Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

They slipped into the outer edge of a bench, Yardem at her side. He handed her back her slippers, and she slid numbed and filthy toes into them, grateful that they could at least begin the journey back toward warmth. His own boots, he laid on the ground. The procession was still making its way in, the murmur of voices still growing within the wide and echoing space. Cithrin put her hand on his.

“Karol Dannien,” she said, not whispering—whispering always sounded like whispering, and so it caught attention—but speaking low. “Did you know him?”

“Did,” Yardem said. “It was years ago, though.”

“Still, he might know. He might have had word of Marcus. Captain Wester, I mean.”

“Might,” Yardem said, but his ears were pressing back against his skull and his forehead was furrowed.

“Will you ask?”

“I could,” Yardem said.

“I’m not angry with him,” she said, maybe too quickly. “He was in his rights to leave. His contract allowed it. It’s just … I wanted to talk with him. Say goodbye.”

Ask him why , she thought, though she would never say it.

Marcus Wester had been the captain of her guard, and before that, the man who’d taken her cause and kept her from being killed. That he’d left while she was gone north to Carse and Camnipol, that he’d stepped away from his work with the bank without so much as letter to explain his choice, shouldn’t have mattered. She didn’t answer to him, and he had kept the word of his agreements. But it irritated. Worse, it hurt.

She had her own work to do, her year’s apprenticeship under Magistra Isadau, and then her return to Porte Oliva and her own branch of the bank and, God help her, Pyk Usterhall. Whatever Marcus was doing, she wouldn’t have been part of it. And still, it would be something to know what had been so much more important than her.

Yardem nodded, and she thought she saw the same distress on his face. He had known Marcus much longer than she had, worked as his second, and even, she thought, taken some responsibility for seeing the captain through his worst times. She felt a passing guilt at reminding him that he had also been left behind. When Yardem spoke, his voice was low and his words as careful as painting eggshells.

“You know that the captain wouldn’t have left without … reason .”

“Probably,” Cithrin said. “And still, I’d like to know what called him away. Wouldn’t you?”

Yardem flicked an ear, his earrings jingling against each other.

“I’ll speak with Dannien,” he said. “See what I can find.”

Cithrin squeezed his fingers and took back her own hand. At the nave, the priest raised his hands, and the crowd went silent. The bells had stopped and a deep, throbbing gong sounded three times. The priest closed his hands, opening them again with a shout. Gouts of flame rose from his fingertips into the wide air, swirling gold and green. Yardem grunted. Returning Cithrin’s glance, he shrugged.

“Cunning men shouldn’t be priests,” he said so softly that only she could hear. “Too much temptation to show off.”

“Gaudy,” Cithrin agreed, as the priest’s reedy voice began to recite from the holy books. She set her expression into an attentive half-smile and let her mind wander.

The arrival of the courier, she forgot about completely until Magistra Isadau called for her that night.

Magistra Isadau sat with her legs crossed and her feet resting atop her desk. The night breeze left the lantern flickering. Her full attention was on a letter in the company cipher that she held in her left hand, so that for a long moment, she didn’t move or acknowledge Cithrin’s presence. When she did, she nodded toward a low upholstered divan. Cithrin sat. Magistra Isadau tapped the papers against her fingertips. In the dim light, the darkness of her scales left her expression unreadable.

“In Carse,” she said, “Paerin argued that Antea would pose little threat for years at the least. You disagreed.”

“I did,” Cithrin said.

Isadau held out the letter. Cithrin hesitated for a moment, then took it from her. The handwriting was unquestionably Paerin Clark’s, the cipher as familiar to her eye as normal script. The words, however, were in a different voice. We have met, but I cannot think you would remember me. For reasons that will become clear, I prefer not to identify myself to you at this time. She turned the page over, glancing at the script.

“It appears that someone else has reached your same conclusions,” Magistra Isadau said. “A faceless voice from the wilds. It happens more often than you’d imagine, and usually it’s someone half mad and in need of coin. But this time … Komme and Paerin addressed this to me, but they meant it for you.”

Cithrin read the full letter from beginning to end, and she felt some part of herself that she hadn’t known was knotted relax. Her mind became stiller than it had been in weeks, clear and cold. For a time, she was in Camnipol, walking the streets that the letter spoke of as best her memory would allow. Detail grew upon detail: prisons, food supplies, the manufacture of weapons, the rising tide of violence against the poor and the powerless, the resentment of the Timzinae conspiracy in which neither she not the letter’s author had the slightest belief. In the end, she folded the letter and looked into the dancing flame of the lantern. She didn’t see it. She was elsewhere. She was in the darkness and the dust, hiding with Aster and Geder, working puzzles about the ancient dragons and the wars long past. If the Geder Palliako she’d known was taking these steps, what would he mean by them? For a moment, she saw him again as he had been the last time they’d been together: in the street smelling of vomit and another man’s blood, trying awkwardly to invite her to stay for tea.

She shuddered.

“Was there a question Komme wanted to ask me about this?”

“Not specifically. Your impression of the author. Whether your experience matched what he says.”

“It does,” Cithrin said. “As to the writer … The details are all as I’d expect, or near enough. The conclusions seem sound. I’ve only been in Camnipol once, and that was under peculiar circumstances, but this description is more plausible for me than the one Paerin gave.”

“So you would trust the source?”

“Not without knowing who it is, no,” Cithrin said. “But I’d read the next letter carefully and treat it with respect. And I’d prepare for another Antean war, though I couldn’t say against whom.”

“Sarakal,” Isadau said, rising from her chair. “The report came in from friends of Komme in Asinport that Lord Skestinin’s fleet had sailed east and south. Komme expects Antea will march early in the spring if they haven’t already.”

Cithrin felt a deep dread welling up in her breast, but she only nodded.

“What is the bank’s position?”

Isadau nodded, her chitinous lips pressing together.

“We’ve taken contracts on supplies. Food, of course. And we bought out any insurance contracts for caravans heading north and invested in three roundships that will be ready to offer an alternate route.”

“And the local coin and spice? Will we be moving it?”

Isadau shook her head.

“Antea can’t win against Sarakal,” she said. “The traditional families pester each other and play out their vicious little intrigues, but nothing unites them like a common enemy. At the height of its power, the Antean Empire found it easier to respect the border than challenge it, and whether the new Lord Regent recognizes it or not, Antea is weakened. There may well be a long and bloody fight. The borders may shift. It’s unlikely that Nus will change hands, though I suppose it’s possible. There will doubtless be starvation and blood on both sides, but Sarakal won’t fall.”