The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said without looking up. “You’ll only make me feel guilty for distracting you.”

  “And if I told you I was looking for Jorey?”

  She smiled. Clara had always had the talent for looking pleased without denying that she felt weary.

  “I’d ask why you weren’t looking in his room or the barracks.”

  “I was going to,” Dawson said. “But I got distracted.”

  She put down her work and patted the mattress at her side. It was too soft, of course. Klin was a weak man at heart, and always had been.

  “Tell me again,” Dawson said, “what happened when Phelia Maas died.”

  “Well, you recall we were in the drawing room, you and Jorey and Geder and that very large religious friend of Geder’s. And poor Phelia was in a state of nerves. When Palliako began unveiling everything that had been going on with Feldin, the poor thing fell apart…”

  She told it all again, as she had before. The pretended errand to Maas’s mansion, the priest’s insistence when challenged that they were there at the baron’s request. Then the letters that proved his conspiracy, and the discovery. Phelia’s death.

  And after, when Vincen Coe had stood against the baron and his men in the corridor while Basrahip the goatherd priest hectored Maas into walking away. Dawson tried to picture it, and failed. He had fought Feldin Maas many times, and more than one of those had been with a blade. To go meekly. To drop his sword and turn away.

  “They have some evil magic,” he said. “It breaks men. It broke Maas and the men in the keep at the Seref. And it’s breaking Klin. I can see it in him. He spoke to them, and it’s drowned the fire in him just the way it did for the others.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t the fever and fighting that’s doing it?” Clara asked. “It doesn’t take magic to break someone’s spirit. The world can be enough.”

  There was a truth in her words he didn’t want to acknowledge, but it was there, patient and implacable. The exhaustion pressing down on his shoulders drew from more than the battle dragging on. More than his frustration and fear. It was also grief. He had done his best for his kingdom. He had done his duty as he saw it, standing bulwark against the small, shortsighted men who would change it. If Simeon had lived only a few more years, enough to give Aster the throne without a regency…

  Clara took his hand, and he tried to muster some hope.

  “Skestinin’s got to be getting close by now,” he said. “Once he brings his men south, he’ll get the gates opened. We’re too evenly matched now, and he can tip the balance.”

  “Will that be a good thing?”

  “If it was only Barriath being under his command, no,” Dawson said. “But there’s Sabiha. Skestinin’s family now. With his reinforcements, we can turn this. We’ll get you and the girl out. Jorey, if he’ll go.”

  “And you?”

  The drums sounded, deep and dry. He saw Clara shudder. The defense again. Another wave of attackers come to erode their strength. They were coming more often now. They weren’t coming to win, but to keep Dawson’s men from resting. A siege within a siege.

  “I have to be there,” he said. “I am sorry the world came to this, love. It ought to have been on better behavior with you in it.”

  “How eloquent,” she said, only half mocking. “You’re a flatterer, you know.”

  “You’re worth flattering,” he said, rising from the bed.

  By the time he reached the street, the men had already pushed back the latest assault. The sun had turned the cobbled streets hot. Even after sunset came, the heat would be rising up out of the land for hours. In better years, he would have been setting out for the Great Bear now, preparing himself for an evening of cooled wine and debates, contests of poetry and rhetoric. In better years, the summer would not have been so hot.

  In the yards, men had built tents and defenses like an army on campaign. Klin’s gardens were pounded into dust by boots. The roses had been cut down to make room, and a wide arbor where grapevines had hung down, dripping with wide green leaves was a pair of broken stumps, the body of the thing part of a street barricade. The men themselves slept on cots, torpid in the heat, or paced to and from the water trough. Their faces were dirty and closed, their move-ments defensive. Even in the way they drank a tin of water and nodded to each other, they were the image of a beaten army.

  It wasn’t true, of course. In the other mansions and squares, there would be other men who’d taken the other opinion who were just as hot and just as tired, who saw the damage being done to the city and felt its loss as deeply. There was no reason that Dawson’s men should be hanging their heads. The battle wasn’t lost as long as they stood.

  He walked the perimeter with the captain on duty. The barricades had been set three and four streets out from Klin’s, proclaiming the squares to be territory of Dawson’s men, but under the constant and shifting attacks they were being eaten away like sandcastles at the change of tide. Where once they had been walls, they’d degraded into hills, or worse, mere collections of refuse, some stacked on each other, but hardly enough to slow an advancing force.

  “We can’t keep holding where we’ve been, my lord,” the captain said. “The men don’t say it, but they know. And once they know, it’s hard to feel much enthusiasm for rebuilding. We need to pull in a way, eliminate two or three places that we have to defend.”

  “And the attack?” Dawson asked. “I’m sorry, my lord?”

  “The attack. How do we take this to them?”

  The captain’s cheeks ballooned out as he considered the question.

  “We’ve got hunting patrols out. Four of them in rotation, looking for the prince and the Lord Regent. And those priests you wanted.”

  “It isn’t enough,” Dawson said. “We’re sitting here like criminals waiting for the magistrate’s blades. The men need glory. Pull back the barricades, and place archers on the rooftops in the new positions. Tell the men to rest tonight. In the morning, we take the fight to the enemy.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the captain said, but there was no joy in his voice. After a moment’s hesitation: “Lord Kalliam, which enemy are we speaking of?”

  “Palliako and his Keshet cultists,” Dawson said.

  “Yes, but Lord, that’s who we’re hunting now. If you mean instead that we’re going to draw arms against Ternigan’s men or Daskellin’s or some such, that changes the look of things. It may not be easy to arrange this well.”

  Dawson could hear how carefully the man was choosing his words.

  “They have been attacking us,” Dawson said. “And we’re curling up and taking the blows. It’s no way to win a fight.”

  “Yes, my lord. I mean no, sir, it isn’t. But they aren’t the enemy. All of us know men on the other side. We served with them. Fought beside them, a lot of them under your command. It’s not the same as marching on Asterilhold or Sarakal. These are Anteans we’re be fighting. It’s not the same.”

  “They’re the servants of the priests now,” Dawson said. “They’re corrupted.”

  “Yes, my lord. It’s just hard to see that when you’re looking at a man who maybe saved your life in Asterilhold. It’s not as though those men crossed us personally. They’re only following what their lords are telling them to do, sir.”

  Just as we are, hung in the air between them. Dawson heard the warning in it. It wasn’t only hope that was fading, it was also loyalty. The glory of battle required an enemy they could hate, and apart from the priests and Palliako, Dawson didn’t have one. He wondered whether the others— Ternigan, Daskellin, Broot—were suffering the same problem. He hoped they were.

  “Thank you for your candor,” Dawson said crisply. “Let’s have those barricades remade. If we can defend the position with fewer men, we can send out more hunting parties, yes?”

  “Yes, Lord. I believe we could do that.”

  “We’ll do that, then.”

  The sun moved slowly in the great arch of sky
above the city. Dawson found himself resenting it. It and all the stars hiding behind its skirts. The Kingspire caught the light for a moment, flashing like a bolt of lightning that didn’t fade. He could imagine Palliako up there in his secret rooms, looking down at Dawson, at the city. That was where to go. If there was an attack to be made, a final assault, it would be to root Palliako out of his perch on the Kingspire. To haul him off the Severed Throne and put Aster there in his place. Already the boy would be a better king than Palliako…

  A voice boomed out. The echoes bouncing from the can-yon walls of the buildings made the words indistinct, but the timbre of it was familiar. Dawson’s gut went tight as he walked and then trotted to where the new barricades were taking shape. His men were divided: half went on piling logs, tables, upended carts in the street, building defenses against the blades of their countrymen, and half stood silent, hands on their bows and swords, ready to push back when the new assault came.

  But it didn’t come. No melee. No blades.

  In the square they had just withdrawn from, a siege tower stood on massive wooden wheels, pushed by a company of slaves at the back. Fifty swordsmen at least marched at its base, but didn’t call the charge. At the tower’s head, almost as high as the roofs themselves, an archer’s house stood, its thick wooden sides proof against incoming arrows and bolts. But instead of archers leaning out from its window to rain down upon them, there was the grey cone of a caller’s tube. The words booming out from it were the deep, rolling voice of Basrahip, the high priest of the spider goddess. Geder’s puppetmaster.

  “Listen to my voice,” he called. “You have already lost. Everything you fight for is meaningless. You cannot win. Listen to my voice…”

  Cithrin

  Y

  ou need a bath,” Sandr said, prodding Charlit Soon with his toe. And then a moment later, “I need a bath.”

  “I think we can say we’d all do well with baths,” Cary said. “And fresh food. And maybe a rainstorm.”

  Cithrin squatted on the back of the cart, a bowl of stewed barley in her hand. She hadn’t come out of the hole until just after midday, and even after the walk to Yellow House, the sun seemed too bright. Twelve days in the darkness. So far.

  “Well, the good news is we found your high priest,” Cary said. “The bad is that he’s holed up in the middle of an army and won’t let anyone come near him. I thought about passing him a letter, but I wasn’t sure you’d want that.”

  Cithrin frowned. The truth was, she was of two minds. Several times in the last week, she’d have offered to cut off a toe if it meant a warm bed, a good meal, and five hours in a bathhouse. When Geder and Aster emerged from the hole, there would be no reason for her to be down in it with them, and she was coming to truly loathe that place. But when the time came, Geder would become Lord Regent Palliako again. Aster would be prince and king. Everything would change.

  She’d been sent here to find out what she could about Antea in the face of its war with Asterilhold. Now she was hiding with two of the most important leaders, present and future, that the kingdom would have. What she’d learned was that Geder Palliako was a funny, somewhat awkward man who loved books of improbable history. That Aster hadn’t known how to spit for distance, and now—thanks to her—he did. She saw the affection between the pair of them, and the enthusiasms. And the almost physical shared sorrow that neither one of them acknowledged, or even recognized. When they rose out of the ground, they would leave her, and her chance to learn more of them both would vanish.

  “I’ll talk to Geder about it,” she said, scooping up the last of the barley with two cupped fingers. “Anything else?”

  “The usual human landscape of lies and folly,” Cary said. “Did you know that Geder commands the spirits of the dead, and that at night ghosts stalk the streets rooting out his enemies?”

  “He hadn’t mentioned that,” Cithrin said. “Good to know. All right, then. If that’s all—”

  Mikel grinned.

  “Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact…”

  Cithrin lifted her eyebrows.

  “You always do that,” Charlit Soon said. “That’s exactly what I was talking about with A Tragedy of Tarsk. You always play the pause for effect.”

  “Has an effect,” Smit said.

  “Yeah,” Charlit Soon said, “it prolongs and annoys.” She tossed a pebble at Mikel.

  “As a matter of fact,” Cithrin prompted.

  “As a matter of fact,” Mikel said, somewhat abashed, “I found where your Paerin Clark’s been hiding. Went to ground in a guesthouse of Canl Daskellin’s, which was a pretty good idea since the inn you were staying in burned.”

  “It burned?” Cithrin said.

  “Fourth night after,” Cary said.

  “My clothes were in there,” Cithrin said.

  “Twelve people were in there,” Sandr said. “Two of them children.”

  Cithrin considered Sandr. There had been a time not all that long ago when she’d very nearly taken him as a lover. From where she sat now, the wisdom of her decision not to glowed like a fire in the night.

  “Yes, I am a small, petty woman,” she said, “and I mourn for the dead and the suffering, but I really wanted to get my own damn clothes back. Can you reach Paerin, or is he as guarded as the priest?”

  “He’s not taking visitors he doesn’t know,” Mikel said.

  “All right,” Cithrin said. “I’ll need something to write on.”

  The company cipher was still clear in her mind, and the note was a brief one: Have access to Lord Regent and Prince Aster. What questions do I ask? Reply by same courier. She considered adding something that would say where she was, where Geder and Aster were, and she didn’t. If he wanted Geder and Aster, he could come to her.

  It was one of the great and powerful lessons of finance. The key to wealth and power was simple enough to state and difficult to employ: be between things. Narinisle was a chilly island with barely enough arable land to support its own population and no particular resources to offer, but the currents of the Ocean Sea put it between Far Syramys and the rest of the continent. And so it was vastly wealthy. Now Cithrin had fallen into Narinisle’s position, and while it wouldn’t last, she could gain more the longer she remained in place.

  “All right,” she said, handing the paper to Mikel. “I’ll come back as soon as I can for the reply.”

  “How are things going underground?” Cary asked.

  “Frightened and bored and ready to be done with this. But we let Aster sneak up to the mouth and look out at the daylight. It seems to help.”

  “Good. When this is over, though, I hope the Lord Regent remembers who his friends are. I’m almost through all the stones the prince brought with him.”

  “Really?”

  “I could buy more with a ripe orange than with one of those pearls,” Cary said. “It’s already starvation time in some quarters. If this all doesn’t break soon, we’ll start seeing a lot more people dying. And they won’t be lords and nobles falling in glorious battle.”

  When there was nothing more to be said, Cithrin pulled a sack over her shoulder with four fresh wineskins, a palmsized round of hard cheese, a bottle of water, some stale bread, and a double handful of dried cherries harvested at least a year before and hard as pebbles. She paused before she started the walk back, looking out over the Division.

  The air was hazy, the far side of the span already a bit greyer than things closer to hand. Nothing was burning at the moment, but there was no reason to expect that would be true through the night, for instance.

  She hadn’t been there for a half a season, but Camnipol had gone from the heart of an empire to a city of scars. It was in the scorch marks on the buildings and the faces of the men she passed in the streets, the empty market squares and the gangs of swordsmen moving together like packs of wolves. She walked quickly and with her head down. She was too clearly not Firstblood to be mistaken for someone with power in the city, but she could p
lay the servant. There were any number of lower-class people of the crafted races, and if she were one of those, no one would wonder particularly where she was going or why.

  On her solitary way back to the warehouse and the hole, three men followed her for nearly half a mile, calling out vulgarities and making crude suggestions. She kept her eyes low and kept walking. She told herself it was a good sign, because it was how the men would have treated a servant girl walking alone through the streets, but she still felt the relief when they lost interest and wandered on.

  At the warehouse, she stopped, turning slowly in all directions. There was no one there to see her. She went through the usual ritual, tying the length of rope to her ankle and crawling in. The others hadn’t come with her this time, so she didn’t bother using the tray. Everything she had already fit in the sack.

  The first time she’d crawled through the black passage, it had seemed to go on forever. Now it felt brief, trivial. When she reached the dropoff where it broadened out into the sunken garden, Geder and Aster were sitting beside each other, drawing patterns in the dirt by the light of a candle.

  “Has that been burning since I left?” Cithrin asked.

  Geder and Aster looked at each other, an image of complicity. Cithrin sighed and began pulling in the pack.

  “It’s going to run out, you know. And won’t get another one until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “Dark now or dark later,” Aster said. “It’s not a great difference.”

  “The difference is dark now would be a choice,” she said. “Dark later’s by necessity. What are you playing at?”

  “Geder was showing me Morade’s Box,” Aster said.

  “It’s a puzzle I found in a book,” Geder said. “It’s about the last war.”

  “We had a last war?” Cithrin asked, pushing back a lock of her greasy hair. “I’m not sure everyone knew to stop.”