‘My sympathy,’ Niessa replied. ‘Now then, since you’ve been straight with me, was there anything specific you wanted to know? I don’t suppose there was, since you say you didn’t know who I was until just now. Or were you given a set of mission objectives for as and when you came across Niessa Loredan?’
‘Only very vague ones,’ the spy answered. ‘And they’re mostly to do with your daughter’s escape – was it prearranged, did she have any help from any of our people, that sort of thing. If you’d care to tell me anything about that, I’d be grateful.’
Niessa wriggled her back into a crack between two barrels. ‘By all means,’ she said, ‘but there isn’t anything much I can tell you, or at least there’s nothing you can corroborate, which is much the same thing. No, it wasn’t prearranged – at least, not that I’m aware. You see, my daughter and I aren’t exactly friends. In fact, we hate each other. Really and truly. Do you have any children?’
The spy shook her head.
‘You’re better off,’ Niessa said. ‘Anyway, it’s just possible that Iseutz knew what was going on and cooked up some scheme behind my back, but I doubt it. Have you caught her yet?’
‘I don’t believe we have. The last I heard was that she was with her uncle in the Mesoge; but you’ll appreciate that I haven’t got any special clearances for restricted information; that’s just the rumour that’s going around.’
‘I understand,’ Niessa said. ‘How’s the war going, do you know? Where I’ve been they haven’t told me anything. ’
The woman narrowed her eyes. ‘Presumably you know about your brother Bardas being in command of the field army.’
Niessa shook her head. ‘Joint command,’ she said. ‘Meaning he’s only there for show.’
‘Not any more. Colonel Estar was killed; your brother’s really in charge now. It’s a strange thought, an outlander in command of four battalions. No offence, but I’m not sure I like the idea.’
‘Given his track record, neither would I,’ Niessa grunted. ‘They’ve beaten him once; twice, really, since all he managed to do when he took over from Uncle Maxen was get the army out of there and back home again. He’s a competent enough subordinate, our Bardas, but I wouldn’t say he had what it takes to be a leader. The same’s true of my brother Gorgas, to a lesser extent; he’s a good soldier, but he has problems dealing with the larger issues. Basically that’s what went wrong on Scona; he couldn’t see that the game had stopped being worth the candle. Mind you, Gorgas has never known when to quit; it’s his biggest problem, really.’
The coach lurched again, even more fiercely this time, and came to a sudden halt. A barrel of fancy biscuits was dislodged from the top of the stack and fell down, nearly hitting Niessa on the head. ‘If I were you, I’d get this driver replaced,’ she said; and then noticed that the spy was dead. There was an arrow right through the exact middle of her throat, pinning her to the barrel she’d been sitting against. As Niessa watched, the spy’s head toppled sideways and flopped down on her right shoulder, eyes still open.
Now what? Niessa thought angrily, and she looked round to see where the arrow had come from. And what’s the point of having an Empire if you can’t keep the roads safe? Nothing seemed to be happening; but wherever they were, it was depressingly open and exposed. Trying to run would be suicide, if the bandits were inclined to kill witnesses, whereas staying put wasn’t any better. No point trying to hide if they were going to steal the cargo; they’d find her sooner or later while they were unloading. So that’s it, then, she thought. All this way for nothing. What a waste of time and energy.
A helmet appeared above the side-rail. Here at least was something she could vent her anger on; she picked up the barrel of biscuits and slammed it down on the apex of the helmet, where the straps that held the plates together met. The result was satisfying, if not downright comic; there was a sigh, and the helmet vanished in a shower of broken slats and biscuits. That’s what you get for tangling with one of the Fighting Loredans, Niessa said to herself, grinning. Just because I’m a girl doesn’t mean I can’t play rough games too.
‘Niessa Loredan?’ The voice was behind her, and as she spun round she caught her ankle in a niche between two boxes. It hurt.
‘Ouch,’ she said. ‘Yes, who wants to know?’
‘We’re here to rescue you.’ Another damned helmet, with some sort of visor contraption that covered the man’s face completely. Was it too much to ask to be allowed to talk to a human being, instead of all this ironmongery?
‘What are you talking about?’ Niessa said.
‘Your brother’s orders,’ the helmet said. ‘We’ve come to rescue you and take you home.’
Niessa scowled. ‘Which brother?’ she said.
The helmet looked bewildered; a difficult trick for a piece of iron. ‘Gorgas Loredan,’ it replied.
‘Oh.’ Niessa sighed. ‘Well, you can jolly well go back and tell Gorgas that I don’t need to be rescued, I don’t want to be rescued and, if I did, the last person I’d want rescuing me is him. Have you got that, or shall I write it down for you?’
Now the helmet was looking utterly wretched. ‘You don’t understand,’ it said. ‘We’re taking you back to the Mesoge. There’s a ship waiting for us. But we’ve got to hurry, because there’ll be a cavalry column along here in an hour, and-’
‘It’s all right,’ Niessa said, ‘I won’t tell them which way you went, provided you leave now. Just do me a favour and steal some of this junk; try to make it look like an ordinary hold-up.’
Poor helmet, she thought as she said this. She could hear other voices of other helmets – they all had a booming, resonant quality, like a man down a well, or the way her late husband Gallas had sounded once when he got his head stuck in the whey bucket. The other helmets sounded agitated, which was reasonable enough. ‘I’m sorry,’ the helmet said, ‘but I’ve got my orders. You’re coming with me. Anything between you and your brother is no concern-’
‘Hang on,’ Niessa said. ‘You’re a Scona man, aren’t you? Well, of course you are. Are you really going to use force to kidnap me? You do know who I am, don’t you? Apart from being Gorgas’ sister, I mean.’
‘Yes,’ said the helmet, rather panic-stricken, ‘but it’s not up to me. I’ve got to do what I’m told. Now stand up and I’ll help you down off the cart.’
‘Go to hell,’ Niessa replied. ‘In fact, you go back to Gorgas and you tell him I said to stop being such a bloody fool, because I’ve had enough of him and his ridiculous heroics. Go on, he won’t bite you. Not if you tell him I said-’
At which point, the man who’d climbed up silently behind her dropped a sack over her head, flipped her carefully off her feet and knelt down beside her to do up the rope. ‘About time,’ the helmet said. ‘Get all this junk off the cart, we’ll use it to lay a false trail.’ Inside the sack, Niessa was making the most extraordinary noises. Between them, they hoisted her off the cart without banging her about too much, while another man looked after the soldier Niessa had brained with the biscuit-barrel, and another finished off the driver, who’d been trying to crawl away in spite of two arrows in almost the same hole through his chest. They cut the guy-ropes and pulled off the barrels and boxes, letting them smash and roll; spices and perfumes and herbs and fine wine and scented oils for dressing salad – all mixed together, the smell was extraordinary, abstruse and exotic enough that even a Son of Heaven would have been hard put to it to identify all the ingredients.
‘That’ll do,’ said the helmet, pulling up his visor to wipe his forehead. Under the metal he was a round-faced man with a little bobble for a nose. ‘You two, take the coach, we’ll meet you back at the ship.’
An hour or so after they’d gone, the cavalry column came through, just as the helmet had said. They found two bodies, one male and one female, stripped naked, and a large heap of smashed biscuits. No barrels or boxes – a bunch of opportunists had appeared out of the sand-dunes and dismantled them in a matter of minutes, prising out the nails to be straightened later, carefully lifting off the steel bands from the barrels and collecting the staves (unbroken ones in one bundle, to be used again; broken ones separate, for firewood) – and all the cargo had been looted, apart from the cinnamon and wild rose honey biscuits so highly prized by the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy. Apparently the looters had tried a few of them, spat them out and jumped up and down on the rest, just in case any foolhardy souls might be tempted to eat them.