“If you knew this was going to fail, would it change anything you did?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
“Either we’re about to end the dragons’ war for the last time, or go down to unremembered deaths in a world condemned to constant and unending war. However it comes out, what we’ve got to do is the same. So it doesn’t make any difference whether we win or lose. It’s the job.”
Kit rubbed a hand over his forehead. There was more grey in his hair than Marcus thought of him having, and it caught the sunlight. “It may be wrong of me,” Kit said, his voice melancholy and warm, “but I do wish you’d just told me you were sure we’d win.”
“You’d have known I was lying.”
The Kingspire stood in the northern reaches of Camnipol, close enough to the Division that it seemed the great height of the tower and the depths of the pit were commenting on each other. Marcus walked through the streets and alleys surrounding it, Yardem at his side, considering the great tower from every angle. The thing had been built to impress more than as a means of defending against attack. Unless it had been built for something else.
It didn’t look good.
From the east, after ambling among the tombs and mausoleums of generations of the noble dead, they reached the wall separating the grounds of the Kingspire from the streets of the city, too long and too low to effectively man. From the south, where the compounds of the most favored of the high families stood shoulder to rose-scented shoulder, the gardens and houses, servants’ quarters and kitchens and stables looked more like a medium-size village than the palace of a king. To the west was the Division, to the north the city wall. Marcus found a narrow stone-paved square and sat at the base of a bronze statue. Pigeons cooed and trotted to him, hopeful of crumbs or corn.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Two hundred men, maybe?”
“To take it or to hold it, sir?”
“I was thinking hold it. Taking it… twice that.”
“Plausible.”
“Problem is, we’ve got you, me, a baroness, a banker, and a handful of actors. Hard to make that work for two hundred.”
“Is,” Yardem said. And then, “Do have the Lord Regent.”
“That’s Cithrin’s plan, but I was trying not to count on him,” Marcus said. “I have the feeling this will be the last time anyone will be able to put all the spiders in the same place at the same time. If they scatter after this, it’ll be the work of generations hunting them down. If it can be done. That’s not something I want to enter into without a fallback plan.”
Yardem nodded. “Do you have a fallback plan?”
“No.”
“Do you expect to find one?”
“Doesn’t seem likely. You?”
“No, sir.”
The puzzle of the thing was still shifting in Marcus’s mind, pieces of their conspiracy moving against each other, trying to find where one thing fit another. Geder Palliako hadn’t turned against them yet, and his visits to his compound were still rare enough they could pretend that he was coming for something other than the chance to moon over Cithrin. He hadn’t seen the dragon since their meeting in the forest, but Marcus had worked up enough pitch and sage to fill a brazier, and he thought he’d found a good place to put it. Clara Kalliam had started bringing more people into bits and pieces of a broader plan, aware that each new person who smelled smoke in the wind was another thousand chances for things to turn to shit. The foundation of the thing was all as stable as a drunkard, but it hadn’t fallen over yet. And the problems that bit at Marcus now weren’t the strategy, but the tactics.
The priests were arriving now in pairs and clusters. Basrahip apparently kept a complete record of them all in his broad head, and, according to Geder, greeted each of them by name when they appeared. As more and more came, their simple density was going to make keeping the plot a secret difficult. Putting them all in the temple at the Kingspire’s top shouldn’t, he thought, be too hard. Keeping them there until Inys arrived might be more of a trick, but what had to be done had to be done. Those plans were made, and if the details were still being tapped into shape, even that didn’t bother him deeply.
No, the splinter in his ass was all the things that they had to think wouldn’t be today’s problem. What Inys would do once he’d snuffed out the last of his brother. What Geder Palliako’s play would be once it was ended. Whether it was possible any longer to bring the scattered priesthood together and not have them each fall on the others with clubs and swords.
The spiders were engines of chaos, after all, and they’d been generating schisms and apostasy for months already. If they all wanted to be reconciled, they might all keep their blades sheathed. If they were already past that, Cithrin might be blundering into a half dozen dramas she knew nothing about. The moment when four assassins all arrived at the same garden was only funny when it happened on a stage.
And it wasn’t as if Marcus didn’t have some betrayals of his own to plan out.
“The smith?” Marcus asked.
Yardem shrugged and stood, as near to a yes as made no difference. Marcus sighed, rose, and turned his back to the Kingspire. Not carrying the poisoned sword left him feeling a little naked, but blending into the city was a better defense now than trying to cut his way through it. And he had his old blade at his side, in case trouble of the more usual kind arose. He made the attempt to fall into the flow of men and women in the streets and yards of the city, to be so much a part of the mood of Camnipol that it accepted him without noticing that it had done so. Two aging fighters on business of their own, and nothing more.
The street life of Camnipol was a strange and disjointed thing, though. Hard to fit into. There was a brightness and energy all around. The beggars capering on the street corners and the women rushing past with cages of live chickens slung over their shoulders, the old men of half a dozen races sitting in the cafés with pipes pinched in their teeth. Everyone had an air almost of celebration, and all of it echoed like thumping a hollow tree. Camnipol knew it was in danger, and was bent almost double with the effort of pretending otherwise. Smaller banners of the goddess hung from windows and over doorways, bright red and white and stark black, and as loud as a coward claiming bravery.
As they made their way to the southeast of the city, the stink of smoke slowly growing as they came near and the wind shifted, Marcus tried to imagine what it would have been like living through the dark years here. How many people had Palliako taken away to his little magistrate’s chamber to question? How many of those had come back? It was no surprise that the city was a tissue of false gaiety and desperation. None of them knew what was happening now, and no one had any idea what would happen next. For all that the girl selling cups of roasted nuts in the square knew, Geder Palliako would reign over Camnipol and Antea and the world under the spiders’ banner for the rest of her life. Or the Timzinae would come from the south and hang them all from their own windows. None of them guessed the goddess was false, or if they did they’d become expert at keeping the thought to themselves.
The only ones untouched by the keen madness of the times were the children and the dogs. And the dogs seemed a little nervous.
The smith’s yard belonged to a massive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. It sat near the city wall, where the smoke from the forges turned the air white and foul. When the servants announced them under the false names Geder Palliako had given them, the smith loomed up out of the depths of his shop. His arms were thicker than Yardem’s thighs and his skin stretched so much by the muscle that lines of pale skin made a lacework around the bronze of his scales. He shook their hands gently, like it required conscious effort not to break them.