The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin) (7 page)

“And you?” the village mother said. It took a moment before Marcus realized she was speaking to him.

“Following Kit,” Marcus said. “Keeping him out of trouble.”

Her sniff carried a cartload of contempt. She handed the parchment back to the cunning man, who bowed until his forehead was even with his knees before he turned and put it in Kit’s outstretched hand.

“I am sorry, noble wanderer. You have wasted your time,” she said. “I know nothing of this adventurer, and I have never heard of any such reliquary.”

The soft exhalation, almost a grunt, that came from Kit might have been the blow of bitter disappointment. But Marcus was fairly sure it wasn’t.

“The map shows a place not far from here where Silas believed he would gain entrance. There is nothing there?”

“There is not. Nor is there any such place within the range of my people. You have been misled.”

Kit ran his hand over his beard to cover a smile.

“I am bitterly sorry to hear this,” he said. “But I thank you for your kindness and your hospitality.”

“You and your servant are welcome to remain and take your rest.” Her voice was gentler now. Marcus imagined that she would be glad to be so easily believed. With a man other than Kit, she might have been.

“You are kind,” Kit said. “Please, let me give you this map as a gift. It is a lie set in ink, but it has its beauty. It is of little use to me now, but it does show something of the lands which belong to you and your people.”

“I accept your gift. I did not expect northerners to be so thoughtful.”

“Northerners are as stones in soft earth,” Kit said. “We’re all different kinds. And some, perhaps, worth more than others.”

The fruit and meat that waited for them when they emerged from the hut would have been the midday meal for any of the other races of humanity. They ate in darkness apart from a small lamp placed near them as a courtesy. Around them, the bustle of village life went on by thin moonlight. The meat from the long-faced boar was sweet and a little gamey, but it was fresh and cooked with onions. A woman brought clay bowls of fresh, cold water to them. Marcus wouldn’t have been more pleased by the finest wine.

On the farther side of the yard, a circle of children sat, whispering into one another’s ears and occasionally breaking out in roars of laughter. Kit watched them with a sour expression.

“Problem?” Marcus asked.

Kit nodded toward the children at their game.

“You’ve played that?” he asked.

“Everyone’s played that. Whisper in one ear, then repeat it until something absurd comes out the far end. Harmless enough.”

“I dislike it,” Kit said. “I’m afraid that all the world’s like that. A long chain of men and women speaking what they believe as clearly as they can, and the truth leaking out like they were trying to hold water in their fists. Even without lies, without deceit, that over there is the best we can manage. A crust of misunderstandings. And all of history is made that way.”

Marcus nodded. The tone Kit spoke in said more than the actual words. “She was lying, then?”

“She was. Not all of it. When she said the Silas map didn’t show where the reliquary was, that was truth. When she said it wasn’t in the range of her people … that was less than true.”

“So it’s close, then.”

Kit took an onion and bit into it, shrugging.

“Probably. Certainly she believes it is.”

“That’s good.”

“On the other hand, it seems to me she’s protective of it. If we press on, the locals may be less friendly than they’ve been.”

The children reached the end of their round, and a great roar of laughter rose up in the darkness. The sounds of daytime laid over the shoulders of night left Marcus uneasy. Now, as guests, it was only a peculiarity of Southling hospitality; the working of a mostly unseen village. When they pressed on unwelcome, there could be other sounds with fewer children and less laughter. He remembered someone telling him that fighting a Southling at night was like fighting with a blindfold. From behind them, a man’s voice called out in the darkness. To their left, another voice answered. The haze thinned enough that the moon showed through in a halo of its own light, too dim to cast a shadow. An insect landed on Marcus’s hand and he shooed it away.

“How much do we know about what happened to the Silas expedition?” Marcus asked.

“Well,” Kit said, his voice reflective and philosophical, “we’re fairly certain they didn’t come back.”

Clara

O
nce she knew to look, the evidence was everywhere. The snow-paved streets of Camnipol had hardly recovered from the violence of the summer, but the preparations had begun anew. Imri, once the cook’s assistant in Clara’s kitchens, was seeing a carter’s boy who’d been hauling pig iron to the forges since before midwinter. When Clara stopped by the forges on a pretext, all she saw were the long, easily bent spear points Dawson used to deride. They were meant to lodge in a shield and then hang from it, weighting a soldier’s arm, slowing him and breaking his formation. She could hear her husband’s snort of contempt, could see the dismissive scowl. A weapon for house painters, he’d have called it, and nothing that a nobleman would employ. The men who ran the city granaries smoked in the alley and shook their heads. The orders had come that they should not expect the spring wheat crop to refill the stores. It didn’t take Clara a great leap to guess where that food might go. In the temples, the priests intoned psalms about loyalty and the bearing of burdens now for greater glory later, and not of justice or the love of peace. And even in the traditionalist temples, the brown-robes of Geder Palliako’s spider goddess sometimes took the pulpit, declaiming in the accents of the Keshet and making cutting remarks about insects and cockroaches that seemed to implicate the Timzinae without ever quite putting a name to them. The magistrates had begun to sentence fewer young men to the cages and more to martial service. The prisons rose brick by pale brick, as much threat as architecture.

The true conversations of power, she no longer had the means to reach. Even those among the noble classes who still took her company were at their holdings or with the hunt. When the first thaw came, it would certainly be different. She would surely be able to discover which direction Palliako meant to send his blades. And also by then, it would all be too far gone to prevent. Walking across the bridges and through the narrow streets, she felt as if she were balancing on a landslide. It was all so much larger than she was that it might as well have been the weather. She had as much ability to stop this as to turn aside a storm.

But Jorey would come back, and Vicarian. Perhaps, one day, Barriath would return from his exile or at least write from it. Her boys. Help from Elisia seemed unlikely, but Clara would send letters to her all the same. The worst her daughter could do was burn them unread. In the meantime, she walked through the city, Vincen Coe at her side, seeking what information she could and putting it together as best she might.

Even when it took her to places that she would have been wiser to avoid.

S
tay behind me, my lady,” Vincen said.

“M’lady, is it?” the smallest of the three men said, his grin gap-toothed and unpleasant. “’Strue, then is it? That’s Treacher Kalliam’s widow.”

“What was it like, sleeping with a traitor?” the largest of them asked.

Clara held her chin up. Rage and humiliation fought against copper-tasting fear, but she didn’t let it show. The street was narrow enough that passing him would be difficult without risking the huntsman’s blade. She didn’t know what would happen if they tried to walk past without showing more steel or making their threats explicit.

“You have no business with us,” she said. “Let us pass.”

The smallest one drew a battered knife and began to clean his thumbnail with it, ignoring her words. “Long way you’ve come from there to here.”

Vincen kept himself between her and the three men. She couldn’t imagine Vincen would allow himself to be surrounded, but neither would he wish to make the first blow. It would be a choice of tragedies. Like so many things.

“We don’t want trouble,” Vincen said.

“Who does?” the largest man said, mock-philosophically, and he strode forward.

Vincen’s blade flicked out, cutting the air. The larger man growled and drew a short, curved blade. Its edge shone in the dim light. It was hardly longer than a child’s forearm, and well suited for violence in the confines of the narrow way. Vincen stepped back, using the reach of his own blade to keep the man at distance and set himself for the coming blow.

“We’ve come to see Ammit No-Thumb,” Clara said. “Perhaps you gentlemen could point the way.”

The middle one, silent until now, spoke. His voice was slow, but with a depth of intelligence that gave Clara something like hope.

“What business would you have with our Ammit?”

“I met his daughter on the Prisoner’s Span last week, and she mentioned that she had had some distress. I have a tea that might be of some use to her, and so I’ve brought it. Or will, if you’ll let us past.”

“Ammit’s no friend of mine,” the smallest said. He had taken a firmer grip on his blade. The largest took a step forward, and Vincen slid to block his progress.

“What sort of distress?” the middle one asked.

Clara hoisted her eyebrow and didn’t speak. In truth, she had nothing more than a few pinches of tobacco and a pocketful of dried apples, but she’d spoken to the girl long enough to know Ammit was a kind soul and that she lived nearby. That she would be known and thought of kindly was a gamble. The silence stretched. The smallest man glanced over his shoulder, then back.

“You’re in the wrong street,” the middle one said. “Go back to the turning and go three more toward the wall. There’s a red house with a half dozen barrels along the side. Turn there.”

“My thanks,” Clara said with a nod, then turned and walked briskly back along the narrow street. Her throat felt thin as a straw and her heart beat like a sparrow. A moment later, Vincen was behind her.

“Not so quickly,” he murmured. “Nothing like running to call the chase.”

Clara forced herself to walk more slowly, as if she belonged there. As if she were safe.

“Has it always been like this?” she asked through clenched teeth.

“Ma’am?”

“The knives and the violence. The inability to walk through the city without fear of being bled. Has Camnipol always been like this, and I didn’t know it, or is this a change?”

“Change,” Vincen said without even a pause for thought. “There’s always rough places. A taproom with a bad reputation. A street where men gather when they’re unwelcome anyplace else. But since the summer … no, it’s worse.”

“Well. At least it isn’t only that I was too blind to see it.”

The pale sky held the red and gold of sunset to the west and the deepening indigo to the east. With every day that passed, the light grew a little longer, the morning a little brighter. First thaw would, she guessed, come early this year. She hoped it was an omen of a gentler year, but she couldn’t bring herself as far as belief. She walked north, Vincen at her side. He didn’t take her arm, but stood near enough to her that she could take his if she chose. It seemed the whole of their relationship, writ small. When she passed the turning that would have taken them to the boarding house, he didn’t so much as break stride.

Dawson Kalliam, once Baron of Osterling Fells and her husband of decades, had no grave. After his execution, the body had been taken to the Silver Bridge and cast into the Division like common trash. Somewhere, far below, his bones lay amid the water and chaos. Tradition set the penalty for retrieving him for a gentler burial to be death, and Clara felt sure it would be upheld. And so every few days she found herself walking out to the middle of the span to spend a moment with the high and open air that had swallowed the last of her husband.

Below her, the pigeons turned in their flock, gliding on the drafts and perching on the Division’s deep sides or the lower, lesser bridges that spanned the gap farther down. She closed her eyes and bowed her head as she’d seen her mother do before her own father’s ashes. It was what a woman did when she was remembering a man who had been her heart and was gone. It wasn’t the first death she’d mourned. She’d lost her own father, her own mother. A brother taken by fever when she’d been hardly more than a girl. She knew what to expect, and how terrible it would be. How terrible it always was. The knowledge took nothing from the pain, or if not nothing, surely not enough.

After a time, she took a kerchief from her sleeve, dabbed away the tears, and walked back to the edge of the span where Vincen was waiting. He knew why she came, and he would not cross with her. Most times, she let the small courtesy pass uncommented. Perhaps it was her growing despair or the aftermath of fear, but today she paused before him, tilted her head, and considered him.

Vincen Coe stood only just taller than she did, his darker eyes cast down only a degree to meet hers. His hair was the light brown of oak leaves in autumn. His jaw was perhaps a little too broad, his nose bent slightly from some long-healed break. This was her self-appointed protector, this huntsman trapped in the treeless paths of the city. He had stolen a kiss from her once, and it had tasted of blood. He’d sworn a kind of love for her, and she had dismissed it because it was ridiculous. And then she had sent him away, because perhaps it was growing less ridiculous.

And that odd, half-acknowledged attachment had saved her life again today.

“Why are you here?” she asked. The question had become something of a ritual between them, and his smile meant that he’d understood her.
Why are you not off chasing some girl your own age? Why do you persist in wasting your own life in service to mine? How can I put so much trust in anything so clearly absurd?

“My lady,” he said, as he often did, “you saved me when I was lost, and I will follow you forever, if you let me.”

Clara shook her head impatiently, and Vincen smiled. A dark cart drawn by a black horse clattered by. A crow called out and another answered back, or else its echo. She took his arm, folding her own around it as an aunt might a favorite nephew.