Devices and Desires (34 page)

Maybe that was why the book had fallen open at that page. He frowned, as a tiny spark flared in his memory. Vaatzes the abominator
had owned a copy of this book, and had, apparently, misunderstood it. In spite of everything, he leaned his head back and
grinned like a dog.
Let a man therefore turn his hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys,
the book said, and the poor literal-minded fool, striving to improve his mind to the level of his betters by reading the
classics, had gone away and done as he’d been told, and got caught at it into the bargain. As a result, he’d earn himself
a footnote in history as the man who brought about the eradication of an entire tribe by his failure to construe an archaic
usage in a set text. It’d make a good joke, if it wasn’t for all the deaths it would cause.

He put the book back in its place and took down Azotes’
Flowers of Didacticism
instead.

The next morning there was another meeting in the cloister garden. It wasn’t on the schedule, which was posted every week
on the chapterhouse door; half a dozen pages had spent a nervous hour just after dawn scurrying through the Guildhall rounding
up Necessary Evil and shepherding them here, puzzled and irritable and speculating about the nature of this urgent new development.

When the stipulated quorum had gathered, Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service asked leave to address the meeting. Before
he started to speak, however, he picked a sack up off the ground, balanced it on the ledge of the rostrum while he opened
it, and took out of it something the size and shape of a large melon, wrapped in dark brown sailcloth. It wasn’t a melon.

“This,” he said, letting the thing dangle from his hand by the hair, “used to be Auzida Razo, our chief of section among the
Merchant Adventurers in Eremia.” He paused. The thing was dripping onto the neat, short grass. “I have reason to believe,”
he went on, “that the covert stage of this operation is over.”

“Auzida Razo,” Orsea repeated. “I know the name.”

One of the drawbacks to sending your enemy a head by way of a gesture is that you’re left with the rest of the body. Orsea
had insisted on seeing it. Miel wasn’t sure why; he believed it was because Orsea had always had a tendency to be squeamish.
Since he’d ordered the wretched woman’s execution, he felt he should punish himself by viewing her decapitated trunk. If that
was the reason, it was confused, irrational, hard for anyone else to understand and quite in character.

“You’ve met her,” Miel said. “Several times. You’d remember her if —” He stopped.

Orsea grinned; he was white as milk and shaking a bit. “Of course,” he said. “That’s me all over. Not so good with names,
but an excellent memory for faces. In this case, however…”

Miel frowned. “Can we go now?” he said.

“Yes, why not?” Orsea turned away abruptly. He’d seen worse, to Miel’s certain knowledge, but the fact that he was directly
responsible, having given the order, presumably made it more immediate. Of course Orsea would argue that he’d also given the
order to attack Mezentia. “I’ve never had anybody put to death before,” he said, all false-casual. “What’s the procedure?
Can it just be buried quietly somewhere, or does it have to be nailed to a door or strung up off a gateway somewhere?”

Miel nearly said,
Well, that’s up to you,
but stopped himself just in time. “I’d leave it to the guard commander if I were you,” he said. “There’s no set protocol,
if that’s what you mean.”

They walked through the arch into the main courtyard of the guardhouse. “So,” Orsea said, “I met her a couple of times. When
and where?”

“She used to call at the palace,” Miel said, carefully looking ahead.

“Call,” Orsea repeated, as though it was an abtruse foreign loanword. “What, on business, you mean?”

“That’s right,” Miel said. “She mostly dealt in luxury stationery — ivory writing sets, antique Mezentine ink bottles, signet
rings, that kind of stuff. Come to think of it, I bought a silver sand-shaker from her myself last spring.”

“She did a lot of business with the court, then?”

“Like I said, luxury goods. Not the sort of thing most people can afford.”

“Yes,” Orsea said, as though Miel was being obtuse, “but what I mean is, she knew people here in the palace, and she was spying
for the Republic. Aren’t you worried about that?”

Only Orsea could ask such a question. “Of course I’m worried,” Miel said. Just not surprised, like you, he didn’t add. “Obviously
there’s a serious problem.”

“Glad you can see that,” Orsea snapped. “What are you proposing to do about it?”

Miel stopped, frowning. “Thank you,” he said.

“What are you thanking me for?”

“The promotion. Apparently I’m head of security now, or captain of the palace guard, or something. I’m honored, but you might
have told me earlier.”

“I’m sorry.” And he was, too; sincerely sorry for being nasty to his friend. That was why Miel loved him, and why he was such
a bad duke. “It’s because I’ve come to rely on you so much since — well, since the battle. I got wounded and you had to get
us all out of that ghastly mess; and since then I’ve turned to you first for everything, loaded it all on your shoulders without
even asking if you minded, and now I automatically assume you’re dealing with it all, like a one-man cabinet.” He sighed.
Miel felt embarrassed. “You should be doing this job, Miel, not me. I just can’t manage it.”

Miel forced a laugh. “Only if you wanted a civil war on your hands,” he said. “A Ducas on the throne; think about it. Half
the people in this country would rather see Duke Valens get the crown than me.”

Orsea turned his head slightly, looked him in the eye. “You wouldn’t have invaded Mezentia, though.”

“You don’t know that.” Miel shrugged. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. In answer to your question —”

“What question? Oh, yes. Slipped my mind.”

“What do we do about the spy,” Miel said. They started walking again. “Well,” he said, “you don’t need to be a doctor of logic
to figure out that the likeliest place to find spies is the Merchant Adventurers. They go everywhere, know people here and
abroad, they haven’t got the same loyalties as us. Nobody else has the opportunities or the motive like they have.”

Orsea frowned. “So what are you saying?” he said. “Round them all up and have them all killed?”

Miel clicked his tongue. “No, of course not,” he said. “But we’re looking at this the wrong way. Asking ourselves the wrong
questions.”

“Such as?”

“Such as why,” Miel said. “Think about it for a moment. Why is Mezentia spying on us,
after
they’ve just beaten us so hard we won’t be a threat to them again for a hundred years? Before, now, that’d make sense. But
after?”

Orsea was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said.

“Nor me,” Miel said. “I mean, there could be several reasons.”

“Such as?”

“Well.” Miel ordered his thoughts. “It could be that this Razo woman had been spying for them for years, and we only just
found out. Like, she was a fixture, permanently stationed here as part of a standing intelligence network.”

“You think that’s what she was doing?”

“It’s a possibility. There’s others. For instance, they could’ve been alarmed because they didn’t have as much advance notice
of the invasion as they’d have liked —”

“Didn’t seem to trouble them much.”

“Yes, but they’re a nation of perfectionists,” Miel said, slightly wearily. “So they decided to set up a long-term spy ring
here, to give them more warning next time.”

Orsea looked worried. “So that’s what you reckon…”

Miel succeeded in keeping the irritation out of his face. No point in setting up a string of straw men if Orsea took them
all seriously. “Another possibility,” he said, “is that they’re planning to invade us.”

This time Orsea just looked bewildered. “Why would they want to do that?” he said.

Miel shrugged. “To save face,” he said. “To punish us for daring to attack them. To make sure we never pose a threat again.
There’s all sorts of possible reasons. Most likely, it’d be internal politics inside the Republic —”

“Do they have politics?” Orsea interrupted. “I thought they were above all that sort of thing.”

Miel actually laughed. “Do they have politics?” he said. “Yes, they do. Quite apart from ordinary backstabbing and dead-men’s-shoes-filling
and infighting for who gets the top jobs, they have a number of factions; started as ideological differences over doctrine,
nowadays it’s just force of habit and an excuse for taking sides. It’s not politics
about
anything; just politics.”

“Oh.” Orsea looked mildly shocked. “Is that good or bad?”

“For us?” Miel made a vague gesture with his hands. “Depends on the circumstances. Bad for us if someone wants a quick, easy
war to gain popular support; good for us if the opposing faction outplays them. It’d be really nice if we could find a way
of influencing them, playing off one faction against another. But we can’t.”

“Why not?”

“We haven’t got anything any of them could conceivably want,” Miel replied. “Except,” he added, “if the Didactics or the Consolidationists
want a war for the approval ratings, we’re a handy target.”

Orsea pulled a face. “Bad, then.”

“Probably.”

“You know all this stuff.” There was bitterness in Orsea’s voice, and guilt, and other things too complex to bother with.
“I feel so stupid.”

“I’m an adviser,” Miel said, trying not to sound awkward. “It’s an adviser’s job to know stuff, so you don’t have to.”

Orsea laughed. “Yes, but look at me. Clueless. What did I ever do to deserve to be a duke, except marry someone’s daughter?”

Miel frowned, ever so slightly. “Orsea, this isn’t helping. You wanted to know the implications of this Razo woman being a
spy.”

“I’m sorry,” Orsea said. “Go on, you were saying.”

“That’s right.” Miel pulled a face. “Forgotten where I’d got to. Right; we know she was spying for the Republic, because she
admitted it. We can guess why, but that’s about all. To go back to your original question: what are we going to do about it?”

“Yes?”

Miel rubbed his eyes. He’d been up all night, and he felt suddenly tired. “I don’t know what to suggest, right now,” he said.
“That was all we managed to get out of her, that she was spying for the Mezentines. We tried to get names of other spies,
contacts, the usual stuff, but she died on us. Weak heart, apparently.”

Orsea nodded. “So really,” he said, “we need to find out some more background before we make any decisions.”

“I think so. I mean, we’ve sent a pretty clear message to the Republic that we know what they were up to and there won’t be
any more reports from that particular source; so that’s probably the immediate problem taken care of. Next priority, I would
suggest, is finding out who else was in on the spy ring, and making our peace with the Merchant Adventurers. After that, it
depends on what we come up with.”

Orsea was satisfied with that, and they parted at the lodge gate. Miel went away with mixed feelings; a large part of them
guilt, for having misled his friend. It wasn’t a significant act of deception. All he’d done was steer the conversation away
from one particular topic, and the amount of effort he’d had to put into it, given Orsea’s naïveté, was practically nil. Still,
he felt uneasy, guilty. Must be catching, he thought.

He went back to the turret room in the west court that he’d appropriated for an office (
me,
he thought,
needing an office. If cousin Jarnac ever finds out I’ve got an office, he’ll wet himself laughing
). He shut the door and bolted it, then pulled out a key on a chain from under his shirt. The key opened a strong oak chest
bound with heavy iron straps and hasps. All it contained was one very small piece of paper, folded many times to make it small.
He unfolded it, for the tenth or eleventh time since it had come into his possession. As he did so, he read the words, tiny
but superbly elegant, on the outside fold:

Valens Valentinianus to Veatriz Sirupati, greetings.

“Shouldn’t we wait,” Ziani said, “until your husband gets here?”

The woman in the red dress looked at him. “You’ll be waiting a long time,” she said. “I’m not married.”

“You’re…” Ziani could feel the brick fall. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Only it’s different where I come from.”

“Oh yes.” There was a grim ring to her voice. “But you’re not in the Republic anymore.”

“I’m beginning to see that,” Ziani said. “Look, I didn’t mean anything by it. Can we forget —?”

“Sure,” the woman replied, her tone making it clear that she had no intention of doing so. “So, you’re the new great white
hope — well, you know what I mean — of Eremian trade. Everybody’s talking about you.”

“Are they?” Ziani said. “Well, there’s not much to see yet, but I can take you round and give you an idea of what we’re going
to be doing here, once we’re up and running.”

She looked at him again. She seemed to find him fascinating; he wondered, has she ever seen a Mezentine before? He’d have
expected her to, being a merchant and an Adventurer, but it was possible she hadn’t. Not that it mattered.

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll try and use my imagination.”

“Right,” Ziani said. He put her out of his mind — not easy to ignore something quite so large and so very red; it was like
failing to notice a battle in your wardrobe — and engaged the plan. It had grown inside his head to the point where he could
see it, quite clearly, with his eyes open, superimposed over the dusty, weed-grown yard like a cutter’s template. “Well, where
we’re stood now, this is where the foundry’s going to be.”

“I see.”

“The plan is to do all our own casting,” Ziani went on. “Mostly it’ll be just small components, but I’m going to build a fair-sized
drop-bottom cupola so we can pour substantial lost-wax castings as well as the usual sandbox stuff. It sounds like a big undertaking,
but really it’s just four walls, a hearth, ventilation and a clay-lined pit. Next to it, so we can share some of the pipework,
I want to have the puddling mill —”