The Dragon’s Path

by Abraham Daniel

  And there will be a next time, he didn’t say. He didn’t need to.

  “If you take my advice,” the ’van master went on, “you’ll take your fee, turn your horse, and ride away from that girl until she’s less than a memory. People like that are only trouble.”

  Marcus bristled.

  “What kind of people do you mean?”

  “Bankers,” the ’van master said, and spat.

  Porte Oliva nestled on a land spur that pressed out into a wide, shallow bay. Even at low tide, the sea protected her on three sides. Reefs and sandbars made the approach from the ocean dangerous enough that local boatmen could earn their living guiding ships from the deep ocean safely into port and then out again. In the thousand years since its foundation, the city had never been taken by force, though twice it had been seduced. The dragon’s road led to it, the green pathway curving up over hills long since washed away, so that the carts traveled across the tops of wide-sloping arches as the ground dropped away beneath them.

  As they drew nearer the city, the road became more crowded. Where Vanai had been rich with the black-chitined Timzinae, the crowd here showed the pale, ethereal faces of Cinnae and the oily, short, bead-adorned fur of Kurtadam in greater numbers even than Firstblood. The press of carts and bodies thickened, and Marcus started to see swordsmen in with copper torcs and the green and gold of Birancour. Queensmen. The guardians of the city, though the queen herself kept to the greater cities of Sara-su-mar and Porte Silena in the north. Marcus watched the caravan master approach one of the older queensmen, lean forward as if to speak above the chirr and murmur of the crowd. A few coins traded hands, and without any obvious change, the carts soon found themselves moving faster than before, passing the foot traffic and hand barrows. Marcus knew they had reached the Porte Oliva proper when the beggars and mendicants appeared.

  Please, my lord, I have a child.

  My husband is a sailor. His ship is three months late, and there’s no money for food.

  God tells us to be generous.

  Marcus paced alongside the carts, ignoring the words and gestures, watching for the thieves and cutpurses who always lived in crowds like these. The other guards followed his example, and likely knew more about sleight of hand than he did. It was odd how well suited the players were to every part of guarding a ’van besides the actual guard duty. He reached the last cart and turned to start for the front again. Three carts ahead, Master Kit leaned down and pressed a coin into an old man’s hand.

  “Don’t encourage them,” Marcus called. “They’re all liars.”

  “Not all, Captain,” Kit called back with a grin. “Only most.”

  He passed the wool cart where the smuggler girl, still in her rough carter’s clothes, drove her team. Put beside the full-blood Cinnae on the road, it was easier to see her as something besides a frail Firstblood girl. Her hair wasn’t as fine as theirs, her features were thicker, her skin had more color, but the resemblance was there. She noticed him watching her, and tried out a smile. He ignored her with the same studied intention as the beggars, and for similar reasons. Riding on, the sense of anticipation and dread sat in his gut. The conversation would come, and it would be today, and the wise thing—the right thing, the thing that would let his nightmares fade again—was to refuse the girl. At the lead cart, Yardem met his gaze impassively.

  Once, centuries before, the city had ended at the great stone embattlements. Now the towering white stone walls were in the middle of a busy market quarter. Fishmongers shouted out their catch on the north side of the arched tunnel that led to the inner city, and after they passed through, indistinguishable men and women called out the same fish. The architecture of war slept in the middle of a living community like a great hunting cat torpid from the kill. Beyond it, the dragon’s road widened and stopped at a huge open square.

  The crowd pressed here as thick as they had on the road. A great marble temple high as five men standing one atop the other loomed on the eastern end, the governor’s palace of red brick and colored glass on the west. God’s voice and the law’s arm, twin powers of the throne. And between them, scattered through the square, wooden platforms rose with prisoners suffering their punishments. A Kurtadam man with rheumy eyes and severed hands held a sign between his stumps announcing himself a thief. A Firstblood woman smeared in shit and offal sat under the carved wooden symbol of a procuress. Three Cinnae men hung dead from a gallows, flies darkening the soft flesh around their eyes; a murderer, a rapist, and a child-user respectively. Together, the platforms served as a short, effective introduction to the local laws.

  The caravan master left them standing for the better part of an hour as he vanished into the governor’s palace, returning with small stone figures on leather thongs to place on the carts as proof the road taxes had been paid. With a shout, he led them down a side road of hard, pale brick to the yard.

  Journey’s end. Marcus made his way to the front cart. The caravan master had a cloth sack waiting for him. It jingled when he held it out.

  “You can count it,” the Timzinae said.

  “That’s fine,” Marcus said.

  The ’van master’s brows lifted, then he shrugged.

  “Suit yourself. But don’t come later saying it was short.”

  “Won’t.”

  “All right, then.”

  Marcus nodded and turned away. He took out his share and Yardem’s, then despite what he’d said, he counted the rest. It was all there.

  The players were at their own cart, still wearing their armor and swords. The road had changed them and it hadn’t. They were harder now, and each of them could handle a sword like a soldier. On the other hand, they laughed and joked now as much as they had in the tavern in Vanai. Sandr and Smit were competing now to see who could hold a handstand longest. Cary, Opal, and Mikel traded quips and barbs as they saw to their mules. Master Kit sat on the cart’s high bench, watching over it all like a benevolent saint from the old stories. Marcus went to him.

  “It appears we’ve managed the trick, then,” Master Kit said. “I hadn’t expected it to be quite so eventful.”

  “Make a fine comedy,” Marcus said,

  “I think the world is often like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Comic, but only at the right distance.”

  “Likely true,” Marcus said as he handed the money to Master Kit. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I suspect Porte Oliva’s as good a venue as any, and suppose we’ll try our luck at our original trade. After a bit of a rest, maybe. There’s a long tradition of puppeteers here, and I’m hoping we might be able to recruit a new actor or two with those skills.”

  “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.

&nbs
p; “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.