Memory

'Maybe I'd like that,' Poldarn suggested pleasantly.

'Maybe you would,' Noja replied. 'Wouldn't put anything past you. Honestly, I can see why Tazencius took to you, in the beginning. You really do think alike. Which is why,' she added, trying hard to sound threatening (but she didn't have the touch), 'you don't stand a chance of getting round him this time. He's got you figured out, you can rely on that.'

Poldarn shifted slightly; he was starting to get cramp in his knee. 'Never mind,' he said. 'I think I've reached the point where I'm not really bothered any more.'

'Nobody ever goes that far,' she said flatly. 'I should know.'

'Really? I expect you've had an interesting life, if you're anything like your sister.'

He'd intended to provoke her; not this much, though. 'You think I'm like her? Oh, please!' Noja's anger was so fierce that he could almost see it, glowing in the dark like hot embers. 'I'm nothing like her, never have been, even when we were kids.'

'You're going to a lot of trouble on her behalf, if you don't even like her.'

'She's my sister.' No, she was concealing something. Whatever she was up to, she wasn't doing it just to help Xipho. Bombarded with so many obscure fragments of data, Poldarn was too confused to know what to do with this one; he tucked it away in his mind, hoping he'd remember it as and when it became relevant.

'And Ciana's your brother.' He let that one hang, but she didn't seem to be reacting. Shot in the dark, anyhow. 'Was this all his idea, or does he just do what his big sisters tell him to?'

Her voice cooled down a little. 'What I told you was the truth. It was Ciana who brought me out here when our parents wanted me to marry some farmer.' She made it sound like some sort of nasty, crawling insect. 'I guess you could say he's the white sheep of the family. He genuinely went to Tulice for the hunting.'

'Really.'.

'Really.' Now Noja didn't sound quite so tense; maybe because this part of her story was entirely true? Hard to tell, especially in the dark. 'And when his good friend the Chaplain in Ordinary asked if he could give him a lift as far as Falcata, he was only too pleased, naturally: doing favours for Cleapho is good business. So when Cleapho asked him for one other little favour-very much in his line, hunting something down in a forest-'

'Me. That's interesting. How did he know where to look?'

Noja laughed prettily. Nice voice; wasted on her. 'Really, you're too entertaining for words. You don't see it, do you?'

'Enlighten me.'

He heard her take a deep breath. 'Chaplain Cleapho wants to get you to Torcea. But he knows you ever so well, from the old days; and he remembers how you fought your way past-well, past the Amathy house men at the inn in Sansory. He knows that you're as slippery as a buttered eel. The only way to get you here is to make you want to come here; and the only way to do that is to get you to think that what you're actually doing is running away-running here, for safety. Hence the pantomime. That loathsome Gain Aciava finds you and keeps you at that foundry place-'

'Dui Chirra.'

'Like it matters. He finds you, keeps you in play there like an angler with a fish that's too big to pull in straight away. Of course, you would have to be there, of all places, where they're making the weapons. That imbecile Muno Silsny hears about you-the brave hero who saved his life.' Noja sighed. 'Fat lot of good it did him, because as soon as he'd figured out who you were, he had to go. Terrible waste of time and effort: Cleapho brought him on, trained him up, from nonentity to commander-in-chief virtually overnight, because he needed someone in that position who'd do as he was told and never think twice. Anyway, that's all done with; Cleapho got rid of him, and just as well as it turned out. But all his plans got screwed up because of it, and by the time General Muno was out of the way, the weapon thing was far too well advanced. Simply bursting in there and flushing you out like a rabbit was out of the question with all those soldiers there. So he had to be clever about it-and wasn't he ever that. Of course he had good help-Aciava, and that strange man, Spen-something-'

'Spenno.'

'Whatever. He flushed you out of Dui Chirra, just in the nick of time-'

'Really?' Poldarn interrupted. 'Why?'.

'You don't need to know why, but what the hell. Because he didn't want you trapped in there when his other man-another old school chum of yours, incidentally-captured it, by force, with some bunch of religious zealots he'd somehow turned into an army. See what I mean about clever? No fool, Cleapho. He wanted you in Torcea, and having the weapons safely kept out of harm's way would be nice too; lo and behold, he's got both. Once you were out of Dui What's-its-name and on the loose, it was child's play to shoo you along to where you had to go. It meant bringing forward the business with Falcata a month or two, but that was no big deal.'

'Falcata?' Poldarn didn't need the explanation, but for some reason he wanted a confession from somebody. 'You mean destroying it.'

'Well, yes. That was part of the plan from way back: make it look like your disgusting compatriots are on the loose again, hence a state of national emergency, and Cleapho can start moving troops to where they need to be, recruiting his strange bedfellows, all the stuff that needs to be done but which is such a bother to justify during peacetime. And thanks to the new man, who's a real treasure by all accounts, it was easy, and you went scampering straight into Cleapho's arms, thinking you were escaping.'

Poldarn scowled, grateful that Noja couldn't see his face. 'But that doesn't make any sense,' he said. 'Because I escaped from him, too.'

'Silly.' She was finding him amusing again. 'That's like saying the ball escapes from the stick when you smash it into the goal. He told you just enough to get you all worked up and determined-to do what he wanted, of course, without knowing that was what you were doing-and then let you slip away, to where Ciana was waiting with his professional huntsmen and tracker dogs and God only knows what, to bring you in and fetch you across the Bay. And here you are. By rights, right now you should be like an arrow on the string, fully drawn and aimed at Tazencius, and tomorrow we let you fly and, well, job done. But I have to go and screw it up, by telling you stories about Xipho as a little girl.'

Poldarn allowed for a moment's silence before speaking. 'I see,' he said. 'You've made rather a mess of things.'

'Yes.' Naturally Noja sounded bitter. 'And now, God only knows what I'm going to do. First thing tomorrow we're supposed to go to Beal, where you're meant to give me the slip, sneak through the guards using all the cunning tricks they taught you at school, and kill the Emperor. Then Cleapho takes the throne, everybody else in the picture gets wiped out, and as soon as the wonderful new weapons have smashed the raider ships into kindling, nobody's going to give a toss about legitimacy of succession, all they'll care about is that the new Emperor just got rid of the raiders once and for all. Years and years of careful planning, and I would appear to have fucked it all up. That's very bad, you know.'

'Yes,' Poldarn said. 'So, what are you going to do now?'

A long sigh. 'I think that's probably up to you,' she said. 'Let's put it this way. If this was a perfect world, and you could do anything you wanted, what would you do tomorrow?'

'Easy,' Poldarn replied. 'I'd go to Beal and murder the Emperor.'

Was it the reply she'd been expecting? Or was she trying to figure out whether he was lying? 'Why would you want to do that?'

'Because he's Tazencius,' Poldarn replied smoothly. 'Because he grabbed hold of me when I was still just a kid, and he turned me into something evil; because he sold me his daughter-who loved me, so I'm led to believe, though I can't say as I remember. It's all his fault; and it seems to me that, since I'm probably not going to live long enough to pick any of this season's apples no matter what happens, I might as well go out doing something useful as sit back at Dui Chirra forging brackets and drinking bean-pod soup until someone turns up to kill me. True,' he went on, 'from what you've been saying it's something of a toss-up who's worse, Tazencius or Cleapho-not forgetting Feron Amathy, mind, he's another evil bastard. But I don't know where Cleapho or Feron Amathy are, whereas Tazencius is just down the road; I might be able to get to him, but probably I haven't got time to tackle either of the other two. When you prune it all down, it becomes nice and simple.'