The Two of Swords--Part Nineteen

by K. J. Parker

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s possible, certainly. I’m a Commissioner, and that’s pretty hot stuff.”

  He wasn’t in the mood. “In that case,” he said, “are you authorised to conduct peace negotiations between the empire and the Lodge?”

  “I guess so. How about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really? Remind me, who’s the emperor these days? I’m a bit out of touch.”

  “I am,” Forza said.

  She nodded slowly. “Just the West, or is Glauca finally dead? Nobody tells me anything.”

  “Just the West,” Forza said. “I took control yesterday, as a matter of fact.”

  “Good for you. What are you using for money?”

  He gave her a sour look, then converted it to a grin. “Thin air and optimism,” he said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about, actually.”

  “And an army?”

  “That was one of the other things.”

  They talked for a while. She admired his ability to sublimate the loathing he clearly felt for her into intelligent and constructive diplomacy. He was also disarmingly honest. He had, he freely admitted, no money and no soldiers, no support from the few scattered remnants of the old government, nothing in fact except his name and a total lack of rivals—

  “Unless you count that ape Axio,” Forza said. “You know him, of course.”

  “Slightly.”

  “My condolences.”

  “I owe him everything. And of course he’s next in line to the throne. You realise he’s Lodge.”

  Forza nodded. “But he’s not here, is he? My people tell me he left for Blemya. And he’d make a truly awful emperor.”

  “You’re suggesting I make a deal with you behind his back.”

  They talked a little more. Then she said, “Changing the subject for a moment, what about your brother? Is he still alive, or did he die at Rasch?”

  “He’s dead,” Forza said firmly, and she could tell he was lying. “So, really, there’s nothing left to fight about, or at least nobody left to fight.”

  She yawned; not deliberately, but she didn’t try very hard to stifle it. “When you say you’ve got no army, you’re exaggerating, surely. A man like you wouldn’t leave the house without a squadron of cavalry. It’d be like going out without your trousers.”

  She was getting on his nerves. Good. “I’ve got a hundred and twenty men,” he said. “My people, from my wife’s estate. You tried to poison them, remember.”

  “They’ll do,” she said. “It’s a hundred and twenty more than anyone else has got, except for us. Good. I’d like to borrow them, please.”

  She’d shocked him. “Are you serious?”

  “Very. And I need a good officer to lead them. In return, you can be emperor of the West.”

  He breathed out slowly through his nose. “And the loan?”

  “Yes, and the no Vei horse-archers. But not yet. And please bear in mind, any deal we may make is subject to ratification by the head of the Lodge.”

  That made him grin. “We just discussed that. He’s in Blemya.”

  She shook her head. “Axio’s a Triumvir, not the Chief Executive.”

  “Fine. So who’s the real boss?”

  Big smile. “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Folded between the pages of book nine of Gennadius’ dismally written and largely inaccurate history, she found a single sheet of parchment. It was very old, and it had been ground blank with sand and brick dust for re-use, probably more than once, so that the ink had soaked into the abused fibres and the letters tended to spread, like coppiced saplings. The handwriting was Reformed Cursive and the language was archaic Mezentine, which it just so happened she could read fluently. It said:

  On closer examination, I found evidence of cleaning, probably with some form of abrasive powder (pumice, millstone wash or corn husks impregnated with cutlers’ grit) in consequence of which the fine raised detail of the relief had been rounded off and lost; however, I was able to confirm thereby that the material was solid silver rather than base metal silver-washed. A light powdery white dust trapped in the crevices also indicated regular cleaning, and I draw the conclusion that the item was on public display and that the tarnish was regularly removed by a curator who had little idea of the significance of the artefact in his charge. Accordingly I felt justified in detaching a small section from the top left edge, and was able to determine the purity of the silver, which proved to be .875 fine, which would be consistent with an item made from melted-down Imperial coinage produced at one of the North-western mints of that era. I then suffered the sample to be totally consumed in cinnabar, which revealed slight traces of lead, mercury and [some word she didn’t know]; the first two impurities are common to all silver, but the third was, in my experience, unique to the silver mines of Spire Cross, which were in operation for no more than forty years in the reigns of Simeon II and Antisyrus. This last would seem to me to be conclusive proof that the item is genuine. I would therefore strongly recommend that

  And that was all. Ain’t that the way.

  Well, yes, the doctor said, she could get up, if she absolutely insisted, but he wouldn’t recommend it, in fact he’d want a disclaimer absolving him of all responsibility, because in his opinion it’d be a very stupid thing to do. So she solemnly absolved him of all blame, forgave him his sins and formally discharged him from her care. On your head be it, he said, and left.

  She got out of bed and walked up and down the room for ten minutes, which made her feel much better. Then she rang the bell. The steward came – you’re out of bed, he observed: is that wise? – and she put in an order for clothes and shoes. I’m sorry, we haven’t got anything like that here. She told him to go out and steal them. It’ll be all right, she said. You can leave the money if it’ll make you feel any better. We haven’t got any money, the steward told her. In that case, she said, don’t leave any.

  She walked up and down for an hour, and then the steward came back, looking mildly stunned, as though he’d just had a vision of something disturbing and wonderful. He had with him a sort of grey sack with holes for her arms and head, and stout, good quality ladies’ walking boots, brand new, two sizes too big. She tore up a pillow case and stuffed them until they fitted, while the steward stood and gazed at her, reduced to silence by the violent death of bed linen. You wouldn’t happen to have, she asked, anything in the way of a weapon? He blinked, as though she’d used a word from a foreign language. You know, a dagger, knife, a small hatchet would do at a pinch. He went away without speaking and came back clutching an Eastern-issue dragoon officer’s backsabre, complete with frog, twin belts and fringed tassel. Thank you, she said, that’ll do fine. I’m leaving now. It’s been an honour, the steward said. Do drop in any time you’re in the neighbourhood.

  Iden Astea had changed since she saw it last. Most of the shuttered shops had been broken into, their contents disappeared, the bits of broken shutter thriftily scooped up and spirited away for firewood. There were dead bodies on the pavement, lying like flotsam on a beach. Nobody had come to collect them, but their clothes and boots had gone. She glanced up, looking for a smoking chimney, but the air was clean and sharp with a slight chill. She snapped the backsabre trying to prise open a door that had defeated her fellow looters; she had no reason to believe there was anything worth having inside, but it was the only intact door she’d seen, so her options were limited.

  The wine shop where Oida had been staying had been stripped of its doors, window and door frames, threshold and floorboards. She walked in, examined it carefully for signs of life (which took about as long as it takes to sneeze) and left. Of course he wouldn’t stay there, once it had sunk in that she’d gone and wasn’t coming back. He had more sense. Now, she knew him better than she’d ever known anyone in her entire life, so where would he have gone? She thought long and hard and realised she had no idea. Oida, gone; and with him the food, the transport, the money, the bed f
or the night, the book to read on the journey, all gone for ever. She prayed to the Great Smith, who never listens to prayers, that he hadn’t gone to Blemya, though now she came to think of it he could very well have done. Hadn’t thought of that when she put Axio on what she’d fondly believed was the wrong trail; she hadn’t anticipated spending three weeks immobilised and incommunicado. She wondered if she should go back to the Lodge house, where they still had some food and a bed to sleep in, but decided she couldn’t face the look the steward would give her. The Lodge, so it would seem, was finished, too, just like everything else. She hadn’t anticipated that, but maybe she should have. Wherever it was, if it still existed anywhere, it wasn’t present and active in the ruins of the Western empire, or it wouldn’t have left its house steward in Iden to starve slowly to death. Someone would have been sent, with food and money, or at the very least a large covered wagon, to carry any castaway Craftsmen to safety. She decided that she’d made peace with Forza under false pretences, not that the thought bothered her in the least.

  So, she asked herself, where now? Academic question, since there were no carriages, carts, wagons, chaises or traps, and no horses to pull them, and no food to eat along the way, whether she rode or walked. How long would it take the people of a city, devoid of leadership and cut off from all sources of supply, to starve to death? Probably less time than you’d think. It would be a quiet cataclysm, like a fire going out. You could easily miss it if you were out of things for a while, laid up recovering from injuries, say, or otherwise indisposed.

  She went to the Single Teardrop, to find the walls bare and the great fresco missing. Someone had chiselled it off the wall in chunks, presumably imagining that they could put it back together again later and finding out too late that fresco doesn’t work like that; there were lumps of painted plaster on the floor, in heaps, and she could picture in her mind how it had happened. At first it comes away easily, and they’re laying it out carefully on the floor, numbering the segments in chalk. But then they try and move it, and it falls to pieces in their hands. It’ll be all right, they tell themselves, and they try and salvage at least some of it, and they carry on trying until they’re left with nothing but coloured rubble – it’s all still there, nothing’s been lost, but no power on earth will ever get it back together again the way it used to be. The truth sinks in eventually, and they give up and go away. Seemed like a good idea at the time, pity it didn’t work out.

  The hell with it. Overrated, in her opinion, and if it hadn’t been chipped off the wall sooner or later the damp would have got into it and achieved the same result. She sat on the floor where the pews had been and stared up into the belly of the dome, too high to reach and strip of its gilded tiles. There were, after all, worse places to end up; and maybe, if she thought long and hard about it, she’d be clever enough to find a way out – if she could be bothered, which she wasn’t sure she could be. When the world ends, maybe the sensible thing is to end with it. Later, perhaps. In the meantime, the beating of the heart and the action of the lungs are a useful prevarication, keeping all options open.

  To keep herself amused and her mind off food, she asked herself the question, whose fault is this? At first, the answer seemed perfectly simple. The two emperors, East and West, who fell out over something or other – nobody had ever found out what, exactly – and fought each other until everything was gone – a bit like a game of chess which comes down to white king, black king and one other piece, all the others having perished; a perfectly valid way to play the game, if the purpose of playing is to win. But that answer was a bit too simplistic. The emperors were at fault, but they weren’t to know that each of them had one of the two greatest generals of all time leading their vast but eventually finite armies, and that these two generals would cancel each other out; two brothers who fell out about something, nobody knew what exactly; two kings left stranded on an empty chessboard, doomed to pace and menace and feint and retreat for all eternity.

  The real answer, of course, was staring her in the face. It was the Lodge’s fault, for not putting a stop to it. Painfully, shamefully obvious. The Lodge could have murdered, say, Emperor Glauca and Forza Belot. It would all have been over in days, and the world need not have ended. But the Lodge had done no such thing. She wondered about that for a long time, then gave up, for fear of having to face the obvious answer.

  She was asleep when they found her. She was dreaming, and in her dream someone called to her: Commissioner, Commissioner Telamon. The dream admitted of no suitable context for that title, so she woke up.

  A woman was kneeling over her, someone she recognised. Behind her, a large number of armed men. I must stop coming here, she told herself. “Triumvir Lycao,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Lycao turned her head to look at someone, and she recognised him, too. Last time they’d met, he’d ordered his men to break her arm. No, that couldn’t be right. “Excuse me,” she said, “are you Senza Belot?”

  Nobody seemed able to hear her. Four of the soldiers came over and lifted her up. “It’s all right, I can manage perfectly well,” she said, and then found that she couldn’t. So she let them carry her, out of the temple and into a jet-black carriage, surrounded by a cavalry escort. Lycao got in next to her, and Senza sat opposite, his gilded helmet coddled on his knee, like a baby.

  “It’s all right,” Lycao said to her, which was just plain silly.

  *

  “You must have been there for days,” Lycao told her. “You nearly died. There’s practically nothing left of you.”

  “I don’t feel particularly bad.”

  “Look.” Lycao lifted a mirror, and showed her something truly horrible: a skeleton, a loathsome thing with bones sticking through the skin. “We found you just in time. Lucky we knew where to look.”

  She had no idea where she was, though it was a distinct improvement on Iden. She was lying in a bed in a small, warm room, in comfortable clean bed linen, with a lamp burning. “You knew?”

  Lycao nodded. “Well, it was a guess. He said the Single Teardrop was your favourite place in Iden, so we went there first.”

  He said. Someone who didn’t know her very well, because it simply wasn’t true – overrated, as previously noted. “Axio?”

  Lycao looked at her and frowned. “Oida,” she said. “He’s worried sick about you. That’s why we came.”

  When she hadn’t come back, Oida had gone looking for her. At first he guessed that her answer had been no and she’d slipped away rather than tell him face to face, but then he realised that would be entirely out of character, and, besides, where would she have gone? That gave him pause for thought, so he went to the Lodge house, where discreet enquiries (she couldn’t imagine Oida making discreet enquiries) revealed that Triumvir Axio was in town. As to what had happened after that, not a great leap of intuition needed, more of a bunny hop.

  So he’d stolen the last remaining horse in Iden and lit out for Headquarters—

  “Headquarters?” she had to ask. “Where—?”

  She’d asked a bad question. Lycao gave her a nasty look, then continued with the story. At Headquarters, he’d burst in on a private meeting between the two remaining Triumvirs and the head of the Order. There had been a bit of a scene, with Oida making threats, until the Chief had agreed to his demands—

  “Which were?”

  “To find you and bring you here.”

  “What threats?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  “Fine. Where’s here?”

  “You don’t need to know that either.” Lycao gave her a look that ought to have chilled her to the bone, but somehow didn’t. “I might add, I was against it. Taking action at this stage puts the whole plan at risk, and we could lose everything. To be entirely frank with you, I don’t think you’re worth it. Luckily for you, though, Oida disagrees.” She pursed her lips. “He’s in for a shock when he sees you, but that’s his problem.”

  “Why does i
t matter what Oida thinks? He’s not a Commissioner. He’s dead.”

  “Something else you don’t need to know.”

  “What’s Senza Belot doing here?”

  That got her a thin smile. “He’s on his honeymoon. As am I. We’d hoped to go somewhere a bit more romantic, but you spoiled all that.”

  Different doctor, same bedside manner, same quantity and quality of information. She was lucky to be alive, a minor miracle, and somehow it was all her fault, though when she asked what she’d done wrong the doctor just looked at her and changed the subject. It’s all right now, he assured her, you’re going to be fine.

  “Where am I? Where is this place?”

  “Plenty of rest,” the doctor said, “and no excitement.”

  An old woman with a lot on her mind looked in on her every half-hour or so and brought her gallons of strong brown broth that smelled and tasted of bones, but which was good for her, apparently. Every time the broth turned up, she pleaded for something to read, but it appeared that that wouldn’t be good for her at all, so no dice. Every time the old woman left the room she bolted the door from the outside; read into that what you like. There was a window, but it was shuttered, and the bars were on the other side. She could always kill the old woman and escape. Maybe tomorrow, when she was feeling a bit stronger.

  Lying on her back all day, she found it very hard to get to sleep at night, though for all she knew what she assumed was day could just as easily have been night, and vice versa. Needless to say, when at last she had a visitor who wasn’t the old woman or the doctor, she’d finally managed to nod off, and the visitor – Triumvir Thratta, no less – woke her up.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked.

  “Sleepy,” she said truthfully. “Where is this?”

  “The doctor says you’re making good progress,” Thratta said, looking at something rather more interesting than she was on the wall behind her head. “Provided you get plenty of rest and don’t overexert yourself, in due course you ought to make a full recovery.”