Memory (45 page)

And how come – damn that little voice, why couldn't it keep its nasty suspicions to itself? – how come Xipho had recognised Chaplain Cleapho? Because she'd lived for a while in Torcea, she'd said, and had seen him preach at the Great Temple. Except – Monach was fairly certain of this but he could be getting confused – hadn't her time in Torcea all been part of the lie she told Ciartan, to cover up the fact that she was an agent of the Order? In which case, she'd never been to Torcea at all, and couldn't have seen Cleapho there—

Assuming she was telling the truth when she'd told him she'd been lying—

(Or perhaps she had been to Torcea at some point in her service, the same way he'd been to all sorts of places; in which case, she'd only lied about how she'd come to be in the capital and what she'd done while she was there. If only he could remember; if only Xipho was here.)

But if Xipho had lied to
him
– and if Ciartan had been here; and now Monach was here and they weren't, they'd skipped out on him and left him in possession of a deadly secret but useless unfinished weapon, and the most strategically important facility in the Empire—

Which should have been the most heavily guarded facility in the Empire, if it was really so confoundedly important. But, instead, it had been left in the care of Brigadier Muno and a couple of hundred infantry, a force so slight and negligible that the Earwig had been able to put them to flight practically by accident. As if someone had set up the Poldarn's Flute project and then left it lying about, where the first passing bandit chief or Mad Monk who happened to be in the area couldn't help acquiring it. As if they'd wanted him to have it.

(But in that case, wouldn't the weapon itself, the Flute, have been finished, ready and waiting for him to collect? Or maybe that was the bit of the plan that'd gone wrong, thanks to Spenno and Galand Dev scratching each other's eyes out over the right way to build a drop-bottom cupola furnace?)

The more I think about it, the harder it gets; except, why would Xipho lie to me?

Not that Monach gave a flying fuck about them, but he hunted down Spenno in his lair and asked after the six newly cast tubes.

‘No idea,' Spenno replied, looking up and marking his place in his book with a small piece of rag. ‘They won't be cool enough to break out of the moulds until this time tomorrow, and until then there's no way of knowing. Could be absolutely fine, could be cracked to buggery and riddled with air pockets. You need patience if you work in a foundry.'

‘Fine,' Monach grunted. ‘So what about the other one? How's the drilling coming along?'

‘Ah,' Spenno said. ‘Now there things are looking a bit more hopeful. They're over two-thirds of the way down, and so far it all seems to be working out. Course, we won't actually know till we load the thing up with Morevich powder and set fire to it. Then, if it blows up and kills us all, we can probably interpret that as meaning we've still got a few bugs to iron out.'

Monach nodded slowly. ‘It's behind schedule, isn't it?' he asked.

Spenno laughed. ‘You could say that. According to old Muno, we should've had a dozen Flutes all polished up and ready to ship by now. Which might've been possible, if I hadn't had to fight that arsehole Galand Dev every bloody step of the way.' He frowned. ‘Not that that's any of your concern, is it?' he asked. ‘I mean, why would you be worried about what the Torcea government wants?'

Not knowing the answer himself, Monach ignored the question. ‘I just found out that the order to arrest that sword-monk came from Chaplain Cleapho. Did you know that?'

Spenno shrugged. ‘News to me,' he said. ‘Talking of which, surely he's one of us. What does he think of your holy war?'

‘I don't suppose he even knows we exist,' Monach replied, uncomfortably aware that he was probably lying. ‘So what'd it take to pack up the unfinished Flutes and that lathe contraption of yours, and set them up somewhere else?'

Spenno smiled, revealing missing teeth. ‘A miracle,' he said. ‘Which is your department, not mine. Like I told you, Father Tutor always reckoned I sucked at religion.'

‘What if I made that a direct order?' Monach ventured.

‘Then I guess I'd be in even more trouble than I am already,' Spenno answered, yawning. ‘But it's like they say: when you're drowning, getting spat on isn't such a big deal.'

Which was about as much Spenno as Monach could take for one day, particularly on an empty stomach. Which reminded him: he had over a thousand people on his hands still, and enough food to feed them for maybe three days. Small administrative details like that.

(Cleapho, he thought, for crying out loud. And Cordo, unaccountably returned from the dead. And Ciartan had been here; but Cleapho had sent orders to arrest the Dui Chirra blacksmith, and they'd taken the other man instead. And where had Xipho got to, when she was most desperately needed?)

Eventually they found Monach in the grain shed, counting the sacks of flour for the fifth time and still not managing to come up with a more reassuring total. There was good news, Mezentius told him, and bad news: which did he want first?

Well, the good news was that the monthly supply train was coming up the west road. It'd been held up, apparently, by the stinking horrible weather – bridges washed away, fords impassable, roads that swallowed carts whole, the usual stuff – but it was definitely on its way and should arrive the day after next.

The bad news, on the other hand, was that there was an Imperial army coming up the east road, which ought to get here at roughly the same time as the supply train. It could quite easily be a dead heat; in which case, Brigadier Muno and his seven thousand men would be able to celebrate their recapture of Dui Chirra with a hearty breakfast.

Chapter Twelve

‘
D
on't ask me,' the sergeant was saying, not for the first time, ‘I don't know what to do, I'm not a bloody officer. Far as I'm concerned, I got my orders and I'm going to carry them out. Nothing to do with me, Falcata.'

‘But that's so stupid,' someone else broke in. ‘You can't just carry on as though nothing's happened. I mean, what if HQ doesn't know about it yet? What if nobody knows? What if the bastards attack somewhere else, and everybody's killed, just because you failed to raise the alarm?'

‘Look.' The sergeant was getting angry. ‘I don't remember anything in Standing Orders about having a vote every time a decision needs making. For all we know,' he went on, lowering his voice a little, ‘getting this prisoner to Dui Chirra's more important to the Empire than saving half a dozen bloody cities. Besides,' he added, with the harsh enthusiasm of someone who'd just picked up on a previously overlooked good point, ‘there aren't any more cities left round here they could burn, it's all poxy little villages and coach stops and charcoal burners.'

It wasn't a good enough argument to stay up for, so Poldarn lay down beside the fire and tried to go to sleep. They'd made hardly any progress all that day, what with the sergeant and his council of advisers bickering and the road in an even worse mess than usual; not that he was bothered, since the last place he wanted to go was Dui Chirra. If his people had really come here and destroyed Falcata, and if they knew there was a bronze foundry in the neighborhood, with enough raw material to supply the forges of a hundred farms for a century, he knew exactly where they'd be headed next. He was almost tempted to slip away – he didn't really want to meet a raiding party from home, which might include friends and relations of Eyvind or some other of his victims; or, worse still, relatives of his own, who'd probably want to take him back to Haldersness – but he didn't have the energy to play hide-and-seek in the dark and the mud with a platoon of already bad-tempered soldiers. The plain fact was, he didn't really care where he went, mostly because no matter where he ended up, he'd have no chance, outside of being killed, of getting away from himself, and the seething mess of memories, half-memories and suspicions he'd been collecting in his mind ever since the man calling himself Gain Aciava had turned up on the cart to Dui Chirra. Compared with sharing his own company, nothing that could happen to him on the Tulice levels was worth getting worked up about.

Eventually he did fall asleep, soothed by a lullaby of querulous voices, and by some miracle or merciful dispensation he didn't have a dream or it didn't stay with him when he woke up, cramped and drenched in dew, at first light the next morning.

Either the soldiers had sat up arguing all night or they'd resumed bright and early: the debate was still going on, though he didn't seem to have missed anything in the way of exciting new arguments. The sergeant, though, was now the only proponent of carrying on to Dui Chirra. The opposition was more or less equally divided between turning round and going back to camp, or heading into the forest and finding the nearest colliers' camp, in the hope of scrounging some food.

Mention of the colliers reminded Poldarn of something; and it occurred to him that, if his sense of direction wasn't completely skewed, he wasn't all that far from Basano's camp, where he'd gone to negotiate a supply of charcoal for the foundry. Had that carefree negotiator really been him? It seemed like a thousand years ago, back in the Age of Gold, before the human race lost its innocence, and there was nothing to worry about except deer ticks, stale beer and boredom. He couldn't help remembering what Basano had said, about how colliery workers came and went, how there was always a job for anybody who was prepared to hang around long enough. At the time, he couldn't get away from the place fast enough. Strange, how the world can change so much so quickly and still look pretty much the same on the outside.

That put a different complexion on all the relevant arguments. True, he'd still be whoever he was, as much so at a colliers' camp as on the road or back at Dui Chirra. The difference was that, during the days and weeks it took for a big pile of cordwood to cook itself into charcoal, the colliers' idea of work was to sit on the edge of the stack and drink their revolting home-brewed beer. Getting rid of himself by drowning his conscious mind in booze was an approach that Poldarn couldn't remember having tried; between intoxication and dysentery, he doubted whether he'd have much opportunity to brood. Ideal.

That was that, then. Unfortunately, it was now too late for him to sneak away in the dark without being noticed; another opportunity neglected. On the other hand, nobody showed the slightest interest in getting up and moving on. It looked as if they'd be perfectly capable of staying here arguing all day, until it was dark enough for him to sling his hook without being seen or missed. But that wasn't so good; waking up to find they'd lost their prisoner might just be enough to snap them out of their differences and bring them along after him. He could always join in the debate and add his support to the pro-food faction; much easier to fake his own disappearance once they were at the colliers' camp, whereupon the soldiers would light out into the forest looking for him, and he could stay behind and ask if there was any work going. He decided against that, however; in the mood the sergeant was in, he'd be certain to veto any suggestion coming from his human cargo. Poldarn gave the matter some more thought, and came to the conclusion that the deciding factor in the debate was bound to be the realisation that they had enough food left for one meal, just possibly two.

So he waited until just after noon, when the soldiers had opened the ration sacks and been reminded of how very little they contained; then he wandered over to the fire, waited for the next tense, gloomy silence, and said in as conversational a tone as he could manage that as far as he could recall, there was a large and well-supplied colliers' camp just across the way from where they were, and maybe they could spare a bit of flour and a drop of beer. When the sergeant started to object, Poldarn added that when he'd been here the last time, the colliers had put him on a good worthwhile short cut back to Dui Chirra, which had shaved at least a day off his return journey—

That put paid to any further resistance from the sergeant, and Poldarn found himself promoted from high-security prisoner to navigator-in-chief. That was fine, the only drawback being that he didn't have more than a vague idea of the way to Basano's place, not without the annoying old man to guide him, and his sense of direction seemed to be allergic to trees in quantity. Annoyingly, the first major landmark he recognised was the filthy, muddy swamp that the old man had called Battle Slough; and he only realised he knew where he was once they'd blundered into it up over their knees.

For some reason, the soldiers didn't seem too pleased about that. Probably because of the rains, the swamp was even stickier and more treacherous than it had been the last time Poldarn had been out that way; and he couldn't help recalling the incident from which, according to his guide on that occasion (Corvolo: he dragged the name out of the back of his mind, with roughly the same level of effort as it was costing him to take one step forward), the place had derived its name. Fairly soon, if Corvolo hadn't been embellishing for dramatic effect, they could expect to come across the mildewed skeletons of the soldiers who'd got themselves hopelessly stuck here, and stayed put until they starved to death—

At least it took his mind off brooding over whether Gain Aciava had been telling the truth. Instead, Poldarn forced himself to concentrate on what he could remember of his first visit, with particular reference to such points as which direction the shadows had been pointing, the time of day, whether the slope had been with or against them. In the end he wasn't sure whether he found the way out of Battle Slough or whether it found him; in any event, by nightfall they were on the faint pattern of bent bracken stems and trampled leaf mould that was the best the forest could furnish them with by way of a road, and on their way to Basano's camp – assuming, of course, that it was still there.