Memory (29 page)

‘Safety in numbers,' Monach replied. ‘I get the impression that the roads around here aren't as safe as they might be, no disrespect intended. Gangs of bandits and the gods know what else roaming around all over the place. After what happened to the prince the other day, it's like nobody's safe any more.'

‘Quite so,' Captain Olens said. ‘So, if you're pilgrims, where are you headed for? I never knew there was anything particularly holy around here.'

Monach raised his eyebrows. ‘You surprise me,' he said. ‘You mean, you haven't heard about the miracle?'

‘Miracle,' Olens said. ‘No, can't say I have.'

‘Good heavens,' Monach said. ‘Everybody's talking about it back home. Manifestation of the Divine Poldarn; quite possibly the Second Coming and the end of the world. Right here,' he added, ‘at Dui Chirra.'

Olens looked at him. ‘Are you sure you've got the right place?' he said. ‘There's nothing at Dui Chirra except a rather scruffy inn and a run-down old foundry.'

‘Poldarn in his aspect of the god of fire and rebirth,' Monach said. ‘Where else would you look except a foundry?'

Olens shook his head. ‘Sorry,' he said. ‘but I think you boys have had a wasted trip. Nothing miraculous going on there, just a bunch of layabouts messing about in a clay pit. If you're looking for miracles, you might try heading south. I did hear they've got a two-headed calf out at Chosiva.'

‘Two-headed calves aren't anything special,' Monach said, shifting his reins into his left hand. ‘Once you've seen one, you've seen them all.' He nudged his horse with his heels, and as they moved forward he laid the back of his right hand on the hilt of his sword, snuggled in his sash like a baby. Captain Olens must have seen him, or else he was properly aware of his circle; he pulled his horse's head around and kicked savagely. Monach's draw cut the air he'd just left.

No point chasing after him; a fine government horse like that could outrun Monach's old bag of bones any day, and even if he did catch up with him, there was nothing to be gained from killing one staff officer in the middle of nowhere. I wonder if he had a similar conversation with the commander of those poor bastards we left at the crossroads, Monach thought.

‘What was all that about?' someone asked him, when he'd rejoined the column.

Monach shrugged. ‘Far as I could make out, I think the government doesn't want us to go to Dui Chirra. I get the impression it's not open to the public these days.'

‘Fine,' somebody said. ‘So what do we do now?'

‘What we're told, of course,' Monach replied. ‘Unless you like the idea of a meeting with the outfit that did over the Amathy house; in which case, you carry on. Personally, I'm going the other way.'

Silence; but Monach didn't care. He was, of course, going to go to Dui Chirra, because it was the only place he could think of where Xipho might sooner or later turn up. Taking this collection of misfits with him was clearly out of the question, but it had never been anything more than a means to an end, an instrument to be used. If he'd wanted to be a soldier, he'd have joined the army.

Chapter Eight

‘
I
t was desperate,' someone said. He recognised the voice, couldn't quite put a name to it.
Desperate
had been the in word in fourth grade, enjoying a brief vogue in between
howling
and
essential
. ‘I thought the old bastard was going to have a fit and drop dead on the spot. Boy, he was absolutely frothing.'

Frothing
helped narrow down the time-span even further; it had been Cordomine's pet word for the first half of Hilary term in fourth grade, and they'd reluctantly adopted it for a week or so, until the sixth-graders started saying
steaming
, setting a trend that nobody dared flout. So, he asked himself, what happened in the fourth, fifth and sixth weeks of Hilary term in fourth grade? He had an idea he ought to know, but he couldn't quite remember. Meanwhile, the old stone crow carried on leering at him from its place on top of the pillar (he could feel it, even with his eyes shut) which could only mean they were in the chapter house at Deymeson, waiting in their appointed places for Father Abbot to lead in the faculty for the start of Traditional Prayers; in which case, it had to be fifth week, because—

‘So,' someone else interrupted, ‘did you see them? What do they look like? Any good?'

The first speaker paused to consider. ‘The middle one's a solid seven,' he said. ‘The eldest – she's the one who's married, to that captain in the guards – she's just a milky old doe. The youngest, though—' Words apparently failed the speaker at this point.

‘Hot?' The other voice prompted.

‘As a stove-pipe,' the first voice confirmed. ‘Like, so hot you could fry eggs.'

Ah, Ciartan thought, now we know where we are. Of course, there was no excuse for not remembering this day of all days. He opened his eyes and looked round.

The first speaker, as he should have known all along, was Elaos Tanwar; the second voice, Gain Aciava. Beside him, looking distinctly frosty, was Xipho Dorunoxy – she always wore that pained, constipated expression when the boys were discussing girls, particularly when they started using the scale of one to ten. Without looking round, she said, ‘You'd better not let Turvo hear you talking about his sisters like that.'

Elaos grinned. ‘You're just jealous,' he said; and ducked, just in time, as Xipho tried to reach round the back of Gain's head to stick a finger in his eye. Sword-monk reflexes.

‘Do you bloody well mind?' Gain snapped; then he too had to dodge out of the way as Xipho tried again. Elaos, of course, was grinning like a monkey.

‘I can't believe it,' he heard himself say, ‘Turvo having sisters who're half decent-looking. It's hard to imagine a female version of Turvo. Just as well,' he added, ‘I missed breakfast.'

‘Cordo says they take after their mother's side,' Gain replied. ‘'Course, he knows the family. His lot know everybody, bloody social climbers.'

‘Where is Cordo, anyhow?' the Earwig asked, from his place next to Xipho, on the left. (What was the Earwig's regular name? Couldn't remember; he'd been the Earwig since before Ciartan had come to Deymeson. Even the faculty called him that, so rumour had it.)

‘Infirmary,' Elaos replied, his tone of voice suggesting that he believed Cordo's illness was wholly tactical. ‘Anybody want to bet me he'll make a miraculous recovery shortly after Third Bell, so's he can go prowling round the Sty just when Turvo's giving them the guided tour?'

Xipho sniffed her disapproval. ‘Trust Cordo to find a way of skiving off double Theory,' she said scornfully. ‘I know for a fact he hasn't done the practicals, because he was creeping round me last night after Seventh Bell asking for the answers.'

‘Which you refused to give him, of course,' Gain said dangerously.

‘Of course I didn't,' Xipho replied. ‘I'm amazed he had the nerve to ask.'

Something in Gain's grin suggested that he believed that Cordo had had certain motives beside attempted cheating for lurking round the girls' common room after dark. Fortunately, Xipho was looking the other way and didn't see him.

‘It really shouldn't be allowed,' Xipho was saying. ‘It says explicitly, in the rules, that visits from family aren't allowed in term-time except at Commemoration and Intercessions, or during Elections with special permission. It's only because Turvo's dad is some kind of minor royal. I thought we were above that sort of thing here, but apparently not.'

Elaos made that funny snorting noise of his. ‘Tazencius is more than some kind of minor royal,' he said scathingly. ‘He's, what, ninth in succession? Or is it tenth? Can't remember. Anyhow, he's quite a nob. We should be honoured. And I expect Father Abbot and the candle-wobblers'll be after him with the begging bowl.'

Xipho sniffed again. For a girl who'd never had a cold in her life, she could sniff quite majestically. ‘It's disgusting what the faculty'll do for money,' she said, and then glowered angrily as the boys (the Earwig excepted, of course) started sniggering. ‘Well, it is,' she went on. ‘And they shouldn't have to. If the government saw to it that our tithes were paid in full, we'd have more than enough funding—'

The last thing the boys wanted to talk about, needless to say, was tithes and indulgence of clergy; not with three new girls in town (or two, discounting the milky old doe). Of all of them, leaving the no-hoper Earwig out of the reckoning, Ciartan was probably the least interested. Unlike them, he hadn't been a monk since puberty, and therefore the subject wasn't as mysteriously fascinating to him as it was to them. Generally speaking, in the interests of not making himself irredeemably unpopular, he tended to shut up and let them get on with their highly theoretical speculations. Even so: a visit by three half-princesses of the blood was distinctly out of the ordinary, and he couldn't help being just a little curious. And if Elaos was right, and the youngest really was hotter than a stove-pipe, it couldn't hurt just to take a very brief look, if by chance he just happened to be passing—

By the same time next day, Ciartan was about ready to give up. Turvo's sisters had proved to be harder to reach than a mountain top. Father Tutor's apoplexy, which Elaos hadn't exaggerated at all, wasn't enough to stop him devising security measures that'd have done credit to the Imperial Guard, all designed to make sure that nobody just happened to be passing any place where Turvo and his sisters (and, infuriatingly, Cordo, who'd contrived to attach himself to the party as visitor-liaison officer, on the strength of the old family friendship) could see them, even to the extent of a distant glimpse. Throughout the long, hot day an endless stream of students was evicted from every hiding place on the premises by grim-faced prefects, temporarily enjoying powers of extreme violence over their fellows. Not for nothing, on the other hand, did the Deymeson syllabus cover persistence, endurance and diabolical ingenuity, to the point where the challenge presented by the faculty's efforts at security outweighed the attraction of three pretty girls (or two pretty girls and one milky old doe.) A cynic would've been forgiven for assuming that Father Tutor had set the whole situation up as an Expediencies practical; if so, he should have been proud. Deymeson rose to the challenge and excelled itself.

Faced with such a level of competition, Ciartan decided he couldn't really be bothered. Once you've seen one pretty girl, he told himself, you've seen them all, and the best of them wasn't worth the risk of getting on the wrong side of the prefects. There was also a very palpable fringe benefit to be considered—

‘Hello,' Xipho said. ‘What're you doing here?'

‘Me?' Ciartan shrugged. They were the only two living souls in the library, usually crowded at this time of day. ‘Reading up for the Theory presentation, of course.'

She looked at him. ‘Oh,' she said.

He yawned. ‘Where is everybody, anyway?'

‘Them.' A look of contempt crossed her face. ‘Buzzing round the honeypot, of course, trying to get a look at Turvo's stupid sisters. Why aren't you out there with them?'

Ciartan shrugged. ‘Can't be bothered,' he said. ‘Can't see what all the fuss is about, really.'

Xipho didn't comment on that, but he could sense a slight relaxation of her legendary guard. ‘Really,' she said. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?'

He sighed. ‘No, I haven't gone blind. And yes,' he added with a very mild leer, ‘I do like girls. But—' He judged the hesitation nicely; that hint of a busy, mysterious past, enough to intrigue without involving him in telling outright lies or, even worse, the truth. ‘Well, I've been around a little bit, and you know what? Half the human race is girls; so if I don't see these particular specimens, chances are I'll run into some others before I die. You never know.'

Maybe he'd overdone it, he thought, because Xipho was frowning slightly. Nevertheless. There was an old saying back home, about the fox knowing many tricks whereas the hedgehog knows one bloody good one. His bloody good trick was dropping veiled hints about his past, but never actually letting slip anything outright, concrete. He knew perfectly well that if he told them he'd grown up on a big farm in a valley but had had to leave in a hurry because of trouble over another man's wife, he'd have committed his reserve and be left with nothing in hand except the rather inadequate resources that made up his personality. Leading them to believe that his history was as rich, dark and exotic as the Empire's was a game he could play easily, and although he was sure they'd figured out by now that there was considerably less to him than met the eye, they still couldn't quite resist the lure, like cats who know it's just the end of a piece of string but can't help lunging after it when it twitches. How long he could keep up this man-ofmystery pose he had no idea, but while it lasted he was determined to make the most of it.

‘Well,' Xipho said eventually, ‘maybe you're not as shallow as a pauper's grave after all. Did you come here to do some work, or just to be annoying?'

He smiled on the inside. A compliment, even a back-handed one, from Xipho Dorunoxy happened about as often as a dry summer in Tulice; and although it was murderously difficult to impress her, once you'd managed it she generally stayed impressed. On balance, therefore, well worth the effort. (Besides, if Turvo's sisters were anything like their brother, you'd pay an extortionate price in excruciating boredom for their good looks. Also, Turvo loved garlic; if he'd picked up the taste for it at home, Ciartan was in no hurry to meet other members of his family.)

He spent a couple of hours reading Zephanes on Deception (he was actually enjoying Expediencies this term) while basking in the unshared proximity of Xipho – the line of her neck and shoulders silhouetted against the high west window was enough to boil your brain out through your ears, but he'd just about mastered the art of ignoring it. Then she closed her book with a snap, called out, ‘See you tomorrow, then,' as she stood up to leave, and
actually smiled
. It was faster than the draw, one of those moments-in-religion that are over so quick that they never actually happened; but if you're lucky enough to survive them, you carry the scars for life.