'Easy. You just sit. If you can ride a horse, you can ride a donkey.'
'I've never ridden a horse.'
'Look, if you're just going to make difficulties…' But then she paused, made an effort, got the grin working again. 'Put it this way,' she said. 'You're a Mezentine, right? The superior race, masters of the known world? Well, then. If a poor benighted savage like me can do it, so can you.'
Now I understand, Psellus said to himself: she's been sent-and paid-to collect me. If she goes back without me, she'll have to refund the fee. Otherwise, by now she'd have written me off as more trouble than I'm worth and told me to get lost. 'A wagon,' he said, 'or no deal.'
She scowled horribly. 'Out of the question. The way we go, you can't take wagons. It's a donkey or walk.'
He shrugged. There'd been a hint of panic in her voice, implying that as far as wagons were concerned she was telling the truth. 'Fair enough,' he said. 'Sixty thalers; half now, half when we get there. When are you leaving?'
Later, when he thought about that journey, Psellus found it hard to remember it clearly: the sequence of events, the constant terror, the agonizing pain in his backside and thighs. It was, he supposed, the same mental defense mechanism that caused him to forget his worst nightmares as soon as he woke up. The only impressions that lingered were the smell of drenched wool and the sight of the rocks that littered the ground on either side of the miserable tracks they followed, rocks on which he was convinced he would fall and split his head open like a water jug. One thing he knew he would never forget, however, was the first sight of Civitas Vadanis, glimpsed for a moment through a canopy of birch branches as they scrambled up a scree-sided hill. Really, it was nothing more than a gray blur, too big and regular-shaped to be yet another rocky outcrop. To Psellus, however, the mere fact that it was man-made lent it a beauty that no mountain, hillside, combe, gorge or valley could ever aspire to. Buildings; houses; people. It didn't matter that the people were hostile savages, as likely as not to kill him and eat him on sight, and to hell with the fact that he carried universally recognized diplomatic credentials. Two days and a night of spine-jarring across bleak, empty rocks had left him with an overpowering need for human contact, even if it took the form of a lethal assault.
'That's it all right,' the woman in red assured him. 'Not much to look at from this distance, but when you get up close it's a bit of a dump, really. You'd never think the Vadani were rich as buggery just from looking at their architecture.'
Psellus didn't reply. Even from three miles away, he'd noticed something that set his teeth on edge.
'No smoke,' he said.
It took her a moment to figure out what he'd meant by that. 'There never is,' she replied. 'Not by your standards, anyhow. I gather your city looks like it's in permanent fog, because of all the forges and kilns and whatever.'
He shrugged. 'That's all right, then,' he said.
But it wasn't. There was more to it than that, and as they got closer the apprehension grew. There should have been specks on the road, carts carrying things to and from the city, riders, people walking; even savages needed to eat, so there should have been constant traffic bringing food to town. On the other hand, plague was a possibility, but surely they'd have heard rumors. Plague aside, how else could a city be empty? The answer was that it couldn't be, and his impressions were false. But the city looked all wrong; it looked dead, like the still, flat corpse of an animal beside the road. While he'd been marooned in the frontier station, had the war come here, been and gone, without anybody bothering to tell him? Possible, he had to acknowledge. After all, he was always the last to know everything.
A mile out, even the woman in red fell silent and looked worried. They were on the main turnpike now, a straight metaled road that looked down at the city like an archer's eye sighting along an arrow, but they had it entirely to themselves. Furthermore, there was no sign of livestock in the small, bare fields, divided up neatly into squares by low, crude dry-stone walls. Plague wouldn't have killed off all the sheep and cows as well as the people; or if it had, surely there'd be bodies lying about, bookmarked by mobs of crows. Eventually, after not saying a word for nearly half an hour, the woman cleared her throat and said, 'This is odd.'
'There's nobody here,' Psellus replied.
She appeared not to have heard him. 'I heard your lot sent a cavalry raid not long back,' she said. 'My guess is, they've cleared everybody out of the outlying villages and farms and barricaded themselves inside the city, to be on the safe side.' She made it sound as though Psellus had planned and led the raid himself, and therefore this desolation was all entirely his fault. 'Could make it tricky for us getting in. We'll have to play it by ear, that's all.'
It turned into something of a farce. The woman in red insisted on acting inconspicuous, even when it was obvious that there was nobody to see. Her idea of inconspicuous shared several key elements with Psellus' definition of low pantomime-talking in a loud voice about deals she was planning, deals she'd recently made; stopping every fifty yards or so to check the loads on the donkeys; bawling out each muleteer in turn for imaginary offenses; retreating demurely behind every third bush for a mimed pee. The city, meanwhile, grew nearer in total silence and deathly stillness. She was giving the performance of her life in an empty theater.
A quarter of a mile from the main gate, Psellus lost his patience.
'Do me a favor,' he said, slithering awkwardly off the donkey and wincing as he landed on a stone. 'Wait here.'
She scowled hideously at him. 'Out in the open?' she hissed. 'You can't be serious. We'll all be arrested.'
'Thank you so much for your help,' he said politely, without looking back, and limped painfully on his wrenched ankle up the road to the main gate.
A hundred yards away, he saw that it was open, which finally put paid to her theory about the Vadani barricading themselves inside the city for fear of a repeat of the cavalry raid. Gate open, no guards; but a single chicken pecked busily in the foregate. It scuttled a yard or so as he approached, then carried on feeding.
Through the shadow of the gatehouse, out into the light on the other side. He walked a few yards, then stopped. He had no idea what he was supposed to do next. He will meet you, the instructions had said, and Psellus had been too preoccupied with the other prospective horrors of the journey to think too closely about that part of it. Subconsciously, he'd never had much faith in his chances of getting this far, so there hadn't seemed much point.
But now he was here, by the looks of it the only living creature in Civitas Vadanis, apart from the chicken. He drew in a breath to call out 'hello' with, but the sheer scale of the silence overawed him and he breathed out again.
Cities don't just empty themselves, like barrels with leaky seams. Either everybody was dead, or there'd been an evacuation. Either way, it looked as though he'd wasted his time. He was struggling to come to terms with that when he saw something move, in an alley on the other side of the square. At first he was convinced it was just a stray dog; but when it came out of the shadows he saw it was a man; a dark-skinned man, like himself.
Well, then, he thought. This must be Ziani Vaatzes.
Shameful to have to admit it to himself, but he was shaking; not with fear, because his city's worst living enemy was striding toward him in an empty place. The last time he'd shaken this way was when he was seventeen, and the girl who'd agreed to come with him to the apprentices' dance had stepped out of the porch of her father's house into the lamplight, and the rush of mingled joy and fear had crippled his knees and crushed his chest.
'Lucao Pselius?'
The voice startled him. He'd been expecting a deep, powerful sound, something like the first low roll of thunder before the first crack of lightning. The voice that called out his name was high, rather tentative; and the embodiment of complicated evil shouldn't have a whining downtown accent.
'That's me,' he heard himself say. 'Are you Ziani Vaatzes?'
A slight nod. He came to a halt about three yards away; about average height for a Mezentine, stocky, square; thin wrists and small hands, unusual in an engineer; a weaker chin than he'd expected, a rounded nose, hair just starting to thin on the top of his head. Such an ordinary man; the only way to make him stand out was to empty the city. Painfully hard to believe that this was the man who'd caused the war, slaughtered the mercenaries, betrayed Civitas Eremiae, written the atrocious poetry. Had he really come all this way to meet such an ordinary little man?
