Colours in the Steel (36 page)

‘Well, quite.’ Loredan grinned. ‘What’s the point in having all these wizards if they can’t even launch a few fireballs and turn the enemy into frogs? Makes you wonder whose side they’re on.’

‘I think the Prefect and the Lord Lieutenant are going to ask me that quite soon,’ Alexius said mournfully. ‘I’ve even started thinking that way myself, may I be forgiven. Thanks to my recent researches, I now know rather more about curses and the way they work. It occurs to me that if we had that girl from the Island here, the one we think might be a natural...’

Loredan held up his hands. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Not if you want me to leave this nice safe cell.’

‘I thought you didn’t believe in all that.’

‘I don’t,’ Loredan replied. ‘But there’s healthy agnosticism and there’s sitting up and begging for trouble. Not for the city, I mean. For you, personally. You look as if you died a week ago and they gave you to the apprentice embalmer to practise on.’

Alexius laughed; more appreciatively than the joke deserved. ‘That’s the nicest thing anybody’s said about me in a long time,’ he replied. ‘I must confess, I’ve felt better. But it’s all right,’ he added, with a slight grin, ‘because it’s just honest-to-goodness ordinary illness, not any more of those confounded side effects from - let’s say - our little adventure into the unknown. Ordinary illness doesn’t worry me so much.’

Loredan nodded. ‘The enemy you can see is the least of your problems. That was a favourite saying of my old commander, rest his vicious soul. It’s like the joke about the two men in the middle of the battlefield; one of them gets hit by an arrow and falls to the ground moaning. The other one takes a look at the fletchings on the arrow and says, ‘It’s all right, mate, it was one of ours.’ What’s that expression they have for it these days? Friendly fire?’

Alexius nodded. ‘That’s more or less the way I feel,’ he said. ‘Physical illness might not be much fun, but at least you don’t feel it’s out to get you, in the same way the other stuff did.’ He sighed. ‘I suppose you’d say it was a self-inflicted wound, and I should stop imagining things.’

‘No,’ Loredan replied, ‘because we’re going to be working together and I do still have a modicum of tact.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully before continuing. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I did give the matter a certain amount of thought, back when you first told me about it all. I still don’t believe in this all-pervading Principle of nature you people talk about - or at least I don’t
disbelieve
in it either, it just seems too wishy-washy to be of any importance...’

‘It is, usually,’ Alexius interrupted, smiling sadly. ‘Most of the time, in fact. All this business with curses and benedictions is just a minor and irrelevant by-product, like oak-apples on oak trees.’

Loredan nodded. ‘I’ll have to take your word on that,’ he said. ‘Another thing I don’t believe in, though, is coincidence; not on the grandiose scale we were getting back-along. I’m prepared to concede that
something
was going on; I just don’t reckon any of us had the faintest idea what it was.’

Alexius nodded his head. ‘There, my sceptical friend, I agree with you entirely,’ he said.

 

‘But why can’t I see him?’ Athli demanded for the sixth time. ‘I’m his clerk, he’s got a business to run. I’ve got students asking for their money back. If you’d care to explain to them why they can’t have the instruction they’ve paid for . . .’

The clerk frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but there are important matters of state involved; rather more important,’ he added unpleasantly, ‘than your colleague’s coaching practice. In fact, I would suggest that you refund any money you may be holding on account without further delay. I would think it highly unlikely that Colonel Loredan will be free to resume his private work for the foreseeable future.’ He stood up, to indicate that the audience was ended. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘if you’d be good enough to excuse me.’

‘All right,’ Athli said, not moving from her seat. ‘Could you pass on a letter for me, and forward the reply? I know he’s in the city,’ she added. ‘I saw him come back myself. And he wouldn’t have left again without letting me know.’

The clerk studied her objectively through dead-fish eyes, noting that she was young and attractive and exhibiting more concern for her principal than a normal business relationship would warrant. Athli read the interpretation in his face, made a mental note to have him horribly murdered at some convenient future date, and played up to what he was thinking. She simpered a little. ‘Please,’ she added. ‘It’d mean so much to me if you could.’

‘I might be able to send a message,’ he said, his voice lightly spiced with contempt and a little self-conscious compassion. ‘I’m not sure about a letter, though; it would have to be passed by the Committee for National Security, and there would inevitably be a delay. Any reply from Colonel Loredan would be similarly subject to—’ He paused, and smiled bleakly. ‘To review,’ he concluded. ‘If that’s not acceptable—’

‘That’ll be fine,’ Athli replied firmly. ‘Can I borrow your pen?’

The clerk sighed and sat down again. ‘Help yourself,’ he said. ‘But please, if you could hurry it up a little. I have to attend a meeting which will be starting very soon.’

‘Won’t keep you a minute,’ Athli said.

She hesitated. Should she add anything else? She wanted to say
something
to let him know that she understood how he must be feeling. (Not that she did, and they’d both know it.) No, she’d only embarrass him. Instead, she scribbled her name, folded the scrap of parchment and handed it to the clerk. ‘You’re sure you’ve got my address?’ she added.

‘We know where to find you,’ the clerk replied with a slight emphasis she was supposed not to like. ‘And now, I really must—’

She allowed herself to be shooed out of the office, and watched the clerk scuttle off at a dignified half-trot towards the main cloister; then she made her way slowly back towards the gatehouse. Nothing to do, and all day to do it in. Again.

Rather than mope about at home, she decided to go down to the stationers’ quarter and buy something. It was traditional that clerks should have something of a stationery fetish; good for business as well, since the tools of a clerk’s trade lent themselves to elegant splendour, and clients tended to assume that the costlier and more magnificent the pen and inkwell, the higher the quality of the words that issued from them. Athli was only too happy to conform to the stereotype. When she stopped to think about it, the amount of money she’d frittered away on such things appalled her (though, she reassured herself, since she’d only ever bought quality she could probably get her money back on them with no trouble at all if she had to.) Which reminded her of something else.

Odd, she mused as she strolled through the chairmakers’ quarter towards the Chandlers’ Gate, the fact that he never seems to have any money. The mathematics of it simply don’t make sense. I get twenty-five per cent of what he makes, and I can live in a nice part of town and afford to waste money on marquetry writing boards and solid-silver counters. He lives in the slums and owns nothing. I know he goes out drinking quite a lot and that must cost a bit, except he seems to go to places where you can drink yourself to death for the price of a glass of wine in a decent inn; what does he do with all his money?

Strange, to work with someone so closely for so long and now know the first thing about him. We get along all right; better than all right, in fact, it’s always been great fun. I’ve never known a man who I can talk to so easily, one who doesn’t make any difficulties . . . But what do I actually know about him? He was in the army - well, everybody knows that now, of course; in fact, everybody knows rather more than I did before all this started - and he was brought up on a farm and he’s got an unspecified number of brothers and at least one sister. He doesn’t talk about his parents, so maybe they’re dead; or maybe he just doesn’t talk about them. And he had lots of acquaintances, in the trade of course, but I’ve no idea if he has any friends. Of course, he knows all about
me
- not that there’s too much to know. He always seems quite interested when I tell him about things, can’t quite seem to understand why I haven’t got married and don’t see anybody. I don’t suppose he’s really interested, though. Why should he be, after all?

She frowned, remembering the clerk’s knowing leer. He’d been wrong, of course, though she’d be lying if she said the thought hadn’t crossed her mind once or twice. But never seriously; not much future in a relationship with a man in that line of work. Worse than loving a sailor; at least they come back sometimes. Not that he’s in that line of work any more; except he’s
Colonel
Loredan now, and that’s scarcely an improvement.

She stopped opposite a stall selling rather garish painted wooden bowls. If he’s going to be Colonel Loredan for any length of time, she thought, he won’t be teaching people how to fence; and then what am I supposed to do for a living? That’s odd, too; when he was working in the courts, I always had my contingency plans ready, just in case anything happened. Now I’m at a loss to think what I’m going to do next. I can’t carry on the school on my own and I don’t think I could bear to go back to clerking for advocates. Oh, damn and blast, what is
wrong
with me?

Slowly and deliberately, Athli calmed herself down; and as she did so, a small but persistent voice in the back of her head began chanting,
When all seems lost, buy stationery!
It seemed like the best advice she was likely to get. She took it.

The atmosphere in the stationers’ quarter varied between picturesque bustle and hell on earth, depending on the time of day and year, supply and demand, the health of the economy and the mood of the city. The feverish intensity of the activity under the rich awnings reflected the influence of the last factor on the list; the clerks of Perimadeia had decided that the end was probably nigh, in which case they might as well indulge themselves while they still had money and their money was still worth something; and if it wasn’t the end of the world, they had cause for celebration, best effected by buying things. The stationery trade had risen to the occasion; Athli had never seen so much good stuff, or such high prices.

There were lignum vitae and rosewood writing boards and accounting boards, lavishly carved and inlaid with ivory, mother of pearl and polished lapis lazuli. There were inkwells; gods, the inkwells - silver inkwells, gold inkwells, inkwells with jewelled lids and little jewelled feet, patent inkwells with little ribs for knocking off the excess ink after you’d dipped your pen, inkwells hollowed out of elephant tusks and walrus tusks, inkwells in the shape of roses, pigs, kneeling figures, skulls, horses, the backsides of women and boys, the Patriarch’s ceremonial crown.

There were cedarwood tablets, hinged and inlaid, with the creamy yellow wax as inviting as sand on the beach after the tide has just gone out, crying out to be marked. There were styluses of breathtaking beauty and nauseating vulgarity, pens cut from the feathers of eagles and peacocks, so long that you wouldn’t be able to use them without wiping your eye with every stroke. There were counters (counters beyond number; joke) of silver and gold, tiny counters for the secretive, huge counters like saucers that probably took two men to lift, fancy counters with every conceivable kind of decoration, including some that were hastily whisked away before Athli could look at them (spoilsports!), plain counters on which your name, titles and favourite platitude could be engraved by our highly skilled craftsmen while you wait, counters that cost more than the sums they’d be used to calculate.

There were cuff protectors and eyeshades, magnifying lenses for the short-sighted, lamps and candle holders, abacuses and tiny sets of portable scales that came in the most delightful little ivory boxes. There was parchment - was there ever parchment! How could there be enough sheep in all the world to supply so much parchment - and every square inch of it scraped and pumiced smooth, thin and softly translucent, so that it glowed like a cloud at sunrise.

There were little jars of powdered ink in every colour you could dream of; turquoise and cobalt, crimson and purple, coroner’s green and government black, chamberlain’s azure, works orange, army blue, shipyards brown, even the incredibly expensive and highly illegal imperial gold - in theory, a clerk could have his hand cut off for using it without express authority; the way round that was to dilute it with a tiny amount of silver in vitriol, which cost as much as the gold ink and burnt you to the bone if you splashed it. There were tiny knives for trimming pens, their blades as thin as leaves and ten times sharper than the average Perimadeian razor; bigger versions, too, that swaggering young clerks liked to display on their belts as a way of getting round the prohibition on carrying arms in the council building.

There were enamelled ink stirrers and gold-wire ink strainers, parchment stretchers and beautifully wrought pumice scrapers for scraping parchment clean of old letters to use again. There were seals, seal-cases, sealing-wax cases, tiny chafing dishes and miniature spirit burners for melting wax, tiny thin blades for unlawfully lifting seals without breaking them, little pots of specially fine clay for taking impressions of seals for the purpose of forgery. There were portable writing chests and little cabinets to hold all your gear (the lid folding out into a writing and counting board, with little hinges and fine silver chains) that stopped your heart with the glory of the workmanship and cost slightly more than a fully equipped warship.