Sharps (31 page)

“Cosseilhatz,” Suidas said.

Tzimisces nodded firmly. “Exactly. Tribes,” he went on. “Actually, that’s entirely the wrong concept, but let’s not get sidetracked. There’s at least a dozen of them. The Chantat are just one, but we call all their different nations Aram Chantat, mostly because it’s the only one we can pronounce. Anyway, the guards from the town are Aram Chantat, the patrol are Aram Cosseilhatz. They don’t get on. And both of them being employed by the Permians isn’t anything like a good enough reason for them not to fight it out to the death, if they’re feeling that way inclined.” He breathed out long and slow. “Fortunately, the patrol outnumbers our escort three to one. Unfair odds,” he explained, “so they couldn’t start anything, they could only fight back if the Chantat attacked them. Which they came pretty close to doing,” he added, with a slight shake in his voice, “but their captain said no, their first duty was to hand over the – well, us to the patrol, because those were their orders. Business before pleasure, you might say. Of course, if it’d been the other way round, it’d have been completely different. The Chantat aren’t bound by the unfair-odds rule, only the Cosseilhatz. Wonderful people,” he added with feeling, “but complicated.”

The coach was moving again. Iseutz said, “Hand over the what?”

“Excuse me?”

“You hesitated. What were you going to say?”

Tzimisces shrugged. “Fine. Technically, we’re now prisoners. Escorting third-party prisoners is a supervening duty,” he continued loudly over the beginning of Iseutz’s howl of fury, “which overrides the obligations of the tribal feud. If we were just honoured guests, they’d have had to attack the Cosseilhatz, and we’d now all be dead. It’s all right,” he went on. “I’ll sort it out when we get to the post station.”

“Marvellous,” Suidas said quietly. “So, whose prisoners are we, exactly?”

“The Cosseilhatz,” Tzimisces said. “The orders were, hand us over to the patrol. Which they did. The Cosseilhatz were therefore obliged to take us. They’re not exactly happy about it, but they’ll do as they’re told.”

Addo cleared his throat. “Which post station?” he said. “It can’t be the one you told us about earlier. We passed that hours ago.”

“Quite right,” Tzimisces said. “It’ll be the next one along. The Cosseilhatz burnt the other one to the ground, two days ago.”

There was a long silence. Then Suidas said brightly: “You know, I’m glad the War’s over. It makes getting from A to B so much less stressful.”

The post house was a square white building with a flat roof, sitting beside the road in the middle of a mile-wide level plain between two cliffs. It had no grounds, yards or garden, which made it look as if it had been carelessly dropped there, like a crate fallen from a cart. From a distance it looked like a hut, but the closer they came, the bigger it grew. “It’s got to be the size of the New Year Temple,” Iseutz said. Giraut thought about it and said it was probably bigger.

“It does seem pretty large for a relay station,” Addo said.

Tzimisces yawned. “It was once a cathedral,” he said, “in the central square of a city.” He sat up a little and pointed through the window. “See that line there, in the distance? That was a river, hundreds of years ago. This plain was the breadbasket of Permia. But the river changed course, the city was deserted, nobody even knows what its name used to be. That thing over there is all that’s left. The Empire used it as a bonded warehouse. When the Permians took it over they tried to pull it down, but it’s so massively built they gave up. There was a battle near here in the War.”

“Semont,” Addo said. “So this must be …”

“Quite right,” Tzimisces said approvingly. “This is Semont de Danzer. Not one of your father’s battles.”

“We were defeated, weren’t we?” Addo said.

“The name rings a bell,” Suidas said. “But I was never with the Third Army.”

The coach came to a halt. Suidas yawned and stretched; Tzimisces reached past him and opened the door. “Last I heard,” he said as he stood up, “there was a squadron of Imperials stationed here. I might just be able to persuade them to take us to Beaute, instead of the Aram Chantat. Don’t get your hopes up, mind, but I’ll see what I can do.”

The post-house door was at least twelve feet high and six feet wide, green bronze, decorated with embossed friezes of human-headed winged lions and bird-headed men. In the very middle, someone had stuck a piece of plank to it with tree gum. On the plank was written, USE OTHER DOOR. Tzimisces, flanked by two oddly nervous Aram Chantat, walked up to it and gave it a gentle shove with his fingertips. It opened, smooth and totally silent. “Wait here,” he said, and went in.

“Did you notice,” Addo said quietly, “it’s a different driver.”

Giraut looked back. On the box he saw an old man in a coat two sizes too big for him. But he wasn’t the same old man who’d picked them up from the livery yard, and there was no fourteen-year-old grandson on the bench beside him.

“All right,” Suidas said, after a moment’s silence. “The other driver refused to go on, so they replaced him.”

“When?” Addo said. “I don’t suppose the Aram Chantat patrols take spare coachmen around with them, just in case.”

“We did stop twice for water,” Phrantzes said mildly. “Perhaps they changed drivers then.”

“In the middle of nowhere,” Iseutz pointed out.

Phrantzes sighed. “What are you suggesting?”

“Actually, I wasn’t suggesting anything,” Addo said. “I just thought I’d mention it, in case it mattered.”

The Aram Chantat, Giraut was uncomfortably aware, were grouped between them and the coach. They were talking to each other quietly in high, soft voices. “I get the idea they aren’t too keen on going inside the building,” Suidas said.

“I’ll be so glad to see the back of them,” Iseutz whispered.

“
You’ll
be glad. Hello, he’s back,” Suidas said, as the door opened and Tzimisces came out. “Well?”

“There’s an Imperial garrison here,” Tzimisces said wearily. “It’s manned by Imperials because the Aram Chantat won’t stay here. Bad luck or something. I think the artwork’s not to their liking. Anyway, that means the Imperials can’t leave them in charge here to come with us. However,” he went on, drawing a breath, “neither will they take us to Beaute, because this is the limit of their beat. The Imperial CO says he’ll send a rider to the next house along; he’ll borrow five men from there and give us five of his own, which is all either of them can spare, and the combined unit will take us to Beaute. With any luck, forty-eight hours. Till then, we’re stuck here. Sorry, but that’s the best I can do.”

Phrantzes pulled a sad face, but Giraut and Iseutz grinned. “A couple of days off,” Iseutz said. “I don’t mind that.”

“We’ve got a match booked at Beaute,” Phrantzes said. “If we’re stranded here for two days, we aren’t going to make it.”

“That faint sound you can hear is my heart breaking,” Iseutz said cheerfully. “Now, I don’t suppose there’s even the remotest chance of getting a bath in this godforsaken place.”

There was every chance. The bathroom was square and marble-lined, with an impossibly high ceiling, on which was painted a fresco of a sea battle in the late Archaic style of the Middle Empire. There were nine baths, side by side, scooped out of single blocks of grey basalt. Water came through a splay of lead pipes from a massive porphyry cistern supported by four fluted marble columns, still showing faint traces of their original gilding. It was stone cold and smelt very slightly of rotten eggs.

The station commander was an exquisite young Imperial by the name of Captain Baudila. He greeted them wearing what looked disconcertingly like a monk’s robe, except that the hood was lined with tiger fur. He wore red boots, with parallel rows of nine silver hooks in the form of eagles’ heads running up the fronts. He would have been extremely good-looking if his nose hadn’t been cut off almost flush with his face.

(“That means he was in some sort of political trouble back home,” Tzimisces explained. “Noblemen who get caught taking part in plots and conspiracies have their noses cut off. It means they’re still fit for active service but they’ll never be promoted or eligible for high public office. The technical name for it is ‘the divine clemency of the Emperor’. Try not to stare,” he added helpfully.)

Dinner was in the post room, a vaulted chamber taller than the Victory Tower back home. Baudila sat at the top of a long table – “during the day, we use it for sorting the mail” – with his guests clustered round him at the top. Twenty or so Imperial soldiers ate quietly at the bottom end. They had roast lamb garnished with rosemary and flat white bread, slightly stale.

“By the sound of it, you were lucky to get out in one piece,” Baudila said with his mouth full. “Apparently the Aram Chantat went a bit mad and carved up a bunch of the locals. They’re not happy. I haven’t heard anything about trouble anywhere else, but it’d be a minor miracle if it doesn’t spread to some of the other big mining towns. Nothing for you fellows to worry about, of course. Your next stop’s Beaute, isn’t it? You’ll be fine there. Different sort of place altogether.” He paused, then shot a shy glance at Addo. “I believe I have the honour of dining with the son of General Carnufex,” he said.

Addo looked up and nodded glumly. “Adulescentulus Carnufex,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

“I studied your father’s campaigns at the military college,” Baudila said. “And my elder brother fought against him in the Hook River campaign.” He made it sound like they’d been at school together. “Absolutely remarkable tactical mind, my brother always said.”

They noted the past tense, but nobody said anything. “He speaks very highly of your people,” Addo said awkwardly. “He told me once he was only ever scared of two things in his entire life, and one of them was the Imperial heavy cavalry.”

Baudila looked delighted. “And the other thing?”

“My mother,” Addo replied. Baudila thought that was a great joke. He wanted to discuss some of the finer points of the Verjan Delta campaign, but Addo politely declined. “I’m the civilian of the family, I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m deplorably ignorant when it comes to my father’s battles. I’m sure you know a great deal more about them than I do.”

Later, when Addo was shown up to his room (on the third floor; the torso of a gigantic statue rose up through the floorboards and disappeared into the ceiling, suggesting that when they’d divided the upper space into storeys, they’d been unwilling or unable to demolish it and had built round it instead), he found a book on his pillow:
Inguiomer’s Commentaries on the Campaigns of Carnufex of Scheria, Vols I–IV
. He sighed, and put it carefully on the floor.

Breakfast in the guardroom, a small space with a low ceiling. The room was crowded with tables and chairs, and three of the walls were covered by racks of spears, their blades polished, their cornelwood shafts shining faintly with newly applied oil. On the fourth wall was a mural, in a totally different style to the frescoes and mosaics that they’d seen elsewhere. The colours were startlingly bright against a white background, the style was crude but vigorous, and the title (painted in foot-high letters across the top) was
The Glorious Victory of Shinnath 15/7 1435
AUC
. It was a battle, mostly. On the left, a huge army of red and blue men, sticks for arms and legs, bobbles for heads, marched towards a blue wavy line, presumably a river. The same wavy line was repeated in the middle, where the red and blue stick men were beating the hell out of a small group of green and orange stick men. On the right, the red-and-blues escorted a long column of green-and-oranges to a grey box, some kind of building, and cut off their heads. Beside the pyramid of heads on the far right, in tiny gold cursive script:
Eternal Victory to Glorious Permia and Death to the Scherians
.

“Good morning,” Baudila said, beaming at them. “I hope you slept well.”

“Very well, thank you,” Phrantzes said, deliberately not looking at the painting. He was trying to position himself so as to block Suidas’ view of the wall, but he was too small and the wall was too big. Iseutz was looking straight at the plate of sausages on the table in front of her.

“Sit down, please,” Baudila said. “I’m afraid there’s only wine or goat’s milk to drink. You simply can’t get fruit juice here, and the water’s not worth the risk.”

They sat down. Suidas was looking at the painting and frowning. Addo said, “Excuse me, but is that a Stiban Urosh?”

Baudila nodded cheerfully. “He was stationed here, during the War,” he said. “Do you like it?”

“My father collects Urosh,” Addo replied. “We’ve got a lot of them at home, so I sort of grew up with them.”

“Really.” Baudila was impressed. “I didn’t think the Naive school was particularly well known outside Permia.”

“Actually,” Addo said, “I believe he’s got the companion piece to this one. Shinnath, but from right to left. He’d love this.”

Suidas laughed. Giraut asked, “Are they valuable? These paintings you’re talking about.”

“Back in the Empire, I believe they’re seriously underappreciated,” Baudila said. “But recently there’s been an increasing level of interest in the Naives. I was lucky enough to acquire a small Brenna myself not long ago. In, say, fifteen or twenty years’ time …”

“Our colour sergeant lost a leg at Shinnath,” Suidas said.

“My father was a young cavalry subaltern,” Addo said. “But his side of the army wasn’t in the heavy fighting. It was the left who broke and ran.”

Phrantzes cleared his throat. “I was wondering,” he said. “Is there any chance we could borrow a room here, to practise in? Only, since we’re going to be here for the next couple of days …”

Baudila beamed at him. “I was just going to talk to you about that,” he said. “My men and I are – well, enthusiastic amateurs is the best we can say for ourselves, nowhere near good enough to give you a fight, naturally. But if you felt like it, and if it’d be any help with your training programme, we’d be delighted to offer ourselves as sparring partners.” He hesitated, then added quickly, “Of course, if you’d rather not, we’d quite understand.”