arch of the city, the gates were beginning to close.
“To me!” Geder shouted, and pushed himself forward. “Vanai to me!”
He and his men burst through the narrowing space between the gates like a handful of dried peas thrown against a window, first the fastest, then one or two more together, and then all of them in a lump. The square Geder had strolled through not two hours before was changed past recognition. Where there had been carts and carriages, bodies lay in the street. From the overturned table of honey stones and candied lavender, a line of Jasuru archers stood, their scales glittering gold. They loosed arrows, and the man to Geder’s left fell down screaming.
“Attack!” Geder shrilled. “Stop them! Attack!”
Geder’s men charged, heads down and voices raised. The archers fell back, and from the right, a group of Yemmu in banded steel and leather with huge two-handed swords lumbered toward them. With jaw tusks painted the color of blood, they were like something out of a nightmare. One raised his wide head and howled. There were words in the cry. Geder turned toward the retreating archers, then the advancing swordsmen, and back again.
A wide blade a yard long whirred toward him, and he danced back. The Yemmu was almost half again as tall as a Firstblood man, wide as a cart across the shoulders. Geder lifted his own blade in both hands, and the Yemmu grinned. With a groan, the Yemmu pulled his sword through the air, forcing Geder back again. To the left, a huge blade caught a gap in the armor of one of the Vanai men, spraying hot blood across Geder’s chest and face. Somewhere behind him, someone shrieked.
Geder’s opponent lifted his sword, preparing to bring it down like an axe. Geder raised his own blade, knowing as he did that he couldn’t even deflect the coming blow. Someone ran by him, slamming into the Yemmu soldier and making him stumble.
“Now, Geder!” Jorey shouted. “Cut him!”
Geder scuttled forward, swinging with his blade. The cut wasn’t deep, but it got through the leather armor. The Yemmu shouted, and Jorey jumped back. Geder swung again. He was trying for the thing’s belly where the armor was thin to let it twist, but the blow went low, dropping toward the thing’s thigh. The Yemmu put out its huge grey hand and shoved Geder back, but Jorey Kalliam’s blade cut down, drawing a gout of blood from its wrist. It howled, dropping its sword and grabbing at the wound to stanch the flow. Geder rushed in, hewing two, three, four, times at the Yemmu fighter’s knee like he was trying to cut down a sapling.
The Yemmu stumbled and fell, lifting its arms in surrender. Geder spun around.
The gates had stopped, neither fully open nor closed, and more of the Vanai soldiers were pouring through the gap. The Jasuru archers were nowhere to be seen, and four of the Yemmu had fallen, with half a dozen more locked in battle against a rising tide of Antean swords. Jorey Kalliam was bent over, breathing hard. Blood trickled from his mouth and stained his teeth, but he was smiling.
“Didn’t know what they were starting when they crossed us,” Jorey said through a foam of his own blood and saliva. Geder grinned.
Well,” Lerer Palliako said, leaning against the parapet of his balcony. “Well, well, well.”
“They actually took the southern gate,” Geder said. “Closed it and jammed the mechanism. We still can’t open it.”
Geder shrugged. The twilight was fading and stars coming out. The feasts and balls were all canceled by order of the throne. Blades and blood in the streets of Camnipol had the king’s guard patrolling the streets. King Simeon himself had gathered a select group of nobles in the Kingspire, and set a dusk-to-dawn curfew that meant anyone found in the darkened streets would be slaughtered without question or warning. The houses were being closed and barred, and a fire watch set on the walls of the city. The stadium that had been remade to house Prince Aster’s celebratory games instead had a dozen gladiators hung from makeshift gallows. Twice that number had been bound and dropped off bridges, their bodies unburied at the bottom of the Division.
The city’s shock and fear seemed to change the air itself. Everything seemed fragile, poised at some great catastrophe. Geder knew he should have been frightened too, but he was exhilarated. An armed revolt in the capital city, and he’d put it down. If he’d been celebrated for the burning of Vanai, he could hardly imagine the glory that would rain down on him now. He was half drunk with the idea of it.
“I also hear Lord Ternigan has ordered the disband,” his father said.
“The men were all desperate to defend their houses and families. If Lord Ternigan hadn’t, I likely would have.”
His father shook his head and sighed. From the window, they could see the Kingspire at the city’s edge, towering above Camnipol and therefore the world. Lights glittered in the windows like stars or the cookfires of an army. Lerer Palliako cracked his knuckles.
“Bad times,” he said. “Very bad times.”
“It won’t go on,” Geder said. “This ends it. There aren’t any more of the gladiators, and if there are, they’ll be hunted down. The city’s saved.”
“There’s whoever suborned them,” his father said. “Whoever arranged the attack. And the names I can put on that list are too powerful to die on a rope. I never spent time at court when I was a young man. I never made the connections and alliances. I wonder now if I should have. But it’s too late, I suppose.”
“Father,” Geder said, but Lerer coughed and held up a hand.
“The disband’s been called, son. You can go anywhere you’d like. Do anything. It might be wise if you were out of Camnipol for a time. Until this is all settled out.”
Unease cut through Geder’s euphoria for the first time since the fighting stopped. He looked around the night-soaked buildings and streets. Surely his father was jumping at shadows. There was nothing to be afraid of. They’d won. The coup had been stopped.
This coup. This time.
“I suppose there’s no harm in going home now,” Geder said. “I have an essay I’m thinking about that I think you’d find interesting. I’m tracking geographic references by time and comparing them with contemporary maps to-”
“Not Rivenhalm,” Lerer said.
Geder’s words trailed off.
“You should leave Antea,” his father said. “You’re too much a part of politics we don’t fully understand. First Vanai, and now this? For the season at least, you should go where they can’t reach you. Take a few servants. I’ll give you the money. You can find someplace quiet and out of the way. By autumn, perhaps, we’ll know better where things stand.”
“All right,” Geder said. He felt very small.
“And son? Don’t tell anybody where you’re going.”
Abraham, Daniel
The Dragon’s Path
Dawson
Simeon paced before them all. The king’s face was a mixture of hesitance and determination that Dawson had seen on hunting dogs unsure of how to get down a slope, aware that once they began there would be no stopping. Whatever counsel his old friend had taken in the long night, it hadn’t been with him. On the other hand, he was certain it hadn’t been with Curtin Issandrian either.
The audience chamber they sat in now wasn’t the usual. There were no tapestries or soft velvet cushions, the walls were bare brick. There were no rugs or cushions to support the bent knees of Simeon’s subjects. The king’s guard stood along the walls with swords and armor that could not be mistaken for merely decorative. Prince Aster sat on a silver throne behind his father. It was clear the boy had been crying.
Curtin Issandrian knelt across the aisle from Dawson, his face drawn and pale. Alan Klin was at his side. Canl Daskellin and Feldin Maas had both managed to avoid attention. Odderd Faskellin was dead of an arrow to the throat, and his killer already feeding the gallows flies. Geder Palliako, by all rights the hero of the hour for holding the southern gate, had already left the city. Dawson was alone.
Behind and above the three of them, the viewing galleries were packed. Every man of nobility sat on low, uncomfortable stools behind the length of woven rope that pretended to separate them from the formal audience.
