“Basrahip! Good to see you.”
“My thanks, Prince Geder,” the massive priest said, bowing his head.
“Things went very well at Lord Skestinin’s. With Sabiha, I mean. It was all a bit dour once the news came about his lordship’s being captured. But I think he’s likely going to be kept safe, don’t you?”
Basrahip pulled a chair out from the table and sat in it, his fingers laced together on the table. Geder was so used to seeing calm, amusement, and certainty. Now the man’s wide face could have been an allegorical painting of sorrow. “I cannot say, Prince Geder. I have heard no voices. Though if you bring them here, I shall—”
“No, no, no. It’s all right. Jorey’s on his way to Porte Oliva. He’ll find a way. What’s… Is there something the matter?”
“I fear, my prince, that I must leave you for a time.”
Geder’s chest ached suddenly, and the coppery taste of fear flooded his mouth. “You’re going? You’re leaving me here, but I need you. Without you—”
Basrahip raised his hand in gesture equal parts reassurance and a command of silence. “You will not be abandoned. Neither by the goddess nor me. I will have another take my place at your side. You will be well. Listen to my voice, and know this to be true. You will be well. She will not abandon you.”
Geder felt his fear grow a degree lower. It did not vanish. “What’s happened? Is there something I can do to help?”
“A darkness has risen in the temple at Kaltfel. We will bring the light to it. The goddess is perfect, as you know. Most of those who fight against us do so because they are creatures of lies, and they flee from her truth because they fear what they will become within her. Once they know her, those battles can be seen as the birth pangs of her coming world. Nothing more.”
“I don’t know,” Geder said. “I’ve just had my first real experience with birth pangs, and they’re more violent than I’d thought.” He was babbling. He made himself be quiet. If Basrahip noticed his discomfort, the priest didn’t mention it.
“We who feel her within our blood are made pure. But sometimes—once, perhaps, in a generation—a man who has seen her light chooses darkness. Knowing what she is, and feeling her power within him, he turns away of his own will. There is no evil more dangerous than this. There can be no mercy for him. One such has arisen in the temple at Kaltfel.”
“What? You mean someone with the gift of the goddess, but—”
“But is spreading lies like poison in a well. A man I have known since I was a boy, who lived with me in the first temples, has become one such. He has fled into the swamps, and I, as Basrahip, must take the sacred blades with which we will hunt this new apostate.”
“Do you need soldiers? Should I be worried about this?”
“It has happened before, Prince Geder, and the goddess has survived. This has all happened before.”
Cithrin
Inys perched on the body of a felled tree that had been lifted between two great stone blocks. Claw marks left bright, pale lines where the bark had been stripped away, and a wide smear of blood on the pavement marked where a young bull had died that morning to satisfy the dragon’s hunger. Flies hovered and buzzed, drinking from the stain. Cithrin sat at a small writing desk, her pen in her hand, a length of parchment spread out before her already half covered with notes and comments. The clouds above them were white and rounded as cotton from the boll, and the heat of early summer thickened the air.
“When the enemy was killed,” Inys said, his voice low and somber, “the soldier fell, but the instruments of its blood would carry on the attack. A single tainted soldier would die, and its death could drive half a dozen others mad. My brother’s spiders could gain entry through the eyes, the mouth. Other ways. Any entry where the skin was thin enough to burrow down to blood. Even the scales of the Jasuru were no protection. They would climb under the scales themselves and dig down at their roots. The soldiers were then transformed, but their brothers and sisters who still loved them could often not bring themselves to kill the newly tainted. They seemed, after all, the men and women they had been before. They loved the same, spoke the same, thought the same. Were the same, truly, except they had been poisoned, and spread whatever false certainties they carried to all those around them. I recall one battle where Erex’s slaves utterly destroyed my brother’s little force, only to fall on each other in rage a month later.”
“And the Timzinae?”
“I fastened the scales into their skins. I built closures within them so finely wrought that their enemy’s blood could not touch theirs. I armed them with swords made to shrivel the spiders and poison the blood. Even above the Yemmu or Haunadam, they were the greatest warriors of the age. Not because they were stronger or better able to withstand violence, but because all other races were vulnerable, and they were not.”
Cithrin wrote it all down like a child before her tutor, her mind folding in every detail. She paused, tapping the butt of her pen against her teeth.
“But the way they can demoralize an army,” she said, “with speaking trumpets, for instance. The Timzinae are just as vulnerable to being convinced by their voices, aren’t they?”
“Yes, yes,” the dragon said, reaching out its foreclaw and pinching at the air as if demonstrating something. “You deafen them first. A little poke in each ear, and pack them with ashes. They heal enough to fight within a month, and the scars keep the spiders clear.”
“Couldn’t you just pour wax in there?” Cithrin asked.
The dragon shook its head. It was a weirdly familiar gesture seen on something so large. “Such plugs can fall out in the middle of a battle. Digging out the ears means there are no errors. It is a much better strategy.”
“But after the war, they’re still deafened for life.”
“After the war, they have served their purpose,” Inys said, unfolding his wings casually.
Cithrin wrote it down, but made a note of her own to look into reliable ways to stop up people’s ears. “Once they were deafened, how could someone command them in battle? A system of banners?”
“Ah, that was the genius of the Stormcrow. Commands were given by launching flames of differing color into the enemy lines. The generals remained at the rear of the force, loading their catapults with balls of resin with impurities that let them burn green or yellow or blue. When the sky above the battle changed color, the soldiers had their orders.”
“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” she said, “but I’ll see what I can find.”
For the better part of the morning, Cithrin listened and recorded. Some days, Inys barely responded to her questions. Others, the dragon would go on for hours about some small point in the battle against his long-dead brother that Cithrin could see no applications for. And other times, times like today, he would outline some history that left her believing the war might be ended by winter.
She had known in general terms that she’d been ridden by anxiety and fear, but she hadn’t let herself actually feel it. She saw it in how poorly she slept, how angry she became with Pyk, how deeply she wept at the puppet shows she watched in the evenings. She felt she was still coming to know herself, the way she might learn about a new friend. But the coming of Marcus Wester and Inys with Master Kit and Cary and the players coupled with the unexpected lifting of the blockade left her drunk with relief. That more than anything else told her how frightened she had been before.
Near midday, Inys sighed once, spread his wings, and leaped into the sky without so much as a polite farewell. Cithrin watched until she was sure the dragon wasn’t coming back right away, then stood. The bowl of fish and rice she’d eaten at dawn had long since left her belly, and she was pleased that the dragon had taken flight. She made it a point not to be the one who ended their interviews. Too much depended on Inys remaining her ally to risk offending him.