The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  ~

  They rode back into the desert, accompanied by a small contingent of guides and scouts. Dante sent moths, dragonflies, and wasps soaring over the contours of the land, following its heights and depressions, discovering the precise course his work would take.

  The Green Mountains, a small range far east of the Mallish city of Whetton, would mark the northern end of the border. The ocean would mark it to the south. That left close to 150 miles to cover. At first, it felt like he'd accepted an insurmountable task—even excavating a 150-mile-long ditch could take months—but as he learned the land, he found his prediction was true, and that it would take far fewer modifications than one would guess. Bolstered by the shaden they'd liberated from Grayson Fort, he thought he could finish the job in as little as two weeks.

  He returned to Collen to present his plan to the Hand. They examined his maps with two parts wonder and one part horror, seeming, at last, to understand how much things were about to change.

  Boggs tapped the southern range of the proposed border. "Could run into trouble there. That's giant territory."

  Dante frowned at the map. "I was just there. It's not that big."

  "The land ain't big, you fool. I mean the people who live there."

  "Exactly how big are we talking?" Blays said. "Big enough to stamp you underfoot? Or just tall enough that the tailor's annoyed at how long it takes to make their trousers?"

  "Taller than any man you've ever seen. Strong enough to tear you in half. More monster than human."

  "You've seen them yourself?"

  Boggs nodded. "Only from a distance. Keep to themselves, which is fine by me. They come and go as they please, though, so watch out."

  Blays scratched the corner of his jaw. "Nomads? Other than big, what do they look like?"

  "Stouter than cows." Boggs spread his hand wide and made a pulling motion down over his face. "Beards from here to eternity. And ears so small you'll wonder where they went."

  Dante and Blays looked at each other. At the same time, they said, "Norren."

  "You know 'em?"

  "Not the ones here," Dante said. "But we know many of them up north. If there's a clan where I need to work, I don't think we'll have any problem getting them to relocate."

  Boggs got a quizzical look. "You mean to deal with them? I was only telling you about them so you wouldn't get clubbed and eaten."

  They rode out once again, taking the swift-legged asties. As soon as they'd convinced the norren to move, Dante would strike north, altering the land as he went. Unless Mallon marched in a matter of days, he'd seal off the basin before they could breach it.

  Boggs had claimed the norren were often seen around the shallow seaside valley, which they used to hem in herds of deer and antelope. As Dante, Blays, and Naran neared it, they slowed, moving from ridge to ridge to take in the surroundings. Tall grass carpeted the valley floor, yellowed from the long summer, though some was starting to regain its green with the autumn rains. A few thorny trees stood in small clusters like gossiping soldiers.

  "Well, better get down there," Blays said.

  Naran looked puzzled. "We have a much better vantage here along the rim."

  "Which means that we'll never see them at all."

  The captain blinked at this. "Since they will see us first. You believe they'll try to stay hidden?"

  Blays moved his horse toward a game trail down the gentle slope of the valley. "Norren tend to keep away from humans. They have a cultural aversion to being murdered and enslaved."

  "How do you know so much about them?"

  "Because Dante and I are official clan members. I won a swimming contest, you see. And also we freed their entire people."

  The expression on Naran's face said two things: first, that he still didn't understand. And second, that coming to understand would be more trouble than it was worth. Instead, he turned his attention to the wind-tossed prairie. Grasshoppers leaped around them, fat and green. Crickets chirped like they'd forgotten how to do anything else. To left and right, chaotic skeins of spiderwebs matted the grass.

  Dante pointed to one messy cluster of threads. "Notice that?"

  Blays nodded. "And no spiderwebs across the trail. Either they've been through here in the last couple hours, or we're about to find out how extraordinarily tall deer taste."

  The path forked repeatedly. Each time, they took whichever branch was clear of webs. Grass rustled. Dante stopped, listening to the winds.

  "If we find them," Naran said, "are you that sure they'll be willing to speak to us?"

  "It wouldn't surprise me if they want nothing to do with us." Dante dismounted to take a look around on foot, tying his horse to the branch of a thorn tree. "But they need to hear what we have to say."

  Blays dismounted as well. "We're practically family. When we explain that—"

  A bow twanged. Something rammed Dante in the shoulder, knocking him to the ground. As he struggled to stand, the bow thrummed again, the arrow coming straight for his throat.

  6

  In Raxa's experience, there were three kinds of people in the world.

  The first kind, and by far the most common, was those who liked to have done something. In the Order of the Alley, that was the type who pulled a job, then were happy to spend the next six weeks sitting in pubs, laughing with their friends and drinking away the evenings. Most of these weren't so interested in thieving for thieving's sake, but rather because of all the down time that came with it. If these people stumbled into a big enough sack of silver, they'd never pull another job again.

  The second kind of person was those who preferred to think about doing something. The planners and the plotters. The dreamers and the schemers. For them, the kick came from the preparation. Casing the joint. Drawing up maps. Placing an inside man or bribing somebody who was already there. Assigning the right people to the right roles. Anticipating contingencies, and making backup plans to deal with them.

  If you ever wanted to pull a job bigger than picking pockets, you needed people like these. Good ones were worth their actual weight in silver. Most, though, they didn't live up to their potential. They'd get so wrapped up in the thinking that they delayed the doing—and sometimes never got around to it at all. For some, following through on it was boring, since they'd already completed the act in their mind.

  Then there was the third type: those who wanted to do the doing. Who only felt alive when they were inside the darkened house, listening for sentries, lifting the jewels from the dresser.

  Raxa was the third type. As she sat down with Vess to work out how to steal the original Cycle of Arawn, it became clear that Vess was a schemer.

  "Stop," Raxa said in the middle of a long proposal about tunneling into the Citadel from the outside. "Don't worry about getting in or out. I've got that covered."

  Vess gave her a skeptical look. "You sound sure."

  "That's a bad thing?"

  "Everyone I know who was sure they could crack the Citadel wound up swinging from the hangman's tree."

  "I can do this. Besides, there's no point planning to get inside before we know exactly where the book is."

  "Don't worry about that," Vess mimicked. "I got it covered."

  "You know where they keep it?"

  "I know that like I know the color of Galand's underwear. But I got someone inside."

  Raxa gave an impressed grunt. "How'd you pull that off? I thought the entire staff was a bunch of fanatics."

  "Fanatics with families. Debts. Same troubles as everyone else. You running the Order, you got to get on that, Raxa. Cheaper to buy someone off than to get raided because you don't know what's coming."

  She was quiet for a moment. Most likely, the reason the Order didn't already have a set of eyes and ears inside the Citadel was that Gaits had been working for them.

  "I'll worry about that later," she said. "Find the book, and I'll make it ours."

  ~

  While waiting to hear back from Vess, Raxa took a
number of meetings with Anya, who could rattle off the name of everyone in the Order, along with what they'd earned over the last year. Raxa was glad to have her around. It was easy to tell yourself things would be so much better if only you were in charge. But when you took on the crown, you soon learned that you served it.

  She didn't think it would be the world's best idea to try to set up a contact in the Citadel at the same time they were conspiring to rob it, but she got Gurles to start laying the groundwork. Other than that, she had to deal with a ton of low-level shit regarding the truce between the Order and the Little Knives.

  The part she hated most was coming up with compensation for her people who'd been permanently injured during the war for the streets. You had people who could have earned a fortune stealing jewels and art, but now they couldn't even climb a wall. You were going to console them with two hundred in silver and a job scrubbing dishes?

  Everyone who signed up for an outfit like the Order knew damn well what they were getting into. Raxa's sympathy only extended so far. Even so, when she thought about what it'd feel like to be in their shoes—the long years of quiet boredom; fading memories of jumping from rooftop to rooftop; forcing out a smile when some kid came in flushed, sweaty, and hilarious from a successful theft—she knew she'd have to walk away. Find a different life. And try to forget.

  As she paid them their due, Anya scribbling amounts in her ledger, Raxa envisioned herself calling down the shadows like the priests did. And using them to make her people whole.

  It was three days before a young boy dropped by her tenement with word from Vess. That night, Raxa hoofed it over to the temple of Urt. Its warped exterior made her head hurt. Vess was waiting in the courtyard, sitting on the branch of a tree.

  It was a humid night and Raxa wiped sweat from her forehead. "Why do we always have to meet in your temple? Do you know how far I have to walk?"

  "Didn't know I was invited. Would love to come by and drink whatever you got."

  "Speaking of gots, how's the book coming?"

  Vess chuckled. "You don't have any love for talk, do you? Every time, it's straight to it. Wonder if the men you're with love that or hate it."

  "I haven't had any complaints."

  "There is a chapel. Four floors."

  "Let me guess," Raxa said. "It's on the top."

  "It's on top. And always guarded."

  "Inside the chamber? Or at its door?"

  "The door. It's in a case. Glass. You know how to cut glass without making it scream?"

  "That won't be a problem."

  "How will you get in?"

  "Ah ah. We haven't worked together nearly long enough for me to tell you that."

  Vess smirked. "Can't blame me for trying."

  Raxa returned to her offices and pored over maps of the Citadel. She'd have to move fast to get to the chapel and back before she ran out of juice. But it looked doable. The next night, she headed for the hill on the north end of the city where Galand had built the carneterium, the institution of monks who liked to paw through corpses and figure out how they'd died—and, sometimes, who'd killed them.

  She slipped into the shadows, the intoxicating world of silver and black, like what it must feel like to live on a star. She walked briskly past the old man sitting inside the cave entrance and hooked down a hallway, reverting back to the real world to save her strength. She reached the side tunnel leading toward the Citadel dungeons. Moving in utter darkness, she shuffled forward until her fingers touched brick.

  The last time she'd been through here, she'd used her almighty bone sword to chop her way through the back of a cell. They'd patched it up in a hurry. Not a problem: in the shadows, walking through rock was like walking through an open door.

  She moved back into the starry world, stepped through the bricks, and bounced right off a wooden wall.

  She flickered back to reality, swearing as she rubbed her forehead. What was going on? Had they slapped up some boards as a temporary cover for the hole, then come in from the other side and walled it over with brick? Strange way to do things. Very strange.

  Raxa reentered the shadows. She moved up to the wood, placing her palm against it, then moved to her right; once it ended, she could simply step through the rock and into another cell.

  Three steps later, the boards were still going. The coverage was much wider than the door-shaped space she'd sliced open on her way out. Even so, it wasn't until she'd gone another twenty feet and still hadn't found a gap in the wood that she understood something might be seriously wrong.

  She retreated to the bricks that marked the original hole and tried walking to the left instead. Same story. Exploring further, she discovered they'd walled up the entire dungeon with wood.

  Raxa returned to the tunnel and the normal world. A slow heat moved around her scalp. Wasn't any reason to coat a stone dungeon with wood panels. Check that: there was no mundane reason. But she could think of one pretty crazy reason.

  To stop people like her from getting in.

  Gaits had told Cee about her little trick. Cee had since taken steps to stop her from getting back in. Raxa did have a sword that seemed capable of chopping through anything, up to and including walls, anvils, and mountains, but there was no way she could whack her way through a brick wall and then a wooden one without drawing the entire castle down on her.

  She cocked her head. If Cee knew who she was, and what she could do, then why hadn't she been arrested yet? She'd been careful for the last few days, but not that careful. There hadn't been any word on the street or from Vess' inside man that the Citadel was out looking for her.

  They didn't really know, did they? In the gloom of the dungeon, Cee hadn't gotten any kind of real look at her. Cee had her name—her first name, anyway—but who else really knew who Raxa was? The others in the Order? The orphans and the families she'd placed them with? The Citadel hadn't come after her because they didn't know who to arrest.

  Something stirred in the fun part of her brain. She turned around and jogged back out the way she'd come in.

  ~

  "Back fast."

  "There was a setback getting in," Raxa said. "But I've got another idea."

  Vess made a flicking gesture with her fingertips. "Let me guess. I don't get to know it."

  "Sorry. A few days ago, we were still trying to kill each other."

  "You couldn't get in like you thought. The new idea works, you still sure you can get out?"

  "If I can get in, I can get out."

  Vess shook her head. "Getting out is always harder than getting in. You got another idea, that's good. Means you still got a few beans between your ears. But if you don't let me come up with a backup exit, I think those beans gone rotten."

  "Where do you come up with this stuff?" Raxa said, laughing. "Fine. You got an idea for me? Or do I have to wait for it?"

  Vess laid out her idea. Risky, but better than nothing. She thought she'd need two days to prepare.

  Back at home base, Raxa woke early and tracked down Anya, who was the annoying kind of person who popped out of bed the instant the sun began to turn the skies pink.

  "I'm looking for Lark," Raxa said. "The new fence. Need to move a few pieces."

  Anya put on a stern look. "Gaits only hired him a few weeks ago. Gaits was compromised. Lark could be compromised as well."

  "That's exactly why I need to test him."

  "An alternate choice would be to assume he is tainted and cut him loose. We have other fences."

  "Gaits was connected to everybody. If we cut loose everyone he knew, we'll have to start over from scratch. We just have to be careful, that's all."

  Anya's expression made it clear what she thought of this idea, but she wasn't the type to buck an order. She gave Raxa Lark's address. Raxa rattled off a note to the effect that she was a collector of jewelry and was looking to sell off a few select items, describing them just well enough for an experienced hand to identify them as coming from the Jerrelec Collection, which
she'd nabbed from the Citadel earlier that summer.

  She handed the note to Skipper, one of their runners. Skipper jogged off into the city. The girl was back before noon. Lark was interested in the pieces—so interested he'd included an offer. Written in code, of course, but it was a good price. Better than Raxa had been expecting. He said he'd need a couple days to get the funds together.

  Raxa sent Skipper back to give him the okay. Lark waited until the next day to send back a time and place for the meet. The night after that, Raxa headed to the place, the back room of a pub inside the Ingate. Not the most imaginative location for a meet, but at least it was a nice location.

  As per instructions, she'd worn a green scarf. As she stood in the warm, smoky pub, a tall, slender man approached, dressed in black.

  "You're Kala?" he said, giving the name she'd attached to the letter. She nodded. He smiled thinly. "Alone?"

  "You think I got a regiment hiding in my blouse?"

  His cheek twitched. "This way."

  He led her through a cramped hallway and into a windowless room. Boots rumbled behind her. Two Citadel goons in black and silver, swords drawn.

  "Hands on your head, scum." One of them stuck the point of his blade against her chest. "Any blades on you?"

  She did. Along with two bracelets and a necklace from the Jerrelec. They tied her hands, loaded her onto a wagon, and rolled her straight through the Citadel gates. They marched her through the courtyard and down a staircase. The dungeons smelled like piss and mildew. They flung her in a cell. Before the door closed, locking her in darkness, she saw the cell walls that fronted the hallway were blank stone.

  The cell reeked, and they'd roughed her up a little, but she didn't care. Lark had swallowed the bait like a starving cod. Offered too much, and then, despite being that eager to buy, his arrangements had been slow—almost as if he'd had to make arrangements with somebody else first.

  She listened to the guards' footsteps fade down the hall. If they took the Jerrelec pieces straight to Cee, who seemed to be head of Citadel's security, the woman seemed smart enough to check in on the culprit for herself. Raxa had two things working in her favor: first, she hadn't told Lark anything that could identify her. And second, the Citadel was a great big gods damn bureaucracy.