If only we weren't at war with the Mezentines, we could send out for inch plate from the Foundrymen's; and in the City, when they said inch, they meant inch, not inch-and-a-thirty-second-in-places-and-twenty-nine-thirty-seconds-in-others. Really, he was doing the world a service, because a nation that can't read a simple caliper isn't fit to survive.

But... He scowled into the darkness. A wide tolerance, a whole sixteenth of an inch of abomination didn't actually matter in this case, because a wire-plate is just a primitive chunk of iron with a hole in it (he wanted it to matter, but it didn't). Even so, six man-days lost would cost the defenders a scorpion. One scorpion could loose twelve bolts a minute, seven hundred bolts an hour. At an estimated thirty percent efficiency rating, the wire-plates would save the lives of two hundred and thirty Mezentines - He heard a boot scrape on the stairs, and looked up. Just when he'd thought he was safe, but apparently not. "I'm in here," he called out, "did you want me for something?" It seemed they didn't, because there was no reply. That was all right, then.

He tried to go back to his calculation, seven hundred divided by three, but he'd lost the thread. The lamp guttered. He pulled out his penknife and set off to trim the wick, crunching and staggering awkwardly on the piles of charcoal underfoot.

The wick was fine; must just have been a waft of air from somewhere. He straightened up, and heard another soft crunch, just like the ones he'd been making himself as he clambered over the charcoal heaps.

Of course, he had no time to shape a plan or design a mechanism. Instead, he stooped, grabbed the lamp and threw it as hard as he could. For a very short moment it was a tiny comet in the darkness, then a little ball of fire, then nothing. He heard the tinkle of the lamp breaking, and another noise, a soft grunt.

He had his penknife, one thin inch of export-grade Mezentine steel; and he had the darkness, and the sound of crushed charcoal. It wasn't much, but it would have to be everything.

If he moved, the hunter would hear him; and the other way round, of course, but the hunter presumably had fearsome weapons and great skill. He tried to think his way into the enemy's mind. He would have to be quick, both to hear and to act. He waited.

As soon as he heard the soft grinding, squashing noise of charcoal underfoot, he took a step - sideways, to the right, a random choice, but unpredictability was his best ally against the hunter's approach, which would be methodical and progressive. He reached out as far as he could with his left hand, keeping his right close to his body. Each time the hunter moved, he took a step of his own. The hardest part was controlling his breathing. Fear made him want to pant; instead he drew in air as smoothly as a good workman turning the lathe carriage handle to keep the cut fine, and let it go at precisely the same rate. That actually helped a little; the fog in his head started to clear, and he could see his thoughts, big and slow as a ship drifting in moonlight.

Now he could begin to work out the logical pattern. Someone must've told the hunter where to find him, so it was reasonable to assume the hunter knew the shape of the room. He recalled the dimensions, twenty feet by ten, with one door in the southwest corner. The pattern would therefore be from side to side. A man zigzagging down the length of the room with his arms outstretched would have a fair chance of touching another man in the dark, even if the prey was flat to the wall. Logical behavior for the prey would be to crouch and become as small as possible; logical meant predictable, and so that was what he couldn't do. Instead, his best course of action - He'd moved too far, two steps to his enemy's one, because his own crunch wasn't echoed. He cringed at his own stupidity, caused by a failure to concentrate. Instinct yelled at him to make a charge, either to find and kill or to escape. He made an effort and wrestled the instinct down.

His best course of action was to become the hunter instead of the prey (because the first question the assassin would ask his inside source would be, is he likely to be armed? and the answer would've been no). It was unfortunate that he knew absolutely nothing about fighting; the last time he'd fought, he'd been nine, and he'd lost conclusively. Mezentines didn't fight. Of course, he wasn't a Mezentine anymore.

But he had the darkness on his side; also the fact that the last charcoal delivery had been late, and two night shifts had had to take their fuel from the reserve store. Obviously, they'd have loaded from nearest the door; but if they shoveled in a straight line, as reasonable men might be assumed to do, would there not be a clear, therefore silent path a shovel's breadth up the line of the southern wall? The enemy was between him and the door, there was no real chance of slipping by except by fluke, but if he could walk unheard...

Time was running low; he made a fair estimate of how long the pattern would take to execute, based on an average length of stride and his own progress. By now, both of them had to be fairly close to the middle of the room, but if he could make it across to the south wall, he'd have a little advantage, which would be all he'd need.

He moved with the crunch, and as his foot came down he heard another grunt. But it was in the wrong place, too far back. There were two of them.

Well, of course, there would be. The Perpetual Republic were no cheapskates, they wouldn't send only one man, like a lone hero charged with slaying a dragon. That made the south wall essential to his chances of survival, because the man on the door would be stationary; King Fashion would've called him the stop, while his colleague would be the beater. The crunch came and he moved with it, but his foot made no sound. He reached out with his right hand, a desperate risk but forced by necessity, and felt stone.

Now he had to stay still. If, by sheer bad luck, the hunter's pattern happened to bring him here, all he could hope for was the random advantage of the encounter. He wondered how perceptive the hunter was; would he notice the absence of the double footfall, and would he interpret it correctly? On balance, Vaatzes hoped his enemy was clever but not brilliant.

He heard two more steps, then a long pause. The missing sound had been noticed and was being duly considered. Because he was standing still, at last he could use his enemy's sound to place him. Excellent; he was nearer to the middle than the south wall, so the pattern should take him clear away, northeast or northwest didn't matter. Very carefully, as though he was scribing a line, Vaatzes began to edge down the south wall toward the door.

Tactically, of course, he was taking a substantial risk, now that he was in the middle between his two enemies. If he couldn't get through or past the stop quickly enough, the beater would be on him from the flank or the rear. He'd never read any military manuals so he was working from first principles, but he could see all too clearly how a clever plan badly or unluckily carried out must be worse than simple, stolid standing and fighting. Too late to be sensible now, though.

Four more crabbed paces, by his calculations; then he stooped, careful of his balance, and groped for a fair-sized chunk of charcoal. He found one and tossed it high in the air. The noise it made when it landed was all wrong, of course - it sounded like a lump of charcoal landing on a charcoal-covered floor - but all he needed to achieve was a moment's bewilderment.

A moment, of course, was all he had. He allowed enough time for the stop to turn and face the noise; that'd be instinct, and now he knew fairly well how his enemy would be standing, the direction his head and shoulders would be facing in. He took a long stride forward and another to the left, crunching his foot down hard in the murrain of charcoal beside the cleared path. Then he brought his right arm across in a wide, fast arc.

He felt an impact, and something hot and wet splashed in his face. It was all he could do not to shout in triumph, because he'd plotted it all out so precisely, inch-perfect, making the target turn so his neck-vein would be presented at the optimum angle to his sweeping cut, and here was his enemy's blood on his face to prove he'd got it right. No time for that now; with his left hand he reached out, grabbed, felt his fingers close on empty air, quickly recalculated allowing for the dying man falling to the ground, grabbed again and felt his fingertips snag in loose cloth. All the dying man's weight was pulling on his fingers, mechanical advantage was against him, but he managed to find the brute strength to haul the mass across and behind him. The knife was no good to him now. He opened his fingers and let it fall as his right hand groped for the door. He found the bar handle just as loud crunches behind him told him that the beater was coming for him. Now it was just running, something he'd never been any great shakes at.

As he wrenched the door open, the light burned him. The gap between door and frame was almost wide enough to give him clearance, but it wouldn't grow. He'd botched moving the body, and it was fouling the door. The urge was to glance over his shoulder and take a look at the beater's face but he hadn't got time. He crushed himself through the gap (like drifting a badly filed hole square with the big hammer), found the bottom step with his foot and pushed himself into a sprint. Breath was a problem, he'd squeezed too much of it out of himself getting through the doorway; his current plan was firmly based on yelling as loud as possible, so that people would come and rescue him before the beater could catch him. But the best he could manage was a soft woof, like a sleepy dog.

Best estimate was that the beater was in the doorway, while he was only four steps up the stairs; there were twelve steps, and if the beater grabbed his ankle and pulled him down, it'd all have been a waste of effort and ingenuity. He heard the beater say something - just swearing, probably - which suggested that luck had given him a little more time. He cleared the top step, filled his lungs, and yelled.

After the silence, where a soft crunch had been so loud, the echo of his voice in the stone stairwell made his head swim. But he felt fingertips brush the calf of his leg, gentle as a tentative lover. Even as he lunged toward the open air he was calculating: assuming the hunter had arms of average length and taking on trust his estimate of the length of his lower leg, from heel to knee-joint, he was safe from a dagger of no more than twelve inches, but a riding-sword, falchion, hanger or hand-axe would be the death of him.

He was in the courtyard; and here was where his plan foundered and crashed. He'd been working on the strict assumption that once he was clear of the stairwell he'd be safe, because the courtyard would be thronged with his stalwart employees, hurrying to answer his shout of distress. Accordingly, he hadn't troubled to plan beyond the threshold of the light. Foolish; here on the level, in the light, it was his ability to run against his enemy's. As if in confirmation, he felt a hand tighten on his shoulder like a clamp, drawing him back and slowing him down.

He hadn't expected to feel anything else, because the knife or the short sword would be properly sharp, and he'd be dead before his body could register the pain. Wrong; instead, he felt the buttons of his shirt give way, and the lapel pulling back over the ball of his shoulder. He could have laughed out loud for joy if he'd had time and breath. It was only a moral victory, of course. The courtyard was empty; they were all hard at work at their anvils and benches, as of course they should be. He'd trained them too well.

The next thing he registered mystified him. It was the paving-slabs of the courtyard floor rushing up to meet him, and the solid, painful contact of stone on his face. He'd fallen; he was lying face down on the ground. Not that it mattered, but...

He heard grunting, then a yell of pain, swearing, shouts, another yell, and the bump of a dead weight falling fairly close. He pushed at the ground with the palms of his hands, bounced himself upright and swung round.

He saw a face that was vaguely familiar, one of the carpenters, whose name there'd been no point using up memory on. The carpenter was kneeling on something; on a man's body, his knee was on the man's neck, and other men whose faces he couldn't see were bending or kneeling over the same body, trying to do something to it that called for effort and strength. "Are you all right?" the carpenter asked; he looked shocked and bewildered, and his face was cut. Vaatzes widened the scope of his vision and saw a short sword (to be precise, a Mezentine naval hanger) lying about a foot from the body's outstretched hand. Strange; more than twelve inches, so he ought to be dead. But (it occurred to him, as a flood of fear and shock swept through him) he wasn't.

"Don't kill him," he heard himself say, "I want him alive." At the same time, he rebuked himself for melodrama; also, what did he want with a Mezentine Compliance assassin? Nothing; correction, he wanted the names of his inside men, the ones who'd told him about the charcoal cellar. It was very important not to let those names get away.

One of the men whose faces he couldn't see mumbled an apology, and Vaatzes noticed that the assassin had stopped moving.

"Is he dead?" he asked.

"Fell on his own knife," someone replied. Knife? He'd had a knife as well as the hanger; a whole new variable he'd omitted to consider. Negligent. Really, he didn't deserve to be alive.

"What the fuck was all that about?" someone asked.

Later, sitting in the window of the main gallery recovering from a horrific bout of shaking and nausea, Vaatzes decided there couldn't have been a knife, because he'd felt the hunter's left hand grabbing at him on the stairs. That helped the world make sense again. He sent someone to fetch the man who'd answered his question. While he was waiting for him to arrive, he called half a dozen men off the bloom anvil and told them to form a half-circle facing him, about five yards back.

When he saw the man again, he recognized him. He even knew his name - Fesia Manivola, second foreman in the grinding shop. A pity, because he was a good worker.

"You wanted to see me?" Manivola was relaxed, inquisitive, friendly.

Vaatzes nodded; it was the cue for the six bloom-hammerers to close in behind Manivola. "You killed him, didn't you?" he said. "He didn't fall on his own knife like you said. You stabbed him so he couldn't give you away."

Manivola denied it, twice, and then one of the bloom-workers broke his neck. They dragged his body out into the yard, laid it next to the two assassins to wait for the arrival of the examining magistrate, who was needed for various formalities. Once they were over, the magistrate asked him the question he'd been asking himself: why did you have him killed straight away? For all you know, there could've been more than one.

"I know," he replied. "But that was enough. If there's more, they'll know they're safe now, but it's too dangerous to try again." He pulled a face. "I've already lost one key worker and there's a war on. If I found out the foundry chief and the foreman of the tempering shop were in on it as well, I'd have to close down a shift."

Either the magistrate saw the logic in that or he knew better than to argue with the man who made the scorpions that had won the great victory. He wrote things in his little book and went away. Shortly after dark a cart came for the bodies; according to the magistrate, they'd be tipped down a disused drain, and nobody need ever know.

In the middle of the first night shift, a messenger came to take him to see the Ducas. He'd been expecting that. He rode in a cart up to the shabby door of the Ducas house, and followed the messenger across courts, quadrangles and cloisters to a small room, by his calculations leading off the northeast corner of the great hall. He told Miel Ducas about Compliance, though he was fairly sure he knew the salient points already.

"The only surprise," he went on, "is that they waited so long. Usual procedure is to kill a defector as soon as possible."

Miel Ducas nodded. "How do you account for the delay?" he asked.

"Not sure," Vaatzes replied truthfully. "My guess is, once they heard about the scorpions we shot up the wagon train with and realized they were homemade, they knew they needed to put me out of action. But that doesn't explain why they haven't tried before."

The Ducas frowned. "So that's it, then. It's a mystery."

"Yes." Vaatzes smiled grimly. "And I'm not complaining. But I was very lucky indeed. I don't know anything about hand-to-hand combat, or any of that stuff."

"Maybe you should learn," the Ducas replied, as anticipated. Vaatzes acknowledged and moved on.

"We'll need guards now, obviously," he said. "It'll slow up loading and unloading, and it won't actually do any good. If they had Manivola helping them -"

"That's the accomplice?"

Vaatzes nodded. "Wouldn't have thought it of him," he said.

"But we'll have guards anyway, just for the hell of it."

"All right. Do you want visitors searched for weapons?"

"In a factory?" Vaatzes laughed. "He could pick a tool off any bench that'd serve as well as any weapon; hammer, saw, whatever. And it'd take too much time. No, I was thinking of a different approach."

The Ducas waited, then said, "Well?"

Vaatzes said: "Normally, I'd make my own, but there isn't time. Do you happen to have such a thing as a brigandine coat?"

The Ducas dipped his head briskly. "Several," he said. "About three dozen, actually. Mine wouldn't fit you, but I'm sure I had a short ancestor at some point in the last three centuries. Wonderful how much useless junk you inherit; and of course we never throw anything away, because everything we acquire is nothing but the best, far too good to part with. I'll have it sent round as soon as possible."

"Thank you," Vaatzes said. "And nobody must know, of course, or there'd be no point."

"Naturally. And you really should find time for some simple lessons: single sword, sword and buckler, bare hand and dagger. My cousin Jarnac's sergeant-at-arms is the man you need. I'll talk to Jarnac when I've got a moment."

"That'd be kind of you," Vaatzes replied. He was looking hard for some sign in the Ducas' face, but what he saw there, in the eyes and the line of the mouth, could have been simple stress and fatigue from running a country at war. "You've been doing things for me ever since I came here. I'm grateful."

The Ducas shrugged. "It's thanks to you we've got a chance in this war," he said. "The scorpions..." He shook his head. "A chance," he repeated. "I don't know."

Vaatzes studied him for a moment, and saw a man in two minds. Half of him knew that Civitas Eremiae would inevitably fall; the other half couldn't see how it possibly could. Mostly, though, he saw a man who'd been tired for so long he was getting used to it. "The Republic's never lost a war," he said, "but there's always a first time. I think our best hope are the Potters and the Drapers; and the Foundrymen, of course."

It took the Ducas a moment to realize he was talking about Guilds. "Go on," he said.

"The Foundrymen are more or less in the ascendant at the moment," Vaatzes explained, "or at least they were when I left. There's never a deep underlying reason why one Guild gets to dominate. It's about personalities and political skill rather than fundamental issues; mostly, I think, because there's virtually nothing we don't all agree about. But the Foundrymen have been on top for longer than usual, and the Potters and Drapers have been trying to put them down for a while, and they're annoyed and upset because so far they've failed. The Foundrymen will have wanted this war because victory always makes the government popular, and we always win. But if we don't win, or at least not straight away, so it's costing lots of money and interfering with business, there's a good chance it'll bring down the Foundrymen. The Drapers and Potters will therefore want to make out that any major reverse is a genuine defeat - they'll say the Republic's been beaten for the first time in history, and it's all the Foundrymen's fault, and we should never have gone to war in the first place. Meanwhile the Foundrymen will be unhappy because they'll be taking men off civilian work to increase the production in the ordnance factory, so that'll be costing them money; they'll want to get rid of the present leadership and end the war so as to limit the damage before the Drapers and Potters have a chance to overthrow them. Also, the Drapers and Potters will have a fair degree of support, because most of the Guilds do a lot of export business with the old country, where the mercenaries come from. If thousands of mercenaries are killed in the war, it'll be very bad for their trade over there. It's possible to win this war, provided you can do as much damage as possible; kill as many men as you can, destroy as much equipment, cost them as much money as possible. As long as they want to fight you, they'll never give up; but if you can make them decide that the war isn't worth the cost and effort, you're in with a chance. It's not like your war with the Vadani, where you hated each other. Hate doesn't come into it with the Republic, that's the key as far as you're concerned. They make war for their own reasons. It's always all to do with them, not really anything about you. You're like the quarry in a hunt, rather than a mortal enemy; you don't hate the animals you hunt, you do it for the meat and the glory. When you're not worth hunting anymore, when you're more trouble than it's worth, they'll call it a day and go home."

Needless to say, the Ducas was as good as his word. The brigandine coat arrived the next morning, in a straw-filled barrel. The first thing Vaatzes looked for was a maker's mark, and he found it, in exactly the right place; the fifth rivet-head in from the armpit, right-hand side, second row down, was stamped with a tiny raised letter F, for Foundrymen. That meant it was Guild-made, and therefore complied exactly with the relevant specification.

The specification for a brigandine coat consists of two thousand, seven hundred and forty-six small, thin plates of best hardening steel, drawn to a spring temper. The plates are sandwiched, overlapping each other, between two layers of strong canvas, held in place by one-sixteenth-inch copper rivets; they're also wired and riveted to each other to make sure they move perfectly with every action of the wearer's body, so that at no time is it possible to drive the point of an ordinary sewing needle between the joints. The jacket is covered on the outside with middle-weight hard-wearing velvet, and lined inside with six layers of linen stuffed with lambs-wool and quilted into one-inch diamonds. The finished coat contains ten thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four rivets, weighs six pounds four ounces, will turn a cavalryman's lance or an arrow from a hundred-and-twenty-pound bow, should be as comfortable as a well-cut gentleman's doublet and shouldn't be noticeable when worn under an ordinary day-jacket. The Linen Armorers' Guild produces a hundred and twelve of them a year, of which ninety-six go for export.

Vaatzes lifted it out of the barrel, brushed away the straw, and held it out at arm's length. He'd never actually seen one before, although he knew the specification by heart. It was strange, here in this barbarous and unsatisfactory place, finally to find himself in the presence of perfection; as though a prophet or visionary had spent his whole life searching in the wilderness for enlightenment, only to find it, having abandoned the search, in a grubby market town, sitting on a toilet.

He laid it flat on the workbench in front of him, and ran his fingertips over the velvet before slowly unfastening the seventeen brass buttons. For one horrible moment, as he drew it across his shoulders, he was afraid it wouldn't fit. Once he was inside it, however, it closed in around him like water engulfing a diver. He could just feel a slight weight on his shoulders and chest, and a very gentle hug as he buttoned it up; just enough to let him know that he was now as perfectly safe as it's possible to be in an imperfect world, his body's security guaranteed by the absolute wisdom and skill of the Perpetual Republic. He'd heard someone say once that a Guild coat would even turn a scorpion bolt; that was, of course, impossible, but there was a part of him deep down that was inclined to believe it. It wasn't the steel or the skill with which the rivets had been closed; it was the specification, the pattern that drew the thousands of plates together and made them move as one unbroken, unbreakable whole, like the City that had made them. The coat wouldn't protect him against scorpions, because even though the steel stayed unpierced, the shock would smash his bones to splinters and pulp his internal organs. That didn't matter, however, because it would be him that had failed rather than the coat. His own frailty in no way invalidated the consummate virtue of Specification; just as the death of one citizen doesn't kill a city.

He smiled. The irony was exact, precise, fitting as closely as the coat. His safety guaranteed by the City that was trying to kill him, he could now carry on unhindered with his design to bring that City to ruin, and all perfection with it. All he needed now was to be taught to kill by the Ducas family, and the symmetry would be complete.

20.

Since the first army had unaccountably been exterminated, it was just as well that the second army arrived earlier than anticipated, thanks to an unusually strong tailwind. If it hadn't been for the defeat and the massacre, their arrival would have been a logistical disaster. There wouldn't have been nearly enough food, blankets, tents or equipment for twelve thousand men arriving a week ahead of schedule; there'd have been chaos, and the whole venture would've teetered on the edge of failure.

Thanks, however, to the Eremians and their homemade scorpions, the stores and magazines held ample supplies for seven thousand men who weren't going to be needing them after all. To the clerks and administrators of the Treasury and Necessary Evil, it was a source of quiet satisfaction that the crisis was averted and all that expensive food, clothing and equipment wouldn't go to waste after all. In the event, the only problem posed by the early arrival of the second army that didn't effectively solve itself was transport, and that was no big deal. Unlike other shipments of imported goods, mercenaries can transport themselves. They have legs, and can walk.

The commanding officer of the new army, Major-General Sthoe Melancton, didn't see it quite like that. He'd been promised ox-carts to shift his men and their gear from Lonazep to the City. It was in the contract, he pointed out, so it was his right; also, his men were in prime condition, ready for the long march up the mountains. An unscheduled route march to the capital would inevitably result in wear and tear on footwear, vehicles and equipment that had not been allowed for in the original agreement. Further, it would mean an extra four days' service, for which he wanted time and a half. The Republic replied by pointing out that by arriving early, he was in fundamental breach of contract, time inevitably being of the essence in any contract for services, and that the failure to provide the agreed transport was entirely the result of his own breach, therefore not the Republic's fault. If anybody had a right to compensation and damages, in fact, it was the Republic; however, they were prepared to waive their claim in the interests of friendly cooperation. General Melancton rejoined by pleading that the tailwind was an unpredictable outside agency, not party to the contract, and therefore not his responsibility or his fault. The Republic countered by citing precedents from mercantile and shipping case-law. Melancton refused to accept Mezentine precedents, arguing that the contract had been finalized in his own country, whose law therefore applied to it. That argument was easily defeated by reference to the document itself, which clearly stated that the agreement was governed by Mezentine law. Melancton gave way with a certain degree of grace. The soldiers marched.

They were met just outside the City by the artillery train. It was at this point that Melancton found out what had become of his compatriots in the first army. Afterward, it was generally agreed that he took the news better than had been expected. After a long moment of silent reflection, he told the representatives of Necessary Evil who'd broken the news to him that he was a man of his word and a professional, and he would do his job or else (here he was observed to dab a drop of sweat away from the side of his nose) die trying. He then asked a large number of detailed questions about the level of artillery support he could expect to receive, all of which the Mezentines were able to answer to his satisfaction. He thanked them politely and withdrew to confer with his senior staff.

In accordance with the ancient and honorable traditions of their craft, the merchants stayed in Civitas Eremiae until almost the last moment; and when they left, they took with them substantial quantities of small, high-value goods which the more pessimistic citizens had been only too pleased to exchange at a loss for hard cash. The general feeling was that it was better, on balance, that the merchants had them for a song than to keep them for the looters to prise out of their dead fingers.

All but one of the merchant caravans headed for the Vadani border by the shortest possible road. The exception, however, turned in a quite unexpected direction, on a course that seemed likely to leave her stranded and dying of thirst in the great desert that formed the civilized world's only defense against the Cure Hardy. What became of her, nobody knew or cared much. It was assumed that she was headed that way because the Mezentines wouldn't be taking that road in a hurry. Those sufficiently curious to speculate about the subject guessed that she had a retreat somewhere on the edge of the desert, where she planned to hole up until the war was over and it was safe to come out. The last recorded sighting of her was, curiously enough, by a column of Cure Hardy light cavalry, heading north to offer their services to the Mezentines in the coming war. How they came to be there, nobody knew and nobody liked to ask. The official explanation was that they'd come the long way round, enduring months of hardship and privation threading their way through the mountain passes that would have defeated an army of significant size - they were, after all, only one squadron of two hundred men. If it occurred to anybody that if that were the case they'd had to have set off long before the Guild Assembly had even considered the possibility of a war, they kept their hypotheses to themselves.

The arrival of outriders from the Cure Hardy squadron was like rain on parched fields to Melancton and his liaison committee from Necessary Evil. Negotiations had broken down and been patched up over and over again, always foundering on the vexed issue of skirmishers. Melancton hadn't brought any with him, because the contract hadn't specified them; there had been an ample contingent with the first army, so there was no need. With the threat of a scorpion ambush hanging over him, he absolutely refused to move across the border without an advance guard of light, fast, expendable scouts, which the Mezentines were not in a position to provide. The Cure Hardy were perfectly suited to the role. They came as the answer to a prayer; which was why asking them how they came to be available at such short notice wasn't considered, or else was dismissed with pointed references to gift horses' teeth.

To those who could be bothered to ask, the newcomers declared that they were a privateer war-band from the Doce Votz, under the command of one Pierh Leal, an obscure off-relation of the ruling family. They were perfectly willing to ride ahead of the advancing army, keeping an eye out for scorpion emplacements (it was highly unlikely they had any idea what a scorpion looked like, but it was assumed they'd find out the hard way soon enough) and declared that their speed and agility would preserve them from anything the war machines could throw at them. Perhaps some of the members of the liaison committee felt a slight degree of unease at the speed with which the outriders returned with the rest of the squadron; it argued that the Cure Hardy were adept at moving very quickly through even the most hostile terrain. But their arrival meant that the second expeditionary force could at last set out, and that came as a relief in the City, particularly to the officials of the Treasury. Melancton gave the Cure Hardy a day's start, then followed.

Much to his displeasure, he'd come to the conclusion after exhaustive debate that he had no alternative but to follow the same route as his predecessors, up the Butter Pass and on to the main road as far as Palicuro. After that, he had options, or at least alternatives, but he declared that he intended to keep an open mind until he reached Palicuro. After a slow start, due in part to a brisk and unseasonable cloudburst, he picked up speed in the middle and late afternoon, and was on time for his first scheduled rendezvous with the Cure Hardy at nightfall.

The scouts had very little to say for themselves. They claimed to have ridden a full day ahead of the edge of the search zone Melancton had assigned them, and to have seen no sign of the enemy, with or without war engines. Melancton was highly skeptical about these assertions, but had no choice but to rely on them and press on. The logistical support he'd insisted on before starting out was all in place, but he nevertheless wasn't inclined to dawdle and risk running short of supplies, thereby courting the same sort of disasters that had done for Beltista Eiconodoulus. Regrettably, this meant that he couldn't afford to wait for the artillery, which was making heavy weather of the road up the mountains and was believed to be at least half a day behind schedule. After a certain amount of soul-searching, he resolved to press on regardless. Artillery dismantled and packed on wagons wouldn't be any use to him if he was ambushed by scorpions in a narrow pass; in fact, they'd compound any disaster by falling into the hands of the Eremians. By keeping the artillery separate and behind him, he hoped to guard against that particular nightmare above all others.

The next two days proved that the Cure Hardy were reliable informants. For reasons best known to themselves, the enemy had failed to take advantage of two perfect locations for ambushes, both of them narrow bottle canyons through which Melancton had no option but to pass. This omission played on his nerves more than a clear sighting would have done; to an army already lacking in self-confidence, the enemy is never more unnerving than when he's invisible. Resisting an almost overpowering urge to slow down, wait for the artillery and build redoubts to hide in until he found out exactly what the Eremians were up to, he pressed on. During the course of the next two days the scouts reported two possible sightings of lone Eremian horsemen, apparently watching the army from a distance of several miles. Of an army or scorpions, they'd seen no trace. The next day, they rode right up to the outskirts of Palicuro, and reported back that the village was apparently deserted.

Once again, they were proved right. In fact, Palicuro was more than deserted; overnight it had been burned to ash and charcoal and the village cistern had been fouled with the proceeds of the village's muckheaps and middens. Melancton had known better than to rely on being able to find food for his men and forage for his horses there, but he was disappointed nevertheless; as a result he'd have enough to get to Civitas Eremiae, but if the Mezentines wanted him to dig in under the walls for a siege, they'd have to send him a large supply train. Otherwise he risked the indignity of the well-fed defenders throwing their crusts and cabbage waste to his men out of pity.

Dispatches containing these observations arrived unexpectedly on the desk of Lucao Psellus early one morning, at a stage in his career when he'd pretty much convinced himself that his fellow commissioners believed he was dead, or had retired to the suburbs to grow sunflowers and keep bees. He'd given up trying to find out what was going on, or what they wanted him to do. Nobody was ever available to talk to him, his memos went unanswered, and copies of reports and minutes had stopped coming a long time ago. He nearly wept with joy to know they still remembered who he was.

With the dispatches was a curt note requiring him to expedite the supply train as requested. That he could do. It would involve a careful balancing of the three basic elements out of which all administration is ultimately formed: time, money and fear. Not many people, even full-time professional Guild officers, really understood the complex and fascinating interplay between these three monumental forces, but Psellus had been experimenting with them in different combinations and ratios for years, like a methodical alchemist. At last they'd given him a job he could do.

Of the unholy trinity, the most fundamental is money, since nothing can happen without it. Accordingly, he walked across two quadrangles and up and down six flights of stairs, and surprised his old friend Maniacis in the payments room, where he was working at his checkerboard.

It was, in its way, a beautiful thing; an enormous oak table, the sort that kings and barons in the barbarian countries would sit at to feast and drink, whose surface was inlaid with thousands of juxtaposed bone and ebony plates, all of them exactly the same size, about an inch and a half square. At the end of each row was a number, a multiple of ten. At the narrow end of the table sat Maniacis, a pile of wax tablets in front of him, a wooden pot at his elbow, a miniature rake with a long thin stem in his hand. Whenever he needed to make a calculation, he took small silver disks, like coins, from the pot and started laying them out on the squares of the bottom row to represent units. As soon as four squares were covered, he flicked them back with his rake, scooped them back into the pot and put one counter on the line between the bottom and the second row, to represent five units. The second row was tens, the third hundreds, while counters placed on the line dividing second and third were fifties. Mostly he would start a calculation slowly and carefully and gradually build up speed as he progressed, until his fingers were moving with extraordinary speed and the raked-back counters jingled and tinkled like a man running in scale armor. The counters were good silver, ninety parts fine, and stamped with the word TREASURY on one side and an inspiring scene from the history of the Republic on the other. New sets were issued every year, at which point the old sets were recalled and sent to be melted down, though the considerable number that reached the cabinets of avid counter-collectors suggested that the calling-in procedure wasn't absolutely watertight.

Psellus waited until his friend had his hand full of swept-up counters, then coughed. Maniacis dropped the counters, looked up and called him something.

"Now then," Psellus replied, and grinned. "You can't say that to me, I'm here in my official capacity."

"Is that right." Maniacis scowled at him. "In that case, triple what I said with spikes on. Your precious Necessary Evil's been running us ragged for weeks."

Psellus frowned. "Lucky you," he said. "They aren't even talking to me. I don't know what I've done to upset them, but they've cut me right out. I've been sitting counting the bricks in the wall."

"Oh." Maniacis looked at him thoughtfully. "So, what're you here bothering me for?"

Psellus perched on the edge of the table and picked up a counter. On the reverse, a nude fat woman of indeterminate age was presenting a muscle-bound warrior with a garland apparently woven from turnip-tops, while in the background smoke rose from a distant mountain. Underneath was the legend The Eremian threat averted. He raised an eyebrow and put it back where he'd found it. "A bit previous, surely," he said.

Maniacis shrugged. "Not pure silver, either. Don't suppose you noticed, but where it rubs on the table, like the edges of the laurel crown and the chubby bird's tits, the copper's starting to show through. Last year's issue were called in early and we got these instead, a week ago. They were supposed to go into service as part of the grand victory celebrations, but..." He shrugged. "That's how tight things are," he said. "We needed the silver, so we pulled the old ones early and put these ones out ahead of time. Tempting providence if you ask me, but there it is, there's a war on."

Psellus wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. "I had no idea things were so bad," he said.

"Oh, they aren't really," Maniacis said with a sigh. "Really, it's all to do with cashflow and housekeeping. The money's mostly there, but we're under orders to try and keep to within this year's budget. If we start breaking into next year's money, it looks very bad in Assembly. So, to tide things over, we're having to scratch about for loose change to bridge the gap."

"I see," Psellus said. "How's it going?"