‘Not until I absolutely had to?’ He smiled. ‘I’m flattered.’
‘Anyway,’ she said briskly, ‘I asked you a question. Do you need a clerk?’
He thought for a moment, or at least made a show of doing so. Apparently he’d been wrong about the reason, which made sense. He didn’t really need a clerk, and he couldn’t pay her less than twenty-five per cent. It’d cut into his earnings and still be a meagre living compared with what she’d been used to, even if he had been her only fencer. (And what about that? Think about it later…) On the other hand-
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Provided you can pull in extra pupils and earn your keep that way. Based on my vast twenty-four hours’ experience of the training profession, I reckon I could train twelve as easily as six. What d’you reckon?’
‘How about a month’s trial?’ she suggested. ‘I’ve been in the training profession a whole day less than you, remember. I might not like it.’
Loredan grinned. ‘Oh, I think you’ll take to it all right,’ he said. ‘Because, when all’s said and done, it’s basically sending young men to their deaths. It’ll be like old times.’
‘Now then,’ Alexius said, ‘close your eyes, and then I want you to tell me what you see.’
The twins shut their eyes obediently; the male, Venart, with his face screwed up into that inevitable embarrassed-but-determined scowl a man always wears when he suspects he’s being made a fool of but daren’t give mortal offence by refusing; the female, Vetriz, with a rapt expression of pure bliss, as befits a nice girl having a wonderful adventure. Alexius shot a glance at his colleague; he looked scared half to death, and grey with pain. The Patriarch smiled thinly at him; he knew exactly how he felt.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
Venart said, ‘Um,’ obviously unable to decide what was expected of him. The girl shook her head.
‘Very well.’ That, of course, had just been mummery, to see if they were faking. Satisfied that they weren’t, Alexius took a deep breath, tried vainly to relax the steel clamps that were slowly squeezing his brain out through his ears, and-
The courtroom. This time, for some reason, the public benches were empty; no judge, ushers or clerks. Nobody there except the man he now knew to be Loredan, with his back towards Alexius, his feet nearly together and his right arm extended straight from his shoulder, holding out his sword in the guard of the Old fence; and the girl he’d done the curse for, all that time ago as it seemed; and-
‘Hello,’ Vetriz said. She had materialised quite suddenly in the small area of floor that separated the two motionless fencers. She walked round them as if they were statues in a square, admiring them.
‘I recognise him,’ she said at last. ‘He’s the advocate we saw the other day. Is the other one a lawyer too? I didn’t realise women did this as well as men.’
Alexius nodded. No sign of Gannadius either; but here at least his head didn’t hurt. ‘I don’t see your brother,’ he said.
Vetriz looked round. ‘He can’t have made it through, then. What about your assistant?’
Oh, what a pity he isn’t here to hear that! I’d never let him forget it. ‘Apparently not,’ Alexius replied, trying to conceal his apprehension. ‘You know, this is very interesting. Do you know how you got here?’
Vetriz shrugged. ‘No idea. Same way I’ve got no idea how I make my arms and legs work. They just do.’ She looked around again. ‘Are we really here, or is this just a dream or something?’
‘I don’t know,’ Alexius confessed. ‘Usually it’s not like this, that’s the strangest part of it. Usually – I say usually, makes it sound like I do this sort of thing every day, and of course I don’t – usually you come in just before some crucial piece of action, either in the future or the past depending on why you’ve come. As far as I can tell, this isn’t either. For all I know, it could just be a dream after all. Or, if you really are a natural, perhaps you do these things in a totally different way.’
Loredan, he observed, was definitely breathing; so was the girl. But their arms weren’t wobbling as they held the guard, and nobody, no matter how many thousands of hours they’d spent practising the manoeuvre, can stand with his sword-arm outstretched for more than a minute or so without moving at all…
That was it. That was what they were doing; not fighting but training… And this wasn’t the courts, it was the big exhibition arena in the Schools, deliberately modelled on the courts so that when students took their final examinations here, they’d be in the most realistic setting possible.
The girl’s sword-tip wiggled, just the tiniest amount.
Extraordinary, Alexius muttered to himself; she’s plucked the picture from my mind and taken it back – or forward? No idea – entirely of her own accord. I have absolutely no idea how you’d set about doing that.
The girl made a little grunting noise, which Alexius recognised as pure agony, and her sword-tip wobbled again. It was of course one of the most fundamental – and arduous – of the fencer’s training exercises, the holding of a position for a specified time. From what he’d gathered, it taught you all sorts of useful skills and toned up the muscles like nothing else. Alexius, who knew perfectly well he couldn’t do anything of the sort for more than a few seconds, winced at the thought.
A wider, more uncontrolled twitch this time; and then Loredan lunged at her, moving much faster than Alexius’ eyes could follow. She parried almost as quickly and they fenced two or three returns of strokes until he knocked the sword out of her hand with a short, apparently effortless flick of the wrist. That done, he bent almost double, hugging his forearm and swearing under his breath.
The girl looked furious with herself, and said nothing.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Loredan gasped, ‘that was really quite impressive. You’re getting the hang of it just fine.’
‘I failed,’ the girl grunted back. ‘I let you beat me.’
Loredan looked at her oddly. ‘Be fair,’ he said. ‘I’m supposed to be your instructor.’
‘Being good isn’t enough,’ the girl said. ‘You can be very good and still die, if the other man’s better.’ There was an edge to her voice that Alexius definitely didn’t like; neither did Loredan, by the look of it.
‘You know,’ Loredan said, ‘I’m so glad I retired when I did. If there’s one thing I could never stand, it’s perfectionists.’
The girl just looked at him, resentfully. Definitely a menace, that one. Whatever possessed me to get involved with graveyard bait like that in the first place?
‘This is tremendous fun,’ Vetriz interrupted, ‘but shouldn’t we be doing something?’
Alexius looked up, startled. ‘What?’ he said.
Vetriz frowned. ‘When you were explaining all this stuff,’ she said, ‘you told me that when you go barging in on people like this-’
Alexius was about to say something, but didn’t. All in all, barging in on people was a very apt way of describing it.
‘-Isn’t the idea that you do something? You know, interfere. Right wrongs, set things straight. Or didn’t I understand it properly?’
‘Well, ordinarily-’ Somehow, Alexius couldn’t find the right words to explain. ‘You see, we aren’t here for anything like that. This is just an experiment, remember.’
‘Oh. Right. Only I thought, since I’d actually seen this man fencing, and here he is obviously in some sort of trouble with that truly ferocious creature over there-’
Once again, Alexius had the strangest feeling, as if he was being lifted up and frogmarched along a row of squares on a chessboard. ‘To interfere just for the sake of interfering would be terribly dangerous,’ he said gravely. ‘Not to mention, well, just plain wrong. We have no idea what the background to all this is.’
Liar, he told himself. And this is definitely getting out of control. Now it seems that dreadful girl’s enlisted in his fencing school; presumably she’s getting him to teach her how to kill him. If this turns out to be all my fault…