The King's Blood

Mastellin looked small and sheeplike and weary. Only Lord Bannien lived and was not with them. He’d gone in the morning with a dozen men to salvage what he could of his mansion, burned in the night.
    “We can’t keep this going,” Klin said.
    “I know it.”
    In the street below them, there should have been men and women, dogs and children. Servants should have been carrying their masters’ clothing back from the launderer. Horses should have pulled carts of turnips and carrots to the market square. Instead, men with swords walked in groups, wary-eyed. His men, Klin’s, Bannien’s. Aster’s banner flew over the house as well, a visible claim of loyalty that seemed to matter less and less with every passing day.
    “If we have King Lechan,” Mastellin said, “we can lay claim to being the legitimate protectors of the throne. We’d hold the enemy of the crown as an enemy.”
    “Are we sure no one’s killed him?” Mirkus Shoat asked. Klin’s laugh was low and nasty.
    “We’re not sure anyone’s fed him,” he said. “He could be gone to the angels and not a dagger in sight.”
    “Then we have to surrender,” Shoat said.
    “Never to Palliako,” Dawson said. “If we lay down arms, it must be to the prince. Otherwise everything they say about us will be true.”
    “I think you underestimate what they’re saying about us,” Klin said. “And it hardly matters. Until we find one or the other of them, we might as well give arms to Daskellin or Broot or whoever we find walking down the street. There’s no one we can surrender to that can guarantee our safety as far as from here to the gallows.”
    “Why not?” Shoat demanded. “Those others could surrender to us.”
    “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