“Your son is in danger,” Cithrin said. “He needs your help. And you need mine.”
“My son has a large number of people protecting him. I doubt any new attempt on his life will come to much.”
“It isn’t his life that’s in danger. Geder’s fallen under the influence of corrupt and corrupting men. They’ve turned him into a monster.”
“That seems alarmist,” the older man said, but he didn’t spur his mount. His gaze cut to the side like a man trying not to admit he couldn’t pay his debt. Hope surged in Cithrin’s breast. Hope and fear. She was so close…
“I know what you’ve heard of me, my lord. But I’ve come here at the risk of my life because I know your son is a good man,” she lied. “He’s in trouble.”
Lehrer Palliako didn’t move for a long time. The leather-clad guard shot a worried glance at him. Cithrin clenched her fists. At last, he took a long, shuddering breath and lowered his head. When he spoke, his voice was low.
“I know,” he said.
The holding at Rivenhalm was smaller than Cithrin had imagined. The house itself was wood with only a little stone. It stood tucked on the side of a deep and wooded ravine. The river from which it took its name was in truth hardly more than a wide and vigorous stream that muttered and clapped its way along below. Even without the leaves of summer, the place was dark with shadows. When the crowding trees were in their fullness, Cithrin imagined the house would never rise much above a green and dappled twilight.
Sitting on a small porch with a window that looked out on the steep hillside, Cithrin imagined young Geder Palliako spending long, quiet hours there on the same floorboards she now walked. Here were the rooms and archways and halls where he had been a boy. Where the seeds of the man he’d become had been planted. She tried to find something sinister in it. There was nothing like that. Rivenhalm felt close and cozy and warm inside. But maybe lonesome.
Lehrer Palliako had led them back, his visit to his farmlands forgotten. His servants had taken the cloaks and jackets from the players and guards and the exile Barriath Kalliam as if it were perfectly normal for the great enemies of the empire to arrive unannounced and be welcomed. But perhaps it was more that there was no one much more likely to appear. No one seemed to come to Rivenhalm.
“My wife died when he was very young, you know,” Lehrer said, half to her and half to the cup of wine in his fist. “I raised him myself. Taught him to love books. Taught him to be a good boy. Did what I could. I never wanted him to go to court. They’re a bunch of self-righteous bastards, all of them. But it isn’t a favor to keep a young man from making friends. Connections in the court. I dreaded it from the day he left. The day. And when Dawson fucking Kalliam threw a triumph for him, I thought… you know, I thought perhaps I’d been wrong. Just because I’d failed at court, it didn’t mean my boy would. I was sure it would be all right. Only it wasn’t.”
Lehrer shook his head, and Cithrin could see Geder in it. Not the monstrous Geder, hacking a man to death with a dull sword because he’d chosen defiance even at the last. The lost and gentle Geder, the one who’d hidden with her in the darkness. But there were glimmers of that other too. Lehrer Palliako was, she thought, a man of deep resentments as well as deep affections. She wondered what his wife had been like when she was alive.
“And then these priests,” Lehrer said. “I went to him I don’t know how many times. I told him not to forget himself, not to let them change who he was. Who he is. When Simeon named him Lord Regent… I was proud. I won’t say I wasn’t. But I was also afraid.”
“You were right to be,” Cithrin said. “The spiders in their blood were made to sow chaos. To make war constant. Inevitable. They’ve lied to him, and it’s not his fault that he believed.”
“Exactly,” Lehrer said. “Exactly. It’s not his fault at all. It’s these priests and courtiers and politicians, isn’t it? They’re what led him astray. My poor little boy. Do you know, he used to try to save the water beetles? When he was young, he’d find water beetles down in the mud, and some were on their backs. He’d bring them back and try to nurse them back to being well. Gave them bits of leaf and fresh water and kept them warm. He’d cry when they died. He’s a good boy.”
Tears streaked the old man’s cheeks. Cithrin had the sense that he’d been waiting to say all this. All he hadn’t had was someone to listen. Someone who understood.
“Will you help me, then? Will you help me to help him?”
“I will,” Lehrer said. “You’ll stay with me. All of you. Geder has an estate in the city. No one will look for you there, and we can get him away from these bastards before they make it worse.”
“Your son is very angry with me,” Cithrin said.
“And Kalliam’s boy. Barriath. The one you brought. I know he is, but it will be fine. We’ll see to it. He’ll forgive you once he understands.” Lehrer reached out his hand tentatively, and Cithrin paused for only a moment before she took it. Lehrer smiled, tears welling again in his eyes. “You would have made a fine daughter. I’m sorry that this has all done what it’s done.”
“I am too,” she said, and let him go. The relief in her belly was like a drink of strong wine. It unknotted her, if only for the moment.
She’d done the first part. She’d gained the confidence of someone Geder loved. Now there was only finding the way to turn the younger Palliako against the priests whose power he relied on. And as difficult as that sounded, she had her path picked out. With every tale Lehrer spun, with every reminiscence about the innocent, kind young man Geder had been before the court corrupted him, she felt more certain she could manage it.
The priests had taken control of the empire, that was true. They were sowing chaos without even knowing that they had been designed for the task. They were the enemy that had to be defeated if there was ever to be hope of peace.
But fire could be fought with fire, violence with violence, and there had been no priests when Geder burned Vanai.
Entr’acte: Nus
The enemies of the goddess have already lost! None can stand against her power. You, her chosen, stand as proof of her grace and her power in the world.”
The priest lifted his hands in blessing, and Duris—along with everyone else in the cathedral—cheered. Their gathered voices echoed off the vaulted ceiling, until the whole building rang with them. A roar louder than a dragon, and more dangerous.
The central cathedral of Nus had been dedicated once to some local god who seemed from the carvings in the stone columns to have had a great deal to do with rose-covered shepherd’s crooks and a shallow bowl with a crack in it. Now, it belonged to the goddess. The red of the banners that hung behind the altar represented the blood of true humanity, untainted by the filthy powers of the dragons and their Timzinae agents. The pale circle in the center with its eightfold sigil, the purifying power of the goddess as it reached out across the world.
Not that Duris would have known that if he hadn’t been told. As the cathedral had once been the shrine of a crook-and-bowl god, Duris had once been a butcher’s apprentice of a little crossroads town that the locals called Little Count, about a morning’s walk south of Sevenpol, and was now a soldier of the empire and of the goddess.
When the roar faded, the priest lowered his hands. “There are many who will deny her. Many who will close their eyes to her light. Stripping away the lies of a lifetime—of hundreds of lifetimes, father and grandfather and on back to the fall of humanity at the claws of the dragons—is like tearing away the scab of an infected wound. Some will cling to their infection rather than accept the healing pain. These are the servants of the lie.”
“Kill them!” Duris and a hundred others shouted. “Kill anyone who stands against her!”
“They come to us now,” the priest said. “They come to kill us and steal back what the goddess has claimed.”
Everyone knew that, of course. The scouting parties had been keeping track of the movements of the enemy army since the fall of I
nentai. But hearing it in the resonant voice of the priest gave it a weight and a dignity that taproom gossip didn’t carry. Duris felt the mixture of dread and exultation in his chest. When he closed his eyes and let the feelings rise up in him, it was like he’d climbed the highest tree in Little Count and was looking down on the roofs and yards far below.
“But,” the priest said, “they have already lost. The goddess is in the world, and her power cannot be denied. She is the living voice of the truth. Faith in her is stronger than arrows. Stronger than swords. Nothing in the world can remain unchanged before her!”
Duris rose, fists in the air. All around him, his compatriots and the converts from among the citizens of Nus stood too. Some—especially the locals—wept. Duris, who wasn’t a butcher’s boy any longer, grinned beatifically and felt the joy and power flow through him.
Nus, the Iron City, had been the first Timzinae stronghold to fall to her, and Duris had been there from the start. When the army had moved on, Duris and his cohorts Noll and Kipp and Sandin had all been picked to garrison the city. In all, there were three hundred Antean soldiers to hold a city of fifty thousand. Three hundred soldiers and half a dozen priests.
For the first few months, he’d struggled not to feel overwhelmed by the city. The grand square alone was larger than all Little Count put together. The salt quarter at Nus took up almost half the city. The port on the northern edge spread out past the great stone-and-metal walls and onto the water, becoming a complex tissue of docks and ships and boats that changed their configuration by the day, like alleyways in dreams. Then there were the archways tucked in among the streets. Long, lazy swoops of hollow dragon’s jade that rose up above the buildings and streets before arcing back down. In Little Count—even in Sevenpol—they would have been wonders to look up at in awe. In Nus, people hung laundry from them.
With the service done, Duris and his friends poured out onto the minor square. Minor, and still big enough to fit most of a village into. The giddiness that always followed a morning listening to the priests left them in playful moods as they strutted past the street vendors with their beaded jewelry and promises of futures told and tin plates of spiced chicken and lamb.
“Did I tell? Had a letter from home,” Kipp said.
“Did not,” Sandin said. “And it wouldn’t help if you did. You can’t read.”
Kipp shoved the larger man while the others laughed, but Kipp was laughing too, so it was all right. “I can hire a scribe, same as anyone else. My sister sent it. Saved up a tenth of her sewing money for a month to do it too. She said Old Matrin’s died.”
Duris missed a step. The pleasure he’d taken in the day faltered. “Did not,” he said, unaware that he was echoing Sandin. Old Matrin with his knives and the white crop of thin hair rising off his brow like smoke had been the butcher in Little Count and the master of Duris’s apprenticeship.
“Did. Caught a fever over the winter and slept himself to death,” Kipp said. He kept his voice light because they were men now, and men didn’t act sad about things. The look he gave Duris was sympathy enough. “Guess you’re the only one knows how to cut those chops of his now, eh?”
“Suppose I am,” Duris said. A wave of homesickness washed over him—Old Matrin’s slaughterhouse, the treelined lane between his old father’s house and the huts where his mother and sisters lived with his new father. The pond where he’d played whistles with the miller’s daughter back when they’d both been too young to think of anything less pure to play at. He shook himself, put a smile back on his face, and kept on. There was no use thinking too much on that now. His mother had said Sorrow calls sorrow so much that he assumed it was true.
The blare of the alarm trumpets cut through the air. It was so unexpected, Duris looked at the others to see whether they’d heard it too. Noll and Kipp had gone pale in the face. Sandin’s jaw was set forward in a vicious grin.
“Guess the fuckers came early, eh?” he said. The alarm came again, and they broke into a run for their siege stations.
At the stone side of the great walls, ladders wide enough for four men to climb side by side stretched up. The walls rose as tall as ten men one standing on the other, and divided so that low walls of iron marked off each length twenty yards long of the street-wide walk along the top. From his post, Duris could see the gates closing, the city of Nus folding in on itself like a turtle expecting a storm. And as he looked out from the top of the wall, the storm front was clear. Clouds of dust rose in the east. The largest plume came from the along the dragon’s road, but three smaller arced in from the south. Sandin, beside him, laughed.
“Well, look,” he said. “All the roaches are in a hurry to sit at the bottom of our wall. Idiots.”
“I don’t know,” Duris said. “Looks like there’s a lot of them.”
“If they make the top of this wall, it’ll be by climbing over the bodies of their own dead,” Sandin said, and spat. It was a phrase Duris had heard before, spoken by the priests. The thought reassured. The captain came last, and the fifteen men of the segment stopped talking among themselves. Callien Nicillian was the second son of some minor house—Baron of Southreach or some such. He had a sharp, dark face and an eager manner that brought Duris and the others with it.
“Take your posts, boys,” Nicillian said. “The roaches will be here by midday, and they may take a little knocking back.”
“Hope so,” Sandin said.
Along the wall, outsize speaking trumpets were being mounted, and the priests were beginning to call into them. The enemies of the goddess cannot win against us! Everything you love is already gone! If you stand against us, you have already lost! The syllables rang out clear and sharp. Duris almost felt sorry for the bastards riding so quickly toward their defeat. He sharpened his sword and wondered whether he’d get to use it. Three of the other men on his segment put together the ballistas and set them into the seating hole in the iron. The inner face of the wall looked down over the city. There were few buildings in Nus as tall as the wall. The people in the streets below him were only the oval tops of heads. He wondered what it would be like looking down at Camnipol from the Kingspire. He’d never seen it himself, but he’d heard it was taller than ten of Nus’s walls stacked one on the next, though that was likely an exaggeration.
When the call to make ready came, Duris was already looking down over the edge. The enemy had come in a force as large or larger than the Antean army that Lord Ternigan had led. The difference being that Ternigan had marched his men—Duris among them—through the opened gates and fought in the streets. The full garrison of Nus. The guards and soldiers of the traditional families that had ruled it. The shopkeepers and merchants and indentured slaves defending their homes. For a moment, Duris wondered whether the three hundred soldiers topping the walls were quite enough to defend a whole city from a full army, but then the priests began to call again, and his unease evaporated.
“Those catapults,” Sandin said, pointing down below them. “You see how the leather at the top looks like a sling? Those are Borjan make.”
“And you’d know that how?” Duris said. “All the time you spent as a boy with your lovers in Tauendak?”
Sandin hit his ear lightly and turned back to the army below. “I’ve heard about them. And see, those aren’t all roaches.”
It was true. There were Timzinae soldiers below them in profusion, but also Tralgu and Jasuru and wide, tusk-jawed Yemmu. Even a few that might have been Firstblood or Dartinae. The banners they carried were in the vertical style of Borja and the Keshet.
“This isn’t an uprising,” Sandin said. “That’s an army that’s fought as an army. Could be this is a good day after all.”
“Think that?”
“Break the back of the Borjan army and show them what it means to take the side of the Timzinae? I’ll put you a full night’s drinks the real people down there are offering up dead roaches by the end of the week as part of their surrender.”
“Not taking t
hat bet,” Duris said. “I’ve seen how you drink.”
“Ready weapons!” Captain Nicillian cried over the calling of the priests, and Duris moved to his ballista. It almost seemed cruel, killing them from his safe perch. But they’d made the choice when they came, and damn but there were a lot of them. “Loose!”
The bolts of the defending ballistas fell on the attackers below. Duris couldn’t tell if they’d done much good. With only four to a segment, it seemed like each bolt would have to spit half a dozen enemy like pork on a skewer to make any difference at all. On the other hand, apart from cobbling together their Borjan catapults, they didn’t seem to be doing anything but standing about waiting to be killed. He waited while the others winched back the swing arm, then he shoved a second bolt in place and barked that he was clear of it. The string made a sound like snapping fingers, and somewhere in the throng below, another man died or was wounded or the bolt pierced only earth. The winch creaked again, and Duris waited with the next bolt.
He didn’t see where the fire came from. A cunning man at the rear of the army, maybe. Or one of the catapults, set aside for the purpose. The first sign Duris had was the intake of breath from the man beside him. When he turned to see what had caused it, he already knew. The ball of bright-blue flame like a sun made from sky floated above the wall, a trail of black smoke showing the arc it had already traveled.
“The hell is that?” he said. And behind him, the Borjan catapults answered: it was the signal to attack. All around the city, the Borjan catapults fired, first one and then a few, and then dozens. The stones arced up, and for a moment Duris thought the enemy’s aim had failed badly. None of them were going to strike the iron wall. None of them were even arcing low enough to pick off the soldiers at the ballistas. One of the stones passed over his own segment, and he saw the line that it drew behind it. The stone dropped down into the city, swinging hard on its leash and cracking into the stone inner face of the wall. The line, as thick as two of his fingers together, snapped taut under its weight.