The Two of Swords: Part 7 Read Online Free PDF

to mask or subtly alter the flavours. Pleda had identified ninety-seven out of ninety-nine; his nearest rival had only managed seventy-six. In a somewhat grimmer trial, he’d also identified forty-two of the forty-seven known poisons, from samples served to him on the tip of a pin. The job paid exceptionally well, but Pleda maintained (and Glauca believed him) that he wasn’t interested in money. So why do you do it? Glauca had asked a thousand times, and Pleda just shrugged.
    “Give it here,” Glauca said, and snatched the bowl from his hands. Then he hesitated. “Aconite?”
    “Can take up to twenty minutes,” Pleda said, through a gag of porridge. “Quite a strong taste, fairly distinctive. But you will insist on salt on your porridge, and that might just mask it. Probably not, but—” The trademark shrug.
    “I like salt on my porridge.”
    Pleda didn’t need words to express what he thought about that. Glauca put the bowl down on the table. “I’ll get them to warm it up for me,” he said.
    “Ah.” Pleda grinned at him. “Morsupeto.”
    “You what?”
    “Morsupeto,” Pleda repeated. “It’s a fourth-degree distillate of your basic Archer’s Root. Clever old stuff. Completely inert and harmless raw, lethal when cooked. So, you bung the stuff raw in a thick soup, say, or a stew. I taste it, nothing happens, but we wait twenty minutes anyway. Then they heat it up again, that cooks the morsupeto, it turns to poison, you eat it, two minutes later you’re rolling on the floor screaming. Bloody clever.”
    Glauca stared at him. “Morsupeto, you say.”
    “That’s right. Blemyan for Sudden Death.”
    “Never heard of it.”
    “Ah,” Pleda said. “That’s because it’s new; it’s not in your old books. Only been two cases so far. That we know about, I mean.”
    “Dear God.” Glauca looked at the bowl. “I can’t be doing with cold porridge,” he said.
    “What you want,” Pleda said, “is a nice fried egg.”
    Translated: what
Pleda
wanted was a nice fried egg. Also, eggs are notoriously hard to poison while the shell remains unbroken – it can be done, but the shell is distinctively stained – so if the egg is prepared in your presence, while you watch the cook’s every move like a hawk, you’re probably all right. “A boiled egg would be all right,” Glauca said, but without much hope – a certain white crystal, dissolved in the boiling water, penetrates the shell without staining and kills in thirty seconds. As anticipated, Pleda shrugged. Glauca sighed and rang the bell.
    “Three fried eggs,” he told the footman.
    There was a little spirit stove in the corner, next to the window. Glauca hated fried eggs.
    “You do it on purpose,” he told Pleda, as he cringed at the feel of runny yolk on his lips. “Everything I like, there’s some damned new poison. You take pleasure in torturing me.”
    Shrug.
    “I know what it is,” Glauca went on. “It’s the power. You enjoy bullying your emperor.”
    “It’s for your own good,” Pleda replied placidly, and Glauca noted the absence of denial or contradiction. “Anyway,” he went on, “you were saying. About this Rhus lad.”
    “Oh, him.” Glauca had to make an effort to redirect his mind. “I don’t trust him.”
    “So you said.”
    “But I believe him.”
    “There’s a difference?”
    Glauca nodded. Yes, there was a difference. Talking to Pleda often cleared his mind, though rarely because of any astounding flash of insight on Pleda’s part. Amiable enough fellow, and he quite enjoyed his rudeness. There has to be someone who’s allowed to be rude to you, or what would become of you? An intellectual, though, Pleda definitely wasn’t. “Well,” he said, “what’s the worst that can happen? Fellow goes off and we never see him again. On the other hand, he might just come back with the goods.”
    “Which are probably fakes.”
    “Oh, almost certain to be. In which case, this lad Musen doesn’t get any