The Dragon's Path

by Daniel Abraham

  “So we just walk away home?” Maas said. There was outrage in his voice. “We hand it over to whichever of our enemies happens by?”

  “Of course not,” Geder said. “We burn it.”

  Vanai died at sundown.

  If the people had known, if they had understood the threat, the little riot in the square before the palace would have been nothing. But despite the emptying of the canals, the wood and coal and oil spread through the streets and squares, and the arming of the gates, they couldn’t imagine that they faced anything more than retaliation for a stone thrown at Geder’s head. Likely some rioters would be caught and burned. They wouldn’t be the first public executions that Vanai had seen. It was only when the Anteans marched through the gates that the city understood what was happening, and by then it was too late.

  History had turned against Vanai. It was a city of narrow streets, of timber waterproofed with oils, of gates at every street mouth. It was smug, and certain that no lasting harm could come to it because none had before. It was the small piece in a much larger game.

  Geder sat on a small dais that Sir Alan Klin had left behind. The seat was a leather sling, and a bit narrow for him, but more comfortable than his own field chair. The highest-ranked of his staff stood around him.

  He’d rehearsed this moment in his mind. Once it was done, he would stand up, announce that he deemed Vanai no longer in need of protection, and give the order to march. It would be like something from the old epics. Around him, the officers fidgeted, glancing at him as if they weren’t sure he really meant to go through with it.

  A hundred yards before him, the gates of Vanai closed, glowing gold from the setting sun. Geder rose to his feet.

  “Block the gates,” he said.

  The order went out, seeming to echo and grow as it passed from caller to caller. The sound would soon reach the southern gates as well. The engineers had been waiting, and they sprang into action. It took less than a minute for the great gates to be disabled. It wouldn’t have been long work to force them open, but still longer than Vanai had remaining.

  “Loose the fire arrows,” Geder said, almost conversationally.

  The order went out. Twenty archers lit their arrows and lifted their bows, the streaks of flame little more than fireflies in the light. Then again, and twice more. All around the city, archers wearing his colors would be doing the same as the order reached them. Geder sat down. In his imagination, it had all happened at once, but the sun slipped down below the horizon, the golden world fading to grey, and no particular sign of fire came. Geder was wondering whether he should have the archers try again when he saw the first trail of smoke rise. As he watched, it spread, but slowly. This might take longer than he’d thought.

  The smoke thickened, and when the breeze turned toward him it was close and greasy. An answering tower of smoke rose in the south, the blackness rising so high in the air that it caught the last light of the sun, flaring red for a moment, and then dark again. Geder shifted in his seat. It was getting cold, but he didn’t want to call for his jacket. He hadn’t slept since the night before last, and he could feel the fatigue tugging at him. He forced himself to sit upright.

  For a long time, nothing seemed to happen. Some smoke. The sound of distant voices. Geder didn’t think that the fire, once started, could be easily put out, but perhaps. The smoke spread, widening its grasp on the night city. And then, as if coming to itself, fire claimed the city.

  The screaming began, voices shrieking and wailing. He’d expected to hear something, of course, but he’d thought it would be like the riot that had disturbed him—God, had it only been the day before? This was a different beast. There was no anger in the sound, only hundreds of voices of raw animal panic. Geder saw movement from his own troops. Someone had slipped out of the city, and the swordsmen of Antea, true to their orders, hunted the refugees down. Geder touched his lip, worrying at the cut. He reminded himself of the effigy hung in the square. They’d started this. It wasn’t his fault they were dying now.

  Smoke billowed up from the streets now, lit from beneath and blocking out the moon. Flames crawled up the buildings nearest the wall and leapt up, leaving the city below and burning in the free air. Another sound, low and steady as an army on the march, came. Geder felt the ground shudder, and looked around for a landslide or an attack. For a moment, he imagined it was some last dragon, hidden under Vanai and disturbed into waking. But it was only the voice of the fire.

  The gates shuddered, warping from the heat. A group of figures appeared on the wall, men and women trying to flee. In a moment as clear and sudden as a lightning strike, one in particular was silhouetted by the flames. Geder could tell that she was a woman, but not what race she was. She waved her arms, trying to communicate something. He had the sudden, powerful urge to send someone to her, to save her, but already she was gone. Some tendril of flame reached the near-empty granaries, and the stirred grain dust detonated like a thunderclap. Smoke rose whirling, a vortex of darkness that dwarfed the city. The wind that pushed past him was the draw of the flames. The roar was too loud to speak over.

  Geder sat, eyes wide, as bits of ash rained down around him. The heat of the dying city pressed against his face like the desert sun. He’d imagined himself sitting there, watching until it was done. He hadn’t understood that Vanai would burn for days.

  He hadn’t understood anything.

  “Let’s go,” he said. No one heard him. “It’s enough! Let’s go!”

  The order went out, and the army of Antea pulled back from the furnace. Geder abandoned the thought of his grand rhetorical gesture. Nothing he could say would measure up to the conflagration. He went back to his tent, wondering if they were camped too close. What if the fire broke through the walls? What if it came for him?

  He waved his squire away and curled up on the cot. He was too tired to move, and the nightmare howl of the flames wouldn’t stop. He stared at the top of his tent, seeing the small figure waving her arms and dying. Geder pressed his hand to his mouth, biting at the skin until it bled, trying to make the noise go away.

  The smoke of ten thousand people rose into the sky.

  CITHRIN

  Word of the destruction of Vanai washed over Porte Oliva. In the Grand Market and at the port, in the taprooms and the wayhouses and the steps that led to the brick-and-glass labyrinth that was the governor’s palace, detail piled upon detail as reports came in by ship and horse and raw speculation. The city had burned for three days. The Antean forces had barred the gate and slaughtered anyone who tried to escape. The canals had been drained so that there would be no water to slow the fire. The Anteans had poured barrels of lamp oil in the streets before they left. The heat had shattered stones. The smoke had carried the smell of burning as far as Maccia and turned the sunsets red. Charred bodies were still clogging the weirs at Newport.

  Cithrin grabbed at each rumor like one of the ever-present beggars watching for dropped coins. At first, she hadn’t believed it. Cities didn’t die overnight. The streets and canals she’d known all her life couldn’t become ruins just because someone said it, even if the man speaking was an Antean general. It was ridiculous. But with every retelling, every new voice that said the same things, her incredulity faded. Even if they were all only echoing one another, the weight of their combined belief pulled her along.

  Vanai was dead.

  “Are you all right?” Sandr asked.

  Cithrin leaned forward, her legs swinging from the side of the actors’ cart like a child sitting on too high a stool. Around them, the midday crowd shuffled. She watched a reed-thin Cinnae boy thread himself through the press of bodies, following the colorless thatch of his hair. The smell of the sea brine made the air feel cooler than it was. She didn’t know how to answer, but she tried.

  “I don’t know. I think so. It’s hard to live in the middle of all this,” she said, nodding at the press of humanity around them, “and really feel the deaths. I mean, I know that Magister Ima
niel is gone. And Cam must be too. All the boys who played in the streets are dead, and that makes me sad sometimes. But when I start thinking that it’s all gone—the fresh market and the palaces and the flat barges and all of it—it gets… I don’t know. Abstract?”

  “That’s a good word for it,” Sandr said, nodding as if he knew what she meant.

  “Nobody knows me now. I’ve lived my whole life in Vanai. It felt like everyone knew who I was. What I was. And now that they’re all gone, there’s nothing holding me to that anymore. Captain Wester, Yardem Hane, you, and Master Kit’s company. You are the people in the world who know me best.”

  “It’s hard,” Sandr said, taking her hand.

  No, that’s the only good part, she thought. When nobody knows what you are, you can be anything.

  “Sandr!” Master Kit called. “It’s time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sandr said, jumping to his feet. He looked down at Cithrin and smiled gently, much the way he did when he took the stage. “You’ll be here when it’s done?”

  Cithrin nodded. It wasn’t as if she had someplace else to be. Besides which, Sandr’s sudden change of heart was interesting. She assumed that some more attractive girl had refused him, and he’d fallen back to court her while his confidence healed. He believed, after their moments beside the mill pond, that she was an easy conquest. Cithrin wondered whether she was. More than that, she wondered whether she’d like to be. She slipped off the cart and into the crowd.

  Mikel was already there, halfheartedly pretending to be a local. He caught her eyes and grinned. She nodded back, then turned to watch Smit and Hornet lower the stage. When the chains had caught, Master Kit strode out onto the boards. He wasn’t wearing his Orcus the Demon King robes anymore. With Opal gone, the story of Aleren Mankiller and the Sword of the Dragons had been set aside. Instead, a shimmering blue cape flowed from the shoulders of a matching tunic. Bright yellow ribbon gartered green hose, and the most ridiculous shoes seen by human eyes bobbled around his toes.

  “Hell-lo!” Master Kit cried in comic falsetto. “I said, hello there! Yes, you, in that wonderful hat. Why don’t you stop for a while. God knows you’ve nothing better to do. And you, there at the back. Come closer, you might see something you like. What? You might. And—”

  Master Kit stopped, his face a mask of shock. Cithrin felt a thrill of fear, half turning to follow his gaze.

  “Oh, not you, dear,” Master Kit went on in the same false voice, his hand fluttering like a sparrow. “You keep right on going.”

  The crowd laughed. Cithrin and Mikel were meant to lead them, but there were already half a dozen others who had stopped to watch. The Bride’s Curse was a comedic sex play with half a dozen costume changes that could be performed with only one woman. Master Kit had changed the traditional lines to match with the specifics of Porte Oliva: the rhymes appealing to the king had all been remade for a queen, and instead of the evil landlord being disguised as a Yemmu with a false shoulder and mouth tusks, Smit jumped onto the stage in a bead-woven sheep pelt as the world’s least convincing Kurtadam. Cithrin laughed and clapped, not leading the crowd so much as adding to its flow.

  When the end came and the players took their bows amid a modest shower of coin, she was almost surprised to find herself returned to her own life. Hiding in Porte Oliva, waiting for the next thieves to attack in the night.

  And Vanai dead.

  Sandr came out from the cart wiping the paint from his face with a damp rag. The smears at his eyes and mouth made him look younger than he was. Or perhaps they made him seem his age, when he usually passed himself as a worn coin.

  “Went well,” he said through a grin.

  “It did,” Cithrin agreed.

  “Buy you that meal now, if you’d like,” he said. Over his shoulder, Cithrin caught a glimpse of Cary scowling at them from the cart and imagined what she would see. Sandr, the leading man. Cithrin, the naïve second-choice girl. Or perhaps Sandr, member of the troupe, and Cithrin, the reason Opal was gone. The pinched lips and furrowed brow could have been disapproval of her or of Sandr. Cithrin didn’t know which it was.

  Find out, Magister Imaniel said from her memory or else his grave.

  Cithrin lifted a hand only as high as her waist, barely a wave. Cary returned it, and then pointed at Sandr and tilted her head. Really? If she’d been angry about Opal, at most she would have smiled and waved. Surprised by relief, Cithrin shrugged. Cary rolled her eyes and went back into the cart.

  “What?” Sandr said, looking over his shoulder. “Did I miss something?”

  “Just Cary,” Cithrin said. “You said something about a meal?”

  The taproom nearest her rooms served plates of chicken and pickled carrots that they claimed went well with the dark beer. Sandr paid five extra coins for the privilege of a private table with a single bench, kept apart from the commons by a draped cloth too humble to be called a curtain. He slid onto the bench at her side, with a tankard of black beer and a wide mug of fortified wine for her. His leg settled easily beside hers, as if the touch were perfectly normal. Cithrin considered shifting to leave a few inches between them. Instead, she drank a generous mouthful of the wine, enjoying the bite of it. Sandr smiled and sipped at his own beer.

  This was, she realized, a negotiation. He wanted to do some of the things he’d just finished mocking in the sex play, and he in turn was willing to offer up food and alcohol, attention and sympathy. And, whether he knew it or not, experience. Implicit exchange was something Magister Imaniel had talked about several times, and always with disdain. He’d liked the precision of measuring coin. Here, in the warmth of the taproom, the tastes of salted meat and fortified wine warming her blood, Cithrin wasn’t sure she agreed. Surely imprecision had its place.

  “I’m sorry about Vanai,” Sandr said, using the same gambit he’d tried before the play.

  Now what was the effect of saying that? Reminding her how badly she needed reassurance and the feeling of connection, she supposed. Making the things he offered seem valuable. Still, he’d made that point earlier. Stating it again was a mistake. Maybe if he’d interspersed it with other tactics. He could devalue her side of the exchange. If, for instance he’d criticized her dress or the cut of her hair, making it clear that lying down at her side wasn’t likely worth so much. The danger there being that she might take offense and end the negotiation. Or pretend offense as a way of forcing him to raise his offer.

  “Cithrin?” he said, and she shook herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “My mind was elsewhere.”

  “The beer’s good. Have you been here before?”

  “I’ve meant to,” she said. “Something’s always come up.”

  “Want some?”

  “All right,” she said.

  She’d expected him to pass his tankard to her, but instead he lifted his arm, calling over the server, and bought a tankard just for her. It was complex and thick, the alcohol lurking in a rich play of flavors. It didn’t have the astringent cleanness of the fortified wine. How had Captain Wester put it? Get her stupid drunk to get her knees apart. Something like that.

  It occurred to her that Sandr wasn’t a man with a wide variety of strategies.

  “I don’t remember my parents,” Cithrin said. “The bank raised me, bought my clothes and tutors.”

  “You must have loved them,” Sandr said, playing the part of the consoler with his voice and pressing his thigh against hers with just a bit more fervor. Still, Cithrin considered the question.

  Had she loved Magister Imaniel? She supposed so. She’d certainly loved Cam and wanted Besel. She’d wept for them all when the first news came. But she wasn’t weeping now. The grief was still with her, but there was something else beside it. A terrible sense of possibility.

  “I suppose I must,” she said.

  He took her hand, as if in sympathy. His brow furrowed and he leaned toward her.

  “I’m so sorry, Cithrin,” he said, and to her amazement, tea
rs came to her eyes. That couldn’t be right.

  Sandr leaned forward, dabbing gently at her eyes with the cuff of his sleeve. Washing away the tears he had called forth. The stab of resentment at the little hypocrisy clarified many questions.

  “Captain Wester!” she gasped, and Sandr dropped her hand like it had bit him. He glanced out from behind the almost-curtain.

  “Where?” he said.

  “He just stepped into the other room,” Cithrin said. “Go, Sandr. Before he sees you!”

  Sandr swallowed, nodded once, and slipped off the bench, heading for the alley door. Cithrin watched him go, then reached over and pulled his tankard to her as well. The chicken did go well with it after all. As she drank, her mind wandered. She wasn’t angry at Sandr, but she couldn’t bring herself to respect him. On another night, she might have let his scene play out, if only to see where it led. But it was increasingly clear that Master Kit intended to remain in Porte Oliva for some time. Since she wasn’t sure when or how she’d depart the city, making that kind of connection was sure to complicate things. And then what if she got pregnant? Everything would fall apart then. Easier to stay out than to get out later. Still, she did wonder what it would have been like. Her mind shifted back to the mill pond, the snow against her skin, the weight of the boy upon her.

  She finished the second beer and went back to the fortified wine. Alcohol was supposed to soften the mind, but she didn’t feel soft at all. Or at least not in a way that left her unaware. She was more relaxed, certainly. The ever-present knot in her gut was looser, and she felt more at home in her skin. But her thinking was as clear as ever. Maybe clearer. She had the sense of huge thoughts shifting just beneath her awareness, her mind comparing and scheming with a speed and elegance that she couldn’t quite keep up with herself. She ate some of the pickled carrots, finished the wine, and got another tankard of the beer.

  When she stepped out the door, the sun had already set. Porte Oliva lounged in the grey twilight. Lanterns flickered and glowed. Men and women scurried through the streets, anxious to get home before twilight had entirely faded. The air was cold but not bitter. This wasn’t a mild winter evening so much as a chilly springtime. She let herself drift down the street, her mind plucking at thoughts, turning them over, and dropping them again. How old Sandr seemed on the stage, and how young off it. The emptiness in her heart that was the death of Magister Imaniel and Cam, the almost vertiginous need to fill it, and her almost clinical detachment from her pain. The impending trip to Carse, smuggling wealth she hadn’t stolen. The books of the bank records, sums and ciphers tracing history from the foundational document to the last rush of fleeing aristocracy. Opal’s betrayal and Captain Wester’s loyalty. She remembered something Master Kit had said about the shape of Wester’s soul, and wondered what shape her own soul might take.