The Dragon's Path

the rich, deep, complex flavor of a constant pot; the stewpot never leaving the fire, and new hanks of meat and vegetables thrown in as they came to hand. Some of the bits of dark flesh swimming in the greasy broth might have been cooking since before he’d left the temple. It was the best meal he’d ever had.
    “My man’s at the caravanserai,” she said. “One of the princes s’posed to be coming in, and they’ll be hungry. Tookall the pigs with. Sell ’em all if we’re lucky. Get enough silver to see us through storm season.”
    He listened to her voice and also the stirring in his blood. The last part had been a lie. She
didn’t
believe that the silver would last. He wondered if it worried her, and if there was some way he could see she had what she needed. He would try, at least. Before he left.
    “What about you, you poor shit?” she asked, her voice soft and warm. “Whose sheep did you fuck that you’re begging work from me?”
    The apostate chuckled. The warm food in his belly, the fire at his side, and the knowledge that a pallet of straw and a thin wool blanket were waiting for him outside conspired to relax his shoulders and his belly. The Yemmu woman’s huge gold-flecked eyes stayed on him. He shrugged.
    “I discovered that believing something doesn’t make it true,” he said carefully. “There were things I’d accepted, that I believed to my bones, and I was… wrong.”
    “Misled?” she asked.
    “Misled,” he agreed, and then paused. “Or perhaps not. Not intentionally. No matter how wrong you are, it’s not a lie if you believe it.”
    The Yemmu woman whistled—an impressive feat, considering her tusks—and flapped her hands in mock admiration.
    “High philosophy from the water grunt,” she said. “Next you’ll be preaching and asking tithes.”
    “Not me,” he said, laughing with her.
    She took a long slurp from her own bowl. The fire crackled. Something—rats, perhaps, or insects—rattled in the thatch overhead.
    “Fell out with a woman, did you?” she asked.
    “A goddess,” he said.
    “Yeah. Always seems like that, dunit?” she said, staring into the fire. “Some new love comes on like there’s something different about ’em. Like God himself talks whenever their lips flap. And then…”
    She snorted again, part amusement, part bitterness.
    “And what all went wrong with your goddess?” she asked.
    The apostate lifted a scrap of something that might have been a potato to his mouth, chewed the soft flesh, the gritty skin. He struggled to put words to thoughts that had never been spoken aloud. His voice trembled.
    “She is going to eat the world.”

Captain Marcus Wester
     
    M arcus rubbed his chin with a callused palm.
    “Yardem?”
    “Sir?” rumbled the Tralgu looming at his side.
    “The day you throw me in a ditch and take command of the company?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “It wouldn’t be today, would it?”
    The Tralgu crossed his thick arms and flicked a jingling ear.
    “No, sir,” he said at last. “Not today.”
    “Pity.”
    The public gaol of Vanai had once been a menagerie. In ancient days, the dragons themselves had stalked the wide square and bathed in the great fountain at its center. At the perimeter, a deep pit, and then great cages rising three stories high. The dragon’s jade façades were carved with figures of the beasts that had once paced behind the iron bars: lions, gryphons, great six-headed serpents, wolves, bears, great birds with breasts like women.
    Between them, pillars in the shapes of the thirteen races of mankind: tall-eared Tralgu, chitinous Timzinae, tusked Yemmu, and on and on. The Dartinae even had small braziers hidden in its eyeholes to mimic the glow of their gaze, though no one lit them anymore. The figures were unwornby time and rain, marred only by the black, weeping streaks where the bars had rusted away—nothing eroded dragon’s jade and nothing broke it. But the animals themselves were gone, and in their place, people.
    Sullen or angry or bored, the guests of Vanai’s justice were displayed in their shame for ridicule and identification while they waited for the sentence of the appointed magistrate. Good, upstanding citizens could parade through the square where few bronze pennies would buy offal from a stand, usually wrapped in a sling of rags. Boys would make a show of showering loose shit, dead rats, and rotting vegetables over the prisoners. A few tearful wives and husbands would bring cheese