K Parker - Memory

Poldarn lifted his head and tried to say something. Fortunately, his input wasn't required, since he appeared to have run out of words.

'You'd like me to begin at the beginning,' Tazencius said. 'Very well.'

He leaned back in his chair. Someone took the silver tray away, out of his sight. Someone else brought him a fresh drink. 'Many years ago,' he said, 'when I was young and foolish, a dimwitted cousin of mine fell out with a promising young army officer by the name of Cronan Suilven. My cousin was a coward; he didn't feel up to attacking the soldier directly, so he persuaded me to pick a fight with him, over some trivial matter. I did as he wanted; the duel was a fiasco, I was humiliated, finished at Court. I was determined to make Cronan pay, but by the time I was in any fit state to take him on, he'd been promoted to commander-in-chief; if I was going to destroy him, I'd have to become Emperor first. So that's what I resolved to do.' He paused and sipped his wine, taking a moment to savour it. Theatre, Poldarn thought contemptuously. 'I knew that in order to get rid of Cronan I'd have to create a threat to the Empire, something so terrifying that anybody who managed to get rid of it would be able to have anything he wanted; also, anybody who tried and failed would be broken, ruined, disgraced. It was about that time that your horrible relations began making serious trouble in the coastal districts; but of course nobody knew who they were or where they came from, nobody knew their language or how to communicate with them. I needed them, of course, as my threat. I needed them to extend their operations from mere seaside vandalism to full-scale acts of war: burning down cities, butchering whole populations. Fortune smiled on me; I found you.'

Poldarn glanced round the room. None of this seemed to have come as a surprise, either to the Amathy contingent or to the domestic nobility.

'You were my link with the savages,' Tazencius went on. 'I had you trained at Deymeson, and gave you my daughter, to secure you; you were, after all, my key component, the most important single piece in the mechanism. You had to be perfect, and you had to be completely, indubitably mine. That's why I gave you everything I ever really cared about-apart from destroying Cronan, of course. I gave you my daughter. All can say is, I've been punished appropriately ever since.'

Lysalis looked up at her father, her face blank, just for a moment. Then she went back to staring at Copis, who wasn't listening at all.

'But that wasn't all I gave you,' Tazencius went on. 'As well as the savages, I needed a strike force, something closer to home and easier to control. I never controlled the savages, you see; all I could do, through you, was make it possible for them to attack deep inland, come and go unharmed and with their terrifying anonymity undamaged. You've seen them, Ciartan, you know what they're like. Ferocious, certainly, and they have this bizarre ability to share each others' thoughts; but they aren't actually superhuman. If they started making raids deep into the Empire, it was only a matter of time before Cronan caught up with them and cut them to ribbons, and then I'd lose everything. But I needed them to be superhuman, invulnerable, unbeatable; so I made sure that Cronan and the government troops never got near them, or else I arranged for them to fall into perfectly planned ambushes, so that the savages could wipe them out to the last man.

'So much effort, you see; and there was always the risk that something would go wrong, someone in the government I'd bought would let me down or betray me. I needed a second weapon: one that I could control directly, one that could be trusted on its own without my having to think of every little thing. So I bought the Amathy house, and had you installed as heir presumptive to its leader. Then I got rid of him, and you became Feron Amathy.

'For a while, everything went very well. On my behalf, you led the House on a series of raids, burning and butchering, leaving no survivors, all the blame being laid on the savages. At the same time, you were coordinating operations with the savages-I thought I was being so wonderfully economical, using you for both functions; since I had to trust someone besides myself (which I hated doing, for obvious reasons), at least I only had to trust one man, and I'd done everything humanly possible to make you secure. I trusted you. That was-' He frowned. 'A pity.'

Poldarn nodded slowly. 'What happened?' he said.

'You betrayed me,' Tazencius replied. 'Unfortunately, I'd overlooked a detail or two. I'd underestimated the Deymeson Order, and its self-appointed mission as guardian of the Empire. But one of the Order's senior officers-your former tutor, indeed-worked out what I was up to and resolved to stop me. It was while you were still at school, which only goes to show how perceptive your old tutor was, and how patient, too. It was fortunate for him that you were part of a small clique of friends-almost unheard of at Deymeson, where friendship is understandably fraught with problems-who'd formed one of those unshakeable adolescent bonds of loyalty that tend to last for life. He recruited two of your clique; their devotion to the Order was the only thing that was more important to them, you see. One of them was this woman here, Xipho Dorunoxy. You were in love with her, and would be, for life. The other-wonderful serendipity-was the boy whom everybody else in your gang was sure you'd callously murdered when a prank went wrong: Cordomine. Understandably, he now hated you almost as much as he loved the Order. Your tutor forged him, so to speak, into a weapon to use against me; he was to become the Chaplain in Ordinary, in effective control of the civil administration, just as my other enemy, Cronan, was in charge of the military. Meanwhile, as you were going about my business in an admirably efficient way, Cordomine wrote to you.

'He wasn't dead, he told you, and he was prepared to forgive you for what you'd tried to do when you'd stabbed him in the library. All he asked in return was that you should betray me, wreck my plans, and deliver me into the hands of my enemies.

'You were delighted to oblige, since you were being eaten alive by guilt for what you thought you'd done-and also by the knowledge that you could never have Xipho Dorunoxy because you'd murdered her friend; but if he came back to life and forgave you-well, who knows?'

Poldarn looked round at Copis. She lifted her head and looked back at him. It was like staring down a well.

'Cordomine arranged for you to send the savages-your flesh and blood-into an ambush. Cronan would slaughter them like sheep, and the survivors would confess and incriminate me as the most unspeakable traitor in history. You would also lead the Amathy house into a similar trap, and they'd be wiped out too.'

Tazencius paused, and grinned. 'Betrayal comes easily to you, Ciartan; I'd never fully appreciated how easily. I sincerely believed that once you were mine, you'd be mine for ever. I think that was the worst mistake I ever made; because look at you, my dear boy. I know you can't answer this because you can't remember; but is there anybody in the world you haven't betrayed at some point in your distinguished career? Your dearest friends: when Elaos Tanwar found out that you were passing military secrets to the savages, you killed him. When you were faced with disgrace and expulsion because of your foolish escapade in the library, you stabbed your friend Cordomine. Your own people: you'd have sent them to be wiped out by Cronan. Likewise the Amathy house, who'd followed you with absolute loyalty, done everything you'd asked of them. Me-after I'd given you everything. You've never made a promise you didn't break, been loved by anybody you haven't hurt or been the death of. There are clear definitions of evil; I suppose I meet most of the criteria, in that I've caused the deaths of tens, hundreds of thousands of innocent strangers in furtherance of my ambition and my hatred for Cronan Suilven. I chose my path and followed it single-mindedly, loyally, without any illusions about myself. That, I believe, is why you're worse than me, more dangerous, capable of doing more damage. Because, you see, you hardly fit the criteria of evil as established in dictionaries and textbooks. You sided with me because the Empire was your people's ancient enemy-you were sent here in the first place to spy on them, help your people to punish them, and steal the precious materials your people so desperately need, marooned on an island with no metal and precious little timber. You did your duty cheerfully; and when it became apparent that my interests coincided perfectly with theirs, you joined me. Soldiers do worse things in a war; you were a spy, and spies cause the deaths of thousands. It doesn't matter, because the thousands are the enemy. But then, because of one terrible error of judgement, in the Deymeson library, when you were trying to do the best for your friends whom you'd led into disaster, you were chained by guilt to one man, Cordomine. Guilt never bothers me, we evil men are immune to it. Guilt made you abandon your people, your followers, your wife, me, without a moment's hesitation.' He smiled, wide and bleak. 'If you'd been an evil man like me, Ciartan, thousands of people who died in pain and fear would still be alive. But you're worse than I am, because you're part evil and part good-as most people are, I suppose. Still, in their cases, it doesn't matter.'