The Two of Swords, Volume 2

by K. J. Parker

  But the food just kept getting better and better, and his ribs stopped hurting, and the cuts on his face scabbed over nicely without infection. “You’ll have a sweetheart of a scar,” Myrtus told him cheerfully. “But I don’t suppose that’ll bother you.”

  Chanso considered explaining about the house marks on his forehead, but decided not to bother.

  “My cousin,” Myrtus went on, “he’s had these terrible scars on his face ever since he was a kid. I can’t say it’s held him back particularly. He’s a musician. Actually, he’s more of a teacher, though he doesn’t really do any teaching. It’s complicated. The point is, a few red squiggles on your face needn’t be the end of the world. And it’s not like you’re missing an ear or anything yucky like that.”

  Somehow, Chanso wasn’t keen on dwelling on his future disfigurement. “How can someone be a teacher and not teach?” he asked.

  Myrtus scratched his ear. “It’s sort of the way we do things. If a man’s a really good teacher, we stop him teaching and make him an organiser. Don’t ask me to explain because you probably can’t grasp the advanced concepts involved. Anyway, he still makes up music. I don’t think he’s supposed to, but he’s so grand these days, nobody can stop him.”

  Beyond the spoiled farmland the country rose steeply. They rode across moors, and skyline-to-skyline expanses of ankle-high tree stumps, where a great pine forest had been cut down. Props, Myrtus explained; when you’re laying siege to a city, you dig tunnels under the walls to undermine them, and you need wooden props to keep the tunnels from falling in. All this—he waved his arm vaguely at the unending row of stumps—went to underpin the siege works at (some place or other; Chanso didn’t catch the name), about ten years ago; he couldn’t remember now whether the city fell or not, but they moved a lot of earth and used up a lot of props. Fifty years of pine needles had so poisoned the ground that nothing would grow between the stumps except bracken and flags.

  “Civilisation,” Myrtus said, pointing. “See, over there, in the steep-sided valley between the two mountain ranges. That’s Ioto. Nice place, if you don’t mind breathing soot.”

  Once the heather gave way to grass, they started seeing sheep on the hillsides, and small herds of short, hairy ponies—bred for the mines, Myrtus said, these hills were practically solid iron, and Ioto was the iron-founders’ town. And over there—he pointed to a range of hills scarred by deep brown gorges—that was where they dug coal to feed the foundries. Coal? Ah. It’s a sort of black rock, and it burns like charcoal, only better. No, seriously.

  When they were two days away from the city, Chanso asked about the stuff on the grass. It was like hoar frost, only black. Soot, Myrtus explained.

  The sky behind the city was brown, and the sun was a red, sore gleam. Ten miles from the city gates, the drop-hammers had sounded like tinkling bells. Once inside the walls, the noise was a low ceiling inside your head that stopped you thinking beyond the simple and immediate. The buildings were black, the streets narrow and blocked with carts, whose wheels ran half-spoke deep in mud-bottomed ruts. There were high, arched wooden bridges over the main thoroughfares, because crossing at street level was impossible, and had been so for as long as anyone could remember.

  It was strange to see people again; very strange indeed to see so many of them. Seventy thousand, Myrtus said; of course, the city had grown enormously during the war. All the country people for miles around had come in to town, to be safe and to find work. Even so, the foundries and the munitions factory were desperately short of workers; they had to pay ridiculously high wages, which was why everything in Ioto was five times the price you’d pay elsewhere. Ocnisant’s third biggest competitor, the Ministers of Grace, were based here. Apart from them, and the general stores, commissaries and mercantiles, everyone worked for the war, making arrowheads. Just arrowheads, nothing else.

  The Lodge had a house in Ioto, or, rather, a cellar: a huge cellar, like underground caverns. Two hundred feet down, it was quiet and cool and the air was relatively clean; water came from an underground cistern. It was clear, and more or less safe to drink if you boiled it first. Chanso was terrified; he felt like he was in a grave, and he couldn’t understand why the roof didn’t cave in, with the weight of all those buildings on top of it. They ate in a long, deserted hall with a stunningly carved and gilded roof, and slept in a little stone box, like the ones Chanso had seen in Blemya, for keeping ice through the summer.

  “It’s called tea,” Myrtus said. “You make it by boiling leaves in water. Some people add honey and spices. It cuts the dust like nothing else, and you can drink it all day without falling over.”

  Turned out it didn’t taste of anything, which was just fine. “Tell me about the Lodge,” Chanso said.

  Myrtus was quiet for a long time, until Chanso had decided he’d asked a rude question and was being ignored. Then Myrtus swallowed all his tea in one gulp and said, “The Lodge is—” And then he stopped.

  “I’m sorry,” Chanso said. “Is it something you’re not supposed to tell me?”

  “What? God, no. It’s just so hard to explain.” He looked round for a while, then raised his hand and waved it. The waving became a beckoning, and then he lowered it again. “I can’t answer you,” he said, “but this lady can.” He called out in the horrible foreign language, and Chanso saw someone in a long grey gown coming towards them. “Siarma,” he said. “Someone I want you to meet.”

  Siarma was female; about Chanso’s mother’s age, very tall and beautiful. She sat down next to Myrtus and lifted the cowl off her face. “Nice to see you, too, Captain. Who’s this?”

  Myrtus grinned. “He’s probably got a catalogue number by now, but his name’s Chanso, as you’ll have gathered he’s no Vei, and he’d like someone to explain to him about the Lodge. I thought, you’ll do it so much better than me, and it’ll give you a chance to polish up your irregular verbs.”

  She turned her head and smiled at Chanso. “It’s always a pleasure to speak your language,” she said, and unlike Chanso she had no trace of an accent. “I learned it for five years before I even met a no Vei, so you’ll have to forgive me if I get things wrong.”

  “You’re doing fine,” Chanso said. “Really.”

  Myrtus laughed. “She’s head of the faculty of southern languages,” he said. “Means she knows more about it than you do.”

  “Ignore him,” Siarma said. “One of my least promising students. What can I tell you about the Lodge?”

  Chanso hesitated. Then he said, “Everything.”

  “Oh, that.” She frowned. “Myrtus, be a darling and get us some more tea, this is ice-cold. And see if they’ve got any of those nice biscuits.”

  Myrtus grinned and went away. “You don’t know anything at all?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Very well.” She laced her fingers together and rested them on the table. “In that case, let me tell you a story.”

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a blacksmith. He lived in a city, or a village, or a tent in the grass country, and people from miles around used to come to him for the tools and the other things they needed.

  “Every day, just before daybreak, he would build a great fire, as hot as the sun. He crushed ore, mixed it with lime and charcoal and loaded it into a crucible; with the bellows he made the fire roar, until the iron sweated out of the rock and pooled in the pig slots he’d cut into the floor. Or he would take scrap from the scrap heap, heat it until it was soft, flatten it, draw it out, fold it and weld it and fold it again and again, then draw it down into bars over a swage block. When they were cool he put the pigs and bars up on a rack, ready to be made into whatever he needed to make.

  “Many things were asked of him, from gates to spoons to needles, hooks to hinges to arrowheads. For each purpose he chose the most suitable material: plain iron for those things that neither bend nor flex, steel for those things that flex and carry an edge. He heated the material in the fire, worked it between hamme
r and anvil, stretched it, jumped it up, bent it, flattened it, twisted it and drew it out; he could make thick bars and thin plates, straight lines and every possible curve; he could make steel so hard it could cut steel, or sheet so thin you could crumple it in your hand. He could make springs that bent double on themselves and sprang back into shape. He could make wire that twisted and stayed twisted. Everything he made was different, but it all came from the same ore and passed between the same hammer and anvil; and everything he made was for a purpose, and everything, everything he made was good.

  “The people would come and take away the things he made; and some of them were wise and used them well, and some of them were stupid, and used them badly. They broke them, bent them, twisted and distorted them; and then they would bring them back to the smith and say, this thing you made for me is no good, fix it or make me another.

  “The smith would look at the work he had made and others had spoiled, and decide what was to be done. Because he loved the things he’d made, he would use all his skill and patience to straighten the bent and the twisted, to weld the broken, to braze and solder, to retemper the steel that had lost its memory. But sometimes the damage they had done was too great; so he put the thing he had made in the fire to soften it, until all its shape and memory were lost, and he hammered and folded and welded it back into bar stock, and began again, as if with fresh iron.

  “Now, you must have seen some of the work that this smith made. You will have seen the sun and moon, which rise and set with such extraordinary precision, and the seasons that come round so reliably we can live by them, though we can’t see the ratchets and the pawls. You will have seen the earth, which gives us bread and meat; you will have seen the body, which is the most perfect tool for all our needs, which responds to our quickest thought and our deepest memory. In everything that works and functions you’ve seen his hand; the mere fact that we can live, that we have a sun to warm us and food we can eat—if you want proof of this smith and his skill, look about you, look at everything useful and helpful and good, and ask yourself: Why does water refresh us and food nourish us? Why is there summer to grow the grain and winter to cool the earth? Why is there a sun to give us light and darkness to let us sleep? Or, if you prefer, who designed us so that we can live in the world, digesting bread and meat and water, being warmed by sunlight and cooled by shade, seeing in daylight and sleeping in the dark? You know there can only be one answer. Because a great craftsman made all of these things, and everything he makes is good.

  “And then reflect; he made me, and he made you. He made us for a purpose.

  “Now the foolish people he makes things for sometimes forget or fail to understand what the purpose of his work might be. Because they’re so foolish, sometimes they ask, why did he make the hurricane or the murderer or the disease? They fail to understand what they see when they look around them, at all the wonderful things he made, that serve their purpose, that work so well. They don’t understand; if he made the sun, and the sun is good, and he made you and me—how can we be bad? They fail to understand that everything is good, applied to its proper purpose.

  “And that,” she said, “is the Lodge. In a nutshell.” She poured herself a cup of the allegedly ice-cold tea, blew on it and sipped it. “Does that answer your question?”

  “So you’re priests,” Chanso said. “Like he said.”

  “Priests.” She looked offended. “Oh dear. No, we aren’t priests, because we don’t pray, and we don’t have temples, and I’m not sure we have any gods, even. I think some of us believe in an old man in a leather apron. Some of us simply feel it’s logical to assume that a world that functions must have a function. But priest is a bit of a rude word. You weren’t to know that.”

  “But you believe—”

  She shrugged. “So do you. You believe that if I drop a stone on your foot, it’ll hurt. Well?”

  “Well, yes. Obviously.”

  “I see. You believe in a machine—call it the world—which makes dropped things fall. Not just sometimes, not even most of the time, but always. You’re halfway there, at the very least.” She smiled. “I think where priests go wrong is asking people to believe in magic. Which is silly. They invent gods who can do stuff which is impossible; and when you stop and think about it, you know it can’t be true. You can’t split mountains down the middle with a frown, or fly without wings, or turn water into milk or wake the dead, and any system of values predicated on magic is obviously garbage. No, we believe in real stuff, like summer and sunrise and the germination of the seed, just as miraculous but we know it’s real, because we can see it. We can see people who need to eat bread to live, and we know that if you put a wheat seed in the ground and come back later, you’ve got bread to eat. Coincidence? I really don’t think so, do you?”

  Chanso frowned. “But you said murderers and diseases—”

  She nodded. “He made them, therefore they must be good, good for something. Yes, I believe that. It’s the logical consequence of everything I see around me. All things have been made well, but some things are misused and some things are misunderstood, therefore some things are damaged and broken. And some things must be beaten and twisted if they are to be saved.” She smiled. “I never said it was easy, or pleasant. I never said he’s kind or loving or even fair. Actually, I don’t see where blame and fault and good and evil come into it; it’s just a case of foolish people using the wrong tool for the wrong job. And, of course, that’s where the Lodge comes in.”

  He was about to ask, but decided to think about it for himself. “The right tool for the right job.”

  She was pleased with him. “Precisely,” she said. “To take a very simple example: some fool took a woodcarver and tried to use him as a soldier. Easily put right; and that’s what we’ve done. Usually it’s not as simple or straightforward as that. Quite often we’re dealing with fools who take craftsmen—Lodge people—and try and use them as targets or chopping blocks; or other fools who mistake people for chess pieces. And sometimes we find someone and even we can’t figure out what the hell he’s good for. Is he a hoe, a corkscrew or a doorstop? Is he a tool, an ornament or a weapon?” She frowned. “You’d be amazed how many people turn out to be weapons. But as often as not, a weapon can only save a life by taking one. I’ve had a good few students in my classes that were almost too dangerous to handle, but they all turned out good in the end, once we figured what they were for. There are no bad things and no bad people. Just bad uses.” She smiled again. “Are we getting there?”

  “I think so,” Chanso said. “I’m not sure I agree, but—”

  “You understand.” She nodded. “That’s the main thing. Agreeing can wait. Sooner or later, nearly everyone accepts that the sun is warm and water is wet. And once you’ve accepted that, all the rest will inevitably follow. Meanwhile—” over her shoulder he could see Myrtus coming back with a teapot and a plate “—I suggest you enjoy the free food and the safety. They’re both hard to come by anywhere else.”

  Myrtus went to find out the news and came back looking thoughtful. Senza Belot, it was reliably confirmed, had survived the battle. He’d stayed to the bitter end, then rushed off alone with five hundred lancers chasing him, but he’d made it to the border and was now back in Choris, in prison, awaiting the emperor’s justice.

  Forza Belot was also confirmed alive. He had been ordered to report to Iden Astea, to explain to his emperor why deliberately losing seventy thousand men in one battle could possibly be construed as a victory, or a good idea. He had not yet obeyed the order, and his whereabouts were not known. Meanwhile, press gangs were frantically recruiting all over the Western empire, and no man over twelve or under seventy was safe; the emperor was reported to be offering ridiculous money for mercenaries, with the result that the few soldiers he still had were deserting from the regular army and signing on with the free companies. Rasch Cuiber, which had been well fed throughout the siege, was now starving because all the farms for miles around were de
serted; instead of coming back when the Easterners left, the country people were staying hidden in the wilderness, for fear of the recruiting sergeants. Attempts to send a relief caravan had foundered because there were no carts, no horses and no carters willing to risk impressment. The emperor was therefore seriously considering evacuating Rasch, sending its people to Iden and burning the city itself to the ground, to keep such a well-fortified stronghold from falling into enemy hands.

  Ioto was forty-eight miles from the coast, sixty if you took the flat, straight road that skirted the mountains; sometimes it was quicker, sometimes not, depending on the state of the mountain passes. The iron wagons took the long road, and it was crowded with them—some days, they reckoned, you could walk to the sea across the beds and booms of carts, and get there quicker. There were six famous inns on the long road. “We’ll go that way,” Myrtus decided. “It’s not like we’re in a tearing hurry.”

  Much as he’d like to, Myrtus explained, he wasn’t going to Beal Defoir. At the coast he’d hand Chanso over to another agent, get his next assignment and be off again, unless his luck was in and there were orders waiting for him to head for Division or Central. No, he had no idea who the agent would be—“though if you’re really lucky, you might just get my wife. You’ll like her, and she’ll get you there quickly with the minimum of aggravation. Her name’s Tenevris: tall, bony woman with bushy red hair. Light of my life. If you do see her, give her my love.”

  The Crown of Absolution was as full as Myrtus had ever seen it, mostly with carters; no hope of a bed for the night, or even a designated area of straw. And then Myrtus asked various questions about the innkeeper’s uncle, and suddenly there was a room, in fact there were two, and dinner was on the house.

  Chanso, who’d only slept under a roof twice before, lay awake most of the night staring out of the window, trying not to think what would happen if the rafters gave way. As is often the way, he fell asleep shortly before dawn and was hard to wake up.