Colours in the Steel (32 page)

Well; that was why he’d got involved at the start. He’d certainly achieved that objective, but none of that seemed to matter quite as much as it did. No doubt about it, on one level there was an intellectual fascination to the business that intrigued him enormously; at times he’d rediscovered the fierce excitement he’d felt as an enthusiastic young student, revelling in strange and bewitching concepts. And no false modesty, please; he and Alexius had stumbled on a whole new aspect of the Principle, an area that hadn’t been tamed and trampled flat by generations of meticulous scholars intent on scratching out every last flake of significance. Rather, they were like two men shipwrecked on an entirely unknown continent; everything they came across was new and unknown, which they could spend a lifetime studying if they weren’t so entirely preoccupied with staying alive and somehow getting home again.

That was the point, Gannadius admitted to himself; most of all, he wanted it to be over and done with, because deep down he was afraid. He was luckier than his colleague, because he wasn’t the one directly threatened. It was Alexius who had fallen ill and now could hardly walk, and despite his best endeavours Gannadius desperately wanted to save him, if he could. He could rationalise it by arguing that if Alexius died too soon, he’d never have an opportunity to cash in all that goodwill and obligation, he wouldn’t be guaranteed the succession. That was still part of it, he supposed, because he did still want to be Patriarch, one day, in the fullness of time.

Maybe it’s just because I like the man. Well, I do. But that’s still not all of it. There’s something important in all this, and I need to know what it is
.

Which made it more than usually aggravating to be stuck behind a table pushing a pile of counters around when he wanted to be in the chapter house, listening to the news and trying to work out what the connection between the Alexius-Loredan business and this new threat to the city might be. There was one; there had to be one, although for the life of him he couldn’t work out what it might be. There was something, some spitefully oblique clue, in that strange dream of Alexius’ he’d inadvertently wandered into; the clouds of dust becoming sails, that confounded pest of an Island girl and something about Loredan having a brother. Alexius hadn’t been able to get anything useful out of him (
I should have gone with him and asked the man myself; Alexius is too emotionally involved with all this to be left to investigate on his own
), but his description of the advocate’s manner when the subject was raised convinced him that the brother had something important to do with all this. Writing it all down to coincidence would be thoroughly poor book-keeping.

Talking of which—He double-checked, dipped his pen in the ink and wrote in the total receipts: twenty-nine thousand and ninety-seven gold units, a disturbingly large sum to have to account for. (
And what possible justification can there be for a contemplative order raking in thirty thousand smilers, let alone spending them . . .?
) Then he braced himself for the expenditure accounts, which were fiddly, awkwardly recorded and most likely wrong, not to mention being written up in Brother Pelagius’ unspeakable handwriting. It was enough to put a man off positions of authority for life.

 

Twelve and three-quarters on smoked fish for a week; he was going to get asked about that, sure as anything, and he didn’t even like smoked fish. And if the auditors didn’t raise hell over seven and three-quarters for three napkin rings, he would. It was high time his brothers in science were made to understand that membership of the Order wasn’t to be construed as a licence to ape the follies of the nobility. It’d be different if they were his napkin rings, but they weren’t. He splodged a dot in the margin and made a note to shout at somebody when he had a moment to spare.

 

That was rather more like it, unless of course it was simply Pelagius’ mistake for boots. He tried to recall what the brother provisioner wore on his feet; he’d noticed more than one of the brothers hobbling around the place in the latest long-toed, brightly coloured fashion footwear. If they had any sense they’d stick to sandals until the audit was well and truly finished with for the year.

He carried on down the page, right hand tracing the column of figures, left hand laying out the counters. Most of these small, fiddling entries he could do in his head, only bothering to carry forward the subtotals for each week to the main calculation on the counting board. Some of the entries he could clearly remember; for example—

 

—which commemorated the nasty bout of food poisoning when the cook experimented with those devilishly expensive imported mushrooms; closely followed by—

 

 

—an entry which might just be taken as evidence that Pelagius had a sense of humour. Gannadius groaned softly, remembering the mushrooms, and moved on down the page.

 

Arrowheads? What in blazes did they want with five smilers’ worth of arrowheads? Frowning, he looked across at the date of the entry. Last week. Well, yes. It did make some sort of sense. The City Academy, like most of the city’s institutions, was responsible for the payment and outfitting of a company of the guard. So; arrowheads. Just so long as nobody expected
him
to dress up in steel knitting and tramp up and down the walls in the pouring rain.

Gannadius shivered, wondering what was going on in the chapter house, where he ought to have been instead of crouching here doing sums. Yesterday the Prefect had announced that Bardas Loredan’s expeditionary force would be ready in three days’ time, and that he felt sure that firm pre-emptive action would see an end to the matter. The Prefect had sounded confident; but then, he always did. Loredan himself had looked depressed, rebellious, embarrassed and scared. Being entirely ignorant of such things, Gannadius didn’t know how to interpret that; for all he knew, that was exactly how a responsible commander should look on the eve of a major expedition. It stood to reason, Gannadius argued to himself, that anybody who wanted to lead an army probably shouldn’t be allowed to for that very reason.

These and similar reflections occupied his mind so effectively that he was through the expenditures almost before he knew it. Now all he had to do was subtract the expenditure total from the receipts total and be left with the figure for cash in hand, and he could call the job done and go to bed. He swept off the counters, re-drew the lines an set out the numbers. It would be so immensely gratifying if, just for once in his life, the blasted thing worked out first time.

It didn’t, needless to say; and for the next two and a half hours Gannadius forgot all about the Patriarch, Bardas Loredan and the army, the barbarian hordes and the antisocial by-products of philosophy while he ground his way through both sets of figures and compelled them to agree, like a mother forcibly reconciling her warring children. As he pinched out the lamp and rolled into bed, he spared one last thought for his sadly afflicted colleague and fellow-discoverer; then a great surge of weariness swept over him, he yawned and fell asleep.

 

The scouts found Temrai supervising the packing up of the first consignment of trebuchet parts. The trebuchets had proved easier to build than the torsion engines, but their sheer size and weight was causing an entirely new class of problems, to which Temrai was too tired and drained to find immediate solutions.

‘Now what?’ he said, as a man appeared behind his shoulder, just as he was about to eat something for the first time in twenty-four hours. ‘Look, if it’s something you can possibly deal with yourselves...’

‘Message from the scouting party.’ The man turned out to be Hedasai, until recently ex-officio commander of the duck-hunters. Now that there were no gullible ducks left anywhere within a week’s ride, he’d been reassigned to lookout duties. It occurred to Temrai that Hedasai shouldn’t be there.

‘Well?’

Hedasai paused for a moment before answering. ‘We think you should come and take a look for yourself. It could be trouble.’