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  Ogyga runs pretty well everything around here, and nothing much can be done about her because her sister is the abbess of the Nine Aspects of Joy, which owns all the land from the mountains to the sea and has a larger standing army than the Archduke.

  She’s about five one, fiftyish, stocky, wears her hair short; about ten years ago she really got into the Warrior Princess look, which was all the rage back then, and she’s stuck with it ever since. So she walks around town in knee-length brass wire chain mail over skin-tight black leather, a leopard-skin headband, and a paper-thin gilded brass shield about the size of a dinner-plate tied to her wrist with purple ribbon. She looks, therefore, like a clown, but appearances are deceptive. Where the people who mess with her end up is anyone’s guess, but so far, nobody’s come across so much as a tibia.

  Imagine my delight, therefore, when Ogyga walked into my workshop one afternoon, just as I was trying to make the most of the last of the light. I’ve spent a fortune on light. When I came home from the war, I took over the derelict tannery on East Hill and had it rebuilt by the Duke’s own head mason, because he’s the only one who knows the trick of those tall, thin windows. For what I spent on the place I could’ve bought a warship, and in return I get on average an extra half-hour of light per day. Worth it, though. I make good money these days, when I’m not interrupted.

  “You shouldn’t be doing that,” she said, glancing down at the sheet of vellum pinned to my desk. “It’s heresy.”

  Full credit to her for recognizing a page of Saloninus’s Genealogy of Morals from only a cursory glimpse. “Strictly speaking,” I said, “no, it isn’t. Heresy is a perversion of the true faith. Saloninus is an atheist. He doesn’t pervert, he denies.”

  “I could have you closed down for that.”

  “You wouldn’t need a reason.”

  She nodded. “I’ve got a job for you.”

  Two salient aspects of jobs Ogyga gives people to do. One, they’re usually illegal, dangerous, or both. Two, you don’t get paid. “Sorry,” I said. “But I’m rather busy at the moment.”

  Which was true. The Saloninus was a commission for a wealthy Sashan client—these days, two thirds of my work goes overseas—and I’d just mixed up an oyster-shell of Antecyrene purple. Once it’s mixed, you’ve got twenty minutes and then it sets hard as a rock, and it costs about twice its weight in silver. The price I’d agreed to for the Saloninus would mean I wouldn’t have to work again for a year if I didn’t want to. I rather like being the best.

  She took a long stride forward, ripped the sheet off its pins, and threw it out the window. “No,” she said, “you aren’t.”

  “My mistake.” I looked up at her. “What can I do for you?”

  “I need a book copied.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I want it pretty,” she said. “It’s for my sister.”

  “I can do pretty.”

  I wasn’t amusing her. “I want skived buckskin,” she said, “double flesh side, burnished, octavo, written in majuscule cursive. Can you do that?”

  “Majuscule cursive? Sure.”

  “Show me.”

  I took a scrap of parchment, pinned it to the desk, quickly chalked two lines top and bottom and looked around for my medium pen. I wrote your mother sucked cocks for money in my very finest majuscule cursive and handed it to her. “Will that do?”

  She nodded. “That’s fine,” she said. “Now I think you’d better eat your words. Chew, don’t swallow.”

  As a matter of fact, I’d eaten parchment before, in Escuivel, but that was a long time ago. While I was chewing, she said, “Go to the Hrutjolf brothers in Coppergate for pigments, they’ll be expecting you. I want nothing but the best. Ultramarine, not cerulean. Here’s nine besants for the gold.” She put down a handful of coins: very old coins. “I figure it’ll take you six weeks, including drying time. I want it sewn, not bound. I’ll get Theudemar to do the binding.”

  Poor Theudemar. Actually, under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t let him bind used cabbage leaves, let alone anything I’d worked on. “Fine,” I said with my mouth full. “Six weeks is pushing it a bit.”

  “Work quickly,” she said. She unlaced the toy shield. In the hollow of the boss was a brass tube, six inches long, an inch wide. They don’t make that sort of brass anymore. Not since the Empire fell and we had to start getting all of our copper from Permia. She put the tube on the desk in front of me. “You can read Dejauzi.”

  “No.”

  “Yes you can,” she said accurately. “Oh, that’s right, I forgot. My sister doesn’t know Dejauzi, so you’ll need to translate it.”

  I gazed at her. “Anything else?”

  “No, I think that about covers it.” She laced the toy shield back onto her wrist. “Not a word to anyone, got that? I want it to be a surprise.”

  My mouth tasted of ink. “Scouts’ honor.”

  “You’d better get started. Let me know when it’s done.”

  * * *

  You have absolutely no idea what we were talking about. Translation as follows—

  Essentially, we write on animal skins. Buckskin is reckoned to be superior to cow, sheep, or pig, though in my opinion the best stuff is nine-week-old bull calf. Skived means the skin is split lengthways—a hell of a job with buckskin, calling for a keen eye, a razor-sharp knife, and rock-steady hands. Double flesh side: you get a much better writing surface on the flesh side, as opposed to hair, but when you’re writing a book rather than a scroll you use both sides of the page. Therefore, to get the best possible surface, you skive your parchment really, really thin, discard the hair side, and then glue two splits together with the flesh sides facing outwards. Burnished means each sheet is rubbed for about an hour with a glass rod, to close the fibres up tight and stop the ink from seeping into them. Octavo means small, about the size of a brick. Ultramarine and cerulean are both blue paint. Cerulean was invented by Saloninus himself and costs a fortune. Ultramarine costs twenty times as much, because it’s ground-up lapis lazuli and is only found in one mountain in a far-off land of which we know little. Besants are gold coins issued by the Emperor out of the purest gold the world has ever seen. It’s been three hundred years since the Empire fell, so besants aren’t easy to come by. What you do is, you beat them out on a mirror-polished anvil with a mirror-polished hammer until you get gold leaf. Try it with anything less fine, such as the garbage that passes for gold currency these days, and the copper the gold is alloyed with work-hardens and splits.

  Talking of translation: I learned Dejauzi in Escuivel so I could talk to the guards in the prison where we ended up, three hundred of us, all that was left after the Battle of the Field of Lilies. After I got out I learned the written language, which is significantly different; the man I was sold to paid for me to learn, and also for my lessons in bookbinding and illumination. That’s why I’m the best, on this side of the Friendly Sea, at any rate. I spent seven years copying manuscripts in a Dejauzi scriptorium, which is the finest education anyone could ask for. If you didn’t produce work of exquisite beauty they flogged you till your bones showed through, but you got to read some very interesting books. When I escaped, I took with me a copy of Genseric’s Principles of Mathematics, which only exists in the Dejauzi translation. When I reached Scona, I sold it for enough to set up my shop. I was robbed, by the way, but I’m not bothered about that.

  * * *

  By the time I’d gotten past the Ogyga-induced shakes, the light had failed, so I lit my lamp. It’s a special lamp. At least, the lamp is nothing out of the ordinary, but next to it I’ve got a blown glass sphere filled with water, and behind it there’s a genuine Dejauzi silver mirror. I paid sixty gulden for it. Like I already told you, I spend a lot of money on light.

  I picked up the tube and looked at it closely. Old brass is soft, and the inscription was so badly worn I could barely read it; also it was demotic minuscule, which is a bitch of a script to write or read. It died out five hundred years ago, and good riddance. It said: slot 412, shelf 8, case 4, row 336, room 71 Old Building, West Quad. You know what it’s like in midwinter, when it’s so cold, anything metal sticks to your fingers hard enough that you can tear your skin if you try to pull away? Actually it was summer, but I took my hands away and let it lie on my desk. I know where you’ve been, I said to myself. I thought I’d seen the last of you.

&nbs

p; That said, I was on the clock, so I couldn’t afford to waste time on traumatic flashbacks or survivor’s guilt. I picked it up again in my left hand and used my right little finger to poke the tight roll of paper out of the tube.

  That’s right: paper. My colleagues in the trade have only heard of it, but I’ve seen it, handled it, hurt my eyes trying to read it, in Escuivel. Five hundred years ago they still knew the trick of making the stuff, by mashing up about a million tons of some reed that grows in the marshes of Blemmya, then spreading out the goo on silk screens, or something like that; in return you get one sheet, about the size of a goatskin. Compared with parchment, paper is rubbish. Over time it gets brittle, like dried leaves. One time back in my master’s shop we got this priceless manuscript to copy. It came in a gold tube encrusted with diamonds and rubies, but when we pushed it out and tried to unroll it, the stupid thing disintegrated, more or less shattered into little flakes, and all we ended up with was a heap of tiny bits. I happened to overhear my master getting yelled at by the owner (so did everyone in walking distance of the city) and apparently it was the only surviving copy of the love sonnets of Raimbaut de Utancour. At the time I remember laughing like a drain. Being a slave does that to you.

  Paper: an extra level of joy. I looked around for my little lead weights, the ones I use for weighing out the very expensive pigments. With two of them I pinned down one end of the scroll, and then slowly, painfully began to straighten it out, expecting it to snap at any moment. Every two inches or so I added more weights, until I ran out and had to use Ogyga’s besants.

  Tiny, tiny writing. Dejauzi is murder at the best of times. They don’t have proper letters, just squiggles that all flow into one another: marvelous for imaginative calligraphy (a page of the best Dejauzi formal hand is a thing of beauty and a joy forever regardless of what it actually says), but no fun to read by lamplight when you daren’t touch the manuscript and you’ve got lead blobs covering up half the words. I felt like I was nerving myself to stick my hand—no, my mind, which is so much softer and more vulnerable—into a patch of brambles or a clump of nettles; tangled tendrils of meaning that which would rip me to shreds.

  In Varit, they have scribes who make really quite passable copies of manuscripts despite the fact that they’re illiterate. Quite true; they can’t read their own language, let alone anyone else’s. But put down a hymnal or a missal in front of a Varith scribe and a week later you’ll be handed something remarkably similar, at a fifth of the cost of having it copied over here. The pictures will be almost but not quite identical—something weird about the eyes, a strange drawn look in the faces, like all the angels and saints are in the early stages of mountain fever; and you start to read and everything’s fine and perfectly normal, and then you come across something that looks like a word, but isn’t. Sometimes, if you hold the book at arm’s length, you can get an intuitive feel of what the word is; sometimes not. The point being, for a Verith scribe this job would be just another day at the workbench. He’d be safe, immune, incapable of catching anything, no matter what the words turned out to be.

  The standard of living in Verit is the lowest on Earth, and life expectancy there isn’t wonderful. If I were Verith, I’d have died five years ago. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. The dead don’t suffer or feel pain, but they’re dead. Pull yourself together and read the damn manuscript.

  So I read it, or at least the first line. That was enough.

  * * *

  Escuivel is a Dejauzi word. It means over there. To the Dejauzi, that meant on the far side of the desert and the mountains. To us, it meant across the Friendly Sea. In any event, Escuivel is by definition a long way away, wherever you start from, a place you get to after severe hardship. Robur or Dejauzi, it’s a place you went to for a purpose: the purpose being to kill people.

  We went there because it’s a holy place, where the Prophet had his vision of the Queen of Heaven and wrote the sacred book. The Dejauzi went there for roughly the same reason; same prophet, same Queen of Heaven, same vision, almost but not quite the same book. We felt that it was vitally important that the holy places should be safeguarded from unbelievers and heretics. The Dejauzi thought the same, but they got there first. Before they arrived, Escuivel was a province of the Empire, marginally productive and desperately poor because of nine centuries of Imperial taxation. The Dejauzi slaughtered the Imperials in the cities and took over their plantations. The slaves carried on being slaves, but the Dejauzi were better masters; they understood the old fiscal maxim that says, the good shepherd shears his flock, he doesn’t skin them.

  Then we turned up. The thing about war is, it doesn’t make anything better. We lost the war, of course, but not until it had made a real mess of Escuivel. We burned some of the cities, they burned the rest. We trashed thousands of acres of farmland so they’d be useless to the enemy, so did they. It gets very cold there at night; I can remember the sheer bliss of sitting close enough to a fire of olive trunks that I could feel my skin scorch. I can also remember the olive harvest back home, when I was a kid, and we worked like lunatics from dawn to dusk knowing that a good crop would make the difference between being able to pay the rent and getting thrown off the farm. Vines and olives are all that you can grow in most of Escuivel. Vinewood makes good fuel too, but olive is better.

  I went to Escuivel when I was sixteen. I did five tours, which is one more than anyone else I’ve ever heard of. Then we had the big battle, and I ended up learning calligraphy. For a long time, I was pretty sure I’d escaped from Escuivel and the Dejauzi, but now I’m not so sure.

  * * *

  I considered my options.

  Ogyga is thorough, but I didn’t think she’d have gone to the trouble and expense of posting a goon outside my door to make sure I didn’t make a run for it; make that two goons, since I have a back door. I had forty gulden cash in the studio strongbox, plus the nine besants she’d given me for gold leaf; call it a hundred gulden, which is a lot of money, objectively speaking. A hundred gulden would get me a boat trip to Scona, with enough left over to hire a studio, slap a coat of distemper on the walls, and buy timber to build myself a desk. When you’re the best at something, you aren’t tied to one place. In five years, I’d be comfortable again, maybe even prosperous.

  I’d more or less resolved to do that when the question occurred to me: Do I take the book with me, or do I leave it here?

  I’d confronted a similar choice when I left Escuivel, and on that occasion the answer was a resounding yes. The circumstances now weren’t all that different. The book, looked at objectively, was worth money—a lot of it, quite possibly all the money in the world. If I stole it and took it to Scona and sold it, naturally Ogyga would put a colossal price on my head; but if I sold the book I could afford to buy several armies.

  At which point, the penny dropped. It hit the ground like a meteorite, gouging out a vast crater. Ogyga couldn’t read Dejauzi; neither could her sister. Not many people this side of the water can. She didn’t know what the book was.

  Think about it. If she knew what it was, would she have left it with me, just like that? Hardly. She’d have had me picked up and all my kit collected from the studio. I’d have been taken to a safe place where there’d be no chance of me getting out or anyone else getting in, and I’d have done the job there. And afterwards? No afterwards for me, most likely.

  Think some more. Ogyga had no idea what she’d gotten ahold of. Presumably she thought it was just some Dejauzi nonsense, a rarity, the sort of thing that would appeal to her bookish sister—but most of the value of the gift would be in the exquisite calligraphy and the heartbreakingly lovely illumination. Hence me, rather than some unimaginative soul already on the payroll, who wouldn’t have to be disposed of afterwards.

  Which added another option. I looked at the lamp.

  If you want light, you need to have fire. Fire is all very well in its way, when it’s properly contained and under control. Let it loose, though, and you have problems. In Escuivel I’d been guilty of letting fire get loose on a number of occasions—barns, houses, villages. Once fire slips its leash, it’s very hard to know what’s going to happen next, though you can be fairly sure it won’t be anything good. I’ve always been scared stiff of fire in my studio, because there’s so much hopelessly flammable stuff there—parchment, oils, spirits, you name it. All it would take would be for a lamp to topple off a shelf, hit the floor, smash—

 

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