Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

By the time they found a chamber that met Marcus’s approval, the sapphire sky had darkened to indigo, the parrots had all vanished, and the evening’s swarm of midges filled the air. An early bat, its wings fluttering wildly, spun through the air above the ruins, eating its fill of the insects. The smells of decay and still water filled the air. Marcus sat with his back against a cool stone wall while Kit measured out the evening meal of nuts and the last strips of dried meat from a foxlike animal Marcus had trapped three days before. His clothes were little more than rags, and he’d had to put another hole in his belt to keep it from slipping off his hips.

The journey had thinned Kit as well. The actor’s handsome face was craggy now, and his beard looked brittle and dull. Marcus took the food with a nod of thanks and Kit lowered himself to sit across the narrow chamber. Likely it had been storage, back when it had been anything. The door had stood a bit ajar for centuries before Marcus was born, its hinges rusted away to black streaks. The ceiling was low enough that any attackers would have to come in hunched and vulnerable, and whatever animal had left its spoor in the corners hadn’t been back recently. It was as good as home.

“Start searching at first light?” Kit asked.

“That suits. And we’ll need to find something to eat. Freshwater. Ancient hoard of the dragons won’t do us much good if we starve to death.”

“I suppose not,” Kit said.

“I’ll take first watch.”

Kit nodded in the growing gloom. Even if they’d found something dry enough to burn, they couldn’t afford the luxury of a fire. Any Southling patrol would see the light of it from seven miles off, jungle or no. Kit yawned and settled down against the far wall. Marcus took his sword in its rotting sheath and laid it across his knees, preparing for the long hours of darkness. Outside their little shelter, something ticked, ticked again, and began a whirring insectile song. Another joined in, and soon the ruins were alive with the sound of inhuman life. The walls and terraces that the dragons had designed were a vast city for beetles and midges, frogs and snakes. And two men whose minds and comprehension of the world was likely nearer to the midges than the dragons. Marcus let himself wonder what the builders of his little shelter would have thought if they’d known, however many centuries ago, that in the vast span of time their work would fall this far. Despair, maybe, that all their efforts were doomed. Or pride that what they did would leave a mark on the world that, though it might change its shape and meaning, would not be erased.

And nothing could ever really boast permanence. Every castle fell in time. Every empire. Every man. Even these walls would eventually be buried by the jungle, though the slow accretion of fallen leaves and grit might take ten times longer than had already passed. There was a kind of consolation in the thought that nothing lasts forever.

“Do you think they’re all right?” Kit asked. His voice was gentle, already half asleep. “Cary and Sandr and the rest?”

“Probably,” he said, and Kit chuckled.

“I keep thinking of things I want to say to them. Two days ago, I thought of a simple, clear explanation for Charlit Soon about why the king’s role in The Song of Love and Salt has to be played as a Haaverkin or Jasuru. When I realized I couldn’t tell her, it was disappointing.”

Marcus grunted.

“And Cithrin. I assume your own thoughts are with her.”

“And Yardem,” Marcus said.

“What are you going to do, when it’s over? Will you go back to them?”

The last time he’d seen Cithrin bel Sarcour, she’d been leaving for Carse with two of his guardsmen and not him. The last word he’d had of her, she’d been lost in the chaos of a political coup in Camnipol. He knew all too well what happened to rich, unarmed women during political uprisings. He tapped a thumb on the body of his blade.

“Once we’re done, I’ll find them,” Marcus said, “and if Cithrin’s hurt or dead and I could have stopped it, I’ll kill Yardem.”

Kit shifted in the gloom.

“You would do that?” he asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Well, I might. Yardem’s good, though, and he’s got reach on me, but one of us will be leaving on a plank.”

“And if Cithrin’s well?”

“Likely the same.”

The chirring song of insect wings was the only sound for a moment. When Kit spoke again, he sounded more awake.

“You’re not having the nightmares any longer, are you? About your wife and daughter. What happened before doesn’t seem to be troubling you.”

“They’ll come back,” he said, meaning the dreams of burning. “They always do. Right now, I’ve got more than enough nightmare just getting up in the morning.”

“I think Yardem was right about you and the shape of your soul.”

“Then he knew the consequences of locking me in that dovecote,” Marcus said. “You should sleep, Kit. We have a lot of ground to cover and no particular idea what we’re looking for. Tomorrow is going to be long.”

For five days, they searched the ruins, waking with the first light and stopping when the darkness forced them to. Even in the torrential rains that came with midday, Marcus pressed on, pulling back growth of vines and scraping through layers of moss and lichen that had grown hard and thick as armor. Twice they found nests of broad gold-and-red beetles that defended against his intrustion by rising in the air, thick as smoke, forcing their bodies into their noses and mouths as if to choke them. Once, something paced them for a long hour, though Marcus never saw more of it than a massive shadow, low against the ground.

The ruins were vast and complex, not a palace buried in green. Halls led into the body of the earth. Doorways lurked, hidden by the grown of the jungle. Towers stood, their windows empty and open as the eye sockets of sun-bleached skulls.

They knew they were coming close when they found the bodies.

The first bones had been a massive beast once, its jaw as long as Marcus’s arm. Three rows of teeth, serrated edges still as sharp as knives, littered the paving stones, a scattering of pale bone on lichen black. Marcus knelt. Thin bits of gristle still clung in the depths of the joints, but the time that had cleaned away the flesh had replaced it with moss. He brushed it off with his fingers.

“What was it, do you think?” Kit asked.

“Big. You see the notches in the bone here and right there? That’s where spears took it.”

“A guardian, perhaps,” Kit said. “A sentry set to watch over the reliquary for the ages.”

Marcus rubbed the back of his hand against his chin.

“Would have been on the old side,” he said.

“Assian Bey was said to be an engineer for the dragon Asteril,” Kit said. “There are tales of the dragons setting guards who could sleep away years until they were disturbed.”

“A trap with teeth, then,” Marcus said. “Well, the good news is that someone’s killed it for us.”

“And the bad?”

Marcus didn’t answer.

The chambers beneath the ruins were dim as night, and the improvised torches of tree branch and moss smoked badly. They walked carefully through a hall larger than the grandest ballroom in Northcoast. The walls were complex with carved designs, and high above them, almost obscured by the shadows, the ceiling seemed to have claws and teeth. It might have been carved stone or stalactites built from the soft fungus of the invading jungle, but it gave Marcus the sense of stepping into the maw of a vast animal. He walked slowly, watching for traps and dangers, and so it was almost an hour before they found the next bones.