The Long Game, page 2
We did the usual, in the fraction of a second it takes us to have a long, leisurely chat inside some poor bastard’s head. Sit down, he says, have a drink. No thanks, I’m on duty (because he may be a friend, but, well, he’s on duty too. No food or drink. You don’t know where or what it’s been. You don’t know who it’s been.) It’s all subjective, of course, inside a stranger’s head. I see it one way, someone else would see (and feel, and smell) something completely different. I always see a marble floor, tapestries with hunting scenes on the wall, oil lamps backed with curved mirrors to amplify and project the light, my friend as a jovial fat man reclining on a couch, while behind us a log fire roars in a grate. So, obviously subjective. Smoke billowing out of someone’s ears would be bound to be noticed.
I ask him for the information. He gives me the answer his superiors have told him to give me. It’s a lie, obviously. I thank him. The fact that I get a lie tells me all I need to know. He knows that, and so presumably do his bosses. After all, we all have to work together all the time, so why make life impossibly difficult for each other? We know the score, and our side always wins eventually, and they accept that with a certain degree of, well, grace. No choice in the matter.
Then, business concluded, we can talk. He tells me about his impossibly demanding and unreasonable line managers. I bitch about the preferment committee and the fact that men I taught when they were novices are now ordering me about, telling me what I can and can’t do. In doing so I let slip a few snippets (personnel changes; new directions in policy) that might prove useful to an enemy. He snaps them up without any indication that he’s caught me out in an indiscretion. The snippets are lies, of course. Professional courtesy.
Then it’s time to go. I’ve been inside the corn-chandler’s head for two seconds. Three, and you start popping blood vessels. Till next time, I say to my friend. He grins; why’s it always you, he says. He doesn’t mean anything by it. I stand up to leave.
I think you ought to know, he says. And stops dead.
There are seven inns in Sabades, and the Flawless Diamonds of Orthodoxy is far and away the best. So I slept in a hayloft over a livery stable in Long Alley, and woke up with a crick in my neck.
Why do we always win?
If you were my third-year revision class, you’d get a rather different answer, but since you aren’t, here we go. We’re stronger. That’s it.
Strength is, of course, a relative term. Give you an example. An arm-wrestling match between a farmer and a locust could only end one way, but when locusts and farmers dispute the possession of a field of grain, it’s the locusts who tend to win. They’re weaker, but there’s ever so many more of them. Sort of the same with us and the Enemy. If one of Them gets inside your head, it’s infinitely stronger than you are. It takes over your bones, sinews, muscles, veins, nerves; unlike you it doesn’t depend on any of them for its survival, so if it tells you to smash your head against a wall—no skin off its nose, but yours is a catastrophe of blood and splinters. Its duty is to mess you up as badly as it possibly can, short of killing you; except— If it can use you to further the long-term aims of its Orientation (what we in the trade call the Greater Bad), it’s permitted and authorised to keep you more or less intact for as long as you’re useful. So; They’re pretty damn strong. Except—
Except we’re stronger. Not you; me, and my kind, adepts, those of us with the Knack. To us is granted the privilege of a greater strength; on us is laid the burden of using it to keep you lot safe. I can winkle out one of Them as easily as you pick a caterpillar off a cabbage leaf, except that it’s not quite as simple as that. Think about weeding onions. You pull up the weed and the onion comes with it, because the weed has cunningly wrapped and entwined its roots round the onion’s, to persuade you and me to leave it alone. So, I can yank the unwelcome visitor out of your head easy as winking, but there may not be much of you left afterwards. Or I can carefully and patiently untangle its roots and suckers, a delicate and exhausting process which can sometimes take me a whole second (that’s a very long time, in context) and remove it without significant permanent damage. I can; as I may already have mentioned, I’m very good at this stuff. Some of my colleagues aren’t quite so proficient, though what they lack in finesse they tend to make up in zeal, and you can track their progress through the provinces by counting all the people who spend all day sitting dead still and being fed through straws.
We’re stronger; that’s it, that’s all. By this point, my third-years will have heard an awful lot of bullshit about Good and Evil, but that’s strictly for the paying customers. Fact; we’re stronger. Period.
Stronger; except—
The crick in my neck was the least of my problems. Being inside someone’s head— You’d think I’d get used to it, eventually, but you don’t. Actually, it gradually gets worse. Immediately afterwards, it’s fine. If anything, you get a slight buzz, say a brandy and a half’s worth, which lasts for up to an hour. But then you find yourself feeling a bit tired and sleepy, so you retire to your quarters and take a nap; and when you wake up— People who’ve had mountain fever and survived tell you about the weariness, the dull ache in every bone, the iron-wedge-splitting headache, the way it takes every last scrap of your strength to scratch your ear or keep your eyelids apart. A bit like that, but the physical stuff isn’t really so bad. It’s the feeling of having had something solid, cold and intensely serrated shoved right up your consciousness that I don’t like. And that was after a relatively civilised encounter with someone (all right, something) I’ve come to consider a friend.
Stronger my arse. We do it because we’re obliged to, but it’s not easy.
But the crick in the neck was additional, and entirely the fault of the people of Sabades for having such lousy inns, so I felt and resented it rather more keenly than the actual discomfort merited. You go to a place, you put yourself through all that, entirely for their sakes, and how do they thank you? By housing you in crummy inns with nasty cramped beds and stinking beer. True, the Diamonds was built four hundred years ago, but the least they could do, surely, is pull it down and replace it with something better, just in case I ever need to stay there.
Accordingly, I wasn’t at my fizziest. The last thing I wanted to see was myself, slumped against the wall with my head lolling and my neck snapped.
Nuts, I thought.
Also; the lady has a temper, for all her demure and dignified demeanour. Instar hominis is such a harmless little Form, useful and inoffensive. I do it the simple way. I pull out a hair and mumble the words under my breath, and the hair turns into a tiny little copy of me, too small to be seen (but an adept can smell it; a really, really sensitive one); the little tiny me hangs discreetly around, gathering information, then makes its way back to me and tells me what it’s found out before popping conveniently out of existence.
She must have a nose like a spaniel, I thought. Also the strength to catch my diminutive observer, expand it to full size, wring its neck and transport it back through either a bolted door, two feet of dense thatch or a solid wall. Not sure I could do that. Not just strong, I said to myself; stronger.
Not that it mattered, because she wasn’t my fault. Maybe in Idalia they have different attitudes to privacy and professional etiquette, as well as four testicles, we simply don’t know. In any event, I intended to be on the first coach out of Sabades, and with any luck I’d never see or hear about her again.
You can guess what happened, can’t you?
I was actually on the coach, with my luggage on the roof and my feet up on the seat opposite, next stop Boethia. I was vaguely wondering why we weren’t moving yet, and wondering what the voices whose words I couldn’t quite make out were saying.
The door opened and a helmeted head appeared. Men in helmets are always bad news. “Everybody out,” said the helmeted head.
I looked at him. “Excuse me?”
“Out,” he said.
Define strength. I could turn him into a cockroach in a heartbeat with no effort at all. He had the full authority of the State behind him. In theory I have benefit of clergy, which makes me even stronger than the State, but invoking the privilege would involve endless bureaucracy, form-filling and faffing-about, and I’d get a ferocious telling-off from my superiors for annoying the civil authorities. So that made him stronger, on that occasion, from my perspective. “Just coming,” I said.
My left foot had gone to sleep. Pins and needles. I despise pain. The coachman was getting my luggage down off the roof. “What am I supposed to have done?” I asked.
The soldier wasn’t looking at me. “Nothing,” he said. “But all coaches out of the city are cancelled, because of the murder.”
“What murder?”
There’s no priory in Sabades Amar, but they have a prior; don’t ask. The prior is the third most important official in the regional administration, which if you ask me is a bit like being the third biggest flea on a blind fiddler’s dog, but the Sabadeans care about shit like that, and why not?
Correction; they had a prior. Not anymore. Some scoundrel had crawled in through a window and stabbed him in the ear as he slept. Eyewitnesses reported seeing someone scrambling out of a window in the prior’s apartments just before a chambermaid came in and discovered the body. The suspect was described as female, young, straight black hair, rather nice-looking, wearing a sort of white sheet getup secured at the shoulder with a distinctive-looking brooch.
For crying out loud, I thought. Still, none of my business. We don’t interfere in the operation of the civil authorities. Three cheers for the doctrine of separation of powers.
Still, it explained why she’d been so rough with my instar hominis. I gave the matter a very small amount of thought and came to the conclusion, on minimal evidence, that if she’d killed the prior, the prior probably needed killing, and went back to the Flawless Diamonds to see if I could hire a cart of some kind to take me to Boethia. Guess who I saw, the moment I walked through the door.
“They’re looking for you,” I said, trying to keep my voice down.
She yawned and poured tea into a bowl. “You again,” she said. “Who and why?”
“They think you murdered the prior.”
“What’s a prior?”
It occurred to me to wonder how come an Idalian could speak flawless idiomatic Robur. The various hypotheses that sprang to mind were all very well, but if so, how come she didn’t know what prior meant? “Did you or didn’t you?”
She gave me dazzling smile. “Did you know,” she said, “that your breath doesn’t smell very nice?”
Her mind was still that insipid shade of beige. “Tough,” I said. “Look, I don’t give a damn if you’ve murdered twenty priors. But unless you enjoy talking to policemen, I suggest you get out of sight. Out of town would be better, but I don’t think that would be possible right now.”
“Sweet of you to be concerned, but what business is it of yours?”
“None whatsoever. Silly of me not to have thought of that earlier. Goodbye.”
I stood up, headed for the door, got three paces and stopped dead. Stronger, I thought. “Hey,” I said.
“Come back here and sit down.”
I felt her let me go. Eight paces to the door. The hell with it, I thought, and went back to her table. “You’re starting to annoy me,” I said.
“Oh dear, how sad. Who did you say is looking for me?”
“Everybody.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a nuisance,” she said. “Do they really think I killed somebody?”
“A woman fitting your description was seen leaving the scene of the crime,” I said.
“There must be loads of women like me in this town.”
“No,” I said.
“Ah.” She nodded. “That’s awkward. You’d better find me somewhere to hide.”
“Now just a—”
Definitely stronger. It was like a giant hand cupped over my head; thumb in one ear, little finger in the other, two fingers in my eyes, and my skull slightly more fragile than an egg. “Please,” she added.
“Sorry,” I said, trying hard not to gasp my words. “Don’t think I caught that last bit.”
“Please?”
“Since you ask so nicely.”
She let go. I gave her vertex fulminis, right between the eyes. She wobbled. I caught hold of her shoulder to keep her from falling backwards onto the floor. Stronger, then, but not impossibly so.
“Now we’ve got that over with,” I said, “tell me. Did you kill the prior or not?”
“That hurt.”
“The slow dripping noise is my heart bleeding. Did you or didn’t you?”
“Oh all right. If you must know, yes, I did.”
“You murdered the prior—”
“Would you mind terribly much not shouting quite so loud?”
Fine, I thought, and plunged into her head.
You’re really not supposed to do that. It can cause serious damage to both the plunger and the plunged, it’s completely unethical and extremely bad manners. At least, it’s all that where I come from. Who knows? In Idalia, it could be the equivalent of shaking hands.
She hadn’t expected it. I landed on my feet, stood up and looked round. The usual; marble floor, tapestries, oil lamps, log fire. Just for once, I wished it didn’t have to be quite so subjective. “Hello?” I called out. “Anybody home?”
She appeared, sitting in an armchair. “That’s rude,” she said. “How did you do that?”
I stood over her and put my hands round her throat. I didn’t squeeze, not really. “Why did you kill the prior?”
“It all feels very real. Is this an illusion or are you really here?”
I squeezed. My hands passed through her neck and met. “Please?” I said.
The tapestries, I noticed, were neither red nor blue; a sort of soothingly bland beige colour. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m not allowed to tell you. Rules. You know how it is.”
I let go. “Why did you kill a prior when you don’t even know what a prior is?”
“Can’t tell you. Sorry.”
“Why did you come all this way to kill someone who couldn’t possibly have any relevance to you? How did you even know about him in the first place?”
“I’m going to count to three,” she said. “One.”
“Answer me and I’ll find you somewhere to hide.”
She put her head on one side, like a puzzled dog. “Getting involved is a high price to pay for curiosity.”
Yes, I thought, it is. And I suddenly remembered that it was none of my business. Except—
“You answer my question. I find you somewhere to hide. I then go away and have nothing more to do with you, ever again.”
She thought about it. “Oh, go on, then. But the hiding place first, I think.”
“You don’t trust—”
“No.”
Fine. Well, I wouldn’t trust me. I never have and, please God, I never will. “Round the back of this horrible building is a shed. In the middle of the floor, under a pile of mouldy and evil-smelling sacks, is a trapdoor, leading to an old root cellar. It’s dark, damp and full of the most enormous spiders, but nobody knows about it except one of the local organised crime syndicates. You’re welcome,” I added, to save her the bother of thanking me. “Now then. Why are you here and why did you kill the prior?”
She pursed her lips. “You want the truth?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
All around me, everything—walls, floor, ceiling—turned blue. The truth. Marvellous. “You don’t know.”
“I wasn’t told, no.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Why would anybody—?”
“Two.”
Believe it or not, there’s quite a substantial literature on the strategic and tactical considerations involved in fighting someone inside his or her own head. The consensus is that where the combatants are evenly matched in skill and resources, the odds are overwhelmingly against the intruder. Screw it, I thought. Absolutely none of my business. “Fine,” I said. “Enjoy the spiders. It was a real pleasure meeting you.”
“Fibber.”
I slipped out, wiping my metaphorical feet on the metaphorical mat as I left. She smiled at me. “Round the back, you said.”
I nodded. “If I were you,” I said, “I’d give it at least a week. The watch in this town is very conscientious.”
She stood up. “Noted,” she said. “Goodbye.”
I tried everywhere I knew, but nobody was hiring carts or horses. Finally, when I dropped in at the Transfigured by Joy, I found a watch sergeant and two steelnecks waiting for me. They were interested in knowing why I was so very anxious to leave town. I told them I was a busy man on a schedule and I needed to be somewhere else, which was true. They gave me that don’t-do-it-again look that law enforcement loves to bestow on the innocent, and went out, leaving me to pay for their drinks.
Stuck in horrible Sabades Amar. They’d even stopped the mail, so I couldn’t write to our people in Drutz to tell them I’d be late. I sat down on a step outside the Guildhall, so fed up and frustrated I could hardly think, and tried to pull myself together.
