K Parker - Devices and Desires

The what?

Well, it was supposed to be a dark and deadly secret; still, obviously we're all friends together now, so it can't do any harm. The defector was a Mezentine-some said he was an important government official, others said he was just a blacksmith-and he was going to teach them all the Mezentines' diabolical tricks, especially the scorpions, because he used to be something to do with making them. He was either a prisoner taken during the battle or a refugee claiming political asylum, or both; the main thing was, he was why the whole expedition had been worthwhile after all; getting their hands on him was as good as if they'd won the battle, or at least that was what they were going to tell the people back home, to keep from getting lynched.

Valens, meticulous with details and blessed with a good memory, turned up the relevant letter in the files and deduced that the defector was the Ziani Vaatzes whom he was required to send to Mezentia. The old resentment flared up again when he saw that fatal word; but he thought about it and saw the slight potential advantage. He wrote to the Mezentine authorities, telling them that the man they were looking for was now a guest of their new best enemy, should they wish to take the matter further; he wished to remain, and so forth.

And then there were the hunt days; days when he drove the woods and coverts, reading the subtle verses written on the woodland floor by the feet of his quarry better than any paid huntsman, always diligent, always searching for the buck, the doe, the boar, the bear, the wolf that for an hour or two suddenly became the most important thing in the world. Once it was caught and killed it was meat for the larder or one less hazard to agriculture, no more or less-but there; the fact that he'd caught it proved that it couldn't have been the one he was really looking for. He'd been brought up on the folk tales; a prince out hunting comes across a milk-white doe with silver hoofs, and a gold collar around its neck, which leads him to the castle hidden in the depths of the greenwood, where the princess is held captive; or he flies his peregrine at a white dove that carries in its beak a golden flower, and follows it to the seashore, where the enchanted, crewless ship waits to carry him to the Beautiful Island. He'd been in no doubt at all when he was a boy; the white doe and the white dove were somewhere close at hand, in the long covert or the rough moor between the big wood and the hog's back, and it was just a matter of finding them. But his father had never found them and neither had he, yet. Each time the lymers put up a doe or the spaniels found in the reeds he raised his head to look, and many times he'd been quite certain he'd seen it, the flash of white, the glow of the gold. Sometimes he wondered if it was all a vast conspiracy of willing martyrs; each time he came close to the one true quarry, some humble volunteer would dart out across the ride to run interference, while the genuine article slipped away unobserved.

Duke Valens' letter rode with an official courier as far as Forza; there it was transferred to a pack-train carrying silver ingots and mountain-goat skins (half-tanned, for the luxury footwear trade), as far as Lonazep. It waited there a day or so until a shipment of copper and tin ore came in from the Cure Doce, and hitched a ride with the wagons to Mezentia. There it lay forgotten in a canvas satchel, along with reports from the Foundrymen's Guild's commercial resident in Doria-Voce and one side of a fractious correspondence about delivery dates and penalty clauses in the wholesale rope trade, until someone woke it up and carried it to the Guildhall, where it was opened in error by a clerk from the wrong department, sent on a long tour of the building, and finally washed up on the desk of the proper official like a beached whale.

The proper official immediately convened an emergency meeting. This should have been held in the grand chamber; but the Social Benevolent Association had booked the chamber for the day and it was too short notice to cancel, so the committee was forced to cram itself into the smaller of the two chapter-houses, on the seventh floor.

It was a beautiful room, needless to say. Perfectly circular, with a vaulted roof and gilded traces supported by twelve impossibly slender grey stone columns, it was decorated with frescos in the grand manner, briefly popular a hundred and twenty years earlier, when allegory was regarded as the height of sophisticated taste. Accordingly, the committee huddled, three men to a two-man bench, between the feet and in the shadows of vast, plump nude giants and giantesses, all delicately poised in attitudes of refined emotion-Authority, in a monstrous gold helmet like a cooper's bucket, accepted the world's sceptre from the hands of Wisdom and Obedience, while a flight of stocky angels, their heads all turned full-face in accordance with the prevailing convention, floated serenely by on dumplings of white cloud.

At ground level, they were way past serenity. Lucao Psellus, chairman of the compliance directorate, had just read out the Vadanis' letter. For once, nobody appreciated the exquisite acoustics of the chapter-house; the wretched words rang out clear as bells and chased each other round and round the cupped belly of the dome, when they should have been whispered and quickly hushed away.

'In fact,' Psellus concluded, 'it's hard to see how things could possibly be any worse. We take a man, a hard-working, loyal Guild officer who happens to have made one stupid mistake, and in trying to make an example of him, we coerce him into violence and murder, and drive him into the arms of our current worst enemy; a man whose technical knowledge and practical ability gives him the capability of betraying at least thirty-seven restricted techniques and scores of other trade secrets. Result: it's imperative that he's caught and disposed of as quickly as possible, but now he's in pretty much the hardest place in the world for us to winkle him out of. I'm not saying it can't be done-'

'I don't see a problem,' someone interrupted. 'We know the Eremians've got him, surely that's more than half the battle. It's when you don't have a clue where to start looking that it's difficult to process a job. Meanwhile, I'm prepared to bet, after what's just happened I don't see this Duke Orsea giving us much trouble, provided we put the wind up him forcefully enough. He's just had a crash course in what happens to people who mess with us. And besides, what actual harm can he do? The Eremians are primitives; if Vaatzes was minded to betray Guild secrets, how's he going to go about it? They're in no position to exploit anything he tells them, they've got no manufacturing capacity, no infrastructure. They can barely make a horseshoe up there in the mountains; Vaatzes would have to teach them to start from scratch.'

Psellus scowled in the direction the voice had come from; because of the annoying echo he couldn't quite place the voice, and the speaker's face had been lost against a background of primary colours and pale apricot. 'For a start,' he said, 'that's entirely beside the point. If we don't deal with this Vaatzes straight away, it sets a dangerous precedent. Troublemakers and malcontents will see that here's a man who broke the rules and got away with it. Furthermore, you know as well as I do, a trade secret is a negotiable commodity. The Eremians may not be able to use it, but there's nothing to stop them selling it on to someone who can. No, we have to face facts, this is a crisis and we've got to take it seriously. This is exactly the sort of situation we were put here for. The question is, how do we go about it?'

There was a brief silence, just long enough for his words to come to rest in the vaulting, like bees settling in a tree full of blossom.