Leviathan Wakes: Book One of The Expanse

by James S. A. Corey

  “It was good working with you,” Marcus said. “Went better than I expected, considering. I expect I’ll see you about the city. We’ll stay until thaw.”

  “Thank you for not emasculating Sandr. I still hope to make a decent leading man of him one day.”

  “Luck with that,” Marcus said.

  “Take care of yourself, Captain Wester,” Master Kit said. “I find you a fascinating man.”

  And that was over as well. To his left, the caravan master was passing to each cart in turn, taking signatures and inventories. Yardem appeared at Marcus’s side.

  “We’ll need men,” the Tralgu said.

  “And a cunning man. But there’s not a war on here. We’ll find some.”

  The Tralgu flicked a jingling ear.

  “Are you going to let the girl hire us, sir?”

  Marcus took a deep breath. The city smelled of horse shit, fish, and brine. Haze left the sky more white than blue. He exhaled slowly.

  “No,” he said.

  They stood together. The ’van master reached her cart. Cithrin stood before him like a prisoner before a magistrate, spine straight, eyes ahead of her. Alone in a city she didn’t know, without protector or path.

  “We could leave now,” Yardem said.

  Marcus shook his head.

  “She deserves to hear it.”

  The ’van master moved on. Marcus looked to the Tralgu, the girl, spat, and went to her. Do it, he told himself, and get the worst behind and on to the next thing. The girl looked up as he came, her eyes unfocused and glassy with exhaustion, her skin even paler than usual. And yet she lifted her chin a degree.

  “Captain,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yardem and I. We can’t work for you.”

  “All right,” she said. For all her reaction, he might have told her the sun rose in the morning.

  “My advice, take as much as you can carry, leave the rest, and take ship out to Lyoniea or Far Syramis. Start over.”

  The ’van master whistled. The first cart pulled away. The caravan officially ended. The carts around them began to shift and squeak, each bound for its own market, its own quarter. Even the players were moving off now, Sandr and Smit walking with the mules to clear the way. Cithrin bel Sarcour, orphan and ward of the Medean bank, novice smuggler, almost woman, looked at him with tired eyes.

  “Good luck,” he said, and walked away.

  The salt quarter of Porte Oliva was, as Master Kit had said, inhabited by puppets. Street performers seemed to be at every other corner, crouched behind or within boxes, hectoring the passersby in the voices of their dolls. Some were the standard race humor of PennyPenny the violent Jurasu and the clever Timzinae Roaches. Some were political like the idiot King Ardelhumblemub with his oversized crown. Some, Stannin Aftellin the perpetually lustful Firstblood in his traditional love triangle with a phlegmatic Dartinae and a manipulative Cinnae, were bawdy and racial and political all together.

  Many more were more local. Marcus was pausing for a moment by a performance about a filthy butcher who smoked his meat with burning shit and ground maggots into his sausage when a Cinnae woman in the crowd started yelling at the puppeteer for taking gold from a rival butcher. At another, four queensmen with swords and copper torcs watched a story about plums and a fairy princess with scowls that suggested the allegory, whatever it was, might put the performer on the wrong side of the law.

  The public house they stopped at had a courtyard that overlooked the seawall. The sun was sliding down the western sky, setting the white stucco walls glowing gold. The water of the bay was pale blue, the sea beyond an indigo so deep it was almost black. The smell of brine and roasting chicken wrestled with the incense smoke from a wandering priest. Sailors of several races, thick-shouldered and loud-throated all of them, sat at the wide tables under the bright embroidered canopies. Braziers burned between every table, bringing the memory of summer to the winter-chill air. Marcus sat and caught the serving girl’s eye. She nodded a promise, and he leaned back in his chair.

  “We’ll need work.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yardem said.

  “And a new crew. A real one this time.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “But there will be warehouses. Come the spring, caravans going inland.”

  “There will, sir.”

  “Any thoughts, then?”

  The serving girl—a Kurtadam with the soft, pale pelt of an adolescent and gold and silver beads all down her sides—brought mugs of hot cider to them and hurried off before Marcus could pay her. Yardem lifted one. In his hands, it looked small. He drank slowly, his brow furrowed and his ears tucked back. Behind him, the sun glowed bright enough to hurt.

  “What it is?” Marcus said.

  “The smuggler girl, sir. Cithrin.”

  Marcus laughed, but he felt the anger behind it. From the shift in Yardem’s shoulders, the Tralgu heard it too.

  “You think it would be wise to put us between that cart and whoever wants to take it from her?”

  “It wouldn’t be,” Yardem said.

  “Then what’s there to talk about? Job’s done. Time to move forward.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yardem said and took another sip. Marcus waited for him to speak. He didn’t. One of the sailors—a Firstblood with close-cropped black hair and the slushy accent of Lyoneia—started singing a dirty song about the mating habits of Southlings. The large black eyes of that race often got them called eyeholes, which lent itself to certain rhymes. Marcus felt his jaw clench. He leaned forward, putting himself in Yardem’s sight.

  “You have something to say?”

  Yardem sighed.

  “If she were less like Meriam, you’d have stayed,” Yardem said.

  The dirty song went to a new verse, speculating on the sex life of Dartinae and Cinnae. Or glow-worms and maggots, as the lyrics put it. Marcus shot an annoyed glance at the singer. The tightness in his jaw was spreading down his neck and between his shoulder blades. Yardem put down his cider.

  “If it had been a man driving that cart,” Yardem said. “Or an older woman. Someone who looked less like Alys or wasn’t the age Meriam would have been, you would have taken contract from them.”

  Marcus coughed out a laugh. The singer took a breath, preparing to launch into another verse. Marcus stood.

  “You! Enough of that. There’s grown men here trying to think.”

  The sailor’s face clouded.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “The man telling you that’s enough,” Marcus said.

  The sailor sneered, then blinked at something in Marcus’s expression, flushed red, and sat down, his back toward Marcus and Yardem. Marcus turned back to his second.

  “That cart is going to pull blades and blood to it, and we both know it,” Marcus said softly. “That much wealth in one place is a call to murder. Now you’re telling me that standing in front of it’s the right thing?”

  “No, sir. Damned foolish, sir,” Yardem said. “Only you’d have done it.”

  Marcus shook his head. In his memory, Meriam reached out from the flames. He took her dying body in his arms. He could smell the burning hair, the skin. He felt her relax against him and remembered thinking that she was saved, that she was safe, and then realizing what the softness in her joints really meant. He didn’t know anymore if it was the true memory of the events or his dreams.

  Cithrin bel Sarcour. He pictured her cart. Pictured the middle-aged Firstblood tin hauler in her place. Or the ’van master and his wife. Or Master Kit and Opal. Anyone besides the girl herself.

  He rubbed his eyes until false colors bloomed in front of him. The sea murmured. The sharp apple smell of his cider cut through the cold air. The anger in his chest collapsed, nothing more than paper armor after all, and he said something obscene.

  “Should I go find her, sir?”

  “We better had,” Marcus said, dropping the coins for their drinks on the table. “Before she does something dangerous.”
>
  Geder

  Geder might have found it more difficult to hide his subterfuge if his failure hadn’t been assumed from the start. Instead, he and his half-loyal soldiers limped back into the city, gave their thin reports, and were dismissed. Geder returned to the weak stream of his duties; enforcing taxes, arresting loyalists, and generally harassing the people of Vanai in the name of Alan Klin.

  “I can’t pay this,” the old Timzinae said, looking up from the taxation order. “The prince had us all pay twice over before the war, and now you want as much as he did.”

  “It isn’t me,” Geder said.

  “I don’t see anyone else in here.”

  The shop squatted in a dark street. Scraps of leather lay here and there. A brass tailor’s dummy wrapped in soft black hide that still smelled slightly of the tanner’s yard loomed near the oilcloth window. As armor, leather that thin would be useless. Barely better than cloth, and probably worse than good quilting. As court costume, on the other hand, it would look quite impressive.

  “You want it?” the Timzinae asked.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “The cloak. Commissioned by the Master of Canals, then he vanished in the night just before”—he held up the taxation notice in his black-scaled hand—“our liberation by the noble empire. It’s not done, and I’ve got enough of that dye lot left I could recut it to fit you.”

  Geder licked his lips. He couldn’t. Someone would ask where he’d gotten it, and he’d have to explain. Or lie. If he said he’d bought it on the cheap, maybe while he was on the southern roads or from one of the little caravans they’d searched…

  “Could you really recut it?”

  The Timzinae’s smile was a marvel of cynicism.

  “Could you misplace this?” he asked, nodding at the paper.

  For a moment, Geder felt the echo of his pleasure riding away from the smugglers, gems and jewels hidden in his shirt. One lost tax notice. At worst it would keep Klin’s coffers a little more sparse, his reports back to Camnipol a little less promising. It would keep the leatherman in his shop for another season; if the man had asked, Geder would probably have “lost” the notice even without the promise of a good cloak.

  Besides which, compared to what he’d already done, the twenty silver coins lost to Klin were like a raindrop in the ocean.

  “Putting an honest man out of work can’t be to anyone’s benefit,” Geder said. “I’m sure we can work this through.”

  “Stand up on that stool, then,” the Timzinae said. “I’ll make sure the drape’s best for your frame.”

  Winter was dry season in Vanai. The walls of the canals showed high-water marks feet above the thin ice and sluggish, dark flow. Fallen leaves skittered along the bases of walls, and trees stood bare and dead in the gardens and arbors. The icicles that hung from the wooden eaves of the houses grew thinner by the day, and new snow didn’t come. The nights were bitter, the days merely cold. The city waited for the thaw, the melt, the rush of freshwater and life that came from a spring still months away. Everything was dead or sleeping. Geder walked through the street bouncing on his toes a little, his guardsmen following behind.

  When he’d first returned, Geder had locked his doors, taken out the cloth pouch that he’d bought in Gilea, and spread the gems and jewels on his bed. Glittering in the dim light, they’d posed a problem. He had enough available wealth now to make his day-to-day life in Vanai more comfortable, but not as coin. He could sell them, of course, but giving them to gem merchants within the city risked someone recognizing a stone or a piece of metalwork. And if Klin or one of his favorites noticed that Geder had suddenly more coin than he should, nothing good could follow.

  He’d answered the problem by sending his squire out to exchange only the most innocuous stones—three round garnets and a diamond in undistinguished silver. The purse of coins had silver and bronze, copper, and two thin rounds of gold frail enough to bend with his fingers. For his lifestyle, it was a fortune, and he carried a portion of it now in his satchel along with a book, ready for his last errand of the day.

  The academy looked over a narrow square. In its greater days, it had been a center for the children of the lower nobility and the higher merchant class to hire tutors or commission speeches. The carved oaken archway that led into its great hall was marked with the names of the scholars and priests who had given lectures there over the century and a half since its founding. Within, the air smelled of wax and sandalwood, and sunlight filtered through high horizontal windows, catching motes of dust suspended in the air. Somewhere nearby, a man recited poetry in a deep, resonant voice. He breathed the air of the place.

  Footsteps padded up behind him. The clerk was a thin Southling man, his huge dark eyes dominating his face. His body spoke of deference and fear.

  “May I help you, my lord? There isn’t a problem?”

  “I wanted to find a researcher,” Geder said. “My squire was told this was the place to come.”

  The Southling blinked his huge black eyes.

  “I… That is, my lord…” The clerk shook himself. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Geder said.

  “You haven’t come to arrest someone? Or levy fines?”

  “No.”

  “Well. Just a moment, my lord,” the Southling said. “Let me find someone that might be of use. If you’ll come with me?”

  In the side chamber, Geder sat on a wooden bench worn smooth by decades of use. The recitation of poems went on, the voice fainter now, the words made unintelligible. Geder loosened his belt, shifting in his seat. He had the almost physical memory of waiting for his own tutors, and pushed back the irrational anxiety that he might not be able to answer the scholar’s questions. The door slid open, and a Firstblood man sidled in. Geder popped to his feet.

  “Good afternoon. My name is Geder Palliako.”

  “You’re known in the city, Lord Palliako,” the man said. “Tamask said something about wanting a researcher?”

  “Yes,” Geder said, taking the book from his side and holding it out. “I’ve been translating this book, only it’s not very well presented. I want someone to find more like it, but different.”

  The scholar took the book gently, as if it were a colorful but unknown insect, and opened the pages. Geder fidgeted.

  “It’s about the fall of the Dragon Empire,” he said. “It’s couched as history, but I’m more interested in speculative essay?”

  The sound of ancient pages hushing against each other competed with the distant voice and the murmur of a breeze outside the windows. The scholar leaned close to the book, frowning.

  “What are you proposing, Lord Palliako?”

  “I’ll pay for any books you can find on the period. If they can be bought outright, I’ll pay a reward. If they have to be copied, I can commission a scribe, but that means a smaller payment for the researcher. I’m looking particularly for considerations of the fall of the dragons, and especially there’s a passage in there about something called the Righteous Servant? I’d like more about that.”

  “May I ask why, lord?”

  Geder opened his mouth, then closed it. He’d never had anyone to talk with about the question, never had to explain himself.

  “It’s about… truth. And deceit. And I thought it was interesting,” he said gamely.

  “Would you also be interested in rhetorics on the subject? Asinia Secundus wrote a fine examination of the nature of truth during the Second Alfin Occupation.”

  “That’s philosophy? I’ll look at it, but I’d really rather it was an essay.”

  “You mentioned that. Speculative essay,” the scholar said, the faintest sigh in his voice.

  “Is that a problem?” Geder asked.

  “Not at all, my lord,” the scholar said with a forced smile. “We would be honored to help.”

  My contention is this: given the lack of primary documents from that time, our best practice is to examine those who later claimed the mantle of the Dragon Empire,
and by considering their actions infer the nature of the examples they followed. The best example of this is the enigmatic Siege of Aastapal. Direct examination of the ruins there has failed to determine whether the destruction of the city was accomplished by the assaulting forces of the great dragon Morade or, more controversially, the occupying forces of his brother and clutch-mate, Inys.

  Faced with this dearth of direct evidence, we may turn to better-known histories. As late as a thousand years after, we have the great Jasuru general Marras Toca in the fourth Holy Cleansing campaign. Also the Anthypatos of Lynnic, Hararrsin fifth of the name, at the battle of Ashen Dan. Also Queen Errathiánpados at the siege of Kázhamor. In each of these cases, a wartime commander claiming lineage with the last Dragon Emperor has chosen to destroy a city as a means of denying it to the enemy. If, as I will try to prove, this was done in conscious imitation of the last great war of dragons, it implies that the destruction of Aastapal was done by Inys as a tactical gambit to keep it from Morade’s control rather than the generally accepted scenario.

  Geder cocked his head. The argument seemed weak. For one thing, he’d never heard of two of the three examples. And then, out of all the battles and wars and sieges since the fall of dragons, he’d think you could pick instances of any strategy or decision you wanted. The case could be made just as well in the other direction by drawing different leaders, different battles. And God knew every third tyrant claimed some sort of lineage from the dragons.

  And still, all specifics aside, it was a fascinating thought. When something can’t be known, when the particulars are lost forever, to look at the events that followed from it, that echoed it, and trace backwards toward the truth. Like seeing the ripples in a pond and knowing where the stone fell in. He looked up at his little room, excited. His writing desk still had a bit of ink in the well, but he’d put his pen somewhere. He laid the book open and scurried to the stack of firewood near the grate, picked up a fallen splinter, and went back to his table quickly. Rough wood dipped into the darkness, and Geder carefully marked the margin of the book. Looking at ripples to know where the stone fell.