The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

Tralgu and Jasuru and Dartinae faces as well. None of those were what stopped him. There was something he couldn’t quite explain—a grandeur and a weariness and sense of terrible age—that seeped through the city itself. He’d known many cities in his life, and until he walked into Camnipol for the first time, he would have said that he understood what it meant for a city to have a personality; that every gathering place of humanity had its own customs and idiosyncrasies, that the coffee in Northcoast came with honey and in Maccia with cardamom. Camnipol was something else again. Here the personality of the city wasn’t just the contingencies and customs of the people in it. It was something that grew out of the stone, that scented the air. Camnipol was a living thing, and the people in its streets were parts of it the way that skin and ligaments and muscles made up a body.
    And what was strangest of all, it wasn’t a secret. It was as obvious as the sun the moment he stepped inside the walls. Kit reined in beside him.
    “Your first time in Camnipol, then?”
    “They didn’t hire many mercenary companies when I was in the trade,” Marcus said. “I spent more time at little garrisons. God. I’m gawking at the place like a child.”
    “Wait until you see the Division,” Kit said. But it wasn’t the great chasm of the Division that caught them up next. When they turned a corner into a wider square, the Kingspire came into view, rising into the sky higher than any human structure should. In the midday sun, it seemed almost to glow. And high up, almost at its top, a vast banner flew.
    When he’d been a boy, Marcus had seen a spider’s egg crack open and thousands of tiny animals with delicate pale bodies no larger than a grain of millet spin out thread into the breeze. He’d watched them rise up in the sun, thick as smoke and tiny. And later in the summer, his father had showed him a vast web at the edge of the garden where a massive yellow-and-black beast of a spider had made its home. The thing had been big as a fist, and its web strong enough to catch sparrows. Marcus still remembered the chill of understanding that had come to him. Each one of those tiny grains floating on the wind had gone out into the world and grown into a monstrosity like this one. And like that, each little banner they had seen, dyed whatever red the locals could manage, painted with the eightfold sigil, and hung from the temple’s eave, had been a grain. And the massive cloth that floated in the air over Camnipol was the beast they would grow into.
    The grimness in Kit’s expression told Marcus that the old actor understood and was thinking along the same track.
    “All right,” Marcus said as they rode across the square to a public stable with the inexplicable sign of an ice-blue mallet over the gate. “What’s the plan, then? Start asking people if they know who’s been sending letters to Carse and wait for someone who tells us no to be lying about it?”
    “It sounds inelegant when you put it that way,” Master Kit said, chuckling. “I have spent some time in Camnipol, and I have some ideas where we might begin.”
    “Well, you can be the one who’s wise in the ways of the city,” Marcus said. “I’ll be the one that hits whoever needs hitting.”
    “That seems a fair division of labor.”
    Rather than pay for stabling, Kit sold the horses at a decent profit, though Marcus suspected it was nowhere near what he could have gotten, and they began their walk through the city. A nail maker greeted Kit by name, and they stopped to talk for the better part of an hour. Then a butcher’s stall run by a Jasuru woman with scales more green than bronze and three missing fingers. Then an old man at a tavern who called Kit Looloo for reasons that Marcus never entirely understood. Everyone they met was happy to see Kit, but the stories they told of life in the city were eerie. The Lord Regent, they said, was a brilliant man with powers more subtle than a cunning man’s. Food was growing short, in part because the farms hadn’t worked at capacity since the war with Asterilhold and in part because so much was still being sent to feed the army in Elassae. The cult of the spider goddess was a blessing for the city, and since it had come, everything was going well. The streets weren’t safe after dark. Too many people were hungry. Camnipol had become more violent and dangerous because of the Timzinae and their agents. Twice,