Saevus Corax Captures the Castle, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by One Reluctant Lemming Company Ltd.
Excerpt from Saevus Corax Gets Away With Murder copyright © 2023 by One Reluctant Lemming Company Ltd.
Excerpt from Notorious Sorcerer copyright © 2022 by Davinia Evans
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937591
ISBNs: 9780316668910 (trade paperback), 9780316668958 (ebook)
E3-20230929-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
Discover More
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of Saevus Corax Gets Away With Murder
A Preview of Notorious Sorcerer
Also by K. J. Parker
Praise for the Novels of K. J. Parker
For Zara, with thanks
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1
The other day, for want of anything better to do, I tried to figure out how many people I’ve killed over the course of my life so far. I came up with a total of eighty-six. That surprised me.
A note on methodology. I’m talking here about people I’ve killed with my own hands, not the rather large number for whose deaths I could arguably be held morally responsible. Also excluded are those – twenty-seven, give or take – whose deaths I’ve ordered at the hands of others. If you count them in as well, we get a bottom line of one hundred and thirteen. Either way, that’s a lot.
Bear in mind that I’m not and never have been a professional soldier. In my defence, I think I can honestly say I’ve never killed anyone out of malice, spite, idealism, revenge, for financial gain or just for the sheer hell of it. All those homicides were, as far as I’m concerned, justified: it was them or me. Either directly, because they were coming at me with a weapon, or indirectly, because they were trying to catch me or prevent me from escaping, or they knew something about me I daren’t let anyone else find out; not my fault, because I didn’t start it. I’ve never started anything in my entire life (well, hardly ever) and all I ask is to be left in peace.
A number like eighty-six begs a serious question. Has my life – to date – been worth eighty-six lives of my fellow human beings? To which I reluctantly but without hesitation answer: no, no way. Worth a single one of them? By any meaningful criteria: no.
Define meaningful criteria. For example, some philosophers claim that in a fight or any form of serious conflict the better man always wins, because winning is the definition of being better. If I’m just that split second quicker with my block, parry and riposte, I’m a better fighter, therefore a superior animal, therefore I deserve to win; by the same token, if I’m a tad slower than you are or your feint high left suckers me into walking straight into your low right jab, God or natural selection has spoken and I’ve got nothing to moan about as my lifeblood soaks away into the sand.
Actually, I’d happily accept that, if it wasn’t for the inconvenient fact that the first man I ever killed – my brother, as it happens – was incontrovertibly the better man: not just morally, ethically, intellectually, so on and so forth, he was also a brilliant swordsman who’d have been remembered as probably the leading fencer of his generation if he hadn’t died at age fifteen, on the point of my sword, during a practice bout I’d tried my best to avoid taking part in. Who was worth more, him or me? I’m not even going to bother answering that. I only mention it to prove that the best man doesn’t always win, and therefore the proposition is flawed. A shame, but there it is. You can’t argue with the facts, though I’ve spent my life trying.
Meaningful criteria: what, for crying out loud? Making the world a better place – no, I reject that. Making the world a better place isn’t my job, I never signed up for it and it’s not my responsibility. I would argue that the world is probably just fine as it is and people are about as good as they’re capable of being. I’ve seen a lot of change and a lot of idealists. The change has invariably been disastrous and nineteen times out of twenty an idealist was to blame. Not making the world a worse place: well, on occasion I’ve tried, even put myself to a certain degree of inconvenience – as witness the ghastly mess on the island of Sirupat a few years back, which (four parts miracle, one part me) didn’t end up as the biggest, most destructive war in human history. The objection to that is that, for all I know, I’ve done loads of things that have led to really bad stuff not happening and never even knew it, let alone intended the consequence. I may have failed to save a child swept away by a river, and that child would’ve grown up to be a second Odovacar or Felix the Conqueror, who’d have slaughtered millions in pursuit of some crazed messianic dream. By the same token the sixpence I tossed in a beggar’s hat yesterday morning may have made the difference between starvation and life for the same kid. Or maybe it was you who tossed that coin. I wouldn’t put it past you.
The hell with it. Eighty-six is definitely not something I’m proud of, but neither am I cripplingly ashamed. Definitely, the next time someone comes at me with a knife or a warder tries to stop me escaping from the condemned cell, the thought of the eighty-six martyrs isn’t going to stop me or even slow me down. I am who I am, I do what I must, I didn’t start it, it’s not my fault. Now read on.
The worst thing about my line of work is when we’re called in late. We need time – to get there, to plan out the job, decide how many carts and barrels and sacks and wicker baskets we’re going to need, how we’re going to do the clearing up and then shift the stuff to where we need it to be. Most of all, we need to get on site before the bodies start swelling up and the flies get into them.
It’s probably very wrong of me, but I don’t much care for flies. Crows I can take or leave alone – they have so much in common with me, after all – and dogs and foxes run away before you come close; even slugs don’t get to me the way flies do. It’s an irrational reaction. Flies don’t do nearly as much repulsive physical damage as birds or mammals. They don’t chew off extremities or peck out eyes. And what’s a fly, compared to a human being? They’re so small, they really shouldn’t register, let alone matter. Logically, therefore, Brother Fly and Sister Bluebottle shouldn’t bother me to the extent they do. Logically, it should be quite the reverse. Crows and foxes and rats come to gorge, stuff their beaks and muzzles with everything they can get for free; flies are constructive. They firmly believe in the future: a better future, for their larvae and their larvae’s larvae. To them, taking account of scale, a dead body is a promised land, given to them by Providence as a place where they settle down, lay eggs, raise families, improve themselves, develop an orderly egalitarian society under the rule of law, quite possibly evolve in due course into a race of perfect beings, like the gods only rather less self-centred.
Even so, I dislike them. Their buzzing gets to me, and the way they move in swarms, one shape made up of thousands of restless, fast-moving components. Maybe it’s because they aren’t scared of me, the way crows and rats and foxes are. Maybe it’s because they have no real cause to be scared of me, because I’m too slow and predictable to be a threat. I like being a threat. It means I get left in peace.
In my line of work, we aren’t nearly as constructive or positive as the flies. We get called in when there’s been a battle, to clear up the godawful mess. In return for gathering up and burning or burying the bodies, the dead horses and the smashed-up hardware, we get to keep the armour, weapons, clothes, shoes and personal effects, which we patch up and sell. For this privilege we pay good money, cash in advance; and, since there are always two sides to a quarrel, we have to pay double, to the ultimate winner and the ultimate loser, because beforehand there’s no way of knowing which will be which. Factor in the overheads – I employ five hundred men; the bigger outfits, such as the Asvogels or the Resurrection Crew, field squads four times that – and make provision for the occasional disaster, like a whole train of fully laden carts getting washed away in a flooded river or ambushed by bandits, and you’ll be forced to agree with me that we earn our profits, such as they are. Vultures and parasites we may be, but we put in a lot of hard, dirty work for our disgusting and inhuman gains. Morally, that makes no difference whatsoever, but a lot of people can be fooled into thinking it does, and I sincerely hope you’re one of them.
Imagine my joy, therefore, when Count Sinderic, instead of fighting a pitched battle with the Avenging Knife on a flat, level plain half a mile from a major seaport, decided to send his cavalry to intercept the enemy as they crossed the Tabletop, a plateau eight hundred feet above sea level, only accessible through a narrow pass through the foothills of the Spearhead Mountains.
I was tempted to wash my hands of the whole thing and go home, but I couldn’t. I’d borrowed money at silly interest to buy the rights to this war, which I normally wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole, but it was the only war in town, so to speak, and we hadn’t worked for a while. An unfortunate consequence of my noble and heroic acts on Sirupat (see above) had been an abnormally long spell of peace, and such action as there had been recently had been snapped up by the Asvogels, who paid stupid money for the rights with a view to starving out the smaller operators like myself and thereby achieving a monopoly. Thanks to them, I’d had to bid well over the odds for this idiotic scrap between Sinderic and his latest crop of rebels. My margins were already as thin as a butterfly’s wing, and now I had to go zooming off into the mountains or risk defaulting on my loans, which would spell death for my business and a deplorable number of broken bones for me personally.
We got there in the end. Sinderic had sent his cavalry because he needed to cover a lot of ground quickly; we therefore had to do the same, but we had carts loaded with empty barrels and hampers, which tended to bounce off and scatter all over the ground every time a wheel ran over a rut or a stone. There comes a point, travelling in that manner, that the faster you try and go the less progress you make. We settled down into a grim, earnest trudge. We tried travelling by night as well as by day, but that was hopeless because we wore out the horses; quite a few of them went lame, and that slowed us down even more. “The hell with it,” I told Gombryas when he nagged me about how slowly we were going. “We’ll just have to take our time and get there properly.”
It’s all about perspective. I was muddy and bruised after helping fix a cracked axle; he’d been sitting on the box of a wagon all day, with nothing to do except experience the passage of time. “At this rate,” he said, “by the time we get there, everything’ll be maggots. You hate maggots. You’ve told me that enough times, God knows.”
“Absolutely true,” I told him. “But if we rush, we’ll break more axles and take longer getting there, and then there’ll be even more fucking maggots. Nice and steady does it. That’s being sensible.”
Gombryas is my friend. Define friend. I see him every day. I talk to him without having to think carefully about what I say. If I broke my leg, he’d do what it took to see me all right, provided he didn’t have a very good reason not to; and vice versa. I know a lot about him, and he knows a certain amount about me. Some things he does amuse me, and his more disgusting habits don’t offend me, because his value to me outweighs the revulsion. He works for me (at a flat rate plus a share of the profits) and he’s very good at his job, which is an important one. If I tell him to do something, it generally gets done, so on balance he makes my life easier. If he died tomorrow, I’d be sorry and upset. If he died tomorrow and someone equally good at his job stepped immediately into his shoes, I’d still be sorry and upset. We choose to overlook each other’s faults. He’s familiar, like inherited furniture. Just occasionally, he says something that hadn’t already occurred to me, and there are some things he thinks about so I don’t have to. He knows me very well (which isn’t the same thing as knowing a lot about me). We trust each other, up to a clearly defined point. He’s my friend.
“Fuck you,” said my friend. “Why don’t you and me and Polycrates go on ahead on the riding horses, and then we can make a start before everything’s gone completely shit, and the wagons can catch us up?”
I hadn’t thought of that; and I’m supposed to be smart, and he’s supposed to be thick as a brick. I spent a frantic moment trying to think of a reason why not, but failed. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “See to it, would you?”
Immediately he started whining. I was supposed to be in charge; why did he have to do every single bloody thing? I explained that it was because he was so smart, and thought of things I was too dim to envisage. He didn’t know what envisage meant. He called me some names and stopped the cart, so he could get down and run around organising things. He likes doing that, though he always moans about it.
There are lots of little valleys and combes all around the edge of the Tabletop, and you could have a quite substantial battle in one of them and nobody would ever know, because you’d be completely hidden from sight. But we had no trouble finding the right place, thanks to the crows, and the stink.
And the starlings. Starlings aren’t big carrion eaters, but they like flies, grubs and maggots. A huge flock of them whirred up off the ground, so loud we could hear them as soon as we broke the skyline. They lifted before the crows did. Starlings getting up are a cloud, whereas crows are like snow falling in a blizzard, only in the other direction. It always makes me feel guilty when I disturb so many thousands of my fellow creatures. They’re getting along just fine, minding their own business in these hard times in the carrion trade, and then I come along and spoil everything. Foxes and badgers and other mammals always act like criminals caught in the act. They lift their heads, give you a horrified stare and run for it, like they know they’re doing something wrong. But crows yell abuse at you, and threaten you with lawsuits for restraint of trade.
“Told you,” Gombryas said. “God, what a stink.”
But after a while you stop noticing it. For a while I lived next to a tannery, and people passing by in the street would stop dead, cover their faces and retch; as far as I was concerned, it was just ordinary breathing air. You can get used to all sorts of things. “It’s not so bad,” I said. Gombryas threw up. Maybe it was that bad after all.
The first thing you do when you find a battlefield, after making absolutely sure there’s no active soldiers on site and, if you’re Gombryas, wiping the last dribble of sick off your chin, is make a thorough skirmish of the field. It’s amazing how often you think you’ve done it all and finished, and then you come across a dell or a dip or a little fold of dead ground, and guess where the heaviest action was, the heroic counter-attack, the desperate last stand of the Imperial guard. By that point you’re already behind schedule, in grave danger of being caught out by the spring floods or missing the ships you’ve booked all that expensive cargo space on; furthermore, you’ve calculated precisely how much food and water you need to supply five hundred men for the return journey, not to mention oats and hay for the horses… So Gombryas and Olybrius and Carrhasio and I trudged through the swollen, purple bodies, figuring out what had happened. If you know what happened, you know where to look. Simple as that.
On this occasion, to begin with, it didn’t make sense. Then I realised why.
“Stone me,” I said. “The Knife won.”
“Don’t talk stupid,” Carrhasio said. He was a soldier most of his life, so he reckons he knows about strategy and tactics. “They never stood a chance.”
Not long after that we found a sunken river. The bulk of Count Sinderic’s army, running for their lives, had slithered down one side, then found the opposite bank was too steep and slippery to climb. The Knife, meanwhile, had crossed the river further up, which meant they could station their archers on top of both banks and shoot up Sinderic’s men, floundering in the deep, fast-running river below. There was no cover, the current made it hard to stand up, let alone shoot back with any accuracy or effect; escape upstream was out of the question, so a fair number of the poor bastards tried to go downstream, and were caught at a sharp bend, where the water suddenly got deep; the Knife’s archers on the bank enfiladed them as they tried to swim back against the current, and the few who weren’t shot drowned.
