The Widow's House

by Daniel Abraham

  The dragon held up its claws and turned his attention back to Marcus, ignoring Sandr as if he were not there. “Imagine now that it cannot be disbelieved.”

  “What can’t be disbelieved?” Sandr said.

  “None of that was true,” Marcus said.

  “The prophecy?”

  “No prophecy,” Marcus said.

  “Oh,” Sandr said with a shrug. “Well, that’s a bit disappointing.”

  The dragon reared up, its nostrils flaring, its wings spreading wide. It pointed a claw at Sandr’s chest. Sandr fell back with a shriek and Marcus moved to stand between them.

  “And that is what they cannot do,” the dragon said, its voice rising to a roar like a forest fire. “They cannot accept when they are wrong. Once told they cannot doubt. And that is what my brother did, and that is why we were weakened when he struck. That is why we died.”

  “Marcus?”

  “He’s not mad at you, Sandr.”

  “He seems mad at me.”

  “He’s not mad at you,” Marcus said. And then to the dragon: “So these wars we’re seeing. These priests spreading through the world again. They really think there’s a spider goddess.”

  “Truth and belief are indistinguishable to them,” the dragon said. “They believe what they believe because they believe. There is no escape from it. And who listens to their voices becomes like them. They drifted into madness before I slept, and they are mad still.”

  “Except Kit. He’s not like that.”

  “All the corrupt are part of Morade’s plan. Give your friend his own followers, and they would kill the ones who disagreed with them like ants in a bottle. I made soldiers to fight them that the corruption would not infect. I forged the culling blades. I made the one you carry now. We fought to clean the stock of slaves, but the corruption outran us. And my brother killed everyone that opposed him. I planned my last, desperate trick. I would let him believe he had won, and then strike. It meant destroying the perches we held sacred. The one thing he did not think I would sacrifice…”

  The dragon’s attention turned inward. It looked stunned.

  “Better I had died,” it said.

  “Don’t let’s get too far ahead with that,” Marcus said. “Wait here. I’m just going to take him back.”

  The dragon’s head sank down until it was staring at itself in the rippled surface of the pool. It shifted its wings with a sound like a ship’s sails creaking. Marcus took its silence as permission and led Sandr back up the hill. The others had come a bit closer now. Sandr sat on the ground and folded his arms around his knees, trembling. Marcus noticed that he was shaking too, then pushed the fact aside. He’d ignored battle panic before too, and this wasn’t likely to be so different. Kit put his hand on Sandr’s shoulder and said something Marcus couldn’t hear. Sandr nodded, and Kit ruffled the young man’s hair before he came closer to Marcus. The old actor’s face was grim.

  “What have you found?” he asked.

  “Everything we thought was wrong.”

  “I’m afraid I may be growing used to that.”

  “Is a habit for us, isn’t it? If I’m following our new friend’s thread, the priests aren’t here to take the world over so much as reduce it to chaos and unending violence.”

  “To what end?”

  “To win a war that’s thousands of years dead.”

  “Ah,” Kit said sourly. “Does he know how they can be defeated?”

  “From what I can tell, he was asleep before your however-many-greats-grandfather took to the ass end of the world. He knows more than we do, though. I think he’s our best hope of ending this, and I expect that your old friends would have put a tree through his neck if they’d found him. That hairwash he was spouting last night about remaking the dragons and promoting me to the next Stormcrow hasn’t come up. He may not remember he said it.”

  “Do you think it meant anything? Or was he so deeply in his cups it’s meaningless?”

  “Can’t say. Not yet, anyway. The more immediate problem is I think our chances of passing unobtrusively through Antea have gotten markedly worse.”

  Kit turned and Marcus followed his gaze. The low, rolling hills of eastern Antea seemed peaceful, but the illusion would only last so long.

  “How long,” Kit said, “would you expect them to stay away?”

  Marcus shrugged. “If it was my inn, I’d be on the way back already. See if it was safe, and if there was anything to salvage.”

  Kit passed his hand across his forehead. Marcus could see the confusion and fear in the gesture. Or else in himself. If that thing had decided to kill me just now, I’d be dead, he thought. And instead of addressing that, I’m going to talk as if this were all perfectly normal. Just another problem that needs fixing.

  “Surely they can’t harm it. Him. I can’t imagine a dragon could be threatened by a few farmers and townsfolk?”

  “Used to be a lot of dragons,” Marcus said. “Only one left. The one thing we can be sure of is they can die. Truth, though, I’m less worried about the locals rallying than the news reaching Camnipol. I’m not greatly tempted by the prospect of answering the sorts of questions that Palliako’s private guard would be prone to ask. Especially as one of your old companions would likely be in the room.”

  “Yes, I suppose that wouldn’t be likely to go well.”

  “We have to get word back to Cithrin and the bank. Most wars, the enemy is looking for victory. If these spiders just want war and more war and more after that… well, that’s a very different thing, isn’t it?”

  “How shall we proceed?” Kit asked.

  “I think we’ll have to scatter. Pairs, I think.”

  “Cary won’t like that.”

  Marcus pressed his lips thin. It was too easy to forget that it wasn’t Kit’s company now. Or his own. “I’ll talk to her about it as soon as—”

  The dragon rose up on its hind legs, wings spread, and stretched its immense neck toward the forest with a hiss. Marcus held up his hand to Kit, and the old actor nodded. Marcus trotted back toward the water, uncomfortably aware of acting as a servant would when his master called but unable to respond otherwise.

  “Enough of your whispers and muttering,” the dragon said. “I will not be treated with disrespect. Even now. Even if I have earned it.”

  “Didn’t mean to keep you outside the circle,” Marcus said. “It’s just… well, we’re in the middle of the enemy’s land. Getting all you’ve told me back to the people who are standing against the spiders is going to be a bit of a trick.”

  The dragon’s head drooped, the vast iris contracting as it focused upon him. The power of its regard was like the cold coming off ice.

  “Why is that?” the dragon asked.

  Making the harnesses took the better part of the morning, but the dragon was astonishingly deft and there was enough leather and cloth and steel to salvage from the ruined inn and stables, and from the players’ cart. Rope and leather and cloth made slings on each of the dragon’s legs, and then at the dragon’s instruction, they crawled into them. The scales Marcus pressed his body against were as wide as his palm and iridescent in the light. The warmth of the huge body was almost uncomfortable. He and Cary and Sandr had taken the left foreleg; Kit, Charlit Soon, and Mikel the right. Smit and Hornet had each strapped onto one of the rear legs.

  “I wish we could take the cart,” Sandr said. “All the props. All the costumes. I’ve grown up in that cart. It’s like a part of the company.”

  “We’ll make another,” Cary said. “And there are plenty of pieces we can play from the ground.”

  “It won’t be the same,” Sandr said.

  Inys shifted, swiveling his head down to consider them. Sandr went quiet, but everything he’d said had been heard. “Better men have lost more,” the dragon said, and then to Marcus. “You are ready?”

  “No, but waiting won’t help.”

  He thought he saw a bleak amusement in the vast eye, and then the leg he wa
s strapped to tensed and shifted. The wings unfurled with a sound like sailcloth in a high wind. The last dragon took to the sky, and Marcus held on to the straps, his mind reeling as the wrecked inn and the ruined cart, the brook and the trees, the world as he’d known it, receded.

  They flew.

  Geder

  Geder leaned forward, his elbows on the table, like a magistrate at a trial. The peasant man kneeling on the floor below him looked up, then bowed his head, then looked up again. The risers on either side of the room were filled with Geder’s private guard, and Basrahip lurked behind the man where Geder could see him and the prisoner could not. Only this was not a prisoner. He had to keep reminding himself of that. The urge to throw the man in chains, have him whipped, have him thrown off the Prisoner’s Span churned in Geder’s guts. It was an effort to remember that the man had done nothing wrong.

  He could not keep the rage from his voice.

  “You’re sure those were their names?” Geder said. “Cary? Hornet?”

  “Y-yes, Lord Regent, sir,” the peasant said. “And… Smit? And the other girl.”

  “Cithrin?”

  “No, Charlit. Charlit Soon. And there was an old one they called Kit. And the sick one. Marcus, he was. And the skinny bastard’s name was Mikel.”

  Geder looked over, and Basrahip nodded once. All of it was true. Geder sucked his lower lip between his teeth and bit down until the pain made him stop. “Did it eat them? Did the dragon eat them? Or did they get away?”

  “All their things were there still when we came. Except the one shiny sword the sick one liked. That was gone. But the remnants of their cart were there, and the horses. And they were just… gone.”

  Basrahip nodded. The peasant went on. “I don’t know if that great bastard ate them or they ran a different direction, my lord.”

  Or if they were there with it, Geder thought.

  If it hadn’t been for Basrahip, he might well have missed the incident. The business of running the empire had always been more odious than he’d expected it to be. His days were filled with letters and meetings and occasions of state. He tried to fit time with Aster in among them and include the prince in as much of it as he could. There was the whole apparatus of servants and slaves, magistrates and priests, who concerned themselves with the mundane functioning of Imperial Antea. Without them, Geder wouldn’t have had time to sleep, and even if he could have done without sleep, the work would have been too much. When the report came in, he had not even seen it, and might never have, except Basrahip had given orders that any message like it be treated seriously. Any message involving dragons.

  Even after the news had been brought to his attention, he hadn’t taken it too much to heart. It was only now, with the priest back from his investigations and the witnesses in tow, that Geder understood the gravity of the situation.

  After the peasant was sent away with Geder’s thanks and a wallet filled with silver to help him rebuild his lost inn, Geder had the doors closed. His guards remained at attention, swords and bows in their hands, their eyes fixed straight ahead. Basrahip sat at his side on the lowest tier of steps, his expression sober.

  “I know them,” Geder said. “I know all of them, except this Marcus and Kit, but she talked about them too. Those were Cithrin’s friends. The players that hid us during the uprising.”

  “Yes, Prince Geder. They were.”

  “And they had a dragon.”

  Basrahip nodded slowly; his jaw slid forward a degree, and his fingers dug into his thighs. “The enemies of the goddess are strong, Prince Geder. And they are full of deceit. They hate her for she is the enemy of all lies, and they are creatures of falsehood and evil. The dragons were her greatest enemies. The false world they created is falling around them now, and the coming pure world has no place for their kind. It is to be expected that they would rise in their fear.”

  It was no coincidence, he was certain of that, and it changed everything. He had to look back and wonder now. If Cithrin had been the tool of the Timzinae from the start, then everything might have been arranged and engineered. Dawson Kalliam had been his patron and his friend. The more he looked at it, the clearer it became that his rebellion had not truly been his own. He had been the tool of the Timzinae. It seemed plausible now that Cithrin and her friends had engineered it all, even Dawson’s rebellion against him, in order to undermine the goddess. And now the Timzinae’s master was exposed too. Not only the shadowy Callon Cane, but the emperors of the world—the dragons—were rising against them. Against him.

  “What do we do?” Geder asked.

  “Do not fear this,” Basrahip said. “You are the chosen of the goddess. No harm will come to you so long as you keep your faith in her. There will be dark days ahead. Desperate struggles. We must not falter.”

  “We won’t,” Geder said.

  Basrahip turned, his dark eyes meeting Geder’s, and the gentle smile on his lips expressed everything he needed to say. He had heard Geder’s voice, and he knew that what he’d said was true. Geder felt a rush of pride, maybe even of love, for the big man. Besides Jorey and Aster, Basrahip had been the best friend Geder had ever had. He clapped the massive shoulder. It was like hitting a stone.

  “We haven’t lost yet,” Geder said. “We won’t stop until the world’s been made pure. The peace we make will last forever.”

  “It will,” Basrahip said.

  A thought stirred in his mind, something like hope surprised him. “Basrahip. Do you think… If Dawson Kalliam was tricked by the Timzinae? By the dragons? Couldn’t Cithrin have been as well?”

  “The tricks of the dark ones are well crafted,” Basrahip said. “Without the voice of the goddess as guide, anyone might go astray.”

  “So maybe… maybe it really isn’t her fault?”

  “We cannot know until she stands before us and speaks with her living voice,” Basrahip said. “Do that, and all will be made clear.”

  “No, I understand now,” Geder said. “I see what this is. We’ll save her. And I know how to start.”

  If he’d allowed it, servants would have cleaned his library every day, whether he had found a few moments to visit it or not. He didn’t like having people in his things, though. Not even people whose lives he could control at a whim. Dust had gathered on his books and scrolls. The codices of old philosophical sketches he’d been paging through the last time he’d been there still spilled across the table. He didn’t know how long they’d been there.

  Bright afternoon light spilled in through the windows as Geder pulled book after book from the shelves, searching for something he only half recalled. It had been part, he thought, of a longer essay. One that touched on half a dozen subjects ranging from antiquity to the nature of time to techniques of agriculture. He had the sense that it was one of Saraio Mittian’s translations of Bastian Preach, but he went through all eighteen of them, and none were the right one. Perhaps one of the Orrian histories.

  His hands were grey with dust and so dry he was afraid his fingertips would crack when he found it. The pages were oversized vellum, thicker than paper and soft as skin. It had been a Saraio Mittian translation, but not of Preach. It was an extended third-age copy of Chariun’s Considerations. Likely, he hadn’t opened the book since he’d been in his father’s house in Rivenhalm. He turned the pages now, admiring the handwork, the details in the dropped capitals and the comic marginalia. The Considerations had been one of his father’s favorite books, he remembered, and Geder still felt a little intimidated opening its pages. And yet if he were to trace his love of speculative essay back to its roots, they were here.

  He paused over the opening pages of the second section, following the lines of script with his thumb.

  Speculation is the art of thinking where no evidence is available. To say that all birds are fish is not speculation but falsehood. To say that some birds swim for a time beneath the water is not speculation, but fact, as evidenced by the northern lake hen and salt heron. It is when we st
ep outside these places of certainty that speculation opens its gossamer wings and breathes the free air. To say that some birds may nest beneath the waves and rise to the air only to hunt is speculation for we know of no such animal, and neither can we say for certain that none such exists. It is for this reason that speculation is also the natural realm of tolerance, for judgment demands evidence, and it follows that the absence of evidence which forms the core of speculation requires the absence of judgment.

  Geder sighed. He didn’t remember reading those words precisely, but he could still conjure up the awe he’d felt at this book once. The reverence he’d had for it. Reading it now, it seemed painfully naïve. Puerile. It was embarrassing to think that he had once come here expecting wisdom. He turned to the back, to the additional sections that Mittian had included.

  The drawings were not quite as he recalled them, but the sense of them was the same. The ruins of Aastapal and the fields where ancient battles had been fought had been a fashion in the third age, and Chariun had not only cataloged the shards and remnants that humanity had pried from the ground, but designed the mechanisms that might plausibly have employed them. The same hand that had sketched the beautiful little comic images in the margins here laid out the pieces of vast winged harpoons designed to loop through the air. Half a dozen designs of vicious hooked spears with holes at the end that would carry loops of thread no heavier than a human hair until the hooks bit dragon flesh. Then the thread was drawn, hauling stout rope through it. One whole page was dedicated wholly to the image of a dragon the size of a mansion being dragged down to its death by humans of half a dozen races. Including, to Geder’s confusion, a Timzinae. Well, it was speculation after all. Likely Chariun hadn’t known the Timzinae for what they were.