The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (40 page)

They stood in ranks, facing the open sky, and Geder took his place behind them. Their heads blocked the blue. It was fine. There, almost too small to see, but high in the open air, something was gliding. A hawk above the city walls, perhaps. Or something larger and farther away, but coming close.

“All right,” Geder said, his voice a cheerful singsong. “I want everyone to close their eyes. Everybody, now. You’ve come all this way to hear what I have learned about the goddess. So close your eyes, and relax. I want you all to feel her power within you. I want you to feel the comfort she gives you all. Can you do that for me?”

A murmur of gentle assent rose all around him.

“Think about all that you have sacrificed for her,” Geder said. The wings were larger than a hawk’s now, but not yet, he guessed, within the city. With every heartbeat, they seemed to grow just a bit wider, just a bit thicker. Like someone had drawn a pen across the clouds, and the ink was still seeping in. “Think about the trust you have put in her. The faith. You have all given your lives for her. Died out of the life you had before in order to carry her voice into the world. Without your dedication to her, you might have had wives. Children. You might have written songs or brewed beer or any of a thousand different things, but you are the servants of the Servant because you knew in your heart that this was better. Am I right? Do you deny it?”

Another wave of voices, now in negation. No, they did not deny. No one could deny the power of her voice. Some of them were swaying now. Someone was weeping, and it sounded like joy. The wings were no longer like a hawk’s. They took a shape more like a vast and ragged bat. Not quite that, but more like. It was a beautiful creature. He could make out the dragon’s head now, and it might have been only his imagination, but he thought he heard a roar rising in the city. A thousand throats shouting in a chorus of fear.

“Think of the promises she made you,” Geder said. “The golden glow of truth. The knowledge that you were better and purer and more right than everyone else. Take a moment, and feel all the love in that promise. Take comfort in it.”

Someone in the group moaned in something like religious ecstasy. Geder bounced on the balls of his feet. His grin was so wide, it ached.

“My voice doesn’t have that power. But it can carry truth.
And the truth I have for you—the one you have been waiting for and searching for, the one that will end all dispute between you, has come. Take a breath, open your eyes, and hear my truth. You don’t get to
fucking
laugh at me.”

One opened his eyes, then a handful, and then all of them together. They looked around in confusion, reared back, cried out. They surged for the doors, but to no effect. The iron held. The dragon’s approach shrugged off the illusion of floating gentleness. It drove toward them all like a falling stone. The great mouth opened, and Geder could see its teeth.

Inys slammed into the tower, his vast head blotting out the city, the sky, the future.

For the first few seconds, the flames felt cold.

I
nys hit the Kingspire with a sound louder than thunder. Cithrin felt it in her chest like a blow. Massive claws dung deep into the tower’s flanks, leaving marks so wide she could see them from the gardens where she stood. His body filled like a bellows, and the roar of the fire was an assault in itself. Flames blew out, bathing the dragon’s head. They lit the windows of the Kingspire. Black smoke billowed up, rising into the sky. An announcement of tragedy. The violence of it staggered her.

Aster, unthinking, pushed himself in front of her as if his body would offer any protection. She put her hand on his shoulder. All around the grounds, the others were gaping up at the spectacle. Other voices raised in alarm came from behind her. Geder’s guards. The city watch. All the men and soldiers that Geder was supposed to have summoned making their own approach, alarmed and unsought. She didn’t know if this was a blessing, and she didn’t turn to see. The banner of the goddess fell toward them, but slowly. It burned as it fell, and seemed borne up by the heat of its own unmaking. It rained ashes below it and belched smoke above.

The dragon drew another vast breath, and the fire came again. A cracking sound, sharp as a board snapped across a knee, but a thousand times louder, came from the Kingspire.

She wanted to call out to Marcus, to Yardem. To anyone.
But there was only her and the prince, and the actors who were the nearest thing to her family. The dying tower at the heart of a dying empire. The terrible grandeur was more than she’d expected. Marcus, Yardem, Geder… they’d been meant to escape the tower first. This wasn’t what was supposed to happen. Either the ground was shaking or she was. She couldn’t tell which.

The banner reached the trees, draping over the broad and leafy branches. New smoke rose up. New flames to echo the ones still glowing in the tower.

We have to get water,
she thought
. We have to put the fires out before they spread.
It wasn’t enough to spur her into motion.

The horror and awe that consumed her shifted, and a new thought slid brightly into her mind. This was it. This was the moment she’d aimed herself toward. If they’d been in the temple, the spiders were gone now. The war that had spanned all human history was rising in the smoke above her. She wanted to see it as a victory, but she couldn’t see it as anything but an act of breathtaking destruction. That peace could come from
this
was an article of faith. A thing she believed because she had to.

Someone called her name, the voice almost drowned out by the sound of the flames. It took her a timeless moment to find him: Sandr waving his hands and pointing at the mechanism beside him. Cithrin shook her head, confused. The actor yelled something and pointed up, at Inys. The serpentine tail wrapped the tower.

Oh. He was asking whether they should loose the bolts and try to pull the dragon down. She turned to find Marcus, only he wasn’t there. She’d known that.

They should wait. They could deal with Inys another time, when Marcus was back. If he came back.

If you fall, I’m picking up your damned blade myself.

Humanity had driven the spiders to the edge of the world once. But it had also thrown off the yoke of the dragons. Defeating one without the other now would only be half the job. If it meant betraying Inys, it was also being true to Marcus. And the royal guard was coming near.

“Do it!” she shouted over the roar and cacophony. “Bring him down!”

Sandr nodded and turned back to his mechanism. From all around the garden, splinters of bright metal arched up toward the dragon’s glittering scales, trailing gossamer. When the first two hit, Inys shifted, swiveling his massive head in confusion. Clinging as he was to the side of the burning tower, he didn’t have the freedom of movement he might have. It was why Marcus had chosen this moment.

Inys ripped out one of the barbs as two more hit. The gossamer on the first looked like it was growing thicker as thread drew up string to draw up rope, to pull Inys down. Geder’s guards rushed past her as if she weren’t there, bows drawn. More shouts came from behind them. Camnipol rising in terror and rage, as Marcus had hoped and intended.

Inys ripped another barb free, shifted his head toward them, and opened his mouth, but the gout of fire that came from him wasn’t strong enough to reach the ground. For the space of a heartbeat, the lines burned and turned to ash. Embers in the shape of spider web, crumbling, and then gone. The dragon’s roar was louder than the fire had been. His face, even from so far away, was perfectly readable—confusion and pain, followed by a vast indignance.

More people rushed forward to the gardens. Not only guards now, but the servants Geder had ordered back. Some brandished swords and bows, but others rakes and horsewhips, stones plucked off the garden’s paths, or only raised
voices and balled fists. For a moment, she loved them all. Aster pressed himself closer to her, but whether to protect her or be protected, she couldn’t say.

There was a strange nobility about it. All these people, faced with catastrophe, and running toward it. Any one of them would have been wiser to turn and flee, but instead they came together. By instinct, they would do together what none of them might have managed alone.

Inys rose, leaping up into the wide sky, his wings beating the air. The wind blew the fires brighter, and the dragon rose high above the reach of their weapons, spiraling up toward the clouds and then diving back down. Screams filled the air, and bows were drawn, ready to meet the attack. But Inys pulled out, swooping around to hit the highest point in the tower with all his weight. The burning Kingspire shook.

“It’s coming down!” Cithrin shouted. “Get out of the way! He’s pushing it down!”

Fire and stone fell together, coming faster than the banner had. It was only the highest part of the great tower that tipped over and tumbled down toward them, but it was still larger than her countinghouse in Porte Oliva had been. It hit the ground, spewing fire and dust. The screaming hadn’t stopped, but it had changed its character. No longer defiance and horror, but pain.

The dragon, hovering in the high air above the city, screamed. Cithrin thought there were words in it, but she couldn’t tell what they were. Inys spread his ragged wings and flew away to the south, far beyond their reach. They hadn’t brought him down. He’d gotten away.

“Well,” she said, her voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else, “that could have gone better.”

The royal quarter looked like a city after a sack. Stone and
ancient wood burned hotter than a forge, scattered across the gardens in heaps taller than buildings. The people of Camnipol, guards and servants, divided themselves among fighting back the flame, tending to the wounded, and staring in open horror at the destruction. Cithrin found herself weeping with them, and didn’t know how many of her tears were sorrow, how many fear, how many relief.

Clara Kalliam stumbled forward out of the haze of dust and smoke, her huntsman close behind her. She came to Cithrin, and for a moment, each tried to find something to say. They fell into each other’s arms, embracing like mourners at a pyre. Cithrin felt other arms around her. Aster was with them, sobs wracking his body. And then Cary as well. And Kit. And Sandr, his hair singed and a thick burn over his right eye. And Charlit Soon whom Cithrin barely knew, holding her now like a sister in the wreckage. In the heart of the terror, they made a knot with each other, and the simple animal comfort of being held by others who shared her distress was the nearest thing Cithrin had ever felt to love.

“Is it done?” Clara asked. “Are they gone?”

“I think so,” Cithrin replied. “Probably?”

Cithrin felt the movement in the group, a shifting that filled her with dread before she understood it. Master Kit, his expression gentle, stood back. His hair was whiter now than it had been when she’d met him on the road from Vanai. The age in his face more pronounced. But the kindness and amusement and sorrow with which he embraced the world still glowed in his eyes.

“No,” he said. “There is one more.”

“Kit?” Cithrin said, struggling free of the others. Behind him, a vast structure within the rubble shifted, throwing out black smoke and embers like a thousand fireflies. Tears streaked Kit’s ash-powdered face.

“Don’t cry,” he said. “I have been thinking of this moment for some time.”

“No,” Cary said. “No no no.”

“Yes,” Kit said, lowering his head.

“You can’t,” Cary said. “We’ve just
won
. We did everything right. It isn’t fair.”

She took a step toward Kit. Her mouth was a slash of grief. Cithrin came to her side.

“It isn’t,” Kit said. “The world has never been fair. Often beautiful. Sometimes kind when kindness was not deserved. But never fair.”

“What are you thinking, Kit?” Cithrin said.

He stepped back, his arms rising at his sides as if he were only walking a stage, and the flames and devastation behind him were just a clever set piece.

“As long as I am in the world, the danger is as well. I am known to too many people, and the power I carry is too great. No, no, please. Don’t cry. This is victory too. I love you all. It has been an honor traveling with you.”

“Kit!” Cithrin shouted, but he was right. She felt it in her heart like a bruise too deep to touch.

The old actor turned his back to them and walked toward the fire, his steps steady and sure. His head held high and bravely. A dead man, choosing his own pyre.

Cary shrieked and surged forward. Sandr leaped for her, grabbing her shoulder and half spinning her. Cithrin took her arm, but the woman shrieked louder and fought. Clara came as well, and her huntsman, and even Aster. Cary lowered her head, pushing madly against them as the other actors came. It was a cruel parody of the embrace they’d just shared. Or else it was the same. Just the same.

When Cary’s knees gave way and she buckled, the others sank to the wounded grass with her. Cithrin’s world stank
of fire and soil and dust and tears. When she looked up, Kit was gone among the flames. She closed her eyes again and looked away.

Time moved strangely for a while. The guards came, eyes wide, swords drawn against some enemy that they imagined they could cut. When none such appeared, they took position around Aster but then seemed not to know what they should do. Eventually, the boy prince ordered them to help contain the fires. A rose garden was in flame to their right. The rubble and debris from the Kingspire scattered like bones to the left, falling out over the edge and into the Division. If something caught flame down there, Cithrin didn’t know how they’d extinguish it, or if maybe it would find its place in the layer upon layer of ruins that were the earth under Camnipol, and set the whole city up like an endless torch. It didn’t matter.

As the fires moved, Aster joined the soldiers and servants in hunting through the wreckage for any who might still live. A sweep of well-tended grass became a makeshift cunning man’s tent, the wounded and the dying laid out in rows. There were more than Cithrin had hoped, but fewer than she’d feared. The cunning men moved through them, chanting and calling forth angels until the air seemed to bend from their petty magics.

She found Marcus on a gravel path by the edge of a burning pavilion. Blood caked his side, and his face was pale with its loss. It seemed almost certain that he would have collapsed without Yardem at his side, supporting him. The evil green blade in its scabbard was across Yardem’s back now. A soldier in the livery of House Caot stood before them, a naked blade in his hand.

“You can’t find an axe?” Marcus said.

“No,” the swordsman said. “This is all I have.”

“It’ll have to do. Get to the north side, up by that fountain. We need to clear all that brush. What you cut down, bring
to
the fire. Burn it where we can control the flames. Clearing the ground doesn’t do shit if you’re building up a pile of kindling on the far side of it.”

“Yes, sir,” the enemy soldier said, and sprinted away.

Marcus sagged, shaking his head.

“All their best men are in the field, sir,” Yardem said. Then, with a nod, “Magistra.”

She wanted to run to them, to fold her arms around them as she had with Clara, with Kit. But somehow, it felt wrong. That wasn’t who they were to each other. Or perhaps to themselves.

“Kit’s dead,” she said.

“How?” Marcus asked. She made her report—what Kit had said, holding Cary back as he walked into the flames—with a calm that sounded like shock even as she said it.

The pain that flickered across Marcus’s eyes was real, and more terrible for being so little expressed. “Sorry to hear that. Liked him. I’m fairly certain we got all the rest. I took the big one. Yardem locked the others in the tower before Inys came.”

“Inys escaped,” Cithrin said. “I… I tried.”

“You did fine. It’s the best plan I could find in the moment, but was long odds even before we started improvising.”

“Still…”

“You stopped the world from falling into an endless war of every man for himself,” Marcus said. “One asshole got past you. Still makes for a damned good record.”

“The asshole was a dragon.”

Marcus shrugged gingerly, flinching when the pain struck. “Didn’t call it perfect.”

“And Geder?” she asked.

Yardem flicked his ears and looked thoughtfully up at the ruined tower. “Dead, ma’am. He stayed behind so that the priests wouldn’t be alarmed. He wanted me to tell you.”

Cithrin frowned, waiting to see what emotions rose up in her. A bit of relief, a bit of confusion. “What did he want you to tell me?”

“That he died a hero, I think. That he sacrificed himself for your plan. For you.”

“Ah,” she said. “Not sure what to think of that.”

“We’ll put it on his tombstone,” Marcus said. “‘Here lies a vicious, petty tyrant who damn near broke the world. He did one brave thing at the end.’”

“It’s the thing he hoped to be remembered for,” Yardem said.

“I can hope for the clouds to rain silver,” Marcus said, “but it’s not going to happen.”