“No they won’t,” Geder said, and the doubt within him had grown. “You’re the liar. You’re the one who turned against her power.”
“I am not,” Ovur said, and the Basrahip loomed up from the darkness. The wide face looked almost serene. Sorrow welled up in Ovur’s heart, vast as oceans. “We are not to be reconciled after all, then.”
“No.”
Ovur nodded, then rested his head against the ground. The cold didn’t seem so terrible now. The pain in his side was vicious, but distant. Something deep in his belly felt heavy and wrong. Others were coming close now too. Soldiers and priests. Men holding lanterns and blades. Some few were familiar, but none were his own.
“Her voice,” Ovur said, then lost the thread of his thought, coughed, and began again. “Her voice is heard in all her temples. Her light shines from every torch. You, Basrahip, are only another torch. You’re not the sun. And I am no apostate.”
The large man’s eyes widened and his mouth became a scowl of rage. He snatched the green blade from Palliako, stepped forward, and, roaring like a storm, sank the blade deep into Ovur’s chest. The pain of the strike was surprising and fierce, but worse was the burning. All through his body, even those parts he’d thought numb, the spiders seemed to take fire. Acid and venom filled him. His flesh pulsed with death throes not his own. And then with his own. He was only vaguely aware of Basrahip’s voice, continuing to denounce him. Of the terrible nausea that seemed to center in the envenomed wound. For a moment, he had a sense of profound clarity, but it brought him neither insight nor comfort.
Ovur, born of Sana and Egran of the Sinir Kushku, offered to the temple in his sixth year, and pilgrim under the Basrahip to the great world beyond the mountains, closed his eyes for the last time. The thing that was not sleep pulled at him, and he let himself be drawn down into it, certain that the goddess he had served with his full heart and whole life would be in that darkness to receive him.
As it happened, she was not.
Captain Marcus Wester
Like wine poured into water, the war stained the world even where the actual fighting had not yet reached.
Carse, the greatest city of Northcoast, looked out over a winter sea. The sky was the grey of snow, the water the grey of slate. No army had crossed the kingdom’s borders, but one camped in Birancour to the south, and another—smaller—was said to be marching in the swamps near Kaltfel to the east. There were rumors that Lord Regent Geder Palliako rode with that second one, that the spirits of the dead had swollen his host to the largest the world had ever known but only at night, that the forces of Antea were poised to sweep over the kingdom like a plague wind. For all Marcus knew, it might be true. Everything else had been strange enough these last few years that drawing a line between groundless fear and plausible scenario had become difficult where it wasn’t impossible.
It didn’t change the job.
He hunched into his cloak, walking through the same frost-touched streets he had as a younger man. His feet ached, and his right knee had started to click sometimes, but it didn’t hurt yet. The poisoned sword hung across his back, eroding his health and making his blood watery and thin. He felt the weight of years slowing him, making each day a bit harder than the one before it. Death was constant, inevitable, and coming. His own, and everybody else’s. Age and maturity meant he was aware of the fact, that was all.
Beside him, Yardem stood tall, his canine face alert, his ears canted forward. There was grey at their tips. They were both getting old, but the years didn’t seem to weigh down the Tralgu as much. So maybe his bleakness was just the sword.
A boy wheeled a cart ahead of them, the steam from it billowing and filling the air with the scent of burning wood and roasting chestnuts. Marcus lifted a hand, and the guards shifted to walk around the cart. Marcus had seen more ambushes than he cared to remember, and this wasn’t one. The carter nodded to them as they passed. No hidden blades appeared in the shadows, no sudden battle cries split the air. Marcus was vaguely disappointed.
“I don’t know who we are anymore,” he said.
Yardem flicked his ear, considering. The earrings jingled. “You’re Marcus Wester, sir. I’m Yardem Hane. Those back there are Enen and Halvill. The one at the back’s called Little Fish, but I couldn’t say why.”
“Not what I meant. Used to be I was captain of the guard for the Medean bank in Porte Oliva, but seeing there isn’t a branch in Porte Oliva anymore, makes it a bit strange. Do we work for Cithrin? Is she still part of the bank? There’s no chain of command anymore.”
“We sleep in the bank’s rooms and eat from the bank’s kitchen,” Yardem pointed out. “At a guess, we work for them.”
“Do they pay us?”
“They do.”
“Do they pay us money?”
The Tralgu flicked a thoughtful ear. “Granted, that’s more a question, sir.”
The chest that Enen and Halvill carried between them was hard oak bound in iron. The lock was thick and well made. It would have taken a man with a crowbar half an hour to crack it open. Everything about it—including the five guards walking through the chill grey streets—indicated that whatever it contained was important. Valuable. Everyone Marcus passed—the carter boy, the old woman in leather and rags trundling through the intersection behind them, even the city watch—would see their burden being treated as if it were precious as gold. And it would add, the idea went, to the story that the yellow sheets of paper with their arcane script and the shining flecks in among the fibers were actually worth something.
Cithrin had called them letters of transfer, but Komme Medean had instructed everyone else to use the name war gold. It was a name meant to weave the idea of real coinage with the fear of the imperial armies at the borders, as if by the magic of pretending the drawing of a gold coin was the same as the thing itself, Northcoast and Carse would be somehow safer from the killing blades and tainted priests.
And the hell of it was, for all Marcus could see it might work. Certainly the sheets that he and his guards were given at the end of each week traded for food and drink, a launderer’s services or a cobbler’s. And Cithrin, sitting deep in the great brick keep that was the holding company, seemed busier than she’d ever been as a simple banker. And still, he felt more like an actor pretending a length of painted wood was a battle-axe than a soldier guarding treasure.
The scriptorium had a wide blue door and wooden walls with carvings of a dozen different scripts worked into them. Snow covered the tiled roof, and icicles clung to the eaves, thin tendrils hanging from the thicker stumps where they’d been broken to keep them from slaughtering random passersby. Marcus rapped on the doorway and waited, his breath ghosting before him. A woman’s voice called from within, then a scrape came, and the door swung open. The master scribe ushered them into a workroom. Twenty desks, each with someone sitting at it. All of the full guild members at work. Thick-bodied, ruddy Firstblood; pale, sprout-thin Cinnae; scaled Jasuru, all with reed-thin pens scratching gently at papers. Four iron braziers warmed the air almost to the point of comfort but not quite. In the back, he knew, were thirty more apprentices with less heat and smaller workplaces. A harpist played in the back of the room in an attempt to keep boredom at bay. A Jasuru woman glanced up at them, her bronze scales glowing in the light, and then went back to her work.
“This way, Captain Wester,” the master scribe said, and Marcus followed her back to a smaller office. The papers waiting there didn’t have the yellow dye of war gold, but they were tools of conflict just the same. They stood on the desk, square pages tied in twine. Marcus slid one around to read the top sheet.