Sharps (47 page)

Nobody spoke. Suidas was grinning, Phrantzes was gazing at his shoes, Giraut was waiting for someone else to say something, and Addo was looking at her with a fine blend of compassion, embarrassment and irritation on his face. She shrugged. “I guess not,” she said. “In which case, screw the lot of you. You’re all stupid.”

Addo opened his mouth, and Giraut thought: he’s about to try and explain, which is probably the worst thing he could do, bar laughing, like Suidas is doing. But evidently he thought better of it. He shook his head and said, “I’m sorry,” and Giraut guessed it wasn’t the first time he’d had to do something like that. Hadn’t he had a girl back home, a girl he’d lost or who’d dumped him, shortly before he came away? He couldn’t remember, and naturally he couldn’t ask.

“You’re sorry,” Iseutz repeated. “Fine. That’s an enormously huge lot of help, Addo. I thought you might be marginally less stupid than the others, but obviously I was wrong. Oh well.”

Suidas smiled at her. “Have you finished?”

“For now.”

“Good.” He got rid of the smile and turned towards the others. “Now, as far as I can remember from the map, Luzir’s no more than half a day’s drive on the road from here, but obviously we can’t do that. I say we dump the coach and walk. The coach can’t go over the rough or outrun them anywhere, and it’s easier to hide if you’re on foot. Agreed?”

He was looking at Addo. Phrantzes said, “Agreed. I mean, it makes sense, I can see that.” Suidas turned his head towards Giraut, who nodded and looked away. “Addo,” Suidas said. “What do you think?”

“I’d rather not ditch the coach just yet,” Addo replied slowly. “I don’t like walking, and these boots are rubbing my heels.”

“Addo …”

“We can’t afford to waste time,” Addo said sharply. “We’ve got to eat and drink, for one thing. Look at it, will you? Does that look to you like country you can live off? I don’t think so. Also, we need to get to Luzir before the civil war starts in earnest. I’m not saying it’ll be safe for us there, but it’s got to be better than out in the open. You might be able to cope out there, Suidas, you’re a soldier, you’ve done this stuff before. The rest of us simply aren’t up to it. Besides,” he added, softening his voice a little, “we’re not a military unit or a government mission, we’re just four men and a girl in a coach. We don’t look anything like a target. Why would either side waste their time bothering us?”

“Because that’s what happens,” Suidas said. “I should know, I’ve done it. I’ve beaten up and killed civilians, just because I could. Force of habit, I guess,” he added, as Iseutz stared at him. “Once you start killing Permians, it can get hard to stop. And there’s always the chance their boots might fit you. Believe me, Addo, you really don’t want to get caught on the road when there’s people like me about.”

“I said our chances would be better if we stuck with the coach,” Addo said. “I didn’t say they were good. We’re not you, we can’t march for six days on an empty stomach. And if we do meet soldiers on the road, there’s every chance they’d be Imperials, and they don’t do the bad stuff. Do they?”

Suidas shrugged. “Not if there’s an officer watching, probably not. But you saw what happened to the Blueskins back there. Even if you meet some and they take you in, they can’t protect you, not if the Aram Chantat are on the loose. See sense, for crying out loud. We both know the others’ll do what you say, because you’re the fucking Irrigator’s kid. Stop pissing around and let’s get going.”

“Half a day,” Addo said. “You said it yourself, we’re just half a day from Luzir on this road. How long’s it going to take to walk? Three days? Four?”

“Cavalry thinking,” Suidas said, making it sound like the worst insult possible. “Get your head down and charge the massed archers. Well, you can if you like. I’ll see you in Luzir, if you make it.”

He halted the coach, threw the reins to Addo and jumped down. “Hold on,” Addo said, “I can’t drive this thing.”

“Learn,” Suidas called back over his shoulder. He was walking quickly, his legs stiff. “A clever boy like you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

“Addo,” Iseutz wailed, but he sat perfectly still, watching Suidas’ back, until he was just a dot against the grey rocks, moving slowly and steadily towards the horizon, a long, low range of hills, one of which looked rather like an upturned bucket. “Damn,” Addo said. Then, quite expertly, he urged the horses into a trot.

“I simply don’t understand you,” Iseutz said, for the tenth time. “I can’t believe you just let him walk off like that.”

Addo had given up replying, which only seemed to make it worse. He fixed his eyes on the road ahead, which was climbing slowly up a broad, slow escarpment. On the other side of the ridge, he devoutly hoped, was Luzir Beal.

It was three hours since Suidas had walked away, and the road had been completely empty. Hardly surprising, since people don’t generally tend to go about their usual business in the early stages of a civil war; they’d seen a few dust clouds in the distance, but none of them had been coming their way. The horses had behaved themselves, the road was straight and well maintained, the sun was shining. Welcome to beautiful Permia.

“We’ve got to go back,” Iseutz said.

“Will you for God’s sake please shut up?” It was the first time Phrantzes had said anything for a very long time, and the words seemed to break out of him against his will. “I’m sorry, but you know as well as I do we can’t go back. It’d be madness.”

“Actually, she’s right.” Addo’s voice sounded curiously detached, as though he was a spectator offering a commentary. “I should’ve gone after him, and we ought to have turned back. Unfortunately, I’ve left it rather too long. I don’t suppose we’d be able to find him now. It’s my fault. I made the wrong decision. I take full responsibility.”

“Addo …” Whatever she’d been about to say, she thought better of it, or decided it was no longer necessary. She slumped back in her seat, just as the coach reached the top of the slope.

“Well,” Addo said, “we’re here.”

Below them, laid out like a model in a sandbox, was a city. It was perfectly, unnaturally square, surrounded on all four sides by a bigger square of green, neatly subdivided into smaller squares bordered by straight brown roads. Tzimisces, if he’d been there, would have told them about Imperial grid-plan modular construction, and how Luzir was the best example of it outside the home provinces. To Giraut it looked unreal, like a painting, the backdrop for a play. Even the straight, regularly spaced lines of the irrigation canals were a bright, cheerful blue. If anything as untidy as people was permitted down there, they’d have to be small clay figures, beautifully painted – model citizens, he thought, and tried not to smile – carefully positioned to set off the architectural features, illustrating the size of the buildings. It occurred to him to wonder if Flos Verjan had looked like that, from the Irrigator’s vantage point, just before he opened the sluices.

“That’s Luzir?” Phrantzes said nervously. “You’re sure?”

“Nowhere else it could be,” Addo said. He sounded exhausted. “More by luck than judgement and two days late, but we made it.”

“You made it.” Iseutz was sitting up, looking at the city. “You got us here, and all I’ve done is whine at you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Addo said. “You were right and I was wrong. I shouldn’t have lost my nerve.” He shook his head. “Well,” he said, “I suppose we’d better go and let them know we’re here. I hope they’ll be pleased to see us.”

They were. Not at first: three bloodstained, wild-looking men and a snake-haired girl in a rich man’s coach rolling into town covered in dust from the direction of the troubles drew brief, hostile stares from the country people in the perfectly square fields, and they had an awkward moment when they reached the city gate and the Blueskin guards quite obviously didn’t believe them; fortunately, they sent for the duty officer, who’d been issued with a description of the missing Scherian touring party. It was, of course, wildly inaccurate – they’d got Addo’s height and eye colour wrong, Phrantzes wasn’t mentioned at all and Iseutz was supposed to be a man. But the Permian in charge of gate tolls was a fencing fan, who’d recently been dividing his time between rereading accounts of the match at Joiauz and bewailing the cancellation of the Luzir fixture. He vouched for them personally, swept Giraut up in his arms and kissed him on both cheeks (he was nearest) and took them off to his lodgings on the top floor of the gatehouse. For a while, Giraut was convinced he was going to keep them for his very own; but his sense of civic duty must have prevailed, because he sent a runner to the Guild house to let the Master know the Scherians had arrived. Then he ran a sort of controlled experiment to see how many honey cakes, almond biscuits and cream-cheese-with-chives-in-little-choux-pastry-horns he could stuff down their throats before the official welcoming committee arrived.

They came in a closed coach, the windows blacked out with shutters, and footmen lined up to make a human wall to keep the honoured guests from being seen. “You’ve no idea,” the Master’s assistant told them, as the coach started to roll through the broad streets. “When we got word you’d been trapped in Beaute and weren’t coming, we nearly had a riot on our hands. Eighteen thousand tickets we’ve sold. They had me in up at the Prefecture. They were deciding which roads to close off, if things got nasty.”

It was strange and rather unnerving to see streets filled with people again. Giraut couldn’t resist pulling back a corner of the shutter, but the Master’s assistant asked him not to. “As soon as word gets around you’ve finally shown up, it’s going to be chaos out there,” he said. “I had to promise the Prefect faithfully that we’d get you safely under cover before we broke the news.”

Addo cleared his throat. “While we’re on the subject of public order,” he said.

The Master’s assistant made a wide, airy gesture. “Oh, nothing like that here, I can promise you that. We’re all good Optimates in Luzir. No, you’re as safe as houses here. Well, so long as nobody sees you or finds out who you are, of course, otherwise you’d be hugged to death in five seconds flat.”

“Optimates?” Iseutz said.

The Master’s assistant hesitated and looked uncomfortable; it’s because she’s a girl, Giraut realised, presumably he’s not supposed to talk to strange women. “The Optimate party,” he said. “Politics. There’s Optimates and the KKA. We’re Optimates, where you’ve just come from is bedrock KKA country. That’s why they’ve had all that trouble.” He made it sound like a rather nasty disease, deliberately contracted. “But you don’t want to bother with all that. Fencing’s much bigger than politics in Luzir.” He grinned. “That’s why fencers are banned from standing in municipal elections, otherwise they’d be running the city. Almost certainly make a better job of it than the bunch of dead-heads we’ve got on the Board of Guardians right now, but that’s not saying much. Don’t repeat that,” he added. “As a Guild officer I’ve got to be completely impartial, of course.”

To make conversation, Giraut asked, “What does KKA stand for?”

“
Kaloi kai agathoi
,” the Master’s assistant replied, “that’s old Eastern Imperial for ‘the beautiful and the good’. Which is what Optimate means in old Western Imperial. Don’t ask,” he added, “it’s complicated. But basically, we hate them and they hate us. Only thing that ever kept this country together was the War. And fencing, of course, except that tends to split down party lines too. Luckily, we’ve got all the money, what there is of it. Right, we’re here.” The coach was slowing down. “Now, I’ll take you straight to the Calidarium. Constant hot water, day and night. I imagine you’d all like a nice hot bath,” he said, as Iseutz made a faint moaning noise.

There was a letter on top of the pile of fresh clean clothes waiting for Phrantzes in his room. He recognised the handwriting. He crossed the room in three long strides, snatched it up and froze. His hands were shaking so much he could hardly open it.

Sphagia to her Jilem, greetings
.

They’ve let me go. I can hardly believe it. They told me I was
going to have to spend the rest of my life in that place. But this morning the prioress came just after dawn prayers and told me, and now I’m back home, in our house
.

I’m fine. Well, I think I’ve lost a stone and they cut off my hair – I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t do anything. It’ll grow back, I promise. I’ve done nothing but eat since I got home, I’d forgotten what real food tastes like. A horrible little man came round from the government – he said who he was but I didn’t take it in – and he brought me thirty nomismata, in a little linen bag. He didn’t say what it was for, just Sign here, so I did. Anyway, the point is, I’m fine, I’m safe and I’m all right for money. So please don’t worry about me
.

They told me you were fine too and everything’s going really well. Are you, and is it? If you can possibly send a letter, please write soon. I miss you
.

He tried to sit down, missed the bed and landed on the floor. He didn’t move. It was like waking up out of a bad dream. He tried to think about Suidas, the man he’d made up his mind to kill, in cold blood. Now the idea seemed absurd; and besides, Suidas had gone, Tzimisces had gone, the problem had dissolved in light and gone away, like those insuperable worries that gnaw at you in the early hours of the morning and seem so ridiculous when you remember them in daylight. He was in Luzir Beal, a civilised city, calm, under control and safe. In a day or so they’d have the fencing match, after which they’d go home. Sphagia was safe, he’d done his job and therefore earned his free pardon, and even if there was another war he was too old to be made to fight. Against his expectations, against all the odds he’d made it and come through.

He was too weak to stand up but it didn’t matter. He was perfectly happy kneeling on the floor for a while.

Later, he tried to tell them what he’d seen: the Aram Chantat slaughtering the Blueskins, the man whose coach they’d taken, all of it. They listened, but he got the impression they didn’t believe him but were too polite to say so.