Evil for Evil (19 page)

He heard a footstep in the passage outside; somebody who didn't feel he had to knock or announce his presence. A colleague, in that case. He frowned. He wasn't in the mood for the society of his own kind.

It turned out to be as bad as he'd thought: Maris Boioannes himself, condescending to visit him. Such a display of solidarity had to mean complications, at the very least.

"There you are," Boioannes said, dropping easily into the other chair and steepling his fingers. He'd had his hair cut, Psellus noticed. "Have you got a moment?"

Fatuous question. On the desk between them, half a dozen messenger tubes, a few sheets of blank paper, the inkwell. "Always," Psellus replied with a mild smile.

"What can I do for you?"

"It's nothing too serious." Boioannes was looking at the wall behind his head, and Psellus suddenly couldn't remember if there was anything on that wall: a picture, a chart, a map of the war. He very much hoped there wasn't anything. The fewer insights into his mind that he conceded to any of his colleagues, the better. "It's just something that's been itching away for a while now, and I was wondering if you could possibly shed some light."

"If I can."

"Splendid." Boioannes frowned slightly, concentrating his mind the way anybody else would sharpen a pen. "As you know, we only managed to take Civitas Eremiae because a traitor opened the gates for us." He paused and smiled bleakly. "Thinking about it, I really feel that
traitor
is far too small a word for Ziani Vaatzes. It's like calling a continent an island."

"He seems to be quite an interesting man," Psellus said.

"Putting it mildly." Boioannes moved his head slightly to one side, scratched the bridge of his nose lightly, and put his head back exactly where it had been. "First he betrays core military secrets to the enemy. Then he betrays the enemy to us." He shrugged, precisely and elegantly. "He causes the war, then ends it—well, not quite, but let's not let a few trivial details get in the way of symmetry. It's tempting to dismiss his motivations as irrelevant, but he's still at large—our best intelligence puts him at the court of Duke Valens, so he's still very much in the center of the action—and I find it irksome not being able to understand him." Boioannes bent forward very slightly from the waist, bringing his formidable head a few inches closer to Psellus. "When you were investigating him at Compliance, I imagine you found out pretty much everything there is to know about the man. I'd value your opinion."

A tiny gleam of light broke through in Psellus' mind, and he answered almost eagerly. "Yes, I conducted an investigation," he said, "and I believe I have most of the pertinent facts. As to whether I've got enough information to base a valid opinion on, I really couldn't say. I'm sure I must have missed something, because it doesn't really make any sense, but I don't know where to look for the missing clue, because I don't know what it is I'm looking for. Quite possibly I have the data but I haven't figured out its significance yet. On the other hand, I could be like a sailor trailing along an established trade-route, oblivious to the fact that just over the horizon there's an undiscovered country. I don't know." He raised his eyebrows. "That's not much help, is it?"

Boioannes pursed his lips. Most of his gestures seemed to constitute self-sharpening, in one form or another. "He's only a human being," he said, "not a paradox of algebra; you should be able to do the equations and solve him, if you try." He leaned back a little. He had the rare knack of looking comfortable on other people's furniture. "Let's start with the obvious. Why do you think he told us how to get into Civitas Eremiae?"

Psellus nodded. "There's the obvious motives," he said. "Remorse: he saw the horrific consequences of his betrayal of military secrets, and felt he had to make amends."

"Discounting that," Boioannes prompted.

"Hope," Psellus continued. "He hopes that, since he gave us Civitas Eremiae, we might be persuaded to pardon him and let him come home. Or, if he's a realist, he understands that we have his wife and daughter."

Boioannes shook his head. "Only a fool would carry out his side of the bargain before negotiating the terms. And he knows we're not savages. We don't take out our anger on innocent women and children."

"Indeed." Psellus twitched; nerves, probably. "It could be some subsequent development we don't know about. For instance, he may have fallen out very badly with the Eremians while he was there, and betrayed them to get his revenge."

"Possible." Boioannes dipped his head in acknowledgment. "Doesn't feel right, though. Oh, it could well be the right explanation, but in order to find it convincing, we'd have to presuppose that his mind had been affected: paranoia, psychotic tendencies. Does he seem to you to be that sort of man?"

"No," Psellus admitted. "But after what he's been through…"

"Let's assume it's not that. What else?"

That was as far as Psellus had got in his own speculations. "The other extreme," he said. "He's a desperate man, we can agree on that. We aren't the Eremians' only enemies. Bear in mind that he's now with the Vadani, and they were at war with Eremia for a long time before the Sirupati Truce. He realizes that the Eremians are likely to lose the war sooner or later, so he does a deal with the Vadani; he betrays the Eremians to us in return for asylum in Civitas Vadanis."

The Boioannes thoughtful smile; a rare commodity, flattering but dangerous. "I could believe that," he said, "were it not for the fact that Duke Valens made a last-minute attempt to relieve the siege, and in so doing effectively declared war on us. If your theory's correct, you'll have to make some fairly large assumptions about Valens' motives, too."

Psellus clicked his tongue. "And that, of course," he said, "is the other great mystery: why did Valens attack us, at the precise moment when he had the least to gain from so doing? I can't help thinking that where you have two great mysteries in the space of one transaction, logic suggests that they're probably linked. But, of course, I'm not our leading expert on Duke Valens."

"You're not." The Boioannes smile darkened a little. "I am. And there aren't two mysteries, there're three. Why did Orsea dismiss and imprison his chief adviser—the only competent man in his government—just when he needed him most?" He shook his head. "Two enigmas might be a coincidence. Three… But now it's getting unrealistic, isn't it? What on earth could connect Orsea, Valens and our erstwhile Foreman of Ordnance? At the risk of overburdening the equation, I think that counts as a fourth enigma." He sighed; it sounded almost like genuine frustration. "It's ridiculous," he said. "We have sixty-five thousand men in arms and complete materiel superiority. The motivations of three individuals should be totally irrelevant. But apparently they matter, so we have to do something about them." Psellus nodded. He should have seen it coming; but if he had, what could he have done? "You want me to investigate?"

This time, Boioannes grinned from the heart. "Why not? It's not as though you've got anything else to do."

"Quite." Pause; the question had to be asked, and Boioannes would be expecting it. "In return, would you tell me something?"

"Perhaps."

"What am I doing on this committee?"

Boioannes' grin opened as if for laughter, but there was no sound, just a showing of teeth. "There are various reasons," he said. "First, we need your expertise, wisdom and lively intellect. Second, we needed someone who would do as he was told and not make trouble. Third, there was a vacancy and we already had as many intelligent men as we could accommodate; a committee needs men like you, just as music needs rests or mosaics need blank tiles. Would you like me to continue?"

"Yes. I'd like the real reason, please."

"Very well." Boioannes frowned. "In fact, it's quite complicated and not in the least profound. We wanted…" He smiled. "
I
wanted someone inert and pragmatic who would stay peacefully in his office until he was given something to do. Naturally, the Foundrymen on the committee wanted another Foundryman. The other Guilds, in particular the Joiners, were prepared to allow another Foundryman only on the understanding that he was—excuse me—a nonentity. Staurachus felt that taking you out of Compliance would create a vacancy that could usefully be filled by a Tailor or a Draper; since Compliance was likely to be taking the main force of the fallout from the Vaatzes scandal, he felt that the Foundrymen should reduce their representation there and pass the poisoned cup, so to speak, to their natural enemies. If you want my opinion, your name came up because half the obvious candidates for the vacancy were too stupid, and the other half were too intelligent. You were—again, excuse me—a name more or less chosen at random from a shortlist of available Foundrymen. Nobody outside the Guild or Compliance had ever heard of you, but the Foundrymen believed you'd be safe, sensible and properly timid. Finally, it was you who got us into this war. There were other reasons—scraps of reasons—but most of them have slipped my mind."

Psellus dipped his head gracefully. "Thank you," he said. "I'd been wondering."

"Understandably."

"It was kind of you to set my mind at rest. I can stop fretting about that and concentrate on this job you've given me."

"Excellent." Boioannes stood up. "As I understand it, you've already…" He frowned again. "
Immersed
yourself in Ziani Vaatzes, so you have the relevant data. His books, for example." The way in which he reached out and picked the book off the shelf told Psellus that he already knew exactly where to find it. "A sensible place to start. Why should a machine shop foreman go to all the trouble of making himself a book out of scrounged materials, and then fill it with low-grade, homemade love poetry?" He opened the book, stared at the pages as if they were an apple he'd bitten into and found a wormhole, shut it with a snap and put it back. "You may find this an interesting comparison," he went on, taking a familiar-looking brass tube from his sleeve. "This is a copy of a letter from Duke Valens to the wife of Duke Orsea, written two months before Orsea's ill-fated attack on the Republic. Fortuitously, it was sent by the hand of a merchant who does business with us, and who had the wit to make a copy before passing it on. There's no poetry in it, apart from a few quotations, but there are distinct parallels which you may find illuminating." He dropped the tube on the desk. It rolled, and came to rest against the inkwell. "Thank you for your time, Commissioner. I look forward to seeing what you come up with." After he'd gone, Psellus realized that he was shaking slightly. This surprised him. He hoped it hadn't been visible enough for Boioannes to notice.

He got up, with a vague idea of going down to the buttery and getting something strong to drink, but once he was on his feet the idea ceased to appeal. He went back carefully over the interview, assessing it in the way a judge at a fencing match awards points to the contestants, and came to the surprising conclusion that it had either been a draw or else he'd come out of it with a very slight lead. True, Boioannes had beaten him up pretty conclusively, but he hadn't heard anything about his own shortcomings that he hadn't already known for some time. On the positive side, he'd finally been given something to do, which made a pleasant change, and he'd forced Boioannes to tell him an unplanned and largely unprepared lie. A lie, he'd learned long ago, is often the mirror image of the truth; by examining it carefully, you can reconstruct the fact that lie was designed to conceal. That was a step forward, but not necessarily one he'd been anxious to take…

(He sat down again. He'd seen a lion once, in a cage in a traveling circus. He'd watched it with a mixture of awe and compassion, as it roared and lashed its tail; absolute ruler of five paces.)

Because the step Boioannes had practically shoved him into taking led to a question that he had no way of answering, but which had quietly tormented him ever since he first read Vaatzes' dossier. Previously he'd assumed that the answer wasn't worth finding because Vaatzes' motivation, soul and very essence didn't really matter very much to the future well-being of the Republic. Now, however, it appeared that Maris Boioannes himself felt that it might have some deeper significance. In which case, he had no option. Until he'd made some kind of headway with the problem, he couldn't get anywhere; it was a locked gate he had to get through, or over. So. (He tilted the small jug on his desk, just in case an invisible goodwill fairy had refilled it in the last ten minutes.)

Ziani Vaatzes was condemned for abomination because he'd made a clockwork toy for his daughter that contained forbidden mechanical innovations and modifications. Fair enough; but how on earth had he been found out in the first place?

Like a donkey turning a grindstone, he followed the familiar, weary circle. By its very nature, the abomination, the toy, was a private thing, not something liable even to be seen by strangers, let alone dismantled and examined with calipers. Neither the wife nor the daughter could have known about the transgression, since they didn't have the mechanical knowledge to recognize it. Surely Vaatzes hadn't talked about it to his fellow workers, or left notes and drawings lying about. Unlikely that he'd made himself conspicuous by stealing or scrounging materials liable to betray his illicit intentions; as shop foreman, he could requisition pretty much anything without exciting suspicion; besides, none of the materials used had been rare or unusual. An unexpected visitor, calling at the house late one evening and seeing components carelessly left lying about on the kitchen table; no, because the deviations from Specification wouldn't have been obvious out of context, and even if the visitor somehow knew they were meant for use in a clockwork toy, he'd have needed calipers to detect the irregularity. It was, in essence, the perfect crime. The answer should, of course, have been right there in the dossier, in the investigators' report. But it wasn't. No account of the course of the investigation, because Vaatzes had immediately pleaded guilty.