Shadow

The carter furrowed his brows. 'I still reckon-' he began.

'Gotto,' Poldarn interrupted, 'shut up. As for you,' he went on, 'what about your men? I heard the officer say something about being cavalry. So where are their horses?'

This time, Tazencius frowned. 'You know,' he said, 'that's a very good point. I hadn't thought of that. They had them last time I saw them. Captain Olens,' he called out, 'did you hear that?'

'Sir,' replied a voice, muffled by the boards of the cart. 'I left them with Corporal Vestens back where we first noticed you were missing, so we could comb the area for you. Too dark to go searching for someone on horseback.'

'That makes sense,' Poldarn admitted. 'All right, let's all get some sleep. The main thing is,' he went on, staring hard at Tazencius, 'I can't think of any reason why you or your people would want to cut our throats, so I'll trust you not to. Agreed?'

Of course, Poldarn had no intention of sleeping, even if there had been any chance that he might. As far as he could judge from the sound of their breathing, Tazencius and his escort (and Gotto, for what little that mattered) all fell asleep quite quickly and easily, but he wasn't prepared to trust his judgement on that point, or many others. It'd all be easier, he reckoned, when daylight came and gave the world back its memory. Dealing in anonymity and trust in the pitch dark was no way for grown men to do business.

He couldn't help wondering, all the same (and it was that time in the early hours of the morning when perspectives are generally different): first Chaplain Cleapho, escaping (presumably he'd escaped) an ambush by the skin of his teeth; now the man Tazencius, whom Cleapho had mentioned (and who'd turned out to be prefect of Mael Bohec, whatever that signified), wandering about in the mist with a rather small escort, surely, for an important man (guessing that prefects were as important as they sounded); add a variety of different types of soldier, the burning of Josequin, all manner of alarms, excitements and coincidences following him round like a tripe butcher's dog (This man who called himself Prince Tazencius, some off-relation of the emperor himself, who reckoned that the two of them were hopelessly shackled together by some secret bond of guilt and fear… First the emperor's chaplain, now the emperor's cousin, claiming to be his fellow conspirators in some desperate venture. Poldarn squeezed his nails into the palm of his hand. He'd tried explaining, and asking; perhaps it was time to take the hint. The pig doesn't stop to ask the slaughterman why the abattoir gate's been left unexpectedly open.)

He yawned. All in all, he'd been happier alone in the dark, with his boot on a stranger's neck. That way, at least, he'd had some measure of control, and he'd been invisible. There was clearly a lot to be said for being nobody nowhere, at least in the short term.

Then, in spite of himself and everything, he fell asleep. If he dreamed, he didn't remember any of it when he woke up, or any splinters of memory sticking into his mind were quickly dislodged by what he saw when he opened his eyes -Gotto, still sitting squarely on the box but with his head leaning right back on to his shoulder blades, his throat cut to the bone, blood still glistening black in the fibres of his coat. No sign of anybody else, no horses, just himself, a dead man and-inevitably, inevitably-two crows opening their wings in exasperation as he interrupted them in their work.

Chapter Eleven

The letter was still there; so was his sword. He jumped down from the cart and tried to trace the direction the horses had been driven off in from the hoofprints in the mud, but there was just a confused mess, open to various interpretations. He looked up and down the road, right and left; two choices, back to that old game again. This time at least, he had something to motivate him: the letter, a job to do, his duty to the Falx house, their trust in him… He didn't give a damn about the Falx house, but it made a pleasant change to have some reason to do something. On to Mael Bohec, then. Easy.

After he'd been walking for a couple of hours, he saw three men on horses coming down the road towards him. Not again, he thought, but when they were close enough for him to see more than an outline he relaxed. There was a large middle-aged man in a red cloak and a broad black felt hat, and two younger men in rather less gorgeous clothes who were almost certainly his sons; the older man was leading a packhorse, unladen (so the chances were that they were on their way home). 'Excuse me,' he called out, 'but can I buy your horse?'

That got their attention. The man in the red cloak introduced himself as Cobo Istin. The other two were Cobo this and Cobo that; Poldarn didn't catch their names, and he got the feeling he wasn't missing much. Yes, Cobo Istin said, he might entertain the idea, provided the price was right. (It was a rather sad horse; it didn't take much imagination to picture the look of amazed joy on the face of Cobo Istin's wife when her husband walked through the door and announced, 'Guess what, I've sold Dobbin!') When Poldarn offered him thirty quarters he said, 'Yes,' without thinking, and his hand shot out like a lizard's tongue to receive the money.

'We haven't got any spare tack,' Cobo Istin added mournfully as soon as his fingers had clamped tight around the coins. 'Otherwise we'd-'

'That's all right,' Poldarn replied. 'I can make up some sort of bridle out of the leading rein.' The expression in his eyes warned Cobo Istin that the leading rein was included in the price; Cobo let the missed opportunity pass with only a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth.

'By the way,' Poldarn continued, 'are you going to Sansory?'

'That's right.'

'Good. I want you to do me a favour. About an hour down the road, you'll find a cart with a dead body in it. When you get to Sansory, send someone over to the Falx house and let them know about it; it's their cart and their dead body. I can't go myself. I've got things to do.'

Cobo Istin looked at him as if to say, I knew this was too good to be true. 'Now just a moment,' he said.

'It's all right,' Poldarn sighed. 'Don't if you don't want to. But Falx Roisin usually pays ten per cent salvage when someone helps him get his stuff back. I'd have thought you'd have known that.'

He left Cobo Istin torn between the prospect of still more free money and the threat of getting involved; he felt slightly guilty about ruining the man's day, and he hoped Falx Roisin wouldn't react too noisily if Cobo did show up at the door and start asking for money.

Gotto had mentioned something about a village with an inn and other amenities of civilised life on the road one day out from Mael. Because the horse turned out to be rather less sad than it had looked, Poldarn arrived there just before sunset. The inn wasn't hard to find (it was the first building he came to in the village and it had INN written in big letters on a hanging sign over the door) and the innkeeper was delighted to see him and take his money; as a glimpse of another, entirely different way of living, in which things generally went all right and people were still there and alive the next day, it was all painfully tantalising. For his two and a half quarters he got a stall for the horse, a genuine bed in an otherwise empty room, and a bowl of bean and bacon soup that didn't taste bad at all.

It was raining when he woke up, but nothing horrible or even unusual happened to him all that day, and he reached Mael Bohec in the late afternoon. He'd been expecting it to be another Sansory-perhaps a little bigger, a little tidier, but basically the same sort of thing. Whether the reality of it came as a pleasant surprise or a shock, he wasn't sure for some time.

Mael Bohec started two or three miles from the walls and gates, at the point where the high, rolling moor dropped down into the flat river valley. Later, he learned that the place was known as the Crow's Nest, after the lookout platform on top of the mast of a ship; from there you could see right down the river as far as the point at which it bent round the foot of Streya, the range of tall, bare-topped hills that separated the Mael valley from Weal and the more favoured country to the west. What struck Poldarn first was the astonishing precision of the roads, walls and hedges of the rich garden country between himself and the city; they all ran for miles in perfectly straight lines, like marks scribed by a skilled craftsman on a sheet of brass. The fields and enclosures and the small woods that made up the chequerboard pattern all looked to be the same size as each other, and arranged in an orderly pattern-five fields down and you came to a hedged lane, five fields across and you came to a drain or a rine; every fifteen fields along, a road, every thirty fields down each road a building; every third field diagonal was fallow, every twelfth field a wood. In the middle of the chequerboard was the perfectly square city, with a gate in the middle of each wall flanked by two identical hexagonal towers and a great square tower on each corner. Even the river was straight, and worked carefully into the pattern so as not to offend regularity or symmetry, since it was balanced on the northern side by the road and a thick line of trees. Whoever designed this place, Poldarn couldn't help thinking, couldn't draw a curve to save his life.