Evil for Evil (59 page)

The thatch was burning on the outside, so inside it must be thick with smoke; still the Mezentines hadn’t come out. The others
didn’t seem concerned. They were standing patiently, like well-trained tethered horses, as though they ceased to exist between
orders. Keeping still while the last minute or so wasted away; clearly it was the Ducas’ responsibility to do something. It
all turned on the timing of catching hold of the rope …

The barn door flew open. Framain led the way, his arms full of bottles and jars. She followed him, clutching the book, and
the glass bottle still caked in its clay. The Mezentines brought up the rear, not in any particular hurry. One of them carried
a large wooden box, familiar; Framain kept it under the bench, got anxious if Miel took too much interest in it.

“Get the horses,” the boss Mezentine said. “And two more for these. Stable’s round the back.”

So that was all right, Miel told himself. No action needed. He let the calculations — timings, angles, distances — slip from
his mind. I don’t care what happens to me so long as it happens later.

There was just one Mezentine now, standing back from him, holding the rope. The others had gone off to get the horses, presumably.
Now that he had the time, he speculated: Framain had told them he had a secret, something that’d be worth a fortune, an opportunity
the Mezentines couldn’t risk ignoring just for the sake of a quiet life. In which case, it was unlikely that they’d betrayed
him, so it had to be the courier, the man he’d pulled out of the bog. That disappointed him, but he couldn’t bring himself
to feel angry about it. He couldn’t have left a man, enemy or not, to sink into the black mud. You could fill a book — someone
probably had — with the selflessly heroic deaths of the Ducas. Dying of thirst in the mountains, the Ducas gives the last
mouthful of water to the rebel leader he’s captured and is taking back to face justice; awestruck by the example, the rebel
carries on to the city and meekly surrenders to his executioners. Fighting a duel to the death with the enemy captain, the
Ducas gets an unfair advantage when the enemy slips and falls; to forbear to strike is to give the enemy a clear shot, which
he’s obligated to accept since he too is fighting for the lives of his people; the Ducas holds back and allows himself to
be killed, since duty to an enemy overrides his duty to his own kind. In such a book, there’d be pages of notes and commentaries
at the end, explaining the complex nuances of the degrees of obligation — nuances which the Ducas understood and calculated
in a split second, needless to say. If there had been such a book, it would have curled and turned to ash in the burning of
Civitas Eremiae, and nobody would add a supplement recording Miel Ducas and the Mezentine in the quagmire. Did that matter?
If not for the paradox, it should have been the perfect exemplar to round off the lesson: the Ducas makes the sacrifice, knowing
there will be no page for him in the book …

“What’re you laughing at?” the Mezentine said.

Miel looked down at him. Even betrayed and captive, the Ducas looks down at his enemies. “Nothing,” he said. “Private joke.”

The Mezentine stared at him for a full second, then gave the rope a short, sharp tug. The effect wasn’t pleasant. No more
private jokes from now on.

“Was it the courier?” Miel asked.

“What courier?”

No reason to suppose the soldier knew the background story, or even why he was here. “Doesn’t matter,” Miel said. “I’ll be
quiet now.”

They brought horses for Framain and the girl; also ropes to tie their hands, and nooses for their necks. Standard operating
procedure; clearly it came easily with practice, since the leader didn’t need to tell his men what to do. Trained soldiers
know their duty, just as well as the Ducas knows his. Duty is obligation, the bastard child of loyalty and the will to serve;
when you think about it, just another roundabout way of saying love. No wonder it causes so much pointless damage.

The Mezentines mounted their horses, the leader gave a sign to get under way. For a short while, Framain rode beside Miel.
“Serves me right,” Framain said (more in sorrow). “I should have left you in the quagmire.”

“Did it work?” Miel replied.

“What?”

“The vermilion. Did it work?”

Framain didn’t answer; a tug on his rope drew him ahead of Miel, too far for a shouted conversation. She was riding behind
him somewhere. He fancied he could feel her staring balefully at the back of his head (weren’t you supposed to be some sort
of hero? You should’ve rescued us, killed them all with a screwdriver or something, repaid us for our kindness, won my undying
love; it was your opportunity, couldn’t have been more convenient if we’d all sat down and planned it together; so why didn’t
you
do
something?). He wished he could explain that to her, at least; that it all turned on his possession of a two-foot-six strip
of sharpened metal at the critical moment, and when that moment came, the metal was on the floor, not in his hand. Simple
mechanics.

A pity, but there it was. Not that it mattered, with no book. If there’d been a book, there’d have been a reason to die trying,
instead of meekly at the hands of an executioner. With no book, it was just pointless activity; if they give you a shovel,
might as well dig a hole as not. All the slaves of duty dig their own graves sooner or later.

The ride to the Unswerving Loyalty was long, hot and boring. There were possibilities, of course. A lone peasant could have
jumped up from the cover of a pile of rocks and shot the Mezentines dead with a longbow;
your father paid for the medicine that saved my little girl’s life,
he’d have explained, as he cut the ropes and set them free,
it was my duty to help the Ducas.
But that didn’t happen; neither did the scattered remnants of Miel’s resistance army sweep down through a narrow pass. Jarnac
failed to arrive with fifty Vadani light cavalry. The innkeeper of the Loyalty didn’t sneak out to the stables and cut them
loose in recognition of the generous tip Miel had left him the last time he was there. So many splendid opportunities for
Fate to indulge itself in satisfying, heart-warming symmetry; all wasted.

But as they were led across the yard to the stables, Miel caught sight of the old carter and his grandson, the pair who’d
carried the load of sulfur. They were sitting on the mounting block in the yard, staring. At last, he thought, and for some
reason he felt the faint quickening of hope. Odd that it should be them, rather than Jarnac or the rebels or the grateful
peasant with his bow, but that just adds piquancy. They can’t be here merely by coincidence.

“Who’ve you got there?” the old man called out.

“Rebel leader,” a Mezentine replied. “What’s it to you?”

The old man shook his head. “You’re welcome to him,” he said, “bloody troublemaker.”

The Mezentine leaned forward a little in his saddle. “You two Eremians?”

“Not likely. Vadani.”

A shrug. “You’ll be next, don’t you worry.”

So much for symmetry; also loyalty, duty and poetic justice. Out of the corner of his eye, Miel caught sight of the scowl
on the boy’s face as he passed. Just one kick, he thought; right now I’d cheerfully sign over the whole Ducas estate north
of the Black-water just for the privilege of booting that brat’s arse.

It was dark in the stables; too dark to see the expression on their faces, once the door slammed shut behind them. Miel sat
with his back to the wall, his eyes closed, hoping for sleep with the same degree of pessimistic realism as he’d waited for
the peasant sniper, or Jarnac and the cavalry. Outside it had started raining again. Somewhere, there was a leak in the roof.
He counted the interval between drips: nine seconds.

A tolerably civilized chaise as far as the Lonazep turnpike. A basic but acceptable mail coach from there to the edge of the
plain. A night on a plank bed in a rather sparse post-house. A military stage, overcrowded with junior officers, very rudimentary
suspension, all day, all night and the next morning with only half a dozen stops up the Butter Pass to the camp in the ruins
of Civitas Eremiae. A ride with the quartermaster’s clerk on a solid-chassis supply cart as far as the frontier post at Limes
Vadanis. Four days away from the Guildhall, Psellus staggered off the box of the cart and stood in a dusty, rutted road under
a disturbingly broad sky, staring apprehensively at mountains. If this was the world he’d heard so much about when he was
growing up in the suburbs of the city, they could stuff it.

“I don’t know,” the garrison captain said in reply to his urgent question. “I got a letter this morning to say you were coming,
but that’s all. Didn’t say who you are or what we’re supposed to do for you. Always happy to oblige the central administration,”
this said with a confidence-diminishing grin, “but you can see for yourself, we’re just a border post, not a diplomatic mission.”
He paused, thought, frowned. “I suppose you might be able to hitch a ride with a trader,” he suggested. “Strictly speaking
it’s a closed border, but we turn a blind eye if it’s just ordinary commercial traffic. You may have to wait a week or so,
but I expect you could find a corner of the guardhouse to crash in.”

It’s all right, Psellus urged himself, I’m equipped to handle this. I have the magic letter. He took it from his pocket, observing
that it was rather more dog-eared and crumpled than it had been four days ago. Still, what mattered was the blob of red wax
at the bottom, into which was impressed the great corporate seal of Necessary Evil. He smoothed the letter out and handed
it to the captain.

“If you’d just care to read that,” he said.

The captain glanced at it. “Like I told you,” he said, “we aren’t set up here to do escorts for civilians.”

Psellus clicked his tongue; supposed to be authoritative verging on majestic, came out petulant. “You’ll notice,” he said,
“that it’s signed personally by Commissioner Boioannes.”

“Who?”

In the event, they were quite kind to him; they fed him on bean porridge with bacon and lentils, which was what they ate themselves,
and gave him a fairly clean blanket and a reserved-for-officers-only pillow. The guardhouse floor wasn’t actually any harder
than the bed in the inn at the post-house. He was, he reminded himself, right out on the very edge of the world. If he got
up in the night for a pee and wandered a yard too far, he’d be across the frontier and in enemy territory, an accidental one-man
invasion. The thought made him cross his legs until morning.

Breakfast — bean porridge with bacon and lentils — and a stroll round the compound. Six troopers in disconcertingly full armor
failed to notice him, presumably for some valid military reason. He found an upturned packing case in the shade of the wall,
and sat on it for an hour or so, his back resolutely turned on the view. Too many mountains, not enough tall buildings. My
beautiful office, he said to himself, my beautiful
small
office.

“Good news.” The garrison captain had somehow materialized next to him while he wasn’t looking. “Actually, it’s something
I’d clean forgotten about, until you made me think of it. I’ve got orders to send a survey team to map the road between here
and …” He hesitated, scowling. “Some river,” he said, “can’t remember the name of it offhand. But if you want to go with them,
they’ll take you most of the way to where you want to go. It means walking, of course — they measure distances by counting
footsteps, apparently — but at least you won’t be on your own. Mind you, there’s always the risk that a party of our lot wandering
about in Vadani territory’s going to attract unwelcome attention from the locals; you may feel you’d stand a better chance
of sneaking in unnoticed on your own.”

So that’s good news, is it? “Can I think about it?” Psellus asked.

“Sure.” The captain smiled. “No rush, they won’t be leaving till this evening. Best to cover the first twenty miles under
cover of darkness. Just in case.”

Psellus agonized over his decision for a full five seconds. “You said something about traders,” he ventured.

Another night on the cold, hard floor; but the thought that he could be spending it scampering along mountain tracks in the
dark with a company of military surveyors made the stones a little softer. Breakfast next day was a pleasant treat: bean porridge
with bacon and lentils. A man could get to like life in a frontier post; as opposed to, say, death a few hundred yards beyond
it. The morning passed. Early in the afternoon, one of the soldiers actually spoke to him. Evening ebbed in, trailing its
hem across the mountains like a weary child dragging his heels. They hadn’t told him what dinner would be, but he was prepared
to hazard a guess.

“You’re the Mezentine.” A woman’s voice, somewhere in the shadow of the guardhouse tower. He looked round sharply, but all
he could see was a slightly denser patch of darkness. The voice itself was middle-aged, provincial and coarse.

“That’s right,” he said. “Who … ?”

“Lucao Psellus?”

“Yes.”

She stepped forward into the torchlight ring; a tall, stout woman, fishbelly-white face, Eremian or Vadani, dyed copper-beech
hair heaped up on top of her head like a lava flow, clashing horribly with her loudly crimson dress. Her bare forearms were
both fat and muscular, the muscle quite possibly built up by the effort of lifting so much monolithic gold jewelry.

“Well?” she said.

“I’m sorry,” Psellus said cautiously. “I don’t think I know you.”

“Quite right, you don’t.” She made it sound as though only sheer all-conquering magnanimity was keeping her from holding it
against him. “You wanted a ride into Vadani territory.”

Merchants; of course. Among the savages, it was quite usual for women to be merchants. “That’s right, yes,” he said quickly.

She looked at him, as though she’d bought him sight unseen and was regretting it. “I’m headed for Civitas Vadanis, more or
less direct,” she said. “Are you carrying diplomatic credentials?”