The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) (9 page)

“Half the farms in the southeast are being manned by war slaves,” Daskellin said. “
Timzinae
war slaves. It won’t be possible to keep word of the troubles in Suddapal from reaching them. And if they should revolt, we don’t have enough swords to send, even with your army home.”

“And?”

“And… we have the prison,” Daskellin said.

A thrill of horror cut through Geder’s foul mood. Of course they had the prison. He’d had it built when the invasion began. Housing for Timzinae children taken as guarantee of their parents’ good behavior. Only now the parents in Suddapal had misbehaved, and if the farm slaves saw that Suddapal could rise without consequences, trouble would spread like fire. The understanding of what he would have to do sank in his gut, and with it, anger and resentment for the people—not the people, the
Timzinae
—who’d put him in this position. But Daskellin, for all his stammering and talking past the point, was right. The thing had to be done.

“Identify all the hostages with parents working the farms,” Geder said. “Pull one out of every ten as witnesses. The others, keep them locked in their cells. The ones with parents in Elassae, throw off the Prisoner’s Span. When it’s
done, send the witnesses to the farms under guard and let them tell what they saw.”

“My lord,” Daskellin said, “they’re
children
.”

“I know what they are!” Geder said, more loudly than he’d meant. “Do you think I like doing this? Do you think it’s something I take pleasure in? It’s not!” All around, the conversations went quiet. The eyes of the court turned toward them. Toward him. Geder lifted his chin, his rage giving him confidence. “This isn’t a choice we made. They knew what would happen. They made the decision. They
made
us do this. If the roaches can’t be bothered to love their children, I don’t see why we should.”

T
he Low Palace at Tauendak looked down over the river port. The High Palace faced the sea. On the dragon’s road that wound into the city from the east, there were no palaces, no compounds of the rich or powerful, only the defense walls. The first was in stone and as tall as two men, the second twice the height and girded by plates of iron. The wars of the Keshet might sweep north into Borja, but those waves broke against the walls of Tauendak. There were even songs about it.

Ships might come to the seaport from as near as the cities and towns of Hallskar or as far as Cabral and Lyoneia. The river trade was all from Inentai, or had been before the Anteans ate the city. Since then, there hadn’t been many barges at the river port.

Within, the city was broad and flat. Seen from above, Tauendak looked like an exercise in cross-hatching done by some great and godlike artist. Roads ran north to south at the bases of the flat-roofed buildings, caught most of the day in some level of shadow and darkness. Bridges spanned east to west above them, their railings painted yellow. And every few blocks the wide circle of a ramp let oxcarts rise up or sink down. Temples rose above all, red brass and blue tile.

The people of the city were of the Eastern Triad: Jasuru, Yemmu, Tralgu. Timzinae were welcomed, especially those
related by marriage to the traditional families that ruled Borja and Sarakal. Dartinae, Haaverkin, and Firstblood were permitted in the city, but barred from certain kinds of trade. Southlings were called Eyeholes, and walked the streets with guards, if at all. Mostly they stayed away. And the Drowned… Well, what could anyone do about the Drowned? They washed through the bay and out again. No one fished for them or sold their flesh at market, because it was ritually unclean, though whether that was because they were another race of humanity or because they were filthier than fish was a matter of some debate.

Damond Gias had been born at the cunning man’s house three streets south of the Red Temple twenty-six years before. As a Jasuru, he had lived in his uncle’s compound, carrying weights of grain and beans and ore from the caravanserai in the east of the city to the ports, carrying weights of fish and rope back to the caravanserai. His cousins and brothers and sisters lived with him until they married. He himself had no interest in women, and the lovers he took among the men of the city had no interest in raising children, so the question of marriage never came up for him. And so it was natural enough that, when the representative of the Regos came and called upon his uncle to give one of the family over in service to the city for ten years, Damond had been picked.

He hadn’t minded. The life of a guardsman wasn’t harder than that of a carter, and the uniform brought a certain level of respect with it. Most violence could be handled with threat, and when that failed, he had a group of well-armed men from across the city who felt that any attack on him was an attack on all of them. Even the odious duties of collecting taxes and closing businesses that hadn’t given up their share to the council weren’t too awful. It had taken
years, in fact, to find a duty among the many duties of the city guard that was so soul-crushingly dull, so arbitrary and absurd, that Damond genuinely dreaded it.

Blood duty was a new thing, a ritual from the west that stank of panic and war-fear. But war-fear had its hand on Tauendak too, and so it went. He didn’t have to like it.

“Tilt your head.”

Damond looked up into Joran’s black eyes. The older man had scales three shades lighter than Damond’s own, and a scar across his cheek that spoke of old violence. By summer, Joran’s time in the guard would be ended, and the old man would go back to whatever he had been. It made him a little easier to negotiate with.

“Not today, eh?” Damond said. “It’s my second blood shift in a week, and I spent all my time since then digging that shit out of my ears.”

“You know the rules. Tilt your head.”

“I’ll give you six lengths of copper to forget it. Just for today. And next time, I won’t even ask. I’ll just put my head on the table and let you pour it in my ears. Not even a grumble.”

“The day you don’t grumble, the sky’ll fall into the sea,” Joran said, baring his sharp black teeth in a grin. “I’ll forget this time, but don’t
you
forget when we come to the taproom that it was six of copper. Or I’ll have it too hot next. I mean it, I won’t haggle on a finished deal.”

“I’d never ask it,” Damond said, grinning back.

“Then get your thick ass out there,” Joran said, putting the cup of wax back with its brothers beside the fire. “You can at least be on time.”

Damond jumped out of the chair, strapped on his blade, and left the close, warm guard’s station for the chill of the streets before the old man could change his mind. In the half
light of the rising dawn, he went up the stairs three at a time, and then across the bridge, running east to the river port. Ammu Qort, the day’s prime, was harsh to men he found shirking their duty, but lazy about checking after the work had started. Damond wanted to be in place well before any inspections could be done.

The cut-thumbs letters had begun arriving just before Longest Night, smuggled past Antean ports on ships from the west. Sheaves of them had been handed around the taprooms and temples. Damond had seen only one himself.
The forces of madness are all around
, it had said. He’d joked with his cousin that anyone who’d worked for the guard had known that for years. For a time, the letters had been the first subject of everyone’s jokes and speculation—whether they were sincere or a kind of expensive joke, whether the things they said were true or pure invention, whether the people making and distributing them had Borja’s best interests at heart. He’d heard that the letters had been written by pirates, or a Northcoast merchant, or some sort of resurgent dragon cult. For himself, he took them lightly.

Someone else, though, hadn’t. A priest had put something in the letters together with a passage of scripture and petitioned the council. The council—probably influenced by Sarakal’s traditional families in exile—had declared new policies for the guard. And Damond, through no fault of his own, had been introduced to blood duty.

Now, he skittered down the stairs where the bridges stopped and run-walked to the inspector’s station. All along the river, a high wall sank down into the muddy depths and rose high above them. Algae greened the stones from the high-water mark down to the surface of the river, and guards only slightly luckier than himself patrolled the thin walk at its top. When he’d started in the guard, there’d been
jokes about Timzinae merchants from Sarakal climbing the walls by night to avoid the inspector’s station. Since the war, the jokes seemed less funny.

Barges stood on the water, shadows on the shining river. In years past, a busy morning might see a hundred boats waiting for the station to come open. Since the war, Damond had never seen more than thirty, and usually fewer. The inspector’s station stood at the end of a walled quay. Whatever goods were to be loaded or unloaded stopped here to be counted, considered, and have tariffs levied. Whoever wished to come into the city or leave it was questioned and examined. Tauendak was a city of the pure, and it didn’t stay that way by opening itself to all comers. Or that was the story it told, anyway. Damond had believed it until he’d been part of the guard.

The number of people the inspector’s station waved through for expedience or changed its mind about for a bribe had scandalized him at first. He’d settled into a professional cynicism since. The cut-thumbs letters had tightened down the passage, as had the fashion of ransom kidnappings in Lôdi before that and the War of Ten Princes in the Keshet before that. Every time the rules became stricter, they also would eventually relax. Antea’s spread across the world was like that too. Whatever the rich and powerful thought, whatever the priests pretended to find in the ancient scripts, the madness of the Firstbloods wouldn’t come here.

Kana Luk, inspector for the Regos, was at her table in the station when Damond came in. It was still dark enough outside that she had her lantern lit, and the flame glittered on the scales of her cheek and forehead.

“You’re late,” she said.

“I’m early.”

“That was a trick. Your ears aren’t done.”

Damond shrugged. “Joran and I must have forgotten.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” the inspector said.

“I can go back, if you’d like. But it might take a while. You know how Joran heads out once his morning duties are done.”

“Any candlemaker in the medina would have wax enough to do the thing.”

“If it’s worth being late—”

“Don’t bullshit me, boy,” she said, a smile in her gruff voice. “I was making excuses to get out of work before your mother licked off your caul.” Damond grinned and took his place, blade and cloth in hand, but Kana wasn’t done. “You watch yourself. I went to the cunning man last night. He said there was great danger coming.”

“He always says that.”

“Does not. Sometimes he says there’s great fortune coming. Or a man to sweep me away in clouds of passion.”

“I don’t know why you give him your money.”

“Promises of danger, fortune, and passion? He’s the most entertaining thing in my life anymore. Now let’s open for work before Qort gets here and finds you idle enough to examine.”

Damond stood by the quayside door, thin blade in one hand, white cloth in the other. Kana opened the door at his side and shouted into the darkness. The voices of the laborers and carters answered back, as they always did. There was a music to the work, and it was the last beautiful thing in Damond’s day.

The first man to come in was a Dartinae, his body thin and lithe, his eyes glowing from within like his brain was afire. He looked from Kana to Damond and back again.

“The fuck is this?”

“New rules, Dabid,” Kana said. “State your name.”

“You just called me by it. I’m Dabid Sinnitlong, just the same as I was last month.”

“I know it,” Kana said. “What’s your business?”

“Grain from the farms down by Sabbit township. Five hundredweight.”

“Nice,” Kana said. “East or west bank?”

“All west,” the Dartinae said. It was a lie, and they all knew it. Someday, Kana would lose patience, and Dabid would pay a thick fine or a slightly thinner bribe. But apparently this wasn’t that day.

“Lucky for you that’s the cheap one,” Kana said, holding her hand out for the bill of lading. She passed her eyes over it, clicked the beads on her figuring board, and wrote a number at the bottom of the bill. She looked up at Damond and pointed three fingers at the Dartinae. It was the motion she was supposed to use so he’d know it was time.

“Thumb, please,” he said, and the Dartinae held out his hand. Damon pricked it, squeezed out a single drop of blood, and wiped it with the white cloth. The smear of red was unremarkable, as they always were. “Pass,” Damond said.

“Well thank God for that,” Dabid Sinnitlong said dryly. “How much are you dunning me for today, Kana?”

“Same as I ever do,” the inspector said. “Now pay it and get out. I’ve a line behind you.”

This was the banter, the human voices, that Damond would have been without if he’d followed the rules too close. His whole day would have been spent in silence, watching people come through the doorway, seeing their mouths move, watching the papers go back and forth from Kana’s desk. Then three fingers up, and he could hear his own voice traveling through his flesh rather than the air.
Thumb, please
, like he was underwater. Like he was one of
the Drowned. The prick, the dot of blood, the swipe with the white cloth. Though by midday the cloth would get to looking pretty gory itself.

As it was, Qort arrived in the middle morning, wandering in and out of the station at odd intervals so that Damond had to pretend he couldn’t hear the whole time. Still, listening was more diverting than the isolation of temporary deafness, even if he couldn’t say anything himself. Most of the morning was dull. A Yemmu woman coming up from the western Keshet to take up house with her cousin. A Tralgu man hauling poppy seeds for the cunning men’s shops. A Firstblood woman sneaking Timzinae goods out of Inentai for refugee families living in Lôdi. The river trades were more interesting for Damond because they spoke of the southern lands. He didn’t have much interest in anyplace with winters colder or darker than Borja.

The Firstblood man came in just before the station shut for midday. He wore a robe the colorless brown of sparrows and stood before Kana with a patient smile, like there was a joke that only he was in on. Damond’s experience of Firstbloods was that a lot of them were smug like that, so he didn’t think much of it. Not at first.

“State your name.”

“Kirmizi rol Gomlek,” the man said.

“What’s your business?”

“I have come to take audience before your Regos.”

Kana widened her eyes and bared her teeth. “Audience with the Regos, ah? The Regos know about that yet?”

“She will,” the Firstblood said. “And from my words shall she profit greatly. There is a darkness that has fallen upon the world. Even now, it walks the streets of your city unfettered and free. I have come to cleanse it.”

“Ah,” Kana said. Even if he had been deaf, Damond
thought he would have recognized the tension and unease in her shoulders. He took a tighter grip on his blade. “How many in your party, then?”

“We are seven,” the man said.

“Coming from?”

“Sarakal.”

Kana nodded. “Where in Sarakal?”

“Outside Inentai.”

“Not inside it?”

“We have been traveling among the towns for some time,” the man said.

“Carrying anything for trade?”

“Only truth, and that we give freely to all who listen.”

“Right,” Kana said. “No papers, then? It’s ten lengths of silver for entrance.”

The man took a purse from his belt, counted out ten coins, and placed them on the table before her, each one making a sharp tap as he placed it. Kana took them, looked to Damond, and lifted three fingers together.