The Spider's War

  Something moved inside him, a knot of emotion he could put no name to shifting in the space below his heart. He wanted to stop talking, to leave and go back to the Kingspire with Aster and have everything be what it was supposed to be. He wanted to erase the alarmed look from Sabiha’s eyes. He wanted to stop talking, but he couldn’t. He’d started, and now it was like a landslide.

  “It’s all going so well, you see. It’s all just the way it was meant. The goddess, she’s coming back to the world, and she’s bringing peace and truth, and all the lies are dying. Everywhere. Since we stopped the apostate, everything in the world’s been getting better and brighter and purer.”

  “Do you want to sit down? Can I have them bring you something? Tea? Wine?”

  “If, if, if they had just done what they were meant to do in Suddapal, this would never have had to happen. They knew. They knew what would happen, and they did it all the same. They rose up. And then I had to. Because of the farms and because of the fucking traditional fucking families in Borja pushing at Inentai, and because if I didn’t do what I said, they would all be laughing at me. And I told them I told them.”

  “Geder. You’re shouting. It will wake the baby.”

  Laughter pushed its way up out of his chest, rich and hot and mirthless. He sat on the divan, his head in his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have raised my voice. I didn’t mean to.”

  “I understand,” Sabiha said, sitting across from him. Her back was straight as a tutor delivering a lecture. Her eyes were wary. Well, why shouldn’t they be? He hadn’t explained himself so much as popped his soul open and spilled it on the floor. He chuckled ruefully and shook his head.

  “It should have been Jorey,” he said. Sabiha stiffened. When she spoke, her voice was careful.

  “What should have been Jorey, my lord?”

  “He should have been regent. Not me. And more than that. The goddess should have chosen him. He’s smart and strong and people like him. He’s kind. No one laughs at Jorey. And he has you—”

  Outside the window, the garden was dead from the cold and dark. Brown sticks and bare wood that would flower again when spring came. That was the promise. It was hard to see the promise of green in all the death.

  “You see,” Geder said, “I can’t talk to Aster, because I’m supposed to be strong for him. I can’t talk to my father, because he thinks I’m doing well. And Basrahip… I don’t know what he’d say. What he’d do. I know that everything is happening as it should. The rise of the temples. The voice of the goddess driving back the Timzinae and their plots. The world’s becoming pure again. Maybe not even again. Maybe for the first time. I know that’s all true. And so when I feel…” He lifted his hands, words failing.

  “You’re… upset,” Sabiha said. There was a buzz in her voice. A roughness that he could hear her struggling against. “You ordered and oversaw the deaths of hundreds of captive children. And you’ve come to me for comfort because you’re upset?”

  “Yes,” Geder said, gratified that she’d understood him despite his rambling. “I was chosen, you know? I am the light that brought her back to the world after her exile. That’s me. I’m making the world better, and everyone knows. I’m the most important man, maybe in the whole world. I know that what we’re doing is right. I know that I’ve helped, that I keep helping. How can anyone do this much good, help the world into light as much as I have, and feel… like this?”

  “I… I don’t know what to tell you,” Sabiha said.

  “That’s all right,” Geder said softly. “It helps just to say it to a friend. I’d have bothered Jorey with it if he were here. Maybe I will when he comes back. Do you think he’d mind?”

  “I can’t imagine,” Sabiha said. She shook her head slightly. He didn’t think she knew she’d done it. What he must look like to her. The greatest man in the empire, the power of life and death in his hand, weeping on her couch over nothing. Over a feeling he couldn’t even put words to. He tugged at his sleeve and dried his eyes.

  “To be so sad,” he said, “when there’s no reason for it. I’m only afraid that… Ah, Sabiha. I can tell you this because I know you won’t laugh. I think there might be something wrong with me.”

  Cithrin

  Cithrin wasn’t there when Inys killed the guardsman. Her understanding of it grew first from the mixture of rumor and report, gossip and speculation that followed the unexpected violence the way thunder follows lightning.

  It happened the day after Inys’s return from the south. Cithrin had meant to have one of her usual conversations with the dragon, but freezing rain and a set of queries from the scribes had distracted her. Inys had taken shelter in a covered amphitheater, and for reasons no one knew and likely no one ever would, one of King Tracian’s guardsmen took exception to the choice. To call it a confrontation would have been generous. The guard had approached the dragon, calling Inys by name, and told him to find another resting place. Inys had gutted the man, eaten the corpse, and fallen back asleep.

  All those facts were agreed upon. It was the interpretations of them that spread out like feathers on a wing. The guardsman had been drunk or embarrassed after having been dressed down by his commander or goaded into rash action by his friends. The dragon had warned him or it hadn’t. King Tracian was enraged and preparing to act against Inys or he approved of the dragon’s actions. There was even the suggestion—taken more seriously than it deserved—that the guardsman had been the secret lover of a noble lady at court, and the dragon had slaughtered him as a sign of favor to the cuckolded husband.

  Only a few seemed alarmed that the huge, intelligent predator that had taken residence in Carse had begun killing. It was a dragon, glorious and powerful. The populace at large seemed willing to assume that whatever it had done was justified by the mere fact that a dragon had done it.

  Komme Medean and King Tracian were in the minority that did care what had happened and why. Even then, Cithrin had the sense that it was more a matter of tactics in the war than an issue of justice. Law for dragons, as for kings, was less about abiding by rules than the making of them. It was a distinction she hadn’t considered before she’d starting making laws of her own. That she kept such company—that they were in some ways her peers—left her feeling uneasy, but not so much that she resorted to the bottle. Or, anyway, not more than usual.

  Inys arrived at his usual time. Rain and clouds had blown away, leaving a clean blue sky from which the dragon descended. Cithrin sat in the courtyard of the holding company, as she had before, a brazier glowing beside her and a dead lamb cooling on the winter-killed grass. She felt only a little more trepidation than usual. Inys folded his tattered wings and swallowed the animal. His breath was hot and acrid, the fumes stinging her eyes.

  “So,” the dragon said. “I have come again. Ask me what you will.”

  Cithrin pretended to consult her notebooks. All their conversations were there. The nature of the spiders, the history of the war, the strategies by which Inys suspected the enemy might be overcome. Many times their conversations veered widely from Cithrin’s questions. She had pages of description of the small politics of the dragons’ court, the composers Inys thought of note, the styles and fashions and vast projects that had been the great concern when humanity had still been tame.

  She cleared her throat. “There was a man you killed. A guardsman of the king?”

  “That,” Inys said, and his deep, symphonic voice seemed thoughtful. “Yes, I’ve been thinking of that since it happened.”

  “You have?”

  “You sound surprised. Yes, I have thought on it. It was badly done, and I should not have. And so I have been thinking on why I chose to do as I did. What it was that fouled my spirit and led me to act improperly. I think it was the loss of the Stormcrow.”

  “You mean Marcus?”

  “The burden of the empty world,” Inys said, canting a huge black eye toward the sun. “Every day I smell the air and taste the
water, hoping for some sign of another, but there is nothing. I am alone. Profoundly. Completely.”

  “Except for us,” Cithrin said, but it was like she hadn’t spoken.

  “To be so set apart. So isolated. It was one of the greatest punishments that could be leveled against us, and it is the one to which I’ve consigned myself. The feelings I have can find no outlet, and so I begin to bond with them. And the Stormcrow most of all. It’s sentiment. Nothing but sentiment. But I feel his absence, and it stands in for all the other absences.”

  “Them?”

  “What are you asking me?”

  “You begin to bond with them? Who do you mean, ‘them’?”

  “You,” Inys said. “The slave races. I shouldn’t have eaten the one. It was bad form. I wasn’t even hungry. And if I do not police myself in these small things, how will I preserve my mind from the large ones? The path from trivial misstep to losing myself utterly is short and broad.”

  “Trivial,” Cithrin said. She hadn’t meant to.

  “I am the only hope for the resurrection of the world. Everything depends on me. On my holding my mind in place. But I am ashamed, and I am humiliated.”

  And you are enjoying it entirely too much, Marcus Wester said in Cithrin’s imagination. She wondered if she said the words aloud whether Inys would laugh or destroy her as he had the guard. Better, she thought, not to answer that question.

  “The spiders,” she said. “Was there any pattern to how the conflicts between them first spread? A distance between them that allowed disagreements to take hold? A number of people? The time they were separated from each other?”

  “Not that I know,” Inys said. “It was unimportant to me at the time. The slaves were corrupted, and the corrupted were of no use. We culled the tainted and kept the pure. The only pattern, so called, was the frenzy they fell into when that which they believed and that with which another confronted them would collide. To hear another voice say something offensive to their sense of the world and also know that the other was not lying? To be faced by the fact of their error called forth a rage like no other.”

  “That’s not the spiders,” Cithrin said. “That’s people.”

  “It was the bent scale in your minds where Morade put his claw,” Inys said. “It is how he destroyed you.”

  “How he destroyed all of us.”

  “No, just you,” Inys said. “I destroyed the rest.”

  What I hear,” King Tracian said, “is that the dragon can’t be depended upon. Yes, if it’s a bright day and he’s in a sunny mood. Or if Wester is here to goad him into it. But I think we can all see that Inys cannot be commanded. Can that be agreed?”

  The meeting room, while it was in the palace, wasn’t the one Cithrin had first seen. This had a fire pit in its center worked in iron, silk upholstered chairs, and lanterns of crystal lit not with flame but by some cunning man’s trick that more nearly seemed like sunlight. The tapestries on the walls were designs of blue and red and gold as deeply saturated as if they’d just come from the dyer’s yards, though they were likely centuries old. Komme Medean, sitting near the fire in robes of simple brown, nodded. Tracian’s master-at-arms—a thin-faced man called Lord Fish though that wasn’t his name—hoisted an eyebrow and waited.

  “I think that can be agreed,” Komme said, “at least provisionally. Inys can be negotiated with—”

  “And if he breaks his word, what punishment are we going to place against him?” Tracian said. “Put him in the stocks? Fine him? Stop giving him food and drink?”

  “Dealing with great power does limit our options,” Komme said. From Tracian’s nod, Cithrin thought she was the only one who’d heard the mordant humor in the words.

  “And so we need to have something else on our side,” the king said. “I’ve been in conversation with Birancour. The ambassador of the queen.”

  Komme looked up, his expression bland but his eyes suddenly sharp. “Sir Brendis Sarreau? I didn’t know he’d come to the city.”

  “Come and gone,” Tracian said lightly, but Cithrin heard the pleasure in his voice. Diplomats and statesmen speak, of course, to the throne. Not the bankers. So Tracian was beginning to understand the deeper price that came with the gold he’d taken. That was a shame. She’d hoped to have a few years at least before that happened.

  “A wise man,” Komme said. “Deep thinker. Have you met him, Cithrin? No? Well, I’m sure you will. What did the ambassador have to suggest?”

  “An expansion of what we already have. Tamed spider priests of our own to counteract the others. Men like your Master Kit who can use Morade’s weapon against Antea and its false goddess.” Tracian smiled and made a wide, sweeping gesture as if he were displaying a fine piece of art. “We’ve already seen that we need the man in more places than one. We needed him here to safeguard the court. They need him with the Lord Marshal’s army to see that it retreats. How many other places would men like him be of use? We could send them to Borja and Hallskar. Cabral. You have your papers, but how much more convincing would demonstrations be? Our tame priests standing before every court in the world, explaining how the whole thing works, how it can be fought against. Your public letters are fine, I don’t dispute that. But if they heard the truth from one of our Master Kits—”

  “They wouldn’t be able to disbelieve it,” the master-at-arms said. “They’d have to believe.”

  The knot in Cithrin’s gut tightened. Komme stroked his beard and looked into her eyes. His silence was a warning. She took her lower lip between her teeth and bit to keep herself from speaking. Komme had lived his whole life in Northcoast. He knew King Tracian better than she could. She had to trust the old banker to see the world she did, and the dangers it held.

  “It’s an interesting thought,” Komme said. “How far have you gone with it?”

  “Porte Oliva will be retaken eventually. The queen has plans in place,” Tracian said. It wasn’t a direct answer, but Cithrin understood. If Kit didn’t return or didn’t agree, there were other priests. If Komme and Cithrin objected, there would be other opportunities to find the corrupted blood and use it. She took a salted nut from the silver plate before her but couldn’t bring herself to eat it. Anything close to hunger she might have had before was drowned by her quiet alarm.

  “Well, it will be interesting to see what the queen does with her new agents,” Komme said, leaning back. “I can certainly see how it would help with the immediate issue, but I wonder how we would convince Birancour to put that sword down once they’d picked it up.”

  “We might not,” Tracian said. “All tools are dangerous when they’re misused. Properly controlled, though, these may be a blessing.”

  “Perhaps,” Komme said. “Perhaps.”

  After the meeting ended, Cithrin and Komme rode back toward the holding company in a carriage. The sky was dark, and the streets frigid. Shuttered windows glimmered at their edges, the light of lanterns and fires slipping out into the night. Otherwise the streets were only moonlight and stars. Cithrin huddled into a wool blanket, but Komme sat in his shirt and jacket, his eyes on the passing buildings.

  “It’s a terrible plan,” she said. “He can’t do it.”

  “I know,” Komme said. “He won’t. But we can’t tell him not to. He’s the king. Informing men on thrones of what you will and will not permit them to do… Well, people juggle knives too. The danger’s what makes the sport interesting. If we weren’t already doing what he proposes, it would be an easier argument to make.”

  “You mean Kit.”

  “These spiders,” Komme said. “They’re meant to drive us against each other, yes? Factions within factions, all with their own particular priests leading the way. Maybe by standing at a pulpit, maybe by whispering in the right ears at the right time. With your actor fellow, we fit that description.”

  “Kit’s different,” Cithrin said.

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I am.”

  “Tracian’s not. Othe
rs may not be. And even if Master Kit is unlike the others, that’s an argument that they can be tamed. Used by forces of good to bring victory to the righteous.” Cithrin’s short, choked laugh brought a wry smile to Komme’s lips. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  “Even if they destroyed all the corrupted that believed in the goddess, it would be a season before Birancour and Northcoast were at each others’ throats over something else. They wouldn’t even recognize that it was happening.”

  “I agree,” Komme said. “Give him a few days to think he’s won. I’ll write him a letter explaining that the holding company has no objection, but the voices of the branches would feel uncomfortable setting business under a crown that uses the spiders. I’ll send a copy to Sir Brendis. It’ll be a carrot to Birancour, since it suggests we would be open to expanding this war gold scheme to them, and a threat to Tracian that we might pull it back.”

  The carriage shuddered across a length of bad paving, the wheels rapping the stones like an assault. Komme put his hand on the door until the roughness passed.

  “Will he see the danger in that?” Cithrin asked.

  “I don’t know. He might not. Not yet. It’s all still a novelty. Once people are used to it—once they’ve lost the memory of coins—we’ll have more leverage. It’s like going down a steep hill in a sled. It’d be easier to steer if it weren’t all going so quickly. But this is how quickly it’s going, so we’d best do what we can.”

  The old man sighed and lapsed into silence. Cithrin sat back. The winter cold pressed at her. In Porte Oliva or Vanai, the cities she’d lost, the nights never grew cold the way they did in Northcoast. Carse’s winter was vicious and long and cold. But more than the chill and darkness, she dreaded the winter’s end. As long as the fighting had stopped, there was hope that she could end it. That the chance wouldn’t fall outside her reach. The sound of another cart came from the street and then faded away.