The Two of Swords: Part 11 Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgiven me for anything. Do you have brothers?”
    “No.”
    “Figures. That sullen introversion is typical of an only child. Did you know only children are three times more likely to take to thieving than kids with brothers and sisters? Whereas siblings are twice as likely to be murderers or arsonists. I don’t know where they get the numbers from, but it’s interesting, don’t you think?”
    They slept in a semi-derelict linhay. Axeo woke up at first light and immediately checked his pocket. The box was gone, and so was Musen.
    So, come to that, were the twelve gold angels, which was where Musen had made his mistake. Even so, it took Axeo four days to find him.
    He got lucky at an inn, miles off the main road, where there were still people. At the time he was the aggrieved master of a runaway servant. Ungrateful bastard cleaned me out, he explained to a sympathetic innkeeper, money, my horse, even took my best boots, left me tied up in my own root cellar, if he wasn’t so useless at tying knots I’d have starved to death. And all because I caught him fooling with the dairymaid and gave him a fat lip.
    The innkeeper looked up. “Man came in here with a split lip the day before yesterday,” he said.
    “Tall man?”
    “Like a tree. Had a meal and a night’s sleep, tried to pay me with a bloody great gold coin, size of a cartwheel. I said to him, where’s an honest man like me supposed to get change for that? He was on about hacksawing a bit off it, but I told him to forget it and get lost. Bloody joker. I knew he was no good.”
    Naturally the innkeeper had no map, but he gave a clear enough account of the local geography that Axeo was reasonably sure in his own mind where Musen would go next. Sure enough, late the next afternoon he met a farmer who’d sold a tall man a donkey for a gold angel.
    “That was my money,” Axeo said. “Didn’t you think there was something wrong?”
    The farmer shrugged. “I didn’t ask to sell it him. He kept on and on about it, and I just wanted shot of him.”
    A very tall man riding a donkey gets himself noticed. “Kids dragged me out of the house and made me look,” a farmer’s wife said the next day. “Daftest thing I’ve seen all year. Tried to buy a loaf off me but all he had was some big brass buttons.”
    “You might want to count your chickens,” Axeo said. The woman turned white as a sheet and ran off across the yard.
    Having established a likely speed and direction, Axeo considered what the innkeeper had told him about the layout of the countryside and decided on a suitable point for interception. The donkey proved to be a stroke of luck; a heavy man on a donkey would take the slow, easy road up the hills on to the moor, whereas a man on foot in a hurry could scramble up the shale outcrops and get there ahead of him. On the moor, of course, neither of them could hide from the other; but that’s why the Great Smith made the night dark.
    The donkey nearly ruined everything, braying and kicking up a fuss; but by then he was close enough, and he’d come prepared. As Musen sat up, he threw the heavy stone he’d picked out earlier and caught him on the side of the head. He went straight down, and a moment later Axeo was sitting on Musen’s chest, with his thumbs digging into his windpipe.
    “The point is,” he said (he was panting slightly, which spoilt the effect), “I don’t need you any more. You’ve done your part of the job, and it only takes one of us to fetch the stuff home. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
    Musen opened his mouth but of course he couldn’t speak. Axeo maintained the pressure but didn’t increase it.
    “Put yourself in my place,” Axeo said. “If I think there’s the slightest chance of you doing anything like that again, I’ve got to kill you now, it’s my duty. I can’t jeopardise ninety thousand lives just for sentiment.” Musen’s face was dark red and he’d stopped struggling. “God knows I’ve done enough