Shadow

'I know where you mean,' the man said. 'Very good, now we're getting somewhere. Next question: have you sent some of your people to kill him?'

Just a dip of the head this time, to indicate Yes.

'Buggery. When?'

The answer, apparently, was that morning, two hours before noon.

'Which means… How were they going? On foot, horseback, wagon?'

He opened his mouth to reply but started coughing instead. Coughing was a very bad idea. The man didn't approve, either, because he repeated his question, loudly.

'Riding,' he managed to say. 'Not hurrying. Can't risk.'

'Were they taking the main road?'

A nod.

'That's something, I suppose. All right, stay there, don't go away.'

The man left the tent, shouting a name, and left him alone. That was wonderful, he'd have a chance to relax, to catch up with the pain, which was racing ahead of his thoughts and blocking their way. He closed his eyes-it was better with them shut, in spite of the dizziness. At the back of his mind something was protesting: no, you mustn't close your eyes, you'll fall asleep or pass out. This is your only chance; look, there's a knife on the map table, you can reach it if you tilt the legs of the chair. You can hide it under your arm, and when he comes back you can stab him or cut his throat, and that'll make up for the rest. Must do it, can't afford not to. You've done very badly, but you still have one chance. Won't get another. Must He stayed still, put the voice out of his mind. Maybe if he knew what was going on it'd be different; if he knew why it was so important to kill this man-Feron something, Feron Amathy, and didn't that name sound familiar from somewhere?-then maybe he might just have made the effort. As it was, no incentive. Nothing outside his body mattered, outside his body and the invisible circle of pain that surrounded it. The pain defined everything.

A while later Feron Amathy came back. He looked unhappy. 'I've sent thirty light cavalry up the old drovers' trail, so if the Lihac's fordable they ought to get there an hour or so before your assassins. Still, it's cutting it fine.'

He sounded like a senior officer briefing a delinquent subordinate, not one enemy telling another how he'd frustrated his plans and made the sacrifice of his life to the cause meaningless. It wasn't cruelty, Monach figured, just a busy man thinking aloud, as busy men so often do. Probably he found it useful having someone to talk to, even if it was only a defeated, humiliated opponent. Monach could feel his weariness, the tremendous weight of responsibility clamping down on his shoulders. 'Now then,' he said, flopping back into his chair and letting his arms hang down. 'What are we going to do with you, I wonder? My instinct says send your head back to Deymeson with an apple stuck in your mouth, to let them know I'm perfectly well aware of what they're up to. On the other hand, why give them any more information than necessary? So long as they aren't sure whether I've worked out that they're involved, they'll have to cover both contingencies, which'll slow up their planning. In which case, I can either have you strung up here, make a show of it, issue double rations, give the lads something to cheer them up; or I could keep you for later, assuming you survive. God only knows what sort of useful stuff you've got locked up in your head, but will prising it out of there be more trouble than it's worth?' He sighed. 'Truth is,' he went on, 'nobody else is fit to interrogate you; even in the state you're in you're probably too smart for them, and I can't afford to let you muck me about with disinformation. I haven't got the time or, let's face it, the energy. Besides, you've caused me a real headache, and until those cavalry troopers get back from Selce I can't be sure you haven't really screwed everything up.' He sighed. 'I think I'll knock you on the head now,' he went on. 'Anything else is just wasting valuable time.' As he said that, he stood up, drawing a short knife from the sash round his waist. One step forward, finger and thumb tightening on his face, a sharp twist sideways, the knife starting to slice the skin of his neck Poldarn woke up, his right hand pressed hard against his neck. Usually the dreams didn't bother him once he'd woken up; they slid away, like ducks launching themselves on to a pond, and left nothing behind. But this dream had been different, much more real and immediate, so that the pain had hurt. He'd already forgotten what had caused it, but the memory of the pain was still with him, an uncomfortable twitch every time it burst into his circle.

'You do that a lot,' Copis said.

He'd forgotten she was there. 'Do what?' he mumbled.

'Sleep with your hand under your ear like that,' she replied. 'I wish you wouldn't, it makes you snore.'

He frowned. 'I don't snore, do I?'

'When you sleep with your hand under your ear, yes.'

'Oh.' For some reason, that bothered him a lot. 'I'm sorry,' he said. 'Did I wake you up?'

She shook her head. 'I'm used to people making noises in their sleep,' she explained, with a slight narrowing of the eyebrows that made it clear that the subject wasn't to be pursued further. 'It's fairly moderate snoring, actually; cutting-damp-wood-with-a-blunt-saw snoring, not monsoon-winds-in-Morevich snoring. Are you going to lie there all day, or would you care to get up so we can go and earn a living?'

He remembered where he was: an inn called the Divine Moderation, a third of the way from Sansory to Deymeson. They were on the road, selling buttons. Yesterday had been a good day; they'd sold fifteen dozen buttons at four hundred and fifty per cent mark-up, and all the women in the village had told them how reasonable their prices were.

'This place we're going to,' Copis said, as he sat down beside her on the box, 'ought to be pretty good. Never been there myself, of course, but I've heard quite a bit about it. Apparently they've got wonderful soil, so they grow garden stuff for Sansory-fruit and vegetables, mostly, and a lot of flowers. Should mean there'll be some money about.'

The name of the place turned out to be Mestory, and it was almost large enough to be a town. The Sansory road brought them in on the south-west side, where there was a sprawl of new houses and fences that were hardly weathered at all, with the gates still hanging straight and held closed by their latches rather than lengths of fraying twine. The thatch on the roofs was still nearer yellow than grey, and all the buildings looked pretty much the same.

'Interesting,' Copis observed. 'New building. Definite sign of prosperity. We could do well here.'

More surprising still was the marketplace; that was all new, too. There was a small but handsome corn exchange in the middle of the market square, so new that the edges of the stone blocks were still sharp and clean. Opposite the corn exchange there was even a temple-a miniature temple, with a toy portico and one self-conscious-looking half-life-size statue outside, but a temple nevertheless. The scaffolding up the side of the east wall suggested it wasn't finished yet.

'All right,' Copis said, 'I'm impressed. So where is everybody?'

As soon as she said it, Poldarn realised that that was what was wrong with the place: no people. There was a fine market, but no stalls. There were temple steps, but nobody sitting on them. Half the shops in the pristine-looking traders' row had their shutters up, and there were no more than a dozen people standing outside the shops that were open. The few people he could see appeared to be acting normally-drifting, chatting, window-shopping-but there was only a sparse handful of them, and it was an hour before noon.

'There's probably a simple explanation,' Poldarn said. 'Maybe everybody's out fetching in the asparagus harvest or something.'

'Fat lot you know about asparagus,' Copis replied accurately, but she was clearly just as bewildered as he was. 'Maybe they're all indoors. Could be a seasonal thing,' she added. 'Maybe, because they grow different stuff to most places, they have their midday meal at a different time.'