The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (41 page)

“No,” Cithrin agreed. “It isn’t.”

Her mind was already racing ahead. With Geder gone, the rest of the plan had to change as well, but possibly in ways that made things better. There wasn’t time for the Anteans to appoint a new Lord Regent. The city was wounded and under threat. The mark of their power was broken both in the city and in the world outside it. But there was a symmetry—the new saving the new—that might help sell what she needed sold now.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where are we going?” Marcus asked, already falling into half-carried step behind her.

“We need Aster.”

At the base of the Kingspire, the worst of the fire had exhausted itself. Here and there, great beams still burned like tree-thick logs in a Haaverkin common house. The tower stood smoking, its top jagged as a broken tooth.
A severed monument to match the Severed Throne. The players were gone except for Mikel, Lak, and Sandr, who were moving with a group of the palace servants, carrying shovels to bury the little fires that still burned. Clara had been joined by several of the other women of the court, and was bringing water from some palace pump or well, not to stop the conflagration but to soothe the throats and clean the eyes and burns of those who did. Cithrin lifted an arm to her, and Clara nodded. She understood. It was time.

Aster stood amid the royal guard, staring up at the ruin that had been his home. Tear tracks marked his soot-dark face, but he was not weeping now. He only looked emptied. She couldn’t help wondering what this was like to him. So many years of believing all that Basrahip and the priests had said. She wasn’t sure even Kit’s words could have untied all of that knot. Would he still hate the Timzinae, even knowing that there was no call to? Would he still believe in a great spirit in the world that promised to slaughter all lies, when it had itself been proven false? Or would he reject everything, and live his life in the desolation that comes after betrayal? She didn’t know what to hope.

The guards closed rank to keep her from him, but Aster ordered them back. She walked to him. Her clothes were as filthy and smoke-stinking as his. Her body was shuddering with weariness. He smiled at her with a sorrow that belonged on a much older face.

“He’s gone, isn’t he?”

“He is,” she said.

He lowered his head, mouth twisting for a moment in grief. “I thought so. He would have found me before this. If he could.”

“That’s true,” she said, because she believed that it was.
“I’m so terribly sorry. About all of this. But I need you to come with me. With us. I need you to take Geder’s place.”

Aster shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was thin and lost. “I can’t.”

“You have to. This isn’t over,” she said. “And you may not be crowned yet, but you’re king.”

I
nys flew. The fallen, empty world passed beneath him like a bad dream from which he could never wake. His mind drifted as effortlessly as his body. He ached in both. Steel barbs still dug in his flesh, his blood sowing the fields he passed over. His wings were more torn and ragged. Even now, he carried the funereal scent of pitch and sage in his nostrils like a memory. There had been a poem he’d heard once about flames being the beginning and end of all things. He tried to remember it now, but it slipped away from him. And if he forgot it, it was gone forever.

The sun slid to the west and vanished. The forests below him turned to waves. Far beneath the sea he could follow the ghost lights of a great pod of the Drowned as they met for their slow council, even as they had done when they were a race new-made. He felt something at that. Not pleasure, but a nostalgia so steeped in longing as to grow poisonous. Near a great rocky island, he found an updraft and spiraled in it, rising up until the moon seemed as near as the ocean below him. The air grew thinner and colder until the draft could carry him no higher, and he only turned in a wide circle watching the moonlight play across his own outstretched wings. Silver against the black.

Marcus Stormcrow had betrayed him, but Inys bore no anger. Later, he might. Or he might not. There was no
wisdom in blaming a flawed tool for shattering. His Stormcrow here was too feral. Untrained. If anything, the blame for the attack lay on Inys himself. He should have spent the time to better manage his slaves. So long as they valued their small, petty wills over his own, they would be dull knives for him, and he had a world to unmake and stitch back together.

He would be more careful next time. Whatever else, he had learned to respect the low cunning of this new generation of slaves and their untamed violence. The long ages through which he’d slept had changed them. The races were as they had been before, or at least nearly so, and he’d let that lull him into thinking that the men and women within the races were likewise unchanged. And perhaps some were. Perhaps it was only a few like Marcus Stormcrow and the half-breed girl whose willful natures had gone unchecked.

It didn’t matter. He knew now. He would do better next time.

He made one last lazy turn, and sloped down to the south. The bones in his back where his wings locked fast creaked and ached. The promise of rest plucked at him like a dragonet begging for food, insistent and endearing and annoying all at the same time. But there was no land wide enough for him yet. There would be. By morning, if not before. The wind of his own passage whispered in his ears until he could almost imagine voices in it.

And still, despite everything, the Stormcrow had helped him. Clinging to the side of the great tower, he had smelled again the coppery tang of his brother’s flesh as the last of Morade died. Each of the tiny creatures and the corruption they’d carried had burned and the fumes from them had felt like a promise. Morade had meant to steal away the use of the slaves, and he had done, once. Nearly did again. But Inys
had won the battle against his dead brother. Yes, through unstable alliance. Yes, through subterfuge and lies. Yes, despite his own grief and despair. What mattered was only that it was done. Had the spiders spread, the slaves of the world would have been tainted forever. Untamable. Now Morade’s influence was gone, they could be made use of in a more systematic way. That credit belonged to the Stormcrow. For that, Inys resolved not to kill the treacherous servant. But he wouldn’t breed him. Mercy had limits.

The ache in his body grew worse slowly. That was fine. Pain was nothing. It was a message he could choose to ignore. He watched the jungle canopy below him until he scented the animals that made their homes beneath the nighttime green, and found a place where he might not be disturbed. With a shrug, he unlocked the bones of his back and canted his wings to cut the air. His descent felt like the long slow fall into sleep made physical. He was not only tired, but weary.

He landed harder than he’d intended, belly thumping against the ground, claws digging into the soil as he tried to slow himself. He came to rest against the trees and lay still, his eyes closed and the wounds in his flesh shouting in new pain. The emptiness of the world overwhelmed him. No air carried the scent of another of his kind. No water carried their taste. And he, like a fool, had allied himself with slaves. He could as well have expected loyalty from fish and pigs. An animal that could speak and write was still an animal. He had lowered himself to treat them with dignity. It was only that there was no one else.

He lifted his head in the air, opened his mouth to breathe more fully. For an hour, he stayed still, waiting, tasting, longing with a fervor worse than physical pain. And then—for a moment—he caught the scent. Cloying and musky and
gone again even before he was certain it was there. It opened a vault of memories. His mother’s workshop in the South Tower, the air hot and rich with the smell of blood and iron, salt and sand. He remembered being so young he could do little more than perch and watch as she took her turn fashioning wonders for the court. He had thought little enough of it all then. He could wish now he’d been a better student. Now that all had been lost, and everything depended on how he could remake it.

Another workshop. Stale and empty, perhaps. Unused for ages come and passed, without doubt. Or a figment born from desire and the ability to lie to himself. It didn’t matter. It was all he had left, and so he would reach for it. At worst, he would die in the attempt. No one would mourn him. No one remained.

The steel barbs of the Stormcrow’s betrayal still clung to him like well-forged thorns. He plucked them out. The blood that came from them drew flies and scavengers, but Inys had more than enough flame now to keep them away. The trees here were so lush and heavy with water that no fire they took would spread for long. There were maggots hearty enough to live under scales, though, so he burned his wounds closed before he slept. The blood on his scales charred and flaked away, leaving him bright again. Scarred, but bright. It was the nearest he had to honor in a world where no other voice could ratify him. He was the highest of his kind and the lowest. Purest and most debased. It was the lack of community in which he might place himself that would eat his mind. If he wasn’t more careful. He had to be more careful.

When he closed his eyes, he dreamed of battle. His wounds and exhaustion must have taken more from him than he’d known, because he didn’t sense the hunter’s approach until he was already upon him.

He was young and alone with the pale skin and huge dark eyes of the Nightswarm. The race the others called Southlings now. He held a sling in his hand, but did not threaten Inys with it. His stillness was abject, and his scent all but covered by the paste of leaves and talc that decorated his skin. The animals he hunted would not know he was there until the blow came, but he had nothing that could harm Inys.

The hunter, aware that he’d been seen, did not flee. He took a single, tentative step nearer, and then, when Inys did nothing, another. The wide black eyes glimmered slightly with trapped moonlight. Inys caught the smell of fear now, and it reassured him. Good that the young one should fear. A dragon, even one as worn and broken as he was, deserved fear. When Inys shifted his head, the boy froze but did not retreat. For a time they considered each other. The only sounds were the ticking of leaves, the calls of night animals, the distant drum of thunder from a storm too far away to see. The hunter sank slowly to his knees and made a sign in the air with his two hands. It looked like the pantomime of a bird in flight, but Inys took it as a mark of respect. A self-abasement before something deserving of the Nightswarm’s awe.

Inys moved gingerly as much to keep from crushing the boy as from fear of reopening his own wounds, drawing himself up. He felt a moment’s pleasure at the hunter’s fear.

“You have a name, little one?” Inys asked.

“Amin,” the hunter said. His voice was deeper than his body suggested. Older. Perhaps Inys had misjudged him. “Amin of Emissir Large.”

“Your people are nearby?”

Amin pointed to the west. “Two nights. I am… I am no longer with them. I was cast out. I did something bad, and so I live here now.”

“An exile?”

“Yes,” Amin said, defiance in his voice. “I am.”

“What were your crimes?”

Amin’s eyes closed and he swayed for a moment before he opened them. They were full of tears. “Am I dreaming this? Are you my vision?”

“No. But if you seek a judge, I am it.”

The answer appeared to satisfy the Nightswarm. He sat and bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice was softer, but clear.

“There was a beast killing my people. I tracked it to its den, laid in wait, and I killed it. Myself. But when I brought it back to my people, my friend said he’d helped. He’d done nothing, but he said he’d been my equal and more than that. I… was angry. I didn’t mean for him to die. I would take it back if I could.”

Inys felt a rush of sorrow. “You cannot. None of us can. Not even me.”

The Nightswarm was quiet for a long moment. “You’re hurt?”

Inys glanced at himself. He’d been cut and healed and been cut again. The edges of his wings looked like ribbons and made his control muddy and rough.
No
, he wanted to say.
This is nothing. No slave can hurt a dragon
.

But what point was there in lying? He’d debased himself once by caring what they thought. By acting as though their good opinion of him mattered. Better to learn from his errors. Better not to repeat them. “I am.”

“I was a healer once. For my people, and for others. Perhaps…”

Inys shrugged and spread his wings.
Do what you can
.

Amin came close. Inys smelled the fear in him and heard it in the hummingbird-fast beating of his heart, but it did
not affect the boy’s movement. The slave slowly cataloged the insults to Inys’s flesh, new and old both. The rips in his wings, unhealed since the battle in the south. The new burns and pricks still raw under the bandage of char. The long swaths where his scales had once been smooth as water and were now rougher than unfinished stone. An odd peace filled Inys. He recalled long baths of water and oil, tended by a dozen slaves. The gentle vibration of the rasp as teams of slaves sharpened his talons. It had been years ago, before the war started, when he’d lived in his cousin’s house and dreamed of besting his brothers… No, not years. More than that. More than centuries. Even Marcus Stormcrow had only addressed Inys’s body as a thing of convenience and need. To feel cared for, even in so small a way, called forth an ache deep in Inys’s breast.

And then the chanting began. Amin’s hands brushed his scales, his wings. A warmth radiated out from the slave’s fingertips, and Inys felt an energy answering it. As if his own ability to heal had been sleeping and now roused, the dragon felt the rough scales shift and realign. The torn fabric of his wings knit together. The aches of his newest wounds and his oldest scars eased, even where they had been for so long he’d forgotten the ache was there. But that was not the greatest gift the chanting carried.

Against all hope, the melody was one Inys knew. He didn’t realize it at first, lost in the bliss of his remaking, but soon he realized he was anticipating the song, expecting the rising trill, the falling cadence, the near resolution that danced away again. It was one he had heard from Asteril when they’d been young and fresh as a first flight. The syllables were foreign and unfamiliar, but when he turned his attention to it, there were even fragments of the old languages. Bits of human words that echoed and carried all
unknowing the power of humanity’s masters, even in the masters’ absence.

And that, Inys thought, his heart lifting in joy, was more than a lone healer’s cantrip. That was the whole of the world. He had thought the dragons gone, apart from himself, but it was true only in one sense. Yes, he was, unless another sleeper lay buried in the world, the last to lay claim to his own whole body, his own complete mind. But like the shards from a broken glass, the dragons were still everywhere. In the bodies of the races they’d made, in the poems and magics that their cunning men passed down through the generations, in the slave paths they had imposed on the changing face of the earth.

He remembered a little thing his first teacher, Myrix, had shown him. A sheet of crystal with a moment’s light captured within it, so that the paths of it shaped any new raw light into the form of it. As the surface of a pond alive with ripples and then suddenly frozen held the pattern of all the cooperating and annihilating waves, even a sliver of the crystal was formed of all that the full stone knew. With a sense of comprehension deeper than love, Inys saw that the world was the same way.

The shards of the dragons were in the laws that humans enforced upon each other. In the shapes of their bodies and the functions of their minds. The way their cities grew and the melodies of their songs. To bring the dragons forth again into the world wouldn’t be an act of creation, but of reassembly. He shuddered with pleasure. And with hope.

The chanting stopped. Amin stepped back. How long it had been, Inys couldn’t say, only the sun was in the sky now, pricking at the Nightswarm boy’s too-large eyes. Amin’s skin was covered in a sheen of sour-smelling sweat, and he trembled. His heart was calm, though. The fear was gone.

Inys took stock, and was pleased. Even with the char fallen away, his wounds no longer bled. The scars of his old battles had faded or vanished away. Even the tatters and holes of his wings had been repaired, the membrane thinner where it had ripped, but whole again. When he stood and stretched his wings out, his bones didn’t ache. He was astonished at how much of himself the slave had offered up.

Inys folded himself down to consider the boy. The Nightswarm blinked and made the curious gesture again. This time it seemed less the motion of a bird and more that of a dragon’s wings.