by K. J. Parker
It was a moment or so before the boy realised what he’d done; he noticed something in his hand, looked down to see what it was. Pleda made a point of not looking at him. He got the horses moving. Not a word from the boy. All right, then.
“Four of Spears,” he said. “Victory. Ace of Arrows.”
The boy said, “What’s all this about?”
“Four of Spears,” Pleda repeated. “Victory. Ace of Arrows. Well?”
Just for a moment Pleda felt a little pang of apprehension. He had a padded jack under his topcoat, proof against a casual knife thrust but that was about all. The boy could quite easily have hidden a knife or a blade of some kind in the sling that supported his broken arm. Then: “Nine of Coins, the Angel, Ten of Spears.”
“And?”
“What? Oh, God, sorry, Eight of Swords.”
“Say again.”
“Eight of Swords.”
There is, of course, no suit of Swords. Not in a normal pack.
So that was all right, then. With a sigh, Pleda shifted the reins from his right hand to his left, then balled his right fist and, without looking, swung it sideways. He hit the boy on the elbow of his broken arm. As he’d expected, the boy howled with pain. Quickly, Pleda stuffed the reins under his left thigh and clamped both hands on the collar of the boy’s coat, twisting it, almost but not quite tight enough to throttle him. “You bloody fool,” he said.
The boy was staring at him; sheer terror, no lies there. Very hard to keep straight who you’re pretending to be when you’re in agony. He’ll have to learn better than that, Pleda thought, but that’s not my problem. He maintained the pressure while he counted to four under his breath, then slowly let go. “Idiot,” he repeated. “Clown. What the hell did they send you for, anyway? You’re not fit to be out without a nursemaid.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy said. “What did I do wrong?”
“Acting up.” Pleda fought down the anger. “Bloody acting up, is what. Making up a lot of nonsense just for the hell of it, when you didn’t have to. Nine times you’ve contradicted yourself, did you know that? Nine times. If anyone with half a brain had been listening to you, they’d have been on to you like a weasel. Bloody acting up. And don’t say you can’t help it, of course you can. You just need to bloody well think what you’re doing.”
He’d got through to him all right; scared, guilty, resentful. “I’m sorry,” Musen said, “I didn’t realise I was doing it. It’s more a sort of a habit, really.”
“That’s no excuse. That just makes it worse. First rule is, concentrate. Think about what you’re doing. It’s not just your neck now, it’s mine. You want to remember that.”
He’d done enough. Any more and the boy would turn against him; padded jack or no padded jack, he’d rather that didn’t happen. “Anyway,” he said. “Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Pleda.”
Pause. “Are you—?”
Pleda took back the reins. “You know better than that. There you go again, overdoing it. I’m the Eight of Swords, that’s all.” He settled himself firmly against the bench; it was digging into the small of his back. Six hundred miles, he thought to himself. What I do for philosophy. “So,” he said, in a very slightly more conciliatory voice, “what exactly happened on the tower?”
“I don’t really know,” Musen admitted. “We heard footsteps. We froze. The old man came up. I’ll swear we didn’t move or make a sound, really. I couldn’t see a thing, it was so dark. Then I guess the old man moved. I heard this horrible yell. I guessed Par—”
“No names.”
“I guessed Six of Arrows had gone over the side, so I ran for it. Tripped over something, and then it felt like I was being trampled by horses or something, and then I was in a prison cell. That’s it.”
Pleda nodded slowly. “What was supposed to happen?”
“The old man was meant to come up on to the tower. Soon as we could, we’d slip past him and go back down the stairs and get caught by the guards. Or the guards would’ve come up first and caught us. But they told me that wasn’t so likely, because the old man likes to be on his own up the tower. Can’t concentrate on his star-gazing if there’s people with him.”
Pleda frowned. “That’s a bloody stupid plan.”
Musen grinned. “That’s what we thought. We said so, and they told us, yes, it is, so why don’t you think of a better one? So, we did as we were told.” He hesitated. “Nobody was meant to get killed.”
Quite. If they’d asked me first—But they couldn’t, of course, could they? “Things like that happen,” he said. “Play with knives, get cut. I don’t know. Whoever picked you for this job’s got a lot to answer for.”
“I don’t see what else I could’ve done,” Musen said. “And it worked, didn’t it?”
“More by luck than judgement.”
The boy could have argued the toss, but he didn’t. Time for a unilateral declaration of victory, Pleda decided, and then let’s move on. “When we get there,” he said. “It’s all laid on at that end, is it?”
“So they told me.”
God help us, Pleda thought. You go through life thinking the Wild Cards know it all; they’re wise and cunning, and their carefully distilled plans run the world. Then you actually get involved in one, and you find out the bastards are basically just making it up as they go along. His fault, he supposed; he’d let things get too lax in his own parish, too busy nursemaiding the old man—but if anything happened to him, God only knew what’d happen, so they couldn’t blame him for that. Trying to run half the world from a cubbyhole in the East Wing, no staff, no support, if he needed to write a letter it was a day’s work, and then all the misery of finding someone to carry it. It’s an honour, they’d told him; you must be very proud. Bastards.
“We’d better get one thing straight,” Pleda said. “We’re going to be months on this job, and it’s a lot of travelling and I hate travelling, and there’s so many things that could go wrong before we even get there, it makes me want to scream just thinking about it. If you make any difficulties, even one tiny step out of line, then so help me I’ll make you wish you’d got gangrene out on the moors and died. Is that clear?”
The boy gave him a wounded look. I didn’t ask to get caught up in this, it said; it’s not my fault, don’t blame me. Quite, he thought. It was time to crack a big, friendly grin. “We’ll be all right,” he said in his special everyone’s-favourite-uncle voice that always worked so well with young idiots. “You do as I tell you and we’ll be just fine.”
A long, long ride to the coast, where they sold the cart to pay for passage on a ship to Beloisa—they’d started making the run again, though there was nothing there but rain-soaked ash and a few blocks of black stone. “Don’t know why we bother,” the captain told them, “force of habit, mainly. We go out empty and bring back maybe five dozen bales of wool and a bit of firewood. The passenger business has gone right down the drain, not that that’s any surprise. What do you boys want to go there for, anyhow?”
Pleda told him they were going home, to visit family and friends. That seemed to be an acceptable answer, though Pleda was quite sure the captain didn’t believe it. Of course, as Pleda knew perfectly well, the government was subsiding the shipowners to keep the north–south crossings going, so the captain wasn’t quite as hard done by as he was pleased to suggest.
“Ten years since I was last in Beloisa,” Pleda observed as the ship dawdled through choppy water on the second day.
Musen didn’t feel much like chatting. He appeared to be working on the assumption (unfounded, as Pleda knew only too well) that if you keep perfectly still, eventually it gets better. “It’s all changed now, I expect.”
“Bound to be, since some bastard burned it to the ground. It wasn’t a bad old place when I knew it. A bit something-and-nothing, but I’ve seen worse.” He turned his back on the sea and rested his elbows on the rail. He’d forgotten, but actually he quite liked sailing. “I’m from Arad Sefny originally. Kno
w it?”
Musen shook his head. A mistake. He closed his eyes and swallowed a couple of times.
“About a day and a half’s walk up from Burnt Chapel. Between Bray Downs and the Greenwater valley.”
“Sorry,” Musen said. “No idea where that is.”
Pleda shrugged. “We had a nice little farm, forty acres on the flat, grazed three dozen sheep on the downs. My mother bred geese, we used to drive them down into Burnt Chapel for the autumn fair. Three brothers, I was the youngest, and a sister; she married a man from Corroway. I used to go over there sometimes to help him with the peat-digging.”
Musen turned his head. “You said your father was a fuller.”
Pleda nodded. “Happy days,” he said. “Haven’t been home for, what, thirty years. Don’t suppose they’d recognise me if I walked through the door.”
“In a town.”
“Burnt Chapel. Smallish place. Used to be a chapel there, but it burned down.”
Musen was grinning. “One contradiction.”
“Good boy. I made it easy for you, mind.”
Musen turned back so that his mouth was directly above the sea. “Where are you really from?” he asked.
“Here and there. The lodge has always been my home. You go where you’re told. I like that.”
The boy thought for a while before he spoke again. “I can see where it saves you a lot of fretting,” he said. “Lots of choices you don’t have to make.”
Pleda frowned. “Oh, there’s choices,” he said. “All the bloody time, and the higher up you get, the more of them you’ve got to make. Don’t get any easier, either, and nobody thanks you for anything, nobody ever says well done, bloody good job.” He spread his elbows wider along the rail; it helped his back, a little. “I think that’s probably why the lodge works so well,” he said. “It’s not like anything else I know; not like governments or armies or Temple or any of that lot. Everywhere else, you always get people who want to get on, people with ambition. When the choices come along, they choose because they want to get to the top, because of the money and the power and all that rubbish. In the lodge, now, the higher up you get, the worse it is. No, don’t pull faces at me; it’s true. You don’t get paid, you live where you’re put, and if they send you to a tannery or a slaughterhouse, cleaning out the stalls, that’s where you go and that’s where you damn well stay. You don’t get fame and glory because there’s only a handful of people know who you are, and they’re lodge, not easily impressed. Just when you’ve got yourself settled in somewhere and your life feels like it’s starting to make sense, the bastards promote you, and it’s off somewhere else and start all over again, whether you like it or not. You can be Grand Vizier to the Sultan of Dog’s Armpit, and if you get promoted and the job means digging ore fifteen hours a day down an iron mine, that’s that, off you go, you don’t argue. Take me, for instance. Before I was put on this food-tasting thing, I was a chief clerk in a treasury office in the home provinces. Big house, nice bit of garden, servants, a bunch of little clerks to do all my work for me. And before that I was an assistant harbour master, and you can take it from me, there’s no better dodge going if you want to make a bit on the side. I could’ve raked it in, if I’d been that way inclined. Now I’m here doing this, glorified footman, with a good chance of getting myself killed any day of the week. That’s promotion in the lodge, my boy, and don’t you forget it. Nothing but trouble and sorrow. Like I said, I guess that’s why it works so well.”
Musen was looking at him with a mildly startled expression. “I don’t want to be anything special,” he said. “I just want to serve the lodge, that’s all. It’s the only thing I ever wanted.”
“Sure. That, and a load of stuff that doesn’t belong to you. Just as well the lodge can use you, then, isn’t it? Mind, that’s the other reason the lodge is so successful. We can use everybody.” And then the grin. “Even you.”
Maybe the grin wasn’t working today. He could tell Musen didn’t like what he’d said—not the stuff about promotion and all, the other thing. “Fact is,” he said, “we’re all the same. We wouldn’t do it otherwise. We serve the lodge because we believe in it. And if you’re a believer—well, the rest all sort of goes without saying. I don’t think it’s something you choose. It’s inside you, right from the start.” Like stealing, he didn’t say. “Some people are like that, they were born to be just the one thing. That’s us. That’s why we don’t need money and flash clothes and big houses.” He paused for a moment, then added: “You’re one of us, sunshine, I can tell. Don’t expect praise. After all, it’s none of your doing.”
He’d said the right thing, at last. “That’s it,” Musen said. “That’s exactly how I’ve always thought about it. It’s why—well, when I was growing up, in Merebarton. That’s my village. I was the only craftsman there.”
Pleda frowned. “Now that’s hard,” he said. “When you’re the only one. Different for me; there were always at least half a dozen of us, we always had someone to talk to. We felt special, you know, strong. Just you on your own, that must’ve been tough.”
Musen’s eyes were wide and bright. “It was,” he said eagerly. “You know, I think that’s why I started taking things. I always felt, you know, different, shut out. Actually, it was more than that. I felt like they were all blind and I was the only one that could see. But somehow that wasn’t an advantage, if you get what I mean.”
Sooner or later, Pleda thought, sooner or later. There’s always a certain combination of words that gets through, and then you’ve got them; like those amazing locks they have in Sond Amorcy, the ones with no keys, and you turn three little dials to line up the tumblers. Work people a click at a time, you’ll get there eventually. He let the boy talk. There was a whole lifetime waiting to come out, like a blocked drain.
Beloisa was just depressing. There was a structure calling itself an inn, on the quay, where the customs house used to be. It was mostly made of doors, charred on the outside, but military-spec crossply is too dense to burn right through; someone had been all round the site and gathered up about a hundred charred and scorched doors, nailed them to scaffold poles and lengths of rafter; oiled sailcloth for a roof, which sagged where rainwater had pooled—any day now, the cloth would give way and some poor devil would wake up drenched. Meanwhile, the weight of the rainwater had bowed the walls inwards. They’d tried to draw them straight again with guy ropes, but the pegs had already started to pull out. Sorry, the innkeeper said, we’re full up; try again next week, or the week after that.
The plan had been to buy a cart. No problem there; country people desperate to get across the sea had plenty of carts for sale, but horses to pull them were a different matter. The military paid cash—about three stuivers in the mark, but cash—for anything with four legs and a faint spark of life. So the country people had mostly turned their carts on their sides and added a lean-to of sooty planks, and there they sat, nothing to do but wait, observing the new arrivals off the boats, like sheep at market watching the butchers.
“Looks like we’re going to have to walk,” Pleda said. “I hate bloody walking.”
But Musen had other ideas. “I’ve got a letter,” he said.
“What sort of a letter?”
Musen reached inside his shirt and produced a thin tube. It looked like brass, but there are other yellow metals. “Put it away, for God’s sake,” Pleda hissed. “You want to get our throats cut?”
Musen hadn’t thought of that. “It’s signed by the emperor,” he said, pulling his shirt down so the tube wouldn’t show. “It says we can have anything we want. I don’t know if that actually means anything.”
Dear God, a plenipotentiary warrant. A real one, not a fake. “It means something,” Pleda muttered. “Means we don’t have to walk, for one thing. Right, we need the prefect’s office.”
The Beloisa prefecture was a genuine stone, brick and tile building, one of the five still standing. The prefect, a pale, thin man Pleda had never he
ard of, took the tube as though he’d just been handed a sleeping cobra. “What’s this?” he said.
“You might like to read it,” Pleda suggested.
The prefect had difficulty getting the parchment out of the tube. First he tried to pinch hold of the end with his fingernails, but they were too short. Then he tried prodding with his forefinger, but somehow he managed to get the base of the parchment crumpled so that it jammed. Then he got up, crossed the room to a big rosewood chest on a stand, opened the chest, rummaged around for a while until he found a foot-long piece of ebony dowel, the sort of thing people who need to draw lines on maps use as a ruler. He tried that, but it was too wide to fit in the tube.
“Let me,” Pleda said. He poked the uncrumpled end of the tube with his little finger, and the roll of parchment slid out on to the prefect’s desk. The prefect gave him a baffled look, unrolled the parchment and started to read. Then he lifted his head and stared. “Sorry,” he said. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
Not nearly as much, it turned out, as they’d hoped. Horses, yes, not a problem. They could go to the stables and help themselves from a wide selection of military-spec thoroughbreds. Only trouble was, they were cavalry horses—first class for charging the enemy, no good at all for pulling carts. All the draught horses in the place had been requisitioned, day before yesterday, and loaded on transports and whisked away over the sea. Not best pleased, as you gentlemen can imagine, since there was now no way of moving supply carts, hauling firewood or emptying the latrines. Sorry about that.
Pleda replied that that wasn’t good enough. He had a warrant in the emperor’s own handwriting promising him whatever he needed. It would not go well with the prefect, he suggested, if he was responsible for making the emperor break his promise. The prefect gave him a smile of pure hate and fear and said he’d see what he could do.