The Dragon's Path Read online

  He’d answered the problem by sending his squire out to exchange only the most innocuous stones—three round garnets and a diamond in undistinguished silver. The purse of coins had silver and bronze, copper, and two thin rounds of gold frail enough to bend with his fingers. For his lifestyle, it was a fortune, and he carried a portion of it now in his satchel along with a book, ready for his last errand of the day.

  The academy looked over a narrow square. In its greater days, it had been a center for the children of the lower nobility and the higher merchant class to hire tutors or commission speeches. The carved oaken archway that led into its great hall was marked with the names of the scholars and priests who had given lectures there over the century and a half since its founding. Within, the air smelled of wax and sandalwood, and sunlight filtered through high horizontal windows, catching motes of dust suspended in the air. Somewhere nearby, a man recited poetry in a deep, resonant voice. He breathed the air of the place.

  Footsteps padded up behind him. The clerk was a thin Southling man, his huge dark eyes dominating his face. His body spoke of deference and fear.

  “May I help you, my lord? There isn’t a problem?”

  “I wanted to find a researcher,” Geder said. “My squire was told this was the place to come.”

  The Southling blinked his huge black eyes.

  “I… That is, my lord…” The clerk shook himself. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Geder said.

  “You haven’t come to arrest someone? Or levy fines?”

  “No.”

  “Well. Just a moment, my lord,” the Southling said. “Let me find someone that might be of use. If you’ll come with me?”

  In the side chamber, Geder sat on a wooden bench worn smooth by decades of use. The recitation of poems went on, the voice fainter now, the words made unintelligible. Geder loosened his belt, shifting in his seat. He had the almost physical memory of waiting for his own tutors, and pushed back the irrational anxiety that he might not be able to answer the scholar’s questions. The door slid open, and a Firstblood man sidled in. Geder popped to his feet.

  “Good afternoon. My name is Geder Palliako.”

  “You’re known in the city, Lord Palliako,” the man said. “Tamask said something about wanting a researcher?”

  “Yes,” Geder said, taking the book from his side and holding it out. “I’ve been translating this book, only it’s not very well presented. I want someone to find more like it, but different.”

  The scholar took the book gently, as if it were a colorful but unknown insect, and opened the pages. Geder fidgeted.

  “It’s about the fall of the Dragon Empire,” he said. “It’s couched as history, but I’m more interested in speculative essay?”

  The sound of ancient pages hushing against each other competed with the distant voice and the murmur of a breeze outside the windows. The scholar leaned close to the book, frowning.

  “What are you proposing, Lord Palliako?”

  “I’ll pay for any books you can find on the period. If they can be bought outright, I’ll pay a reward. If they have to be copied, I can commission a scribe, but that means a smaller payment for the researcher. I’m looking particularly for considerations of the fall of the dragons, and especially there’s a passage in there about something called the Righteous Servant? I’d like more about that.”

  “May I ask why, lord?”

  Geder opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d never had anyone to talk with about the question, never had to explain himself.

  “It’s about… truth. And deceit. And I thought it was interesting,” he said gamely.

  “Would you also be interested in rhetorics on the subject? Asinia Secundus wrote a fine examination of the nature of truth during the Second Alfin Occupation.”

  “That’s philosophy? I’ll look at it, but I’d really rather it was an essay.”

  “You mentioned that. Speculative essay,” the scholar said, the faintest sigh in his voice.

  “Is that a problem?” Geder asked.

  “Not at all, my lord,” the scholar said with a forced smile. “We would be honored to help.”

  My contention is this: given the lack of primary documents from that time, our best practice is to examine those who later claimed the mantle of the Dragon Empire, and by considering their actions infer the nature of the examples they followed. The best example of this is the enigmatic Siege of Aastapal. Direct examination of the ruins there has failed to determine whether the destruction of the city was accomplished by the assaulting forces of the great dragon Morade or, more controversially, the occupying forces of his brother and clutch-mate, Inys.

  Faced with this dearth of direct evidence, we may turn to better-known histories. As late as a thousand years after, we have the great Jasuru general Marras Toca in the fourth Holy Cleansing campaign. Also the Anthypatos of Lynnic, Hararrsin fifth of the name, at the battle of Ashen Dan. Also Queen Errathiánpados at the siege of Kázhamor. In each of these cases, a wartime commander claiming lineage with the last Dragon Emperor has chosen to destroy a city as a means of denying it to the enemy. If, as I will try to prove, this was done in conscious imitation of the last great war of dragons, it implies that the destruction of Aastapal was done by Inys as a tactical gambit to keep it from Morade’s control rather than the generally accepted scenario.

  Geder cocked his head. The argument seemed weak. For one thing, he’d never heard of two of the three examples. And then, out of all the battles and wars and sieges since the fall of dragons, he’d think you could pick instances of any strategy or decision you wanted. The case could be made just as well in the other direction by drawing different leaders, different battles. And God knew every third tyrant claimed some sort of lineage from the dragons.

  And still, all specifics aside, it was a fascinating thought. When something can’t be known, when the particulars are lost forever, to look at the events that followed from it, that echoed it, and trace backwards toward the truth. Like seeing the ripples in a pond and knowing where the stone fell in. He looked up at his little room, excited. His writing desk still had a bit of ink in the well, but he’d put his pen somewhere. He laid the book open and scurried to the stack of firewood near the grate, picked up a fallen splinter, and went back to his table quickly. Rough wood dipped into the darkness, and Geder carefully marked the margin of the book. Looking at ripples to know where the stone fell.

  He sat back, pleased. Now if there was just some discussion of the Righteous Servant…

  “Lord Palliako,” his squire said from the doorway. “Lord Klin banquet?”

  Geder sighed, nodded, and tossed the blackened splinter into the fire. His thumb and forefinger were stained. He washed his hands in the basin, his mind only half involved in his task. The squire helped him into his formal tunic and new black leather cloak and almost led him to the door and out to the street beyond.

  At home in Camnipol, the one great event of the winter was the anniversary of King Simeon’s ascension. Whatever favored noble family the king chose might spend half its year’s income on one night, the court descending upon it like crows on a battlefield. Geder had been twice, and the richness of the food and drink had left him vaguely ill both times.

  In Vanai, Sir Alan Klin echoed the event with a great banquet and an enforced public celebration.

  Festive lanterns hung along the narrow streets casting strange shadows. Musicians played flutes and beat drums as reedy Timzinae voices rose and fell in song. A thick-faced woman rolled a barrel along the street, wood thundering on the cobbles.

  Geder passed local men and women dressed in their finest, all wearing mildly amused expressions. The chill air left all the Firstblood faces rosy and noses running. Doors stood open all along the street, light blazing within, to invite passersby in, but without the flags and fireshows of Antea. Last year, none of these men and women had known or cared when King Simeon had taken his crown. If the soldiers of Antea went home, the date would be
forgotten again as quickly and as cynically as it had been adopted. The whole enterprise struck Geder as the empty shell of a real celebration. Tin passing itself for silver.

  At the palace of the former prince, Klin had appropriated a long audience chamber for the nobility of Antea to celebrate. Here, warm air pressed at the mouth and nose. Traditional Antean foods crowded the tables—venison in mint, trout paste on twice-baked toast, sausage links boiled in wine. The press of voices was like a storm, shouted conversations echoing against the great bronze-colored arches above them. Competing singers wandered between the tables cadging spare coins from the Antean revelers. An old servant with the red-and-grey armband of Klin’s household led Geder to one of the smallest tables, far from the great fireplace where half a tree burned and popped. Geder kept his cloak. So far from the fire, it was cold.

  Geder allowed a slave girl to give him a plate of food and a wide, cut-crystal glass of yeasty-smelling dark beer. In the midst of the revel, he ate by himself, mulling over questions of truth and deception, war and history. The high table—Alan Klin, Gospey Allintot, and half a dozen of the others of Klin’s favorites—was a ship on the horizon to him. He didn’t notice Daved Broot being ushered to his table until the boy plopped down on a bench.

  “Palliako,” the younger Broot said with a nod.

  “Hello,” Geder said.

  “Good cloak. New?”

  “Recent anyway.”

  “Suits you.”

  Their conversation completed, Broot took a plate and began a campaign of systematically eating as much food as possible. He seemed to take no joy in it, but Geder felt a whisper of admiration for the boy’s determination. Minutes later, when Jorey Kalliam and Sir Afend Tilliakin—two more of Klin’s least favored—came to the table together, Broot had already called for a second plate.

  “How does your father read the situation?” Tilliakin said as the pair took their seats.

  Jorey Kalliam shook his head.

  “I don’t think we can draw any conclusions,” he said, lifting a plate of venison and a flagon of wine out of a servant’s waiting hands. “Not yet.”

  “Still, that little banker Imaniel won’t be going free anytime soon. Lord Klin must be chewing his own guts that he didn’t find that caravan, eh?”

  All thought of dragons, ripples, and eating prowess fell away from Geder. He took a long drink of beer, hiding behind the glass, and tried to think how to ask what the pair were talking about without seeming obvious. Before he could come up with something clever, Broot spoke up.

  “You talking about the letter from Ternigan?”

  “Jorey Kalliam’s father is seeing the whole thing from back home, but I can’t pry details out with a crowbar.”

  Geder cleared his throat.

  “Ternigan wrote a letter?” he said, his voice higher and more strained than he’d meant it to be. Tilliakin laughed.

  “Half a book, the way I heard it,” he said. “The war chests Klin’s been sending home were a little light for some people’s tastes. Ternigan wants to know why. The way I heard it, he’s sending in one of his men to look over Klin’s books, see if he’s been taking more than his share.”

  “That’s not happening,” Jorey said. “At least it isn’t happening yet.”

  Broot’s eyebrows rose.

  “So you have heard something,” Tilliakin said. “I knew you were holding out.”

  Jorey smiled ruefully.

  “I don’t know anything certain. Father said that there’s been some concern at court that the Vanai campaign hasn’t done as well for the crown as expected. It’s all grumbling in the court so far. The king hasn’t said anything against the way Klin’s managed things.”

  “Hasn’t said anything for him either, though, has he?” Tilliakin asked.

  “No,” Jorey said. “No, he hasn’t.”

  “Ternigan won’t recall him,” Broot said around a mouthful of sausage. “They’d both look bad.”

  “If he does, though, he’ll do it quick. Be interesting to know who he’d put in his place, wouldn’t it?” Tilliakin said, staring pointedly at Jorey.

  Geder looked back and forth between the men, his mind bounding on ahead of him like a dog that has slipped its leash. Klin’s steady stream of taxation demands suddenly took on more significance. Perhaps he wasn’t only finding unpleasant tasks to occupy Geder’s days. Those coins might be going back to Camnipol in place of the ones lost when the caravan vanished away. Klin buying back the court’s good opinion.

  The thought was too sweet to trust. Because if it was true, if he had put Sir Alan Klin in the bad graces of the king…

  “I think Jorey would make a fine prince for Vanai,” Geder said.

  “God’s wounds, Palliako!” Broot said. “Don’t say that kind of thing where people can hear you!”

  “Sorry,” Geder said. “I only meant—”

  A roar came from the high table. Half a dozen jugglers dressed in fool’s costumes were tossing knives back and forth through the air, blades catching the firelight. The occupants of the high table had shifted, making room for the show, and Geder could see Alan Klin clearly now. Through the flurry of knives, he imagined there was an uneasiness about the man’s shoulders. A false cheerfulness in his smiles and laughter. A haunted look to the bright eyes. And if it was true, then he—Geder Palliako—had put them there. And what was more, Klin would never know. Never follow back the ripples.

  Geder laughed and clapped and pretended he was watching the performance.

  Cithrin

  After the night skating on the mill pond and the throat-closing fear of the day that came after, her nights took on a pattern. First, bone-deep exhaustion. Then, after she curled into the wool, a glorious hour of rest before her eyes popped open, her mind racing, her heart tight and nervous. Some nights, she would see the doughy Antean nobleman finding the hidden chests again, only this time he shouted out, and his soldiers came. Her mind spun through nightmare images of what had almost been. Sandr killed. Opal slaughtered. Master Kit riddled with arrows, his blood bright on the snow. Marcus Wester handing her over to the soldiers in exchange for the caravan’s safe passage. And then what the soldiers might have done to her. That it hadn’t happened gave the fear an almost spiritual power, as if her near escape had incurred a debt whose payment might be heavier than she could bear.

  She fought back with memories of Magister Imaniel, the bank, the balances of trade and insurance, intrigue and subtle design that reminded her of home. It didn’t bring rest, but it made the cold, dark, wakeful hours bearable, letting her pretend the world followed rules and could be tamed. Then the eastern sky would brighten, and the exhaustion would fall over her like a worked-metal coat, and she’d force herself up, out, and through another impossible day. By the time they reached Porte Oliva, she was living half in a waking dream. Small red animals shifted and danced in the corner of her vision, and the most improbable ideas—she had to swallow all the books to keep them safe, Master Kit could grow wings but didn’t want anyone to know, Cary secretly planned to kill her in a jealous rage over Sandr—took on a plausibility they hadn’t earned.

  Everything she knew of Porte Oliva, she knew at second hand. She knew it sat at Birancour’s southern edge and survived on what trade from the east didn’t stop at the Free Cities and what from the west made the extra journey to avoid the pirates haunting Cabral. The greatest part of its wealth came as a wayport between Lyoneia and Narinisle. Magister Imaniel had called it everybody’s second choice, but he’d said it as if that might not be such a bad role to play. She’d imagined it as a city of rough edges and local prides.

  Her arrival itself had been uncanny. She remembered driving her team along hilly, snow-blown roads, and then a Kurtadam boy, sleek as an otter, trotted alongside her cart, his hand outstretched, asking her for coins, and a forest of buildings had sprouted around her. Porte Oliva was the first real city she’d seen apart from Vanai, stone where Vanai was wood, salt where Vanai was freshwater.
Her first impressions of it were a blur of narrow streets with high white arches, the smells of shit and sea salt, the voices of full-blooded Cinnae chattering like finches. She thought they’d passed through a tunnel in a great wall, like the old stories of dead men passing from one life to another, but it was just as likely she’d dreamed it.

  She remembered nothing about how she’d hired Marcus Wester and his second as her personal guard. Not even why she’d thought it was a good idea.

  The captain padded across the stone floor. From the cot against the wall, Yardem Hane snored. Cithrin let herself swim up from her nap and survey the dank little rooms again for the hundredth time. A small fire in the grate muttered, casting red-and-orange shadows on the far wall and belching pine smoke into the air. The window was scraped parchment, and it dirtied what sunlight it let in. The boxes—contents of the cart she’d carried so carefully from Vanai—were stacked along the walls like any cheap warehouse. Only the most valuable of the cart’s contents had been put in the sunken iron strongbox. Hardly a tenth of what they carried would fit. Cithrin sat up. Her body felt bruised, but her head was almost clear.

  “Morning,” Marcus Wester said, nodding politely.

  “How long was I asleep?” she asked.

  “Half the morning. It’s not midday yet.”

  “Is there any food?”

  “Some sausage from last night,” he said, nodding toward the small door of warped wood that led to the only other room.

  Cithrin rose. For years in her life, half a morning’s sleep would have been barely enough to see her through to evening. Now it felt like a luxury. The back room had neither door nor window, so Cithrin lit a thumb-sized stub of candle and carried it back with her. The books, soul and memory of the Vanai bank, hunkered on a wooden palette. A rough oak table supported a carafe of water and a length of greyish sausage. The overwhelming stink came from a tin chamberpot in the corner. Cithrin relieved herself, throwing a double handful of ashes in before putting the lid back in place. She cut a length of sausage and leaned against the table, chewing it. Apple and garlic seasoned the meat. It wasn’t nearly as bad as she’d expected.