The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin #5)

by Daniel Abraham

His flesh pulsed with death throes not his own. And then with his own.

It was a fact well understood that a person was never a perfect match for the tales told of them. It might be something as small as Lady Caot’s reputation as having an iron will, which was true so far as it went but neglected her weaknesses for her grandson and butter tarts. It might be as great as the person of Geder Palliako, hero of Antea and champion of the empire, who was instead… what he was.

The story of a person could never be as complex as they actually were because then it would take as much time to know someone as it did to be them.

The mask of habit slipped on so easily, it almost frightened her. Was she the somewhat touched woman of the court wandering about the field of war like it was a garden party? To them, she was. It wasn’t that appearances were deceiving. That was a given. What astonished her every time was that they were so fluid.

It was a mistake to think you couldn’t mislead the spiders. You just couldn’t lie outright to do it. There was and always had been a gap wide enough to march a cohort through between speaking truth and being understood.

Cithrin reached the ladder and Barriath met her eye. His nod was curt, but not unfriendly. His smile was perhaps a bit self-satisfied. Cithrin wondered whether every man looked at a woman he’d bedded with the same proprietary smugness.

“No choice means no choice,” Jorey said.

“How are we paying for all this?” Clara asked. “It isn’t as though we brought any coin to speak of.” “We’re an army, m’lady. They show that we’re all friends by housing and feeding us, we show we appreciate it by not killing them all and taking what we want. That’s tradition.”

It was in many ways the end of the Lord Marshal’s command. Though Jorey Kalliam would lead the largest of the groups, all would act independently to harass Dannien’s scouts and threaten his supply lines, draw him off the swift path of the dragon’s road into the weeds and dirt of the plains. They would slow the attackers, distract them, and if one group was cornered and slaughtered to a man, there would still be seven more to carry on the job. It was the kind of fighting they did in the Keshet and the wilder edges of Borja, dirty and harsh and thin on honor. It was the kind of battle an army didn’t win so much as indefinitely postpone losing.

Jorey let that sink in. When he looked out toward the horizon, it was like he was seeing all the way back to Kiaria, Suddapal, Inentai. All the way back to the beginning of the war, whenever that had been. “This is what we did to them, isn’t it?” “And what you’ll do to them again, if you get the upper hand,” Marcus said. “Never again. Not if I can help it.” “No? Well, good luck with that, but we’ll have to visit the question when we’re not down a well and drowning. Everyone loves peace when they’re losing the battle.”

That night, the messenger slept in the lee of one of the statues, looking up at the vast carved dragon that covered them all. The best part of the journey was over. Now it was all going to be sheepdogging the priests back the way he’d already come. He’d do it, but he wouldn’t like it. You didn’t become the fastest tracker in the empire by enjoying the company of people.

“Brought some bread,” she said when she reached them, holding out the basket. “Had extra.” “Thank you,” Jerrim said, taking it from her carefully so that their hands brushed each other’s. “You can bring me back the basket later,” she said. “I will.” She smiled, nodded once to Coppin like she was agreeing that yes, he was there too, and went back down the ladder.

The spiders were engines of chaos, after all, and they’d been generating schisms and apostasy for months already. If they all wanted to be reconciled, they might all keep their blades sheathed. If they were already past that, Cithrin might be blundering into a half dozen dramas she knew nothing about. The moment when four assassins all arrived at the same garden was only funny when it happened on a stage.