what I've done." He smiled, straightened up a little, took a deep breath. "Allow me to outline for you the plan of campaign drawn up for us by our expert engineer, Ziani Vaatzes." The hammering Duke Valens had heard came from an anvil under a big, splay-limbed beech tree on the northern edge of the camp. There, a farrier was shaping shoes for a rather fine chestnut gelding, assigned to the new commanding officer of the fourth Eremian light cavalry division, Major Miel Ducas. Having nothing else to do, the major sat and watched, while an armourer finished the alterations to his issue mailshirt. The major was taller and more slightly built than the notional average soldier for whom the shirt had been tailored; the rings cut out of the waist would more or less provide the necessary extra length. Meanwhile the woman generally referred to as the major's wife, at least in his hearing, was weaving straw to pad out his helmet.

"They're always too big," she said, as she paused to flex her sore fingers. "When we were scavenging on battlefields, we saw it time and again. You'd find a man with his head smashed in, and his helmet lying next to him without a scratch on it. They make them a big standard size so you can pad it to fit, but I guess they don't explain that properly when they hand them out. Silly, really. You should talk to the duke about it, it'd save a lot of people from getting killed."

Miel snuggled his back against the trunk of the tree he was sitting under. "Not my place to bother the duke with operational details," he said drowsily. "The chain of command says I should report something like that to the quartermaster general's department, through my immediate superior."

"Oh," she said. "Who's that?"

"Ersani Phocas," Miel replied, yawning. "But he's too embarrassed to talk to me, because before the war he was a third cousin of a minor collateral branch of the Phocas, and I was the head of the Ducas, so strictly speaking I shouldn't even be able to see him on a sunny day, let alone take orders from him. Also, the Ducas and the Phocas hate each other, except when we intermarry. All that's gone now, of course, but Ersani Phocas is an old man, set in his ways. These orders he's given me read more like a dinner invitation I'm expected to be too high and mighty to accept. All very charming and nostalgic, but it means I'm still not sure exactly what it is I'm supposed to be doing."

"Well, then," she said, tucking one end of the plaited straw under the leather rim of the liner. "It's like my father used to say. The aristocracy's just a waste of space."

He frowned, watching a bird on a branch overhead. "We ran Eremia fairly well, all things considered. Not perfectly, but as well as anybody could. Most people had enough to eat, and we kept the roads safe from robbers."

"Very true," she said placidly. "You did a marvellous job, and you never got any thanks for it."

He nodded. "And we spent your rents on tableware and cushions and falcons and parade armour, mostly imported. We ate too much and made our wives and sisters waste their lives embroidering samplers, we fought our rival families like lunatics and we let Orsea lead us into a war that finished us. But I think the worst of it was, we never enjoyed what we had."

"Of course," she said. "Everything else pales into insignificance in comparison."

He smiled. "I think so, yes," he said. "We had so much; we had everything. I owned huge areas of land I'd never even seen. I could've snapped my fingers and said, Bring me a lifesize gold statue of a horse, and they'd have apologised for the week's delay. Instead-"

"What good would that have been?" she asked pleasantly. "It'd take up a lot of room, and what could you use it for?"

"Instead," he went on, "I spent my whole life worrying. I shouldn't have had a care in the world, but I worried every day of my adult life; because I might've done something inappropriate, or someone else was sneaking past me in the advancement stakes, or I wasn't giving the right advice in council. I worried because I hadn't got married like I was expected to, and then I felt guilty because I couldn't face the prospect of being lumbered with any of the small number of dreadful women who were suitable for me. We used to have the most amazing dinners, but I can't remember what we ate because I was worried about everything going right, not offending the guests. We used to hunt at least once a week in the season, but I was worried about making sure my guests got more of the action than I did. I worried like hell I wouldn't get to be chief adviser to the duke; then, after I got the job, I never got another good night's sleep. I worried myself to death about the war. Then we lost, and suddenly I didn't have to be the Ducas any more, I could actually choose for myself for the first time; and now look at me, getting ready to go off to fight, which is the one thing I hate above everything else."

"Fine," she said, looking away. "Don't go, then."

He sighed. "I've got to," he said. "I won't make any difference, nobody really cares if I don't, my superior officer hates the fact that he's got to order me around and would far rather I just went away somewhere. For the first time," he added, his voice suddenly flat, "I'm scared I'll get killed, because of what might happen to you and…"

"That," she said. "That's what you were going to say, isn't it? You and that."

He nodded. "I'm sorry," he said.

"Don't be. I understand."

He shut his eyes and scowled. "But I've got to go," he said. "I've got to go and be a small, unimportant part of a war that doesn't really concern me. I don't even know who I'll be fighting-could be the Mezentines or the Cure Doce or some other ally they may have kidded into joining them. You'd think that if you've got to kill someone, if they're that important to you, at least you'd know who they are. Killing strangers without even knowing why is really rather ridiculous, don't you think?"

She frowned at the inside of the helmet, then pulled the plaited straw out and twisted it a little tighter. "Not so long ago you were killing men for their boots," she said.

"Yes." He nodded, staring straight ahead. "In comparison, that was practically honourable. We needed to kill to stay alive. There's far worse things in the world than honest predators."

"So," she said. "Don't go. We can go back to hunting soldiers for a living. Better still, you could get the duke to make you an ambassador or something: Eremian diplomatic representative to some country they haven't discovered yet. Then we could stay home all day and not do anything."

"I could," he replied.

"But you won't."

"No."

"Well, there you are, then." She stood up and held the helmet out. "All done," she said. "Try it on, see if it fits better now."

He tried it. Still a little too big. "That's fine," he said.

"No it isn't. Give it here."

She sat down again and pulled the straw out. He looked at her but couldn't see her face.

"Fine," he said. "So what do you think I should do?"

"Not up to me." Her hair, usually stretched tightly back and stabbed with a comb, was coming loose, like stuffing from a frayed cushion. "I'm not even your wife. And that doesn't really change things so much, does it? I mean, the Ducas must have left little souvenirs right the way across Eremia."

He scowled. He could tell her it wasn't true, but she'd choose not to believe him. "I don't suppose the apple wants to fall from the tree," he said. "But it has no choice."

"Bullshit." She looked up at him and smiled; a bleak, angry smile that hit hard and deep. "You're going because you want to. You're an aristocrat, all your noble ancestors fought in every war there's ever been, so you're going. Simple as that."

He nodded. "That's right," he said. "Like I said. No choice."

She sighed. "Well," she said, "at least when you get bashed on the head, your helmet shouldn't fall off. Don't suppose any of those blue-blooded suitable cows you ought to have married would've known how to line a helmet."

"Quite true." He took it from her and settled it on his head. Perfect fit. "Don't worry about me," he said. "I'll be back soon enough. I've made arrangements…"

"Of course you have." A different smile this time. "You're the slave of duty, you told me so yourself. The farrier's finished, look. Give me twelve quarters and I'll go and pay him for you."

She left him then. He waited for the armourer to finish the work on his mailshirt. In the distance he could see Aram Chantat leaving their gaudy pavilion; the big meeting breaking up, presumably. He caught a glimpse of Valens, hanging back to talk privately with one of them. Someone walked past, blocking his view. By the time he was able to see again, Valens had disappeared.

He looked up. The man who'd walked past him was the murderer, Daurenja.

Without thinking he jumped to his feet. He knew that Daurenja was very much in favour with the duke, which meant nothing could be done about him, and he'd heard he was back from Civitas Vadanis, having ridden in with the first shipment of artillery from Vaatzes' factory. Actually seeing him, on the other hand, was something he hadn't expected, and he found it intensely disturbing.

But so what? He knew for a fact that some years ago Daurenja had killed a man and raped his sister; that Valens knew about it and had hidden behind some abstruse technicalities of legal jurisdiction to avoid having to take action. He was also well aware that, since the crimes had been committed on Ducas land, before the war, he was the legal authority and instrument of justice. Properly speaking, he was duty bound to chase after the man, grab him by his ridiculous ponytail and cut his throat, like a butcher killing a calf. Instead, he trotted after him and caught up with him just as he was about to disappear into one of the storage sheds.

"Oh," Daurenja said. "It's you."

"Yes."

He paused, licked his lips like a cat. "I gather you've been given a command."

"That's right."

Daurenja frowned. "Congratulations," he said. "Was there anything you wanted?"

Miel looked at him, but it was like trying to see through mist. "I just thought I'd let you know I haven't forgotten about you."

"I should think not. People tell me I'm a memorable character. Rather a mixed blessing, but on balance I'd rather be notorious than a nonentity. If that's all, you'll have to excuse me. I'm rather busy."

He moved, but Miel put a hand on his arm. "I guess you should know," he said, "I'm filing a formal request with Duke Valens to be recognised as the official representative of the Eremian government in exile, now that Duke Orsea's dead. There's nobody left except me, you see, and somebody's got to do it."

Daurenja frowned. "What about the duchess?"

"Remarried," he replied. "Under the Act of Settlement, if she marries a foreign head of state, she forfeits her rights as trustee of the succession. That means we have to fall back on the heirs in the third degree, which in this case means the head of the Ducas family. Me."

Daurenja looked genuinely interested. "Does that make you the duke?" he asked.

"The proper term is Lord Protector," he replied, "meaning I'm responsible for safeguarding Eremian interests while the dukedom is in abeyance. There can't be another duke until all of the former duchess's sisters have officially passed the age of childbearing; after that, there's a complicated formula for working out which of their children is the rightful heir. Since we don't know what's become of any of them, it's all a bit academic anyway. Meanwhile, there's just me."

"Fascinating," Daurenja said. "I've always had a soft spot for that sort of thing: genealogy and heraldry and rights of succession to thrones that don't actually exist any more. I once met a man who told me he was the rightful king of Palaeochora, which is the old name for what's now Mezentia. He had letters and charters and all manner of old documents to prove it. Not much practical value, of course, unless there's money involved."

"No money," Miel said. "Just obligations."

Daurenja grinned. "Isn't that exactly like life," he said. "Well, nice to see you again. I really must get on now, though. Ever such a lot to be done."

Miel didn't move. "Once Valens has given me official status," he said, "I intend to prosecute you for the murder of Framain's son. I thought I ought to warn you, so you'll have time to prepare your defence."

"No defence." Daurenja shook his head. "I confess, I did it, I'm guilty. It's a pity you're not actually the duke, otherwise you could issue a full pardon. Though if you're effectively the government of Eremia, I suppose it'd be valid. Especially if Valens confirms it. I'll have to talk to him about it. I think it'd be nice to get that business cleared up and out of the way." He smiled. "Is Framain still hanging round the camp, or is he back at Civitas Vadanis? I'd really like to do something for him, and his daughter. God only knows what they're doing for a living these days, now they haven't even got the pottery factory any more." He lifted Miel's hand gently off his arm. "Justice is all very well, but I believe in making amends. Practical help, instead of empty vengeance. I mean, revenge is fine, but it doesn't put food on the table, and isn't that all that really matters, in the long run?" He paused, and maybe he glanced down at Miel's boots; it was hard to tell. "After all, we've all done bad things at some time or other, because we've had to. Getting sanctimonious about it just makes things worse, if you ask me. Show a little remorse, make things better for anybody you've harmed in the past, do the decent thing and what more can anybody ask of you?" He reached out and pushed open the shed door. "Take care of yourself," he said. "There's a nasty rumour going round that the Eremian contingent's generally regarded as expendable, because the duke's promised your land to the Aram Chantat after the war; the more of you get killed, the fewer people he'll have to evict. It's not how I'd want to do things, but I don't suppose he's got any choice in the matter." Captain Aureolus of the duke's general staff left the Aram Chantat pavilion after the briefing was over and went back to his tent. He sat down on the rickety chair and pulled the rickety table towards him. Farmhouses, he thought; here we are in the recently deserted Eremian countryside, scores of farms within a day's ride. It wouldn't be all that big a deal to send out a half-squadron with a couple of carts to round up some decent chairs and tables that didn't wobble like exotic dancers every time you breathed.

His job was to assign the various tasks on the agreed schedule of actions to the units best suited to undertake them. Not the hardest job in the world. He dipped a pen in the black oak-gall ink and drew a line down a sheet of paper to form two columns; at the top of one he drew a little sun, on the other side a little skull and crossbones. On the Sun side he jotted down the nice, easy tasks. On the Death's Head side went the rotten jobs. Then he took a new pen, dipped it in the green ink, to represent Vadani forces, and wrote the name and number of a unit and a commanding officer next to each Sun-side entry. A third pen went in the red ink, to represent the Free Eremians assigned to operations on the Death's Head side.

(Nobody had told him to do it that way. Nobody had needed to. You didn't have to teach a baby how to breathe, either.)

He assigned the Death's Head missions in reverse order of hopelessness and danger. When he came to the third from last, he paused, consulted his roster, gazette and army lists, then carefully wrote in: Fourth Eremian light cavalry, Major Miel Ducas commanding.

He paused. The name was vaguely familiar, but he couldn't remember why. Not that it mattered; the fourth Eremian light was an experienced unit, made up of pre-war regulars and men who'd seen action during the brief resistance. If they encountered enemy forces in the course of their reconnaissance, they'd put up a good fight. If they lost… they were Eremians, no doubt pleased to have the opportunity to give their lives for their horribly abused country.

There was also a bottle of blue ink, to signify Aram Chantat. He had specific orders not to use it unless explicitly told to do so.

A shadow fell on the page, and he couldn't read the words. He looked up, and saw him, whatever his name was: the duke's Mezentine engineer's assistant, the murderer, the freak. He was standing perfectly still, and Aureolus knew at once that he was one of those people who have the knack of reading upside down.

He didn't like it. Nobody knew for sure what the freak's rank, status or authority were. He was a civilian, but he reported directly to Vaatzes and the duke, nobody else. The general consensus was: if he gives you an order, better obey it just in case.

"Can I help you?" he said.

The freak nodded. "Let me see that."

Aureolus could feel trouble coming on, the way some people can sense an approaching thunderstorm when the sky's still blue. "I'm not sure I can do that," he said. "I'll need to see some kind of-"

"No." The freak reached for the paper, his thin, bony wrist emerging from the sleeve of his coat like a tortoise's neck from under its shell. The fingers tightened on the page, and Aureolus knew that if he tried to snatch it away, the paper would tear. It was an example of intuitive tactical thinking on a level Aureolus knew he'd never aspire to. In passing, he noticed that the freak chewed his fingernails.

"Fine," he said. "If anyone asks, I'll say you assured me you had clearance."

The freak wasn't listening. In fact, Aureolus realised, as far as the freak was concerned, he no longer existed. Galling, but on balance he preferred it that way.

"Just a moment," the freak said, and the skin on his fishbelly forehead tightened. "This entry here." He put the paper on the table; left hand pinning it down, right forefinger pointing to a name. "Pen."

Aureolus said: "What's the problem?"

The freak reached across him, so that the elbow of his sleeve brushed Aureolus' mouth. The coat, he observed, was best-quality Mezentine cloth, last year's fashionable cut, indescribably filthy with mud, oil and dried blood. He took the red-ink pen, crossed out an entry, paused for a moment, and wrote something in over the top in tiny, neat, spiky letters.

"What do you think you're…?" Aureolus started to say; then the freak looked at him, and the words evaporated, like water on a stove-top. Carefully the freak replaced the pen.

"You made a careless mistake," the freak said pleasantly. "Lucky for you I was here to correct it. You could've been in so much trouble."

For some reason, Aureolus felt he shouldn't look down and see what had been changed. "You've got the authority to do that, have you?" he said.

The freak grinned. "Do what?"

Rumour had it that this man was guilty of murder and rape; that when his victim's father was captured by the Mezentines, he'd broken into their camp, killed half a dozen guards with his bare hands and rescued him. Since then, he'd disobeyed the duke's direct orders to assume command of a mission, turned a potentially disastrous ambush into a victory; and before that, when the duke's hunting party was attacked on his wedding day, something about saving the duchess's life; which duchess he wasn't quite sure, but that wasn't the point.

The freak was grinning contemptuously at him. "Thank you for your time," he said.

Aureolus felt his fist tighten, realised that the freak had seen it and now there was an almost hopeful look in his eyes: go on, they were saying, take a swing at me, I want to fight, I enjoy it. Aureolus froze. He'd fought in nine pitched battles and two dozen skirmishes in his time, been wounded twice, honestly believed he was a brave man. Now, though, he was scared. The feeling reminded him of watching dogs, the way the underdog backs down when the pack leader growls. He realised he wasn't brave at all.

The freak broke eye contact, turned away and left the tent. When Aureolus was sure he'd gone, he looked to see what had been changed. A line through the fourth Eremian light cavalry and Major Ducas; in their place, the seventh Eremians and Colonel Pardas.

He thought about that. Really, it didn't matter. The seventh were practically indistinguishable from the fourth, and he'd never heard of Pardas, but presumably he had to be reasonably competent or he wouldn't have been given the seventh to command. Then a wave of relief swept over him, making his knees tremble and his bladder ache.

God only knows what all that was about, he thought, but it's nothing to do with me.

He filled in the last two remaining assignments. To be on the safe side, he didn't use the fourth Eremians at all. Big army, plenty of other suitable units.

He made a fair copy, without the excessively frivolous sun and skull column headings. Then, just in case there was a problem, he burned the sheet of paper the freak had written on.

Later that day, he came back from the latrine to find the hated regulation-issue chair and table gone, and a solid Eremian rustic stool and small farmhouse table in their place. He made a point of not asking anyone if they knew where they'd come from. At the next weekly briefing in the Aram Chantat pavilion, Valens reported the findings of the intelligence-gathering exercises agreed on at the previous meeting. As anticipated, the enemy had made various attempts to secure concealed defensive positions on the hog's-back ridge in front of the City. Predictably, these positions had consisted of hastily excavated and fortified artillery emplacements, mounting between twelve and twenty scorpions, supported by a platoon of heavy infantry and a company of archers. All the emplacements had been successfully taken, and it was encouraging to note that all of them were manned by Mezentine citizens rather than mercenaries or Cure Doce. The artillery had inflicted casualties, units of the Eremian second and seventh light cavalry coming under particularly heavy fire and losing a considerable number of men (their gallantry and sacrifice was duly noted in the minutes, using the usual form of words); the enemy archers too had proved unexpectedly effective. In hand-to-hand combat, however, the Mezentines had proved to be completely ineffectual, in spite of their best-quality arms and equipment. Accordingly, Valens felt able to describe the operations as a success. Not only was the hog's back now firmly under allied control; the principal objective, testing the enemy's ability to fight at close quarters, had been achieved, and the result was extremely encouraging. Naturally, it was safe to assume that the enemy would learn from the encounter and step up the combat training of their citizen levies. With only books to learn from, however, it was unlikely they'd be able to make any significant difference in the time available to them. Meanwhile, he felt confident that it was now safe to occupy the hog's back, prepare siege lines and deploy the first consignment of artillery. The siege of Mezentia (he allowed himself to indulge in a little melodrama at this point) was about to begin.