6. Truth Potion
On the way back to the Ramkin-Vimes House from Agatha's shop, Isabella made a sudden about face and marched up to a man in a brown leather vest and shabby breaches. Workingman's attire, like thousands of men in the city wore. He slipped behind a mule but Isabella called out to him.
"Sir! Could you please let his lordship know I'll be visiting at nine? Thanks so much."
The agent considered not delivering the message to the Patrician, but guessed he'd be in deeper trouble if Isabella showed up without warning than if he just admitted he'd been tagged.
When nine came around, Isabella sent a Palace servant to inform the Patrician that they would be meeting in a room one floor above, a sitting room far more comfortable than his office. She prepared it alone, setting out the candles and opening the window a crack to air things out. The cloth bag she'd brought with her was set in a corner, next to the sideboard.
The Patrician appeared at a quarter after with a large roll of paper under his arm. Without a word, Isabella held out her hand. He placed her wedding ring in her palm. She set it on the sideboard.
"A nasty trick."
"I do apologize."
A servant brought in a tea tray and they drank for a few minutes without speaking, watching each other. The mutual examination was becoming something of a ritual.
"You made some interesting visits today," said the Patrician, setting his cup aside. "I have always had a naïve attitude toward club sandwiches. As a young man, I was rather fond of eating what I realize now is a metaphor for spacetime. Remarkable."
"Ridcully is wearing a terrible cow's eyeball around his neck."
"It has the benefit of making him a social pariah."
Lord Vetinari watched Isabella set the sealed vial on the table between them.
"I have always found it doubtful that a mixture of certain herbs, mystery ingredients and magic spells could compel someone to tell such an elusive thing as the truth," he said. "It seems to imply that the world is made up of unbendable truths that can be tapped in some universal way, when in reality the truth is one of the most flexible substances known to man. And dangerous, of course. In my experience, 'tell the truth' is usually an invitation to present one's own narrow perspective of a given situation, and once that's out, everyone usually regrets it."
"As a wise man said: If you want to tell the truth, have one foot in the stirrup," said Isabella.
The Patrician smiled. "Indeed, though it sounds better in the original Tsortian." He peeled the wax off the vial and handed it to her. "You appear to be in the saddle, Miss Capelli."
She plugged her nose and took a swig. Immediately she fell into a fit of coughing and sputtering into her sleeve. Lord Vetinari had to take the vial away before she spilled the rest of the oily liquid all over her skirt.
"Gods," she said. "Awful."
"I've heard it tastes of a cross between rabbit fur and brussel sprouts."
Isabella wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "If I'd known the truth would taste so terrible, I wouldn't have drunk it."
Lord Vetinari smiled.
And drank the rest of it.
"You didn't have to do that, Havelock."
He allowed a brief grimace to pass over his face. "Yes. Brussel sprouts," he said in a tone that implied more of the rabbit fur taste would have been welcome. He coughed into his fist. "We shall see how effective Mistress Agatha's truth potion is. Ten minutes until the effect, I think?"
Taking the potion served a purpose, of course. It wouldn't do for Isabella to have exchanged the potion for water and resealed the vial. He didn't think her the type to do that, but then, he was currently investigating what type of person she really was. Now. Not then. He was being careful to separate the two.
"Let's get some fresh air before this hits us," she said.
She led him to the wall next to the sideboard and pressed a nondescript part of the white striped wall paper. A panel slid back. Beyond was a dark, dusty passage, lit here and there by small slits in the stone walls through which moonlight shown. Isabella led the way, straight fifty feet, a right, two hundred feet, another right, a hundred feet to a stairway, sixty winding steps up. Finally, she stopped at a stone wall, pressed a space in the blackness and a door swung open.
Wind blew in, whistling through the hinges in the door and spinning down the corridor behind them. It picked up Isabella's skirt and the Patrician's robe as they stepped out onto a large stone shelf. The roofs of the Palace were below them. The Rimward Tower was, with its widdershins twin, the tallest part of the Winter Palace. Crenallations rose like squared teeth around most of the tower except for a space facing Lower Broadway that was clear, a sheer edge used centuries ago as the setting for some anti-siege machine. There was nothing there now. The entrance to the secret passage lay in a cylindrical stone structure in the very center of the tower. It looked like a top hat.
Over the edge of the tower they could see in reduced size the Assassins Guild next to the Fools, and the Day Watch House across from the Guild of Thieves. Beyond was the Brass Bridge over a 90-degree bend in the Ankh.
"My favorite view," said Isabella. She pointed at the bridge. "One day I'd like to build a tunnel under the Ankh right there. We could direct commercial traffic underneath Broadway and free up congestion on the surface." She sighed. "Leonard still hasn't come up with a water-tight tunnel shield, though he's left his attic twice to test prototypes. The tunnels under Widdershins Park work like a dream but digging under the river is…" She glanced at Lord Vetinari. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"
"Perhaps we should sit before the Truth knocks us off our feet."
They sat on the edge of the tower shelf, their legs dangling over the side. Ankh-Morpork spread out below them, a cluster of light, brighter in some neighbourhoods where people could afford to burn candles rather than use them to fry up the evening meal. The Patrician knew the tower well and appreciated the view. He'd discovered it as a young Assassin casing out the Palace when it was in the hands of the patricians Homicidal Lord Winder and Mad Lord Snapcase. He'd even allowed himself a bit of graffiti once with the green face paint he'd used as camouflage. Carpe noctem could not be seen on the tower wall even right after he wrote it. It was camouflage paint, after all.
The foolish things one does when one is young, the Patrician thought wistfully.
"May I begin?" he asked.
"If you promise to answer my questions too."
He nodded.
"Where have you lived the past fifteen years?" he asked.
Isabella patted the masonry beside her. "Right here. At the Palace. I've been telling the truth about that. Where did you think I was?"
"I was at the funeral. I had no reason to believe you were not in the coffin."
They talked for a long while, dealing first with the questions from the night before, all answered calmly, without guile. Isabella denied knowledge of a carriage accident or of leaving the city to live elsewhere. She stuck by the Lady Vetinari story, describing the fundraiser at Lady Sybil's and its guests, who were mostly nobles and wealthy merchants. There were no wizards or other representatives of the magic community in attendance. Lord Vetinari was there, she said, but was talking to Lord Selachii when she went outside for some fresh air. The weather had been completely normal as far as summer nights in Ankh-Morpork went, though she blamed the humidity for the terrible headache she'd had that grew steadily worse as the evening wore on. She remembered pausing among the rhododendrons in Sybil's garden and a feeling of vertigo and then waking up in a bed in the Ramkin House with Sybil looking after her.
Lord Vetinari studied her face but could find no sign that she was avoiding the, for lack of a better word, truth.
"What do you think happened?" he asked.
"I can think of about a half dozen possibilities that fit the facts so far," she said. "It's an interesting spectrum. On one end is some kind of quantum event. On the other is my husband staging a cruel plot to drive me completely insane." She rubbed her eyes. "You're capable of such amazing things."
It was clear by the way she said it that this was not a compliment.
"If there is a plot, it hasn't originated from me," he said.
"Who else would be capable of such a thing?"
"Lady Margolotta was under consideration but that's looking increasingly unlikely. She doesn't have the power to…" The Patrician stopped. He hadn't intended to bring her up.
"Why did you suspect her?"
He listened to himself talk freely about the note he received on the day he was informed that Isabella was in the city. It was ridiculous. Truth potion only worked when the person who took it believed it would. He didn't. Yet he was talking despite his best efforts to keep his mouth shut. It was a new experience for him.
"She's not the type to send you a woman as a gift," Isabella was saying.
"You've met?"
"At the wedding. The week before, rather. She was very condescending at first."
Isabella crossed her legs, tilted her head up and gestured as if she was smoking from a cigarette holder.
"I never guessed that Havelock vould vun day marry such a lovely child," she said in a cool Uberwaldean vampire accent. "Ve vill be good friends, you and I. Ve shall write often and I shall tell you vhat to do to make your new husband happy. I have experience."
Isabella dropped her Margolotta act.
"At least you had the decency to tell me something about your old visit to Uberwald. I was anxious to get a look at her after all of that. She was everything I expected." She laughed suddenly, but dampened it by patting her mouth in a mock show of politeness. "She and my mother got along famously. We did too, actually, after she stopped calling me 'my child' all the time. She's really a fascinating woman."
The Patrician looked thoughtful.
"What is the one thing that all rulers, at some point, want?"
"An heir."
"Hm. While in general I can see the attraction of having you here for that purpose, I don't see the benefit for Lady Margolotta."
"Her riddles are always more subtle."
"Indeed." The Patrician replayed his last sentence or two over in his mind, then dismissed them quickly.
A cool wind skirted the edge of the tower and passed over them. It gave the air a refreshing nip, as if the wind had come from further up the plains where it was raining.
"Tell me," said Isabella, "how do you know me if you aren't my husband?"
"A rather complicated issue." The Patrician sighed. "I was able to help you in certain matters and in return you--" He cut himself off. He could feel the potion chipping at his self control. Wrestling with his own mind wasn't pleasant but he did it often and had more experience (and success) at it than most people. He forced himself to shift gears.
"How well do you know the layout of the city?" he asked.
"Don't change the subject."
"I'm not. You did some work for me before the accident. Some sketches. Surveys and so forth. You had just begun a new city map when whatever happened…happened."
Isabella looked relieved.
"At least that's the same. I did do a map for you back then but it took me a year." She studied the Patrician's face. "We met at a Merchants Guild reception, didn't we?"
He nodded.
"And then?"
"We met again. You were quite anxious to show me drawings you'd made of various bridges."
"I thought the carriage accident was soon after the reception."
"Five months, one week and two days."
He was looking out over the city again. A memory came back to him, a single sharp image that blotted out the panorama. He remembered the dark green marble fireplace in his study at his house – not the Palace, his family manor in Ankh – and huddling very close to the flames, a blanket around his shoulders, a book open on his lap. The quill suspended, dripping ink on the page, then the scratch of the nib like a saw on his nerves.
Merchants Guild sent word of Capelli accident this afternoon...
Isabella was looking at him.
"You're not telling me everything."
The Patrician got smoothly to his feet and offered her a hand.
"You're quite right. If you will accompany me downstairs, I would like to make a small request, if I may."
Out of curiosity, Isabella followed without argument. On a table behind the sitting room sofa, the drafting paper had been spread out, its edges held down by small pyramidal paperweights.
"Would you oblige me by drawing a rough version of the city map?" asked the Patrician.
Isabella picked up a quill.
"What scale?"
He looked at her blankly. It wasn't that she appeared to imply she could draw a map at scale without rulers and proper drafting tools, it was…
He shook off the thought.
"One to 13,000, please."
Isabella sketched quickly, beginning with the general round shape of the city within the old walls, cut by the snaking twists of the Ankh River. Blocks of neighborhoods were shaded in next according to the dissections certain main streets made of the Ankh-Morpork pie. But there were major differences from what the Patrician knew. Wide boulevards where there were supposed to be simple streets, an extra bridge at the extreme rimward edge of the old city walls, peculiar concentrations of buildings, a massive open space that Isabella identified as Widdershins Park, where carriages, banned on the surface, travelled in tunnels under the terraces, groves and pavilions.
"We re-routed or re-built quite a few roads after the rain water reservoirs were constructed, one off Treacle Street and and the other between Quarry and Elm," she said.
She sketched in two large six-sided figures.
"We built them on hills made out of earth brought up from construction of the new winter harbour widdershins of the old piers." On the edge of the paper, she drew a series of squares and curves.
"Parts of the Shades in a line roughly following Elm Street hubward to the bend in the Ankh near Pon's Bridge were torn down and rebuilt as a municipal garden with canals," she said. "We did that in several places, actually. A political nightmare at first. People accused us of destroying their homes and businesses. We started a redevelopment site widdershins of Cunning Artificers," she pointed, "and are subsidizing the rents until things settle down."
"Gardens in the Shades," said Lord Vetinari. "What an interesting idea."
"We didn't do it because we like gardens. We did it because of the fire ordinance."
The Patrician gave her an "obviously" sort of look.
"If there's a fire in one section of Morpork, there's relatively quick access to a canal or a straight road to one of the reservoirs," said Isabella. "Even if things burn a bit, the fire can't spread so quickly to the other sections because of the gardens. We haven't had to put out a fire by opening the flood gates on the Ankh in seven or eight years."
She turned her attention to the center of the map, and pointed to just rimwards of Pseudopolis Yard and the Opera House.
"We built the public library here. Sybil donated the first thousand volumes but now the city has fifty thousand in twelve languages. We plan an expansion next year, and there's no way to build but up." Her eyes sparkled as she began to sketch a building on the edge of the paper. "The hospital on Treacle Mine Road is already six stories but I can make the library eleven -- eleven stories, Havelock -- if instead of using the stone walls as supports, we take steel beams and lay…"
The Patrician didn't need the drawings as she talked. Even under the influence of a truth potion that was bringing on a rotten head ache, he could see the city in his mind. The changes Isabella talked about he sketched in on his mental map and they fit and were sensible, with the possible exception of the library (which encouraged widespread literacy and multiple printing presses) and the hospital (which implied a leap forward in the practice of medicine from what he knew). Otherwise, the city laid out before him in two dimensions was…brilliant.
Isabella set the quill aside and flexed her fingers.
"You didn't marry me for my charms, Havelock; you wanted an architect and planner, someone to improve things physically while you worked on the politics and finances. Until the children came along, all I did was city work."
The Patrician was still gazing down at the map. He didn't bother to comment that the existence of children implied that there was time during the massive overhaul of the municipal landscape for at least two moments of rest.
Isabella went back to her chair and pressed her fingers to her eyes, then down her cheeks. "Do you believe me now?"
"I believe this to be a remarkable situation," he said, "whatever the truth of it."
She looked away from him. On the sideboard was a small gleam of gold. Her wedding ring. She thought about going to get it but she didn't move from her chair.
"I could use your help," she said. "I wouldn't ask unless it was serious."
The Patrician looked at Isabella looking at her wedding ring and narrowed the reasons she hadn't put it back on to two. Three, actually. It was a prop, meaning nothing to her. Or it was no longer needed. Or it was no longer wanted. All of them interesting possibilities.
"We'll consult the wizards tomorrow," he said. "If we avoid lunchtime, perhaps we'll get useful help from them."
"In return for helping me, I'll help you."
Lord Vetinari held up a hand. "I ask for nothing. For now."
"If you intend to work on the issue of vampires tonight, maybe I can give you some information. I know Festus' Uberwald dispatches well; they're an interesting balance with Margolotta's letters. Especially on the latest developments with the Reds and Blacks. Maybe we can compare notes."
The Patrician blinked. He did have an agent named Festus in Uberwald. His best agent there. Possibly his best anywhere on the Disc. It was a coup to have a vampire working for him at all; vampires tended to get touchy about espionage for foreign powers. That was why Festus was one of the Patrician's best kept secrets.
He added it to the tally of things Isabella Capelli shouldn't know. The floor plan of the Palace. The secret passageways. The contents of his desk. Leonard of Quirm in the attic. She had perfect recall of the city map, her version of it anyway. She obviously knew something about his past with Lady Margolotta, and with her comment about Blacks and Reds, she hinted at recent political developments in the vampire community that he knew only from his agents.
He got to his feet and fetched the bag Isabella had brought.
"You are a lady of forethought to come with an overnight bag," he said.
"I'd like a guest room, don't worry."
The Patrician opened the door. "Then we will drop this off and retire to my office. I believe a tea out of the herb Longenkraut with a bit of honey will do wonders to clear the head."
When the door closed, Klieg slipped over the windowsill and around the curtains and stood surveying the room. So many windows. So many places through which to peek. And listen. The talk about the city map had bored her but the mention of Festus interested her immensely. She knew Festus. Everybody knew him. A spy… Klieg poured herself a scotch at the drinks cabinet. Lady Margolotta was going to be delighted to hear the news.
She was about to take a sip of her drink when she froze. There was no movement, no sound. Slowly, her eyes swivelled to the chair where Isabella had been sitting. The scotch glass was set aside and Klieg started sniffing the air, her body bent double until her nose touched the back of the chair, then slid down until it hovered above the seat cushion. She straightened then, a frown on her face. Her nose alerted her to something else, and she began sniffing again, this time leading to the tea cup Isabella had drank from. Klieg licked the edge carefully, then let her nose carry her across the room to the sideboard. And the ring. She looked at it, slipped it into her mouth, bit the gold gently, then removed it and set it with reverence on the sideboard again.
The smell and the taste…
The woman's scent was irresistible, like nothing Klieg had ever smelled before. The scent of an average victim, say, a Vetinari, revealed in its pungency and song the life that could be tasted, one short life but fully lived. A vampire could smell on one of her own kind the scent of a single long, life that stretched indefinitely and thinned as it went. Isabella, though, was different. A thousand lives shimmered. That was the smell of her. As if tasting her would deliver in an instant the same gratification as a thousand victims consumed at once in an impossible orgy. In another world, a comparison could have been drawn between a tobacco cigarette – the stimulating effect of the average victim on a vampire – and a syringe full of heroin.
Klieg already felt the prick of the needle at her vein.
Deep in the night, when even Ankh-Morpork was at its quietest, she sat perched outside the window of the guest room Isabella had selected. The curtains were drawn and the window closed, but Klieg imagined that the scent of her came through the glass. During the vigil, she shivered from the expectation of tasting what lay inside the room. Of course she wouldn't take the woman tonight; the expectation was too delicious.
Dawn approached. Klieg wasn't tired and would have rather stayed, but daylight was not her friend. The window glass was cool beneath her lips when she whispered "Isabeeeeeelllaaaaa" against it before dropping into the night. She needed a bit of a night cap before bed.
