She shook her head. “It’s the big score,” she said, and even though I knew her so well, the low hiss in her voice thrilled me. “Really, it is. The one and only. If it goes through, we’ll never have to work again.”

  OH, THAT.

  The big score. The ultimate caper. The very last and the very best. If it actually comes off, all your troubles will be over, money will flow’ like rivers when the snow melts, the rest of your life will be a symphony of sweetness and joy and you’ll have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was all worthwhile, that you were right to spend your life and your talents on this side of the fence, that it wasn’t all a horrible mistake and a tragic betrayal of everything you might otherwise have been. And it comes only once in a lifetime, until you screw it up and barely escape by the skin on the backs of your heels, and the week after next you start off all over again with another big score or ultimate caper.

  But the trouble is, you have faith. It's like falling in love. You know full well, when the first poison tendrils hit you and start winding themselves through your heartstrings, that it’s all a mistake and it can only end in tears, but what the hell, you can't help it. It’s not a rational, informed choice. You see, and you believe.

  Blessed are those who have seen and yet have not believed; but the blessed in this context are few and far between. Personally, I think the idea of the big score calls out to the inspired part in us, the part wherein dwell all those wonderful wasted gifts and talents we live by perverting and abusing; every master needs a masterpiece. You can spend thirty years painting a hundred and twenty portraits of noblemen's prize racehorses, or you can be Prosper of Schanz and use up the same length of time creating just one colossal bronze horse. The racehorses will pay better, in the long run, but the bronze horse will be a keystone of men’s souls until the sun goes cold. Also, with the big score, you get all the money at once, which means you can stash it somewhere safe, turn into a dragon and sprawl all over it till you rot.

  “TELL ME ABOUT it,” I said.

  She shook her head, which made the ends of her hair swing like bells. “I know you, remember?”

  She thought that if I knew what the game was, I’d dart in ahead of her, do the scam myself and cut her out. The thought never crossed my mind, though it may have hung in the air overhead like the sun.

  “Fine. You need the ambassador out of the way so he won’t recognise you. Does he actually have to be dead?”

  “I ask you to do one simple little thing for me, and all I get is attitude.”

  “Killing people makes things complicated,” I said. “More difficult, not less. If an ambassador suddenly drops dead, people ask questions. The whole point, I’d have thought, is to avoid curiosity.”

  “Not if he dies in his sleep of a heart attack.”

  Diamonds are proverbially a girl’s best friend, but she was also on excellent terms with foxgloves. As well as being an outstanding artist, she has a thorough grasp of practical alchemy, an encyclopedic knowledge of the herbiary and a rock steady hand. A girl who’s never happier than when she’s among the flowers.

  “All right,” I said. “Why me? I don’t know the man. I don’t mix in those circles. You obviously do, or you wouldn’t be scared stiff of bumping into him. You do it.”

  “I might get caught.”

  I breathed in deep, then out again slow. "It works both ways, you know. I could tell on you.”

  She beamed at me. “You’d never do a thing like that.” “Don’t be so sure. When they're pulling out my teeth with blacksmith’s tongs and asking me who put me up to it, I could say all sorts of things."

  “Tell them the Blemmyans paid you to do it. They’d love that.”

  “You tell them.”

  “No thanks. Why keep a dog and bark yourself?”

  "I don’t know the man,” I repeated.

  “I’ll get you an introduction.”

  “Why me?”

  She gave me a smile like a sunrise. “Because this job’s really difficult and suicidally dangerous and you’re the smartest and most resourceful man who ever lived, of course.”

  “Ah.”

  IF YOU WANT to learn a profession, I heartily recommend being on the run from the authorities. You’re holed up somewhere, in a derelict bam or an abandoned warehouse, and all you have with you by way of entertainment, spiritual guidance and self-improvement is one book.

  In my case, Principia Medica, by Aimeric de Poulignac. I stole a luxury edition of it many years ago from the treasury of the Golden Wing monastery at Scell, along with a sackful of other trifles. During the course of the proceedings, I got in the way of a crossbow bolt loosed off by a careless watchman. I managed to get as far as the harbour, where I had a fishing-boat tied up ready and waiting to take me to Steepholm, a small uninhabited island about three miles off the coast, where there’s a ruined priory, an ideal place to stash my modest haul while I made enquiries among wealthy art-lovers. I got to Steepholm, and crawled on my hands and knees to the ruins, and after that things are a bit vague. I remember waking up in a shirt brown and sodden with blood to find eight inches of oak dowel sticking out of me, and not feeling myself.

  I hadn’t set out to steal the book; it was dark in the treasury and I scooped things up at random and shoved them in the sack, until the barking of unpleasant-sounding dogs made me think it was probably time to go. It was only when I opened the sack, hoping to find something I could use to mop up the blood, that I saw the gold lettering on the gold-and-jewel-encrusted spine. What a pity, I'd been thinking, that there isn’t a doctor around, he might possibly have saved my life—and then, lying half-covered by the burlap, not a doctor but the thing that makes doctors; the standard work, the set text, everything you need to know about repairing the human body between two vulgarly ornate covers. It was as though I'd been starving and crying out for bread, and stumbled on a two hundredweight sack of flour.

  Poulignac wrote in Old High Scherian and the book has no index, but eventually I found the bit about extracting arrows and more or less figured it out; Old High Scherian isn’t that different from Melgoil, and if you can understand Pausanee, you can sort of burst your way through Melgoil, like a pig in an outhouse. In retrospect I realise that I guessed some of the words wrong. I was fine with the introduction (I clearly recall the statement, “arrows inflict wounds with a fatality greater than that of other weapons, particularly when surgical assistance cannot be obtained”) but after that it got a bit technical, and I had to keep flicking back to the anatomy section, with my finger between the pages to keep the place. Still, Poulignac saw me through, more or less. He warned me that muscle contraction can be strong enough to bend the point of the arrow, so press down a tad before pulling up—sure enough, he was right; the horrible thing had missed the bone, thank God, but the tip was bent up into a hook, which would’ve ripped me open if I hadn’t disentangled it first. Fortunately I trusted him when he told me to enlarge the wound channel slightly to aid extraction. I really didn’t want to, because it meant pushing the pin of a big gold brooch I found in the sack all the way down the wound until I felt the end of the arrowhead, and prising the hole open to make that extra bit of room, but I did it anyway and thereby saved myself from the horrors of pulling out the shaft and leaving the head still in there. All in all, the whole business went surprisingly smoothly, and the worst thing that happened was blood getting all over the exquisitely illuminated pages of the book, thereby significantly reducing its value to collectors.

  After that, fever set in, as Dr Aimeric had warned me it would, and after that I was as weak as a kitten for a long time, with nothing to do but lie very still and catch up on my reading. By the time I left the island, I reckon I knew as much about the science of medicine as most of the people who earn their living from it, and very useful that knowledge has been to me over the years. It was only later, during a period of enforced isolation in a condemned foundry in Mesembrocea, that I realised that Poulignac had been wrong about quite a few things, which led me to research this and that, which resulted in my own Praecepta Medica, which they tell me has pushed Poulignac out at most of the leading schools, and for which, incidentally, I never got a bent trachy in royalties.

  Long story short; I make a pretty convincing doctor when the need arises, so when we were trying to figure out how to worm me into the palace so I could murder the Lurian ambassador, I suggested she introduced me as the learned Dr So-and-so, professor of medicine at the Echmen Imperial University.

  Echmen doctors are the best in the world, and I decided I was one of them. I happen to like the Echmen— pity I can never go back there, really—and their language is actually quite simple when you get into it. She kindly offered to act as my translator—she does actually speak Echmen, believe it or not, one of about twenty people in the West who can; but we had reason to believe that one of the remaining eighteen might be hanging around the Court at that time, so we decided to play it safe. As a doctor, of course, I could poison who the hell I liked, and nobody would be ill-bred enough to comment.

  I’d been professor So-and-so before, so I knew him quite well. I think he actually exists somewhere, hence my reticence with his real name, though if he’s still alive he’d be an old man now. The version of him I created was court physician for a while to the Count of Auvade— during which time I took the opportunity to do the research which led to the Praecepta—and when he left suddenly the Count was quite upset, though I reckon he had other things on his mind, such as the disappearance of the family collection of Barnasite icons.

  Creating a character matters; you need to know your characters inside and out, what they ate for breakfast, what they look for when buying perfume for their mistresses, which diseases they had when they were children, all that sort of thing. I'm lucky; as soon as I think someone up, I know him intimately. I don't have to speculate or ask myself, is this or that right for this person. I just know. Which is why I knew the professor would’ve bought a wool gown as soon as he got off the boat (the Echmen feel the cold so badly in the West) but would insist on keeping his wooden-soled sandals, because no matter how well made, leather soles never feel right and make his back hurt.

  “Where the hell,” she wanted to know, “are we going to get Echmen sandals from?”

  “Attention to detail,” I told her.

  “Yes, but who’s going to notice?”

  "Me.”

  She argued, but only from force of habit. She knew all about attention to detail. Forgers understand these things. They also know that there's some commodities—the passage of time, for example—that can’t be had even for ready money, and you need to find acceptable substitutes. So she made me a pair of Echmen sandals. They were perfect. No good, I told her.

  “You what?”

  “Too new.”

  To her credit, I didn’t need to explain further. Other men might be prepared to go on a long voyage to a strange land in a new pair of sandals, but not the professor. He'd be set in his ways, and experienced enough to know that no man is more wretched than he who finds himself a long way from home in uncomfortable shoes. He'd have worn his favourite pair, properly broken in, so perfectly adjusted to the shape of his foot that he didn’t know he was wearing them.

  To simulate the effects of three years of daily wear, she gouged out shallow slots in the soles, soaked and dried them to open the grain, then polished them glassy smooth with ten different grades of carpenter's sand, applied on a wooden strickle, followed by buffing soap. She frayed the leather straps with the edge of a razor, just enough to take the square off the edges, and stained them with vinegar to simulate sweat. In fact, it was her idea to roughen the underside of the soles—which don’t show and nobody but me would ever have anything to do with—because an Echmen academic would do a lot of walking on pavements, and in the city the doctor came from, the streets are paved with volcanic tufa. If she wasn’t scarier than a cave full of tigers, I’d like her a lot. She has a strain of integrity that I can’t help but admire.

  The scar left by that stupid arrow is one of my very few distinguishing marks, and of course you have to peel my shirt off to see it. Unfortunately it’s recorded in vivid detail in the files of criminal investigation agencies right across the world, which is why I keep my shirt on even when it’s baking hot. Whereby hangs a tale. There was this man in, I think, Mezentia who was pretending to be me in furtherance of some illegal scheme or other— I assume money was involved, but I don’t know the details—and he’d read the files and knew about the scar. There was no real need to worry about it. There was an outside chance he’d have to seduce the wife of the Dean of Humanities, but she wasn’t likely to know what was in the police files. Aside from that, no real issue. But this man knew about attention to detail and the vital importance of being in character, so he got an arrow, with a bodkin head like the one I’d been shot with, and fixed it to a door pointing out at right angles, and pulled the door towards himself sharply, impaling himself in the precise spot where I’d been hit. He healed up pretty well to begin with, but then something must’ve got in the wound, because he went down with gangrene and died.

  I suppose it’s a bit like religion. Perfect virtue, they tell us, can be achieved only by imitating in every detail the life of the Invincible Sun in His human incarnation; which is why nobody can be perfect, since in order to do that you’d need to be able to die for the sins of the people, be resurrected and ascend bodily to Heaven in splendour. Do not try this, as the saying goes, at home. There’s a level of perfection that’s unattainable by definition. He can do it, you can’t, so don’t bother trying. To which I responded at an early stage by saying; if I can't be perfectly virtuous, I’ll always be imperfect, therefore sinful and wicked, and once I’ve conceded that it’s all just a matter of degree, which really doesn’t interest me, so why bother at all? My tutors got vexed at me when I pointed this out to them and told me I was missing the point. I got the point all right. When they say, you’re missing the point, it means they know their position is logically untenable. The joker who pretended to be me did everything right, in terms of fastidious authenticity, but he died and wasn’t able to resurrect himself. I didn’t die. And when I did, I rose again from the dead. Not that I’m drawing a parallel. Just something to think about.

  I hope you’ll understand what I'm getting at when I tell you that the scar on my chest was, as far as I was aware, the only clue I’d left open. Everything else that was possible to cover in advance, we covered. So why omit the scar? I know it sounds stupid, but when I really immerse myself in a character I can go in so deep, I need something—like the golden thread in the Labyrinth myth—to find my way home with. So long as I had the scar, I’d know who I really was.

  "That’s stupid,” she told me.

  “I know.”

  “Something like that could get us both hung.”

  "Yes.”

  "It’s vanity, that's what it is. It’s you saying, I’m so smart, I can leave a bloody great big clue lying about and still you're too dumb to catch me. It'd be like me signing my work on the back in tiny letters."

  But she’d done that, several times, and got away with it. Well, I’d noticed, but nobody else. “I agree,” I said. “But I’m superstitious.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “It’s like being superstitious,” I said. “And anyway, do you know any way to get rid of a twenty-year-old scar?"

  “There isn’t one.”

  THE RECTOR OF the University, no less, introduced me to the Duke and his court at a reception for the Lurian ambassador. The Doctor, he explained, had come to town to examine some ancient and incredibly rare medical treatises in the Palace library. He’d brought with him letters of introduction and accreditation from his own faculty back in Echmen, together with recommendations and testimonials from a dozen world-famous universities, all of which had been duly lodged and declared acceptable by the Abbot and chapter, who’d invited him to lecture to them on Saloninus’ theory of the circulation of the blood.

  The Duke said he’d heard about that, though he had no idea what it meant. I explained it to him. He was shocked. You mean it goes round and round inside you, he said. Yes, I told him, like irrigation channels or the works of a water-clock. But surely you’d feel something, he said, a sort of throbbing, and a sloshing noise. The human body, I told him, is a remarkable thing. Yes, he said. Quite.

  Then I was shoved in front of a few more deadheads, and then the Lurian ambassador, who startled the life out of me by greeting me in practically flawless Echmen, though he did get a couple of the tones wrong. His posting before last, he explained, was as diplomatic attache to Hocha, on the border between the Sashan and the Echmen, and while he was there he learned the language.

  You speak it very well, I told him. He was pleased. Do you really think so, he said.

  After that, we got on like a house on fire, and since nobody else in the room could understand a word we were saying, we ended up in a corner of the room, quiet so we could hear ourselves think and handy for the food.

  “It must be awkward for you,” he said. “I mean, there’s hardly anything here you can eat.”

  I smiled. “Our dietary laws aren’t nearly as strict as people think. Besides, even if you’re ultra-orthodox, you can eat pretty much anything you like so long as you sanctify it first.”

  “Excuse me?”

  "With cha powder,” I explained.

  “I don’t think I ever came across—”

  “Ah.” Mock furtive. “It’s not something we tell foreigners about.”

  “Oh. So what—?”

  “Cha powder,” I told him, "is the seeds and flowers of a dozen holy herbs, dried and ground and then blessed by the monks of the Crystal Sky monastery, on the slopes of the Holy Mountain. A few specks of cha purges all trace of abomination, so you can eat any food that’s put in front of you. Provided," I added, “that your motive in doing so is to spare offence to your host, or extreme starvation. Just liking how the stuff tastes won’t do, unfortunately.”

 

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