208 - Pleasant conversation

“Kyash on my face,” said Krero, when I came up on deck next morning as we sailed downriver. “Can everybody on this Earthsphere just walk under my nose and get hold of you whenever they want?”

“Give them credit, and be happy that they’re ours. It was very well-thought-out and executed,” I said.

“I’m not ten-tenths convinced they’re ours. What if they had a slow poison on that letter that causes a death that looks like some illness so that we’d never suspect?”

“When I talk to the summit person at home, I’ll ask if she—he?—has received their report; that’ll make it for sure.”

“You could be dead then! Kyashin child-raping three-dicked five-cunted horse that I rode sideways in on, I pity the poor slob you choose to protect you all the time.”

“You don’t want the position, then? I was thinking of appointing you.”

He stared at me with such a mixed look of horror and temptation on his face, I had to laugh, even though my head was thick with being drugged the day before, and the ship-heaving, slight though it was, wasn’t helping. “You’re joking, right?” he said. “I’d do my best, rip my heart out of my chest with an Arkan eating-spoon to save your life, but there has got to be someone else better at it than I am...”

“I’ll take that under advisement.”

“What I am most curious about,” said Sach, thoughtfully, “is whether we’re allied with the Lakans.” My parents and several others chalked that.

“Of course we are,” I said. “You doubted we would be?” I told them how, and several doubled over with hands over their faces, or made little aigh noises.

We came into Brahvniki in the dead of night. The Yeoli embassy there had never been large, since Selina is so close anyway, but it was no more; they’d left town after one of their staff had been killed, and his head left on the doorstep, with “slaves of Arko” written in Arkan in his blood on the threshold. The murderer had never been caught. I learned this from Krena. But she knew a way into the back of the Benai Island, for dealing with Ivahn. It was raining, a dead-straight hard fall like dark curtains hiding us, and soaking us all to the bones.

At the door I told the sleepy-eyed Vra in his red robe, “Tell the Benaiat his long-lost grandson Vik, who had him forward a letter or two for him from Arko, is visiting. I know he will get up for that.” It was good not to be called precious darling. In a short time we were shown in. I wondered why we were being housed in a cellar, which had once been used for tanning hides; but, as I said to one or two who grumbled, if we wanted to complain to the innkeeper, we’d better move to paid lodgings.

Ivahn embraced me as if I really were his long-lost grandson. With Arko controlling Selina, things were worse in Brahvniki, he told me; there were never less than five red-sailed ships in the harbour, fully-manned, and the marines walked the streets freely with unbounded weapons. Two Arkans had worked their way onto the Praetanu, acting with typical arrogance, and it was not even secret that they had Imperial backing and were taking Kurkas’s orders.

Ivahn looked older, wearier, with limbs thinned, and motions slower and more careful. He kept coughing wetly, which I didn’t like to hear. When I asked after his health, he said, “It’s well enough,” and wouldn’t say more.

“I know you are not just here to pass through,” he said, once we’d shared the salt, which means getting down to business in the Brahvnikian and Zak world. “How much do you need?”

“One of my alliances is conditional on my hiring seven thousand mercenaries,” I said. “Tell the truth, I’d rather have ten.” I told him who my allies were, to let him know I had the makings of a goodly-sized army, and gave him my well-practiced recounting of the battles.

“I can give you a start to those sell-swords,” he said. “I can also direct you to some other citizens of note.” Luckily, he’d just had a large sum deposited by some adventurers who’d crossed the great western ocean. Twelve thousand gold ankaryel and five thousand sword blanks, for five per cent yearly, we agreed to. I kissed his hands and we drank Saekrberk on it, his toast being, “May the taste be slightly steely.” His practice was to hide sword-blanks in Saekrberk casks.

The next day, I sent my mothers and several of the guards into the city to have a demarchic shirt tailored, and a signet carved, using the imprint from a letter I’d sent Ivahn from Vae Arahi. “Best you look the part, speaking to whom you’re going to speaking to,” Ivahn said. Just as we were starting to sign off the loan papers, his assistant, Stevahn, rushed into the office. “Benaiat, the inspector’s on the ferry.”

His hands moved faster than I thought they could, seizing up papers, locking them away in walnut chests. “Honey-Giving One,” he swore under his breath. “Why now? You must be hidden, Shchevenga, go with her.”

My stomach was suddenly creeping. I didn’t move. “The inspector?”

He made a brush-off gesture, saying, “It’s no trouble, lad, but you must go.” There was more annoyance in his brown eyes than fear, but perhaps he was hiding it. “If I and my people are in some kind of danger, my friend,” I said as Stevahn pulled on my arm, “I think I should know.”

Ivahn let out a rushing sigh, his mouth pursed as if he had something sour in it. “Yes, yes, of course you should, I’m sorry. Stevahn, tell him as you’re going.”

She hurried me through the onion-arched corridors with their sweet air, from scent permeated into the stone. “The Arkan embassy reserves the right to come into the precinct, to see, as they say, that nothing is, em, amiss.” I set my teeth as we walked. In my heart, I had known. “You know how it is, semanakraseye; we have our hireling guard, but they could have twenty ships here in three days, from Selina. Don’t worry, they suspect nothing. They haven’t a hope of not being outwitted by the Benaiat, as you can imagine.”

No wonder we were sleeping the cellar. But why had he tried to hide it from me? Not to get the better of me in bargaining; we’d hardly bargained. Not to weaken my own hope? He couldn’t think so little of me and still lend me all that. I thought of his deep-wrinkled face, the joy dimmed in those peaked bird-eyes. No; it was his hope that needed strengthening.

I asked Stevahn where in the Benai the inspector would go. “Oh, it’s fairly random,” she said. “Always through the barrels, though; he finds our distillate growing on him.” She chuckled. Even to Arkans, the monks of the Bear are generous. The liqueur is a sacrament, to be proselytized and do its good work whatever way.

I don’t think Stevahn wondered about the favour I asked—to lend us a store of red robes as disguises—being in too much of a hurry. Such an Arkan would never descend to visit our cellar, if Ivahn even let him know it existed. I put one on. From my month away here, I still knew the corridors well enough to find the main barrel-store. I set to sweeping its floor with monkish devotion.

I knew when they were coming by weapon-sense; the Arkan wore a sword, two daggers and, as I saw when they came into view, full armour, as if someone was going to attack him in the Benaiat, and none of the blades were peace-bonded, sure enough. Ivahn and Stevahn were conducting him personally, in a way that suggested they always did.

I saw the nature of the deception right away. In a reedy, obsequious drone, Ivahn prattled on endlessly, about every trivial Benai detail as if it were all-important, forgetting things and losing his train of thought now and then (with Stevahn reminding and prompting him in a long-suffering tone), and laying on flattery with a trowel whenever the Arkan seemed annoyed.

The blue eyes glazed over, the mouth yawned; I could see him thinking, “How did I ever land this post? If he says ‘Excuse me for being tedious’ one more time…” His fill of Saekrberk he clearly considered fair payment for wasting his time with this dotard who couldn’t find his behind with two hands and a map, let alone pose any sort of threat to Arko. Stevahn was right; the Arkan didn’t stand a chance.

But it wasn’t without price. Ivahn had to bear the remarks, the contemptuous angle of the nose, the boorish spitting on the floor. Here is some of the weight, I thought, that’s bent those shoulders.

While the Arkan was upending his cup yet again, his back to me, Ivahn took a quick glance, to see who this Vra was who wasn’t staying clear as he ought to be. I lifted my head just enough to show him my face, and winked. The string of unctuous words broke for a moment, adroitly changing into a clearing of the throat. The inspector must have a boot-leather throat, for he drank still more, and I did the Arkan prayer-gesture of two hands to the temples, and turned it into wiggling ass-ears. Ivahn sputtered, changing it into a coughing fit.

“You peach-chinned pup!” he said, when the inspector had staggered back onto the ferry and I was back in Ivahn’s office to finish signing. “No wonder the things that befall you befall you. And I just quartered my bank to you…”

“Did I get caught?” I said. “I know how not to. What were the chances, really, that he’d imagine it was me under that robe?”

He gave me a dark look, but said, “Well, it’s good to see the boy still in you, after all you’ve been through, nonetheless. Just be careful.” The smile in his voice brought back old days, just what I’d hoped for.

He’d been thinking of a particular Brahvnikian who might help me. Annike, called Lady Gar, had been on the Praetanu, but was no longer, it seemed, having been ruined by pirates burning her ships. “Pirates under red sails, flying the eagle,” said Ivahn. “It was one of our dear Arkans who replaced her. She has little to lend, but she is better connected to those antipathetic to Arko than I. I mean to invite her to tea tonight.” He fingered the elbow of my shirt, which had become a little worn. “Dealing with these people, you’d better look like a king, not a reformed gladiator, with nothing shining but your teeth.” I told him I had someone on it already.

No one will do as well shopping for you as your mothers, at least if you no longer have a Skorsas in your life. They’d ordered me a demarchic shirt that would be ready by dinner, and taken the letter to a Zak stone-carver who didn’t know a word of Enchian, let alone what a demarchic signet might mean; that would take three days, though, so I’d have to finish signing whatever I signed then. Some part of me felt like an actor, rushed onstage with quickly-done face-paint and hardly knowing my lines, to play the lead on which the whole production depends. Still, I’d done well so far.

Annike had been a self-made clawprince. Even with sparse jewelry and satin Brahvnikians pantaloons that looked old-style, she had a feeling of consequence about her. Her eyes were hard and measuring, the kind that miss nothing, being too honest with herself; her handclasp was firm and cool. Her manners were polished as an ancient sword, of course. But she was refreshingly blunt, once we were alone and had shared the salt. “So, here you are, young Shchevenga, a king without a country.”

“Who means to take it back,” I answered, not too quickly, drawing myself up just slightly. “As I hardly need say.”

She smiled. “And here am I, a clawprince without a fortune. Whatever were we introduced for, except pleasant conversation?”

I laughed. If bitter humour has any purpose other than to ease bitterness, it is to draw the aggrieved together. “Ivahn was struck, I think, by what we have in common,” I said, “having lost by the same agency.”

“Indeed,” she said, her eyes, which were a steely-grey that reminded me of Emao-e’s, hardening.