The Two of Swords: Part 8 (8 page)

Quite suddenly, Pleda was stone cold sober again. He tried his very best not to let it show. “That’s right,” he said. “A little hint never hurt anybody.” He mimed slow, painful thought for a moment. “Tell you what,” he said. “Gamble you for it. If I win, you give me a little hint.”

The Imperial had another quick telepathic conference with his colleagues. “And if we win?”

“Oh, I don’t know. My head on a pike?”

Next to the neat man, on his left, was a big man with red hair and a beard. “We could’ve had that already, if we’d wanted it.”

Pleda shrugged. “That’d have been cheating,” he said. “Difference between fleecing a man at the tables and mugging him in the alleyway outside. Anyhow, it’s all I’ve got. Take it or leave it.”

The Imperial nodded briskly and opened the silver box. Then he hesitated. “I forgot, these don’t belong to us any more. With your permission?”

“Go ahead,” Pleda said.

The Imperial took out the cards and shuffled them. “Let’s make it strictly chance,” he said. “Fairer that way. You cut, then we cut. Highest card wins all. Agreed?”

Pleda waved vaguely. “You’re the doctor.”

The Imperial fanned out the cards. Pleda leaned forward. He knew, better than anyone, how to force a card on somebody. He took his time, and picked from the left-hand edge of the fan. He looked at the card. Eight of Swords. He felt suddenly cold. Oh, he thought.

“No, don’t show me yet,” the Imperial said; then he offered the fan to the veiled woman, who took a card and covered it with her other hand. The Imperial put the cards down carefully on the table and looked at Pleda. “Now,” he said. “You first.”

Pleda turned over his card and held it up. “Ah,” the Imperial said. Then he nodded to the woman, who revealed the Nine of Arrows.

There was a moment of dead silence. Then the Imperial said, “Congratulations.”

I’m a dead man, Pleda thought. “You what?”

“Northern rules,” the Imperial said. “Swords are trumps. You win,” he explained.

Pleda opened his mouth, but no words came. He closed it and tried again. “Oh,” he said.

The Imperial leaned forward and gently pulled the card out of his hand. “So you get your hint,” he said, returning the card to the pack. “Try not to look so sad about it.” He shuffled the pack and laid out nine cards, face upwards. “Well, now,” he said.

Pleda leaned forward. The Hero. The Thief. Poverty. Virtue. The Two of Spears. The Two of Arrows. The Scholar. The Eight of Swords. The Cherry Tree.

“Hint,” the Imperial said.

“Personal,” Pleda said. The Imperial shrugged. “I don’t tell fortunes,” he said.

Now, then. Two of Spears and Two of Arrows back to back had to be the Belot brothers. The Thief was presumably meant to be Musen, though the identification struck him as facile. By the same token, the Scholar had to be Glauca. Eight of Swords; now who could they possibly mean by that?

“Who’s the Cherry Tree?” he said.

The woman drew back her veil. He saw a pale, thin, sharp face with light blue eyes; twenty-seven or -eight, though he was a poor judge of women’s ages. Not pretty, not beautiful, but if she walked into a room it wouldn’t be long before every man there noticed her. “That’s me,” she said. “I’m Lysao Pandocytria.”

Pleda caught his breath. Senza Belot’s Lysao; except she wasn’t, that was the point. He remembered someone using the expression
collector’s item
, and two things Musen had said: something about wild cards, and
it’s what they’ve been collecting us for
. He decided he’d changed his mind about what the lodge were planning to do here. Not a fortress or a temple, a museum. “That was your coach outside,” he said, for something to say.

“Yes. I’ve just arrived. I’ll be safe here.”

The Cherry Tree. He wasn’t quite sure he got it, but that was probably because he was being rather slow. He looked at the Imperial. “Does this mean I can’t go home?”

The Imperial smiled at him. “Don’t be silly,” he said. “We trust you. After all, you’re a craftsman. We know what side you’re on.”

Glad somebody does. “I’d better be going, then. Thanks for the hint.”

“I trust everything is now perfectly clear.”

“As mud, thank you. I don’t suppose you’d tell me who the Hero is.”

The Imperial shrugged. “I could tell you his name,” he said, “but it wouldn’t mean anything to you.”

“Shouldn’t the Scholar be reversed?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

Well, that was something. He was actually quite fond of Glauca. “What about the Two of Spears?”

The Imperial hesitated, then reached out and turned the Two of Spears face down. “We think,” he added. “If you find out for sure, please let us know.”

Liar, Pleda thought. He collected the cards – they clinked, because his hands were shaking – and put them in the box, and put the box in his pocket. “We must do this again sometime,” he said.

“No,” the Imperial said. “We shouldn’t.”

The big red-headed man stood up and opened the door for him. “Thank you for the game,” he said.

“My pleasure,” Pleda replied, and stood up to go. “Who won, by the way?”

The Imperial beamed at him. “We’re craftsmen,” he said. “We all won. Have a safe journey home.”

Pleda reached out, grabbed the bottle by the neck and walked out quickly. He didn’t look back until he heard the door slam shut. He shook the bottle gently. Empty, of course. He put it down on the ground; as he let go of it, he discovered that his hand wasn’t empty. He turned it palm upwards and opened his fingers. Squashed into his palm was a card, from a cheap, throwaway pack, like the sort soldiers have. It was the Ace of Swords.

He grinned. There is no suit of Swords. He crunched the card into a ball and stuffed it into his pocket.

Two days later, Senza Belot won a crushing victory over the main Western army at Cenufrac. The Westerners, under the veteran General Gamda, seem to have had no idea that the Eastern Fifth Army was ahead of them; either that, or they assumed that the Fifth would avoid contact, since they were outnumbered six to one. Accounts of the battle are frustratingly vague and inconclusive; the entire Western staff was wiped out, and therefore no official report of the battle was filed, since there was no one left alive to file it; for reasons unknown, Senza Belot’s despatches were uncharacteristically terse and elliptical, simply stating when and where the battle took place and the numbers of combatants and casualties. All that is known for certain, therefore, is that the main battle took place on both sides of the Ilden brook, which flows out of the mountains to join the Bosen estuary, that the Westerners fielded over sixty thousand men against Belot’s twelve thousand, and that twenty-seven thousand Western soldiers died there, as against nine hundred Easterners.

One can only speculate as to Senza Belot’s reasons for not leaving a detailed account of one of his most conclusive victories. Anecdotal evidence gathered some time later suggests that he did not regard the battle as particularly interesting from a tactical point of view, or that he was somehow ashamed of the ease and scale of his triumph. One much later account has him in tears on the battlefield, as the dead of both sides were collected up; however, the source is a dubious one, embroidered and romanticised and with an unhappy tendency to adapt facts to fit its explicitly pacifist agenda. The likeliest explanation would seem to be that General Belot, aware that he was operating deep inside enemy territory and that communications with the East might well be intercepted, was reluctant to commit to paper any details that might prove useful to the enemy; later, it is argued, he lacked the time and the motivation to write the battle up, or assumed that someone else would do so. Whatever the reason, it is to be regretted that so little is known about one of the great man’s finest achievements.

It is ironic that what should have been a decisive moment in the war turned out to have little or no lasting effect, coming as it did a few weeks before the mutiny of the Beloisa garrison and their defection to the West. The Western losses at Cenufrac were more than made up for by the unexpected acquisition of thirty-one thousand seasoned Eastern veterans, who were immediately transferred to the Northern theatre to block any advance Senza Belot may have contemplated making in the aftermath of the battle. A smaller army, some nine thousand men, was sent to fortify and hold Beloisa and its dependent territories against the expected Eastern counter-attack; this, however, did not materialise, and the Westerners were able to rebuild and garrison Beloisa at their leisure. They were given the opportunity to do so because Glauca II had quite literally run out of money. He could afford to hold what he still possessed, and maintain Senza Belot and the Fifth Army in the field to discourage aggression from the West, but any kind of offensive operations were, for the time being at least, entirely beyond his means until the hole in his exchequer had been replenished. To achieve this, he was compelled to embark on a programme of retrenchment and austerity, combined with increased taxes and the further sale of crown and government assets, all of which weakened the Eastern economy and severely hampered his ability to wage war. The West, which could reasonably have expected to face an all-out assault in both the Northern and Southern sectors following the defeat at Cenufrac, found that it had been granted an unexpected reprieve. Bearing in mind the crisis that was soon to break, this was undoubtedly just as well.

K. J. Parker
is the pseudonym of Tom Holt, a full-time writer living in the south-west of England. When not writing, Holt is a barely competent stockman, carpenter and metalworker, a two-left-footed fencer, an accomplished textile worker and a crack shot. He is married to a professional cake decorator and has one daughter.
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Read on in
The Two of Swords: Part 9.