The Spider's War

by Daniel Abraham

  The servant coughed a laugh, and Geder smiled his encouragement until she smiled back. When he nodded, she backed away, still grinning under the oily fur of her race, and trotted off to retrieve Canl Daskellin from whatever waiting area they’d stowed him in while they got Geder’s permission for him to enter. Outside, night had fallen, and the candles in the library remade the window as a dark and deforming mirror. Geder shifted his weight back and forth, watching his reflected head swell to a massive, ungainly monstrosity on a twig-thin body, then shrink down to almost a nub perched on comically heroic shoulders, then back again.

  Daskellin appeared behind him, and he turned. Sweat and dirt streaked the older man’s dark skin, and he wore riding leathers that smelled of horse even from where Geder sat.

  “Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, “I have a report.”

  “From Northcoast?”

  “No, from the east. Sarakal, and it seems Elassae.”

  Geder shifted in his chair. “I thought you were the ambassador to Northcoast. Why are you bothering with things in the east? It’s not yours to worry about. Mecelli’s supposed to be doing that.”

  “He isn’t well, my lord,” Daskellin said. “The cunning men report an army outside Nus. And another massed in Orsen.”

  Geder waved the news away. “Cunning men can’t be relied on,” Geder said. “Half the time they get these so-called messages, it turns out they were never actually sent in the first place. Just someone mistook a dream for some crackpot magic and got everyone’s feathers in a whirl over nothing.”

  “I’ve had a bird from my man in Orsen. That one at least is true. And Lord Mecelli’s report after Inentai was right. The traditional families are taking back all we won in Sarakal. And more than that, they may not stop at the border of the empire.”

  “Inentai is the border of the empire,” Geder said. “It’s just in flux for the moment. It’ll come back under our control. We put a temple in it. No city where we dedicated a temple to the goddess can fall. Just be lost for a bit. You heard what Basrahip said. You know all this.”

  “I did hear, Lord Geder,” Daskellin said. “But I also had the reports. And I’ve seen the maps. If we want any hope of defending the empire, we have to raise an army. Possibly two.”

  Silence fell between them, dividing the room as effectively as the Division split Camnipol.

  “Are you telling me you doubt the protection of the goddess?” Geder asked, slowly.

  “I believe in it,” Daskellin said, and the distress in his voice was like listening to a single high note played on a violin forever. It was about more than the news of the armies, more than the news of the war. There was a personal distress and hearing it made Geder’s own soul ring with it like a crystal glass echoing a singer’s pure note. “I don’t doubt her, but I also look at the world. And as much as my faith tells me that we are under her protection, my life’s experience says we need sword-and-bows at the ready. The storm that’s coming? We aren’t prepared to weather it.”

  Geder hunched over his book, hand flat against the soft leather cover. The sense of his head being stuffed with wool returned, and with it a deep weariness and anger. He felt the rage bubbling in his chest. It was unfair, monstrously unfair, to bring this all to him. Did Daskellin think he had a cunning man’s stick he could wave and conjure able-bodied fighters out of nothing? The men he’d marched to Asterilhold were all that Camnipol had, and since he’d called the disband, they weren’t even gathered or armed. And Geder was ill, after all. Something was wrong with him, only no one seemed able to see it. Or else to care when they did.

  As long as things were going well, everyone celebrated him and threw victories for him and praised him as a hero. But as soon as there was any trouble, no one cared about him at all.

  “This is not my fault.”

  “Lord Geder?”

  “This,” Geder repeated, his voice growing to a shout, “is not my fault. The position we’re in? The unrest in Elassae and Sarakal? You were my advisors. The best men in the kingdom. You served King Simeon and you’ve been in the court. You were supposed to be the ones who knew how to run a campaign!”

  Daskellin took a step back as if he’d been struck. His jaw worked as if fighting to get out some sentiment too large for his throat. Rage boiled up from Geder’s belly. He stood, throwing the book at Daskellin’s head as he did it. It missed by a wide margin, but the violence of the intention was clear. For a moment, Geder thought the man would attack him, and in that moment, he welcomed the thought. The prospect of beating Daskellin’s smug, self-serving face with his bare fists was like the hope of water to a man possessed by thirst.

  They teetered on the edge of the moment, the air in the room rich with the potential for violence. Daskellin took his lip between his teeth and looked down. When he spoke, his voice shook, but it was not loud.

  “If I have failed you, Lord Regent, I apologize. I have always done what I hoped would be best for the throne.”

  “And there just now you’ve remembered that I can have you killed,” Geder snapped, but the fire in his gut had died already. He felt as though he was sinking back into himself. He’d thrown a book at the man. That was embarrassing, but it was Daskellin’s own fault. The man should have known better. “I’ll put out the call. We’ll bring back the men I led against the apostate. It’s not an army like Broot had in Elassae or Jorey’s force. And you’ll lead it. You personally. Then I don’t want to hear anything more about how I’m not prepared.”

  “Yes, Lord Regent,” Daskellin said.

  “And we won’t fall. No matter what we won’t fall, because the goddess is here. She’s remaking the world, and we are her instruments, so we won’t fall. Because of me. Because I brought her here. Everything we’ve gained, we gained because of me. What we’ve lost is your fault.”

  “Lord Regent,” Daskellin said, making it sound like a yes without actually saying the word. Geder sneered and turned away. An exhaustion was coming over him, turning his bones to granite and lead. The effort of standing up was too much. Everything was too much. Daskellin was a selfish bastard for taking away what little energy Geder had left.

  “You can go,” Geder said. “You’ll have your soldiers tomorrow.”

  Daskellin nodded, his jaw still shifted forward like a showfighter’s at the start of a match. “Thank you, Lord Regent,” he said, then turned and, walking stiffly, left. Geder tried to look out the window and failed. His own bent reflection blocked his view of the city. Of the world. Only when he put the candles out could he catch glimpses of the lights of Camnipol and the moon and the stars. He sat for a time in a darkness too deep for reading. The feast was still going. Would be going all night. If he returned to it, he’d be made welcome. Or he could go to the Great Bear and drink distilled wine and smoke pipes and trade stories with whoever was there. He could command any woman in the court to his bed if he wanted to. Make her do whatever he wanted, and if she laughed at him afterward, he could have her thrown into the Division. That was the power of the emperor. The power of the throne.

  The thing was, he didn’t want to do any of it. Everything sounded awful. Even the effort to call for more light seemed beyond him. When he’d been a boy in Rivenhalm, he’d dreamed of going to Camnipol, becoming a hero of the court. Now he was here, and he’d done it, and he dreamed of being almost anywhere else.

  “It’s only for now,” he said to the darkness and the books. “Soon, she’ll have burned all the lies from the world, and we’ll be at peace. It’ll be all right.”

  Or else the confusion he’d glimpsed in Basrahip’s eyes would grow. That bad news would multiply. More cities would fall. No, not fall, but be lost for a time. For longer. The death throes of the old world still had the power to crush everything, and staying out of its thrashing meant being nimble and quick. Geder didn’t feel nimble or quick. In fact, he barely felt anything at all, except muddy in his mind and angry without knowing who or what he was angry with.

  A light in the
garden below the library shifted. Some servant walking in the night. Or a member of the court. Or Basrahip and his priests. Or the goddess herself. Or Cithrin. Geder didn’t know, and he didn’t want to. As long as he wasn’t certain, there was hope that it might be something astounding. Something that would heal him.

  Far Syramys wasn’t actually so far, really. Ships left for it every year from Narinisle and Herez and Cabral. The blue-water trade carried the highest risk in the world, but it was done. Geder closed his eyes and imagined himself on the deck of a ship cutting through the vast waves of the open sea without so much as an island in sight. It was supposed to be a vision of comfort, of possibility, but his mind kept turning to how it would feel to be lost there. Lost in a hostile emptiness without any sense of how to go back home or else forward to safety.

  It would feel, he thought, very much like being Lord Regent.

  Marcus

  As the sky slid from blue to indigo, Jorey and Marcus walked the defenses, Jorey ahead and Marcus behind. Barricades and low, improvised walls stood on either side of the dragon’s road. Mud and stone and uprooted hedge, they were often little more than the idea of cover. But it gave the Antean archers places to hold and fall back to as Dannien’s soldiers moved in. They’d even managed a scout’s perch on an outcropping of rock where someone with younger eyes than Marcus could shout back reports of the enemy movements and Kit could use a speaker’s trumpet to call out assertions about the outcome of the fight in hopes of making them true. Night birds began their songs, trilling to each other and the Antean soldiers. The sun, already vanished behind the mountains to the west, sent streaks of red across the thin, scudding clouds. The smoke of the first campfires rose up like it aspired to being a cloud itself.

  Marcus watched more than the battleground. Jorey moved among his men with an ease that wasn’t quite easy yet. Like an actor new to the troupe, he made the gestures without entirely making them his own. He had potential, though. Marcus had seen more than one great general rise to power with less compassion for the men who followed him. Jorey Kalliam understood the importance of commanding loyalty. It would serve him well if any of them managed not to be killed on this blighted stretch of jade. Jorey called an end to the day’s building, as they’d agreed he would, and the men put up a ragged cheer. During the long, terrible days of the march, Marcus had kept as much as he could to himself, but he still knew some of them.

  Durin Caust was the one with two missing fingers who’d been the first to learn how to make a shelter out of cut snow. Alan Lennit and Sajor Sammit were the lieutenants under one of Jorey’s bannermen who held each other’s hand during the march. The one with the flaming red beard and eyes dark as a Southling’s was called Mer, and he had a good singing voice.

  Trivial, meaningless bits of information that took them from being a single organism—the army of Antea—and made them into a company of men that Marcus didn’t particularly look forward to watching die. It occurred to him as they walked back to the main camp that holding himself apart hadn’t only been so that his already thin disguise as a servant wouldn’t be seen through. He also hadn’t wanted to see them as anything more than meat on legs, extensions of Geder Palliako and the priests and Imperial Antea. So he’d cocked that up too.

  “Double fires tonight,” Marcus reminded Jorey. “If we have wood or twigs or dried dung. Anything that’ll burn, burn it. Let their scouts think we’re more than we are.”

  “Last fires we’ll see for a good while too,” Jorey said. “Might as well enjoy them.”

  “That’s truth.”

  The attack would come in the morning with the rising sun low on the horizon, blinding the Antean forces. Depending on how the enemy was stocked, Marcus guessed that it would be a hammer blow of horsemen coming down the road in hopes of scattering them quickly or a foot assault swooping south and taking them in the right flank. Or both. Dannien likely had enough men for both. Jorey had laid out the camp to make that plan seem the sound one. More fires in the north, closer together. Fewer and more widely spaced in the south. Likely, Dannien would be using banners or flares to signal his men. Their ears would be stopped against Kit’s voice. As advantages went, it was thin, weak, and insufficient.

  It wasn’t only that Marcus didn’t want the battle in the first place. It was also that there was no chance that he could win it. Weak as they were and without the morale-breaking voices of the priests, they had effectively lost already. The Timzinae forces would break the exhausted, underfed, road-weary Anteans like a dry twig, wheel north, and burn a pathway from there to Camnipol.

  And so, when Karol Dannien led his men out of Orsen, Jorey and his army would need to be elsewhere.

  As the last grey of twilight settled to black, the Antean scouts went out. The moon hung over the horizon at just less than a quarter. It would be below the horizon before midnight. Jorey and his captains went to the men at their fires and checked each group personally. Their packs had to be filled with dried meat and hardtack and the sticky, dense waybread they’d taken from Bellin. That and their swords and bows. No armor. It was too heavy for what they were doing. Boiled leather and worked scale were all burned or ripped down at the seams so that the enemy couldn’t make use of them. Marcus sat with Clara Kalliam beside the Lord Marshal’s tent, waiting for word to come that something had gone awry. That the enemy scouts had seen them or that Dannien had somehow stolen a march and blocked their way. If they’d done it right, there wouldn’t be many scouts to the north of the camp. They’d be marking out ways to lead the attacking forces to the south of the road, but few plans were so graceful as to match the world.

  “Are you well, Captain?” Clara Kalliam asked.

  “Am I fidgeting?”

  “A bit, yes.”

  “Sorry. I’m told I do that when I’m annoyed. Isn’t something I’m aware of at the time.”

  She shifted, drawing deeply on her pipe and letting the smoke out through her nose. The firelight played across her face. She was handsome, in a solid, well-bruised way. More than looking like a beautiful woman, she looked like an interesting one.

  “You’re thinking this may not work,” she said, her voice low.

  “I’m not thinking one way or the other,” he said. “I’m waiting to see what happens. If it’s interesting, I don’t want to spend the time then getting ready to make a call, so I’m just anxious and cranky now. Gets me out ahead of it.”

  “Your burden seems to be bothering you less,” she said.

  “My burden?”

  “Your blade,” she said.

  Marcus glanced back at the hilt rising above his shoulder. When he thought about it, the skin across his shoulder still itched and burned a little. The muscles where the scabbard rode against him ached. The weird taste in his mouth that came of carrying the poisoned thing too long had become so familiar, he’d have noticed more if it left. And still, he knew what she meant.

  “It hasn’t changed,” Marcus said. “It’s only that I’m more distracted. There are a thousand things I’m bad at. This one, I’m good at.”

  She smiled. “You’re good at being annoyed and anxious?”

  “The way I’ve heard it put is that my soul’s a circle. I’m best at the bottom, heading up. The top of things is just the first part of down. At least for me. Being caught in a storm keeps me from thinking about other things, and when it’s too quiet, I do. And then I’m not as good.”

  Clara Kalliam lifted an eyebrow in query.

  Marcus shook his head, refusing the question, but then answered it anyway. “I saw my wife and daughter dead before me.”

  “I see,” Clara said. “I watched my husband executed.”

  “By Palliako. I heard. I’m sorry.”

  “I am too,” she said. “Dawson was an old-fashioned man, but he was a good one. I miss him, but I also think the world as it has become would have been a hell for him. There are times I’m glad he didn’t live to see this.”

  Ah, Marcus thought. The night-before
-battle conversation. He hadn’t expected to have one of those, but here he was, sitting in darkness with the things that simmered and stewed in people’s hearts starting to bubble out. Well, she’d opened the bottle because she wanted to. He’d accommodate her and see what she would drink.

  “You sound as though you’ve recovered from the loss,” Marcus said.

  “No,” Clara said. And then, “Or yes. Yes, I have. I haven’t unmade what happened. It was too ugly an end to something precious. I shall always have the scars of it, I think. But I realized his wife died with him, and I have mourned her, and I am someone new. And I like who I am. If God gave me the option, I couldn’t go back.”

  “It’s not like that for me,” Marcus said, his voice lighter and more conversational than the truths he spoke. “I’m the same man I was the night they burned.”

  “You haven’t changed at all?”

  “Not in any way that matters,” he said. His inflection was like a joke, but she heard past it.

  “No scars, then. Only wounds. That must be terrible.”

  “It is,” Marcus said. “But it makes me good at the things that keep my mind off it.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve intruded.”

  “I let you, m’lady,” he said.

  “Then thank you for that. I will not undervalue it.”

  He looked at her, unsure what weight her words carried. It struck him for the first time what very lucky men her husband and the so-called servant everyone pretended wasn’t her lover might be. She was a singular woman.

  Footsteps approached the fire, and Marcus looked up. He’d forgotten to put his back to the fire, and his eyes were poorly adapted to the darkness around them. When Vincen Coe loomed up from the night, it was like he’d stepped into being.

  “Word’s come from the scouts. Jorey’s chosen a path.”

  “Well then,” Marcus said. “Let’s see if we can pull this off after all.”

  The night march began. Everyone’s orders were strict. No voices rose in chatter or song. No scabbard remained unwrapped for the starlight to glint off the metal. The soldiers had rubbed their faces in dirt and ash to keep the sweat from shining. Likely it was more than they need do, but the way to find that out was to try without and fail. The curious thing about war—about so many things—was the number of critically important things that no one could know.