The Spider's War

  Only no, they didn’t. The sound he heard complicating his steps came from above. He paused, his hands stretching wide and then tightening into fists. Footsteps retreating above him. The feral grin stretched his lips wider, and Marcus let himself run. Up the flight to a hall with half a dozen corridors converging on it. The sound was louder here. There was labored breath as well. He was close. A narrow window looked out to the southwest, offering a view of the grounds, the gaol, the Division, the sprawling city. But not a dragon. Not yet. Marcus closed his eyes, listening. The footsteps and breathing grew a degree quieter as he turned slowly, but he found which of the hallways it came from. He ran again with the long loping stride of a scout and a soldier.

  The chamber at the hallway’s end was low-ceilinged and wide. Carved wooden tables stood discreetly against the walls under portraits of kings long dead. A thin white carpet covered the floor like fallen paper, and the spill of light from the shuttered window drew bright lines across it. The priest labored his way across it toward a half-open door and a fresh flight of stairs.

  “Hey!” Marcus shouted as he drew the poisoned sword.

  The priest turned. He was a large, broad man with flushed face and rage in his eyes. Marcus had known others like him, naturally strong even if he didn’t train. It wasn’t the only hint of Yemmu blood in the man’s history. The shape of his jaw had a bit of it too. Marcus drew the poisoned sword, holding it in a double-handed grip. He saw Basrahip understand what it was, and what it meant.

  The priest held a bright steel blade in his right fist like it was a stick. Not much technique, Marcus guessed, but plenty enough power. In case it was easy, Marcus lunged, his blade cutting fast and low.

  The priest parried him. A little technique, then. That was a shame.

  The priest’s breath was fast and hard. It might have been the exertion of the run or mind-blanking rage. Basrahip bared his teeth and shouted in wordless, animal aggression. Marcus took an involuntary step back. Even absent meaning, the sound of his voice held power. The gift Morade had given him and his kind along with their world-killing madness.

  Basrahip swung his own blade in a short, hard arc. Marcus danced back, and the priest surged forward, shouting again. The poisoned sword stank with fumes that left a foul taste in Marcus’s mouth, but the priest ignored that, striking out artlessly with his own steel blade. Marcus parried and countered. Basrahip pushed the attack aside like he was clearing weeds. Marcus felt the impact of blade against blade in his wrists and shoulders.

  “Strong bastard, aren’t you?” he said. “How’s your stamina?”

  For that, he thought, how’s mine? But the priest was hammering at him again, the raw fury of the attack driving Marcus slowly back. The shuttered windows was behind him. If this went on too long, he’d be driven against it. Marcus imagined himself being tossed out, spinning head over feet to the path below. It would be a stupid way to die.

  The priest used the moment’s distraction. His vast howl came again, and the blade with it. Marcus shifted away, but the tip of the priest’s sword touched his arm as it passed. The pain was bright. Blood pattered against the perfect white of the floor and Marcus drew himself into a guard position and countered, driving the priest back toward the stairway. The injured arm felt numb, but it wasn’t weaker. Or not much so. As far as he could tell. There was a lot of blood, but no muscle cut through. He only needed one solid hit, and the venom would do the rest. If it meant letting Basrahip open his guts for him, it wouldn’t matter. The priest would still be dead. He wouldn’t raise the alarm. Where the hell were Yardem and Geder anyway?

  The priest’s laughter began as a deep sound, like someone chopping wood, and grew.

  “Something… funny?” Marcus gasped out.

  “Cannot,” the priest said. “Cannot win. You cannot win.”

  In Marcus’s belly, something gave way. Not fear, not despair—not yet—but the awareness of how he was vulnerable. He struck forward, pushing the priest, but Basrahip was laughing now, even as he avoided the envenomed blade.

  “You have already lost,” the priest said. “Listen to my voice. Everything you love is already gone. You cannot win.”

  “Heard that before,” he said, as if defiance would rob the man’s voice of the dragon’s power.

  “There is no reason to go on.”

  Marcus tried to pull his attention away from the words. Tried to focus on the weight of the blade in his hand, the stance of his opponent. The brightening pain in his arm, the sound of his blood pattering onto the floor like raindrops. But the words pressed through it all, taking him by the throat.

  “You have lost,” Basrahip said, and even as he knew the trick of it, Marcus felt the deep, familiar darkness rising up from his mind to meet the man’s voice. “You cannot win. Everything you love is already gone. Listen to my voice. You cannot win.”

  For a heartbeat—no more—he was holding Merian’s body against his. The smell of fire and death filling his nostrils, the fumes rising up from her corpse and changing who he was forever. Merian. Alys. His wife and his child, dead because he’d been loyal to the wrong man. Cithrin was already the same. Already doomed because he hadn’t been strong enough or wise enough to turn her from the path she’d chosen. Yardem was as good as dead. Kit and the players. Because he hadn’t done better.

  “You cannot win. You have already lost. Everything you fight for, everything you care for, all of it is already gone. Your failure cannot be changed. You have lost!”

  The priest’s voice rang out in the narrow space, and Marcus felt the poisoned sword growing heavier. It sank lower, dropping out of defensive stance. Tears familiar as old enemies filled his eyes, and his chest ached with every failure he’d dragged behind him all through the wide, empty world. The priest stepped closer, as Marcus had known he would. Basrahip’s blade was stained at the tip, red with Marcus’s blood.

  “You can never win. You have lost everything. Everything and forever.”

  The vast and familiar ocean of sorrow in Marcus’s chest opened, blooming out endlessly. Other people healed, other people mourned and moved on. But he would feel the pain fresh every time, every moment without Merian and Alys would be as bright with grief as the first one. And nothing could ever undo it. The priest took another step nearer. His eyes were bright and certain. The blade in his vast hand was ready. Marcus blinked away a thick tear.

  “Listen to my voice,” Basrahip said. “You cannot win. You have lost, now and always. Everything you love is lost to you. Everything you do is doomed. Empty. Meaningless.”

  “Old news,” Marcus said, and sank the poisoned sword into Basrahip’s gut.

  The priest’s eyes narrowed in what looked like confusion as he stepped back. Dark, thick blood poured out of his belly onto the pale floor. Spiders ran a few skittering inches from where they fell, tracking pinpoints of inky blood behind them, then stilled and died. Basrahip put a hand to the wound, astonished and confused. Already a thick white foam was forming where the blade had broken the big man’s skin. A smell like heated wine and fresh shit filled the room, but Marcus didn’t gag. Basrahip’s breath stuttered and became harder, gasping.

  “What have you done?” he demanded through clenched teeth.

  Marcus shrugged and nodded toward the flowing, spider-clotted blood. “The job.”

  His own arm was slick with his brighter blood, and the pain from it was getting worse. He stepped back, waiting for the priest to fall. Instead Basrahip’s eyes filled with rage, and he bulled forward, swinging his sword before him like a farmer’s child at his first reaping. Marcus moved back, his center low, the two-handed blade shifting to turn every blow. The priest was strong, but with each breath, his attacks grew weaker. Less precise.

  Something was happening under the priest’s skin; a dark mottling covered his hands, his neck, his wide face. His eyes lost their focus on Marcus, found him for a moment, then wandered again.

  Slowly, Basrahip sank to his knees, trembling, but he did not
drop his blade. The blood on his belly was so dark now, it looked black, and the spiders that fell from the wound were dead before they found the floor. Marcus watched, unmoved and unmoving, as the last vestiges of life left Basrahip and his empty body slumped to the side. Marcus drove the poisoned sword through the stilled chest, leaning until the blade came through the dead man’s back, just to be sure it was done. He didn’t intend to sit so much as he simply found himself, legs crossed, on the floor. The fresh red blood from his arm pooled around him, mixing with the darker spatters, and it occurred to him for the first time that the injury he’d taken in the fight might be more serious than he’d thought.

  He should bind it. Slowly, like a man half-asleep, he pulled his belt from around his waist and cinched it around his arm above the wound. He felt borne up on a soft relief. It was done. He’d stopped the priest. He was done. It was over. He realized he’d closed his eyes when he opened them. The poisoned sword rose from the corpse like a flagpole. Or the marker for a grave. He’d carried the damned thing so long, and at such cost. It was good he’d gotten some use from it.

  He needed to get up. Find Yardem. Warn him. The dragon was coming, or had already come. Marcus opened his eyes again and had to concentrate to keep from closing them. He wanted to rest, wanted to let sleep take him, and maybe something deeper than sleep. Basrahip’s empty face was turned toward him, still as stone. The stench from him was awful, but Marcus didn’t mind it. Death shouldn’t be pretty. It shouldn’t be dignified. Better that it come ugly and brutal and true. If you could love it then, you’d be sure you were ready.

  He closed his eyes, and waited for Merian to come. For Alys to take his hand. For all the shit and sorrow of decades to go away forever. When none of that happened, he sighed and levered himself up to his feet.

  Some other day, then.

  “Yardem!” he shouted. “Are you still here?”

  Geder

  I’ll be waiting when you come back,” Cithrin said.

  Geder’s heart ached at her fragility and her strength. What he wanted was to take her in his arms and swear he’d protect her and that she’d never want for anything again. Instead he looked at her, his expression serious, and promised the next best thing. “We will return.” It meant a hundred things more than the words themselves. He hoped she understood. He turned to the Tralgu guard. Yardem, his name was. “We’d best get started. It can be a long way up.”

  The guard smiled vaguely, and Cithrin said, “Thank you, Yardem.”

  Geder turned, and they walked toward the Kingspire. Geder felt her eyes on him, or imagined that he did. He held himself a little taller in case he was right. When they stepped through the main doors of the Kingspire, Geder hesitated. Something felt wrong. Then he realized it was only that the great tower was quiet where usually it echoed and rumbled with the voices of servants and slaves and the business of the crown.

  “Prince Geder!”

  Basrahip lumbered toward him from the shadows. Geder’s smile went still. The great priest wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be up in the temple. Cithrin bel Sarcour wasn’t fifty feet behind him, and here was Basrahip looking at him. It was oddly thrilling. Which one of us is the dupe now? “Basrahip.”

  “We have all come to your call,” Basrahip said, hunching forward in unconscious deference. “The last of us are making their way up to the temple even now.”

  “Just going there myself,” Geder said. Because it was true. He had to be careful to say only things that were true. Things were going well, but they were still on a knife’s edge.

  “I will join you in a moment,” Basrahip said, and looked back over his shoulder.

  “Is there anything wrong?” Geder asked.

  “The Lady Kalliam said she wished to refresh herself and that she would be well, but…” He shook his great head.

  You can deal with it when you come back, Geder almost said, then stopped himself. Basrahip couldn’t deal with it when he came back because he would never be coming back, and Geder knew it. No lies. He could mislead, but he couldn’t lie. He’d almost given the game away, and the nearness of the mistake chilled him. “All right, but don’t take long. I really, really want you up there.”

  Basrahip’s smile was broad and grateful. “I shall be there in a moment, Prince Geder. I long to hear the voice of the goddess in yours.”

  Do you? Geder thought. Well, don’t wait underwater.

  Basrahip turned and lumbered off. Geder made for the stairs, the Tralgu guard at his side.

  “That going to be a problem?” the guard asked.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Geder said.

  What’s taking him so long?”

  The temple hadn’t been made as a temple. Geder had had it dedicated to the spider goddess, the Righteous Servant, after Dawson Kalliam turned Camnipol into a battlefield. There was a large room with an open window almost as wide as the wall itself that looked out over the city and past it to the haze of land in the south. Ropes as thick as Geder’s arm held the great red banner draping down from here. Far below, the tops of the trees shifted in the wind, their soft green billows echoing the shapes of the white clouds above.

  Beyond the main room, the temple was only corridors and rooms that had been pressed into the goddess’s service. Cells for the priests to pray in, an altar where they carried out their rites. A pantry somewhere that servants stocked with bread and soup and wine. A privacy closet that they cleaned five times in the day. Old sconces with the black soot halos that marked where generations of torches had guttered and burned. Iron rings in the walls and ceilings whose use Geder could only guess at. The stones were older than the empire, and generations of footsteps had worn the floors smoother than glass. There was a beauty to the rooms, and a sense of age and dignity.

  Geder scratched his arm and glanced back at the great doors. The ones that led to the stairway that they would escape down. The doors he and Yardem would bar and block just as soon as Basrahip arrived.

  If he would only come.

  “Might be a problem for another day,” the Tralgu man said.

  “No. No, he has to be here,” Geder said.

  Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “Any reason?”

  Because he was the one who lied to me, Geder thought but didn’t say. He was the one who made me look like a fool. “He just does.”

  The rooms of the temple were loud with the rush and crash of priestly voices. The air stank of incense and bodies. Geder hadn’t known really just how many priests there were. Between all the cities of the empire and the men still tending the original temple in the mountains east of the Keshet, hundreds had come. Most Firstblood, but at least one Jasuru and what looked to be a handful of Cinnae men, pale and reed-thin. He didn’t know when they had been brought into the fold. Tainted by the spiders.

  The priests walked through the rooms of the temple, segregating themselves into groups that eyed one another warily. There were so many, it was hard to see where one group ended and the next began. The divisions were there, though, marked out in the motion of bodies and the suspicious glances.

  The group standing nearest the great doors were all Antean, inducted into the temple in the last years. Jorey’s brother was among them, talking and laughing. They were too near the doors. What if they stepped out? What if they found the bars that were going to turn the temple first into a prison, and then into a kiln? How would he explain that?

  “Don’t,” Yardem said.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t stare at the door. They’re watching us.”

  Of course they were. Geder was their savior, after all. The man who had called them all into the reach of his living voice to reconcile all their differences and schisms. To end forever the wars between them. And he would, he would, but Basrahip needed to be there. He turned away, looking out over the city without seeing it. His chest felt tight, and between the heat of the room and the smell of it, little waves of nausea were starting to crawl up the back of his
throat. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. This was his moment of vengeance, and all he wanted was for it to be over.

  So many things in his life had been like that. Everything he’d expected, everything that was supposed to be good and wonderful, had actually been sour and sad. He’d ridden off to war expecting camaraderie and friendship, but except for Jorey, he’d been the butt of jokes and pranks. He’d been protector of Vanai, but only because he’d been set up to fail. He’d had a triumph thrown in his name, been given the regency, and none of it had brought the satisfaction he’d expected. None of it had carried any lasting joy.

  Well, that wasn’t fair. There had been moments. His time with Cithrin and Aster in the ruins, of course. But others as well. Undermining Alan Klin had been a pleasure, and that had been before he’d met Basrahip and everything had been tainted. That one time, when Klin had sent him into the winter mud of the Free Cities hunting for the fleeing wealth of Vanai, he’d actually found it, made his own little fortune, and let the smugglers go rather than hand Klin the glory. The memory of the chest filled with gems and jewelry, half-sunken in ice and snow, of pouring double handfuls of the treasure down his shirt before anyone could see him, filled him with a soft, nostalgic glow. Of all he had done in all his life, there had been a good moment.

  Something plucked at the back of his mind. The smugglers had been in a caravan guarded by some famed mercenary captain. He couldn’t remember the name. But…

  “Were you ever in Vanai?” he asked.

  Yardem answered with a noise deep in his throat. He put a hand on Geder’s shoulder.

  “Now,” he said.

  “Now? What now?”