“I think it’s a crab’s leg,” Sandr replied. “Big, isn’t it? Catch one of these, it would be a good meal.”
“It would or you,” Cary said.
Sandr shrugged and dropped it back where it had been. Marcus walked forward. The stones grated against each other under his feet. He swept his gaze back and forth across the ground in front of him, moving slowly, his eyes a little unfocused, waiting for some detail to draw his attention. So far, Sandr was winning the prize for most interesting discovery.
“You’re sure about this, Kit?”
“No,” Kit said. “I’m sure that old Kirot thought there was something out here, but he may have been wrong.”
Marcus stepped across a gap between two larger stones, wary of the thin coating of ice that made them slick and treacherous.
“Would have been nice if we had a damn clue what we were looking for,” he said.
“Not a giant, not a sword,” Kit said. “Not a weapon, not a medicine, and no sort of armor.”
“How about a rock?” Marcus said. “You think any of these might be a magic rock?”
“Possibly,” Kit said. “But probably not.”
The storm had lasted three days, and so for three days and nights they’d sat in the great, smoky lodge house, trading stories with the Haaverkin and playing songs. Cary and Smit had danced a number in way that caught the attention of the Antean force and left Marcus wondering whether there was something more going on between them than he’d guessed, but the Haaverkin didn’t seem impressed by it. People who weren’t thick with insulating fat and heavily tattooed didn’t have much erotic charge for this crowd.
When at last the weather broke, Dar Cinlama and his men packed their things, offered to travel with them one last time, and then headed south for Borja before they froze in place. Marcus had to admit that their plan had an appeal. Dar Cinlama was powerfully impressed with himself, but he told a good tale and he didn’t drink more than his share of the beer. It was enough to win him some respect as far as Marcus was concerned, even with who he was working for.
“How do you think it’s going out there?” Marcus asked.
“Out there?”
“In the world. Where there are people.”
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “At a guess, poorly.”
“That was my thought too.” He stepped forward. A flash of yellow in one of the small tidepools caught his attention, and he leaned close. A tiny starfish clung to a stone. Probably not the source of earth-shattering magic. “Do you think Cithrin and Yardem are all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s why they call it a guess.”
Kit smiled. “Well, then, since I know that they are both clever and competent, I would guess that they are fine, whatever’s happened.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“No.”
They moved on, Marcus sweeping his eyes over the ground, then moving forward. Sweeping, and moving forward. Almost half an hour later, he spoke again.
“I keep thinking about the war. About how it’s just like all the other wars I’ve seen, only it isn’t.”
“I’m not certain what you mean,” Kit said, and squatted down.
“Find something?”
The actor reached into one of the salt puddles. When he drew out his hand, he had a thin stem of hollow bone.
“Pipe stem,” Kit said. “It might been carried in by the waves.”
“Or it might have been dropped by someone walking this same path. I’m going to call that a good sign.”
“But you’d been talking about war.”
“Right. I’ve seen a lot of wars fought for a lot of reasons. Pride. Fear. Power. The right to use land. Trying to keep someone else from using land. Even just the bull-blind love of winning. And I look at what Antea’s been doing, and I see all of that. But the other thing—and I’ve always seen this no matter who’s fighting and whatever they’re fighting for—is once you’re in a war, you want out of it. You want to win or you want to sue for peace or you want to get away from the mad bastards who are stabbing at you. Even the ones that love winning don’t love the war. And that’s not something I see.”
“Ah. I understand. You’re thinking of this as if Antea were at war.”
The stone under Marcus’s foot shifted and he danced back. “There’s some evidence that it is.”
“Consider that Antea is waging war the way that a horse leads a cavalry charge. It seems to me it is being ridden by men like myself. Perhaps Antea will rise and spread across the world with the goddess at the reins. Or it may founder and be abandoned for another champion or some number of others. When you look at Antea, you see the enemy. I see the first among victims.”
“Odd kind of victim when you get all the power from it.”
“I don’t fear this high priest as much as I do his first enemy within the temple,” Kit said.
“How do you figure that?”
“We were pure when we were in one village in the depth of the Keshet. Every day, we heard the high priest’s voice. Now there are temples that are weeks to travel between. New temples being built. New initiates, I would assume. If not yet, then certainly soon. And the new initiates will bring their own experiences. Their own prejudices.”
“I thought your goddess ate their minds.”
Kit laughed. “Think of who you’re talking with, Marcus. I am not the only apostate in history. I see no reason to think I’m the last. But the next one perhaps will understand some piece of doctrine differently. Instead of finding doubt, he may honestly and sincerely believe something that other priests in other places don’t, and none of them will have a single voice to keep them from drifting apart. What the spiders do—let’s not call it the goddess—is erase the ability of good men to question. They eat doubt. And when there are enough temples far enough flung from each other, and their understandings drift apart, it seems to me there will be a war of zealots and fanatics that will churn the world in blood. And I don’t see how Antea or anyplace else will be immune.”
“I’m not having a great upwelling of optimism about this, Kit.”
“I think we are living in dark times,” Kit said. “As dangerous, I would guess, as any since the fall of the dragons. But the world is unpredictable, and I take a great deal of comfort from that.”
“Glad someone does,” Marcus said.
The other actors—Mikel and Cary, Hornet and Smit, Sandr and Cary and Charlit Soon—were all spread along the shore from the ice-choked waterline to the edge of the land. All of them walked slowly and carefully. And by and large, they found nothing. The waves pressed slowly closer, driving them together in a smaller and smaller space. If whatever it was they were looking for was out near the low-water mark, they would walk by it and never know better. If it was lost among the stones or the caves and outcroppings near the shore, they had a better chance, and ignorance made one strategy as good as the next.
“I thought it was interesting that Dar Cinlama didn’t know what he was looking for,” Marcus said. “Do you think your old friends do?”
“I don’t know, but I would suspect that they have some idea, even if one that’s warped by time and misunderstanding.”
“You don’t think they just made it all up?”
Kit looked pained.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “Didn’t mean to step on a sore toe twice.”
“I believe that you’re right that something drove them back to the temple, and that fear of it became a prison of sorts, until something happened that gave them a kind of permission to return. A story that made coming back into the world a better thing than hiding.”
“But what that was?”
“I can’t guess.”
Near the shoreline, Smit stepped out from a small cave and put his hands to his mouth, shouting to be heard over the roar and crackle of the surf. “Think I found something.”
