The Two of Swords, Volume 2 Read online

  “Deal. The thing is, I’m a very materialistic person. I like my things. Rather more than I like people, as it happens. You might want to bear that in mind.”

  Round the next bend they ran into a pair of sentries, flanking a closed door. There was no time to say anything to each other; nothing but mutual trust would save them now, the sort of faith Axio generally reserved for the Great Smith. “I caught this one sneaking about in the—” he began to say, and then Musen hit him.

  It worked because he really hadn’t been expecting it. No time or capacity for acting his part; the world went soft around him, he tried to breathe but couldn’t, and sank to his knees. By the time he could breathe again it all appeared to be over; Musen was bending over him helping him to his feet.

  “Sorry,” Musen said with a grin.

  “That’s fine,” Axio whispered. “Oh, hell, you didn’t kill them, did you?”

  Musen shook his head. Axio looked for himself. They seemed secure enough. “Did they teach you to punch at Beal Defoir?”

  “No, I’m just strong.”

  Fair enough. “You’d better put them away tidily,” Axio said. He didn’t like the way one of them was lying, but it could just be a broken leg. But how do you break a man’s leg by punching him on the jaw? “I think we passed a laundry room a little way back.” He searched them for keys, found none. “Dump them in there and cover them with sheets or something.”

  The lock was actually quite simple: four massive great wards that turned back easily, a credit to the locksmith for the quality of his filing and stoning, if not his imagination. Axio turned the handle and opened the door a crack, slipped the lock pick back in between the seams of his boot top and waited for Musen to return. He was gratified by the brief look of surprise on Musen’s face. “Teach you to do that one day, if you’re good,” he said.

  “Thanks, I’d like that.”

  “I bet.” He put three fingertips against the door and gently wafted it open. There was light on the other side of it. “Here goes,” he whispered, and walked through.

  He was at the foot of a staircase. There were two chairs and a brazier, but no guards. Bless the Household regiment for its self-confidence.

  It was a long staircase, but Axio knew they hadn’t gone high enough to be there yet. At the top was another of those damned wide galleries, with tapestries on the walls and rush matting (thank you, someone) on the floor. Whoever used this part of the building believed in being snug. His throat was sore from reflux and his knees were still weak, but he’d felt worse. “My guess is there’s a priest’s cell of some kind, and the stairs to the chapel are in there. Our tough luck if someone’s sleeping in there.”

  There were nine rooms leading off the corridor, all unoccupied. At the back of the ninth was a door that had no rational explanation. It opened on to more stairs.

  “How did you know?” Musen asked.

  “Every Dualist monastery had a Dawn Chapel.” Axio was breathless on the stairs, but he told himself it was just the after-effect of Musen’s punch. “The abbot went there every morning to greet the rising sun. They kept all their best stuff in there, so it had to be tight as a drum. Logical place for a temporary strongroom.”

  The staircase ended in a steel door. The only light came from a lantern Musen had thought to bring with him from the gallery. “Hold it still, for pity’s sake,” Axio said, scrabbling around the lock plate with his lock pick. “I need to see what I’m doing.”

  “I thought it was all by feel.”

  “It helps if you can actually see the keyhole.”

  Five wards: four flipped easily; the fifth was stiff and nearly bent the pick. “That was so easy, you could’ve done it,” Axio said, as the door moved under his hand. “Cover the lantern, you idiot. We’re not in the lighthouse business.”

  They blanked off the windows as best they could with Axio’s coat and Musen’s cloak and hood. When Musen unmasked the lantern, they saw a stack of steel strongboxes, floor to ceiling, each one with at least one padlock. Axio groaned. “How long does a man stay put out when you thump him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it varies.” Axio fished in his other boot for his spare pick. “Now pay attention. I’m going to teach you how to pick locks.”

  To Axio’s delight, Musen was a quick learner. It helped that the padlocks were deplorably old-fashioned and simple, but the fact remained, the boy had a natural aptitude, a gift. “Fine,” Axio said. “Now, you take that stack and I’ll do this one. Don’t hang about and don’t steal anything.”

  Musen, of course, was the one who knew what they were looking for. Luckily, it was him who found it, in the sixth box he opened. Axio only realised when he noticed how still and quiet the boy had suddenly become.

  “You’ve got it?” he whispered. “Is that it?”

  Musen didn’t answer. On the stone floor beside where he was kneeling lay a silver box, its lid hinged open. Musen was staring at something cupped protectively in his hands, the way you might hold an injured bird. “I said, is that it?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Thank God for that. Here, let me see.”

  Musen hesitated, then opened his hands. Axio saw a pile of thin silver wafers—longer and wider than any playing cards he’d ever seen, embossed with figures he couldn’t make out in the poor light. “You’re sure?” he said. “Come on, it’s important. Every human life in Rasch depends on this.”

  “I think so,” Musen said. “They’re like the ones back in the village. Yes,” he said, his voice suddenly confident, “it’s them.”

  “Give them here.”

  For a moment, Axio was sure Musen would refuse, and that would have been extremely awkward. But then he looked away and held out his hand. Axio snatched the cards, and scrabbled on the floor for the box. The cards wouldn’t go back in; he tried to straighten them up so they’d fit, and dropped two. Musen took the cards back from him, dropped them neatly in the box, added the two strays and handed the box back.

  “You’re absolutely positive,” Axio said. “We can’t come back again, you know that. It’s got to be right.”

  “It’s them.”

  Well, Musen was the expert; which was to say, he was the only specialist thief available who knew what the wretched things were supposed to look like. Damn all rush jobs and emergencies. “If they’re not, I’ll kill you.”

  “I told you, it’s them.”

  “Good enough for me.” Axio reached to put the box in his coat pocket, then remembered that his coat was serving as a blackout. “Kill the lantern,” he said. “Come on, quickly.”

  The two guards were still dead to the world in the laundry room. “We need a new story,” Axio muttered, dragging dirty washing out of a big wicker basket. “All this making stuff up is incredibly stressful for me. I’m basically a very truthful person.” He held up a long black priest’s robe, then saw the vomit stains on the lower skirt. “This is no good, it’s mostly women’s clothes. What we want is a couple of those beige sack things the clerks wear.”

  “Like these?”

  Axio swung round, then sighed. “They’re the wrong colour, and they’re frocks. God preserve me from provincials. Just a moment, though.” He shoved Musen out of the way and rummaged. “In the gold,” he said, “score ten,” and held up a pale blue scholar’s robe. There were wine stains on the bottom hem. “How would you like to be drunk?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t drink.”

  Axio thought for a moment. “It’s a very hard thing to pretend to be,” he said. “All right, I’m the drunk and you’re a servant taking me to sleep it off.” He reached inside his shirt and pulled out a gold star on a fine silver chain. “This is actually mine,” he said. “I’m entitled to it. Order of Academic Merit, second class. They don’t give these things away at weddings.” He stripped off his coat, retrieved the silver box and put it down on the laundry basket, then slipped and wriggled into the gown. It was slightly too long for him,
but not to worry. He hung the gold star round his neck, then tucked the silver box safely in the deep sleeve of the gown. “Watch and learn,” he said. “I’m good at this.”

  A noisy, aggressive drunk who also happens to be a high-ranking scholar is the sort of bad news a sentry can do without. “Would you mind keeping it down, sir?” he asked, ever so politely; in response, the drunk took a swing at him, and only prompt action by the drunk’s enormous servant stopped him from making contact, which would have obliged the sentry to report the incident and made trouble for everyone. The servant rolled his eyes apologetically; the sentry nodded. “Get him out of here,” the sentry said imploringly. “And for God’s sake stop him singing.”

  No such luck. For an intellectual, the drunk had fairly basic taste in music: mostly romantic and scurrilous ballads by Oida, with a few old army favourites thrown in. People came out of their rooms to look, saw the blue gown and the servant’s split lip and closed their doors quickly. A captain of the guard came bustling up as the dreadful pair weaved their way across the inner cloister, caught sight of the gold star and ducked behind a column. The drunk started to sing “Soldier’s Joy” in a loud, clear voice that would have been quite attractive if not for the tendency to roar.

  Their luck stuttered at one point when they found themselves face to face with another blue gown, draped over a short, stocky man with a long white beard. “Name and college,” he roared; the drunk lunged at him, but the servant tripped him neatly and he went sprawling. The short man took a step back. “I don’t recognise him,” he said to the servant. “Who is he?”

  The servant gave him a weak grin. “Just arrived, sir. With the dogs. Doctor of Natural Philosophy.”

  The short man grunted disgustedly. “Get him to bed before anyone sees him,” he said, and stalked back the way he’d just come.

  The riot petered out just before dawn, when it started raining heavily and the Prefect and the mayor of Prosc worked out a compromise, the details of which have not been recorded. By noon, wheeled traffic was crossing the causeway once again, and Axio (who’d slept in a coal bunker, with Musen curled up at his feet like a dog) decided it would be safe to leave the city. He dumped the blue gown, which by then was filthy with coal dust, and sent Musen to steal him a coat. Musen protested that he was covered in coal dust, too, but Axio pointed out that the rain would wash most of it off, so that was fine.

  Carts and coaches were streaming into the city; not much was going the other way. They tried to hitch a lift on a farm cart, but the driver told them to go to hell, so they walked. Axio’s ankle was playing up; he couldn’t remember damaging it, but it’s easy to tweak something and not notice when your life gets exciting for a while. Musen’s lip had scabbed over. “Don’t pick at it,” Axio advised him.

  “I must confess I didn’t give a lot of thought to how we get home,” Axio said, as they sheltered from the rain under a chestnut tree on the edge of the northern marshes. “Never thought we’d get this far, to be honest. Still, fool’s luck.”

  Musen had taken off his left boot and was wringing out a wet sock. “Can’t we just walk?”

  Axio gave him a sour look. “Theoretically, I suppose we could. I hate walking. It’s boring and I get blisters.”

  Musen shrugged. “Where I come from, we walk everywhere.”

  “Oh, well, then, in that case.” Axio craned his neck to look up at the sky. “Bloody rain,” he said. “Come on, we’ve done the difficult bit, surely. The rest should be easy.”

  Musen dragged his boot back on. “Did you really think we wouldn’t make it?”

  “I was convinced of it. Our continued existence is a complete but agreeable surprise to me.”

  “You seemed so sure of yourself. Like it was all a prank or something.”

  Axio shrugged. “I appease the Great Smith by playing the clown. One of these days he won’t find me funny any more.”

  Musen turned his head away.

  “You don’t like me saying things like that,” Axio said, “making jokes, taking His name in vain.”

  “Not much, no.”

  “Provincial.” Axio wriggled back up against the trunk of the tree. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that the greatest blasphemy of all is implying that He can’t take a joke?”

  Musen frowned, then suddenly grinned. “I never thought of it like that.”

  “Course you didn’t, you’re a provincial. I imagine you think of Him as an old man with a white beard and a leather apron. Well?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “Fair enough.” Axio pulled two apples from his coat pocket, offered one to Musen, who took it. “It’s a valid interpretation. Me, I see Him as a vast, extraordinarily complex concatenation of circumstances.” He bit into the apple. “Which, taken together, admit of no other possible explanation other than intelligent design and conscious purpose. All as broad as it’s long, of course. I from the evidence, you from intuitive revelation, we both arrive at the same point. Which is all that matters, really.”

  Musen looked at him. “I’ve always believed,” he said. “Ever since I was a kid. Nobody else in our village did, so I had to keep it to myself.”

  Axio nodded. “Like the thieving.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “Your special gifts.” Axio yawned. “I used to wonder about that,” he said. “Why would He do that? I guess it’s easy to see why He would call someone to be a saint, a healer of the sick, a champion of the poor and oppressed, or even a great artist or musician. But why did He call you to be a thief and me to be an enormously talented leader of irregular troops? It seems unlikely.”

  “He needs thieves sometimes.”

  Axio clapped his hands and pointed. “Exactly. As we’ve just demonstrated, in fact. He made us as we are, therefore by implication we must be good for something: our duty is to find out what it is. It’s a bit crazy, though. I mean, take me and my brother. You ever come across him?”

  “Once.”

  “Once is enough. He was always so jealous of me when we were kids. And quite right, too, because I was always smarter, stronger, better looking, better singing voice. It was quite pathetic sometimes. He was always trying to find something he could be good at, and as soon as he did, I took it up, too, and got better at it than him, just to put him in his place. Drove him crazy. I never let him keep a girl for more than five minutes, either. I guess I’m partly responsible for the mess he’s turned himself into, but what the hell. I never liked him very much. I think the day I joined the army was the happiest day of his life.”

  Musen grinned. “I can see why.”

  “Well, quite. But the point is, here you have me, a man with all the talents, all the graces, I could’ve been a great musician or a poet, I could’ve been a wise statesman, definitely an outstanding general. And what does He decide to use me for? Robbing people and leading bandits.” He shrugged. “His will be done, I guess, but I can’t help thinking it’s a waste.”

  Musen looked at him sideways. “You sure that was Him and not you?”

  “Oh, yes.” Axio scowled. “That was Him all right. He put me in a position where I had no choice but to throw it all away and become the sorry object you see before you. I don’t actually care if you believe this or not, but you’ll never ever meet anyone who’s given up more for his faith than I have.” He smiled. “Just as well He and I both have such a strong sense of humour,” he said. “Otherwise we wouldn’t be nearly such good friends.”

  He waited for Musen to ask, but he didn’t. So he said, “You don’t approve of me, do you?”

  Musen pulled off his other boot. “Have we got any money left?” he said.

  “Not much,” Axio replied, “apart from what you filched out of the strongboxes, in spite of what I told you.” He held out his hand. Musen tapped the heel of the boot he’d just taken off, and coins tumbled out. “Just as well you don’t obey orders,” Axio said, and picked them up. Twelve angels; old coins, pre-schism, but still current, the few tha
t were left. Most of them had been melted down long ago, because the gold content was higher. “Not bad,” he went on. “We can buy a coach and horses to take us home and still have enough left for a small farm.”

  Musen gave him a look that wasn’t a scowl but did just as well.

  But the sad reality is that it doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got if there’s nobody around to sell you things. That morning they passed four substantial farms, all boarded up, the stables empty. Musen climbed a roof, dug down through the thatch and came out again with half a cheese and a slab of dusty bacon, or they’d have gone hungry.

  Mail coaches passed them once or twice; but all going to the city, none coming back the other way. Axio didn’t like that at all.

  “For all we know,” he complained, “Rasch has already fallen, Senza’s on his way up here and this has all been a complete waste of time.” He covered his pocket with his hand, just to make sure it was still there. “You’re definite that was the right pack?” he added.

  “Yes. You keep asking me that. I’m sure.”

  “It’s ironic, the fate of a great city depending on the antiquarian knowledge of the likes of you. Don’t they have horses in Rhus? Is that why you walk everywhere?”

  “Horses cost money.”

  “That was never a problem when I was growing up,” Axio said gravely. “Everything else, but not money, we were fine for that. All gone now, of course. I was the eldest, so when I had my bit of difficulty it was all forfeited to the Exchequer. Oida’s never forgiven me for that. Actually, he’s never forgiven me for anything. Do you have brothers?”

  “No.”

  “Figures. That sullen introversion is typical of an only child. Did you know only children are three times more likely to take to thieving than kids with brothers and sisters? Whereas siblings are twice as likely to be murderers or arsonists. I don’t know where they get the numbers from, but it’s interesting, don’t you think?”

  They slept in a semi-derelict linhay. Axio woke up at first light and immediately checked his pocket. The box was gone, and so was Musen.