The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  The scouts confirmed that the approaching army was General Belot, with approximately fifteen thousand men. The garrison numbered precisely seven hundred and thirteen.

  “These things always go the same way,” Jaizo told him. “It’s a set procedure, a sort of unwritten protocol. There were classes on it when I was at the Institute.”

  For some reason, Jaizo had started talking to him. He guessed it was because he was outside the chain of command. Since Jaizo always brought a bottle with him, and left what he hadn’t drunk behind, Musen encouraged him.

  “Go on.”

  Jaizo filled his cup. “Sure you won’t join me?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Wise fellow. Bad habit.” He swallowed half a cupful. “It goes this way. They launch an assault. If they get through, it’s all over; most of us will probably get it during the fighting, they’ll be so pissed off with the rest of us that they’ll slaughter us like sheep. So, we fight back like mad and drive them off. That’s stage one.”

  “I see,” Musen said. “What’s stage two?”

  “Investment,” Jaizo said. “They dig in round the walls, set up siege artillery if they’ve got any, start building it if they haven’t. Their sappers set about undermining the perceived weak points of our defences. If we feel like it, we can launch a sortie or two, to steal or spoil their food supplies or set fire to their siege engines. We don’t have to, but it sort of shows willing. Anyway, that usually lasts about ten days. Then we move on to stage three.”

  “What’s stage three?”

  Jaizo drank some more. “Terms,” he said. “They offer terms, we reject them. They come back with a better offer. We put forward terms of our own. We haggle a bit, and then we surrender. Depending on the deal we’ve struck, we get to leave the city with or without our arms, armour and regimental insignia, provisions for the march, escort and safe passage, et cetera. We go home, our commanding offer is court-martialled and hanged for cowardice, we get reassigned without blame, life goes on. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, that’s what happens.”

  “I see. What if it doesn’t?”

  Jaizo shrugged. “There’s stages four through six,” he said. “Basically, they bombard us with rocks, dig under our walls and make them fall down, launch assaults with scaling ladders, rams and siege towers, that style of thing. Each time they have a go and we beat them off, there’s an opportunity to go back to stage three. Stage seven is where they make it through the wall, burst into the city, kill everything that moves and burn the place to the ground. But that’s pretty rare.”

  Musen was silent for a moment. “So Pieres—”

  Jaizo shook his head. “He knows the score,” he said. “It’s a fact of life; you live with it if you accept a garrison command. After all, the only alternative is stage seven, so you’re dead either way, only then you take hundreds of your mates with you. And, of course, the senior staff wouldn’t stand for that. If we thought he was thinking along those lines, we’d cut his throat.”

  Musen thought a bit more. “So if everyone knows the city’s going to surrender sooner or later,” he said, “why bother with all this? Why not just—?”

  “Give up straight away? Forget it.” Jaizo wiped his mouth. “You never know, the government back home might send us reinforcements, or there could be an outbreak of plague in their camp, or heavy rains washing shit down into their water supply, or they could be recalled and sent somewhere else. That’s what motivates the garrison commander to stay at his post, the one in a hundred chance of staying alive. Not very likely,” he conceded, “but you never know. That’s why we fight. Just in case.”

  “But usually—”

  “Usually, yes.” Jaizo poured a thimbleful into his cup. “The vast majority of these things end with surrender. Like, if the government back home really gave a damn they wouldn’t have let it come down to a siege in the first place. Or they don’t do anything because they can’t, because they haven’t got the men or the money.” He shrugged. “Slightly different here, because we were fooled; we thought it was a trick and we were wrong. Our only hope of keeping the city is if our Belot wins a really big one on the other side of the sea, and they have to recall their Belot to deal with him before he’s winkled us out of here. Not that it matters,” he added with a shrug. “We don’t actually want this godforsaken place, we only came here to open a second front and take the pressure off down south. It’s all just strategy and tactics, isn’t it?”

  This godforsaken place. The trouble was, Musen realised, he thought of it in those terms, too. The moor, waste, empty, useless; their Belot and our Belot, but which was which? He really didn’t want to be cooped up inside the city if there was a siege, neither soldier nor civilian, sideless. And another thing—

  “Can I ask you something?”

  This time, Jaizo was definitely drunk. Every day he went a little bit further; the previous evening, he’d brought two bottles, though he hadn’t actually opened the second. Tonight, he was a quarter of the way into it. “Sure,” Jaizo replied. “So long as it’s not troop movements, because then I’d have to kill you.”

  “The war,” Musen asked. “What’s it about?”

  Jaizo laughed. “Good question,” he said, and fell asleep.

  General Belot was building siege engines. Since Beloisa stood at the edge of the treeless moor, his only source of lumber was the joists, beams, floorboards and lintels of the handful of farmhouses scattered around the elevation where grass gave way to heather. The only way he could get nails was to burn them out of planks too rotten or warped to be useful; as for rope, he had a thousand men stripping and twisting nettles, of which the abandoned market gardens to the south-east furnished an ample supply.

  At least water wasn’t a problem, even though the garrison had deliberately cut itself off from the river; it rained non-stop for a week and all the tanks were full. Unfortunately, so were the gutters and the drains, and then the streets, and then the basements and cellars, including several that housed provisions and supplies. Forty-six miles of best flax rope were ruined in one night, engulfed in thirty tons of cement, earmarked for making good the damage soon to be inflicted by General Belot’s artillery. As for Pieres’ beautiful new moat, in places it was lapping up against the top of the battlements, and the engineers were frantically trying to figure out a way of draining it without flooding the whole city.

  He wasn’t in a good mood. They’d demolished his hay barn, where he slept—something about firebreaks in the heavily built-up zone next to the north wall, in case Belot bombarded them with incendiaries—and his blanket, pillow and spare clothes were now under three feet of compacted rubble. Also buried beyond recovery, though at different sites, was his stock in trade, but he couldn’t see how he could register a formal complaint about that.

  Having nowhere else to go, he decided to sleep in a temple. There weren’t quite so many to choose from as there had been; the Old, the New, the White and the Refining Fire had all been pulled down or collapsed, the Perpetual Grace was flooded and the Eastgate had been turned into a hospital for men injured during the building works. That just left the Reformed and the Mercy, and the Reformed, next door to a major granary, was alive with rats. Musen went to the Mercy.

  The door was locked, of course, but he didn’t even need to force the vestry window; someone had done it for him, and very neatly, too. He wandered into the nave, and saw with a degree of surprise that the Flame was still burning, its glare reflected in the gilded walls and polished marble floor, so that the nave was flooded with light to roughly the same extent as the street outside was flooded with water. That made him feel oddly comfortable and also rather guilty. It meant that, in theory at least, the fire god was still here, at His post, on duty; a good soldier, though Musen suspected that He was no longer in practical control of the situation. Nevertheless, he made a perfunctory grace, bobbing his head and patting the left side of his chest, the way kids do. At the same time he was thinking: there must be a
big reservoir of lamp oil under there somewhere, enough for several days. Lamp oil was at a premium right now. Query: if he doused the flame and stole the oil, would he drive the god out of His own temple? Could he actually do that, evict the god, as though He was behind on the rent? Define rent, he thought.

  He went back into the vestry and found the chest where the priests stored their vestments. Good stuff, actual silk; you’d have thought they’d have spent out on a decent padlock. He gathered a heaped armful, went back into the nave and made himself a silk nest, like a caterpillar, in front of the fire, although the actual warmth it gave off was negligible. Our Father, he prayed, keep me safe, tonight and always.

  Two chasubles made a fairly effective pillow, and he was just slipping into a dream when he heard someone cough. The voluntary sort. He sat up. “Hello?”

  “That’s so sweet,” she said.

  “You.”

  She was wearing deep red, an extraordinary choice in a city under siege, where people instinctively tried not to be noticed. Maybe she’d looted the dress from somewhere; maybe she’d been caught in the rain and got soaked to the skin, and the red number was all she could find. Red, of course, is the proper colour for the fire priestess. A terrible thought struck him. “Are you—?”

  She grinned. “Actually, yes. At least, I’m ordained, but I’m not in offices. I sort of collect qualifications. They’re useful.” She changed the grin to a frown. “You’re pretty hard to find.”

  Her shoes, he couldn’t help noticing, were dry. “Am I?”

  Over her shoulder, he could see the main door. It was slightly open. Did that mean she had the key? “Yes, you are. I’ve wasted a good hour looking for you. Mind you, I should’ve thought of a temple to start with. You really do believe, don’t you?”

  An odd time to discuss religious conviction. “Yes,” he said, “of course.”

  She nodded, as though he’d given the right answer. “And when your friend Sergeant Egles insulted the pack, you hit him.”

  “Actually he hit me.”

  Shrug. “Same difference. You’re a good craftsman, and a true believer. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Country people have stronger faith, I’ve noticed that.” She’d produced his pack of cards, from somewhere. He tried very hard not to look at them. “It says in Scripture, you must not steal.”

  “I know.”

  “But you do.”

  “I’m not perfect.”

  “Do you try to be?”

  He thought about that; it was a good question. “Yes,” he said. “I fail, obviously.”

  “Lesson one,” she said. “Nobody’s perfect. To seek to attain perfection is to presume that you are capable of being equal in grace and substance with Him. That’s very bad. Don’t do it. Instead, you should confess your imperfections, to show that you regret them, and seek to make them good.”

  “You mean stop doing them.”

  Roll of the eyes. “No. Make them good. You don’t understand, do you?”

  For some reason, he wasn’t scared, even though he knew he should be. But there was a sincerity in the way she spoke that had caught his attention, as though these questions mattered, urgently, here and now. “Sorry.”

  “Fine.” She sat down, folded her hands, composed herself: the start of the lesson. The Master had done the same. “A smith makes a thing, let’s say a hinge or a scythe blade. He makes it, but it comes out wrong. He can throw it in the scrap and start again, or he can try and make it good. With me so far?”

  Musen nodded.

  “The Great Smith makes us. Sometimes we come out right, sometimes we don’t. Some of us are so badly flawed, we go in the scrap. Some of us are worth making good. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Great Smith works on us through us; we are his hands and tools, his anvil and hammer. To make us good, He inspires us with awareness of our error, which leads us to recognition and repentance. Still with me?”

  “Yes. Go on.”

  She smiled. “He then inspires us to make ourselves good. It’s very important you understand what that means. It doesn’t mean we throw ourselves away and start again. That’d be presumption. It’s not for us to throw ourselves away, only He can do that. Well?”

  “I understand.”

  “Good boy. When He made you, he gave you a shape, a form. He made you how and what you are. If you try and change that, be someone else entirely, you’re throwing away the thing He made. Which is wrong. Isn’t it?”

  “I suppose so, yes.”

  “That’s right. The shape and form He gave you is your character. That’s actually what character means, it’s a word in Old Imperial meaning a stamp or design.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course you didn’t, but you do now. What you have to do is make good. You’ve got to work on that flaw, the flaw in your character, and make it good. Like, the smith draws out the hinge too thin on one place. So, he draws the rest of it down until it’s all one even thickness. Or he burns the edge of the blade, welding it to the back; so he jumps up and draws down all round it and makes the burned bit good. He takes the flaw and makes it good. Do you see?”

  “I think so.”

  “Excellent, we’re nearly there. What you have to do is identify that flaw of yours—in your case, taking things that don’t belong to you—and make it good. That’s all. But it’s really important. Because that’s what He’s doing, through you. If you fail Him, you’re a bad tool. Bad tools go in the scrap.”

  She was silent for a while. He asked, “But I don’t see what I’m meant to do. You’re saying stealing is a flaw, but it’s wrong just to stop doing it.”

  Another smile. “It depends on the flaw,” she said. “Is it just a blemish on the surface that can be beaten out and filed smooth, or does it go all the way through the iron, like a cold shut or an inclusion? In your case, I’m guessing, it goes all the way through, right down deep inside you. You won’t ever stop thieving, because you can’t. He made you that way. But He made you. So, two choices. Throw you away or make you good. Which do you think He should do?”

  Musen thought about it. “Throw me away.”

  “Wrong.” She scowled at him, mock-ferocious. “You have faith; you’re a sincere craftsman. He wouldn’t have made you that way if He didn’t have a use for you. So, you need to be fixed.”

  “I’m not sure I—”

  “Also,” she said, “you’re a good thief.” That made him blink, like a bright light shoved in his face. “Or you could be, if you’re taught properly. I’ve been watching you very carefully, and in my professional opinion you show genuine promise.” She pursed her lips. “You’re a bit old for training, you’re woefully ignorant of basic general knowledge and you’ve got the manners of a pig, but we can fix that. So, cheer up. I’ve decided. You’re getting out of here.”

  A surge of uncontrollable joy, like the rainwater flooding the cellars. “You can—”

  She nodded. “I’ve got a ship,” she said. “Well, call it a ship, it’s more a sort of overgrown dinghy, but it’ll get us where we’re going.” She paused. “Now you ask, where’s that?”

  “Sorry. Where—?”

  She beamed at him. “It’s a really nice place,” she said. “You’ll like it there. Nice shady cloisters, so you won’t boil to death, like most Rhus do in the South. Board and lodging completely free, and the food’s actually quite good. Also, I think you’ll enjoy learning. I should say you’re quite an intellectual, for a farm boy.”

  He wasn’t sure what that meant, but she seemed to think it was a good thing. “You’ve got a ship,” he repeated.

  “I said so, didn’t I? It’s all right, it’ll still be there in the morning.” She stood up, walked to the fire. “Sorry about this,” she said, and threw his pack of cards into it. They burned up quite quickly, and the reflection of the brief flare on the gilded walls was like daybreak. “No valued possessions, it’s the rule. Essential, actually, when you think about it. Fiv
e hundred thieves under one roof, the one thing you simply can’t afford to let them have is property. Otherwise, there’d be chaos.”

  “Five hundred thieves,” he repeated.

  “There or thereabouts,” she said. “At the Priory. People just like you.”

  His head was swimming. “The Priory. That’s where we’re going.”

  “That’s it. Or you can stay here and die, of course, if that’s what you’d prefer. This place has got absolutely no chance. That’s official, direct from the General Staff.”

  He took a deep breath. “Sorry,” he said. “Can I just get this straight? You’re sending me to a sort of thief school, in the South.”

  “You could call it that.”

  “And this is to do with religion. It’s a holy school.”

  She gave him a fond smile. “It’s all right,” she said, “they’ll explain it all when you get there.”

  “And you can do this. Make the decision, I mean.”

  “Me? No, of course not.” She paused for a moment. “Well, the actual decision, whether you’re suitable or not, yes, that’s me. But we’ve been watching you for a long time.”

  “You have.”

  “Since you were eight. Quite a remarkable thing, two of you in one poxy little village out in the middle of the bush. We thought it was just an inexperienced observer trying to make a name for himself. But no, you both measured up. And, of course, a linked pair’s always a good thing to have up your sleeve. Anyhow, that’s enough about that. Be here, first light. I’ll send someone.” She stood up and walked towards the open door. “Nice meeting you. You won’t see me again for a bit.”