Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

The ten men had died quickly and lay where they had fallen. If there had been survivors, they hadn’t buried their dead or raised cairns. A vast bronze door stood before them, its seals broken. Marcus and Kit stepped carefully among the dead.

“Dartinae,” Marcus said. “One over here that might have been a Cinnae or a very young Firstblood, but most of these were Dartinae.”

“I suspect we’ve found where Akad Silas died. I think I would feel better if I knew what had killed him.”

“Poison’s my bet,” Marcus said, poking his head through the opening of the great bronze door and peering into the inky darkness beyond. “Fill the chamber here with bad air, and when someone opens it, all the swordsmanship in the world won’t help you.”

“I am beginning to think Assian Bey might perhaps have been a bit overfond of his own cleverness,” Kit said sourly.

“It is a vice. Come on. This is as far as they got. Whatever comes next is our problem.”

Despite everything they had seen, despite the warnings of bone and flesh, Marcus very nearly didn’t see the third guardian of the reliquary before it was too late.

The corridor had narrowed, the ceiling dropping down so low that Marcus could touch it with his fingertips. The statues of dragons clung to the walls, shifting evilly in the dim torchlight. Kit walked beside him, humming tunelessly under his breath. Ahead of them, something glittered in the darkness. And then it moved. Marcus froze, and half a heartbeat later, Kit did as well. Something like massive eyes blinked in the gloom ahead and a low, reedy sound like the breath of a vast animal filled the narrow space. Another beast, Marcus thought, only that seemed wrong. Repeating the same sort of trap didn’t seem the thing an overly clever engineer in the last days of the Dragon Empire would do. And anyone who’d come this far would be expecting another trap, would be watching for it. Marcus’s blood went cold.

It was a distraction.

He whirled, drawing his sword by instinct, as the massive toothed blade descended from above. He pushed Kit forward and down with the back of his arm, and swung in a desperate parry. The ancient steel met the new and snapped. The evil blades drove in toward Marcus’s belly, rusted spikes scraping his sides. The impact knocked the breath out of him but the mechanism would not let him fall. For a moment, Marcus stood in the darkness, uncertain whether he’d just been impaled, waiting for the shock to fade and the pain to come in. He looked down at his belly.

The spike that would have ended him, weakened by centuries of rust, had been broken by his parry. The stump had cut into his skin, but not badly. If he hadn’t seen it, if he hadn’t turned in the breath that he had, the rusted teeth would have punched into the small of his back deep enough to kill.

“Are you all right?” Kit asked. He sounded awed.

Marcus considered his answers, and settled on, “Yeah.” He pulled himself out from between the spikes and walked toward the false beast with a confidence born of relief and fear. The eyes were half spheres of gold, the reedy breath a vast bellows.

Beyond it, a long hallway stretched, thick with webs and the scent of rot. They moved through it slowly, alert for the next trap. At the end stood two vast bronze doors with a massive complex of locks, fitted with dozens of crystal vials that still had thick, noxious-looking fluids in them. Turn the wrong wheel, it seemed to say, and release the poison. It took several hours to see that it was a trick, and that the doors could be opened by lifting the bar.

And beyond them, like the boasting display of a king, lay the treasures of the Dragon Empire. A huge tome with letters in worked bronze on its side that Marcus couldn’t read. A silver case, the metal tarnished to black, filled with stoppered vials fashioned from dragon’s jade. A roll of copper hung like a tapestry with a fine lines etched into it showing what appeared to be a massive ship floating in the sky and doing battle with a vast dragon. An urn of orange-and-gold enamel with the image of a weeping Jasuru woman painted in its side. There was no gold, no gems or jewelry, but it hardly mattered. Anything there would have called forth wealth enough that Marcus need never work again for any king of any nation. If they didn’t just kill him and take it.

Marcus walked slowly through the reliquary’s deepest chamber, his torch held high above him. A mirror in the back caught the light, but its reflection was some other room in a sunlit tower. A wide throne of black wood and yellow silk sat in a corner, and Marcus’s skin crawled just being near it.

“Here,” Kit said. “It’s here.”

Kit stood before a simple wooden stand that held a single blade. It was longer than Marcus preferred, designed perhaps for a Tralgu or Yemmu. It would have been unworkable for a Cinnae. The scabbard was green, but deeper and more complex than enameling would explain, like the emerald carapace of a vast beetle.

“Strike a man with it, and he will die,” Kit said. “Strike a man like me with it, and all the spiders within him will die as well. We had blades like it at the temple to purify the unclean.”

“Meaning kill people like you.”

“Meaning that, yes.”

“And stick it in a goddess’s belly, and we save the world,” Marcus said, reaching for it.

Kit stopped him, the old actor’s hand on his wrist.

“What’s the matter?”

“This is an evil thing. An evil object.”

“Come a long way for second thoughts now,” Marcus said.

“I know that. I agree with you. But I brought you here, and I feel wrong letting you take this without being certain that you know what you are sacrificing. What I am asking of you … I think I am asking a great deal of you, Marcus. And I consider you my friend.”

Marcus tilted his head. Kit’s face was somber. The grit and dirt of weeks had ground itself into the man’s pores and the greasy wires of his beard and hair. Kit swallowed.

“This weapon is poison,” Kit said. “I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it—just that, carry it and nothing more—the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably , it will kill you.”

“It’s a sword, Kit,” Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from its place. “They’re all like that.”

Cithrin

The market houses of Suddapal sat at the edges of the wide, grassy commons. Pillars of black wood carved with delicate whorls and spirals marked the corners of every room, and wall hangings of rich green felt hung where Cithrin would have expected tapestries to be. Where the Grand Market of Porte Oliva assigned stalls to merchants and let the buyers move between them, everything here was in flux. Halfway through a negotiation, some third party might intrude with a better price or an accusation of poor quality, and this was true whether the issue hinged on the price of a single apple or a shipping contract worth half the value of the city. Nor was that the only aspect of the market that left Cithrin feeling at sea.

Her youth had been spent in the Free Cities where Firstblood and Timzinae had lived and worked in very nearly equal proportion. If asked, she would have said that she was perfectly comfortable with the race, with any of the thirteen races of humanity. The market houses of Suddapal showed her that that was not perfectly true. Walking through rooms and corridors filled almost exclusively with the dark-scaled bodies and twice-lidded eyes, she felt conspicuous. She was aware of her slight frame and unscaled, pale skin in a way she had never been before, and she disliked the feeling. And while no one was cruel to her, she could not help noticing that she was watched, considered, and commented upon. By stepping on a boat in Porte Oliva and stepping out in Suddapal she had become an oddity, and she didn’t know how to play the role.