The Folding Knife (24 page)

"Five? You said..."

"There was quite a crowd. They had to cut their way through."

Basso stared at him. "That's eighteen people," he said.

"That's right. Really, it's amazing that you--"

"Shut up, Cinio," Basso said. "Listen, who knows about this?"

"Aelius, naturally. And the watch captains, and the gatekeepers; we've closed all the gates, so they can't leave the city. Otherwise, we're keeping it quiet, for now. We reckon we'll have a better chance of catching them if--"

Basso shook his head. "I couldn't give a damn about that," he said. "But keep a lid on it for as long as you can. Officially I've come down with something debilitating but trivial--food poisoning, I don't care. How long before I'm back on my feet, by the way?"

"Not sure," Cinio said. "It's so hard to pin these doctors down to anything definite. At least a fortnight."

"The hell with that." Basso tried to move, and discovered, much to his surprise, that he had no strength at all. "The point is," he said, "I don't want this to be public knowledge. Understand?"

Cinio looked at him. "I'm not sure we can--"

"I am. If there's rumours, deny them. Food poisoning. And find some excuse for someone to come and see me, someone people'll believe. The message is, I'm not dead, I'm a bit off-colour but I'll be fine, nothing's happened. Do you understand?"

"Yes." Cinio's face made it obvious he was lying. "But that's going to make catching the bad guys rather difficult, if we can't--"

"I don't want them caught. At least, I don't care one way or another. They're just some men who got paid to do a job of work."

"But if we don't catch the assassins," Cinio said, a patiently-explaining-to-an-idiot voice, "we don't stand much of a chance of finding out who hired them. Surely--"

"I'm not interested," Basso said. "That's the message. I don't think we're going to find out who planned this, even if we catch the hired hands. So, if I can't catch them, I want to do the next-best thing."

"Meaning?"

"I want to annoy them," Basso said. "As much as possible."

Cinio looked very sad. "I don't follow."

"Think about it," Basso said. "You've planned something like this. Against all the odds, it doesn't work, but you console yourself with the thought that, at the very least, the City'll be turned upside down, everybody'll be thrown into a panic, and you've put it in people's minds that the First Citizen was only a hair's breadth from being killed, and he might well not be so ridiculously lucky next time. That's at least a third of your objectives achieved. People who've been with me so far will start to think, what'll become of me if Basso gets killed and the other lot get in? What do you think'll happen to the Bank if people start thinking I might not be around this time next year?" He paused for a moment; his weak, useless body had caught up with him and he was completely out of breath. "Figure it out for yourself," he said. "There was no attempt on my life. A simple case of the running shits. I'll be up and back to work before you know it. All right?"

Cinio was obviously doing as he'd been told, thinking about it. "If you say so," he said. "I can't say I agree, though. We've got plans for a day of national thanksgiving for your miraculous escape. Services in Temple, a procession--"

"Go away," Basso said weakly. "You're making my head hurt."

Naturally, the rumour spread. Within twelve hours of the attack, it was everywhere. But when Chancellor Licinius stood up in the House to announce that the First Citizen was indisposed owing to a tiresome but minor gastric complaint--

Caelius Thraso, from the Optimate front bench, interrupted at this point. He was overjoyed, he said, to hear that the First Citizen's condition was relatively minor. He had heard a rather different version: that there had been a most deplorable, cowardly attempt on the First Citizen's life. Could the Chancellor categorically state...?

The Chancellor most certainly could. Food poisoning, in all probability picked up from tainted shellfish the First Citizen had eaten at the reception for the Mavortine ambassador. Several other guests at the reception had reported similar symptoms. The rumours (it was the first the Chancellor had heard of them) were entirely untrue. In future, the Chancellor added, the noble gentleman might consider consulting official sources if he wanted to know the facts of a matter, rather than listening to idle bar-room chatter.

Nobody believed a word of it, of course; not for the first twenty-four hours. After that, they still didn't quite believe it, but they lost faith with the assassination story as well. Nobody, the argument ran, could try and cover up something as big as an attempt on the life of the head of state. Furthermore, why would anybody want to? Accordingly, simple logic required that there couldn't have been one. Therefore, whatever it was that was keeping Citizen Basso from doing his job, it wasn't the running shits and it wasn't multiple stab wounds either. Various theories, more or less lurid depending on the source, floated about for a day or so. Then Basso was seen riding in his chair from his home to the House, which was taken as an indication that the story, whatever the truth of it may have been, was now over.

Basso paid the compensation--ten thousand nomismata to the families of the guards, the bearers, the torchbearers and the dead civilians--out of his own pocket, and a further ten thousand to each of the men who'd stopped the assassin with the hunting sword from killing him. He handed the money over personally, just him and the recipient alone in a room together.

("How did it go?" Sentio asked him afterwards.

"Not well," Basso replied. "They were grateful." And that was all he had to say about the matter.)

By an extraordinary coincidence, it later emerged that two junior secretaries from the Chamber of Trade had indeed suffered food poisoning after the Mavortine reception, as a consequence of over-indulgence in marinaded cuttlefish. For a while they were eagerly courted by senior Optimate figures, who wanted to know if they'd seen the First Citizen actually eating the stuff himself. They replied that they couldn't say for sure but they imagined he would have done, since marinaded cuttlefish was a Mavortine delicacy and it'd have been impolite to refuse it. They, on the other hand, had each had four helpings, though they wouldn't be making that mistake again in a hurry. Shortly afterwards, there was a major reshuffle on the Optimate front bench; Caelius Thraso stepped down as deputy shadow chancellor, and the balance of power shifted a little towards the centre. Since support for the Optimates was at its lowest level for forty years, however, it hardly seemed to matter very much.

"No, I'm not just feeling lonely," Basso snapped. "And it's a matter of the utmost urgency. Go and bloody well do as you're told."

It hadn't been his idea to hire a social secretary. But he needed someone to do it. Antigonus had flatly refused; Scaevola, from the Protocol Office, had volunteered but was useless at everything; in desperation, he'd told Sentio to find him someone. He hadn't expected a woman ("It's not right," he objected. "How can I shout at her when she does something wrong?"). But, according to Sentio, there were quite a few female clerks in Protocol these days, and they did a fine job; and really, so long as they weren't citizens, where was the harm in it?

Melsuntha (her name was longer than that; you had to break a bit off if you were to stand any chance of saying it) turned out all right. She was thirty-one years old, free-born, a Mavortine but with only the faintest trace of an accent, and he found he could shout at her just fine. She didn't seem to notice. She just stood or sat there till he'd finished, and then went on with what she was saying. Within the first hour of their acquaintance he'd nearly fired her three times. Two months later, he'd got used to her being there. When he heard she'd caught the plague, he was surprised by the slight lurch of fear he'd felt, and the pleasure when he heard she'd recovered.

"Fine," she said. "You want me to find you a wife. What sort of timescale did you have in mind?"

"I told you, as soon as possible."

She frowned. "Please be more specific. Months? Weeks? Days?"

No use. He was going to have to explain. "My sister's blackmailing me," he said. "She's going to marry one of my worst enemies if I don't get married myself in the next couple of months. I might just possibly get away with a formal betrothal in three months and one day, but that's about all the slack I can expect her to cut me. She can be rather vindictive sometimes."

She listened to that as if it had been the most reasonable thing in the world. "You'd better give me the criteria," she said. "I assume you want to make the best deal possible as far as political and business alliances are concerned."

He frowned. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I suppose I ought to. After all, it's my trademark, turning disasters into opportunities."

She looked at him. "You classify marriage as a disaster?"

That made him laugh. "In my admittedly limited experience, yes. You know about me, do you?"

"Everybody knows that," she said.

They discussed criteria for a while, and she made some extremely sensible suggestions. He hadn't expected she'd be quite so well informed about politics and commerce.

"I listen," she said. "I have excellent hearing. And people don't notice I'm in the room."

He found that hard to believe. "Well," he said, "we've got some possibilities there, I suppose. Now there's the question of how we're going to set about it."

"Excuse me?"

He thought about the choice of words. "The courtship procedure," he said. "As you know, there are protocols. Unfortunately, they don't help us much. Normally, where it's a political or dynastic marriage, the negotiations are carried out between the heads of the families. But that's going to be awkward here, because I'm the head of our family, and it'd be a breach of etiquette, not to mention hideously embarrassing, for me to negotiate on my own behalf."

She frowned. "I see," she said. "Excuse me, but that's a curious gap in the system. Surely you can't be the first head of family in history to be looking for a wife."

"It's very rare, actually," he said. "The assumption is, a head of family's already thoroughly married. If their wives die, they're not really supposed to marry again, it messes up the existing arrangements. I imagine that was one of the reasons my sister came up with the idea; the maximum embarrassment for the minimum effort."

She nodded. "In that case," she said, "we'll have to innovate. The simplest thing would be for me to open negotiations as your representative."

He thought about that. "Actually," he said, "that's not a bad idea. You're completely outside the family structure, so there's no real scope for taking umbrage. Yes, all right, do that. Mind you," he added, "I wouldn't want your job."

She didn't react to that. "I'll draft a standard letter for your approval," she said. "I expect there's a form of words in one of the books of precedents that I can adapt. Please let me know if there are more names you'd like me to add to the list."

He felt strangely let down, as if a traumatic but exciting thing he'd been expecting to happen had been cancelled at the last moment. "Fine," he said. "Right, you get on and do that. It'll be interesting to see what reactions you'll get."

She was gathering up her papers, putting them away in the appropriate files. "One other thing," he said.

"Yes?"

He frowned. "I've been calling you Melsuntha all this time. Is that actually your name?"

She looked up. "Since you ask," she said, "no."

"Oh."

"It's complicated." She put the files back on the desk. "Where I come from, names serve a different purpose. They convey information."

"Same here," he said. "I'm Bassianus Honorius Arcadius Severus; that tells you who my father and mother and paternal grandfather were, and people call me Basso for short."

She sort-of-smiled. "That's a very simplistic way to use names," she said. "My name is Elagabil-Manzicert-Rusinholet-Melsuntha. The Melsuntha part merely tells you that I'm an unmarried woman, of good family but without a title."

"Ah," Basso said. "Sorry," he added. "So really it's more of an adjective than a name."

"Oh no." She shook her head. "It's a name all right, or part of one. Lotheir-Melsuntha's the heroine of one of our oldest verse dramas, and she happens to be an unmarried woman of good family but without a title. There are several other heroines of literature whose names are used in the same way. I could just as easily have been called Kerimheltha or Berineld; they'd have meant the same thing. But my
name
," she went on, "is Elagabil."

"Ah." He pursed his lips. "And the other bits?"

She smiled properly this time. "Manzicert is an obscure folk heroine associated with the region where my family originated; not where they live now, of course, but where they came from. Rusinholet is the patron goddess of the clan with whom our clan, the Gabil, have traditionally been allied. Ela signifies that my mother wasn't from the Gabil clan. Because Rusinholet comes after Manzicert, that means that we as a family no longer live where we used to. The fact that Manzicert was chosen as the regional identifier rather than one of the better-known folk heroines from our area--there are at least a dozen--tells you that our family occupies a rather junior role in the clan hierarchy. One of my people would be able to interpret the nuances quite precisely." She folded her arms. "There's rather more to it than that," she said, "but I won't bore you with the more abstruse elements. I just wanted to give you an overview."