Published at 29th of December 2023 9:47 am

Chapter 42: Four years earlier

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I knew of Sword-master Shimon. Makin told me stories about him. About his exploits as a young man, champion to kings, teacher of champions, legend of the tourney. I hadn’t expected him to be so old.

“Yes, Sword-master,” I said, and I followed him out into the courtyard.

To say he moved like a swordsman would be understatement. He looked as old as Tutor Lundist, with the same long white hair, but he stepped as if he heard the sword-song beating through each moment of the day.

Qalasadi had gone from the shadows and the courtyard lay empty but for a serving girl crossing with a basket of washing, and the men on guard at the gate. Other guards crowded the door of the refectory behind us, but they didn’t dare follow us out. Shimon had not extended them an invitation.

The sword-master turned to face me. The bookish look of him surprised me. He could have passed as a scribe, but for the dark burn of the sun and a hawkishness about the eyes. He drew his sword. A standard issue blade the same as mine.

“When you’re ready, young man,” he said.

I slid my sword out, wondering how to play this. Qalasadi was probably telling my uncle who I really was right now, so why not make full use of the opportunity?

I slapped at his blade, and he did that rolling-wrist trick the Prince of Arrow used, only better, and took my sword out of my hand. I heard laughter from the doorway.

“Try harder,” Shimon said.

I smiled and picked my sword up. This time I moved in quick with a thrust at his body. He did the trick again but I rolled my wrist with his and kept my blade.

“Better,” he said.

I attacked him with short precise combinations, the moves I had been working on with Makin. He fended me off without apparent effort, replying at the end of each attack with a counter-attack that I could barely contain. The rapid clash of metal on metal echoed around the courtyard. I felt the music of steel rise about me. I felt that cold calm sensation rolling out over my arms, cheeks, the skin of my back. I heard the song.

Without thought I attacked, slicing high, low, feinting, deploying my full strength at precisely the right moments, all of me moving, feet, arms, hips, only my head still. I increased the tempo, increased it, and increased it again. At times I couldn’t see my blade or his, only the shape of our bodies, and the necessity of the dance let me know how to move, how to block. The sound of our parrying became like the clickety-click of knitting needles in expert hands.

Shimon’s hard old face didn’t look made for smiling, but a smile found its way there. I grinned like an idiot, sweat dripping off me.

“Enough.” He stepped away.

I found it hard not to follow him, to press the attack, but I let my sword drop. There had been a joy in it, in the purity, living on the edge of my blade without thought. My heart pounded and sweat soaked me, but I had nothing of the anger that normally builds even in practice sessions. We had made a thing of beauty.

“Could you beat me?” I asked, pulling in a breath. The old man seemed hardly winded.

“We both won, boy,” he said. “If I’d taken a victory we would have both lost.”

I took that as a yes. But I understood him. I hoped that I would have had the grace to step back if I saw him weaken. Not to do so would have spoiled the moment.

Shimon sheathed his sword. “Enjoy your lunch, guardsman,” he said.

“That’s it?” I asked as he turned to go. “No advice?”

“You don’t try hard enough at the start, and you try too hard at the end,” he said.

“Hardly technical.”

“You have a talent,” he said. “I hope you have other talents too. They will probably bring you more happiness.”

And he went.

“Unreal,” Greyson said when I returned to the table. “I’ve never seen a thing like that.”

And that was all the time I had to bask in my glory. The bell sounded to let us know lunch had ended and I got to go back to guarding the Lowery Gate.

The Lowery Gate nearly broke me. I gave deep consideration to naming myself to my grandfather. In the end though, I wanted to see how this court worked from the inside, how my relatives went about their lives, who they really were. I guess I wanted a window into my past and not to mucky it up with my own surprises.

I slept again in the guardhouse and woke to new duties. Qalasadi didn’t appear to have gone to my uncle. I suspected that he thought I would wield some influence once my identity was known and he didn’t want to make an enemy of me. If he didn’t let my secret slip, who would know that he ever knew it? And so he would face no censure for not revealing me.

My new assignment was as personal guard to Lady Agath, a cousin of my grandfather’s who had been living at Castle Morrow for some years. A fat old lady, getting to the point where the weight started to slip from her as it does with the very old. Live long enough and we all die skinny.

Lady Agath liked to do everything slowly. She paid me no attention other than to moan that my scar was ugly to look at and why couldn’t she have a presentable guard? To the wrinkles brought by her advanced years she added those that fat people acquire as they start to deflate. The overall effect was alarming, as if she were a shed skin, discarded perhaps by a giant reptile. I followed her around Castle Morrow at a snail’s pace, which afforded me the time to look the place over, at least the part of it lying between the privy, the dining hall, Lady Agath’s bedchamber, and the Ladies’ Hall.

“Be still, boy, you’re never still,” Lady Agath said.

I hadn’t moved a muscle for five minutes. I continued the habit and held my tongue.

“Don’t be smart with me,” she said. “Your eyes are always flitting from one thing to the next. Never still. And you think too much. I can see you thinking right now.”

“My apologies, Lady Agath,” I said.

She harrumphed, jowls quivering, and settled back in her black lace. “Play on,” she told the minstrel, a dark and handsome fellow in his twenties who had a sufficient combination of looks and talent to hold the attention of Agath and three other old noblewomen at one end of the Ladies’ Hall.

The Ladies’ Hall appeared to be where Horse Coast women came to die. For certain there weren’t any ladies there on the right side of sixty.

“You’re doing it again,” Lady Agath hissed.

“My apologies.”

“Go to the wine-cellar and tell them I want a jug of wine, Wennith red, something from the south slopes,” Lady Agath told me.

“I’m not supposed to leave you unattended, Lady Agath,” I said.

“I’m not unattended, I have Rialto here.” She waved toward the minstrel. “I always have my wine from the cellar. I don’t know what they do to it in that kitchen but they ruin it. Leave it open to the air I guess. And the girls always dawdle so,” she remarked to the other ladies. “Go, boy, quick about it.”

I had my doubts as to whether Rialto could protect Lady Agath from an angry wasp, let alone any other threats, but I didn’t feel her to be in any danger, and I didn’t much care if she was, so I left without complaint.

It took me a while to find my way down to the right cellar, but after a few wrong turns I located the place. You can generally tell a wine-cellar by the sturdiness of the door, second only to the treasury door in the majority of castles. Even the most loyal servants will steal your wine given a quarter of a chance, and they’ll piss the evidence over the wall.

I had another trip to find the day cook and get him to unlock for me. He sat on a chair positioned by the door and set to chewing on the leg of mutton he’d carried down with him in his apron.

“Jugs are by the door. Go find what you want. Don’t leave the spigot dripping. Wennith reds are at the far end, left corner, marked with a double cross and crown.”

I lit a lantern from his and ventured in.

“Watch out for spiders,” he said. “The smaller brown ones are bad. Don’t get bit.” When he said “small” he made a circle with his finger and thumb that didn’t look particularly small.

The cellar stretched on for dozens of yards, the wine casks stacked on shelves, most unbroached, the occasional one set with a spigot. I wound a path along the narrow alleys, squeezing past a loading truck and several empty casks left to trip me.

The Wennith red caskets were all sealed save for an empty one. I suspected most of its contents had swilled through the Lady Agath on their way to the privy. The tools and spare spigots for broaching a new cask weren’t apparent. I noted a door, almost concealed beneath a build-up of grime and mould, behind a stack of emptied barrels. It looked too disused to be a store cupboard, but the need of a mallet and spigot provided a good excuse to have a look behind. I’m an explorer at heart and I’d come to nose around in any case. What noble folk keep in their cellars and dungeons can tell you a lot about them. My father kept most of my road-brothers for torture and execution in his dungeon. I won’t say that they didn’t deserve it. Harsh but fair, that’s what my father’s dungeon said about him. Mostly harsh.

I had to lift and heave at the same time to get the door to judder across the flagstones, pushing the empties aside. When a gap had opened large enough to admit me, I went in. A spiral staircase led down. The stairs themselves were carved stone, the work of the castle masons, but the shaft down which they led was poured, Builder-stone. The shaft led down fifty feet or so, into the bedrock. At the bottom an archway led into a rectangular chamber dominated by a grimy machine of cylinders, bolts, and circular plates. Glow-bulbs provided a weak light, three of maybe twenty still working, though not as bright as those in the Tall Castle.

I crossed to the machine and ran a hand along one of its many pipes. My fingers came away black, leaving gleaming streaks of exposed silver metal. The whole machine shook with a faint vibration, little more than heavy footfalls echoing in a stone floor.

“Go away.” An old man stood there, sketched rapidly by an invisible hand. The ghost of an old man I should say, because only light fashioned him. I could see the machine through his body, and he had no colour to his flesh, as if he were made from fog. He wore white clothes, close fitting, of a strange cut, and from one moment to the next his whole form would flicker as if a moth had passed before whatever light was projected to create him.

“Make me,” I said.

“Ha! That’s a good one.” He grinned. In looks he could have been brother to Sword-master Shimon. “Most folk just run screaming when I say ‘boo.’”

“I’ve seen my share of ghosts, old man,” I said.

“Of course you have, boy,” he said. He looked as though he were humouring me. Which was odd given that he was a ghost himself.

“How long have you haunted this place, and what manner of machine is this?” I asked. It pays to be to the point with ghosts and spirits. They tend to vanish before you know it.

“I’m not a ghost. I’m a data echo. The man I am copied from lived another fourteen years after I was captured—”

“How long?”

“—and died more than a thousand years ago,” he said.

“You’re the ghost of a Builder?” I asked. It seemed far-fetched. Even ghosts don’t last that long.

“I am an algorithm. I am portrayed in the image of Fexler Brews, my responses are extrapolated from the six terats of data gathered on the man during the course of his life. I echo him.”

I understood some of the words. “What data? Numbers? Like Qalasadi keeps in his books of trade?”

“Numbers, letters, books, pictures, unguarded moments captured in secret, phrases muttered in his sleep, exclamations cried out in coitus, chemical analysis of his waste, public presentations, private meditations, polygraphic evidence, DNA samples. Data.”

“What can you do for me, ghost?” His gibberish meant little to me. It seemed that they had watched him and written his story into a machine—and now that story spoke to me even though the man himself was dust on the wind.

Fexler Brews shrugged. “I’m an old man out of my time. Not even that. An incomplete copy of an old man out of his time.”

“You can tell me secrets. Give me the power of the ancients,” I said. I didn’t think he would, or my grandfather would already be emperor, but it didn’t hurt to try.

“You wouldn’t understand my secrets. There’s a gap between what I say and what you can comprehend. You people could fill that gap in fifty years if you stopped trying to kill each other and started to look at what’s lying around you.”

“Try me.” I didn’t like his tone. At the end of it this thing before me was nothing but a shadow-play, a story being told by a machine of cogs and springs and magic all bound by the secret fire of the Builders. “What does this do?” I tapped the machinery with my foot. “What is it for?”

Fexler blinked at me. Perhaps he had often blinked so and the machine remembered. “It has many purposes, young man, simple ones that you might understand—the pumping and purification of water—and others that are beyond you. It is a hub, part of a network without end, a tool for observation and communication, bunkered away for security. For me and my kind it serves as one of many windows onto the small world of flesh.”

“Small?” I smiled. He lived in a metal box not much bigger than a coffin.

Fexler frowned, peevish. “I have other things to do: go and play elsewhere.”

“Tell me this,” I said. “My world. It’s not like the one I read about in the oldest books. When they talk about magic, about ghosts, it’s as if they are fairy-tales to frighten children. And yet I have seen the dead walk, seen a boy bring fire with just a thought.”

Fexler frowned as if considering how to explain. “Think of reality as a ship whose course is set, whose wheel is locked in place by universal constants.”

I wondered if a drink would help with such imaginings. All that wine seemed very tempting.

“Our greatest achievement, and downfall, was to turn that wheel, just a fraction. The role of the observer was always important—we discovered that. If a tree falls in the wood and no one hears it, it both does and doesn’t make a sound. If no one sees it, then it is both standing and not standing. The cat is both alive and dead.”

“Who mentioned a fecking cat?”

The ghost of Fexler Brews sighed. “We weakened the barriers between thought and matter—”

“I’ve heard this before,” I said. Ferrakind had told me something similar. Could this ghost of a Builder share that same madness? The Nuban had spoken of barriers thinning, of the veil between life and death wearing through. “The Builders made magic? Brought it into the world with their machines?”

“There is no magic.” Fexler shook his head. “We changed the constants. Just a little. Strengthened the link between want and what is. Now not only is the tree both fallen and unfallen—if the right man wills it so, with sufficient focus, the fallen tree will stand. The zombie cat will walk and purr.”

“What’s a zombie?”

Another sigh. Fexler vanished and all the lights went out. Even my lantern.

I climbed back up the stairs in the dark, got bitten by a spider, and was very late with Lady Agath’s wine.

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