The Two of Swords: Part 7
Read The Two of Swords: Part 7 Online
Authors: K. J. Parker
Y
K. J. P
ARKER
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
For David Barrett, with thanks
Published by Orbit
ISBN: 978-0-356-50562-6
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 © 2015 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.
O
RBIT
Carmelite House
Little, Brown Book Group
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
17
The Scholar
When the boy had gone, Glauca rose stiffly to his feet, stopped for a moment until the stabbing pain in his knees had subsided a little, and hobbled slowly across the tessellated gold floor until he reached the wall. In front of him a great bank of cabinets, gilded to match the walls and floor, stretched away in either direction until they were swallowed up in the blaze. Glauca didn’t need to look for the number stencilled on the door. He could have found cabinet thirty-seven blindfold.
From inside his plain cotton shirt he drew a bunch of keys nearly the size of a man’s fist, hung on a stout steel chain; these days they bruised his chest, but he didn’t feel safe unless he was constantly aware of them pressing against his skin. He peered at them through the rock-crystal magnifying lens that was always folded inside his clenched left hand – it was unique, and the sum he’d spent on it was more than Senza would need to pay his army – until he saw the number 37 on the barrel of a slim brass key. He scrabbled it into the cabinet’s lock (his hands shook badly these days), turned it, pulled it out again and let the bunch go. It swung against his chest like some piece of siege equipment.
Most reliable sources state that the first pack was designed and executed by the silversmith Ebbo, to the orders of Tandulias of Pyrrho. As is well known, the first pack and the imitations made of it for the next ninety years were not wood or planed bark but silver, each card being made in two parts: the generic back, embossed with a generic stylised abstract design, and the face, on which was embossed the image specific to that card. The two parts were then soldered together and carefully fettled so that, when placed face down, they appeared identical.
Fortune-telling as it is practised today was never a part of Tandulias’ intention. In his writings, now lost, he stated that although the dealer should not be able to see the faces of the cards as he laid them out, it was both inevitable and desirable that the fingers of an experienced dealer would come to recognise – not consciously, perhaps, but on a subconscious level – the feel of the embossed designs of each card. His idea was that the dealer would be guided by what Tandulias called his inner eye to select the cards appropriate for the sitter; most certainly, he never believed that some directed chance or supernatural agency operated to pull the right cards seemingly at random from the pack. Later, however, as the pack became more widely known outside the inner arcana of the Order and the demand for affordable packs for private owners grew, painted copies began to be made, and naturally these could not be read with the fingers in the same way as the silver embossed versions. Tandulias’ original intentions were ignored or forgotten, and the practice of fortune-telling, which all right-thinking men so properly despise, became widespread among the ignorant and profane …
Thus Felician, in the introduction to the
Mirror of True Wisdom
. These days, only twenty-seven genuine silver packs survived; nineteen of them were secured in cabinet thirty-seven, the other seven were in the Western empire, in the hands of rich individuals; that hateful boy his nephew had decreed that any attempt to offer them for sale would be construed as treason. All of the nineteen were unspeakably precious, but it was always the Five Oak Leaves Pack that his fingers reached for; supposedly (the provenance was good but not unshakeable) the fourth pack ever made, by Ebbo’s apprentice Vecla, and briefly owned by Tandulias’ son-in-law Panchion, the worthy, prosaic dentist of Lauf Barauna who founded the first ever lodge.
Glauca shuffled back to his seat and laid the pack on the table. The cards scared him; not just the usual proper awe, but a definite, palpable feeling of disquiet, the sort of thing he used to feel when he hunted boar with his father in the woods, and they’d dismounted and started to walk up through dense undergrowth; the same feeling that something close by was waiting for him, and when it burst out of cover and headed straight at him he simply wouldn’t have the time or the presence of mind. Silly old fool, he thought; he closed his eyes and walked his fingers up the table until one fingertip encountered the cold silver.
Damn idiots nowadays, fortune-tellers and frauds and cheats, smooth cards and pretending there was a precise, fixed meaning to every card and every sequence and combination of cards. He slid his thumb between the top card and the one underneath, then hinged the top card sideways until it fell into the palm of his hand. In Rhaxantius’ day they favoured blind men as dealers, because a blind man couldn’t see to cheat; idiots, because a blind man can read with his fingertips far better than a sighted one. He let the pad of his middle finger drift across the metal, following the contours of the embossed relief. Eight of Arrows. He supported its weight as he spread it on to the table, like laying down a woman who’s fainted in your arms. Done that once or twice over the years, of course. Ah well.
Next card, Victory. Of course, Victory doesn’t mean
victory
, just as Death doesn’t mean death. He laid it down and slid it until its edge met that of the Eight of Arrows. The Two of Spears, which always made him shiver. Poverty; he let his fingertip dwell on her face before he turned the card and put it next to the others. She always reminded him of his second wife – a remarkably inappropriate similarity, but he’d been in love with the little silver face since he was twelve years old, and even now the feel of her made him smile. A pattern, or at the very least a faint obscure shape, was beginning to emerge. He dealt the Nine of Spears, which made no sense at first, followed by the Angel, and then he understood.
Tandulias maintained that a brief pause for reflection after dealing six cards allowed impressions to seep through from the unconscious mind, and avoided the dangerous tendency to leap to conclusions. Well, the Two was almost certainly young Senza Belot, couldn’t really be anything else. The Nine must be a reverse of some sort; impossible to say at this stage whether the Angel was figurative or personal. Trump, number, trump was nearly always a transition, but trump, number, trump and then a Nine was a problem; it all depended on how you read that disputed passage in Vexantian, and whether the verb was to be construed as indicative or subjunctive. Damn nuisance, and if there really was an afterlife he eagerly anticipated meeting the unknown copyist in it, so he could kick his arse for being so wickedly careless. Until then, all he could really do was go by context and the overall mood of the cards.
Onwards, as young Senza would say. Next he turned up the Five of Stars, which of course made everything much clearer; personal, had to be, in which case the Angel was presumably some savage chieftain – the nomad prophet, perhaps, or some headman of the Hus or the Tel Semplan. The feeling of tension slackened off just a little – odd, that, but somehow he felt he could cope better with people than with abstract ideas, laws of nature and war and economics. He turned up the Blind Woman, who presumably was someone he hadn’t met yet.
Four of Spears – three Spears in one deal, for pity’s sake. The Blind Woman and Senza Belot; he frowned. He assumed that young Senza liked girls – yes, there’d been that one he’d been particularly keen on, though wasn’t there some story about what had happened there? Slipped his mind, but presumably there’d be someone about the place who knew it, a damned gossip factory like the palace. Then it occurred to him that three of the same suit meant that the last three cards must be subjective – yes, fine, but who was the subject? Four of Spears, Senza Belot. Fine. He turned up a new card to find out who Senza would encounter next.
Two of Arrows.
Oh, he thought. Well, at least now we know. Not dead after all.
Two cards to go. The first was the Sun, followed by the Seven of Shields. That made him sit back in his chair. Personal and subjective, he reminded himself; the end of the world for Senza Belot wasn’t necessarily the same thing as the end of the world, although the two could so easily amount to the same thing— He felt a spasm of pity for the boy, the only one of the damned lot of them he had any time for, but then he reminded himself that he was the emperor, and the interests of the empire had to come first. Besides, if Forza was dead, Senza was no longer indispensable. There were other generals. Bound to be.
He counted slowly to twenty, and passed his fingertips over the cards once more, just to be sure. No mistake. Such a damned shame. He’d miss the boy, for one thing; someone he could trust, always a pleasure to talk to, very bright, clearly interested in art and history, with a genuine appreciation of the finer things. But all men, even scholars and aesthetes, are bloody fools where women are concerned. It occurred to him to wonder who she was, what she was like; had to be something special, he decided, to bring down young Senza. Damned shame. But if it was in the cards, there was nothing he or anyone else could do about it.