The Spider's War

by Daniel Abraham

  Jorey’s face was thin, his eyes sunken. He seemed on the verge of tears. The others—his men, the noble blood of Antea—were little more than corpses who hadn’t had the good sense to rot yet. Only Wester seemed to have his faculties fully about him, and they were his words that found her first.

  “If we try to sleep, the best we can hope is a third dead by morning. The smart bet’s more.”

  “What’s going on?” Clara demanded. She had no rank or authority, but they were all past that now. Marcus nodded to her and lifted his chin, pointing with it to the landscape all around them.

  “Listen,” he said.

  When she heard it, she realized she’d been hearing it for some time. A high, merry tinkling sound like a thousand mice playing chimes. It seemed to come from all around her, to rise up from the ground itself and shimmer down from the mountains.

  “The thaw’s here,” Marcus said. “We can’t build a decent shelter with wet snow. We’d wind up sleeping in puddles, and that makes waking up come morning less likely. Add that it’s hours, not days, before some unfortunately warm breeze gets up to the peaks. Once the melt starts there, all this is going to spend a week as a particularly unpleasant river.”

  “What can we do?” Clara said.

  “Forced march,” Jorey said, his voice low and sepulchral. “We don’t stop for the night. We don’t stop at all. We only keep walking until Bellin.”

  “It’s not much farther,” Marcus said. “We can do this.”

  “Not all of us,” Jorey said.

  “The ones that can’t are dead anyway,” Marcus said. “As their commander, the best thing you can offer them is a chance to rise to the occasion.”

  Jorey’s head sank to his chest. Clara felt his weariness and distress as if the ache were her own. She wished there were a way to take him in her arms, to comfort him. She had the mad fantasy, gone as soon as it came, of calling for her servants to bring the carriage close as she’d done when her children were no more than babes. Too late for that now, and in so many ways.

  “No choice means no choice,” Jorey said. He lifted his head, and his eyes were hard as stone. “Send the word. We’ll break before sundown, but just for food and water. Then we keep on.”

  “As if we had food,” one of the other men said with a hollow laugh. None of the others picked it up.

  That night, she walked. The darkness came on slowly, and then all at once. The trickling carried on for a time, then stopped as the free water turned to ice. The surface of the snow they passed by had changed. She saw already the texture of it shifting from smooth, unbroken white to a dirtier form, specked where the crystals had broken down and been remade. Beneath the surface would be paths of ice like the branches of inverted trees, clear and hard and cutting through the soft and white.

  She could see them all around her, like spirits from the grave. Ice-souls returning for one terrible night before the thaw came in earnest and washed away living and dead alike. She heard their voices chattering like the meltwater and recognized as if from a great distance that she was dreaming. Asleep and walking at the same time. She was half surprised that knowing alone didn’t wake her, but it all went on as she pushed one foot out ahead of the other, and then again, and then again. Forever and only in the single, painful moment.

  She observed her mind slowly falling apart, at first with horror and then with an almost childlike curiosity. It was like watching an animal being butchered for the first time, seeing all the bits of her self come apart. She didn’t realize she’d stopped walking until someone tugged her arm. In the darkness, Vincen was nothing more than a shadow and a scent. She would have known him anywhere.

  “Can’t stop now, m’lady,” he said. His voice sounded rough. “Soup.”

  “Soup,” she agreed, and she walked.

  Dawn was turning the snow to indigo when the mountain began to glitter.

  She thought at first it was another hallucination conjured by her failing mind, but one of the soldiers ahead of her lifted his arm and pointed. And then another. A ragged, sore-throated cheer rose until the commanders gestured for them to be quiet. It would be sad, after all, to have come all this way through all this terror, and be buried by an avalanche there before the candle-lit windows of the free city of Bellin.

  In her little rooms carved from the living stone and heated by a single black iron brazier, Clara ate until she was nauseated, ached like she’d been beaten, and slept like a woman sick with the flu. It might have been half a day or half a month before her mind regained itself and her body found its strength again. She rose from a string-and-cloth cot that seemed grander just then than any bed she’d ever slept in. Thin windows carved into the stone wall filtered in a pale sunlight. She washed herself at the little tin basin for what felt like the first time in years and braided her still-wet hair. Bruises blotched her legs and arms, and she had no recollection of where they’d come from. Her leathers and wools vanished, she put on a thick wool robe the color of corn silk and a pair of boots picked by someone with a daintier imagination of her feet than her body could support.

  She was just beginning her search for a bell or a cord to summon a servant when a scratch came at the door and Vincen’s muffled voice came after. “If you’re ready, m’lady?”

  The hall was a tunnel of stone with lanterns hung at the corners filling the air with buttery light and the scent of oil. He looked better. He’d shaved and his long brown hair caught the glow of the light. Too thin, though. God, they were both too thin.

  “Have you been eavesdropping on me?” she asked.

  “I hear that all the best servants do,” he said. “Makes us seem cleverer than we are.”

  She stepped into his enfolding arms, resting her head against his breast. It was difficult not to weep, though she didn’t feel at all sorrowful. It was simply a thing her body did after death had tapped her shoulder and then walked past. Vincen stroked her damp hair, kissed her temple, and pushed her gently back.

  “We did it,” Clara said. “We went through the closed pass at Bellin, just before the thaw.”

  “And we only lost a third of our men,” Vincen said. “The locals are telling us that we’re crazy, brave, and lucky as hell.”

  “What a world that this is good luck,” she said.

  “You’re here. It’s enough for me.”

  She was tempted to pull him into the little room and draw him onto the cot. It wasn’t lust, or not lust alone. It was also that he was alive and she was alive and the trek through hell behind them. He saw the thought in her eyes and smiled, blushing. “Your son is waiting. They have a meeting room set up farther in the mountain.”

  “Of course,” she said crisply. “Lead on.”

  She had heard of Bellin before she knew it. A free city mostly within the flesh of the mountain, built who knew how many centuries before by Dartinae miners and then abandoned when the great plague struck their race. She had passed it less than a year before, following Jorey and his army in disguise. Being within the tunnels was different from knowing the story of them. Reality gave it weight, but also stole away the romance of it. She’d imagined grottoes within the stone, carved walls with the forms of dragons and men, light coaxed down through shafts high above or created in bright crystal lanterns. In the experience of it, it felt more like a complex mine mixed with the narrow streets of Camnipol’s poorer quarters. Less impressive than her imagination, but impressive for being actual.

  “The men are being housed outside for the most part,” Vincen said. “But we’ve got good leather tents and the local cunning men are helping with the sick. They’ve eaten real food for two days straight as well, which appears to have helped more than anything. Jorey and his captains have rooms in the city proper, and Captain Wester and Master Kit besides. No one’s said anything, but they seem to recognize that Wester’s advice is worth considering.”

  “How are we paying for all this?” Clara asked. “It isn’t as though we brought any coin to speak of.”

/>   “We’re an army, m’lady. They show that we’re all friends by housing and feeding us, we show we appreciate it by not killing them all and taking what we want. That’s tradition.”

  “As I recall it, we wouldn’t have been able to slaughter and loot a wet kitten before they took us in,” Clara said.

  “Having one of the priests there to smooth the way was a blessing.”

  Clara smiled and chuckled, though something about the idea sat poorly with her. She put it aside for another time. For the moment, gratitude that the world had seen fit to keep her warm and fed was enough.

  The meeting room was round and roughly cut. The air smelled of dust and smoke, but didn’t feel close breathing it. A low table of polished oak with legs of iron commanded the center of the room. Maps and papers were laid out upon it. She caught a glimpse of a troop list. Many of the names had been crossed through. Men of Antea as loyal to the throne as Lord Skestinin, and on much the same terms. They would not be going home.

  Also at the table was Marcus Wester. The journey appeared to have affected him least, though how that was possible she could not have said. Perhaps he was simply the sort of man that thrived on travesty.

  “Good to see you up and about, Lady Kalliam,” the mercenary captain said with a little grudging bow.

  “I am very pleased to have the opportunity to be seen,” she said. “I thank you for that.”

  “It’s the job,” Wester said, then, as if he realized how rude he sounded, “You’re welcome, though.”

  “We were looking at the path from here,” Jorey said, turning to the map. “The dragon’s road leads east to Orsen, and then north, which brings us near to Elassae.”

  “Can we not cross through here?” she asked, tracing a finger more directly from Bellin to Camnipol.

  “That’d mean the Dry Wastes,” Wester said. “We could try it, but it would make the pass look like a stroll through the garden. I wouldn’t give odds of six of us making the whole way.”

  “Then Orsen?” Clara said. Jorey shot a glance at Wester, as if he hoped to read the right answer in the older man’s face. Wester shrugged.

  “It’s got its dangers, but I don’t see safe on the table anywhere.”

  Jorey nodded. “We’ll give the men one more day to rest, and then start out. With the road, the path should be quicker.”

  “There’s quite a bit that’s quicker than slogging through snow up to your asshole,” Wester said, then grimaced his regrets to Clara. She pretended not to have noticed the vulgarity. “But yes. It won’t be a bad trot, compared to what we’ve done.”

  “Well then,” Clara said. “Good that the worst is over.”

  “Wouldn’t go that far,” Wester said, but he did not elaborate.

  Marcus

  Marcus still wore servant’s robes. He still pretended to wait on Lady Kalliam and walked beside the new and skittish horse offered up by the aristocracy of Bellin. Even in private, he never presented the Lord Marshal with orders. Just suggestions that the boy knew better than to deviate from. He had a story prepared if the others became suspicious. He was ready to claim Jorey’s mother had hired him on as an unofficial advisor. He even had a name picked out: Darus Oak, mercenary captain from the Keshet. As they walked through freezing mud and snow turning to slush, he amused himself by inventing Oak’s history and exploits, his loves and humiliations. His tragic failures and brilliancies and dumb-luck escapes. It came of traveling with actors, he supposed. It took his mind off the march.

  When he wasn’t lost in his own flights of fancy, Clara Kalliam made for pleasant company. She had a better understanding of field wars than most women of court, which was to say she had any at all. More than that, she knew in a general sense what she didn’t know, and asked smart questions. Still, he was careful not to be too harsh in laying fault at her son’s feet. Wasn’t any call to be rude about things.

  “He’s smart,” Marcus said. “That’s not the issue. It’s Palliako’s failing. I’ve seen it any number of times before. It doesn’t matter if it’s a garrison command or kingdom or the bastard who’s picking the gate guard. He chooses the person because he trusts them, not because they can do the job. Give Jorey another five or ten years in the field, he’d be a fine Lord Marshal. It’s just he’s green.”

  Lady Kalliam nodded. “That’s my fault, I’m afraid.”

  “Raising him different wouldn’t have helped,” Marcus said. “It’s experience he needs.”

  “I meant that I arranged that the last Lord Marshal should be caught conspiring against Geder. Lord Ternigan was quite accomplished in the field, but Geder killed him all the same. Because of me.”

  They walked for a few moments in silence.

  “That’s a stronger case for it being your fault than I’d expected,” Marcus said.

  “It’s a weight I can carry,” she replied. “If I had done differently, my kingdom would have done better, and things would be worse.”

  “Confusing, but true.”

  She favored him with a smile. “I have become more comfortable with contradictions these last few years.”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  The truth was that commanding a real army again—even if it was at one remove—felt better than he’d expected. It had been a long time since he’d been a general, and his reputation after Wodford and Gradis had been more a burden than a joy. But there was something ineffable about doing a hard job well. Most wars were won or lost long before the battlefield, and getting a force of any size and strength through a winter-closed pass with only a third lost was solid work under the best of circumstances. With this collection of thin sticks and doom, it was a brilliancy. No one who didn’t know to look would see the achievement for what it was but he felt the lift of pride all the same. Except when he remembered whose army he’d just saved.

  Spring rose up around them, fragile and pale and new. The trees they passed—the few that hadn’t been burned for wood by the same men going the other direction the year before—didn’t have leaves yet, nor even buds. It was only that the dead-looking bark was taking on a faint green undertone; the mud smelled less of ice and shit and more of water and soil. Little things, but they added up to hope and the mindless animal optimism that the darkness was passing.

  Nor was the only change in the landscape.

  The soldiers of Antea had been starving shadows in Birancour. The years on campaign hadn’t just hardened the men, they’d scraped them down to bones and madness. Without the priests to goad them on, they would never have kept together so long. Palliako’s army had pushed itself past the breaking point, and then kept pushing, firm in the dream that because it hadn’t all turned sour yet, it never would. Now, on the road home, it was like seeing them wake up.

  No, not that far. Seeing them stir in their sleep, maybe. Food stayed scarce, and the day’s march went long, but the men talked more. They joked more. Their homes called them forward like water going downhill. Kit, walking among them as the priests before him had done, was greeted with less solemnity and more joy. Sometimes, Marcus saw it as a good sign. These weren’t bloodthirsty swordsmen anxious to cut a fresh throat. They were farmers and laborers and men of the land pressed into service and kept there too long. Even the noblemen who led them were hungry for home and comfort and an end to the war. Other times, he wondered which of the men he’d helped guide through the pass was the one who’d killed Smit and Pyk, or else recalled that any of them would have been pleased to haul Cithrin along in chains. Or worse. Those times, their laughter grated.

  The dragon’s jade of the road snaked a bit to the north, then to the south, curving gently around hills that had worn away centuries before, rising up above the earth in long bridge-like stretches, and disappearing beneath the loam. The passage of the army on its way toward Birancour and Northcoast had churned the land to either side, but the eternal jade remained. At Orsen, it would meet another track headed north into Antea and one that continued east to Elassae. Roads that had been
there before the nations they connected, and that would outlast them too. The confluence of them—along with the defensibility of Orsen’s weird single hill in the otherwise flat plains—defined where cities were built and how trade and violence flowed. Odd to think how much the world was defined by where it was easiest to get to.

  When the remaining army of Antea made the approach that at last brought Orsen clearly into sight, the free city looked something different than it had. The differences weren’t obvious at first, except in Marcus’s sense that something was off. The air around the city seemed greyer than he’d expected. Huts and small buildings clumped at the base of the lone mountain that looked familiar and out of place at the same time. With the advantage of being on horse, Clara Kalliam saw it better than he could, and Marcus saw his unease echoed in her expression.

  Either the burden of the poisoned sword was dulling his mind or the hard passage had left him more compromised than he knew. When he realized what he was seeing, it was obvious.

  “We’ll need to get your son, ma’am,” Marcus said. “The halt needs to be called right now, and a scout sent forward under a flag of parley.”

  “What is it?” Clara asked, but the tone of her voice told him she’d already guessed.

  “Orsen’s not looking to be as hospitable as Bellin was. That darkness at the mountain’s base is a camp.”

  “They’re fortified against us?”

  “Doubt it. I’ll lay gold that’s a Timzinae army making an early march to the north. Probably the force that broke out of Kiaria.”

  “Ah,” Clara Kalliam said. “So we’ve come too late.”

  The field of parley sat at the side of the road in a meadow that wasn’t yet entirely churned to mud. It wasn’t quite near enough to Orsen that they could haul a table and chairs out from the city, so the enemy had set up a frame-and-leather tent. Protocol had them withdrawing to just out of crossbow range and letting Jorey’s guard come inspect the place to be sure it wasn’t an ambush. That done, Jorey and his guards would wait in the tent and the enemy commander and his guards would come join them, followed by some more or less heated conversation. After that, tradition was everyone went back to their camps and got on with the business of slaughtering each other. The parley was as much about trying to find some hint of the enemy’s weaknesses as any genuine attempt to avoid battle.