The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin) (36 page)

Her breath was fast, her heart racing. The warmth in her body was strange and wild and familiar as an old coat, long forgotten and rediscovered. When she laughed, it came from low in her throat. It came from the girl she had been at eighteen.

“My lady,” Vincen said unsteadily.

“Clara, Vincen,” she said. “My name is Clara. Now take me home with you.”

Marcus

T
he first days of an occupation said a lot about the war that brought it about. In the best case, the new protector would reach out to the older, established powers in the city and find ways to make the habits and expectations of the citizens work gracefully under the new regime. The worst was slaughtering everyone and burning the place to the foundations. Suddapal fell in between. There were few fires, and what there were got doused quickly. Three ships sank during the sack, and given the number of vessels at the docks, Marcus suspected they’d been scuttled by captains who for whatever reason couldn’t put out to sea. The physical city itself was treated, for the greatest part, with respect. But it was the respect of an owner for their property. It didn’t bode well for the citizens.

And neither did the march of children.

Suddapal had three gaols, a legacy of the different cities it had been before they grew together. One stood safely inland with great stone walls around lines of iron cages. The second was at the top of a cliff near the shore with cells that lay open to the weather, foul or fair. The third was an island with only a single bay and currents cruel enough to defeat even the most experienced swimmers. All three had been emptied of their prisoners and refilled with the young. From his first glance at the children packed twenty in a cage meant for six, Marcus understood what he was seeing. Not a city folded into the empire. Not a people made subjects. Slaves, then, at best. And more likely, the culling that Kit had feared. The man did pick the worst times to be right.

The new protector—an improbably mustached Firstblood named Fallon Broot—had set a curfew for all Timzinae in the city. No one on the streets from dusk to dawn. Marcus had seen a fisherman at the piers shouting that the catch would be gone before he was on the water. The new Antean portmaster had him whipped in the street until there were bright tracks of raw meat along the chitined back. A dozen soldiers watched, laughing.

All of it put Marcus in an odd place. Like the Anteans, he was Firstblood. Like them, he was an unfamiliar face in the city. He could walk the darkened streets that the citizens no longer could. And more than that, he could pass unremarked by the new masters of Suddapal because he looked like them. Even Enen and Yardem, not technically bound by the curfew, would be noticed for their race. Marcus looked like what he was, a Firstblood soldier out of uniform and a little long in the tooth. He looked like nobody. He could ferry messages between the elements of Magistra Isadau’s shadow company with less danger than anyone else in the branch.

Or at least less danger from the invaders.

“Isadau sent me,” Marcus said, his hands at his shoulders, palms out. The blade pressed against his throat.

“The hell she did,” the Timzinae man holding it said.

“My name is Marcus Wester. I’m guard captain for the Porte Oliva branch.” It might not be true, but going into the complexities of his employment seemed like a poor decision. “I came here with Magistra bel Sarcour.”

“Prove it.”

“You have seven children hidden in the attic right now. You sent the message this afternoon as a letter asking about a loan for a new millstone.”

The blade came tighter, drawing a trickle of blood. The compound around him was less than a fifth of the bank’s size. Hardly bigger than a Northcoast farmhouse. They were in the dining room, the remnants of the night’s meal still on wooden plates. In addition to the man presently in position to open his throat, there were four by the benches with knives. This, Marcus thought, would be a profoundly stupid way to die.

“System could have broken,” the man behind him hissed. “Been intercepted. How do I know you’re not one of them?”

“Because I don’t have fifty Antean soldiers outside throwing lit torches through the windows and putting arrows in anyone who runs out,” Marcus said. “Why would they bother trying to trick you?”

There was a long pause. The blade went away, and Marcus put his hand to his neck. The cut wasn’t much worse than he’d do to himself shaving, but it was embarrassing to have been overcome. His reflexes were getting slower. He wondered if it was another effect of the poisoned sword he’d left with Yardem and Kit or just the creeping in of age.

“Sorry,” the man said, wiping his blade clean of Marcus’s blood. “Can’t be too careful.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Marcus said. “I have a message from the magistra. There’s a ship going out to Pût tomorrow just before noon. Captain’s name is Brust. His ship’s got a double hull.”

“A fucking smuggler, then,” one of the men at the table said and spat. “I hate smugglers.”

“What exactly do you think it is we’re
doing
?” Marcus said crossly, and a pounding came at the street door. The Timzinae froze.

“In the name of the Protector, open the door!” a voice called. The accent was Antean. The man who’d been ready to kill Marcus moments before pushed him back into a pantry closet.

“Stay here,” he said. “Don’t make a damned sound or you’ll get us all killed.”

Marcus nodded and pulled the door almost shut. Through the slit he left himself, he could hear the doors open and the Anteans pushing in. The voices were harsh, pressing in over each other. Marcus wondered if the children hiding above him could hear it all too.

“We had a report. Someone came here in violation of the curfew,” a new voice said, and Marcus felt his blood go cold. He peeked out. The man wore no armor, but brown robes. His wiry hair was pulled back and his long face could have been Kit’s twenty years ago. One of the priests. The man with the blade drew in his breath to lie and doom them all and Marcus stepped out of the closet.

“That was likely me,” he said.

“And who are you?” the priest said. There were four more Antean blades behind him, and God knew how many waiting in the street.

“Marcus Wester. I work for the Medean bank.”

The priest’s eyes narrowed as he consulted the spiders in his blood. Marcus’s flesh crawled a little, just thinking about it. Behind him two of the Firstblood men exchanged a glance. Nice to have the name recognized.

“What are you doing?” the blade man said.

“Telling the truth,” Marcus said, and stopped himself before he went on with,
We have nothing to hide
. Because of course they did.

“Why are you here?” the priest asked.

“Business. The magistra had a note this afternoon about a loan for a new millstone. She wanted me to follow up on it since she can’t. Curfew and all.”

“A millstone? Was there nothing else?”

No
would be a lie. Marcus smiled and shrugged, his brain casting about wildly.

“I can get you the note, if you’d like,” he said. And then, “You won’t find anything else in it.”

“And yet when you heard us, you hid in a closet? Why was that?”

“I’ve been in occupied cities before, and they can be intimidating. I got scared, and I didn’t think it through.”

The priest cocked his head, nodded. “Thank you. It seems there’s no violation here.”

“You shouldn’t be doing business with bugs,” one of the swordsmen said. “What kind of merchant works with these?”

“Bankers can be surprisingly flexible where there’s money involved,” Marcus said. “But I’ll tell them what you said.”

It was over, but there was still a chance it could go the other way. If the Anteans still thought of themselves as coming to enforce the curfew, they’d go now. If not, there was still plenty of chance for a bloodbath. But with him and the five Timzinae, the odds were good that at least one of the Anteans wouldn’t walk out. Apparently the swordsmen came to the same conclusion.

“Next time, you open the door faster,” he said, pointing his blade at one of the Timzinae who hadn’t actually opened the door at all, “or there’ll be trouble. You understand me?”

“I do,” the Timzinae man said, and the Anteans withdrew, scowling as they went.

When the door was shut, Marcus sagged down onto a bench. The sense of narrowly avoiding death left him slightly nauseated. There was a time when things like that had felt exciting, but he’d been a younger man.

“You all right?” the blademan said.

“I am,” Marcus said. “Or anyway I will be. Listen, those priests? You can’t ever lie to them. Or listen to them if you can help it. They’ve got spiders in their blood that give them power over truth and lies.”

The blade man’s nictitating membranes closed, and he nodded slowly.

“All right,” he said. “You say so.”

Marcus chuckled mirthlessly. “Well, I have a friend. If
he
told you, you’d think it was true.”

This
, Marcus thought,
isn’t going to work
.

T
hey’re good people,” Magistra Isadau said. “Reliable. They won’t say what they know.”

“And in another situation, that would matter,” Marcus said. “But you built all this thinking you’d have to deal with swords and magistrates. Cunning men, maybe. Torturers. But this? These things change everything. The network you built didn’t take the spiders into account.”

The Timzinae woman gazed out the window, her face hard as stone. The meeting room looked out over the street, the city. The wind was coming in from the north, pulling low clouds with it. It wouldn’t rain, or not much; the mountains north of Kiaria would have wrung the clouds dry. All of Suddapal’s rain came from the south. What these brought was the first bite of the coming winter. Marcus looked at Cithrin. She had the distant, calm look that came when she was thinking. That was good. One of the magistras of the Medean bank needed to be able to look at things coldly, and Isadau’s grief was going to make that hard.

“What would you recommend?” Cithrin asked.

“First off, tell everyone what we’re working against. The biggest advantage they have is that people don’t know what they are. But be quiet about it. It’s a hard thing to believe unless you’ve seen it, and if they start marching the priests through the streets with speaking trumpets talking about how they can’t tell when you’re lying, people will believe them and we’ll be right back where we are now.”

Cithrin nodded. “And we can’t work together. Not safely. It has to be individual, uncoordinated efforts. We’ll need a way to support them without anybody knowing who’s giving the support or who’s receiving it.”

“Don’t see how that’s practical,” Marcus said.

“Really?” Cithrin said. She seemed genuinely surprised. “It isn’t difficult. We put a bounty on safe children. Anyone who brings a child from Elassae to Carse or Porte Oliva is paid out of a fund that’s administered by … oh, I don’t know. A mysterious figure in black, only of course it’s really the bank. Anyone who cares to add to the fund can send gold to some particular address and we won’t know who they are. Anyone who arrives with a child gets the payment without questions being asked. How they get there is their own problem. They solve it however they solve it, and they can’t be betrayed, because we won’t know.”

“They’ll send assassins,” Isadau said. “The Anteans will send men to kill whoever does it. They’ll send their filthy priests.”

“So we have guards and make them cut thumbs, just like on any contract,” Cithrin said. Then, to Marcus, “I can draw up a full plan in a day or so. If Komme approves it, we can have it in place before the first frost.”

“And how would we tell people?” Isadau snapped.

“Piece of chalk, and a dark night, and as many walls as you can reach,” Marcus said. “Best not to get caught, but that’s going to be true of any of this.”

“And it doesn’t have to be only the children,” Cithrin said, her voice a mix of contemplation and pleasure. “We can put bounties on anything we want done. Bring proof that you’ve killed an Antean soldier or stolen their food or interfered with the flow of orders. The same coins can pay for any number of things. That’s what makes them dangerous. Of course, it’ll be messy. We’ll have to expect a certain amount of fraud. Unless … If we had Master Kit—”

“It’s a good thought,” Marcus said, “but we’ve only got one of him, and I’ll need him worse.”

Cithrin’s expression fell. He’d guessed it might. He tried to ignore the knot of guilt under his ribs. He ran his fingertips against the grain of the tabletop and waited for her to speak.

“Need him,” Cithrin said, trying to keep her tone light. Merely curious. “What for?”

“Job hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “We have to kill the goddess. I’m taking Kit to Camnipol. We’ll see if we can’t find that mysterious source of yours and learn what we can about the expeditions they sent out. What they’re looking for. Whether they’ve found anything.”

Isadau’s voice was harsh. “You’d take the one man we have who can match their power and run after shadows?”

“I’d take the sword too.”

“Why?” Cithrin asked.

“May want to kill some priests.”

“No, I mean why would you go to Camnipol? Why that?”

Marcus took a deep breath. In the street, a mule brayed.

“Did Yardem ever tell you about Gradis?”

“No,” Cithrin said. “I’ve only heard the name when they called you the hero of Wodford and Gradis.”

“All right, so this was the second year of the war between Lady Tracian and Lord Springmere. I was still dancing Springmere’s tune, idiot that I was. Gradis is a keep in the middle of a mountain pass. Dragon’s road runs right through it. Lady Tracian had it, and if she’d kept it, her supply lines would have been solid as stone. The thing was, she had about as many men as I did, and she had position. So I sent out a force just outside arrow’s range. Not a big one, but with all the banners. Springmere rode with it. I was there. Our three greatest allies, and not just their men, but them in person. Well, Lady Tracian saw us all out there like something out of a poem, and she knew she could take us. Sent her men out after us. So we fought for bit, and I sounded the retreat. We pulled back about half a league and reformed. Her men reformed, and we did it again. Better part of a day, she beat us back and back and back. And when she was pulled far enough back, all the sword-and-bows we’d left behind poured in and took the keep. No banners. No great men. Hardly any cavalry. Just the right force in the right place at the right time to win the fight that mattered.”