The King's Blood

matching colors. The woman herself wore a black leather cloak, cut too generously. Fashion in all things.
    “What’s your business here?” the Jasuru demanded, his hand on his sword’s pommel.
    “Nothing pressing,” the apostate said. “Didn’t see I was in the way. Quite sorry.”
    The guard growled low in his throat and looked away. The apostate turned his back and walked. Behind him, the high, rattling sound of the tin gongs began. He hadn’t heard the call to prayer since he was a boy and a priest in a mountain temple half a continent away. For a moment, he could smell the dust and sweet wellwater, could hear the scrape of lizards across the stone and taste the curried goat that no one else in the world made the way they had in the village of his youth. A deep voice began the call to prayer, and the power in the apostate’s blood thrilled to the half-forgotten syllables. He paused, ignored the wisdom of a thousand children’s tales, and looked back.
    The bull-huge man wore the green and gold of a high priest preparing the low rites, but he was no one the apostate recognized. The high priest he had known was dead, then. Well, the spider goddess promised many things, but physical immortality wasn’t one. Her priests could die. The thought was a comfort. The apostate pulled his cheap wools closer around him and disappeared into the wet labyrinth of broadways and alleys.
    T
    he Division split Camnipol down its center like God’s knife wound. Half a dozen true bridges spanned the abyss from its rim, standing high above the empty air, massive webworks of stone and iron. Any number of improvised chain-and-rope constructions reached across it lower down where the walls came closer together. If one were sitting near its edge, the history of the city was laid bare, ruin laid upon ruin laid upon ruin until the ancient architecture vanished, indistinguishable from stone apart from the occasional archway or green-bleeding bronzework. Since the age of dragons and before, there had been a city where Camnipol stood, growing upon and out of the ruins of the city before it. Even now, poor men and women of the thirteen races lived deep in the flesh of the city, inhabiting lightless caves that had been the storehouses and ballrooms and palaces of their ancestors.
    “You never really think about drainage,” Smit said, looking out into the grey air.
    “I don’t believe I do,” the apostate said, shrugging off his cloak. “Was there a reason you felt I should?”
    The troupe had taken shelter in a common yard at the Division’s edge. The cart’s thin doors were open, but they hadn’t lowered the stage. Cary sat cross-legged with her back against the wide wheel, sewing beads to the blue gown. They were going to play The Bride’s Folly that night, and the role of Lady Partia called for a bit more frippery. Sandr and Hornet were at the back of the high shelter with sticks in their hands, walking the choreography of the final battle where Anson Arranson exposed the treachery of his commander. Charlit Soon, their newest actor, sat with her hands under her thighs, her lips moving as if in prayer. It was her first night playing in The Bride’s Folly, and her anxiety was endearing. Mikel was nowhere to be seen, likely off to the market and haggling for meat and river fish. There would be plenty of time for him to return and make ready. It was only the gloomy weather that made everything seem late.
    “Well, you think about it,” Smit said, nodding at the rain, “the things that really make a city are about controlling nature, aren’t they? This here rain may not look like much, but Camnipol’s a big city. It all adds up. Right now, just looking at it, it’s like God upended a river on the place. All that water’s got to go somewhere.”
    “ The sea, the sea, the endless sea ,” the apostate said, quoting a play they’d done two years before. “ As all water finds the salt waves, so all men end in death. ”
    “Well sure,” Smit said, rubbing his chin, “but the important thing’s how it gets from here to there, isn’t it?”
    The apostate smiled.
    “Smit, my dear, I believe you’ve just committed metaphor.”
    The actor blinked a false innocence.
    “Did I? And here I thought we were talking about gutters.”
    The apostate smiled. For fifteen years now, he had traveled the world with his little band of players. They had sung for kings and brutish mobs. He’d taught players from eight of the thirteen