Out in the open air, I thought about what I’d committed myself to, and it occurred to me that I’d managed to do an amazingly remarkable thing; I’d found a way to make my previous situation worse. I almost felt proud. Not many people could’ve done that. Quite an achievement.

  The sensible thing would be to go to my tutor and confess. At least then I’d be able to warn him to be on his guard. It meant I’d be thrown out of the Studium before the exam rather than after it, but that would save my father a week’s board and lodging, so no bad thing. I agonised about it for about four seconds, then set off for his lodgings.

  He was there, reading Gelimer on Moral Necessity. He looked up at me and smiled. He never did that. He offered me a bowl of tea and a honeycake. What’s got into him, I wondered. Then it struck me that I knew exactly what had got into him. Say what you like about the legions of the Prince of Darkness, they don’t stop to let the grass grow under their metaphorical feet.

  I’d already started the sentence. “I’ve done a terrible thing,” I heard myself say.

  My tutor nodded. “I know. It’s no big deal. Don’t worry about it.”

  I thanked him and left.

  Say not the struggle naught availeth. True, I’d struck a bargain with the Evil One to obtain an unlawful advantage, but that didn’t mean I was going to take advantage of that advantage. It would still be my hand moving the pen across the paper in that horrible circular room. So what if some hellspawn inside my head told me all the right answers? Nothing to stop me writing down the wrong ones. It wouldn’t make it right, but at least I could mitigate my crime to a small (but significant) extent. On the day of the exam I turned up an hour early, with my pen, my inkhorn and my penknife, and hung around looking mournful until the invigilators opened the doors and shooed us inside. I sat down at my place on the bench next to a man I knew slightly and didn’t like much, and rehearsed slowly and carefully the one Form I’d thoroughly revised the night before. It was sicut in terra, the Form for closing your mind to a hostile intruder. When he came, I’d be ready for him.

  The chief invigilator cleared his throat and read out the questions. I copied them down automatically, realising that I knew all the answers.

  Made no sense. I muttered sicut in terra under my breath anyway, just in case, but it didn’t matter. If he came, I could simply tell him to get lost, because I didn’t need him. All the correct answers had been inside my head all along; I must have absorbed them subconsciously while daydreaming or hung over in lectures, and the fact that I hadn’t revised them didn’t matter a damn. The information had been in my memory all along and I hadn’t realised it. Good old brain, I said to myself, I never doubted you for a minute.

  I wrote quickly and finished with time to spare, which clearly annoyed my neighbour, who was still scribbling frantically when the bell went. I smiled at him when we got up to leave. I knew I’d scored at least ninety-two per cent; probably a record. Clever old me.

  Traditionally, students celebrate the end of their Finals by drinking until they’re reduced to the level of brute beasts, but I wasn’t in the mood. Instead, I went and flopped down by the fountain in the Sanctuary Yard. I’d bought a loaf of stale bread from one of the vendors in Coalgate, and I sat there picking bits off it to feed the carp in the fountain pool. It was a warm afternoon, birds were singing in the lime trees, and the splash of falling water was soft and soothing, like rain on the roof at night. I guess I must have fallen asleep—

  He was sitting next to me, looking just like the miserable bastard beside me on the bench during the exam. “There now,” he said. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said. “And I did it without you.”

  He laughed. “Don’t kid a kidder,” he said. “Just say thank you and be grateful.”

  “But you weren’t in there. I kept you out. I used sicut.”

  He sighed. “If you’d been paying attention in lectures,” he said, “you’d have known that sicut doesn’t work against an intruder who’s already in place. Though I resent the term intruder. As I recall, I was invited.”

  He’d been inside my head all the time. Since when? Since I went to see my tutor? I had no idea.

  My stomach suddenly heaved.

  “Tsk,” he said. “I gather it’s standard operating procedure to throw up in a fountain after Finals, but I think you’re supposed to drink something first. You’d better get going before the proctors arrive.”

  He had a point. I got to my feet and wobbled. My head felt like it was full of something. I realised I was awake, and there was vomit all over the fountain steps.

  “Sorry about question six,” he said, inside my mind. “Truth is, I don’t know that one. I never did get around to reading Prudentius.”

  “Get out,” I yelled aloud, but he’d already gone.

  I passed. I got ninety-five per cent, a record which stands to this day. My tutor was delighted. Of course, he said, I never doubted you’d come through with flying colours. I always knew you had it in you.

  I waited and waited for payback time. You can’t let a demon do you a favour and expect to get away with it. It’s not possible. It makes no sense. Except—

  I’m still waiting.

  “So that’s what they are,” she said. “Well, then. I really don’t see that there’s a problem.”

  “Think about it,” I said. “For some reason I can’t begin to speculate about, there are no demons in Idalia. You want to take one there. Can’t you see what’s wrong with that?”

  “No.”

  I took a deep breath and didn’t shout. “There are no demons in Idalia. Three possible reasons for that. No, make that four. One, they don’t know about you. Two, they can’t exist in your climate. Three, there used to be a long time ago but you somehow managed to get rid of them. Four—” I’d forgotten what the fourth reason was. “Either there can’t be demons in your country, in which case you’re wasting your time, or else there can, in which case you risk infesting yourselves with them, which is potentially catastrophic. You have absolutely no idea what they’re capable of. The only reason human life can survive here in the west is because we, the Studium, keep the little horrors strictly under control. We can do that because we’ve got five thousand years’ worth of experience and knowledge, desperately hard won. You’re planning to import them and set them loose to fight your war, and you don’t know the first thing about them. It’s like deciding to keep bubonic plague as a pet.”

  “I’m sure we can handle them,” she said blithely. “It can’t be hard, or you couldn’t do it.”

  “What exactly happened? When you killed the prior.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep banging on and on about that.”

  “What happened?”

  A thoughtful look settled on her lovely face. “I’m not sure, exactly,” she said. “After I got rid of you at that inn place, I wandered about in the market district for a bit, wondering how I was going to find out about this weapon you’re supposed to have that we need but don’t know about. And the next thing I knew, I was climbing out of a window and there was blood all over my hands. That’s all I remember. I’ve only got your word for it that I killed anybody.”

  “My word and the City Watch.”

  “Maybe you told them I did it, I don’t know. You haven’t really given me any reason to trust you.”

  I tried to make sense of what she’d told me, but it was like trying to put a frightened cow in your pocket. “That’s all you remember.”

  “I just told you that. I wish you’d listen.”

  “So you were roaming around in a public place, wanting to attract a demon—”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “And look what happened. The unprovoked murder of a high-ranking religious leader.”

  “So you tell me. I don’t know that.”

  “Tell me something,” I said. “Is there any conceivable way of making that sound like a desirable outcome? Maybe I’m being stupid today, but I can’t think of one.”

  She shook her head. “Teething troubles,” she said. “Like when Na invented thunder powder.”

  “Who’s Na and what the hell is thunder powder?”

  “You know.” She frowned. “Maybe you don’t. Thunder powder. What people use in [weird Idalian word] and [another weird Idalian word]. For blowing things up. No? Gosh. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is, the first time it was discovered, the man who discovered it was killed and half a city was reduced to rubble. But after a fairly short time we figured out where he’d gone wrong and how to do it right, and now we’ve got an incredibly useful and beneficial artefact that we put to all kinds of good uses, completely under our control.” She gave me a warm, understanding smile. “You’re afraid of these demons because you don’t understand about them. Probably that’s why you’ve convinced yourselves that they’re some sort of dark spirits serving some nebulous Prince of Evil. It’s because you’re primitives. You don’t understand scientific method. You live by superstition and fear, instead of enlightened logic. I’m prepared to bet these demon things aren’t nasty little men who burrow into your head, they’re how you perceive a perfectly ordinary natural phenomenon, like magnetism or lightning. I bet you people think lightning is the anger of the gods. It’s not. It’s an accidental discharge of cosmic energy, ignited by friction when it pierces the bulwark of the clouds. Nothing supernatural about it at all. But to unsophisticated primitives like you, it looks like magic. Probably the same with these demons. I don’t suppose they’re even alive. You’ve just convinced yourselves they are, that’s all.”

  Something I’ve noticed about people. The smarter they are, the dumber they can sometimes be. There’s something about great wisdom and learning that unlocks a person’s vast latent capacity for doing really stupid things, when the opportunity presents itself. “It’s not a thing, it’s a—” I was about to say person. “It’s alive and it thinks for itself. And it’s smarter than you are. You may find that hard to believe, but it’s true.”

  That earned me an indulgent smile. “How would you know?”

  “I know about them,” I said, “the way a beekeeper knows about bees. You do have bees in Idalia, don’t you?”

  “I see. You farm them. You draw off the evil.”

  You can see it in someone’s eyes, the dreadful moment when you put an idea into their head that would never have got there if you’d kept your mouth shut. “No, I didn’t mean that. Not bees. Wasps.”

  “You can’t farm wasps, they don’t make honey. But these creatures of yours—”

  What had I done? “It was a really bad analogy,” I said. “They’re nothing like bees, but very like wasps. Make that hornets. The only thing you can do with them is smoke them out so they go away.”

  The smile warmed up and widened, God help me. “When the First Emperor was being besieged by his enemies and they tried to dig saps under the walls to make them collapse, the Emperor ordered his men to gather up all the hornets’ nests in the city. They dug into the enemy saps and threw the hornets’ nests in. A few days later, the enemy gave up and went away. That’s how wasps saved the Empire.” Her face was radiant, like the sun. “Everything can be useful and everything can be made to serve the glorious purpose of true virtue. You’ve just got to have a little imagination, that’s all.”

  Someone, I forget who, once said that there are only two sorts of people in the world, friends and strangers. Love your friends, the hell with strangers. I’m all for that, as a general rule. The acid test must always be; what harm did he ever do me, what good did he ever do me? Except—

  I lunged at her with velut fulmen. It’s a wonderful Form. It comes out of nowhere and glides through most types of shield as if they weren’t there. Even if your shielding works, it hits you so hard you’re left stunned and reeling, like a soldier in full armour hit with a sledgehammer. The only reason it’s not more widely used is that it’s difficult, but I can do it easy as sneezing. Because it’s not in the usual repertoire nobody expects it. The only drawback is, it gives you a slight nosebleed, but so what?

  It bounced off. It’s not supposed to do that.

  “Did you just hit me?” she said.

  “No.”

  She shot me a poisonous look, and then the ground opened and swallowed me up.

  I hate it when that happens.

  I came round with blood trickling into my mouth, from the nosebleed. It was dark, and I was lying at an awkward angle, which hurt my back. High above me I saw a long, thin slit of light; the open sky above the ravine she’d opened under my feet. The bitch, I thought. Now, how do I get out of this?

  I tried to stand up, but the space I was confined in was too narrow. The walls of the ravine were sheer and smooth, like glass. I scrabbled at them with my hands and my fingertips squeaked. It suddenly occurred to me that unless someone happened to come along with a very large coil of rope over his shoulder and notice me down there, I was probably going to die. The violent access of terror that followed was like a very heavy weight resting on me, not quite heavy enough to crush my bones but not far short of it. I tried breathing, but my chest muscles weren’t strong enough to lift the weight. I can’t begin to tell you what it was like, the unexpected and very real possibility that in a few days, a sun would rise that I wouldn’t be there to see; a world without me, carrying on perfectly normally on the surface, but from my perspective with one small but important element missing. So this is it, I thought. Shit.

  That bloody woman. Had she really meant to kill me, or had she meant it as no more than a useful tactic for getting rid of an annoyance, assuming that I knew some Form or other for fishing myself out of very deep holes? Maybe they had just such a Form where she came from, one that they teach to twelve-year-olds as a simple way to ease them into the curriculum. Or maybe her temper had flared up, and she neither knew nor cared what the consequences would be. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. In a country where adepts were the rulers, what incentive would you have to care? Just like we have no real reason to mind where we’re putting our great big feet when walking among ants.

  And these people were under the impression that demons might come in handy. Oh boy.

  Not that it mattered. They lived a very long way away, and they were much more likely to wipe each other out than come together in unity to embark on world conquest. The demons were welcome to them, though I wasn’t entirely sure that they were welcome to the demons. Like the old joke about the palace falconers; why did they start feeding the hawks on lawyers instead of rats? Well, under certain circumstances you can grow attached to a rat.

  Or a demon; at least when compared with some of the more extreme examples of my own species. Which raised the question—not exactly at the forefront of my priorities at that moment, but there was nothing else I could do while stuck in a hole except think, and I had time on my hands—of what constitutes us and them, and where my loyalties ought to lie. Now don’t get me wrong; I believe unshakably in us and them, the great polarity that defines everything, what Basso the Fortunate calls the doctrine of Sides. In a world divided between day and night, land and sea, living and dead, human and animal, all the countless binary distinctions by which we make sense out of chaos, it’s inevitable. You’re defined by the side you’re on, and there are always sides. Morals and ethics come and go, fluid and mutable as the whims of dressmakers and milliners. This year we wear our beards long and we hate Blemmyans and homosexuals, next year everybody’s sporting moustaches with chinstraps and universal tolerance and understanding, and the only thing reliable and constant is that next year everything will be different, and we’ll all be ashamed and horrified about how we used to look and we’ll make a solemn vow; platform heels, never again. But sides—your family, your clan, your tribe against everybody else—that’s forever. And it’s not something you think about, agonise over or choose; you know, every time you look in a mirror. I belong to this family, this clan, this tribe, this guild, this nation, and everybody else is the enemy.

  Except—

  I know which side I’m on. I’m for light against darkness, heaven against hell, human against demon. I knew it before I was old enough to think, and then I went to the Studium, where they taught me what I already knew, but with rational explanations for all my instincts. I’m for Good against Evil, and I don’t care who knows it. I’m for Good, right or wrong.

  In which case, I was for her, against my friend.

  There’s not a lot to be said in favour of being stuck in a crevasse in a derelict tannery, but it gives you time to think. I thought for a long time, and then I heard a voice calling my name.

  I looked up. Impossibly high up above me was a face. Someone I didn’t know, a stranger, but he knew me. “It’s all right,” he was yelling, “I’ll get you out of there in two shakes. Stay calm. Don’t go away.”

  The face vanished. Very few people know my name. Maybe, I thought, she’s realised what she’d done and sent someone to get me out. I waited for what seemed like a very long time and the stranger came back, with a rope. He told me to tie it round myself under my armpits, which I did. Then he pulled me out.

  By the time I reached the top he was exhausted with all that pulling. His hands, I noticed, were red raw and bleeding. “Thank you,” I said.

  “’S all right,” he gasped. “No skin off my nose, obviously.”

  I looked at him. A big man in his early thirties, well-dressed, expensive shoes, fashionable hair done that morning at one of the good barbers’ shops in Haymarket. Never seen him before in my life. Not used to hard manual labour. He was a wreck.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” I said.

  He nodded. “You all right?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks to you.”

  “I always seem to be getting you out of deep holes,” he said. “Though this one you didn’t dig for yourself, which makes a nice change.”

 

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