The Two of Swords: Part 7 by K. J. Parker

17
The Scholar
    When the boy had gone, Glauca rose stiffly to his feet, stopped for a moment until the stabbing pain in his knees had subsided a little, and hobbled slowly across the tessellated gold floor until he reached the wall. In front of him a great bank of cabinets, gilded to match the walls and floor, stretched away in either direction until they were swallowed up in the blaze. Glauca didn’t need to look for the number stencilled on the door. He could have found cabinet thirty-seven blindfold.
    From inside his plain cotton shirt he drew a bunch of keys nearly the size of a man’s fist, hung on a stout steel chain; these days they bruised his chest, but he didn’t feel safe unless he was constantly aware of them pressing against his skin. He peered at them through the rock-crystal magnifying lens that was always folded inside his clenched left hand – it was unique, and the sum he’d spent on it was more than Senza would need to pay his army – until he saw the number 37 on the barrel of a slim brass key. He scrabbled it into the cabinet’s lock (his hands shook badly these days), turned it, pulled it out again and let the bunch go. It swung against his chest like some piece of siege equipment.
    Most reliable sources state that the first pack was designed and executed by the silversmith Ebbo, to the orders of Tandulias of Pyrrho. As is well known, the first pack and the imitations made of it for the next ninety years were not wood or planed bark but silver, each card being made in two parts: the generic back, embossed with a generic stylised abstract design, and the face, on which was embossed the image specific to that card. The two parts were then soldered together and carefully fettled so that, when placed face down, they appeared identical.
    Fortune-telling as it is practised today was never a part of Tandulias’ intention. In his writings, now lost, he stated that although the dealer should not be able to see the faces of the cards as he laid them out, it was both inevitable and desirable that the fingers of an experienced dealer would come to recognise – not consciously, perhaps, but on a subconscious level – the feel of the embossed designs of each card. His idea was that the dealer would be guided by what Tandulias called his inner eye to select the cards appropriate for the sitter; most certainly, he never believed that some directed chance or supernatural agency operated to pull the right cards seemingly at random from the pack. Later, however, as the pack became more widely known outside the inner arcana of the Order and the demand for affordable packs for private owners grew, painted copies began to be made, and naturally these could not be read with the fingers in the same way as the silver embossed versions. Tandulias’ original intentions were ignored or forgotten, and the practice of fortune-telling, which all right-thinking men so properly despise, became widespread among the ignorant and profane …
    Thus Felician, in the introduction to the
Mirror of True Wisdom
. These days, only twenty-seven genuine silver packs survived; nineteen of them were secured in cabinet thirty-seven, the other seven were in the Western empire, in the hands of rich individuals; that hateful boy his nephew had decreed that any attempt to offer them for sale would be construed as treason. All of the nineteen were unspeakably precious, but it was always the Five Oak Leaves Pack that his fingers reached for; supposedly (the provenance was good but not unshakeable) the fourth pack ever made, by Ebbo’s apprentice Vecla, and briefly owned by Tandulias’ son-in-law Panchion, the worthy, prosaic dentist of Lauf Barauna who founded the first ever lodge.
    Glauca shuffled back to his seat and laid the pack on the table. The cards scared him; not just the usual proper awe, but a definite, palpable feeling of disquiet, the sort of thing he used to feel when he hunted boar with his father in the woods, and they’d