“I know this”—still slowly—“to be true.”
“I have been visited,” Geder said. “Truths have been revealed to me, and I will reveal them to you. Listen to my voice. Am I lying?”
Basrahip only shook his head this time. No, Geder wasn’t lying.
“I will reconcile every schism. I will bring every apostate to a place where there is no dissent and no confusion and no lies. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” Basrahip said, and there was wonder in his voice. “I hear the truth in you.”
“Damned right you do,” Geder said. “Call all of them. I’ll give you the best couriers in the empire. The fastest birds. All the cunning men we can use. Send the word to every priest there is, everyone who carries her in his blood. Bring them all here. To me.”
“Prince Geder.…”
“Am I the chosen of the goddess?”
“You are.”
“I know how to fix this. Bring them here, and I will. Do you believe me?”
Basrahip moved forward, wrapping his vast arms around Geder’s body in a massive embrace. Geder thought of the swarm of spiders pressing against him, kept away by a thin veil of human skin. It made his flesh crawl.
“We are blessed to have you, Prince Geder.” The priest’s breath was warm against his ear. Something damp touched Geder’s temple and for a second he was certain it was blood, but Basrahip was only weeping. There were no tiny black bodies in his tears.
“You bring them here,” Geder said, “and bring them quickly, and I’ll see all of you reconciled forever.”
And that’s true, he thought. He wasn’t lying. Because there’s no room for dissent in the grave.
Marcus
Rain came in the north starting on their second day. Mornings were pleasant enough apart from the damp of the day before, but shortly after midday the few white puffs of cloud coalesced and joined together into great angry pillars with grey veils at the bases. They crept across the Antean landscape like giants, unaware of humanity and its little wars. Marcus envied the storms a little. There was a great deal about humanity he’d prefer not to be aware of himself.
When the hard grey clouds passed over them, Marcus and Yardem plucked up their hoods and rode on. The little mules that carried them were as unimpressed by the wet as they were by everything else. If the downpour became too great, they took what shelter they could or, if there was none, stopped where they were and suffered until it abated. By sundown, the cloud giants began to decay into great swaths of red and gold and peach that faded to ash as the light failed, and the midnight sky was clear for the stars.
The going was slow. They kept off roads and tracks, making their own trail as they went. Solitude itself was the goal, and anywhere they could find it would do. Only it had to be complete. If it worked—and there was every chance it might not—being observed at it risked everything. The stakes justified the effort.
Marcus called the halt at the ruins of a small fort by a clearing in the heart of the wood. The tumbled stones showed no sign of human use. Thick moss hung on the tie-posts. A black mat of rotten leaves choked the half-tumbled fire stand. The clearing was a little narrower than the courtyard of a small inn, and showed the marks of a lightning-struck fire a year or two old. New trees thinner than fingers were already competing to choke the grasses with shade again. Like all places of light and openness, this one was temporary.
The only tracks were of deer and rabbit, wolf and bear. No horses and no humans and no dogs. Even poachers and huntsmen had left this place behind. Whoever had built the fort and whatever danger they’d built it against were forgotten. The only exceptional thing they found in the search before making camp was a bronze statue of a Jasuru woman that had been half engulfed by the trunk of an ash. Marcus stopped there for a moment, trying to make out the features on the statue’s face. Whether it had been martial or serene, it was a tree now. Marcus moved on.
The second meeting at Palliako’s compound had, for Marcus, been the test of Cithrin’s scheme. Not whether it would work. Only God knew that, and that was the same as saying no one. No, the second meeting was the proof of whether Cithrin and Kit and Geder’s father had managed to sway the Lord Regent into forsaking his own reign out of spite. As it happened, the little man had arrived on time and without a regiment of guards to haul them all to the gaol or throw them down Camnipol’s throat. More than that, Geder Palliako had seemed pleased. Almost excited. Marcus couldn’t begin to guess what sludge was flowing behind that man’s eyes, but Cithrin’s take on him seemed solid. His anger had turned toward the priests, and if it fixed there long enough for the rest of the plan to play out… Well, that was more than Marcus would have hoped for.
Geder had listened to the schemes that might slow down the invasion and open corridors to let the wide-scattered priests come home with a seriousness and intelligence that were more than a little surprising. When Marcus laid out his own plan for the trap, there’d been a spark in Geder’s eyes. He’d even called for paper and pen and written out letters of passage for Marcus Wester and Yardem Hane. The pages, signed with Palliako’s private chop, were still folded in an envelope of oiled parchment sealed with wax in Marcus’s little mule’s saddle pack. If they were stopped by soldiers and questioned, they had the Lord Regent’s protection. It wasn’t a shield he’d try against an arrow, but it was more than nothing.
He’d expected nothing. Or worse than that.
They’d sent out a bird for Northcoast the next morning. Clara Kalliam was a past master of sneaking messages to Paerin Clark in Carse. Her couriers were fast and well practiced. Lehrer Palliako even thought he might know a cunning man who could be put upon to drive the message through his peculiar talents. It didn’t matter what channel the word went by, only that it arrived.
There was more than enough dead wood under the canopy of trees, and Marcus had a small fire crackling by the time Yardem emerged from the wood with the corpse of a rabbit he’d hunted down for their dinner. Marcus cleaned and dressed the animal and set it on a thin, improvised spit. The smell of roasting meat was pleasant and a little melancholy too. Until today, the animal whose body was crisping on a stake might never have seen anything more human than these ruins, and tonight, it had learned—however briefly—what humanity was.
That wasn’t fair. Not really. The world was filled with people who did things more noble than killing in order to eat. Artisans who fashioned tools of great utility and beauty. Poets who made songs that honored the living and the dead, or only made people laugh for a while. Brewers and bakers and all the puppeteers from the streets of Porte Oliva. Some of them probably didn’t even eat meat. It was just Marcus and Yardem weren’t among that number, and the rabbit whose haunch he carved had had the ill fortune to run into them.
“Ever think about what we look like to the dragons?” Marcus asked. “Well, the one, I mean. Isn’t like there’s a wide choice of dragons to compare among.”
“Sometimes, sir.”
Marcus bit into the rabbit. The flesh was a little gamy, but after a long day of nothing but dried fruit, nuts, and some twice-baked bread, it was decent enough. That or else carrying the poisoned sword had numbed his tongue past the point of knowing good from bad. Yardem was eating it too, though. It couldn’t have been that wretched.
“Draw any conclusions?”
Yardem flicked his ears thoughtfully, the rings jingling. “Hard to say. Inys isn’t human. I am. It’s a wide gulf to cross.”
“You think that? I don’t know. He’s seemed fairly explicable to me, one way and another. Lonesome, self-indulgent, convinced that he’s a monstrosity and also the only hope for the world. Well, his version of the world, anyway.”