The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  There was a brief debate as to whether they should stop for the night at the tenth milestone, or press on to the city, even though it would mean marching the last hour or so in the dark. Prexil agonised about it for a while, then decided to press on. The road was easy enough to follow, after all, and as soon as the sun set they’d have the lights of the farms and suburbs to guide them.

  But they didn’t. The darkness slowly filled out, but there were no lights. The scouts hadn’t returned, either. Prexil called a halt, and put the army on lesser alert. He was thinking, he explained, about the dust cloud, the one that had preceded them and then vanished. “It did occur to me,” he said, “that the reason the cloud stopped was that they’d moved on to the road and were coming up it at us, though I wasn’t all that bothered if they were. What I didn’t think was that they’d joined the road and gone the other way, towards the city. I mean, what if we get there and find there’s a siege? It’s the only reason I can think of why the suburbs are dark.”

  “We’d see the enemy campfires, though, surely,” suggested one of the captains. Prexil shrugged.

  “You’d have thought so,” he said, “but maybe they’re staying dark, for some reason. Like we did, in the desert. Don’t want to give their positions away. As I recall, there’s some pretty high-class artillery on the walls, and I can’t imagine they’ve got any engines of their own to keep our boys’ heads down with.”

  That made an uncomfortable amount of sense, and everyone was quiet for a while. Then Prexil said, “Well, if that’s what’s happening, all I can say is, the bastards have got a nasty surprise coming. If we can get in close before they see us—”

  “What about our scouts?” someone said.

  Indeed; the scouts who’d so signally failed to return. “Well,” Prexil said, “if they know we’re coming, so what? I imagine they’ll bugger off out of it before we get there, but if they don’t, I’ll take great pleasure in kicking their arses up through their ears. I don’t know about you fellows, but I’ve taken a bit of a dislike to these people. It’s about time we gave them a bit of a smacking.”

  Daxen sat through the meeting in silence, then went and sat alone in the dark for a while. They hadn’t pitched the tents; by the time they stopped it was already too dark. It was bitter cold, of course, and naturally Prexil had forbidden the lighting of fires. The fall of Seusa was one thing; if the savages (he was doing it now) had dared lay siege to Erithry, however, something would have to be done about it. Something, yes; define something. Carrying the war out into the desert, he was now unshakably convinced, wasn’t an option. Somehow, the savages managed to live out here, but civilised people, Blemyans, couldn’t survive in this unnatural place, let alone conduct military operations. In which case, all he could think of was some sort of diplomatic retaliation—discreet infiltration, setting one tribal faction against another, that sort of thing. Which would take time, and the results, though potentially satisfactory, wouldn’t be visible. What was needed was a grand gesture, to reassure the world, and he couldn’t think of one. That made him feel depressed. He couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t read and he was freezing cold. He snuggled four blankets into a sort of nest and lay awake, looking at the stars.

  There was no siege. That was apparent as soon as they reached the outlying vineyards. From the high ground, eminently suitable for growing fine-quality grapes, they had a good view of the city, and the Foregate was empty; no tents, earthworks, besieging army. No anybody. The vineyards were deserted, likewise the wide, flat, hedgeless fields of cabbages, turnips, leeks and beans, geometrically perfect and immaculately tended; a few chickens, and that was all. No signs either of assault and destruction. Someone murmured something about a sudden deadly attack of plague, and got no response.

  They matched up the road in total silence, apart from the rather inhuman thump of forty thousand men marching in step. For some reason, they were parade-ground perfect—a slight lag between the very front and the very end of the column, making a weird sort of ripple-echo effect, but as near exactly in time as it’s possible for such a large number of humans to be. It’s because they’re concentrating on what they’re doing, Daxen guessed. Concentrate on keeping in step and you don’t think about other things.

  Between the market gardens and the wall, the suburbs; a concentric outer circle, like the blue on an archery target. In other places, you had shanty towns outside the walls, where the very poor built houses out of barrels, crates and boxes. Not at Erithry; here, the suburbs were mostly villas, sprawling single-storey blocks with an ostentatiously extravagant footprint, usually with a portico and cloister, formal gardens and an acre of kitchen garden enclosed by a wall. Normally you’d see small armies of gardeners, smoke rising from bonfires, carts everywhere taking the surplus produce into town; it could take half an hour to travel the last two hundred yards to the city gate because of the bottleneck and the queues. All empty, and the road shimmered in front of them like some absurdity out of a bad dream.

  “They wouldn’t have evacuated, would they?” said a nervous young lieutenant who didn’t know when to shut up. “I mean, it’d be a huge operation—what’s the population of Erithry, a hundred thousand?”

  “Double that,” someone said. “Easily.”

  The young lieutenant was quiet after that. Yesterday, he’d been telling anyone who’d listen that he had cousins in Erithry: they were in the silk business, they had a beautiful garden and a very fine cook. Now you could practically see him not-thinking, closing the gates of his mind against the unimaginable. He wasn’t the only one with relatives in Erithry, not by a long way.

  They could see the gate clearly. It was open. “There’s got to be some perfectly simple explanation,” someone said.

  (Yes, Daxen told himself, I can think of one. But it can’t be that, because there aren’t any bodies. There’s no smell. Two hundred thousand bodies, at least a week in the hot sun, there’d be a smell all right. But the only smell was jasmine, from the fields to the east where they grew it for the perfume trade. So it couldn’t be that. The end of the world would never smell like jasmine.)

  When Daxen was a boy and they lived most of the time at the country house, the housekeeper would send him to the farm for milk and eggs. He hated that, because he’d walk down to the farmyard and there’d be no one there. He’d wander in and out of the barns and sheds, looking for someone. There’d be chickens scuttling about, maybe calves penned up, pigs in the sties, lambs in the long barn, but no sign of the farmer, his wife or sons, nobody to issue him with milk and eggs so he could go home. He wasn’t allowed to take the stuff without asking, so he was doomed to roam endlessly through the muddy, mucky yard until eventually someone turned up, back from the fields to fetch something. Someone always did turn up, eventually; but he often thought, what if they don’t? What if there really is nobody at all, and I have to stay here for ever and ever?

  They marched through the gate into Sheepfair. A dozen startled crows flew upwards, shrieking with rage, to reveal a split sack of grain. This was where the bakers had their market; three quarters of an acre of canopied stalls, but not today. The white marble pavement shone brilliantly, empty as the desert.

  The coppersmiths’ quarter; they went from shop to shop, and the doors were open, and the tools were neat in the racks and the hearths were cold. The lumber yards; long sheds with long saw benches, the great circular saws frozen, the mill trains disconnected, the waterwheels rock still beside their briskly flowing races. Nobody in the weavers’ quarter, the looms all quiet. Nobody feeding the fish in the carp tanks (but the fish cruised up and down under the surface, swift, anxious; hadn’t been fed in days. What was going on?). Nobody in the tanneries or the slaughterhouses or the empty stockyards, nobody in the potters’ quarter or the fulleries, and the urine tanks were empty. So they tried looking in houses, and the beds were made and the cups and dishes were in the racks, coats hanging behind doors, cots and cribs empty. No horses in the mews, stables and livery yards, no
carts in the traphouses. No dogs, for crying out loud. How could there possibly not be any dogs in Erithry?

  “They eat them,” Mesajer said. It was the first time he’d spoken for an hour.

  “What?” Prexil snapped. “Who eats what?”

  “The desert people. They eat dogs.”

  Nobody in the goldsmiths’ quarter. Plenty of gold, both finished goods and carefully stacked ingots, but no people. “That’s just crazy,” said the engineer. “Who captures a city and leaves the gold?”

  No sign of looting or plundering of any sort, not anywhere. The only missing commodities were food—every kind of food, from bulk grain to salt pork to raisins to baby cucumbers in dill pickle. There was nothing to eat in the whole of Erithry.

  “Cabbages,” Prexil said.

  The quartermaster nodded. “And a bit of curly kale. There’s a few fields of early beetroot, turnips about the size of walnuts, hard as rock but just about eatable if you boil them for an hour. No beans yet. Nothing’s ready for another month.”

  Prexil sighed. “How much flour is left?”

  The quartermaster shrugged. “Depends on how you ration it. Maybe six days, if we really spin it out.”

  Prexil issued orders for the Sixth, Ninth and Third Auxiliary to go and cut cabbages. “This time of year they’re just finishing up the store crops,” the quartermaster explained. “Only all the clamps are empty; we looked. Just about the worst time of year for this to have happened, really.”

  Daxen had thought that, too. Twenty miles up the road and you came to the wheat belt, huge fields as far as the eye could see; but close to the city was all greens and other ephemera, things that don’t keep. At any other time, half a dozen different crops would’ve been in season. The disappearance, the great absence, had taken place at the one point in the food cycle when there was hardly any fresh produce in the fields.

  “We can’t survive indefinitely on bloody cabbages,” Prexil was saying. “Quite apart from the men, I’ve got fifty thousand horses and mules to feed, have you got any idea how much those bloody things eat? We’re out of oats and barley—we had to give all we had left to the men for porridge—so right now I’ve got all the horses out grazing turnip tops, but we can’t take three hundred acres of garden land with us when we leave. And why the hell aren’t there any carts?”

  “We’ll have to build some,” someone suggested.

  “Oh yes, let’s do that,” Prexil snapped. “A thousand carts, just like that. We’d be here for weeks. We can’t afford to be stuck here, doing nothing, when—” He stopped. It wasn’t a sentence he wanted to finish. “We’ll have to make big cloth bags,” he said. “There’s plenty of cloth, at any rate. How long do cabbages keep for once they’re cut, anyway?”

  They tried the less obvious places where people might hide—cellars, towers, cisterns, even the sewers. But the sewers smelt sweet. They looked for freshly turned earth, evidence of intensive burning. They tried the City hall; papers neatly stacked and no ink in the inkwells. “Whatever it was,” said a lieutenant who claimed to know about these things, “it happened early in the morning, before they mixed the ink. That’s how it’s done,” he added defensively, as people looked at him. “Every day, the junior clerks take turns to mix the ink and take it round the offices in a big jug. Then, in the evening, they go round and empty all the inkwells.”

  Actually, that made sense; not just the clerks’ offices, but all the shops and workshops looked as though they’d been packed away for the night and not opened the next day. It wasn’t much, but it was something to go on, the first tiny step towards a hypothesis. “A dawn attack,” Prexil said. “No, it’d have to be before dawn. Maybe fourth watch. There’s never anybody about then.”

  “There’s sentries,” someone objected. “And first thing they’d do would be ring the bells. And besides, we examined the gates. No sign of forced entry.”

  Daxen said, “Did anyone look for the keys?”

  Everyone went thoughtful. “No sign of any keys,” someone said.

  “Did you look?”

  “No,” the speaker admitted. “But we’d have seen them if they were there.”

  “Go and look,” Daxen said.

  No sign of the keys, which was just bizarre, because the keys to a city are incredibly significant things, hedged around with procedures and ceremonies, duty officer rosters and guard changeover schedules. Judging from the size of the locks, they were also huge. “They’ve got to be somewhere,” Prexil said. “For crying out loud. We can’t secure the city unless we find them.”

  They looked. A whole brigade of the Sixteenth searched the gatehouse, watch house and guard rooms. No keys. “Someone must’ve taken them,” a junior captain said.

  “Oh come on,” Prexil exploded. “They leave six million angels in gold coins in the Treasury, and they steal a bunch of keys. None of it makes any sense.”

  Without food, they couldn’t leave. Without keys, they couldn’t secure the gates. The engineer sent his smiths away to make bars, hasps and keepers; twelve hours’ work, not including fitting. In the meanwhile, they jammed the gates shut with scaffolding poles. “Nobody is going to make me believe that a Blemyan army garrison surrendered the third biggest city in the Kingdom without a fight,” Prexil declared. It was a statement of faith (defined as an irrational belief for which one can furnish no objective proof) and he clearly wasn’t in the mood to be contradicted. “Someone betrayed them, opened the gates in the middle of the night, it’s the only possible explanation.”

  And not a bad one, at that, Daxen was forced to concede. He sent men to examine the bakers’ ovens; no bread, no flour, needless to say—but there were burnt-out ashes in the hearths, which told him that the fires had been lit. When do bakers start work? Early, he knew that. He buttonholed a captain.

  “Somewhere in your unit there’s got to be a man who used to be a baker before he joined up,” he said urgently. “I need to talk to him now. Do you understand?”

  The captain stared at him and nodded. “Sir.”

  “This is important. Life and death.”

  “Sir.”

  An hour later, the captain came back with two sergeants flanking a terrified-looking man, who confessed to having been born a baker’s son. Daxen gave him a huge smile and offered him a chair. “What time of day did your father light the oven?”

  “Third watch, sir.”

  “On the bell, or later?”

  The man thought for a moment. “More like halfway between third and fourth, sir. He’d start laying the fire on the third bell, but it takes time, like; it’s got to be done just right. So he wouldn’t actually get it lit much before fourth bell.”

  “Thank you,” Daxen said. He reached in his pocket, then remembered he didn’t have any money. “Captain, give this man two angels. Thank you, dismissed.”

  Well, it was a start. Some time after the middle of the third watch, then; a time when any city is at its quietest, when even the drunks are asleep, but before the early risers start work. The perfect time of day, and at the perfect time of year; someone intelligent and well informed thought up this plan, he told himself, someone who knew about cities and how they operate. It didn’t feel like a spur-of-the-moment reaction, the sort of thing you’d expect from a wild-eyed desert prophet outraged over the defiling of a sacred well. Perhaps. The time-of-year aspect might simply be chance and coincidence. The capture of the city, on the other hand, was work of the very highest quality. And why had nothing except food been taken? Nothing at all.

  He climbed a long spiral stair that left him shamefully breathless and arrived at the top of the gatehouse tower. One dust cloud. He looked up and down the wall. There was nobody on watch. Furiously angry, he ran down again and stormed into Prexil’s tent; but he wasn’t there. Eventually, after a great deal of fruitless rushing about, he found him eating a bowl of porridge in one of the guardhouses.

  “Why aren’t there any sentries on the wall?” he yelled.

  Prexi
l gave him a sad look. “Aren’t there? Damn. Right, I’ll see to it.”

  “You do that. And there’s now one dust cloud, and it’s coming straight at us.”

  Prexil jumped up, knocking the table and the porridge flying. “Oh hell,” he said crisply. “Right, here we go.” He grabbed for his sword, which was lying in its scabbard on the table; he fumbled with the buckles, gave up and left it. “It’s about time, I guess. Did you see if they’ve done the bars on the gate yet?”

  They were peening over the rivets when Prexil and Daxen got there. “Close the gates,” Prexil yelled. “All units to stations.” A count of three, and men started pouring out of doorways, ramming helmets on their heads, scrabbling at the loops and catches of their armour. “Mobile reserves to the bastions,” Prexil shouted; he didn’t seem to be talking to anyone in particular, but he had a loud voice, and things were certainly happening. He didn’t draw breath for five minutes, by which time the walls were lined with archers, and a solid phalanx of spearmen was drawn up at attention in Foregate Yard. It was only then that Daxen remembered something he’d heard recently. He craned his neck to look, just to make sure.

  “Aren’t there supposed to be siege engines mounted on these walls?” he said.

  “Yes, of course. Twelve tactical batteries, four long-range—”

  “They’re gone.”

  Prexil froze, staring at him. “Oh God,” he said. “Are you sure?”