K Parker: Devices and Desires

As she followed him, it did occur to her to ask why he'd come to save her. Everybody else seemed to have forgotten about her-her maids, her ladies-in-waiting, the guards, the chamberlains, the flower of Eremian nobility, theoretically sworn to defend her to the last drop of blood. They'd gone to the battle, or run off to hide, or simply melted away as though they'd never actually existed in the first place. Only this strange little brown-skinned man had thought of her, and by some lucky chance, he was also the only person in the city who'd thought of escaping through the water tunnels. Only a foreigner would've seen the possibility, she supposed; or something along those lines.

He'd already prised up a trapdoor in the little yard behind the cloister garden with the fountain. 'I knew there'd be one around here somewhere,' he said, with a faint smile. 'Fountain-water.'

'Yes, of course,' she said. She'd never have thought of that.

'I'll go first, if you like,' he said. He opened his coat and drew a sword. It looked ridiculous in his hand, somehow. 'Give me a moment or so, then follow me.'

'All right,' she said. For some reason she trusted him completely. He took a deep breath, then walked down the steps, picking his way delicately like a still-wobbly foal. A few seconds later his head reappeared. 'Seems to be all right,' he said. He'd got a smear of cobweb in his hair, which made him look comical.

She should have been prepared for the darkness, once she was down in the tunnel, but she wasn't. The dark, the silence and the cold put her in mind of a grave. She couldn't see, and all she could hear was the soft patter of Vaatzes' feet somewhere up ahead of her. This is ridiculous, she thought; I'm leaving my husband and my home and running out into the night in my third-best dinner gown; I've got no money and nothing to eat, and even if we survive and get outside the city, what the hell are we supposed to do then? Walk to-

Walk to Civitas Vadani; the name slipped into her mind as neatly and unostentatiously as a cat jumping up on her lap on a winter evening. If Orsea was… She shied away from that; but if her old life was over, where else was there to go? Yes, she accused herself, but now that I have thought of it, I want to go; because-

'Stop.' He'd said the word so softly she almost missed it, even in that dead silence. 'Stay there.'

There was an edge in that quiet voice that frightened her. She froze, with a half-drawn breath. Vaatzes hadn't been afraid earlier, she remembered, but now apparently that had changed. She had a feeling that anything capable of scaring him was likely to be very bad news indeed.

Then he was there, very close to her in the dark. 'We can't go this way,' he whispered intimately (she could feel his breath on her face). 'I didn't think there'd be any of them down here, but-' He stopped. 'I'm sorry,' he said, and the apology in his voice, the admission of failure, left her weak with fear. 'We'll have to go back and think of something else.'

Of course; they'd go back, he'd think of something else. She still couldn't imagine why he'd apparently taken responsibility for her safety, but he had, and she still trusted him. 'Keep still,' he went on, 'I'll go past.' She felt him brush past her, a tiny contact with the back of her hand, the faintest brush of a sleeve against her cheek. Once he was past, she followed, until they were back where they'd started. The sun was nearly up now, and on the cloister lawn, grossly incongruous in that green, formal space, lay the dead body of a man.

Vaatzes noticed it and frowned slightly, as if it was a loose bolt or a worn bearing. 'Looks like they've been through here,' he said. The dead man was an Eremian, a civilian; she didn't recognise him. 'I'm not sure,' Vaatzes continued. 'Probably our best bet would be to go down the hill-against the flow, so to speak. Less likely to bump into them if we go where they've already been.'

That was stupid, though; they were too conspicuous-him because of his dark face, her because of her aristocratic gown. 'I don't think that'd be such a good idea,' she said. It came out sounding different from what she'd intended.

'What did you have in mind?' he asked.

'I don't know,' she mumbled. 'I wish I knew what was happening.'

To her surprise, he reacted as though she'd just said something very profound. 'That's an idea,' he said. 'Probably best if we got up high-in one of the towers, maybe, except I'd rather not run into them on one of those narrow staircases. How about the Ducas house? Isn't there supposed to be a private entrance?'

She nodded. 'But I don't know where it is.'

'Forget that, then.' He was shifting restlessly, as though the floor was painfully hot. 'All I was thinking was, if we can get out into the Horsefair, and then straight down to the city gate; if the fighting's all done, there shouldn't be anybody much about right now. Or we could try hiding somewhere, if you can think of some place they wouldn't be likely to come looking.'

Being offered a choice shocked her. It suggested that Vaatzes didn't have another plan to replace the one that had, apparently, failed; otherwise he'd simply have told her instead of asking her opinion.

'Well,' she said, 'it's probably best if we don't stay here.'

Vaatzes laughed at what she assumed was a private joke. 'That's true enough,' he said. 'All right, we'll make for the Horsefair and see if we can get as far as the city gate. We'll just have to take it slow and steady, that's all.'

Slow and steady was a nightmare. As Vaatzes had predicted, the streets where the enemy had already been were deserted, unless dead people counted as population, in which case they were crowded. Once they were out of the palace grounds, most of the bodies were Eremian soldiers, but there were civilians too, women and children as well as men. 'They won't start setting fires till they've pulled out,' Vaatzes said at one point. She hadn't even considered that possibility.

Very strange indeed to see the Horsefair so quiet. This time of day, it should've been packed-country people setting up stalls, staff from the big houses coming out to buy things for that evening's meal, horse-traders and merchants already doing business. She stepped over a man she knew slightly; she recognised him as a guardsman who often stood outside the palace gate. He'd been cut nearly in half by something, and the scowl on his face was pure anger.

'There's still a chance,' Vaatzes was saying, 'that we could duck down into the water tunnels somewhere else. To be honest, if we're going to play hide-and-seek, we'd stand a better chance in the dark than up here in the open.'

She was about to say that she didn't really like that idea when she noticed he'd stopped. He was looking at something in the distance, on the far side of the fair. She looked, and saw men running, but she couldn't make out who they were, Mezentines or Eremians.

'I wonder what's got them so worked up,' Vaatzes said.

A moment later he got an answer to his mystery. Through the archway came a party of horsemen, moving fast. In front of them, Mezentines were scattering, like poultry in a run when the fox has broken in. She saw, she could just about make out, a horseman riding one of them down. The rider came up behind the runner at a slow, contained canter, and she saw the runner throw up his arms and drop to the ground. More horsemen were spilling out now, a great many of them; as if in response, a large number of Mezentines coalesced, like bees forming into a swarm, from the edges and the walls. They were trying to get into some sort of formation, but it seemed as though they'd misjudged something, or left it too late. The horsemen rode through them while they were still scrambling about, and once the cavalry line had gone by, there didn't look to be any of them still standing.