The Two of Swords, Part 17 Read online

  The Two of Swords: Part Seventeen

  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 978-0-316-27194-3

  E3-20170825-JV-PC

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Two

  Extras Meet the Author

  About Orbit Short Fiction

  By K. J. Parker

  Orbit Newsletter

  TWO

  The horses didn’t like her, which was fine, because she didn’t like them either. She wondered who they belonged to – likewise the cart, a valuable capital asset. Mine now, she decided. Twenty-six gold angels, two horses and a cart; in any town in the empire that’d make you upper middle class, if not downright rich, and she’d inherited all that against her will. Made you wonder why anybody bothered going to work. And the sword, of course, she’d forgotten that. It had to be worth an angel of anybody’s money, though of course everywhere was awash with surplus military hardware these days. I could go somewhere and set up as a carter, she thought: it’s a good trade, people will always want stuff moved from A to B. Or I could go to Permia; in which case, getting there would burn off every last stuiver of twenty-six angels, and she’d have to trade in the horses and rig to pay for her passage, steerage, assuming she could find a ship going there.

  Pointless thoughts; so she crumbled the beeswax off the lid of a jar of pickled cabbage and pinched out a couple of mouthfuls of the foul stuff, just to keep her strength up. It gave her raging indigestion, a circumstance which for some reason she found hilarious.

  *

  The road had kidnapped her. Four days since Porpax died, and she was having to ration the pickled cabbage. Her knowledge of the geography and her memories of relevant maps told her that she should have crossed the Timoin some time ago – it ran directly east–west and it was forty yards wide at Angersford, not something you could easily overlook – but apparently the road knew better. She was still climbing a hill that shouldn’t be there, invisible from the normal roads, marked on no map, unknown to the Imperial Survey; how could you keep something that big and tall a secret? Maybe it was a Lodge road, and the Lodge had carefully suppressed all knowledge of it – a sure sign that she was coming to the frayed end of her rope, when she seriously considered a theory like that.

  Besides, if it was the Lodge’s road they’d have taken better care of it. There were ruts in it eighteen inches deep – she didn’t like to think what sort of carts had gouged them, or in what frequency; someone had used this road to shift a large amount of very heavy stuff, and nobody knew about it. At least the terror of guiding a seven-foot-wide cart along a road with a six-foot-six span between the ruts kept her busy, and took her mind off the appalling mess she was in.

  In the end, the road cheated. It filled up a wider than normal rut with black, brackish water, seeped up from the underlying peat. The first she knew about it was a sudden bone-jarring jolt that made her teeth snap together and nearly slid her off the box into the ditch, as the left side of the cart dropped away. Then the whole rig stopped dead.

  She climbed down and took a look. The left back wheel had gone in a pothole, and the force had splintered the axle. The wheel was bent up at forty-five degrees, retained by a thicket of torn wooden fibres. She dropped to her knees and yelled in fury. Then she forced herself to be calm and examined the damage.

  In theory – in theory she could unlimber the horses, prop the bed of the cart up on stones, lever out the massive iron staples that pinned the broken axle to the chassis, take the backsabre, cut down a sapling and rough-hew it into a new axle, pin it back in place and remount the wheels. Piece of cake. For some reason, though, she didn’t fancy that, so she cut a long piece out of the reins and used it to tie the necks of the three remaining pickled-cabbage jars together, slung the water bottle round her neck, picked up the jars and the sword and walked away.

  The top of the hill came as a complete surprise, probably because it was artfully hidden in a wood. She’d been steadily climbing all day, and now the sun was just about to set. She looked up, and to her amazement she noticed that the skyline wasn’t shrinking away as she approached it. On the contrary, it stayed put, and every step brought her nearer to it. This was significant. From the top of the hill she could look down, possibly even recognise something and figure out where the hell she was. She was too tired to break into a run but she lengthened her stride just a little. Each time her right foot touched the ground, she could feel the blister on the sole of her foot compress and squash. They’d been very suitable shoes for walking from the inner courtyard of the Department to her ridiculously splendid lodgings, but fifteen miles uphill on mud and flint had robbed them of their youth and beauty.

  The last twenty yards or so were vindictively steep; then she stumbled on to the skyline and looked down. Immediately, a black cloud of crows got up off the heather – she was out of the wood at last – and streamed into the air in an angry, closing screw-thread. There must have been hundreds of them, thousands even.

  If it involves birds, it’s an augury and it can’t be avoided. She knew what a thousand crows in a small area means. It’s one of the less inscrutably coded symbols in the divine vocabulary.

  Over the years she’d met a number of men who’d have been able to read it like a book; the degree to which the crows had stripped the flesh off the bones, the absence of stench, things like the effect of damp on cloth and leather, the beginnings of mould, the colour of rust – all useful and pertinent information, things she needed to know in order to make informed decisions about what to do next. Well, you can read the text or you can just look at the pictures. She sat down on a large stone. The crows had retreated about a hundred yards up and were wheeling in open formation, like light cavalry, yelling abuse at her. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen a battlefield. You get used to things.

  After a while, she pulled herself together and dragged her attention away from the foreground and on to the horizon. That big pudding-shaped lump over there could only be Hopelstanz; and the sun, considerately setting smack bang on top of it, hinted that it was due wes
t. In which case – she felt stupid, as though she’d just walked into a wall without looking. Hopelstanz due west; in that case, the long, weary hill she’d dragged up could only be the outer foothills of the Dis Hexapeton – which made sense, in a crazy sort of a way, because the moor that separates the two ranges is about forty miles wide, and Hopelstanz looked to be about forty miles away, give or take; and she was twenty miles further north and about sixty further west than she had any right to be, and in a different province, formerly a different country, not to mention perilously close to the front line—

  She got up from her nice stone and picked her way through the heather clumps and couch-grass tussocks. Hell of a place to try running away from anything; every two yards or so, you’d trip up and land on your nose. She picked over a few dead bodies, and accumulated some useful information.

  They’d been shot, and whoever had shot them had been round retrieving the spent arrows, but hadn’t bothered to strip off tens of thousands of angels’ worth of armour, clothing and other saleable kit. Nor had Ocnisant been along to work his sanitary magic; but Ocnisant went wherever the Belot boys happened to be, so if he hadn’t been here—The equipment was Western standard issue, the third-grade junk they were sending new recruits out in these days. Ambush and arrow-storm; probably what she was looking at was just the hopeless end of one breakaway unit, who lost their nerve and ran for it, and picked up a squadron of horse-archers. The rest of the battle, the main event, would probably be down the slope somewhere, and maybe that was the bit the West won, with this mess just an irrelevant sideshow that didn’t affect the practical outcome.

  Like she cared. Three weeks was her best guess, and by now the survivors, winners and losers, could be hundreds of miles away, making the spectacle before her none of her business. Meanwhile, if that really was Hopelstanz, if she wanted to reach civilisation (assuming some dangerous lunatic hadn’t burned it to the ground), she needed to hold north by north-west, so aim for that cluster of low hills over there—

  Who did she know who’d retrieve every last arrow but leave a small fortune in plunder to the damp and the rust? She stood stock still and tried to think. Surely not. The Lodge was finished, at least as a strategic force. They’d picked a fight with the big boys, realised their ghastly mistake and gone scuttling back to Mere Barton to build very high walls and very deep ditches. Most certainly they weren’t sending out field armies to slaughter Western regulars a few days’ ride from the walls of Rasch. They didn’t have field armies to send. You can’t just conjure up troops of armed men by scattering dragons’ teeth. It was impossible.

  The sun had almost disappeared, drenching the moor with red light. True; but you can hire armed men, if you’ve got the money. And if until relatively recently your people were staffing the Treasuries of two empires, maybe you’d have enough money to hire all the mercenaries you could possibly want; Cosseilhatz and Cure Hardy and Rosinholet, specialist, born-in-the-saddle horse-archers who’d kill anyone you cared to point out for a stuiver and a pail of milk. The thought hit her like a slingstone. The Lodge wouldn’t have started a war it had no chance of winning, and one thing there was never any shortage of was mercenary soldiers. True, when last heard of they’d been working loyally for the two empires, but a subtle redistribution of funds discreetly arranged could change a lot of things. And it’s easier to massacre a column of infantry when they haven’t yet realised you’re the enemy. The bastards, she thought. The clever, clever bastards.

  While there was still light to see by, she poked around and found some more money. It was all just copper, of course, but she guessed they’d been paid just before they got their marching orders and hadn’t had time to spend it on anything. She filled a small canvas satchel, somewhere in the region of six angels, and decided it was compensation for the loss of her cart and horses. Then she made herself a nest out of damp, stinking greatcoats and went to sleep.

  She had a dream in which she was a princess walking along the seashore. She found a dead man lying face down in the sand, wearing rich robes of brocaded silk, sodden with water and crusted with salt, and a golden crown set with rubies and pearls, of which two were missing. She turned him over and he woke up, and so did she. But the dead men all around her were still dead, and she still wasn’t a princess; she cursed herself for letting the sea get into her sleep, because dreams about the sea tended to mean she was scared about something and gave her a headache for the rest of the day.

  A final rootle around among the dead produced a pair of boots which, padded with bits of torn-up scarf, sort of more or less fitted, and she blessed the fact that she had large feet, something her mother had always taken as a personal affront.

  Hunger, according to the approved commentary on the Lesser catechism, is a spiritual experience which should be undergone by everybody at least once in their lives. Extended experience of hunger, the anonymous commentator says, sharpens the senses, clarifies the mind and allows one to redraw one’s ethical map, with Life itself as the magnetic north.

  Not true, she decided. Hunger just makes you think about food, all the damn time. Furthermore it saps your energy, and you can’t see what’s so important about putting one foot in front of the other; after all, the road goes on for ever, there’s no end to it and no destination, so why bother?

  So she gave up, and sat down on a clump of couch grass, and took her boots off, because they hurt her feet and she wouldn’t be needing them any more; and, mostly because it was the only thing she hadn’t tried yet, she closed her eyes, clasped her hands together like she’d been taught when she was a little girl, and prayed. Great Smith, she said (she made no noise, but her lips moved), if this is because I disobeyed your orders about killing Oida, I’m very sorry, and if this is the end I know I deserve it, but if You’ve still got a use for me, could you please send me something to eat, because I’m so very, very hungry. And when You’ve quite finished punishing me, which might well take a long time, I realise that, but when I’ve finally paid in full, could You please send a cart or a horse or something, because I really don’t want to walk any more. Or if You’d rather just finish me off, that’s fine too, only please do it now, because this is miserable.

  She opened her eyes. Nothing. She felt stupid. Proving nothing, she said to herself, because the Great Smith doesn’t answer prayers; it’s the Invincible Sun who does that, and he doesn’t exist. But you can pray to the Smith till you’re blue in the face, and if what you’re asking for isn’t part of His design, you’re wasting your breath. Also, the Smith neither rewards nor punishes, He just uses the useful material and discards the useless. In fact, whatever were you thinking of? Stupid.

  A horse neighed. She turned round slowly.

  There were four of them; and she should have been able to tell by the design of the bridles and the way they did their hair whether they were Rosinholet or Doca Votz or Cure Hardy, but she couldn’t remember which was which, and it really didn’t matter. They were all young, no more than twenty; short, goldenhaired, with long, braided ponytails; grey-eyed, slim-waisted, broad-shouldered, slender forearms with fine, almost invisible golden hair and long, delicate fingers; painted saddles with no stirrups; long, thin linen shirts belted at the waist; soft moccasins sewn along the seams with thick square leather laces; pale white skins that had caught the sun and burned red. Three of them held their bows in the right hand, one in the left. All four had an arrow nocked on the string, thin dogwood shafts with short, needle-pointed square-section bodkin heads. They were looking at her as if she didn’t make sense in a rational universe, and they were wondering what if anything they were supposed to do about it.

  Oh, she thought. “Hello, boys,” she said. “Looking for me?”

  Clearly they didn’t understand Imperial, which was probably just as well. Nomad humour is basic and physical – cutting off a goat’s feet and setting the dogs on it, or tying a prisoner to a wooden stake and pelting him with bones. There’s no word for joke in any of the seventy-six dialec
ts.

  “Are you lost?” said one of them, and the syntax was Cure Hardy but the accent was no Vei. In which case, they were probably Aram Chantat – Oida would know, damn him; for some reason he knew all about bloody nomads.

  “Yes,” she said, trying to remember if the Aram Chantat were one of the tribes that had strict rules about helping strangers. No, that was the no Vei. Pity.

  “So are we,” said the horseman. “We want to get to Pithecusa. Do you know where that is?”

  Where? “Sure I do.”

  All four looked happy. “How do we get there?”

  “Ah,” she said. “You can’t actually get there from here. If you want to get to Pithecusa, you have to start from Cornische, or Ennepe, or Boc Afon.”

  “We’ve just come from Boc Afon,” said a different horseman.

  “Splendid,” she said, and smiled. “Take me there, and I can show you how to get to Pithecusa.”

  They looked at each other. “How are you going to get there? You don’t have a horse.”

  “That’s all right.” She broadened the smile. “I’ll climb up behind one of you boys.”

  “No,” the first horseman said, “you can’t, you’re too heavy. The horse would go lame.”

  Fair point, she forced herself to concede; she was taller and bigger than all of them, and the horses were little more than ponies. Her feet would nearly touch the ground. Even so. “Well,” she said, “one of you could walk, and I could ride his horse.”

  “We don’t like walking. We aren’t used to it.”

  “Do you want to get to Pithecusa or don’t you?”

  She’d shouted, and that was a mistake. Very bad manners, and, among the nomads, uncouth people don’t live very long. They were looking at her sternly. “I’m sorry,” she said, “please forgive me, I’m tired and hungry and you know what we’re like, no idea of how to behave. I shouldn’t have raised my voice. It was very wrong.”