The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (23 page)

The thing was, he didn’t want to do any of it. Everything sounded awful. Even the effort to call for more light seemed beyond him. When he’d been a boy in Rivenhalm, he’d dreamed of going to Camnipol, becoming a hero of the court. Now he was here, and he’d done it, and he dreamed of being almost anywhere else.

“It’s only for now,” he said to the darkness and the books. “Soon, she’ll have burned all the lies from the world, and we’ll be at peace. It’ll be all right.”

Or else the confusion he’d glimpsed in Basrahip’s eyes would grow. That bad news would multiply. More cities would fall. No, not fall, but be lost for a time. For longer. The death throes of the old world still had the power to crush everything, and staying out of its thrashing meant being nimble and quick. Geder didn’t feel nimble or quick. In fact, he barely felt anything at all, except muddy in his mind and angry without knowing who or what he was angry with.

A light in the garden below the library shifted. Some servant walking in the night. Or a member of the court. Or Basrahip and his priests. Or the goddess herself. Or Cithrin. Geder didn’t know, and he didn’t want to. As long as he wasn’t certain, there was hope that it might be something astounding. Something that would heal him.

Far Syramys wasn’t actually so far, really. Ships left for it every year from Narinisle and Herez and Cabral. The blue-water trade carried the highest risk in the world, but it was done. Geder closed his eyes and imagined himself on the deck of a ship cutting through the vast waves of the open sea without so much as an island in sight. It was supposed to be a vision of comfort, of possibility, but his mind kept turning to how it would feel to be lost there. Lost in a hostile emptiness without any sense of how to go back home or else forward to safety.

It would feel, he thought, very much like being Lord Regent.

A
s the sky slid from blue to indigo, Jorey and Marcus walked the defenses, Jorey ahead and Marcus behind. Barricades and low, improvised walls stood on either side of the dragon’s road. Mud and stone and uprooted hedge, they were often little more than the idea of cover. But it gave the Antean archers places to hold and fall back to as Dannien’s soldiers moved in. They’d even managed a scout’s perch on an outcropping of rock where someone with younger eyes than Marcus could shout back reports of the enemy movements and Kit could use a speaker’s trumpet to call out assertions about the outcome of the fight in hopes of making them true. Night birds began their songs, trilling to each other and the Antean soldiers. The sun, already vanished behind the mountains to the west, sent streaks of red across the thin, scudding clouds. The smoke of the first campfires rose up like it aspired to being a cloud itself.

Marcus watched more than the battleground. Jorey moved among his men with an ease that wasn’t quite easy yet. Like an actor new to the troupe, he made the gestures without entirely making them his own. He had potential, though. Marcus had seen more than one great general rise to power with less compassion for the men who followed him. Jorey Kalliam understood the importance of commanding loyalty. It would serve him well if any of them managed not
to be killed on this blighted stretch of jade. Jorey called an end to the day’s building, as they’d agreed he would, and the men put up a ragged cheer. During the long, terrible days of the march, Marcus had kept as much as he could to himself, but he still knew some of them.

Durin Caust was the one with two missing fingers who’d been the first to learn how to make a shelter out of cut snow. Alan Lennit and Sajor Sammit were the lieutenants under one of Jorey’s bannermen who held each other’s hand during the march. The one with the flaming red beard and eyes dark as a Southling’s was called Mer, and he had a good singing voice.

Trivial, meaningless bits of information that took them from being a single organism—the army of Antea—and made them into a company of men that Marcus didn’t particularly look forward to watching die. It occurred to him as they walked back to the main camp that holding himself apart hadn’t only been so that his already thin disguise as a servant wouldn’t be seen through. He also hadn’t wanted to see them as anything more than meat on legs, extensions of Geder Palliako and the priests and Imperial Antea. So he’d cocked that up too.

“Double fires tonight,” Marcus reminded Jorey. “If we have wood or twigs or dried dung. Anything that’ll burn, burn it. Let their scouts think we’re more than we are.”

“Last fires we’ll see for a good while too,” Jorey said. “Might as well enjoy them.”

“That’s truth.”

The attack would come in the morning with the rising sun low on the horizon, blinding the Antean forces. Depending on how the enemy was stocked, Marcus guessed that it would be a hammer blow of horsemen coming down the road in hopes of scattering them quickly or a foot assault
swooping south and taking them in the right flank. Or both. Dannien likely had enough men for both. Jorey had laid out the camp to make that plan seem the sound one. More fires in the north, closer together. Fewer and more widely spaced in the south. Likely, Dannien would be using banners or flares to signal his men. Their ears would be stopped against Kit’s voice. As advantages went, it was thin, weak, and insufficient.

It wasn’t only that Marcus didn’t want the battle in the first place. It was also that there was no chance that he could win it. Weak as they were and without the morale-breaking voices of the priests, they had effectively lost already. The Timzinae forces would break the exhausted, underfed, road-weary Anteans like a dry twig, wheel north, and burn a pathway from there to Camnipol.

And so, when Karol Dannien led his men out of Orsen, Jorey and his army would need to be elsewhere.

As the last grey of twilight settled to black, the Antean scouts went out. The moon hung over the horizon at just less than a quarter. It would be below the horizon before midnight. Jorey and his captains went to the men at their fires and checked each group personally. Their packs had to be filled with dried meat and hardtack and the sticky, dense waybread they’d taken from Bellin. That and their swords and bows. No armor. It was too heavy for what they were doing. Boiled leather and worked scale were all burned or ripped down at the seams so that the enemy couldn’t make use of them. Marcus sat with Clara Kalliam beside the Lord Marshal’s tent, waiting for word to come that something had gone awry. That the enemy scouts had seen them or that Dannien had somehow stolen a march and blocked their way. If they’d done it right, there wouldn’t be many scouts to the north of the camp. They’d be marking out ways to
lead the attacking forces to the south of the road, but few plans were so graceful as to match the world.

“Are you well, Captain?” Clara Kalliam asked.

“Am I fidgeting?”

“A bit, yes.”

“Sorry. I’m told I do that when I’m annoyed. Isn’t something I’m aware of at the time.”

She shifted, drawing deeply on her pipe and letting the smoke out through her nose. The firelight played across her face. She was handsome, in a solid, well-bruised way. More than looking like a beautiful woman, she looked like an interesting one.

“You’re thinking this may not work,” she said, her voice low.

“I’m not thinking one way or the other,” he said. “I’m waiting to see what happens. If it’s interesting, I don’t want to spend the time then getting ready to make a call, so I’m just anxious and cranky now. Gets me out ahead of it.”

“Your burden seems to be bothering you less,” she said.

“My burden?”

“Your blade,” she said.

Marcus glanced back at the hilt rising above his shoulder. When he thought about it, the skin across his shoulder still itched and burned a little. The muscles where the scabbard rode against him ached. The weird taste in his mouth that came of carrying the poisoned thing too long had become so familiar, he’d have noticed more if it left. And still, he knew what she meant.

“It hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “It’s only that I’m more distracted. There are a thousand things I’m bad at. This one, I’m good at.”

She smiled. “You’re good at being annoyed and anxious?”

“The way I’ve heard it put is that my soul’s a circle. I’m best at the bottom, heading up. The top of things is just the
first part of down. At least for me. Being caught in a storm keeps me from thinking about other things, and when it’s too quiet, I do. And then I’m not as good.”

Clara Kalliam lifted an eyebrow in query.

Marcus shook his head, refusing the question, but then answered it anyway. “I saw my wife and daughter dead before me.”

“I see,” Clara said. “I watched my husband executed.”

“By Palliako. I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I am too,” she said. “Dawson was an old-fashioned man, but he was a good one. I miss him, but I also think the world as it has become would have been a hell for him. There are times I’m glad he didn’t live to see this.”

Ah
, Marcus thought.
The night-before-battle conversation
. He hadn’t expected to have one of those, but here he was, sitting in darkness with the things that simmered and stewed in people’s hearts starting to bubble out. Well, she’d opened the bottle because she wanted to. He’d accommodate her and see what she would drink.

“You sound as though you’ve recovered from the loss,” Marcus said.

“No,” Clara said. And then, “Or yes. Yes, I have. I haven’t unmade what happened. It was too ugly an end to something precious. I shall always have the scars of it, I think. But I realized his wife died with him, and I have mourned her, and I am someone new. And I like who I am. If God gave me the option, I couldn’t go back.”

“It’s not like that for me,” Marcus said, his voice lighter and more conversational than the truths he spoke. “I’m the same man I was the night they burned.”

“You haven’t changed at all?”

“Not in any way that matters,” he said. His inflection was like a joke, but she heard past it.

“No scars, then. Only wounds. That must be terrible.”

“It is,” Marcus said. “But it makes me good at the things that keep my mind off it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve intruded.”

“I let you, m’lady,” he said.

“Then thank you for that. I will not undervalue it.”

He looked at her, unsure what weight her words carried. It struck him for the first time what very lucky men her husband and the so-called servant everyone pretended wasn’t her lover might be. She was a singular woman.

Footsteps approached the fire, and Marcus looked up. He’d forgotten to put his back to the fire, and his eyes were poorly adapted to the darkness around them. When Vincen Coe loomed up from the night, it was like he’d stepped into being.

“Word’s come from the scouts. Jorey’s chosen a path.”

“Well then,” Marcus said. “Let’s see if we can pull this off after all.”

The night march began. Everyone’s orders were strict. No voices rose in chatter or song. No scabbard remained unwrapped for the starlight to glint off the metal. The soldiers had rubbed their faces in dirt and ash to keep the sweat from shining. Likely it was more than they need do, but the way to find that out was to try without and fail. The curious thing about war—about so many things—was the number of critically important things that no one could know.

Marcus and Vincen and Clara Kalliam, like the rest of the great army of Antea, abandoned their fire and their tent, their carts and the great majority of the supplies they’d carried, and became ghosts. Silent as the spirits of the dead, they whispered their way to the north, running along deer trails and through thin woods. The air was chill to the point of real cold, but after the pass, it felt like nothing. The thread
of dragon’s jade that led from Orsen up into the body of the empire lay somewhere far to their right, unseen. When the last sliver of moon failed them, they went on in darkness without so much as a candle to give them away.

Hours later, the east brightened to charcoal and the figures walking in their silent lines began to have silhouettes. Jorey called the halt, and the army divided. Five groups to the west, to cross the dragon’s road and take shelter separately in the shallow hills and forests of Antea’s southern reaches. Three to stay here and skirt the edges of the Dry Wastes as best they could. One small group with most of the horses to ride north to Camnipol, raising the alarm along the way.

It was in many ways the end of the Lord Marshal’s command. Though Jorey Kalliam would lead the largest of the groups, all would act independently to harass Dannien’s scouts and threaten his supply lines, draw him off the swift path of the dragon’s road into the weeds and dirt of the plains. They would slow the attackers, distract them, and if one group was cornered and slaughtered to a man, there would still be seven more to carry on the job. It was the kind of fighting they did in the Keshet and the wilder edges of Borja, dirty and harsh and thin on honor. It was the kind of battle an army didn’t win so much as indefinitely postpone losing.

None of Jorey’s captains, no matter how noble their blood, objected. That alone, Marcus thought, showed how far Antea had gone down the dragon’s path. No one dreamed of glorious conquest on the field of battle. No one called their sneaking away in the night an act of cowardice. Years in the field and more than half the men who’d marched out to capture Nus dead or scattered back along the path had left the veterans of Antea with fewer illusions about the glories of war than when they’d started.

Which, though Marcus didn’t say it, suggested there was another problem.

T
hey stopped three hours after midday in a shallow valley. Sandstone blocks made a rough wall, the only vestige of some long-vanished structure. There was no snow there, no ice, nothing that could have been made into water. The air had an uncanny salt taste that Marcus had only ever found near the Dry Wastes. But though they were close, these weren’t the wastes.

Jorey’s personal force was a hundred and fifty men, five horses, and his mother. Of the three that had stayed on the east side of the jade road, it had gone farthest north. Even if Dannien wheeled his forces and quick-marched after them—which would have been a first-campaign level of error—they wouldn’t reach here in twice the time Jorey had. The army might be hard to stop, but at the price of speed.

Marcus found Kit on the sun-soaked side of the wall. The actor had grown thinner since they’d left Carse. They all had. His cheekbones seemed ready to cut through his olive skin, and his wiry hair haloed him in brown and grey. He lifted an exhausted hand to Marcus.

“Well,” Marcus said, sitting beside the man. “That was unpleasant.”

“I found it less enjoyable than I expected,” Kit agreed. “And I don’t think my expectations were particularly high. I must admit, I was surprised that our little sidestep was effective.”

“There are advantages to having a name that kings whisper to scare their princes at night. Great warriors don’t traditionally turn tail and sneak out in the dark before a battle. Add to that I challenged him, and he thought we had more men than we did. He believed he’d win, but I didn’t let him
think I agreed quite so much.” Marcus laughed and rested his head against the gritty stone. “I won’t be able to pull the trick again.”

Kit made a noise of appreciation deep in his throat and went silent. Marcus shifted the scabbard, unslung it awkwardly, and put it on the ground at his side.

“Noticed something odd. When the forces split, no one was talking about the greater glory of the goddess or how we were all bringing truth to the unwashed or any of that.”

“I suppose I hadn’t paid attention to that,” Kit said.

“No, they dropped their honor-and-glory talk in favor of something practical pretty damned fast. Leaves me wondering.” He looked over at his old friend and companion. They had come through terrible places together, he and Kit. He didn’t want to go on, but it was the job. “Get the feeling you may have been improvising some lines.”