Blade of Dream

AS DANIEL ABRAHAM The Kithamar Trilogy Age of Ash Blade of Dream The Long Price Quartet A Shadow in Summer A Betrayal in Winter An Autumn War The Price of Spring The Dagger and the Coin The Dragon’s Path The King’s Blood The Tyrant’s Law The Widow’s House The Spider’s War Leviathan Wept and Other Stories Balfour and Meriwether in the Incident of the Harrowmoor Dogs Hunter’s Run (with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois) WITH TY FRANCK ASJAMES S. A. COREY The Expanse Leviathan Wakes Caliban’s War Abaddon’s Gate Cibola Burn Nemesis Games Babylon’s Ashes Persepolis Rising Tiamat’s Wrath Leviathan Falls Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection The Expanse Short Fiction Drive The Butcher of Anderson Station Gods of Risk The Churn The Vital Abyss Strange Dogs Auberon Star Wars: Honor Among Thieves AS M. L. N. HANOVER The Black Sun’s Daughter Unclean Spirits Darker Angels Vicious Grace Killing Rites Graveyard Child ORBIT First published in Great Britain in 2023 by Orbit Copyright © 2023 by Daniel Abraham Map by Jayné Franck The moral right of the author has been asserted. All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-356-51543-4 Orbit An imprint ofLittle, Brown Book GroupCarmelite House50 Victoria EmbankmentLondon EC4Y 0DZ An Hachette UK Companywww.hachette.co.uk www.orbitbooks.net To the audienceand other unacknowledged collaborators In the course of a single life, a man can be many things: a beloved child in a brightly embroidered gown, a street tough with a band of knifemen walking at his side, lover to a beautiful girl, husband to an honest woman, father to a child, grain sweeper in a brewery, widower, musician, and mendicant coughing his lungs up outside the city walls. The only thing they have in common is that they are the same man. These are the mysteries, and there is a beauty in them. In this way, Kithamar is a beautiful city. All through its streets, Kithamar shows the signs and remnants of the cities that the city has been. Walls that defended the border of a younger town stand a dumbfounded, useless guard between the noble compounds of Green Hill and the fountain square at Stonemarket. The great battlements of Oldgate glower out over the river, the arrow-slits and murder holes used for candle niches now, and the enemy races who stormed or manned it sleep side by side in its armories because the rents are cheap. The six-bridged Khahon was the border between a great Hansch kingdom and savage near-nomad Inlisc to hear it one way, or the first place that the frightened, violent, sharp-faced Hansch had come from the west if you told the story from the other bank. Now the river is the heart of the city, dividing and uniting it. The ancient races killed one another and swore eternal hatred, only to bury their enmity and pretend to be a single people, citizens of one city. Kithamar has declared itself the subject of the one true god. Or the three. Or the numberless. For three hundred years and longer, it has been a free city, independent and proud and ruled by princes of its own rather than any distant king. Only today, its prince is dead. The reign of Byrn a Sal had been brief. Less than a year before, the streets had filled with revelers and wine, music and joy, and more than a little imprudent sex to celebrate the great man’s coronation. The months between then and now were turbulent, marked by ill omens and violence. A winter of troubled sleep. Now, as the first light of the coming dawn touches the highest reaches of the palace towering at the top of its hill, the red gates open on his funeral procession. Two old women dressed in rags step out and strike drums. Black, blindered horses follow, their steps echoing against the stone. And all along the route, the men and women and children who are Kithamar wait. They have been there since nightfall, some of them. They love the spectacle of death and the performance of grief. And, though few of them say the words aloud, they hope that the season of darkness will end and something new begin. Only a few of them ask their questions aloud: How did it happen? Was it illness or accident, murder or the vengeance of God? How did Byrn a Sal die? The black lacquered cart passes among the gardens and mansions of Green Hill. The heads of the high families stand at their entrances as if ready to make the dead man welcome if he should stand up. Servants and children and ill-dignified cousins gawk from the bushes and corners. Only the burned-out shell of the Daris Brotherhood ignores the funeral. And then the body passes into the city proper, heading first for Stonemarket and then south through the soot-dark streets of the Smoke. Those lucky enough to have buildings along the route have rented space at their windows and on their roofs. As the death cart shifts and judders across the cobblestones, people jockey to look at the corpse: a little less than six feet of iron-stinking clay that had been a man. Behind the cart follow the highest dignified of the city. The dead man’s daughter—soon prince herself—Elaine a Sal, rides behind her father in a dark litter. She wears rags, but also a silver torc. Her chin is