The sky above the harbor was hazy white, the bodies of hundreds of seagulls dark against it. The tall-rigged ships that had been the heart of the blockade stood out in the deep water off the harbor, transformed from enemy to protector, and the sea shone bright and rich as mother-of-pearl. Marcus and Yardem stood on the seawall looking down into the waves.
“Do you think Inys made the Drowned too?” Marcus asked. “He said he had them undermine that island. He made the Timzinae. Maybe he made the Drowned too.”
“Might have,” Yardem said. “Might only have found a use for them.”
“I still don’t like thinking of a whole race of people as tools made for a purpose. Use them and clean them and put them in the box when you’re done.”
“Would they be better meaningless?”
“They should be able to make their own meaning.”
Yardem grunted, his ears turning back they way they did when he was being polite.
“What?” Marcus said.
“Don’t see what stops them from doing that, sir. Can stab a man to death with a cobbler’s awl. Can dig up weeds with a dagger. Seems to me what something’s made for matters less than what’s done with it.”
“But they made us what we are. Even the Firstbloods, to judge by the way we dance to whatever tune he calls. We’re all formed by a dragon’s will for a dragon’s plan. All of history is a gap in a war they fought using us for weapons.”
“Something had to make the dragons,” Yardem said. “I believe there’s a larger order, and Inys is part of it just as we are.”
“Any evidence for that?”
“None, sir.”
“So why think it?”
“Just seems plausible.”
A new voice called out from the walkway behind them. Marcus turned back. Porte Oliva stretched out. Tile roofs and white walls and narrow, cobbled streets. Kit, Cary, and Barriath Kalliam walked toward them. The two players wore new clothes of a carefully nondescript grey. Until they could amass a new supply of costumes and props, they’d fallen back on the style of Princip C’Annaldé where the performers created the illusions of their stories through only the use of their voices and bodies. Beside them, the pirate captain looked almost gaudy, though in truth his cloak and breeches were no more than anyone might wear. Barriath nodded to Marcus and then Yardem.
“Your friends here said you wanted to speak with me?”
“Do,” Marcus said. “No offense to the governor and the queensmen—or the dragon, for that matter—but I’m the sort of man who likes having five or six plans deep, and you’re the man at the city’s back door.”
“You think the fleet’s likely to attack when the army comes.”
“It’s what I’d do,” Marcus said.
“It could happen,” Barriath said. “There are a few ships in the Inner Sea, mostly at Suddapal, but they’re spoils of war, and the sailors for them were up in Nus until they started sailing for here. I don’t see how they get those ships crewed unless they hire on mercenaries, and frankly, I’ve already bought the best of those.”
“You’ll have to tell me more about how you managed that at some point,” Marcus said. “What about the blockades on Porte Silena and Sara-sur-Mar?”
“They will come south, block any supplies coming in or escape going out. But the water’s where we’re strongest now. We might not be able to stop them getting here, but I’m fairly sure we’ll see them coming, and the dragon wouldn’t have trouble burning them all to the waterline.”
If we can talk him into caring at all, Marcus thought but didn’t say.
“It seems to me,” Kit said, “that you are also in a rare position to advise the city defenders on the drier end. I understand that the army is commanded by your brothers. Is there any insight you can give into how you expect that conflict to play out?”
Barriath crossed his arms. His expression was equal parts pain, anger, and the cold consideration of a man accustomed to war. Marcus waited. However carefully it was put, the question was still how best go about killing Barriath’s brothers. The sailor’s eyes turned toward the sea, but what he was seeing, Marcus couldn’t guess. Cary put a hand on his arm, and Barriath started. Her smile was encouraging, and he nodded.
“Jorey. My youngest brother. He’s smart, but not experienced. I don’t know how he’ll do as a commander, but Father told us stories of great battles and strategies of the hunt. And this isn’t his first time in the field.”
Brothers and wars. If Barriath and Jorey and this third one whose name Marcus kept forgetting had all been dragons, they’d be at the mouth of the war instead of the ass end of it. “All right. With any luck it won’t come to this, but I think we need to discuss what happens if—”
“Breaking the siege isn’t the problem. Or it’s not the one I see,” Barriath went on, ignoring him. “Maybe I’m being dim, but this isn’t a normal war. If the army comes and shatters itself against the walls, then what happens? Does Palliako sue for peace? If he does, and the queen accepts it, then what? Send the army and the priests back to Antea and call it victory? Or do you few march on Camnipol with as many queensmen as Birancour’s willing to grudge you?”
“That’s a little farther on than I’m worried about just yet,” Marcus said.
“It shouldn’t be. This is precisely what you should be worrying about right now. Because everything I’ve heard so far are ways not to lose the war. I don’t see anyone thinking about what it would take to win it.”
Geder
Basrahip left Camnipol with a group of eight priests behind him. They rode the finest, fastest horses Geder could get them, and they carried strange green-black scabbards strung across their backs. Geder went with them as far as the city gate, and the black-cobbled streets emptied before them, the citizens of the empire scattering like mice before a fire. Geder felt a bright dread growing in his belly with every street they passed. In some corner of his heart, he’d hoped that something would keep this from happening. The apostate in Kaltfel might be found and killed without the need of Basrahip to oversee the hunt, and so the massive priest could stay. The danger would pass like a child’s dream at sunrise, and everything would be back to the way it should be. The city wall loomed high above them, and that little wisp of hope shriveled and died.
Basrahip was leaving. He was really leaving, and Geder was staying behind. There were other priests, of course. Basrahip’s duties would still be done, but by someone unfamiliar. New faces and voices would take his place, and it was that prospect that shifted in Geder’s belly, the fear growing. What if the new priests didn’t like him? What if they thought he was an impostor, a fake? That he didn’t deserve the regency? Basrahip had known him since the beginning, it seemed. They understood each other, trusted each other. Geder didn’t have many friends.
The gate rose up higher than three men. Geder pulled his own horse to a halt. He’d held this gate once, after his return from Vanai. Kept it open long enough to let his army get in and push back the showfighters and mercenaries that Asterilhold had snuck inside the city. It had been a warmer day than this, and the fighting, though fierce, had been joyous. He’d saved Jorey’s life that day when a thick-tusked Yemmu had been about to drive a spear through Jorey’s side. Or maybe it had been a sword. Those had been better days, Geder thought. Or if they weren’t, at least he remembered them that way.
“All will be well, Prince Geder,” Basrahip said.
“I want to come with you,” Geder said. “This apostate? I want him caught and burned and his ashes poured into the bottoms of the pisspots of every taproom in Kaltfel.”
“We will never stop hunting him,” Basrahip said. “His abomination will not spread.”
More reports had come from Kaltfel in the days of Basrahip’s preparation. The apostate priest was a man named Ovur, one of the first priests to arrive from the temple in the mountains beyond the Keshet. Geder remembered him as an older man with white threads in his hair and beard. When they had dedicated the temple in Asterilhold—the first of the new temples Geder had sworn to raise in every city he conquered—Ovur had gone to it. With the expansion of the empire to the east, no other priests had gone to his temple for the long winter previous, and when they had, the changes they’d found were dire. Ovur had been preaching that the spider goddess was centered not just in Camnipol, but was present equally in every temple dedicated in her name. Basrahip was no more or less her voice than any of the other priests, himself included. The phrase Though there are a thousand mouths, there is only one truth figured into his teachings. A group of the newly initiated priests arrived to aid him in keeping the temple, and one tried to correct him. Ovur had flown into a rage and beaten the man. Since then, Kaltfel had been in an uproar. And so the nine priests and their blades set out to restore the peace and keep his lies from infecting any of the other cities and temples.