The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (39 page)

“What have you done?” he demanded through clenched teeth.

Marcus shrugged and nodded toward the flowing, spider-clotted blood. “The job.”

His own arm was slick with his brighter blood, and the pain from it was getting worse. He stepped back, waiting for the priest to fall. Instead Basrahip’s eyes filled with rage, and he bulled forward, swinging his sword before him like a farmer’s child at his first reaping. Marcus moved back, his center low, the two-handed blade shifting to turn every blow. The priest was strong, but with each breath, his attacks grew weaker. Less precise.

Something was happening under the priest’s skin; a dark mottling covered his hands, his neck, his wide face. His eyes lost their focus on Marcus, found him for a moment, then wandered again.

Slowly, Basrahip sank to his knees, trembling, but he did
not drop his blade. The blood on his belly was so dark now, it looked black, and the spiders that fell from the wound were dead before they found the floor. Marcus watched, unmoved and unmoving, as the last vestiges of life left Basrahip and his empty body slumped to the side. Marcus drove the poisoned sword through the stilled chest, leaning until the blade came through the dead man’s back, just to be sure it was done. He didn’t intend to sit so much as he simply found himself, legs crossed, on the floor. The fresh red blood from his arm pooled around him, mixing with the darker spatters, and it occurred to him for the first time that the injury he’d taken in the fight might be more serious than he’d thought.

He should bind it. Slowly, like a man half-asleep, he pulled his belt from around his waist and cinched it around his arm above the wound. He felt borne up on a soft relief. It was done. He’d stopped the priest. He was done. It was over. He realized he’d closed his eyes when he opened them. The poisoned sword rose from the corpse like a flagpole. Or the marker for a grave. He’d carried the damned thing so long, and at such cost. It was good he’d gotten some use from it.

He needed to get up. Find Yardem. Warn him. The dragon was coming, or had already come. Marcus opened his eyes again and had to concentrate to keep from closing them. He wanted to rest, wanted to let sleep take him, and maybe something deeper than sleep. Basrahip’s empty face was turned toward him, still as stone. The stench from him was awful, but Marcus didn’t mind it. Death shouldn’t be pretty. It shouldn’t be dignified. Better that it come ugly and brutal and true. If you could love it then, you’d be sure you were ready.

He closed his eyes, and waited for Merian to come. For
Alys to take his hand. For all the shit and sorrow of decades to go away forever. When none of that happened, he sighed and levered himself up to his feet.

Some other day, then.

“Yardem!” he shouted. “Are you still here?”

I
’ll be waiting when you come back,” Cithrin said.

Geder’s heart ached at her fragility and her strength. What he wanted was to take her in his arms and swear he’d protect her and that she’d never want for anything again. Instead he looked at her, his expression serious, and promised the next best thing. “We will return.” It meant a hundred things more than the words themselves. He hoped she understood. He turned to the Tralgu guard. Yardem, his name was. “We’d best get started. It can be a long way up.”

The guard smiled vaguely, and Cithrin said, “Thank you, Yardem.”

Geder turned, and they walked toward the Kingspire. Geder felt her eyes on him, or imagined that he did. He held himself a little taller in case he was right. When they stepped through the main doors of the Kingspire, Geder hesitated. Something felt wrong. Then he realized it was only that the great tower was quiet where usually it echoed and rumbled with the voices of servants and slaves and the business of the crown.

“Prince Geder!”

Basrahip lumbered toward him from the shadows. Geder’s smile went still. The great priest wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be up in the temple. Cithrin bel Sarcour wasn’t fifty feet behind him, and here was Basrahip
looking at him. It was oddly thrilling.
Which one of us is the dupe now
? “Basrahip.”

“We have all come to your call,” Basrahip said, hunching forward in unconscious deference. “The last of us are making their way up to the temple even now.”

“Just going there myself,” Geder said. Because it was true. He had to be careful to say only things that were true. Things were going well, but they were still on a knife’s edge.

“I will join you in a moment,” Basrahip said, and looked back over his shoulder.

“Is there anything wrong?” Geder asked.

“The Lady Kalliam said she wished to refresh herself and that she would be well, but…” He shook his great head.

You can deal with it when you come back
, Geder almost said, then stopped himself. Basrahip couldn’t deal with it when he came back because he would never be coming back, and Geder knew it. No lies. He could mislead, but he couldn’t lie. He’d almost given the game away, and the nearness of the mistake chilled him. “All right, but don’t take long. I really,
really
want you up there.”

Basrahip’s smile was broad and grateful. “I shall be there in a moment, Prince Geder. I long to hear the voice of the goddess in yours.”

Do you?
Geder thought
. Well, don’t wait underwater.

Basrahip turned and lumbered off. Geder made for the stairs, the Tralgu guard at his side.

“That going to be a problem?” the guard asked.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Geder said.

W
hat’s taking him so long?”

The temple hadn’t been made as a temple. Geder had had it dedicated to the spider goddess, the Righteous Servant, after Dawson Kalliam turned Camnipol into a battlefield.
There was a large room with an open window almost as wide as the wall itself that looked out over the city and past it to the haze of land in the south. Ropes as thick as Geder’s arm held the great red banner draping down from here. Far below, the tops of the trees shifted in the wind, their soft green billows echoing the shapes of the white clouds above.

Beyond the main room, the temple was only corridors and rooms that had been pressed into the goddess’s service. Cells for the priests to pray in, an altar where they carried out their rites. A pantry somewhere that servants stocked with bread and soup and wine. A privacy closet that they cleaned five times in the day. Old sconces with the black soot halos that marked where generations of torches had guttered and burned. Iron rings in the walls and ceilings whose use Geder could only guess at. The stones were older than the empire, and generations of footsteps had worn the floors smoother than glass. There was a beauty to the rooms, and a sense of age and dignity.

Geder scratched his arm and glanced back at the great doors. The ones that led to the stairway that they would escape down. The doors he and Yardem would bar and block just as soon as Basrahip arrived.

If he would only
come
.

“Might be a problem for another day,” the Tralgu man said.

“No. No, he has to be here,” Geder said.

Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “Any reason?”

Because he was the one who lied to me,
Geder thought but didn’t say
. He was the one who made me look like a fool.
“He just does.”

The rooms of the temple were loud with the rush and crash of priestly voices. The air stank of incense and bodies. Geder hadn’t known really just how many priests there
were. Between all the cities of the empire and the men still tending the original temple in the mountains east of the Keshet, hundreds had come. Most Firstblood, but at least one Jasuru and what looked to be a handful of Cinnae men, pale and reed-thin. He didn’t know when they had been brought into the fold. Tainted by the spiders.

The priests walked through the rooms of the temple, segregating themselves into groups that eyed one another warily. There were so many, it was hard to see where one group ended and the next began. The divisions were there, though, marked out in the motion of bodies and the suspicious glances.

The group standing nearest the great doors were all Antean, inducted into the temple in the last years. Jorey’s brother was among them, talking and laughing. They were too near the doors. What if they stepped out? What if they found the bars that were going to turn the temple first into a prison, and then into a kiln? How would he explain that?

“Don’t,” Yardem said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t stare at the door. They’re watching us.”

Of course they were. Geder was their savior, after all. The man who had called them all into the reach of his living voice to reconcile all their differences and schisms. To end forever the wars between them. And he would, he would, but Basrahip needed to be there. He turned away, looking out over the city without seeing it. His chest felt tight, and between the heat of the room and the smell of it, little waves of nausea were starting to crawl up the back of his throat. This wasn’t what it was supposed to be like. This was his moment of vengeance, and all he wanted was for it to be over.

So many things in his life had been like that. Everything
he’d expected, everything that was supposed to be good and wonderful, had actually been sour and sad. He’d ridden off to war expecting camaraderie and friendship, but except for Jorey, he’d been the butt of jokes and pranks. He’d been protector of Vanai, but only because he’d been set up to fail. He’d had a triumph thrown in his name, been given the regency, and none of it had brought the satisfaction he’d expected. None of it had carried any lasting joy.

Well, that wasn’t fair. There had been moments. His time with Cithrin and Aster in the ruins, of course. But others as well. Undermining Alan Klin had been a pleasure, and that had been before he’d met Basrahip and everything had been tainted. That one time, when Klin had sent him into the winter mud of the Free Cities hunting for the fleeing wealth of Vanai, he’d actually found it, made his own little fortune, and let the smugglers go rather than hand Klin the glory. The memory of the chest filled with gems and jewelry, half-sunken in ice and snow, of pouring double handfuls of the treasure down his shirt before anyone could see him, filled him with a soft, nostalgic glow. Of all he had done in all his life,
there
had been a good moment.

Something plucked at the back of his mind. The smugglers had been in a caravan guarded by some famed mercenary captain. He couldn’t remember the name. But…

“Were you ever in Vanai?” he asked.

Yardem answered with a noise deep in his throat. He put a hand on Geder’s shoulder.

“Now,” he said.

“Now? What now?”

“We have to do the thing now.”

“We can’t,” Geder said. “Basrahip—”

“The signal torch is burning,” Yardem said.

For a moment, it was as if the words were in some
unknown language. He couldn’t make sense of them. Then, slowly, the air left him. He looked down toward the dueling yard. The iron brazier there glimmered like a star in the night sky. A thin cloud of smoke billowed up from it. Geder’s chest tightened more. He couldn’t breathe.

“No,” he said. “No, that’s just the sunlight. That’s just a reflection of the… of the…”

Yardem steadied him with a wide, strong hand. His voice was low and conversational. Nothing in his tone suggested that their lives were suddenly at risk. “We’ll be all right. But we have to go now.”

“We have to go now,” Geder echoed.

He gathered himself to walk, but his limbs suddenly felt as if they were made from wood. He’d become a puppet with an impatient child yanking at his strings. He forced his mouth into a smile that felt grotesque and false. The urge to run pricked him, and he had to pretend he didn’t feel it. Yardem padded calmly at his side, as if the distance from the great open windows to the door at the temple’s far end weren’t the difference between life and death. Geder tried to match the Tralgu’s stride.

The priests turned to watch him. Of course they did. That didn’t mean anything. He’d called them here. He hadn’t explained what he was doing. They were curious. Of course their attention was on him. It wasn’t because they
knew
.

The doors seemed to come closer, even through it was really him moving toward them. A wire-haired priest in a black robe with a belt of chain nodded to Geder. He nodded back, but didn’t speak. He couldn’t speak. They were thick doors. Hard to break through. Now he wasn’t sure of that. There were so many priests, after all. But the dragon was coming. All they needed to do was pass through the room, close the doors. There were iron bars waiting there in the shadows.
He’d hold the doors closed while Yardem fit the metal across the brackets, and then they’d run. Geder could already imagine himself running down the stair so fast it felt like falling.

His heart stopped. What if they met Basrahip on their way down? How would he explain what was happening?

“We can’t,” he whispered, hoping the priests weren’t close enough to hear.

“Going to have to, my lord,” Yardem said.

The doors came closer, and Geder’s heart beat again, harder now for having lost its rhythm. It fought against his ribs like a panicked bird killing itself against the bars of its cage. He couldn’t quite believe the priests didn’t hear it. His own ears were roaring with his pulse. A dozen more steps to the doors, then the stairs…

“Remembered something important, Lord Regent?” Vicarian Kalliam asked, his voice light as a joke.

Geder nodded, acknowledging him without answering. He couldn’t answer.

“Prince Geder?” another priest said. “You look unwell. Are you leaving us?”

“I—” Geder said, and stopped.

The room was silent now. All the priests—there were hundreds of them—had shifted to face him. There were too many. He couldn’t fight his way free. He had to say something. He had to tell them everything was all right, but it wasn’t, and they’d know. He had to tell them he wasn’t leaving, but he was leaving, and they’d know. He had to lie, because if they knew the truth, they’d rip him to shreds with their hands and spill out into the world again, and Cithrin would know he’d failed. And Aster. Only he couldn’t lie.

There had to be a way. A turn of phrase and intention that would get him free, but he couldn’t think of anything. The seconds stretched, and fear with them.

He looked up into the Tralgu’s warm, dark eyes.
We’re going to die here
, Geder thought.
I’ve done all this, come all this way, and I’m going to die here because someone asked me a question I couldn’t answer
. The monstrous unfairness of it was like a torch in his belly. It hurt and it filled his nose with the scent of smoke. The anger flowed into him, an old ally come in his hour of need.

He had to say something.

It had to be true.

Fine.

“No,” Geder said. “I’m not leaving.”

The Tralgu blinked, but if there was any surprise in his expression, Geder couldn’t see it.

“I’m not leaving,” Geder said, his voice ringing out. “Hear my voice? I’m not… I’m not leaving.”

Because if I were, you bastards would know it. And if you knew, it would all be over. And I’m
not
losing to you again.

Yardem nodded. “I’ll let her know.”

The sense of loss was less terrible than he’d thought it would be. It wasn’t even grief, precisely. Only a profound disappointment. There were going to be days and nights in Cithrin’s company. He was going to read poetry to her, and watch Aster become king. He was going to go out to Rivenhalm with his father and spend a long day fishing at his side, the way he’d always meant to. He’d see Sabiha and tell her himself how Cithrin bel Sarcour had come and saved the empire with him, and everything was going to be all right. Only no. He wouldn’t. He was going to do this instead.

“Yes. Please tell her,” Geder said. “Tell them all.”

Then he stood silently and watched while the Tralgu walked out the doors and closed them solidly behind him. Briefly, something in Geder’s mind shrieked.
This is the
moment. Change your mind again. Run!
But then the low growl of the iron bars came, and all hope died.

He looked around at the men staring at him. Dozens of different faces. Some were confused, some sullen and angry, some lit with hope. He smiled. It felt real this time. It was as if everything he’d ever seen had been through a dirty window, and now the glass was clean.

He was done. Nothing mattered.

“Well,” he said, rubbing his hands together. “All right. Why don’t we get started? Can all of you come here, please? Everyone from the back rooms too? Yes, good. Everybody. Come out here where you can get a good look out at the city.”

Like a nurse with too many children to care for, Geder made a show of putting them all in lines and rows. They shuffled and pushed under his guidance, jockeying for position without knowing it was their own pyre. Geder found a bleak and terrible joy in it all.
Here, you’re taller, so stand at the back. Make sure everyone’s got a good view. This is important. This will be amazing. You’ve been looking forward to this, haven’t you? I can tell
.