The Dragon's Path

The windows looked out over a garden of leafless oaks and snowbound flowerbeds. In spring, it would be like having a private forest. Geder’s new bed was warmed by an ingenious network of pipes that led to and from a great fire grate, the pump driven by the rising air. The contraption burbled to itself, sometimes directly beneath Geder, as if the feather mattresses had eaten something that disagreed with them. Geder lay in the dim, firelit room for almost an hour after the last servant had been dismissed. Though he was exhausted, sleep would not come. When he rose, it was with the delicious sense of doing something he ought not do, clear in the knowledge that he would get away with it.
    He lit three candles from the fire, blackening the wax a bit with the smoke, and set them beside his bed. Then from the small cache of his own things brought here by his squire, he plucked the creaking binding of the book he’d most recently bought. He’d read it through already, and marked the section that he found most interesting so that he could find it easily.
    Legends of the Righteous Servant, also called Sinir Kushku in the language of the ancient Pût, place it as the final and greatest weapon of Morade, though the degree towhich this is simple confabulation with the dragon’s network of spies and the curiously insightful nature of his final madness remains unclear.
    Geder put his finger over the words, fighting to remember what he knew of the languages of the east.
    Sinir Kushku.
    The End of All Doubt.

Cithrin
     
    I ’m saying there is evil in the world,” Master Kit said, hefting the box on his hip, “and
doubt
is the weapon that guards against it.”
    Yardem took the box from the old actor’s hands and lifted it to the top of the pile.
    “But if you doubt everything,” the Tralgu said, “how can anything be justified?”
    “Tentatively. And subject to later examination. It seems to me the better question is whether there’s any virtue in committing to a permanent and unexamined certainty. I don’t believe we can say that.”
    Captain Wester made a noise in the back of his throat like a dog preparing for the attack. Cithrin felt herself start to cringe back, but didn’t let her body follow the impulse through.
    “We can say,” the captain said, “that wasting good air on the question won’t get the work done any faster.”
    “Sorry, sir,” the Tralgu said.
    Master Kit nodded his apology and went back down the thin wooden stairs to the street. Sandr and Hornet, coming up with a box of gems between them, flattened themselves to the wall to let him pass. Cithrin shifted, giving them room enough to pass the new box to Yardem, and Yardem enough to find a place for it in the new rooms. A cold, damp breeze and the smell of fresh horse droppings wafted through theopen windows along with the daylight. Cithrin thought it seemed like springtime.
    “Was he a priest as a boy?” Marcus said, pointing down the stairway with his chin. “He starts talking about faith and doubt and the nature of truth, it’s like we’re back in the ’van getting a sermon with every meal.”
    “What he says makes sense,” Yardem said.
    “To you,” Marcus replied.
    “Suppose he might have been a priest. It’s Master Kit,” Hornet said with a shrug. “If he told us he’d walked up the mountainside and drank beer with the moon, I’d probably believe it. We’ve got two more boxes the size of that one, and then all those wax blocks.”
    “Wax?” Marcus asked.
    “The books,” Cithrin said, but the words came out as a croak. She coughed and began again. “The books and ledgers. They’re sealed against the damp.”
    Which is a good thing,
she thought,
since we sank them in a mill pond.
Immediately, she imagined a crack in the sealing wax. Pages and pages of smeared ink and rotting paper hidden by the protecting wraps. What if the books were ruined? What would she tell Magister Imaniel then? What would she tell the bankers in Carse?
    “Well, bring them up,” Marcus said. “We’ll find a place for them somewhere.”
    Hornet nodded, but Sandr was already going down the stairs. He hadn’t even looked at her. She told herself it didn’t bother her.
    Cithrin was very aware that the new rooms didn’t entirely meet with Captain Wester’s approval. Unlike the place in the salt quarter, these were on the second story with woodplank floors that reported any motion to the floor below in a language of creaks and pops. The shop