Devices and Desires (32 page)

Psellus spent his evening clearing out his old office and moving to his new one, which was just off the main gallery of the
cloister, and about a third smaller than the one he’d just vacated. That meant there wasn’t room for his old desk and chair,
but somehow he wasn’t heartbroken about that. It was a ghastly mess, of course; inevitably, Crisestem would get his old job
at Compliance, at least until this ridiculous war was over. He tried to focus on the fact that his promotion was good for
the Foundrymen and for Didacticism in general; somewhat marginal, once you’d balanced a seat gained on Necessary Evil against
control of Compliance lost to the Tailors and Consolidation. If the war went wrong, needless to say, he’d be finished (which
was rather like saying that if the sun failed to rise one morning, the world would be very dark. The Republic’s wars never
went wrong. Hadn’t ever gone wrong yet).

It was just after midnight by the time he’d finished arranging his books and sorting his files, and it occurred to him that
he hadn’t had anything to eat for a very long time — not since he was in Compliance, in fact, and that was easily a lifetime
ago. He wasn’t in the least hungry, but he knew what missing meals did to his digestion. The dining room would be closed by
now, but the buttery over in Foundrymen’s Hall stayed open all night; stale bread, thick, slightly translucent yellow cheese
and a small soft apple if he was lucky. Probably Necessary Evil had its own private, secret canteen where you could get plovers’
eggs and mashed artichoke at three in the morning, but nobody had mentioned it at the meeting. Presumably you had to serve
a probationary period before you were trusted with a map reference and a key.

Foundrymen’s Hall was two quadrangles down and one across. It was twenty-five years since he’d first walked under its modest
arch, knees weak and guts twisted into a knot. He’d got used to it since then; now it was just a building, ever so slightly
shabby if you knew where to look. He didn’t get lost in the corridors anymore, and when nervous young men asked him the way,
he answered clearly and immediately without having to think, the way you move your hand. A day would come when his name would
be written up on one of the honors boards in the downstairs lobby — he’d never see it, of course, because he’d be dead — and
some terrified youth waiting to be collected and shown to his new desk would stare up at it and wonder without really caring
who the hell he’d been, and what he’d done. When that day came, he’d be the sixth Psellus on the boards, and of course the
last. There were no annotations beside those gilded names, so nobody would ever know, unless they had occasion to delve back
through ancient minute-books and cross-reference with the archives of memoranda, that he was the man who destroyed Eremia
Montis by getting up out of a chair; a neat trick, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to achieve it. It’s something
to ensure that your name will live forever, even if the reason why gets lost along the way.

There were half a dozen men in the buttery when he got there; he recognized the faces of two sessions clerks but couldn’t
remember their names, and the other four were strangers. He declined the vegetable soup (twenty-five years, and he’d never
seen or heard of anybody having the vegetable soup; it was universally shunned, like leprosy, but all day every day there
was a black cauldron full of it, simmering like a dormant volcano over the fire) and risked a pear instead of an apple.

“Congratulations,” someone said in his ear. He looked round.

“Thank you,” he said gravely. “You’re having the salt pork.”

“I always do when I come in here. It’s disgusting, but I’m too set in my ways to change.”

They sat down at a table in the corner furthest from the hatch. “What are you doing up at this hour, Stali?” Psellus asked.
“You’re never up late.”

“It’s all your fault,” replied Stali Maniacis, his oldest and only friend. “You get it into your head to declare war on some
tribe nobody knows anything about, so naturally they send for the treasurer, and he sends for me. I’ve spent the last eight
hours shuffling jetons around, trying to find some money for you to hire your soldiers with.”

“Ah,” Psellus replied. “Any luck?”

Maniacis nodded. “Pots of money,” he said. “It’s there, you can go down the cellars with a lamp and look at it, all heaped
up on the floor. The problem’s finding it on paper. Backdated appropriations and contingency reserves and five-year retentions
and God only knows what. Your best bet, if you really want this war of yours, is to hire a bunch of pirates to break in and
steal it. Cut through all the formalities, and we can write it off as hostile action, make our lives a whole lot easier. So,”
he went on, “rank and power at last. How did you manage it?”

Psellus shrugged. “I didn’t get out of the way quick enough, I suppose.”

“Balls. The lightness of the foot deceives the eye. One moment you were the failure responsible for a fuck-up in Compliance,
next thing you’re magically transfigured into a god of war, and nothing will be your fault ever again. Don’t tell me you haven’t
been cooking this up for months.”

“If only,” Psellus said. “It was nothing to do with me.”

“All right. So who, then?”

“Staurachus.”

“Oh.” Maniacis pulled a face. “Him. Fine. So presumably this is all part of some magnificently intricate maneuver on behalf
of the greater glory of Didacticism.” He shook his head. “Don’t see it myself, but then I wouldn’t expect to. What’s your
new office like?”

“Small.”

“View?”

“You can just about see a corner of the cloister garden, if you lean out and crane your neck a bit.”

“Better than the glassworks, though.”

“True.”

Maniacis frowned. “You really aren’t very happy about this, are you? What’s the problem? Feeling out of your depth?”

“I’m used to that,” Psellus said. “I’ve been a politician now for fifteen years, I wouldn’t know my depth if I fell in it.
But I’m sure there’s something I’ve missed, and I don’t know where.”

“You always were a worrier.”

“Yes,” Psellus said. “But it probably doesn’t matter. That’s what’s so good about war, it papers over all the cracks. If we
scrape Eremia Montis off the map, none of the fiddling little details will matter anymore.” He yawned. “I think I’ll go to
bed,” he said. “I expect tomorrow is going to be a long and interesting day.”

“Going home?”

Psellus shook his head. “I’ll sleep in the lodge,” he said. “I can’t face all those flights of stairs at this time of night.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Maniacis grumbled. “I’ve still got three projections to do. I don’t imagine I’ll be finished much
before dawn. Next time you declare war, do you think you could do it around nine in the morning? Some of us have to work for
a living, you know.”

“If you call shuffling brass disks round a checkerboard work,” Psellus replied. It was, of course, an old debate between them,
as thoroughly rehearsed as a wedding dance. It could be started with a word, or stopped immediately and put on one side, bookmarked,
to be continued later at some more opportune time. “Now I suppose you’re going to say it’s all my fault that you’ve got to
go scrabbling about trying to find the money to pay for all of this.”

Maniacis frowned. “All of what?”

“The war, of course.”

“Oh.” Somehow Psellus felt he’d said something unexpected. “No, we’re used to that,” Maniacis went on. “You politicals say
the word, all we’ve got to do is click our fingers and the money appears out of thin air. I mean, it’s not like we’ve got
anything else to do.”

It was synthetic, because it was always synthetic between them, like an exhibition bout between prizefighters; this time,
though, he noticed a certain edge in his friend’s voice, a slight reluctance to look him in the eye. But that was strange,
since Stali wouldn’t ever be genuinely upset with him because of work. Something he’d said was rattling about in his mind
loose, but he couldn’t place it. Because he was so tired, probably.

“Bed for me,” he said, standing up. “Have fun with your projections.”

Maniacis said something vulgar, and he left. All the way down the stairs and across the back courtyard he tried to work out
what it was that didn’t fit. Something was wrong; something small and trivial, of course.

The lodge porter opened up a guest room for him; slightly smaller than a prison cell, with a plain unaired bed, a washstand,
an empty water jug, one elderly shoe left behind by a previous visitor. He undressed, snuffed the lamp and lay down on top
of the threadbare coverlet, his hands folded on his chest like a corpse laid out for embalming. Directly overhead was the
old dorter, a survival from the days when the Guildhall was still a religious house; in consequence, the ceilings of these
rooms were all vaulted, though of course you couldn’t see anything in the dark. One of the rooms still had traces of the old
painted stucco, devotional scenes from a religion nobody remembered anymore. Probably not this one; Psellus had seen them
once, years ago, but they were just people standing about in the flat, stylized poses of pre-Reformation religious painting.
Authentic but entirely lacking in artistic merit; it’d probably be kinder to chip them off and whitewash over the top. It’d
be miserable, he reckoned, to be the ghost of a god, pinned to the mortal world by one crumbling and indistinct fresco.

(And in Eremia shortly… Did the Eremians have any gods? He had an idea they’d believed in something once, but they’d grown
out of it. Just as well, probably. If you eradicated a religious people, would their gods survive even with nobody to pray
to them? And if so, what would they find to do all day?)

He closed his eyes, like a fencer moving from First guard to Third.

“Civitas Eremiae,” said the expert, “is the highest city in the known world. It’s built on the peak of a mountain; the walls
are founded on solid rock, so you can forget about sapping, undermining or tunneling your way in. They have an excellent system
of underground cisterns, with never less than six months’ supply of water. There’s also a substantial communal granary, likewise
underground. That means a siege would present us with enormous difficulties as regards supply. They have plenty of water and
food in store at all times; if we wanted to lay siege to them and starve or parch them out, we’d have to carry water and food
for our men up the mountain. There’s just the one road, narrow and winding back and forth. Even if we kept up a continual
relay, we couldn’t shift enough supplies in one day along that road for more than seven thousand men, way too few to maintain
an effective blockade. To be blunt: we’d be dead of hunger and thirst long before them, and we’d also be outnumbered two to
one. Unless someone can think of a way round those problems, a siege is out of the question. If you want to take Civitas Eremiae,
it’ll have to be by way of direct assault; and the longest an army capable of doing that could last up there would be forty-eight
hours. Talking of which; the very least number of defenders we’d be likely to come up against would be fifteen thousand infantry
on the walls. The city has never been taken, either by siege or storm. If you contrived somehow to get through the gate or
over the wall, that’s where the fun would start. The whole place is a tangle of poxy little alleys and snickets; from our
point of view, one bottleneck and ambush after another. There are some thatched roofs, a handful of wooden buildings; not
enough for a decent fire to get a foothold on. Artillery isn’t going to be much help to you. In order to get it up the approach
road, you’d have to break it down completely and rebuild it once you’re in position, but you’d be wasting a lot of sweat and
effort for nothing. The slope’s so aggressive, you’d be hard put to it to find a level footprint for anything bigger than
a series five scorpion; but nothing less than a full-size torsion catapult’s going to make any kind of a mark on those walls.
The same goes for battering rams and siege towers — and maybe this is an appropriate moment to point out that the main strength
of the Eremian military is archers. Put the picture together and I think you’ll agree, you’ve set yourself a difficult job.”

Thoughtful silence. After a nicely judged pause, the expert went on: “Maybe you’re wondering why a poor and relatively primitive
bunch like the Eremians have gone to such extraordinary lengths to fortify their city. It’s worth dwelling on that for a moment.
Consider the drain on national resources, both material and manpower, involved in building something like that. The Eremians
keep a few slaves, true. Not many, though; all that work was mostly done by free Eremian citizens, in between their daily
chores and the seasonal demands of the sheep and goats. Why bother? you’re asking yourselves. They must’ve been afraid of
somebody, but it wasn’t us.”

Another pause, and everything so quiet you could hear the patter of water-drops from the fountain. “The answer,” the expert
said, “is of course their neighbors, the Vadani. Eremia Montis has just emerged from a long and particularly nasty border
war with the Vadani; and that’s the direction I’m asking you to look in for help in cracking this nut. There may be peace
right now, but the Eremians and the Vadani hate each other to bits, always have and always will. If you want the Eremians,
you’re going to have to get the Vadani on your side first. At the very least, they’ve got generations of experience of fighting
the Eremians. They also have money, from the silver mines. The first stage, therefore, will have to be diplomacy rather than
straightforward military action. Everything will depend on the Vadani; and the only way you can do business with them is through
their chief, Duke Valens. He’s your first objective.” The expert relaxed slightly, aware that he’d done his job and not left
anything out. “To brief you on him, I’d like to call Maris Boioannes of the diplomatic service.”

Psellus sat up a little straighter. He knew Boioannes, or had known him a long time ago. A man stood up in the front row of
seats, but he could only see his back; he had to wait until he’d made his way up to the lectern before he could get a look
at his face.