The King's Blood (40 page)

Behind him, Alan Klin cleared his throat. And Mirkus Shoat, never a man of particular originality, did as well. Dawson turned to his council. The patriots being mistaken for traitors. Estin Cersillian was dead, caught by a blade in the street. Odderd Mastellin looked small and sheeplike and weary. Only Lord Bannien lived and was not with them. He’d gone in the morning with a dozen men to salvage what he could of his mansion, burned in the night.

“We can’t keep this going,” Klin said.

“I know it.”

In the street below them, there should have been men and women, dogs and children. Servants should have been carrying their masters’ clothing back from the launderer. Horses should have pulled carts of turnips and carrots to the market square. Instead, men with swords walked in groups, wary-eyed. His men, Klin’s, Bannien’s. Aster’s banner flew over the house as well, a visible claim of loyalty that seemed to matter less and less with every passing day.

“If we have King Lechan,” Mastellin said, “we can lay claim to being the legitimate protectors of the throne. We’d hold the enemy of the crown as an enemy.”

“Are we sure no one’s killed him?” Mirkus Shoat asked. Klin’s laugh was low and nasty.

“We’re not sure anyone’s
fed
him,” he said. “He could be gone to the angels and not a dagger in sight.”

“Then we have to surrender,” Shoat said.

“Never to Palliako,” Dawson said. “If we lay down arms, it must be to the prince. Otherwise everything they say about us will be true.”

“I think you underestimate what they’re saying about us,” Klin said. “And it hardly matters. Until we find one or the other of them, we might as well give arms to Daskellin or Broot or whoever we find walking down the street. There’s no one we can surrender to that can guarantee our safety as far as from here to the gallows.”

“Why not?” Shoat demanded. “Those others could surrender to us.”

“But they won’t,” Klin said, his voice the melody of despair. “They’re winning.”

“What about the priests?” Dawson said. “Have we tracked any of them down?”

“A few,” Klin said. “Not all. The high priest especially can’t be found. We’ve rounded up six or seven of the bastards.”

“Where are they now?” Mastellin asked.

“Bottom of the Division,” he said. “We threw them off a bridge. I talked to one of them for a while first. They tell interesting stories.”

“I don’t care what pigs mean when they grunt,” Dawson said, but Klin went on as if he’d been silent.

“They say Palliako’s running the whole damned fight from a secret tower in the Kingspire. He’s supposed to have some kind of magical protection. When the blades hit him, they passed right through like he was mist.”

“It’s shit,” Dawson said. “The only thing my blade passed through was the priest.”

Klin shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was harder.

“They say he planned all this. That it’s part of the purge he began with Feldin Maas, and only he knew how deep it really ran. They say the fighting now is all him putting a hot cloth on the wound so he can draw up the pus.” Klin looked around the rooftop. “We’re the pus, in case you missed the metaphor.”

In the street, someone shouted and half a dozen men drew blades and ran to the sound. Dawson wished his eyes could turn the corners and follow them instead of standing up where he could see so much more of the city, and still too little.

“You don’t believe it,” Dawson said.

“I don’t know,” Klin replied. “I didn’t, but even wild tales can have a grain of truth to them. Palliako knew we were coming.”

“He was suprised,” Dawson said.

“He didn’t know it was you, maybe,” Klin said. “But he does now. Maybe it was all built to see who was against him. It worked out that way, didn’t it?”

Sweat trickled down Dawson’s back and stuck his sleeves to his arms. The shouts in the streets below were growing louder, and the sound of steel against steel rang with them. Klin ignored that too.

“I don’t think he’s become some sort of master cunning man who turns to mist and knows the hearts of all his subjects. But some people do, Kalliam. Some people think that’s true.”

“There are always idiots,” Dawson said as a rough knot of melee pushed its way back round the corner and toward Klin’s courtyard. “And you’re one for talking to them. Damn it, they’ve come back. Sound the defense.”

“What’s the point?” Klin asked.

“That they don’t kill us,” Dawson said, speaking each word individually. Klin only smiled.

“Every man dies sometime,” he said. “At least it won’t be in that swamp.”

At last, the drums beat out the defense. The men at rest came out from behind Klin’s walls, pressing the attackers back to the barricades Dawson’s forces had made. He was going to have to pull back farther still. With Bannien gone, he had too few men to command all the streets around Klin’s estate. And God alone knew when Bannien would return.

And if.

*    *    *

T

he halls of Klin’s estate were frankly ugly. Like Issandrian and Maas and all of that cohort of young iconoclasts, the old aesthetics were lost on them. There were no clean lines here. No austerity or dignity or gravity. Nothing held the beauty of classic architecture. Instead, the doorframes were carved into small riots of form: monkeys lifting frogs, frogs with lions on their backs, lions pawing at stretch-winged herons who were also the lintel. The tapestries were gaudy, busy things that dripped fringe like a drool from a man with a bad tooth. No floor could be left alone. They had to be inlaid with different colors of stone and chips of stained glass.

Sitting in the withdrawing room, Clara was like a gem in a pile of stones. The bed that Klin had supplied took up the better part of the room, but she sat on it as if it were the most elegant silk divan. The interior of the house was viciously hot, and without even the advantage of the smoky breeze, so she had the shutters cracked open, the soft daylight on her needlework. The web of pink threads and yellow and green were growing together into a pattern he couldn’t yet make sense of. He’d always had the sense that she complicated the work intentionally, putting the thread together as a puzzle for her to resolve. In the end, it would be as if each step had been perfectly straightforward. Elegant.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said without looking up. “You’ll only make me feel guilty for distracting you.”

“And if I told you I was looking for Jorey?”

She smiled. Clara had always had the talent for looking pleased without denying that she felt weary.

“I’d ask why you weren’t looking in his room or the barracks.”

“I was going to,” Dawson said. “But I got distracted.”

She put down her work and patted the mattress at her side. It was too soft, of course. Klin was a weak man at heart, and always had been.

“Tell me again,” Dawson said, “what happened when Phelia Maas died.”

“Well, you recall we were in the drawing room, you and Jorey and Geder and that very large religious friend of Geder’s. And poor Phelia was in a state of nerves. When Palliako began unveiling everything that had been going on with Feldin, the poor thing fell apart…”

She told it all again, as she had before. The pretended errand to Maas’s mansion, the priest’s insistence when challenged that they were there at the baron’s request. Then the letters that proved his conspiracy, and the discovery. Phelia’s death.

And after, when Vincen Coe had stood against the baron and his men in the corridor while Basrahip the goatherd priest hectored Maas into walking away. Dawson tried to picture it, and failed. He had fought Feldin Maas many times, and more than one of those had been with a blade. To go meekly. To drop his sword and turn away.

“They have some evil magic,” he said. “It breaks men. It broke Maas and the men in the keep at the Seref. And it’s breaking Klin. I can see it in him. He spoke to them, and it’s drowned the fire in him just the way it did for the others.”

“Are you sure it isn’t the fever and fighting that’s doing it?” Clara asked. “It doesn’t take magic to break someone’s spirit. The world can be enough.”

There was a truth in her words he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was there, patient and implacable. The exhaustion pressing down on his shoulders drew from more than the battle dragging on. More than his frustration and fear. It was also grief. He had done his best for his kingdom. He had done his duty as he saw it, standing bulwark against the small, shortsighted men who would change it. If Simeon had lived only a few more years, enough to give Aster the throne without a regency…

Clara took his hand, and he tried to muster some hope.

“Skestinin’s got to be getting close by now,” he said. “Once he brings his men south, he’ll get the gates opened. We’re too evenly matched now, and he can tip the balance.”

“Will that be a good thing?”

“If it was only Barriath being under his command, no,” Dawson said. “But there’s Sabiha. Skestinin’s family now. With his reinforcements, we can turn this. We’ll get you and the girl out. Jorey, if he’ll go.”

“And you?”

The drums sounded, deep and dry. He saw Clara shudder. The defense again. Another wave of attackers come to erode their strength. They were coming more often now. They weren’t coming to win, but to keep Dawson’s men from resting. A siege within a siege.

“I have to be there,” he said. “I am sorry the world came to this, love. It ought to have been on better behavior with you in it.”

“How eloquent,” she said, only half mocking. “You’re a flatterer, you know.”

“You’re worth flattering,” he said, rising from the bed.

By the time he reached the street, the men had already pushed back the latest assault. The sun had turned the cobbled streets hot. Even after sunset came, the heat would be rising up out of the land for hours. In better years, he would have been setting out for the Great Bear now, preparing himself for an evening of cooled wine and debates, contests of poetry and rhetoric. In better years, the summer would not have been so hot.

In the yards, men had built tents and defenses like an army on campaign. Klin’s gardens were pounded into dust by boots. The roses had been cut down to make room, and a wide arbor where grapevines had hung down, dripping with wide green leaves was a pair of broken stumps, the body of the thing part of a street barricade. The men themselves slept on cots, torpid in the heat, or paced to and from the water trough. Their faces were dirty and closed, their move-ments defensive. Even in the way they drank a tin of water and nodded to each other, they were the image of a beaten army.

It wasn’t true, of course. In the other mansions and squares, there would be other men who’d taken the other opinion who were just as hot and just as tired, who saw the damage being done to the city and felt its loss as deeply. There was no reason that Dawson’s men should be hanging their heads. The battle wasn’t lost as long as they stood.

He walked the perimeter with the captain on duty. The barricades had been set three and four streets out from Klin’s, proclaiming the squares to be territory of Dawson’s men, but under the constant and shifting attacks they were being eaten away like sandcastles at the change of tide. Where once they had been walls, they’d degraded into hills, or worse, mere collections of refuse, some stacked on each other, but hardly enough to slow an advancing force.

“We can’t keep holding where we’ve been, my lord,” the captain said. “The men don’t say it, but they know. And once they know, it’s hard to feel much enthusiasm for rebuilding. We need to pull in a way, eliminate two or three places that we have to defend.”

“And the attack?” Dawson asked. “I’m sorry, my lord?”

“The attack. How do we take this to them?”

The captain’s cheeks ballooned out as he considered the question.

“We’ve got hunting patrols out. Four of them in rotation, looking for the prince and the Lord Regent. And those priests you wanted.”

“It isn’t enough,” Dawson said. “We’re sitting here like criminals waiting for the magistrate’s blades. The men need glory. Pull back the barricades, and place archers on the rooftops in the new positions. Tell the men to rest tonight. In the morning, we take the fight to the enemy.”

“Yes, my lord,” the captain said, but there was no joy in his voice. After a moment’s hesitation: “Lord Kalliam, which enemy are we speaking of?”

“Palliako and his Keshet cultists,” Dawson said.

“Yes, but Lord, that’s who we’re hunting now. If you mean instead that we’re going to draw arms against Ternigan’s men or Daskellin’s or some such, that changes the look of things. It may not be easy to arrange this well.”

Dawson could hear how carefully the man was choosing his words.

“They have been attacking us,” Dawson said. “And we’re curling up and taking the blows. It’s no way to win a fight.”

“Yes, my lord. I mean no, sir, it isn’t. But they aren’t the enemy. All of us know men on the other side. We served with them. Fought beside them, a lot of them under your command. It’s not the same as marching on Asterilhold or Sarakal. These are Anteans we’re be fighting. It’s not the same.”

“They’re the servants of the priests now,” Dawson said. “They’re corrupted.”

“Yes, my lord. It’s just hard to see that when you’re looking at a man who maybe saved your life in Asterilhold. It’s not as though those men crossed us personally. They’re only following what their lords are telling them to do, sir.”

Just as we are
, hung in the air between them. Dawson heard the warning in it. It wasn’t only hope that was fading, it was also loyalty. The glory of battle required an enemy they could hate, and apart from the priests and Palliako, Dawson didn’t have one. He wondered whether the others— Ternigan, Daskellin, Broot—were suffering the same problem. He hoped they were.

“Thank you for your candor,” Dawson said crisply. “Let’s have those barricades remade. If we can defend the position with fewer men, we can send out more hunting parties, yes?”

“Yes, Lord. I believe we could do that.”

“We’ll do that, then.”

The sun moved slowly in the great arch of sky above the city. Dawson found himself resenting it. It and all the stars hiding behind its skirts. The Kingspire caught the light for a moment, flashing like a bolt of lightning that didn’t fade. He could imagine Palliako up there in his secret rooms, looking down at Dawson, at the city. That was where to go. If there was an attack to be made, a final assault, it would be to root Palliako out of his perch on the Kingspire. To haul him off the Severed Throne and put Aster there in his place. Already the boy would be a better king than Palliako…