“Look at me, Rojan. I’ve got a city load of starving people, Outside I’ve got Storad trying to batter their way in; inside I’ve got a load of cardinals that are worse than useless, they’re actively trying to counteract everything I do. I’m fairly sure half of them are trying to work out how to bribe their way out of the Mishan gate on the other side. They pretty much all want to hand you over to buy some time. I’ve got guards who are afraid to guard anything, Specials who are still smarting over what you did to Dench, and Dench telling the Storad all our little secrets. And down in the ’Pit I have tunnels. I don’t know how many, or where most of them are, but I do know that if we don’t find them the Storad will, and they’ll use them, because that’ll be one of the secrets Dench will have mentioned. Storad have been poring over the mountainsides; I’ve been watching them. So have the cardinals, and they’re panicking. The Storad are going to find those tunnels eventually and I want to be prepared for when Dench uses them.”
A long time ago, when we were just a castle in a handy pass through the mountains with a warlord who could serve as the definition of “sneaky”, he’d had a load of tunnels made. Devious tunnels that you wouldn’t find unless you fell into them, tunnels that not coincidentally led straight from the keep of the castle to the rear of where any army stupid enough to try to siege us would camp. Which would be great, if we knew where they all were.
I sighed inwardly – I had the feeling I knew what was coming, that I’d already lost this battle. I skipped over the predictable argument and went straight to the “What is it you want me to do?”
Perak’s smile became more genuine, and he looked less tired. “Go to the ’Pit. Find whatever tunnels you can, so we can have them blocked up. Lise has a plan in mind for one of them, if you can find one that opens out near where the Storad are camped. With a bit of luck, getting you out of the cardinals’ sight for a while may help too.”
“When you say ‘find whatever tunnels’, can I take it this means even you don’t know where they are?”
“Not all of them, no.”
“Perak, I really don’t know if I’m the best guy for this job. A structural engineer would be better, surely?”
“I need you out of the way right now, before you get bundled off and sent to Dench. It might give me some time to smooth things over with the cardinals, especially if I can tell them the tunnels aren’t a problem any more. Where better to be out of the way than the ’Pit?”
“Surely you’ve got men down there already? Men who’d be better at it than me?”
“Look, those tunnels are our weakest point bar the gates. I want to be sure, and for that I need to use someone I can trust. I wouldn’t trust a guard further than I could spit him, and the Specials… well, after Dench, trust isn’t something I have in them. You, Pasha, Dendal, Lise, Jake… you’re all I’ve got that I can truly rely on. It was Dendal’s idea. He said the thought of bacon would be enough to persuade you, and it’d make a handy training exercise for some of the younger mages.”
There was that word again, “rely”. Much as I hated it, it was flattering in a way.
“Well, I suppose – Wait, did you say bacon?” If there is one thing in this world that may, perhaps, persuade me there is a Goddess and she looks down on us with something approaching kindness, it’s bacon. Hot, crispy, fat bacon, all golden and crunchy around the edges. My stomach contracted painfully at the thought, and the remembrance of what I was actually going to be eating later – half a bowl of mouldy-looking mush, if I was lucky. If I wasn’t lucky, it would have weevils in it.
“The Storad had a supply train in yesterday. It brought about a hundred pigs, among other things.” Perak tried to suppress a smile. This was his big persuading move. Which was annoying, especially when you considered that it was, in fact, persuading me.
I stared at him while my mouth daydreamed. A hundred pigs. A hundred. That was a lot of bacon, and I’d have forked my own eye out just for one measly, glorious rasher. So it was my stomach rather than my brain that said, “All right, we’ll do it.”
It needed a bit of arranging, so I was left to my own devices for a while. Black shapes kept swimming past my eyes, the voice kept on in my head. I needed sleep, but my stupid conscience would give me lots of lovely dreams that I didn’t want to think about. It was starting to get dark, and that meant that at least one person of my acquaintance would be around, one person who might be able to help me with those shapes.