“How long would you imagine it’s been,” Marcus said, “since someone stood in this place, looking out?”
Neither of them answered. They didn’t have to.
“Did it go to get food, Marcus?” Cary asked.
“I think so.”
“So it’ll come back, then,” she said.
“Probably.”
“If it doesn’t,” Kit said gently. “Or should our friend become distracted by grief…”
Marcus looked out over the vast, trackless glacier. “Well, that would make for an interesting problem.”
“I suppose we’ll hope it doesn’t come to that,” Kit said.
“That was my plan.”
Cary called Mikel over, and together they started looking for something to gather ice and snow in, melting it for drinking water. Marcus turned back, walking to the statues bent down to make their obeisance to the empty perch. The metal from which they were cast was unlike any he had seen before. The workmanship was beautiful. Had the artists chosen to make their subject lifelike, Marcus would have thought perhaps some dragon’s magic had brought real men and women low, transforming them into art, but these were stylized just slightly. The fur of the Kurtadam made soft spirals. The Jasuru’s bent head snarled at the ground, baring its pointed teeth. The Tralgu, its large ears laid back against its head, held a fist against its chest as if pressing its heart, but when Marcus looked closely, the thumb and fingers were folded together in a gesture that would have gotten Yardem into a brawl in any taproom of the Keshet.
Marcus leaned against the massive statues, imagining some human sculptor more generations ago than he could count shaping the molds from which these were cast and adding in the snarl of the Jasuru. The Tralgu’s rude gesture. From even his brief acquaintance with dragons, Marcus felt sure the punishment for being disrespectful to Inys and his kin would have been death, and likely an unpleasant one. Someone had thought it worth the risk.
Smit and Hornet had made their way through some back chambers to the sixth tier and were waving down to Sandr and Charlit Soon. Their laughter was giddy and bright, fueled as much by the terror of their situation as delight. Marcus shifted the poisoned sword against his back. The shoulder it had rested against ached like he’d wrenched it.
“Kit,” he called, waving the old actor toward him. “Does anything strike you about our friend?”
“It seems to me that he’s in great pain.”
“Other than that.”
“I would say he is likely to be our best ally against my former companions.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of his towering contempt toward us and the way we all seemed inclined to accept it.”
“Well, yes. I suppose there is that.”
“There was a mercenary captain I used to know. Arren Bassilain. Ever heard of him?”
“I can’t say that I have.”
Marcus leaned against the massive Tralgu, hitching himself up to rest on the statue’s broad shoulders. “He had a trick. Before the campaign, he’d stop at every taproom along the way and make a thing of himself. Boast, tell tales. Spill all this hairwash about the glories of battle and how it made boys into men. Talked about how the women in a fallen city would throw themselves at the conquering army. That no man in his force ever slept alone after a battle.”
Kit chuckled ruefully. Above them, Hornet and Smit were waving a brush as long as a man at the end of a long, thin pole. Marcus could imagine Inys at his perch being groomed by his slaves.
“The thing is,” he went on, “Arren was a hell of a talker. By the time he reached wherever we were supposed to be fighting, he’d have taken on a couple dozen boys greener than grass and convinced they were about to have all their dreams delivered to them on a plate. Whenever the first battle came, he’d send them out first to soak up some arrows and get an idea of what the enemy’s position was so that when he sent his real forces, he had that little bit more information.”
“It seems a cynical and cruel thing to do,” Kit said.
“My trade doesn’t attract the best people. The thing is, not all of them died, and the ones that lived, some of them stayed in his troop. More and more over time. He didn’t think anything of it, and I didn’t either. And then one day a group of his men got together and traded stories about how he’d recruited them, got angry over it, and opened his throat for him.”
“I see,” Kit said, his gaze shifting around the hall. “Do you think something similar may have happened to the dragons of old?”
“I think war’s like fire. It goes where it wants more often than where you’d have wanted it to,” Marcus said. “We know for a certainty that the dragons fell and that the spiders fled. If you count the victor as who was standing on the field at the end, that wasn’t either of them.”
“Kit! Cary!” Sandr said, pulling Charlit Soon along behind him by the sleeve. “Charlit’s got the best idea ever. We’ve got to do this!”
Marcus and Kit exchanged a look and stepped forward. At the base of the great perch, Charlit was smiling, her eyes bright and a little glassy. Her cheeks were red with wind burn, the same as all of them. Cary crossed her arms and nodded to her.
“I was just thinking that, with the cart gone, we’d be practicing the things we can play from the ground,” Charlit Soon said. “And it struck me that Inys has never seen any of them. He’s probably never even heard of PennyPenny or Orcus the Demon King or any of them.”
“It would be like performing for the greatest king in the history of the world!” Sandr said. “We could do The Prisoner’s Gate. Or Allaren Mankiller—”
“We can’t do Mankiller without the props,” Cary said. “But maybe PennyPenny and the Three Wives of Stollbourne?”
“Kit could be the third wife!” Charlit Soon said, laughter bubbling out of with the words.
Kit’s smile was warm and gentle. “I suppose I could at that,” he said.
“What’re you talking about down there?” Hornet called from the upper tier. “Are you making jokes about us?”
“No,” Sandr called. “We’re going to put on a performance. Get down here and help, you lazy bastard!”
Marcus stepped away from the gabble and excitement, back to the edge of the hall. The sun had set now, and the mountains seemed crafted from distance and mist and the deepening gray-blue of night. The snowfield glowed. The players’ voices rose and fell behind him, giddy and pleased and happy because they were a people who traded in that. He traded in violence, and had his whole life. He didn’t see that changing now.
Far off and low between two peaks, something glowed for a moment. Smaller than a spark, but red amid the blue-lit world. A brief flame, here, and then gone. Marcus squinted. His eyes hurt from the dryness and his head still ached. In the growing gloom, it was hard to be sure that the little flame had been dragonfire, but before long, there was a little knot of moving darkness in the direction the spark had been. And then, barely visible, the great wings, and then Inys rose up from the night, the corpse of a ram in his hind claw. Marcus stepped back as the dragon landed, dropping its kill onto the floor. The thin grooves that had wicked away the snowmelt were just as effective with blood.
“I can dress that for you if you’d like,” Marcus said, nodding toward the dead animal.
“I have eaten all I care to,” the dragon said, its voice half exhaustion and half disdain. “This is to take care of my tools.”
“Inys! Inys!” Charlit Soon called from the perch. “Come see what we’ve made for you!”
The dragon lumbered away toward the perch, leaving bloody claw marks behind. Marcus drew a work knife from his belt and took the dead ram by its horns while the players arrayed themselves inside and Cary began declaiming. The dragon watched with an amused expression, licking the blood from its talons.
“You know, little sheep,” Marcus said, as he prepared to skin and clean it. “I really don’t see how this ends well.”