Free The Devil You Know by K. J. Parker Page A

the file. “It can’t be her,” I said. “Listen. She turned up on the sisters’ doorstep seven years ago. She’s been married to the salt merchant for six years. You blew up Prince Phocas forty-one years ago. The figures don’t tally.”
    He frowned. “It looks just like her,” he said. “I could’ve sworn it was her.” He thought for a moment. “When was Phocas’s palace rebuilt?”
    Back to the files. “It wasn’t,” I said.
    “It must have been. Prime real estate in the middle of the city.”
    I shook my head. “Because of the way it was destroyed,” I told him. “Nobody wanted to go anywhere near the place, they reckoned it was bewitched. The only people who went there were thieves and looters.”
    He turned and looked at me.
    “It’s possible,” I said slowly. “She could have been there all that time. Could she?” I added.
    “Why are you asking me?”
    “Well, you’re the expert,” I said irritably. “You know about alchemy, probably more than we do. As I’ve been trying to get you to understand, it’s a subject we really don’t choose to dwell on.”
    He was silent for a long time. “It’s possible,” he said. “After all, nobody has ever done that experiment before, so it’s anybody’s guess how long the transmutation process takes. It could’ve been thirty-odd years, I just don’t know. Or maybe, once the process is complete, you hibernate like a caterpillar in a cocoon until somebody wakes you up.” He shook his head like a wet dog. “This is silly,” he said. “Why are we speculating, when you’ve got all the facts at your fingertips? Of course you know who she is; name, date and place of birth, date and place of death, come to that. You know everything.”
    I looked away, deeply ashamed. He was asking me for something—as was his right under the contract—and I couldn’t give it to him.
    Yes, we’re omniscient. Of course we are. And to us, all things are possible.
    Up to a point.
    Take human beings, for instance. We can track and trace any human being in an instant. Except that there are exceptions. Tiny ones, of indescribable rarity. Exceptions so trivial and insignificant that they can’t conceivably matter. And they aren’t really exceptions at all, because they’re all to do with that single unbearable overriding abomination, alchemy.
    A human being who’s been alchemically altered ceases, as far as our tracking and tracing protocols are concerned, to exist. Logical; the natural thing that stems from the Created has gone, having been unnaturally altered into something else. The something else, being beyond and outside nature, exists in spite of us—we don’t recognise it, the way a government doesn’t recognise the bunch of pirates and thieves who’ve seized power in the kingdom next door.
    This woman, the one Saloninus claimed as his Eudoxia, bore no trace. She wasn’t in the records. As far as we were concerned, before the moment she woke up in the ruins of Phocas’s palace, she hadn’t existed.
    Oh dear cubed and recubed.
    * * *
    This was too much. I consulted my superiors.
    It only took an instant, and I’m sure Saloninus didn’t even notice I’d gone. I travelled to the office of the Supreme Archive. As luck would have it, the deputy chief is an old acquaintance of mine.
    “It’s possible,” he said.
    He seemed curiously guarded, which I put down to the disgust and horror that alchemy stirs in all of us. “I know it’s possible,” I said. “What I need to know is, can there be any other explanation?”
    He was quiet for a moment. “This wretched woman doesn’t show up anywhere,” he said. “Right until the moment she wakes up with the beam across her.” He pulled down a ledger from a shelf. “The princess Eudoxia similarly disappears from the record at the moment when she drank the potion. I invite you to draw your own conclusions.”
    “Done that,” I snapped. “What I want—sorry, what I desperately need—is an