“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.
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.