The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (22 page)

One of the Timzinae guards shifted his weight. Marcus paused a long moment to see if an attack would follow, but the man thought better of it.

“It sounded more convincing before you said it that way, I’ll give you that,” Marcus said. “But let’s say your side too. We pick a place and fight. Some of your men die. Some of Kalliam’s men die. Maybe you and I live through it, maybe we don’t. Whoever wins… what? Gets to brag about it? No dead child comes back. No wrong thing that’s happened gets undone. A bunch of angry, confused assholes hack each other to death in a field or else they don’t. Now tell me why my way’s worse?”

“We’ll make Antea an example to anyone else who pretends to empire,” Dannien said, biting each word as it passed his lips. “And there will be justice for their atrocities.”

“There’ll be more atrocities, at least. And it’ll be you doing them this time. So that’s a change,” Marcus said. “Not sure you’re made better than Palliako by going second.”

God smiled,
he thought.
I’m sounding like Cithrin now.

“There has to be a reckoning, Wester,” Dannien said.

“You’re right. There does,” Marcus said. “But this ain’t it.”

In the silence, the breeze made the leather tent sides thrum in their frames. A bird called out three sharp and rising notes, like a trumpet calling the charge. Marcus felt his weight centered between his feet, his hands soft but ready. He hadn’t been aware of preparing for violence, but here he was. Prepared. The odd thing was, his mind felt clearer and more his own than it had in months. Some things resisted being forgotten.

“You don’t stand a chance,” Dannien said.

“That’s what they said in Northcoast,” Marcus replied.

“No other way?”

Marcus felt his plans slipping into place already. How many men he had, and what supplies. Where Karol stood on the plain and the mountain above it. The dragon’s roads and the merely human dirt tracks and the deer trails and streams. He saw what he’d need to do later, and it shaped what he had to do now. Hopefully Jorey Kalliam wouldn’t take offense.

“No other way,” Marcus said. “If it’s a fight you need, Karol, I’ll hand it to you. And then I’ll beat you fair. Afterward, we can talk about justice and reckonings while we wait for Suddapal to pay your ransom.”

Karol Dannien stood. The rage made his face darker. His neck was almost purple with it. “You always were a prick.”

He left, the Timzinae guards trotting to keep up. Marcus leaned against the table, glanced at Jorey Kalliam, then
away. The boy had the shocked look of someone who’d just taken an unexpected blow. “Sorry about that. Overstepped myself.”

“Not sure I’d have done better,” Jorey said.

“Still. It wasn’t mine to decide, and… well, I may have decided.”

Vincen spoke for the first time since they’d come. His voice was steady and deep. “What are our chances of winning through?”

Marcus shifted, looking through the seams of the frame where the daylight glinted through. He wanted to be sure none of Dannien’s soldiers were near enough to hear, and even then, he spoke low. “They’ve got more men, and better rested. They’ve got position on us, and given all we had to leave behind, we can assume they’re better armed. They know about what the spiders can do, though I don’t think Kit would be willing to use that power to help kill people. It’s a problem for him.”

“What do we have?” Jorey asked, and his voice was solid as stone. He had some promise.

“You’ve got the hero of Wodford and Gradis,” Marcus said, tapping himself on the chest. “So in a
fair
fight, you’re fucked.”

T
he thaw hadn’t reached Camnipol, but the court had returned. The first group tacitly fleeing the strife in the east was joined by the more traditional grandees who’d spent their winter in the King’s Hunt. Cyr Emming had presided over the hunt itself, relying on his position as Geder’s advisor even more than on the dignity of his titles. Now that he’d come back, he seemed pleased to continue being the social center of the court. Geder was pleased to let him. Despite that, not all balls and feasts could be avoided.

Since the wars began, Camnipol had seen a great influx of wealth from the conquered. Asterilhold and Sarakal and Elassae had all given up their treasuries and the adornments of their temples along with their land and freedom. Emming’s grand ball was lavish beyond anything Geder had ever seen. Distilled wine poured out of statues of gold and pearl, spilling as much onto the floor as into the cups. Slaves sat in contorted, uncomfortable positions to act as living chairs and divans for the high families of the court. The food was rich and greasy, meats and butters and cakes thick as jelly. After two seasons of starving, Geder didn’t have the belly for it.

The silk banners that hung from Emming’s vaulted ceiling listed the names of conquered cities. Suddapal and Inentai were among them. And the guests… court fashion was
famed for changing year by year, and now was no different. Some few still wore the oversize black leather that Geder himself had made popular, but more had adopted the newer look based, it seemed, on feathers and bone. Sanna Daskellin in particular wore a gown fashioned from ravens’ feathers and a cape of tiny bird bones sewn together with dark thread. She clattered when she moved.

Braziers in the shape of Timzinae bodies bent in pain stood among the guests, the light from their fires licking out of their mouths and eyeholes. The smoke they gave off smelled of incense and burning sap. Reed instruments and viols filled the air with exotic music inspired by the new lands under Antean stewardship and the Kesheti rhythms associated in the court’s collective mind with the goddess.

His own chair stood on an elevated dais so that he could look out over it all. The whirl of bodies and darkness, smoke and gold and gaiety. Geder stayed as long as he could stand it, making small conversations with men and women, many of whom were newer at court than himself. Tiar Sanninen, newly Baron of Eccolund. Salvian Cersillian, cousin of the former Earl of Masonhalm, and her daughters. Lady Broot, whose every word and gesture was hoping for happy news of her family in Elassae. Happy words that Geder didn’t have to offer.

Everything about the court made it seem a fabric of excess and fear. The laughter, too wild. The joy, too desperate. It was as though the court in general had caught a fever and was pretending that it hadn’t. The buzz of desperation and despair this seemed designed to drown out… well, perhaps that was only Geder’s own.

He made his curt excuses to Emming, handed back his half-finished flagon of wine, and called for his carriage. Aster was there somewhere. Dancing, most likely, with the
girls of his cohort. Well, he was the prince. He could do that. Should, even. Someone should wring a drop of being carefree out of the world.

The streets of Camnipol in twilight were oddly beautiful and quiet after the too-lush feasting rooms. The air smelled clean and clear and like the presentiment of rain. There were few trees outside the gardens of the great houses, but here and there splashes of green ivy spilled up grey stone walls, their leaves defying the cold. Hardy, thick-bodied finches had joined the sparrows and crows of the winter. Geder leaned out the window of his carriage as it rattled toward the Kingspire and let the breeze of his passage cool his face. The banner of the goddess fluttered high above, draped from the doors of the temple. Lights flickered up there as well. Basrahip and his priests, performing their rites or eating rice from simple bowls or simply sitting together. Geder didn’t know. If the trek up those stairs weren’t quite so awful, he might have joined them. Instead, he took comfort where he had before. His library.

The books perfumed the desk with dust and sweet paste. The light of a dozen candles warmed the leather-bound volumes and parchment scrolls, the codices and maps and fragile paper sewn together with twine. Geder’s stomach gurgled and shifted with the unaccustomed too-rich food of Emming’s feast, but he didn’t call for water or a cunning man. It would have meant talking to someone, and even ordering a servant to do his bidding was more energy than he could manage just now. He was ill, after all, whatever the cunning men said.

He sat on a large chair, the light spilling over his shoulder and onto the pages of a third-age history of Far Syramys by a likely mythical Dartinae poet who went by the name Stone.

Geder fell into the words like he was falling asleep. Or else waking up to some other life. He imagined himself in the court of the Grand Agha, sitting on the floor and drinking tea with poets and hunters. Or trekking through great caverns beneath Sai where the waters ran yellow and red, and drinking them was death. Or seeing the Uron Tortoise wandering the northern desert with a city of thousands riding unnoticed on its vast shell. He longed for it all, even as he knew that in practice, it would all be awkward, tiring, and uncomfortable if it was even real. But then it wasn’t really those places that left him empty and hungry and rich
with need. It was the Geder Palliako who could take joy in them. That better version of himself who belonged there.

When the Kurtadam servant girl appeared at the door, her eyes wide and the pelt on her face twisted into a grimace by her anxiety, Geder was almost happy to be interrupted. Not quite, but almost.

“L-lord Regent? My lord?” she said, her voice high and piping.

“Yes?”

“I apologize, my lord, but there’s—” she choked on the words. Her hands balled in fists and she looked down, her mouth pressed tight. His heart went out to her. Poor thing was so sure she was going to be in trouble.

“It’s all right,” he said, his voice gentle. “I don’t bite. Least not often. What’s the issue?”

When she spoke, her voice was smoother, calmer. Still rich with fear, but not throttled by it. “The Baron of Watermarch has come, my lord. He asks your urgent presence.”

Geder closed the book and laid it aside. “Show him in, then,” he said. “And let this be a lesson to you… what was your name?”

“I’m Chanda, my lord.”

“Let this be a lesson to you, Chanda,” he said solemnly. “We all have to do shit we don’t enjoy.”

The servant coughed a laugh, and Geder smiled his encouragement until she smiled back. When he nodded, she backed away, still grinning under the oily fur of her race, and trotted off to retrieve Canl Daskellin from whatever waiting area they’d stowed him in while they got Geder’s permission for him to enter. Outside, night had fallen, and the candles in the library remade the window as a dark and deforming mirror. Geder shifted his weight back and forth, watching his reflected head swell to a massive, ungainly monstrosity
on a twig-thin body, then shrink down to almost a nub perched on comically heroic shoulders, then back again.

Daskellin appeared behind him, and he turned. Sweat and dirt streaked the older man’s dark skin, and he wore riding leathers that smelled of horse even from where Geder sat.

“Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, “I have a report.”

“From Northcoast?”

“No, from the east. Sarakal, and it seems Elassae.”

Geder shifted in his chair. “I thought you were the ambassador to Northcoast. Why are you bothering with things in the east? It’s not yours to worry about. Mecelli’s supposed to be doing that.”

“He isn’t well, my lord,” Daskellin said. “The cunning men report an army outside Nus. And another massed in Orsen.”

Geder waved the news away. “Cunning men can’t be relied on,” Geder said. “Half the time they get these so-called messages, it turns out they were never actually sent in the first place. Just someone mistook a dream for some crackpot magic and got everyone’s feathers in a whirl over nothing.”

“I’ve had a bird from my man in Orsen. That one at least is true. And Lord Mecelli’s report after Inentai was right. The traditional families are taking back all we won in Sarakal. And more than that, they may not stop at the border of the empire.”

“Inentai
is
the border of the empire,” Geder said. “It’s just in flux for the moment. It’ll come back under our control. We put a temple in it. No city where we dedicated a temple to the goddess can fall. Just be lost for a bit. You heard what Basrahip said. You
know
all this.”

“I did hear, Lord Geder,” Daskellin said. “But I also had the reports. And I’ve seen the maps. If we want any hope of defending the empire, we have to raise an army. Possibly two.”

Silence fell between them, dividing the room as effectively as the Division split Camnipol.

“Are you telling me you doubt the protection of the goddess?” Geder asked, slowly.

“I believe in it,” Daskellin said, and the distress in his voice was like listening to a single high note played on a violin forever. It was about more than the news of the armies, more than the news of the war. There was a personal distress and hearing it made Geder’s own soul ring with it like a crystal glass echoing a singer’s pure note. “I don’t doubt her, but I also look at the world. And as much as my faith tells me that we are under her protection, my life’s experience says we need sword-and-bows at the ready. The storm that’s coming? We aren’t prepared to weather it.”

Geder hunched over his book, hand flat against the soft leather cover. The sense of his head being stuffed with wool returned, and with it a deep weariness and anger. He felt the rage bubbling in his chest. It was unfair, monstrously unfair, to bring this all to him. Did Daskellin think he had a cunning man’s stick he could wave and conjure able-bodied fighters out of nothing? The men he’d marched to Asterilhold were all that Camnipol had, and since he’d called the disband, they weren’t even gathered or armed. And Geder was ill, after all. Something was wrong with him, only no one seemed able to see it. Or else to care when they did.

As long as things were going well, everyone celebrated him and threw victories for him and praised him as a hero. But as soon as there was any trouble, no one cared about him at all.

“This is not my fault.”

“Lord Geder?”

“This,” Geder repeated, his voice growing to a shout, “is not my fault. The position we’re in? The unrest in Elassae
and Sarakal? You were my advisors. The best men in the kingdom. You served King Simeon and you’ve been in the court. You were supposed to be the ones who knew how to run a campaign!”

Daskellin took a step back as if he’d been struck. His jaw worked as if fighting to get out some sentiment too large for his throat. Rage boiled up from Geder’s belly. He stood, throwing the book at Daskellin’s head as he did it. It missed by a wide margin, but the violence of the intention was clear. For a moment, Geder thought the man would attack him, and in that moment, he welcomed the thought. The prospect of beating Daskellin’s smug, self-serving face with his bare fists was like the hope of water to a man possessed by thirst.

They teetered on the edge of the moment, the air in the room rich with the potential for violence. Daskellin took his lip between his teeth and looked down. When he spoke, his voice shook, but it was not loud.

“If I have failed you, Lord Regent, I apologize. I have always done what I hoped would be best for the throne.”

“And there just now you’ve remembered that I can have you killed,” Geder snapped, but the fire in his gut had died already. He felt as though he was sinking back into himself. He’d thrown a book at the man. That was embarrassing, but it was Daskellin’s own fault. The man should have known better. “I’ll put out the call. We’ll bring back the men I led against the apostate. It’s not an army like Broot had in Elassae or Jorey’s force. And you’ll lead it. You personally. Then I don’t want to hear anything more about how I’m not prepared.”

“Yes, Lord Regent,” Daskellin said.

“And we won’t fall. No matter what we won’t fall, because the goddess is here. She’s remaking the world, and we are
her instruments, so we won’t fall. Because of me. Because I brought her here. Everything we’ve gained, we gained because of me. What we’ve lost is your fault.”

“Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, making it sound like a yes without actually saying the word. Geder sneered and turned away. An exhaustion was coming over him, turning his bones to granite and lead. The effort of standing up was too much. Everything was too much. Daskellin was a selfish bastard for taking away what little energy Geder had left.

“You can go,” Geder said. “You’ll have your soldiers tomorrow.”

Daskellin nodded, his jaw still shifted forward like a showfighter’s at the start of a match. “Thank you, Lord Regent,” he said, then turned and, walking stiffly, left. Geder tried to look out the window and failed. His own bent reflection blocked his view of the city. Of the world. Only when he put the candles out could he catch glimpses of the lights of Camnipol and the moon and the stars. He sat for a time in a darkness too deep for reading. The feast was still going. Would be going all night. If he returned to it, he’d be made welcome. Or he could go to the Great Bear and drink distilled wine and smoke pipes and trade stories with whoever was there. He could command any woman in the court to his bed if he wanted to. Make her do whatever he wanted, and if she laughed at him afterward, he could have her thrown into the Division. That was the power of the emperor. The power of the throne.