Shadow

'Piece of cake,' Poldarn said, brushing mud off his knees. 'Don't know what all the fuss was about, really.'

Under other circumstances a remark like that could easily have cost him his life. As it turned out, however, his colleagues in the Falx house were either too busy or too exhausted to do anything more than scowl horribly at him as they scuttled or limped past.

'It worked,' Falx Roisin said.

Poldarn frowned. 'You sound surprised,' he said.

'You bet your life I'm surprised,' he replied. 'I was convinced you were going to bring the whole gatehouse down on top of your head. Still, it worked, so who the hell cares? Well done. I owe you a favour.'

Poldarn shrugged. 'Just making myself useful,' he replied. 'I think I'll get on and wash this mud off my hands.'

'What? Oh, right, yes. You know, what you did back there, it reminds me of something, but I can't think what. Bloody clever, though. If I needed a house engineer, I'd give you the job like a shot.'

'Thank you,' Poldarn replied dubiously. 'I'll be going now, if that's all right.'

It was dark before the house finally got back to normal, and dinner was delayed accordingly. Rather than spend an hour getting congratulated for his cleverness in the mess hall, Poldarn sneaked round to the back door of the kitchens and charmed one of the cooks, a massive woman as tall as he was and nearly twice his weight, into letting him have half a loaf, a big slab of the more recent cheese and a small jug of beer. He carried his trophies off to the stables, had his dinner in peace and quiet down behind the feed bins, returned the jug and went to his quarters to sleep.

Falx Roisin was waiting for him there. He'd brought a lamp, rather a magnificent object in highly polished brass in the shape of a pig.

'I remembered,' he said.

'Excuse me?'

'That trick of yours,' Falx Roisin said. 'I remembered where I'd heard about it before. It's exactly what General Cronan did at Zanipolo.'

Poldarn looked blank. 'Two carts got stuck in a gateway, did they?'

Falx Roisin frowned. 'Illanzus had been besieging Zanipolo for eighteen months, and they were running desperately short of food, half the camp was down with swamp fever and the rebels were coming up fast with a relief force twice the size of the loyalist army. Cronan was just a captain then, attached to the engineers because nearly all their regular officers had been killed or had died of the fever. Cronan had them dig under the gatehouse; calculated it so perfectly that they came up right in the middle of the lodge. A few minutes later they got the gates open and that was that. It was the making of him, of course; never looked back.'

Poldarn thought for a moment. 'That's very interesting,' he said. 'And you left your dinner and came all the way up here just to tell me about it?'

'No,' Falx Roisin replied, sounding annoyed. 'I wanted to ask you if you'd ever been in the army.'

'I see. Why?'

That annoyed him even more. 'Answer the question,' he said. 'Were you in the army or weren't you?'

Poldarn sighed. 'No,' he said.

'Really. You're sure about that.'

Poldarn grinned. 'You think I'd forget about it if I had been? Yes, I'm sure. No, I've never been in the army. Why do you want to know?'

'There was a soldier here this morning,' Falx Roisin continued, 'just before the big screw-up in the yard. Military tribune from the guards, no less. He was asking after a deserter. The description sounded a lot like you.'

'Did it? What did he say?'

'Middle-aged, medium height, long nose, pointed chin. Hair just starting to go grey.'

Poldarn smiled. 'No offence,' he said, 'but it sounds to me like he was describing you. I mean,' he went on, 'there must be hundreds of men in this city who answer to that.'

'That's what I told him,' Falx Roisin said. 'And I didn't think of you when I answered him; I mean, you've only been here five minutes, and I've got a lot of faces to remember. But then he said this deserter was one of Cronan's staff. High-ranking man, brevet-major or something like that. Not the sort to go absent without leave on a nine-day bender. So I guessed it might be something serious.'

'Sounds like it,' Poldarn said, shifting his weight to his back foot, taking himself out of the circle of light from Falx Roisin's lamp. 'But nothing to do with me.'

Falx Roisin looked at him for a moment. 'So I pressed him for some details,' he went on, 'and he replied that he couldn't tell me a lot because it's all under seal and classified. But he did happen to mention something about Prefect Tazencius; he tried to escape, apparently, and he had accomplices waiting for him on the road between here and Weal, two people in a cart. I was wondering if you knew anything about that, either.'

'Two people in a cart,' Poldarn repeated. 'You mean the two who were going round pretending to be the god?'

Whatever Falx Roisin had been about to say, he didn't say it. Instead, he narrowed his eyebrows, opened his mouth and closed it again. 'I hadn't thought of that,' he said eventually.

'Somebody else did, apparently,' Poldarn replied. 'They've caught them and brought them in. I passed them on my way back from town.' He paused, waited for a moment, then went on, 'Oh, I see. You were thinking that it was Gotto and me.'

'What? Oh, no, God forbid. The thought never crossed my mind.' Poldarn looked at Falx Roisin and was sure he could see machinery working behind his eyes. 'Damn it, if you're right, that'd make a whole lot of sense, wouldn't it? I mean, they've been going round prophesying the end of the world, spreading panic and doom and stuff, and now people are saying they had something to do with what happened to Josequin. Bloody hell,' he added, pulling a ferocious face. 'The bastards. All this time they were hand in glove with that arse-hole Tazencius-and the raiders, God damn it, just think of that. I just hope they string 'em up high, that's all, and Tazencius as well, even if he is some kind of minor royal. That's disgusting.'

'I thought so,' Poldarn said. 'Not to mention the blasphemy side of it. If that's not asking for trouble, I don't know what is.'

'Blasphemy? Oh, I see what you mean.' Falx Roisin looked at him with the atheist's gentle contempt for the believer. 'Well, quite,' he said. 'God, though, I'd never have guessed that one. Prefect Tazencius being in with the raiders. And to think I once gave him a silver dinner service.'

Shaking his head, Falx Roisin picked up his lamp and drifted away, still murmuring to himself about the iniquities of the world. Poldarn shut the door after him, kicked his boots off and lay down on the bed. Then he realised that he was still wearing his new coat, and that it was covered in dust and mud. He stood up, took it off and hung it over the back of the chair, and stretched his back, which was just starting to stiffen up.

Coincidence, he told himself. It was a fairly basic idea; if you can't get at something from straight on or above, try from underneath. Furthermore, take away the fact that both cases had involved a gateway and the similarity between them wasn't all that great. Even supposing it was, and that the idea had been in the back of his mind all along, and he'd used it for the Falx house emergency; just because he'd copied the idea, it didn't automatically follow that he'd been in General Cronan's army, or any army; Falx Roisin hadn't, to the best of his knowledge, but he'd heard about what Cronan's engineers had done; if Falx Roisin had heard of it through news or gossip, then in all likelihood so had he, and the idea had been snuggled away behind the screen along with the rest of his memories.