"I'm not sure that'd be appropriate," the duty officer said. "But I assure you, as soon as I see him-"
"Haven't you been listening to me?" Orsea could hear the shrill, petulant anger in his own voice; it revolted him. "As soon as you see him could be too late. If the innkeeper at Sharra knows we're here and there's a Mezentine patrol stationed there-"
"Assuming," the duty officer interrupted quietly, "that what this woman told you is true."
I must try and make him understand. "She found me, didn't she?" he said. "She heard we were here from someone; she told me it was the innkeeper who told her. I can't imagine why she'd want to lie about it. Think about it, can't you? There's this merchant with a delivery for my wife. Here, look." He thrust the little cloth sack at the officer's face, like a fencer testing the distance. "Now, if she wasn't told where I was likely to be, how do you think she found me? Just wandering around at random on the off chance she'd run into me?"
The officer leaned back a little, putting space between himself and the smell of the bag. "You may like to bear in mind that we're on a road," he said, voice flat and featureless. "People travel up and down roads, on their way to wherever they happen to be going. It seems more likely to me that she fortuitously came across this column while following the road than that she heard about us at Sharra and made her way here across country, in a ladies' chaise, just to deliver a bag of dried flowers."
Orsea pulled in a deep breath. "I don't agree," he said. "And I'm asking you to send someone to find Valens, right now. Are you going to do it?"
The officer's eyes were sad as well as hostile. "I'm afraid I can't," he said.
"Fine." Orsea swung round, traversing like a siege engine on its carriage, to face the Eremian officer who'd led him there. "All right," he said, "you do it."
The Eremian was only a young man, embarrassed and ashamed. "I'm sorry," he began to say.
"You heard what I just told him?"
The Eremian nodded wretchedly.
"Good. I'm telling you to find Duke Valens and pass the message on."
Such a reproachful look in the young man's eyes. "Actually, I'm supposed to be taking a note to-"
"Never mind about that." Orsea couldn't help thinking about the drunk with the stick. "It can wait. Do you understand what I want you to do?"
The young man was looking past him, at the duty officer. Orsea couldn't see what he saw, but the young man nodded slightly. "Of course," he said. "Straightaway." He left quickly, grateful to get away, leaving Orsea and the duty officer facing each other, like the big man and the little drunk. I won, Orsea thought, I got my way. Shouldn't that make me the big man, not the other way round?
The carpenters weren't happy. Valens found that hard to take, since he was merely telling them to do what they'd told him was the only way. But apparently there wasn't enough good seasoned timber to do the job; they could use green wood, but-
"I know," Valens snapped. "You told me."
Dignified silence. They were good at dignified silence. "Do the best you can," he growled at them, and left with what little remained of his temper.
Heading back to his coach, he met a sad-looking ensign; an Eremian, he noticed from his insignia. He looked weary and ground down, as though he'd been given an important job he didn't know how to do.
"I've got a message for you," the sad ensign said. "From Duke Orsea."
One damn thing after another. "Go on, I'm listening."
He listened, and when the ensign had finished, he said, "Orsea told you that? Himself?"
The ensign nodded. "He reported it to the duty officer-"
Valens wasn't interested in any of that. "All right," he said, "here's what I want you to do."
He fired off a list of instructions, detailed and in order of priority. He could see the ensign forcing himself to remember each step, his eyes terrified. Fear of failure; must be an Eremian characteristic. "Have you got that?"
"Yes."
"Repeat it all back to me and then get on with it."
It all came back at him like an echo; it sounded very impressive, as though Duke Valens was on top of the situation. It'd be nice if he was, since the lives of everybody in the column depended on him. If only the warning hadn't come from Orsea; anybody else, a soldier, a half-blind crippled shepherd, a twelve-year-old boy, and he'd be comfortable with it. But no, it had to be Orsea. Still, the risk was too great. If he ignored it, and the Mezentines came…
The ensign darted away, swift as a deer pursued by hounds, born to be hunted, inured to it. Valens stopped to take a deep breath and clear his mind, then went to find the duty officer.
21
His third visit to the Unswerving Loyalty; Miel Ducas was starting to feel at home there. Mind, he wasn't sure he liked what the Mezentines had done with the place. Rows of hastily built sheds crowded the paddock behind the original stable block, and the yard was churned and rutted from extreme use. Stacks of crates and barrels masked the frontage; it hadn't been a thing of beauty, but the supply dumps hadn't improved it. Mezentine soldiers everywhere, of course; definitely an eyesore. He wondered if he ought to point out to someone in charge that the inn was, properly speaking, his property, and he hadn't authorized the changes.
They let him out into the yard for half an hour, for exercise. They were punctilious about it-probably because they were cavalrymen, used to the need to exercise horses. The degree of joy he felt at being allowed into the open air disturbed him. Something so trivial shouldn't matter, now that his life was rushing to its end. He'd wanted to achieve a level of tranquility; how could it possibly matter whether or not he saw the sun one last time before he died? But the light nearly overwhelmed him, after a sleepless night in a stone pigsty. Perhaps it wasn't the light so much as the noise. Out here, people were talking to each other. Not a word had been spoken in the dark; his fellow prisoners' silence had been harder to bear than anything they could have said to him. As soon as they'd left the pigsty, Framain and his daughter had walked away from him, crossed to the other side of the yard. He could see them talking to each other, but he couldn't make out what they were saying. Probably just as well.
He watched a Mezentine groom leading a horse across the top of the yard, passing a man sharpening a bill-hook on a big wheel grindstone. The horse tried to shy as it passed the shower of orange sparks, but the groom twitched its headstall and it followed him, resigned rather than calm. Someone else was forking hay out of a cart into a hayloft. A sack of grain rose into the air on the end of a rope, as a winch creaked. A boy, not Mezentine, raked up horse dung into a barrow. Nobody seemed interested in Miel Ducas, apart from the two guards who watched him as though he was the only thing in the world. He felt mildly ashamed that he hadn't given any serious thought to trying to escape; properly speaking, it was his duty, but he simply couldn't be bothered. If he tried to get away, they'd only kill him. It was less effort to stay where he'd been put, and he was enjoying watching the people.