The Two of Swords: Part 7 Read online

  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

  For David Barrett, with thanks

  Copyright

  Published by Orbit

  ISBN: 978-0-356-50562-6

  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

  Carmelite House

  Little, Brown Book Group

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.orbitbooks.net

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  By K. J. Parker

  Dedication

  Copyright

  17 The Scholar

  About the Author

  17

  The Scholar

  When the boy had gone, Glauca rose stiffly to his feet, stopped for a moment until the stabbing pain in his knees had subsided a little, and hobbled slowly across the tessellated gold floor until he reached the wall. In front of him a great bank of cabinets, gilded to match the walls and floor, stretched away in either direction until they were swallowed up in the blaze. Glauca didn’t need to look for the number stencilled on the door. He could have found cabinet thirty-seven blindfold.

  From inside his plain cotton shirt he drew a bunch of keys nearly the size of a man’s fist, hung on a stout steel chain; these days they bruised his chest, but he didn’t feel safe unless he was constantly aware of them pressing against his skin. He peered at them through the rock-crystal magnifying lens that was always folded inside his clenched left hand – it was unique, and the sum he’d spent on it was more than Senza would need to pay his army – until he saw the number 37 on the barrel of a slim brass key. He scrabbled it into the cabinet’s lock (his hands shook badly these days), turned it, pulled it out again and let the bunch go. It swung against his chest like some piece of siege equipment.

  Most reliable sources state that the first pack was designed and executed by the silversmith Ebbo, to the orders of Tandulias of Pyrrho. As is well known, the first pack and the imitations made of it for the next ninety years were not wood or planed bark but silver, each card being made in two parts: the generic back, embossed with a generic stylised abstract design, and the face, on which was embossed the image specific to that card. The two parts were then soldered together and carefully fettled so that, when placed face down, they appeared identical.

  Fortune-telling as it is practised today was never a part of Tandulias’ intention. In his writings, now lost, he stated that although the dealer should not be able to see the faces of the cards as he laid them out, it was both inevitable and desirable that the fingers of an experienced dealer would come to recognise – not consciously, perhaps, but on a subconscious level – the feel of the embossed designs of each card. His idea was that the dealer would be guided by what Tandulias called his inner eye to select the cards appropriate for the sitter; most certainly, he never believed that some directed chance or supernatural agency operated to pull the right cards seemingly at random from the pack. Later, however, as the pack became more widely known outside the inner arcana of the Order and the demand for affordable packs for private owners grew, painted copies began to be made, and naturally these could not be read with the fingers in the same way as the silver embossed versions. Tandulias’ original intentions were ignored or forgotten, and the practice of fortune-telling, which all right-thinking men so properly despise, became widespread among the ignorant and profane …

  Thus Felician, in the introduction to the Mirror of True Wisdom. These days, only twenty-seven genuine silver packs survived; nineteen of them were secured in cabinet thirty-seven, the other seven were in the Western empire, in the hands of rich individuals; that hateful boy his nephew had decreed that any attempt to offer them for sale would be construed as treason. All of the nineteen were unspeakably precious, but it was always the Five Oak Leaves Pack that his fingers reached for; supposedly (the provenance was good but not unshakeable) the fourth pack ever made, by Ebbo’s apprentice Vecla, and briefly owned by Tandulias’ son-in-law Panchion, the worthy, prosaic dentist of Lauf Barauna who founded the first ever lodge.

  Glauca shuffled back to his seat and laid the pack on the table. The cards scared him; not just the usual proper awe, but a definite, palpable feeling of disquiet, the sort of thing he used to feel when he hunted boar with his father in the woods, and they’d dismounted and started to walk up through dense undergrowth; the same feeling that something close by was waiting for him, and when it burst out of cover and headed straight at him he simply wouldn’t have the time or the presence of mind. Silly old fool, he thought; he closed his eyes and walked his fingers up the table until one fingertip encountered the cold silver.

  Damn idiots nowadays, fortune-tellers and frauds and cheats, smooth cards and pretending there was a precise, fixed meaning to every card and every sequence and combination of cards. He slid his thumb between the top card and the one underneath, then hinged the top card si
deways until it fell into the palm of his hand. In Rhaxantius’ day they favoured blind men as dealers, because a blind man couldn’t see to cheat; idiots, because a blind man can read with his fingertips far better than a sighted one. He let the pad of his middle finger drift across the metal, following the contours of the embossed relief. Eight of Arrows. He supported its weight as he spread it on to the table, like laying down a woman who’s fainted in your arms. Done that once or twice over the years, of course. Ah well.

  Next card, Victory. Of course, Victory doesn’t mean victory, just as Death doesn’t mean death. He laid it down and slid it until its edge met that of the Eight of Arrows. The Two of Spears, which always made him shiver. Poverty; he let his fingertip dwell on her face before he turned the card and put it next to the others. She always reminded him of his second wife – a remarkably inappropriate similarity, but he’d been in love with the little silver face since he was twelve years old, and even now the feel of her made him smile. A pattern, or at the very least a faint obscure shape, was beginning to emerge. He dealt the Nine of Spears, which made no sense at first, followed by the Angel, and then he understood.

  Tandulias maintained that a brief pause for reflection after dealing six cards allowed impressions to seep through from the unconscious mind, and avoided the dangerous tendency to leap to conclusions. Well, the Two was almost certainly young Senza Belot, couldn’t really be anything else. The Nine must be a reverse of some sort; impossible to say at this stage whether the Angel was figurative or personal. Trump, number, trump was nearly always a transition, but trump, number, trump and then a Nine was a problem; it all depended on how you read that disputed passage in Vexantian, and whether the verb was to be construed as indicative or subjunctive. Damn nuisance, and if there really was an afterlife he eagerly anticipated meeting the unknown copyist in it, so he could kick his arse for being so wickedly careless. Until then, all he could really do was go by context and the overall mood of the cards.

  Onwards, as young Senza would say. Next he turned up the Five of Stars, which of course made everything much clearer; personal, had to be, in which case the Angel was presumably some savage chieftain – the nomad prophet, perhaps, or some headman of the Hus or the Tel Semplan. The feeling of tension slackened off just a little – odd, that, but somehow he felt he could cope better with people than with abstract ideas, laws of nature and war and economics. He turned up the Blind Woman, who presumably was someone he hadn’t met yet.

  Four of Spears – three Spears in one deal, for pity’s sake. The Blind Woman and Senza Belot; he frowned. He assumed that young Senza liked girls – yes, there’d been that one he’d been particularly keen on, though wasn’t there some story about what had happened there? Slipped his mind, but presumably there’d be someone about the place who knew it, a damned gossip factory like the palace. Then it occurred to him that three of the same suit meant that the last three cards must be subjective – yes, fine, but who was the subject? Four of Spears, Senza Belot. Fine. He turned up a new card to find out who Senza would encounter next.

  Two of Arrows.

  Oh, he thought. Well, at least now we know. Not dead after all.

  Two cards to go. The first was the Sun, followed by the Seven of Shields. That made him sit back in his chair. Personal and subjective, he reminded himself; the end of the world for Senza Belot wasn’t necessarily the same thing as the end of the world, although the two could so easily amount to the same thing— He felt a spasm of pity for the boy, the only one of the damned lot of them he had any time for, but then he reminded himself that he was the emperor, and the interests of the empire had to come first. Besides, if Forza was dead, Senza was no longer indispensable. There were other generals. Bound to be.

  He counted slowly to twenty, and passed his fingertips over the cards once more, just to be sure. No mistake. Such a damned shame. He’d miss the boy, for one thing; someone he could trust, always a pleasure to talk to, very bright, clearly interested in art and history, with a genuine appreciation of the finer things. But all men, even scholars and aesthetes, are bloody fools where women are concerned. It occurred to him to wonder who she was, what she was like; had to be something special, he decided, to bring down young Senza. Damned shame. But if it was in the cards, there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it.

  Well, he’d still have the pack, the Five Oak Leaves. All his life he’d been aware that things mattered more to him than people. He loved things, material objects, in a way he could never love a human being; they could be perfect, the way no human being ever was, they could resist change, they could be relied on. Things had been his friends when everyone else had turned against him, his own flesh and blood, and the Five Oak Leaves was his oldest and dearest friend; never let him down, never once lied to him. Without realising he was doing it, he turned his thoughts to the other packs, the eight trapped on the other side of the border – the Theugistes, the Chipped Star, the Third. Damn that bloody nephew of his, spiteful, hateful boy. Damn fool had written to him once, offering to trade, the Chipped Star for the frontier castle at Deura Adrabati. He’d refused, of course, he had to; sent the messenger back with his tongue cut out for delivering such an insult. But the Chipped Star; if it had been up to him— But it wasn’t, of course. That was the cruel irony. The emperor, and, really, there was so little he was allowed to do.

  He sighed with pain as he stood up. He never got up for anyone these days, but he stood up and took the pack to cabinet thirty-seven and lodged it securely in its proper place, found the key, turned it in the lock, then paused for a moment to recover himself after the exertion. Damn fool of a doctor said it was his heart; clearly hadn’t read Mnesimno – what earthly bloody use is a doctor who doesn’t read the books? Glauca knew precisely what was wrong with him, a complex and eventually fatal imbalance between the Marine and Aerial humours, brought on by his quarrels with his family, exacerbated by the wicked defiance of his nephew; even if the war ended tomorrow, the empire reunited, his nephew’s head on a pike in the palace yard, he knew that too much damage had already been done. He had nine years, two months and seventeen days left, so much still to do and so much irritating nonsense getting in the way— No, mustn’t allow himself to fret about it. Fretting, Mnesimno said, accentuated the imbalance by polluting the Terrestrial humour with green bile. Nine years was a maximum, not a guarantee.

  The fire in the brazier was burning low. He was cold so much of the time these days, but he daren’t have the room any warmer because of drying out the textiles and the bindings of the books. He picked up the bell and rang it; when the boy came, he ordered rugs and his goose-down coverlet. Then he sat for a while and listened to his own breathing; sounded all right, but of course you never can tell.

  That night, according to Seuinto’s Perpetual Calendar, the White Swan ought to be visible in the skirts of the Great Ship. Glauca hated climbing stairs more than anything else in the world, but a comet—Well.

  The Observatory was the highest point on the west side of the palace. Quite unreasonably – since it was only logical that its principal users would be scholars, wise men, therefore of necessity old men – the only way up there was a narrow spiral staircase, its treads bowed and slippery with wear. Glauca had ordained a rope handrail, which helped a little. What he really needed was someone behind him to push, but his dignity forbade it. The only thing worse than climbing the Observatory stair was coming back down it, but he tried very hard not to think about that.

  Instead he thought about the comet. Primitives believed the appearance of a comet was an omen, usually a herald of disaster, not knowing that science and observation had made such appearances entirely predictable. It followed that, since men had free will to choose their path, and the comet’s course through the heavens was strictly predetermined, a comet could not be a portent. Instead – rather more significant and fascinating – a comet marked an interval, like a bar line on a sheet of music. In a sense, it was a fixed place by which one could gauge the mo
vement of those astral entities that were capable of change and flux. Accordingly, it was necessary to drag oneself up these intolerable stairs, not to observe the comet, but, rather, everything else.

  Gajanus had wanted two guards to go up with him, but he wasn’t having that; no room on the damn stair, and the last thing he needed when he got up there was a pair of kettlehats breathing down his neck while he was trying to concentrate. Idiotic, the very idea. Nobody was going to climb the sheer outer face of the tower with a knife between his teeth. Gajanus had pulled his on-your-own-head-be-it face but he’d ignored it. Bloody mother hen.

  He stopped four times on the stairs to catch his breath, but even so, by the time he scrabbled his way through the trapdoor at the top on to the leads of the turret, he was exhausted and gasping for air. No pain in his chest or arm, though, which proved what he’d always suspected about those damned fools of doctors. Heart be damned; misaligned humours, just as he’d—

  Something was wrong.

  Not for the first time, he cursed his own frailty. Because he was puzzling and wheezing so loudly, he couldn’t hear a damn thing except his own sad noises, and naturally it was too dark to see, but something was very wrong indeed. He tried to keep still – pretty poor fist of it – and concentrate. Something – yes, damn it, of course. Taranice’s Garland, a constellation of nine stars low down in the south-eastern quadrant, first identified by Nuammes in auc 176. It wasn’t there.

  But it was a clear night, and there were the Three Brothers, and Causica, and the curling tail of the Wyvern. But, in the gap between the Brothers and the endmost star of the tail, nothing but a dark patch—

  It was sixteen years since Glauca had been called upon to fight, but there are some things you don’t forget. Clear as a bell in his mind, the words of his old drill instructor: full measure or right up close; it’s half-measure that gets you killed. He took a long step forward, aiming himself straight at the last star of the Tail. He had no idea if he was still strong – had been once, strong as a bear – but he knew he had no option but to find out. At the last moment he bent his knees, unable to stifle the whimper of pain, and shot his arms out. As he’d anticipated, they encountered legs, the legs of a man. He wrapped his arms around them, hugged them to his chest and stood up.