Devices and Desires (33 page)

Curious, how the changes of age surprise us. The Maris Boioannes he remembered had mostly been objectionable on account of
his appearance: a tall man, with a perfect profile, a strong chin and thick black hair, a revoltingly charming smile, deep
and flashing brown eyes. You knew you never stood a chance when Boioannes was around. This man — oddly enough, the smile was
still there, although the chin had melted and the hair was thin, palpably flicked sideways to cover a bald summit as prominent
as Civitas Eremia as described by the previous speaker. Deprived of its natural setting, however, the smile was weak and silly.
You could easily despise this man, which would make you tend to underestimate him. Probably why he’d done well in the diplomatic
service.

“Duke Valens Valentinianus,” Boioannes said (his voice was the same; still rich and warm. He looked different once he’d started
to speak), “is almost certainly the most capable duke to rule the Vadani in two centuries. He’s intelligent, he’s firm, decisive;
he’s a good leader, highly respected; still very young, only in his early twenties, but that’s not so uncommon among the mountain
tribes, where life expectancy is short and prominent men tend to die young. He’s well educated, by Vadani standards, with
a firm grasp of practical economics; he reads books for pleasure — we know what he reads, of course, because his books all
come from the Republic; we’ve compiled a list from the ledgers of his bookseller, and it’ll be worth your while to take a
look at it. He has an inquiring mind, maybe even a soul. He’s not, however, an effete intellectual. We’re still working on
a complete schedule of all the men he’s had executed or assassinated since he came to power, but I can tell you now, he’s
quite ruthless in that way. Not a storybook bloodthirsty tyrant, shouting ‘off with his head’ every five minutes; there are
several well-authenticated instances where he spared someone he really ought to have disposed of, gave him a second and even
a third chance. It’s notable, however, that in each of these cases he took full precautions to make sure that the offender
couldn’t do any serious harm while on license, so to speak. He’s an excellent judge of character, and he has great confidence
in his own judgment. He believes in himself, and the people believe in him too. All in all, a most efficient and practical
ruler for a nation like the Vadani.”

Boioannes paused and drank a little water. He still had that mannerism of using only his index and middle fingers to grip
the cup. “As far as weaknesses go,” he went on, “we haven’t found any yet, though of course we’re working on it. He’s depressingly
temperate as far as wine and women are concerned; his only indulgence appears to be hunting, which is a big thing among both
of the mountain nations. Buying him isn’t really an option, since the revenue from the silver mines is more than a tribal
chief would know what to do with; also, he doesn’t seem to show any interest in conspicuous expenditure — no solid gold dinner
services, priceless tapestries, jewel-encrusted sword-hilts. He draws only a very moderate sum from the profits of the silver
mines, and lives well within his means. Currently, therefore, the most productive line of approach would seem to be intimidation;
but we have an uncomfortable feeling that it could go badly wrong, and force him into a genuine alliance with his neighbor.
What we need to find, therefore, is a crack in the armor. We’re confident that there is one — there always is — and given
time we know we can find it. Much depends, therefore, on how much time we have available. That’s for you to tell us. What
we’re fairly certain we can’t do is simply rely on his instinctive hatred for the Eremians. Common sense would seem to be
the keynote of this man’s character, and an ability to ignore or override emotional impulses that conflict with what his brain
tells him is the sensible thing to do. He’ll know straight away that if we come to him and propose an alliance against Eremia,
the whole balance of power in the region will be irrevocably changed. Remember, his father started the peace process with
Eremia and he saw it through; not through fear, or because he doesn’t hold with war on principle, but because he realized
that peace was the sensible thing, in the circumstances.”

Psellus’ attention started to wander; he wasn’t really interested in the Vadani Duke. Instead, he opened his mind to a picture
of a mountaintop (he’d never seen a mountain, except as a vague fringe at the edge of a landscape, hardly distinguishable
from banks of cloud) with all those impossible defenses — the walls, the narrow spaces, above all the desperate gradient.
He knew that Civitas Eremia would fall, because the Republic had promised that it would, but as an engineer he could only
see the problems, not the solution to them. He felt as if he’d heard the beginning of a story, and the end, but not the middle.
Not by assault; not by siege; if they wanted to get inside the gates, they’d have to persuade someone in the city to open
them for them.

He allowed himself a little smile. Of course, how silly of him not to see it earlier. The old saying: no city, however massively
fortified, is impregnable to a mule carrying chests of gold coins. Treachery, that old faithful, would see them through.

Boioannes had stopped talking; people were standing up and chatting, so the meeting must be over. He wished he knew a bit
more about Necessary Evil protocols; at the end of a meeting, were you supposed to hurry straight back to work, or did you
linger, mix and network? He wished he was back somewhere where he knew the rules.

“Good briefing, don’t you think?” Staurachus had materialized next to him, like a genie in a fairy tale popping up out of
a bottle.

He nodded. “I’ve certainly learned quite a bit,” he said.

Staurachus rubbed his eyes. Of course, he wasn’t getting any younger, and all this extra work would be tiring to a man of
his age. Somehow you don’t expect frailty in your enemies, only your friends; you imagine that their malice makes them immune.
“So how do you think we should proceed?”

“Get hold of someone inside the city and pay them a lot of money.”

Staurachus smiled. “Very good,” he said. “And who do you think would be a good prospect?”

Psellus shrugged. “I don’t know a lot about them,” he said, “but from what I’ve heard, I’d say the Merchant Adventurers. Mind
you,” he added quickly, “that’s just off the top of my head. I’d need to know a bit more in the way of background. I mean,
do the Eremians allow their women to go wandering about the place at night on their own?”

“Who knows?” Staurachus raised his hands in a vague, all-purpose gesture of dismissal. “We have people working on that side
of things, cultural issues and what have you. It’s standard operating procedure to compile a complete profile in these cases.”

Reassuring, Psellus thought; we’ll wipe them out, but the file will be preserved forever somewhere in the archives. A kind
of immortality for them, every aspect of their culture scientifically recorded in the specified manner. “That’s good,” he
heard himself say. “At any rate, we’ve got to try it before we risk an assault against those defenses.”

Staurachus shrugged. “If it comes to that, I don’t think it’ll prove to be beyond our resources. We’re blessed with advantages
that few other nations have in war; we have the best engineers in the world, and our armies are made up of well-paid foreigners.
Arguably, the harder the assault proves to be, the better the demonstration to the rest of the world.”

“I suppose so,” Psellus said. “But it’d probably be better to try treachery first. For one thing, we could forget all that
business about having to get the Vadani on our side.”

“Ah yes.” Staurachus smiled a little. “You knew Boioannes at school, didn’t you? Or was it later, in vocational training?”

“Both.”

“The diplomatic service see things from a slightly different angle,” Staurachus said tolerantly. “They have their pride, same
as the rest of us. They like to believe they’re useful. We listen to what they can tell us, but we don’t usually tend to follow
their recommendations.”

At the end of his first day in Necessary Evil, Psellus felt an overwhelming need for a bath. As a Guild officer of senior
executive rank, he was entitled to use the private bath in the main cistern house, instead of having to pitch in at the public
bathhouse on the other side of the square. It was a privilege he valued more than any other, since he’d always been diffident
about taking his clothes off in front of other people (I have so much, he often told himself, to be diffident about: so much,
and a little more each year); and besides, the water in the cistern house was always pleasantly warm, instead of ice-cold
or scaldingly hot.

His luck was in; nobody else was using it, and quite soon he was lying on his back lapped in soothing warmth, gazing up at
the severely geometrical pattern of the ceiling tiles. As he relaxed, he mused on treachery. Staurachus had sounded as though
he already had a plan for the betrayal of Civitas Eremiae; probably involving the Merchant Adventurers, either directly or
indirectly. His question, therefore, had been by way of a test; fair enough, since Staurachus was his sponsor, and one likes
to reassure oneself that one’s protégé is worth putting one’s name to. But there’d been something about his old enemy’s manner
that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, and it referred back, he was sure, to the big question: why had Staurachus
chosen him, of all people?

There was a saying — Cure Hardy, he rather thought — that when making a sacrifice to the gods, you should offer the best animal
in the herd, preferably someone else’s. He paused his train of thought, and tried to work out which herds he belonged to.
Foundrymen’s; Didactics; no enlightenment there. Compliance; yes, but he wasn’t Compliance anymore. What else? Who would his
failure and disgrace reflect badly on? When he failed —

But how could he possibly fail? He couldn’t, because the Republic couldn’t lose a war. It might just conceivably lose a battle.
It might even, under circumstances too far-fetched to be readily imagined, lose an army. The war might drag on for a year,
or twenty years. The Republic would, however, inevitably win. Furthermore, as Staurachus had said himself, a military disaster
wasn’t necessarily a failure. A nation that wins a great victory frightens its neighbors; a nation that suffers a devastating
defeat and then goes on to win the war, hardly noticing its losses, terrifies them to the point where both aggression and
resistance are unthinkable. It wouldn’t matter to the Republic if it lost fifty thousand men in one engagement, since all
its armies were made up of hired foreigners. Indeed, the simple fact that dead men don’t need to be paid had helped the Republic
on several occasions in the past to regard bloody defeats with a measure of equanimity. No, failure wasn’t possible. No matter
how hard one tried, it simply couldn’t be done.

After he’d finished his bath, Psellus went to his room. He slumped on the bed (his calves and knees ached pitifully, because
of all the unaccustomed standing and walking) and put his hands behind his head. Normally he’d read a little before going
to sleep; a few pages of early Mannerist poetry, perhaps, or Pogonas’
On Details;
something wholesome, orthodox, approved and gently soothing in its familiarity. Tonight, anything like that would be too
bland to have any effect. He sat up again, scanned the titles on the shelf that stood against the wall and, on a whim, pulled
down a very old, fat, squat book he hadn’t looked at in years.

He made up for that now with a brief inspection. The covers, bound in plain off-white vellum gradually losing its translucence
with age, were about the size of his palm; width, the length of his thumb. On the spine a previous owner had written, in ink
now brown and faded with light and age,
Orphanotrophus, concerning the measurement of small things,
between the first and second backstraps of the binding. It was, he reflected, an accurate but misleading description. He
let the book sit in his palm. The binding, still tight after four hundred years, nevertheless allowed a slight gap between
the pages about a third of the way in. He opened it at that point, and stared for a moment at the tiny, precise handwriting.
He’d forgotten that the book was written in what he believed was called copy minuscule — perfect, but very, very small, so
that although he could read it without difficulty it made him feel dizzy, as if gazing too long at something a very long way
away. He read:

In considering this same virtue which we call tolerance, namely the virtue that seeks ever to diminish and make small its
own substance, we should most diligently consider wherein lies the true end of an endeavor: whether it be the perfection of
the act of making, or of the thing made. For to value and cherish fine small work in the making of a worthless thing were
folly, and but little to be regarded against the making of an useful thing, though basely and roughly done, save that in such
act of making there is an effect of making fine worked upon the maker: so that each thing made small and fine by such making
refines the hand that wrought it. Thus a man of great arts continually exercising his skill upon the perfection of fine things,
though they be but idle and nothing worth, gains therefrom, besides material trash, a prize of great value, namely that same
art of making small and fine, or rather the augmentation thereof by practice and perfection. Let a man therefore turn his
hand to all manner of vain and foolish toys, so that thereby he shall make good his skill for when he shall require of it
to serve a nobler purpose.

Psellus lifted his head and rubbed his eyes. Thirty-five years ago, he remembered, he’d sat in a badly lit room the size of
an apple-crate, staring dumbly at this very same page on the eve of his Theory of Doctrine exam. Addled with too much concentration
and too little sleep, he’d read it over three or four times before he finally got a toehold in a crevice between its slabs
of verbiage, and hauled himself painfully into understanding. Not long afterward he’d dozed off, woken to see the sun in the
sky, and run like a madman to the examination halls just in time to take his place… But the great force of providence that
looks after idle students in the hour of their trial had been with him that day. Out of the whole of that fat, dense book,
which he’d been meaning to get around to reading for two years and opened for the first time the previous evening, the learned
examiners had seen fit to set for construction and comment the one and only paragraph he’d managed to look at before sleep
ambushed him. Accordingly, he scored ninety marks out of a hundred, thereby earning his degree and with it the chance of a
career in Guild politics.