For a moment, they stood, facing each other. The beast curled against itself like a runner protecting a stitch. Marcus stayed low, feet grounded and knees bent, ready to jump away. Blood poured from the animal’s belly. It roared, snapping at the air, but it came no closer. Its eyes fixed on Marcus, then glazed and fixed on him again. Blood poured into Marcus’s ear and down his neck. Long ropes of saliva draped down from the animal’s panting jaw. Flies were already buzzing around them, drawn by the smells of violence and death.
The beast coughed once, and then a sudden gout of blood shot out from its mouth and nostrils, bright red against the black muzzle. It slipped to the ground, folding its legs underneath it as if merely resting, and its dark eyes closed. Marcus took a long, shuddering breath.
“Well,” he gasped. “Hope those don’t travel in packs.”
Kit stood at the far side of the clearing, his walking stick held above him like a club, his face pale and his hair standing out from his head in all directions. Marcus’s legs began to shake, and he sat down. He’d been in the business of violence long enough to know how this would go. A half hour’s time and he’d be fine, but until then trying to will himself to normalcy only made it worse. He touched his wounded ear. The rip was rough at the edges and as long as the first joint of his thumb. He was lucky it hadn’t gotten more than a single tooth to bear, or the beast might have torn the whole damn thing off. The flies buzzed around him, sliding in to drink up the gore.
“Are you all right?” Kit asked.
“Had better days,” Marcus said. “Had worse, for that. If you’ve still got that salve in your pack, I’d take a couple fingers’ worth.”
Kit hurried back into the trees and returned with the pale leather pack, one of the few objects that hadn’t yet rotted in the jungle. Marcus opened the stone jar and scooped a double finger through the yellow-white salve. It burned like fire when it touched the wound, but it would keep the maggots out.
For weeks, they had battled the land, following animal trails that widened for a hundred feet and then vanished as if they’d never been, avoiding Southling hunters who haunted the nights, and spending as much time scraping for food and water as searching for the reliquary. Kit’s face had lost all its cushion, the skin growing gaunt against the bone. Marcus was fairly sure he’d lost a tenth of his own body’s weight, and he still had a bit of potbelly. The indignities of not dying young.
“I believe I’ve heard of these,” Kit said, staring at the animal. “Kaskimar, they’re called where I came from, but … they were much smaller.”
The actor reached out with his walking stick to prod the corpse.
“Don’t touch it,” Marcus said, a breath too late.
The black eyes clicked open and a paw lashed out. The walking stick flew out of Kit’s hand, cracking against a tree trunk. Kit fell back with a curse, and the beast closed its eyes again.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “Should have said before. Did it get you?”
“I’m afraid so,” Kit said ruefully. “I may need needle and thread.”
“That deep?” Marcus said, levering himself to his feet. “Let me see—”
“No,” Kit said sharply. “Stay back. It isn’t safe. Just throw me the pack and then get away.”
“Get away?”
Kit nodded, licked his lips, and winced. Marcus thought he saw something tiny and black skitter across Kit’s arm, and his flesh crawled a little.
“It’s the spiders,” Kit said. “There’s too many of them to keep track of. It won’t be safe for you.”
Marcus tossed the pack to Kit’s side and made his way to the other side of the dying beast. The shaking was already less. Kit grunted in pain and started pulling their few supplies out and onto the ground before him.
“How bad are the bites from those things?” Marcus asked
“Hmm? Oh. They raise welts. Itch for a few days.”
The beast took a deep, shuddering breath and didn’t draw another. In a few minutes, Marcus guessed, it would be safe to retrieve his sword.
“Hardly seems fair that they bite you,” Marcus said. “Disloyal, somehow.”
“I don’t believe they know who I am. What I am, for that. I doubt they have minds themselves, even so much as a normal spider might. They act as the mark of the goddess’s authority and the channel for her gifts.”
“Which is why we’re killing her,” Marcus said. “So her power and gifts all go boneless.”
“Yes.”
“Still seems rude of them to bite you.”
“Annoying, yes. But that isn’t why they’re unsafe. I’m using the last of the salve.”
“Use it if you need it. Might as well use nothing as not enough. Why unsafe, then?”
Kit took a sharp breath, his hand pressed to the the wound in his leg. His face paled and the red-black blood that ran between his fingers might have been thick with clots or something less pleasant. A yellow frog, long-legged and shining like a river stone, leaped onto the dying beast’s head, then off again. The animal didn’t stir.
“One might … God, but this does sting, doesn’t it? Ah. One might get inside you.”
“Inside me?”
Kit looked up and managed a smile.
“I wasn’t born with them,” he said. “If I hadn’t been chosen for the temple, I’d be herding goats in the Sinir Kushku today instead of this.”
“Better off too,” Marcus said. “How do they get inside you?”
Kit fumbled on the ground. The black roll of silk thread had a fine bone needle in it, and Kit held it between his teeth, talking around it as he found the free end of the thread. It slurred his words, but not so badly that Marcus couldn’t understand him.
“For me, it was the ritual initiation. I spent five years learning before my mind was ready, or that’s what the high priest told me, and I believed him. I suppose I still do, for that. I can’t imagine how unpleasant it would be to have the goddess enter you if you were unprepared. It only took one. I cut my skin just inside the elbow, and the high priest cut his thumb and pressed it to my wound. That was all. I felt it come in me, felt it crawling through my veins, and then the next day, there were more. Everywhere, and I knew I was changing. I remember embracing it at the time, but we were always warned that the goddess would break an unready mind. Even as it was, there was a day my brothers had to strap me down to keep me from trying to open my skin and let them out.”
“I think I’ll stay with the usual empty prayers and overpriced candles,” Marcus said. “And that could happen to anyone? And when I say anyone, I mean that could happen to me?”
Kit made a little grunt of satisfaction, holding the needle in one hand and gently rolling the thread through its eye. The tiny, sharp shard of bone danced between his fingers, seeming to fly in the dimness like a cunning man’s conjure. With a sigh, he took it between finger and thumb and turned to the work of sewing his skin closed. Tending your own wounds like that was unpleasant, but sometimes the times required it.
“They wouldn’t intend to. It isn’t as though they seek for it,” Kit said. “But if you were unlucky, one might find its way into your blood. A cut would be the simplest, but any path under your skin would do, I think. Eyes. Mouth. Less mentionable paths. I haven’t made the experiment, but that’s what they told me in the temple, and it seems plausible.”
“So it’s never happened?”
“Once,” Kit said, “when I was very new to the world. It was an accident. I was in Borja, and I was drunk. I got into a fight. Not a serious thing; fists, not knives. But I split his lip, and then later on, he bit me. They decided a demon had possessed him, and they threw him on a bonfire.”
“Seems extreme.”
“I convinced them it was called for.”
Kit said the words lightly, but his closed expression spoke of shame. He drove the bone needle through his skin again, pulling the dark thread until the wound narrowed. Tiny red dots marked his hands and the skin of his leg. Spider bites.
<
br /> Marcus stepped forward, but not too close. Flies were drinking at the corners of the beast’s closed eyes, and he shooed them away. The animal seemed, if anything, heavier in death. Marcus rolled it onto its wide back. His sword stuck out of its chest at an angle, thick with gore and insects. So little time, and the jungle was already hard at work reclaiming the animal, remaking it, folding it into the merciless cycle of eater and eaten. He took hold of the hilt, braced his foot, and heaved. The sword came free on the third try. He squatted on the ground, rubbing the worst of the blood off with moss and old leaves. In a perfect world, he’d have been able to wash it with a real cloth and oil it after. He considered the beast’s body, shrugged, and ran the flat of the blade across the slick black fur. There would be some body oils in the pelt. It wasn’t the most dignified way to treat a fallen enemy, but it wasn’t the worst thing he’d done to the animal that day. He put the sword back into its rotting leather scabbard.
Kit finished his gruesome task and tried standing. It looked awkward and painful. Marcus felt himself making the calculations. If Kit’s wound went septic, getting back to friendly territory would be a hard thing. Kit could likely talk any Southlings they came across into giving them aid, providing the man was still coherent and not lost in a fever. If it was all up to Marcus, their chances would be worse.
And even then, there was only so much longer they could go on before the landscape consumed them. They would become another cautionary tale to excite the interest of explorers and idiots. Any man who cared about his own life would turn north now and hope he hit seawater before his strength gave out. Only that wasn’t the job.
“We can make camp here,” Marcus said.
“And spend all night fighting ants and scavengers?”
“We can make camp a way down from here. Maybe find a little creek.”
“I think that sounds wise,” Kit said. “Let me get my staff.”
While Kit limped into the underbrush to retrieve the fallen stick, Marcus knelt by the dead animal. It was magnificent in its way.
“Your time now, kitty,” he said under his breath. “My time later.”
He patted the beast’s shoulder like it was an opponent he’d bested in the gymnasium’s fighting pit, then started to stand. He stopped. The ground near the great black claws had been churned up, black earth and pale roots. Marcus dug his fingers down, pulling up the fabric of plant and soil. The stone beneath it was a perfect green. Only it wasn’t stone.
“Kit?”
“Marcus?”
“There’s dragon’s jade here.”
Kit hobbled forward, leaning against his staff. His face was grimy and streaked with his own blood, but his eyes were bright.
“Where?”
Marcus stood up and stepped back, pointing to the turned earth. As Kit knelt down to examine it, Marcus walked up and down the clearing, squinting in concentration. All around them, great trees towered up, fighting each other to reach the sunlight. But here in this strip, the trees were thinner, shorter, weaker. The roots that fed them, perhaps shallower. Yes, now that he knew to look for it, it was clear.
“This is a road,” he said. “There’s a dragon’s road running through this valley. North to south, and maybe turning a little to the east just here.”
“Well, now,” Kit said. “There’s a pleasant surprise.”
“Did we expect to find a dragon’s road?”
“We did not.”
“And if there’s dragon’s road, it seems likely that at some point way back when there were still dragons to make the jade, it was a road to someplace.”
“That would seem to follow.”
Marcus felt a smile plucking at his lips.
“This is the path to your mysterious reliquary, isn’t it?”
Kit hauled himself up.
“I suppose it could be.”
For a long moment, the two men stood in the cloud of flies that buzzed around the corpse, grinning at each other like boys.
Cithrin
Magistra Isadau’s office was near the center of the compound. It was as understated as Cithrin’s back room in the café had been, but like a stone set in tin or else silver, the surroundings changed the nature of the space. Where Cithrin’s workplace was clearly built on business, Isadau drew anyone coming on bank business through her house. After meeting with Cithrin in Porte Oliva, a person would step out to see the Grand Market with its queensmen and merchants, traders and cutpurses, shouts and laughter and commerce. Leaving Isadau’s meant passing through not only the magistra’s home, but her brother’s, her sister’s, her mother’s. Isadau’s nieces and nephews wandered the wide hallways with their friends or else their tutors. Mother Kicha had visitors every day, so that even in the afternoons, the broad hall outside the matriarch’s bedchamber might be half full of poets or priests or sour-faced Timzinae women embroidering flowers and sunbursts onto dresses and pointedly ignoring Cithrin.
Jurin—the brother—was a farrier, and the stables were his as much as Isadau’s. Kani, who had met Cithrin at the docks, did scribe work for the bank and deliveries for Jurin and errands for her mother without drawing any distinction between them. Yardem and Enen and Roach were expected to work with Isadau’s own guardsmen, sharing the duties of the watch and escorting payments through the city, and they were also guests welcome at the family dinner table. The kitchens smelled of fennel and cumin and cinnamon, and they fed anyone who came. The cook who oversaw them, an old Yemmu man with a black crack running jaggedly through his left tusk, made a great noise and wailing about being interrupted and then kept whoever had come in conversation harder to escape than a honey trap.
There was no tradition of wayhouses in Suddapal. Travelers negotiated hospitality with whatever family opened their doors to the knock. Coming out of her room in the morning was like stepping into the street had been in Porte Oliva. Anyone might be there on any business. And Magistra Isadau’s complex—while larger and better appointed than most—was only one of hundreds that made up the five cities. In the first days, Cithrin could feel her own mind shifting, struggling to put the culture of Elassae into terms of her old experience. The compounds were like villages of a single family, each in competition with the ones around it. Or the compounds were like homes shared through a greater family and in service to all the endeavors the men and women of that family fell into. Or they were like the holdings of the nobility, except without the base of taxation and tribute to hold them up. It was only very slowly and with almost as many steps back as forward that Cithrin came to accept the compound for what it was, and even then it felt profoundly foreign. Nor was its openness the only difference.
“Hold your shoes, ma’am?” Yardem asked.
Tenthday was a moving ceremony, falling on each of the traditional seven weekdays with a mathematical certainty that was like music. Callers marched out from the basilica at dawn, ringing bronze bells and singing the call to prayer. The pious like Mother Kicha and Jurin, and those who wished to be thought well of by the pious, like Isadau and Cithrin, all met the callers barefoot in the streets and joined the procession.
“Thank you,” Cithrin said, handing the leather slippers to Yardem. “This will be more pleasant in the summer when the paving feels less like ice.”
The Tralgu’s wide, canine mouth took on a gentle smile.
“Imagine it will,” he said. His own wide leather boots hung in his hand. Roach stood beside him, his race making him seem more a part of the household than of Cithrin’s guard. Enen was staying behind; there was a whole genre of jokes about what people found at home after the ceremony. Leaving some family behind was considered an acceptable compromise between the worship of God and the nature of humanity. The callers came, bells breaking like waves against the low bass chanting of voices. Cithrin sighed, stood the way Master Kit and Cary had taught her, and joined the household as they stepped into the street. The steady pace allowed even the oldest among them to keep up, and Cithrin let her mind wander as they passed t
hrough the wide streets of Suddapal. The group was mostly Timzinae, but the massive bodies of Yemmu lumbered among them, as well as the tall and tall-eared Tralgu. Cithrin was the only Cinnae or Firstblood; her pale skin and hair stood out like a star in the night sky, and she caught more than a few people craning their necks for a glimpse of the newcomer. She tried not to feel awkward about it.
The city here sloped down to the south. The sea was a greater whiteness behind sun-glowing mist. The sky was pale as opal.
Magistra Isadau appeared at her side, and Cithrin nodded formally. Some swift calculation seemed to pass behind the older woman’s eyes before she returned the gesture.
“You’re looking well this morning, Cithrin.”
“Thank you,” Cithrin said over the chant and the bells.
“I saw that you’d begun your review of the books?”
“I have,” Cithrin said, then looked around her. They were where the private business of the bank would be overheard if spoken of, and yet the magistra’s comment felt like an invitation. Cithrin felt a tightening in her gut, like a rat smelling a dog, but not sure yet which direction held the danger. “I’ll want to look over them more this afternoon.”
“I suspect we can make time for it,” Isadau said. “There are some people I would like you to meet after the ceremony.”
Cithrin smiled carefully.
“Whatever you think wise,” she said, keeping her tone cheerful.
“Ati Isadau!” a voice called from behind them. A younger Timzinae boy—thirteen summers or possibly a bit less—was pushing his way through the crowd toward them. Men and women made way for him with expressions of annoyance. He reached them winded, one black-scaled hand clutched to his side. “Ati Isadau,” he said between gasps. “There’s a courier come. Package for you. From the holding company.”
Isadau’s smile seemed warm enough that she might actually have meant it.
“Thank you, Salan,” she said gravely. “I appreciate your letting me know.”
Salan, Cithrin thought. It took her a moment to recall where she’d heard the name. This was the nephew, son of Isadau’s brother, who’d decided to be infatuated with the exotic girl from Birancour. He looked at Cithrin, then tried to bow and walk forward at the same time. All in all, he managed creditably.
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