The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  She could tell a great deal about the state of the city by walking through the streets near the Grand Market. The food sellers on the corners showed what harvests had been good and what disappointing. If crime had been low, there was more horse and ox shit on the street waiting for the guests of Porte Oliva’s magistrates to come and clean it. The number of beggars who’d made their way in from the dragon’s road leading into the city said whether there were caravans expected or if the traffic to the city was all local. It was like a cunning man smelling someone’s breath and knowing the condition of their liver. Cithrin did it automatically, as she had all through her childhood. Only now there would be no Magister Imaniel to go home to and show off her con clusions. It was only a habit.

  Pyk wasn’t at the café, which on one hand was a blessing because Cithrin could spend a few hours working on the bank’s business without her. On the other, anything she did here would have to be discussed with the foul woman later. All the faces around the table were familiar. Maestro Asanpur smiled at her and winked his milky eye.

  “One moment,” he said, stepping to the back, and she knew he would return in moments with a mug of fresh coffee and a barely sweetened honey roll. She sat at a table in the front looking out over the square and waited. Maestro Asanpur brought her just what she’d known he would, patted her shoulder gently as he did, and made his slow way back inside. Someday, Cithrin thought, he would die and the café would change. It would become something different and unknown. She wondered what it would be like.

  She knew the man when he stepped into the square. She had never met him except through the letters of proposal he had left at the bank, but he walked with a sense of purpose. He was thick across the shoulders for a Dartinae and his eyes glowed brighter than most. His tunic was leather and the sigil of a dragon was inked on it. When he came up to her table, she nodded to the chair opposite her own. He sat with the grace of a dancer and leaned forward, his elbow on the table.

  “Dar Cinlama, I presume,” Cithrin said.

  “Magistra bel Sarcour,” he said, bowing from the neck.

  “I’ve read over your proposal. I’m afraid our bank doesn’t have a history of backing expeditions like the one you propose.”

  “There is great risk, it’s true. There is also great reward. When Seilia Pellasian found the Temple of the Sun, she came home with gold and jewels enough to last a hundred lives. Sarkik Pellasian didn’t find gold, but the designs in the old library are what everyone uses in siegecraft now. The list is very long, Magistra.”

  “And doesn’t include the name of anyone now living,” she said.

  “Not yet,” he agreed with a smile. “But who in a generation has taken the chance? The world is sick with history. The dragons were everywhere, you know? It’s only us who hold to the roads. We go where it is convenient. Build where it is convenient. But what’s convenient for us was nothing to the dragons. Their roads were the open sky. Is there a lost treasure in Porte Oliva? No. People have been building on their own outhouses since forever. But in the Dry Wastes? In the north of Birancour where no dragon’s road runs? No one touches these places deeper than a plow will cut. I was a boy in such a place. We would go out to the fields and dig for dragon’s teeth. By the time I left, I had a dozen.”

  The lines were compelling and delivered with the ease of long practice. Cithrin shook her head.

  “It’s a pretty story,” she said, “and there’s some sense to it, but—”

  He leaned forward and placed something on the table before her. The tooth was as long as her hand and curved. The sharp end was rough. Serrated. The base was a tangle of hooks and broad places meant to root the thing in a massive jaw. Cithrin picked it up, surprised by its weight.

  “There are hidden things in this world,” he said. “More than you might imagine. And some of them are good for more than decoration.”

  Cithrin turned the great tooth over in her hand, her mind lit like a fire. It didn’t show the bite of a chisel she’d expect on sculpted stone or the flat place that a poured cast would leave. It might still be a forgery, but if so, it was a better one than she could catch out. Even if it was a tooth, there were any number of beasts that might have such a thing. She wondered what Pyk’s tusks had looked like before they’d been taken out. For all Cithrin knew, this might have come from nothing more exotic than a particularly large Yemmu.

  Or it might be a dragon’s tooth.

  “All sorts of things were lost in the fall of dragons,” the Dartinae said. The glow of his eyes was like twin candle flames. When he blinked she could see the blood vessels tracing through his eyelids. “What could rot’s rotted, but there are things that time won’t touch. Give me the coin to hire carts and shovels, and I’ll bring back treasures that humanity forgot. Things we don’t dream of now.”

  Yes, she wanted to say. Yes, take it and take me with you. Get me out of this city and let’s make enough money to found a whole new bank and drive Komme Medean and Pyk Usterhall into the streets. Instead, she pushed the tooth back across the table. It was a romance. A dream. Even if Pyk hadn’t been sitting on the strongbox, Cithrin knew the right answer to this was no. It was a desperate man’s game, and that it attracted her said more about her state of mind than the true risks.

  Dar Cinlama pursed his lips.

  “No, then?”

  “No,” she said. “You’ll find someone. You’re very good at telling the tale, and the logic of it’s persuasive if you find someone who wants to be persuaded. I’d try a nobleman with more money than sense. I run a bank. We don’t make our coin on grand gestures and glorious adventure.”

  “More’s the pity for you,” he said. “You think it’s a trick, then? That I’m playing a confidence game?”

  “No,” she said. “I think you’re sincere. But I also wouldn’t think less of you if you weren’t.”

  The man nodded and stood.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “Thank you, Magistra. I’ll be off looking for a nobleman with more money than sense. Preferably one you haven’t cleaned out already.”

  There was a little heat in his voice. But there would be. She’d just disappointed him.

  “Don’t forget your tooth,” she said.

  “Keep it. Remind you of me when you hear what better I’ve found.”

  “Thank you, then,” she said and watched him walk away.

  She had had her season traveling off the dragon’s roads. Moving through snow and freezing mud, desperate to stay ahead of the Antean army and sitting on the wealth of a whole city. It hadn’t seemed at all exciting at the time, but the farther away the past drew, the more warmly it glowed. She finished her bun and coffee, licked each finger individually to take the last of the glaze off, put the dragon’s tooth in her purse, and started back.

  He was right, of course. It wasn’t only treasure hunters. Smugglers knew it too. The dragon’s roads covered a great deal of the continent, but not all. And where it was not, people were scarce. Dragon’s jade ran through forests, but not deep ones. The deep ones were too hard for loggers, because there was no road. Better to find a stand of oaks that had been there for a hundred or two hundred years than go through mud and farmers’ paths until you found the ones that had lived for a thousand. And with them, whatever slept in their roots. The desperate and the dreamers and those with something to hide. They left the jade roads.

  She remembered slogging through snow with Master Kit and the players. The Timzinae caravan master and his religious sermons over dinner. The way the tin merchant would always try to start arguments. Cary and Mikel and Hornet and Smit. And Sandr, who’d kissed her and almost more. And Opal. If the snows hadn’t blocked the pass at Bellin, she would never have known them. Not really. The caravan would have gone to Carse as it was meant to, and never left the—

  Cithrin’s heart began to beat almost before she knew why. The plan came to her fully formed, as if it had been drawn on the inside of her
skull and a curtain pulled back to reveal it already done. Simple and obvious and incontrovertible, the solution to the problem of Pyk Usterhall spread out before her. She stopped in the street to laugh out the relief.

  There was no room for the notary in the counting house itself. She’d taken private rooms two streets over between a secondrate bathhouse and a butcher’s stall. Her door was heavy oak with a worked iron knocker in the shape of a dog’s head. If there was some symbolism there, it was lost on Cithrin. Pyk’s voice was muffled and thick, but once it was clear that Cithrin wasn’t a taxman or a thief, the bar scraped and the door creaked open on leather hinges.

  “May I come in?”

  “Of course, Magistra,” she said, stepping back. The rooms were smaller than her own, but only just. Her desk was, if anything, larger. The account books were open, and a half-written report waited for pen and ink. Cithrin could see the careful marks and numbers of the bank’s private cipher. There was no key. Pyk could read and write directly into the cipher. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “The reports. When will they be ready to go?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “A week, I think. Not longer than two. Why?”

  “I don’t suppose you’d be open to carrying them to the holding company yourself? Spending a little time in North-coast? I could watch things in your absence.”

  The sneer took up the better part of her face, as Cithrin had known it would.

  “I think not, Magistra. My instructions were quite clear.”

  “Well,” she said, holding out a sheet of soft, cream-colored paper, “don’t say I didn’t try to save you.”

  Frowning, Pyk took the page and unfolded it. Her eyes scanned it, confusion and distrust growing.

  “You’re invited to a feast?” she said.

  “I am,” Cithrin said, “but you will have to attend in my place. I’ll be taking the reports to Carse.”

  Dawson

  T

  he funeral ceremony began at the Kingspire. Simeon, King of Imperial Antea, lay on a bed of flowers, red and gold and orange, like a funeral pyre that could not consume its dead. He wore gilt armor that caught the sunlight, and his still features were turned to the sky. All the great families were there: Estinford, Bannien, Faskellan, Broot, Veren, Caot, Palliako, Skestinin, Daskellin, and more and more and dozens more, all those who had sworn their loyalty to Dawson’s old friend, those many years ago. They wore mourning cloth and covered their heads in veils. Though the sky was cloudless, the breeze that tugged his sleeves and drowned the chanting of the priest smelled of rain. Dawson bowed his head.

  He didn’t remember meeting Simeon. It must have happened, some singular first time that led to another, that led to two boys of the noblest blood in Antea running wild together. They had taken to the dueling yards, standing second for each other in matters of honor and jest and the small intrigues that forged long friendships. The happy memories betrayed him now, moving him to tears. Once, they had hunted a deer through the forest, breaking away from the hounds and the huntsmen to tear after the beast alone. The deer had led them through some small farmer’s garden, circling the little stone cottage with their horses at its heels until they’d reduced the rows of peas and eggplant to greenish mud. It had seemed sweet then. Ridiculous and hilarious and beautiful. Now Dawson was the only one who would remember that laughter or the comic expression of the farmer rushing out to find the crown prince covered in mud and pulped vegetables.

  What had been a shared moment was private now, and always would be. Even if he were to tell the story, it would be a tale told and not the thing itself. The difference between those two was the division between life and death: a lived moment and one entombed.

  Simeon had been so young then. So noble and strong. And still, somehow, he had looked up to Dawson. There is nothing in a young man’s world sweeter than being admired by the boy you admire. And then, inevitably, that love had ended, and now even the dream of its recapture was gone. One dead, the other standing with the veil shifting around his nose while a priest a decade older than the corpse being consecrated mumbled and lifted hands toward God. The king’s breath was stopped. His blood turned black and solid in his veins. His heart, once capable of love and fear, was now a stone.

  The priest lit the great lantern, and the bells rang out first one, and then a dozen, and then thousands. The brass mouths announced what everyone already knew. All men die, Simeon said in his memory. Even kings. Dawson stepped forward. Etiquette dictated which of the pale-fleshed ash poles he was to take, who he was to carry before, and who behind. He was not so near the front as he wished. But he was close enough to see young Aster walk out to his place at the column’s head.

  The boy was pale as cheese. He had accepted coronation in the ceremony immediately before the burial, as tradition demanded. Palliako had, to no one’s surprise, accepted the regency. The great men of the nation had bent their knees to the boy prince, now king. The worked silver crown perched on Aster’s head as if in real danger of sinking to his ears, but his steps were sharp and confident. He knew how to bear himself as if he were a man full-grown, even if the effect was only to more clearly show that he was a child. Geder Palliako, as protector, stood behind him looking considerably less regal than the child prince. The bells stopped together, replaced by the dry report of the funeral drum. With the rest of the hundred bearers, Dawson took his pole and lifted Simeon to his shoulders.

  At the royal crypt, they laid Dawson’s childhood friend in the darkness and closed the stone doors behind him. The official mourners took their stations at the crypt’s entrance. For a month, they would live in the open, keeping a fire lit in memory of Simeon and all kings past. When that was done, the fire would be let die. As the priest read final rites, Dawson’s family came around him. Clara stood at his right, and beside her Barriath and Vicarian. Jorey stood to his left with his arm around Sabiha still fresh from her wedding gown. When the last syllable had been spoken and the last bone-dry drum sounded, the nobles of Antea turned back to their carriages.

  “For what it carries, I am sorry,” a voice said. Lord Ash-ford wore the dark robes of mourning, his cheek ash-marked like the rest. “I’d heard he was an amazing man.”

  “He was a man,” Dawson said. “He had faults and virtues. He was my king and my friend.”

  Ashford nodded. “I am sorry.”

  “Now that Palliako’s regent, you have an audience with him,” Dawson said.

  “I do.”

  “He’s asked me to attend.”

  “I look forward to it,” Ashford said. “This has been hanging over our heads too long. Better to have a clean start now.”

  There are no clean starts, Dawson thought. Just as there are no clean endings. Everything is built like Camnipol: one damn thing atop another atop another reaching down into the bones of the world. Even the forgotten things are back there somewhere, shaping who and what we are now.

  “Yes,” he said instead.

  T

  he walls here were draped with silk tapestry, the air warmed with charcoal and incense. The king’s guard stood along the walls, their faces as impassive before Geder as they had been for Simeon. Even Geder Palliako seemed nearly right for his new role. The tailors had outfitted him in a brocade of red velvet and a circlet of gold that had him looking almost dignified. If he wore it like a costume, these were early days yet. With time and experience, he would come to look natural in it.

  Lord Ashford stood, his hands clasped behind him, waiting for the Lord Regent of Antea to take his seat, and Dawson wondered whether Geder knew that no one was permitted to sit until he did.

  Dawson’s displeasure wasn’t that other people had been welcomed into what should have been a private audience. It was Geder’s first official act as regent. He’d proved an apt tool in Vanai, and whatever magic he’d done to expose Maas had saved at least Aster and likely the kingdom. Lord Ternigan and Lord Skestinin were both present, and rightly so. Lord Caot, Baron of
Dannick. Lord Bannien of Estinford. They were more problematic, but at most they signaled an anticipated shift of the powers in the court. No, what irked Dawson was the other person Geder Palliako had chosen to include.

  “Lord Kalliam,” the priest said, bowing. A season in Camnipol had done little to wipe the desert dust off the man. He still looked like a goat-herder from the depths of the Keshet, likely because it was what he was. Geder’s pet cultist looked about as much at home in the chamber as Dawson would have been slogging through a pigsty.

  “Minister Basrahip,” Dawson said, neither bowing nor allowing any warmth into his voice. “I am surprised to see you here. I had thought we were addressing affairs of state.”

  “It’s all right,” Geder said. “I asked him to come.”

  Dawson held back his reply. There were things he would have said to his equals that he could no longer say to Geder Palliako. Instead he nodded.

  “Well, then,” Geder said, fidgeting with his sleeve. “Let’s get this done. Please. Everyone. Sit down.”

  Ashford waited, matching his movement to Palliako’s so that at no point was he sitting while the Lord Regent stood. Basrahip didn’t sit at all, but rather stood back against the wall, his head slightly bowed, like a boy in silent prayer. Dawson sat, slightly mollified. A foreign priest had no reason to be welcome at the meeting, but at least he was acting like a servant. The other lords of Antea ignored the priest magnificently. He might as well not have existed.

  “Lord Ashford?” Geder said, leaning forward with his elbows on the table. “You requested this audience, and I think we all know why. Would you like to say anything?”

  “Thank you, Lord Regent,” Ashford said. He took a moment to gather himself, his gaze meeting each man at the table in turn. “We are all aware of the crimes of Feldin Maas. King Lechan asked that I come to assure you all that he had no knowledge of the plot and would have been utterly opposed to it if he had known. The intentions to kill Prince Aster were and are unconscionable, and on behalf of Asteril-hold, I would ask for time to address this conspiracy ourselves.”