K Parker - Shadow

That signified the end of the interview; he could feel them turning over his page and moving on to the next item of business. He allowed himself to be politely shooed out of the room by the four sword-monks who hadn't left his side since early that morning, and went with them across the yard, through a couple of arches, past the stables and the coach-house He didn't stop, because he didn't need to. When a man's been jolting and rattling along muddy, rutted roads in a cart for any length of time, he gets to the point where he can recognise that cart by the thickness of its tyres or the degree of warp in the side panels. Definitely his cart, their cart, but it was backed in and surrounded by a dozen others in the coachhouse, suggesting it had been subsumed into the transport pool, to be booked out and assigned to the duty carter next time a load of charcoal needed to be fetched or two dozen crates of chickens brought up from the market.

Attention to detail, just as he'd guessed. Easy enough to reconstruct what had happened. A monk would have come back from the lower town that morning and sent for a carter, explaining that there was a cart down at the inn, and that its owners wouldn't be needing it any more; if it stayed there, the innkeeper might get to wondering what had become of the man and woman who'd brought it in-he wouldn't say anything out loud, of course, but loose ends like that are bad for morale. So the monk would have given the carter some kind of warrant or letter of authority, and the carter would have given it to the innkeeper, and the innkeeper would have told his groom to get the cart ready, and the carter would have turned it over to the transport officer or the duty officer, who would have told him to put it away with the others (waste not, want not; men and women die every day, but a functional cart is valuable property), and the cart itself would henceforth serve the order, purged of its identity and memory, because a piece of equipment is there to serve and be used by whoever has a right to it.

'Just a moment,' he said, slowing down without stopping. 'I left some things in my cart last night. Would it be all right if we stopped off at the inn and picked them up?'

'Don't worry about it,' one of the monks replied. 'We'll arrange for all your stuff to be collected and kept for you till you get back. If there's anything you need, we can stop by the quartermaster's.'

They were in perfect position, two in front and two behind, just outside his circle. If they'd been closer or there had only been three of them, he'd have given it a try. But the order wouldn't make a mistake like that. Poldarn shrugged. 'No, the hell with it,' he said. 'It wasn't anything important.'

'There'll be a horse waiting for you at the gate,' the monk continued. 'You'll have three days' rations, money for expenses in the saddlebag, change of clothes, blanket, water bottle, all the usual kit. Is there anything else you might need, do you think?'

Poldarn didn't smile, though he felt moved to do so. 'Well,' he said, 'there's my book. Normally I wouldn't go anywhere without it, but just this once won't hurt.'

The monk was curious. 'Book?'

Poldarn nodded. 'Marvellous thing,' he said, 'contains all the wisdom in the world. Still, I won't be needing it for this job, I don't suppose.'

'All the wisdom in the world,' the monk repeated. 'Must be a big book, then.'

'Quite big,' Poldarn replied. 'Not as big as the recipe book, but it makes a good pillow.'

The cavalry escort was waiting for him: fifty sword-monks, in dark brown and grey coats drawn from the quartermaster's bin marked 'Riding Coat, Civilian, Nondescript'. Would they be wearing armour under them, he wondered, or didn't sword-monks feel the need of steel rings and scales when they had their invisible circle of sharp steel around them at all times? If getting away from four monks on foot was beyond him, escaping from fifty of them on fast horses wasn't going to be any easier. Falx Roisin would have been delighted to give any one of them a job riding dangerous cargo.

On an impulse he turned to the monk he'd already talked to and asked him, 'What do you know about a god called Poldarn?'

The monk hesitated for a moment, then grinned. 'Bit late to be asking that now, isn't it?' he said. 'Besides, it should be me asking you, shouldn't it?'

Poldarn shrugged. 'Well, you know,' he said. 'I always like to know who I've been.'

'You were pretty good at it, by all accounts,' the monk replied. 'But really, she should've known better, or else she didn't know. Talk about tempting providence.'

'I don't quite follow,' Poldarn said quietly.

'Oh, no, of course,' the monk said. 'I forgot, sorry. The thing about Poldarn is, you see, that anybody who gets up in the cart with him always dies.' He made a vague gesture with his right hand. 'You could just about come up with a worse omen, but it'd take some fairly serious research. Still, there you are.'

'Quite,' Poldarn replied. The monk had moved very slightly out of position, no more than a single step, but enough. He could see the sequence perfectly clearly in his mind's eye, as if he was remembering something that had already happened. From the draw, he cut the side of this monk's neck and carried on, so that the curved tip sliced into the soft skin under the second monk's chin as he stepped away and left. By this time the two monks behind him had drawn and were one step, of the right foot forward, which was why his turn pivoted around his left heel, bringing the overhead diagonal slash perfectly in line with the left-side monk's right wrist; then the clever move, dodging left to keep the wounded man between himself and the fourth opponent, just long enough for a feinted lunge to make him shy backwards into a right-side rising cut to the chin; the wounded man, dealt with at his leisure, completed the pile of bodies, all four dead before the first hit the ground. And Father Tutor, looking on with grudging approval 'Is something the matter?' the monk asked him.

Poldarn looked up sharply. Last time he'd looked, the monk had been toppling over backwards with the white of his spine showing through the red lips of the cut. Then he remembered: that hadn't actually happened, or not yet. On the other side of the yard, three birds pitched on the ridge of a roof. He looked again, and saw that they were pigeons.

'This may sound like a silly question,' Poldarn asked slowly, 'but do we know each other?'

The monk actually smiled. 'You're remembering, aren't you?' he said. 'Go on, see if you can…'

'No,' Poldarn snapped. 'You tell me.'

'All right.' The monk was still smiling. Three of them were now out of position, as good as dead; in another part of his mind he could see a fine mist of a few drops of their blood, hanging for a tiny moment in the air. 'My name's Torcuat. Ring any bells?'

Poldarn shook his head. 'Names don't mean anything to me. Tell me how long we've known each other.'

'Since sixth grade, actually,' Torcuat replied. 'At least, we were in the same class, but so were a hundred other kids. You were always the high flyer, of course; four months in sixth grade and then straight on to seventh. I was stuck in sixth for another two years, and by then you were a junior proctor. Then you were my-'

'Tutor in swordsmanship for six months,' Poldarn said. 'You were clumsy. In fact you were worse than clumsy, you were a menace to yourself and others. You even dropped your sword once, I wanted to have you thrown out of the school-'

The monk grinned, and pulled up the left leg of his trousers to show his ankle. 'There,' he said, 'see it?'

Poldarn saw it very clearly indeed: a crescent-shaped pink scar, just above the bone. He could remember the same mark when it was gushing blood; how he'd almost panicked, for just a moment convinced himself that one of his students was going to bleed to death right there in the schools, and that'd be the end of his teaching career. He looked up at Torcuat's face.