The Two of Swords: Part 11 Read online

  The Two of Swords: Part 11

  K. J. Parker

  www.orbitbooks.net

  BY K. J. PARKER

  The Fencer trilogy

  Colours in the Steel

  The Belly of the Bow

  The Proof House

  The Scavenger trilogy

  Shadow

  Pattern

  Memory

  The Engineer trilogy

  Devices and Desires

  Evil for Evil

  The Escapement

  The Company

  The Folding Knife

  The Hammer

  Sharps

  The Two of Swords (e-novellas)

  BY TOM HOLT

  Expecting Someone Taller

  Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?

  Flying Dutch

  Ye Gods!

  Overtime

  Here Comes the Sun

  Grailblazers

  Faust Among Equals

  Odds and Gods

  Djinn Rummy

  My Hero

  Paint Your Dragon

  Open Sesame

  Wish You Were Here

  Only Human

  Snow White and the Seven Samurai

  Valhalla

  Nothing But Blue Skies

  Falling Sideways

  Little People

  The Portable Door

  In Your Dreams

  Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

  You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps

  Someone Like Me

  Barking

  The Better Mousetrap

  May Contain Traces of Magic

  Blonde Bombshell

  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages

  Doughnut

  When It’s A Jar

  The Outsorcerer’s Apprentice

  The Good, the Bad and the Smug

  Dead Funny: Omnibus 1

  Mightier Than the Sword: Omnibus 2

  The Divine Comedies: Omnibus 3

  For Two Nights Only: Omnibus 4

  Tall Stories: Omnibus 5

  Saints and Sinners: Omnibus 6

  Fishy Wishes: Omnibus 7

  The Walled Orchard

  Alexander at the World’s End

  Olympiad

  A Song for Nero

  Meadowland

  I, Margaret

  Lucia Triumphant

  Lucia in Wartime

  Copyright

  Published by Orbit

  ISBN: 978-0-356-50618-0

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by K. J. Parker

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Orbit

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.orbitbooks.net

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  By K. J. Parker

  Copyright

  Four of Stars

  About the Author

  Four of Stars

  Frontizo to Axeo, greetings.

  You’ll never guess who I’ve just had the pleasure of entertaining. Your idiot brother showed up here. I’ve only just this minute managed to get rid of him. You’ll be relieved to hear that he’s safe and well, and Providence in its unfathomable wisdom seems to be taking special care of him. Well, make that one part Providence and three parts me. You never told me what a terrible card player he is. Special love to our special friends. Wrap up warm and don’t forget you owe me six angels thirty.

  Axeo shrugged, screwed up the scrap of parchment into a ball and went to throw it on the fire, only to find it had gone out. He sighed, stood up and grabbed two handfuls of kindling from the sack by the hearth, then felt in his pocket for his tinderbox. Then he scowled.

  “Musen,” he shouted. “Get in here.”

  A few moments later an impossibly tall, flat-faced young man pushed aside the sacking curtain. “What?”

  Axeo held out his hand. “Give it back. My tinderbox.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  “Oh, come on.” Axeo gave him a grim smile. “I’ll say this for you, you’re getting better. The first time you stole it, I felt you. For crying out loud, son, it’s freezing in here.”

  “I haven’t got it.”

  Axeo nodded and turned away, immediately turned back. Musen saw him coming and took a long step to the rear but not quickly enough; Axeo was behind him, and trod down hard on the inside of his knee. Musen dropped to the ground. Axeo stooped and put his hand round his windpipe, bearable but firm pressure from thumb and forefinger. “Pockets,” he said.

  Musen turned out his pockets; then, unasked, took off his boots and shook them out. Axeo sighed. “You’ve sold it,” he said. “Marvellous. So now we both sit here and freeze.”

  “I can light a fire.”

  Axeo let go of him. “The point about tinderboxes is,” he said, “they make lighting a fire easier. That’s why it’d be nice if one or the other of us had got one.” He sat down again, while Musen squatted by the hearth and picked through the kindling. “Who’d you sell it to?”

  No answer. Musen broke a piece of dry bark off a log, gathered some withered moss from another.

  “Presumably that horrible old woman who hangs round the stables,” Axeo said. “I think I’ll have her arrested and strung up. Then I might get to keep some of my stuff.”

  “It wasn’t—” Musen checked himself. “She hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  “Ah.” Axeo nodded. “In that case it was that fat groom on the night shift. If he tries to sell it back to me, I’ll break his arm.” Musen was twirling a bit of stick. That’ll never work, Axeo thought, then saw a tiny feather of smoke. “That tinderbox happened to be a present from my brother.”

  “I thought you couldn’t stand him.”

  “I can’t.” Axeo closed his eyes and tried to get comfortable in his chair. Physically impossible. “How do you do that, exactly? Whenever I try, it doesn’t work.”

  “I don’t know,” Musen said. “I’ve always done it this way, and it always works for me.”

  He blew on the dry moss and it glowed red. He tipped it into the grate and started laying kindling over it, rafters-fashion. Axeo got up, unhooked the remains of a side of bacon from the wall, took out his folding knife and cut four thick, ragged slices, which he stuck on the tines of a home-made toasting fork, four strands of the heavy-grade fence wire twisted together. Musen tipped charcoal from the bucket on to the fire, crouched down on his hands and knees and blew on it until the first tentative flames appeared.

  “It’s dumb stealing things from people you live with,” Axeo said. “Doesn’t matter how well you cover your tracks, they know it’s you because they know stuff’s missing and you’re a thief. True, there’s not a shred of evidence, but who needs evidence when you know? Like the Craft, really, I can’t prove the Transmutation by Fire, but I know it happens. I’m surprised you do it, actually, because in other respects you’re not completely stupid.”

  Musen took the toasting fork from him and held it in front of the fire. After a while, drops of fat dripped into the flames and ignited in a brief yellow flare.
r />   “Some of them reckon you can’t help it,” Axeo went on, yawning. “They say you’re ill, it’s something loose up here. I don’t think so.” He paused. “Out of interest, why do you do it? I’m interested, that’s all.”

  Musen didn’t turn round. “It’s my gift.”

  “Mphm.” Axeo closed his eyes. “The Great Smith made you a thief, and it’s the Lodge’s duty to find a good use for you. I know that’s what they taught you at Beal Defoir. Do you believe it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fair enough. But if I catch you perfecting your gift around my stuff ever again, I’ll break all your fingers. Understood?”

  He knew he’d phrased that wrong, since he wouldn’t catch Musen, not now. But it was too late to rephrase, that would just be weak. Besides, they both knew it was an empty threat. Thou shalt not damage the property of the Lodge. Ribs were different, though. Musen didn’t use his ribs to steal.

  “I don’t know why you annoy me so much,” he said, almost as an admission of his error. “My guess is that you’re smart and you act stupid. Growing up with my brother, I’m used to the other way round, so you confuse me. Tell you what,” he went on, “stop doing it and I’ll stop giving you a hard time. How about it?”

  Musen went on toasting the bacon. Axeo rather admired him for that. It takes a degree of integrity, as well as intelligence, not to give in to an offer of friendship. He was beginning to see why Beal Defoir had thought so highly of the boy. Even so. It was irksome, not being able to talk. The prospect of the job he was about to do was making him nervous, and the sound of his own voice soothed him like nothing else.

  They had no special privilege on the southbound mail, which was crowded, and ending up riding on the roof, squashed in between two merchants’ couriers and a government official. Axeo wedged his back against the rail, closed his eyes and eavesdropped.

  It was all going really badly, the government man said; he was on his way to take up his new appointment as Clerk of Tolls at Saphes, but whether there’d be a job for him when he got there he simply didn’t know. Everything was done through Rasch, and it was quite possible that the letter confirming his appointment hadn’t got out before the siege started, in which case he’d get to Saphes and nobody would have the faintest idea who he was. Furthermore, even if there was a job for him there, it was anybody’s guess how he was supposed to do it. The main function of the Clerk of Tolls at a provincial capital is to send the returns compiled by the sheriffs to Rasch, and then receive a reply and pass it on to the governor’s office, who passed it on to the sheriffs, who did whatever they did. With Rasch cut off, what was he supposed to do all day?

  The merchants’ couriers weren’t impressed. Their employers had tens of thousands of angels’ worth of scrip signed off against deposits with the Knights and the Temple Trustees and a dozen or so private banks; they’d handed out hard cash against this paper, to the point where they had nothing left but a few boxes of old green copper change, and now nobody was interested in taking their notes, because everybody knew their money was the wrong side of Senza Belot’s army and quite possibly only a few days away from a cart ride to Choris. Meanwhile, honest, hard-working couriers were expected to rush around the countryside with letters of credit and bills of exchange that were probably only good for mending shoes and wiping arses. It wouldn’t be so bad (one of the couriers added) if Rasch would only get a move on and surrender. Then the war would be over, and presumably some sort of arrangement could be made with the new administration to overwrite existing deposits at so many stuivers in the angel – life would go on, after all, once the war was over, and whoever won they’d need banks and merchant venturers, and all that money couldn’t simply evaporate, like rainwater on a sunny day—

  “How about you?” Axeo realised the government man was talking to him. “You heard anything?”

  Axeo shook his head. “We’ve been up in Rhus, the boy and me,” he said. “Last I knew about it, the siege was still on and nothing much was happening.”

  “You mean you haven’t heard about the battle?”

  Axeo caught his breath but covered it. “What battle?”

  The battle. Apparently, four of the remaining Western field armies, comprising at least a hundred thousand men, had converged on Rasch. Senza Belot, with thirty thousand cavalry, had met them in a wheatfield to the north of the city. Casualties – well, the rumours flying around were obviously nonsense, there was no way they could be that high, but apparently a big man with the Gasca brothers, who were joint-venturing with Ocnisant on a strictly one-off basis for this job, reckoned they’d buried forty thousand, at least, and precious few of them had been cavalrymen. Where what was left of the Western army had got to and what sort of state it was in, nobody knew. What was certain was that Senza was back standing guard outside Rasch, with the plunder from the Western supply trains to keep his men happy; and it was simple arithmetic, say ninety-five thousand civilians in Rasch plus the garrison, eating a pint and a half of flour a day.

  “Rasch can’t fall,” said one of the couriers. “It’s the capital city of half the world. They’ll just have to raise more armies, that’s all.”

  “It’s time the Blemyans did something,” the government man said. “Everybody knows they’re on our side. They’re civilised people, they’re not just going to stand by and see the West go to hell. If it wasn’t for the bloody diplomats—”

  “What about Forza Belot?” Axeo asked.

  All three of them looked at him. Hadn’t you heard, one of the couriers said. Forza’s dead. Been dead for months.

  Iden Astea was originally built by refugees from the Third Political War. They chose the site well, or were extremely lucky to stumble across it. The old town occupies a substantial island in the middle of the lake formed by the run-off from the mountains that surround it on three sides. The suburbs crowd the eastern and southern shores of the lake; you can get to the island by an artificial causeway (which can be breached in the middle in half an hour, if needs be) or by boat; the regional myth that the Identines are born web-footed is untrue, but they are beyond question the best freshwater boatmen in both empires. There are submerged rocks and shoals in Lake Iden that you can’t begin to understand unless you were born there, they say, and navigating the narrow lanes between the rows of buoys is a mystery not lightly revealed to outsiders.

  Iden was, therefore, a natural choice for the Western emperor, as soon as the threat to Rasch was fully appreciated. He arrived in a two-wheeled chaise in the middle of the night, escorted by five captains of the Household Guard; the rest of the Inner Court arrived over the course of the next few days, accompanying a long train of sturdy wagons carrying the Imperial treasury. Two days after that, two battalions of the Ninth Army arrived to form a garrison. The extent to which the Identines appreciated the honour of entertaining the Brother of the Sun and his entourage for an unspecified length of time is not recorded. They were probably quite philosophical about it. Iden has a massive granary, cut from solid rock in the side of the mountain that dominates the island, and the alluvial plain is enormously fertile; the arrival of a thousand noblemen and their accumulated movable wealth was probably seen as an opportunity, or at the very least a challenge, rather than an unmitigated imposition.

  The arrival of the Court had the effect of rekindling the dormant Relocation Debate, which had been quietly seething under the surface of Imperial politics ever since the schism. Rasch, the relocators were now saying, has been proven to be hopelessly vulnerable; at the first sign of trouble, what does our eminently sensible emperor do? He jumps in a chaise and heads for Iden. Is there any good reason why he should ever go back? Iden is not only far more defensible, it’s also closer to the geographical centre of the Western empire, it backs on to an unlimited food supply, it’s healthier and the view is better. To which the conservatives replied: Rasch is a city, everywhere else is just villages, and it’s blasphemy to ask the Co-Regent of the Firmament to make his official residence in th
e provinces. To which the relocators replied: if Rasch falls, does that have to mean that the war is over, and we’ve lost?

  Axeo and Musen arrived in Iden to find the road closed. They were stopping all traffic at Barys; there were barricades manned by guardsmen in gilded armour. Axeo put on his best parade-ground face, marched up to the checkpoint and asked the sergeant what was going on.

  Riots, apparently. Late the previous evening, a snaking column of wagons, carriages and carts had arrived at the head of the causeway, carrying the Imperial kennels, which had evacuated from Rasch shortly after the Court, and had only just got here; two hundred dogs and four hundred men, together with ancillary equipment – each dog its own special bed and favourite cushions, its dedicated cook, the cook’s specialist pots, pans, trivets and spits, five wagons filled with Blemyan corn, from which was baked the only sort of bread the dogs would eat, seventy cages of pedigree chickens and other necessary items too numerous to particularise. The City prefect arrived and told the convoy commander that there was no room on the island, which was exclusively reserved for people. The commander appealed over his head to the Chamberlain, who decreed that the dogs would have to rough it in Prosc Docian, the largest of the suburbs on the southern shore of the lake. The guard commander was given the job of evacuating the residents of Prosc to the nameless shanty town on the edge of the western marshes. The residents had objected, the guards had driven them out at spear point, and now they were occupying both ends of the causeway, tearing up paving stones and throwing them at the Watch. The guards couldn’t simply wade in and slaughter them, since the people of Prosc Docian did most of the actual work in the City – ground the flour, chopped the vegetables, made the beds, waited at tables, none of which they’d be available to do if they were dead. The emperor, for his part, was still white with anger at being told he couldn’t have his dogs with him on the island, and refused point-blank to allow the kennels to be relocated yet again. A committee had been formed to consider possible resolutions; rumour had it that the favourite was currently the construction of a temporary floating barracks for the providers of essential services, to be moored off the City dock during the day and cast adrift to float on the lake by night. Meanwhile, nothing was going in or out until the situation had been dealt with.