Evil for Evil Read Online Free Page B

people who told me this, but I have no reason to believe they’re lying.
    Trust again. As Orsea had said, that old thing. Valens reached across the table for the ink bottle and wrote a requisition
     for food, boots, blankets; he hesitated, then added ten barrels of arrows and two surgeons. Wasteful, because if Miel Ducas
     really was dead, quite soon there’d be no resistance to feed or arm, Anser was quite right about that. Even so; he sealed
     the requisition and put it on the pile for the clerks to collect. He wondered if he ought to have Anser’s letter copied to
     Orsea, but decided against it.
    He picked up another sheet of paper, and wrote on it:
    Valens to Anser, greetings.
    Make finding out about the Ducas your first priority. I can’t send you Jarnac Ducas, he’s too useful to me here; at last I’ve
     found an Eremian who’s good for something other than causing me problems. I’m sending you what you asked for, but there won’t
     be any more. I think it’s time to cut our losses, even if the Ducas is still alive. Once you’ve found out about that, disentangle
     yourself and come home; we’ve had a change of plans here, and I need you to do something for me. I’m sorry for wasting your
     time …
    Valens hesitated, then picked up the pumice and rubbed out the last line. He wrote instead:
    I hope you’ve enjoyed your holiday (I know how much you like travel and meeting new people). One last thing; if any of your
     people there have heard any rumors — anything at all — about who sold out Civitas Eremiae to the Mezentines, I want to know
     about it. Until I know the answer to that question, I’m wasting my time here trying to plan any kind of strategy.
    He lifted his head and looked out of the window. It had stopped raining. Too late now, of course. As far as he was concerned,
     the day was a dead loss.
    Well, he was in the library, he might as well read a book. There were plenty to choose from. His father (his father used to
     say that reading was like taking a bath; sometimes you had to do it) had bought a hundredweight of books (various) from a
     trader. He had had the books unpacked, and shelves put up in the old game larder to store them on. When Valens was fifteen,
     he’d told him he could choose five books for his own; the rest would be burned. Valens had read them all, desperately, in
     a hurry, and made his choice. Varro’s
On Statecraft,
Yonec’s
Art of War,
the Suda
Encyclopedia,
Statianus on revenues and currency, and the
Standard Digest of Laws & Statutes;
five books, Valens reckoned, that between them contained the bare minimum of knowledge and wisdom a prince needed in order
     to do his job properly. When he announced that he’d made his choice, his father had had the five books burned and spared the
     rest; books should be a man’s servant, he declared, not his master. Valens wasn’t quite sure he saw the point, but he’d learned
     the lesson, though not perhaps the one his father had intended to convey: that to value anything is to give it an unacceptable
     degree of power over you, and to choose a thing is to lose it.
    Most of what survived the bonfire was garbage: inaccurate books with pretty pictures, elegant and insipid belles-lettres,
     genteel pornography. When his father died, Valens sold most of them back to the same trader and started building a real library.
     There were three sections: technical and reference, literature, and the finest collection of hunting manuals in the world.
    He stood up, faced the shelves like a general addressing his troops on the eve of battle, and made a choice.
    Regentius’
Calendar of Hawks and Ladies
had been one of the original hundredweight. It was a big, fat book with lurid pictures of birds of prey and couples having
     sex, apparently drawn by a scribe who’d never seen either, but there was one chapter that justified keeping it. The woman
     is a heron who feeds alone on the marshes; the man is the wild falcon who hunts her and is