The Widow's House

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 step 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.

For hours he paged through the designs. Some were clearly fanciful. The sections on the vast, bladderlike airships fitted with prows of viciously curved metal that could tear and rend a dragon’s delicate wings were beautiful, but unconvincing. The bogs of adhesive tar that were meant to foul the dragon’s perch and slow or stop it taking to air were an interesting thought, but there was no guidance on how to concoct them. The ballistas modified with toothed gears that would spin bladed disks into the sky, on the other hand, seemed at least worth the effort of experiment…

He placed bits of thin cloth on each of the pages that seemed most promising to him. He didn’t feel as though he had been at his study long before the book looked as if it had sprouted a dozen tongues. When he reached the end, he felt the almost forgotten tug of pleasure, the temptation to stay and page through the library for a while. Not for anything specific, though if there were other volumes that touched on the weapons that the ancient dragons used in their wars, he would be interested. Maybe not even to read them, but to find the images and sketches put there by hands a thousand years dead. To find again some small thought that had never occurred to him before and let his mind take fire with it for a time. Basrahip might deride the words as being dead things, but not the pictures, certainly? A picture wasn’t true or false, it just was. And the things the drawings showed could be resurrected. Remade in a new time, and by the skilled hands of smiths who had never heard the old designers speak a word. There was a book about the making of maps, for instance, that he’d gotten years ago in Vanai, and never had the opportunity to more than skip through. In his memory, it had had pages demonstrating the different cartographic styles in half a dozen different hands. He wondered where exactly it had gotten to…

But no. Or, not no, but another time. He was Lord Regent of Antea, and the Lord Regent could spend a day looking over old books whenever he wanted. Unless the business of court intruded. And the war. And Cithrin. And the players. And, God, had they really had a dragon?

He hefted the book up under his arm and made his way down the stairs. Servants and courtiers scattered and bowed before him, but he ignored them. He called for his litter, and within moments half a dozen servants and twice the number of guards were carrying him out into the streets of Camnipol. Him and his book besides.

The smiths and armorers kept a district in the southeast of the city, tucked almost against the city wall. The smoke of the forges thickened the air. When he looked out through the windows, the men and women all along the street were bent double or even kneeling in honor of his passage. Near his destination, a particularly fat old man was being helped to his knees by two younger men.

The greatest smithy in Camnipol belonged to a massive Jasuru named Honnen Pyre. He and his apprentices rushed out to the street when Geder’s litter stopped there, and they were kneeling, heads bowed, by the time he stepped down. Geder walked over to the Jasuru. He was wider across the shoulders than Basrahip, his skin so stretched by the underlying muscle that his bronze scales didn’t overlap anymore, but showed a lacework of pale skin between them.

“Lord Regent, you honor my small house,” the smith intoned.

“Thank you. Please don’t let me… please stand up. Yes. Thank you. Please don’t let me interrupt your apprentices. I only need to talk with you.”

Standing, the Jasuru was no taller than Geder, but easily twice as wide and all of it muscle. He nodded to his apprentices, and they scattered back into the forge. The smith crossed his arms and nodded nervously. It was always odd for Geder, seeing men who were so much stronger than him act as though he were the threatening one. It was the office, no doubt. When Aster took the throne, all that would vanish into mist. Still, he’d enjoy it while he could.

“I have a commission for you,” Geder said. “A rather large one, I’m afraid.”

“You’re the Lord Regent, my lord. We’re yours to command,” the smith said.

“Good,” Geder said, pulling the book out from where it rested on his elbow. “Is there a place I can put this? I don’t want to get…” He gestured at the soot and smoke all around them.

“This way, Lord Geder,” the smith said.

For the next hour, Geder and the smith went over the pictures, Geder waving his hands and growing more excited with each new page. The smith remained cautious and thoughtful. It was as if Geder could see the thoughts and strategies forming in the man’s brain. Slowly, the Jasuru’s scowl softened, and he began nodding more than he shook his head. The harpoons with needle-eyes on the ends would be the easiest, he thought. The ballista was possible, perhaps, but there was a man he knew with greater experience in siege engines. He would be pleased to consult with him and bring a full report to Lord Geder.

When a servant came pelting from the Kingspire to remind him of a council meeting, Geder waited for the smith to sketch out copies of the weapons built to destroy the dragons. Reluctantly, he took his book back and trotted to the litter. He couldn’t help but grin. It was the first moment of real happiness he’d felt since the terrible day in Suddapal he’d arrived to find Cithrin—

No, there was no point thinking of that. Not now. Instead, he opened the book again, reviewing the designs of the weapons and imagining how it might feel to wield them. He traced the lines and thought of half a dozen more questions he hadn’t thought to present to the smith. Later, then. He’d have to have a long talk with the man later.

His steps were light as he passed through the lowest floors of the Kingspire, and he bounced on the balls of his feet as if he might break into a delighted little caper at any moment. He could already see the hooked spears flying into the sky, the winged harpoons thrown by modified ballistas looping through the air. Ripping through dragon wings, spilling blood on the earth like rain from a cloud. He imagined himself standing on the corpse of a great dragon the size of a house, sinking a huge two-handed sword in its belly. Cithrin would be there too, drenched in the blood of her conquered masters.

She would look up at him, tears in her eyes. Forgive me, she’d say, her voice breaking just a little, her breasts shuddering with her sobs. Forgive me, Geder. I didn’t know. And he would smile and hold out his hand to her, and she would rise and take it. And they would look after Aster together until he took the throne, not only of Antea but of a purified world. And then he—

“Lord Regent?”

Geder blinked and turned back. He’d walked past the door to the meeting room without noticing he’d done it. The captain of his personal guard hovered behind him, uncertain what to do. His distress was so comical, Geder couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m sorry. My mind’s half gone some days, isn’t it?” he said.

“Ah…” the guard captain said. “If you say so, my lord.”