The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  She was in plain clothes. The cloak and hood he recognised as the property of her maid, which bothered him. By now, at least fifty interested parties around the court would know that the queen had borrowed her maid’s cloak, and would be drawing conclusions like lunatics. He mentioned it.

  “Do I look stupid?” she said. She was annoyed because it was so early. “I stole it from her when she wasn’t looking and hid it at the bottom of the linen press. She’s been searching high and low for it ever since, the silly cow.”

  She didn’t like her maid, but was too soft-hearted to get rid of her just for that reason. He apologised. “It’s just, you can’t be too careful, all right?”

  “I know. Anyway.” She took a cake and stuck it in her mouth. “What’s so important?” she mumbled through the crumbs.

  He paused for a moment. “I don’t know if it is important,” he said, “or if it’s just weird. I mean, it’s definitely weird, but I can’t see anything more to it than meets the eye, which is weirder still. I mean, it’s such a lot of trouble to go to, if really it’s nothing but an extravagant gesture.”

  “Daxin,” she said, “you’re talking drivel.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Well?”

  He sighed. “All right,” he said. “It’s good for a laugh, if nothing else. This professor from the music school came to see me.”

  “What professor?”

  “A professor. Juxia Epigennatus, if you must know. Never heard of him before.”

  “Nor me.” She took the other cake. “So?”

  “So,” he said, and hesitated again. It was just so weird. “Apparently, he got hold of that musical score the Easterners brought. You know, the new Procopius.”

  She nodded. “I flicked through it,” she said. “Not my sort of thing, really.”

  “Well,” Daxin said, “this Juxia’s done a damn sight more than flick through it. He’s been working on it day and night for a week, and he—”

  “Why?”

  Daxin shrugged. “It’s a masterpiece by one of the greatest living composers. That’s what professors do. Anyway, he made a remarkable discovery. Well, a really strange one, anyhow.”

  She did the impatient frown. It was one of the few times she ever looked genuinely pretty. “And? Oh, come on, Dax, it’s freezing out here and I’ve only got this stupid cape thing.”

  “Well,” Daxin said. “Apparently one of the things you do with a piece of music if you’re a professor is, you calculate the numerical values of the intervals of the main chromatic themes. Don’t ask me to explain that,” he added quickly, “and I could well have got the technical terms completely wrong. What it means in real life is that in every piece of formal music there’s got to be certain elements, or it’s cheating or it’s not proper music or something like that. One of the ways you analyse these things, if you’re a professor, is, you turn the music into numbers, using a universally accepted standard equivalence. All right?”

  “It all sounds incredibly silly to me,” she said. “But, yes, I think I see. Go on.”

  “The professor was doing his sums,” Daxin went on, “and there was something about the patterns of the numbers that rang a bell in his head, and he couldn’t think for the life of him what it was. He racked his brains for a day or so, and then, just for a laugh, he turned the numbers into letters, using the universally accepted—”

  “He turned the letters into—?”

  Daxin nodded. “W is one, D is two, so on and so forth. It’s a craft thing. Hundreds of years old. Anyway, he did that, and guess what? The letters made words, and the words made sense.”

  She blinked at him. “That’s weird.”

  “Told you so,” Daxin said. “Apparently he’s been through the whole thing five times, checking and rechecking, and it comes out the same thing every time. Turned into words and then into numbers, the Procopius thing is a poem.”

  “What?”

  “A poem,” Daxin said. “A fairly well-known one, by Corrhadi. One of the love sonnets. Do you know them?”

  She frowned, and her nose wrinkled. “I think so,” she said. “My mother made me read them. All soppy and over the top, I thought.”

  Daxin nodded. “That’s the ones,” he said. “This is the one that starts off, If love were all, what would be left to say. Book two, sonnet sixteen.”

  She was silent for about five seconds. “That’s weird,” she said.

  Daxin grinned. “I guess so,” he said. “I mean, on one level, it’s the most amazing tour de force of utterly pointless cleverness. It’s this really amazing piece of music that also happens to be a Corrhadi sonnet in code.”

  She shrugged. “Showing off.”

  “Indeed. Except, why the hell bother? Why make life so incredibly difficult for yourself? And why a Corrhadi sonnet, of all things? I mean, they’re one notch above the Mirror of True Love, but that’s about all you can say for them.”

  “Weird,” she said. “All right, but how exactly is this a threat to national security?”

  Daxin looked round. Unnecessary, since they were in the South cloister, but even so. “I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “As far as I can see, it’s just very, very strange. But I can’t help thinking. After all, Procopius is sort of in their government, or at least he’s what you’d call an establishment figure. What if this isn’t just some smartarse showing off? What if it’s, I don’t know, a coded message or something?”

  “A coded love sonnet.”

  “Well, yes. But if the Eastern government’s behind it somehow—” He made a vague despairing gesture. “They come here,” he said. “They hand over this bizarre thing. The same night a member of the cabinet is murdered by an unknown assassin. It’s got to mean something. Well, hasn’t it?”

  She looked at him. “Oh, come on,” she said.

  He pulled a sad face. “I’ve sent Professor Juxia away,” he said, “and told him to make the same analysis of all Procopius’ major orchestral works, see if they’re all like it.”

  “Dax! You didn’t.”

  “Serves him right,” Daxin replied. “Also, I got the impression he’d have done it anyway. No, listen. If Procopius makes a habit of encoding third-rate romantic slush in all his compositions, then there’s no special significance and nothing to bother about. If not—” No good. He knew that look.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I hereby pardon you for dragging me out of bed at this ridiculous hour of the morning. The thought of that poor man doing all those idiotic sums—”

  He lowered his voice. That always made her listen. “You need to take it seriously,” he said. “Right now, we’ve got to take everything seriously. Come on, you know what a horrible bloody mess we’re in.”

  She gave him a cold look. “I had sort of gathered, yes.”

  “I’m sorry. Of course you know. It’s just—” He ran out of words. He was twenty-three years old, chief executive of a big, rich country hours away from civil war, and he simply hadn’t a clue. “I’m sorry,” he said. “But Iaxas is taking it seriously, so I thought—”

  She nodded. “It’s just so weird,” she said. “We’ll see what your professor finds out, and then we’ll know.”

  He felt the tension drain out of him. “You’d better get back before you’re missed,” he said.

  “You make it sound like—” She stopped and frowned. “Yes, right,” she said. “Now I’ve got to go and put on all that horrible junk. It’s not fair. I look like a woodlouse. Why can’t I wear nice clothes, just once in a while?”

  One of the steelnecks, General Rixotal, had put it best. In an unguarded moment, among friends, he was reported as having said, “You know what’s wrong with this country? It’s being run by bloody children.”

  Daxin couldn’t agree more. It struck him as ludicrous; almost as ridiculous as taking the second son of a minor nobleman, who’d picked up his education the same way a dog picks up scraps at table, and making him Grand Logothete of Blemya, simply because he’d
played Rattlesnakes with the queen when they were kids. The truly awful thing was that he was a good Logothete, a brilliant one, born to it, a natural. He could guess why. Years of being careful, keeping his eyes and ears open, learning quickly, having to keep the peace between Father and his brother, doing and getting things for himself because nobody else was going to; it had been the perfect training. Mostly, he could understand people. If you could do that, the rest of it was just keeping calm and paying attention to detail.

  “As far as we can tell,” the colonel said, “he must’ve climbed the wall, come in here, through the window, done it, stuck the guard and made off down the corridor. That’s what all the evidence tells us. It just doesn’t make sense, that’s all.”

  Daxin peered down at the brown-stained sheets. No sense at all. An assassin, skilful enough to climb the outer wall of the north elevation, cool enough to kill a man and not wake the woman sleeping next to him, instead of simply turning round and going back the way he’d come, took the huge and unnecessary risk of killing a guard and wandering off down a corridor, with half the palace to walk through before he could get out again. But the killer had definitely come in through the window; there had been the clear prints of toes and heels in the grime on the ledge outside, and traces of that grime on the sheepskin rug, which surely ruled out the possibility that he’d come from inside the palace. An inside killer would’ve had a much easier job, given that he was committed to killing the guard anyway. Clearly a man who knew what he was doing. The colonel was still baffled by the fact that he’d managed to open the door and come out into the corridor without the guard yelling and raising the alarm. You’d have to be so quick and so quiet. The only men the colonel knew of who were that good were the Eastern emperor’s Pasgite bodyguards—tiny wild men from the far north, trained to kill from childhood, so strange-looking and alien it was a moot point whether they were genuinely human. That (the colonel said) tied in rather neatly with the size of the footprints; also, the Pasgites always went barefoot.

  He took one last look round, then thanked the colonel and went to meet the Emergencies Commission. No further leads, he reported. All we can say for certain is that the clues we’ve found have yielded no definite information whatsoever about who the killer was, what country or party or organisation. It was possible that the assassin was a Pasgite, or a child, but even if that was true, all it implied was that the killer was a hired assassin, which was more or less certain anyway.

  “We’ve got the City more or less locked down,” the prefect said. “Two battalions of Life Guards on the streets, a big presence on all the gates, random stop and search, keeping the pressure up generally. General Ixion’s brought down four regiments of marines and all the south-eastern cavalry and stationed them in a ring round the suburbs. It’s working for now, there haven’t been any more riots or anything like that. And he’s pretty confident about the men themselves. They’ll do what he tells them.”

  Daxin nodded. Ixion was a good man, for a steelneck, and the soldiers liked him. The trouble was, he was seventy-three years old and desperate to retire. “Outside the City,” he said.

  The Chief Commissioner pulled a sad face. “Not so good,” he said. “Because Ixion’s pulled so many troops out to secure the City, we’ve got trouble in the South and the West. Mostly quite peaceful, people out on the streets shouting and waving banners, but no real trouble so far. I guess it’s because it’s all so vague and mysterious, and nobody actually knows anything at all. It’s hard to work up a really good head of righteous indignation when you’ve got a sneaking suspicion in the back of your mind that it might just have been your side that did it.”

  Daxin thought for a moment. “I think we can probably slacken off gently in the City,” he said. “Nice and gradually, so people get the impression that things are easing up, but we can still come down like a ton of bricks if we have to. If we keep it too tight for too long, it’s more or less inevitable that something’ll strike sparks, and then we’ll be in real trouble. I’m not too worried about out of town. Country people have got too much to do at this time of year, and I gather the miners have stayed pretty quiet.”

  “So far,” said the Deputy Chief. “They never liked him anyway.”

  “Small blessings,” Daxin said. “What about the lodges? They’ve been remarkably relaxed about the whole thing.”

  “I’m guessing they’ve come to the conclusion there’s nothing in it for them,” the Chief Commissioner said. “Either that or they’re playing a very long game. I confess, I don’t like it when they’re quiet.”

  News from the war. The Belot brothers had fought a battle, a big one. It had come as a shock to the governments of both sides, who hadn’t really known what they were up to; both brothers were experts at moving quietly and very fast. They’d fought to a standstill for the best part of a day just outside the oasis city of Rumadon, on the border, only thirty miles or so south of the Blemyan frontier. Early reports said casualties were in the tens of thousands on each side, and that afterwards both armies had pulled back and gone away, and nobody was entirely sure where they were now.

  “The priestess,” the Count of the Stables said, as they walked together into the Lesser Hall for dinner. “Did you notice her?”

  “Hard not to,” Daxin said. “Bright red dress.”

  “I thought they didn’t ordain women in the West.”

  “They don’t.” Taxin stopped to let a server go past with a big tray of fresh bread. “Priestesses are different. They stand up in Temple and chant things, but they don’t actually do anything. Like, they can’t hear confessions or confirm you or anything like that.”

  The Count sighed. “It’s confusing,” he said.

  “We used to have them here,” broke in the Urban Tribune, who was behind them in the procession. “But they sort of died out about fifty years ago, when we introduced women deacons. They don’t have women deacons in the West,” he added. “All a bit primitive, if you ask me.”

  Later, when they were sitting down, the Count said, “I looked it up.”

  “Looked up what?” Daxin said, with his mouth full.

  “Priestesses,” the Count said. “In relation to foreign embassies. I read through all the relevant stuff in Porphyrion’s Offices. Nothing at all in Imperial protocol says you’ve got to have a priestess on an embassy. They made that up.”

  Daxin frowned. “But that’s pre-war, surely,” he said. “How it was under the united empire, in the old days. Presumably the West’s got its own protocols now. They like to invent new stuff to show they’re grander than the East.”

  The Count shrugged. “That’s probably it, then. I just thought it was funny, that’s all. Considering how anti-women they are in most things.”

  Look who’s talking, Daxin thought. “It’s like conjurors do,” he said. “Fetch on a girl in a red dress; at the crucial moment everyone’s gawping at her, so they don’t see you pull the Six of Thrones out of your sleeve.”

  “That’s an interesting remark,” the Count said, frowning. “So you think the Westerners did it?”

  “The murder?” Daxin shook his head. “I don’t think anything of the sort.”

  “Come on,” said the Count. “You say they had the priestess along as a distraction, but on the surface, so to speak, they didn’t actually do anything. Just handed over the music book and left. No distraction needed,” he added, “on the surface. So, if there was a distraction, it must’ve been to keep us from noticing something we didn’t actually see. Like the murder.”

  Daxin sighed. “You’re putting words in my mouth,” he said. “All I did was, I suggested that may be the reason why, as a matter of standard operating procedure, they routinely take women in red dresses along on embassies. On this specific occasion—”

  “Pass the mustard, would you?”

  Daxin reached across and grabbed the little silver pot. “Anyway,” he said, “we know exactly what function the priestess was serving: she was there to keep the Ill
ustrious Oida from browsing the local wildlife. Given his reputation, I should say it was a very sensible precaution, though if you ask me it’s like inviting someone to lunch and he brings his own food. If you’ve finished with that—”

  The Count nodded. He took back the mustard and spooned a little dab on to the side of his plate. The Count said, “What did you make of him?”

  “Oida? As it happens, I know him from way back. He’s one of those people who’s actually a lot less objectionable than he likes to make out.”

  “Not sure I follow you,” the Count said, “but never mind. You do know he’s a distant cousin of Herself.”

  Daxin didn’t know that. “Really?”

  “Oh yes.” The Count was mopping up gravy with a corner of bread. “Once removed or is it twice? Not sure. On his mother’s side. Strictly speaking, he counts as a Royal. The chamberlain’s office had a fit when they found out, because by then, of course, it was too late, the wretched man was already here, and there’s all these protocols that should’ve been observed but weren’t. Fortunately, nobody knew, so—”

  “Oida’s a member of the Royal family.”

  “That’s right,” the Count said, “and as you know, there’s not a hell of a lot of them left, what with them slaughtering each other like sheep for the last hundred and fifty years. I seem to remember some clerk telling me that, theoretically, he’s something like tenth in line to the throne.”

  Daxin frowned. “You said he was a second cousin or something.”

  “Yes, but that’s beside the point. Strictly speaking—”

  “So if ten people die, Oida becomes king.”

  The Count laughed. “Can you really see that happening?” He ate a last chickpea and pushed away his plate. “Besides, you know the man, you said. He seems all right. We could do worse.”