The Spider's War Read online

  “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.

  “It started before that, though,” Cithrin said. “I started being afraid in Vanai, and there weren’t any priests then. Or only the normal sort. Prayers and herbs and promises about justice after you die. Not like them. Not like—” She pressed her lips together, but Kit knew what she hadn’t said.

  “Not like me,” he said.

  “We talk about Morade’s spiders as if they were the root of all the evil, all the killing, but
they aren’t, are they? Because they’ve been back in their temple long enough that no one even remembered they were real, and there have been wars and murders and cities burned all that time.”

  “I understand there have been, yes,” Kit said. “It seems to me that the source of war isn’t the dragons or magic or the spiders in the blood. I hear the histories and learn the songs, and I feel that humanity is the beginning of it all. Pain and lust and vengeance and oppression. But I also see that we are capable of tremendous compassion and hope. I think of all the cities that war has razed, and still, we’ve built more than we’ve torn down. I think of all the things of beauty that found their end in violence, but there keep being more beautiful things.” Kit gestured at the city around them. “As I see it, Morade’s spiders didn’t create a fault in us, but rather inflamed what was already there.”

  “Certainty’s always brittle, and disagreement’s inevitable,” Cithrin said. “And so apostates.”

  “And schisms,” Kit agreed. “The creation of enemies from those who were once allies. And I may be wrong, but it’s seemed to me that the sense of betrayal by someone who you thought of as one of your own is even more punished than simply being of a dissenting tribe. If you think of it, I am an example of what the spiders were meant to do. I believed as they did, worshipped as they did, and then I had a thought that took me from the group.”

  “Only instead of running off and starting your own church to lead into battle against them, you turned into an actor,” Cithrin said.

  “And yet, it seems I still find myself at the head of a kind of army fighting against the men I once called brothers. I lost faith in the goddess, and in the story we told of her. The world that brought her forth. The apostate who came to King Tracian broke with the Basrahip in Camnipol over issues of doctrine. I broke with the temple because I came to understand the words truth and certainty differently. I’m not sure the distance between my heresy and theirs is as great as I would like to pretend.” A small dog trotted past, a length of rope in its jaws. The sounds of cartwheels clattering against stone and a woman laughing seemed to blend into each other, and the low, white sky. Kit put a hand on her shoulder. “Is something troubling you?”

  “I don’t think I can win,” Cithrin said. “I’m doing as much as I can. I’ve sent the letters about the spiders and what they are all down the coast, east to Asterilhold and Borja and All-star. I’ve doubled the bounties against Antean forces and shifted what we’re paying for so that it’s bent to take on the spiders. I’ve hired all the mercenaries I could find to keep the Lord Marshal’s army from coming north and to keep the peace if he retreats the way Clara seems to expect him to. But I keep thinking that I’m fighting Antea, and then remembering that I’m really fighting the spiders. And then remembering that I’m not fighting the spiders, but the impulse toward war.”

  At the common room, someone was shouting, and then two people, and then a dozen. It didn’t sound like violence so much as a shared celebration, but it might have been a brawl. It was hard to know.

  “And how many swords does it take to defeat an idea?” Kit said.

  Geder

  There were an endless parade of events and feasts, rituals, and customary celebrations in the course of a season at court. When Geder was a boy, his father had taken him to many. As Lord Regent, Geder suffered through them all. Of them, many—the grand audience, the Remembrance Ball, Midsummer—occurred at set times, predictable as the fall of sand in a glass. With a few, though, there was no set schedule. First Thaw with its honey floss and candy ice came when the warm winds blew it to them. Abandon Night with its masks and smokes and dangerous sexuality came when an heir to the throne was born. And a triumph came at the end of a military campaign when the soldiers returned to camp outside the walls of Camnipol, and their commander called the disband. For those sorts of occasions, part of their joy was their uncertainty.

  Geder had been a child when the rebellion in Anninfort was put down. He tied his memory of his first triumph to that, but he could have been misremembering. As he recalled it, the streets had been filled with cheering men and women of all classes—from barons and lords to beggars and pisspot boys. He remembered it as being overwhelming.

  He’d seen others since. Had one of his own after his return from Vanai. The overall shapes had been the same. The conquering hero—or defender of the empire, if the campaign hadn’t gained any new land for Antea—moved through the city to the accolades of Camnipol. The walls were decorated, sometimes in the house colors, sometimes in the king’s, sometimes just with whatever looked most festive and came to hand. Then there were feasts and parties in the houses of the most honored lords, with the commander whose men had just earned their release the most honored guest.

  It seemed wrong that this particular triumph should seem so weak and vaguely foul. It was, after all, the one that marked the final battle in humanity’s war against the dragons. The apostate’s death was the dawn of the new, brighter age. The spider goddess’s power was sweeping invisibly out from the spot where her false servant had died. Basrahip had explained it all to him. Of course, it being winter, there were few lords at court. And there was more pleasure in parading down streets that didn’t have ice coating the cobblestones. There was music, but it was thinner. There were houses with open doors and plates of bread and meat and cakes, but they all opened just ahead of the procession and closed again behind it. Not that he blamed them. It was a cold, grey, miserable day. An icy wind pushed the fog from the southern plains north until it broke against the walls of the city and filled the Division with mist the color of milk. The Kingspire darkened to the color of iron against the low, grey sky. Cunning men on the street corners performed small miracles of light and fire, but no one crowded around to throw coins at their feet.

  His soldiers, returned to their lives with the success of his campaign, trailed behind him. Very old and very young, thin and fat and coughing. They looked more like slaves of a fallen foe than heroes returned in glory. Geder held his chin high, but the cold made his nose run, and really he just wanted the parade over so he could go inside.

  It was the greatest triumph in history, and all he felt was tired and dispirited and ashamed of himself for feeling tired and dispirited. Was he really so shallow that he couldn’t be pleased with just the truth? Did it all have to come with cloth-of-gold and flares and music to mean something?

  Victory—true victory—is humble, he told himself. Just the knowledge that he had led the force that ended the dragons’ last and greatest threat against the goddess was enough. Even if it had been the biggest, most lavish celebration in Camnipol’s long history, it wouldn’t have been as glorious as the truth. There was even a beauty in this exhaustion. This wasn’t the paper-thin remnant of a third-pressing army celebrating that it had slaughtered a few dozen religious zealots in a swamp. It was the proof of how much the empire had pushed itself in the name of the Righteous Servant. All of Antea was like a warrior kneeling on the battlefield with the dead enemy all around. It was easier to see a nobility in the greyness when he thought of it that way.

  At the entrance to the royal quarter, Prince Aster waited. He was dressed splendidly, and the handful of lords and nobles who’d stayed in the capital through winter stood with him. There were fewer of them, and many of the great faces he’d known growing up were missing. Either suborned and corrupted by the plots of the Timzinae or scattered to the corners of the vastly expanded empire. The few that remained stood like watchmen in a tower, a forest of servant-held torches warming the air around them and making a little circle of gold in the darkness of the city.

  The prince came forward. In the time Geder had been gone, he’d grown a little fluffy peach-fuzz moustache. It made him look like a puppy. Geder could see the boy’s anxiety and knew him well enough to recognize its meaning. A dismissive comment from him now—or even a false compliment—would devastate the prince. Geder felt a smile burgeoning and bit his cheek to force it back as he knelt.


  “Lord Regent Palliako,” the prince said. “We welcome your return.”

  “My prince, you honor me,” Geder said. “The enemy of the Severed Throne is defeated.”

  There was a round of applause, noble palms banging together to fill the air between leafless trees and dry fountains. And above them, the Kingspire rose, higher, it seemed, than the clouds. For a moment, it reminded Geder of the green blades Basrahip and his men had carried against the apostate, as if the heavens had leaned down with one and cut the city in half, the mist rising out of the great wound of the Division like milky blood.

  With the parade complete, the men scattered. One of the low halls was ready for them, ham and beer and roasted fowl, singers and cunning men and perhaps some of their families come to welcome the unlikely warriors home. Many would go, and others would scamper back to their homes—their children, their parents, their wives. Aster drew Geder to a black carriage with gold bunting and a team of pale horses. The servants helped them inside, and the carriage lurched off, wheels and hoofs clattering. Aster let himself sink back against the cushions and grin. For the first time since he’d left, Geder felt something like relief.

  “You did it,” Aster said. “You found the apostate.”

  “We did,” Geder said. “Killed him where he stood. It was mostly Basrahip, though.”

  “You always say that,” Aster said. “This was it. It’s over now.”

  “Not totally over,” Geder said. “We still have two armies in the field, after all. But yes. With the apostate gone, the dragons’ power is broken. Basrahip said it will be like light pouring through the fabric of the world until everything’s… right.”

  Geder felt a blush rising in his cheeks, called up by the admiration in Aster’s eyes. The prince swallowed and grinned. “You’ll be remembered as the greatest hero in history, Geder. You know that.”