The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (34 page)

“Brought some bread,” she said when she reached them, holding out the basket. “Had extra.”

“Thank you,” Jerrim said, taking it from her carefully so that their hands brushed each other’s.

“You can bring me back the basket later,” she said.

“I will.”

She smiled, nodded once to Coppin like she was agreeing that yes, he was there too, and went back down the ladder. Jerrim watched her go with a longing that was almost palpable. Coppin took the basket and opened it. The bread was fresh anyway. So that was good.

“She’s what we do this for,” he said around a mouthful of the stuff.

“What?” Jerrim said.

“This,” Coppin said, and held up the spear. “Being guard. Risking our lives to protect people like her. The whole city of them. Truth is, I’ve got nothing against the roaches as roaches go. Until they crossed the Severed Throne, I didn’t care about them one way or the other.”

“Me too.”

“If they all just went back where they came from and didn’t come back, I wouldn’t chase after them. Would you?”

“Not me,” Jerrim said. “Heard the other army’s left Nus heading this way.”

“They’ve been saying that for weeks. It hasn’t been true yet.”

“But what if it is?”

“We’ll kick ’em in the nuts and send ’em to work the farms, same as we always do,” Coppin said. It was what he always said, and Jerrim gave his usual chuckle in reply. Both the bravado and the appreciation of it felt different this evening, though. Thinner somehow. It reminded Coppin of the feeling at the back of his throat before he got sick. Not the actual illness so much as the announcement that something unpleasant was coming. It wasn’t in his throat, though. The whole city felt like that. Maybe the world.

“Think they’ll come this far?” Jerrim asked.

“Elassae they or Sarakal they?”

“I meant Sarakal, but either, I guess.”

“Maybe. Yeah, probably before the end of summer. It won’t matter, though. They’re roaches. We’re destined to win.”

“Yeah.”

They reached the station house, a room the size of a toolshed bound to the inner face of the wall. Arrows and bolts were stacked there in cylinders of twenty each. Hand axes
for cutting lines if an enemy tried to climb. Long spears with hooks at the bases of the blades for pushing back ladders. The pair looked at it all for longer than they usually did.

“Strange not hearing them,” Coppin said again.

“Yeah.”

I
believe that history is a listing of atrocities and horror,” Kit said, gesturing widely with a cup of wine, “not because we are evil, but because history is itself a kind of performance. And we are fascinated by those events and characters which are most unlike our essential selves.”

“Wait,” Marcus said. “Just wait. You’re saying… are you saying that the whole blood-drenched history of the world—war after murder after war—says something
good
about humanity?”

Cary’s voice came from outside, lifted in a simple melody. Lak’s rougher, less practiced notes rose up around them to an odd but pleasant effect. The smell of nearby coffee and distant stables harmonized as well. Like a single green meadow in the ash fields after a forest fire, Palliako’s estate had become a small place of calm in a vast and implacable chaos.

The peace was an illusion created in the gap between understanding that trouble was coming and the appearance of banners on the horizon. Anytime the approaching enemy arrived even an hour later than expected, there was a limn of hope that maybe something unlooked for but not unwelcome had happened. Maybe this time the storm would turn aside. That the hope was doomed didn’t make it less precious.

“The truth of history, I can’t speak to, but the
version
we tell? I think yes,” Kit said. “I can’t see how any history could be complete and accurate. To be told at all, it must be simplified, and every simplification means something, yes? What we leave in, what we leave out, and how we choose tells, I suggest, a great deal about the teller.”

“
I
suggest you’re drunk,” Marcus said, laughing.

“It seems to me that what makes us human is our ability to create a dream and live within it. History, I think, is storytelling that begins, ‘Here is a thing that actually happened,’ but after you’ve said that, you’re constrained by all the same rules of technique and structure that a playwright or a poet labors under. Which was why I said that history itself is a kind of performance. Consider.” The actor held up a finger. “Why do you suppose there are no plays about good people being kind to each other? Thoughtful lovers who, in the face of adversity or misunderstanding, have a conversation between them?”

“Because they’d be terrible stories,” Marcus said, laughing.

“I agree,” Kit said, “and why is that?”

“Because nothing would ever happen.”

“It would, though. People would be thoughtful and kind and gentle and resolve their hurts and confusions with consideration and love. Those are things. They happen. And they
seem
like nothing. Thoughtfulness and kindness and love, I contend, are so much the way we expect the world to be that they become invisible as air. We only see war and violence and hatred as
something happening
, I suggest, because they stand out as aberrations. In my experience, even in the midst of war, many lives are untouched by battle. And even in a life of conflict, violence is outweighed by its absence.”

“That’s going to be a hard apple to sell all the men and women who’ve died hard in the last few years,” Marcus said. “Seems more likely to me that violence and strife catch the
attention because ignoring them leads you down a short road. I’ve walked a lot of battlefields that had boys who’d have lived another few decades watering them. I’ve made my gold working at war and death, and I haven’t often gone hungry.”

“But war’s not the same as death, is it?”

“The one involves the other, Kit.”

“I disagree. War, I think, only involves a particular
manner
of death. Everyone always dies. It’s the price of being born.”

Marcus laughed. “All right. I don’t know anymore if you’re drunk or I am.”

Kit scowled, his beard bunching at the cheeks, as he stared into his cup. “I can’t judge you,” he said, “but I’m fairly certain I am.” A fly buzzed past them, and then away. Cary began her song again, and Lak joined in more gracefully this time. “I am afraid, Marcus. I’ve come to love the world, and I feel we’re on the edge of losing it. We won’t, will we? We can’t have come all this way through so many fires only to lose, can we?”

“If you knew this was going to fail, would it change anything you did?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“Either we’re about to end the dragons’ war for the last time, or go down to unremembered deaths in a world condemned to constant and unending war. However it comes out, what we’ve got to do is the same. So it doesn’t make any difference whether we win or lose. It’s the job.”

Kit rubbed a hand over his forehead. There was more grey in his hair than Marcus thought of him having, and it caught the sunlight. “It may be wrong of me,” Kit said, his voice melancholy and warm, “but I do wish you’d just told me you were sure we’d win.”

“You’d have known I was lying.”

T
he Kingspire stood in the northern reaches of Camnipol, close enough to the Division that it seemed the great height of the tower and the depths of the pit were commenting on each other. Marcus walked through the streets and alleys surrounding it, Yardem at his side, considering the great tower from every angle. The thing had been built to impress more than as a means of defending against attack. Unless it had been built for something else.

It didn’t look good.

From the east, after ambling among the tombs and mausoleums of generations of the noble dead, they reached the wall separating the grounds of the Kingspire from the streets of the city, too long and too low to effectively man. From the south, where the compounds of the most favored of the high families stood shoulder to rose-scented shoulder, the gardens and houses, servants’ quarters and kitchens and stables looked more like a medium-size village than the palace of a king. To the west was the Division, to the north the city wall. Marcus found a narrow stone-paved square and sat at the base of a bronze statue. Pigeons cooed and trotted to him, hopeful of crumbs or corn.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Two hundred men, maybe?”

“To take it or to hold it, sir?”

“I was thinking hold it. Taking it… twice that.”

“Plausible.”

“Problem is, we’ve got you, me, a baroness, a banker, and a handful of actors. Hard to make that work for two hundred.”

“Is,” Yardem said. And then, “Do have the Lord Regent.”

“That’s Cithrin’s plan, but I was trying not to count on him,” Marcus said. “I have the feeling this will be the last time anyone will be able to put all the spiders in the same
place at the same time. If they scatter after this, it’ll be the work of generations hunting them down. If it can be done. That’s not something I want to enter into without a fallback plan.”

Yardem nodded. “Do you have a fallback plan?”

“No.”

“Do you expect to find one?”

“Doesn’t seem likely. You?”

“No, sir.”

The puzzle of the thing was still shifting in Marcus’s mind, pieces of their conspiracy moving against each other, trying to find where one thing fit another. Geder Palliako hadn’t turned against them yet, and his visits to his compound were still rare enough they could pretend that he was coming for something other than the chance to moon over Cithrin. He hadn’t seen the dragon since their meeting in the forest, but Marcus had worked up enough pitch and sage to fill a brazier, and he thought he’d found a good place to put it. Clara Kalliam had started bringing more people into bits and pieces of a broader plan, aware that each new person who smelled smoke in the wind was another thousand chances for things to turn to shit. The foundation of the thing was all as stable as a drunkard, but it hadn’t fallen over yet. And the problems that bit at Marcus now weren’t the strategy, but the tactics.

The priests were arriving now in pairs and clusters. Basrahip apparently kept a complete record of them all in his broad head, and, according to Geder, greeted each of them by name when they appeared. As more and more came, their simple density was going to make keeping the plot a secret difficult. Putting them all in the temple at the Kingspire’s top shouldn’t, he thought, be too hard. Keeping them there until Inys arrived might be more of a trick, but what had to
be done had to be done. Those plans were made, and if the details were still being tapped into shape, even that didn’t bother him deeply.

No, the splinter in his ass was all the things that they had to think wouldn’t be today’s problem. What Inys would do once he’d snuffed out the last of his brother. What Geder Palliako’s play would be once it was ended. Whether it was possible any longer to bring the scattered priesthood together and not have them each fall on the others with clubs and swords.

The spiders were engines of chaos, after all, and they’d been generating schisms and apostasy for months already. If they all wanted to be reconciled, they might all keep their blades sheathed. If they were already past that, Cithrin might be blundering into a half dozen dramas she knew nothing about. The moment when four assassins all arrived at the same garden was only funny when it happened on a stage.

And it wasn’t as if Marcus didn’t have some betrayals of his own to plan out.

“The smith?” Marcus asked.

Yardem shrugged and stood, as near to a yes as made no difference. Marcus sighed, rose, and turned his back to the Kingspire. Not carrying the poisoned sword left him feeling a little naked, but blending into the city was a better defense now than trying to cut his way through it. And he had his old blade at his side, in case trouble of the more usual kind arose. He made the attempt to fall into the flow of men and women in the streets and yards of the city, to be so much a part of the mood of Camnipol that it accepted him without noticing that it had done so. Two aging fighters on business of their own, and nothing more.

The street life of Camnipol was a strange and disjointed
thing, though. Hard to fit into. There was a brightness and energy all around. The beggars capering on the street corners and the women rushing past with cages of live chickens slung over their shoulders, the old men of half a dozen races sitting in the cafés with pipes pinched in their teeth. Everyone had an air almost of celebration, and all of it echoed like thumping a hollow tree. Camnipol knew it was in danger, and was bent almost double with the effort of pretending otherwise. Smaller banners of the goddess hung from windows and over doorways, bright red and white and stark black, and as loud as a coward claiming bravery.

As they made their way to the southeast of the city, the stink of smoke slowly growing as they came near and the wind shifted, Marcus tried to imagine what it would have been like living through the dark years here. How many people had Palliako taken away to his little magistrate’s chamber to question? How many of those had come back? It was no surprise that the city was a tissue of false gaiety and desperation. None of them knew what was happening now, and no one had any idea what would happen next. For all that the girl selling cups of roasted nuts in the square knew, Geder Palliako would reign over Camnipol and Antea and the world under the spiders’ banner for the rest of her life. Or the Timzinae would come from the south and hang them all from their own windows. None of them guessed the goddess was false, or if they did they’d become expert at keeping the thought to themselves.

The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.

The smith’s yard belonged to a massive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. It sat near the city wall, where the smoke from the forges turned the air white and foul. When the servants
announced them under the false names Geder Palliako had given them, the smith loomed up out of the depths of his shop. His arms were thicker than Yardem’s thighs and his skin stretched so much by the muscle that lines of pale skin made a lacework around the bronze of his scales. He shook their hands gently, like it required conscious effort not to break them.

“Come back,” the Jasuru said. “I’ll show you what we have.”

The smith’s yard went back farther than Marcus had expected, opening into a private courtyard with the forges off to one side. A pair of women were hauling out double handfuls of bright metal and arranging it on the paving stones. Marcus looked back into the shadows. All Pyre’s apprentices seemed to be women. The men, he assumed, had all been pressed into the army, and he wondered what would happen when they came back and tried to retake their places by the fires. The women stacking the weapons looked broad enough across the shoulder he wouldn’t have wanted to pick fights.

“This is what the Lord Regent was asking after,” Pyre said. “We’ve got a half dozen of these ready to put on carts if the army had a need, and we can make more. Take time, though.”

Marcus walked slowly around the metal. It was like a ballista, but built on a base that could shift and turn, tracking the vast body of a dragon through the sky. The bolts were light, but barbed as a fishhook, with a small pulley built into the shaft. The line that it carried out with it was finer than yarn and laid out to tug back on the bolt as little as possible, then tied to a braided cord. He imagined firing up into the dragon’s wings and belly and then trying to pull the line through enough to drag the great bastard out of the
sky before it turned the weapon and everyone using it into slag and ashes. If he hadn’t seen the scars from it on Inys’s flanks, he’d have thought it wasn’t possible.

“Six of them is all?” Marcus said.

“All the rest went out,” the smith said. “They’re beautiful, but they aren’t fast work.”

“Fair enough,” Marcus said.

The smith crossed his arms and glanced nervously from Yardem to Marcus and back. “Should I put them on carts?”

Marcus shook his head. Honnen Pyre was asking if the dragon was likely to attack the army. That was his fear: the Timzinae and the dragon joining forces to destroy Camnipol. If Marcus told him to have the things delivered to the Kingspire, what would he make of that? And what were the chances that he’d keep his speculation to himself? If the priesthood found there was a secret shipment of weapons designed to slaughter Inys being installed around their temple, would that tip Cithrin’s hand or reassure them?