Shadow

The magistrate looked very upset. 'I can't do that,' he said. 'It's common knowledge all round the city that they're here, and I'm accountable to the watch committee. If I tell them-'

'You tell them whatever you like,' Monach interrupted. 'Just so long as you do what you've been told everything will be fine and you'll never see them or me again. Mess me about, though, and you won't see me but I'll see you. If you follow me,' he added, resting his left hand on his sash, over the point where the sword hilt lay hidden.

He smiled to himself about it afterwards, of course. If there was one thing he despised as a rule, it was blustering, threatening soldiers and officials. Somehow playing at being one, and a really exaggerated, over-the-top impersonation at that, had been fun. Of course, only a gullible idiot who knew nothing at all about the Deymeson order would've taken all that play-acting at face value; the order didn't make threats, eschewed melodrama of all kinds.

Once he'd parted company from the false god and his priestess (they vanished as if by magic; one moment they were there, the next they'd gone), he turned his horse east, towards the road that led to Deymeson, rest and sanity. ('Just one thing,' the man had asked. 'What was it gave us away, when we told you the first story?' He replied that it had been the bit about glassblowing; true, there were glassworks in Josequin, but he didn't look anything like any glassblower he'd ever met, and as it happened he'd met several. Glassblowing was, however, one of the trades of which Poldarn was supposed to be the patron; hence the mental association, for a southerner. At which the man had shaken his head. 'Actually,' he said, 'that was perfectly true. Not about Josequin, I've never been there in my life. But I was apprenticed to a glassworks when I was a kid, and I passed my trade test, even stuck it there for a year or two, so yes, I'm a glassblower all right.') With any luck he'd be able to turn in his report, kid his way through his debriefing and get back to drawing and cutting practice. All in all, he decided, he wasn't suited to being an investigator: too complicated for his liking, nothing straightforward that split down the grain or cut cleanly. The Poldarn business was worse than any other investigation he'd been involved with, of course; it was a case of the more he thought about it, the more obscure it became.

The trick, as he knew perfectly well, was not to think about it. No need to, after all. He'd make his report; an investigator-somebody else, please God, let it be somebody else-would be sent to Morevich to verify the false god's story, the matter would be reported in passing in closed chapter and put aside as a dead issue. The nasty loose ends, such as who had put on the show at Cric, how he'd been able to foretell the future and raise the dead, how General Allectus had managed to survive this long without being found, who the god in the cart was if he wasn't Poldarn, these fell outside his remit and he didn't have to bother about them. Indeed, if he tried to raise any of these issues, he'd get told off by Father Tutor, and quite right, too. It's not the place of the swordsman to fight shadows. (Who'd said that? Somebody famous.)

For the rest of the day he kept catching sight of two black birds, rooks or crows or ravens, flying slowly alongside him a long way away. Whether they were the same ones or different each time he had no way of knowing, but most of the time he was fairly certain they were ravens, therefore not significant or a coincidence.

He reached the Piety and Poverty an hour before dark and spent the evening playing whittlejack for pleasure and profit with a party of bone merchants en route to Sansory to buy at the ossiary sale. By the time he'd finished with them, the number of cartloads of bones they'd be able to afford had gone down considerably, but they seemed good-humoured about it and even offered to buy him a drink. He refused politely, explaining that he had to be up early and clearheaded in the morning, and went to bed, wondering what on earth he was going to do with the substantial sum of money he'd just acquired. It was no conceivable use to him, and he didn't relish the prospect of explaining how he'd come by it if he turned it over to Brother Treasurer. Giving it back to the four jolly bonemen would probably be construed as an insult, and he was too tired to go back and deliberately lose it to them, even assuming he was capable of such finesse in his play. He could dump it, he supposed, or leave it in his room for the groom or the chambermaid, but the Piety was the kind of place where they might just send on a purse of money found in a guest's room, with an explanatory note ('the serving girl says you left this money on your pillow…', not something he'd like Father Tutor to read if he could help it). There was always the deserving poor, of course, except that brothers of the order weren't authorised to deal in largesse and charity except by special licence of their superiors, for fear of setting awkward precedents, upsetting the balance of existing aid and alms initiatives, and so on, and so on. In the end he spent a whole hour staring resentfully at the purse, wishing he'd had the moral fortitude to resist the chance of playing whittlejack with born losers… But he'd always been exceptionally good at the game, and he enjoyed it, and only got a chance to play once in a blue moon, and everybody knows that it's physically impossible to play it except for money.

Some god or angel must have visited him in a dream, because when he woke up he knew exactly what to do. He found the innkeeper, a man he'd known for years (though the innkeeper didn't know him from a brick in the wall, owing to the fact that each time he'd been there he'd been using a different persona) and reckoned he could trust, at least with something he couldn't give a damn about.

'See this?' he said, emptying a few of the coins on to his palm. 'Belongs to a friend of mine. He left it with me for safekeeping and I was going to meet him here and give it back to him. But he must've got held up somewhere, and I haven't got time to hang around waiting for him. Can you keep an eye out for him, and let him have it?'

He could see the innkeeper looking wistfully at the money and resolving to be good. 'No problem,' he replied. 'So what's he called, your friend?'

Monach shook his head. 'It's not as simple as that,' he replied. 'I promise you there's nothing skew about it, only he won't be travelling under his own name.' Then he gave the innkeeper the description of the god in the cart he'd heard from the man in Cric who might have been General Allectus. He may be travelling in a cart,' he added. 'Possibly he'll have a woman with him, or he may just send her, I can't say for certain.' He then described the priestess. 'You don't mind, do you?' he added. 'I don't think my friend'll begrudge you two gross-quarters for your trouble.'

The innkeeper brightened up considerably, and said no, that wasn't necessary; Monach insisted, the innkeeper insisted back, Monach counterinsisted and the innkeeper tightened his hand round the purse so hard it was a miracle he didn't bend the coins double. 'Oh, one other thing,' Monach added. 'As and when one of them shows up, if you can spare one of your people to run out to the Joy and Sorrow at Deymeson, leave a message for me there. My name's Monach.'

'Of course,' the innkeeper said. 'I'll send one of my boys over. They're always glad of an excuse for a trip out.'

Monach thanked him and ordered a good breakfast. As he ate it, he wondered whether it had been such a good idea after all. Anybody riding east from Sansory would be sure to stay over at the Piety, it was the only half-decent inn on a bleak and miserable road. There was therefore a one in four chance that the other Poldarn, the one who'd been to Cric, would end up there sooner or later; slightly better odds that the innkeeper would recognise him from Monach's description and send the message. If sent, the message was almost certain to reach him, since the Joy was owned by the Order and the people there were used to fielding strange and unintelligible messages and passing them on discreetly. In short, there was a remote but far from negligible chance that he'd end up getting a lead on this other Poldarn, the one he'd been thinking long, awkward thoughts about, and that given such a lead he might feel a moral obligation to do something about it. The god or angel in his dream had reckoned that was a good idea. He wasn't so sure.