The Spider's War

by Daniel Abraham

  “Why is this, do you think?”

  “No idea,” Vicarian said, pinching another almond between his fingers, then popping it into his mouth. “But it does seem the colder the water gets, the better it resembles soup.”

  “At the temple, we heard of the sea. I imagined it as a wide lake. This is better.”

  “It is,” Vicarian said.

  In his years studying to become a priest—the traditional role for the second son of a landed noble—Vicarian had participated in the mysteries of half a dozen of the more popular cults. He’d drunk wine and recited stanzas of the Puric Creed under the half-moon. He’d prayed to the empty chair that was the symbolic center of the Lissien Rite. For four long months, he’d fasted or eaten only flour paste and water until he’d found visions at the bottom of the secret Shoren Temple hidden deep in the caverns and ruins under Camnipol, though in fact the visions he’d suffered seemed as plausibly the results of starvation and sleeplessness as anything holy. For the greater part, the Antean court treated its religions much the way it did hunts or feasts or ceremonial balls. The stories of gods and goddesses, of the spirits of the wood and the water, were taken seriously by a few. Membership in the rites was more important by far than actual belief.

  Vicarian had quite enjoyed it. It had felt at the time like a kind of pretend that none of them—or at least none of the smarter of them—took all that seriously. There were a few here and there for whom the creeds and rites meant something deeper, but so far as Vicarian could see, none of those ever displayed a power from the divine more impressive than a street-corner cunning man’s. The philosophical disputations carried some actual pleasure, though.

  He had spent countless hours sitting with his fellow novices, crawling through the knottier problems of living in a god-haunted world. Could the gods be mistaken? Were the figures in the various dogmas truly separate, or did they represent aspects of a single, unitary, wider faith? Was divine will discovered by prayer or created by it?

  The long nights of disputation held an honored place in his memory, like running down the halls of his father’s house with his brothers or climbing a very large tree at the corner of their garden that he wasn’t supposed to climb. Innocent pleasures he’d indulged in joyfully, once when he was young.

  The cult of the spider goddess was a very different thing. The clarity he knew now, the unveiling of the world and the souls of the people he spoke with, was subtler and more beautiful than the talents of the most talented cunning man. The coming age of purity promised a peace unlike anything the world had seen. He’d played for years at being holy without understanding what being holy was. Now he had achieved it.

  Kurrik had been there from the start, tending to him and the other inductees in the temple at the top of the Kingspire. Whispering words of comfort and promise in those first difficult hours and days when the goddess’s power was still new to him, when his blood had not yet finished changing from his own to hers. That he was in Porte Oliva now, tending to Jorey’s conquest, felt like the goddess expressing her favor like an indulgent nurse letting him sneak a honeystone before bed.

  “This is the Inner Sea, yes?” Kurrik asked.

  “It depends on how you judge it, actually,” Vicarian said. “Some captains say that the Inner Sea stops at Maccia and this is the Ocean Sea. Others call it the Inner Sea until you’ve lost all sight of shore and headed out on the blue water for Far Syramys.”

  Kurrik grunted, scooping up the last two almonds in his fingers and shaking his head. “Something is or it is not. So many names for the same water? It is a symptom of the world of lies.”

  “I understand it has something to do with port taxes,” Vicarian said, chuckling. “So, yes, I suppose it is.”

  Kurrik smiled, balled the remaining paper into a wad the size of his thumb, and tossed it out over the wall. A seagull swooped in, plucked the pale dot out of the air, and sloped away again. Vicarian stood and held out his hand, helping draw his fellow priest up. The midday sun held a bit of warmth, and there was no snow, even in the alleys and corners. So deep in the winter, Camnipol would be encased in ice. Jorey and the army, still in the field, would be shivering in their boots. Feeling cold in Porte Oliva was a sign of decadence. And still, Vicarian did feel a little cold.

  “Walk with me? Take off the chill?” he said.

  “Always, brother,” Kurrik said.

  Vicarian had never been to Birancour before he came as its conqueror. He had no knowledge of Porte Oliva to use in making a comparison, but it seemed to him that for a fallen city, it was doing fairly well. Certainly the scars were there. Empty, soot-dark doorways where fires had gutted buildings during the sack. Gouges on the walls where arrows and bolts had chipped away the pale stucco. Street-corner carts where a girl might sell cups of sweet mash or strips of peppered meat that were empty now, the girls who’d stood them dead or fled. He’d heard for many years of the puppets of Porte Oliva, the public debates and competing performers. There were a few such now, but only a few.

  As they strolled through the streets, their guard at a polite remove, Vicarian pulled his hands into his sleeves against the cold. The citizens—milk-pale Cinnae, otter-pelted Kurtadam, thick-featured Firstbloods—made way for them, and Vicarian couldn’t say if it was out of respect or fear or whether the two had a great deal of difference between them now. There were, of course, no Timzinae.

  After the sack, the roaches and enemies of the goddess had been rounded up. Some had been consigned to the yard of stocks and gallows that divided the palace from the newly reconsecrated temple of the goddess. Others had been weighted down and thrown into the bay. Some had burned. Vicarian supposed that to the uninitiated and unaware, it would have looked like monstrosity. It worried him, but only a little. With time, his voice and Kurrik’s would bring the truth to them. Antea’s invasion was the best thing that could have happened to them. They hadn’t been beaten, but saved.

  “Still no word from my brother,” Vicarian said, though likely Kurrik was aware of the fact. Had some report come from the army, Vicarian would have blurted it out as soon as he’d met his friend and fellow priest that morning, not waited until now.

  “Your former brother,” Kurrik said, gently. “The Lord Marshal is not of our blood now.”

  Vicarian nodded, but only halfheartedly. He heard the truth in Kurrik’s voice, the gift of the goddess, the certainty she brought. If he felt a bit sad to think of Jorey as no longer being his baby brother, it was a matter of language more than truth. “But you know what I mean,” he said, gesturing with a sleeve-swallowed hand.

  “Thanks be to her,” Kurrik said. “All hidden things come to light through her.”

  They stepped into the wide, empty plaza that had once been the Grand Market, past the gouged-out socket that had once been a cafe where Cithrin bel Sarcour had held her unclean court. It was strange to think that she’d been here. She’d walked the same streets, eaten the cousins of these almonds, looked out over the endlessly changing bay. It rankled to have come so near to capturing her.

  Nor was that precisely the only thing that rankled. From the burned stones of the square for almost two more close streets, he kept his peace. “You know, the use of the word brother really has changed since the goddess led you to the desert. You’re right, of course, that the blessed of the goddess are my brothers since I took the vows, but Jorey is still the child of my same parents.”

  “That you misuse your voices is part of the impurity of the world,” Kurrik said gently.

  Vicarian grunted. Kurrik was correct, of course. If it hadn’t been for the rhetorical reflexes built by his years of disputation, Vicarian would probably have let the matter drop. Probably.

  “Whole languages have risen and fallen into disuse since you’ve left,” he said. “And the goddess’s word is true in all those languages.”

  “Her truth is eternal,” Kurrik said. He’d begun walking a bit faster, as if in annoyance. Vicarian stretched his stride wider to keep up. />
  “That’s my point, isn’t it?” he said, forcing his voice to be light and teasing. If the slightest buzz of annoyance slipped through, it wasn’t so much that it demanded acknowledgement. “Her truth is eternal, but the world isn’t. Kingdoms, cities, languages. They’re all in flux. The goddess is like a lighthouse, unchanging and unmoving, but the world is like a ship on the sea, and the angle that it sees her from changes. Every age needs to find new words to express the same truth.”

  Kurrik stopped at a corner where three streets came together. A high warehouse wall rose above them both, its shadow darkening Kurrik’s face and the cobblestones around them. Across the street, one of the remaining puppeteers was yanking a gold-scaled doll through violent paroxysms that Vicarian recognized as part of a PennyPenny story. The thin crowd standing before him all seemed to be covertly watching Kurrik and himself. And the expression on Kurrik’s face sobered him. Annoyance. Vicarian told himself it was only annoyance.

  “Her truth,” Kurrik said slowly, “is eternal.”

  “Of course it is,” Vicarian said. “I would never dispute that. What I’m saying is that when you have something outside of change like the goddess and something that suffers constant change like the world, the relationship between them must change too. There was a court philosopher in second-age Borja—a Haaverkin named Pelemo Addadus—who wrote a book on the question. I studied it when I first joined the priesthood.”

  “You did not join the priesthood until you were touched by her,” Kurrik said. There was more than annoyance in his voice. There was anger, and Vicarian, despite himself, felt its echo in his own chest. It felt like taking a breath and then taking another without exhaling in between. It enlarged him. Through his body, the spiders wriggling in his blood, whipping him on.

  “Not the true priesthood, no,” he said, struggling to keep himself from shouting. “But I studied the thoughts and forms of the world. The changing world. You and your brothers from the temple did a tremendous good for us all. You kept the truth of the goddess safe for thousands of years when the dragons would have silenced it. There is nothing that can diminish how important that was.”

  The rage in Kurrik’s eyes dimmed, his jaw softened. Across the corner, the puppeteer coughed and spun PennyPenny into a frenzied dance, trying to pull her audience back to herself. Vicarian rested his hand on his friend and—in the religious sense of the word—brother’s arm. The spiders grew calmer, if not quiet. “Those of us who remained in the world while the goddess was gone went through many changes,” Vicarian said. “We will bring her word to everyone. You can hear that in my voice, yes? We will spread her truth to the world and watch the world remade. And we will find the right way to do it.”

  “We will,” Kurrik said. “Yes, this is true, we will.”

  His agreement felt like a salve on Vicarian’s soul. But it will mean changing the words we use to reflect the changes in the world floated at the back of his throat. He was right. He knew it. And Kurrik would too if he would only listen to Vicarian’s voice long enough to hear it. The presence of their guard—Antean soldiers with swords and battle-scarred leather armor—seemed to unease the audience. The puppeteer shifted PennyPenny to face Vicarian and dropped whatever threads of story she had been weaving. The Jasuru puppet lifted a string-hoisted hand.

  “You there! You! I am PennyPenny. Come and hear my story, yes? Come and hear.”

  “We should keep walking,” Vicarian said. “Once that sort starts, they won’t stop until you’ve paid them.”

  “Of course,” Kurrik said, turning. PennyPenny’s cries grew quieter as they strode away to the north and the palace. Overhead, seagulls screeched and whirled beneath high, thin clouds. Two dogs, one brown and the other one grey, darted out of an alley, then ran ahead of them and turned back to bark. Vicarian turned their conversation to other matters: the disturbing news from Elassae, how the presence of the goddess would solidify the traditionally fractious Free Cities, the plans for taking the word of the goddess west to Cabral and Herez and Princip C’Annaldé.

  By the time they reached the wide, paved square with the governor’s palace to the left and the goddess’s newest cathedral—the blood-red banner with the pale center and the eightfold sigil of the goddess rippling in the afternoon breeze—to the right, questions of the relationship between flux and eternity had been nearly forgotten. Nearly, but not quite.

  The end of their walk through the city marked the beginning of their evening duties. Kurrik took a speaker’s trumpet and the guard, and returned to the streets, his voice carrying over the street performers and the taproom conversations, penetrating into every building, pressing through every window. The enemies of the goddess have already lost. Everything they love is lost. Those who come to the goddess will be lifted up, their fortunes restored and their grief assuaged. In content it wasn’t so very different, Vicarian knew, from the religious claims of any cult. It was only that theirs had the power of truth behind it.

  For himself, he remained at the cathedral, overseeing the workmen as they chiseled out the icons of the old local gods and hammered the old statues to gravel. The local dye yard, the only one old enough to have been within the city wall when everything outside it burned, delivered banners to hang over the emptied niches. And as he worked, he took little audiences. A Dartinae boy brought his girl love to the temple putatively to be blessed, though in fact he wanted Vicarian to find if she’d been sexually faithful to him. A merchant captain hauled his crew to the steps of the cathedral to ask which of them had been stealing from the company box. It was the work of a magistrate, but Vicarian did it without charging the tax and fees. All he required was that they all stay for the evening sermon. Their ears and attention to his voice was enough.

  But that night, as he rested in the palatial luxury of the rooms they had taken from the governor’s priests, the issue gnawed. He’d spent the better part of a month once, debating Addadus and Cleymant with his fellow novices, and found the knowledge he’d squeezed from it fascinating. More than fascinating, important. The idea that all that wisdom would be swept away by the goddess seemed almost self-evidently mistaken. Her power was to lift up truth, and to celebrate the world as it genuinely was, and that included what had been understood during the goddess’s exile, so long as it was also truth.

  Kurrik was wrong to turn away from it, and that his spiritual brother was caught in an error was like having a splinter. It bothered. He lay in his bed, the smells of incense and the sea competing in the air. The walls around him ticked and shifted as the day’s heat radiated away into the humid air. He wondered whether he should go wake Kurrik, explain the error, show him how the work done by philosophers and priests during the goddess’s exile still held value because they reflected the history that had played out. Show him that knowing more made the goddess’s word stronger. The temptation plucked at him.

  But it was late, and Kurrik’s anger earlier—though it had been misplaced—wasn’t something he wanted to bring up again just now. He was tired. Better to wait. Perhaps he could write a letter outlining the issue to Basrahip. The high priest was more likely to understand than a minor prelate like Kurrik. He was a good-souled man, but perhaps not the smartest after all.

  Vicarian sighed, adjusted his pillow, and tried to will himself to sleep. He remained troubled by the certainty not only that he was right, but that Kurrik was wrong. The anger in him was irrational, but knowing that didn’t comfort him.

  Kurrik was wrong. And sooner or later, something would have to be done about it.

  Geder

  I find nothing wrong,” the cunning man said. He was an old Tralgu man with one cropped ear and a gentle voice. He was the sixth of his profession Geder had appealed to. The others had either voiced the same opinion—that the Lord Regent was in fine health—or offered random maladies on a platter. He had taken bad air, or bad water, or he had too much blood or not enough sleep or his spirit had come a bit loose from his body. Of all that he’d heard, that last
sounded most likely. None had been able to help.

  “If there’s not a problem,” Geder said, “why don’t I feel well?”

  In the royal apartments, his palatial bedroom had high windows and thick rugs, tapestries on the walls with scenes from history and legend that had looked out on generations of kings. Now they looked down on his bare chest and exposed legs and the scowling cunning man. It was hard not to feel like a disappointment to them.

  The illness—and Geder felt certain it was an illness—had begun, he thought, on the return from killing the last apostate. Oh, his optimism and good cheer at the time might have covered it over, but it had been there. Thin enough to ignore, but present, like a blemish on an apple small enough to overlook, but warning of worms inside. Since then, the illness had grown. Sleeplessness at night, and exhaustion in the daytime. The almost physical sensation that his mind was stuffed with cotton. The overwhelming sense that something was wrong without anything he could find that justified the dread.

  “It started in Asterilhold. In the swamp,” Geder said. “I think it started there.” He’d said the words before, but to no effect. The cunning man flicked his one whole ear thoughtfully and rubbed his canine chin.

  “I have a tea I can give you. It may fix nothing, but if it does improve your vigor, that will tell us something.”

  “Fine,” Geder said. “That’s fine.”

  The cunning man nodded more to himself than to the Lord Regent, and opened his small wooden chest. He hummed to himself as he plucked bits of herbs and stones from his collection, dropping each into an iron pot. Geder watched him for a time. Absent the cunning man’s permission or prohibition, Geder tried covering the softness of his body with his undershirt. The Tralgu didn’t object, so Geder pulled it on entirely. He felt better that way. He hated it when people saw him just in his skin.