“Ah,” Kit said. “That’s not good.”
“Isn’t. You think you might be able to use those uncanny powers of yours to find us some replacements?”
“I assume we can walk up to the city. It might take some time to earn enough to buy horses, but we can try.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of walking up to someone on a nice horse and asking them to let us use it.”
Kit made an uncomfortable kind of grunt and Marcus looked over at him.
“I believe the power—her power—can become a path of corruption. An opportunity, as it were, to lose what is most valuable about ourselves.”
“Yeah. Saving the world here, Kit,” Marcus said. “Let’s keep focus on that.”
The old actor sighed.
“Let me see what I can do.”
Once they’d reached the dragon’s road, they moved as fast as a courier, changing for fresh horses twice a day. The fields, farms, and wild places of Antea spread around them like a vast grey-brown cloak. The trees were shedding their summer green. In the fields they passed, Firstblood farmers rode on mules with whips at their sides while Timzinae men and women harvested the last of the autumn crops—pumpkins and gourds and winter wheat. Whenever they passed a low temple, the banner of the spider goddess flew from its roof. And even with all this for warning, Marcus was surprised when at last they reached Camnipol.
Coming from the south meant that the great city stood on an escarpment above them. They went up the trails to the southern gate with only the massive walls to see. Within them, Camnipol might have been empty for all Marcus could tell. It was only when they passed through the tunnel in the wall and emerged into the wider city that the full extent of the place became clear. All around him, buildings rose two and three and four stories high. The streets were thick with people, Firstblood mostly, but Tralgu and Jasuru and Dartinae faces as well. None of those were what stopped him. There was something he couldn’t quite explain—a grandeur and a weariness and sense of terrible age—that seeped through the city itself. He’d known many cities in his life, and until he walked into Camnipol for the first time, he would have said that he understood what it meant for a city to have a personality; that every gathering place of humanity had its own customs and idiosyncrasies, that the coffee in Northcoast came with honey and in Maccia with cardamom. Camnipol was something else again. Here the personality of the city wasn’t just the contingencies and customs of the people in it. It was something that grew out of the stone, that scented the air. Camnipol was a living thing, and the people in its streets were parts of it the way that skin and ligaments and muscles made up a body.
And what was strangest of all, it wasn’t a secret. It was as obvious as the sun the moment he stepped inside the walls. Kit reined in beside him.
“Your first time in Camnipol, then?”
“They didn’t hire many mercenary companies when I was in the trade,” Marcus said. “I spent more time at little garrisons. God. I’m gawking at the place like a child.”
“Wait until you see the Division,” Kit said. But it wasn’t the great chasm of the Division that caught them up next. When they turned a corner into a wider square, the Kingspire came into view, rising into the sky higher than any human structure should. In the midday sun, it seemed almost to glow. And high up, almost at its top, a vast banner flew.
When he’d been a boy, Marcus had seen a spider’s egg crack open and thousands of tiny animals with delicate pale bodies no larger than a grain of millet spin out thread into the breeze. He’d watched them rise up in the sun, thick as smoke and tiny. And later in the summer, his father had showed him a vast web at the edge of the garden where a massive yellow-and-black beast of a spider had made its home. The thing had been big as a fist, and its web strong enough to catch sparrows. Marcus still remembered the chill of understanding that had come to him. Each one of those tiny grains floating on the wind had gone out into the world and grown into a monstrosity like this one. And like that, each little banner they had seen, dyed whatever red the locals could manage, painted with the eightfold sigil, and hung from the temple’s eave, had been a grain. And the massive cloth that floated in the air over Camnipol was the beast they would grow into.
The grimness in Kit’s expression told Marcus that the old actor understood and was thinking along the same track.
“All right,” Marcus said as they rode across the square to a public stable with the inexplicable sign of an ice- blue mallet over the gate. “What’s the plan, then? Start asking people if they know who’s been sending letters to Carse and wait for someone who tells us no to be lying about it?”
“It sounds inelegant when you put it that way,” Master Kit said, chuckling. “I have spent some time in Camnipol, and I have some ideas where we might begin.”
“Well, you can be the one who’s wise in the ways of the city,” Marcus said. “I’ll be the one that hits whoever needs hitting.”
“That seems a fair division of labor.”
Rather than pay for stabling, Kit sold the horses at a decent profit, though Marcus suspected it was nowhere near what he could have gotten, and they began their walk through the city. A nail maker greeted Kit by name, and they stopped to talk for the better part of an hour. Then a butcher’s stall run by a Jasuru woman with scales more green than bronze and three missing fingers. Then an old man at a tavern who called Kit Looloo for reasons that Marcus never entirely understood. Everyone they met was happy to see Kit, but the stories they told of life in the city were eerie. The Lord Regent, they said, was a brilliant man with powers more subtle than a cunning man’s. Food was growing short, in part because the farms hadn’t worked at capacity since the war with Asterilhold and in part because so much was still being sent to feed the army in Elassae. The cult of the spider goddess was a blessing for the city, and since it had come, everything was going well. The streets weren’t safe after dark. Too many people were hungry. Camnipol had become more violent and dangerous because of the Timzinae and their agents. Twice, Kit’s friends told of a secret ring of Timzinae who’d been stalking the streets at night and stealing away Firstblood women. In one version, they’d been taken to a secret temple under the city and slaughtered as offerings to the dragons. In another, they’d been found in a secret room in the manor house of the traitor Alan Klin, which only served to show that Klin had been as much a tool of the Timzinae as Dawson Kalliam.
It was almost night when they reached the Division. The great chasm ran through the city’s heart like a river. Marcus stood at the center of a span and looked down. The depth of it left him breathless.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. How many bodies would you guess go into that in the course of a year?” Marcus said. Then, “Kit?”
Kit’s face had gone pale. Marcus followed the man’s gaze to the far side of the great canyon. A building four floors high and painted the yellow of egg yolk loomed on the farther side of a common yard. A stable stood off to the south with carts and horses enough to mark the place as a wayhouse and a tavern. Kit began to walk toward it in a drunken stagger, and Marcus followed, confused until he saw what Kit was walking toward.
The cart looked much the same as it had when Marcus and Kit and the others had hauled it as part of the last caravan from Vanai half a decade before. Two of the boards on the stage had been replaced recently, and the new wood stood out brightly from the old. Kit put a trembling hand to it. A tear tracked down his cheek.
“Hey, you old bastard,” a rough voice called from behind them. “Watch whose cart you’re feeling up.”
The woman, thin across the shoulders with dark hair pulled back in a braid, swaggered across the yard. Two men walked behind her. When she reached them, she fell into Master Kit’s arms. The two men wrapped arms around the pair until all four were in a tight knot of affection and humanity. The larger of the men turned his head to Marcus.
“Good to see you too, Captain,” Hornet said.
“Always a pleasure.”
Hornet pulled back an arm, inviting him into the huddle, but Marcus declined with a smile.
“Cary?” Master Kit said, half choked with sobs. “What are you … how did you come back here?”
“You made an assumption there,” the other man, Smit, said. “You see how he made that assumption?”
“I did,” Hornet said, grinning. Cary only looked up at Master Kit with a smile of defiance and pleasure. She looked like a child whose father had come home from a journey of years.
“You’ve been here all this time?” Kit said, disbelief in his voice. “This same yard for … ? How can that be?”
