Venart couldn’t think of anything to say to that, and while he was recovering Athli asked after Vetriz. He closed his eyes for a moment. One good thing about the endless aggravations of doing business on Scona was that they could be made to occupy his full attention and keep his mind off other things.
‘She’s in trouble,’ he said. ‘Very bad trouble.’
‘Oh.’ Athli stopped walking. ‘What kind of trouble?’
Venart made a despairing gesture. ‘That’s the worst part of it, almost. I don’t
know
. As far as I can tell, it’s something to do with Patriarch Alexius, magic and Colonel Loredan. But as for trying to make sense of it all—’
‘Colonel Loredan,’ Athli interrupted. ‘You mean Gorgas Loredan.’
‘No, Bardas. You know,
your
Bardas. Him you used to work for. If you remember, he’s the Director’s brother, but they don’t get on. It’s all mixed up with some stuff about Perimadeia, but I couldn’t follow it.’
‘What’s Bardas Loredan got to do with it?’ Athli asked quietly.
‘Like I said,’ Venart replied, ‘it all went way above my head. At first, it looked like Triz and I had been arrested; then it seemed the Director wanted her help with something, and then Triz said it was all right, she wanted to stay and do whatever it is the Director wants her to. And here I am, worried out of my head about her - are you listening?’
‘What? Yes, of course I’m listening. Look, let’s get that drink and you can tell me all about it, right from the beginning. You never know, I might be able to help.’
Venart thought for a moment. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘My mind’s a complete blank, I’m afraid, so if you can suggest something, or make sense of what’s going on, that’d be wonderful. Gods, I wish we’d never come here,’ he added savagely. ‘This is the most awful place I’ve ever been in my entire life. If only we can get away and make it safely back to the Island—’
‘Yes,’ Athli said impatiently, ‘all
right
. Look, there’s a wine shop on the corner, we’ll go there. And for pity’s sake, pull yourself together and start again at the
beginning
.’
‘Six quarters,’ the old man repeated. ‘Take it or leave it.’
Bardas Loredan looked at the eel, then at the old man, then back at the eel. Pare off the man’s limbs and there’d be a strong resemblance. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but on balance I think I’d rather starve. You can’t get food poisoning from starvation.’
The old man blinked. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing else.’
‘That’s crazy,’ Bardas replied. ‘A bunch of Shastel soldiers roam about the island for a couple of days and smash up some villages, and suddenly there’s nothing to eat on the whole of Scona?’
‘Six quarters. Take it or leave it.’
‘Four.’
The old man didn’t say anything. He had a knack of sitting perfectly still, like a lizard.
‘Five,’ Bardas said. ‘And that’s just because if I don’t buy it you might eat it yourself, and I don’t want your death on my conscience.’
‘Six quarters. Take it—’
‘Oh, for gods’ sakes.’ Bardas fumbled in his pocket and produced the money. The old man tucked the eel under the crook of his knee while he held the coins up to the light. Five of them he reluctantly passed after a thorough inspection. The sixth he laid on a flat stone beside him, fished a chisel and a small hammer out of his pocket and cut into the coin on the edge of the rim. Then he held it up again and moved it about in the sunlight until the nick he’d just cut caught the light and sparkled. He clicked his tongue and handed it back.
‘Plated,’ he said.
Bardas looked for himself. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘How the hell did you spot that?’
The old man looked at him. Bardas produced another coin, which passed muster. The old man lifted his knee and handed over the eel.
‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ he croaked.
Bardas found the boy, who was sitting in the village square beside the well, eating an apple. ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.
‘Old woman gave it to me,’ the boy replied with his mouth full. ‘Want some?’
‘What? Oh, no, you carry on,’ Bardas said, looking wistfully at the apple. ‘Never could stand the things. Give me heartburn. Here’s supper, look.’
The boy took one look at the eel and backed away a little. ‘I’m not eating that,’ he said. ‘It’s gross.’
‘Don’t be stupid, it’s a perfectly good eel. Delicacy where I come from.’
‘Bet you’re glad you left, then.’
‘It’s this,’ Bardas said with his last drop of patience, ‘or I give you a bow and one arrow and you can go bunny-bashing. Your choice. No obligation.’
The boy looked at the eel and swallowed. ‘It might be all right,’ he said, ‘with some sage and chives and a lot of pepper.’
‘No sage. No chives. Certainly no pepper. If you’d rather have rabbit,’ he added, ‘again,’ he stressed, ‘then be my guest. We haven’t had it stewed yet, have we?’
‘Day before yesterday,’ the boy replied sullenly. ‘All right, we’ll have your rotten eel. But tomorrow we go into Town and buy some bread, all right?’
Bardas shook his head. ‘No. I’ve told you, I don’t like it there. We’ll try up around Seusa, there’s bound to be food out that way. Remember the time we made a delivery up there and had those doughnuts?’
The boy studied him carefully. ‘Why don’t you want to go to Scona?’ he said. ‘It’s much nearer than Seusa and there really is food there. And we won’t be ripped off like we’re being in the villages.’
‘I don’t like it there,’ Bardas repeated.
‘Why not?’
‘Because. Now jump in the cart and let’s go home before it gets dark.’
Bardas was being over-optimistic. By the time they got back it was pitch black and starless, and the boy had to walk in front of the cart with a lantern for the last two miles of the journey. When they reached the top of the lane, the boy stopped dead.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘There’s a light in the house,’ the boy called back.
Bardas thought for a moment, then jumped down and handed the reins to the boy. ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘If you see anyone coming who isn’t me, run for it back to that old tower we were in and wait there a day.’ He reached in his pocket and pulled out a purse. ‘Don’t lose this, for gods’ sakes. There’s enough there to buy a passage to the Island. Find a woman called Athli Zeuxis and say I sent you. All right?’
The boy stared at him, his eyes wide with terror. ‘What’s happening?’ he said. ‘If it’s something bad, why don’t we both just go away and hide till they’ve gone?’
Bardas shrugged. ‘You remember my brother sent some men to round us up and bring us in?’ he said.
The boy nodded. ‘You bashed them,’ he said.
‘That’s right. Well, figure it out for yourself. Whoever that is waiting for us down there, he doesn’t seem bothered about letting us know he’s here. I think that rules out thieves, or the odd stray halberdier. I don’t think it’s more of my brother’s soldiers, for the same reason. So, who else is left? A big party of halberdiers, possibly; and if so, I’ll see the sentries and come right back. But I don’t think so, If they’re wandering about openly and lighting fires, we’d have heard about them by now, with all the travelling round we’ve been doing. I think I know who that is.’
‘Your brother?’
Bardas nodded. ‘Or it could be someone completely harmless, I don’t know. Anyway, you wait here, and remember - Athli Zeuxis, on the Island. You got that?’
‘Yes,’ the boy replied. ‘Can’t I come with you?’
‘No. Stay here. Pay attention.’ He reached into the cart and took out the short heavily recurved ninety-pounder and the quiver of short reed arrows, looked at them and put them back. ‘The hell with it,’ he said, ‘I can’t shoot straight in broad daylight, let alone the pitch dark. Serves me right, I suppose.’
He walked quietly along the side of the barn as far as the woodshed. Fortunately, he knew everything there was to know about the woodshed door, including the precise way to lift it to stop the hinge squeaking. It was impossible to see anything in there, but he was able to find what he was looking for by feel: a hatchet-head fitted to a felling-axe handle, hanging from a strap from a hook in the centre beam. It was a weapon in the way rabbit was food; a significant improvement on nothing at all.
Why he felt so angry he didn’t know. If it was Gorgas in there, he was glad he’d had some warning. The way he was feeling right now, he’d have gone for him straight away, without even thinking about it, and since Gorgas was most probably better armed than he was, that would have been a bad mistake. The advance notice hadn’t changed how he felt; time to think about it had given him an opportunity to choose some semblance of a weapon, but it hadn’t cooled his temper. And that was odd. He’d spent so many years killing for money that he couldn’t imagine himself ever killing for free again. He hadn’t felt this way when he first came to Scona and was confronted with Gorgas and Niessa. He’d even managed to be civil to them both while making it clear that he wanted to be as far away from them as the cramped geography of the island would permit. He hadn’t enjoyed the interview and it had been hard work being in the same place with them, but he hadn’t felt this terrific urge to see their blood.
Since then, nothing in particular had happened. They’d left him alone, just as he’d asked. Once he’d turned away a few messengers with gifts of money and clothes and the like, Gorgas had taken the hint and stopped trying. Recently Bardas had been able to go days at a time without feeling their presence in this enclosed space they owned. He’d worked hard, very hard, at shutting them out of this mind; and although he knew it was all entirely artificial, this pretence that he was a simple artisan making a satisfactory living by honest toil, that his bows were of such exceptional quality that the procurement officers paid a premium for them and took whatever he could produce, nevertheless it was an illusion that he believed he could maintain for a while yet (as his mind slowly took a set, like a bow left strung and put away, until the wood forgets the tension in the back and the belly and follows the string in a permanent bend), perhaps even indefinitely. He wondered about the physics of it, and considered the old saying in his trade that a bow at full draw is nine-tenths broken. He concluded that all he wanted to do now was break, and the hell with everything; but why this should be he couldn’t quite grasp. Perhaps it was nothing more than this heavy-handed reminder of how shallow the illusion was, as simple as that; the act of walking into his home and lighting a fire. In Perimadeia, where houses quite often went without an owner (because someone had died childless and without family, or had gone abroad and not come back) it was the law that ownership was asserted by treating the property in some way as if one owned it - moving in furniture, whitewashing the walls, cleaning the curtains or even something as simple and ordinary as lighting a fire in the hearth. He’d have taken it without a word from a couple of stray Shastel halberdiers, even if they’d burnt the place down, because they’d have been passing through and wouldn’t have been asserting ownership. Gorgas lighting a fire in his grate was another matter entirely; that made it a legal issue, and he’d spent long enough in the lawcourts of the City to know what to do about that.
Or it could just be a couple of burglars. Gods, I hope so
.
He knew which shutter-bolt was loose, fastened into rotten timber; the axe-handle between shutter and window-frame as a lever, and a gentle but insistent application of pressure, to rip the bolts through the crumbling wood without making a noise.
I’d have made a good burglar myself; here I am, breaking in. Already I’m treating it as another man’s house
. Once he’d got the shutter loose he paused and counted to twenty before slowly swinging it open, then another twenty before he carefully stepped though and into the pitch-dark back pantry. For all his care and attention to detail, he’d forgotten something; he remembered it just in time, when something dry and textured like skin batted him gently in the face. Two of those damned ubiquitous rabbits, skinned and hung to drain out the blood into a pudding-bowl placed under them on the flagstones; he let his breath out slowly, calmed himself down, and took a moment to remember exactly where the door-latch was, and where he’d put the bowls. Treading rabbit-blood footprints through his own house (
yes, my house, damn it
) would only serve to add another level of aggravation.
Another count of twenty after he opened the door an inch or so. The pale orange light was coming from the main hearth, no question about that. He was starting to feel horribly uncomfortable, as if the house had betrayed him somehow; as if it had been Gorgas’ paid spy ever since he first came here, and he’d only just realised it. He felt as if he was sneaking up on his wife and her lover, listening to them as he edged down the dark passageway. No pretence of trying to make himself calm down, not now that he could practically smell his brother here, like unfamiliar hair-oil on a pillow. All he could feel was the urgent physical need to swing the little axe, to split bone like splitting a newly felled tree (every tree will split if only you know where to hit, where to find the fault-line); it was something he couldn’t put away in his mind, insistent and distasteful like a full bladder or an upset stomach, something he’d rather not do but absolutely had to.
And then we’ll be all square
, he reflected,
I’ll finally be on the same level as him, though perhaps without his minor plea of expediency. Or he’ll get me and be that much nearer the full set. Whatever. The outcome really doesn’t bother me; it’s getting it over with that matters
.
Indeed. He relaxed, stood up straight, took a deep breath. No earthly reason why he should skulk about in his own house. He put his left hand against the dividing door and pushed.
Gorgas was sitting on a stool in front of the fire, with his back to him; a pair of broad shoulders hunched a little and the back of a bald head. He turned round and stood up in the same movement - there had always been a sort of grace about the way Gorgas moved; he’d never been clumsy or awkward, even as a boy - and stepped a little to one side, so that the light of the fire shone in his face.