The King's Blood

by Daniel Abraham

  “You will speak when I say you can!” Geder screamed. Cithrin almost laughed at the unintended, bleak comedy of it. No one would ever successfully command Dawson Kalliam to speak again.

  Geder stood, looking out at the crowd as if seeing them for the first time and unimpressed. At his feet, Dawson Kalliam spasmed once, then again, bare heels kicking at the floor. He went still.

  “It’s over,” Geder said. “You can go now.”

  He walked out quickly, the bloody sword forgotten in his hand.

  “I do believe that man is about to vomit,” Paerin Clark said.

  “I think we should leave,” Cithrin said.

  The court left with them. Men with wide eyes and women with tight mouths. They’d come to see a death, and there had been one, but the form of it had been wrong and it left them shaken. If Dawson Kalliam had been stabbed with thirteen dull, rusted blades, there would have been no discomfort. Instead, Geder had lost his temper and taken the thing in hand and anything was possible. And she’d have bet a month’s salary that by nightfall, the story in the taphouses and alley mouths would make it sound like something out of a drama. The righteous king taking the executioner’s sword in his own hand.

  The day gave no hint at the violence that had just taken place. Birds still sang, and the breeze smelled of flowers and smoke and the promise of rain. As she and Paerin walked down the flagstone pathway past sprays of midsummer blooms, she caught sight of the woman in grey. Lady Kalliam. On impulse, she took Paerin’s hand and dragged him with her as she threaded her way through the crowd.

  “Lady Kalliam,” she said as she drew up beside the woman.

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Cithrin bel Sarcour. I’m voice of the Medean bank in Porte Oliva. I wanted to give you the bank’s sympathies and my own. This can’t have been a good day.”

  Lady Kalliam lifted her chin and smiled. She looked younger than Cithrin had thought. And on a better day, she would have been beautiful.

  “That’s kind of you,” she said. “Very few people seem to feel that way.”

  Cithrin put her hand on the woman’s arm, and Lady Kalliam covered Cithrin’s fingers with her own. It was less than a breath, and then the crowd parted them again.

  “And that was for?” Paerin asked.

  “Her son’s important enough to Palliako that there was special dispensation to speak at the execution,” Cithrin said. “May be useful later, it may not. Either way it costs us nothing.”

  “Well, I suppose that’s one—”

  “Cithrin!”

  She stopped, looking back. The crowd between her and the Kingspire was splitting apart, highborn and low, noblemen and servants, all of them stepped off the flagstones and into flowerbeds or grass or mud. Geder Palliako was racing toward them, his face red. Blood still spattered his sleeves and face. She waited for him. The eyes of the court were on her like hawks considering a rabbit. Paerin Clark’s eyebrows were crawling up his forehead. This was a problem, and she couldn’t solve it.

  “Oh dear,” she said. Then, stepping forward. “Lord Regent. You’re much too kind.”

  He stood before her now, his chest working like a bellows.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see that. I shouldn’t have … I meant to invite you. And Paerin. Both of you. After it was done, I wanted you to join me for a meal. Some conversation. I have a book of poems that I got in Vanai, and I wanted you …”

  Paerin Clark, beside her, said nothing. She didn’t think a little help here would have been too much to ask, but she also knew he wouldn’t give it.

  “You are very, very kind to make such an offer, my lord,” she said. “But it occurs to me that you are presently soaked in a dead man’s blood.”

  “Oh,” Geder said, looking down at himself. “I am. I’m sorry about that too. But if you’ll wait, just a few minutes.”

  “There will be better days for it, my lord,” Cithrin said. For a heartstopping moment, she thought he was going to kiss her, but instead he only bowed much more deeply than the head of an empire should ever do before a banker. The looks of surprise and outrage traveled out from him like a ripple in a pond, but she only kept her smile in place as he made his way back toward the Kingspire. When she turned to leave, Canl Daskellin’s daughter was looking at her like the promise of an early death. Cithrin bowed to her as well, and took Paerin Clark by the arm.

  The crowd re-formed, high men scraping mud off their best leather boots, and the tittering and laughter and scandalized eyebrows swarming among them. Cithrin cursed quietly under her breath, repeating a nearly silent string of obscenities until they were nearly at the cart. She was embarrassed. She was horrified. And more deeply than any of the rest, she found she was afraid. Afraid in particular of Geder Palliako.

  The carter started them off into the press of the street. No one was moving quickly. It could take them hours to get back to their rooms. Cithrin wished deeply for a way to clear their path, and not just here on the street.

  “So,” Paerin Clark said. “Did all of that mean something?”

  “It meant it’s time for us to get out of Camnipol,” Cithrin said.

  Marcus

  I

  t had been years since Marcus had traveled the coast of Elassae. He’d forgotten how beautiful it was. Just after Newport, the ground became rough, the coastline ragged and craggy. Mountains rose up, dead volcanoes with caldera lakes. They marched along north to south like soldiers marching into the sea. The string of islands leading south into the Inner Sea was their heads as they sank deeper and deeper. The water had none of the greenish tint and cloudiness of the colder climes. Sailing a boat on these waters would be like taking wing and flying.

  There was no dragon’s road along this coast, or rather there were rumors that once there had been one, and the spill of the molten rock had covered it over back before the volcanoes had gone into their torpor. Somewhere deep under the rolling black hills, a thread of eternal green about as useful now as a fishhook in the desert. And Marcus found he didn’t particularly care. The path before them was clear enough: don’t walk so far north that you were going uphill, don’t walk so far south that your feet got wet. Soon enough, they’d reach the inner plains, and then Suddapal and then south across the Inner Sea to Lyoneia. And after that, it was too far ahead to figure.

  The grass on the hills they rode was so green it hurt to look at. So intense that there were times Marcus felt that he was dreaming or hallucinating, and the sun and the tall blue air left him feeling that he could stretch up his arms and take it all into himself. Small villages studded the coastline. Timzinae fishermen, their black, insectlike chitin greyed and cracked by years of brine. When they were asked, Master Kit told a story about being a naturalist for the queen of Birancour searching for a rare kind of singing shrimp. He told it well enough that Marcus had found himself wondering sometimes whether the next cove might have them. Or perhaps it was the power of Master Kit’s strange blood that made him so convincing.

  They were asked less often than Marcus had expected, though. The more usual case was that they were offered a bowl of the potluck stew that every fishing dock kept cooking all through the year, each man paying in something from that day’s catch in return for a bowl that had been simmering since before some of them had been born. The fishermen of the coast were dour and gruff and friendly. The women, apart from being Timzinae, were beautiful. The scales were more than enough to keep Marcus from repeating his error from Porte Oliva, though. And Master Kit, while a vicious flirt, never seemed to follow along as far as a woman’s bed.

  Suddapal was a complex of five coastal cities, the largest of which spread out black and tan against the unreal green of the countryside. Where there should have been farms, sheep, goats, there was a vast swath of wild grassland, untouched and unhunted except at religious festivals. It struck Marcus as a terrible way to assure a steady food supply, but he had to admit it was beautiful to look at and walk through. A dra
gon’s road led east from its main square, but they’d gone as far east as they were going to go.

  Which meant finding a boat.

  “Are you sailors, then?” the Yemmu man asked.

  “I’ve been known to haul a rope a time or two,” Marcus said.

  “I’ve been known to pray a time or two,” the man said, the words surprisingly clear around the massive bulk of his tusks. “Doesn’t make me a priest.”

  The docks of Suddapal spread out before them, piers running out into the wide blue water like bridges so long that Marcus could imagine walking to Lyoneia. After Timzinae, the most common race in Suddapal were the Yemmu like this man, thick, strong, intimidating to look at, but for the most part nicer than Pyk Usterhall. It was good to be reminded that the woman’s irritating nature was her own and not her people’s.

  “We aren’t expecting difficult waters,” Master Kit said. “I understand that the worst of the storm season is over, and the maps I’ve seen show the current carrying us quite near our destination.”

  “Maps you’ve seen,” the Yemmu said. “So you’ve never been there.”

  “No.”

  The man nodded his massive head.

  “You’re a pair of idiots,” he said.

  “Friendly, though,” Master Kit said. “And I do have a certain amount of gold.”

  “Gold sinks,” the Yemmu said. “I don’t mind taking your coin, but I start feeling guilty when I let idiots die. Here’s what I will do, though. Small finder’s fee. Nothing you can’t afford. I’ll find you a ship and someone that knows how to use it.”

  Marcus looked at Master Kit. The actor frowned.

  “I hesitate to take anyone with us,” Master Kit said. “Our business is sensitive.”

  “You know what else is sensitive? My—”

  “I’m afraid that what we’re doing might be dangerous,” Master Kit said.

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “Kit,” Marcus said. “Give the man his fee. If we find something that’ll work, we’re not obligated to wait. If we don’t, that’s a fine second best.”

  Kit sighed, counted out seven silver coins, and pushed them across the table. The Yemmu man took them, nodded once, and heaved himself up and away. Marcus watched him lumbering away from them down the docks.

  “You think he’ll really look for someone?” Marcus asked.

  “He will,” Kit said. “I wouldn’t have given him the money otherwise.”

  “Right, you can tell,” Marcus said. “I keep forgetting about that.”

  One of the curiosities of Suddapal was the utter lack of inns and wayhouses. There were travelers, but negotiating shelter was a matter of knocking on doors until someone with a spare room or space in a shed was willing to reach agreement. In good weather, they went to a great common green in the middle of the city and set up camp there just as they would have on the road. Timzinae boys walked the green from dusk until late into the night selling baked fish and goat in bowls made from turtle shells. The horizon was clear and the smell of the sea air so clean and unthreatening that they put their bedrolls out without the bother of the little lean-to tent. The horses, they stabled, though other people had let theirs wander the green, cropping the grass and sleeping in a great and temporary herd.

  Marcus traced the constellations, his fingers laced behind his head. It had been a long time since he’d just looked up at the stars. Beside him, Master Kit sighed.

  “Maybe we should have started by sea,” he said. “We could have gotten a boat in Maccia. Or gone west to Cabral and made up the time by sailing.”

  “I thought the currents wouldn’t have done the right thing.”

  “But if we’re going to end up hiring on help anyway,” Kit said.

  “We couldn’t have known. It was the best guess we had. Not like there’s much else we could go on.”

  “No,” Kit said. “I suppose there’s not.”

  Across the green, someone struck up a tune on a small harp.

  “Are you still worried about her?” Master Kit asked.

  “Cithrin, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Marcus said. “But I think you were right. She wouldn’t have been counting on me to come save her. So at least I won’t have disappointed.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “That’s because I’m a mean bitter old man. Do you see those four stars in a row? The ones right there near the horizon?”

  “I do.”

  “You can’t see them where I was born. Too far north. There are a lot of stars you can’t see from there.”

  Kit made a small grunting sound by way of comment.

  “You’ve traveled the world,” Marcus said. “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  “Hmm. Let me see. There’s a lake in Herez. Lake Esasmadde. It’s huge. And in the center of it, there’s a whirlpool like when the last of the water is leaving a drain, but the lake never empties. And in the center of the whirlpool there’s a tower. Five stories tall, and utterly unreachable. As far as I can tell, it’s been that way since the dragons.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It could be a prison. Someplace that the dragons dropped their bad slaves. Or the last retreat of Drakkis Stormcrow. I really couldn’t say for certain. What about you? What’s the strangest thing you’ve seen in your travels?”

  “Probably you.”

  “Well. Fair enough.”

  The harp tune changed, shifting to a soft melody that the night seemed to carry on its own.

  “I think the third string’s out of tune,” Kit said.

  “Only a bit,” Marcus said. “And you aren’t paying for it.”

  Sleep hovered at the edge of Marcus’s mind, but never quite descended. Kit shifted in his bedroll, and a falling star flashed overhead, there and gone before Marcus could say anything.

  “You know,” Kit said, very softly. “I think I could make the nightmares go away. If you wanted me, I could try.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “I would tell you that it wasn’t your fault, what happened to them. I could tell you that they forgave you. Given time, you would believe me. It might afford you more peace. Some sleep.”

  “If you tried, I’d have to kill you.”

  “That bad?”

  “That bad,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t take your memory of them.”

  “It would take what the memories meant,” Marcus said. “That’s worse. Besides, they’re not bothering me right now.”

  “I’d noticed that,” Kit said. “I thought it was a bit odd. You’ve seemed almost content. It’s unnerving.”

  “I had everything in Porte Oliva,” Marcus said. “Steady work. A company that respected and followed me. I didn’t work for a king. I had Cithrin and I had Yardem. I am, by the way, going to kill him when we’re done with this. He betrayed me, and he’ll answer for it. You can try your little magic on that if you want.”

  “I believe you,” Kit said. “But you’ve lost all of that now, haven’t you?”

  “I have,” Marcus said. “I’m finishing up my fourth decade in the world sleeping on dirt and grass beside a man with spiders crawling though his veins. I have to get across the Inner Sea, and I don’t know how I’m going to manage it. If I do get there, I’m not certain yet how I’ll get back. And when I do, I’ll most likely be killed trying to slaughter a goddess. And I feel better than I have since Cithrin beat her audit. When I have something, I worry about all the things I’d have to do to keep it. Out here, I’ve got nothing. Or at least nothing good. And so I’m free.”

  “That sounds like a complex way of saying that your soul is in the shape of a circle, turned on its edge,” Kit said.

  Marcus nodded.

  “You know I respect your wisdom and enjoy your company, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody likes you when you’re being clever.”

  Marcus drifted to
sleep even before the harpist quit for the night. He woke in the morning with dew in his hair and the blue-yellow light of dawn reaching across a perfect blue sky.

  T

  wo days later, they were walking past a small streetside café when Master Kit suddenly paused, his eyes narrowing at the worked iron sign of a dolphin above the door.

  “Something?” Marcus said.

  “Perhaps,” Kit said. “It’s been … Just a moment, would you?”

  Inside, the café was dirty and close, the walls stained by years of smoke that came even now from the kitchen, leaving the place in a haze of charcoal smoke, seared fat, and spices that made Marcus’s mouth water just smelling them.

  A young and angry-looking Timzinae man barreled out toward them, waving black hands.

  “Not open yet,” he said. “Come back in an hour.” “Forgive me,” Master Kit said. “Your name wouldn’t be Epetchi, would it?”

  The Timzinae’s eyes went wide, and then disconcertingly did it again as his nictitating membrane slid open with an audible click.

  “Kitap!” he shouted, leaping to put his arms around Master Kit. “Kitap, you old bastard! We all thought you were dead by now. You and your friend come back to the kitchen. Ela! Kitap’s here, and you won’t believe it. He’s old and fat.”

  Marcus found himself carried along on a wave of other people’s enthusiasm, seated at a cutting table, and eating from a bowl of something that looked like the waste scraped off a cooking grill and tasted better than anything he’d had in years.

  All around him, Timzinae men and women were smiling, and little boys and girls so young that their scales were still light brown were trotted out bored but patient to Master Kit, who delighted over each one. When he introduced Marcus by his full name, he could tell that the first man—Epetchi, his name was—was skeptical. But if old Kitap wanted to travel with a man who pretended to be the murderer of kings from Northcoast, it was apparently fine by him.