Evil for Evil by K. J. Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

bigger holes in them, come
     to that.
    The fourth time; he didn’t quite know what he’d done differently. It just seemed to go, as if it had given up the struggle.
     Victory; now what? He went back to his memories. They threaded it, right, and then they cut or broke off a foot or two of
     thread. He scowled. It stood to reason that if you stuck the needle in and pulled it through, the thread would simply pass
     through the cloth and come out the other side, and you’d be sitting there with the cloth in one hand and a threaded needle
     in the other. There had to be some way of anchoring the end of the thread in the cloth; did you tie it to something, or stick
     it down with glue, or what? All his life, all those hundreds of sewing women, all he’d have had to do was stop and ask and
     one of them would’ve been happy to explain it to him. As it was …
    They tied a knot in the end of the thread. He remembered now, he could picture it. The knot was thicker than the hole the
     needle made in the cloth, so it stuck. Excellent. He laid the needle carefully down on his knee — the last thing he needed
     was for the thread to slip out of the eye after all that performance getting it in there — and found the other end. Was there
     a special kind of knot you had to use, like sailors or carters? The women in his memory hadn’t used any special procedure
     that he could recall, however, so he’d just have to take his chances on that. He dropped the knot and retrieved the needle.
     Now, he imagined, came the difficult part.
    Think about it, he ordered himself. Sewing is basically just tying two sheets of material together with string. Surreptitiously,
     he turned over his wrist and unbuttoned his cuff.
    The Ducas, of course, has nothing but the best, and this rule applies especially to clothes. He had no idea who’d made his
     shirts — they tended to appear overnight, like mushrooms — but whoever they were, it went without saying that they were the
     best in the business. Obviously, therefore, they didn’t leave exposed seams, not even on the inside, where it didn’t show,
     and their stitches were small enough to be practically invisible. He cursed himself for being stupid; looking in the wrong
     place. He put his hand into the sack and pulled out a shirt; a proper, honest-to-goodness, contractor-made army shirt, Mezentine,
     made down to a price and with nice exposed seams on the inside that even the Ducas could copy. He studied them. Apparently
     the drill was, you stacked the edges of the two bits of cloth one on top of the other; you left about three-sixteenths of
     an inch as a sort of headland (why couldn’t it have been farm work instead of sewing? he asked himself; at least I know something
     about farm work), and then you ran a seam along to join them together. But even the army-issue stitches were too small to
     be self-explanatory; he stared at them, but he couldn’t begin to figure out how on earth they’d ever got that way. It was
     a mystery, like the corn or the phases of the moon.
    Fine. If I can’t work out how a load of stupid women do it, I’ll just have to invent a method of my own. Think; think about
     the ways in which one bit of something can be joined to another. There’s nails, or rivets; or how about a bolt on a door?
     You push a bolt through a sort of cut-about tube into a hole that keeps it — Or a net. Now he was onto something he actually
     knew a bit about. Think how the drawstring runs through the mouth of a purse-net, weaving in and out through the mesh; then,
     when you pull on it, it draws the net together. If you do something similar with the thread, weave it in and out through both
     layers of cloth, that’ll hold them together. Brilliant. I’ve invented sewing. I’d be a genius if only someone hadn’t thought
     of it before me.
    He took another look at the shirt-seam. It hadn’t been done like that. But if he went up it once, then turned it round and
     went down again,