The Proof House (33 page)

As if to confirm her musings, she found Vetriz Auzeil waiting for her at home, wanting to know if she had any news about the war.

‘You mean any news about Bardas,’ she replied, because she was tired and fed up. ‘No, sorry. If there’s anything in the despatches from Shastel, I’ll let you know.’

‘Oh.’ Vetriz smiled. ‘That obvious, is it?’

‘Pretty well,’ Athli replied, wondering just what Eseutz had meant by ‘woolly’. An odd term to use. ‘If you’re that bothered, why not just write him a letter? I’m pretty sure the Shastel courier would pass it on; there’s a regular diplomatic bag now between Shastel and the provincial office, and once it’s there, the Imperial post is excellent.’

‘Thanks,’ Vetriz said, ‘but I don’t really have anything to say. I was just curious, really; you know how it is, when someone you know is mixed up in something important. You take an interest.’

Hanging around in someone’s porch waiting for them to come home just in case they had some news struck Athli as rather more than just taking an interest; but it wouldn’t help matters to point that out. ‘Coming in?’ she asked.

‘Why not?’

Athli opened the door. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘I did hear something that might interest you, since you spent all that time as a guest of the other Loredans. Gorgas is making trouble again.’

Vetriz caught her breath. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’

‘I’m going to pour myself a drink; can I get you anything? Apparently, he wrote to the prefect offering an alliance against Temrai. The prefect turned him down flat.’

‘Well, he would,’ Vetriz said. ‘Who’d want to be associated with the likes of Gorgas Loredan?’

Athli smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘but it gets better. A day or so after Gorgas got the get-lost letter from Ap’ Escatoy, he managed to capture a man called Partek—’

‘Now that name’s familiar.’

‘It should be,’ Athli said. ‘He’s been on the Empire’s Most Wanted list for years. He’s some kind of rebel leader, apparently.’

She handed Vetriz a cup of sweet cider, spiced Perimadeian style with honey and cloves. Vetriz managed not to pull a face when she sipped it. ‘Really? I didn’t think the Empire had rebels.’

‘Well, it does,’ Athli said, dropping on to a couch and kicking off her slippers. ‘Though they hate admitting to it; the warrants always say
pirate
or
highway robber
. But it’s common knowledge that they’ll do whatever it takes to get hold of Partek.’ She closed her eyes. ‘I must admit, I resent it when people like Gorgas get strokes of luck like that. I mean, it’s not as if he’ll do anybody any good with it; probably not even himself, if his record’s anything to go by.’

Vetriz had become uncharacteristically quiet; she was staring at the wall a foot or so above Athli’s head as if something was written there. Athli decided to change the subject—

But Vetriz wasn’t listening.
Oh, damn
, she thought,
I thought I’d seen the end of this sort of thing.
Apparently not; she was standing in some kind of workshop or factory, and the first thing she noticed (couldn’t help but notice) was the noise. Men were bashing bits of metal with hammers. The light slanted in from high, tall windows, marking out silver squares on the floor and making the rest of the building seem dark and gloomy by comparison. In the middle of the floor she could see a pile of what looked like body parts: arms, legs, heads, torsos, heaped and jumbled up - it was in the dark part, and she couldn’t see clearly, only a flash of metal and the evocative shapes of joints and limbs. The men at the benches were bashing away at more of the same, hammering a leg or a torso or a hand, then adding it to the pile. Why were they doing this, she wondered? There didn’t seem much point, bashing a limb that was already severed; or maybe this was a factory where they made mechanical men, like the ones in the fairy tale she remembered from when she was little. Then the angle of the light shifted a little, and she saw that they were making armour -

(
Same thing, really; perfect steel men, can’t be broken or damaged from the outside. If only these people were a little bit more clever, maybe they could find a way of doing without the soft, fallible bit that goes on the inside
.)

- And there was someone she knew; they were building him, piece by piece from the feet up, and when they put the head on, it had his face (
but there’s nothing inside. There was something inside once, it’s customary for there to be something inside. Maybe in his case they’ve made an exception
) -

‘Triz?’

‘Sorry,’ Vetriz said. ‘I was miles away. What were you saying?’

 

The battle wasn’t going well.

Temrai leaned away, settling his weight over the heel of his back foot, and kept his guard up, his wrists low, watching his enemy along the outstretched, upwards-tilted flat of his sword. He was completely out of his element here, of course, struggling to remember position one from fencing lessons fifteen years ago. He’d just about got the hang of position one when the camp was raided and there was no more time for education; so as far as scientific swordfighting was concerned, that was it.

Don’t look at your sword, look at me
, they’d told him - encouragingly, patiently, angrily, loudly, until he’d made himself do what he was told just so he’d be allowed to lower his guard and ease the pain in his wrists. Now he could see what they’d been getting at; but it was too late now to ask what he should do next.

All he could see in the other man’s eyes was intense, single-minded concentration, something he found infinitely more disturbing than mere hatred. It was as if he could see the lines, angles, geometric projections that he was calculating behind his expressionless steel face; it was like trying to stare down pure mathematics. Just as he was thinking seriously about dropping his sword and running away, the other man made his move; a wonderfully co-ordinated manoeuvre involving a long step forward with the front foot, a powerful swivel of the waist, a minimal-backlift sideways cut with the bend of the wrists accelerating the blade swiftly and smoothly through the arc of the swing. In reply, Temrai jumped backwards with both feet and pushed his sword at right angles towards the other man’s face, as if urging him to take it from him. He felt the shock of the blades colliding run up past his wrists into his elbows; it was a dull, bone-jarring pain, like hitting your own thumb with a hammer.

It had all gone wrong so quickly. First, a volley of arrows dipping down at them out of the sky - it was like the time he’d been cutting ferns for the horses’ litter and inadvertently sunk his hook into a wasps’ nest, the same bewildering, unexpected suddenness. The column was still bucking and scrambling and rearing and picking itself up off the floor when the heavy infantry had erupted out of a small copse the scouts had certified as clear only a few minutes before; they made contact while the last of the arrows were still dropping in and pitching (like pigeons or rooks on a patch of rain-flattened beans, with a swirl and a flourish). They pulled the men on the outside down from their horses and trod on them as they squashed their way in, pushing men and horses out of the way with their shields, slashing at exposed arms and legs and knees as if they were trimming back a hedge. Temrai had just worked out who they were and where they’d come from when the pikemen slammed into the column from the rear; then he’d been knocked off his horse by the man next to him, toppling out of the saddle like a badly secured sack of flour, and for a while he’d seen nothing of the battle except the hooves of spooked horses, trampling the ground all round his head.

Apparently, he’d parried the first blow; but even he could see that he’d done it the wrong way, got himself deeper into trouble. With a small, precise movement, the other man disengaged his sword from the block, made a slight adjustment of angle and lunged, far too quickly for Temrai to do anything about it. The sword-point hit him at the top of the arch of his ribs; but amazingly the angled contour of the breastplate turned it, made it slide away across his chest and under his armpit. Without really knowing what he was doing, Temrai slammed his own sword across the other man’s forehead, making a terrible thumping noise. The other man took a step back, put his heel down on the head of a dead man behind him, turned his ankle over and went sprawling down on his backside, his legs lifting up in the air so sharply that Temrai would have had his teeth smashed in if he hadn’t managed to dodge the flailing sabaton.

Unfortunately, in all this excitement he’d dropped his sword. By the time he’d stooped awkwardly down and picked it up out of the mud the other man was sitting up, backing away, scrabbling for his own sword. Temrai hit out at him and managed to connect with the side of his helmet, the force of the blow glancing off the sloped plate; and the grip was so slippery with mud that he couldn’t hold on to it, and it slipped through his fingers like the first trout he’d ever managed to tickle off the bed of a stream and then didn’t dare hold on to. The other man was on his knees, swishing at him with his sword - easily avoided by taking a step backwards, but that was a mistake, since his own sword was now about five yards away, behind his enemy.

The hell with this
, Temrai said to himself; and he jumped over the flailing arc of the sword blade, landed with his knees round the other man’s neck and went over, grabbing at the top of his head as he fell. His shoulder hit the ground first; then he felt a screaming pain in his knee where he’d twisted it round almost half a turn. Without thinking much about what he was trying to achieve, he got his fingers under the bottom rim of his enemy’s helmet and dragged upwards as hard as he possibly could. He could feel the other man twisting and struggling between his legs, hands trying to grab his; so he tugged harder, shrieking as the pain from his knee surged up through his whole body. It hurt so much that it was several seconds before he realised that the other man had stopped moving, strangled by his own chinstrap.

Temrai realised that he couldn’t let go; if he did, all his weight would fall on his dislocated knee, and he couldn’t bear the thought of that. ‘Help!’ he yelled, but of course nobody could hear him - half the men within a five-yard radius were the enemy, and all of them were dead. Fat lot of use they were to a man in a nasty spot of trouble.

Wonderful stuff, armour
, he thought, in the small part of his mind that wasn’t saturated with pain.
Mine saved me, his killed him. Pity we can’t train it to fight on its own; then we could all stay at home
. Then the pain leaked through into that compartment as well. He closed his eyes and tried to numb out the ache in his fingers, which were starting to slip. He could feel the sharp edge of the helmet rim methodically cutting the skin on the inside of his top finger-joints. If he held on long enough, say for a week, would it eventually slice through the bone?

‘Temrai? Is that you?’

He opened his eyes. He couldn’t see who it was talking to him, and he couldn’t quite place the voice. ‘Yes, of course it’s me. Help me up, I’m stuck.’

‘What seems to be - oh, right, I see. Hold still. This’ll probably hurt.’

‘Mind what you’re—’ he said, and then screamed and let go with his fingers. The next thing he was consciously aware of was the feeling of the flat ground under his back and head, and a slightly different modulation of the pain in his knee. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and opened his eyes.

‘That’s all right.’ It was Dassascai, the spy. ‘Now then, how the hell am I going to get you out of this?’

Temrai breathed in as far as he could manage. ‘What’s happening?’ he said.

‘We counter-attacked,’ Dassascai replied. ‘It wasn’t the cleverest move in the world, but we got them beat by sheer weight of numbers. You don’t want to know any more, for now.’

‘Don’t I? Oh, right. Can you get me out of the way somewhere, and then find Kurrai or someone—’

‘Not Kurrai,’ Dassascai said. ‘He wouldn’t be much use.’

‘Oh,’ Temrai repeated. ‘Damn, I can’t remember who’s next in seniority. Find someone, anyhow. I need to know what’s going on.’

‘First things first,’ the spy said. ‘I’m going to try dragging you over to that tree - oh, of course, you can’t see it from there. It’ll probably hurt a lot.’

‘All right,’ Temrai said. It did.

A little later, Dassascai knelt down beside him and asked, ‘Do you still want me to go to look for someone, or would you rather I stayed here? The last I saw we pushed them back, but I haven’t a clue whether we made it stick; they could be through here any minute. I really don’t want you to be lying here like this if they come back.’

Temrai shook his head. ‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘Send someone to fetch me when you get the chance. And thank you.’

Dassascai nodded his head. ‘That’s all right,’ he said.

‘Excuse me asking, but are you really a spy?’

Dassascai looked down at him, smiled and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘All right, stay there. I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Temrai closed his eyes; above all, he realised, he was completely exhausted. It’d be very easy right now just to drift off to sleep. But that wouldn’t do, not in the middle of a battle. He thought about what Dassascai had just told him - not the cleverest move in the world, got them beat by sheer weight of numbers.
I bet you really are a spy
, he thought, and passed out.

When he came round, there were voices talking overhead.

‘—Wasn’t meant to be a decisive battle; just a probe, that’s all, to see what we’re about and slow us down a little. Gods help us when they really come after us.’

‘Quiet. He’s awake.’

He opened his eyes, and at first it was as dark as if he was underground. Then a lamp flared as someone lifted it over his head and put it down nearby.

‘Temrai?’ He recognised the voice and the face, but the name escaped him, which was odd, since he knew the man well. ‘Temrai, it’s all right. You’re back at the camp.’