K. Parker - The Proof House

‘They don’t, usually,’ Temrai replied. ‘As often as not, it comes down to who loses first.’

Dear Uncle , she’d written. It had taken her a lot of time and effort, gripping the pen between the stumps of her fingers, and the writing looked like a small child’s school exercise.

Dear Uncle. The thought made her smile. Mostly, she wrote to her uncle to annoy her mother, who wanted her to have nothing to do with any of her uncles; not the three recently come into a desperate hand-to-mouth kind of power in that place she’d never been to but which even her mother sometimes absentmindedly referred to as home; certainly not to her other uncle, the one she was still determined to kill one day, when she got around to it. The fact remained: the nearest she’d been to feeling at home anywhere had been her uncle Gorgas’ house on Scona, in that short space of time before everything had inevitably torn itself apart, with a little indirect help from herself.

Dear Uncle. She looked out of the small, narrow window towards the sea. It was getting harder to find messengers to carry her letters, what with her mother’s attitude, various wars and the general stagnation of trade between the Empire and its prospective victims. While he’d lived, the truffle man had been the most reliable courier; but presumably he was one of the however-many-it-was thousand who’d died in the fall of Ap’ Escatoy, when her other uncle, the bad one, tunnelled under the walls like a mole and pulled them down on top of him. Nobody seemed to want to take over the truffle run between the Mesoge and Ap’ Bermidan; the great lords of the provincial office were getting their truffles from somewhere else now, cheaper, bigger and fresher. And without the truffle business, why the hell would anybody want to go from here to there and back again?

Dear Uncle, nothing much has happened here since I wrote to you last. Could she really be bothered to go to all the trouble it would take her to write that? She thought about it, and decided yes, worth it just for that worried sideways look her mother gave her every time she suspected her of having sent a letter ( What the hell could be in those letters? The little bitch must be spying on me, sending him secrets; but what could they possibly be? I hadn’t realised I had any secrets he might possibly want, but obviously I do or she wouldn’t be writing him letters …). And besides, it wasn’t as if she had anything at all else to do.

Years and years ago, when she was a little girl, an old man who was a friend of the family (her other family, not this one; this family didn’t have friends) had told her stories about beautiful princesses who were locked up in towers by their wicked stepmothers. Inevitably, as night follows day, there was always a handsome young hero who tricked or slashed his way into the tower and rescued the princess; that was the order of things, and it explained why the princesses stayed calm and stayed put, knowing that sooner or later the prince would turn up and everything would work out as it was supposed to. When she was a little girl, she’d thought to herself how jolly it would be to be one of those princesses, with her own tower (nobody to scowl at her and tell her to get it tidied) and the reassuring knowledge that her own designated prince was probably already on his way.

Stories like that had all died on the same day her bad uncle killed her other uncle, her father’s brother, the man she’d been betrothed to since she was a little girl listening to fairy stories. She’d given them no more thought after that, until suddenly she’d found herself in this tower, a tower of her very own overlooking the dark-blue sea at Ap’ Bermidan. Of course, properly speaking she wasn’t a princess, nothing like; her mother was just another merchant, albeit a very rich one (or she assumed she was rich; she had no way of knowing, cooped up here like a man buried alive). The situation was close enough, however, to put her in mind of the stories, and a make-believe wish that had come horribly true. Perhaps that was why it was so important to write to her uncle; if anybody was going to come to rescue her, it would probably have to be him; and, since she was a realist, she wasn’t holding her breath. Looked at dispassionately, the main motivation was annoying her mother. Anything else was just serendipity.

It was also stretching the point a bit to call Uncle Gorgas a prince. True, he fitted the description in some respects; he was the ruler of the country he lived in (though technically that made him the king, not a prince); but there were a lot of other, nastier words to describe what her uncle Gorgas was. Or what he was to everybody else. Normal people.

She heard footsteps on the stairs, and swore under her breath. With her mutilated hand it was painfully difficult to get the writing stuff out of sight in time; one slip and she’d drop the ink-horn, leaving a tell-tale splodge on the floor, or a pen would fall to the ground – there were any number of ways she could slip up and give herself away, finally give her mother the excuse she’d been looking for to tighten the chain; no more visitors, no more merchants and traders allowed to come to see her – which would mean no more paper, pens and ink, no more books. She’d just managed to get the paper out of the way under her bed when someone knocked at the door.

‘Just a moment,’ she called out. Well, it wasn’t her mother, at any rate. Mother never knocked before barging into a room. ‘All right, come in.’

But it was just the porter; the big, dozy-looking man who sat between her and the rest of the world, when he wasn’t cleaning her shoes or making her soup. He was harmless enough, too stupid to recognise an ink-horn or a penknife if he saw one. ‘What is it?’ she said.

‘Man here to see you,’ the porter replied; and over his shoulder she could see one of Them, the Children of Heaven, in a fancy dark-blue travelling cloak with a gold pin that told you his rank if you understood about such things.

‘All right,’ she said.

The porter got out of the way, and her visitor came in. He was old; long and thin, as many of Them were, with grizzled white hair sticking to his head like bits of cobweb. He looked round without saying anything, then sat down without being asked.

‘Iseutz Loredan?’ he said.

She nodded. ‘And you are?’

‘Colonel Abrain. I have a commission from the prefect of Ap’ Escatoy.’

He didn’t seem in any hurry to let her see it, and she couldn’t be bothered to ask. ‘You’ve come a long way, then. What does the prefect want from me?’ she asked.

Her visitor looked at her again, as if she were a mathematical problem, a complicated diagram in algebra. ‘You have an uncle,’ he said, ‘Bardas Loredan. You’ve repeatedly threatened to kill him. The prefect would like to know more about him.’

She frowned. ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why,’ she said.

‘I’ll tell you if you want me to,’ the man replied. ‘I assume you know about the fall of Ap’ Escatoy, and the part your uncle played in it.’

‘Of course. Everybody does.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Uncle Bardas is now a war hero, and you don’t want me to kill him after all. Am I warm?’

She watched him puzzle out the unfamiliar idiom. ‘The prefect doesn’t see you as a threat, if that’s what you mean,’ he replied. ‘And although it’s true that Sergeant Loredan did distinguish himself-’

‘ Sergeant Loredan.’

He looked annoyed. ‘That is his current rank in the provincial office, yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’re used to thinking of him as Colonel Loredan. Well, now, in the provincial office, rank is earned, not carried forward from an individual’s last employment.’