The King's Blood tdatc-2

by Daniel Abraham

“That’s a large favor to ask,” Yardem said. “Even if it was someone from the old days.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “We don’t have anything like the gold to hire a company.”

  “I know where there’s a bank’s strongbox.”

  Yardem bowed his head and grunted. Marcus went on a half dozen steps before he realized that Yardem had stopped. The Tralgu’s face was perfectly empty. Impassive. Marcus walked back and stood before him.

  “You’ve something to say?”

  “Do I understand, sir, that your plan is to steal from the bank, hire a mercenary company, and march it into the middle of an imperial civil war?”

  “My plan,” Marcus said, his voice conversational but with a buzz of anger, “is to get Cithrin back safe. Whatever I have to do in order to see that happen, I’m doing. If it meant sinking this city in the sea, I’d do it.”

  “This is a mistake, sir.”

  “Are you saying she isn’t worth it?”

  “I’m saying that taking an outside force into a civil war is marching barrels of oil into a fire. Crossing the bank to do it means nothing to come back to, even if you did find her.”

  “What else am I supposed to do? Sit by and wait?”

  “The magistra’s smart. Capable. You could have faith in her.”

  “She’s a girl in the middle of a war,” Marcus said, “and we both know what can happen to girls in the middle of wars. I’m going to find her, and I’m going to keep her safe. I’ve never asked you to come with me. If this isn’t something you can do, then it isn’t.”

  Yardem’s scowl seemed to change the shape of his bones.

  “I’m going to ask you to reconsider this,” he said, his voice low. “The strongbox—”

  “Tell me it’s worth more than she is,” Marcus said. “Tell me the bank is worth more than Cithrin.”

  They stood in the street. On the horizon, the clouds flicked with lightning, but they were too far away for thunder. Marcus took another bite of his food, and Yardem sighed.

  “How do you plan getting to the strongbox, sir?”

  “I set who’s on the watch,” Marcus said. “A hammer. A chisel. A cart with a decent team. We know the low roads between here and the Free Cities, or else we can charter a little coast-hugger. Hell, buy a fishing boat and just don’t come back. Could be in Elassae in twenty days. Maccia in considerably less.”

  “Still an awfully long way to Camnipol.”

  “That’s an argument for starting tonight,” Marcus said.

  Buying a handcart took Marcus almost no time. A potter with a small yard near the counting house was willing to part with one, and Marcus was willing to overpay. Finding a hammer and chisel meant finding the smith in his home and explaining what he needed. Decades of hammer blows had made the man nearly deaf.

  The plan’s simplicity was its strength.

  The street was empty and dark, the righteous men and women of Porte Oliva asleep in their beds and the unrighteous tending to stay nearer the salt quarter. Fewer queensmen patrolled here in the night, and if they did, what could they object to? Marcus and Yardem were known to be part of the bank. If someone came across them on the way to the counting house, they were only on their way to a turn at the watch. And once they left, Marcus assumed they were gone forever. It wasn’t likely that Porte Oliva or anywhere that the Medean bank was a force would be open to him again.

  Small price.

  In the gloom, Yardem pulled the handcart into the house, locked and barred the door. Marcus went below to the sunken strongbox. The lock was stronger than it looked, and opening it took the best part of an hour. When the lid finally did swing back, silent on well-oiled hinges, Marcus brought his lantern close. Only the most sensitive and valued contracts were kept here. Papers were only paper, and the number of people who could use them was small. Gems, though. Sacks of gold coin, weights of silver. Jewelry and sealed tubes of rare spice. Those were things that anyone could use. Marcus squatted over the box, his free hand going through the wealth of the bank quickly but with consideration.

  “Less than it was when we came,” Yardem said.

  “That’s to be expected,” Marcus said. “Most of it’s tied up in loans and partnerships. There’s enough, though. Maybe not for a full company and full season, but a couple hundred sword-and-bows. We’ll move faster on the road that way too. Won’t have the long supply lines to slow us down.”

  “I’m going to ask you for a favor, sir.”

  Marcus looked up. The lantern cast the shadow of Yardem’s chin up over his face, hooding him with it. In that light, he could have been someone else entirely.

  “What is it?” Marcus said.

  “Once we put that in the cart and walk out the door, it’s done. This is the last chance to reconsider. I’d like you to take a moment and pray with me on this.”

  Marcus laughed. “I’m serious, sir.”

  “God’s not listening,” Marcus said. “It’s not what he does.”

  “I think we might be the ones meant to listen, sir.”

  “Get it over with,” Marcus said.

  Yardem bowed his head, the black eyes closing. Marcus shifted from foot to foot, waiting. It was seven streets to a stable. More than that to the port. But with what he’d have in hand, buying a way out of the city would be easy. Between the gold and their two swords, the morning would find them elsewhere. Yardem opened his eyes.

  “Change your mind, sir.”

  “Nope, the spirit didn’t speak. Enough theology,” Marcus said, tossing a small leather sack of gems. Yardem caught them overhand. “Help me load this up.”

  Yardem’s hand closed on his shoulder, and the world spun. The stone wall of the basement struck his back like a hammer, and he fell to his hands and knees.

  “What in—”

  Yardem stepped close, his wide hand on Marcus’s neck. Marcus rolled, pulling his sword free as he did it, but the Tralgu’s other hand clamped on his wrist and twisted. The hand around his throat lifted, and Marcus’s feet lost the floor. As the world began to go red and hazy, he brought a knee up hard into the soft spot just under Yardem’s ribs. He felt something give way and the grip on his throat eased enough that he could draw in a sip of air. There was desperation in the way Yardem pulled at Marcus’s sword arm, working it like a lever, but Marcus went with his momentum and broke the hold.

  He swung around, blade at the defense half a heartbeat too late. The hammer he’d bought to break the lock came down gracefully on the bridge of his nose. Something cracked wetly and the world dissolved in pain. He felt his sword wrested from his grip as if it were happening to someone else. He bulled forward blind, his shoulder finding something soft and pushing Yardem back to the ground, but the Tralgu slipped to his left and got an arm around his throat. Marcus kicked, trying to twist his head down low enough to put his teeth on Yardem’s arm, but he couldn’t. His mouth tasted of blood and he couldn’t breathe through his nose. His fingers dug at the thick, strangling flesh. Something smelled like smoke. His leg kicked out from under him, and the world narrowed to a greyish point far away before him and then blinked out.

  When Marcus came to, his legs and arms were bound behind him and a cloth was pushed into his mouth and tied there with a leather thong. A sack was pulled over his head, making the process of breathing even more difficult. He was in the handcart, and its wooden wheels were rumbling against the cobblestones. His nose throbbed, sending stabbing pain back into his skull, and he tried to twist into a position where he could rise to his knees or shout for the queensmen. Anything.

  “That the package?” an unfamiliar voice asked.

  “Is,” Yardem said. “You know where to take it?”

  “Do. But I’m not going to vouch for a damned thing if he gets loose along the way. I’m no soldier.”

  “I am a soldier,” Yardem said. “He won’t get loose.”

  Something lifted him around the middle and dropped him hard against boards. Chains ratt
led and a wide leather strap wrapped him like a girth. The sack slipped, and Marcus saw the bed of a cart, a wide iron ring set into the planks, and Yardem fixing the chain to it. Rage and willpower lifted him to his knees, and Yardem casually pressed him back down.

  “How long are you going to take back there?” the carter asked.

  “Almost done,” Yardem rumbled. He pulled at the chain, and Marcus slid down to the boards. His shoulder and hips screamed in pain. His labored breath started the blood flowing from his nostrils. Again. If he craned his neck, he could see the Tralgu’s stoic face looming over him. There was fresh blood on Yardem’s hands and a cut on his ear that Marcus didn’t remember making. Part of Marcus still expected to be released. That it was a joke or a lesson or the start of some overblown religious statement.

  The other part of him, that part that understood, stared up and thought, I will kill you for this.

  When Yardem spoke, his voice was calm. He might have been talking about the weather or the prospects of a new recruit. He might have been talking about anything.

  “The day I throw you in a ditch and take the company, sir? It’s today.”

  Geder

  They went underground.

  His first thought had been to follow the paths and gantries that clung to the side of the Division, working their way down until they found a passageway that led into the ruins beneath the city. The pale woman, Cithrin, had seen the problem with that: following paths that people were already using meant running across the people who were already using them. Safety meant finding places that no one went, making passageways where there had been none before. The idea seemed second nature to her. It scared him to death, but he couldn’t deny the wisdom of her words. It took the better part of a day for the actors to find an abandoned corner of the city, but they did. An old warehouse that had fallen into disuse and partly collapsed in on itself, the walls sinking into the city below.

  The building had fallen because there was something beneath it to fall into. Geder, dressed now in rough grey clothes that stank of perfume and greasepaint, had let himself be led into the fallen house, and down to where an ancient archway still held the stone above it at bay. There was only a foot or so of open air between the rubble and the archway’s top, but cats went in and out through it freely. Cithrin had gone first, crawling into the darkness with only a small candle carried in a thick glass lamp. The hole was so small, she had to pull herself along by the elbows, but when she’d gone in a half dozen yards, she called back. It opened wider. There was space. They should join her.

  Aster had gone next, the stones scraping under him. Cithrin had kept calling until he found her.

  And then it was his turn.

  When he’d been a boy Aster’s age, he had been the son of the manor in Rivenhalm. There had been no boys of his station within a day’s ride in any direction. Climbing trees, leaping from precipices into distant water, crawling through caves. These hadn’t been the things of his childhood. He had no experience of adventure to draw from. Inching forward, the daylight fading behind him, Geder was aware of the great weight above him. The old stone pressed on the air, thickening it. The rubble grew deeper, pressing his back against the ceiling until he almost had to slither, snakelike. The stink of cat piss grew stronger. At one point, he felt sure that he’d turned the wrong way in the darkness, that he was lost and buried alive.

  But then the glimmer of Cithrin’s candle caught his eye. When he tumbled down into the half-filled chamber, he was sure there would be blood soaking his knees and forearms, but the candle revealed only a few pale scratches.

  Aster had volunteered to go back out to the actors waiting under the open sky. His eyes had been bright and excited. When he came back, he had a string tied to his ankle. Together, they pulled a tray through the tiny crawl-space: candles and blankets and sealed jars of raisins and water and dried meat. It wasn’t enough to live on for long, but it would get them through the day. Cithrin shouted her thanks, and the faint voices of the others answered and then went away.

  The room was part of a buried garden. The flowerbeds were still visible between ancient columns. An open turning led to a smaller space where the corpse of a tree lay against the still-standing stones of a great wall. A crushed doorway led deeper into the bones of the city, rooms that might once have been a house. The space was too small for anything that wasn’t a cat, and the dust on the ground was thick and undisturbed by human feet. Everything stank of cat, but Geder found that the scent faded with time.

  “Well,” Cithrin said. “This will do nicely.”

  “We should look more in the back,” Aster said. “Might be another way out.”

  “Better that we don’t. It’s not on anyone’s path. If we go farther in and find a space that people are using, we might be discovered. Better that we stay here where nobody goes.”

  “Who would be down here?” Geder said. “This place is a hole. Literally. It’s a hole in the ground.”

  “Every city in the world has its poor,” Cithrin said. “And say what you want about this. It’s shelter. That’s why we’re here.”

  More than the violence, what haunted Geder was the betrayal. He lay in darkness, hands behind his head. Cithrin had gone out for food and news. The cats whose lair they’d appropriated were staying away except for the occasional distant scratching of claws on stone. Aster’s deep, regular breath said the boy was sleeping. He wished he could sleep too.

  When he closed his eyes, he saw Dawson Kalliam. He saw the knife in his hand and the blood on Basrahip’s fingers. It didn’t make sense. This was Jorey’s father. Geder had helped the man expose and destroy Feldin Maas. He’d trusted Dawson with his armies. Dawson Kalliam was a friend. A patron. He saw the knife again, the cold hatred in Dawson’s eyes.

  If Dawson was an enemy, then anyone could be. For any reason or for no reason at all.

  It was terrible and crushing, and since Aster was asleep and couldn’t know, Geder let himself weep a little from the fear and desolation.

  There were small noises here. The cats who still stalked the deeper ways, tentative scouts coming near and then scrabbling away in panic. There were neither rats nor mice, the prey kept away, Geder assumed, by the stink of the predators. Now and then, he also heard the ticking of pebbles and flakes of rock as something small dislodged. Over years and centuries, those tiny bits of stone and rivulets of rainwater would fill in the spaces like this. Once, men and women had walked on these stones, admired the violets in these beds. Now even the open sun was gone. And one day the sand and stone would claim even this small bubble of air. Anything could be buried below Camnipol, and no one would ever find it. It was a city built on lost things.

  Someone grunted. Stones shifted in the little crawlway. Geder sat up, licking his lips nervously. He couldn’t see anything. The darkness was perfect. He drew his little dagger, his breath coming ragged.

  “Are you awake?” Cithrin asked, and Geder heaved a sigh.

  “I am,” he said, softly. “Aster’s sleeping.”

  “All right,” she said. “Light a candle for me, will you? I didn’t dare while I was outside.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s night. Someone might see.”

  Geder lit the candle, and the woman slipped down into the buried garden. Her hair was pulled back in a fierce pony-tail, and grime and dust covered her hands and knees. Her skin, pale as a wraith, seemed almost to glow in the candlelight. With the thinness of her mixed blood, she seemed fragile, weak. It was only the way she held herself and the confidence of her movements that gave that the lie. If she’d been a Firstblood, he would have thought she was little more than a girl, at least from the smoothness of her skin. But she was the magistra of a bank, and likely older than he was. A woman who traveled the world. She knelt, untying the rope at her ankle, and pulled. The tray skidded and scraped as she pulled it toward them.

  “The news isn’t good,” she said softly so as not to wake Aster. “There’s still fighting i
n the streets. Some of it’s private guards and noble houses, but there are looters too. Gangs of them. If it looks like a nobleman’s house is standing empty, they’ll strip it to the walls. And there seem to be some old vendettas coming due. Five men in masks took away a merchant named Deron Root and threw him off a bridge this afternoon, and no one seems to know why.”

  “What about Basrahip?”

  “The temple’s scorched, but it’s still standing. Mikel and Sandr didn’t find anyone there, but they didn’t find any bodies either. Some got killed, there doesn’t seem much question. There are also stories that people have seen the priests about, but so far we haven’t found any.”

  He sat forward, shaking his head. The tension in his shoulders ached. It was all too much. It was falling apart. And if he didn’t have Basrahip or Dawson either, he couldn’t imagine what he would do if he ever rose back up out of the earth.

  “What about the city guard?” he asked. “What are they doing?”

  Cithrin reached into the darkness of the crawlway, grunting, and pulled the tray back with her.

  “They’ve got their hands full,” she said. “There’s no law out there right now. Honestly? We three are probably the safest people in Camnipol tonight.”

  “Unless your friends betray us,” he said.

  “Unless that,” she agreed, taking something wrapped in cloth from the tray and setting it on the ground at her feet. “They’re not likely to, though.”

  “Why not?” Geder said, thinking of Dawson Kalliam’s face again. The blood on his knife. “Any of them could. Why wouldn’t they?”

  “One of them did before,” she said. “They saw how that ended.”

  She took a jar down from the tray, and then three wineskins. The last thing on the tray was a tin chamberpot that she held up in the candlelight with a rueful smile.

  “Very nearly forgot the necessities,” she said. “Do you think we set up the tree over there as the privacy room, or should we push in and see if we can’t find someplace a bit farther from nose range.”