Devices and Desires (20 page)

One last page caught his eye: schedule of items seized by investigators from the prisoner’s house, after his arrest. It was
a short list. Usually, when a man came to no good, there’d be pages of this sort of thing — tools and equipment stolen from
the factory; the usual depressing catalog of pornographic or subversive literature (always the same titles; the circulating
repertoire of both categories was reassuringly small in Mezentia); forbidden articles of clothing, proscribed food and drink,
religious fetishes. In this case, however, there were only a handful of items, and none of them was strictly illegal, though
they were all disapproved. A portfolio of drawings of yet more amendments to the scorpion (a note in the margin pointing out
that the drawings numbered seven, twenty-six and forty-one should be forwarded to the standing committee for assessment, since
they appeared to have considerable merit); a book,
The True Mirror of Defense
— a fencing manual, copied in Civitas Vadanis (private ownership of weapons was, of course, strictly forbidden; whether it
was also illegal to read books about them was something of a gray area); another book,
The Art of Venery,
about hunting and falconry. Psellus smiled; he was prepared to bet that Vaatzes had thought the word
venery
meant something quite different. Another book:
A General Discourse of Bodily Ailments and the Complete Herbal,
together with some pots of dried leaves and a pestle and mortar. Psellus frowned. He’d have to check, but he had an idea
that the
General Discourse
was still a permitted text in the Physicians’, so it was against the law for a Foundryman to have a copy. How had he come
by it? Did that mean that somewhere there was a doctor with a complete set of engineer’s thread and drilling tables? If so,
why?

He closed the file, feeling vaguely uncomfortable, as though he’d been handling something dirty. A case like this was, of
course, an effective remedy for incipient complacency. It was easy to forget how perilously fine was the line between normality
and aberration. How simple and straightforward life would be if all the deviants were wild-eyed, unkempt and slobbering, and
all the honest men upright and clean-shaven. There wasn’t really anything disturbing about a thoroughgoing deviant; it was
inevitable that, from time to time, nature would throw up the occasional monster, easy to identify and quickly disposed of.
Far more disquieting the man who’s almost normal but not quite; he looks and sounds rational, you can work beside him for
years and never hear anything to give you cause for concern, until one day he’s not at his post, and investigators are interviewing
the whole department. Truly disquieting, because there’s always the possibility (orthodox doctrine denies it categorically,
but you can’t help wondering) that anybody, everybody, might be capable of just one small aberration, if circumstances conspired
to put an opportunity in their path.
If the temptation was strong enough, perhaps even me
— Psellus shuddered at the thought, and dismissed it from his mind as moral hypochondria (look at the list of symptoms long
enough, you can convince yourself you’ve got
everything
). It was just as well, he decided, that he wasn’t an investigator working in the field. You’d need to have nerves of steel
or no imagination whatsoever to survive in that job.

He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes and waited to see if an image of Vaatzes would form in his mind — he thought
of the process as something like what happens to an egg when it’s broken into the frying pan — but all he got was a vague
shape, a cutout in a black backcloth through which you could catch glimpses of what lay behind. His best hope of understanding
the man, he decided, lay in interviewing the wife. If there was a key to the mystery, either she’d be it or have an idea of
where it was to be found. Strictly speaking, of course, none of this was necessary. They weren’t being asked to understand
the man, just hunt him down and kill him. Probably just as well. Even so; the pathology of aberration was worth studying,
in spite of the obvious danger to the student, or else how could further outbreaks be prevented in the future? Definitely
the wife, Psellus decided. She was the anomaly he kept coming back to.

He stood up, shook himself like a wet dog to get rid of unwelcome burrs of thought. A man could lose himself in work like
this, and in his case that would be a sad waste. There were other letters waiting for him; he’d seen them when he came in
but forgotten about them while his mind was full of Vaatzes and that dreadful man Crisestem. As was his custom, he broke the
seals of all of them before he started to read.

Two circular memoranda about dead issues; minutes of meetings of committees he wasn’t a member of, for information only; a
letter from his cousin, attached to the diplomatic mission to the Cure Doce, asking him to look something up in the
Absolute Concordance
— some nonsense about the structure of leaves and the diseases of oak-trees; notice of a lecture on early Mannerist poetry;
an invitation to speak, from a learned society he no longer belonged to. The sad thing was, if he didn’t get letters like
these he’d feel left out, worried that he might be slipping gradually out of favor. He made a note to tell his clerk to check
the oak-disease reference; he’d take the speaking engagement; standard acknowledgments to all the rest. So much for the day’s
mail — the world bringing him new challenges to revel in, like a cat that will insist on presenting you with its freshly slain
mice. Another glass of brandy was a virtual necessity, if he didn’t want to lie awake all night thinking about Vaatzes, and
deviance in general. One last note to his clerk: set up meetings with Vaatzes’ wife, father- and brother-in-law. Yes, that
was where the answer lay, he was almost certain of that. It would help him make sense of it all if she turned out to be pretty,
but he wasn’t inclined to hold his breath.

In the event he slept soundly, dreaming of Manuo Crisestem being eaten alive by monkeys, so that he woke early with a smile
on his face, ready for his breakfast. His clerk had already come and gone, so he took his time shaving and dressing — it was
always pleasant not to have to rush in the mornings; he even had time to trim his nails and pumice yesterday’s ink stains
from his fingertips. That made him smile — subconsciously, was he preening himself just in case the deviant’s wife did turn
out to be pretty? — and he back-combed his hair in gentle self-mockery; then he thought about his wife, spending the off season
at the lodge, out at Blachen with the rest of the committee wives, and that took the feather off his clean, sharp mood. Still,
he wouldn’t have to join her for a month at least, which was something.

The first three hours of every working day were eaten up by letters; from the morals and ethics directorate, the assessment
board, the treasurer’s office, the performance standards commission (twenty years in the service and he still didn’t know
what they actually did), the general auditors of requisitions, the foreign affairs committee. Three of them he answered himself;
two he left for his clerk to deal with; one went to one side for filing in the box he privately thought of as the Coal Seam.
The process left him feeling drained and irritable, as though he’d been cooped up in a small room with a lot of people all
talking at once. To restore his equilibrium he spent half an hour tinkering with the third draft of his address to the apprentices’
conference, at which he would be the keynote speaker for the fourth year running (“Doctrine: A Living Legacy”). He was contemplating
the best way to give a Didactic spin to the proceedings of the Third Rescensionist Council when his clerk arrived to tell
him that the abominator’s wife would be arriving at a quarter past noon.

He’d forgotten all about her, and his first reaction was irritation — he had a deskful of more important things to do than
talk to criminals’ wives — but as the day wore on he found himself looking forward to the break in his routine. His clerk,
he suspected, was getting to know him a little too well; the hour between noon and resumption was his least productive time,
the part of the day when he was most likely to make mistakes. Far better to use it for something restful and quiet, where
a momentary lapse in concentration wasn’t likely to involve the state in embarrassment and ruin.

There were five interrogation rooms on the seventh floor of the Guildhall. He chose the smallest, and left instructions that
he wasn’t to be disturbed. The woman was punctual; she turned up half an hour early. Psellus left her to wait, on the bench
in the front corridor. A little apprehension, forced on like chicory by solitude and confinement, would do no harm at all,
and he’d have time to read another couple of letters.

He’d been right; she was pretty enough, in a small, wide-eyed sort of a way. He had the dossier’s conclusive evidence that
she was twenty-four; without it, he’d have put her at somewhere between nineteen and twenty-one, so what she must have looked
like when she was seventeen and the subject of negotiations between her father and the abominator, he wouldn’t have liked
to say. She sat on the low, backless chair in the corner of the room quite still, reminding him of something he couldn’t place
for a long time, until it suddenly dawned on him; he’d seen a mewed falcon once, jessed and hooded, standing motionless on
a perch shaped like a bent bow. An incongruous comparison, he told himself; she certainly didn’t come across as a predator,
quite the opposite. You couldn’t imagine such a delicate creature eating anything, let alone prey that had once been alive.

He sat down in the big, high-backed chair and rested his hands on the armrests, wrists upward (he’d seen judges do that, and
it had stuck in his mind). “Your name,” he said.

Her voice was surprisingly deep. “Ariessa Vaatzes Connena,” she said. There was no bashful hesitation, but her eyes were big
and round and deep (so are a hawk’s, he thought). “Why am I here?”

“There are some questions,” he said, and left it at that. “You were married young, I gather.”

She frowned. “Not really,” she said. “At least, I was seventeen. But five of the fifteen girls in my class got married before
I did.”

She was right, of course; he’d misplaced the emphasis. It wasn’t her youth that was unusual, but her husband’s age. “You married
a man ten years older than yourself,” he said.

She nodded. “That’s right.”

“Why?”

What a curious question, her eyes said. “My father thought it was a good match,” she said.

“Was it?”

“Well, clearly not.”

“You were unhappy with the idea?”

“Not at the time,” she said firmly.

“Of course,” Psellus said gravely, “you weren’t to know how things would turn out.”

“No.”

“At the time,” he said, “did you find the marriage agreeable?”

A faint trace of a smile. There are some faces that light up in smiling; this wasn’t one. “That’s a curious word to use,”
she said. “I loved my husband, from the first time I saw him.”

“Do you still love him?”

“Yes.”

She said the word crisply, like someone breaking a stick. He thought for a moment. Another comparison was lurking in the back
of his mind, but he couldn’t place it. “You’re aware of the law regarding the wives of abominators.”

She nodded, said nothing. She didn’t seem unduly frightened.

“There is, of course, a discretion in such cases,” he said slowly.

“I see.”

She was watching him, the way one animal watches another: wary, cautious, but no fear beyond the permanent, all-encompassing
fear of creatures who live all the time surrounded by predators, and prey. “The discretion,” he went on, “vests in the proper
compliance officer of the offender’s Guild.”

“That would be you, then.”

“That’s right.”

“I imagine,” she said, “there’s something I can help you with.”

(In her dossier, which he’d glanced through before the interview, there was a certificate from the investigators; the wife,
they said, had not been party to the offense and was not to be proceeded against; her father and brother were Guildsmen of
good standing and had cooperated unreservedly in the investigation on the understanding that she should be spared. It was,
of course, a condition of this arrangement that she should not know of it; nor had she been made aware of the fact that clemency
had been extended in her case.)

“Yes,” Psellus said. “There are a few questions, as I think I mentioned.”

“You want me to betray him, don’t you?”

Psellus moved a little in his chair; the back and arms seemed to be restricting him, like guards holding a prisoner. “I shall
expect you to cooperate with my inquiries,” he said. “You know who I am, what I do.”

She nodded. “There’s nothing I can tell you,” she said. “I don’t know where he’s gone, or anything like that.”

“I do,” Psellus said.

Her eyes opened wide; no other movement, and no sound.

“We have reports,” he went on, “that place him in the company of Duke Orsea of Eremia Montis. Do you know who he is?”

“Of course I do,” she said. “How did he —?”

Psellus ignored her. “Clearly,” he said, “this raises new questions. For example: do you think it possible that your husband
had been in contact with the Eremians at any time before his arrest?”

“You mean, spying for them or something?” She raised an eyebrow. “Well, if he was, he can’t have done a very good job.”

He’d seen a fencing-match once; an exhibition bout between two foreigners, Vadani or Cure Doce or something of the sort. He
remembered the look on the face of one of them, when he’d lunged forward ferociously to run his enemy through; but when he
reached forward full stretch the other man wasn’t there anymore. He’d sidestepped, and as his opponent surged past him, he’d
given him a neat little prod in the ribs, and down he’d gone. Psellus had an uncomfortable feeling that the expression on
his face wasn’t so different to the look he’d seen on the dying fencer’s.