The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (21 page)

“Having one of the priests there to smooth the way was a blessing.”

Clara smiled and chuckled, though something about the idea sat poorly with her. She put it aside for another time. For the moment, gratitude that the world had seen fit to keep her warm and fed was enough.

The meeting room was round and roughly cut. The air smelled of dust and smoke, but didn’t feel close breathing it. A low table of polished oak with legs of iron commanded the center of the room. Maps and papers were laid out upon it. She caught a glimpse of a troop list. Many of the names had been crossed through. Men of Antea as loyal to the throne as Lord Skestinin, and on much the same terms. They would not be going home.

Also at the table was Marcus Wester. The journey appeared to have affected him least, though how that was possible she could not have said. Perhaps he was simply the sort of man that thrived on travesty.

“Good to see you up and about, Lady Kalliam,” the mercenary captain said with a little grudging bow.

“I am very pleased to have the opportunity to be seen,” she said. “I thank you for that.”

“It’s the job,” Wester said, then, as if he realized how rude he sounded, “You’re welcome, though.”

“We were looking at the path from here,” Jorey said, turning to the map. “The dragon’s road leads east to Orsen, and then north, which brings us near to Elassae.”

“Can we not cross through here?” she asked, tracing a finger more directly from Bellin to Camnipol.

“That’d mean the Dry Wastes,” Wester said. “We could try it, but it would make the pass look like a stroll through the garden. I wouldn’t give odds of six of us making the whole way.”

“Then Orsen?” Clara said. Jorey shot a glance at Wester, as if he hoped to read the right answer in the older man’s face. Wester shrugged.

“It’s got its dangers, but I don’t see safe on the table anywhere.”

Jorey nodded. “We’ll give the men one more day to rest, and then start out. With the road, the path should be quicker.”

“There’s quite a bit that’s quicker than slogging through snow up to your asshole,” Wester said, then grimaced his regrets to Clara. She pretended not to have noticed the vulgarity. “But yes. It won’t be a bad trot, compared to what we’ve done.”

“Well then,” Clara said. “Good that the worst is over.”

“Wouldn’t go that far,” Wester said, but he did not elaborate.

M
arcus still wore servant’s robes. He still pretended to wait on Lady Kalliam and walked beside the new and skittish horse offered up by the aristocracy of Bellin. Even in private, he never presented the Lord Marshal with orders. Just suggestions that the boy knew better than to deviate from. He had a story prepared if the others became suspicious. He was ready to claim Jorey’s mother had hired him on as an unofficial advisor. He even had a name picked out: Darus Oak, mercenary captain from the Keshet. As they walked through freezing mud and snow turning to slush, he amused himself by inventing Oak’s history and exploits, his loves and humiliations. His tragic failures and brilliancies and dumb-luck escapes. It came of traveling with actors, he supposed. It took his mind off the march.

When he wasn’t lost in his own flights of fancy, Clara Kalliam made for pleasant company. She had a better understanding of field wars than most women of court, which was to say she had any at all. More than that, she knew in a general sense what she didn’t know, and asked smart questions. Still, he was careful not to be too harsh in laying fault at her son’s feet. Wasn’t any call to be rude about things.

“He’s smart,” Marcus said. “That’s not the issue. It’s Palliako’s failing. I’ve seen it any number of times before. It doesn’t matter if it’s a garrison command or kingdom or the
bastard who’s picking the gate guard. He chooses the person because he trusts them, not because they can do the job. Give Jorey another five or ten years in the field, he’d be a fine Lord Marshal. It’s just he’s green.”

Lady Kalliam nodded. “That’s my fault, I’m afraid.”

“Raising him different wouldn’t have helped,” Marcus said. “It’s experience he needs.”

“I meant that I arranged that the last Lord Marshal should be caught conspiring against Geder. Lord Ternigan was quite accomplished in the field, but Geder killed him all the same. Because of me.”

They walked for a few moments in silence.

“That’s a stronger case for it being your fault than I’d expected,” Marcus said.

“It’s a weight I can carry,” she replied. “If I had done differently, my kingdom would have done better, and things would be worse.”

“Confusing, but true.”

She favored him with a smile. “I have become more comfortable with contradictions these last few years.”

“I’m still working on it.”

The truth was that commanding a real army again—even if it was at one remove—felt better than he’d expected. It had been a long time since he’d been a general, and his reputation after Wodford and Gradis had been more a burden than a joy. But there was something ineffable about doing a hard job well. Most wars were won or lost long before the battlefield, and getting a force of any size and strength through a winter-closed pass with only a third lost was solid work under the best of circumstances. With this collection of thin sticks and doom, it was a brilliancy. No one who didn’t know to look would see the achievement for what it
was but he felt the lift of pride all the same. Except when he remembered whose army he’d just saved.

Spring rose up around them, fragile and pale and new. The trees they passed—the few that hadn’t been burned for wood by the same men going the other direction the year before—didn’t have leaves yet, nor even buds. It was only that the dead-looking bark was taking on a faint green undertone; the mud smelled less of ice and shit and more of water and soil. Little things, but they added up to hope and the mindless animal optimism that the darkness was passing.

Nor was the only change in the landscape.

The soldiers of Antea had been starving shadows in Birancour. The years on campaign hadn’t just hardened the men, they’d scraped them down to bones and madness. Without the priests to goad them on, they would never have kept together so long. Palliako’s army had pushed itself past the breaking point, and then kept pushing, firm in the dream that because it hadn’t all turned sour yet, it never would. Now, on the road home, it was like seeing them wake up.

No, not that far. Seeing them stir in their sleep, maybe. Food stayed scarce, and the day’s march went long, but the men talked more. They joked more. Their homes called them forward like water going downhill. Kit, walking among them as the priests before him had done, was greeted with less solemnity and more joy. Sometimes, Marcus saw it as a good sign. These weren’t bloodthirsty swordsmen anxious to cut a fresh throat. They were farmers and laborers and men of the land pressed into service and kept there too long. Even the noblemen who led them were hungry for home and comfort and an end to the war. Other times, he wondered which of the men he’d helped guide through the pass was
the one who’d killed Smit and Pyk, or else recalled that any of them would have been pleased to haul Cithrin along in chains. Or worse. Those times, their laughter grated.

The dragon’s jade of the road snaked a bit to the north, then to the south, curving gently around hills that had worn away centuries before, rising up above the earth in long bridge-like stretches, and disappearing beneath the loam. The passage of the army on its way toward Birancour and Northcoast had churned the land to either side, but the eternal jade remained. At Orsen, it would meet another track headed north into Antea and one that continued east to Elassae. Roads that had been there before the nations they connected, and that would outlast them too. The confluence of them—along with the defensibility of Orsen’s weird single hill in the otherwise flat plains—defined where cities were built and how trade and violence flowed. Odd to think how much the world was defined by where it was easiest to get to.

When the remaining army of Antea made the approach that at last brought Orsen clearly into sight, the free city looked something different than it had. The differences weren’t obvious at first, except in Marcus’s sense that something was off. The air around the city seemed greyer than he’d expected. Huts and small buildings clumped at the base of the lone mountain that looked familiar and out of place at the same time. With the advantage of being on horse, Clara Kalliam saw it better than he could, and Marcus saw his unease echoed in her expression.

Either the burden of the poisoned sword was dulling his mind or the hard passage had left him more compromised than he knew. When he realized what he was seeing, it was obvious.

“We’ll need to get your son, ma’am,” Marcus said. “The
halt needs to be called right now, and a scout sent forward under a flag of parley.”

“What is it?” Clara asked, but the tone of her voice told him she’d already guessed.

“Orsen’s not looking to be as hospitable as Bellin was. That darkness at the mountain’s base is a camp.”

“They’re fortified against us?”

“Doubt it. I’ll lay gold that’s a Timzinae army making an early march to the north. Probably the force that broke out of Kiaria.”

“Ah,” Clara Kalliam said. “So we’ve come too late.”

T
he field of parley sat at the side of the road in a meadow that wasn’t yet entirely churned to mud. It wasn’t quite near enough to Orsen that they could haul a table and chairs out from the city, so the enemy had set up a frame-and-leather tent. Protocol had them withdrawing to just out of crossbow range and letting Jorey’s guard come inspect the place to be sure it wasn’t an ambush. That done, Jorey and his guards would wait in the tent and the enemy commander and his guards would come join them, followed by some more or less heated conversation. After that, tradition was everyone went back to their camps and got on with the business of slaughtering each other. The parley was as much about trying to find some hint of the enemy’s weaknesses as any genuine attempt to avoid battle.

Putting Jorey’s strategy together hadn’t been quick. They’d talked over sending someone else in his place in hopes the enemy might think the Lord Marshal was commanding another—possibly larger—force nearby. They’d talked about abandoning the parley and falling back to Bellin. They’d even talked about trying to ambush the enemy commander and hold him hostage, because that was an idea
every inexperienced commander reached for one time or another. Usually, they had an advisor to talk their hands out of the fire on that, and this time it had been Marcus.

The plan instead came to this: Jorey would go, with Marcus in borrowed armor acting as one of his customary three guards. That way Marcus could hear the full parley, possibly pick up on some nuance of strategy or tactic Jorey might have overlooked. Once the parley was ended, Marcus would offer up his best suggestions. After that, the action grew hazy. The idea of taking Kit as another of the guard was considered, but Vincen Coe took his place at the last minute as Marcus deemed the risk too great.

Given how quickly the plan fell to bits, it had been a wise choice.

The guards, when they ducked into the tent, were Timzinae. Knowing now that Inys had created them specifically as warriors against the spiders, Marcus could see the black chitinous scales that covered their bodies as armor. Their double-lidded eyes were empty of everything but hate. The way they stood made it clear that even breathing the same air as a Firstblood was an indignity. Or that was how it seemed until their commander came in and took his seat across from Jorey. He was a Firstblood himself, and more than that.

The years had been kind to Karol Dannien. A bit more softness around the jowls, and his knife-cut hair had gone the white-grey of clouds on the horizon. His eyes were as clear and sharp as when their companies had fought together at Lôdi and against each other in Hallskar. Marcus could only hope that he’d changed enough that the other mercenary didn’t place him.

“Lord Marshal Jorey Kalliam, yeah?” Karol said.

“I am,” Jorey replied. “I take it you’re commander of the Timzinae army?”

“No such thing,” Karol said, his voice buzzing with anger. “Timzinae’s a race of people. This here’s the collected force of the nation of Elassae. Got plenty of Timzinae folks in it. Got plenty that aren’t.”

“As you say. But you are their commander.”

“Karol Dannien. Lately in the employ of the fivefold city of Suddapal. We pried the last of you little shits out of it a month ago.” Karol’s smile could have cut meat. “So tell me how it is, Lord Marshal, you’re saying how you’re the one in charge when you’ve got Marcus twice-damned Wester standing behind you?”

Jorey glanced back at him, and Marcus sighed. “Karol. Been a while. How’s Sarrith?”

“She quit a few years back,” Karol said. “Went to Herez. Last I heard she was raising up two nephews and a niece her brother left behind when a fever took him. Cep Bailan took her place.” Marcus hoisted an eyebrow, and Dannien sighed. “I know. He’s a good man in a fight, though.”

“Your force, your decision,” Marcus said.

“Damned right. So what in all hell happened to you? Last I heard, you were on our side.”

“Still am,” Marcus said. “Just which side’s
ours
got complicated.”

“This ragtag bunch out on the road looking to join up, go burn some Antean farms on our way to sack Camnipol?”

“No,” Jorey said. “We won’t let that happen.”

“Well, Marcus,” Dannien said. “The puppy here’s saying we’re not on the same side after all.”

Marcus sighed. “You know these poor bastards weren’t behind any of what happened. They’re doing what they’re told because they’re loyal. Or because it seemed easier to strap on a sword than die in prison for defying their lords. We can march out onto a field and see who can kill how
many of the other side if you want. Then if you win, you can go make sword-shaped holes in a bunch of farmers and tradesmen who couldn’t have stopped any of this either. That’s going make things better?”

“If the war’s not the soldiers, then who? The lords? All right, then. Hand over everyone you have there with noble blood or title. We’ll just kill them, and only put the rest in chains.”

“You know I can’t do that,” Marcus said.

“Had a hint. How about these priests? Got any of those?”

“I’ve got the same one who went to Suddapal and helped get the word out what we’re really fighting against. And no, you can’t have him either. Don’t be an ass about it.”

“And what should I be?”

“You know damned well that Cithrin and her bank stood against all of this from the start. Well, turns out they weren’t the only ones. There are good people in Antea who’ve been working against Palliako and his priests. We’re on our way up to rein this in. Only I can’t do it if I’ve got to crack your ass the other way before I go.”

“Rein it in how, exactly?”

“Not going to talk about that,” Marcus said.
Mostly because I haven’t worked it out
, he didn’t add.

Karol Dannien leaned back in his chair. His eyes were so cold they would have put a skin on water. “You hear about the children?”

“What children?” Jorey asked, but Marcus could hear in his voice the boy already knew.

“Suddapal rose, yeah? We popped out of Kiaria, sent Fallon Broot and his bunch swimming south for Lyoneia without a boat. Took back what was ours to start with. Palliako threw the hostages into the Division. Right now, while we’re being polite to one another, there’s hundreds of children
who… how’d you call it? Weren’t behind any of what happened? Hundreds of kids that weren’t behind any of it either, rotting and feeding worms at the bottom of the biggest ditch in Antea.”

Jorey closed his eyes, pressed his knuckle to his lip. Funny how close horror and exasperation could run together. Marcus felt it too. Of course Geder had done the thing. Anything to make it all worse.

“Hadn’t heard that,” Marcus said. “Not much pleased now that I have.”

“Well that’s big of you,” Dannien said. “So let’s review, yeah? You’re marching the same Antean soldiers, some of them, that pulled these children away from their families and shoved them up north to die. You’ve got one of these mind-breaking spider priests in your pocket who you won’t hear of handing over. And what you want of me is I go back and tell these men and the ghosts of their babies that we ought to stand aside and let you pass by. Did I get that right?”