The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (20 page)

She slept below decks fully clothed, with Hornet and Mikel, Charlit Soon and Sandr, Cary and Lak. Barriath took the days on deck, and Yardem the nights. It felt less like voyaging across the sea than being snowbound in a cabin too small for the people living in it. There were parts of the salt quarter in Porte Oliva where people had lived more densely than this, but they’d had the streets of the city to retreat into. She had nothing. The days were cold, the nights colder. The air belowdecks stank of tar and bodies and grew stale until it seemed like every breath was stolen out of someone else’s mouth.

She should have hated it. She didn’t.

On the third night, the coast to their south began to roughen. Rises became hills. Hills became mountains. Rude, rocky islands rose from the waves like rotting teeth. Cithrin looked for the little winged lizards she remembered from her first voyage to Antea, a lifetime ago it seemed, but there were none. The cold had dropped them into torpor or killed them. She had no way to know which.

After night fell, she stood on the moonlit deck with
Yardem as he measured the stars and adjusted the sails. In other circumstances, they would have stopped for the nights and sailed in the safety of day. Instead, their wake glowed behind them, as if the mirror of the aurora shimmering in the northern sky. Cithrin shivered, her fingers and face numbed, and still she was unwilling to leave. Not yet.

“Komme said you saw the shape of my soul,” she said.

“I said so.”

“Was it true?”

“No,” Yardem said. “I lied. He was looking for a reason to hope, and…” the Tralgu shrugged. “It may not have been the right thing, but it seemed wise at the time. Or kind. But since I expected you would do the thing regardless, it seemed better than he have reasons to agree.”

“And you came because you promised Captain Wester.”

“He’d have wanted me to.”

The sea rushed against the wood of the boat. The canvas sails thudded and barked. Sea travel had a way of making everything sound like a whisper and a shout at the same time. Cithrin leaned against the rail and watched the lights shimmer in the vast air above them.

“I’m impressed with how devoted Cary is to Master Kit,” Cithrin said. “All of them, really. It’s a deeper loyalty than I’m used to seeing. But I suppose they’re like family to each other.”

Yardem coughed once.

“What?” Cithrin said.

“Nothing, ma’am.”

“Tell me.”

“They came for your sake, not Kit’s.”

“Oh.”

Cithrin laughed once in disbelief, then again in embarrassment. She turned to look at the dark water she’d led them to, and the spray hid her tears.

T
hey trekked through the pass, mountains rising black against the snow and towering above their desperation. Somewhere under the snow a thread of dragon’s jade snaked unseen. Clara couldn’t guess how deep they would have had to dig down under blue ice and hardpack to find it. The winds that the land channeled down upon them bit in the mornings and killed in the night. They did their best, building block huts at the end of each day small enough that the heat of their bodies made a crust of clear ice on the walls and floors. They melted handfuls of snow for fresh water and ate what little hardtack and salted meat remained. Every morning, fewer rose up than had lain down.

Marcus Wester had taken to accompanying Jorey when he reviewed the troops, and though the bank’s mercenary still wore the costume of a servant, his wisdom and confidence lent him stature both in Jorey’s eyes and those of his men. Somewhere along the plodding, freezing, ice-haunted march, they had stopped being the army of Imperial Antea and become merely participants in a shared nightmare.

Clara’s horse died on the fourth day. Forging through a drift of snow deeper than its knees, the animal paused, sighed a weary sigh, hunkered down, and refused to rise. It was the last, and with it gone, there was nothing but to walk or else lie down beside the dead animal and follow its lead.
The carts had long been abandoned. Men were even leaving behind their weapons as their strength waned and failed them. There was nothing to fight in these passes. What was bringing them all low couldn’t be cut and wouldn’t bleed.

Clara, for her part, lost herself in the physical misery. At the head of the column, a few men broke the trail, forcing a path through snow light enough to be pushed aside or dense enough to be walked on. It was the hardest, most punishing work of the trail, and which unfortunate was called on changed ten or fifteen times a day. Clara was never called, but Vincen was. And Marcus. And even Kit, their tame priest. The rest of the army followed in that path, two or three walking abreast through an aisle of snow. It made the passage easier, not fighting against a fresh drift with every step.

Time thinned as she walked in a way she’d come to recognize and associate with living on the road. Her numbed feet felt like balancing on stumps. The joints in her hands and hips ached. And still she hauled her trailing foot forward, shifted her weight to it, and began the process again. At first, she heard her own voice in her head saying,
One more step. One more step. You can do one more. Just keep doing one more for long enough, and you’ll have made it
. The voice quieted in time, but by then her body had the habit of it, and the soldiers drew her along like a living stream. She had neither the energy nor the inclination to do anything but be carried along by it.

Twice, she passed men who had stopped. Both had the vague and confused expression of someone lost despite there being only one path before them and only one direction in which to go. The first she prodded into taking a few steps that seemed to reorient him. With the second, intervening didn’t occur to her at all until she was well past him. She
hoped that someone farther back in the line had helped him. That her own exhaustion hadn’t condemned the man to death.

Every night, Master Kit came by, sticking his head into the shelters of snow and ice, assuring them that their progress was good and their strength was enough. It was the trick of the spiders, but for the time that he was there and for several hours after, it seemed plausible that they might survive.

There were no women with the army apart from herself. All the camp followers and tradesmen and fortune-tellers had been scraped off by the rough knife of winter. Nor could she warm her little shelter with her own flesh alone. It gave her an excuse to bring Vincen in with her. There was neither sex nor the desire for it. She was worn too thin to even consider that, as, she hoped, was he. But bodies offered other comforts than release, and having him there was as near as she could hope to coming home.

“I think we may die here,” she said, her head resting against his chest.

“We won’t,” he said, his voice as empty as habit.

“Might rather we did,” she said. “I’m not sure how much longer I can go on. Life alone may not be worth the effort.” She was joking, at least in part. She did wonder how much it would take for her dark humor to slide into simple truth.

“Not life,” Vincen said. “Soup.”

“Soup?”

“It’s how I stay strong through this. Life’s too big. Too abstract. Can’t bring myself to want it in particular. Soup, though? A good rich bowl of soup is just a little further down the road somewhere.”

“God,” Clara said. “And a pipe with some fresh leaf.”

“Pie. With Abitha’s cold crust and cheese and beer.”

“You’ve convinced me,” Clara said, shifting against his
body as if she might burrow into him for warmth. “Let’s live.”

“I will if you do,” he said, but she was already halfway to sleep. The ice seemed comfortable as a feather bed, and her hands and feet were all terribly far away. No dreams came, only a deep velvet darkness and a sense of terrible weight dragging her down. She woke to the tapping of the camp’s caller on the iced wall. On Wester’s advice Jorey had banned use of the speaking horn until they were someplace less prone to avalanche. She rose, chewed a bit of leather the length of her thumb that was breakfast, and the march began again.

Only today, it grew worse.

The first sign of trouble didn’t catch her attention until much later. The second came when the leaden march passed a widening in the landscape, the mountains stepping a bit apart before they closed ranks again. Jorey and Marcus Wester and half a dozen of the highest-ranking of Jorey’s men stood together at the side of the column. Clara’s footsteps slowed, faltered, and turned.

Jorey’s face was thin, his eyes sunken. He seemed on the verge of tears. The others—his men, the noble blood of Antea—were little more than corpses who hadn’t had the good sense to rot yet. Only Wester seemed to have his faculties fully about him, and they were his words that found her first.

“If we try to sleep, the
best
we can hope is a third dead by morning. The smart bet’s more.”

“What’s going on?” Clara demanded. She had no rank or authority, but they were all past that now. Marcus nodded to her and lifted his chin, pointing with it to the landscape all around them.

“Listen,” he said.

When she heard it, she realized she’d been hearing it for some time. A high, merry tinkling sound like a thousand mice playing chimes. It seemed to come from all around her, to rise up from the ground itself and shimmer down from the mountains.

“The thaw’s here,” Marcus said. “We can’t build a decent shelter with wet snow. We’d wind up sleeping in puddles, and that makes waking up come morning less likely. Add that it’s hours, not days, before some unfortunately warm breeze gets up to the peaks. Once the melt starts there, all this is going to spend a week as a particularly unpleasant river.”

“What can we do?” Clara said.

“Forced march,” Jorey said, his voice low and sepulchral. “We don’t stop for the night. We don’t stop at all. We only keep walking until Bellin.”

“It’s not much farther,” Marcus said. “We can do this.”

“Not all of us,” Jorey said.

“The ones that can’t are dead anyway,” Marcus said. “As their commander, the best thing you can offer them is a chance to rise to the occasion.”

Jorey’s head sank to his chest. Clara felt his weariness and distress as if the ache were her own. She wished there were a way to take him in her arms, to comfort him. She had the mad fantasy, gone as soon as it came, of calling for her servants to bring the carriage close as she’d done when her children were no more than babes. Too late for that now, and in so many ways.

“No choice means no choice,” Jorey said. He lifted his head, and his eyes were hard as stone. “Send the word. We’ll break before sundown, but just for food and water. Then we keep on.”

“As if we had food,” one of the other men said with a hollow laugh. None of the others picked it up.

That night, she walked. The darkness came on slowly, and then all at once. The trickling carried on for a time, then stopped as the free water turned to ice. The surface of the snow they passed by had changed. She saw already the texture of it shifting from smooth, unbroken white to a dirtier form, specked where the crystals had broken down and been remade. Beneath the surface would be paths of ice like the branches of inverted trees, clear and hard and cutting through the soft and white.

She could see them all around her, like spirits from the grave. Ice-souls returning for one terrible night before the thaw came in earnest and washed away living and dead alike. She heard their voices chattering like the meltwater and recognized as if from a great distance that she was dreaming. Asleep and walking at the same time. She was half surprised that knowing alone didn’t wake her, but it all went on as she pushed one foot out ahead of the other, and then again, and then again. Forever and only in the single, painful moment.

She observed her mind slowly falling apart, at first with horror and then with an almost childlike curiosity. It was like watching an animal being butchered for the first time, seeing all the bits of her self come apart. She didn’t realize she’d stopped walking until someone tugged her arm. In the darkness, Vincen was nothing more than a shadow and a scent. She would have known him anywhere.

“Can’t stop now, m’lady,” he said. His voice sounded rough. “Soup.”

“Soup,” she agreed, and she walked.

Dawn was turning the snow to indigo when the mountain began to
glitter
.

She thought at first it was another hallucination conjured by her failing mind, but one of the soldiers ahead of her
lifted his arm and pointed. And then another. A ragged, sore-throated cheer rose until the commanders gestured for them to be quiet. It would be sad, after all, to have come all this way through all this terror, and be buried by an avalanche there before the candle-lit windows of the free city of Bellin.

I
n her little rooms carved from the living stone and heated by a single black iron brazier, Clara ate until she was nauseated, ached like she’d been beaten, and slept like a woman sick with the flu. It might have been half a day or half a month before her mind regained itself and her body found its strength again. She rose from a string-and-cloth cot that seemed grander just then than any bed she’d ever slept in. Thin windows carved into the stone wall filtered in a pale sunlight. She washed herself at the little tin basin for what felt like the first time in years and braided her still-wet hair. Bruises blotched her legs and arms, and she had no recollection of where they’d come from. Her leathers and wools vanished, she put on a thick wool robe the color of corn silk and a pair of boots picked by someone with a daintier imagination of her feet than her body could support.

She was just beginning her search for a bell or a cord to summon a servant when a scratch came at the door and Vincen’s muffled voice came after. “If you’re ready, m’lady?”

The hall was a tunnel of stone with lanterns hung at the corners filling the air with buttery light and the scent of oil. He looked better. He’d shaved and his long brown hair caught the glow of the light. Too thin, though. God, they were both too thin.

“Have you been eavesdropping on me?” she asked.

“I hear that all the best servants do,” he said. “Makes us seem cleverer than we are.”

She stepped into his enfolding arms, resting her head
against his breast. It was difficult not to weep, though she didn’t feel at all sorrowful. It was simply a thing her body did after death had tapped her shoulder and then walked past. Vincen stroked her damp hair, kissed her temple, and pushed her gently back.

“We did it,” Clara said. “We went through the closed pass at Bellin, just before the thaw.”

“And we only lost a third of our men,” Vincen said. “The locals are telling us that we’re crazy, brave, and lucky as hell.”

“What a world that this is good luck,” she said.

“You’re here. It’s enough for me.”

She was tempted to pull him into the little room and draw him onto the cot. It wasn’t lust, or not lust alone. It was also that he was alive and she was alive and the trek through hell behind them. He saw the thought in her eyes and smiled, blushing. “Your son is waiting. They have a meeting room set up farther in the mountain.”

“Of course,” she said crisply. “Lead on.”

She had heard of Bellin before she knew it. A free city mostly within the flesh of the mountain, built who knew how many centuries before by Dartinae miners and then abandoned when the great plague struck their race. She had passed it less than a year before, following Jorey and his army in disguise. Being within the tunnels was different from knowing the story of them. Reality gave it weight, but also stole away the romance of it. She’d imagined grottoes within the stone, carved walls with the forms of dragons and men, light coaxed down through shafts high above or created in bright crystal lanterns. In the experience of it, it felt more like a complex mine mixed with the narrow streets of Camnipol’s poorer quarters. Less impressive than her imagination, but impressive for being actual.

“The men are being housed outside for the most part,” Vincen said. “But we’ve got good leather tents and the local cunning men are helping with the sick. They’ve eaten real food for two days straight as well, which appears to have helped more than anything. Jorey and his captains have rooms in the city proper, and Captain Wester and Master Kit besides. No one’s said anything, but they seem to recognize that Wester’s advice is worth considering.”

“How are we paying for all this?” Clara asked. “It isn’t as though we brought any coin to speak of.”

“We’re an army, m’lady. They show that we’re all friends by housing and feeding us, we show we appreciate it by not killing them all and taking what we want. That’s tradition.”

“As I recall it, we wouldn’t have been able to slaughter and loot a wet kitten before they took us in,” Clara said.