The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (32 page)

“Say it. Hear your own voice. Hear the truth in it. Geder Palliako is the chosen of the goddess.”

Basrahip’s shrug was vast, his shoulders rolling like cartwheels. “Prince Geder, you are the chosen of the goddess, precious to her and blessed.”

“Good. Do it again.”

Basrahip shook his head this time, but complied. “You are chosen of the goddess.”

“You know that’s true, then.”

“Of course.”

“Good, now listen to me. Listen. We have a problem. The apostate we killed wasn’t the only one.”

“He was—”

“No. To me. Chosen of the goddess?” Geder said, pointing to himself. “Listen to me. We still have a problem. You’ve felt it troubling you, but you haven’t been able to think about it. Am I right? But I know it’s going on. And I know how to fix it.”

Basrahip shuddered. It wasn’t a motion that came from anger or confusion. It was like a man twitching in his sleep or in a fever. He swallowed.

“Listen to my voice,” Geder said. “We have a problem, and I know how to fix it. Am I lying?”

Basrahip’s voice came slowly now, creaking like a bad hinge. “You. You speak the truth, Prince Geder.”

“I do. And you
know
I am chosen of the goddess. You know it because you said it.”

“I know this”—still slowly—“to be true.”

“I have been visited,” Geder said. “Truths have been revealed to me, and I will reveal them to you. Listen to my voice. Am I lying?”

Basrahip only shook his head this time. No, Geder wasn’t lying.

“I will reconcile every schism. I will bring every apostate to a place where there is no dissent and no confusion and no lies. Do you hear me?”

“I hear you,” Basrahip said, and there was wonder in his voice. “I hear the truth in you.”

“Damned right you do,” Geder said. “Call all of them. I’ll give you the best couriers in the empire. The fastest birds. All the cunning men we can use. Send the word to every priest there is, everyone who carries her in his blood. Bring them all here. To me.”

“Prince Geder.…”

“Am I the chosen of the goddess?”

“You are.”

“I know how to fix this. Bring them here, and I will. Do you believe me?”

Basrahip moved forward, wrapping his vast arms around Geder’s body in a massive embrace. Geder thought of the swarm of spiders pressing against him, kept away by a thin veil of human skin. It made his flesh crawl.

“We are blessed to have you, Prince Geder.” The priest’s
breath was warm against his ear. Something damp touched Geder’s temple and for a second he was certain it was blood, but Basrahip was only weeping. There were no tiny black bodies in his tears.

“You bring them here,” Geder said, “and bring them quickly, and I’ll see all of you reconciled forever.”

And that’s true,
he thought. He wasn’t lying
. Because there’s no room for dissent in the grave.

R
ain came in the north starting on their second day. Mornings were pleasant enough apart from the damp of the day before, but shortly after midday the few white puffs of cloud coalesced and joined together into great angry pillars with grey veils at the bases. They crept across the Antean landscape like giants, unaware of humanity and its little wars. Marcus envied the storms a little. There was a great deal about humanity he’d prefer not to be aware of himself.

When the hard grey clouds passed over them, Marcus and Yardem plucked up their hoods and rode on. The little mules that carried them were as unimpressed by the wet as they were by everything else. If the downpour became too great, they took what shelter they could or, if there was none, stopped where they were and suffered until it abated. By sundown, the cloud giants began to decay into great swaths of red and gold and peach that faded to ash as the light failed, and the midnight sky was clear for the stars.

The going was slow. They kept off roads and tracks, making their own trail as they went. Solitude itself was the goal, and anywhere they could find it would do. Only it had to be complete. If it worked—and there was every chance it might not—being observed at it risked everything. The stakes justified the effort.

Marcus called the halt at the ruins of a small fort by a
clearing in the heart of the wood. The tumbled stones showed no sign of human use. Thick moss hung on the tie-posts. A black mat of rotten leaves choked the half-tumbled fire stand. The clearing was a little narrower than the courtyard of a small inn, and showed the marks of a lightning-struck fire a year or two old. New trees thinner than fingers were already competing to choke the grasses with shade again. Like all places of light and openness, this one was temporary.

The only tracks were of deer and rabbit, wolf and bear. No horses and no humans and no dogs. Even poachers and huntsmen had left this place behind. Whoever had built the fort and whatever danger they’d built it against were forgotten. The only exceptional thing they found in the search before making camp was a bronze statue of a Jasuru woman that had been half engulfed by the trunk of an ash. Marcus stopped there for a moment, trying to make out the features on the statue’s face. Whether it had been martial or serene, it was a tree now. Marcus moved on.

The second meeting at Palliako’s compound had, for Marcus, been the test of Cithrin’s scheme. Not whether it would work. Only God knew that, and that was the same as saying no one. No, the second meeting was the proof of whether Cithrin and Kit and Geder’s father had managed to sway the Lord Regent into forsaking his own reign out of spite. As it happened, the little man had arrived on time and without a regiment of guards to haul them all to the gaol or throw them down Camnipol’s throat. More than that, Geder Palliako had seemed pleased. Almost excited. Marcus couldn’t begin to guess what sludge was flowing behind that man’s eyes, but Cithrin’s take on him seemed solid. His anger had turned toward the priests, and if it fixed there long enough for the rest of the plan to play out… Well, that was more than Marcus would have hoped for.

Geder had listened to the schemes that might slow down the invasion and open corridors to let the wide-scattered priests come home with a seriousness and intelligence that were more than a little surprising. When Marcus laid out his own plan for the trap, there’d been a spark in Geder’s eyes. He’d even called for paper and pen and written out letters of passage for Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane. The pages, signed with Palliako’s private chop, were still folded in an envelope of oiled parchment sealed with wax in Marcus’s little mule’s saddle pack. If they were stopped by soldiers and questioned, they had the Lord Regent’s protection. It wasn’t a shield he’d try against an arrow, but it was more than nothing.

He’d expected nothing. Or worse than that.

They’d sent out a bird for Northcoast the next morning. Clara Kalliam was a past master of sneaking messages to Paerin Clark in Carse. Her couriers were fast and well practiced. Lehrer Palliako even thought he might know a cunning man who could be put upon to drive the message through his peculiar talents. It didn’t matter what channel the word went by, only that it arrived.

There was more than enough dead wood under the canopy of trees, and Marcus had a small fire crackling by the time Yardem emerged from the wood with the corpse of a rabbit he’d hunted down for their dinner. Marcus cleaned and dressed the animal and set it on a thin, improvised spit. The smell of roasting meat was pleasant and a little melancholy too. Until today, the animal whose body was crisping on a stake might never have seen anything more human than these ruins, and tonight, it had learned—however briefly—what humanity was.

That wasn’t fair. Not really. The world was filled with people who did things more noble than killing in order to
eat. Artisans who fashioned tools of great utility and beauty. Poets who made songs that honored the living and the dead, or only made people laugh for a while. Brewers and bakers and all the puppeteers from the streets of Porte Oliva. Some of them probably didn’t even eat meat. It was just Marcus and Yardem weren’t among that number, and the rabbit whose haunch he carved had had the ill fortune to run into them.

“Ever think about what we look like to the dragons?” Marcus asked. “Well, the one, I mean. Isn’t like there’s a wide choice of dragons to compare among.”

“Sometimes, sir.”

Marcus bit into the rabbit. The flesh was a little gamy, but after a long day of nothing but dried fruit, nuts, and some twice-baked bread, it was decent enough. That or else carrying the poisoned sword had numbed his tongue past the point of knowing good from bad. Yardem was eating it too, though. It couldn’t have been that wretched.

“Draw any conclusions?”

Yardem flicked his ears thoughtfully, the rings jingling. “Hard to say. Inys isn’t human. I am. It’s a wide gulf to cross.”

“You think that? I don’t know. He’s seemed fairly explicable to me, one way and another. Lonesome, self-indulgent, convinced that he’s a monstrosity and also the only hope for the world. Well, his version of the world, anyway.”

“Hard to say how much is there and how much we’re putting there.”

“Meaning you still think I’m using the great bastard as a mirror.”

“Wouldn’t say so, sir.”

Marcus popped open a waterskin and took a long, tepid drink. They’d want to find a spring tomorrow if the dragon hadn’t arrived. “So what would you say?”

Yardem was quiet for longer than Marcus had expected. He’d almost thought the Tralgu wasn’t going to reply at all when he finally spoke. “We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What we would have to feel to do what they have done. If we can’t put ourselves into that place, then we can only guess.”

“That’s not only dragons. That’s anyone.”

“It is.”

“Palliako and Inys would get along if they didn’t hate each other.”

“If you say so,” Yardem said so mildly that Marcus looked at him again to see if it was mockery. Yardem’s expression was so polite, Marcus laughed. He handed his friend the waterskin. They waited.

I
nys appeared in the late morning, four days later. He began as a thin line of black high in the western sky, easy to overlook. Then he was a hawk riding the high air, only with something odd about the shape of his wings. Marcus could imagine people on the roads looking up at the wide blue-and-white expanse and never seeing the predator in it, and wondered whether the rabbits he’d been eating had noticed Yardem.

When the dragon descended, he came down fast, folding his wings and dropping toward them like a stone. Marcus felt a pang of unease shift in his chest—would Inys be able to stop in time? Had he chosen this particular moment to die suddenly of whatever the hell killed dragons?—before the great wings opened. They caught the air with a sound like a tree snapping in half or a vast canvas sail bellying suddenly out in a high wind. The wings themselves were ragged. Bits of blue shone through here and there where the scars of Porte Oliva would never entirely heal. The fall slowed, and
as he came nearer the earth, Inys flapped the wide, ruined wings to slow himself further. It was like storm wind aimed straight down. The boughs of the trees nodded with it until it seemed like the forest itself was bowing to the fallen king of the world.

When Inys’s claws sank to touch the grass of the meadow, it was with the lightness and grace of a dancer. The dragon lifted his wings out again, stretching them, then folded them in against the shining scales of his body and stood still as stone for a moment. A smell like burning pitch and fortified wine filled the air and left the birds silent. The wilderness might ignore the presence of two men, but a dragon set the world on its best behavior. Every sane animal in the wood was still and quiet and hoping against hope not to be noticed. And so, it being the job, Marcus strode forth.

Inys turned his head, considering him with a wide, dark eye, then hunkered down, crushing the young trees of the meadow with his belly or ripping them with the casual motion of his tail.

“Marcus Stormcrow,” Inys said, his voice a deep rumble that seemed to come up from the ground as much as the beast’s vast throat. “You
sent
for me, and I, like your servant, have come. Do not insult me again.”

Well, God smiled,
Marcus thought
. Baby’s in a sulk.

“Thank you for this,” he said aloud. “I’d have come the full way myself, but there may not be time. And the roads you travel have fewer enemies on them than the ones I have to hold to.”

Inys grunted. His massive eye blinked. Marcus took it as permission to go on.

“We’re gathering all the priests together in a place they feel safe, and then we’re killing them all. But for it to work we need to keep the number of people who know what we’re
up to low, the trap we kill them with simple and effective. That’s why we need you.”

“Go on,” Inys said and laid his head on the turf like a child bored by their father’s lecturing.

“They moved the temple to the top of the Kingspire after some rioting and insurrection a few years back. That’s where we’re bringing them.”

“Kingspire?”

“Tower in the north of the city. Only one like it, and it has the banner of the goddess hanging out of the temple proper like a dog’s tongue. It’ll be hard to overlook. You’ll have to be near enough by we can get you the signal but not so close you’ll be seen. We’ll bar the door so they can’t get out and run like hell for the bottom. You come in, burn them all to the bones and the spiders with them, and they’re through.”

“The war ended,” Inys said. “After so long. And at such cost.”

“It’s got some holes in it,” Marcus said. “There’s at least one army, possibly two, headed in the general direction of Camnipol, which might make bringing them all in one place difficult. The priests are moving in pairs and small groups. They’ll go quicker than a fighting force, and we’re doing what we can to speed them up and slow the other down, but—”

“My brothers gone. My people turned to ash. Our perches drowned and lost forever. This is the fruit that war brings forth.”

Yardem flicked his ear, scratched his arm, and looked back at Marcus. No help there. “Yes,” Marcus said, guessing at what the dragon wanted to hear. “It’s rough. But it’s almost over. And look at all you did.”

“I killed them all,” Inys said. “I drowned the city and sent my allies and friends… my love… to death while I hid in darkness. Like a coward. Ah, Erex, what have I done?”

“And you’re striking the last blow,” Marcus said. “You’re the one who made it to the end, where you can crush Morade’s invention for the last time.” Inys sighed. Marcus bit back a shout and tried again. “And think of the other things you’ve managed. You carried the secrets of the spiders and what they are and how to defeat them when the world had lost all knowledge of them. That isn’t nothing. And the Timzinae. You made a race of warriors who right now are—”

The dragon roared in anguish, thrashing his massive tail into the trees and stripping away the bark with his violence. His claws ripped into the ground, clenched in what looked like pain.
Something’s wrong with him
. Marcus thought.
He’s wounded
.

“I did not,” Inys sobbed. “I did not.”

Marcus waited a long moment as the dragon shook his head and bared his teeth, but no more words came out. “Didn’t what?”

“Asteril, my brother, made the Timzinae. They are
his
children. When I claimed them, it was a lie. This is what I am. What I am reduced to. Dishonoring myself to court the approval of slaves.”

“No one cares,” Marcus said, his voice sharp. “None of us ever thinks about which dragon made which race. It’s not a thing that matters, unlike the chance to kill the priests that’re tearing the world apart. That matters. So why don’t we come back to it?”

Inys reared back like the words had stung him. Violence filled the dragon’s dark eyes, bare as a taproom drunk about to take a swing. Marcus fought the impulse to take a step back. Instinct told him that any show of weakness now was the same as death. Fumes leaked from between Inys’s scaled lips, poisoning the air with the threat of fire. In his peripheral
vision, Yardem had gone very still. If there was a way to get between the dragon’s shoulders—someplace where his head couldn’t reach—and find a break in his scales before he flew up into the clouds or rolled on his back and crushed any attackers…

Inys’s roar filled the world. There wasn’t room for the noise and thought both. The trees shuddered, their leaves flickering pale undersides like a wind was passing through them. Marcus scratched his nose, pretending that his heart wasn’t ticking over in his chest fast as a stone rolling down a mountain. The dragon bared teeth as long and cruel as knives. Then visibly deflated.

For a moment, they were all silent, and the forest too. Somewhere to Marcus’s right, a particularly stupid bird sang out, as if its small, bright trill could answer the dragon. Stupid or brave. Or both.