The Two of Swords, Part 17

by K. J. Parker

  The next morning, Saevolus woke up feeling ill. He’d forgotten about his winnings, a sum so trivial that it slipped through the meshes of his mind, but he distinctly recalled the brave stranger who’d saved him from certain death and then vanished, leaving behind no trace of his identity. It was rather miraculous, therefore, that the first person he met as he staggered out into the daylight some time later should be the mysterious hero in person.

  “I wanted to know if you were all right,” Musen said shyly. “Only, I couldn’t very well call at the front door. Your people would throw me out looking like this, and quite right, too.”

  So, he went on, he’d been hanging about outside on the off chance; he was greatly relieved to see that no serious harm had been done, and now he’d be on his way.

  No chance of that. I owe you my life, said Saevolus. Oh, that’s all right, it’s what anyone would have done. Saevolus offered money. Musen looked shocked and offended. Well, anyhow, Saevolus insisted, if ever there’s anything I can do for you, anything at all – Musen thanked him, said that so long as he was all right, that was the main thing, and walked away. And if Saevolus even noticed that he’d lost his gold cloak pin and come out without any money, he certainly didn’t make the connection.

  “You said you were done with all that.”

  Musen shrugged. “I saved his life. He owed me.”

  “He offered you a reward and you didn’t take it.”

  “He’d paid already.” He scowled. “So I keep my hand in now and again, that’s not the same as regular thieving, like going out and looking for stuff. And I really am finished with all that, I promise.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Anyhow,” she said, “that’s all very well, but how’s that supposed to help us get to Engoi?”

  “Simple. We hitch a ride with the caravan.”

  Which put her in her place good and proper. Brilliant. Both emperors had made it known that Saevolus’ caravans, performing as they did a vital economic function, had unequivocal safe passage. Saevolus never sent his stock anywhere without a substantial escort, and it was cheaper in the long run to ship them in carts, thereby cutting transit times and preventing them from losing condition. Two civilians on foot wouldn’t last ten minutes on the Great East Road, which ran straight through the heart of Eysi province, but a well-armed and supplied caravan with diplomatic credentials would have nothing to worry about at all.

  “But what makes you think he’s sending a caravan in that direction?”

  “That would be the favour.” Musen grinned. “Like I said, he owes me.”

  *

  She assumed it wouldn’t actually work. Either Saevolus would have forgotten Musen, or would pretend he had, or the favour would be too much to ask, bearing in mind the substantial cost of fitting out a caravan; or maybe he simply wouldn’t be at home when Musen called, and wasn’t expected back again for nine weeks.

  She assumed wrong. Musen went to call, and Saevolus was at home. He was delighted to see Musen again. His debt, he said, had been weighing heavily on his mind ever since the night in question. Permians believe that if you die while under a serious obligation of honour, the person to whom you die obliged gets control of your immortal soul, and can conjure you to appear and perform magical tasks. Actually, very few Permians still believe that, and Saevolus definitely wasn’t one of them, but it rankles, like a grape pip between the teeth.

  Sure, Saevolus said, I can do that. In fact, it just so happens that I have an order to fill at Ana Straton, on the western edge of Eysi, so Engoi would be less than a day’s ride out of my way. Then a depressing thought struck him: you wouldn’t mind desperately if I didn’t come with you myself? Only I’ve got so much to do here, and—

  Musen assured him that that wouldn’t be necessary. Saevolus, looking mightily relieved, promised to send his best man to lead the caravan; Bidens, splendid fellow, tough as old boots, he’ll see you get there and no messing about. Then he sat down at his desk and wrote a letter of recommendation in his own handwriting, which Musen presumed Bidens could read, through dint of long practice; to him, it looked as though a mouse had fallen in an inkwell, then chased its own tail across a sheet of paper. “The plan was to leave the day after tomorrow,” Saevolus said, “if that suits you. If not, I can easily reschedule.”

  “That’ll do fine,” Musen said, thanked him and left without stealing anything.

  A small, high-value consignment: all skilled men, twenty to a wagon, ten wagons plus two supply carts, escorted by thirty Mi Chanso horse-archers and fourteen men-at-arms. To which was added Saevolus’ personal carriage – not his best or his second-best, but his third-best was still a degree of luxury and sophistication which she hadn’t encountered before, even when travelling with Oida. In the back of the coach was a tent – no, you had to call it a pavilion – with enough rugs and cushions and tapestry draught-excluders to furnish a house, not to mention the portable stove, with its incredibly ingenious telescopic flue. It was the sort of rig the emperor would’ve had, if only he could’ve afforded it. On the box there was room for a driver and two guards, who doubled as butler and lord high chamberlain; an aristocratic Blemyan by the name of Phrixus, and a gigantic Permian with decorative scars criss-crossing his cheeks and a real knack for folding napkins in the shape of roses.

  “This is stupid,” she said, as they rumbled along the Great East Road in gorgeous sunshine. “We’re supposed to be slipping out unobtrusively, and we look like an embassy from the Great King of the Sashan. We couldn’t be more conspicuous if we were on fire.”

  Musen shrugged. Sitting in the coach made him bored and restless. “If anyone’s watching out for us,” he said, “this is the last place they’d look, because of what you just said. So really, it’s a good way of not being seen.”

  Idiot’s logic, to which she had no answer. “What did you manage to find out about the cargo?”

  “Not much,” he replied. “Tried asking the guards, but they don’t know a lot either. They’re Easterners of some kind, but that’s all I know.”

  She’d caught a few glimpses of them, nothing more; rows of men, middle-aged or older, sitting on benches in the wagons, their feet shackled to a steel bar running the length of the wagon bed. Her impression was that they were too pale for farmhands, so presumably artisans of some description. “There used to be a foundry at Straton before the war,” she said, “though I’m pretty sure it got burned down. I don’t know, maybe there’s enough of it left to be worth rebuilding. Still, it’s a bloody funny place to build a factory, right in the middle of a war zone.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Musen said, “I’ve never been there.”

  Helpful as ever. “I can’t believe you actually arranged all this. First-class travel door to door, all expenses paid.” A thought struck her. “Is this Andrapodiza a Craftsman?”

  Shrug. “Don’t know.”

  No, and why should he? She should, though; a prominent public figure, rich and well-connected. It would make sense if he was. After all, Saevolus and the Great Smith were in more or less the same line of business, making even the most improbable people useful, and not giving them much say in the matter. Oida would know if Saevolus was Lodge, of course. She turned her head and looked out of the window. This close to Rasch, the landscape should be a well-ordered grid of carefully tended fields (good growing country; had to be, to feed the biggest city in the world) but it was a long time since they’d seen a human being, and the fields were waist-high grass, nettles and briars.

  It wasn’t like travelling with Oida, who always carried spare books and foldaway chess sets and backgammon boards that just seemed to materialise when needed out of his minimal luggage. Musen seemed content (no, wrong word; resigned) to sit staring at the floor for hours on end; occasionally he’d pull out a cheap pack of cards and stare at them instead, but he never suggested a game of anything. She had no great interest in talking to him, but on the third day of their improbable journey the silence started to get to
her.

  “What do you do with all the money?” she asked.

  He looked up from the cards. “What money?”

  She smiled grimly. “You’re always stealing things,” she said. “Usually small and valuable. You don’t drink or gamble; you hardly spend anything. So, what do you do with it all?”

  There was a short battle inside him. Then he smiled. “I put it in the bank. Where it’s safe.”

  She blinked. “The bank.”

  He nodded. “I got an account with the Knights. And another one with the Sword-blade. Sort of like hedging my bets.”

  The Knights and the Sword-blade; oh dear. Just before she left Rasch she’d removed her trivial savings from the Knights and lodged them with the Trani Brothers, too small to be invited to join the syndicate to cover the Imperial loan. Pointless, though, because when the Knights went down—” That’s very sensible of you,” she said.

  “Well,” he grunted. “I worked hard for that money. When all this is over, I want something to show for it.”

  It had been Oida’s bright idea, of course, to bring about the end of the world. Looking out of the window at the derelict fields, the end of the world was something she could actually bring herself to believe in. A comforting thought, in a way. If everything comes to a sudden and violent end, we won’t have to clear up all the messes we’ve made.

  Everything went fine until they reached the Mafaes, which they should have been able to cross by way of the magnificent stone bridge built by Gauda IV three hundred years earlier.

  “It must have taken them weeks,” she said. “Probably longer than building it.”

  A remarkable feat of engineering, certainly. To break the bridge, someone had had to undermine the central span, which had meant digging a shaft deep underneath the river, a hundred yards through the living rock, in order to collapse the mighty granite columns. “It was fine when we came through this way last month,” Bidens assured her. “This is all new. Beats me why they bothered. I hadn’t heard there was any serious fighting in these parts.”

  At its narrowest point, where the bridge used to be, the Mafaes is two hundred and ten yards wide and fifteen feet deep. The nearest crossing point is twenty-six miles upstream; and if you go that way, in order to get back on the Great East, you have to scramble up the Pig’s Head and down the other side, which isn’t possible in a wheeled vehicle. “Isn’t it lucky,” Bidens said, “that we happen to have with us a hundred and five professional carpenters.”

  She looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “No shit.” He turned and nodded towards a stand of tall, spindly birch. “Of course, we don’t have any woodworking tools. But we do have twenty-five blacksmiths, and twelve sledgehammers.”

  The smiths used the sledgehammers to forge links from the spare sets of shackles into hand-hammers and tongs, using salvaged granite blocks from the bridge as anvils. Then they used the hand-hammers to forge the sledgehammers into axes, with which the carpenters cut down and rough-shaped trees into beams wide enough to span the gap, while the smiths forged iron scraps and offcuts into nails. They worked quickly and efficiently, never saying a word to the guards or each other, except when necessary for the furtherance of the job in hand. When their shifts were over, they went and sat in the wagons, with their shackles on. The work took two full days and half a morning. Musen had offered to help, but was politely told he was a passenger and mustn’t exert himself.

  Bidens the overseer had taken to riding with them in the coach. He hoped they didn’t mind; it made such a pleasant change to have someone cultured and intelligent to talk to – apparently Musen was officially included in this category, though Bidens ignored him most of the time. He wanted to talk about the plays he’d seen in Rasch, most of which she’d missed because she’d been out of town. Bidens’ idea of discussing a play was to give a detailed blow-by-blow account of the plot; and when he ran out of plays he started discussing books, most of which she’d never heard of. He was clearly a voracious reader and playgoer, though she suspected that nearly everything he read and saw went over his head like a flock of migrating geese; still, he evidently managed to get pleasure from it, in the same way as the gold miners pulverise a whole mountain to get a cupful of gold. His voice filled up the silence, which had been starting to get to her, and his regurgitated narratives of hate, lust, greed, cruelty and revenge, all wildly melodramatic and unreal, had a curiously soothing effect as they passed through the briar-smothered ruins of town and villages, or camped for the night beside thickets of the tall, red-flowered weed that grows on the site of burned-down buildings. Listening to Bidens, you could kid yourself into believing that violence was like dragons or gryphons, an imaginary monster invented to account for phenomena for which there was, in fact, a perfectly normal and natural explanation; we pretend there’s this monster called war, but really it’s just the houses and people dying off in winter so they can come back to life in the spring.

  You can’t tell someone the plot of the entire Maricas Cycle and not warm to them just a little bit. So, when she felt the time was right, she started delicately fishing for facts, and eventually she got them. The slaves were on their way to join up with the Third Army, the last, best hope of the West; their job was to build siege engines for an assault on a major Eastern city, whose fall would end the war at a stroke. The idea was, it was far easier to take the engineers to the job than lug the finished product halfway across the empire under constant harassment from the enemy. By the same token, the sight of a fully-equipped siege train would put the enemy on notice and give him time to prepare. Which city? Bidens frowned and confessed that he didn’t know, although these days there weren’t that many left to choose from. But she shouldn’t read too much into their destination; this caravan was one of twenty, all heading east by circuitous routes, twisting and turning about and eventually meeting up where they were supposed to be. Senza Belot – this was Bidens’ theory – always got his results by dashing along terribly fast in a straight line. Like a dog, he couldn’t really see something unless it was moving. The best way to hide something from him, therefore, was to shift it slowly and meandering along in loops and circles; anything like that wouldn’t register as a threat, and he’d ignore it.

  “But Forza’s just like his brother, isn’t he? He thinks in lightning flashes.”

  Bidens shrugged. “Maybe this isn’t his idea. Maybe they’ve got a new general. After all, Forza’s done nothing at all to win the war; he just keeps it going on and on for ever. About time the West tried a new approach, if you ask me.”

  “I thought Saevolus was supposed to be neutral. That’s why he’s got safe passage.”

  Bidens shrugged. “Yes, I wondered about that. Wouldn’t look good if he got found out. But it wouldn’t come to that. I’ve got perfectly legitimate bills of sale that say this lot’s consigned to a sawmill in Eysi. It’s not there any more, of course, it got burned down five years ago, but I don’t know that officially.” He ate an olive, offered her the jar. “My guess is, by the time it all comes out, the plan will have worked and the war’ll be over and Saevolus will be well in with the winning side.” He grinned. “More likely, he’s doing something equally devious for the East at the same time, so they sort of cancel each other out. Fact is, everywhere’s so desperate for manpower these days, nobody’s going to pick a quarrel with Saevolus, no matter what he does, so long as he’s not too blatant about it.”

  “Now that’s not something you see every day,” Bidens said.

  She looked up from the book he’d lent her – she already knew the story, in great detail, but something to read is something to read – and glanced out of the window. At first, nothing registered; just open fields, with men cutting down briars and loading the brash on to carts. Then, “My God,” she said. “People.”

  They hadn’t been at it long, to judge by the area that had been cleared. “Probably some of ours,” Bidens said, with a hint of pride. “Though we haven’t sold many farmhands in
the empires, you just can’t get the stock. Still, it’s nice to see waste being put back into productive use.”

  One of the field hands stooped and picked something up. He was maybe thirty yards away. Without thinking, she threw herself on the floor. “Get down,” she yelled.

  Musen followed her, dragging Bidens down with him. “What’s going on?” he asked, as the coach stopped suddenly. “What the hell are you playing at?”

  Tough as old boots, Saevolus had said; well. “Shut up,” she said, and Musen put his hand over Bidens’ mouth.

  The carriage door swung open. “Out,” someone said. He sounded confident, and in a hurry.

  They were piling the bodies of the horse-archers on to the piles of cut briar. The men-at-arms had made a show of throwing away their weapons as soon as they realised what was going on, and had been spared, but the aristocratic looking Blemyan had been shot in the stomach and wasn’t expected to live. They’d laid him out on the grass, and stepped over him as they went about their business.

  Someone was cutting iron with a hammer and cold chisel. The man who’d ordered them out of the carriage looked them over and obviously reached the conclusion that they were no bother to anyone. “Stay there,” he said and walked away. There seemed to be no reason not to do as he said. Like a dog, or Senza Belot, they only seemed disposed to attack moving targets.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time,” Bidens muttered under his breath. “That’s why we have the armed escorts: we’re carrying a valuable commodity.” He pulled a sad face. “I always wondered what it’d be like, to be one of them.” He nodded towards the nearest wagon. “There’s irony for you.”

  They hadn’t bothered to tie up the surrendered men-at-arms, who were standing around looking forlorn and keeping out of the way. Bidens could be right, she told herself, but somehow she didn’t think so; if they were just stealing the slaves, why bother to cut off the shackles?