The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (7 page)

“Only two,” Clara said.

“Only two if no others have arrived in your absence.” Komme’s voice was gentle, but firm. “We speculate on what’s happened in the winter camp, but we can’t know. And though I hesitate to point it out, Lord Marshal of Antea hasn’t been an invitation to a long career since Palliako took the crown.”

“Why didn’t Skestinin come to us?” Tracian said. “He has to know what the priests are. We have showed him the one we have, haven’t we? The actor?”

“He’s known since Porte Oliva,” Komme said. “It isn’t at issue with him.”

“Why not?”

Several thoughts collided in Clara’s mind:
He is bound by his honor
and
He has reason to fear Palliako
and
Men of a certain age can only understand the world they were boys
in
. She was left with an impatient grunt as the most eloquent answer she could give.

“More to the point,” Komme said, “is what we can do about it. You know the court in Camnipol better than any of us. Will they rise against the priests? When they know, will they take arms? Or will they be like our guest?”

Clara wished badly she’d thought to bring a pipe. The wine was warm, but too sweet. She wanted the feel of the stem between her teeth and the taste of smoke. “The court,” she said, “is unlikely to turn. The lords who were most prone to object to the priests rose already, my husband among them, and they’re all dead. Anyone disloyal to Palliako is dead or exiled or hung from the Prisoner’s Span. The fear he has built in these last years… No. I think they won’t rise up. Even if they know what the priests are and how they function. And after all, they think they’re winning.”

“They
are
winning,” Tracian said, only of course that wasn’t true. None of them were winning, except perhaps Morade, thousands of years dead and still sowing chaos among the dragons’ slaves.

Komme Medean sighed. “That’s the thing with these spiders, isn’t it? Even when the wolf’s at their door, they’ll
believe
they’re on top of the world and pissing down on the rest of us. You can’t change a man’s mind when he’s lost the capacity to see he’s wrong.”

H
ow long did you work with Karol Dannien?” Marcus asked. If she hadn’t known him for as long as she had, it might have sounded like an innocuous question. The Yemmu sitting across the table from them reached up and scratched at one of the great carved tusks that rose from his lower jaw. Since Cithrin was fairly certain the intricate whirls and images in the enamel weren’t capable of itching, she interpreted it as a sign of annoyance.

“Three seasons, more or less,” Dantag Moss said. “Two in Borja when the council shat itself and Tauendak declared against Lôdi, and then a summer in the Keshet.”

“Small unit work?” Marcus asked.

“And some garrisoning. Elder Samabir up in Tauendak wanted his family to have the glory of the battle, so he set us up to stop anyone from looping around behind him.”

Yardem flicked a jingling ear. “And you let him?”

“Dannien let him,” Moss said. “I was tertian back then. Not going to dictate to my prime.”

Marcus glanced over at Yardem, the two men conducting some tacit conversation over her head. Cithrin wished she had a tusk to scratch, then smiled, amused by the image. Around them, the common house was quiet. It was just after midday, and the streets were at their warmest. When the door opened, there was the smell of water and the sound
of dripping snowmelt from the roofs. The winter sunset would come in fewer than three hours and turn it all back to ice. There would be time later to huddle together around the rough wood tables, but anyone whose work called them out into the city was hurrying now to get it finished before the dark came.

Cithrin was comfortable where she was.

“Fair enough,” Marcus said. Whatever test he’d been making, the mercenary had passed it, or near enough.

Cithrin took it as time for her to take the negotiation. “How long before you could put your men in the field?”

“Start of fighting season’s still six weeks out, if the weather’s with you. Nine if it’s not.”

“Not what I asked.”

“Then the answer’s going to depend on what your cold bonus is. Man loses a finger, it ain’t much comfort that it was frostbite and not an axe.”

“Fair enough—”

“And, ah, no offense, miss? Captain Wester? But hard coin. This war gold? It doesn’t do with the men.”

Yardem made a low throbbing sound in his throat, something equal parts cough and growl. Moss’s scowl deepened, his lips flowing around the carved teeth. The only other Yemmu Cithrin had worked with was Pyk Usterhall, the bank’s notary lost in the flight from Porte Oliva. Seeing Pyk’s expression on the mercenary’s face left her melancholy. Cithrin took a long sip of wine to clear it away.

“There’s a bonus for accepting war gold,” she said. “If you only take coin, it’ll be eighty on the hundred. And you’re going to be provisioning from Northcoast and Narinisle. It won’t make much difference to a bag of feed whether it was bought with metal or paper. Tastes just the same after.”

“Still,” the Yemmu said.

“We could do the provisioning, ma’am,” Yardem said. “Captain Moss takes coin for his wages, we give him the horses and the food. Any arms or armor.”

It was a suggestion Cithrin had fed to the Tralgu before the meeting. He’d brought it up a little sooner than she’d hoped, but it was close enough. She made a show of thinking about it. “Ninety on the hundred for that, but yes. We could.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead on ourselves.”

“Of ourselves,” Marcus said. “
Of
. Not
on
.”

Moss shrugged, but the correction had hit home. That was fine. Marcus made an accomplished hard party. He was older, a man, and Marcus Wester. She was younger, slighter and paler than a full Firstblood, and a woman. If Moss was like the others, he’d play to her.

“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” Moss said, and Cithrin made a silent note that he’d accepted Marcus’s correction. “What’s the work we’re doing here? My men are hard as stone and sharper’n axes, but if you’re putting us against Antea in the field—”

“We aren’t. Their army’s going to fall back. We want you to… clean where they’ve been. Look for people who’ve been taken by the spiders. Whoever you find, you burn.”

“Hunters, then,” Moss said, sucked noisily at his teeth, and shrugged. “We can do that, yeah. If your price is right.”

“There’s risks,” Cithrin said. “We’re working to have Birancour’s permission, but if the queen doesn’t agree, it won’t change our contract.”

“You paying me or is she?” Moss said. Cithrin felt a knot in her belly untie.

“I’m paying you.”

“All right, then,” Moss said. “We won’t bother the queensmen if they don’t bother us. Plenty of peace to get kept, I figure. Enough to go around anyway.”

“One thing,” Marcus said. “If one of the queensmen has the little fuckers in his blood? Even if he’s captain or lord of whatever town you’re passing through…”

“He burns,” Moss said. “I understand. But what’s the money?”

The negotiation went on for the better part of an hour as they worked through the details—how much for a sword-and-bow, how much for a horse, how much for a cunning man; the length of the contract; the payment schedule; the bonus for every one of the tainted they burned; the standard of evidence they had to provide for it. The cold bonus. The penalty for killing outside their mandate. It wasn’t her first pass through this particular area of contract law, and having Marcus and Yardem talk her through the logic of it all beforehand let her seem more experienced than she was. When it was done, Cithrin shook Dantag Moss’s huge, thick hand. The contracts would be drawn up in three days. They’d cut thumbs on it and sign, and she’d hand over the initial payment—hard coin for the men, war gold for the provisions. If it had all been coin, it wouldn’t have happened.

She stepped out to the street, Marcus and Yardem behind her, and turned to the north. The sky was white from horizon to horizon. Snow melted in the sunlight and glowed bluish in the shadows. Carse wasn’t a beautiful city. It was too open, too austere. She had grown up in the close streets and canals of Vanai, come to her full power in the dense humanity of Porte Oliva. Even the fivefold city of Suddapal—where she’d been as out of place as a candle for the Drowned—had been more beautiful in its way. Carse was unnerving, she realized again, because it was built on the scale of dragons.

Inys could walk through these streets, his tattered wings folded behind him. He could perch in the square or throw himself down to weep among the claw-marks of the
Graveyard of Dragons. Children might roll hoops in its squares and alleys, food carts could steam at its corners and fill the air with the scent of roasting nuts and spiced meat, but Carse was not a human city. It was a place for the absent masters of humanity. Or nearly absent.

“We going to see him?” Marcus asked as they walked.

“No,” Cithrin said. “Not the dragon. The troupe.”

Marcus grunted his approval and squinted up into the sun. The lines of his cheekbones cast shadows down his face. The venomous green culling blade was strapped across his back.

“Why do you carry that thing?” she said, speaking her real concern as if it were only banter.

“In case I need to kill someone with it,” he said, just as lightly.

“Expecting a flood of spider priests?”

“No, but I wasn’t expecting the last one either,” Marcus said. “That was nicely done with the war gold just now. Get a few more countries on the same scheme, you’ll have men like Moss willing to take full payment in paper.”

“We’ve had letters from Princip C’Annaldé and Cabral,” she said. “Apparently the idea of giving all the gold there is to the crown is fairly popular among certain strata of power.”

“Imagine that,” Marcus said.

“I only wish we weren’t calling it war gold.”

Yardem cleared his throat. “Any reason not to, ma’am?”

“War’s what we’re fighting against. What we’re trying to avoid. I’m afraid that if we keep the name, we bake it into the new system from the start.”

“New system’s not really new, though, is it?” Marcus said. “There are always people who’d rather not solve problems by killing each other. Or at least by doing it at some
remove. It’s why we have people like me and Moss. Karol Dannien. Merrisan Koke.”

“We have mercenary soldiers because we don’t want war?” Cithrin said.

“You have us because you don’t want to go to the field yourself.”

“That’s not why I’m using them.”

“No?”

“No. I want soldiers who won’t hold a grudge against the enemy once it’s done. If you’re fighting out of love or loyalty, peace can be a kind of betrayal. Mercenaries are like whores. By taking money for it, they debase what it means. I
want
to debase what violence means.”

Marcus laughed, but Yardem didn’t. His great brown eyes met hers. “You may have missed your calling, ma’am. You’d have been a fascinating priest.”

“No!” Marcus said. “No recruiting for the priesthood on my watch, Yardem. I’ve got enough trouble following her when she’s talking about things that exist. Start pulling gods into it, and I’ll lose the thread entirely.”

“Sorry, sir,” Yardem said. “Didn’t mean to confuse you.”

“And you have to call it war gold,” Marcus went on. “If you called it
peace gold
, no one would take it seriously.”

The news had come three days before from Suddapal, and whether it was good or bad was beyond her capacity to say. The fivefold city, home of the Timzinae race, had risen. The siege at the mountain fortress of Kiaria had broken. The forces of Antea had been put back on their heels. In a normal war, it would have been excellent news. If there was such a thing as a normal war. Cithrin found herself beginning to doubt the idea.

Isadau and Komme had been locked in conference since the courier had arrived, stumbling, exhausted, and filthy, in
the middle of the night. Already, the servants were packing Isadau’s things. Taking ship to Elassae now was a terrible risk. Antea held Porte Oliva, and likely the ports of the Free Cities as well. But Barriath’s pirate navy had fast ships, and sailors who knew well how to evade a navy. Cithrin was torn between wanting Isadau to stay and wanting to go with her, though neither was possible. It was a choice between ache and ache.

And as with all aches, she found she could soothe it in a taproom bottle. That the troupe was also there made things convenient for her.

She wanted to like the new actor, but she didn’t. His name was Lak, and he was thin and gawky with eyes the color of ice and an unruly head of hair only just darker than straw. His voice was good, though, and with his paleness against Cary’s dark hair, some striking tableaus became possible. She could see the reasons for choosing him, especially as the company had lost its stage and props and costumes. But he wasn’t Smit. And fair or not, she couldn’t forgive him for that.

Cithrin found them in the yard outside the stables. Cary, her arms crossed and her breath smoking in the cold, stood where the audience would be. Master Kit, Hornet, and Charlit Soon held their places and poses. And Lak. Mikel and Sandr were off somewhere, but a pair of young Timzinae boys stood in the door to the stable, watching with dark and shining eyes.

“Again,” Cary said as Cithrin took another long pull of wine from the glass neck. “From where the king makes his speech.”

Master Kit nodded and walked across to a different spot on the frozen dirt. “Here?”

“That’ll do,” Cary said.

Kit lifted his hand dramatically and turned to Lak. “Boy, know this,” Kit said, his voice suddenly rounder and deeper, as if he were speaking inside a temple. “To be king of all the world would not be enough to sate my hunger. I am more than a throne, more than a land, more than death or love. I am King Ash!”

Lak fell to his knees and Cary sighed impatiently. “No. Stop. It’s still not right.”

“What if I was on his left?” Lak said. Kit put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and shook his head. Cary walked back toward the common room scowling. Lak watched her go with a poorly disguised distress.

“I would be surprised if this was yours to carry,” Kit said to him. “I think it more likely that she’s used to the way we staged it before. Give her time to reimagine how it could be, and I think you’ll see a different side of her.”

“I don’t think she likes me,” Lak said.

Kit didn’t say more, but clapped the boy’s shoulder again and made his way to Cithrin.

“You’re still rehearsing,” she said.

“Did you expect something different?” Kit asked as they fell in step with each other. “We’re actors.”

“It’s only that, with things as they are…”

Kit chuckled, low and warm. “If we only worked when the world was certain, I expect we’d have starved long before this. I’m afraid this one may be beyond us, though, for the time being.”

“The props and the costumes?”

“I think more than that.
The Ash and the Pomegranate
is, I feel, more a story of war than of love. I’ve always found war stories difficult.”

“Worse than romances?”

“Yes. Love, I believe, is a small thing that feels large. I
find the feelings might overwhelm, but the action is between a handful of people. War, by comparison, seems to me so large and happens so differently to so many people that capturing it in a tale leaves me with the sense that I’ve simplified it so much that it no longer resembles the thing it depicts. The best I’ve managed is a story about people while a war goes on around them, but I think that isn’t the same.”

Charlit Soon yelped and sped past them down the street. Sandr and Mikel were struggling around the corner of a brewer’s yard, pulling a low wooden cart loaded with sacks behind them. Old cloth and thread, Cithrin guessed. Perhaps some lumber. The raw material for costumes and a better stage, false swords and paste-and-leaf crowns. The slow rebuilding of all that they’d lost to the great war.

“I can’t remember not being afraid,” Cithrin said. “I can’t remember what it was like when Antea wasn’t killing people.”

“Palliako’s war has been greater and worse than any war I’ve seen or heard of,” Kit said. The paving stones gave way to a wide strip of dragon’s jade. A path through the city unworn by the ages.