by K. J. Parker
The simple inscription on the base of Saevus’ statue reads: He saw the worth of every man. We shall not look upon his like again.
When Procopius (the great composer) was fourteen years old his uncle sent him to the Imperial Academy of Music at Tet Escra to study harmonic theory under the celebrated Jifrez. Aware that the journey would involve crossing the notorious Four Fingers Pass, Procopius’ uncle provided him with an escort of six men-at-arms, two archers, a personal attendant and a cook; he also sent with them the full cost of his nephew’s tuition and maintenance: five thousand angels in gold. A cautious man, he had made proper enquiries about the eight soldiers, and the servant had been with the family for many years. The cook was a last-minute addition to the party. He seemed like a respectable man, and he came recommended by a noble family in the south.
The party crossed the Four Fingers without incident and began the long climb down Castle Street to the river valley. On the fourth day, just before sunrise, Procopius woke up to find the cook standing over him with a filleting knife in his hand.
“What’s the matter?” he asked. The cook bent down and stabbed at him with the knife.
It was probably his phobia about blades that saved him. He rolled sideways as the blow fell, so that the knife struck him on the shoulder rather than in the hollow between the collarbones, as the cook had intended. The cook yelled at him and tried to stamp on his face; he caught his attacker’s foot with both hands and twisted it, toppling him; then he jumped up and ran, passing the dead bodies of the soldiers and his servant, all with their throats cut. The cook threw the knife at him, but it hit him handle first, between the shoulders. He kept running, until he was sure the cook had given up chasing him.
Although he’d escaped the immediate danger, his situation was about as bad as it could be. The cut in his shoulder was bleeding freely. He was still five days from the nearest known settlement, with nothing except his shirt. His feet were bare. The surrounding countryside was shale rock, with a few clumps of gorse. He had no idea if there were any streams running down off the mountain; he couldn’t see any, and was reluctant to leave the road to go exploring. It was a reasonably safe assumption that the cook would be following the road—where else would he go?—and he would be on horseback, most likely armed with a selection of the dead soldiers’ weapons. Procopius had never fought anyone in his life. He seriously considered staying where he was and waiting for the cook to find him and kill him; he was going to die anyway, and a knife would be quicker and easier than hunger, exposure or gangrene. It was only the thought that, if he let himself be killed, the cook would prevail and thereby in some vague sense prove himself the better man; the sheer unfairness of it that convinced him to keep going and do his best to survive.
Fortuitously, the road at this point was steep and made up of loose, dry stones; a horseman would have little advantage over a man on foot. He kept up the best pace he could manage, stopping only to listen for the sound of his pursuer, until nightfall. Then he left the road and hid as best he could in the gorse, waiting for sunrise. He was so tired he fell asleep for a few hours, but was wide awake long before the sun rose.
As soon as it was light enough to see by, he carefully made his way back uphill, parallel to the road, about fifty yards off on the eastern side, until he reached the place where the cook had camped for the night. He covered his advance by using the cook’s horse as cover. He took an arrow from the quiver hanging from the saddle, crept in slowly and quietly and stabbed the cook through the ear without waking him.
He made an effort to cover the body with stones but soon gave up; the clouds were gathering, and he understood the merit of getting as far along the road as he could before the rain started to fall. As well as the money, the cook had brought two full waterskins and a sack of food, mostly cheese, dried sausage and apples; also two blankets and an oilskin cape. There were also various weapons, but Procopius left them behind, as he had no idea how to use them. He took a small knife and the cook’s boots, which were much too big for him.
The next two days were fairly straightforward, although he led the horse rather than rode it, even though his feet were horribly sore. On the third day, however, he came to the place where the Blacklode crosses the road. Heavy rain on the Four Fingers had swollen the normally shallow river into a flood. Procopius had no experience with such matters, but he recognised at once that he had no hope of crossing the river in that state. With no map, he had no way of knowing if there were any alternative fords or crossings. He’d been careful with the food, but at best he had just enough for another four days. He couldn’t get his head far enough round to see properly, but he had an idea that the wound in his shoulder had gone bad; it was warm and tender to the touch and hurt more now than it had earlier, and he felt weak and decidedly feverish. He decided that honour had been satisfied by his defeat of the cook, and there was nothing inherently shameful in this situation about death by exposure. He sat down beside the river, cleared his mind and fell asleep.
He woke up to find a man leaning over him, in more or less the same attitude as the cook. This time, though, he didn’t instinctively flinch, mostly because he was too weak and sick to move. He noticed that the stranger wasn’t holding a knife.
“You all right?” the stranger said.
“No.”
The stranger frowned. “How’d you get yourself all cut up like that?”
Procopius took a deep breath and explained, as lucidly as he could; he’d been sent on a journey with a large sum of money, one of the servants had tried to kill him for the money but he’d managed to get away, and now here he was, lost and alone and very sick. The stranger nodded, to show he’d understood.
“Will you help me?” Procopius asked. “Please?”
The man smiled. “Wish I could,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’ll be all right. What happened to your face? It’s a real mess.”
Procopius explained that, when he was eighteen months old, his father had murdered his mother and then tried to kill him too. “Is that right?” the stranger said. “You’ve had a pretty rough old time, one way and another. Still, it’ll all come right in the end. Believe it or not, you’ll look back on all this someday and understand it was all for the best.”
“Look,” Procopius said, “please, can you help me? At least give me a leg up so I can get on the horse. I haven’t got the strength.”
The stranger smiled. “In that case, that horse isn’t much use to you, is it? So, really, I might as well have it, save me footslogging it all the way to the nearest town to fetch help. I hate walking. I get blisters.”
“You can’t have it.”
“Sorry.” The stranger’s smile grew wider, if anything. “You can’t use it, and you can’t stop me taking it, so tough. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll buy it off you.”
“I don’t want to sell it. I need it.”
“No you don’t,” the stranger said gently. “But I’m going to give you a good price for it. I’m no thief.”
He gathered the reins, put his foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. All the provisions and the other stuff were in the saddlebags. “It’ll be all right,” he said, “I promise you. You’re going to be fine, just you wait and see.”
Procopius watched him until he was out of sight; a long time, because, from where he was, he could see the road for ten miles, so at least an hour, during which time the horse and rider gradually grew smaller and further away before dwindling down into a dot, and then nothing. During that long time, he resolved not to die, because he needed to follow the thief, catch up with him and deal with him the way he’d dealt with the cook, for roughly the same reason. But this time it looked as though that wasn’t going to be possible. He was getting weaker, it was harder and harder to stay awake; when he wasn’t burning hot he was freezing cold, and, really, what was the point? His weakness had proved him to be inferior. If he didn’t deserve to live, he didn’t deserve to live. Simple as that.
He woke up lying in the bed of a cart. The driver and his wife were taking a load of cheese to market; you poor thing, they said, whatever happened to you? And they were very kind and looked after him, they took him to the inn at Loscobiel and stayed with him until he was better, and then took him on to Tet Escra, where he was able to get a letter of credit from his uncle’s bank that made good his losses and enabled him to give the cheesemonger and his wife a proper reward, appropriate to his dignity and station in life, so that was all right.
On his first day at the Academy, he presented the Principal with a manuscript: a flute sonata in three movements. He didn’t mention the background to the piece, how the shape of it had come to him as he lay among the rocks hoping to die, after the thief stole his horse, because that wasn’t relevant, and he didn’t suppose the Principal would be interested. The Principal put the manuscript on his desk and said he’d be sure to look at it some time, when he had a moment.
Two days later, he was sent for.
“Did you write this?” the Principal asked him. He looked fierce, almost angry.
“Yes,” Procopius said.
“Think carefully, and I’ll ask you again. Did you write this?”
“Yes.”
“All on your own?”
Procopius suppressed a smile. Very much all on his own. “Yes. Sir,” he added, remembering his manners. Then he couldn’t resist asking, “Did you like it?”
The Principal didn’t answer that. Instead, he gave a ferocious lecture on the evils of plagiarism. It had been known, he said, for students from wealthy families to hire penniless young composers to write works which the students then passed off as their own; behaviour the Principal confessed he couldn’t begin to understand, because surely anybody who did such a thing would be eaten away with shame, and what possible pleasure could anyone get from being praised and rewarded for something he hadn’t done? In such cases, the penalty was instant expulsion from the Academy. He wanted Procopius to understand that; and now he’d ask the question a third time, and if the answer was yes, there’d be no penalty, not this time. Did you write this piece of music?
“Yes,” Procopius said. “Sir. I mean, like you said, why would I want to pretend if I hadn’t? I’ve come here to learn, not to show off.”
“I see,” the Principal said. “In which case, that’ll be all. You can go.”
The Principal never liked him after that, because he’d made a serious accusation against him and it turned out to be wrong. But all the teachers loved him and said he was the most remarkable talent they’d ever come across, and it was a privilege to be part of the making of someone who would undoubtedly turn out to be the finest musician of his generation. Procopius wasn’t sure about all that. The teachers had shown him all sorts of clever ways to turn the shapes in his mind into music; he’d been shocked and appalled by his own ignorance and the fact that he hadn’t been able to figure out such things for himself but had had to be shown. That felt like cheating, though apparently it was quite legitimate. For the rest of it, the shapes just came to him, without any real work or effort on his part, certainly no skill or engagement with excellence. He was given them, unearned, just as he’d always been given everything, his whole life, undeserved, simply because he was the son and sole heir of a rich man who died relatively young, and the nephew of a rich, doting uncle.
So, for a while, he made sense of it the best he could. He thought about the man who’d taken his horse. You’ll be all right, the man had said, just you wait and see. And he’d said he wasn’t a thief, and he’d pay a good price for the horse; and that was when young Procopius began to see the shapes, and calling that a coincidence was stretching belief much further than it could possibly go. He could make no sense of it, of course—because what would a god or similar supernatural agency want with a horse, or feel the need to pay for a perfectly unremarkable thirty-thaler gelding with such a precious and valuable commodity?—but the fact that he couldn’t make sense of it certainly didn’t mean that it didn’t make sense, only that he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. Later, he realised that he’d simply exchanged one insoluble problem for another, with a garnish of the supernatural to excuse him from having to analyse it rationally, and simply accepted; he was one of those people from whom things are taken and to whom things are given, not necessarily proportionately; a conduit for the remarkable and the excessive, himself unremarkable and lacking in any real substance, either for good or evil.
if you enjoyed
THE TWO OF SWORDS: VOLUME TWO
look out for
A CROWN FOR COLD SILVER
The Crimson Empire
by
Alex Marshall
“It was all going so nicely, right up until the massacre.”
Twenty years ago, feared general Cobalt Zosia led her five villainous captains and her mercenary army into battle, wrestling monsters and toppling an empire. When there were no more titles to win and no more worlds to conquer, she retired and gave up her legend to history.
Now the peace she carved for herself has been shattered by the unprovoked slaughter of her village. Seeking bloody vengeance, Zosia heads for battle once more, but to find justice she must confront grudge-bearing enemies, once-loyal allies, and an unknown army that marches under a familiar banner.
FIVE VILLAINS. ONE LEGENDARY GENERAL. A FINAL QUEST FOR VENGEANCE.
Chapter 1
It was all going so nicely, right up until the massacre.
Sir Hjortt’s cavalry of two hundred spears fanned out through the small village, taking up positions between half-timbered houses in the uneven lanes that only the most charitable of surveyors would refer to as “roads.” The warhorses slowed and then stopped in a decent approximation of unison, their riders sitting as stiff and straight in their saddles as the lances they braced against their stirrups. It was an unseasonably warm afternoon in the autumn, and after their long approach up the steep valley, soldier and steed alike dripped sweat, yet not a one of them removed their brass skullcap. Weapons, armor, and tack glowing in the fierce alpine sunlight, the faded crimson of their cloaks covering up the inevitable stains, the cavalry appeared to have ridden straight out of a tale, or galloped down off one of the tapestries in the mayor’s house.
So they must have seemed to the villagers who peeked through their shutters, anyway. To their colonel, Sir Hjortt, they looked like hired killers on horseback barely possessed of sense to do as they were told most of the time. Had the knight been able to train wardogs to ride he should have preferred them to the Fifteenth Cavalry, given the amount of faith he placed in this lot. Not much, in other words, not very much at all.
He didn’t care for dogs, either, but a dog you could trust, even if it was only to lick his balls.
The hamlet sprawled across the last stretch of grassy meadow before the collision of two steep, bald-peaked mountains. Murky forest edged in on all sides, like a snare the wilderness had set for the unwary traveler. A typical mountain town here in the Kutumban range, then, with only a low reinforced stone wall to keep out the wolves and what piddling avalanches the encircling slopes must bowl down at the settlement when the snows melted.
Sir Hjortt had led his troops straight through the open gate in the wall and up the main track to the largest house in the village … which wasn’t saying a whole lot for the building. Fenced in by shedding rosebushes and standing a scant two and a half stories tall, its windowless redbrick face was broken into a grid by the black timbers that supported it. The mossy thatched roof rose up into a witch’s hat, and set squarely in the center like a mouth were a great pair of doors tall and wide enough for two riders to pass through abreast without removing their helmets. As he reached the break in the hedge at the front of the house, Sir Hjortt saw that one of these oaken doors was ajar, but just as he noticed this detail the door eased shut.
Sir Hjortt smiled to himself, and, reining his horse in front of the rosebushes, called out in his deepest baritone, “I am Sir Efrain Hjor
tt of Azgaroth, Fifteenth Colonel of the Crimson Empire, come to counsel with the mayor’s wife. I have met your lord mayor upon the road, and while he reposes at my camp—”
Someone behind him snickered at that, but when Sir Hjortt turned in his saddle he could not locate which of his troops was the culprit. It might have even come from one of his two personal Chainite guards, who had stopped their horses at the border of the thorny hedge. He gave both his guards and the riders nearest them the sort of withering scowl his father was overly fond of doling out. This was no laughing matter, as should have been perfectly obvious from the way Sir Hjortt had dealt with the hillbilly mayor of this shitburg.
“Ahem.” Sir Hjortt turned back to the building and tried again. “Whilst your lord mayor reposes at my camp, I bring tidings of great import. I must speak with the mayor’s wife at once.”
Anything? Nothing. The whole town was silently, fearfully watching him from hiding, he could feel it in his aching thighs, but not a one braved the daylight either to confront or assist him. Peasants—what a sorry lot they were.
“I say again!” Sir Hjortt called, goading his stallion into the mayor’s yard and advancing on the double doors. “As a colonel of the Crimson Empire and a knight of Azgaroth, I shall be welcomed by the family of your mayor, or—”
Both sets of doors burst open, and a wave of hulking, shaggy beasts flooded out into the sunlight—they were on top of the Azgarothian before he could wheel away or draw his sword. He heard muted bells, obviously to signal that the ambush was under way, and the hungry grunting of the pack, and—
The cattle milled about him, snuffling his horse with their broad, slimy noses, but now that they had escaped the confines of the building they betrayed no intention toward further excitement.