The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  “Yes,” he said. His eyes were fixed on the pack in her hand.

  “Fine.” She nodded. “So, you really haven’t got it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is.”

  “You’d know,” she said. “It’s not the sort of thing someone like you would find in his pocket and mistake for something else.” She sighed and lowered her hand, still holding the cards. “It’s beginning to look like it’s got lost somewhere, genuinely lost. You didn’t sell stuff to anyone else, did you? Apart from Diudat?”

  “No.”

  “Fine. I know about everything he had from you. So, either Teucer lost it before you stole the handkerchief, or it was loose in his pocket and fell out. There wasn’t a hole in the pocket; we checked that.”

  It occurred to him that this checking of pockets must’ve happened after Teucer arrived in the city across the sea, but she knew about it. How many days’ journey was it? Someone had told him, but he couldn’t remember. She was looking straight at him now. He wondered what she’d decided.

  “Don’t go anywhere,” she said. “I’ll keep your cards, for now; sort of a hostage. I don’t think you’ll run away and leave them behind. If you’re very good, you can have them back.”

  He considered taking them, but not for very long. “What have I got to do?”

  “You? Nothing. Just stay put and keep out of trouble, and if you do happen to remember anything else, for God’s sake tell me.”

  “How? How do I reach you?”

  She sort of grinned. “When you read the cards for Sergeant Egles, rig the pack so he gets the Chariot, followed by Mercy, followed by the Drowned Woman. Then I’ll find you, all right?” The cards had gone back in her sleeve; he’d been looking at them, but he’d missed how she did it. “Don’t ask anyone about me, and stop thieving from the stores. You’re not very good at it, and you’ll get caught, and they’ll hang you, and we might need you again. All right?”

  He knew that whenever he came up to a group of soldiers and they suddenly went quiet, they were talking about the war. The rest of the time, they were fine, like he was one of them, and he quite liked that. But people were going quiet on him rather a lot lately, from which he gathered that something was happening.

  “We’re not supposed to tell you,” Egles said.

  “Fine. In that case, you can do your own readings.”

  Egles gave him a hurt look. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “It’s an order, from the major.”

  “Who’d know?”

  The war wasn’t going well. General Belot had been recalled to deal with a new offensive in the South, which had turned out to be a feint specifically designed to get him out of the North. Now his brother, the enemy’s general Belot, was somewhere out on the moor with a large army, heading straight for Beloisa Bay. It’d be suicide to be there when he arrived, but if they withdrew from Beloisa they’d lose everything they’d gained over the last eighteen months; the lines would go back to where they’d always been and it’d be as though the big push had never happened. The area commander, General Lauga, was an experienced officer with a sound record and three or four good victories to his name, but he’d never fought Belot. He wouldn’t stand a chance. The question was, would the emperor make them stay and get slaughtered, or pull them out before Belot arrived? There was politics back home involved, apparently, so nobody had the faintest idea what was going to happen.

  “That’s stupid,” Musen said. “It’s no good to anyone if you lose a whole army.”

  “You don’t understand politics, boy. If we lose an army on the Optimates’ watch, it’s bad for them and the KKA look good. There’s war elections coming up in the city. So the KKA want us to stay here and get wiped out, the Optimates want us out of here soonest. Trouble is, the Optimates are the government.”

  “That’s good, surely.”

  Egles smiled at such innocence. “They pull us out, the KKA’ll say they’re running from a fight, really bad for morale and how foreigners see us. Could lose them the election. They leave us here, we die, the KKA give them all sorts of shit for a major defeat that could’ve been avoided. Fucked both ways.”

  Musen frowned. “That’s really how things work?”

  “Politics, boy. Our only hope is if the emperor makes the decision, because he can do anything he damn well likes. Sometimes he does; sometimes he leaves it to the government. Usually he only gets involved in stuff if he thinks’ll make him look good.”

  The war, again. He’d hoped it had gone away. The stupid thing was, he felt at home in Beloisa, as much or maybe even more so than he’d done in Merebarton. There were craftsmen here, his people. Being a craftsman, he had a place, guaranteed; and he was better than the ordinary soldiers, who didn’t seem to be allowed into the craft under the rank of sergeant. Also, he liked them rather more than Rhus people, especially the Blueskins; they’d gone out of their way to be friendly, even though he was technically the enemy. And they had far more in the way of portable possessions, it went without saying, and if anything went missing they assumed they’d mislaid it. Nice people generally.

  If they left, would they take him with them? He’d asked Captain Jaizo, Pieres’ second in command, about signing up, joining the Western army; he’d said he wasn’t sure, he’d have to look into it, and that was some time ago. Egles thought probably not; and if Musen did, he’d have to go to a training camp and go through basic, and probably a specialisation as well; he couldn’t just stay in Beloisa and carry on working in the stores. His best bet, Egles reckoned, if they were going home, would be to stow away on one of the ships and stay hidden until they were well out to sea. Trouble was, he’d never be able to fade away into the crowd back in the South, he was just too damn tall.

  Just possibly, there was another option. So—

  “Next card, Mercy,” he said, turning it over. “That’s good.”

  “Is it?”

  “Mercy’s always good,” Musen said. “And coming after the Chariot, that’s very good indeed. Definitely looks like you’ll be going home.”

  Egles beamed. “That’s great,” he said. “Well, we should all be going home, because of Senza fucking Belot. But you predicted it,” he added. “Long before the news got out. You foresaw it in the cards.”

  “Well.” Musen did the modest shrug. “What’s next? Ah, that’s good.”

  “What, the Drowned Woman? That’s terrible, isn’t it? Means the ship’ll sink.”

  “Not really,” Musen said. “Not following Mercy and the Chariot. You’ve got to remember, it’s all about context. The woman’s floating, remember. What it actually means is, once you get home, you’re going to get that extra stripe. Colour-sergeant Egles is what that means, unless I’m very much mistaken.”

  Egles glowed slightly. “Well,” he said, “you were right about going home, I’ll give you that.”

  “Trust me,” Musen replied. “We’re craftsmen, aren’t we?”

  It worked. She didn’t come to the stores this time. She materialised in his hayloft, like an angel; he opened his eyes, and didn’t know if it was a dream.

  “Well?” she said.

  She’d brought a lamp, and the loft was filled with soft golden light. Number twenty-seven, he thought, Mercy. “You came.”

  “Yes, and I’m in a hurry. You’ve remembered something.”

  He looked at her. It was difficult. “You’ve got to get me out of here.”

  “What?”

  “When the enemy get here and we pack up and go home. You’ve got to get me on a ship.”

  He’d said something that amused her. “Why should I?”

  No suggestion that she couldn’t do it. “I can’t stay here,” he said. “I tried to join up, but I think there must be difficulties.”

  “Why should I put myself out for you? You haven’t remembered anything. You don’t know where it is.”

  “You’re wrong. But I’m not saying anything unless you get me on a ship.”

  “Sorry.”
She started to move away.

  “I know where it is. I remembered.”

  She hesitated. She didn’t believe him. “Well?”

  “A place,” he said. “On a ship.”

  “What is it? The thing we’re looking for. If you’ve remembered, you must’ve figured out what it is.”

  “I didn’t see it clearly, just a shape—” He was losing. “About as long as my finger.”

  “What?”

  “It was about as long as my finger.” He pinched his forefinger and thumb together. “About this thick.”

  She froze. “Go on.”

  “Not till you get me a place.”

  “You’re guessing,” she said. “You’re thinking, what shape would something be if you could wrap it up in the handkerchief.”

  “It was something flat,” he said. “Thin and flat, rolled up.”

  She looked at him for some time. “I’ll see what I can do,” she said. “You sure you want that, though? This is your home, surely. It’s your lot who’s winning.”

  “Get me on a ship,” he said. “Please. Craftsman to craftsman.”

  “Suit yourself.” She picked up the lamp. Just the usual red clay type, but it gave off far more light than they normally did. “Soon as you’re on the ship, draw the pattern of six wedges on the rail.”

  “The what?”

  She sighed. “Wooden thing to stop you falling in the water. You’ll know what I’m talking about as soon as you see it. Got that?”

  Bad news from the war. General Lauga had resolved that Beloisa must be defended at all costs. He’d asked for reinforcements from home; meanwhile, all units were being called in, and Beloisa was to be fortified and placed in a posture of defence. Meanwhile, Belot was reported to be at some place called Spire Cross, wherever that was; it didn’t show up on any of the maps.

  “I know where Spire Cross is,” he told Captain Jaizo.

  “Is that right?” Jaizo looked startled. “What about it?”

  “That’s where Belot is, right?”

  “You’re not supposed to know that.” He picked up a big brass tube, poked in one end with his finger. “Show me on the map,” he said.

  Musen studied it. “This map’s all wrong,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s all wrong. Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be. Are you sure this is the right one?”

  Jaizo nudged him out of the way. “All right,” he said, jabbing with his forefinger. “We’re here, Beloisa.”

  “Yes, but the rest’s all wrong. There’s no mountains here, look, and they’ve missed out two rivers.”

  “Impossible. This is the Imperial Ordnance.”

  “There’s mountains marked here, look,” Musen said. “There’s no mountains anything like that anywhere in Rhus. This is all rubbish.”

  “Yes, well.” Jaizo pursed his lips. “Yes, there’s problems with these maps, we know that. They’ve got proper maps back home, the old pre-war ones, but they won’t copy them. Restricted. So we’ve got to make do with these.”

  “All right,” Musen said. “Got some paper?”

  Musen had never drawn a map. It was such a strange idea, like drawing a picture of a thought, or a piece of music. “We’re here,” he said, squiggling a line for the sea. “Now, those hills you can see out the window are here, in a sort of horseshoe, like this—”

  When he’d finished, Jaizo looked at the result for a while, then said, “So we’re here and Belot’s here.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s bloody close.”

  Musen nodded. “Yes,” he said. “But how come you didn’t know? Captain Guifres knew where Spire Cross is.”

  “Guifres’ lot were dragoons,” Jaizo replied, as though that explained everything. “So, naturally, they got issued the good maps. That really is terribly close. I’d better tell the major. He’s not going to like it.”

  Major Pieres had enough on his mind already. Orders had been issued to all the units in Rhus to fall back on Beloisa. That should have been enough to give them the advantage in numbers. So far, though, nobody had come. It wasn’t hard to draw a conclusion from that, though nobody said it aloud.

  “But if he’s that close,” Egles theorised, “and he hasn’t come for us yet, and none of our lot’s shown up yet—”

  “There’s other explanations,” Musen said.

  “Right? Such as?”

  He came up with a few—Belot was having supply problems; the missing units had defied orders, or the orders had been superseded; they’d joined together and fought Belot out on the moors and beaten him; both Belot and the missing units were wandering about on the moor in the fog somewhere, hopelessly lost—and Egles was convinced enough to cheer up dramatically, but Musen wasn’t fooling himself. And what was the point of arranging a place on a ship, at God knows what cost, if there weren’t going to be any ships? And, if there were no ships, why hadn’t she known that? Or maybe she had.

  Finally the ships came.

  Marvellous. Thank God. But they weren’t troopships. They were freighters, loaded down with supplies and provisions for the siege. Thousands of barrels of flour, bacon, salt beef, salt fish, butter; hundreds of tons of oatmeal, in sacks; thousands of gallons of lamp oil, vinegar, birch syrup, honey; onions, dried peas, lentils, chickpeas; one ton of turmeric, for crying out loud, and a quarter of a ton of nutmeg. “There’s enough here to last for years,” Jaizo said, raising his voice over the thunderous rumble of rolling barrels.

  “Yes,” Pieres replied miserably. “Think about it.”

  Jaizo wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he got it. He immediately posted guards on the quayside and more guards on the ships, to catch stowaways. The roll was called four times a day. Musen was told to report to the guardhouse at the start of each watch. “Don’t take it personally,” Egles told him, but Musen was furious. They couldn’t have it both ways, he argued. If they wanted to order him about and condemn him to death by making him stay and be killed, they should at least have the decency to let him join up. If they didn’t want him, they should let him go. Simple as that.

  “Fine,” Egles said. “So desert. Go back to your lot. Bet you they’d be really pleased to see you, with what you could tell them.”

  “I can’t do that,” Musen snapped. “I can’t betray craftsmen. You know that.”

  Egles stared at him. “Really. You don’t mind screwing your own people, but not craftsmen.”

  “You don’t understand anything,” Musen said.

  Egles just laughed. “Get the rest of the barrels shifted,” he said.

  And rumours, of course. Scouts had gone out and found the battlefields where Belot had slaughtered the Fifth, Sixteenth, Ninth Auxiliary, the entire Southern Army, recalled from the far distant frontier to relieve Beloisa and intercepted somewhere on the high moor. Furthermore, the relief fleet, carrying thirty thousand regular infantry and two field artillery divisions, had been caught in a storm, or sunk by the enemy fleet, or both. The good news was that plague had broken out in Belot’s army and killed two men in three; his supply chain had been cut and he was starving; hundreds of his men were deserting every day; the Queen of Blemya had finally joined the war on the Eastern side, and was sending fifty thousand armoured cavalry on stone-barges—

  “But none of it’s true,” Musen protested.

  “Probably not,” Egles conceded. “But it makes people feel good. Like Temple.”

  Don’t go there, Musen told himself. “Who’s the Queen of Blemya?” he said.

  Scouts—real ones—reported a large body of men approaching the city from the east. They hadn’t been able to identify them for sure—you had to get uncomfortably close to do that, since both Eastern and Western regulars used basically the same patterns of kit—so they couldn’t definitely say whether the army was Belot or the missing friendly units. Pieres sent heralds, who didn’t come back.

  The supply freighters sailed home again. Musen hadn’t bothered trying to sto
w away; he’d have been caught, and things were bad enough already. Everyone else in the camp was working flat out on the reinforced defences, hacking stone blocks out of temples and municipal buildings, hauling them on rollers, lifting them into position on rickety improvised cranes; when Musen volunteered to help he was turned away, with or without courteous thanks. It’s because you’re one of the enemy, Egles explained helpfully. That made him much angrier than he’d thought possible, but he did his very best not to show it. A few ships appeared in the harbour: small, fast diplomatic couriers, which anchored well out to sea and sent their passengers ashore on launches.

  Pieres ordered the city’s four gates to be walled up solid. (“You know why, don’t you? It’s not to keep Belot’s men out, it’s to keep us in.”) To get blocks big enough, they dismantled the façade of the White temple, the oldest and biggest in Beloisa. Whoever was in charge of the operation did his best to shore the temple up with scaffolding, but there was only a limited supply of seasoned poles and beams, and the gangs working at the gates had priority. Without warning, the spire, bell tower and north portico of the temple suddenly collapsed, killing thirty men and completely blocking North Foregate, thereby cutting the city into two isolated halves. The granaries and water tanks were in the western half, which meant that three quarters of the garrison, working on the gates, had to go without water and food for the forty-eight hours it took to clear a way through the rubble.

  The main water tank sprang a leak. Normally this wouldn’t have mattered, since a tributary of the Los flowed in through a watergate in the east wall; but Peires’ crews had dammed the river to form a moat and walled up the watergate. The breach in the tank flooded one of the three principal grain stores before it could be found and stopped up, by which time the tank was nearly half empty. The cause of the breach proved to be damage to the foundations of the tank, caused by the collapse of the White temple.

  A fire broke out in the Tannery quarter. The district was deserted and there were no strategic stores there, but the intense heat cracked the west wall and made it subside; on investigation, it turned out that the fire had spread to an extensive network of cellars under a vintner’s warehouse, where empty casks were stored. These had burned out, setting fire to the wooden props supporting the galleries, which caved in; the displacement of earth made the whole wall shift six inches. Pieres’ men tried to shore it up with beams, but they didn’t have any long enough so they built three buttresses out of rubble and half-fired bricks from one of the city kilns. They partly collapsed during the night, and had to be done all over again with finished stone from the hospital outbuildings.