Cary finished her song with a flourish of hands that evoked a dove’s wings in flight, and the Haaverkin stamped and whistled and tossed a few grimy silver coins to her. Hornet gathered them up, radiating pleasure as if the paltry take actually deserved gratitude. Kit sighed, gave in, and drank.
“Do you think she’s still in Suddapal?” Kit asked.
“Cithrin, you mean? I hope not. Even with her wits and the bank’s money, going against an occupying army’s bad work. And when they’ve got people like you on their side, and you can’t even lie about it?” Marcus shook his head. “I’m hoping she’s gone back to Porte Oliva or Carse. Which means about as far as you can get from here without crossing the sea, but it’s an imperfect world. One way or the other, we’ll find her and we’ll find Yardem, and we’ll tell them… Well.”
“Yes,” Kit said. “That we found a sleeping dragon that might or might not be what the spider priests were looking for, that we woke it up, gave it a rough outline of human history since the fall of the empire. And then it got upset and flew away.”
“Didn’t say we’d covered ourselves in glory,” Marcus said.
At the hearth, Hornet was tuning the dulcimer while Cary and Charlit Soon talked with each other about what the next song should be. A thick-bodied Haaverkin man opened the door, ushering in a blast of numbingly cold air, raised his tattooed eyebrows, and retreated. Marcus shifted on his bench.
“I wish that I knew what to make of it,” Kit said. “Was the dragon the thing they were searching for? If it was, then why? Or was it coincidence? I don’t know where it went, or what it wants, or… anything really. I did believe once that I knew the secrets of the world, and now I don’t know anything.”
When Marcus chuckled, Kit looked over at him with an injured expression.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “I was just thinking how much easier it was for you to speak to the virtues of doubt when you thought you understood everything.”
Kit scowled, but after a moment a glimmer of amusement came into his eyes. “I suppose that is a bit funny, isn’t it?”
“I didn’t mean to rub ashes in the cut.”
“No, no, I think you’re right. I believed that I had special knowledge that no one else had, and apparently I took some comfort in it. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time.” Kit took another sip from his drink. “I suppose it was a bit arrogant of me, looking back at it.”
“It’s all right,” Marcus said. “We love you anyway.”
Kit’s expression went still and a thin shine of tears came to his eyes.
“What?” Marcus said.
“Nothing.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just that when you said that just now, you meant it, and I—”
Marcus raised a palm. “Let’s not talk about our feelings just now, eh? We’ll have to leave after the next song or we’ll miss the tide, and I’d hate to be bawling on each other’s shoulders all the way out to the dock.”
Charlit Soon stood up at the front of the room, her hands clasped before her. Hornet struck an interval on the dulcimer, and a huge roar came from the street. A massive, angry voice screaming the promise of violence even before the first words came. Hornet’s little hammers paused in the air.
“Come out!” the voice shouted. “Come out, you honorless scum!”
“Someone’s having a bad day,” Marcus said.
“In the name of Order Murro, I call out the coward Marcus Wester. Come out, you son of a whore! Come to this street, or we will come in and haul you out by your balls!”
Marcus sighed and put down his cup. “And apparently it’s me. Get the others together. If there’s no one at the back, go out the alley and head to the ship.”
“What about you?”
“If I’m there when the tide turns, we’ll go to Sevenpol. If I’m not, I’ll try to catch up to you farther down the road.”
“And if they kill you?”
“Then I may not try very hard,” Marcus said, rising to his feet.
“For the last time, come out!”
The street was wide and mottled with horse shit and filthy ice. The traffic of carts and shaggy ponies had stopped. Five huge Haaverkin men stood in a rough circle around the door of the bar. They were naked to the waist, the order tattoos on their chest and faces bright in the afternoon light. They had whips with bits of metal woven into the leather in their massive fists. Marcus shrugged, loosening the poisoned sword in its sheath but not yet reaching up to draw it. The biggest of them took a step forward and hammered himself on the breast.
“I am Magra of Order Murro. You took the hospitality of my order and used it to violate our sacred mysteries. We gave you and yours shelter from the storms, and you defiled our secrets!”
Traffic was at a stop now. The eyes of a dozen strangers were on him, and more pausing every moment to see the show. People were coming out the door behind him now too, watching and blocking his retreat. Whipped to death in the street of Rukkyupal wasn’t what he’d had in mind. Marcus smiled.
“Technically, that’s all true,” he said. “And I offer you and your people my profound apologies. It was rude of me, and graceless. And I’ll swear to you before God and everyone that it’s not going to happen again.”
“You are a coward and a false net!” Magra of Order Murro screamed, his breath equal parts fog and spittle.
“Don’t know what a false net is,” Marcus said. “But I understand you’re upset, and you’re right to be. I’m in the wrong on this one. Let’s not compound that by making me kill you too.”
The five men growled and shook their hands. The whips skittered against the stone and ice. Marcus drew the blade. The steel was a nacreous green, and as soon as it cleared the scabbard, the fumes from it stung his eyes. He took a simple guard pose.
“I’d rather not do this,” he said again. Not that he expected the violence to stop, but he was willing to be surprised.
Magra’s whip cut through the air fast as a snake. Marcus thought it had missed, but as the whip pulled back, his right ear began to sting and a trickle of blood cooled his neck. The next man moved slower and Marcus met the whip, slicing it clean. Then two more whips arced through the air. They didn’t have Magra’s wrist, and Marcus avoided the first of them entirely. The second raked his leg, ripping the wool and leather, but not quite biting skin. The crowd was roaring now, great fists raised and voices clamoring for violence. Marcus gritted his teeth, lunged forward, reaching out with the blade. Magra jumped back a fraction too late, and the green tip caressed the swell of the man’s belly. With any other sword, it would have been little more than an insult wound. With this, it was slow death.