for Borja before they froze in place. Marcus had to admit that their plan had an appeal. Dar Cinlama was powerfully impressed with himself, but he told a good tale and he didn’t drink more than his share of the beer. It was enough to win him some respect as far as Marcus was concerned, even with who he was working for.
“How do you think it’s going out there?” Marcus asked.
“Out there?”
“In the world. Where there are people.”
“I don’t know,” Kit said. “At a guess, poorly.”
“That was my thought too.” He stepped forward. A flash of yellow in one of the small tidepools caught his attention, and he leaned close. A tiny starfish clung to a stone. Probably not the source of earth-shattering magic. “Do you think Cithrin and Yardem are all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s why they call it a guess.”
Kit smiled. “Well, then, since I know that they are both clever and competent, I would guess that they are fine, whatever’s happened.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“No.”
They moved on, Marcus sweeping his eyes over the ground, then moving forward. Sweeping, and moving forward. Almost half an hour later, he spoke again.
“I keep thinking about the war. About how it’s just like all the other wars I’ve seen, only it isn’t.”
“I’m not certain what you mean,” Kit said, and squatted down.
“Find something?”
The actor reached into one of the salt puddles. When he drew out his hand, he had a thin stem of hollow bone.
“Pipe stem,” Kit said. “It might been carried in by the waves.”
“Or it might have been dropped by someone walking this same path. I’m going to call that a good sign.”
“But you’d been talking about war.”
“Right. I’ve seen a lot of wars fought for a lot of reasons. Pride. Fear. Power. The right to use land. Trying to keep someone else from using land. Even just the bull-blind love of winning. And I look at what Antea’s been doing, and I see all of that. But the other thing—and I’ve always seen this no matter who’s fighting and whatever they’re fighting for—is once you’re in a war, you want out of it. You want to win or you want to sue for peace or you want to get away from the mad bastards who are stabbing at you. Even the ones that love winning don’t love the war. And that’s not something I see.”
“Ah. I understand. You’re thinking of this as if Antea were at war.”
The stone under Marcus’s foot shifted and he danced back. “There’s some evidence that it is.”
“Consider that Antea is waging war the way that a horse leads a cavalry charge. It seems to me it is being ridden by men like myself. Perhaps Antea will rise and spread across the world with the goddess at the reins. Or it may founder and be abandoned for another champion or some number of others. When you look at Antea, you see the enemy. I see the first among victims.”
“Odd kind of victim when you get all the power from it.”
“I don’t fear this high priest as much as I do his first enemy within the temple,” Kit said.
“How do you figure that?”
“We were pure when we were in one village in the depth of the Keshet. Every day, we heard the high priest’s voice. Now there are temples that are weeks to travel between. New temples being built. New initiates, I would assume. If not yet, then certainly soon. And the new initiates will bring their own experiences. Their own prejudices.”
“I thought your goddess ate their minds.”
Kit laughed. “Think of who you’re talking with, Marcus. I am not the only apostate in history. I see no reason to think I’m the last. But the next one perhaps will understand some piece of doctrine differently. Instead of finding doubt, he may honestly and sincerely believe something that other priests in other places don’t, and none of them will have a single voice to keep them from drifting apart. What the spiders do—let’s not call it the goddess—is erase the ability of good men to question. They eat doubt. And when there are enough temples far enough flung from each other, and their understandings drift apart, it seems to me there will be a war of zealots and fanatics that will churn the world in blood. And I don’t see how Antea or anyplace else will be immune.”
“I’m not having a great upwelling of optimism about this, Kit.”
“I think we are living in dark times,” Kit said.