The Two of Swords, Part 16

by K. J. Parker

  “Traditionally,” he was saying, “we’ve recruited heavily among prostitutes, minor criminals, licensed victuallers, actors, impoverished young men and women of good family, travelling musicians and the less respectable class of merchants and tradesmen. This approach has always worked well for us, and I recommend it to you as a good starting point. However, we need to be careful. The enemy will know we’ll be recruiting, and why. We must expect moles, plants and double agents. Anybody approaching you and volunteering will be automatically suspect. More difficult will be those who come forward claiming to be established agents seeking to re-establish contact. It may well be that their former controlling officers, now defected to the enemy, will have briefed them most convincingly; they will probably know more about our operations at ground level than we do. And, naturally, genuine, established agents will get to know about the recruiting drive and present themselves to the recruiters. I believe we have to regard them as guilty until proven innocent, and where – as will often be the case – it turns out to be impossible for them to prove their bona fide status simply because the necessary materials are lost or destroyed – we will have to assume that they’re fraudulent, and arrest and dispose of them. I regret this. Inevitably, a number of good, loyal servants of this Department will be unfairly condemned. However, I believe the threat of infiltration is great enough to warrant such harshness. It will make our job a lot harder, since established agents will learn what befalls their colleagues and either lapse and be lost to us, or even defect to the enemy out of disgust. I can tell you that the Director has considered the question most carefully and reached this decision. We, therefore, do not need to think about it, and I strongly recommend that you don’t. You’ll sleep easier for it, I promise you.”

  Just for the sheer mental exercise, she compiled in her mind a list of the field agents whose names she knew; thirty, maybe forty, nearly all of them Craftsmen. But she’d be gone soon, and her duty would be to leave behind her a list of agents she knew for a fact weren’t Craftsmen, making it look as though they were. She could kill hundreds that way; hundreds of key government officers, slaughtered by a scrawled list stuck between the pages of a book. Senza or Forza Belot would do it like a shot.

  “To sum up,” he was saying, “the service faces the greatest challenge it has ever had to deal with in its long and distinguished history. For five hundred years, we have been the gardeners of empire. We have dug out the weeds and eradicated the pests, usually before they were able to do any appreciable damage. We have averted catastrophic wars, prevented disastrous conspiracies and revolts, suppressed dangerous ideological movements; saved infinitely more lives, treasure and cities than our very finest generals and statesmen. A wise man once said that the best fight is the one not fought. Finer still are the war not waged, the revolution smothered in infancy, the coup prevented by a swift, early, decisive intervention. A venerable trope in the philosophy schools is, if you had a chance to go back in time and stand over Hegesimon sleeping in his crib with a knife in your hand, would you strike the blow? Of course we all would; and that precisely is what we have always done, whenever humanly possible. No aspect of government has done more to preserve and benefit the State; we are government at its best, a shining example of the benefits of rule and order. Now our enemies have brought us to our knees; worse still, they have snatched our best weapons from our hands and turned them against us. We will meet this challenge, we will fight the enemy, and we will prevail. Failure is inconceivable. Bear that in mind, and, I promise you, everything else will be straightforward.”

  “Did he really say that?” Procopius smiled. “Things must really be bad.”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry?”

  He laughed and poured her a drink. “You don’t know Cardonius,” he said. “When everything’s going to hell in a handcart, he gets inspired and makes these incredibly powerful speeches. If everything’s trickling along nicely, the most you’ll get out of him is: any other business? Fine, meeting adjourned.” He’d poured a drink for himself, but hadn’t touched it. “Obviously he’s scared rigid. Which is fair enough. I’m scared, God knows.”

  He’d carefully kept his bad side away from her. His good side was nice looking, in a solid, nondescript way. He reminded her of Oida, on his better days. But he was being nice to her, which made her flesh crawl. Time to put a stop to that.

  “Why weren’t you at the meeting?” she said.

  He shrugged. “I had work to do. Meetings aren’t work; they’re a waste of my time. Cardonius does them better than me, in any case. When I’m in the chair, everybody’s on their best behaviour, so nothing gets done.”

  “Work?”

  He looked at her as though she was a grey area, then picked up the ivory box from the floor, balanced it on his knees, opened the lid and took out a sheet of paper, which he handed to her. “You read music, don’t you?”

  She glanced at it, and caught her breath. It was just the melody; lots of space left blank above and below for the orchestration. She looked up at him and found she couldn’t speak.

  “It just sort of popped into my head,” he said. “And I knew if I didn’t sort it out and get it down on paper, it’d be gone. That or the meeting. Would you call it dereliction of duty?”

  “Going to the meeting? Yes.”

  He laughed. “Good answer,” he said; “you turned it round and made it face the other way. Tell me, is it really annoying, being held back just because you’re a woman?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s like saying, do you mind breathing air; wouldn’t you rather breathe something else? It’s just how it is, that’s all.”

  “I suppose it must be.” He sighed. “I’ve always been held back by this.” He touched the side of his face she couldn’t see. “I’m fifty-two years old. Did you know I’m still a virgin? It’s just how it is, that’s all, but I resent it like hell.”

  “It’s different,” she heard herself say.

  “Of course it is. Now, then. This list of loyal agents you’ve got for me.”

  Sixty-two names. He took it from her, glanced at it, nodded. “I know about him,” he said, “and those two, and them. Yes, that looks very good. All right, get in touch with them and introduce yourself.”

  “No need,” she said. “They’re all people I’ve worked with.”

  He smiled. “One of the reasons I chose you,” he said. “It’s stupid, isn’t it? We never used to promote agents straight out of the field; they had to have done seven or ten years behind a desk first. You, on the other hand, are fresh from the battle, so to speak, so obviously you know what’s going on rather better than we do.”

  “Thank you.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “My pleasure.” He reached out and retrieved the sheet of music, which she’d forgotten she was still holding. “Oida tells me you’re a fan. Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got a favourite?”

  “Yes,” she said in a rush: “the funeral march from the Seventh symphony. You take the worst despair possible, turn it on a sixpence into the most wonderful feeling of hope, and then back again, just with a single key change.” And then she thought: did I just say that? How embarrassing.

  But he was nodding. “I rather liked that one,” he said. “But most of my stuff is garbage. Let me know how you get on with your list.”

  She sat perfectly still, reeling from what she’d just said, until she realised he’d told her to go away. Then she got up and left without a word.

  The best way to maintain one’s cover, they taught her when she joined, is actually to be what you pretend to be. Since her cover was a deaconess of the Invincible Sun, she went to services at the Silver Horn and swung a censer in the processions. She didn’t mind. If you find yourself in a temple under orders to kneel and silently pray, then silently pray, by all means.

  So she turned her face toward the altar (that staggering, indigestible expression of post-Reform vulgarity, of hammered gold and gold enamelli
ng, in which His suffering, passion and triumphant resurgence are so turgidly portrayed; except that, as very few people know, the original gold was stripped off by the Canons during the Emergency under Photius IV to pay for sails for warships; what you see now is an incredibly close, faithful copy, done in paper-thin gold sheet overlaid on lead by a man whose usual job was maintaining the temple guttering) and asked for strength to do what she had to do; that, rather than grace to refuse, or that the bitter cup should pass from her. She muttered a slightly adapted formula from the liturgy, then peeked up at the rood-screen in the forlorn hope of a sign. She saw a feather, probably from one of the pigeons which had taken to nesting in the corbels since the roof shed a few tiles during the spring gales, lodged between the clasped hands of personified Endurance, kneeling on the left hand of the Invincible Sun. The bitch of it was, it was almost certainly an omen, but she hadn’t a clue what it could possibly mean.

  She returned to the Department, to carry on with compiling the list of potential recruits. Some point or other came up, to do with regional excise officers in Cephal. She got up to go to the archive, then remembered that she had people to do that sort of thing for her now. So she hollered for a clerk. Nobody came. She pulled a face, got up and went down the corridor to the clerks’ room.

  “Someone nip out to Excise and get me Memmias Clutamen. He’s in Establishments and he’s got the most amazing memory for names.”

  They looked at her and nobody spoke. Oh, she thought, it’s like that, is it? And isn’t it amazing how the clerks know every damn thing that goes on around here. Then she went to the archive and looked the name up for herself. It would, of course, have been much quicker and easier to do that in the first place, even if Clutamen hadn’t been disappeared.

  “First,” the priest told her, “it wasn’t an omen, it was an augury. There is a difference, you know.”

  “Yes, of course. Um, what—?”

  That got her a disapproving look. “An omen is notice of something that is preordained and will inevitably happen. An augury is due warning of something that will happen unless you take steps to avoid it. And what you saw was an augury.”

  That was reassuring but mystifying. “How can you tell?”

  “Auguries involve birds. Anything with a bird in it is an augury.”

  She blinked, but decided to press on. “So what did it mean?”

  The priest frowned. “Hard to tell.”

  “Yes, I thought so.”

  Maybe he hadn’t heard her. “It’s in the nature of auguries to be cryptic and ambiguous. The point is, the Invincible Sun doesn’t spoonfeed us the answers. It’s up to us, in the exercise of our free will, to recognise the true meaning and choose the right course of action to avoid the impending disaster.”

  She dipped her head in acknowledgement. “I appreciate that,” she said. “But you’re an expert. What do you think it means?”

  “How should I know? I’m not the one who saw it.”

  She decided on a different approach. “If it had been an omen, you could interpret it.”

  “Oh yes, of course. Omens use a clearly defined symbolic iconography and are capable of explicit and unambiguous interpretation.”

  “I see. So if it had been an omen, what would it have meant?”

  “It couldn’t have been an omen. It involved a feather. Therefore it was an augury.”

  She set up a sort of satellite office in the taproom of the Shining Countenance. It was smaller, therefore less oppressive, and the people she tended to meet there found it less intimidating.

  “Changing the subject,” one of them said, “your boyfriend’s in Permia.”

  A moment for it to sink in. “Oida?”

  That got her a smirk.

  “Oida’s in Permia?”

  Nod. “Apparently. Some local voivode offered him his weight in gold if he’d sing a few songs at a funeral. Funerals up there are the most amazing parties. And, no offence, Oida’s been putting it on round the middle lately. Obviously an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

  She went to her control. “Well then,” he said. “Obviously, you have to go to Permia.”

  “But I can’t.”

  “Actually, you can. You take a ship as far as Mirvau—”

  “I can’t. I’m far too busy to go swanning off. We’re reorganising the whole department. I’ve barely got time to wipe my nose. What am I going to tell the Faculty?”

  He looked at her. “I think,” he said, “it’s about time you stopped lying to yourself.”

  That stopped her short. She shivered. “Look,” she pleaded, “this new job, it’s the most amazing opportunity for the Lodge. I’m right in there at the core of things. Just give me a little bit of time to burrow down deep and I’ll be in a position to—”

  “You don’t understand,” he said patiently. “The world’s about to end. Everything you’ve always known is about to fall apart. People are about to die, not by the tens of thousands but by the million. You’re making plans for a future that simply won’t happen. Ten years ago, you’d have been a pearl beyond price for the Lodge, except that ten years ago you’d never have got that job. But this is now. And all that matters is securing the crown for Axio. Oida has to be dealt with, as quickly as possible.” He lowered his voice just a little; for effect, since there was no way they could be overheard. “Both Senza and Forza Belot have been given direct orders to shelve the war and attack Mere Barton. The only reason they aren’t already on the march is that they’ve both lost two-thirds of their general staff, and, right now, their armies simply don’t work. But you know the Belot boys. Any day now, they’ll have replaced the Craftsmen they’ve lost, and they’ll be ready to move, and you know how fast they are once they get going. It’ll be a race to see who gets there first. And how long do you think Mere Barton will last? Days? A whole day? A morning?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Of course you didn’t, but you do now. And, obviously, we have the situation in hand. There are things, a limited number of things, we can do to slow them down, and we’re doing them. But time is running out, and you have to do your part. You have to do it now. You have to go to Permia.”

  The little door of the confessional slid shut. Permia, then. A godforsaken place on the edge of the map; things came from there – furs, bulk timber, tin and copper ore, wool, dried fish, salt fish; but the haulage costs were exorbitant and the risks from robbers, pirates, foul weather and disease put off even the most determined traders – but nobody went there. The Permian chieftains were rich, stupid savages, and the ordinary people ate strangers. You’d have honestly thought a man like Oida would rather have died than go to Permia, but apparently not. Instead, he’d preferred to go to Permia rather than die. And his weight in gold, of course – Damn the man.

  On her way back to the Department she stopped at the Golden Hook temple and asked to see the treasurer. He led her down into the crypt, and, below that, into the vault where the temple kept its money. They also looked after things for a select number of favoured parishioners. It wasn’t her parish and never had been, but there was an oak chest with her name on it. To open it, you needed six keys, of which she had two. She took out a couple of things, and put a couple of things away. In theory at least, even the emperor would hesitate to violate the privacy of a temple deposit; also, only she and the treasurer knew about it, and he wouldn’t talk if he knew what was good for him. She asked to borrow an inkwell and some paper, and wrote three letters, which she entrusted to Father Prior personally. Then she went back to the Department, where a half-platoon of the Household Guard met her at the porter’s lodge and arrested her for murder.

  The cell was a sandstone box with a clean, bare floor and a small window eight feet off the floor. The bed was the usual stone ledge, but there was a blanket on it, newly laundered and neatly folded. On top of the blanket was a copy of Illectus’s Aspects of Comedy. She figured there’d be light to read by for another three hours or so. She folded the
blanket into a cushion, sat down and started to read. After a while, Illectus’s prose worked its special magic and she fell asleep.

  She woke up in pitch darkness with a crick in her neck and the book open on her knees. She badly needed a pee. There was no chamber pot, so she got up and squatted in the far corner, feeling her way along the wall with her hands, then back again to the stone shelf. It wouldn’t be very long before the darkness started getting to her; she never went anywhere without a candle and a tinderbox, which she could light by feel. She settled herself on top of the blanket, lay down and closed her eyes, so that the darkness would be voluntary and intentional. She forced herself to consider an abstruse point of theological doctrine, something to concentrate her mind on. Does the Light Eternal proceed from the Invincible Sun, or are they of one substance, indivisible? Better theologians than she’d ever be had spent their lives gnawing away at that one. She knew the arguments on both sides, including the sub-hypotheses and the counter-arguments thereto. It was mental chess, moving them around in her mind in the hope of finding a disposition of the pieces that might be made to constitute an answer. It was something she tended to do when she was very frightened and completely powerless. It helped.

  Any length of time under such conditions is very, very long. After a very long time, the door opened and the cell filled with blinding light from a single shuttered lantern.

  “On your feet,” said a voice behind the light.

  She pretended to be asleep. The light came closer. A hand closed in her hair and pulled her head up. “All right,” she said. “Give me a moment, will you?”

  She left the book. Her escort consisted of three Household troopers, with drawn swords. The Household Guard are the finest soldiers in the Western empire, and tend to regard jailering as below their dignity. Also, nobody likes to pull the night watch. It screws up your body rhythms. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll come quietly.”