The King's Blood

Are you ready, sir?”

“Wait.” Marcus swung his foot in the darkness until he found the fallen man’s sword. He lifted it with one toe until the steel was close enough to grab with his encumbered fingers. He didn’t want to be responsible for a horse or a person stepping on a live blade in the darkness. And they might get a few coins for it. Likely more money than he’d paid on the loan. “All right. Let’s get him to the magistrate.”

“Yes, sir.”

“So talking to her may or may not improve things, but keeping silence certainly can’t help?”

“Yes, sir,” Yardem said as they started off at a slow walk, Canin Mise slung between them like a sack.

“And you couldn’t just say that?”

Marcus felt Yardem’s shrug translated through their shared burden.

“Didn’t see the harm, sir. We weren’t doing anything else.”

The public gaol of Porte Oliva looked like a statue garden in the first light of dawn. Blue-lipped prisoners huddled under whatever tarps and blankets the queensmen had seen fit to throw over them. The wooden platforms they stood or squatted on were dark with rain. A Kurtadam man, all the beads pulled from his pelt, stood bent double with a carved wooden symbol at his hip that showed he hadn’t paid his tax. A Cinnae woman moaned and wept at the end of an iron chain, her pale skin stained by its rust, for abandoning her children. Three Firstblood men hung by their necks in the central gallows, unconcerned by the cold.

To the west, the huge brick-and-glass hill of the Governor’s Palace. To the east, the echoing white marble of the high temple. Divine law on one side, human law on the other, and a bunch of poor bastards dying of cold in the middle because they had the misfortune to get caught. It seemed to Marcus like the whole world writ small.

To the north, the wide, soft green of the dragon’s road led away, running solid and eternal out to the web of ancient roads that the fallen masters of the world had left behind when madness and war destroyed them. For a moment he stood on the wide steps of the square and watched the queensmen wrestle Canin Mise into a tiny metal box with a small hole on top where his head would be exposed to the air. Canin Mise would be easy enough to find until the magistrate had time to review his situation. By taking the man into cus tody for breaking a private contract, the governor had tacitly purchased the debt at a tenth of its price. Whatever value the law was able to squeeze out of the man now was no concern of Marcus or Cithrin bel Sarcour or the Medean bank.

Dragons had built this square in millennia past, and the sun had risen on it every day since. Rain and snow and hail had battered or caressed it. Porte Oliva itself was an artifact grown over the remnants of a fallen age. None of these buildings had been where they now stood when the races of humanity had been made. Empires had risen and fallen, and while Porte Oliva itself had never been stormed by an invading host, it had been home to riots and slaughter and death just as any city. It had suffered its fevers and loss. It had become complex, pulling its history around it like a knit shawl. The square hadn’t been meant to house the suffering and the guilty, but it served the purpose.

A pigeon took wing, grey in the grey, flying out over the square to alight on the top of the gallows post. Marcus had the sudden and profound sense of living in a ruin. Generations of Firstblood and Kurtadam and Cinnae had risen and fallen, lived and loved and died within the walls of the city. And so had the pigeons and rats, the salt lizards and the feral dogs. He couldn’t say that there was a great difference between the walls and roofs and passageways that humanity had built and the birds’ nests that huddled in their eaves. Except that birds didn’t have thumbs. None of them were dragons.

He considered Canin Mise’s lost sword. It was a nice piece, well forged and well cared for. The letters SRB were worked into the pommel, but what they meant was anyone’s guess. Perhaps the blade had been a gift from a lover or a commander. Or Canin Mise might have taken it from its owner before him. Regardless, the letters had meant something once, and they didn’t now.

“All right,” Marcus said. “I need food and sleep. I’m getting maudlin.”

“Yes, sir.”

But when they reached the bank office, Pyk Usterhall was waiting for them. The grey slate still hung on the wall, an artifact of the building’s history as a gambler’s stall. Where the day’s odds had been posted, the duty roster now stood. The three names for the standing guard—Corisen Mout, Roach, and Enen—were listed in Yardem’s block letters, but none of them were present. Marcus had noticed before now that when the Yemmu notary was in the front room, there always seemed to be pressing work in the back.

She sat at a low desk, leaning on one massive elbow. The papers on the doomed Canin Mise loan were spread out before her. Her lips sagged in where her tusks should have been, the gap between front and back teeth giving her face a horsey look. She could almost have been a fantastically ugly, obese Firstblood woman. Almost, but not quite.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” Marcus said.

“She’s still sleeping.”

“Sorry?”

“I saw you looking around for the girl. She’s not here. She’s still sleeping. What happened?”

Marcus put the sword on the desk. Pyk looked down at it, then up at him, scowling.

“He was where we thought, and he knew we were looking for him. When I talked to him, he tried to cut me down.”

“And?”

“He didn’t manage.”

Pyk nodded curtly.

“You’ve handed him to the magistrates?” she asked.

“Saw him in the box before we came back.”

Pyk sucked at her teeth, plucked the pen from its inkwell, and wrote a line in the margin of the original contract. For a woman with such huge hands, her writing was tiny and precise. Putting the pen back in place, she sighed prodigiously.

“I need you to fire half your guards,” Pyk said. “Whichever ones you like. Use your best judgment.”

Marcus laughed before he saw she wasn’t smiling. Yardem coughed. Pyk scratched her arm, looking up at him from under her eyebrows.

“We can’t do that,” Marcus said. “We need the men we’ve got.”

“All right,” Pyk said. “Then cut their pay in half. Doesn’t matter to me. But I have reports to send back to the holding company, and we need our expenses down. If we see fewer cock-ups like this”—she gestured at Canin Mise’s blade—“we can hire some back in the autumn.”

“Ma’am, all respect, but the guards will need to eat before autumn. I try to bring them back, they’ll have other work. I’ve run a company. It costs less to pay a few men you don’t need than to need a few you haven’t got.”

“You haven’t run a bank,” Pyk said. “I’ll want the names of the ones you’re losing by tonight. Can you handle that, or do you need help?”

Marcus leaned forward, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. He was tired and hungry and the anger that boiled up in him felt liberating. Like anything that felt good, he distrusted it. He looked over at Yardem, and the Tralgu’s face was perfectly bland. Pyk might have asked him whether it was raining outside.

“I can handle it,” Marcus said.

“Then do.”

He nodded, turned, and stepped back out into the street. In the east, the sun burned at the top of the houses. The rainclouds had broken like a fallen army, and steam was rising from the stone streets. Marcus stretched his arms and his neck, only realizing as he did that they were the same movements he made before a fight.

Marcus took a deep breath.

“I believe that woman is trying to upset me,” he said.

“How’s she doing with that, sir?”

“Fairly good job of it. So. The day you throw me in a ditch and take control of the company?”

“Still not today. Breakfast and sleep, sir? Or would you rather go about this hungry and tired.”

Marcus walked west without answering. A pack of city dogs trotted at his heels partway down the street,