The Spider's War

  “But war’s not the same as death, is it?”

  “The one involves the other, Kit.”

  “I disagree. War, I think, only involves a particular manner of death. Everyone always dies. It’s the price of being born.”

  Marcus laughed. “All right. I don’t know anymore if you’re drunk or I am.”

  Kit scowled, his beard bunching at the cheeks, as he stared into his cup. “I can’t judge you,” he said, “but I’m fairly certain I am.” A fly buzzed past them, and then away. Cary began her song again, and Lak joined in more gracefully this time. “I am afraid, Marcus. I’ve come to love the world, and I feel we’re on the edge of losing it. We won’t, will we? We can’t have come all this way through so many fires only to lose, can we?”

  “If you knew this was going to fail, would it change anything you did?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “Either we’re about to end the dragons’ war for the last time, or go down to unremembered deaths in a world condemned to constant and unending war. However it comes out, what we’ve got to do is the same. So it doesn’t make any difference whether we win or lose. It’s the job.”

  Kit rubbed a hand over his forehead. There was more grey in his hair than Marcus thought of him having, and it caught the sunlight. “It may be wrong of me,” Kit said, his voice melancholy and warm, “but I do wish you’d just told me you were sure we’d win.”

  “You’d have known I was lying.”

  The Kingspire stood in the northern reaches of Camnipol, close enough to the Division that it seemed the great height of the tower and the depths of the pit were commenting on each other. Marcus walked through the streets and alleys surrounding it, Yardem at his side, considering the great tower from every angle. The thing had been built to impress more than as a means of defending against attack. Unless it had been built for something else.

  It didn’t look good.

  From the east, after ambling among the tombs and mausoleums of generations of the noble dead, they reached the wall separating the grounds of the Kingspire from the streets of the city, too long and too low to effectively man. From the south, where the compounds of the most favored of the high families stood shoulder to rose-scented shoulder, the gardens and houses, servants’ quarters and kitchens and stables looked more like a medium-size village than the palace of a king. To the west was the Division, to the north the city wall. Marcus found a narrow stone-paved square and sat at the base of a bronze statue. Pigeons cooed and trotted to him, hopeful of crumbs or corn.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Two hundred men, maybe?”

  “To take it or to hold it, sir?”

  “I was thinking hold it. Taking it… twice that.”

  “Plausible.”

  “Problem is, we’ve got you, me, a baroness, a banker, and a handful of actors. Hard to make that work for two hundred.”

  “Is,” Yardem said. And then, “Do have the Lord Regent.”

  “That’s Cithrin’s plan, but I was trying not to count on him,” Marcus said. “I have the feeling this will be the last time anyone will be able to put all the spiders in the same place at the same time. If they scatter after this, it’ll be the work of generations hunting them down. If it can be done. That’s not something I want to enter into without a fallback plan.”

  Yardem nodded. “Do you have a fallback plan?”

  “No.”

  “Do you expect to find one?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely. You?”

  “No, sir.”

  The puzzle of the thing was still shifting in Marcus’s mind, pieces of their conspiracy moving against each other, trying to find where one thing fit another. Geder Palliako hadn’t turned against them yet, and his visits to his compound were still rare enough they could pretend that he was coming for something other than the chance to moon over Cithrin. He hadn’t seen the dragon since their meeting in the forest, but Marcus had worked up enough pitch and sage to fill a brazier, and he thought he’d found a good place to put it. Clara Kalliam had started bringing more people into bits and pieces of a broader plan, aware that each new person who smelled smoke in the wind was another thousand chances for things to turn to shit. The foundation of the thing was all as stable as a drunkard, but it hadn’t fallen over yet. And the problems that bit at Marcus now weren’t the strategy, but the tactics.

  The priests were arriving now in pairs and clusters. Basrahip apparently kept a complete record of them all in his broad head, and, according to Geder, greeted each of them by name when they appeared. As more and more came, their simple density was going to make keeping the plot a secret difficult. Putting them all in the temple at the Kingspire’s top shouldn’t, he thought, be too hard. Keeping them there until Inys arrived might be more of a trick, but what had to be done had to be done. Those plans were made, and if the details were still being tapped into shape, even that didn’t bother him deeply.

  No, the splinter in his ass was all the things that they had to think wouldn’t be today’s problem. What Inys would do once he’d snuffed out the last of his brother. What Geder Palliako’s play would be once it was ended. Whether it was possible any longer to bring the scattered priesthood together and not have them each fall on the others with clubs and swords.

  The spiders were engines of chaos, after all, and they’d been generating schisms and apostasy for months already. If they all wanted to be reconciled, they might all keep their blades sheathed. If they were already past that, Cithrin might be blundering into a half dozen dramas she knew nothing about. The moment when four assassins all arrived at the same garden was only funny when it happened on a stage.

  And it wasn’t as if Marcus didn’t have some betrayals of his own to plan out.

  “The smith?” Marcus asked.

  Yardem shrugged and stood, as near to a yes as made no difference. Marcus sighed, rose, and turned his back to the Kingspire. Not carrying the poisoned sword left him feeling a little naked, but blending into the city was a better defense now than trying to cut his way through it. And he had his old blade at his side, in case trouble of the more usual kind arose. He made the attempt to fall into the flow of men and women in the streets and yards of the city, to be so much a part of the mood of Camnipol that it accepted him without noticing that it had done so. Two aging fighters on business of their own, and nothing more.

  The street life of Camnipol was a strange and disjointed thing, though. Hard to fit into. There was a brightness and energy all around. The beggars capering on the street corners and the women rushing past with cages of live chickens slung over their shoulders, the old men of half a dozen races sitting in the cafés with pipes pinched in their teeth. Everyone had an air almost of celebration, and all of it echoed like thumping a hollow tree. Camnipol knew it was in danger, and was bent almost double with the effort of pretending otherwise. Smaller banners of the goddess hung from windows and over doorways, bright red and white and stark black, and as loud as a coward claiming bravery.

  As they made their way to the southeast of the city, the stink of smoke slowly growing as they came near and the wind shifted, Marcus tried to imagine what it would have been like living through the dark years here. How many people had Palliako taken away to his little magistrate’s chamber to question? How many of those had come back? It was no surprise that the city was a tissue of false gaiety and desperation. None of them knew what was happening now, and no one had any idea what would happen next. For all that the girl selling cups of roasted nuts in the square knew, Geder Palliako would reign over Camnipol and Antea and the world under the spiders’ banner for the rest of her life. Or the Timzinae would come from the south and hang them all from their own windows. None of them guessed the goddess was false, or if they did they’d become expert at keeping the thought to themselves.

  The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.

  The smith’s yard belonged to a m
assive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. It sat near the city wall, where the smoke from the forges turned the air white and foul. When the servants announced them under the false names Geder Palliako had given them, the smith loomed up out of the depths of his shop. His arms were thicker than Yardem’s thighs and his skin stretched so much by the muscle that lines of pale skin made a lacework around the bronze of his scales. He shook their hands gently, like it required conscious effort not to break them.

  “Come back,” the Jasuru said. “I’ll show you what we have.”

  The smith’s yard went back farther than Marcus had expected, opening into a private courtyard with the forges off to one side. A pair of women were hauling out double handfuls of bright metal and arranging it on the paving stones. Marcus looked back into the shadows. All Pyre’s apprentices seemed to be women. The men, he assumed, had all been pressed into the army, and he wondered what would happen when they came back and tried to retake their places by the fires. The women stacking the weapons looked broad enough across the shoulder he wouldn’t have wanted to pick fights.

  “This is what the Lord Regent was asking after,” Pyre said. “We’ve got a half dozen of these ready to put on carts if the army had a need, and we can make more. Take time, though.”

  Marcus walked slowly around the metal. It was like a ballista, but built on a base that could shift and turn, tracking the vast body of a dragon through the sky. The bolts were light, but barbed as a fishhook, with a small pulley built into the shaft. The line that it carried out with it was finer than yarn and laid out to tug back on the bolt as little as possible, then tied to a braided cord. He imagined firing up into the dragon’s wings and belly and then trying to pull the line through enough to drag the great bastard out of the sky before it turned the weapon and everyone using it into slag and ashes. If he hadn’t seen the scars from it on Inys’s flanks, he’d have thought it wasn’t possible.

  “Six of them is all?” Marcus said.

  “All the rest went out,” the smith said. “They’re beautiful, but they aren’t fast work.”

  “Fair enough,” Marcus said.

  The smith crossed his arms and glanced nervously from Yardem to Marcus and back. “Should I put them on carts?”

  Marcus shook his head. Honnen Pyre was asking if the dragon was likely to attack the army. That was his fear: the Timzinae and the dragon joining forces to destroy Camnipol. If Marcus told him to have the things delivered to the Kingspire, what would he make of that? And what were the chances that he’d keep his speculation to himself? If the priesthood found there was a secret shipment of weapons designed to slaughter Inys being installed around their temple, would that tip Cithrin’s hand or reassure them?

  “Have them ready to move,” Marcus said. “We’ll send word where to take them when the time comes.”

  Pyre nodded sharply and motioned to his apprentices. Marcus and Yardem made their way back to the street. Their rooms were halfway across the city from here, and Marcus’s feet felt sore. When they crossed the oiled and arching wood of the Silver Bridge, Yardem turned toward the courtyard of a taproom there without having to ask Marcus whether he wanted to stop.

  The building was three levels tall, each narrower than the one below, with benches and tables on each. The walls were an unlikely yellow that caught the sunlight and made the whole place seem more cheerful. Beyond, the Division gaped, a canyon that was also a city. A Firstblood boy with black skin and hair brought them cider and took their coin. It was decent enough drink, but the pleasure of just sitting still was better than the best alcohol. At least for the time being.

  “We’re going to need to a way to move through the Kingspire without drawing notice.”

  “There are servants there,” Yardem said.

  “We can’t use them. The more people we involve, the more likely someone’s going to step wrong.”

  “I meant we could hire on,” Yardem said.

  “Oh,” Marcus said. “Yes, there’s that.”

  “Only?”

  “It’s nothing. Just sits wrong to be a servant in Geder Palliako’s house.”

  “Could see it as playing the role,” the Tralgu said.

  “I’m too old to start worrying about dignity. You think Cary and the other players will be able to pass too?”

  “Imagine so,” Yardem said. “They’ve done worse before now. But I can’t see them crewing the weapons to kill a dragon.”

  “They won’t need to kill him. We just have to hold him in place until the locals can join the fray. This whole thing would be simpler if we could actually bring Karol Dannien into it on our side. There’s a perfectly capable army not a full day’s ride from here, and I can’t put it to use.”

  “Life’s rich irony, sir.”

  Philosophically, Marcus spat. “It strike you as odd that we’re looking to bring about peace in the world by killing a great bunch of people?”

  “Think the peace part’s supposed to come after, sir.”

  “That’s always the story. Ten more, a hundred more, a thousand more corpses, and we’ll be free.”

  On the street, someone shouted. Another voice shouted back, and the people paused, shifting to the side to let a carriage ride past with the banner of the goddess jouncing at its side. It clattered onto the Silver Bridge and out across the abyss.

  “More priests arriving,” Yardem said.

  “Ah,” Marcus replied, dryly, “I guess that means we’re doing well.”

  Geder

  When it was over, Geder decided for the hundredth time. When Basrahip and the other priests were burned bones and ashes, then he’d kiss Cithrin.

  It would be a moment of shared joy, after all. And it wasn’t as if she’d never kissed him before. They’d done much more. And there wouldn’t be a better time to bring her back to him. He’d have proven himself. He’d have saved the world. He’d be a hero. And in the wake of that, he would put his arm around her waist and pull her close to him, and…

  It was so strange knowing she was close. That he could, if he chose, go to her anytime he wanted to, and there she would be. All his day’s work took on the feeling of dreams. He attended the wedding of Perrien Veren and Sanna Daskellin, sitting on a chair set aside for his own honor while the priest intoned a version of the rites, but Cithrin was in the city. He sat the long hours of the grand audience, listening to complaint and petition while it was really Basrahip that stood in judgment, and the hours didn’t bother him because he was borne up by his secret. And the promise of the time very soon when he’d proved himself to her.

  Even apart from Cithrin’s presence, there were other little and unexpected joys. Basrahip, for example. From the moment he’d delivered his message, Geder had made a point of avoiding the great priest as much as he could. It had begun simply enough as an effort to keep his newfound secrets secret. But with every meeting he cut short, with every meal he ate away from the great bastard’s company, Geder saw something more than curiosity rising in the priest. There was a need there, a longing to know what it was that had been revealed to Geder. For the first time, Geder had power over the priest. It wasn’t Basrahip’s world any longer. His connection to his imaginary goddess had been undermined, and in a way that put him at Geder’s feet for once. And Geder’s mind was clear now. Clear and cool as river water. He’d hardly had any more moments of killing rage like the one in the Great Bear, and the few he’d had were justified.

  There was a pleasure, he thought, that came from being outside a group. Looking back, he saw that he’d always really been like that. Before his journey to the Sinir Kushku, he’d been excluded from the charmed circle of Alan Klin and Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. It had ached for him only because he’d wanted so badly to be accepted, not because belonging gave him anything worth having. The moments of authentic pleasure he’d had in his life had all come from being apart. Reading alone in Vanai, for instance. Or the dark days after Dawson Kalliam’s insurrection, hiding with Aster and Cithrin, being protected by her
friends who—through that—became his own. He’d always been at his best when he was his own man. Funny that it had taken him so long to understand it. He had been—still was—the Lord Regent of the greatest empire in the world. His commands, life and death. And what made him happiest in the whole time he could remember was that Cithrin was here, and Cary and Hornet and Mikel. Jorey’s mother and the bank’s mercenaries. And among them, with them, him. It was as if Lord Regent Geder Palliako had ceased to be, and he was only playing the part now.

  His real friends were with him at last, and he hadn’t even known how much he’d missed them until they appeared.

  Marcus Wester, dressed in the bright tunic of a servant, walked across the kingdom, stepping carefully over the dragon’s road between Kavinpol and Camnipol, then looking to the south and the markers of Jorey Kalliam and Canl Daskellin and the approaching Timzinae army. The man’s expression was a strange combination of amusement and despair. Geder found himself trying to imitate it. The Tralgu—Yardem Hane—stood with his feet in the blue glass beads of the northern sea, his arms crossed before him. The news of Kavinpol’s fall hung in the air between them like smoke.

  “That’s going to make things harder,” Wester said, then turned to Geder. “We’re sure about the numbers?”

  “No,” Geder said. “We aren’t sure about anything. But it’s what Daskellin wrote, and I don’t have a better source.”

  Wester grunted. “All right. The next question’s whether Karol Dannien’s going to turn east to join them or keep pressing north.”

  “North,” Yardem said.

  “That’s what I figure too.”

  “Is that bad?” Geder asked.