The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin)

by his parry. The stump had cut into his skin, but not badly. If he hadn’t seen it, if he hadn’t turned in the breath that he had, the rusted teeth would have punched into the small of his back deep enough to kill.
    “Are you all right?” Kit asked. He sounded awed.
    Marcus considered his answers, and settled on, “Yeah.” He pulled himself out from between the spikes and walked toward the false beast with a confidence born of relief and fear. The eyes were half spheres of gold, the reedy breath a vast bellows.
    Beyond it, a long hallway stretched, thick with webs and the scent of rot. They moved through it slowly, alert for the next trap. At the end stood two vast bronze doors with a massive complex of locks, fitted with dozens of crystal vials that still had thick, noxious-looking fluids in them. Turn the wrong wheel, it seemed to say, and release the poison. It took several hours to see that it was a trick, and that the doors could be opened by lifting the bar.
    And beyond them, like the boasting display of a king, lay the treasures of the Dragon Empire. A huge tome with letters in worked bronze on its side that Marcus couldn’t read. A silver case, the metal tarnished to black, filled with stoppered vials fashioned from dragon’s jade. A roll of copper hung like a tapestry with a fine lines etched into it showing what appeared to be a massive ship floating in the sky and doing battle with a vast dragon. An urn of orange-and-gold enamel with the image of a weeping Jasuru woman painted in its side. There was no gold, no gems or jewelry, but it hardly mattered. Anything there would have called forth wealth enough that Marcus need never work again for any king of any nation. If they didn’t just kill him and take it.
    Marcus walked slowly through the reliquary’s deepest chamber, his torch held high above him. A mirror in the back caught the light, but its reflection was some other room in a sunlit tower. A wide throne of black wood and yellow silk sat in a corner, and Marcus’s skin crawled just being near it.
    “Here,” Kit said. “It’s here.”
    Kit stood before a simple wooden stand that held a single blade. It was longer than Marcus preferred, designed perhaps for a Tralgu or Yemmu. It would have been unworkable for a Cinnae. The scabbard was green, but deeper and more complex than enameling would explain, like the emerald carapace of a vast beetle.
    “Strike a man with it, and he will die,” Kit said. “Strike a man like me with it, and all the spiders within him will die as well. We had blades like it at the temple to purify the unclean.”
    “Meaning kill people like you.”
    “Meaning that, yes.”
    “And stick it in a goddess’s belly, and we save the world,” Marcus said, reaching for it.
    Kit stopped him, the old actor’s hand on his wrist.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “This is an evil thing. An evil object.”
    “Come a long way for second thoughts now,” Marcus said.
    “I know that. I agree with you. But I brought you here, and I feel wrong letting you take this without being certain that you know what you are sacrificing. What I am asking of you … I think I am asking a great deal of you, Marcus. And I consider you my friend.”
    Marcus tilted his head. Kit’s face was somber. The grit and dirt of weeks had ground itself into the man’s pores and the greasy wires of his beard and hair. Kit swallowed.
    “This weapon is poison,” Kit said. “I believe that the cause we carry it in is just, but that will not protect you. It is not only death to those whose skin it cuts; it holds a deeper violence within it. If you carry it—just that, carry it and nothing more—the poison will still affect you. In time, you will grow ill from it, and eventually, inevitably , it will kill you.”
    “It’s a sword, Kit,” Marcus said, lifting the green scabbard from its place. “They’re all like that.”

Cithrin
    T he market houses of Suddapal sat at the edges of the wide, grassy commons. Pillars of black wood carved with delicate whorls and spirals marked the corners of every room, and wall hangings of rich green felt hung where Cithrin would have expected tapestries to be. Where the Grand Market of Porte Oliva assigned stalls to merchants and let the buyers move between them, everything here was in flux. Halfway through a negotiation, some third party might intrude with a better price or an accusation of poor quality, and this was true whether the issue hinged on the price of