The Two of Swords: Part 12

by K. J. Parker

  The Two of Swords: Part 12

  K. J. Parker

  www.orbitbooks.net

  BY K. J. PARKER

  The Fencer trilogy

  Colours in the Steel

  The Belly of the Bow

  The Proof House

  The Scavenger trilogy

  Shadow

  Pattern

  Memory

  The Engineer trilogy

  Devices and Desires

  Evil for Evil

  The Escapement

  The Company

  The Folding Knife

  The Hammer

  Sharps

  The Two of Swords (e-novellas)

  BY TOM HOLT

  Expecting Someone Taller

  Who’s Afraid of Beowulf?

  Flying Dutch

  Ye Gods!

  Overtime

  Here Comes the Sun

  Grailblazers

  Faust Among Equals

  Odds and Gods

  Djinn Rummy

  My Hero

  Paint Your Dragon

  Open Sesame

  Wish You Were Here

  Only Human

  Snow White and the Seven Samurai

  Valhalla

  Nothing But Blue Skies

  Falling Sideways

  Little People

  The Portable Door

  In Your Dreams

  Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

  You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, But It Helps

  Someone Like Me

  Barking

  The Better Mousetrap

  May Contain Traces of Magic

  Blonde Bombshell

  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sausages

  Doughnut

  When It’s A Jar

  The Outsorcerer’s Apprentice

  The Good, the Bad and the Smug

  Dead Funny: Omnibus 1

  Mightier Than the Sword: Omnibus 2

  The Divine Comedies: Omnibus 3

  For Two Nights Only: Omnibus 4

  Tall Stories: Omnibus 5

  Saints and Sinners: Omnibus 6

  Fishy Wishes: Omnibus 7

  The Walled Orchard

  Alexander at the World’s End

  Olympiad

  A Song for Nero

  Meadowland

  I, Margaret

  Lucia Triumphant

  Lucia in Wartime

  Copyright

  Published by Orbit

  ISBN: 978-0-356-50619-7

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by K. J. Parker

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Orbit

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DZ

  www.orbitbooks.net

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  By K. J. Parker

  Copyright

  The Thief

  About the Author

  The Thief

  Musen propped himself up on the rail of the bridge and tried to catch his breath. Stupid, to keep running until he was completely worn out. Now he’d have to sit and rest, and that would lose more time than if he’d walked the last mile. He groped at his pocket to make sure the box was still there, then sat down with his back to the rail, looking back the way he’d come.

  He remembered – what was his name? Thin man with a turkey neck, lived outside Lower Town. He ran away with the wife of Rensa the wheelwright, many years ago. They went up on the moors, everybody reckoned he must’ve had some half-baked idea of heading for Spire Cross, but of course Rensa and his brothers caught up with them both and they ended up dead in a bog pool. A bit fairy tale, the doomed lovers running through the heather with Rensa’s hounds at their heels, but when you thought about it clearly, just stupid. They must’ve known they’d never get away with it, but they went ahead anyway. For love. Stupid.

  He pulled off his right boot and shook it out, dislodging a few coins and a small silver brooch. The brooch pin had ripped open his sock and lacerated the front of his big toe. He stuffed the coins and the brooch in his pocket, then eased the boot back on. His foot appeared to have grown in the minute or so it had been exposed to the air; it was now far too big for the boot and he couldn’t get his toes all the way down. He stood up; his shins protested furiously and he sat down again.

  The pony cart, he noticed, was gone. It was only just over a day since they’d abandoned it, but it wasn’t there. Not that it mattered particularly. Even if the cart had still been there, the pony would be long gone by now; and even if he’d found them both exactly where they’d been left, even if he then traded the pony trap for a coach and eight and galloped without stopping all the way to Permia or Sashan or the Blemyan desert, it wouldn’t make any difference. Sooner or later he’d be woken up by those fingers round his neck. The longer he postponed it, the angrier Axeo would be, the more unpleasant the reckoning. Pointless, the whole thing, just like the wheelwright’s wife and her stupid lover whose name he couldn’t even remember. All for love.

  Even so. He remembered the first time he’d ever killed a chicken. He’d squeezed and squeezed, pinching his thumb and forefinger together on the little thin pipe under the feathers; he’d counted to ten, but the bird just looked at him, opened and closed its beak. He’d squeezed again, counted to twenty-five, and the chicken blinked and screamed without sound and scrabbled with her claws, giving him a scratch that had gone bad and needed a poultice. Life isn’t so easily got rid of, even when the enemy is ten times your size and the hands round your throat are very strong. He’d dropped it in fear and disgust; it lay for a moment then tried to get up, wobbled a few determined steps and then flopped in a heap; and then his mother came and finished it off with a small, quick upward flick of the wrist, like God answering a prayer. Maybe there are people who have the gift of being able to give up and give in when it’s obvious what the outcome must be, but Musen knew he wasn’t one of them. And certainly not while he still had the pack.

  He realised he hadn’t actually looked at them yet, not beyond a brief glimpse or two by lamplight in that weird tower with the painted walls. He reached for the box, stopped, patted his pocket to make sure it was still there. Why in God’s name hadn’t he killed Axeo while he had the chance? You may not kill a fellow craftsman – that, of course, but stealing from the Lodge was ten times worse, and that in effect was what he’d done, and he hadn’t thought twice about it. (Oh God, he thought, I’ve stolen from the Lodge, that’s so bad, how could I possibly have done that? Only at the time it didn’t feel like stealing, it was rescuing …) The Great Smith will forgive you, he remembered, but not in this form; you will be softened in the fire and hammered out until all your shape and memory is gone, and then He will make you again into something new; there is no fault in the material, only in the form into which it is shaped, which is transitory, inconsequential; there is no death, only change of form, there is no evil, only poor workmanship, which can be corrected. He always found that bit comforting, except that it seemed to contradict itself.

  He tried to think like Axeo. I come to the bridge, and I see the cart isn’t t
here, and the footprints stop. So I assume— He frowned. I assume the stupid little thief has taken his boots and socks off and waded twenty yards upstream, fondly imagining I’d be fooled by the oldest trick in the book. So I walk up and down the bank until I find where he got out again—

  A sound in the distance made him freeze; a voice, and another answering it. He pulled himself together, jumped up, looked round. A stab of pain from his foot reminded him of the stupidity of running with something sharp in your boot toe. He hobbled a few yards on to the bridge, then stopped. Hiding was out of the question, he wasn’t sure he was flexible enough to get across the broken place in the planking, and running was out of the question. He heard the voices again; at least one of them was female. He went back to where he’d been and sat down again.

  Before very long he saw a small, neat wagon, drawn by two horses. The driver and the passenger sitting beside her on the box were both women; one about forty-five (he wasn’t good at women’s ages), the other somewhere around seventy. The older one was driving. Both of them were wrapped up in enormous honey-coloured fur capes. Behind them in the bed of the cart were eight large barrels.

  They must have seen him, because the cart stopped. He stayed where he was. So did the cart. The hell with it, he thought. He got up and walked slowly toward the women. When he was about ten yards away, the younger woman reached down and picked up an axe; call it an axe, it was a little hatchet, for splitting little logs into kindling. He stopped again, smiled and raised his hands, palms outwards.

  “Who the hell are you?” the younger woman called out.

  “My name’s Musen. Look, if you were planning on crossing at the bridge, I’m afraid you can’t. It’s all broken up in the middle.”

  “What?” The older woman scowled at him. “You’re joking.”

  “Come and see for yourself, if you like. But you won’t be able to get that rig across, not unless you’ve got tools and about a dozen twelve-foot planks.”

  The younger woman climbed down; not an easy process, there was a lot of her under the cape. “You keep away from the cart,” she said, walking round him. Her heels clopped on the bridge. “Shit,” she said. “He’s right. It’s completely shot.”

  “Well, that’s just perfect,” the older woman said. “We’ll have to turn round and go back to bloody Shant, or straight on to Cusavant and double back to Stert Ford. Either way, we can forget the fair. Might as well go home.”

  The younger woman was staring through the hole into the river. “You,” she said. “Can’t you do something?”

  “Me? Sorry, no. I’m not a carpenter, and, anyway, there’s no tools or materials.”

  “You could cut down a tree or something. There’s one, look.” She pointed to a frail willow sapling growing out of the bank on the far side. “Chop it down, split it into planks, lay ’em over the gap. You can use our axe if you like.” She held it out to him. He raised his hand politely.

  “I don’t think that’d work,” he said. “I guess we could break up one of your barrels and use the staves, but like I said, I’m not a—”

  “Don’t even think about it,” the older woman said. “Tell him, Gorna, that’s six-year-old mead, it’s worth more money than he’s ever seen in his life. And don’t give him the axe, he might be dangerous.”

  “It’s all right, Mother.” The younger woman rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind her,” she said, “she doesn’t like strangers. You’re sure you can’t do anything? Maybe if you could carry the barrels across, we could go downstream to that shallow place and swim the horses across.”

  “How big are those barrels?”

  “What? Oh, forty-five gallons. Why?”

  “That means they weigh close on a third of a ton,” Musen said. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, well.” She looked at him. “What’s the matter with you? Been fighting?”

  Musen gave her a weak grin. “Bit of a one-sided fight,” he said. “I work for this man, and he’s got a nasty temper. When he gave me this, I thought, the hell with it. I’m sort of between jobs now.”

  “Mphm. Caught you stealing things, did he?”

  “Maybe there was a bit of that,” Musen said. “Anyway, sorry I can’t help you.”

  “Gorna,” the older woman called out. “Come here.”

  There was a brief whispered conversation; it looked like the younger woman was trying to get her case across, but she lost. Then she came back.

  “My mother seems to think,” she said, “that if you come with us as far as Hart Ferry, you can unload the barrels, take them over, then bring the boat back and fetch over the cart. I told her, those things weigh half a ton, but she wouldn’t listen. Well?”

  “We could do it, if we had a couple of planks. Where’s this ferry?”

  “Five miles upstream, give or take. What do you care? You aren’t doing anything.” She hesitated, then added, “Mother says you can have thirty stuivers.”

  “Where did you say you were going?”

  The woman frowned. “I didn’t,” she said, “but if you must know, we’re going to Malfet fair.” She paused, then added. “It’s a hiring fair, you could come with us and look for a new job. But that would be instead of the thirty stuivers.”

  “Gorna, what’s he saying?” the older woman called out.

  The younger woman sighed. “Come on,” she said. “She gets impatient. Well? Do you want to come with us or not?”

  “How fast does this cart go?” The words came out before he could stop them. The woman looked at him. “You said there was a hiring fair,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to miss that.”

  The woman frowned, then shook her head; there was a mystery, but it wasn’t worth solving. “You’ll have to ride in the back with the barrels. I expect you can find somewhere to sit.”

  The younger woman was Gorna, and her mother was Elaim, and the family had been carters for six generations, until the war came and took all the men away. It would be all right, the soldiers said, nobody was expecting them to fight or anything like that. All they were expected to do was drive their own carts along the military roads, for which they’d be paid their usual rates plus a third, in government scrip, guaranteed by the emperor himself. This war’s a wonderful opportunity for people like you, they said. That was eight years ago.

  So Gorna and her mother fixed up the last remaining cart, which the soldiers had declared unfit for service, and taught themselves how to drive it; and now they had a flourishing business, pretty much a monopoly, because the soldiers had taken all the other carts in the county, along with the wainwrights and the wheelwrights and all the good lumber. There wasn’t much actual cash money, of course, because the taxmen had had all that long ago, but they were happy to be paid in kind, it’s surprising how well you can get along without money. It was only men who couldn’t run a business or a farm without money and tallies and chequerboards and ledgers, and you can get along pretty well without men, too.

  “However,” Gorna said, her eyes on the road ahead, because craning round hurt her neck, “I’m not saying we couldn’t use a strong pair of hands about the place, I mean, it’s amazing how much lifting and loading you can do once you’ve learned all the tricks and dodges, but Mother’s not getting any younger, are you, dear, and I hurt my back about ten months ago and it’s never really been right since. Of course we couldn’t pay you in money, there simply isn’t any, like I said, but there’s plenty to eat and you can have a house of your own to sleep in, there’s all those buildings empty and just falling down, it wouldn’t take you hardly any time at all to fix one up and you’d be quite cosy and snug, if you used the slates off the old trap-house roof. Of course it’s entirely up to you, but you might think about it. I mean, it’s not like you’ve got anywhere else to go, and I’d have thought someone in your position would be glad of a roof over his head and two square meals a day, and who knows, I mean, when Mother and I get too old for the business, someone might as well take it over, there’s no point the cart just mouldering
away in a shed. No hurry, of course, you take all the time you want, and if you don’t want to you can take your chances at Malfet fair and see if anybody’ll have you. They’re always looking for men for the stone quarries, though I gather they don’t last very long there, because of the dust. Still, it’s up to you entirely.”

  The ferry was an old charcoal barge, little more than a raft, hauled along on a double chain that spanned the river. All you had to do was haul on a lever, which opened an ingate and allowed water to run down a channel, which filled a dam. You then pulled another lever which opened the dam, and the water poured out and turned a waterwheel which drove the chain; when the dam was empty the chain stopped, but by then the ferry was across to the other side, where there was an identical arrangement. The ferry was rated at two tons – if you put any more load on it than that, you’d break something and be stuck in the middle of the river. There used to be ferries like it every ten miles, but none of the others worked any more; they’d been broken up for scrap metal, which was so much in demand because of the war.

  There was also a derelict shed, where the ferry keeper used to live. Musen demolished the door and came away with two strong inch-thick planks. Rolling the barrels down off the cart wasn’t easy, and one of them nearly got away from him into the river, but Gorna managed to head it off and between them they wrenched it on to the barge and got it standing upright. Mother operated the levers – anything mechanical or that needed manipulation seemed to be her province – and Musen and Gorna rode over to unload the barrels. Gorna had Musen operate the levers on the far side. “I’m hopeless with machinery,” she said, with what sounded like pride. “My father and my husband always did that sort of thing, and the boys, when they were old enough. Of course, Mother does her best, bless her.”

  The horses didn’t want to get on the barge. Gorna had to talk to them quite sharply. There wasn’t any trouble after that.

  Musen half killed himself getting the barrels back into the cart. He’d thought to bring a couple of rafters from the fallen-down shed to use as levers; Mother and Gorna sat on the ends, while he heaped stones up under the barrels to raise them a foot; then more levering, more sitting, more stones, until eventually the barrel could be tipped and wrestled over the lip of the bed, forced upright and walked into position. By the time the last barrel was loaded he was shaking, and his arms felt as light as air. After that, it turned out that there was enough room for three on the box, if Musen didn’t mind sitting on the end and hanging on to the rail.