The Proof House (52 page)

He closed his eyes; and then he was somehow underneath the town, directly under Athli’s house, in a tunnel, the usual tunnel, that reeked of coriander and wet clay. ‘Look, is this really . . . ? he started to protest, but the floor of the tunnel was giving way under his feet, and he was falling -

- Down into another tunnel (the usual tunnel), where they were scooping up the spoil and loading it on to the dolly-trucks; and mixed in with the spoil he could see all manner of artefacts and curios from a time several hundred years ago. Some of the pieces were familiar; others weren’t, and some of the unfamiliar ones were a very strange shape indeed - parts of suits of armour for creatures that were far from human, or part human, part something else.

Gannadius looked round. There wasn’t anybody there that he could see, just helmets and pieces of armour -

An elegant, if somewhat battered, barbute sallet, the sort of helmet that covers the face completely apart from narrow slits for the eyes and mouth. ‘Is that you?’ Gannadius asked. ‘You remind me of someone I used to work with, but I can’t quite . . .’

No great mystery; they’d run the tunnel through the middle of a burial ground, a mass grave for the losers of some battle long ago; or else they’d reopened a tunnel from some previous siege, where a cave-in had buried an assault party. ‘Just a minute,’ Gannadius said, ‘you aren’t Alexius, you don’t sound a bit like him. Who are you?’

‘It matters to me,’ Gannadius replied, turning the helmet over. It was empty.

‘No, I . . . Yes, the wizard.’ Gannadius couldn’t sit down, there wasn’t room, so he leaned his back against the curved, damp wall of the tunnel. ‘Is there actually a point to this, or is it just that big hunk of cheese I ate?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Gannadius replied, feeling rather self-conscious about apologising to a hallucination. ‘So I take it there is a reason for this?’

Gannadius frowned. ‘The what house?’

‘I’m not sure,’ Gannadius replied. ‘To be honest with you, I don’t think either comparison is a perfect fit. Besides, why are you asking me this?’

‘Oh . . .’ Gannadius shrugged. ‘All right, on balance I’d say the Principle is more like a river than a wheel. Satisfied?’

Gannadius scowled. ‘If I treated my students like that, I’d be out of a job.’

‘If I do, can I wake up?’

Gannadius sighed. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I hold that the Principle flows like a river along a bed of circumstance and context; it goes where it goes because the landscape takes it there. I hold that it flows from a beginning to an end, and as and when it reaches that end, it’ll stop. I hold that the course of the Principle can be deflected, but only by diverting it from one set of circumstance and context into another; further, that only the future course can be diverted - it’s impossible to change the past. How am I doing?’

‘If you insist. I hold that the Principle revolves, like a wheel, around an event; but, like a wheel, as it turns on firm ground it pulls itself forward, thereby moving its own axis forward with it - which explains why we don’t live the same day over and over again. The analogy breaks down because the events that form the axis, or do I mean axle, are constantly changing, but the wheel continues to revolve around them without loss of continuity - which is why it’s better to think of the events as the bed and banks of a river, in my opinion. I’ll admit, though, that the wheel analogy is preferable because it brings out the repetitive aspect of the Principle, something which is rather understated in the river image; it’s still there, of course, because a water-course only comes into being after hundreds of years, when countless cycles of rain and flood have eroded a channel for it to run down. Actually, both images are misleading; the Principle doesn’t repeat itself, it just tends to make the same sort of thing happen over and over again. Anyway, to get back to the wheel, you can’t divert the wheel itself - it can only go round - but by shifting the axle you can steer those revolutions on to a different road. In theory, that is. In practice, anybody fool enough to try interfering will probably get run over - or drowned, if you prefer. There, will that do?’

‘Adequate,’ Gannadius repeated. ‘Well, thank you ever so much.’

- And the roof caved in, and the town came crashing down through it, and after that the whole world; but not enough to fill the tunnel. For a moment Gannadius could see it all - cities and roads and towns and fortresses, villages and fields and forests, tumbling into the hole like milk through a tin funnel and soaking away into the black clay. There was a rich stench of garlic, and all around him Gannadius could see the Sons of Heaven, watching in silent, detached appreciation, as if this was a ballet or a lecture. He could see ships, vast fleets of them spilling infinite numbers of steel men on to all the beaches and headlands in the world, until the steel men covered the face of the earth -

‘As if the world was wearing armour,’ he said aloud. ‘Nice touch.’

- and under every city and town and village he could see tunnels and galleries and saps, where steel men burrowed and hammered and bashed steel limbs and heads over anvils, until all the cities and towns were undermined and fell down into the camouflets, and the skin of steel closed over where they’d stood. In the mines, the steel men skinned the steel off the bodies of the dead, cutting the straps with thin-bladed knives, peeling away the steel plate to reach the flesh beneath; the steel went into the scrap, the trash, piled up in pyramids that touched the roof, while the hammers bashed and pounded the flesh, breaking up the fibres to make it easier to cook. And all the flesh went into the mouths of the Children of Heaven, and all the steel went back into the melt, to be drawn off in blooms, hammered into billets, hammered again into plates, hammered again into the shapes of limbs, hammered again by the sword and the axe and the mace and the flail and the morningstar and the halberd and the long-shafted war-hammer, at every stage put to proof (
proof, if proof were needed
) and hammered to the point of failure, which is the point at which the chrysalis fails at the seams and bursts open, releasing the butterfly.

‘That’s an interesting hypothesis,’ Gannadius murmured.

Then the images merged, as all the cities became one city, all the countries one country, all the steel one suit of proof, all the people one man; and he was standing over his anvil swinging his hammer, letting it fall in its own weight, pinching the metal between the hammer and the anvil so that it flowed like a sluggish river, or the stream of lava from a volcano.

‘Alexius?’ Gannadius asked.

But the man shook his head. ‘Close,’ he replied, ‘but no grapefruit. Alexius is dead, I’m afraid - we just couldn’t make an exception for him any longer - and so is Anax, Bardas Loredan’s friend, and a lot of others too. They went in the scrap, and the scrap went into the melt, and the melt became billets, and the billets become me. You’re seeing me as Alexius because of your basic human need for a reassuringly friendly face.’

‘Ah,’ Gannadius said.

‘Which is misleading, of course,’ he went on, ‘because I’m not reassuring and I’m sure as hell not friendly. You see, the Principle is the Empire; it’s the melt and the anvil; it’s a river that drowns you, or a wheel that runs you over. The lava stream is a good image too, as far as it goes. But personally, I like the idea of the Principle being the proof house, because for every inch of development there has to be a crumpled and wrecked yard of destruction; otherwise, how do you ever get on to the next stage?’

‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Gannadius said.

‘Fair enough,’ he replied, as his hammer distorted the metal. ‘It’s because you can’t see the beginning, the points it started from. You see, every act of destruction begins with a first small moment of failure - the first point where the metal stresses and tears, the first crack, the first place where the material is beaten thin. Once you have that, everything around it fails and everything falls in - it’s like the one prop you pull out to set off a camouflet, and then the city falls through the hole. Gorgas Loredan was a point of failure, where the stress became too much; there were others - centuries ago, some of them, like the moment when the Sons of Heaven first broke through, or very recent, like the Empire getting its hands on a fleet of ships, which is the failure that’ll pull down the cities across the sea. There was a moment of failure when Alexius stupidly agreed to place the curse on Bardas, and that ripped open a whole seam. You could say it was like splitting a log - one wedge opens a crack to put the next wedge in. That’s the progressive element of the Principle.’ He laughed. ‘Definitely not reassuring,’ he said with a smile. ‘And definitely not friendly. Another really major failure was the moment when you agreed to carry the duck from Perimadeia to the Island; that was a disaster from which the world may never recover. But try not to feel guilty about it; you weren’t to know. Quite probably, you were only trying to be helpful.’

‘That’s right,’ Gannadius said. ‘I was.’

He nodded. ‘Comic,’ he said, ‘in a grotesque sort of a way; destruction and ruin swoop down on the west, sewn up in the crop of a duck. Well, that ought to have given you plenty to think about. Thanks for watching.’

- And his eyes were open again, as the plate toppled off his knees and the crusty end of the bread rolled under the chair.
Damn
, he thought.
But I’m not sure I’m convinced. It’s a specious enough theory, but I’d like to see some hard proof.

Someone was hammering at the door; he stood up, brushing away crumbs, and answered it. There were two soldiers standing in the doorway, and a clerk.

‘Doctor Gannadius?’

‘That’s me.’

‘The sub-prefect’s compliments,’ the clerk said, ‘and he thought you might be interested to know there’s been an unscheduled arrival, a ship from Shastel. It was blown off-course and put in here. The sub-prefect has asked them to hold over until tomorrow morning so they can carry some letters for him, and he thought you might like a berth on it.’

‘That’s very thoughtful of him,’ Gannadius said. ‘I’d like that very much. What’s the ship called?’

‘The
Poverty and Forbearance
; the master’s name is Hido Elan, and it’s down on the Drutz. They’ve agreed to take you home for free, as a gesture of goodwill.’

‘Goodwill,’ Gannadius repeated. ‘Well, isn’t everybody being kind to me today.’

Colonel Ispel, in command of the provincial office’s expeditionary force against Perimadeia, made an undisputed landfall and sent out his scouts. When they returned, they reported no sign of the enemy in any direction. Ispel pitched camp on the site of Temrai’s recently abandoned settlement, spread out the maps on the floor of his tent and did his homework.

Because the enemy had abandoned their position and moved off inland, the reason for launching the offensive this way had become obsolete before he’d even embarked. Nevertherless, his situation was strong; he had just over fifty thousand men in arms, made up of twenty thousand heavy infantry, four thousand cavalry, sixteen thousand light infantry and ten-thousand-and-something archers, artillerymen, pioneers and irregular skirmishers. He left two thousand of the least useful irregulars to keep the crews of his ships from slipping away - they were, after all, Islanders, no threat but entirely untrustworthy - and set out with the main army to follow in Temrai’s footsteps. In addition to the fighting men, he had a large but not unwieldy baggage and supply train, with enough supplies to see the army clear across the plains and back into Imperial territory - one thing he knew for sure about this country was that living off it was out of the question. Such a large encumbrance would obviously slow down the progress of his main force, but he resisted the temptation to send his cavalry too far ahead. The clans were extremely competent light cavalry and horse-archers, and what he’d read about them suggested that they would enjoy nothing more than an opportunity to harass a slow-moving column unprotected by cavalry, to the point where momentum broke down and the advance ground to a halt. Besides, he was in no great hurry; intelligence reports from Captain Loredan’s army suggested that Temrai had dug in on top of some hill and was waiting for the end. If that was true, the only way this war could be lost was by making a stupid mistake, and he’d be far more likely to do that if he rushed blindly ahead into barren and largely unknown territory.

The plains turned out to be unlike any other country he’d served in. He’d fought in swamps and deserts and mountains, in hell and in paradise, in bleaching sun and driving snow, but this was the first time he’d had to march across a landscape that was utterly, painfully boring. It wasn’t called the plains for nothing; once he’d left behind the little fringe of mountains that overlooked Perimadeia itself, there was nothing on either side but flat land covered in coarse, fat blue-green couch-grass for as far as the eye could see. Not that boring was necessarily a bad thing; in country this open an ambush was effectively impossible, and provided they kept to the road, they would be able to make extremely good progress. Off the road, of course, it was a different matter; the ubiquitous couch tended to grow in little tussocks about the size of a man’s head, and trying to march an army across country would be courting disaster. Apart from the substantial monetary cost of keeping an army in the field (twenty thousand gold quarters a week), he wasn’t facing any problems that called for forced marches and flying columns. The only niggling fear in the back of his mind was that Captain Loredan might have finished the job before he arrived, leaving him and his men with nothing to look forward to except a long, dull march home.