Poldarn shrugged. 'Fine,' he said. 'Let's go.' He didn't ask again whether the Emperor would be there; he'd heard her the first time, after all, and he didn't want to be too obvious.
Noja sent one of the footmen back to the house to tell Ciana Jetat where they'd gone; that left one footman and two coachmen (three to one, in Deymeson terms, assuming Noja classed as a non-combatant). The ride out of town towards the northern hills-Beal lay in the valley on the other side-was slow and dulclass="underline" Noja embarked on a series of tales of mercantile adventure involving daring purchasing coups and bluffs called and uncalled in jute options and charcoal futures, most of which went over Poldarn's head like teal rising out of a reed-bed. He filtered out the words and half-listened to the patterns and inflections of her voice, which was by no means unpleasant, reminding him of a cheerful but repetitive tune played on a cane-stalk flute. By the time her flow of commercial epics dried up, they were outside the city walls and trundling along a wide, dusty road flanked by tall beech hedges. There were carts and carriages and traps in front and behind, more going the other way. He thought about Falx Roisin, and his short time as a courier in the Bohec valley-terrible, fatal things had tended to happen to people who'd shared wheeled transport with him back then. In fact, a large proportion of what memories he had seemed to involve a combination of carts and unexpected violence.
Night fell faster in the hinterland of Torcea than in Tulice or the Bohec valley. The sunset was spectacular but short, and as soon as the sun had disappeared (like a big chunk of bronze scrap sinking down into the crucible as it melted) Poldarn began to feel uncomfortably cold in the thin shirt and coat he'd been issued with back at Ciana's house. Noja looked like she was cold too; she'd stopped talking and was trying to snuggle down under a thin, coarse travelling rug, which she didn't offer to share. All in all, Poldarn was delighted when they passed under a gallows sign and he read the words The Purity of Soul, with Orchat underneath in smaller letters.
'Food,' Noja said, as the coachmen unfolded the steps for her. 'Don't know about you, but this chill in the air's given me an appetite. The leek and artichoke soup here was always fairly good, though I think the old cook quit about eighteen months ago. Still, it's risk it or go hungry.'
'We risk it,' Poldarn said assertively. 'And you said we'd be stopping here for the night.'
She nodded. The gesture reminded Poldarn very strongly of someone he couldn't immediately call to mind.
The leek and artichoke soup was fairly ordinary, but the bacon and wild mushroom casserole was much better, or so Noja reckoned. As far as Poldarn was concerned, it was stew, and as such a profound improvement on nothing at all. In scale and volume it wasn't anything like the catering at the Ciana house-you could see over your plate without a ladder-but Noja didn't seem to mind, and memories of what passed for food at Dui Chirra were still fresh enough in Poldarn's mind to make him grateful for anything he could get that didn't have cinders floating on top of it. They ate in a small private dining room wedged in between the kitchens and the common room. It was warm and quiet, and Noja, for some reason, had started telling stories about her childhood in the country; something about stealing a cake from their well-off neighbours and hiding it under her sister's bed, getting her into all sorts of trouble… Once again, Poldarn stepped back from what she was saying and treated her voice as music; just because he had so few memories of his own, he didn't necessarily need to fill up the empty space with other people's. Instead, he tried to reconstruct the geography of the forest where he'd first run into Ciana Jetat; which direction had the light been coming from, how far had he walked since dawn when he ran into the hunting party, and (probably most important of all) how had Cleapho, the most important man in the Empire, arrived at the rendezvous with Copis and Gain Aciava, alone and without getting covered in mud?
'So that was that,' Noja was saying. 'My sister was sent to bed without any supper, while I was allowed to stay up until Daddy came home from the fair. Monstrously unjust, of course, and she never did get any of the cake-'
'Your sister,' Poldarn asked quietly. 'What did you say her name was?'
Noja stopped and stared at him, her eyes suddenly wide. He'd seen that expression before, usually when his opponent had been expecting to be parried with the flat, and got a cut across the forearm instead. 'Well,' she said, 'we always called her Weasel, because-'
'Because of the shape of her nose,' Poldarn said. 'But what was her regular name?'
Noja didn't answer for a while. Then she stood up and carefully slipped the catch of the brooch that held her cloak together. 'I'm tired,' she said flatly, without expression. 'I think I'll go to bed now. You coming?'
Poldarn looked at her. She was allowing the cloak to slip down over her shoulders, revealing the sharp profile of her collarbone. 'You go on,' he said. 'I think I'll just sit up for awhile.'
'Fine.' Her eyes were ice cold, like the touch of dead meat. 'Don't stay up too late,' she said. 'We ought to make an early start in the morning.'
Noja waited for a reply, then turned and walked out. The angle of her cheekbone as she moved away was entirely familiar. Mostly, Poldarn realised, he felt disappointed.
After she'd gone he counted up to two hundred, then opened the door cautiously and listened; the coachmen and the footman hadn't struck him as the sort of men who had the knack of breathing quietly. A small, detached part of him regretted missing the honey festival, which had sounded rather pleasant, if you liked that sort of thing. But they hadn't been going there in any case.
Nobody in the corridor, which was pitch dark; but it was easy enough to locate the kitchens by smell alone. He considered his options. There would be people in the common room, but that was no guarantee of safety, and the shortest route to the stables was out that way, so that was where they'd be expecting him to go. Through the kitchens and round the back was three times as far. Simple mathematics: if she followed the relevant precept of religion (sharpen an arrowhead but make a shield as broad as possible), she'd have assigned two guards-the coachmen, presumably, they seemed to be a matched pair-to the common room, and stuck the footman outside the kitchen door. He was fairly sure he could handle the footman, quietly and without making a disturbance. But there was, of course, a third alternative: the stairs.
The bedrooms at the Purity of Soul were on all four sides of a gallery above the common room; one flight of stairs only, leading up from the end of the corridor he was standing in. It'd be a rather bone-jarring drop from a window down into the courtyard, but that couldn't be helped. The Weasel, he thought (assuming she'd been telling the truth), and the Earwig: a regular pest menagerie. Had they given him a nickname too, he wondered? Not that it mattered; but quite soon, one way or another, he'd be in a position where he'd never be able to ask about that sort of thing again. Whether he liked it or not, between them they had possession of most of his life (his memories their hostages, as it were). Even if everything went as well as it possibly could, he'd lose everything they knew about him for ever; and the loss of memories is the destruction of the past, and what is a human being except the sum of his experiences? Dead either way.
On balance, Poldarn decided, he'd rather be dead and still moving; so he turned his back to the wall and slid along it until the side of his foot bumped against the first stair. If they had to creak, he begged providence, let them creak softly. Up to a point, a creaking stair is your friend, because all stairs creak a little during the night, as the compressed fibres of the wood relax. The sound, being usual, is ignored and therefore inaudible. ('Something seen a hundred times becomes invisible': yet another precept of religion. There was probably a complete list of them, in alphabetical order, at the back of Concerning Various Matters, but he hadn't managed to get that far.) It's the sudden loud, complaining creak that gives you away and sets the dogs barking.