Free The Two of Swords: Part 14 by K. J. Parker Page A

took him to learn Imperial. Afterwards he could remember days of unbelievable effort, when his mind was more utterly exhausted than his body had ever been in his life, followed by nights dreaming in a strange language, where he could make out one word in ten, then in four, then in three; and then there was the morning when he dragged himself up the eight flights of stairs to the rooftop where Domna Herec taught him, and she looked at him sourly and told him to go away.
    He felt as though he’d been kicked in the face. “Why?” he asked. “What have I done?”
    ‘Na Herec was eighty years old and the most terrifying human being he’d ever encountered. She must have been six feet tall when she was younger, and very beautiful. Now she had one appalling eye, sparse white hair scraped back into a bun and a tone of voice like fingernails digging into a burn. He’d spent every waking hour with her for as long as he could remember; ten days, possibly twelve.
    “You’ve finished, that’s what,” she said. “Go away, I’m busy.”
    He felt terrible; all the effort she’d put in, all the patience she’d wasted on him, all the furious anger at his ineptitude she’d bottled up behind that one piercing eye, and finally she’d decided he was hopeless and she’d given up on him. “I’m sorry,” he blurted out. “Please, can’t we try again? I’ll do better, I promise. I’ll try really hard.”
    She gave him that look. “What language are we speaking?”
    “Oh.”
    “Go away,” she repeated, “and come back this time tomorrow, we’ll be starting the next course. Try not to be late, if you can possibly manage it.”
    The next day she told him it was probably because he’d never learned to read. Illiterates (that was him) found it much easier to pick up new languages, because their minds and memories hadn’t been spoiled, they still worked like a child’s. And now, she went on, I’m going to teach you to read.
    Reading was easy; it was like sheep tallies, except that each mark stood for a sound rather than a number or a place or ewe or ram. The hardest part was learning how to hold the stick. To start with, he gripped it so firmly it broke. Then he pressed down too hard, and went right through the half-inch of beeswax and split the wood. For a carver, she told him, he was incredibly cack-handed; is that how he handled his chisels and gouges?
    What are chisels and gouges, he asked.
    This, said Domna Seutz, is a chisel and this is a gouge. You can tell them apart because the chisel is flat and the gouge is half round. And what in God’s name do you carve with where you come from if you don’t know about chisels? What,
that
?
    There were twenty-six chisels on Domna Seutz’s rack, all different, and sixteen gouges. ‘Na Seutz was younger than ‘Na Herec, a short, solid woman with a man’s hands and a humped back. Her eyes, she said, weren’t what they were, so she had a round piece of glass, flattish, with thin edges and a thicker centre, mounted in a gold setting with wires sticking out of it. The wires fitted into carefully sewn sleeves in the linen band she wore round her forehead, and kept the glass a constant three-quarter inch from her right eye. When Chanso looked through it at his fingernail, it was nearly twice its normal size. No, he couldn’t have one; these glasses had been made in Mezentia, a thousand years ago or something like that. There were only a few left, and nobody had been able to figure out how to make more of them. This one was Lodge property, on loan to her for the rest of her working life. Nobody knew what it was worth, but Emperor Glauca had one like it in his collection, and he’d traded the city of Scand Escatois to the Aelians to get it.
    ‘Na Seutz wasn’t nearly as fierce as ‘Na Herec, but she was much harder to please. She didn’t like the primitive style, she told him. What’s that? It’s what you do, she explained. She preferred Classical and Mannerist, though she