The Two of Swords, Volume 1

by K. J. Parker

  On the sixth day they came across an army. Which army it had been, led by whom, was anybody’s guess, because every single body had been stripped naked, and the heat had swollen them into unrecognisable lumps. You could just about tell the Imperials, because they were plum-brown rather than purple.

  “We ought to bury them, surely,” Euxis said. The crows were screaming again, and Daxen could see their point. First they chase us off the laid wheat, now the carrion. What harm did we ever do them? Nobody was inclined to walk up and down among the bodies and carry out a systematic count, so they made do with a rough guess; fifteen thousand, call it twelve regiments plus auxiliaries. Nearly all arrow wounds (but the enemy hadn’t left a single arrow. Waste not, want not). From a distance, they looked like a spectacular crop of mushrooms, overgrown and just about to spoil.

  Later, Daxen overheard some of the junior officers talking; they were riding behind him, he didn’t recognise their voices and he couldn’t see their faces. One was saying: fifteen thousand dead, doesn’t that make it the greatest defeat in Blemyan history? No, another one said, that’s Second Antecyra, sixteen thousand four hundred. Then there’s Choris Axeou, sixteen thousand two-fifty. Yes, said the first one, but Second Antecyra, wasn’t that where the bridge collapsed, you can’t count that, it was a separate thing. Yes, said the second, but the bridge collapsing was during the battle, so properly speaking it counts. Choris, said a third voice, wasn’t that where we lost about eight hundred to friendly fire from the garrison batteries? No, said the second voice, you’re thinking of Gavetta; Choris was where five hundred men got marched off a cliff in the dark, during the night outflanking manoeuvre. Fine, said the first voice, knock off five hundred, you’re down to fifteen seven-fifty, and bear in mind we didn’t do an accurate count, it could’ve been more than fifteen seven-fifty. At any rate (said the first voice, resolutely defiant), it’s got to be the second-worst defeat in Blemyan history. Well, hasn’t it? And the third voice said, Hang on, though, aren’t you forgetting about the Hyaxan Forks?

  The next day, five hours before they reckoned on arriving at Laxen’s Ferry, they met a cart.

  The outriders raced back with the news: there’s a cart on the road. About a mile ahead, just one cart, two people in it, possibly a man and a woman. For a moment or so, Daxen and his senior staff were too bewildered to speak. Then someone said, fetch them here, right now. Someone else said, hang on, what if it’s a trap? One cart, someone else said, out in the open, it should be all right. The second voice explained that he’d meant it as a joke.

  “Bring them in,” Daxen said (and a part of his mind realised: trap, pony and trap, oh I see). “Quick as you can.”

  They were Oxelas and Ruxen, and they had a small coopers’ yard in Laxen’s Ferry, and they were on their way to a vineyard at a little place called Brown Reach, and if the soldiers didn’t believe them, they could look for themselves. See? Two dozen half-hogsheads, as ordered. Yes, they’d left Laxen’s that morning, end of fourth watch, soon as the gates opened. Invasion? What invasion?

  When Daxen told them, they went deadly pale. We’ve got to get home, the woman said to the man, what about the children? The man gestured her quiet, and asked if the invasion had got as far as Brown Reach. Little place, he repeated, about four miles off the road, there’s a track off to the left. Daxen said he didn’t know, which seemed to surprise the man very much. Sorry, he said. You’re the army, I thought you’d know something like that.

  Daxen thanked them and sent twenty cavalry with them as an escort. Then he called a staff meeting. They sat on folding stools beside the road, while the army leaned on their shields and waited for orders.

  “They can’t just have vanished into thin air,” Prexil said. “If they turned back, we’d have run straight into them. They can’t have gone off cross-country, or we’d have seen signs. You can’t march a huge army through cornfields without leaving a trail.”

  Daxen pointed out that they’d passed a major crossroads early that morning. He clicked his fingers for the map and found a thin blue line. Castle Street, he read out; runs parallel to the river, then forks, and one branch swings back down to join the East Military. He looked up. “Maybe they’ve gone home,” he said.

  There was a bewildered silence. “Why would they do that?” Euxis said. “I thought they were headed for the capital.”

  The engineer shrugged. “We don’t know that,” he said. “That lodge bastard sort of implied it, but we don’t know.”

  “More likely,” Prexil said, “they’ve changed course, trying to throw us off. Where’s that map?”

  Daxen kept hold of it. “I don’t think so,” he said. “If they turned off down this Castle Street thing, there’s nowhere to cross the river for fifty miles, not till you get to Holden. And from Holden back to town is a hell of a hike, up through the forest and all sorts.” He stopped and looked round. “Has anyone sent scouts to Laxen’s Ford?” he asked.

  No, they hadn’t. The omission was swiftly rectified. “If they wanted to give us the slip,” said the engineer, who’d got hold of the map while Daxen was occupied with other things, “surely they’d have carried on just past Laxen’s and taken the Old Express. That way, they could’ve led us a merry dance through the Mesoge and still not have had to go very far out of their way. That’s assuming they know the geography, but I think we can take that for granted.”

  Daxen stood up and tugged the map gently from his hands. “Why would they turn back?” he said.

  Silence; then a young lieutenant whose name Daxen should’ve known by now said, “Maybe they’ve got what they came for, or done whatever it was they wanted to do. You just don’t know, with people like that.”

  People like that—“Actually,” Daxen said, “he could be right. Since we don’t know what they want, we’re in no position to guess if they’ve got it yet.”

  “I thought the lodge man said they wanted to wipe us off the face of the earth,” Euxis said.

  “Maybe they do,” Daxen said. “It’d be so much simpler if we could just ask them.”

  The scouts came back from Laxen’s Ford. Everything seemed normal. They’d asked a couple of farmers if they’d seen anything of the invaders, and been met with blank stares. No invasion here, friend, sorry.

  Daxen gave orders to pitch camp. Someone pointed out to him that there was no water. They marched on another two miles until they came to an irrigation channel, and stopped there instead. Daxen announced that there would be a general kit inspection (which would give the men plenty to do) and retreated to his tent with all the maps. No interruptions, under any circumstances.

  With the flaps drawn, he lay on his bed, closed his eyes and tried to clarify his mind. So far, they’d marched into the desert and back again, visited a deserted town and city, passed by the dead bodies of an entire army, chased an invisible enemy who’d dissolved into mist for no apparent reason. In order to carry out this mission, he’d taken direct personal command of the armed forces. He had absolutely no idea what he was doing, or what was going on.

  So far, so good. He still had the army, nearly full strength, adequately supplied, undefeated in battle; the mighty Blemyan army, holder of the balance of power between empires, widely acknowledged as the finest fighting force in the civilised world. That should be enough, he thought, but somehow it wasn’t. He had the wretched feeling of having been found out, as though he’d forged a document or impersonated someone. All along, he’d reassured himself by saying that whatever happened, she’d understand; but now he wasn’t so sure. In his mind he could hear her: How could you, she was saying: how could you have been so stupid?

  Suddenly he grinned. She was funny when she got all pompous, and she couldn’t keep it up for very long. Then she’d break up laughing at herself, amused and angry and ashamed, and everything would be fine after that. He realised, for the first time, just how much stronger she was than him.

  Then the bright moment faded, because there was nothing at all she’d
be able to do, if she was here, except quite possibly lose her throne; she couldn’t take charge, lead the army. If she tried to, the soldiers would just stare at her, red with embarrassment. Oh God, he thought, why does it have to be us? Why can’t we just offload it all on to someone else, a professional, a grown-up? Then he thought about the steelnecks and the politicians, and was forced to the unhappy conclusion that he was on his own.

  Still, once he’d accepted that, at least he knew what to do. He got up, pulled back the tent flap and yelled for Captain Euxis.

  “First thing tomorrow,” he said, “we’re going to the capital. I want to leave at dawn. Got that?”

  Euxis was about to say, Yes, but. At the last moment, he drew back from the precipice and said, “Yes, sir.”

  “I want you to send the cavalry on ahead,” he went on. “We won’t need them, and I want some sort of military presence near the City as soon as possible. And there’ll be despatches to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, so I’ll need the fastest rider we’ve got. All right?”

  After that, he went back and lay on the bed for a long time.

  They crossed the river at Laxen’s Ford and pressed on up the road. Mesajer had insisted on leaving him two squadrons of heavy cavalry—you can’t have an army of just foot soldiers, he’d said, it’s unnatural—and Daxen sent them on ahead to announce their arrival and gather any news at all of the invaders. At Coxin they found fresh fruit and vegetables waiting for them; at Piloessin they were joined by a convoy of a hundred and seventy carts, commandeered from the mines by a quick-thinking cavalry lieutenant. The military governor of the province rode out to meet them outside Argyra; what was the emergency, and what could he do to help? Daxen thanked him and told him to stand by, whatever that meant. Was it true that Erithry had been burned to the ground? Not quite. Just stand by, there’ll be an official communiqué in due course.

  An exhausted horseman appeared at the camp gate and was carried in to see him. Apparently, he’d been riding for four days, as fast as he could without killing the horse. He wasn’t even a soldier, it turned out, or not a proper one anyway. He was a mulberry grower, the second in command of a militia unit from a place called Outemida, a miners’ transit depot on the East Military Road. Early one morning he and his CO had been dragged out of bed by hysterical townspeople, who reckoned they’d seen a vast body of people and horses on the road, just as the sun was rising. When you say vast, he’d said; tens of thousands, they’d told him, maybe even hundreds of thousands, the line was three miles long, it took them nearly an hour to go past where we were hiding. There was no trace of booze on their breath, so he’d guessed they were telling the truth; his CO had sent him to tell the military governor, but when he got to Argyra he was told the governor was headed for Laxen’s Ford. He’d cut across country, but the governor hadn’t been there; so he’d followed the road looking for the army he’d been told about, and here he was—

  Daxen thanked him, made notes and dismissed what he’d heard from his mind. If the enemy had passed through Outemida four days ago, he had no chance of catching up with them this side of the desert, and there was no way he was going back there again. Now at least he knew something; the enemy were headed back where they’d come from, and they weren’t alone—people and horses, the mulberry grower had said, there were men and women on foot as well as the hostile cavalry. That could be interpreted as meaning that at least some of the prisoners from Erithry were still alive, at the very least. They take care of their prisoners, Genseric had said, like they take care of their other livestock. He shivered. Something else, about belonging to the god. Fine. If you’re that pious, enough to go to war over a perceived insult to a well, you’d take pretty good care of God’s property, now wouldn’t you?

  The ancient and beautiful city of Cortroche. Daxen had cousins in Cortroche, an elderly lady and her two jolly, stolid sons. He’d stayed with them once, seven or eight years ago; they had the most amazing pear orchard. Like a fool, he’d forgotten that this was the time of the celebrated Cortroche Goose Fair, to which people (and geese) flocked from miles around. Consequently the road was jammed with carts, people and several million geese, waddling in step like (the comparison wasn’t lost on him) a large but badly led army. They came so far that the geese had to be shod, with little wood-and-leather pattens that strapped under the foot. The army spent a morning causing chaos trying to force their way down the road, covered a whole mile and a half, scattered seventy thousand geese over a huge area; then Daxen made the decision to go round the city, across country. The outskirts of Cortroche are ringed by orchards, some of the finest in Blemya. Marching forty thousand men through orchards was easier than marching them through geese, but only just. The people they encountered didn’t seem pleased to see them; why don’t you go and play soldiers somewhere else?

  Back on the road, eventually. They were nine miles out of Cortroche and Daxen was thinking about where to camp for the night when someone told him there were riders up ahead. Not a big deal any more. He put them out of his mind until Euxis came and told him the riders were official, from the capital; from the queen.

  Daxen’s heart stopped for a moment. “Why the hell didn’t you say so earlier?” he snapped, quite unfairly, and scrambled through soldiers pitching tents and driving in palings until he found them: six smartly dressed kettlehats watering their horses at a stream.

  “Have you brought a letter?” he asked breathlessly. One of the kettlehats turned and looked at him for a moment, and asked if he was Grand Logothete Daxen.

  “Yes, that’s me. I’m expecting a letter from the queen. Have you—?”

  The kettlehat looked round, as if assessing some tactical issue. Then he made an obvious effort and took a step forward. The other five closed in behind him. “I have a warrant for your arrest,” he said.

  It wasn’t a cell, as such. As far as he could make out, it was an ante-room to the vestry of what had once been the private chapel used by the emperors of the united empire, before the civil war. Here, presumably, the supreme pontiffs of the one true faith had retired to meditate before performing the high sacraments in front of the emperor, the imperial family and the inner court; that would account for the exceptional quality of the mosaics that covered every square inch of the walls and ceiling. On all four sides of him was the Translation—the epiphany, the transmission of the holy flame, the miracle of the five red birds, the apotheosis of the Prophet and the transubstantiation of the flesh—while above him Our Lady of the Penitent Spirit stood in a posture of eternal supplication, her left hand raised, the single tear glistening on her mahogany cheek. If Daxen had been just a little bit more spiritual, he’d have said it was worth it just to be there, for hours on end, with nothing to do but sit and admire the artwork.

  After a very long time the door opened; it was a footman with a silver tray. Cold beetroot and artichoke soup (very fashionable but he couldn’t be doing with it), duck terrine with cherries, something with noodles and bits of chicken in a creamy mushroom sauce, and nothing to eat it with; no knife, no spoon, even. He looked at it.

  “Can I get something to drink with that?” he asked. The footman looked over the top of his head and withdrew, and he heard a bolt grind in a hasp outside. Apparently not.

  He wasn’t hungry anyway. He put the tray down on the floor and sat down again. The chair was three hundred years old and hard as nails, but he was damned if he was going to sit on the ground. He tried to think, but he couldn’t: beyond anger, beyond fear. He just wanted something to happen.

  He must have dozed off, because a voice woke him. He sat bolt upright and opened his eyes, and found he had a headache. Wonderful.

  “I said,” said the voice, “didn’t you like your dinner?”

  Daxen looked at him. A very tall, broad man with a wide face, completely bald, an Imperial, in plain light grey academic vestments; he had forearms like legs, and the gold signet ring of the Royal Clerical order. Daxen had never seen him before. He took a deep breath.
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  “You’re going to be in so much trouble,” he said.

  The man smiled. “My name is Carrhasian,” he said. “I’m the deputy chief clerk of the Observances office. You’re Daxen.”

  Daxen grinned back at him. “No, I’m not. You’ve got the wrong man. Can I go now?”

  Carrhasian nodded. “You queried the warrant,” he said. “I’ve consulted the precedents, and I can confirm the warrant was in order and your arrest was entirely lawful.”

  “Like hell,” Daxen snapped. “Clearly you don’t understand. I’m the queen’s authorised deputy; I answer only to her. As far as you’re concerned, I am her. Now, you’ve got one minute to let me out of here, or your neck is on the block. Have you got that?”

  But Carrhasian shook his head. “You were properly impeached in absentia on charges of treason,” he said. “You no longer hold any office of any kind.”

  Daxen breathed in deeply. “I’d like to see some paperwork, please.”

  Carrhasian shrugged. “In due course, maybe. I’ll see what I can do. Properly speaking, since you no longer hold office you don’t have clearance to view restricted government papers. But I have a certain degree of discretion.”

  “What have you done with the queen? Is she still alive?”

  A mighty eyebrow lifted. “Of course.”

  “You’ve got her locked up somewhere, then.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We are loyal servants of the queen.” He smiled gently. “You’re the traitor.”

  Daxen had a shrewd suspicion that this man could break his arms like twigs if he wanted to. The thought helped him cool his temper a little. “That’s not true,” he said. “What am I supposed to have done?”

  Carrhasian pursed his lips. “That’s also restricted,” he said.

  “Really. You’ve charged me with something, but you’re not allowed to tell me what because it’s a secret.”