The Widow's House (The Dagger and the Coin)

by Daniel Abraham

  Governor Siden’s face was bloodless. “No. No no no. Our dragon,” he murmured, then turned on the queensman. “Don’t just stand there! We have to help! Sound the attack! We’ll free him from this trickery and end this once and for all.”

  “Shouldn’t do that,” Yardem said.

  “Yes, sir,” the guard captain said and bolted past the servants and down the stairs. There was little need. On the ground and at the wall’s top, the soldiers of Porte Oliva were already surging forward. Cithrin willed them to go faster. To save Inys before it was too late. The dragon’s voice rose in rage and agony and the governor sank to his knees. Yardem made a low grunt like he’d been punched. Cithrin turned to him. The coldness in his eyes surprised her.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’d thought Captain Wester was being overcautious,” he said. “Owe him an apology. You need to come with me now.”

  “But—” She gestured at the wall that hid the battle from her.

  “Ma’am,” Yardem said, “they’re going out after him. That means they’re opening the gates. Not something that’s wise to do with an experienced army on the other side.”

  “No, I have to see that—”

  Yardem put a hand on her shoulder. His eyes were dark and hard. “Ma’am, the governor’s just ordered the attack. He’s opening the gates. The city’s about to fall.”

  Cithrin blinked, shook her head. It was like waking up from a dream. “Oh,” she said.

  The stairs had been interminable when she’d gone up them. Going down was faster, easier, and seemed to take lifetimes. She expected to have nightmares running down an endless stairway, the curve of the stone walls keeping her from seeing what was only just ahead, for the rest of her life. If she lived out the day.

  When they reached the square, the fighting had already spilled into the city. The streets, tightly packed before, were in chaos. Bodies surged one direction and then another, pressing together until Cithrin couldn’t move her arms, couldn’t breathe. Yardem raised his voice and then his bare sword. There were no Anteans near him. He was fighting their own. Refugees and workers and bakers and children. They were transformed to the enemy by the accident of being between them and where they wanted to be.

  Ten horses in full barding appeared at the far side of the square, men in armor sitting astride them and hewing at the crowd. Cithrin managed to reach the far corner and thread her way through the press, following Yardem’s shouts and threats. She was weeping, but she ignored it. An old Kurtadam woman with a grey-brown pelt and rheumy, confused eyes stepped into Cithrin’s path, and Yardem disappeared. Cithrin shouted for him. Called his name. Screamed. She could barely hear her own voice. The crowd moved like a riptide, carrying her with it. She fought to breathe. She stumbled over something soft, and was pushed along before she could see what it was. She hoped it wasn’t a body. If it was a body, she hoped it was already dead.

  At the corner of the Grand Market, the churn of humanity grew thicker. Worse. Maestro Asanpur’s café was shattered and overrun. The tents of the Grand Market had fallen, the space they had contained overflowing with panic and the desperate need for escape when there was no escape to be had. Cithrin screamed Yardem’s name and Marcus’s. She couldn’t hear her own voice over the roar of the crowd.

  First the roar, and then the screams.

  Antean soldiers poured into the market square from two of the larger streets. People shrieked, and the pressure of flesh pushed the breath out of her. She couldn’t shout. Couldn’t call for help. She thought for a moment she saw Besel a few ranks in front of her, and she tried to reach out to him until she remembered he was dead, had died before even the fall of Vanai. Words carried over the roar, inhumanly loud. You have lost. Everything you love is already gone. There is no hope. Listen to my voice. All is lost. The air was hot and the sounds of slaughter made it hotter. She closed her eyes. Nausea overwhelmed her. Somewhere very, very nearby, people were being cut to death with swords, and she was powerless to stop it or to avoid it.

  This is war, she thought. What she’d fled in Vanai and Camnipol and Suddapal had caught her here. Her head swam, bright colors dancing before her that had nothing to do with light. The distance to her feet seemed like a day’s journey. Her mind slid away, and she didn’t try to hold it close.

  Time changed, became meaningless. A series of moments passed with no more connection between them than images in a dream. A Timzinae man, blood pouring from his mouth. A Firstblood child huddled in a corner, her hands over her head. The cobbled street, Cithrin’s cheek pressed against it as someone ground their boot against her ear.

  “Are you Cithrin bel Sarcour?”

  Her lip was swollen. Something had happened to her knee. Someone shook her shoulder. The words came again, in their strange accent.

  “Are you Cithrin bel Sarcour?”

  “No,” she said.

  A man’s laughter. She opened her eyes. She didn’t know him, but she saw the resemblance. He had the same shape of face as Master Kit. The same wiry hair. His robes were the brown of the spider priests, and he held a speaking trumpet in his hand. Soldiers stood at either side. She knew the place. She was at the seawall, not far from where Opal had died. She hadn’t thought of Opal in years. Why was her mind calling up the dead? The screams of the crowd still deafened. The air smelled like a slaughterhouse. Flies were buzzing everywhere. The slaughter was still going on. The death of her city.

  “This is she,” the priest said. “This is the one.”

  She shook her head. She was on her knees. She didn’t remember being on her knees. She must have fallen in the crowd. “No,” she said. “I’m not. You’ve made a mistake.”

  “Sergeant!” the man at her right called. “We’ve got the bitch!”

  A Firstblood voice howled in triumph behind her. She shook her head, but her heart was in her belly. Better she’d died in the press. Not this. Please, anything but this.

  A man stooped down beside her. He had thinning pale hair, pockmarks on his cheeks. She thought he looked sad. “All right,” he said. “No one hurts her. She goes back to Camnipol, not so much as a bruise on her. Not until she gets there. Understood? You! Kippar. You’re her personal guard now. Anything happens to her, you’re the first to die for it.”

  Cithrin’s gaze swam up to the new man. He stood beside the priest, fists the size of hams, shoulders as broad as a table. Yemmu blood in him, she was sure of it. When he spoke, his voice was sharp.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll see to it.”

  The priest’s head snapped forward, blood splashing on Kippar’s face. The massive guard stumbled back, shouting and clawing at his eyes. The two men at her shoulders dropped her and turned. The priest lay on the pale stone pavement, a crossbow bolt protruding an inch from the back of his head. Rich red blood pooled around his skull. And in the pool…

  Cithrin screamed and tried to crawl away. To run. Tiny black bodies scattered from the dead priest, leaving pinprick footsteps of crimson. Someone shouted, and the Anteans, blades already drawn, closed ranks around her. The sad-faced sergeant looked around, confusion in his expression. He glanced down, dropped his blade, started screaming. Something tickled Cithrin’s ankle and she slapped it hard enough to sting her fingertips. Small black legs thinner than hairs stuck to her palm, the spider’s body ripped apart.

  “Please, I’ll go with you,” she shouted. “Let me get up!”

  She tried to stand, but someone pushed her down. Another Antean knelt beside the priest and started screaming.

  “They’ve got a cunning man!” someone shouted. “They’re using some kind of magic on us.”

  “Get away from the body,” Cithrin shouted. “They’re in his blood. Get away from his body!”

  They ignored her. Boots tramped on stone. Voices rose in battle cries. The soldiers around her drew their blades, forgetting even her for the moment. She staggered back against the seawall itself, and her bank’s guardsmen fell on the Anteans. Halvill, his dark scales marked
with white lines where enemy blows had already struck him. Corisen Mout, his teeth bared. Enen, her pelt matted with and dark with blood. Yardem Hane and Marcus Wester standing side by side, their blades moving with the simple economy of men so long accustomed to violence it had become a reflex.

  “There’s spiders!” Cithrin screamed, and saw Marcus’s head turn to her. She pointed at the fallen priest, and watched understanding bloom in the guard captain’s eyes. The green sword in his hand flickered like a tongue of flame as he pushed in toward her. The Anteans, caught between the invisible threat spilling out from their dead priest and the advance of her guardsmen, retreated. Five of them were left writhing on the pavement, clawing at their own eyes and mouths and crotches. Marcus went to each in turn, sinking the poisoned sword into them, and then into the corpse of the priest. The others stood back at a respectful distance as he waved the blade slowly over the paving. A shudder of movement, almost too small to see, caught Cithrin’s eye. A spider shriveled by the stinging fumes of the blade.

  He reached her, sheathing the sword. He was breathing hard, laboring. His cheeks looked sunken, his eyes fever bright. When he spoke, though, it was the understated, calm tone she’d known since she’d been a lost girl with a banker’s heartlessness, fleeing from a violence she barely understood. Little had changed.

  “This?” he said, nodding at the city, the violence, the death that still spilled in the gutters. “It could have gone better.”

  Marcus

  Most days, from the seawall to the piers was the walk of minutes. A brief turn through the salt quarter with its narrow, dark streets, and then out into the broad ways built for carts and the traffic of trade. Most days, there had been puppeteers at the corners, playing out their dramas for coin. A large audience might slow things down a bit if they spilled too far into the street.

  Now it was a meat grinder.

  Even where there were no soldiers, there were people in the streets. Half-built barricades jutted out over the cobbles without plan or strategy. In the north, a great column of smoke might have been the Antean siege engines or the Governor’s Palace or the beginning of a conflagration that would turn the city to ash. Marcus didn’t know, and no answer changed what he had to do in the next hour.

  Marcus and Yardem led the way, their blades clearing the way before them for the most part. The press of fear and humanity made the passage slow, and Marcus didn’t want to kill anyone he didn’t have to. Some of the citizens of Porte Oliva would likely survive the sack, and the ones that didn’t, he preferred that the enemy killed. His arms and back ached already, and the day wasn’t near done. Cithrin’s arm was around Enen’s shoulder. The thinness of frame that came with her Cinnae blood left her light enough that any of them but Halvill could throw her over a shoulder and run if the need came. Any of them but Halvill and himself. He tried to ignore the weakness in his arm and shoulder, the burning in his muscles that he hadn’t felt wielding a blade since before his voice had cracked. He told himself it was age and indolence, but it was the venom of the blade taking its toll.

  It didn’t matter what it was. The job was getting Cithrin through a brief turn through the salt quarter, then the broader ways by the piers. That was all that mattered.

  “She’s not looking good, sir,” Yardem said.

  “She’ll keep.”

  “Not sure she will.”

  “She’ll have to.”

  Marcus looked over his shoulder. Blood marked Cithrin’s neck and arm. He told himself it was her own, that she’d only been beaten and cut in the violence. It was a bleak thought to find comfort in, but the red hadn’t been from the priest. He’d gotten there in time to keep the spiders from getting into her, at least. Still, she seemed dazed, her eyes flat and empty. She was hurt, no question. And they were a long run from safe.

  A wave of bodies spewed into the intersection before them, shouting, shrieking, moving singly and together like a flock of birds. At least three of them were bleeding. Marcus and Yardem closed ranks without speaking and marched forward into the throng. A Kurtadam man, his dark, glossy pelt adorned with silver and glass beads, stopped before them, his hands out in a commanding pose.

  “You! All of you! In the name of Nerris Alcion, I command you to the defense of my warehouse!”

  “You should move,” Marcus said, not breaking stride.

  Snarling, the man put his hand against Marcus’s chest. Yardem kicked the side of the Kurtadam’s knee, folding it the wrong way, and tossed him into the gutter. The mewling sounds of pain were drowned out quickly. All around Marcus, the guards of the bank drew together, their blades at the ready. Down the length of the street, Marcus caught a glimpse of open space. It wasn’t a good sign. The only thing that opened a crowd like this was violence. He pushed ahead. In the clear space, the green and gold of queensmen dithered, caught between formation and free battle.

  “Hey!” Marcus shouted. “Guardsmen! To us!”

  “They can’t hear you, sir.”

  “You try, then,” Marcus said, leaning forward into the unyielding bodies of the crowd. “People might make way for men in uniforms.”

  “They can’t hear anyone,” Yardem said. “Wax plugs in the ears. Against the priests.”

  With a roar, a dozen or so Antean soldiers as thin as reeds rushed at the milling queensmen. Marcus spat on the ground between his feet. “Well, God smiled,” he said, then turned again toward the port. “Make way! Move, damn it, or we’ll spit you before they can! Make a fucking path!”

  The buildings of the salt quarter loomed, high and dark. The smell of smoke was growing thicker. Voices all around them were wailing, and the crowd in the street was nearly at a standstill. In front of him, a Firstblood woman stood with tears in her eyes. The press of humanity behind her gave her no way to get out of Marcus’s path, and her gaze was fixed on the thin, green-patinaed blade between them. She mouthed the words I can’t, I can’t, shaking her head, and began to sink down to her knees.

  “Stand up!” Marcus shouted. “If you fall down now, you’re dead. Stand up!”

  The woman blinked, stood. He had the sense he could have told her anything and she’d have done it. Whoever she was, whoever she had been until now, the trauma of the day had transformed her into another kind of puppet, ready to do what she was told because the part of her that could make decisions had already surrendered. Marcus sheathed the poisoned sword and took the woman by the shoulder. He pulled her into the center of the little knot of guards, and Halvill took her from there, shoving her out behind them. One by one, Marcus ate away at the crowd in front of them, moving the guards—moving Cithrin—forward another step, and then another, and then another. It was like chipping down a mountain with a hammer, but it was all he could do, so he did it.

  The crowd before them broke, the blocking bodies streaming away, diving into doorways and shifting away. Seven men in light scale armor bearing blades whipped at them, cutting the people down like grass. They might have been Antean or some group of local thugs driven mad by panic. All that Marcus cared was that they were between him and the docks and that they’d already started fighting so he didn’t have to feel bad about killing them. They didn’t exchange words. There was no banter. He drew his sword, Corisen Mout came to his right side, Yardem to his left. The first blow almost wrenched the blade from Marcus’s hand, but then long habit flowed into him.

  Yardem’s longer reach drove the attackers slightly toward Corisen Mout, crowding them against the wall. Marcus’s world narrowed to a few impressions, gone as soon as they arrived. The angles of the blades, the motion of shoulders. He blocked the attacks and pressed his own. The enemy weren’t very good, aiming for his face instead of his body, going for the quick kill. One left his foot too far forward, and Marcus drew off the man’s blade with a feint while Yardem sank his sword’s point into the enemy ankle. One less. Corisen Mout fell back under a rush, and Marcus slapped the enemy’s arm with the edge of his blade. The man’s elbow began dripping blood at once,
and the venom doubled him over screaming not five breaths later. Corisen Mout finished him, and together they slid forward. The crowd was gone now, and they were moving in another of the little clearings of violence. At least there was room.

  When the enemy broke and ran, Marcus trotted after them, not so quickly as to catch up, but enough to keep that little bubble in the greater crowd open for as long as he could. They reached the broader, more open streets. Bodies lay on the cobblestones, and blood trickled in the gutters. Smoke and the smell of death thickened the air. The masts of the ships stood to the south, pointing at the sky like the leafless trunks of a winter forest. Marcus looked back. Cithrin’s eyes were glazed, but still open. Her jaw set. That was as much as he had time for.

  At the piers, the fighting was worse. The ships that hadn’t cast off were in danger of being overrun, and their crews were locked in battle with the men and women fleeing from the city. Hours ago, they had all been allies against Antea. Now they were beating each other with bricks and fists, kicking and shrieking. Many of the boats had untied from the piers and were floating off in the water, where the brave and crazed swam toward them without any way to climb up into them. Outside the harbor, the remains of three Antean roundships burned and smoked. In the chaos, it was as if their destruction was another blow against Porte Oliva, the earlier victories turned to loss by the overwhelming collapse of the city.