Read Online The Tyrant's Law (Dagger and the Coin) by Daniel Abraham - Free Book Online

darkness. The sounds of daytime laid over the shoulders of night left Marcus uneasy. Now, as guests, it was only a peculiarity of Southling hospitality; the working of a mostly unseen village. When they pressed on unwelcome, there could be other sounds with fewer children and less laughter. He remembered someone telling him that fighting a Southling at night was like fighting with a blindfold. From behind them, a man’s voice called out in the darkness. To their left, another voice answered. The haze thinned enough that the moon showed through in a halo of its own light, too dim to cast a shadow. An insect landed on Marcus’s hand and he shooed it away.
    “How much do we know about what happened to the Silas expedition?” Marcus asked.
    “Well,” Kit said, his voice reflective and philosophical, “we’re fairly certain they didn’t come back.”

Clara
    O nce she knew to look, the evidence was everywhere. The snow-paved streets of Camnipol had hardly recovered from the violence of the summer, but the preparations had begun anew. Imri, once the cook’s assistant in Clara’s kitchens, was seeing a carter’s boy who’d been hauling pig iron to the forges since before midwinter. When Clara stopped by the forges on a pretext, all she saw were the long, easily bent spear points Dawson used to deride. They were meant to lodge in a shield and then hang from it, weighting a soldier’s arm, slowing him and breaking his formation. She could hear her husband’s snort of contempt, could see the dismissive scowl. A weapon for house painters, he’d have called it, and nothing that a nobleman would employ. The men who ran the city granaries smoked in the alley and shook their heads. The orders had come that they should not expect the spring wheat crop to refill the stores. It didn’t take Clara a great leap to guess where that food might go. In the temples, the priests intoned psalms about loyalty and the bearing of burdens now for greater glory later, and not of justice or the love of peace. And even in the traditionalist temples, the brown-robes of Geder Palliako’s spider goddess sometimes took the pulpit, declaiming in the accents of the Keshet and making cutting remarks about insects and cockroaches that seemed to implicate the Timzinae without ever quite putting a name to them. The magistrates had begun to sentence fewer young men to the cages and more to martial service. The prisons rose brick by pale brick, as much threat as architecture.
    The true conversations of power, she no longer had the means to reach. Even those among the noble classes who still took her company were at their holdings or with the hunt. When the first thaw came, it would certainly be different. She would surely be able to discover which direction Palliako meant to send his blades. And also by then, it would all be too far gone to prevent. Walking across the bridges and through the narrow streets, she felt as if she were balancing on a landslide. It was all so much larger than she was that it might as well have been the weather. She had as much ability to stop this as to turn aside a storm.
    But Jorey would come back, and Vicarian. Perhaps, one day, Barriath would return from his exile or at least write from it. Her boys. Help from Elisia seemed unlikely, but Clara would send letters to her all the same. The worst her daughter could do was burn them unread. In the meantime, she walked through the city, Vincen Coe at her side, seeking what information she could and putting it together as best she might.
    Even when it took her to places that she would have been wiser to avoid.
    S tay behind me, my lady,” Vincen said.
    “M’lady, is it?” the smallest of the three men said, his grin gap-toothed and unpleasant. “’Strue, then is it? That’s Treacher Kalliam’s widow.”
    “What was it like, sleeping with a traitor?” the largest of them asked.
    Clara held her chin up. Rage and humiliation fought against copper-tasting fear, but she