Daniel Abraham - The Tyrant's Law

The lady of the house brought them mugs of good cider and plates of gristly pork with a pepper sauce that kept Marcus from knowing whether the meat had started to turn. He watched the soldiers out of the corner of his eye. The five of them hunched close to each other, talking low. Every few seconds, one or another of them would glance over at Marcus.

No, not at him. At Kit.

“Interesting,” Marcus said.

“What?” Kit asked, drinking his cider and ignoring his meat.

“Our friends at the next table there. I do believe they’re deserters.”

“Really?” Kit said, and began shifting on his bench to glance at them. Marcus put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

“Think so,” Marcus said. “And I think they recognize you as looking as if you might be one of the priests. Because ever since we stepped in, they’ve been jumpy as mice that smell a cat. And seeing how they outnumber us more than double, I’m thinking we’re in a position that—”

The Anteans rose in a group, drawing their blades. The benches they’d sat on clattered to the ground as Marcus drew his own blade and put himself between the attackers and Kit. The lady of the house screamed and ran out the door. The chances she’d be back with timely help seemed thin.

“There’s no need for violence,” Kit said, and his voice filled the space. “You can put down your—”

“Shut up, you bastard!” the nearest of the Anteans shouted. “One more word out of you, and I swear we’ll cut you down and burn whatever comes out.”

Five men, Marcus thought, was a damned lot of people. But they hadn’t attacked yet. If anything, they seemed more frightened. He backed up slowly, pushing his table with the backs of his legs as he went, trying to clear a path for the men to leave if they wanted to.

“They followed us,” a dark-skinned one at the back said. “Lani, they followed us.”

“Well, and if they didn’t you just told them my name,” the man at the front said. “And thanks for that.”

“Lani?” Marcus said. “My name’s Wester. We don’t need to—”

The attack was fast and disorganized. Lani jumped forward, his blade swinging high. Marcus blocked and made a low counterstrike by long habit. Lani grunted with pain, falling half a step back and preparing for Marcus to press the advantage, but by then two of the others had stepped to their leader’s side. Marcus could see them preparing to attack in unison. He couldn’t block them both.

Kit’s cider mug came from behind him in a low, fast arc and shattered against the nose of the man on Lani’s right. Marcus thrust at the one on the left, who fell back, cursing.

“I don’t want this,” Marcus said. “We’re not hunting you.”

“We’re not going back!” Lani shouted, and then as if on a signal, all five men turned and bolted for the yard, leaving Marcus and Kit alone in the common room. Marcus moved forward carefully. Retreating to the next room to set up an ambush was an idiot’s plan when you already had five blades to the opponent’s one, but working with the assumption that his enemies weren’t idiots would have had its drawbacks as well. Keeping the blade at the ready, he moved forward step by careful step. The sound of hooves pelting away down the road left him feeling a little more certain, and when he reached the yard, the thin groom’s confused expression and the cloud of dust in the west were enough that Marcus sheathed his blade. Kit’s familiar footsteps came up behind him.

“Well,” Marcus said. “That’s not good.”

“Don’t you think so?” Kit asked. “It seems to me it might be quite a hopeful sign. Men are beginning to abandon the Antean army. And did you hear what they said to me? Cut me and burn whatever comes out? That sounds to me as if some other people within the enemy forces have begun to see that something odd is going on, and they aren’t celebrating it.”

“That’s true,” Marcus said. “It’s not what I meant, though.”

“No?”

“I’m fairly sure they stole our horses.”

“Ah,” Kit said. “That’s not good.”

“Isn’t. You think you might be able to use those uncanny powers of yours to find us some replacements?”

“I assume we can walk up to the city. It might take some time to earn enough to buy horses, but we can try.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of walking up to someone on a nice horse and asking them to let us use it.”

Kit made an uncomfortable kind of grunt and Marcus looked over at him.

“I believe the power—her power—can become a path of corruption. An opportunity, as it were, to lose what is most valuable about ourselves.”

“Yeah. Saving the world here, Kit,” Marcus said. “Let’s keep focus on that.”

The old actor sighed.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Once they’d reached the dragon’s road, they moved as fast as a courier, changing for fresh horses twice a day. The fields, farms, and wild places of Antea spread around them like a vast grey-brown cloak. The trees were shedding their summer green. In the fields they passed, Firstblood farmers rode on mules with whips at their sides while Timzinae men and women harvested the last of the autumn crops—pumpkins and gourds and winter wheat. Whenever they passed a low temple, the banner of the spider goddess flew from its roof. And even with all this for warning, Marcus was surprised when at last they reached Camnipol.

Coming from the south meant that the great city stood on an escarpment above them. They went up the trails to the southern gate with only the massive walls to see. Within them, Camnipol might have been empty for all Marcus could tell. It was only when they passed through the tunnel in the wall and emerged into the wider city that the full extent of the place became clear. All around him, buildings rose two and three and four stories high. The streets were thick with people, Firstblood mostly, but Tralgu and Jasuru and Dartinae faces as well. None of those were what stopped him. There was something he couldn’t quite explain—a grandeur and a weariness and sense of terrible age—that seeped through the city itself. He’d known many cities in his life, and until he walked into Camnipol for the first time, he would have said that he understood what it meant for a city to have a personality; that every gathering place of humanity had its own customs and idiosyncrasies, that the coffee in Northcoast came with honey and in Maccia with cardamom. Camnipol was something else again. Here the personality of the city wasn’t just the contingencies and customs of the people in it. It was something that grew out of the stone, that scented the air. Camnipol was a living thing, and the people in its streets were parts of it the way that skin and ligaments and muscles made up a body.

And what was strangest of all, it wasn’t a secret. It was as obvious as the sun the moment he stepped inside the walls. Kit reined in beside him.

“Your first time in Camnipol, then?”

“They didn’t hire many mercenary companies when I was in the trade,” Marcus said. “I spent more time at little garrisons. God. I’m gawking at the place like a child.”

“Wait until you see the Division,” Kit said. But it wasn’t the great chasm of the Division that caught them up next. When they turned a corner into a wider square, the Kingspire came into view, rising into the sky higher than any human structure should. In the midday sun, it seemed almost to glow. And high up, almost at its top, a vast banner flew.

When he’d been a boy, Marcus had seen a spider’s egg crack open and thousands of tiny animals with delicate pale bodies no larger than a grain of millet spin out thread into the breeze. He’d watched them rise up in the sun, thick as smoke and tiny. And later in the summer, his father had showed him a vast web at the edge of the garden where a massive yellow-and-black beast of a spider had made its home. The thing had been big as a fist, and its web strong enough to catch sparrows. Marcus still remembered the chill of understanding that had come to him. Each one of those tiny grains floating on the wind had gone out into the world and grown into a monstrosity like this one. And like that, each little banner they had seen, dyed whatever red the locals could manage, painted with the eightfold sigil, and hung from the temple’s eave, had been a grain. And the massive cloth that floated in the air over Camnipol was the beast they would grow into.