“Magistra,” he said, matching his tone to hers. “It’s a good building. I was never inside it before this. Didn’t really think they’d built it quite so much to withstand a siege. A couple dozen men, and you could hold this place for quite a while.”
“The holding company has always been aware that people might grow to dislike it.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Marcus said dryly. “Anyway, I was down at the docks, and the harbormaster’s thinking the ships may come tomorrow. Depending on how much our great scaly friend is slowing things down, of course.”
“Did he say what the chances were that the pirates have killed everyone and vanished to Lyoneia with the gold?”
“Wasn’t something he ventured a guess on,” Marcus said. “If they did, though, it’s because Inys let them. I don’t doubt he’d have been comfortable burning all the ships to the waterline and having the Drowned carry the gold across the ocean floor in carts.”
“Might take longer to get here that way,” she said.
“Might. Saw your Master Komme coming up here. He still looks like he’s swallowed a squirrel.”
“He would.”
“Really? I thought you and he spoke the same language. Understood each other.”
“We do,” she said, and nodded at the edge of the wall and the long drop beyond it. “You know how it feels looking down from too great a height? Like the precipice is calling for you? He feels that way all the time right now.”
“Does he, now?”
“I assume so. God knows I do.”
Marcus leaned his shoulders against the bricks, turning his back to the sun. Cithrin stared out past him to where the great red disk was sinking lower behind the buildings of Carse.
“Kit keeps trying to explain the trick to me,” Marcus said. “Part of it, I follow. The other part of it just seems… well, I get lost. I see where getting people to take these bits of scribble instead of actual money lets you afford things you couldn’t otherwise. I’m not clear on how that makes the world a place full of justice and equality and all.”
Cithrin looked at him. The light of the setting sun had burned into her eyes, and its afterimage obscured him. “Justice and equality?”
“Stopping war’s the point, isn’t it? Not just this one, but all of them?”
“I don’t know about all of them, but this one. And making fewer others. But you’ve worked for me. Did you think we were making Porte Oliva just and equal?”
“No offense, but that really wasn’t the impression I took, no,” Marcus said. “That’s where the confusion comes in.”
“Do you recall Annis Louten?”
Marcus scratched his chin, the stubble making a sandpaper noise against his nails. “He was the spice man, wasn’t he? Came to you for a loan.”
“He was. And he repaid late, with penalties. The ship he invested in didn’t come through, and he hadn’t put insurance against it. He had to scrape and save and go without in order to keep us from taking his rooms and his stock. That’s trade. Going to his rooms with the full guard and taking the same money from him at knifepoint? That’s war. Both leave him just as low, just as poor. He did little to deserve either besides be unlucky. But in one, we take what we want under threat of death. In the other, he gives it because he agreed to.
“If I manage what I hope, people will still starve. Families will still be broken. People who have done nothing wrong will still lose their livelihoods, their health, their homes. You’ve seen my trade. You don’t have any illusions about what I do when a contract is broken.”
“Yes, but if someone’s given their word, that justifies what comes after.”
“How?”
“Justice,” Marcus said.
“There are as many definitions of justice as there are people making them. Justice is doing what you said you would do, or being forced to. Or justice is getting back what was taken from your family. Or justice is hurting the man who hurt you. Anyone who wants to make the world just has only to say what justice is first, and then impose it on everyone with a different thought. I don’t care about that. I just want to keep people from burning each other’s cities quite so often.”
From the street, far below them, a man cried out, and a woman shrieked. Cithrin and Marcus looked over the edge together to see the two tiny figures in each other’s arms smiling and greeting each other like old friends. The sun slipped behind the buildings and turned the world to rose and grey.
Marcus let a long breath out from between his teeth.
“The way you say it, money does the same thing a blade would,” he said.
“It’s a tool, the way a blade is,” Cithrin said. “But blades aren’t my tools, and this is. The violence we do with a contract is the sort I understand.”
Marcus
For years, Northcoast had been in the back of Marcus’s mind. It had taken on a depth and significance that had nothing to do with the actual stones and skies. Northcoast was the place where the past had happened. Where he had been loved and powerful and betrayed. When he’d left Carse the last time, it had been in a fast boat going south with a king dead behind him and an old enemy on the throne by his hand. It was the kind of romantic gesture young men made because they didn’t have any better way to purge their grief. And now he was back, and walking through the city was like the blankness in the eyes of an old lover who didn’t recognize him. The taproom across from the great launderer’s yard where he and Alys had eaten their meals was still there, but the old man who’d served them sausages and apples and beer wasn’t. The empty house where he’d met with his men that last, fatal night before King Springmere earned his place in history as the Mayfly King had been taken over and cleaned. Half a dozen children were playing pebble-tossing games on the same stones where he’d cut Butun Skinkiller’s throat. There was a memory. He hadn’t thought of old Skinkiller in years.
After Springmere’s death, Marcus had run from this city and from everything he’d been when he was here. He’d been a legend. The great general who’d pulled victory from a lost war and then cast it all away in the name of vengeance. Or justice. Or whatever name people wanted to put to it. He’d become a minor mercenary captain and head of a merchant bank’s guard. Northcoast hadn’t forgotten him, but the Marcus Wester it remembered had been younger, more certain of himself, and hadn’t had the rash across his back where the damned sword made his skin itch and peel.
He passed through the city like a ghost. The holding company made room for him and Yardem and Kit, putting them all in a brick-walled storeroom that smelled of wheat flour and old oil. The three men spent their days in the taprooms and at the docks, finding what word they could. They spent their nights at the holding company, sharing information and telling tales and jokes. Cithrin’s great scheme still seemed like something a street-corner swindler would do to rook the unwary out of a few bits of silver, but for the moment she was safe from Palliako and his armies. Yardem and Kit made good company when they didn’t wander off on religious debates about the nature of truth and doubt and the spiritual roots of wealth. And even when they were talking hairwash like that, having familiar voices while he sharpened his knife or ate rice and meat from the holding company’s kitchen or started building plans for what to do when Carse fell under Antea’s hammer made the evening pass faster. In the nights, he would lie on his cot, looking out the narrow window at the stars, and try to put off sleep for a few minutes more.
Because the nightmares, of course, were back, fresh and raw and more terrible than they had ever been before.
Kit snored, but not enough to make an annoyance of himself. His blanket was a series of dark brown lumps where he tangled himself. The top of his head poked out at one end, and a single bare foot at the other. Yardem, by contrast, slept on top of his blanket, his eyes slitted but not quite closed, and his sword on the stones beneath him where his hand could find the hilt without requiring him to stand or even roll to reach it. Only his ears drooping to the sides showed the Tralgu was actually asleep.