“You bring them here,” Geder said, “and bring them quickly, and I’ll see all of you reconciled forever.”
And that’s true, he thought. He wasn’t lying. Because there’s no room for dissent in the grave.
Marcus
Rain came in the north starting on their second day. Mornings were pleasant enough apart from the damp of the day before, but shortly after midday the few white puffs of cloud coalesced and joined together into great angry pillars with grey veils at the bases. They crept across the Antean landscape like giants, unaware of humanity and its little wars. Marcus envied the storms a little. There was a great deal about humanity he’d prefer not to be aware of himself.
When the hard grey clouds passed over them, Marcus and Yardem plucked up their hoods and rode on. The little mules that carried them were as unimpressed by the wet as they were by everything else. If the downpour became too great, they took what shelter they could or, if there was none, stopped where they were and suffered until it abated. By sundown, the cloud giants began to decay into great swaths of red and gold and peach that faded to ash as the light failed, and the midnight sky was clear for the stars.
The going was slow. They kept off roads and tracks, making their own trail as they went. Solitude itself was the goal, and anywhere they could find it would do. Only it had to be complete. If it worked—and there was every chance it might not—being observed at it risked everything. The stakes justified the effort.
Marcus called the halt at the ruins of a small fort by a clearing in the heart of the wood. The tumbled stones showed no sign of human use. Thick moss hung on the tie-posts. A black mat of rotten leaves choked the half-tumbled fire stand. The clearing was a little narrower than the courtyard of a small inn, and showed the marks of a lightning-struck fire a year or two old. New trees thinner than fingers were already competing to choke the grasses with shade again. Like all places of light and openness, this one was temporary.
The only tracks were of deer and rabbit, wolf and bear. No horses and no humans and no dogs. Even poachers and huntsmen had left this place behind. Whoever had built the fort and whatever danger they’d built it against were forgotten. The only exceptional thing they found in the search before making camp was a bronze statue of a Jasuru woman that had been half engulfed by the trunk of an ash. Marcus stopped there for a moment, trying to make out the features on the statue’s face. Whether it had been martial or serene, it was a tree now. Marcus moved on.
The second meeting at Palliako’s compound had, for Marcus, been the test of Cithrin’s scheme. Not whether it would work. Only God knew that, and that was the same as saying no one. No, the second meeting was the proof of whether Cithrin and Kit and Geder’s father had managed to sway the Lord Regent into forsaking his own reign out of spite. As it happened, the little man had arrived on time and without a regiment of guards to haul them all to the gaol or throw them down Camnipol’s throat. More than that, Geder Palliako had seemed pleased. Almost excited. Marcus couldn’t begin to guess what sludge was flowing behind that man’s eyes, but Cithrin’s take on him seemed solid. His anger had turned toward the priests, and if it fixed there long enough for the rest of the plan to play out… Well, that was more than Marcus would have hoped for.
Geder had listened to the schemes that might slow down the invasion and open corridors to let the wide-scattered priests come home with a seriousness and intelligence that were more than a little surprising. When Marcus laid out his own plan for the trap, there’d been a spark in Geder’s eyes. He’d even called for paper and pen and written out letters of passage for Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane. The pages, signed with Palliako’s private chop, were still folded in an envelope of oiled parchment sealed with wax in Marcus’s little mule’s saddle pack. If they were stopped by soldiers and questioned, they had the Lord Regent’s protection. It wasn’t a shield he’d try against an arrow, but it was more than nothing.
He’d expected nothing. Or worse than that.
They’d sent out a bird for Northcoast the next morning. Clara Kalliam was a past master of sneaking messages to Paerin Clark in Carse. Her couriers were fast and well practiced. Lehrer Palliako even thought he might know a cunning man who could be put upon to drive the message through his peculiar talents. It didn’t matter what channel the word went by, only that it arrived.
There was more than enough dead wood under the canopy of trees, and Marcus had a small fire crackling by the time Yardem emerged from the wood with the corpse of a rabbit he’d hunted down for their dinner. Marcus cleaned and dressed the animal and set it on a thin, improvised spit. The smell of roasting meat was pleasant and a little melancholy too. Until today, the animal whose body was crisping on a stake might never have seen anything more human than these ruins, and tonight, it had learned—however briefly—what humanity was.
That wasn’t fair. Not really. The world was filled with people who did things more noble than killing in order to eat. Artisans who fashioned tools of great utility and beauty. Poets who made songs that honored the living and the dead, or only made people laugh for a while. Brewers and bakers and all the puppeteers from the streets of Porte Oliva. Some of them probably didn’t even eat meat. It was just Marcus and Yardem weren’t among that number, and the rabbit whose haunch he carved had had the ill fortune to run into them.
“Ever think about what we look like to the dragons?” Marcus asked. “Well, the one, I mean. Isn’t like there’s a wide choice of dragons to compare among.”
“Sometimes, sir.”
Marcus bit into the rabbit. The flesh was a little gamy, but after a long day of nothing but dried fruit, nuts, and some twice-baked bread, it was decent enough. That or else carrying the poisoned sword had numbed his tongue past the point of knowing good from bad. Yardem was eating it too, though. It couldn’t have been that wretched.
“Draw any conclusions?”
Yardem flicked his ears thoughtfully, the rings jingling. “Hard to say. Inys isn’t human. I am. It’s a wide gulf to cross.”
“You think that? I don’t know. He’s seemed fairly explicable to me, one way and another. Lonesome, self-indulgent, convinced that he’s a monstrosity and also the only hope for the world. Well, his version of the world, anyway.”
“Hard to say how much is there and how much we’re putting there.”
“Meaning you still think I’m using the great bastard as a mirror.”
“Wouldn’t say so, sir.”
Marcus popped open a waterskin and took a long, tepid drink. They’d want to find a spring tomorrow if the dragon hadn’t arrived. “So what would you say?”
Yardem was quiet for longer than Marcus had expected. He’d almost thought the Tralgu wasn’t going to reply at all when he finally spoke. “We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What we would have to feel to do what they have done. If we can’t put ourselves into that place, then we can only guess.”
“That’s not only dragons. That’s anyone.”
“It is.”
“Palliako and Inys would get along if they didn’t hate each other.”
“If you say so,” Yardem said so mildly that Marcus looked at him again to see if it was mockery. Yardem’s expression was so polite, Marcus laughed. He handed his friend the waterskin. They waited.
Inys appeared in the late morning, four days later. He began as a thin line of black high in the western sky, easy to overlook. Then he was a hawk riding the high air, only with something odd about the shape of his wings. Marcus could imagine people on the roads looking up at the wide blue-and-white expanse and never seeing the predator in it, and wondered whether the rabbits he’d been eating had noticed Yardem.
When the dragon descended, he came down fast, folding his wings and dropping toward them like a stone. Marcus felt a pang of unease shift in his chest—would Inys be able to stop in time? Had he chosen this particular moment to die suddenly of whatever the hell killed dragons?—before the great wings opened. T
hey caught the air with a sound like a tree snapping in half or a vast canvas sail bellying suddenly out in a high wind. The wings themselves were ragged. Bits of blue shone through here and there where the scars of Porte Oliva would never entirely heal. The fall slowed, and as he came nearer the earth, Inys flapped the wide, ruined wings to slow himself further. It was like storm wind aimed straight down. The boughs of the trees nodded with it until it seemed like the forest itself was bowing to the fallen king of the world.
When Inys’s claws sank to touch the grass of the meadow, it was with the lightness and grace of a dancer. The dragon lifted his wings out again, stretching them, then folded them in against the shining scales of his body and stood still as stone for a moment. A smell like burning pitch and fortified wine filled the air and left the birds silent. The wilderness might ignore the presence of two men, but a dragon set the world on its best behavior. Every sane animal in the wood was still and quiet and hoping against hope not to be noticed. And so, it being the job, Marcus strode forth.
Inys turned his head, considering him with a wide, dark eye, then hunkered down, crushing the young trees of the meadow with his belly or ripping them with the casual motion of his tail.
“Marcus Stormcrow,” Inys said, his voice a deep rumble that seemed to come up from the ground as much as the beast’s vast throat. “You sent for me, and I, like your servant, have come. Do not insult me again.”
Well, God smiled, Marcus thought. Baby’s in a sulk.
“Thank you for this,” he said aloud. “I’d have come the full way myself, but there may not be time. And the roads you travel have fewer enemies on them than the ones I have to hold to.”
Inys grunted. His massive eye blinked. Marcus took it as permission to go on.
“We’re gathering all the priests together in a place they feel safe, and then we’re killing them all. But for it to work we need to keep the number of people who know what we’re up to low, the trap we kill them with simple and effective. That’s why we need you.”
“Go on,” Inys said and laid his head on the turf like a child bored by their father’s lecturing.
“They moved the temple to the top of the Kingspire after some rioting and insurrection a few years back. That’s where we’re bringing them.”
“Kingspire?”
“Tower in the north of the city. Only one like it, and it has the banner of the goddess hanging out of the temple proper like a dog’s tongue. It’ll be hard to overlook. You’ll have to be near enough by we can get you the signal but not so close you’ll be seen. We’ll bar the door so they can’t get out and run like hell for the bottom. You come in, burn them all to the bones and the spiders with them, and they’re through.”
“The war ended,” Inys said. “After so long. And at such cost.”
“It’s got some holes in it,” Marcus said. “There’s at least one army, possibly two, headed in the general direction of Camnipol, which might make bringing them all in one place difficult. The priests are moving in pairs and small groups. They’ll go quicker than a fighting force, and we’re doing what we can to speed them up and slow the other down, but—”
“My brothers gone. My people turned to ash. Our perches drowned and lost forever. This is the fruit that war brings forth.”
Yardem flicked his ear, scratched his arm, and looked back at Marcus. No help there. “Yes,” Marcus said, guessing at what the dragon wanted to hear. “It’s rough. But it’s almost over. And look at all you did.”
“I killed them all,” Inys said. “I drowned the city and sent my allies and friends… my love… to death while I hid in darkness. Like a coward. Ah, Erex, what have I done?”
“And you’re striking the last blow,” Marcus said. “You’re the one who made it to the end, where you can crush Morade’s invention for the last time.” Inys sighed. Marcus bit back a shout and tried again. “And think of the other things you’ve managed. You carried the secrets of the spiders and what they are and how to defeat them when the world had lost all knowledge of them. That isn’t nothing. And the Timzinae. You made a race of warriors who right now are—”
The dragon roared in anguish, thrashing his massive tail into the trees and stripping away the bark with his violence. His claws ripped into the ground, clenched in what looked like pain. Something’s wrong with him. Marcus thought. He’s wounded.
“I did not,” Inys sobbed. “I did not.”
Marcus waited a long moment as the dragon shook his head and bared his teeth, but no more words came out. “Didn’t what?”
“Asteril, my brother, made the Timzinae. They are his children. When I claimed them, it was a lie. This is what I am. What I am reduced to. Dishonoring myself to court the approval of slaves.”
“No one cares,” Marcus said, his voice sharp. “None of us ever thinks about which dragon made which race. It’s not a thing that matters, unlike the chance to kill the priests that’re tearing the world apart. That matters. So why don’t we come back to it?”
Inys reared back like the words had stung him. Violence filled the dragon’s dark eyes, bare as a taproom drunk about to take a swing. Marcus fought the impulse to take a step back. Instinct told him that any show of weakness now was the same as death. Fumes leaked from between Inys’s scaled lips, poisoning the air with the threat of fire. In his peripheral vision, Yardem had gone very still. If there was a way to get between the dragon’s shoulders—someplace where his head couldn’t reach—and find a break in his scales before he flew up into the clouds or rolled on his back and crushed any attackers…
Inys’s roar filled the world. There wasn’t room for the noise and thought both. The trees shuddered, their leaves flickering pale undersides like a wind was passing through them. Marcus scratched his nose, pretending that his heart wasn’t ticking over in his chest fast as a stone rolling down a mountain. The dragon bared teeth as long and cruel as knives. Then visibly deflated.
For a moment, they were all silent, and the forest too. Somewhere to Marcus’s right, a particularly stupid bird sang out, as if its small, bright trill could answer the dragon. Stupid or brave. Or both.
“I will do as you ask, Stormcrow,” Inys said. “Bring me my brother’s work, and I will end it, scatter its ashes, and bury the grievance between us forever. When the time is right, light a torch of sage and pitch like the funeral pyres of emperors, and I will come. There will be a kind of honor in that.”
“All right,” Marcus said. “It is going to be important that no one notices there’s a dragon in the vicinity, though. You can’t be near the city. Will a torch be enough to—”
“Do not question my ability again. I am not a child fresh from his first kill.”
“Pitch and sage then,” Marcus said.
“And once we have finished, then the work will begin. I have smelled remnants of a workroom far in the south. Little more than a hint of old herb and vivarium, but it will be a start. Yes.”
Inys turned, his head snaking up and to the north. There wasn’t anyplace on his back a swordsman could be that head couldn’t reach. But maybe if there was a way to grab on to the back of the neck itself… Inys launched himself into the sky with no word of farewell. The scarred wings commanded the air, graceful and strong and the image of power. The last dragon rose toward the sun until he was smaller than a sparrow. Marcus lost him in the light.
“Could have gone worse,” Marcus said.
“Could.”
“That workroom bit at the end was a little disturbing, though.”
“Was.”
Marcus walked to their little camp and started to pack it away. “I believe our great scaly friend up there is still thinking about repopulating the world in his image and keeping us as pack animals and pets.”
“Problem for another day, sir.”
“Maybe,” Marcus said. He tied the leather thongs of his pack and swung it over the shoulder that didn’t have the sword on it. The meadow looked like a badly tilled field: ripped grass and churned earth
. Long, dark wounds marked where Inys’s claws had torn the forest, and the smell of sap from the ruined trees competed with the lingering stink of dragon’s breath. He’d come and had a short conversation, and the place would bear the scars of it for a century. Maybe more.
“Those big toys we had to leave in Birancour?” Marcus said. “The ones Jorey used to knock our scaly friend there down in Porte Oliva?”
“Yes, sir?”
“We should see if Palliako’s got any more of them.”
Entr’acte: The World
The summer sun punished the Keshet, but the messenger ran on. The green of Antea and Sarakal were behind him, the trailing mountains on the north of Elassae as well. He’d moved fast, traveling by night as well as day, avoiding the well-trodden paths and dragon’s roads. Where he could buy or steal horses, he did, riding them until their exhaustion left them of no use, then setting them free. It was not a journey but a sprint that stretched out behind and before. The Lord Regent and the high priest had chosen him for the task because he was the best tracker in the kingdom, and of all the journeys in this nightmare summer, this would be hardest.
In the sand-colored hills of the Sinir Kushku, he had to slow. Consult maps and diagrams that he carried in his pack. Here were the fallen pillars, here the hidden spring that only the men who’d lived here knew. He found the mountain where men who looked to be the Basrahip’s cousins led sheep across barren-looking ridges. He found the chieftain and said the words he’d been told to say.
The gate to the temple towered as high as the western gate in Camnipol. A machinery of gigantic gears rumbled and clanked as it opened. Banners like the one hanging from the Kingspire adorned the walls, though in all the wrong colors. Ruined statues stood in audience or else as guard, worn to nothing by wind and time. Words stood in iron, each letter as tall as the messenger. KHINIR KICGNAM BAT. He didn’t know what they meant. The priests who came out wore darker robes than the ones in Camnipol, belted with chains. The messenger rubbed his chin and nodded to them as they came close. The lead one was a tall, thin man with dark eyes and a scar on one cheek like someone had laid him open with a rock at some point and it hadn’t healed quite right.