“The map shows a place not far from here where Silas believed he would gain entrance. There is nothing there?”
“There is not. Nor is there any such place within the range of my people. You have been misled.”
Kit ran his hand over his beard to cover a smile.
“I am bitterly sorry to hear this,” he said. “But I thank you for your kindness and your hospitality.”
“You and your servant are welcome to remain and take your rest.” Her voice was gentler now. Marcus imagined that she would be glad to be so easily believed. With a man other than Kit, she might have been.
“You are kind,” Kit said. “Please, let me give you this map as a gift. It is a lie set in ink, but it has its beauty. It is of little use to me now, but it does show something of the lands which belong to you and your people.”
“I accept your gift. I did not expect northerners to be so thoughtful.”
“Northerners are as stones in soft earth,” Kit said. “We’re all different kinds. And some, perhaps, worth more than others.”
The fruit and meat that waited for them when they emerged from the hut would have been the midday meal for any of the other races of humanity. They ate in darkness apart from a small lamp placed near them as a courtesy. Around them, the bustle of village life went on by thin moonlight. The meat from the long-faced boar was sweet and a little gamey, but it was fresh and cooked with onions. A woman brought clay bowls of fresh, cold water to them. Marcus wouldn’t have been more pleased by the finest wine.
On the farther side of the yard, a circle of children sat, whispering into one another’s ears and occasionally breaking out in roars of laughter. Kit watched them with a sour expression.
“Problem?” Marcus asked.
Kit nodded toward the children at their game.
“You’ve played that?” he asked.
“Everyone’s played that. Whisper in one ear, then repeat it until something absurd comes out the far end. Harmless enough.”
“I dislike it,” Kit said. “I’m afraid that all the world’s like that. A long chain of men and women speaking what they believe as clearly as they can, and the truth leaking out like they were trying to hold water in their fists. Even without lies, without deceit, that over there is the best we can manage. A crust of misunderstandings. And all of history is made that way.”
Marcus nodded. The tone Kit spoke in said more than the actual words. “She was lying, then?”
“She was. Not all of it. When she said the Silas map didn’t show where the reliquary was, that was truth. When she said it wasn’t in the range of her people … that was less than true.”
“So it’s close, then.”
Kit took an onion and bit into it, shrugging.
“Probably. Certainly she believes it is.”
“That’s good.”
“On the other hand, it seems to me she’s protective of it. If we press on, the locals may be less friendly than they’ve been.”
The children reached the end of their round, and a great roar of laughter rose up in the darkness. The sounds of daytime laid over the shoulders of night left Marcus uneasy. Now, as guests, it was only a peculiarity of Southling hospitality; the working of a mostly unseen village. When they pressed on unwelcome, there could be other sounds with fewer children and less laughter. He remembered someone telling him that fighting a Southling at night was like fighting with a blindfold. From behind them, a man’s voice called out in the darkness. To their left, another voice answered. The haze thinned enough that the moon showed through in a halo of its own light, too dim to cast a shadow. An insect landed on Marcus’s hand and he shooed it away.
“How much do we know about what happened to the Silas expedition?” Marcus asked.
“Well,” Kit said, his voice reflective and philosophical, “we’re fairly certain they didn’t come back.”
Clara
Once she knew to look, the evidence was everywhere. The snow-paved streets of Camnipol had hardly recovered from the violence of the summer, but the preparations had begun anew. Imri, once the cook’s assistant in Clara’s kitchens, was seeing a carter’s boy who’d been hauling pig iron to the forges since before midwinter. When Clara stopped by the forges on a pretext, all she saw were the long, easily bent spear points Dawson used to deride. They were meant to lodge in a shield and then hang from it, weighting a soldier’s arm, slowing him and breaking his formation. She could hear her husband’s snort of contempt, could see the dismissive scowl. A weapon for house painters, he’d have called it, and nothing that a nobleman would employ. The men who ran the city granaries smoked in the alley and shook their heads. The orders had come that they should not expect the spring wheat crop to refill the stores. It didn’t take Clara a great leap to guess where that food might go. In the temples, the priests intoned psalms about loyalty and the bearing of burdens now for greater glory later, and not of justice or the love of peace. And even in the traditionalist temples, the brown-robes of Geder Palliako’s spider goddess sometimes took the pulpit, declaiming in the accents of the Keshet and making cutting remarks about insects and cockroaches that seemed to implicate the Timzinae without ever quite putting a name to them. The magistrates had begun to sentence fewer young men to the cages and more to martial service. The prisons rose brick by pale brick, as much threat as architecture.