The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (19 page)

Geder’s breath was coming too quickly, shuddering. Something was wrong. He was having an attack of something. He stumbled back, wondering whether he would have time to reach a cunning man. If Mecelli saw his distress, he ignored it.

“We have no way to retake the city. None. What little we had left is busy dying in Elassae. If the Timzinae and the traditional families have made common cause—and they have—Nus will fall with the first thaw. There will be enemy armies marching on Kavinpol by
midsummer
!”

A moment came, shorter than a breath.

It struck Geder in the heart like a hammer.

After the moment passed, Basrahip smiled and bellowed, he invoked the goddess and her will and her power as he always had. Geder watched as Mecelli’s despair and rage were battered by the flood of words and imprecations. He watched Mecelli shift from the certainty of their doom to a listless, halfhearted kind of hope. The optimism of a fever. By the time Canl Daskellin arrived, it was all but over. Mecelli made his report to Daskellin: there had been a setback in the East. Inentai would have to be reconquered when the spring broke. The temple there would have to be rededicated. Daskellin listened soberly. It was all as it had been before. As it would be again, if they needed their faith in the powers of the goddess renewed.

All of it the same as ever, except for when the priest had heard Mecelli say the enemy army would arrive by midsummer, and for a moment shorter than a breath and longer than a lifetime, Geder had looked into Basrahip’s face like he was looking down a well and seen confusion there.

N
o,” the dragon said. “I’m not your cart horse. I took the Stormcrow on his errand. I don’t care to take you on yours. If it’s so important that you be there, go. I will find you if I need you.”

Inys turned his great head away from her and laid it on the ground. His great claws flexed, gouging the flesh of the land apparently without his being aware of doing it. The chill wind bit at Cithrin’s cheeks and earlobes as she stood, deciding whether to press on. She knew that he was sulking, and she thought she guessed why. With Marcus gone and her going, both of the humans Inys knew best were leaving the last dragon behind. And God forbid that he not be the center of all things.

The temptation to chide him for his behavior was difficult to withstand. Phrases like
You’ll have other people to tell you how important you are
and
This is beneath the last dragon
and
Are you a child
? all rose in her mind, and she turned them all away. They might shame Inys into doing what she wanted of him or they might spur him to casual slaughter. And of all humanity, the only one he seemed to care about preserving was Marcus. She wasn’t certain that her value in the dragon’s eyes was high enough to protect her, so she stood for a long moment, looking out over the slate-grey sea under a slate-grey sky, then turned and walked away.

The taproom was warm and loud and busy, and she walked past it without a thought. Since her night with Barriath, she’d stopped drinking. It was always hard, every time she did it, but she needed her wits now. Around her, Carse fell away, step by step. The wide roads were as cold as they had been when the winter was new. The towers as grey.

If there was any change at all, it was only in the slowly contracting span of the nights, the inexorable effort of the light to hold the darkness at bay a few minutes more than the day before, and a scent in the air that hinted at the green and new. In a different year, they’d have been the beacons of hope. Winter’s back broken at last. But this would be a war spring. If she failed, it would be the first of a very long line of them. Or no. Not even the first.

At the holding company, the servants ignored her and the guards nodded her past their swords and axes. The first hard taps of rain sounded against the stones as she ducked into the warmth of the house. Not snow. Not even hail. Rain. Even the clouds were warmer than they’d been.

She found Komme Medean waiting for her in her room. A small fire danced and spat in the grate. The old man’s gout had taken pity on him, and his joints were of a merely human proportion for the time. He looked up at her with eyes unshadowed by the cunning man’s draughts and tinctures, and she made a little bow, only half in jest. She felt the coppery taste of fear, but pressed it down.

“Will he take you away, then?”

She considered pretending ignorance, but discarded the thought. Better to play it bare. “No hope,” she said. “Not from him.”

“Probably better,” Komme said. “You’d make up something in speed, it’s true. But a fast boat with a good crew’s nothing to look down on either.”

Cithrin lowered herself to the floor beside the grate, the heat of the flames pressing against her arm. Komme Medean looked down at her along the length of his nose. In the flickering light, she could almost forget who he was: the master of a bank that had spanned nations. And still did. And would again, if the idea of nations and countries and kingdoms survived the coming chaos. All her life had been lived in awe of Komme Medean, in the shadow of him and the institution he’d piloted to greatness. He was only a man. Clever, talented, and lucky, but as subject to illness and time, fear and foolishness, as anyone. He smiled at her.

“I met your parents once,” he said. “When they placed their money with the bank, Magister Imaniel had them meet with me. I was traveling in the Free Cities at the time, so it wasn’t as grand a gesture as it sounds. We all had dinner together at a table beside a canal. It was roast pork. And almonds. I didn’t remember that until just now, but it was.”

Cithrin was quiet. She knew little of her family apart from the fact of her parents’ death and the extended family’s disavowal of the half-breed daughter. She thought she should feel something more when she heard of her parents, but it was like hearing names from a song.
I ate with Drakkis Stormcrow once, and danced with the Princess of Swords
. Father and Mother were ideas, not people. Roles that someone might play, like Magister or Clerk. Or Enemy. Statement of function and relationship, not identity. Komme sighed.

“I didn’t think much of it. He was a Firstblood. She was Cinnae. I could tell it had been a matter of contention, and that they had taken each other’s side against the world. I suppose I admired that, but for me they were simply money. An account that we would take or not take, pay out on or take a loss. Business. When the letter came from Imaniel
that they had died and no one was willing to take you, the only thing I asked was whether their account had enough to support you until you were of age. We called you ‘the liability.’ Not by your name. Not ‘the child.’ And now…”

“You’re getting sentimental in your old age,” she said.

“I am,” he said, annoyance creeping into his voice. “I used to be so hard-hearted, and now it seems like a kitten sneezes, and I’m suddenly made of snow. Soft, I am. Old and soft.”

He shook his head. The fire settled in the grate. Cithrin lifted her chin. “May I ask who told you about my plan?”

“No one
told
me. But I can smell a change in the weather. I called Yardem Hane and put it to him. He said you’d come up with a flavor of… extortion? Is that it?”

“No,” Cithrin said. “Just a way to sell dead priests to the only man in a position to buy. In the coin that matters to him more than coins. Or power.”

“Abduct his father and offer the trade.”

“If it comes to that. There may be a more elegant solution, but it’s good to have a fallback. Have you come to forbid me?”

Komme turned to the fire. The relected fire made him look like an old Dartinae for a moment, eyes glowing and fierce. “Hane argued in favor of your idea. He said… he said he’d seen the shape of your soul, and that keeping you here would bankrupt the world. Break it. And that if I tried to stop you, the death of civilization would be my fault personally.”

“He said that?”

“The bit about the soul, yes,” Komme said. “The rest, I’m paraphrasing. Geder Palliako is a tyrant who has ended kingdoms and crippled races, and you want to do business with him.”

“He’s a small man in a large position, and he’s the only
one in the world who can buy what I’m selling,” Cithrin said. And then a moment later, “We’ve just said the same thing.”

“He hates you more deeply than he hates anything. He’s cracked his empire’s back to catch you.”

“At least I’m important to him. And this is how bankers do things, isn’t it? Not armies in the field, but intrigues in back rooms?”

“The way bankers do things is to keep the profit and farm out the risk,” Komme said. “
I’m
taking the banker’s path. I don’t know what way you’re going. The odds of anything good coming of this are terrible.”

“I agree,” Cithrin said. “But that’s true of taking the safer route too. Mine has better odds than doing nothing, and the stakes are the same.”

“They are, aren’t they?” Komme said, and then lapsed into silence. When he rose, it was with a sigh. He reached down and put his hand on the crown of her head like a father placing a blessing on his child. “Good luck. I’ve had a rich and fascinating life. Seen a dragon. There’s been nothing as interesting as your mind.”

She watched him as he left. He didn’t look back. When the door closed behind him, she took the seat he’d left behind, pressing thoughtful fingertips to her lips and watching the fire dance. He’d said goodbye. Not in any straightforward way, but it was the story under his words. He was the man who, whether he’d meant to or no, had sheltered her all through her life, whose sense of risk and reward had built the financial empire she’d used. He had learned her plan, given his blessing, and said his farewells.

She didn’t know if it was more disturbing that he made the odds that she’d fail or that he thought she should try anyway.

T
he docks at Carse lay at the bottom of the great pale cliffs. The stairways that clung to the stone face were built of wood, and exposed constantly to the salt air and storm and sun and wind. She’d heard it said that they were rebuilt every ten years or so. The cliff face was dotted with old holes where previous incarnations of the stairs had been. And if an attacker ever came by sea, the steps could be burned, and the invader trapped at the bottom of a wall higher than any siege ladder could hope to reach. Walking down to the ship, Cithrin realized how much the violence of Suddapal and Porte Oliva had changed the way she made sense of the world. When she’d first walked up these steps, the idea of burning them wouldn’t have occurred to her.

Ice covered the dock in a thin sheet. A slack-jawed Jasuru boy in sailor’s canvas walked the length of it with an iron bar, shattering the frozen seawater until the dark wood was white with chips and shards that Cithrin took on faith were surer footing. The little sloop that waited for her looked too small, its draft too shallow. Barriath Kalliam stood on the ladder that reached to the deck, his weight shifting as the ship rose and fell with the motion of the sea. He was speaking to a thin Timzinae woman Cithrin recognized as Shark, one of the commanders of the piratical fleet Barriath had assembled.

On the little deck itself, three figures in oiled skins shifted, talking among themselves. Cithrin reached the ladder and Barriath met her eye. His nod was curt, but not unfriendly. His smile was perhaps a bit self-satisfied. Cithrin wondered whether every man looked at a woman he’d bedded with the same proprietary smugness. She drew her deliberate gaze down his body—neck, shoulders, chest, belly, groin—and lingered there a moment before looking back up. She didn’t feel any particular accomplishment in knowing what
the skin looked like beneath his leathers, but she could see the uncertainty in his expression at being viewed as he had viewed her. Uncertainty and also a tentative shade of hope.

“Magistra Cithrin,” Shark said as Cithrin moved past her. Black water shifted beneath them both. “Best of luck to you and yours. Hope you cut their cocks off and shove ’em up their holes.”

“Thank you,” Cithrin said. The Timzinae woman nodded once to her and once to Barriath, then went back to the docks and marched away toward another of the dozen ships tied there.

“Shark’s going to keep order while I’m gone,” Barriath said. “I imagine when I get back she’ll have appropriated the better half of the ships and headed out to sink some trade ships coming back from Far Syramys.”

“Good to know what to expect,” Cithrin said, stepping onto the gently shifting deck. It was small enough that her words carried to the three waiting figures, and one of them laughed. The sound was familiar. Cary pulled back her hood. Her dark hair had a threading of white to it, and her mouth had taken a hardness since Smit’s death in Porte Oliva, but she was still beautiful. More so for being unanticipated.

“What are you doing here?” Cithrin said.

“Learning to play the sailor,” Cary said.

From beneath another of the hoods, Hornet picked up the thought. “You’ll note she didn’t say
learning to sail
, Magistra. Luck is I’ve spent a few years on the ropes. Lak has too.”

“You couldn’t expect us to stay here,” Cary said. “We’ve no props, no costumes. Half a stage at best. And with Master Kit gone, we’ve lost our Orcus the Demon King, Lord Frost, Annanbelle Coarse, Bakkan the Elder. Anything that takes gravity or makes its humor by undercutting it.”

“I didn’t think you’d mind,” Yardem said.

“They’re looking for you, though,” Cithrin said. “All Antea’s looking for the troupe since Inys landed on you coming back from Hallskar.”

Cary shook her head. “If they’re still looking, it’ll be for an acting company heading for the border. We’re a trade boat from Narinisle to Borja on the last leg of the blue-water trade. Yardem here’s Mikah Haup, tradesman of Lôdi. We’re his hired crew.”

“I won’t pass for a sailor,” Cithrin said.

“I won’t be mistaken for anyone but myself,” Barriath said. “Under Lord Skestinin, I patrolled this stretch of water for the better part of a decade. If it comes to someone being that near to us, we’ll be belowdecks.”

Cithrin considered the ship with a skeptical eye. “How much below does this thing have?”

“Enough,” Barriath said. “She’s a fast boat. If there’s trouble, we’ll outrun it. My plan is to find a cove on the north coast about halfway between Asinport and Estinport. There’s a stretch there with no dragon’s roads at all. Then south and west from there until we reach Rivenhalm and Lehrer Palliako. I can act as guide. I haven’t been there myself, but I know the land well enough.”

“That’s
your
plan,” Cary said. “Mine’s to get my damned Orcus back.”

“What about the others?” Cithrin said.

“They’re below already,” Cary said.

A soft voice rose up from a thin hatch at Cary’s feet. Sandr’s voice. “And we’re stacked like fucking cordwood, I don’t mind saying.”

“We’ll reprovision along the way,” Barriath said. “This is going to be faster than a smuggler’s run if I can manage it.”

Cithrin turned, looking up at the vast cliff face above her.
She half expected to see wings silhouetted against the clouds, but there were only gulls and terns. The dragon was elsewhere.

“We should go,” she said. “Before I change my mind about the whole errand.”

Cithrin thought, after her escape from Suddapal to Porte Oliva and then north to Carse, that she’d come to understand the sensations of being aboard ship. She was mistaken. With the sails lifted to catch the winter wind, Barriath’s little boat flew until it almost seemed to rise up from the water, skipping on it like a stone. The dock and Carse and Inys fell away behind them more swiftly than she’d imagined possible, and by morning on the next day, they could see the mouth of the river Wod and the fishing boats that haunted its estuary.