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The King's Blood

The King's Blood

Titel: The King's Blood Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Daniel Abraham
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I will take full responsibility for ending this, and I will send my written judgment and corrected plans to Camnipol tonight. Please make a courier and horse ready as—”
    “Listen to my voice,” the priest said. “You will not fail. We are servants of the truth and the goddess. What we tell you is true. Their men cannot stand against you. They will fail.”
    Dawson leaned back. The heat of the room and the smoke of the candle were doing something unpleasant.
    “How can you think that is possible?” he said. “Do they have fewer men than they did?”
    “It does not matter how many they are.”
    “Are they all sick? Is there plague?”
    “It does not matter whether they are sick or well. You are the men of Antea, strong at heart and blessed of the goddess. They are weak, and their fear is justified.”
    “Be that as it may,” Dawson said, “they are in a fortified position with our only line of attack clear, open, and insecure. All I need to do is look at a map and the numbers, and I can tell you as surely as I can tell you my own name that that keep can’t be taken any more than this one can.”
    “Listen to my—”
    “I don’t care to listen to your voice, boy,” Dawson said. “I don’t care how often you tell me that a pig is really a kitten. That doesn’t make it true.”
    “Yes, my lord,” the middle priest said. “It does .”
    Dawson couldn’t do anything but laugh. The candle flames danced and flickered.
    “What is a word except what you mean by it, Lord?” the priest said. “This is a dog and that may be a dog, and yet they look nothing like each other. One is half the size of a horse, the other would fit in a woman’s lap. And yet we call them dogs.”
    “You can breed them.”
    “Timzinae and Haaverkin can’t breed. Which one is the human? A finch and a hawk are birds, can they share an egg? Words are empty until you fill them, and how you fill them shapes the world. Words are the armor and the swords of souls, and the soldiers on the other side of that bridge have no defense against them.”
    “Nothing you just said,” Dawson said, stressing each word individually, “makes any damn sense. A war isn’t a word game.”
    The priest lifted a finger. “When you became Lord Marshal, nothing about you changed. Your fingers were the same. Your nose. Your backbone. All of your body was as it had been, and yet you were transformed. The words were said, and by being said, they became true. A pig can be another kind of kitten if I say it and you understand its truth. If we say the Timzinae are not human, then they are not. We are the righteous servants of the goddess, and all the world is this way for us. Lies have no power over us, and the words we speak are true.”
    “The words you speak won’t turn a blade,” Dawson said.
    “Blades turn because hands turn. Hands turn because of hearts. Listen to my voice, Lord, and know what the men who have listened to us already know. What you want is already yours. The blades of Antea are of steel, and your enemies are grass before you.”
    “Yes, well, you haven’t seen the grass I’ve just come from,” Dawson said, but his mind was already elsewhere.
    The room was close and hot, and the air was thick. It felt like the war. Trapping, confining. They would be years in those marshes, fighting their way to the north mile by mile. Already they’d missed too much of the planting. Food would be scarce in the autumn, and next spring men would starve. And that was as it stood now. Today.
    If only what the priests said were true, hundreds—maybe thousands—would live who now were slated to die. Many of them were the men he commanded now. The dead waited in ranks outside the keep, only waiting for their turn to die. Perhaps it didn’t matter if they died here on this bridge or a year and a half from now, starving in the mud of Asterilhold.
    “Listen to my voice,” the priest said again. He seemed overly fond of the phrase. “The war is yours if you will accept it from us.”
    Dawson took a deep breath. He knew it was doomed. All sense and experience told him that it would fail. And yet, against that knowledge, there was some new force, some waking part of him that he could neither embrace nor deny. It felt like trying to wake from a dream, and being uncertain which was the dream and which the waking world. His skull filled with uncombed wool.
    “This is madness,” he said.
    “Then you can take joy in madness,” the priest said.

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