The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin) Read online

  Until now.

  The calls of the sailors changed. The ship shifted under her feet. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the dark line of land thickened and took on shape. Hills and valleys, and then the more regular forms of buildings. And then reaching out to her like a thousand fingers, the piers with their forest of masts. Suddapal, the fivefold capital city of Elassae, and home of the farthest-flung branch of the Medean bank.

  “We’ll have you to land by midday, Magistra,” the captain, an old Firstblood man with a patchy white beard said. “There’ll be the matter of the last part of the payment to consider?”

  Cithrin smiled.

  “As soon as we’re in port, Captain,” she said.

  “Might as well now,” he said. “We’ve time.”

  “Policy,” she said, as if the word explained and excused everything. She turned back toward the growing city and wished she’d had less wine in the night.

  Her agreement with Komme Medean had called for a year’s apprenticeship, and they had agreed before she left on the long winter journey south from Carse that Suddapal would be the best place. Komme Medean’s letters would have reached Magistra Isadau weeks before, but Cithrin had no way to know what the woman would think of the arrangement. Any greeting could be waiting for her on the docks. Or even a refusal.

  The sailors scrambled behind her, and the little ship turned its nose to the shore. The noise of the sails as they caught the breeze deafened. A guide boat raced out to meet them, hardly more than a canoe with three Timzinae youths hauling on red-dyed oars. Timzinae had been as common as Firstblood in Vanai, and the young men’s dark bodies and shining scales comforted her.

  “Magistra,” Yardem Hane said from just behind her. She turned, craning her head up toward the Tralgu’s broad dog-like face. His expression was impassive, but the tall, mobile ears were canted forward, toward the shore. “We’ve packed the chest.”

  “And last payment?”

  Yardem patted his hip where his leather wallet hung from his belt, the sound of coins hardly carrying over the din. “I’ll take care of it. Enen and Roach will see to the rest.”

  Cithrin nodded, her eyes following the laughing gestures of the guide boat crew. Their canvas pants and rough shirts seemed too light for the cold of the winter sea, but any discomfort they felt was hidden by their boisterous shouts and friendly profanity. She envied them. She had more money than they would likely see in a decade and had commanded control of a hundred times that, but the ease with which she held her body and the calmness of her affect were all the fruit of study and artifice.

  Leaving Porte Oliva had been harder than she’d expected. The white buildings and winter mists, the street dogs and the little café where she had leased the back room, the wide square between the Governor’s Palace and the grand temple where the guests of the magistrate’s justice served out their punishments. All of it was gone now. Even Pyk Usterhall, officially the notary of the Porte Oliva branch and in truth its voice in all but name, carried a weight of fond nostalgia for Cithrin now, and she disliked Pyk as much as she did anyone breathing air. The only familiar faces were the guards she chose as her companions. Enen because the woman was old, uncompromising, and as hard as last week’s bread. Roach because he was the only Timzinae among the bank’s guard, and having someone who might pass for a local could only be to her advantage. And Yardem Hane, because he was Yardem and because Captain Wester had quit while she was in Camnipol. He’d vanished into the world without so much as a farewell. He’d given no explanation of his decision to leave, left no note or letter behind for her. She told herself that his departure hadn’t stung, but she wasn’t quite able to convince.

  But even without Marcus, Porte Oliva had been the first home she’d made for herself. She had founded the branch of the Medean bank there without in fact even consulting with the bank’s holding company. Her rooms there were familiar and comfortable, the servants at the taphouse down the street knew her and her habits, the queensmen who kept order in the streets touched their brows in respect as she passed by. In Porte Oliva, she had been someone, and more, she understood who and what she was. In Suddapal, she might be anyone. And so she might be nobody.

  Her stomach made a little flutter, and she wished that she had a little skin of wine. Preferably distilled.

  The piers of Suddapal reached out deep into the waters of the Inner Sea. The planks were black, slippery, and flecked with foam. At the height of a shipping season, Cithrin imagined they would be as full and crowded as the beggar-press walking into Porte Oliva, and she was pleased to have arrived when she could keep herself far away from the churning green of the sea against the pilings. The waves seemed to shift the boards under her feet, the world rolled unsteadily, and she knew it was an illusion of stepping back on land. Any pier that truly swayed so much would come to pieces in a day.

  A Timzinae woman stood before a palanquin of red and gold, and two massive Yemmu men with uncut tusks rising from their jaws knelt behind her. Her robes were a vibrant green that would have left Cithrin looking wan and sickly. A necklace of gold splayed itself on her throat. Cithrin put on a smile, tucked her hips the way Master Kit had taught her to make herself seem older, and walked to the woman. The Timzinae smiled, the nictitating membrane sliding over her eyes, blinking and unblinking.

  “Magistra bel Sarcour?” the woman asked.

  “Magistra Isadau, I presume?” Cithrin said.

  “Oh, no. Isadau is my sister. She’s folded into some business or other. I am Mykani rol Ennenamet, but please call me Kani.”

  Behind her, Yardem snapped out a sharp order. Enen replied, her voice respectful and unintimidated. Cithrin found herself on the wrong foot, trying to readjust her expectations of Magistra Isadau and her bank.

  “I wasn’t aware that the Magistra had family,” Cithrin said, and Kani’s laughter shimmered.

  “There seem like a thousand of us sometimes, but we don’t all live in the compound. Just me, Isadau, and our brother Jurin. And the children, of course.”

  “Magistra Isadau has children?” Cithrin said. She tried to imagine Magister Imaniel with a wife and children of his own. It was as easy to picture a house cat juggling knives.

  “Not of her own,” Kani said, “but I have my girls, and Jurin is raising three boys. We have the household to herd them, though. They’re all looking forward to meeting you. In fact, I should warn you. Jurin’s oldest boy, Salan, just turned twelve. He saw a company perform a play last year about a Cinnae queen who saves Herez from a plague of demons.”

  “The Ash Burner’s Tale,” Cithrin said.

  “Yes, I think that was the name. Regardless, the woman playing the queen was quite beautiful, and I think he’s decided to fall in love with you on that basis. If his mooning around gets bothersome, let one of us know and we’ll rein him in somehow. You know how boys that age are with their doomed infatuations.”

  I haven’t got a clue, Cithrin thought, but didn’t say. How are they?

  “We’re ready, Magistra,” Yardem said. His ear flicked, and the earrings jingled. Kani’s attention fastened on them.

  “Priest caste?” she said.

  “Fallen,” Yardem said.

  “Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t mean to overstep.”

  “No offense taken,” Yardem said. Kani’s smile stayed warm, but a reevaluation showed in her eyes.

  “You are a fascinating woman, Magistra bel Sarcour. It should be delightful having you in the family,” Kani said. The repetition of her formal name and title made Cithrin realize she’d been rude.

  “Please, if I’m to call you Kani, you should call me Cithrin.”

  Kani made a small, playful bow, then scooped Cithin’s arm into her own and led her toward the palanquin. The two Yemmu men coughed to one another and hunkered down, ready to lift Cithrin and her new companion and carry them into the city.

  “Cithrin,” Kani said. “That’s a beautiful name. Was it your mother’s?”

  The five cities that ma
de up Suddapal stretched along the northern coast of the Inner Sea. Along the eastern side, black cliffs rose. Islands towered a hundred feet above the waves, topped by tiny houses and greenswards where sheep spent their whole lives without ever cropping the mainland’s grass. Farther to the west, the docks and piers stretched out to sea, and streets and squares pressed up into the hills. There were no canals as there had been in Vanai. Many of the streets were stone-paved, but in others, a low, tough ground cover grew on the soil, resisting horses’ hooves and carts’ wheels alike. The puppets and singers that had seemed to spring up on every corner of Porte Oliva were gone. Timzinae children played, running alongside the palanquin, chanting rhymes that Cithrin couldn’t quite follow in harmonies that were as complex as the most sophisticated singers she’d heard in the temples. Here and there, she caught glimpses of other races—Yemmu, Tralgu, Firstblood—but for the greatest part, Suddapal was a Timzinae city, and Cithrin realized that her skin, hair, and stature would stand out there like a daisy among roses. Just another thing to consider as she remade herself here. The year ahead seemed to stretch out forever.

  Magister Imaniel had always taught her that a bank’s public face should be humble. Architecture that boasted was better left for kings and princes and priests. A small house, clean and simply run, told the mechanisms of power that the bank was no threat to them, and since that was not true, the appearance of it was all the more important. In Porte Oliva, Cithrin had taken an old gambler’s stall for the home of her branch, and had conducted business in Maestro Asanpur’s café. When the guard grew large enough to require a barracks of their own, she hadn’t moved to larger quarters, but taken other places. Other sites. As her power in the city grew, she took pains to appear small even to the people who knew better. Especially to them.

  The Medean bank in Suddapal, in contrast, was in a broad, sprawling compound as grand and pleasant as a duke’s holding. Halls of polished granite with statues of gods and holy men, monsters and angels in niches at every corner. A massive pasture adjacent with stables enough for a dozen horses. A slave to greet them wearing a decorative silver chain that wasn’t even attached to the doorframe. Pillars of carved wood and the scent of pine smoke. If this was how a bank remained unnoticed, humble, and small, then Suddapal had to be the richest city in the world. Cithrin felt certain that it wasn’t.

  The strangest thing about it all was the openness of the space, the absence of glass or parchment over the windows. The building itself seemed exposed to the air and weather in a way she had never seen before. She wasn’t sure it was wise.

  Her own room had a black iron stove squatting in the corner with a fire already burning in its belly. Fresh rushes covered the floor. Her bed was square with a soft mattress, a blanket filled with down, and a pillow stuffed with buckwheat hulls. A washing basin of carved stone topped an iron stand at the bedside, and an enameled night pot waited discreetly beside it. The desk was made from carved oak, stained almost black. The window opened onto a courtyard, and the voices of a man and woman carried to her. The hall just outside had a guard’s niche where Enen sat. With a Kurtadam’s thick pelt, the cool hallway might be almost comfortable.

  Cithrin had hardly changed into fresh clothes and washed her face when a gentle tapping came at the door.

  “Magistra Isadau’s come,” Enen said.

  Cithrin squared her shoulder, put on her best imitation of an older woman, and opened the door. Magistra Isadau, voice of the Medean bank in Suddapal, was slender with flecks of gray at her temples and the first dusting of frost on the scales of her face and neck. Her gown was simple cotton, embroidered with flowers and vines, and she held a small green pot in her hands with what looked like a windblown pine in miniature.

  “Magistra Cithrin,” the woman said, extending the little tree. “Welcome to my home.”

  The pot was heavier than it looked. Cithrin put in on the corner of the desk with a distinct clunk. The tiny boughs shivered as if blown by an unseen wind.

  “Thank you. Please come. Sit.”

  Isadau smiled and sat on the corner of the bed, leaving the desk’s chair to Cithrin. Her eyes flickered, considering Cithrin without judgment.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

  “Thank you,” Cithrin said, wondering what the head of the Medean bank had said about her, and whether she could find out. “I’m not sure how much Komme Medean said.”

  “It wasn’t only Komme. Mani mentioned you too, one time and another.”

  It took Cithrin a moment to realize Isadau meant Magister Imaniel. She’d never considered that the two heads of Medean branches so physically near one another must have also known each other, or that Magister Imaniel would have spoken about the girl who was only the ward of his bank. Her past had always been entirely her own, and her first and unconsidered response to sharing it was resentment.

  “I see,” Cithrin said. “Well. I hope it was all positive.”

  “Most was, yes,” Isadau said. “Komme wrote that he saw a bit of Mani in you. I can too. You speak the way he did.”

  “I grew up with him.”

  “That can’t have been easy. Komme also said you had the best mind for banking he’s seen in a generation. A wild talent still, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of. The phrase was bold without being reckless and reckless without being stupid. He can be a bit of a poet when he’s in a good mood,” Isadau said, then her forehead narrowed. “I have to ask. Did you really boast to the king of Northcoast that you’d bedded the Antean Lord Regent?”

  Cithrin felt the blush growing in her neck.

  “I wouldn’t call it boasting. They weren’t listening to me,” Cithrin said. “Geder Palliako and I were in close quarters for weeks. All they’d ever managed was a few meetings and letters. I wanted them to understand that I knew the man better than they did.”

  “And that you’d lain him was proof of that?”

  “I might have phrased it for effect,” Cithrin said

  Magistra Isadau’s laughter was warm and delighted, and Cithrin felt the knot in her belly loosen a notch.

  “Well, no one can call you timid.”

  “I don’t know I’d say that. I was annoyed with them,” Cithrin said. Then, a moment later, “Did Komme say anything else about me?”

  “That your heart hadn’t died yet,” Isadau said, her tone precisely as it had been before, “but that it was in danger of it.”

  Now Cithrin laughed, but it was a nervous sound even to her. In the courtyard, someone called out, a woman or a child. Magisra Isadau lifted a finger.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course,” Cithrin said.

  Isadau gestured with her chin to the tiny plant on the desk.

  “Why did I bring that to you?”

  Cithrin considered, chewing the inside of her lip. For a moment, she was a child again, sitting at evening meal with Magister Imaniel and Cam and Besel, answering question after question. It came to her as easily as breath.

  “Gifts create a sense of obligation,” she said. “Not debt, exactly, because it can’t be measured. And because it can’t be measured, it can’t be definitively repaid. If instead you’d given me the coin you spent to buy that, I’d know what I owed, and I could give it back and be done. By giving me a gift instead, you build the sense of owing without a path to repayment, and so I’m more likely, for example, to grant you a favor or make some concession that I’d never have agreed to if I’d been given an explicit price.”

  Cithrin spread her hands, as if presenting something. Magistra Isadau nodded, but her smile seemed melancholy.

  “Mani taught you well. I can hear him say all of that. Only … there is more than one way of doing what we do. Of being what we are.”

  Cithrin shrugged, vaguely disappointed not to have been praised.

  “All right,” she said. “How would you say it?”

  “I wanted you to like me, and I was anxious that you might
not.”

  The older woman’s frank vulnerability brought a sudden tightness to Cithrin’s throat. She didn’t know if it was pity or surprise, sorrow or fear, only that she didn’t like it and didn’t know what more to say. Magistra Isadau nodded more than half to herself and stood.

  “We eat our evening meals late, but the kitchens are always open to you. The whole family comes to table, and it isn’t formal. Rest if you like, or look around the grounds. If you’d like to go into the city, I have a girl who can guide you. In the morning, I’ll show you the office and where the books are kept.”

  Cithrin tried to speak, coughed, and tried again.

  “Thank you, Magistra.”

  “You’re welcome. And truly? I am glad you’ve come.”

  For a long time after Isadau had left, Cithrin sat at the desk, her gaze on the little plant as if it might be somehow dangerous.

  Captain Marcus Wester

  Marcus leaned against the slick, waxy bark of the tree and stared out over the valley. Their recent days in the cloud forest had kept his horizon close. Fifteen feet, twenty at most. The thick-packed trees, stubborn brush, and warm mist had tied a cloth across his eyes until he felt that each day had ended in the same stand of trees by the same brook, lulled to sleep by the same bright-colored birds. When he came to the ridge, it was like the world cracking open. Mountains as steep and sharp as black knives rose toward the white sky. Row after row, each more grey than the one before, until he could imagine them receding forever. The sun, high and to his left, was little more than a brighter stretch of haze.