Evil for Evil (65 page)

“Thanks,” he heard himself say. “She’ll be really pleased.”

“No trouble,” she chirruped back. “Do you think they’ll be able to spare me some hay and a bucket of oats for my horse? I’ve
probably got enough to get me as far as the Modesty and Prudence, but better safe than sorry.”

“Try the ostlers,” he was saying, when the significance of what she’d told him hit him like a hammer. “Excuse me,” he muttered,
and broke into a run. She called out something, but he didn’t catch what she was saying.

There are times when it’s better to run frantically, headless-chicken fashion, than to arrive. When finally he found Valens’
carriage — he felt like he’d run five miles, up and down the middle of the convoy — he pulled up and froze, realizing as he
panted like a thirsty dog that he was in no fit state to tell anybody about anything, not if he expected to be taken seriously.
He dragged air into his burning lungs and tried to find a form of words. Then he balled his left fist and rapped it against
the carriage door.

No answer. His mind blanked. Clearly, the carriage was empty; in which case, Valens wasn’t here; consequently, he could be
anywhere. Orsea felt his chest tighten again, this time with panic rather than fatigue. His discovery was obviously so important
that it couldn’t wait, but searching the entire convoy … Just in case, he knocked again, much harder. This time, the door
opened.

“Who are you?”

He recognized her, of course; the only female Cure Hardy he’d ever seen. “I’m Orsea,” he said, realizing as he said it how
inadequate his reply was. “I need to see Valens, urgently. Do you know where … ?”

“No.” She was looking at him as though she’d just noticed him on the sole of a brand-new shoe. “What do you want?”

“It’s very important,” Orsea said. She made him feel about nine years old; but while he was standing there babbling, the Mezentines
could be moving into position, ready to attack. “Can you give me any idea where he’s likely to be? The whole convoy’s in danger.”

She frowned. “Have you told the duty officer?”

Pop, like a bubble bursting. “No,” Orsea admitted. “No, that’s a good idea. I’ll do that.”

She closed the carriage door; not actually in his face, but close enough for him to feel the breeze on his cheek. Something
told him he hadn’t made a good impression. The least of his problems.

Even Orsea knew how to find the duty officer; dead center of the convoy, look for a tented wagon with plenty of staff officers
coming and going. Mercifully, one of them was an Eremian, who escorted him, in the manner of a respectful child put in charge
of an elderly, senile relative, up the foldaway steps into the wagon.

Orsea had nearly finished telling his story when he realized that the duty officer, a small, neat, bald Vadani, didn’t believe
him. It was the lack of expression on his face; not bewilderment or shock, but a face kept deliberately blank to conceal what
he was thinking. “I see,” he said, when Orsea had finished. “I’ll make sure the Duke gets your message.”

“Will you?”

“Of course.” Orsea could see him getting tense, afraid there’d be a scene, that he’d be forced into being rude to the known
idiot who technically ranked equal with Valens himself. “As soon as I see him.”

“When’s that likely to be?”

“Soon.” Pause. The officer was trying to hold out behind his blank face, like a city under siege. “I expect he’ll send for
me at some point today, and when he does —”

“Don’t you think you should send someone to find him?”

Orsea couldn’t help being reminded of a fight he’d seen once, in the streets of Civitas Eremiae. A huge, broad-shouldered
man was being trailed by a tiny, elderly drunk, who kept trying to hit him with a stick. Over and over again the big man swatted
the stick away, like a fly, but eventually the drunk slipped a blow past his guard and hit him in the middle of the forehead.
A lucky strike; the big man staggered, and while he was off guard, the drunk hit him again, three or four times on the side
of the head. Realizing that he could be killed if he didn’t do something, the big man tried to grab the stick, and got slashed
across the knuckles and then beaten hard just above the ear. He swung his arm wildly but with force; the back of his hand
hit the drunk in the mouth, dislocating his jaw and slamming him against a wall; he slid down and lay in a heap. With that
picture in his mind’s eye, Orsea looked down at the duty officer, sitting very upright in his straight-backed chair. If I
goad this man again, he thought, he’s going to have to strike back; but I’ve got no choice.

“I’m not sure that’d be appropriate,” the duty officer said. “But I assure you, as soon as I see him —”

“Haven’t you been listening to me?” Orsea could hear the shrill, petulant anger in his own voice; it revolted him. “As soon
as you see him could be too late. If the innkeeper at Sharra knows we’re here and there’s a Mezentine patrol stationed there
—”

“Assuming,” the duty officer interrupted quietly, “that what this woman told you is true.”

I must try and make him understand. “She found me, didn’t she?” he said. “She heard we were here from someone; she told me
it was the innkeeper who told her. I can’t imagine why she’d want to lie about it. Think about it, can’t you? There’s this
merchant with a delivery for my wife. Here, look.” He thrust the little cloth sack at the officer’s face, like a fencer testing
the distance. “Now, if she wasn’t told where I was likely to be, how do you think she found me? Just wandering around at random
on the off chance she’d run into me?”

The officer leaned back a little, putting space between himself and the smell of the bag. “You may like to bear in mind that
we’re on a road,” he said, voice flat and featureless. “People travel up and down roads, on their way to wherever they happen
to be going. It seems more likely to me that she fortuitously came across this column while following the road than that she
heard about us at Sharra and made her way here across country, in a ladies’ chaise, just to deliver a bag of dried flowers.”

Orsea pulled in a deep breath. “I don’t agree,” he said. “And I’m asking you to send someone to find Valens, right now. Are
you going to do it?”

The officer’s eyes were sad as well as hostile. “I’m afraid I can’t,” he said.

“Fine.” Orsea swung round, traversing like a siege engine on its carriage, to face the Eremian officer who’d led him there.
“All right,” he said, “you do it.”

The Eremian was only a young man, embarrassed and ashamed. “I’m sorry,” he began to say.

“You heard what I just told him?”

The Eremian nodded wretchedly.

“Good. I’m telling you to find Duke Valens and pass the message on.”

Such a reproachful look in the young man’s eyes. “Actually, I’m supposed to be taking a note to —”

“Never mind about that.” Orsea couldn’t help thinking about the drunk with the stick. “It can wait. Do you understand what
I want you to do?”

The young man was looking past him, at the duty officer. Orsea couldn’t see what he saw, but the young man nodded slightly.
“Of course,” he said. “Straightaway.” He left quickly, grateful to get away, leaving Orsea and the duty officer facing each
other, like the big man and the little drunk. I won, Orsea thought, I got my way. Shouldn’t that make me the big man, not
the other way round?

The carpenters weren’t happy. Valens found that hard to take, since he was merely telling them to do what they’d told him
was the only way. But apparently there wasn’t enough good seasoned timber to do the job; they could use green wood, but —

“I know,” Valens snapped. “You told me.”

Dignified silence. They were good at dignified silence. “Do the best you can,” he growled at them, and left with what little
remained of his temper.

Heading back to his coach, he met a sad-looking ensign; an Eremian, he noticed from his insignia. He looked weary and ground
down, as though he’d been given an important job he didn’t know how to do.

“I’ve got a message for you,” the sad ensign said. “From Duke Orsea.”

One damn thing after another. “Go on, I’m listening.”

He listened, and when the ensign had finished, he said, “Orsea told you that? Himself?”

The ensign nodded. “He reported it to the duty officer —”

Valens wasn’t interested in any of that. “All right,” he said, “here’s what I want you to do.”

He fired off a list of instructions, detailed and in order of priority. He could see the ensign forcing himself to remember
each step, his eyes terrified. Fear of failure; must be an Eremian characteristic. “Have you got that?”

“Yes.”

“Repeat it all back to me and then get on with it.”

It all came back at him like an echo; it sounded very impressive, as though Duke Valens was on top of the situation. It’d
be nice if he was, since the lives of everybody in the column depended on him. If only the warning hadn’t come from Orsea;
anybody else, a soldier, a half-blind crippled shepherd, a twelve-year-old boy, and he’d be comfortable with it. But no, it
had to be Orsea. Still, the risk was too great. If he ignored it, and the Mezentines came …

The ensign darted away, swift as a deer pursued by hounds, born to be hunted, inured to it. Valens stopped to take a deep
breath and clear his mind, then went to find the duty officer.

His third visit to the Unswerving Loyalty; Miel Ducas was starting to feel at home there. Mind, he wasn’t sure he liked what
the Mezentines had done with the place. Rows of hastily built sheds crowded the paddock behind the original stable block,
and the yard was churned and rutted from extreme use. Stacks of crates and barrels masked the frontage; it hadn’t been a thing
of beauty, but the supply dumps hadn’t improved it. Mezentine soldiers everywhere, of course; definitely an eyesore. He wondered
if he ought to point out to someone in charge that the inn was, properly speaking, his property, and he hadn’t authorized
the changes.

They let him out into the yard for half an hour, for exercise. They were punctilious about it — probably because they were
cavalrymen, used to the need to exercise horses. The degree of joy he felt at being allowed into the open air disturbed him.
Something so trivial shouldn’t matter, now that his life was rushing to its end. He’d wanted to achieve a level of tranquility;
how could it possibly matter whether or not he saw the sun one last time before he died? But the light nearly overwhelmed
him, after a sleepless night in a stone pigsty. Perhaps it wasn’t the light so much as the noise. Out here, people were talking
to each other. Not a word had been spoken in the dark; his fellow prisoners’ silence had been harder to bear than anything
they could have said to him. As soon as they’d left the pigsty, Framain and his daughter had walked away from him, crossed
to the other side of the yard. He could see them talking to each other, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. Probably
just as well.

He watched a Mezentine groom leading a horse across the top of the yard, passing a man sharpening a bill-hook on a big wheel
grindstone. The horse tried to shy as it passed the shower of orange sparks, but the groom twitched its headstall and it followed
him, resigned rather than calm. Someone else was forking hay out of a cart into a hayloft. A sack of grain rose into the air
on the end of a rope, as a winch creaked. A boy, not Mezentine, raked up horse dung into a barrow. Nobody seemed interested
in Miel Ducas, apart from the two guards who watched him as though he was the only thing in the world. He felt mildly ashamed
that he hadn’t given any serious thought to trying to escape; properly speaking, it was his duty, but he simply couldn’t be
bothered. If he tried to get away, they’d only kill him. It was less effort to stay where he’d been put, and he was enjoying
watching the people.

They brought in a cart — he was treating it as a show put on for his benefit — and took off one of the wheels. Enter a wheelwright,
with tools and helpers; they struck off the iron tire with cold chisels and cut out a damaged spoke. Miel wondered how they
were going to fit the replacement; would they have to dismantle the whole wheel, and if so, how were they going to get the
rim off? They were bringing out strong wooden benches. Miel tried to remember; he’d seen wheels made and mended before but
hadn’t bothered to observe, assuming in his arrogance that it wasn’t any of his business. Now, he realized, he urgently wanted
to know how it was done. If they took him back inside, and he missed the exciting part, it’d be like listening to most of
a story and being cheated of the ending. Felloes, he suddenly remembered; the rim of a wheel is made up of six curved sections,
called felloes, dowelled together, held rigid by the spokes, restrained by the tire. Where had he learned that; or had he
been born knowing it?

“Are you going to move?” one of his guards said.

That struck Miel as a very odd question. “I’m sorry?”

“You’re supposed to be exercising,” the guard explained. They’d put the wheel on its side on top of a large barrel. It had
taken three men to lift it into place. “But you’re just standing still.”

Fair enough. “I was watching them mend the wheel,” he explained. “Is that all right?”

The guard shrugged. “You’re supposed to be walking about,” he said.

“Have I got to?”

“You please yourself,” the guard replied. Clearly he didn’t approve. “It’s just some men fixing a wheel.”

“I know,” Miel said.

The wheelwright was tapping carefully on the inside of the rim, easing the felloe off the dowels. Obviously you’d have to
be careful doing that. Too much force and you’d snap off a dowel. How would you cope if that happened? Drill it out, presumably;
not the end of the world, but a nuisance. “I wish I could do that,” Miel said. The guard didn’t reply. They’d got the felloe
off; now the wheelwright was flexing the damaged spoke in its socket, the way you waggle a loose tooth. Were all the spokes
on Mezentine carts interchangeable, so that you could simply take out a broken one and replace it with a brand-new spare from
the stores? But perhaps it wasn’t a Mezentine cart.