The Two of Swords, Part 16

by K. J. Parker

  She suddenly realised she’d been crying and hadn’t noticed. “I can’t do it.”

  “You must.”

  She went to her favourite cutler, in Haymarket.

  “Not you again,” he said. “What do you do with them all?”

  She wasn’t in the mood. “Show me what you’ve got in stock.”

  He sighed and picked a box up off the floor. He opened it and thought for a moment. “Try that.”

  He had a good memory, she had to give him that. It was exactly what she looked for in a knife; the right length, width, point geometry and edge profile. The grip was just the right size for her hand. The blade was charcoal-blued; resisted rust and didn’t flash in the light. Could have been made for her. Given how many times she’d been in this shop over the years, it probably had been.

  “How much?”

  He frowned at her. “I like to tell myself you buy them as presents for your brothers in the army. I imagine they’re careless and keep losing them. Eight angels.”

  She had the money, but only because Oida had lent it to her.

  There was a note from the Department pinned to her door – Where are you? Report in immediately. Call themselves spies, she thought. She screwed it up, then left the building; not by the door, but up on to the roof, then across the handy plank she’d left hidden up there on to next door’s roof, down the stairs into the cellar, which had a shared charcoal chute with the next house down the block; out through their door, which opened on to a different street. This she did in the fond hope that someone from the Department was watching her, and would report back that she was acting oddly and should be brought in immediately for questioning. If she was locked up in a cell for a week or so, she couldn’t be out killing people; and it could hardly be her fault if she was arrested. But of course there was nobody watching her, and she walked away unfollowed. The Department was desperately short-staffed these days, and she simply wasn’t that important.

  She went to a cockfight, out back of the Equity and Redemption in Lazars Row. She bet two angels on a nice little Rhaesian Grey called Fireclaw in the Domestic Stakes. Fireclaw took slightly longer than two Ascensions and a Shorter Creed to turn his opponent into a bloody mess, with a few pathetic feathers still floating in the air long after the remains had been scooped up and dropped in the trash. Two angels at seven to one is fourteen angels. Damn the man.

  She reported in at the Department. “Where have you been?” they yelled at her, and didn’t wait for a reply; he wants to see you, right now. Sorry, which he would that be? Him, of course; and a finger pointed discreetly upwards.

  She froze. “You’re kidding.”

  “No I’m not. You’re to report to the Director immediately. And that was six days ago. Why d’you think we’ve been scouring the bloody city for you?”

  Please, no, she said to herself as she climbed the stairs: no more, I can’t cope with anything else. It occurred to her that she could simply run away (like all the other Craftsmen); if that was what they called scouring the city, she had a fair chance of being on a boat to Blemya or the Republic before they realised she’d gone. But that would be – no. Oida was due back in town for a recital in three days’ time, so she had no choice.

  The Department building had been many things in its time. It was old, and nobody knew who’d originally built it. The ground floor had been a temple to some long-obsolete god; then it had housed a garrison, and then it was a grain store, in case of siege; after a hundred years or so, oil replaced grain, and there was a fire, and when Vindex IV inherited the ruins he built yet another palace, to house one of his twenty-seven mistresses. When Vindex’s grandson Lodar found himself swinging from a meathook in the Arches, the palace was extended upwards and outwards to house the Ministry of Supply, until the Third Republic fell, whereupon Spolas II gave the land to the monks of the Blue Hand, who tore down half of it, extended the other half and built a soaring belltower, decorating every square inch of the interior with dazzling neo-Archaic frescoes. When Cuon dissolved the monasteries, a mercantile consortium bought the site, using the cloisters as a ropewalk and the buildings as storage. Most of the frescoes that survived the damp were defaced during the Iconoclast crisis under Copax III; the only ones to survive were the Annunciation and the Judgement of the Dead in the lower bell-chamber, which was blocked off by fallen masonry until the Department was founded by Hunderic I and moved into its present site. The first Director naturally claimed the bell-chamber for his own, and his thirty-two successors had fiercely guarded the privilege. Accordingly, only a very few people had seen what were probably the finest surviving examples of neo-Archaic devotional art, and it was a fair bet that most of them had been in no state of mind to appreciate them.

  Telamon arrived at the top of the last flight of stairs weak-kneed and out of breath, and found herself face to face with the Invincible Sun in Glory, twelve feet high and glowing in the early evening light, filtered through yellow stained glass in a strategically placed skylight. For a moment, she couldn’t think; for a moment, she was prepared to believe that she was in the presence of the real thing, not a picture. Then she pulled herself together with a snap, like a dog’s jaws closing, and noticed a man sitting in the far corner of the outer chamber, gazing up at the painting. She recognised him; hard not to, because of the appalling scars on his face.

  He turned and looked at her. She felt herself choke up, the way she always did when she met somebody she particularly admired.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I was miles away.”

  Procopius, principal of the Imperial Academy of Music, the greatest living composer, quite possible the greatest of all time. Then a horrible thought struck her; what was he doing here, sitting forlornly in the anteroom of the Director’s office?

  “I’m sorry,” she said, then realised she had no idea what she was apologising for. “I don’t suppose you remember me. Oida—”

  “Introduced you to me after a concert.” He smiled. The effect was horrible. “I’m terrible with names but very good with faces. Ironic.”

  She realised she was staring, and felt her face heat up like a bar of iron in the forge. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, but Procopius shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “If I were you, I’d look at the painting instead. It’s a lot prettier.”

  She did as she was told, and for the first time noticed that on the blazing gold cheek of the Invincible Sun there was a single, unexplained tear.

  “Worth the climb, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” she said, and then remembered where she was. She desperately wanted to ask: what are you here for? But of course she couldn’t. Procopius was gazing at the painting; she glanced at him quickly, then looked away again. He didn’t seem worried, but probably he never did; the sort of man who’d look the same whether he was waiting to drink the hemlock or for the rain to stop. As discreetly as she could she pressed her fingertips together. Lord, she mouthed at the painting, please don’t let him be in any trouble. Let him get out of here safe and in one piece.

  Then Procopius stifled a yawn, stood up and opened a door, set so cunningly into the wall that she hadn’t noticed it was there. “Come on through,” he said, and went in.

  It was as though the roof had fallen in on her. The door clearly led to the Director’s office, the inner sanctum, the lair of the Imperial spymaster-general, the most feared and hated man in the West after the emperor himself. Procopius the musician had just opened it and told her to follow him. Therefore—

  Her head was pounding, and the moment she was through the door she was faced with a scene far beyond the scope or strength of her mind; the Judgement of the Dead, by the most brilliant, most disturbed painter who ever lived. It was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen, and if her legs had still been working she’d have run away; probably tripped and fallen down the stairs and broken her neck.

  “I know,” said a voice from a long way away, “it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? Takes
a bit of getting used to, which is why I usually sit with my back to it. Tell you what. You have my chair, and I’ll sit here. For two pins I’d get them to whitewash it over, except that’d be a crime against humanity.”

  She sat down in his chair. It was huge, and her feet didn’t quite reach the ground. It had been carved out of the root-ball of a huge oak tree, and made to look like a hand closing around the sitter. The other seat was an army-issue folding camp stool, on which Procopius squatted like a grown-up perched on a nursery chair. There was no desk. In this office, nothing was ever put down on paper.

  “Thanks for coming,” Procopius said. “Sorry to drag you all the way up here. By the way, as you’ve probably guessed, I run this circus.” He grinned, taking care to angle the scarred side away from her. “You don’t need to be told this, but not a word to anyone, all right? It’s all melodrama, of course, but the fewer people know about me, the better.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good girl. Don’t look so worried,” he went on, “it’s good news. As you probably know, the Deputy Director in charge of recoveries is no longer with us.” He drew the tip of his finger lightly across his throat. “So there’s a job going, and it’s yours. Smile,” he added. “You’re supposed to be pleased.”

  “I am. Thank you.”

  “Fibber,” Procopius said gravely. “Not that I blame you, the way things are at the moment. But under normal circumstances it’s a real plum; you get a seat on Faculty, and you’ll be an ex officio member of the Security Council, which ain’t bad for someone who started life as a blueberry-picker on Heneca Moor. And for what it’s worth, you’re only the second woman in four hundred years, and one of the very few to have made it this far up the ladder starting at the very bottom. I’d like to say it’s purely on merit, but the fact that everybody else is dead or on the run did have something to do with it.”

  “Thank you,” she repeated.

  His grin widened. “Don’t thank me till you’ve sat through your first Council meeting. Also, if you feel you’ve got to be grateful to someone, I did get a really enthusiastic reference from a certain mutual friend of ours. He sings like a bullfrog, but I trust his judgement when it comes to women.”

  Damn the man. “We’ve worked together on a number of—”

  “He’s crazy about you.” Procopius was smiling; bless you, my children. “Genuinely and sincerely, if that’s even remotely possible. But that’s none of my business. Anyway, the job’s yours. I’m afraid you can’t turn it down, because you now know about me, and that information is limited to the Council and the Faculty. But you don’t want to, do you?”

  She forced herself to rally, like the shattered remnants of the Third Guards at Scola Hill. “What does the job involve exactly?”

  He nodded his approval. “Basically, it means that instead of dashing about the place catching the enemies of the People and bringing them in, you sit behind a desk and give the orders. You don’t decide who the enemies are, of course, that’s my job. I send you a memo; you hand out the assignments. There’s also an unbelievable amount of paperwork, without which the sun will not rise, and on top of that there’s Council every evening just after compline and Faculty twice a week, and as a junior member you’ll be the one landed with doing the actual work. If it’s any consolation, you get a really nice suite all to yourself at the far end of the East wing, and a ridiculous amount of money, to make you completely immune to bribes, and which you’ll have no time to spend. Questions?”

  She was staring again, but not at the scar, which she couldn’t see. He gave her a slightly annoyed look. “What?”

  “Sorry. It’s nothing, really.”

  “Go on.”

  Well, she thought. “How can you do it? I mean—” too late now; her tongue had run away from her, like a bad dog with a bit of old twig. “You write such beautiful music. It’s—” She hesitated; too late now. “It’s all about the things we ought to be but never can be, about everything that’s wonderful and good, the things we can’t get at and spoil—”

  “Thank you.”

  “Yes, but it’s true. Everybody says so. It’s like you’re touching the Divine. So how can you do that and be the spymaster? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He shrugged. “What you mean is,” he said, “which one’s the real me, and which one do I do for a hobby?” Then, quite deliberately, he turned his head. “Here’s an old joke for you. Man bought a black carthorse, painted the whole of its left side white, left the right side black. Why’d you do that? people asked him. He said: it’s so that if I ever have an accident in my cart and run someone over, it’ll confuse the hell out of the witnesses. Now run along and do some work.”

  It didn’t matter, of course. Entirely irrelevant; because she wouldn’t be around here very long, one way or another. Like the man walking to the gallows who stoops and picks up a ten-angel piece.

  To her surprise, one of the other members of Faculty was someone she knew. “I never realised,” she said.

  He smirked at her. “Of course you didn’t. First rule of this business, never let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.” He paused, then added, “Did he make you sit facing the painting?”

  “No.”

  “Ah. In that case, he likes you. Me he doesn’t like. I had nightmares for a week.”

  She nodded. “No wonder he sits looking the other way.”

  “Like hell he does.” He peered at her. “Straight up, it’s true. When you go in there, he’s sitting on that little camp stool and you have to lower yourself into that ghastly clutching-hand thing. He says he likes looking at it; he sits there for hours just contemplating it. No wonder he’s a bit – well, you know. You would be, with that lot staring at you all day long.”

  She went to the bookstall that sold sheet music and bought all the Procopius he had. She could read music, just about; that is, she could pick her way through a score when she knew the piece already, but not actually hear it inside her head. If she’d hoped to find any clues there, she was disappointed. And the next day, the small cedarwood chest she’d put them in was empty, though she looked all around, all the doors and windows, and saw no signs of a break-in.

  Oida had cancelled the concert he’d been supposed to be giving; no explanation. It wasn’t like him, he was always so reliable, never let the public down. He must be ill, people said, or unavoidably detained somewhere.

  She moved into the lodgings reserved for the Deputy Director of Recoveries. It occupied a whole floor – vaulted roof and polished oak floor – and was completely empty, not even a speck of dust. She liberated a camp bed, a chair, a small folding table and a lamp, and set them out in the middle of the biggest room, like the last pieces left on the chessboard. The ridiculously large sum of money would be credited to her account with the Knights on the last day of the month; until then, she had her cockfight winnings and four stuivers in copper. When she remembered about food, she sneaked down to the Buttery in the early hours of the morning and picked the lock.

  It wasn’t unusual, they told her, for the Director to be absent from Council and Faculty meetings. When he wasn’t there, the head of Finance took the chair: Cardonius, a huge slug of a man with the biggest hands she’d ever seen. She quite liked him. He was sensible and down to earth and never raised his voice.

  “Essentially,” he was saying, “we have two problems. First, we don’t know who our people are. Over half of our intermediate grade officers turned out to be Craftsmen and have defected or been arrested; needless to say, before quitting the service, they destroyed the registers of names and contact details of the field officers they controlled. Since, by the very nature of the job, our field officers operate under deep cover and go to great pains to avoid being recognised for what they are, it’s now impossible for us to trace them, contact them or give them their instructions; they, by the same token, don’t know who to apply to, since their only contact with us was their controlling officer. Second, we don’t know how much money
we have or where it is. We’ve always made a point of obscuring how much money we have and where we keep it; those records have also been lost. In essence, we’re flowers cut off from our roots, and unless we can do something about it it won’t be long before the service withers and dies. If it’s any consolation, nearly all the other functions of government are more or less in the same boat, though naturally not to such an alarming extent.

  “So, what are we going to do about it? First, we must see to it that we recover what we can. I want all of you to get your remaining staff to tell you everything they can remember, no matter how slight or trivial. It might be enough to trace a deposit account or a field agent. Second, we’re just going to have to start again from scratch. The Director has already applied to the emperor for emergency funding, and I’m pleased to say that His Majesty has agreed to give us a sum equivalent to two-thirds of our most recent annual budget, as a one-off interim provision. Your job will be to recruit new field agents, as quickly as possible. Obviously, there simply isn’t time to train them to the usual standard, added to which we don’t have enough qualified, experienced officers to do the training. So we’ll just have to do the best we can. It’ll be messy, and a lot of mistakes will be made along the way. That can’t be helped. The Director has explained our present difficulties to His Majesty, and warned him what to expect. We are officially instructed to do our best. I think I speak for all of us when I say that this Faculty would never dream of doing less.”

  There’s two of me, she thought, as the slug-man’s high, slow, pleasantly reassuring voice filled the small room. One of them could do this job. She’d relish the challenge. She’d show those complacent, idle bastards. She’d do really well at a time like this. But the other one, the real one, won’t be here in a few days or a few weeks – pity, that, but it can’t be helped.