drove the poor fool out of his own head and left him to die, like a snail out of its shell.
Ziani turned round sharply. One or two of the men lifted their heads to look. 'No, I insist,' he said, and his voice wasn't friendly. 'You've done all this stuff for me, hard work, tedious chasing around that'd have driven me crazy. There's got to be something you want in return, but so far you haven't told me what it is. I think it's about time I found out what I'm letting myself in for.'
Daurenja's face had gone completely blank; it reminded Ziani of dead bodies laid out for a wake, their faces nudged and prodded and molded by skillful fingers into a total lack of expression. 'Not at all,' he said. 'It's a pleasure and an education to work for you. I've learned so much from this project.'
'You're lying,' Ziani said.
The bewildered look on Daurenja's face was completely false. 'I promise you, I'm not. Besides,' he went on, with an equally false simper, 'even if I have got some weird ulterior motive that you don't approve of, it wouldn't affect you. All you'd have to do is say no.'
Ziani breathed out slowly, hoping it would calm him down. It didn't. 'That's right,' he said. 'That's all I'd have to do.'
Daurenja smiled. It could have been a beautiful expression; friendly, open, reassuring. 'In any case,' he said, 'you're far too smart to let anybody take advantage of you. Quite the reverse.'
Ziani felt something twist in his stomach. 'You reckon.'
'Absolutely. Anybody who could manipulate Duke Orsea and Duke Valens so adroitly with nothing but a simple letter…' He shrugged. 'And the salt merchant,' he added. 'A stroke of genius. Tell me: did you know about the secret road before you met her?'
After such a long time being in charge, making plans, carrying them out, bearing so much weight, it was almost a relief to be paralyzed. 'What do you want?' Ziani said.
'Nothing,' Daurenja said. 'Trust me.'
13
'You again,' she said.
Psellus nodded, and sat down in the chair across the table from her. Politeness, he told himself. In the face of a resentful, angry witness, good manners are a shield. 'Thank you for coming in,' he said. 'I hope it's not too inconvenient.'
Her eyes were bright, and completely out of place in her mild, beautiful, insipid face. 'It's not as though I had any choice,' she said. 'Soldiers on my doorstep at five in the morning…'
'They weren't soldiers,' Psellus said pleasantly. 'Guild security officers. I thought you might appreciate a lift, instead of having to walk.'
She folded her thin arms across her chest. 'I like walking,' she said.
He copied her gesture, except that he kept his back straight in his chair. 'That's fortunate,' he said, 'now that you live so far out of the center of town. Your old house was much more convenient.'
She shrugged. She seemed to be trying to look behind her left shoulder. 'There's nothing I need to go into town for,' she said. 'I can get all my shopping in the Eastgate market, and it's cheaper.'
Psellus nodded. 'That's true,' he said. 'Personally, though, I don't think I'd like living in the suburbs. I've lived my whole life in the center of the city.'
It was intended as a rest, an empty moment. She kept still and let it pass.
'Do you like your new house?' Psellus asked.
'It's all right.'
'Just all right?' He smiled indulgently, like a kind old uncle. 'It seems a lot of trouble to go to, all the aggravation of moving, if the new place isn't any better than all right.'
'I hated living in the old house,' she said coldly. 'After everything that happened there.'
'I can understand that,' Psellus said soothingly. 'A lot of painful memories, I'm sure.'
She turned her head a little. A small chin, rounded, but not weak. 'I didn't like living there by grace and favor, either,' she said.
'You were allowed to stay there for as long as you needed to,' Psellus reminded her. 'True, it was a dispensation rather than a right-'
'Grace and favor,' she repeated.
'I understand. And how's your daughter liking her new home? Settling in? Making new friends?'
She shrugged, as though she wasn't really interested.
'It must help,' Psellus went on, 'that she's living in a different neighborhood, where the other children don't necessarily know about what her father did. It must have been very hard on her, at the old house.'
'Not really.' She was, he conceded, superb in defense, using every aspect of her weakness to the full. Sympathy glided off her, like arrows off the best proof armor. 'We never mixed much with the neighbors anyway.'
'Apart from your own family, of course.' No response to that. 'It must be hard on you, living so far from them.'
'It's not all that far,' she corrected him, almost scornfully. 'Half an hour's walk.'
'Indeed.' Big smile. 'Half an hour's walk is a very long way for me, but I'm old and fat.' Pause; in his head, he counted to four. 'All in all, then, things are working out well for you.'
'I suppose so, yes.'
'You suppose so.' He raised an eyebrow, but she wasn't looking at him. 'I'd say you've been quite fortunate- no, that's not quite the word, it does rather imply that you don't really deserve your good fortune. In your case, it's more like a just reward, or compensation at the very least.'
That made her look at him. 'What?'
He smiled broadly. 'Finding true love,' he said. 'And in such difficult circumstances.'
Her look should have punctured him like a bubble, but he'd been ready for it; invited it, like a fencer tempting his opponent with a feigned weakness. 'That's right,' she said.
'Actually, that's why I asked you here,' he went on, as smoothly as he could in the presence of such brittleness. 'Your application for a dispensation to remarry, even though your husband is still alive.'
'Oh,' she said. The same maneuver, mirrored; a feigned relaxation of her guard. 'Is there a problem?'
He shook his head. 'No, I'm pleased to be able to tell you, we've considered all the facts and, in view of the circumstances-'
'I mean,' she interrupted, 'he's as good as dead, isn't he? In the eyes of the law he's dead, because he was condemned to death. For all anybody knows, he is dead. So-'
A cue; deliberate, or fortuitous? 'As a matter of fact,' he said quietly, 'Ziani Vaatzes is still very much alive. We have intelligence that places him at the court of Duke Valens of the Vadani. He's just completed the sabotage of the Vadani silver mines; a very neat piece of work, I should add, thanks to him the mines will be completely useless to us once we've conquered the country.'
She shrugged. 'He's still making a nuisance of himself, then.'
Psellus had read the reports. Dry, needless to say, and doing their best to gloss over the things that had caught his imagination. In his mind's eye, nevertheless, he'd seen them: thousands of dead men, killed as they advanced in perfect formation, without even the time to break rank and start to run. Making a nuisance of himself. 'That's none of your concern now,' he said. 'Just in case you've been worrying, nobody holds you in any way responsible for his actions, either before his escape or since. The findings of the board of inquiry were absolutely explicit on that point.'
The words board of inquiry made her flinch, as well they might. No bad thing to remind her of how close she'd come to sharing her husband's disaster.
'So that's all right, then,' she said. 'Falier and I can get married.'
'Indeed you can, I'm delighted to say.' None of that delight seemed to be reflected in her face. 'You'll be able to get on with the arrangements, let your family know the date and so forth. I'm sure there'll be a great deal to do.'
