Blue and Gold (4 page)

I got four yards
down the catwalk when the blast hit. Shook me off my feet; I landed painfully
on my outstretched hands and one knee, only just kept myself from sliding off
the catwalk and getting splatted. I dragged myself into a ball and curled up
under the rampart.

I counted. On
five, a dog started barking, about a hundred yards away. Then I heard the first
running footsteps, and got my head down. Even if someone tripped over me in the
dark, they wouldn’t think twice about a drunk hunkered down out of the wind in
the shelter of the rampart, and they wouldn’t stop to arrest him for vagrancy,
not when there were enemies loose in the City, blowing holes in the walls. Four
or five watchmen did in fact run straight past me, but whether they noticed me
or not I couldn’t say. There was yelling and running, lights waving about,
doors slamming in the guardhouse. I stayed put and clung to my vagrant persona
like a drowning man clinging to driftwood. Even when the running around had
stopped, I stayed where I was till five o’clock, by the Priory bell. Then I got
up and hobbled back to the tannery.

*

A
wise man
once said that any human
being is capable of infinite achievement, so long as it’s not the work they’re
supposed to be doing. The
Dialogues
were a case in point. My thesis was
supposed to be a metalingual analysis of Eustatius’
On Various Matters;
I started out with a hypothesis I really and truly believed in
_;
and
it took me two years of diligent, painstaking work (during which time I was
working as a college porter, since I couldn’t afford the fees) to prove
conclusively that my hypothesis was wrong. Along the way, quite by accident, I
stumbled on some leads in a totally different field. I mulled them over while I
was lugging heavy trunks about and scraping vomit off the flagstones after
end-of-exams parties, and in a few idle moments I jotted down some stuff. That was
the
Dialogues.
When the time came to present my thesis, I realised that
it was going to be rather short—

*

Did Linguistic
Forms Materially Affect Eustatius’ Logical Structures in ‘On Various Matters?’
No.

*

—so I left Elpis
the night before I was due to appear before the examining board, leaving behind
my notes, some unpaid bills and an old pair of shoes I couldn’t cram into my
haversack. The shame, you see. Curious insight into the mind of my younger
self; I thought it less disgraceful to take up highway robbery than to admit to
my tutors that I’d just wasted two years of their time and my life.

Though I say it
myself as shouldn’t, I was a good robber. I thought about it carefully first,
rather than just plunging in at the deep end, which I gather is what most
robbers do. I spent a week walking the City, taking notes on watch patrol
routes and timings, lines of sight, direct routes from the big mercantile
houses to the major banks. I went to the Court archive and read transcripts of
hundreds of highway robbery trials, which gave me a pretty clear idea of where
most robbers went wrong (sixty-seven per cent of robbers are caught because
they start throwing money around in a suspicious manner; thirteen per cent
attack men carrying concealed weapons; six per cent rob the same courier in the
same place more than four times). I trained for two weeks at the School of
Defence in Haymarket, and spent another week picking fights in bars. Only then
did I sit down with a large sheet of paper, a map and a pair of compasses, and
plan out my first robbery. It went beautifully and netted me seventeen angels
thirty. I very nearly quit while I was ahead.

But Elpis isn’t a
big town, and there were too many people there who knew me, so I took the mail
coach to Paraprosdocia. Took me a month to get it mapped out and reconnoitred,
and what happened? Third time out, the sedan chair I robbed in Goosefair turned
out to be carrying the provost of my old college back at Elpis. I cleared out
the next day and got as far as Choris Seautou, where I banked my savings and
organised a bolthole for future use. Then I went back to Paraprosdocia and sent
a letter to my old college chum, prince Phocas, making him an offer I knew
would interest him. On reflection, I still believe it was the smart thing to
do; if the watch had got me, the Prefect would’ve strung me up before Phocas
knew anything about it, and I’d have been dead. Death or Phocas; a close call,
but on balance I reckon I made the sensible choice.

*

It was all
over town the next day. A certain
Saloninus, alchemist, scholar and gentleman thief, wanted for questioning in
connection with the death of the lady Eudoxia, had skipped town by the rather
drastic expedient of blowing a seven-foot hole in the City wall. It could only
have been Saloninus, they reckoned, because the only known explosive capable of
doing that much damage was ichor tonans (invented by the said Saloninus); only
five men in the world know how to make that stuff, and of those five men, four
were out of town at the time. According to a watch captain I overheard in a
barber’s shop, where
I
’d just got
a job sweeping up for three bits a day, the Prefect had sent a whole company of
light cavalry after this Saloninus, so there was no way he’d get far.
Meanwhile, the prince was absolutely livid, and had sent a squadron of
scuttlehats after the Prefect’s men, thereby implying he didn’t trust them to
do a proper job, an implication the watch captain clearly resented.

I managed to stick
it in the barber’s for three days, just to make sure the watch wasn’t still
looking for me in town. Then I mugged a slobbering-drunk Vesani merchant
outside the
Wisdom Temperance;
five angels twenty. Next morning, I
booked on the first mail coach to Choris Seautou. Piece of cake.

Goes without
saying, I didn’t get on the coach. I turned up at the stop, outside the Mail
Office, making sure the booking clerk, yard master and coachman all got a good
look at me; got in the coach and sat inside for quite some time, till it was
ready to leave; then quietly opened the door on the blind side, slipped out and
darted up that little alley that leads to the cheese warehouse; scaled the
wall, quickly across the yard, through the back gate into Cutlers’ Yard. Then I
went to the tannery, cleared out my stuff and hired a cellar under a
closed-down inn next to the old Instruction Theatre in Browngate. Sure enough,
a few days later, I overheard two off-duty scuttlehats in the
Chastity
Rewarded
telling someone they had a red-hot lead on Saloninus that put him
in Choris Seautou, and he’d be in custody inside of a week.

The trouble is,
when you get a reputation for being clever, you have to live up to it.

The cellar under
the inn was perfect for what I had to do. Money, of course, was my biggest
problem, followed by the dangers I’d have to run getting supplies. I really
didn’t want to do any more robberies. Even under ideal circumstances it’s a
horribly dangerous way of earning a living, and my background information, I
knew for a fact, was seriously out of date. Also, I don’t think it’s a very
nice way to behave. And, as the greatest living authority on ethical theory, I
guess I have a duty to set an example. But I needed money; not so much for food
and stuff, because I’ve learned the hard way how to do without it for prolonged
periods, but for supplies and equipment; my other difficulty. I thought long
and hard, but no flash of inspiration came. With great regret, I decided it was
time to cash in one of my last few remaining assets; namely, Professor
Laodicus.

*

Things are best
, but people can be
useful sometimes. Laodicus is a case in point. Back at Elpis, the second time I
was there, just after the
Dialogues
came out, I was the newly-appointed
lecturer in moral and ethical philosophy, and Laodicus was the scrawny,
tongue-tied, earnest student who doesn’t make friends and can’t seem to get a
handle on the course material. I was going through one of my recurrent
being-a-decent-human-being phases at the time, and I got Laodicus through
Preliminaries, albeit by the skin of his teeth. He was shaping up to be a
worthwhile student when my circumstances changed and I had to get out of town
in a hurry. Now, here he was at the Studium, professor of Major Arts, with a
keyring that gave him access to the petty cash and the store cupboard. In
Essay
on Ethical Theory
I argued strenuously against the
enlightened-self-interest view of altruism, dismissing it as thinly-veiled
mystical nonsense. Guess I was wrong about that, too.

I walked in
through the front gate of the Studium and nobody looked at me. This was because
everybody there who might possibly have recognised me knew I was in Choris
Seautou. I’d had a wash in a horse-trough and a shave in a barber’s shop, and I
was wearing a smart, quiet gown I’d lifted off a washing-line on the other side
of town. I asked at the porter’s lodge where I might find Professor Laodicus at
that time of day. Easy, they told me, he’ll be in the Old Library. I nodded my
thanks, which was what a distinguished visiting academic from the provinces
would do. It was a trifle stiff and cold, because of the handle of the axe
sticking into the inside of my thigh.

The Old Library at
the Studium is big. If you burnt it down and ploughed over the site, you could
grow enough grain there to feed a village. The philosophy section is the whole
of the second floor (up a tightly-coiled stone staircase that plays hell with
my vertigo}. It took me a while to track down Laodicus, but I recognised him
from twenty yards off. He’d lost his hair (he was thin on top at nineteen) and
puffed out round the middle, but his face was the same. Unnaturally so; as
though someone had flayed it off and sewn it onto a bald head attached to an
older, chubbier body.

He was standing
with his head bent over a book. I couldn’t resist. I walked up on him nice and
quiet, until I was directly behind his left shoulder, and said, “Hello,
Laodicus.”

Wasn’t the smart
thing to do. I could have triggered heart failure. As it was, he jumped about a
foot in the air and made a squealing noise, like six pigs at market. He looked
at me, mouth open and moving, no words coming out.

“Walk with me,” I
said.

One of those
people who’ll obey you instinctively if you use the right tone of voice. He
turned his head so he didn’t have to see me, and said, “What are you doing
here? Don’t you know—?”

“I’m not here,” I
said, smiling, as though we were sharing a pleasant memory. “I’m in Choris
Seautou.”

“You can’t stay
here.” His eyes were bulging, as though I’d put a cord round his neck and
pulled it tight. “If they find you here—”

“Don’t worry,” I
said. “You can get rid of me very quickly and easily. Where’s your office?”

“New Quad,” he
replied, then realised he shouldn’t have. “What do you want?”

“Keep going,” I
said. “And smile.”

I wish I hadn’t
told him to do that. He looked like one of the heads they hang up on Northgate,
after it’s been out in the sun for a week. “What do you—?”

“Shh.”

Down the back
stairs, out into South Quad, through the cloister to New, turn left. He had a
ground-floor set, which implied status. Didn’t lock his door, implying either
beautiful trust in his fellow men or rank carelessness. I shut the door and
slipped the bolt.

“You don’t seem
pleased to see me,” I said.

“You’re mad coming
here,” Laodicus said. “If they catch you here, it’ll ruin my career. I’ve already
had the prince’s men here, asking questions.”

I hadn’t
anticipated that, though I should’ve done. “Well, that’s fine,” I said.
“Obviously they believed you when you said you hadn’t heard from me, and
there’s no reason for them to come back. Now, listen. I need your help.”

He looked very
sad. “What—?”

I told him. He
stared at me, as though I’d just asked for his liver. “I can’t do that,” he
said. “It’d be stealing. If anyone found out I’d misappropriated supplies and
funds—”

I gave him my hurt
look. “In chapter seven, section five, paragraph nine of
Ethical Dilemmas,”
I said, “you argue that loyalty to a friend must always come before loyalty to
the State. You use the analogy of bricks in a wall; unless each brick bonds to
its neighbour, you say, it doesn’t matter how straight and level the rows are,
the base will never support the upper floors.” I smiled at him. “I used to take
the opposing view, but you changed my mind. You know, you really have come a
long way since your first year at Elpis.”

He gave me a
terrified look. “I can’t,” he said. “I’m too scared.”

“Nonsense.” I’d
already won the battle. “You’re confusing moral and physical courage. In
chapter nine, section two, paragraph four, you write—”

“All right.” One
of those born academics who’d rather have his teeth ripped out with pliers than
have his own words cited against him. “Stay here. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

I shook my head.
“You won’t be able to carry all that stuff on your own,” I pointed out. Which
was true. I, on the other hand, had two years as a porter and a succession of
heavy-lifting jobs during my bad years behind me. He couldn’t fault my logic.

*

Fact is, I
stumbled into alchemy by
accident, during my second spell at Elpis.
I
’d always been vaguely interested in it, but I was far too busy with my
prescribed studies and besides, I couldn’t afford the kit. Then I got to know
Euelpides, one of the research fellows. He was looking for an assistant. Pretty
soon, we’d exchanged roles; and when he retired, they offered me his job. I needed
the money.

Never hard, of
course, to attract research funding for alchemy. As long as people believe it’s
possible to turn base metal into gold (it isn’t), you’ll find rich men willing
to invest. So long as they were prepared to pay, I was happy to try and do the
impossible. Where I went wrong, of course, was falling in love with the
subject, about three months after I took the job.