The King's Blood(118)

“But they won’t,” Klin said, his voice the melody of despair. “They’re winning.”

“What about the priests?” Dawson said. “Have we tracked any of them down?”

“A few,” Klin said. “Not all. The high priest especially can’t be found. We’ve rounded up six or seven of the bastards.”

“Where are they now?” Mastellin asked.

“Bottom of the Division,” he said. “We threw them off a bridge. I talked to one of them for a while first. They tell interesting stories.”

“I don’t care what pigs mean when they grunt,” Dawson said, but Klin went on as if he’d been silent.

“They say Palliako’s running the whole damned fight from a secret tower in the Kingspire. He’s supposed to have some kind of magical protection. When the blades hit him, they passed right through like he was mist.”

“It’s shit,” Dawson said. “The only thing my blade passed through was the priest.”

Klin shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was harder.

“They say he planned all this. That it’s part of the purge he began with Feldin Maas, and only he knew how deep it really ran. They say the fighting now is all him putting a hot cloth on the wound so he can draw up the pus.” Klin looked around the rooftop. “We’re the pus, in case you missed the metaphor.”

In the street, someone shouted and half a dozen men drew blades and ran to the sound. Dawson wished his eyes could turn the corners and follow them instead of standing up where he could see so much more of the city, and still too little.

“You don’t believe it,” Dawson said.

“I don’t know,” Klin replied. “I didn’t, but even wild tales can have a grain of truth to them. Palliako knew we were coming.”

“He was suprised,” Dawson said.

“He didn’t know it was you, maybe,” Klin said. “But he does now. Maybe it was all built to see who was against him. It worked out that way, didn’t it?”

Sweat trickled down Dawson’s back and stuck his sleeves to his arms. The shouts in the streets below were growing louder, and the sound of steel against steel rang with them. Klin ignored that too.

“I don’t think he’s become some sort of master cunning man who turns to mist and knows the hearts of all his subjects. But some people do, Kalliam. Some people think that’s true.”

“There are always idiots,” Dawson said as a rough knot of melee pushed its way back round the corner and toward Klin’s courtyard. “And you’re one for talking to them. Damn it, they’ve come back. Sound the defense.”

“What’s the point?” Klin asked.

“That they don’t kill us,” Dawson said, speaking each word individually. Klin only smiled.

“Every man dies sometime,” he said. “At least it won’t be in that swamp.”

At last, the drums beat out the defense. The men at rest came out from behind Klin’s walls, pressing the attackers back to the barricades Dawson’s forces had made. He was going to have to pull back farther still. With Bannien gone, he had too few men to command all the streets around Klin’s estate. And God alone knew when Bannien would return.

And if.

* * *

T

he halls of Klin’s estate were frankly ugly. Like Issandrian and Maas and all of that cohort of young iconoclasts, the old aesthetics were lost on them. There were no clean lines here. No austerity or dignity or gravity. Nothing held the beauty of classic architecture. Instead, the doorframes were carved into small riots of form: monkeys lifting frogs, frogs with lions on their backs, lions pawing at stretch-winged herons who were also the lintel. The tapestries were gaudy, busy things that dripped fringe like a drool from a man with a bad tooth. No floor could be left alone. They had to be inlaid with different colors of stone and chips of stained glass.

Sitting in the withdrawing room, Clara was like a gem in a pile of stones. The bed that Klin had supplied took up the better part of the room, but she sat on it as if it were the most elegant silk divan. The interior of the house was viciously hot, and without even the advantage of the smoky breeze, so she had the shutters cracked open, the soft daylight on her needlework. The web of pink threads and yellow and green were growing together into a pattern he couldn’t yet make sense of. He’d always had the sense that she complicated the work intentionally, putting the thread together as a puzzle for her to resolve. In the end, it would be as if each step had been perfectly straightforward. Elegant.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said without looking up. “You’ll only make me feel guilty for distracting you.”