The Folding Knife

by Parker, K. J.

  Praise for the Novels of

  K. J. PARKER

  "I have reviewed books before that I thought might someday be found to have achieved greatness... K. J. Parker is writing work after work that demands to be placed in that category."

  --Orson Scott Card

  "Blends gritty military fantasy with the 18th-century 'island story' tradition.... Parker carries the reader on a headlong gallop to the powerful conclusion."

  --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  "Imagine Lost meets The Italian Job... a masterfully planned and executed book, one that builds on ever-revealing characterization and backstory, leading slowly yet inexorably to its final conclusion."

  --SFF World

  "It's a dark, bleak and fiercely intelligent portrait of the human condition..."

  --SFX

  "A deftly paced mix that's brimming with psychological insights."

  --Library Journal

  "The whole thing is brilliant--disturbingly so, since these fantasies (without a whit of magic) explore the human condition and reveal it all, brain, heart, guts and bowels, with a startling precision."

  --Locus

  "Parker's intricately plotted and meticulously detailed book... moves as deliberately and precisely as an antique watch."

  --Entertainment Weekly

  "An audacious, utterly captivating novel... Parker's prose glitters with intelligence and precision... one of the most entertaining novels I've read this year."

  --Realms of Fantasy magazine

  "K. J. Parker is more of a hurricane than a breath of fresh air."

  --Dreamwatch magazine

  "It's a splendid story, full of turmoil and conspiracy."

  -- blogcritics.org

  "As efficient and well constructed as its protagonist's well-oiled machines."

  --Starburst

  By K. J. Parker

  THE FENCER TRILOGY

  Colours in the Steel

  The Belly of the Bow

  The Proof House

  THE SCAVENGER TRILOGY

  Shadow

  Pattern

  Memory

  THE ENGINEER TRILOGY

  Devices and Desires

  Evil for Evil

  The Escapement

  The Company

  The Folding Knife

  Copyright

  Copyright (c) 2010 by K. J. Parker

  Excerpt from The Company copyright (c) 2008 by K. J. Parker

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Orbit is an imprint of Hachette Book Group. The Orbit name and logo are trademarks of Little, Brown Book Group Limited.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First eBook Edition: February 2010

  ISBN: 978-0-316-07210-6

  Contents

  Copyright

  Forty Years Later

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Extras

  Meet the Author

  A Preview of The Company

  For Jonathan Katz

  "His life is gentle, and the elements

  So mixed in him that nature might stand up

  And say to all the world, 'This is a man' "

  Forty Years Later

  A man is sitting on the roof of a coach, crawling through a dusty plain. He wears an expensive coat, dirty and stained, and ruined good shoes. Next to him, avoiding conversation, sit a liveried porter, an armed man and a gloomy individual in a faintly comic footman's outfit. In front of them there's an impressive pile of luggage, trunks and cases and chests, secured to the rail with strong rope. The coach rolls over a stone and all four men sway precariously.

  The man in the dirty coat looks down at his fingers, notices a hangnail, drops his right hand into his pocket and fishes out a beautiful gold-handled folding knife. He finds it awkward to open; there's something wrong with his left hand, the fingers are stiff and it doesn't work properly. He trims the nail, but then the coach hits another stone and lurches wildly. The folding knife flips out of the man's hand. He makes a wild attempt to catch it as it falls, gets two fingers on it, fumbles the catch. The knife slips out of his grasp, hits the rail, bounces off and flies over the edge of the roof.

  The man stares for a moment at where the knife suddenly isn't. Then he shouts, "Stop the coach."

  Nobody reacts.

  "I said, stop the damn coach," the man shouts. Nobody reacts.

  The man scrambles up, sways with the motion of the coach, forfeits his balance and lands ingloriously on his backside. The armed man, some kind of guard, grins at him.

  The man looks over his shoulder. By now, the coach has moved on some thirty or forty yards; even if he hurls himself off the roof without breaking his leg or his neck, his chances of finding the knife are too slim. It's gone, and that's that. Also, he recognises and concedes that he's not the man he once was. Until very recently, any order he chose to give would have been obeyed without question; now, nobody even hears him. The folding knife has gone, as quickly, suddenly and irrecoverably as someone dying.

  The man--if any of his three companions on the roof had thought to ask him his name, he'd have lied to them--closes his eyes. As soon as he does so, a moment from the past fills his mind. It always does, the same image, the same moment, every time his eyes close. Twenty years.

  He sees a bed, in a well-furnished room. On the floor beside it lies a naked man, face down, holding a fancy costume dagger. His throat has been cut. On the bed there's the body of a woman, and her throat's been cut too, but she lies face upwards; her lips are still moving, but her eyes are just taking on that cold, hard look. If a speck of dust were to land on them, or a fly, they wouldn't blink. He sees her through a red blur, because the blood from her jugular vein spurted in his face. In his right hand he feels the handle of the folding knife.

  (Always the same, always there. By now, surely, it should be familiar enough to be invisible. Once, when he was extremely rich, he'd bought a painting by one of the great masters. He'd hung it on the wall opposite his bed, so it'd be the first thing he saw when he woke up. A man could never get tired of looking at this picture, they reckoned. In its perfectly inclusive lines, its total sublimation of symmetry and asymmetry, it contained every possibility in the world. After a week, he stopped noticing it was there. A month later, he sold it, made a profit, and had a mirror put in its place, as a form of punishment.)

  The woman's lips stop moving, part-way through an unvoiced word, and then she just falls sideways, like a piece of furniture carelessly knocked over. Her head cracks against the leg of the bed, making a wooden sound, like a stick hitting a ball.

  He hears his name spoken; not his name, a word equally familiar, amounting to the same thing. Oh, he thinks, and turns round. Twin boys, about seven years ol
d, stand in the doorway, looking at him.

  "Daddy?"

  For some reason, he folds up the knife and puts it back in his pocket. "Go to your room," he says. "Now."

  Neither of them moves. They stare at him, and it occurs to him that the look on their faces must be very much like the look on his own, when he'd first entered the room.

  (Still there, he thinks, and still the same; interesting. Surely, by now, that should have been the least of my problems.)

  He opens his eyes.

  One

  On the morning of the day when Basso (Bassianus Severus, the future First Citizen) was born, his mother woke up to find a strange woman sitting at the foot of her bed.

  Her husband was away somewhere on business, and the servants slept downstairs. The woman was dirty and shabby, and she was holding a small knife.

  "Hello," Basso's mother said. "What do you want?"

  Over the woman's shoulder, Basso's mother could see that the skylight had been forced. She was shocked. It had never occurred to her that a woman could climb a drainpipe.

  "Money," the woman said.

  Basso's mother assessed her. About her own age, though she looked much older; a foreigner, most likely a Mavortine (blonde hair, short, fat nose, blue eyes); there were always Mavortines in the city at that time of year, seasonal workers. She was wearing the remains of a man's coat, several sizes too big.

  "I'm terribly sorry," Basso's mother said, "but I don't have any. My husband doesn't let me have money. He does all the..."

  The woman made a strange grunting noise; frustration and annoyance, all that work for nothing. "I'm sorry," Basso's mother repeated. "If I had any money, I'd give it to you." She paused, then added, "You look like you could use it."

  The woman scowled at her. "What about downstairs?"

  Basso's mother shook her head sadly. "All the money in the house is kept in my husband's iron chest," she said. "It's got seven padlocks, and he carries the keys about with him. The servants might have a few coppers," she added helpfully, "but it's nearly the end of the month, so I doubt it."

  The woman was holding the knife rather than brandishing it. Basso's mother guessed she'd used it to work open the skylight catch. It was a folding knife, an expensive item, with a slim blade and a gold handle; the sort of thing a prosperous clerk would own, for sharpening pens.

  "If you're that hard up," Basso's mother said, "you could sell your knife. It must be worth a bit."

  The woman looked at it, then back at her. "Can't," she said. "If I went in a shop, they'd know it was stolen. I'd be arrested." She gasped, then burst into a noisy coughing fit that lasted several seconds.

  Basso's mother nodded. "So jewellery wouldn't be much use to you either," she said. She was feeling sick, but managed to keep her face straight and calm. "All I can suggest is that you help yourself to some decent clothes. The dressing room's next door, just there, look."

  The woman was looking at her, considering the tactical implications. "Shoes," she said.

  Basso's mother wasn't able to see the woman's feet. "Oh, I've got plenty of shoes," she said. "I think a pair of good stout walking shoes would be the most useful thing, don't you?"

  The woman started to reply, then broke out coughing again. Basso's mother waited till she'd finished, then said, "I'm sorry about the money, but at least let me get you something for that cough. How long have you had it?"

  The woman didn't answer, but there was an interested look in her eyes. Medicine clearly didn't feature in her life. Basso's mother pushed back the sheets and carefully levered herself out of bed and onto her feet. She didn't bother putting her slippers on.

  "Rosehip syrup, I think," she said, waddling across the room to the table where her apothecary chest stood. She took the key from the little lacquered box and opened the chest. "There's a jug of water on the stand beside the bed. Would you mind?"

  The woman hesitated, then brought the jug. Her feet were bare, red, nearly purple; quite disgusting. "While I'm fixing this, have a look in the shoe closet. It's just there, look, on your left."

  Not that the woman would be able to read the labels on the bottles. Basso's mother poured a little dark brown syrup into a glass and added water. "Here," she said, "drink this."

  The woman had already pulled out two pairs of boots; she was clutching them, pinched together, in her left hand. The knife was still in her right. She hesitated, then threw the boots on the bed and took the glass.

  "When you've drunk that," Basso's mother said, "I'll ring for some food. When did you last have anything to eat?"

  The woman was staring at her, a stupid look on her face. Basso's mother counted under her breath. On five, the woman staggered; on seven, she flopped down on the floor. Usually it was at least ten before it had any effect at all.

  Later, Basso's mother decided she must have given her too much (understandable, in the circumstances). Also, the woman may have had a weak heart or some similar condition. It was sad, of course, but just one of those things. Basso's mother paid for a coffin and a plot in the public cemetery. It was, she felt, the least she could do.

  Whether the shock induced early labour the doctors couldn't say. In the event, there were no complications and the baby was perfectly healthy, though a little underweight. Basso's father had bars fitted over the skylight. A better catch would have done just as well, but he was that sort of man. Basso's mother tried not to notice the bars, but they were always there in her mind after that.

  The woman must have dropped the folding knife when she fell over, and knocked it under the bed. A maid found it and put it away in a drawer. Basso's mother came across it some time later and decided to keep it; not quite a trophy, but not something you just throw away. Besides, it was very good quality. When Basso was ten years old she gave it to him. He knew the story that went with it, of course.

  Back home his name was seven syllables long, but here, in the army of the Vesani Republic, he was Aelius of the Seventeenth Auxiliary, the youngest captain in the service, kicking his heels in barracks in the City when men with half his ability were shipping out to the war in charge of a battalion. He was checking supply requisitions in his office when a flustered-looking sergeant interrupted him.

  "We've arrested a boy, captain," the sergeant said.

  Aelius looked up. "And?" he said.

  "He beat up a sentry."

  The culture of the service demanded that enlisted men addressed officers as rarely and as briefly as possible. Aelius thought it was a stupid rule, but he observed it rigorously. "You'd better bring him in," he said.

  A boy, sure enough. Fourteen rather than fifteen, Aelius decided, mostly on the evidence of the face; on the tall side for his age, but still only a kid. "And this child assaulted a sentry?"

  The sergeant nodded. "Broken arm, broken jaw, two cracked ribs and knocked out a couple of teeth, sir. Unprovoked attack. Two witnesses."

  The boy didn't seem to have a mark on him. Correction: skinned knuckles on his left hand. "This boy attacked a grown man for no apparent reason and broke his jaw," Aelius said. The boy was looking past him, at the far wall. "Well?" he barked. The boy said nothing. "I'm talking to you."

  The boy shrugged. "I hit that man, if that's what you mean."

  Aelius nodded slowly. "Why?"

  "He spoke to my sister."

  "And?"

  The boy frowned. "He made a lewd suggestion."

  Aelius managed to keep a straight face. "So you beat him up."

  "Yes."

  Aelius looked sideways at the floor. Bringing charges was out of the question. A soldier of the Seventeenth beaten to a jelly by a child; they'd never live it down. The face was vaguely familiar. Not a pleasant sight: his nose was a little concave stub, and his enormous lower lip curled up over his upper lip, smothering it. "What's your name?"

  "Arcadius Severus."

  That made Aelius frown. The boy wasn't dressed like a gentleman's son, but he had a formal name. The voice was completely nondescr
ipt, and Aelius hadn't been in the Republic long enough to distinguish the subtleties of class from a man's accent. Harder still with a boy with a tendency to mumble. "That's a big name for a kid," he said. "Who's your father?"

  The boy felt in his pocket, produced a copper penny and held it out on his palm, heads upwards. "He is."

  No wonder the face was familiar. "Sergeant," Aelius said, "get out."

  As the door closed, Aelius leaned forward across his desk. The boy was watching him, to see what would happen next. He wasn't afraid, he wasn't smug. That alone was enough to confirm that he was who he said he was. "What kind of lewd suggestion?" Aelius asked.

  "None of your business."

  Aelius shrugged. "Fine," he said. "All right, you can go."

  The boy turned towards the door, and Aelius rose smoothly to his feet, snatched his swagger stick off the desk and slammed it against the side of the boy's head, hitting him just above the left ear. He went down, started to get up, staggered, recovered and got to his feet.

  "Can I go now?" the boy said.

  Aelius nodded. "I think that makes us all square," he said. "Do you agree?"

  "Yes," the boy said. "Yes, that's fair."

  Fair, Aelius thought. Not the word he'd have chosen, but surprisingly appropriate. "Then go home," he said. "And maybe you'd like to think about the relationship between the military and the civil authorities. Ask your dad; he'll explain it to you."

  Outside, the boy's sister was waiting for him. She was flanked by two sentries; not physically restrained, but held in place like a chess piece that can't move without being taken. "It's all right," the boy said. "They let me go."