The Two of Swords: Part 7 Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing, he’d believed the boy, and he wasn’t wrong about that sort of thing. For another – a leading expert on the silver packs, a top-ranking astronomer; practically the whole senior faculty of a major university would have had to be in on the scheme. And the risks; it was sheer chance that he’d thrown the other thief off the battlements, not the boy Musen; sheer chance that either of them had survived to be interrogated; sheer chance that Glauca himself had been sufficiently intrigued by the presence of a pack in a thief’s pocket to take a closer look. Weigh the investment required against the remoteness of the possibility of a return, and it simply wasn’t a business proposition. Besides which, anyone in the forgery business would know the histories of the previous attempts to sell to the emperor; no matter how gloriously unimpeachable the provenance might be, the pack itself would still have to pass inspection by the greatest expert in the world, the man who owned nineteen of the things— No, it simply wasn’t credible. By the time you’d been to all that work and expense, you’d need to get fifty thousand just to break even. There were easier ways of making money, and without the exceptional degree of risk.
    The other alternative, then: that up in the wild north, where people were so primitive they barely counted as human, a tiny college of priests or craftsmen had preserved a silver pack, intact and unknown. Well, such things happened. Take the Cossudis Bowl, for example, or the Red Victory Icons, found in a hayloft; or the Three Noble Chalices, used by an ignorant country squire to feed his dogs. Silver is a precious metal, but not so precious or rare that it’d be broken up and melted down on sight. A particularly rich or unusually discerning savage might take a fancy to a pack of silver cards, just because he liked the look of them, and decide to keep them as a treasure; or there were genuine documented cases of wandering scholars and vagrant colleges and mendicant orders of monks and friars; the craft had lodges everywhere, even among the barbarians, and it was just possible that a great scholar, say the abbot of a monastery who’d played at politics and lost, might be exiled there, or need to go where nobody would ever think to look for him— He laughed because it sounded so very like the false provenances he’d come to know so very well. But they faked them like that because
such things had happened
, really and truly, and surprisingly often over the years.
    The world is full of lies, his father used to say, but sometimes, just occasionally, people tell the truth.
    “Of course I don’t trust him.”
    Pleda didn’t say anything, just sat there methodically chewing. Porridge again. Pleda hated porridge.
    “But I’ve got no choice,” Glauca went on. “Yes, obviously, nine chances out of ten the boy’s no good. Either he’s a liar or he’s been lied to. Likelihood of the Sleeping Dog still existing, and suddenly turning up after all this time in the frozen north, practically nil. It’s almost certainly just another damn masquerade. But—” He shrugged. Pleda understood. “Well?” he went on. “You dead yet?”
    Pleda, who’d been asked that question at least three times a day for twenty years, shook his head. “Not yet,” he mumbled, with his mouth full.
    “Probably all right, then.”
    Pleda nodded. “Unless it’s aconite.”
    “I’d taste that, surely.”
    “Be too late then.”
    Pleda was one of those slow eaters. Some people bolt their food; there’s a blur, and then there’s an empty plate. Pleda ate slowly, steadily, like a cow. Not a problem most of the time, but right now Glauca was
hungry
. “I’ll risk it.”
    “Your funeral.”
    The finest, most discriminating palate in the empire; there had been a grand competition, with cooks from the great noble houses preparing special dishes crammed with the rarest and most abstruse ingredients, prepared in such a way as