From Inentai, reports said the empire’s strength was faltering. At Kiaria, the mountain stronghold of the Timzinae race, the armies of Antea had met defeat even with the power of the spider priests. Like a child who had never learned restraint, Geder Palliako had spread his might so wide that it had grown thin and brittle. The war was the widest and swiftest anyone had ever seen, and the price it had demanded was terrible. The cities it had taken from her—Vanai, Suddapal, Porte Oliva—still ached like a lost limb. The Timzinae taken into slavery, their children imprisoned as surety of their good behavior, suffered and died on the farms of the Antean Empire even as she sat, warm and safe in Carse.
To sow chaos among the enemy now, with enemy forces spread so wide and schisms beginning to form among the priesthood of the spider goddess, was less than blowing aside a feather. The map of the war was a portrait of overreach.
In any other conflict, it would have given her hope.
There had been a time, not even very long ago, when winning a war had meant crushing an enemy, killing them, lighting their cities afire. She, like the others around her, had imagined redeeming the world with the point of a dagger. It was, after all, the story everyone told of how a war ended: a righteous victor, a conquered evil, order restored. It was a lie in every particular. Every war was the precursor for the wars that followed, a slaughter that justified the slaughters to come. And the spiders that tainted the priests’ blood were a tool designed by a brilliant, twisted mind to sow this violence. They were the living embodiment of war without end, a promise of permanent victory, infinitely postponed. To imagine tools—even her own tools—turned to some different solution was like trying to wake from a nightmare. She failed more often than she liked.
“I find myself looking through a scheme,” she said, gesturing to Isadau with a cup of steaming tea, “and chortling over how it will break Geder’s army or ruin his supply lines or give weapons to the traditional families in Nus. And I realize I’m doing it again. I’m looking for ways to win the fight, not to end it.”
The Timzinae woman smiled her gentle smile. From their first shared flight from Elassae and then Birancour to now had hardly been more than a year, but it sat on Isadau’s black-scaled face like decades. The greyness at the edges of her chitinous plates made her seem fragile. “There may need to be a certain amount of winning,” she said.
“I know that,” Cithrin said. “But I don’t think past it. I get as far as That’ll show the bastards and then I just… stop. It’s frustrating.”
Isadau sipped her own tea. The steam curled up around her face, softer than clouds. “The first enemy is the priesthood,” she said, as if she were agreeing. “If we can find a way to defeat them…”
The frustration in Cithrin’s gut knotted itself tighter. “Then what? Say we did find a way to drive them all back to whatever hole they’ve been living in since the dragons fell. Would that end our problems?”
“The critical ones, yes,” Isadau said.
“Or would it only make it a war we thought we could win? Tell me that when Antea falls all the Timzinae will drop their chains, shake the hands that whipped them, and say Don’t worry about all the people you killed and the families you shattered. The priests are gone, and we’re fine now. Because I believe that they wouldn’t.”
Isadau’s inner eyelid clicked shut, leaving her both watching Cithrin and not. The rage under her surface calm was palpable. A stab of regret took Cithrin under the ribs.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That was too far.”
“No, I take your point,” Isadau said. “They wouldn’t. Nor would I, for that.”
“I don’t know how you fight against war. Even the words don’t fit.”
They lapsed into silence for a long moment, two women who had once been voices of the Medean bank, neither of them welcome or safe in the cities she’d called home. The damp of the city air made droplets on the palm-wide panes of window glass. Isadau’s expression was angry, then closed, then amused.
“At least you’ve ended the age of usurpers,” she said. “Not, perhaps, the task we’d set ourselves, but not an inconsiderable windfall.”
“How did we do that?”
“We took the power of gold and married it to the crown,” Isadau said. “Who’ll ever rise against King Tracian when as soon as he falls, all the coins in their chests turn into leaves and ink?”
Cithrin waved the comment away as if she were fanning smoke. “All it means is that whoever cuts off his head and takes the throne will have to offer the same guarantees he did. Kings are just as disposable as they ever were.”
“But bankers aren’t.”
Cithrin heard Komme Medean’s half-joking voice in her head. Cithrin bel Sarcour. Secret queen of the world. This was what he’d meant, then. Whatever house rose or fell in Northcoast, whoever sat the throne would need to keep on good terms with the bank, because as soon as the kingdom lost confidence in the worth of the letters of transfer, everyone from the boys selling pisspots to the launderers for bleach to the highest lord in court would be bankrupt. The worth of gold had always been a shared fiction about a soft and shining metal, but now it was also braided with a crown and a bank. The loss of any would shake the confidence in all three, and so long as the powerful understood that, perhaps it was less likely that a usurper could rise up. Or at least not without her permission. There was a giddying thought.
“So,” Cithrin said. “We only need to design something like that that we can apply to the world as a whole, and the problem… well, it won’t vanish, but we’ll put a blanket over it anyway.”
“An end to all war,” Isadau said. “Next we’ll be tying ropes to clouds and having them carry us across the sea to Far Syramys.”
“Well, if not an end to war, at least an alternative to it. That’s a bit less grandiose.”
“Do you think so?”
“A bit,” Cithrin said with a shrug.
A soft knock came as the workroom door opened, and Paerin Clark leaned in, his pale face an icon of amusement and a cynical sort of wonder. “Forgive my interruption,” he said. “I have someone in my sitting room I think you two might like to meet.”
Cithrin put her tea down with a clatter. Isadau rose to her feet. Cithrin’s expression was a question, but Paerin either didn’t see it for what it was or else chose not to. He led the way down the brickwork hallway with its tapestry hangings and crystal-and-silver candle holders. The melting beeswax still held a ghost of autumn honey. Thick woven rugs gentled their footsteps, so Cithrin heard the voices coming from the sitting room well before they reached it.
Paerin Clark didn’t bear the name Medean, though his wife Chana did. She sat now at her father’s side, her smile demure and warm in a way that made the hair on Cithrin’s neck stand up. Komme Medean, his joints only somewhat swollen by gout, warmed his hands at the fire. Yardem Hane stood by the door, his expression unreadable apart from the interest in his forward-pointing ears. Captain Wester leaned against a low teak table, his arms crossed. And opposite him, Barriath Kalliam and an older woman.
The last news Cithrin had had of Barriath placed him in Sara-sur-Mar, taking the role of the mythical Callon Cane and funding bounties against the Antean army that his brother Jorey Kalliam led. Seeing him here now was a shock, and Cithrin’s mind took hold of it at once. The bounties were no longer being offered in Birancour. They had been compromised, perhaps. Or the queen had decided that antagonizing the soldiers who had already sacked one of the great cities posed too great a risk. For a moment, she was lost in a cascade of implications that his presence set in motion. The woman at his side seemed almost an afterthought at first.