The Two of Swords Part 18 Read online

  The Two of Swords: Part Eighteen

  K. J. Parker

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  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by K. J. Parker

  Cover design by Kirk Benshoff

  Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: September 2017

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  ISBN 978-0-316-27190-5

  E3-20170829-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Three

  Extras Meet the Author

  About Orbit Short Fiction

  By K. J. Parker

  Orbit Newsletter

  THREE

  The repair to the bridge hadn’t fallen to bits yet, so they had no trouble crossing the river, and the Great East was empty, so they flew along. Just as well. All her life, she’d dreaded boredom; stuck in a coach again, with nothing to read and no one to talk to. Axio slept most of the time; like a lizard, she thought, when there’s nothing to do he conserves energy. Musen stared out of the window or went over and over his pack of cards, sometimes muttering under his breath, sometimes staring at them as though there was one blindingly obvious fact he knew he was missing, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. The Lodge had packed them all sorts of nice things to eat and drink. Musen was the cook, and every bite and sup she took terrified her, because of what she’d nebulously planned to do to him, except that she didn’t happen to have any poison with her, and noxious substances don’t grow on trees, or at least they do, but you need to be able to identify them and know how to render them down. The only naturally occurring poison she knew enough about to be able to pick and use was a certain kind of green-capped mushroom, and that only grew in forests in the far South.

  “Stewed chicken with mushrooms,” Musen announced sadly, pushing a bowl under her nose. Musen was a good cook, though he hated doing it. She tried picking out the bits of chicken, and wiping the sauce off when nobody was looking.

  Axio snored; at night, not during the day. How he could sleep at all was a mystery to her, since he’d spent the whole day away with the fairies. It was one of those irregular snores that you simply can’t ignore. You just have to lie there listening to it in horrified fascination. At least it gave her a chance to keep an eye on Musen, though he slept like a log from the moment he closed his eyes until Axio kicked him awake at daybreak.

  More news at the last way station before Rasch. As a result of the big battle (not the one they’d heard about; another one), Forza Belot had been relieved of his command, and was now under house arrest at his wife’s villa in the Cleir mountains. The emperor had sent an embassy to his uncle in the East, with a view to establishing a framework and timescale for preliminary negotiations; meanwhile, all the men in Rasch over fourteen and under sixty-five, including foreign nationals and resident aliens, had been called up to guard the walls in the event of a siege. The city gates were closed to everything except supply convoys; “so if you were planning on going there, you’re out of luck, because they won’t let you in.”

  Axio didn’t seem particularly worried about that. He had a brief talk with Musen, which she wasn’t allowed to join in; then Musen stole a horse and rode away, while they carried on in the coach as far as Beuda, the last village on the Great East that wasn’t a suburb. Musen was waiting for them in the inn.

  “Any luck?” Axio asked. Musen nodded, and led them to a derelict barn on the western edge. Inside it they found a large cart loaded with barrels. “Apples,” Musen said. “It was all I could get.”

  “Apples are fine,” Axio replied. “Splendid. We’re now a supply convoy.”

  Just to be on the safe side they painted the cart white, with some distemper Musen had managed to steal from somewhere. Attention to detail, Axio explained; the last thing we need is to get arrested for stealing a cart. Also, he added, in a whisper that Musen could’ve heard if he was stone deaf, it gives the boy something to do, keeps him out of mischief.

  “If this is Rasch stocking up for a siege,” Axio said, “they’re being damned casual about it.”

  She was forced to agree. She’d anticipated a long, crawling line of carts and wagons, shuffling along at walking pace all the way from the Tenth Milestone to the Gate. Instead, they shared the road with three farm wagons and a big army cart, which was empty. But she didn’t think it was any lack of urgency on the city prefects part. More likely, there simply wasn’t any food left to buy, because there were no farmers left to grow it, and no money to pay for it.

  Florian’s Wall, which surrounds Rasch on three sides, is thirty feet high and ten feet thick, with guard towers every hundred yards and enfilading bastions every quarter-mile. The story goes that there was once a mountain overshadowing the city, where now there’s a flat plain; Florian quarried the whole mountain to build the city wall, and still had to send out for more stone when the mountain had been used up. The story isn’t true, because the walls are granite and basalt and Rasch is built on sandstone; that doesn’t mean there isn’t a flat plain somewhere else that was once a mountain, or a mountain range.

  In the uncomfortable inner ring, between Florian’s Wall and the outer ring, property has always been cheap, because that’s where catapult shot and fire-arrows land during a siege; and Rasch has seen a lot of sieges. So the outer ring has traditionally been a ramshackle huddle of wattle-and-daub or wooden houses, shacks, warehouses, workshops, crammed with expendable enterprises and expendable people, a place where money is made but not spent. From time to time there’s a fire, which serves the useful function of cleaning up the godawful mess, and then they rebuild and pretty soon it’s all back to normal –

  There had been a fire, but they weren’t rebuilding. They were ploughing.

  “Quite right,” someone told them at the Poverty and Patience in Goosefair. “Prefect’s orders. They torched the whole lot, and they’re ploughing it up, going to grow barley and cabbages and stuff. Three days’ notice they gave, and they shut the inner ring gates so the poor sods couldn’t get into the city. No idea where they went: the soldiers pushed them out through the gate and told them not to come back. Makes sense, of course. They’d just be more hungry mouths to feed when Senza comes.”

  Quite. You could grow a good crop in the outer ring: all that ash, on top of generations of haphazard sanitation soaking away in
to the ground. “If Senza comes,” Axio asked him, “are you going to stick around?”

  The stranger shrugged. “Might as well,” he said. “Nobody’s going to buy my business with that hanging over us, and it’s all I’ve got. Anyway, a siege isn’t so bad, if you’re prepared for it. And they can’t get past Florian’s Wall, not even Senza, so it’ll just be a sitting-down match. And old Glauca can’t last for ever, can he?”

  “This is worrying,” Axio said, when they’d found a private table in the corner. “I have a nasty feeling someone in the government’s got a brain, and isn’t afraid to use it.”

  She forced a smile. “Surely not.”

  “It had to happen, sooner or later. Besides, they’ve tried everything else. Like the old saying, when all else fails, think.”

  “All right,” she said. “So what’s the new plan?”

  “I should say it’s quite obvious when you look at the facts. Forza’s out; they’re getting ready for a really long siege. So, someone has finally figured out that the war can’t be won on the battlefield. Sure, they’ve got Forza, but the East’s got Senza, and so long as those two are alive, they cancel each other out – which would be fine, except that while they’ve been at it, most of the male population of the empires have been turned into fertiliser. So, Plan B. Get rid of Forza, recall what’s left of the army to garrison Rasch. What happens? Five minutes later, Senza arrives and sits down outside the gate. But he can’t storm Florian’s Wall, nobody can. So there he sits, thinking up more and more desperately ingenious ways of feeding his army. Inside the city, we sow and reap and winnow corn where the common people used to live, your basic agrarian idyll, and in ten or fifteen years’ time, Emperor Glauca dies and the war’s over. And the West wins, by default. The rest of the Western empire doesn’t matter, it’s mostly a wilderness now, and what little is left of it won’t come to any harm, because the East can’t spare any men from the siege of Rasch to do any real damage. Then, when the day comes when Glauca finally breathes his last and we’re all just one big happy family once again—” He shrugged. “It’d be easy to say, so why did nobody think of it earlier? But to be fair, it can only work once both sides have withered away down to the bone.”

  She didn’t ask why that would be worrying. She was sure Axio could answer that, but she didn’t want to hear it.

  Being in Rasch again made her skin crawl. She’d lost track of how long it had been since she’d broken out of the most secure prison in the city, leaving a trail of dead bodies behind her. It felt like a hundred years; but there must still be plenty of people here who knew her by sight. Don’t worry about it, Axio said airily; you’re with me, you’ll be just fine. But that in itself was a contradiction in terms, so she didn’t put much faith in it. “I’ve lost count of how many warrants there are out on me,” he went on, “but I don’t let it get to me. Besides, they’ve got other things on their minds right now. Trust me; nobody gives a damn.”

  They turned a corner, and suddenly they were in Golden Cross Yard. “Just a minute,” she said. “Where are we going?”

  “Headquarters. Weren’t you listening?”

  The south entrance to Intelligence was in the north-east corner of Golden Cross Yard. “I can’t go there,” she said. “I’ll be seen. People I used to work for.”

  “You worry too much.”

  She drew back, but he grabbed her scientifically round the neck, his thumb jammed in her windpipe. Her head started to swim. She staggered. He was laughing; his other arm was holding her up; a handsome man and his drunk girl, and of course they wouldn’t be looking at her, because everyone always looked at Axio. She tried to speak but couldn’t. He hustled her along so fast she could barely keep her feet. He was going to turn her in to the authorities rather than kill her himself, and if she tried to shake herself free she’d fall flat on her face. Then thinking through the fog got too difficult; her strength ebbed away, and Axio swept her up in his arms, like the handsome prince in a fairytale.

  “Here we are.” His voice came from far away. “Steady now”, and she felt the ground under her feet. Her knees buckled, but his strong, reliable arm was there to support her. “Deep breaths, there’s a good girl.”

  It hurt so much to breathe; he’d nearly crushed her throat, and her lungs burned. “Told you it’d be fine,” he said, looping her hair round his hand so that he could control her head as surely as a horseman with a tight rein.”Now, take a moment to get your breath: we’ve got stairs to climb.”

  She contemplated kicking his kneecap with her heel, but she simply didn’t have the strength. Across her mind flashed an image of her mother, scowling at her; be good, or the monster will get you. Well, she thought, she’d been right about that. She felt her scalp lift off her skull, and knew he’d pull it off if he felt he had to. There was a stone step under her foot, and then another one. A knee in the back of her knee straightened her leg for her.

  “Come on,” Axio said brightly. “We haven’t got all day.”

  She let go, neither resisting nor cooperating; forty-seven steps. She’d been in and out and round about this building for years, but she had no idea where she was, and the heavy oak door they stopped in front of was completely new to her. Axio leaned past her and banged on it with his head. A moment later, it opened. She saw a long, narrow room like a gallery, with one small window. Three chairs facing her, one with its back to her. In two of the chairs sat a man and a woman. The man she recognised: Thratta, senior assistant archivist, nominally a big man in Security but he ran his own show off on the sidelines somewhere, and what he did and where he did it nobody else knew or cared. The other one she felt she ought to know: a striking looking woman with a thin, taut face, maybe a year or so younger than her, hair scraped back and firmly secured, as though if it got loose it might be dangerous.

  “Sorry we’re late,” Axio sang out. He deposited her in the single chair by tripping her feet out from under her; she landed square on the seat, very neatly done. Then he sat down with the other two. “Sorry,” he went on, “introductions. Well, Thratta you know, obviously. And this is ’Na Lycao.”

  In spite of everything, she couldn’t help being fascinated; Senza’s Lycao, for whom the world would be well lost. She realised she was staring. Lycao gazed back at her. Obviously, she’s used to it. Everybody wants to see the most beautiful, enchanting woman in the world. Nobody can possibly imagine what he sees in her. Fine. Telamon blushed and looked away.

  “Congratulations,” Lycao said.

  Which made absolutely no sense at all. Congratulations on what? On escaping from the Guards? Getting as far as she had before Axio brought her back? “Excuse me?”

  “On your appointment as Commissioner,” Thratta said. He was a round-faced old man with a beard and no moustache; that fashion had lasted a couple of years, thirty years ago. “Excuse me, but are you all right?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise—” She tried to take a deep breath, but her throat still hurt terribly where Axio had creased it. “Sorry, but who are you?”

  Axio laughed. “We’re the Triumvirs, of course. No, hang on, you won’t have heard of us. Basically, we run the Lodge, under the supreme boss. Among other things, we choose the Commission. You’re here to be sworn in, remember?”

  Headquarters. In a room in the Intelligence building. And Thratta – just because he was old and fat and so very, very boring, they’d all assumed he was simply marking time until he retired and drew his pension. She remembered the proverb Oida had told her once: what’s the deadliest creature in Blemya? The elephant? The lion? The buffalo? The black mamba? No, the mosquito.

  “Of course,” she said with a smile. “What have I got to do?”

  Thratta yawned. “There isn’t actually a prescribed ritual, and, if there was, we haven’t got time for it right now. Do you accept the job? Say yes.”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid. In accepting the job, of course, you’re automatically deemed to have bound yourself to obey all
the rules and carry out the orders of your superiors without question. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. What are the rules?”

  Thratta smiled bleakly. “We don’t know. If we need to know them, they tell us. Of course, if we inadvertently break them, ignorance of the rules is no excuse.”

  She nodded. “I understand,” she said.

  Axio burst out laughing. “Don’t take any notice of him,” he said, “he just likes to tease, that’s all. Just raise your right hand swear you’ll do as you’re told. That’s what I did,” he added, when Thratta scowled at him.

  “I promise to do as I’m told,” she said. “Was that all right?”

  Lycao was looking at her, and she felt all the fight drain out of her, like milk out of a cracked bucket. She managed not to apologise.

  “All right,” Axio said. “Now let’s move on.” He steepled his fingers and rested his hands on his knees. “We have a job for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “We want you to kill Forza Belot.”

  Dead silence, for about as long as it takes to pour a glass of wine. “You mean Senza.”

  Lycao shook her head. “Forza,” she said.

  “Very well.”

  Thratta raised his eyebrows. “Either she’s as cool as snow or she’s not going to do it,” he said.

  “She’ll do it, don’t you worry.” Axio was looking straight at her. “Won’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “There.” Axio was grinning. “Done and dusted.”

  “But I’d like to know,” she went on, “why Forza? He’s irrelevant now, surely. He’s been dismissed and disgraced.”

  “For the time being,” Lycao said. “But when I kill his brother, Forza will be the best soldier in the world.”

  “I see.” She tried to breathe. The difficulty she experienced had something to do with the imprint of Axio’s thumb, but not all that much. “Can you help me out at all, or am I on my own?”