The Dragon's Path

sound for the metal to be much more than show.
    “Yes, I saw it.”
    “But I’m sure it had nothing to do with those particular men getting rounded up,” Marcus said.
    “You’d best come along, Captain. The city of Vanai needs you.”
    “The caravan leaves in three days,” Marcus said. “And I leave with it. Under contract.”
    Dossen didn’t move, but his face flushed red. Marcus suspected that a member of the prince’s guard wasn’t used to being refused.
    “You think you’re above men like me?” Dossen said. “You think you can dictate terms and the world’s going to listen? Wake up, Wester. You’re a long way from the fields of Ellis.”
    Yardem grunted like he’d taken a body blow and shook his massive head.
    “I wouldn’t have mentioned Ellis,” he said, his voice a low rumble.
    Dossen looked up at the Tralgu with contempt, then at Marcus, and then, nervously, away.
    “Didn’t mean disrespect to your family, Captain,” he said.
    “Walk away,” Marcus said. “Do it now.”
    Dossen stepped back. Just out of thrusting range, he paused.
    “Three days until the ’van leaves,” he said.
    The rest was clear.
Fail to meet the terms of the contract,and answer to the prince. Like it or no.
Marcus didn’t answer. Dossen turned and strode into the square.
    “That’s a problem,” Yardem said.
    “It is.”
    “We need men, sir.”
    “We do.”
    “Any thoughts on where we find them?”
    “No.”
    Marcus took one more despairing look at the men who had once been his, shook his head, and left the menagerie behind.
    The city of Vanai had once been a seaport at the mouth of the river Taneish, but centuries of silt had slowly pressed the river mouth away until now it lay a full morning’s ride to the south. Canals and waterways laced the city, and flatboats still came there on the way to and from the smaller, younger city of Newport carrying grain and wool, silver and timber from the countries to the north.
    Like all the Free Cities, Vanai had a history of conflict. It had been a republic led by a lottery-chosen council, the private holding of a monarch, the ally or enemy of Birancour or the Severed Throne depending on which way the wind blew. It had been a center of religion, and of revolt against religion. Every incarnation had left its mark upon the white wood buildings, the greasy canals, the narrow streets and open squares.
    Here, ancient gates still hung at rest, prepared to protect the halls of the Common Council though the last councilmen were all generations dead. There, a noble bronze statue showed the wise and solemn countenance of a robed and mitred bishop streaked with verdigris and pigeon shit. The streets had signs in wood and stone from a thousand years of history, so that a single alley might be called by adozen names. Iron gates marked the twenty tiny political districts, allowing the prince to remake the pathways through the city at his whim, protection against riots and conspiracy.
    But even more than the architecture, Vanai wore its past in the character of its people.
    Timzinae and Firstblood were most common, but glow-eyed, hairless Dartinae, the reed-thin, snow-pale Cinnae, and bronze-scaled Jasuru all had districts within the city’s wide white walls. Time and experience had given them all a sophisticated, cynical edge. Walking through the narrow streets beside rich green canals, Marcus could see all the small signs of it. Firstblood merchants, loyalists to the prince, offered the soldiers discounts on goods that had been marked higher for the purpose. The beer houses and physicians, tanners and cobblers and professionals of every sort prepared fresh signs in Imperial Antean script so that business could go on unabated after the war was lost. Old Timzinae men, their dark scales greying and cracked, sat cross-legged at quayside tables talking about the last revolution when the prince’s father had taken power from the republic. Their granddaughters walked in groups wearing thin white skirts of an almost imperial cut, black-scaled legs showing through the cloth like shadows.
    Yes, some soldiers would die. Yes, some buildings would burn. Some women would be raped. Some fortunes would be lost. It was an evil that the city would weather, as it had before, and no one expected the disaster would come to them in particular. The soul of the city could be summarized with a shrug.
    In a green-grass common, a weathered theatrical cart had dropped its side, the shallow stage