“Hard to say how much is there and how much we’re putting there.”
“Meaning you still think I’m using the great bastard as a mirror.”
“Wouldn’t say so, sir.”
Marcus popped open a waterskin and took a long, tepid drink. They’d want to find a spring tomorrow if the dragon hadn’t arrived. “So what would you say?”
Yardem was quiet for longer than Marcus had expected. He’d almost thought the Tralgu wasn’t going to reply at all when he finally spoke. “We only understand other people by imagining what we would do in their position. What we would have to feel to do what they have done. If we can’t put ourselves into that place, then we can only guess.”
“That’s not only dragons. That’s anyone.”
“It is.”
“Palliako and Inys would get along if they didn’t hate each other.”
“If you say so,” Yardem said so mildly that Marcus looked at him again to see if it was mockery. Yardem’s expression was so polite, Marcus laughed. He handed his friend the waterskin. They waited.
Inys appeared in the late morning, four days later. He began as a thin line of black high in the western sky, easy to overlook. Then he was a hawk riding the high air, only with something odd about the shape of his wings. Marcus could imagine people on the roads looking up at the wide blue-and-white expanse and never seeing the predator in it, and wondered whether the rabbits he’d been eating had noticed Yardem.
When the dragon descended, he came down fast, folding his wings and dropping toward them like a stone. Marcus felt a pang of unease shift in his chest—would Inys be able to stop in time? Had he chosen this particular moment to die suddenly of whatever the hell killed dragons?—before the great wings opened. They caught the air with a sound like a tree snapping in half or a vast canvas sail bellying suddenly out in a high wind. The wings themselves were ragged. Bits of blue shone through here and there where the scars of Porte Oliva would never entirely heal. The fall slowed, and as he came nearer the earth, Inys flapped the wide, ruined wings to slow himself further. It was like storm wind aimed straight down. The boughs of the trees nodded with it until it seemed like the forest itself was bowing to the fallen king of the world.
When Inys’s claws sank to touch the grass of the meadow, it was with the lightness and grace of a dancer. The dragon lifted his wings out again, stretching them, then folded them in against the shining scales of his body and stood still as stone for a moment. A smell like burning pitch and fortified wine filled the air and left the birds silent. The wilderness might ignore the presence of two men, but a dragon set the world on its best behavior. Every sane animal in the wood was still and quiet and hoping against hope not to be noticed. And so, it being the job, Marcus strode forth.
Inys turned his head, considering him with a wide, dark eye, then hunkered down, crushing the young trees of the meadow with his belly or ripping them with the casual motion of his tail.
“Marcus Stormcrow,” Inys said, his voice a deep rumble that seemed to come up from the ground as much as the beast’s vast throat. “You sent for me, and I, like your servant, have come. Do not insult me again.”
Well, God smiled, Marcus thought. Baby’s in a sulk.
“Thank you for this,” he said aloud. “I’d have come the full way myself, but there may not be time. And the roads you travel have fewer enemies on them than the ones I have to hold to.”
Inys grunted. His massive eye blinked. Marcus took it as permission to go on.
“We’re gathering all the priests together in a place they feel safe, and then we’re killing them all. But for it to work we need to keep the number of people who know what we’re up to low, the trap we kill them with simple and effective. That’s why we need you.”
“Go on,” Inys said and laid his head on the turf like a child bored by their father’s lecturing.
“They moved the temple to the top of the Kingspire after some rioting and insurrection a few years back. That’s where we’re bringing them.”
“Kingspire?”
“Tower in the north of the city. Only one like it, and it has the banner of the goddess hanging out of the temple proper like a dog’s tongue. It’ll be hard to overlook. You’ll have to be near enough by we can get you the signal but not so close you’ll be seen. We’ll bar the door so they can’t get out and run like hell for the bottom. You come in, burn them all to the bones and the spiders with them, and they’re through.”
“The war ended,” Inys said. “After so long. And at such cost.”
“It’s got some holes in it,” Marcus said. “There’s at least one army, possibly two, headed in the general direction of Camnipol, which might make bringing them all in one place difficult. The priests are moving in pairs and small groups. They’ll go quicker than a fighting force, and we’re doing what we can to speed them up and slow the other down, but—”
“My brothers gone. My people turned to ash. Our perches drowned and lost forever. This is the fruit that war brings forth.”
Yardem flicked his ear, scratched his arm, and looked back at Marcus. No help there. “Yes,” Marcus said, guessing at what the dragon wanted to hear. “It’s rough. But it’s almost over. And look at all you did.”
“I killed them all,” Inys said. “I drowned the city and sent my allies and friends… my love… to death while I hid in darkness. Like a coward. Ah, Erex, what have I done?”
“And you’re striking the last blow,” Marcus said. “You’re the one who made it to the end, where you can crush Morade’s invention for the last time.” Inys sighed. Marcus bit back a shout and tried again. “And think of the other things you’ve managed. You carried the secrets of the spiders and what they are and how to defeat them when the world had lost all knowledge of them. That isn’t nothing. And the Timzinae. You made a race of warriors who right now are—”
The dragon roared in anguish, thrashing his massive tail into the trees and stripping away the bark with his violence. His claws ripped into the ground, clenched in what looked like pain. Something’s wrong with him. Marcus thought. He’s wounded.
“I did not,” Inys sobbed. “I did not.”
Marcus waited a long moment as the dragon shook his head and bared his teeth, but no more words came out. “Didn’t what?”
“Asteril, my brother, made the Timzinae. They are his children. When I claimed them, it was a lie. This is what I am. What I am reduced to. Dishonoring myself to court the approval of slaves.”
“No one cares,” Marcus said, his voice sharp. “None of us ever thinks about which dragon made which race. It’s not a thing that matters, unlike the chance to kill the priests that’re tearing the world apart. That matters. So why don’t we come back to it?”
Inys reared back like the words had stung him. Violence filled the dragon’s dark eyes, bare as a taproom drunk about to take a swing. Marcus fought the impulse to take a step back. Instinct told him that any show of weakness now was the same as death. Fumes leaked from between Inys’s scaled lips, poisoning the air with the threat of fire. In his peripheral vision, Yardem had gone very still. If there was a way to get between the dragon’s shoulders—someplace where his head couldn’t reach—and find a break in his scales before he flew up into the clouds or rolled on his back and crushed any attackers…
Inys’s roar filled the world. There wasn’t room for the noise and thought both. The trees shuddered, their leaves flickering pale undersides like a wind was passing through them. Marcus scratched his nose, pretending that his heart wasn’t ticking over in his chest fast as a stone rolling down a mountain. The dragon bared teeth as long and cruel as knives. Then visibly deflated.