Free The Two of Swords: Part 11 by K. J. Parker Page B

presumably some sort of arrangement could be made with the new administration to overwrite existing deposits at so many stuivers in the angel – life would go on, after all, once the war was over, and whoever won they’d need banks and merchant venturers, and all that money couldn’t simply evaporate, like rainwater on a sunny day—
    “How about you?” Axeo realised the government man was talking to him. “You heard anything?”
    Axeo shook his head. “We’ve been up in Rhus, the boy and me,” he said. “Last I knew about it, the siege was still on and nothing much was happening.”
    “You mean you haven’t heard about the battle?”
    Axeo caught his breath but covered it. “What battle?”
    The
battle. Apparently, four of the remaining Western field armies, comprising at least a hundred thousand men, had converged on Rasch. Senza Belot, with thirty thousand cavalry, had met them in a wheatfield to the north of the city. Casualties – well, the rumours flying around were obviously nonsense, there was no way they could be that high, but apparently a big man with the Gasca brothers, who were joint-venturing with Ocnisant on a strictly one-off basis for this job, reckoned they’d buried forty thousand, at least, and precious few of them had been cavalrymen. Where what was left of the Western army had got to and what sort of state it was in, nobody knew. What was certain was that Senza was back standing guard outside Rasch, with the plunder from the Western supply trains to keep his men happy; and it was simple arithmetic, say ninety-five thousand civilians in Rasch plus the garrison, eating a pint and a half of flour a day.
    “Rasch can’t
fall
,” said one of the couriers. “It’s the capital city of half the world. They’ll just have to raise more armies, that’s all.”
    “It’s time the Blemyans did something,” the government man said. “Everybody knows they’re on our side. They’re civilised people, they’re not just going to stand by and see the West go to hell. If it wasn’t for the bloody diplomats—”
    “What about Forza Belot?” Axeo asked.
    All three of them looked at him. Hadn’t you heard, one of the couriers said. Forza’s dead. Been dead for months.
    Iden Astea was originally built by refugees from the Third Political War. They chose the site well, or were extremely lucky to stumble across it. The old town occupies a substantial island in the middle of the lake formed by the run-off from the mountains that surround it on three sides. The suburbs crowd the eastern and southern shores of the lake; you can get to the island by an artificial causeway (which can be breached in the middle in half an hour, if needs be) or by boat; the regional myth that the Identines are born web-footed is untrue, but they are beyond question the best freshwater boatmen in both empires. There are submerged rocks and shoals in Lake Iden that you can’t begin to understand unless you were born there, they say, and navigating the narrow lanes between the rows of buoys is a mystery not lightly revealed to outsiders.
    Iden was, therefore, a natural choice for the Western emperor, as soon as the threat to Rasch was fully appreciated. He arrived in a two-wheeled chaise in the middle of the night, escorted by five captains of the Household Guard; the rest of the Inner Court arrived over the course of the next few days, accompanying a long train of sturdy wagons carrying the Imperial treasury. Two days after that, two battalions of the Ninth Army arrived to form a garrison. The extent to which the Identines appreciated the honour of entertaining the Brother of the Sun and his entourage for an unspecified length of time is not recorded. They were probably quite philosophical about it. Iden has a massive granary, cut from solid rock in the side of the mountain that dominates the island, and the alluvial plain is enormously fertile; the arrival of a thousand noblemen and their accumulated movable wealth was