The Spider's War

by Daniel Abraham

  The Timzinae woman—Isadau—had been silent. Now she lifted her chin. When she spoke, her voice was thin and resonant as a bowed string. “Have we decided this, then? Is there no conversation about the people who’ve been killed or the families shattered?”

  Cithrin bel Sarcour nodded, not in agreement, but a kind of recognition, as if the phrase was part of some other conversation.

  “Isadau,” Komme Medean began, but the woman went on, her voice more terrible for being as matter-of-fact.

  “I don’t ask for myself… No, that isn’t true. I saw my city humiliated,” she said. “I saw Firstblood men whipping Timzinae women through the street for sport. Children stolen from their mothers and fathers. Sometimes the priests were there, and sometimes they were not. I respect that the Lord Marshal and his mother aren’t pleased with Geder Palliako, but how does that wash clean all that’s been done in Antea’s name? Do we believe we can end this without also demanding justice? Because I am not convinced.”

  And in a breath, what had been a meeting of minds with a common purpose became split. The Timzinae woman stood in one world, and Clara—to her dismay—in another. Like flakes of iron pulled by a lodestone, the others would become allies of one or the other. Already she could see it. Barriath shifting in his seat, moving toward her as if to protect her from attack. Cithrin easing down her gaze, pricked by a moment of shame perhaps. Guilt at her disloyalty. Chana Medean and Paerin Clark glancing at the old man of the banking house to see how Komme reacted to the question, but the old man’s face was blank as stone.

  And it had all been going so well up to now.

  Clara took a deep breath, searching for words that would bring them back together. She couldn’t imagine what they were. To her surprise it was Captain Wester who spoke.

  “When you start talking about killed friends and lost babies, justice and revenge are two names for the same dog. If the question’s how much do we have to punish the other side before we can stomach peace, my experience is you can do the enemy a damned lot of hurt before it starts feeling like justice enough. Most times it comes down to how many of them you can kill before you get tired and bored. And whether you can break them so they don’t take their turn after. Looking for everyone to feel happy is waiting for yesterday.”

  The Timzinae woman’s inner eyelids closed with a faint click and she rocked back an inch as if she’d been slapped. The Tralgu’s tall, mobile ears went flat against his head in what looked like chagrin. “He’ll be better in a few days, ma’am.”

  “I hope you’ll excuse me,” Isadau said and walked stiffly from the room.

  Wester sighed. “Am I going to have to apologize for that?”

  “Yes, sir,” the Tralgu said.

  “Put it on the board for tomorrow.”

  “Was already planning to, sir.”

  “Still, she brings up a fair point,” Komme said. “Even if you pull Antea back inside its borders, there are going to be a lot of people howling for blood. It might not be too early to start thinking about what reconciliation would look like.”

  Barriath snorted, “The spiders have been in play since before the dragons fell. Don’t you think we should find how to win against the priests first?”

  “Or figure out who we’re talking about when we say we,” Wester said.

  Cithrin bel Sarcour raised her thin, pale hand. Her gaze was fixed on nothing, as if she were reading a text invisible to everyone else. “It has to all happen at once. The spider priests, the war—all the wars. And building what comes after to keep it from all starting up again. It all has to happen at the same time.”

  “That’s quite a bit to ask,” Komme said.

  “Well,” Clara said, “necessary isn’t the same as simple, is it?”

  Komme’s laughter was sharp and barking, but she saw how it eased the tension in all the others’ faces. Except Wester’s. “Fair point, Lady Kalliam. If we’d wanted easy, we should have stayed home. Or all of you should have, at any rate. It isn’t as though I’ve left my house. Why don’t we drink a little wine and talk through this like it was a question of business. What do we have to work with?”

  “All the money in the world,” Cithrin said, the phrase coming with a depth of meaning that Clara couldn’t entirely parse. Then she smiled at Clara with a brightness and sharpness that might have been genuine or an actor’s artifice. “And the mother of the Lord Marshal as an ally.”

  “Well, one of those is better tested than the other,” Komme said. “But I follow you on both points. What else have we got?”

  For the better part of an hour, they spoke. Much of it Clara followed—the letters written against the powers of the priests, the knowledge that the dragon Inys could provide, the dispositions of the Antean army and the forces rising in Elassae. Other points, like the peculiar relationship among Narinisle, Northcoast, and Herez mediated by the new “war gold” letters, she couldn’t quite parse, but she did her best to listen intelligently. A brown-pelted Kurtadam girl brought platters of glazed meat and soft cheese. A Firstblood boy with skin as dark as a Timzinae’s scales poured wine into thick crystal cups. The day flowed quickly into night until the fire couldn’t outpace the chill. When, at evening’s end, they parted, Barriath walked with her to the rooms the bank had set aside for her.

  For a moment, she suffered a sense of displacement. Memories of winter nights in Osterling Fells while Dawson was off on the King’s Hunt mixed with something more recent—walking in unfamiliar halls with a young man. So much had changed in her life in so few years. And in herself.

  “Well,” Barriath said as they came to her rooms, “and what did you make of your first council of war, Mother?”

  “A very apt rehearsal for the real one,” she said, and Barriath chuckled. A Dartinae servant, his eyes glowing a gentle yellow, slid her door open with a bow.

  “That was the real one,” Barriath said.

  Clara paused in her doorway. He didn’t sound as though he were joking, and his face didn’t have the expression he employed when he was teasing. But she couldn’t take what he’d said seriously. When she spoke, she sounded scandalized, even to herself. “Without a representative of the crown?”

  “Things are different since the bankers took over.”

  The journey from Jorey’s camp to the great city of Carse had been unpleasant, but not overly long. Jorey had given them good horses and a sturdy cart. Nothing grand enough to attract the wrong kind of attention on the road. Coming so far and through so much only to be killed by bandits would have been absurd, but the world didn’t seem to shy away from absurdity now. If it ever had. Barriath had traded his disguise as Callon Cane for a servant’s robes and a cheap hat that drooped down on the sides to obscure his jawline. The winter roads were thinly traveled, and while the forces of King Tracian kept a close eye on the southern border, an old woman and her son weren’t a threat they feared. They had slept in merchant inns and public houses, keeping to themselves as much as they could. Barriath could pass for a man of no country, but the accents of the Antean court were too much a habit for her. She could no more deny her origins than explain them.

  The hardships of following the army had served her well. She rose before dawn, her eyes opening while the still-dark sky betrayed nothing of the coming day, and traveled until twilight faded to dusk. Between the falling winter and their northern route, the light came late and left early. But the fighting had not reached Northcoast, and a mild autumn had left the granaries full, the harvest just passed still rich in memory. Clara had been greeted with as much generosity as suspicion, seen as much courage as fear. In time of war, it was more than she had hoped.

  Her rooms at the holding company, home and hearth for Paerin Clark and the Medean bank, were less than the room she would have offered guests of her own in Osterling Fells, greater than she’d had in Abitha Coe’s boardinghouse in the poorer quarters of Camnipol. The bed was large enough for two, with a thin down mattress and wool blankets that she could lose hersel
f in. The fire grate held a small blaze and the bricks held the heat for hours after the flames went out. The inner walls of the little keep bent in there, giving her something like a balcony that looked down on the inner courtyard, walled off by thick cedar shutters with oiled cloth in the joints to keep out the wind.

  When she slept there, she dreamed of Dawson. Something about the cold or the voice of the wind, perhaps. In her dreams, he was neither alive nor dead, neither with her nor apart. Often she did not see his face or hear his voice. There was only a sense of his presence that faded when she woke. For the hour or so she sat alone with her tea and honeyed bread, wrapped in a robe as thick as tapestry, she would remember him. The names of his favorite dogs. His overwhelming contempt for Feldin Maas and Curtin Issandrian. The way he’d taught Barriath and Vicarian and Jorey to fight and to hunt. The melancholy she felt then wasn’t for her own loss. She’d spilled her grief in strange places, and what remained was a complicated tissue of fondness and gratitude and guilty pleasure at who she had become.

  Dawson had wagered his life that the world could be kept as it had been: static and unchanged. He had lost. These people of ledgers and sums would have been as vile to him as the foreign spider priests. For him, the world had had an order. To plan a war against a noble—and Geder wasn’t king, but he was certainly of noble blood—without its being between peers would have been unthinkable. He would never have done what she had chosen to do. She loved him for that. Worse, she was relieved that he hadn’t lived to see this.

  And she missed Vincen Coe. Not simply as a man, not any man, but the one particular face and body and voice. The lover of her new life as Dawson had been the lover of her past one. Necessity had made leaving him behind with Jorey easy. Not pleasant, never that, but easy. Once one saw what had to be done, it simply had to be done. She’d needed to find Cithrin bel Sarcour, the enemy of her enemy, and hope to turn the fall of Geder Palliako into something other than the devastation of her country.

  Perhaps it was even working. But as the first scattering of fat grey snowflakes swirled down from the white morning sky, she found herself picturing Vincen huddled in a cunning man’s tent. Cold. Still recovering from the wounds he had suffered. She wished him here, in relative safety. In her bed, where she could warm him and be warmed by him. And more than that. He was her one critical vice.

  She knew, or thought she knew, what Antea would be if they failed against the spiders. And if they won? Who would she be then? Would she stand in the court by her remaining sons and turn her scandalous lover aside? Would she vanish into the low world at Vincen’s side and leave behind her children? Her grandchildren? All that she had built and loved and made?

  No matter what, the nation she saved—if she saved it—wouldn’t be the one she’d known.

  She filled her pipe thoughtfully, her thumb tamping the leaf into the bowl with the ease of long practice. She lit it from the fire, drawing smoke deep into her chest. When she breathed out, the smoke was as grey as the snow. She had to make a plan, but she couldn’t. Not by herself. Not any longer.

  The shriek came suddenly, and from everywhere. She started, her fingers snapping the stem of her pipe. It came again, louder, and followed by a rushing sound like the voice of a great fire. Her breath shuddered as she stood. She shook, fears deeper and more primal than speech could form filling her mouth with copper, but she rose all the same. The shutters were frigid against her hand as she pulled them aside and stepped out onto the little balcony.

  A vast shadow passed over her, blackness dotted white by snow-strewn air. The dragon dropped to the courtyard in the center of the keep, its war-tattered wings too wide to fully unfurl. It was magnificent and awing. Its dark scales defied the cold. Its massive head turned on a serpent neck. Clara had the sudden, powerful memory of going to court for the first time. A child of eight years faced by the splendor of a king.

  A black wooden door opened far below her. A thin figure stepped out into the fallen snow. Cithrin bel Sarcour walked out to the dragon, notebook and pencil in her hand. The dragon folded his wings and settled before her. Clara couldn’t hear the girl’s voice at all, and Inys’s replies were bass rumbles, like a landslide with words in it. She watched them consult, the most ancient ruler of the world and the newest.

  These are the allies I’ve picked, she thought as her toes and earlobes began to ache. Please God let me have chosen well.

  Geder Palliako, Lord Regent of Antea

  As he had been preparing for this last campaign, Geder’s father had come to see him. They’d sat in one of the gardens just within the grounds of the Kingspire, the huge tower rising up on one hand, the depth of the Division on the other. Lehrer Palliako, Viscount of Rivenhalm, had been the central man in Geder’s life, even when he was not present. Ever since Geder had become first the hero of Vanai, then Baron of Ebbingbaugh and then Lord Regent of Antea, he’d felt a little odd around him, as if his rise in court were somehow a reproach upon his father. It had struck him that day as they sat eating dried apples and fresh cheese how much older Lehrer had become.

  A day would come, he realized, when he would be the Viscount of Rivenhalm himself. The idea had been both melancholy and wearying. He’d distracted himself and his father by outlining the hunt for the apostate. He’d done all he could to make it sound the grand adventure that it was, but Lehrer seemed only to hear the risk in it.

  “Be careful out there, Son,” he’d said.

  “I’ll be fine. I have Basrahip, and the men may not be the first pressing, but we have the goddess with us. We can’t lose.”

  “Still,” Lehrer had said, “do be careful out there. And when you come back too.” Then he’d smiled and patted Geder’s knee as he’d done since Geder had been a child. “My good boy. My good, good boy. There’s more danger in court than on a battlefield, eh? Always remember that.”

  Now that the fight was done, Geder found himself wondering what exactly the old man had meant.

  Killing the apostate priests in the swamps of southern Asterilhold—or what had been Asterilhold before he’d conquered it—had been the final defeat of the darkness, the birth of the light. Geder, sitting alone in his private rooms in the palace at Kaltfel, thought it might have been a little more momentous.

  From the way Basrahip had described things, Geder had imagined the apostate priest as a dragon in human skin. A being of darkness and violence and rage, bent on holding all humanity in a death-grip of lies. He’d imagined the man would be tall and graceful and threatening, honey-tongued like a villain in an old song. And his defeat would crack the world like the Division in the center of Camnipol. Split the earth itself down to its bones. And afterward, everything should have been light and hope and renewal. The world made right. The allies of evil slaughtered or else, if they’d been innocent, set free. That was the way those things were supposed to happen.

  Instead they’d followed a rough path into the swamp, killed a couple dozen wet, cold, angry men, and come back to the city.

  Basrahip had explained that the light of the goddess wasn’t like real light. The world wouldn’t suddenly start glowing gold or some such. And of course, Geder had known that. The light of the goddess was a metaphor for purity and righteousness, only sitting by the fire with a rug over his knees, the insides of his thighs still chapped from the ride, he couldn’t help feeling that purity and righteousness might be metaphors for something too, and he wasn’t quite sure what.

  Kaltfel had been the first city to fall in the war that stretched out behind him, year after year. Dawson Kalliam had taken it and brought King Lechan to Camnipol in chains. King Lechan who’d plotted to kill Prince Aster and claim the Antean throne for some cousin of the royal line whose loyalty was to Asterilhold. Unify the kingdoms.

  Well, Lechan had managed that anyway, though not the way he’d meant to. All the remaining court had sworn allegiance to Geder and Aster and the Severed Throne. And since the priests had been there when they’d done it, the ones who hadn’t mean
t it were all dead. The court in Kaltfel was loyal to Antea. Still, it was strange.

  Lechan, the old man Geder had put to death, had probably sat in this room. In this chair. Warmed his shins before a fire like this one. Slept in the bed where Geder had slept last night, would sleep again tonight and then hopefully never again. With Basrahip arranging priestly things at the temple, Geder had thought of searching through the old man’s library, browsing the shelves and boxes for something rare and old and special. An essay that had never been translated. A poem he hadn’t seen. Speculative essays that laid out visions of the world and wild insights and imaginings he would never have had on his own. It was the way he’d amused himself on any number of evenings before he’d become Lord Regent. But the idea of pleasure wasn’t the same as the thing itself, and all during the long, grey afternoon, he’d found he didn’t quite have the will to rouse himself and go looking. Or order someone else to do it for him. Or really manage anything much besides sit and watch the fire dance in the grate and the sky go dark with the sunset.

  He was tired. That was all. It was only that he needed a solid night’s sleep. Tomorrow would be better.

  A soft knock came at the door, and he let himself imagine that it would be something dramatic. Assassins come to assault him or Jorey finally arrived with Cithrin in chains. Something. Anything. But it was only a grey-haired old man in the gold-and-silver filigree of the highest servants. Geder had been told his name at some point, but he didn’t remember it now, and didn’t care enough to pretend otherwise.

  “Lord Regent,” the servant said. “Sir Raillien Morn requests a moment.”

  “Who?” Geder asked.

  “Sir Morn is the sworn protector of Asinport. He has ridden a day and a night to reach you, my lord. He says it is a matter of deadly import.”

  He didn’t remember anyone named Raillien Morn, but he also didn’t recall whom he’d named protector of Asinport. He might not even have done it. There were so many declarations and proclamations and appointments and things that Daskellin and Mecelli had shoved in front of him for his signature. Or Ternigan might have appointed the man before he’d turned loyalties.