The Spider's War by Abraham Daniel

Author:Abraham, Daniel [Abraham, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Fiction / Action &#38, Adventure, Fiction / Fantasy / Historical
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2016-03-07T18:30:00+00:00

Clara

War was made from individual lives, but that didn’t make it special. Any number of endeavors were just the same. The loaves of day-old bread she’d handed out at the Prisoner’s Span had been as much the product of disparate lives as any battle. The boy who gathered the eggs might have done so while in despair of ever winning his father’s love. Or in silent contemplation of the murder of his rivals. Or still flush from the revelation of a great secret. Or bored beyond measure by another day’s empty work with only chickens for companionship. And so for the farmer who’d brought in the wheat and separated the chaff. A carter had brought grain to the mill and taken flour from it, and done it as part of a full span of years punctuated by its own tragedies and moments of exultation. In Camnipol, a baker had worked the common magic of yeast and heat and time, transforming what individually would have been inedible into a moment of warmth and beauty that passed unappreciated, cooled, faded, staled. And then a noblewoman still deep in her grief had taken it, used the little bun as a way to create some connection with the lower classes of the city with whom she imagined she had nothing in common. And from her to a thief or robber or thug hanging in a cage over the gaping fall of the Division, who had had a childhood and a mother and friends and a moment of defiance before the magistrate or one of fear and sorrow. All that was in a bit of bread, and a city was immeasurably more.

Whenever Dawson had spoken of the nobility of war, or the honor and glory of the battlefield—or even, on rare occasions, obliquely of the atrocities it carried in its saddlebags—he had given the project a life of its own. A name, like a god’s name or a city’s. War became a person of a sort, and because it was a person, it became worthy of a kind of politeness. One didn’t speak ill of one’s family or one’s friends, however rude they might be. Even sowing derision toward one’s enemies was a process rich with rules and obstacles of form. As she became more familiar with the process of battle herself, Clara became less and less respectful of it.

Every soldier in an army had a life that had brought them there, that had tested them and remade them and put them through times of glory and of despair. And if they’d remained farmers and blacksmiths and huntsmen and bakers, then they would have done there as well. More would have died of illness and accident, and fewer on a stranger’s blade.

No, Clara had looked war in its face now, and she found herself unimpressed.

For the better part of a week, they skirted the edge of the Dry Wastes. She woke in the mornings to the stink of salt and rode through the day, Vincen at her side, as they ghosted along the road.

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