The Two of Swords: Volume Three

Book 0: Two of Swords

by K.J. Parker

Genres: Action & Adventure; War & Military; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

The epic concluding volume in The Two of Swords trilogy by World Fantasy Award-winning author K. J. Parker. "Why are we fighting this war? Because evil must be resisted, and sooner or later there comes a time when men of principle have to make a stand. Because war is good for business and it's better to die on our feet than live on our knees. Because they started it. But at this stage in the proceedings," he added, with a slightly lop-sided grin, "mostly from force of habit." A soldier with a gift for archery. A woman who kills without care. Two brothers, both unbeatable generals, now fighting for opposing armies. No-one in the vast and once glorious United Empire remains untouched by the rift between East and West, and the war has been fought for as long as anyone can remember. Some still survive who know how it was started, but no-one knows how it will end. The Two of Swords is the story of a war on a grand scale, told through the eyes of its soldiers, politicians, victims and heroes.

Release date: December 12, 2017

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 416

Sample

 

To Saevus Andrapodiza, all human life had value. This revelation came to him in a moment of transcendent clarity as he looked out from the summit of Mount Doson over the fertile arable plains of Cors Shenei in central Permia. Every man, woman and child, regardless of age, ability, nationality, religion, sexual orientation or social class was valuable and must be treated as such. His task, he realised, was finding someone to buy them all.

As a native of East Permia, he was free from the restrictive laws of the two empires, where slavery had been illegal for a hundred and fifty years, ever since excessive reliance on servile labour had threatened to wipe out the yeoman class, from whom the Imperial army was almost exclusively drawn. In Permia, with the lowest level of population per square mile in the inhabited world, there were no such considerations. When Saevus embarked on his mission, the price of a field hand in Permia was nine oxen, thirty ewes or forty pigs, making good help unaffordable to the hard-working farmers who were the backbone of the nation. He set out to change all that.

He considered the proposition from the supply end. Because Permia had been at peace with its neighbours for generations, the supply mostly came from breeders, who naturally had to recoup the costs of fifteen years of careful nurture, together with the ongoing expense of the brood stock. But there were wars practically everywhere else; stockades crammed with surrendered prisoners, the women and children of captured cities slaughtered simply because they weren’t worth anything to anybody. Prices at the pithead, so to speak, were ridiculously cheap; the real expense lay in transporting the goods to Permia, across some of the worst roads in the world.

Perhaps Saevus’ greatest gift was his vision, his ability to see clearly, his sense of perspective. Before he entered the business, slave caravans limped through the high mountain passes between Rhus and Permia in gaggles of ten or twenty, moving at the pace of the slowest lame man or sickly child; and why? Because the traders were small operators, undercapitalised, inefficient. Saevus had a ship built, at that time the biggest merchant vessel ever constructed. With a full load of seven hundred, it could cover the distance between Aelia Major and Permia in ten days, as opposed to the six weeks needed by an overland caravan to cover the same distance. The cost of the ship was staggering, but, from the moment its keel bit the surf, Saevus was saving money. Marching rations of a pound and a half of barley bread per day for six weeks amounted to sixty-one pounds of bread, at a cost of an angel sixteen. Shipboard rations, a generous pound per day for ten days – ten pounds, nineteen stuivers, a saving of eighty-five per cent. Furthermore, the mortality rate overland was between forty and sixty per cent, so half the outlay was liable to be wasted, expensive bones bleaching by the roadside, dead loss. Aboard Saevus’ ship, the death rate was a trivial fifteen per cent.

War is always with us; even so, it wasn’t long before Saevus Andrapodiza had dried up the pool of young, able-bodied men available for purchase, or at least generated a demand that far outstripped supply. By keeping his prices to the end user as low as he possibly could, he’d stimulated the Permian economy, doubling grain yields in under a decade, with the result that more and more Permians were able to afford a slave, or two, or five. Land which since time immemorial had been dismissed as useless was now coming under the plough, as thousands of reasonably priced hands swung picks and mattocks, shifting millions of tons of stones and hacking out terraces on windswept hillsides. More and better farms called for more and better tools, which someone had to make, from materials that someone had to fell or mine; and more money in circulation meant more people could afford the better things in life, and the craftsmen who supplied them couldn’t cope without help. Permia was crying out for manpower, but all the wars in the world couldn’t keep pace. For a while, Saevus looked set to be the victim of his own success.

It’s a true measure of the man that he made this setback into an opportunity. Obviously, perfect physical specimens were the ideal; but life, he argued, isn’t like that. Take any small family-run farm or workshop; look at who actually does the work. It’s not just the man and his grown-up son. Everyone is involved – women, children, the old folks, the feeble, the sick. Saevus often talked about a farm he’d visited as a boy, where the farmer’s aunt, seventy years old and missing an arm, still made a precious contribution keeping an eye on the sheep, collecting the eggs, leading the plough-horses, sorting through the store apples. Everyone is valuable – not necessarily of equal value, it goes without saying, but that’s just a matter of appropriate pricing, and there were smallholders and small-scale artisans who’d be glad of any help they could get, assuming the price was one they could afford to pay. What was more, these hitherto neglected categories of livestock came with hidden benefits. Children grew into adults. Old men had skills and valuable experience. Many women had significant recreational as well as practical value. A one-legged crone might look like she’s not worth her feed, but she’s bound, over the course of a long life, to have learned how to do something useful, and you don’t need two legs to card wool or ret flax or plait straw or sort and bag up nails: all the tedious, repetitive, time-devouring little jobs that somehow have to get done if the householder’s hard work in the field or at the workbench is to be turned into money.

Saevus built a fleet of new ships, each one capable of transporting twelve hundred head, with a ninety per cent survival rate. The unit cost of getting a potential worker from battlefield or burned-out city to Permia fell by a breathtaking thirty-seven per cent. As his overheads fell, so did his prices. Now, practically everybody could afford to own a functional, useful human being.

Sadly, Saevus didn’t live to see the outbreak of the East–West war, but his son Saevus II, universally known as Saevolus, was ideally placed to take full advantage when the Eastern emperor Glauca repealed the anti-slavery laws throughout his dominions, shortly followed by his nephew in the West. And only just in time. War losses and economic devastation had led to attrition of manpower on such a scale that it was virtually impossible to make up the losses of the endless sequence of major battles, or keep anything like a serious army in the field. Slave labour, however, would enable the empires to take thousands of men from the plough and the forge, freeing up whole regiments for service, while ensuring uninterrupted supply of equipment and materiel for the war effort from slave-staffed State arsenals.

The simple inscription on the base of Saevus’ statue reads: He saw the worth of every man. We shall not look upon his like again.

 

When Procopius (the great composer) was fourteen years old his uncle sent him to the Imperial Academy of Music at Tet Escra to study harmonic theory under the celebrated Jifrez. Aware that the journey would involve crossing the notorious Four Fingers Pass, Procopius’ uncle provided him with an escort of six men-at-arms, two archers, a personal attendant and a cook; he also sent with them the full cost of his nephew’s tuition and maintenance, five thousand angels in gold. A cautious man, he had made proper enquiries about the eight soldiers, and the servant had been with the family for many years. The cook was a last-minute addition to the party. He seemed like a respectable man, and he came recommended by a noble family in the south.

The party crossed the Four Fingers without incident and began the long climb down Castle Street to the river valley. On the fourth day, just before sunrise, Procopius woke up to find the cook standing over him with a filleting knife in his hand.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. The cook bent down and stabbed at him with the knife.

It was probably his phobia about blades that saved him. He rolled sideways as the blow fell, so that the knife struck him on the shoulder rather than in the hollow between the collarbones, as the cook had intended. The cook yelled at him and tried to stamp on his face; he caught his attacker’s foot with both hands and twisted it, toppling him; then he jumped up and ran, passing the dead bodies of the soldiers and his servant, all with their throats cut. The cook threw the knife at him, but it hit him handle first, between the shoulders. He kept running, until he was sure the cook had given up chasing him.

Although he’d escaped the immediate danger, his situation was about as bad as it could be. The cut in his shoulder was bleeding freely. He was still five days from the nearest known settlement, with nothing except his shirt. His feet were bare. The surrounding countryside was shale rock, with a few clumps of gorse. He had no idea if there were any streams running down off the mountain; he couldn’t see any, and was reluctant to leave the road to go exploring. It was a reasonably safe assumption that the cook would be following the road – where else would he go? – and he would be on horseback, most likely armed with a selection of the dead soldiers’ weapons. Procopius had never fought anyone in his life. He seriously considered staying where he was and waiting for the cook to find him and kill him; he was going to die anyway, and a knife would be quicker and easier than hunger, exposure or gangrene. It was only the thought that, if he let himself be killed, the cook would prevail and thereby in some vague sense prove himself the better man; the sheer unfairness of it that convinced him to keep going and do his best to survive.

Fortuitously, the road at this point was steep and made up of loose, dry stones; a horseman would have little advantage over a man on foot. He kept up the best pace he could manage, stopping only to listen for the sound of his pursuer, until nightfall. Then he left the road and hid as best he could in the gorse, waiting for sunrise. He was so tired he fell asleep for a few hours, but was wide awake long before the sun rose.

As soon as it was light enough to see by, he carefully made his way back uphill, parallel to the road, about fifty yards off on the eastern side, until he reached the place where the cook had camped for the night. He covered his advance by using the cook’s horse as cover. He took an arrow from the quiver hanging from the saddle, crept in slowly and quietly and stabbed the cook through the ear without waking him.

He made an effort to cover the body with stones but soon gave up; the clouds were gathering, and he understood the merit of getting as far along the road as he could before the rain started to fall. As well as the money, the cook had brought two full waterskins and a sack of food, mostly cheese, dried sausage and apples; also two blankets and an oilskin cape. There were also various weapons, but Procopius left them behind, as he had no idea how to use them. He took a small knife and the cook’s boots, which were much too big for him.

The next two days were fairly straightforward, although he led the horse rather than rode it, even though his feet were horribly sore. On the third day, however, he came to the place where the Blacklode crossed the road. Heavy rain on the Four Fingers had swollen the normally shallow river into a flood. Procopius had no experience with such matters, but he recognised at once that he had no hope of crossing the river in that state. With no map, he had no way of knowing if there were any alternative fords or crossings. He’d been careful with the food, but at best he had just enough for another four days. He couldn’t get his head far enough round to see properly, but he had an idea that the wound in his shoulder had gone bad; it was warm and tender to the touch and hurt more now than it had earlier, and he felt weak and decidedly feverish. He decided that honour had been satisfied by his defeat of the cook, and there was nothing inherently shameful in this situation about death by exposure. He sat down beside the river, cleared his mind and fell asleep.

He woke up to find a man leaning over him, in more or less the same attitude as the cook. This time, though, he didn’t instinctively flinch, mostly because he was too weak and sick to move. He noticed that the stranger wasn’t holding a knife.

“You all right?” the stranger said.

“No.”

The stranger frowned. “How’d you get yourself all cut up like that?”

Procopius took a deep breath and explained, as lucidly as he could; he’d been sent on a journey with a large sum of money, one of the servants had tried to kill him for the money but he’d managed to get away, and now here he was, lost and alone and very sick. The stranger nodded, to show he’d understood.

“Will you help me?” Procopius asked. “Please?”

The man smiled. “Wish I could,” he said. “But don’t worry, it’ll be all right. What happened to your face? It’s a real mess.”

Procopius explained that, when he was eighteen months old, his father had murdered his mother and then tried to kill him too. “Is that right?” the stranger said. “You’ve had a pretty rough old time, one way and another. Still, it’ll all come right in the end. Believe it or not, you’ll look back on all this someday and understand it was all for the best.”

“Look,” Procopius said, “please, can you help me? At least give me a leg up so I can get on the horse. I haven’t got the strength.”

The stranger smiled. “In that case, that horse isn’t much use to you, is it? So, really, I might as well have it, save me footslogging it all the way to the nearest town to fetch help. I hate walking. I get blisters.”

“You can’t have it.”

“Sorry.” The stranger’s smile grew wider, if anything. “You can’t use it, and you can’t stop me taking it, so tough. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll buy it off you.”

“I don’t want to sell it. I need it.”

“No you don’t,” the stranger said gently. “But I’m going to give you a good price for it. I’m no thief.”

He gathered the reins, put his foot in the stirrup and hoisted himself into the saddle. All the provisions and the other stuff were in the saddlebags. “It’ll be all right,” he said, “I promise you. You’re going to be fine, just you wait and see.”

Procopius watched him until he was out of sight; a long time, because, from where he was, he could see the road for ten miles, so at least an hour, during which time the horse and rider gradually grew smaller and further away before dwindling down into a dot, and then nothing. During that long time, he resolved not to die, because he needed to follow the thief, catch up with him and deal with him the way he’d dealt with the cook, for roughly the same reason. But this time it looked as though that wasn’t going to be possible. He was getting weaker, it was harder and harder to stay awake; when he wasn’t burning hot he was freezing cold, and, really, what was the point? His weakness had proved him to be inferior. If he didn’t deserve to live, he didn’t deserve to live. Simple as that.

He woke up lying in the bed of a cart. The driver and his wife were taking a load of cheese to market; you poor thing, they said, whatever happened to you? And they were very kind and looked after him, they took him to the inn at Loscobiel and stayed with him until he was better, and then took him on to Tet Escra, where he was able to get a letter of credit from his uncle’s bank that made good his losses and enabled him to give the cheesemonger and his wife a proper reward, appropriate to his dignity and station in life, so that was all right.

On his first day at the Academy, he presented the Principal with a manuscript: a flute sonata in three movements. He didn’t mention the background to the piece, how the shape of it had come to him as he lay among the rocks hoping to die, after the thief stole his horse, because that wasn’t relevant, and he didn’t suppose the Principal would be interested. The Principal put the manuscript on his desk and said he’d be sure to look at it some time, when he had a moment.

Two days later, he was sent for.

“Did you write this?” the Principal asked him. He looked fierce, almost angry.

“Yes,” Procopius said.

“Think carefully, and I’ll ask you again. Did you write this?”

“Yes.”

“All on your own?”

Procopius suppressed a smile. Very much all on his own. “Yes. Sir,” he added, remembering his manners. Then he couldn’t resist asking, “Did you like it?”

The Principal didn’t answer that. Instead, he gave a ferocious lecture on the evils of plagiarism. It had been known, he said, for students from wealthy families to hire penniless young composers to write works which the students then passed off as their own; behaviour the Principal confessed he couldn’t begin to understand, because surely anybody who did such a thing would be eaten away with shame, and what possible pleasure could anyone get from being praised and rewarded for something he hadn’t done? In such cases, the penalty was instant expulsion from the Academy. He wanted Procopius to understand that; and now he’d ask the question a third time, and if the answer was yes, there’d be no penalty, not this time. Did you write this piece of music?

“No,” Procopius said. “Sir. I mean, like you said, why would I want to pretend if I hadn’t? I’ve come here to learn, not to show off.”

“I see,” the Principal said. “In which case, that’ll be all. You can go.”

The Principal never liked him after that, because he’d made a serious accusation against him and it turned out to be wrong. But all the teachers loved him and said he was the most remarkable talent they’d ever come across, and it was a privilege to be part of the making of someone who would undoubtedly turn out to be the finest musician of his generation. Procopius wasn’t sure about all that. The teachers had shown him all sorts of clever ways to turn the shapes in his mind into music; he’d been shocked and appalled by his own ignorance and the fact that he hadn’t been able to figure out such things for himself but had had to be shown. That felt like cheating, though apparently it was quite legitimate. For the rest of it, the shapes just came to him, without any real work or effort on his part, certainly no skill or engagement with excellence. He was given them, unearned, just as he’d always been given everything, his whole life, undeserved, simply because he was the son and sole heir of a rich man who died relatively young, and the nephew of a rich, doting uncle.

So, for a while, he made sense of it the best he could. He thought about the man who’d taken his horse. You’ll be all right, the man had said, just you wait and see. And he’d said he wasn’t a thief, and he’d pay a good price for the horse; and that was when young Procopius began to see the shapes, and calling that a coincidence was stretching belief much further than it could possibly go. He could make no sense of it, of course – because what would a god or similar supernatural agency want with a horse, or feel the need to pay for a perfectly unremarkable thirty-thaler gelding with such a precious and valuable commodity? – but the fact that he couldn’t make sense of it certainly didn’t mean that it didn’t make sense, only that he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out. Later, he realised that he’d simply exchanged one insoluble problem for another, with a garnish of the supernatural to excuse him from having to analyse it rationally, and simply accepted; he was one of those people from whom things are taken and to whom things are given, not necessarily proportionately; a conduit for the remarkable and the excessive, himself unremarkable and lacking in any real substance, either for good or evil.

 

You don’t bury your mother every day, so Telamon had treated herself: a new dress and shoes, two angels twenty from the best ladies’ outfitters in Moil, which was also the only ladies’ outfitters in Moil and the whole of the Eastern Mesoge. The dress was dark grey wool, covered her ankles and made her look like a granite outcrop. The shoes chafed at the heel, but only came in one size. Wool is far too hot to wear next to the skin in the Mesoge in midsummer, so she was going to be uncomfortable the whole time. Appropriate. Her mother would have liked that.

She’d budgeted an angel forty for the stage from Moil to Heneca; it had been an angel forty for the last thirty years to her certain knowledge, and things just don’t change east of Moil, it’s impossible, like water flowing uphill. So she handed the money to the driver, who looked at her.

“Where did you say you were going?”

“Heneca Cross.”

“That’s another ten stuivers.”

She looked at him. “No it bloody isn’t,” she said. “Are you trying to be funny?”

Unlikely; he didn’t come across as a humorous sort of man. “Angel fifty to Heneca Cross,” he said. “Angel forty’ll get you as far as Cordouli. You can walk from there if you like.”

Between Cordouli and Heneca Cross stands the massive cloud-wreathed rampart of the Framea escarpment. In the old days before the war, painters and refined young ladies who did watercolours rode out to Heneca Top to paint the breathtaking vista of the Western plain sprawling away into the distance. On the other hand, what with the dress and the shoes she now had precisely three angels seven, out of which she had to find the cost of the funeral and her fare home. She did some mental arithmetic and found that if she didn’t eat for the next three days she could just afford the fare. She fished two five-stuivers out of the hem of her glove and handed them over.

She wasn’t the only passenger in the stage. There was also an old man in a long gown, who smelled, and a stout, round-faced woman with short grey hair, who read aloud from a prayer book the whole way. When it got too dark to read, she recited from memory. She got bits wrong, but Telamon didn’t correct her.

She was facing forward, so she didn’t get to see the amazing vista at Heneca Top. Instead, she got a fine view of the moors: a million acres of blackened heather-stubs, because they burn off the heather at midsummer, to keep the gorse in check. Beyond that was Eyren Common, a million acres of tree stumps slowly submerging into a tangle of ferns and briars, where they’d felled Eyren forest for charcoal, for the war. So, you see, some things do change in the Eastern Mesoge, though not necessarily for the better. Trees get cut down, and people die, and gradually the reasons for dragging back to this godforsaken place get fewer and less overwhelming, so that it begins to be possible to conceive of a day when one might not have to come back ever again —

(“So you’re from the Mesoge,” a young man had said to her once. “Very flat there, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she’d replied, “except for the hills and the mountains.”)

One thing that never changes; it’s three hours by stage from the Top to Heneca Cross, and the road goes straight through all the places she’d known when she was a little girl. A straight line, with her life on either side of it, like the things you don’t like to eat left on the side of your plate. It’s very much the sort of place where people don’t have what they need, so they use something else. There’s no slate and no clay, so they roof their houses with turf; the sheep clamber up onto the low eaves and clump about overhead all night, keeping you awake, and your big brother thinks it’s amusing to tell you that the clumping noise is dead men dancing on the roof, and you lie awake quivering. There’s no trees, so the fields are divided up with barriers of dry bramble and bracken wedged between rows of blackthorn stakes, for which the technical term is dead-hedging, and the only fuel is dried peat. There are no roads, no meadows, no woods, no inns, no villages, no chapels, no big houses of the rich and powerful. Instead, the people live in turf cabins in turf-walled enclosures, supposedly to protect their sheep from rustlers, though that hasn’t worked worth a damn in two thousand years. They make plain but exceptionally fine weapons in the Eastern Mesoge, and they catch passenger hawks, which sell for big money. Apart from that, it’s the last place God made.

There’s no chapel at Heneca Cross, but the Father comes out from Segita once a month and holds services under the old thorn tree, so that’s where they bury people, in the only clay seam north of the Aiser. It’s convenient, because the stage stops there, and all the very many people who’ve left the area can come home when somebody dies, just briefly, just long enough to splash a bit of money about, and then go home. There’s a stone-built barn to store the bodies in, more or less out of the damp and nicely chilled by the knife-edged wind, two stuivers a day, until the grieving kinsfolk can get there, and the farmer’s wife lays on a sit-down meal for two stuivers a head or bread and cheese standing for three-farthings. It’s the closest thing in those parts to a business.

“I came as soon as I could,” she told the farmer, who she hadn’t seen for twenty years. He hadn’t forgotten her. Like a bad penny, said the look on his face. She owed him twenty stuivers, plus an angel for the plot. You could buy a small valley of indifferent grazing for an angel, but it wouldn’t be under the thorn tree, so it wouldn’t be right. Right and wrong are absolute and definite in the Eastern Mesoge. No grey areas whatsoever.

He showed her the plot he’d set aside. She frowned. “That’s not right,” she said.

“That’s all there is. Take it or leave it.”

“I don’t want that one. I want the one next to my sister.”

The farmer looked at her. One patch of scrubby heather is pretty much like another, you’d have thought, but apparently not. “That’s reserved,” he said.

“Is that right? How much to unreserve it?”

“Sixty stuivers.”

More mental arithmetic. She could walk down the hill to Cordouli, but that would only save ten stuivers. The farmer and his son charged twenty-five stuivers for digging a grave.

“I’ll give you another twenty,” she said, “and you can lend me a shovel.”

She’d never dug a grave before, but how hard can it be? It’s just a hole in the ground. The farmer was a kind man at heart, so he lent her a pick as well. Clearly he knew his own land. Eight inches of crumbly black topsoil, all roots and small flints, and then you were into the clay. The shovel blade wouldn’t bite, it turned on the fist-sized stones, and she hurt her ankle when her foot slid off with all her weight on it. So she swung the pick – how do you swing it properly without stabbing yourself in the back? She got the hang of it eventually, and each bite of the pick loosened up a palmful of clay crumbs, unless she hit a stone, in which case there were sparks and a jolt up the abused tendons of her forearms, and a burning in her lungs from the effort. Of course, the deeper down she went, the less room there was to swing the pick and manipulate the five-foot handle of the shovel. Before long she was squatting on her heels, scooping clay in her cupped hands on to the shovel blade, levering out stones with her fingernails. Her fringe was sodden with sweat, which trickled down into her eyes, salt water like tears, which she had so far neglected to shed. She wiped sweat off her forehead and smeared it on her cheeks and neck, to cool them. Hell of a way to save twenty-five stuivers, she thought; and then it occurred to her that there were probably a dozen men within walking distance who’d cheerfully have done the job for ten, because life in the Eastern Mesoge is hard (hard and treacherous and difficult and more stones than dirt) and ten stuivers is a lot of money, in context; and she’d moved away, had it easy in the soft south, never did a hand’s turn, didn’t know she was born. Her mother’s words, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head saying them, and wouldn’t she have been angry and ashamed to see her daughter digging a grave with her own hands, just to save a penny or two, because she could afford all the fine clothes and the fancy shoes, but when it came to burying her own mother —

“Telamon,” said a voice somewhere in the air above her. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She wanted to laugh – because of the surprise, the incongruity, the very thought of him being here of all places (unimaginable, like her mother in silk underwear); and for sheer joy, because she hadn’t seen him for so long. She didn’t look up, and she kept her voice absolutely neutral. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.”

“You seem to be digging some sort of a hole.”

She turned, looked up and located him; a silly, handsome face; a clever man doing an incredibly realistic impression of an idiot. Beyond any doubt the most distinguished stranger ever to visit Cordouli Hundred, though quite possibly nobody here had ever heard of him. Not very musical, the people in these parts. “Yes,” she said, dropping the pick. “Oida, what are you doing here?”

“I happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

Possibly the most absurd thing he’d ever said in a lifetime of spectacular inanities. “Doing what?”

“Never you mind. Then I heard some people saying there’s this beautiful, rich, sophisticated city lady visiting at Heneca Cross, so I came by on the off chance it was you.”

“Go to hell.”

He didn’t seem to have heard her. “Why are you digging a hole?”

“It’s a grave.”

He was silent, long enough to say half a catechism. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

Another pause. Then: “You need to go a bit deeper than that. Six feet is generally recommended.”

“It’s not fini. . .