The streets were disconcertingly quiet, which made him wonder whether there was some kind of curfew in Sansory. The basic premise he'd founded his careful strategy on was that once he was outside the Charity and Diligence he'd be able to melt away into a crowd within seconds and become invisible; as it was, the sound of his stolen horse's hooves on the cobbles struck him as being probably the loudest noise ever made since the creation of the world.
Another choice: abandon the horse and make his way slowly but rather more unobtrusively to the nearest gate, or rely on speed and to hell with the racket. He didn't need to be told that he had no way of making an intelligent decision without knowing one vital fact, namely whether the city gates were shut at night, and if so, when.
Common sense, he thought. Why bother having gates at all if you don't close them at night? Furthermore, it'd be shameful to make the same mistake twice and fail to look at the problems that lay beyond the accomplishment of his immediate objective, getting out of town. On foot, on the north road or west along the riverbank, he'd be exposed and vulnerable; with a horse, at least he stood a chance of outrunning anybody who might be after him. If he could find somewhere quiet to sit still and wait till morning, he wouldn't have to give up the horse, but unless the enemy were stupid or in a hurry, wouldn't they think to watch the gates? Irrelevant, of course, if the gates were shut already. Complications were springing up all around him, snagging him like bindweed growing up through ivy. As for all the implications of what had happened to him that day, he really didn't want to think about them.
On his left he noticed something that looked highly promising: an empty coach-house, its doors open just wide enough to allow him to ride through without scraping his knees. He decided to accept it as an omen or portent advising him to lie low and wait for morning, which suited him fine. He was, he realised, exhausted.
He unsaddled the horse and tied it to a ring conveniently set in the wall, then closed the door and used a couple of lengths of wood he found on the floor to wedge it shut. It wasn't completely dark inside; a little moonlight seeped in through the gaps in the roof where slates were missing, and he was able to move about by judging the textures of shadows. His chores finished, he sat up against the far wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, and closed his eyes.
Probably he was far more tired than he thought, because the next thing he saw was a waterwheel towering above him, triangles of blue sky blurred in the gaps of the turning frame. Behind it was a high brown wall built of large, carefully shaped blocks of sandstone, at whose foot the mill-leat lapped and splashed through a dense filter of brambles, weeds and rushes. Beside the wheel grew a tall, thin pear tree, in whose leafless branches, not surprisingly, perched two crows. One of them had a stick in its beak-just a plain, ordinary twig. The other gripped a gold ring, but it was having trouble with it, and after a few failed attempts to get it under control it let the thing fall into the thick grass at the foot of the tree.
Ah, he thought, symbolism. But I like this dream more than the last one, and the one before. More homely. Cosier.
Judging by the position of the sun it was mid-afternoon, while the yellow quality of the light, the bare branches and the slight but palpable nip in the air suggested late autumn. General Cronan sat up and looked for a distant line of hills obscured by mist (or low cloud, or heat-haze); instead he saw trees all around him, covering dramatic scarps and slopes on either side of the river from which the mill-leat had been carefully drawn off. At the junction of river and leat there was an extremely impressive dam and lock-he hadn't a clue how it worked, but it involved two leadscrews with painted iron turn-wheels and a bunch of heavy-toothed cogs obscured by a generous smearing of thick black grease. A raft of sodden brown and red leaves floated on the still water of the dam pool, supporting his earlier observations about the time of year.
He walked over to the pool and looked at his reflection. (Him again, he thought, as the crows resentfully spread their wings and flapped out of the pear tree, and then he remembered that last time he was the young, stupid nobleman called Tazencius who'd tried to kill the man whose face he could see in the water.) He found the cut, which started an inch or so above the hairline and ran sideways to just over his left ear; not so bad after all, in spite of the alarming quantity of blood.
Apparently he'd been wrong about that particular helmet; it had done a pretty good job after all.
A single drop of blood trickled down over his eyebrow and fell into the water, dissolving into a small, veined brown cloud. Absently he wiped away the rest of it from his forehead with the base of his thumb, and dismissed the injury to a very low place in his priorities ladder. Instead, he turned his mind to the more important issues: the battle, the fate of the empire, the future of civilisation as he knew it, all of which were going on in that wood over there, without him to keep an eye on them. That was bad.
But just for once he didn't want to go back and get on with the job. It came to something when a desperate hand-to-hand fight with a larger, stronger, younger enemy, from which he'd barely escaped with his life, was nothing more than an annoying distraction from his work, an aggravating and inconvenient waste of time… Surely they could spare him for just a quarter of an hour, until he'd had a chance to have a rest and a drink of water, and maybe even stop bleeding.
He smiled; not likely. He turned to face the wood, trying to remember the way he'd come (he hadn't been paying too much attention, on account of being chased by the enemy; a poor excuse, not much better then the dog ate my homework, but the best he could do at the moment), and noticed a flattened patch in the random hedge of briars, where he'd burst through on his way out. Going back in that way in cold blood wasn't an inviting prospect, but he knew his own sense of direction too well to trust it. If he didn't retrace his steps exactly, he'd end up hopelessly lost. Standing in front of a divine tribunal and explaining to the immortal gods that he hadn't been there to save the empire because he'd taken a wrong turning in a wood was an even less appealing thought than the brambles.
He retrieved his sword, only to find that the blade was hopelessly notched about four inches down from the point, useless; he left it where it was, found the body of his enemy and nervously rolled it over with his foot. Beyond question the man was dead; he was practically in two pieces, so that if by some horrible miracle he did get up again, he'd fall apart like a badly built lean-to. Nevertheless he was the enemy, and if he could cause trouble, he would-for example, by having dropped or thrown his sword where it couldn't be found when it was needed.
After a frustrating search, Cronan eventually found it a good five yards away in the middle of a tall and awkward bed of nettles. He managed to dislodge it with the toe of his boot, wasting valuable time as he did so, and bent down to pick it up. It was the first time he'd handled one of these semi-mythical objects, the dreaded raider backsabres. He'd been expecting it to be wrist-breakingly heavy, but it wasn't; if anything, it felt lighter and livelier in the hand than his own government-pattern sword, the kind he'd drilled with every day for twenty years. That surprised him, and he took a moment to look at it critically and objectively, as a piece of equipment rather than as an icon of the looming apocalypse.
It was as long as his arm, from the point of his shoulder to the tip of his outstretched middle finger, though nearly a third of that length was the two-handed grip, protected by the spectacular inward-curving horns on the blade side that swept out above and below the hand to form the pommel and hand-guard. The blade itself curved sharply forward and down, making the sword look as if it was the wrong way up, until it flicked back up again a finger's length from the point to form a swan's beak. Underneath the edge flared out, widening as it followed the inward curve, ending in a thin, flat cutting section nearly a palm's breath across, at which point it followed the upwards sweep of the topside, giving the blade the appearance of a dolphin leaping. Just below the spine of the blade was a broad, shallow fuller that followed the profile of the curve, lightening it without sacrificing strength and throwing the centre of percussion forward into the pit of the hook. As a practitioner of the trade of cutting human tissue, Cronan could see that it was, quite simply, the most perfect instrument for shearing through flesh and bone ever made, incapable of development or improvement, since any change to the design must inevitably detract from its perfection. It was, accordingly, a deeply disturbing object, being proof that the people who made it weren't just very tall, very strong and very ferocious, all attributes that could be dealt with quite easily using existing procedures and techniques; they were also intelligent, perceptive and thorough. Now that was something to worry about.