The Spider's War

  It was to him the messenger addressed himself. “I have a message from the Basrahip. He said I should invoke the third oath.”

  The scarred priest’s thick black eyebrows rose and his eyes narrowed.

  “What do you know of the third oath, traveler?”

  “Nothing except that I was supposed to invoke it. And he said you’d hear it in my voice if I told you true. Figure as I have, so you know I’m not farting out my mouth here.”

  “What is his command?”

  “You’re all to come to Camnipol now. Like pack-some-water-and-let’s-be-off now. The goddess is making her voice known direct in the temple there, and you’re all meant to be present when it happens. I’m to guide you back.”

  The scarred priest flushed, his eyes brightening like a babe seeing a sweet gum. “I will gather our elders to join you—”

  “Everyone. Lord Regent was very particular on that. All those touched with the power of the goddess’ve got to be there. It’s what he said.” The scarred priest nodded, though some struggle was clear in his eyes. The messenger leaned forward and tapped him once on the shoulder. “Everyone.”

  “I will bring all of the faithful together. In the morning, we will take leave with you.”

  What’s wrong with right now? the messenger thought, but didn’t say. “Good enough, if it’s all you’ve got.”

  “Will you take rest with us?” the priest asked, gesturing to the vast iron gate that stood open behind him.

  “I’ll camp here,” the messenger said. “Not much one for being cooped up.”

  “As you prefer.”

  That night, the messenger slept in the lee of one of the statues, looking up at the vast carved dragon that covered them all. The best part of the journey was over. Now it was all going to be sheepdogging the priests back the way he’d already come. He’d do it, but he wouldn’t like it. You didn’t become the fastest tracker in the empire by enjoying the company of people.

  Porte Oliva in the summer fell on Kurrik’s shoulders like a smothering blanket. It wasn’t the heat. He’d grown up in the Sinir Kushku. It was the steam-thick air and the stink of the sea and the unbearable smugness of his alleged brother Vicarian Kalliam. Of the three, the last was worst.

  “The tide goes out before nightfall,” Vicarian said. “If we aren’t at the docks, we’ll miss the launch.”

  “Thank you, brother,” Kurrik said. “I intend to return in time, and I will be vigilant.”

  He ducked out the door and down the hall of the cathedral toward the square and the sun before Vicarian could find another way to say If you’re not right, you’ll be wrong.

  The streets of the city were thick with people. Claiming the city had cut the number of streets and houses almost in half, but it hadn’t killed nearly half the people. Now they lived stacked one atop the other, two and three families in rooms that had before housed only one. Buildings were rising up over the ashes of the battle, but small ones. Shanties that might one day grow to dignity but had none now.

  Vicarian, who claimed to have great knowledge of the world because he’d lived so many years in decadence and lie, didn’t see how the locals scattered before them. They were frightened even now of the power of the goddess, and Kurrik knew it. And he sensed the same fear—the same taint—in Vicarian’s yammers of Cleymant and Addadus. He was careful to couch all his words such that there was no essential lie, but Kurrik sensed it lurking at the back of all their conversations. It had been an error to believe that men new to the priesthood would comprehend what they had been given. Without the lessons learned from boyhood, the habit of deception and lie ran too deep. Vicarian and all the new priests like him were flawed at the base.

  And now it seemed Kurrik might not have to be the one to resolve the matter after all.

  Shandor Paan lived in a shed near the waterfront. He was a thin man, hunched at the shoulder and slow of speech. His loyalty to the goddess was based in fear more than faith, but it would do. If it had to. Their meeting place was a dark corner in what was called the salt quarter where they could speak without being seen, and Kurrik found the man waiting for him there.

  “You took my message?” Kurrik said.

  “I did. I did,” Shandor said. “How long are you gone for?”

  “I do not know. The Basrahip called us, and so we go. I believe he has seen the same flaw that I have. If so, we may not need to go forward.”

  “That’s good,” Shandor lied. Of course he did. His wish now was not the elevation of the goddess but of Shandor Paan. It pained Kurrik to see men so lost to lies that they forgot they were telling them, but there was no denying that Shandor was one such.

  “If it is not that,” Kurrik said, “I will approach the Basrahip myself, so that when we move forward with the correction of our error, it will be with his blessing.”

  And if it turns out that the Basrahip has also fallen into error, we will find another, purer way to remake the temple in her image, free of the corruption of the fallen world. He could already imagine taking the children of Porte Oliva into a temple of his own, conducted as they had the first temple, the true temple, before they’d been led out to the world and astray.

  “So we’ll still kill the other one?” Shandor said, hope lighting his eyes. It took Kurrik a moment to understand what he was saying.

  “If the need is still there, the need is still there. I will know more when I return.”

  “Yeah. It’s only…” Shandor ducked his head like a bird.

  “Only what?”

  “What if the city rises up with you gone, eh? What if those letters that keep coming down from Carse make people think they can go back?”

  “They will never go back,” Kurrik said. “The goddess is here whether you feel her presence or not, and once you have been touched by her grace, you will never fall to error.”

  “But… the other one… he’s in error, yeah? So sometimes…”

  Kurrik’s blood surged with impatience and anger. Having the city all around him was like living in a pile of rotting meat. The ignorance and the lies were worked into the skin of the place, and it would never, never be wholly clean. That was why men like Vicarian and Shandor should never be granted her gifts.

  “It won’t fall,” Kurrik said. “Listen to my voice. Porte Oliva will be loyal to the goddess forever. The fighting here is over unless I am the one who brings it.”

  The priesthood of the goddess left Asinport under a flowered archway with the local children singing the praises of the goddess in chorus. Girls in summer gowns with ivy braided into their hair strewed light-pink petals along the jade road before them. They were seven men in robes riding the best horses the city could offer. A train of servants followed, and a cart draped by the blood-red banner whose cousin hung above the temple.

  Where the dragon’s road leading south widened, Sir Raillien Morn had set up a little stage. He stood on it now. He’d oiled his scales, and they glowed like metal in the morning sun. The men and women of court were all of lower families. Most were Firstblood, though there were a few of his own family present as well. The merchants present were more varied. Kurtadam with formal beads tied on their pelts. A pair of Cinnae men standing with the goddess and the empire in defiance of the banker girl who, they said, soiled the name of their race. There had been a Timzinae quarter in the city once, though of course none of it remained now. The lowborn who crowded the road were of any number of races, all equally unbathed and uneducated. They had come for the spectacle and the distraction, as if honor were a theater piece.

  The priests paused before him. Sir Raillien lifted his hand to them in formal greeting.

  “Since the coming of the goddess to Asinport,” he declared, “we have known nothing but peace and prosperity. While the world itself has shaken and struggled, our city has known only blessings and joy. This we credit, as is right, to our newest and best-beloved citizens. We wish you speed in your journey and safety on the road that you will return to us soon and with th
e further blessings of her truth. In her honor and in yours, I pledge a week of feast and celebration beginning upon whichever day you return to us.”

  The eldest priest rode forward. When he answered, his voice carried as loud as if he’d held a speaker’s trumpet, and Sir Raillien felt himself washed by the words.

  “You do yourself honor by this,” the priest said. “And you will not be forgotten by us or by her. We leave only briefly and look forward to our return to this, our right and proper home. Asinport is blessed by the Righteous Servant, and taken into her protection now and forever.”

  The crowd cheered and waved small paper banners, red and pale and black. Sir Raillien took to horse, riding south with the priests. Both sides of the road were thronged. Every man, woman, and child in the city or the lands nearby had come out to watch.

  A mile past the city’s southern gate, they came to the place where the prisoners had been executed. The bodies were nailed to poles set in the earth. Apart from a few scraps of white, the leaflets the dead men and women had been found with couldn’t be seen sticking out from between their rotting lips. But Sir Raillien knew they were there, as did the priests. And everyone else as well.

  Morn stopped there among the righteously punished and the dead. The priests and their train rode on.

  Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said, leaning on his spear like it was a walking stick.

  “That’s truth,” Jerrim said, then chuckled. “Strange not hearing the truth is truth. Funny, that.”

  Kavinpol stood in the fragrant sun of the summer evening, the guard looking down both sides of the wall. On one, the city streets slow in the heat. On the other, the traffic along the road and the river docks. Carts filled with early harvest crop, and lambs and pigs carried in carts or led on ropes, heading for the slaughterhouses and the butchers and the fires and the tables. Flatboats waited at the water gate where a team of men like Coppin and Jerrim took the tax, let in who could pay, negotiated with who couldn’t. Sometimes the rules bent, sometimes they didn’t. A farmer who’d brought Timzinae slaves, for instance, might be looked at more carefully than one who’d brought real Firstblood help. Having the roaches inside the gates at all made some people jumpy, and for a reason.

  Twice in the last week, the forces in the south had come looking for resupply and cunning men. Daskellin’s once, Kalliam’s the other time. Seeing what the roach army was doing had sobered more men than Coppin and Jerrim. Lost legs and fingers and eyes. Men half-gone from fever. Lady Flor had set aside her personal ballroom and filled it with cots for the injured and the dying. They said you could smell the pus two streets away. Others had come down from Sevenpol and Anninfort. Boys and women now bearing whatever weapons they could scrounge, coming to defend the empire.

  Coppin, leaning on his spear, clumped along the wall, and Jerrim followed after. Coppin had lost three toes off his left foot to an axe when he was ten. His arm was good enough to pitch spears down the wall if it came to it, or else he’d have been on the road with the others. Jerrim had fits, sometimes three a week, and the captain of the guard said he’d be more trouble than he was worth in the fighting. It didn’t matter. They had their part, and that was enough. They manned the walls, they kept the peace, they showed the roaches and traitors that Kavinpol had teeth enough to bite if it had to. And they waited for the war to get done with. The priests came along every day or two and gave a talk about it, and they always left feeling better after. It didn’t matter how things looked. It mattered how things were. Truth would carry them through.

  And the truth was that the goddess was alive in the world. No city that had her temple had ever fallen. Even if one was occupied for a time, that wasn’t the same as fallen. The roaches hated her because they were made by the dragons to seem like they were human, but they were really the servants of the lie. It didn’t count when you killed them.

  Coppin stumbled and Jerrim steadied him. A voice called from behind: Coppin’s name, then Jerrim’s. Drea was climbing up the rope ladder to the wall’s top, a basket bouncing against her hip. She was a small woman, brown as a nut with bright eyes and a gap in her teeth when she smiled, and everyone know that she and Jerrim were in love except for her and Jerrim. Coppin, for instance, didn’t have doubts.

  “Brought some bread,” she said when she reached them, holding out the basket. “Had extra.”

  “Thank you,” Jerrim said, taking it from her carefully so that their hands brushed each other’s.

  “You can bring me back the basket later,” she said.

  “I will.”

  She smiled, nodded once to Coppin like she was agreeing that yes, he was there too, and went back down the ladder. Jerrim watched her go with a longing that was almost palpable. Coppin took the basket and opened it. The bread was fresh anyway. So that was good.

  “She’s what we do this for,” he said around a mouthful of the stuff.

  “What?” Jerrim said.

  “This,” Coppin said, and held up the spear. “Being guard. Risking our lives to protect people like her. The whole city of them. Truth is, I’ve got nothing against the roaches as roaches go. Until they crossed the Severed Throne, I didn’t care about them one way or the other.”

  “Me too.”

  “If they all just went back where they came from and didn’t come back, I wouldn’t chase after them. Would you?”

  “Not me,” Jerrim said. “Heard the other army’s left Nus heading this way.”

  “They’ve been saying that for weeks. It hasn’t been true yet.”

  “But what if it is?”

  “We’ll kick ’em in the nuts and send ’em to work the farms, same as we always do,” Coppin said. It was what he always said, and Jerrim gave his usual chuckle in reply. Both the bravado and the appreciation of it felt different this evening, though. Thinner somehow. It reminded Coppin of the feeling at the back of his throat before he got sick. Not the actual illness so much as the announcement that something unpleasant was coming. It wasn’t in his throat, though. The whole city felt like that. Maybe the world.

  “Think they’ll come this far?” Jerrim asked.

  “Elassae they or Sarakal they?”

  “I meant Sarakal, but either, I guess.”

  “Maybe. Yeah, probably before the end of summer. It won’t matter, though. They’re roaches. We’re destined to win.”

  “Yeah.”

  They reached the station house, a room the size of a toolshed bound to the inner face of the wall. Arrows and bolts were stacked there in cylinders of twenty each. Hand axes for cutting lines if an enemy tried to climb. Long spears with hooks at the bases of the blades for pushing back ladders. The pair looked at it all for longer than they usually did.

  “Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said again.

  “Yeah.”

  Marcus

  I believe that history is a listing of atrocities and horror,” Kit said, gesturing widely with a cup of wine, “not because we are evil, but because history is itself a kind of performance. And we are fascinated by those events and characters which are most unlike our essential selves.”

  “Wait,” Marcus said. “Just wait. You’re saying… are you saying that the whole blood-drenched history of the world—war after murder after war—says something good about humanity?”

  Cary’s voice came from outside, lifted in a simple melody. Lak’s rougher, less practiced notes rose up around them to an odd but pleasant effect. The smell of nearby coffee and distant stables harmonized as well. Like a single green meadow in the ash fields after a forest fire, Palliako’s estate had become a small place of calm in a vast and implacable chaos.

  The peace was an illusion created in the gap between understanding that trouble was coming and the appearance of banners on the horizon. Anytime the approaching enemy arrived even an hour later than expected, there was a limn of hope that maybe something unlooked for but not unwelcome had happened. Maybe this time the storm would turn aside. That the hope was doomed didn’t make
it less precious.

  “The truth of history, I can’t speak to, but the version we tell? I think yes,” Kit said. “I can’t see how any history could be complete and accurate. To be told at all, it must be simplified, and every simplification means something, yes? What we leave in, what we leave out, and how we choose tells, I suggest, a great deal about the teller.”

  “I suggest you’re drunk,” Marcus said, laughing.

  “It seems to me that what makes us human is our ability to create a dream and live within it. History, I think, is storytelling that begins, ‘Here is a thing that actually happened,’ but after you’ve said that, you’re constrained by all the same rules of technique and structure that a playwright or a poet labors under. Which was why I said that history itself is a kind of performance. Consider.” The actor held up a finger. “Why do you suppose there are no plays about good people being kind to each other? Thoughtful lovers who, in the face of adversity or misunderstanding, have a conversation between them?”

  “Because they’d be terrible stories,” Marcus said, laughing.

  “I agree,” Kit said, “and why is that?”

  “Because nothing would ever happen.”

  “It would, though. People would be thoughtful and kind and gentle and resolve their hurts and confusions with consideration and love. Those are things. They happen. And they seem like nothing. Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as something happening, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”

  “That’s going to be a hard apple to sell all the men and women who’ve died hard in the last few years,” Marcus said. “Seems more likely to me that violence and strife catch the attention because ignoring them leads you down a short road. I’ve walked a lot of battlefields that had boys who’d have lived another few decades watering them. I’ve made my gold working at war and death, and I haven’t often gone hungry.”