The Spider's War (The Dagger and the Coin series) by Daniel Abraham Page B

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    “Tilt your head.”
    Damond looked up into Joran’s black eyes. The older man had scales three shades lighter than Damond’s own, and a scar across his cheek that spoke of old violence. By summer, Joran’s time in the guard would be ended, and the old man would go back to whatever he had been. It made him a little easier to negotiate with.
    “Not today, eh?” Damond said. “It’s my second blood shift in a week, and I spent all my time since then digging that shit out of my ears.”
    “You know the rules. Tilt your head.”
    “I’ll give you six lengths of copper to forget it. Just for today. And next time, I won’t even ask. I’ll just put my head on the table and let you pour it in my ears. Not even a grumble.”
    “The day you don’t grumble, the sky’ll fall into the sea,” Joran said, baring his sharp black teeth in a grin. “I’ll forget this time, but don’t
you
forget when we come to the taproom that it was six of copper. Or I’ll have it too hot next. I mean it, I won’t haggle on a finished deal.”
    “I’d never ask it,” Damond said, grinning back.
    “Then get your thick ass out there,” Joran said, putting the cup of wax back with its brothers beside the fire. “You can at least be on time.”
    Damond jumped out of the chair, strapped on his blade, and left the close, warm guard’s station for the chill of the streets before the old man could change his mind. In the halflight of the rising dawn, he went up the stairs three at a time, and then across the bridge, running east to the river port. Ammu Qort, the day’s prime, was harsh to men he found shirking their duty, but lazy about checking after the work had started. Damond wanted to be in place well before any inspections could be done.
    The cut-thumbs letters had begun arriving just before Longest Night, smuggled past Antean ports on ships from the west. Sheaves of them had been handed around the taprooms and temples. Damond had seen only one himself.
The forces of madness are all around
, it had said. He’d joked with his cousin that anyone who’d worked for the guard had known that for years. For a time, the letters had been the first subject of everyone’s jokes and speculation—whether they were sincere or a kind of expensive joke, whether the things they said were true or pure invention, whether the people making and distributing them had Borja’s best interests at heart. He’d heard that the letters had been written by pirates, or a Northcoast merchant, or some sort of resurgent dragon cult. For himself, he took them lightly.
    Someone else, though, hadn’t. A priest had put something in the letters together with a passage of scripture and petitioned the council. The council—probably influenced by Sarakal’s traditional families in exile—had declared new policies for the guard. And Damond, through no fault of his own, had been introduced to blood duty.
    Now, he skittered down the stairs where the bridges stopped and run-walked to the inspector’s station. All along the river, a high wall sank down into the muddy depths and rose high above them. Algae greened the stones from the high-water mark down to the surface of the river, and guards only slightly luckier than himself patrolled the thin walk at its top. When he’d started in the guard, there’d beenjokes about Timzinae merchants from Sarakal climbing the walls by night to avoid the inspector’s station. Since the war, the jokes seemed less funny.
    Barges stood on the water, shadows on the shining river. In years past, a busy morning might see a hundred boats waiting for the station to come open. Since the war, Damond had never seen more than thirty, and usually fewer. The inspector’s station stood at the end of a walled quay. Whatever goods were to be loaded or unloaded stopped here to be counted, considered, and have tariffs levied. Whoever wished to come into the city or leave it was questioned and examined. Tauendak was a city of the pure,