The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (3 page)

“Do you? Well. Keep ’em to yourself.”

“Was my plan.”

The winter wind shifted, pushing snowflakes at him like little handfuls of sand. Marcus squinted into the cold and ignored it. The ice might make him a little blind, but the chances were thin that he and Yardem were going to be ambushed in sight of the dragon they’d escorted to Northcoast. Even if they were, the worst that would happen was they’d all be killed.

He tried to imagine Merian here with him. And Alys. He could hardly recall the shapes of their faces some nights. All that was left was a sense of overwhelming love and overwhelming loss that had names and memories built into it.
His daughter’s determined smile when she’d taken her first step. His wife’s arm around his sleeping waist. Years ago. Decades. They were dead. They didn’t miss him. But he’d have cheerfully slaughtered anyone who tried to relieve him of the wounds they’d left behind.

“Made that noise again, sir.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “It ever strike you that we’re doing the same thing as they are?”

“No, sir. It hasn’t.”

“I just mean the mythical spider goddess and all her priests’ hairwash about what history was and what the future’ll be and how it all fits together. They’re just making up stories and getting everyone to act like they’re true. No real stone to build on anywhere.”

“That’s fact, sir.”

“How are Cithrin and her paper gold any different? We’re telling a story and talking people into forgetting that it’s all something we made up. Then we’re using what we’ve snowed them into thinking in order to make the world the shape we want it to be.”

For a long moment, they stood in silence with only the winter wind to reply. Inys, tiring of the game, scooped the dead animal into his gullet and swallowed massively before tucking his head under his great battle-tattered wing. Muffled by the snow, distant footsteps came nearer.

“I still see some distinctions,” Yardem said, but then Halvill burst into the yard. White snow dotted his broad black chitin scales and his inner eyelids flicked open and closed in agitation.

“Captain Wester. Yardem. You’re wanted, both of you, back at the holding company.”

Marcus looked up into Yardem’s wide, considering eyes. “What’s at issue?”

“It’s Barriath Kalliam, sir. He’s come back from Sara-sur-Mar.”

“Ah,” Marcus said. “So the pirate admiral’s finished presiding over the bounty board already, has he? Well, I suppose we should be glad he didn’t get himself killed doing it.”

“No sir,” Halvill said. Then, “I mean, yes sir. I mean, he hasn’t come alone.”

Marcus stood, seeing the excitement in Halvill’s stance clearly for the first time through the veil of his own unease. He felt his spine grow a little straighter, the weight of the sword on his shoulder not so heavy.

“Didn’t come alone?” Marcus said.

“No, sir,” Halvill said. “He’s brought his mother.”

A
ll the money in the world
. Even now, with winter’s progress turning the war sluggish, it was the thought that kept her awake in the night.
All the money in the world
.

Creating debt was nothing new to her. Conjuring an absence of money was as simple as laying any wager at odds. Should storm or piracy intervene, a weight of silver paid for insurance on a ship might call forth twenty of its kind. To create an obligation for money greater than the actual coins in the coffers was nothing more exotic than a default. It happened, if not constantly, at least often.

But to reverse that, to create letters of transfer that summoned the idea of gold—the function of it—without need of the coin itself, still left her giddy. From the remnants of the fortune from her branch of the Medean bank, she had purchased a debt that would never be repaid, and from that debt she had made all the money in the world. As much as she could print, so long as she kept the confidence of the merchants and tradesmen, nobles and artisans whose custom she had changed.

All the other forms were being kept as they had been. The letters were kept in the same strongboxes that the coin had been. They bore the image of the coins they represented. They traded as coins would trade. King Tracian’s master of coin was even coming around to the idea of accepting
them for taxes, which would, she believed, seal them forever as the legitimate equivalent of gold. She had even heard of money changers weighing the papers as if the heft of the pages themselves signified anything. It was a kind of grand theater piece where the whole kingdom—and Narinisle and Herez now as well—ate imaginary food and was miraculously nourished by the exercise.

And because of it, things that had once been impossible were now within reach.

When first she and Isadau had plotted their war in Porte Oliva, desperation had driven them. The breadth and varieties of strategy had been immense. Did the enemy need to cross land to reach you? Offer a guaranteed high price to the farmers along the dragon’s roads for cotton and tobacco, and when the army came to loot the farms, there would be no food to eat. Did the enemy outnumber you? Hire mercenaries wise in the ways of the battlefield and warned against the poisoned voices of the spider priests. Buy ore and drown what couldn’t be used so that Antea and Geder Palliako could forge fewer weapons. Post bounties against the enemy on every front—Elassae, Sarakal, the Free Cities. Even cities of Birancour that hadn’t yet shared Porte Oliva’s fate. Let the enemy face a silent army of the desperate and greedy that you only had to pay.

They had been constrained by the gold in their coffers then. Now that the gates of possibility had opened, Cithrin’s time was spent less generating plans than with putting them in action. Bounty boards were fast and easy. A single local agent in an occupied city could inspire any number of actions against the enemy simply by setting a price on them. Or, if the enemy forces within cities like Nus and Inentai and Suddapal proved too dangerous, some nearby hamlet in Borja or the Keshet could be converted to a base.

Hiring mercenaries was slower than that, but in the long term more effective. The paid blades were for the most part between contracts for the winter. Those who were not subjects of Northcoast or Herez or Narinisle might demand coin rather than the letters of transfer, but Cithrin was confident that she could buy hard coin with credit if she found the right discount rate. It wasn’t as though the gold of Northcoast was needed in the kingdom any longer. Not if she had her way about it. Fixing prices on ore and inedible crops, while ultimately more powerful, took a greater time to see results. She found herself wishing that victory against the enemy might be a matter of years, just so she could see all her schemes enacted.

She sat in her workroom in the holding company’s compound, the dim, fitful light of winter that came through the window adding blue to the buttery yellow light of her candles. Her ledgers piled the desk, and maps lay unrolled and tacked to the walls. A bottle of wine still half-full stood forgotten beside a plate of cheese and hard sausage. In her small space, the world opened like a blossom in springtime, visible only to her. And to people who had the trick of seeing the world as she saw it.

From Inentai, reports said the empire’s strength was faltering. At Kiaria, the mountain stronghold of the Timzinae race, the armies of Antea had met defeat even with the power of the spider priests. Like a child who had never learned restraint, Geder Palliako had spread his might so wide that it had grown thin and brittle. The war was the widest and swiftest anyone had ever seen, and the price it had demanded was terrible. The cities it had taken from her—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—still ached like a lost limb. The Timzinae taken into slavery, their children imprisoned as surety of
their good behavior, suffered and died on the farms of the Antean Empire even as she sat, warm and safe in Carse.

To sow chaos among the enemy now, with enemy forces spread so wide and schisms beginning to form among the priesthood of the spider goddess, was less than blowing aside a feather. The map of the war was a portrait of overreach.

In any other conflict, it would have given her hope.

There had been a time, not even very long ago, when winning a war had meant crushing an enemy, killing them, lighting their cities afire. She, like the others around her, had imagined redeeming the world with the point of a dagger. It was, after all, the story everyone told of how a war ended: a righteous victor, a conquered evil, order restored. It was a lie in every particular. Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And the spiders that tainted the priests’ blood were a tool designed by a brilliant, twisted mind to sow this violence. They were the living embodiment of war without end, a promise of permanent victory, infinitely postponed. To imagine tools—even her own tools—turned to some different solution was like trying to wake from a nightmare. She failed more often than she liked.

“I find myself looking through a scheme,” she said, gesturing to Isadau with a cup of steaming tea, “and chortling over how it will break Geder’s army or ruin his supply lines or give weapons to the traditional families in Nus. And I realize I’m doing it again. I’m looking for ways to
win
the fight, not to
end
it.”

The Timzinae woman smiled her gentle smile. From their first shared flight from Elassae and then Birancour to now had hardly been more than a year, but it sat on Isadau’s black-scaled face like decades. The greyness at the edges of her
chitinous plates made her seem fragile. “There may need to be a certain amount of winning,” she said.

“I know that,” Cithrin said. “But I don’t think past it. I get as far as
That’ll show the bastards
and then I just… stop. It’s frustrating.”

Isadau sipped her own tea. The steam curled up around her face, softer than clouds. “The first enemy is the priesthood,” she said, as if she were agreeing. “If we can find a way to defeat them…”

The frustration in Cithrin’s gut knotted itself tighter. “Then what? Say we did find a way to drive them all back to whatever hole they’ve been living in since the dragons fell. Would that end our problems?”

“The critical ones, yes,” Isadau said.

“Or would it only make it a war we thought we could win? Tell me that when Antea falls all the Timzinae will drop their chains, shake the hands that whipped them, and say
Don’t worry about all the people you killed and the families you shattered. The priests are gone, and we’re fine now
. Because I believe that they wouldn’t.”

Isadau’s inner eyelid clicked shut, leaving her both watching Cithrin and not. The rage under her surface calm was palpable. A stab of regret took Cithrin under the ribs.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was too far.”

“No, I take your point,” Isadau said. “They wouldn’t. Nor would I, for that.”

“I don’t know how you fight against war. Even the words don’t fit.”

They lapsed into silence for a long moment, two women who had once been voices of the Medean bank, neither of them welcome or safe in the cities she’d called home. The damp of the city air made droplets on the palm-wide panes
of window glass. Isadau’s expression was angry, then closed, then amused.

“At least you’ve ended the age of usurpers,” she said. “Not, perhaps, the task we’d set ourselves, but not an inconsiderable windfall.”

“How did we do that?”

“We took the power of gold and married it to the crown,” Isadau said. “Who’ll ever rise against King Tracian when as soon as he falls, all the coins in their chests turn into leaves and ink?”

Cithrin waved the comment away as if she were fanning smoke. “All it means is that whoever cuts off his head and takes the throne will have to offer the same guarantees he did. Kings are just as disposable as they ever were.”

“But bankers aren’t.”

Cithrin heard Komme Medean’s half-joking voice in her head.
Cithrin bel Sarcour. Secret queen of the world
. This was what he’d meant, then. Whatever house rose or fell in Northcoast, whoever sat the throne would need to keep on good terms with the bank, because as soon as the kingdom lost confidence in the worth of the letters of transfer, everyone from the boys selling pisspots to the launderers for bleach to the highest lord in court would be bankrupt. The worth of gold had always been a shared fiction about a soft and shining metal, but now it was also braided with a crown and a bank. The loss of any would shake the confidence in all three, and so long as the powerful understood that, perhaps it was less likely that a usurper could rise up. Or at least not without her permission. There was a giddying thought.

“So,” Cithrin said. “We only need to design something like that that we can apply to the world as a whole, and the
problem… well, it won’t vanish, but we’ll put a blanket over it anyway.”

“An end to all war,” Isadau said. “Next we’ll be tying ropes to clouds and having them carry us across the sea to Far Syramys.”

“Well, if not an end to war, at least an alternative to it. That’s a bit less grandiose.”

“Do you think so?”

“A
bit
,” Cithrin said with a shrug.

A soft knock came as the workroom door opened, and Paerin Clark leaned in, his pale face an icon of amusement and a cynical sort of wonder. “Forgive my interruption,” he said. “I have someone in my sitting room I think you two might like to meet.”

Cithrin put her tea down with a clatter. Isadau rose to her feet. Cithrin’s expression was a question, but Paerin either didn’t see it for what it was or else chose not to. He led the way down the brickwork hallway with its tapestry hangings and crystal-and-silver candle holders. The melting beeswax still held a ghost of autumn honey. Thick woven rugs gentled their footsteps, so Cithrin heard the voices coming from the sitting room well before they reached it.

Paerin Clark didn’t bear the name Medean, though his wife Chana did. She sat now at her father’s side, her smile demure and warm in a way that made the hair on Cithrin’s neck stand up. Komme Medean, his joints only somewhat swollen by gout, warmed his hands at the fire. Yardem Hane stood by the door, his expression unreadable apart from the interest in his forward-pointing ears. Captain Wester leaned against a low teak table, his arms crossed. And opposite him, Barriath Kalliam and an older woman.

The last news Cithrin had had of Barriath placed him in Sara-sur-Mar, taking the role of the mythical Callon
Cane and funding bounties against the Antean army that his brother Jorey Kalliam led. Seeing him here now was a shock, and Cithrin’s mind took hold of it at once. The bounties were no longer being offered in Birancour. They had been compromised, perhaps. Or the queen had decided that antagonizing the soldiers who had already sacked one of the great cities posed too great a risk. For a moment, she was lost in a cascade of implications that his presence set in motion. The woman at his side seemed almost an afterthought at first.

She was older, and a Firstblood. Her hair was done up in a prim bun, and her skin had the ruddiness of the naturally pale who had been roughened by the sun. She could have been a caravan carter or a farmer, but her bearing was elegant and easy. Here among people of violence and wealth, she was at ease. More than that. Relaxed. Her hands, folded on the table, had a scattering of age spots, but they were strong. The woman’s gaze met Paerin as he brought the two magistras-in-exile into the room. The new woman nodded to Isadau with grace, but her eyes sharpened when they met Cithrin’s gaze.

She felt a wave of unease. For a long moment, she couldn’t place the woman. There was only a sense of the familiar and a half memory of terrible violence. Of blood and fear. It was as if a figure from Cithrin’s nightmares had stepped in among the flesh-and-blood of her daily life, and the dread that tightened her throat was inexplicable. Then the woman moved her shoulders, and something about the motion brought her full memory back.

“I suppose,” Paerin Clark said, “that introductions may be in order.”

“Of course not,” Cithrin said. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Lady Kalliam.”

“I was afraid you wouldn’t remember me,” Clara Kalliam said, rising to her feet. She wasn’t a large woman, but she seemed to radiate a strength that Cithrin didn’t remember of her. Of course the last time they’d spoken had been moments after Geder Palliako had slaughtered Lord Dawson Kalliam in front of the Antean court. “For that matter, I wasn’t at all certain I would know you, other than by reputation. As it happens, I do. I think you were very kind, the last time we spoke. Though I admit my recollection of the day isn’t what it might have been.”

“It was a terrible time,” Cithrin said.

“One of several, I’m afraid.”

Isadau cleared her throat. “Cithrin has an advantage over me.”

“Magistra Isadau,” Paerin Clark said, “Clara Annalise Kalliam, formerly Baroness of Osterling Fells, mother to the Antean Lord Marshall Jorey Kalliam and also our own ally Barriath. And also, it seems, to a spider priest named Vicarian who’s still in Porte Oliva.”