Read The Two of Swords: Part 9 for Free Online

been whining about having to leave his behind, afraid it would be broken or stolen. He didn’t seem to have noticed that he wasn’t alone. He tucked the rebec under his chin, and began to play.
    It wasn’t his usual sort of thing at all – a set of variations on a theme by Procopius (for her? Surely not). The first movement was slow, a complex melody rising like smoke on a windless day. Then, without warning, the key changed, the tempo quickened and the strange, lazy incantation became a reckless dance, wild and dangerous, swaying up and down the scale, swooping and staggering and abruptly stopping in mid-sequence. When it started again, the theme flashed in and out of a dark, malevolent fugue that made her hands clench and her eyes ache. Just when she thought she was about to drown in it, the fugue collapsed and the original theme soared up out of the wreckage, bright and harsh as winter sunlight, and quickly died away into stunned silence.
    After a moment that seemed to last a very long time, the soldiers started to clap. There was a slightly grudging feel to the applause, as though they’d been tricked into agreeing to something they didn’t hold with. Oida nodded the most perfunctory bow possible, tucked the rebec under his arm, and sang them “Dogs of War”, which was what they’d come to hear. By the third verse, all six thousand of them had joined in. As the fifth verse ended, she realised she’d been singing, too – a mistake, as all who knew her well would testify, but luckily nobody could’ve heard her over the universal roaring.
    After “Dogs” he gave them “The Longest Road”, “Where My Heart Takes Me”, all nine verses of “Grey Green Hills” and finally “My Life for Yours”, perhaps her least favourite song in the whole world, at the end of which she found she was in floods of tears.
    “There you go,” he said abruptly (they’d been talking about different philosophies of salad dressing). “I think that’s it, paid in full.”
    From somewhere he’d magically produced a big cloth bag, about the size of a bunch of grapes. His hand was clawed around it in a way that suggested it was heavy. “What?” she said.
    “My gambling debt,” he said. “Go on, take it, before I strain something.”
    The coach chose that moment to ride a particularly deep rut. The bag jarred out of his hand, fell on the coach floor and split open. Gold coins – the big, chunky Blemyan
tremisses
, each one roughly equivalent to ten angels Imperial. She looked at them, and then at him. “Where in God’s name did you get—?”
    “My fee.” He smiled. “For the gig. That’s nearly all of it.”
    All that money. He’d made all that money in
half an hour
. All she could think to say was, “They paid you in cash?”
    He laughed. “Of course not. Government scrip. Which I was able to change at ninety-nine
trachy
to the
hyperpyron
at the Knights, before we left. You do realise,” he added gravely, “that now I’ll be barely breaking even on this trip.”
    She stared at him. “Don’t be silly.”
    “Two thousand angels,” he reminded her, “for the spinet. Well, don’t just sit there, that’s your money on the floor. In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a crack just below the doorframe.”
    She swooped like a hawk; unfortunately, so did he, at precisely the same moment, and their heads collided with a solid crack. He sat up sharply, moaning. She started picking up coins.
    “They call it the Beautiful City,” he observed, peering out of the window. “God knows why.”
    She was facing backwards, so she couldn’t see. “It was all right,” she said. “Mind you, we didn’t get to see much of it last time.”
    “That’s because we arrived from the north. Actually, it looks much better from that direction. All the good stuff, architecturally speaking, is crowded in around the Northgate.” He sat back in his seat. “What we both need,” he said solemnly, “is a