The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  "That wasn't my idea. But it might be now." Blays's smile faded. "People who didn't see it happen will tell other people all about it. Kids will grow up with the stories, and they'll only remember the craziest parts, which they'll tell to their kids, who will only remember the craziest parts of that, and so on. A few hundred years from now, the Colleners will all swear to the story of Don Tay the Stone-Shaper, who waved a hand and summoned a thousand-foot wall between Collen and Mallon, booting out the oppressors for all time."

  "I really must learn how to live for another few hundred years."

  "What if it's always been like that? What if our holy books are just stories of powerful people who did something great long ago? People who got turned into gods by the passage of time—and by us wishing that there was something more for us to follow?"

  Dante blinked. "It's a good thing we're in the middle of nowhere, because that might be the most heretical thing I've ever heard."

  Blays squinted at the sky. "I suppose we'll never know. So we might as well believe so we don't accidentally piss any of them off."

  The next day brought them within five miles of the Green Mountains. The day after that, Dante's loon twinged in the middle of the morning. It was Naran.

  Mallon's army was on the march. It would arrive in Collen within three days.

  8

  Dante ran his hand down his face. "Three days until the Mallish are here? Why couldn't they have waited just one more day?"

  "I don't know," Blays said. "But it's probably best to spend our remaining time complaining about it."

  "You're right. We've got work to do." He jogged north toward the Green Mountains, leading his horse beside him.

  Blays matched pace. "Do you realize you're going the wrong way? Or are we deserting?"

  "If we leave this route open, they can use it to strike straight at Collen. We'll be trapped in a siege. It could be months before we're able to make it out."

  "We'll be fine. I can shadowalk away at any time. And you can do your little mole act. It's just the entire Collen Basin that'll be trapped."

  "At least my nightmares would have plenty of screaming faces to choose from. I'm finishing the barrier. If we ride back as fast as we can, using the nether's help, we'll beat the Mallish to the fort."

  "Assuming the Mallish don't pull any forced marches. They probably won't, though. After all, the first thing they taught me in warring school was that it's always safe to make assumptions about the enemy's capabilities."

  Dante knew it was a gamble. If the Mallish beat him to the fort he'd set up near the king's road, the Colleners would only have a single sorcerer to their name: the Keeper. The Mallish ethermancers would rip straight through their lines.

  But it would be just as much of a gamble to leave a gaping hole in their line of defense. A hole for which they had no backup plan.

  All in all, finishing the barrier took nearly a day and a half, along with all the remaining shaden in his possession. As he turned around to gallop south, he reached for the nether, but it was sluggish, reluctant. Of course. He'd been counting on being able to use it to refresh the horses' muscles, allowing them to make as much haste as possible, but somehow, it hadn't occurred to him that he'd use most of it up reshaping the earth.

  They pushed their mounts as hard as they dared. By nightfall, they were within a day's ride of the fort where the Colleners intended to make their stand, but the Mallish had advanced within twelve miles. They could be upon the site by the next afternoon.

  Cord's scouts had placed the enemy's numbers at five thousand men, including eight hundred cavalry. In sheer numbers, the Colleners were their equal. But the priests alone could tip a battle in favor of the Mallish. If Gladdic was among them, and he summoned his Andrac, it would turn into a slaughter.

  Dante made himself awaken by four in the morning. Lighting the way with his torchstone, and then a small ball of ether, he galloped onwards, Blays right beside him. Their haste was for nothing. After sunrise, Naran informed him the Mallish were turning south. Bypassing the fortifications and making for the road along the coast—the road that remained open.

  "Is Cord ready?" Dante said.

  "She's preparing to march as we speak," Naran said. "Though it remains to be seen whether this is a ruse."

  "After last time, the Mallish won't want to rush into another pitched battle. They'll try to slip past our guard and capture Collen while it's undefended."

  "And we're sure we can stop them?"

  "I think we've traveled together long enough for you to know we're never sure of anything."

  Naran made a sound that was almost but not quite a chuckle. "In that case, I look forward to finding out what we're about to do."

  ~

  Dante hunched behind the pale green sagebrush, certain that one pair of eyes among the five thousand passing below would be sharp enough to spot him. He was perched on a hill on the west end of the Valley of Northern Spirits. Behind and to his right, gray seas churned under slate skies.

  A Mallish cavalry vanguard had already claimed the eastern rim of the valley, holding it against the several hundred Colleners who had made a desperate march to cut the enemy off before they could penetrate deep into the basin. The remainder of the Mallish army was on the verge of catching up. Thousands of men in blue shirts gathered on the western rim.

  A strip of land directly along the coast was raised thirty feet above the ocean, as well as the valley it sloped down to on the other side. It was here that the coastal road ran. No more than a hundred feet wide, the rise would have made a natural chokepoint, but the Mallish had beaten them there. Already, the infantry was starting to cross, forming two well-ordered columns.

  Blays shifted beside him. "Any sign of Gladdic?"

  "A few priests. But none that look like a shambling corpse."

  "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

  Dante hesitated. "I don't know. But it's what we've got."

  The blueshirts marched onward, the stamp of their boots carrying on the damp, cool air. The smell of rotting kelp drifted up from rocky, crab-pocked beaches. Dante waited until the army was strung out along the entire length of the elevated road, then drew his knife and slipped it along his arm.

  Blood trickled down his wrist. He dived into the dirt, rushing forward along the strip of land the road lay on. The earth there wasn't a solid mass of rock; rather, it was a mixed jumble of boulders and hard-packed silt and sand. Like the mouth of a river gone dry, then disguised by the deposits left by a few hundred years of oceanic waves.

  He found a soft spot near the western bank and shook it loose. The outer wall collapsed into the ocean. Gray-green water rushed forward, sluicing inward. Dante softened the soil in front of it and the water surged on, churning and brown, pummeling all the way through the dirt and into the valley on the other side.

  The ocean roared through the gap, ripping it wider. Men were screaming, running for the eastern edge of the strip. Dante opened a second channel there, cutting them off.

  The water flooding through the two channels would have done away with the plug of boulders and silt by itself, but Dante had no intention of giving the Mallish priests the time to figure out an escape. He continued to jostle and weaken the soil, letting the titanic strength of the ocean take care of the rest. The strip of land shrank on all sides, opening a third gap through it, then a fourth.

  Soldiers ran from the crumbling embankments. As the land dwindled beneath their feet, spilling them into the tide like grain poured into a boiling pot, a few flung themselves over the northern banks. The foamy eddies swallowed them up. Dante watched with a perspective that didn't feel entirely human.

  On the eastern shore of the flooded valley, the Colleners unleashed a battle cry that could barely be heard over the torrential wash of the sea. They charged the Mallish vanguard, which had scattered from their formation, trying to get away before the flood claimed them next.

  Dante watched from afar as the most organized of the enemy
commanders redrew their lines. Most didn't. The Colleners punched through their slipshod ranks like a spear through untanned leather.

  In a matter of minutes, five thousand men had been reduced to five hundred.

  On the west bank, less than two hundred yards from where Dante crouched in the sagebrush, Mallish officers yelled commands to their men. Dante killed each officer with a bolt of black nether. The enlisted men cried out and danced back, covering their heads.

  Dante reached out with his right hand. Black mist congealed over the fallen bodies, sinking into their skin. The dead staggered to their feet, launching themselves at the men they'd once commanded, biting ragged hunks of flesh from faces and necks.

  Blays grunted. "I almost feel bad for them."

  "If they'd taken the basin, they would have murdered every last person in it."

  "I said 'almost.'"

  Dante brought ten more undead to their feet. They grappled with the soldiers and made clumsy hacks with their swords. After a brief skirmish, the surviving soldiers broke, streaming west through the yellow grass.

  "Why are you letting them go?" Blays said.

  "So that they'll be able to tell King Charles the story of what happened here."

  ~

  The entire valley had flooded for miles inland, running all the way to where Dante had started his barricade of ridges and ravines. He and Blays rode north along the new arm of the sea. The water was as brown as tilled earth, sloshing chaotically as it made sense of its new shape.

  The waterway was at least a quarter of a mile across at its narrowest, widening to a mile or more at others. Conceivably, the Mallish could sail a fleet up it and debark on the eastern bank, but with a few watchmen along the coast, the Colleners would have no troubles defending it. The rocky cliffs bordering the shore would prevent a landing elsewhere.

  The barrier was complete.

  They swung around the northern tip of the inlet and struck south along the eastern shore. Blays scanned the horizons. "Suppose the Walking Fish made it out?"

  "No idea," Dante said. "And I'm not sure if I want them to have."

  Blays laughed. "You're in a dark mood these days."

  "That's the natural reaction to getting jerked around." He was quiet for a moment. "The norren are stubborn. But they aren't stupid. After we found the Face of Dozundo, Kadda knew we weren't just lunatics. She would have people watching for any signs of trouble."

  "Then I'm sure they had a great time watching the giant, inescapable flood."

  "We warned them. We did everything they asked of us. If they chose to stay, then that's on them."

  Riders appeared ahead. Cord galloped at the front of the Colleners who'd crushed the Mallish vanguard, grinning like she'd gone mad. She reined her mount to a stop, dust blossoming from its hooves.

  "Friends!" She carried her wheel in one hand. Both the point of its spear and the iron ball on its butt were coated in blood. "Do you know what we've done?"

  "Won a war?" Blays said. "Or are you referring to this brand new beach you've acquired?"

  "We did more than win. As I killed the Mallish, I felt the calling of the gods. This was where they always meant for us to triumph. We've fulfilled our destiny!"

  Around her, the other soldiers thrust up blades, spears, and fists and screamed at the sky.

  "Collen is free!" Cord bellowed. "Today and forever, Collen is free!"

  The atmosphere among the other soldiers was equally ecstatic. Almost religious in its fervor. When Dante and Blays returned to the city of Collen, they were greeted with such overwhelming gratitude Dante was afraid his ass would fall off from all the kissing.

  Men rolled kegs of beer into the street, pouring cups for any and all. People danced in the squares while women strung strips of red cloth between the upper windows of the buildings. Boggs had arranged a great feast for them, peppered asparagus and quail eggs, venison with gravy, squares of almond paste served at the end. The volume of beer tapped for the occasion was enough to flood the Valley of Northern Spirits all over again.

  "Have you ever seen people this happy?" Blays said between bites of red venison. At a nearby table, two men were in the process of falling out of their seats from laughter. Others were dancing with their plates in hand, asparagus spilling to the tile floor.

  "No," Dante said. "But then again, I've never seen people celebrating the end of nine hundred years of armed occupation."

  Until that moment, he'd felt removed from the outrageous good cheer of the Colleners. But when he put their achievement into words, he was brightened. No matter how much awful shit had come attached to the victory, they had nonetheless done some good for the world.

  He was kept up late by the well wishes of a steady stream of farmers, who in Collen were granted the esteem of minor lords. At last, he was allowed to sleep. He dreamed of walking a world free from people, questing in perfect solitude. As he moved on, the landscape shifted around him with each step, and he was supposed to find a silver doorway, with the other side holding the answers to all his questions. Yet every time he glimpsed it and tried to walk toward it, the world shifted again, and the doorway disappeared.

  When he woke, he summoned a meeting of the Hand at their customary balcony. To his lack of surprise, no one was in a state to convene until well into the afternoon. Even the Keeper had the glassy eyes and flushed skin of someone who'd struggled valiantly to empty a keg all by herself.

  "I'd congratulate you on your victory," Dante said. "But from the look of your face, you probably don't remember it."

  Boggs laughed raspily. "And as soon as we're done at this table, I'll be getting back to the one with venison and ale on it."

  "We would never be here without you," the Keeper croaked. "Thank you for your aid. And for playing the part given you."

  Dante raised his eyebrows. "The part was 'given' to me? More like 'thrust upon.'"

  "Clobbered by, as if with a giant mallet," Blays said.

  "Ground up and fed to, like corn to a fatted calf."

  "You have made your point," the Keeper said. "Regardless, you will always have friends—and a home—in Collen. Will you require horses for your journey back to Narashtovik?"

  "You think we're leaving?" Dante frowned out at the sunny fields below the butte. "I don't see any snows yet."

  "Mallon is defeated. They won't have time for a third attack before winter. I doubt that they have the will to continue the war at all."

  "I expect you're right. But this isn't the first time the Collen Basin's booted them out, is it? They've always come back. It might take years, but the king's army will return."

  "Let them!" Cord pounded her fist on the table. "You've built a barrier from one end of our nation to the other. If they want to shed their blood against it, we'll use it to water our wheat."

  "It isn't the barrier I'm concerned about. Not when they have a much easier route into Collen."

  He unfolded a map he'd copied from one of their own. Setting his finger over Bressel, he moved out to sea, tracing his way along the coast.

  "Our coasts are sheer cliffs," Boggs said. "But they can make landfall in the Strip. Come straight up through our guts."

  Dante tapped the coastline. "That's what I'd do. If you want this victory to last, you're going to need allies. Starting with the Strip of Alebolgia."

  "They will have no desire to ally with us," the Keeper said. "They wouldn't even sell us grain."

  Blays twirled a knife in the air, catching it by the blade. "That was before you kicked King Charles' ass clean off his hips. Go to them now, while the afterglow of your victory's still blinding everyone, and they might switch sides."

  "Even if they don't, you can't leave the matter there," Dante said. "The cities of the Strip are ruled by individual families, right?"

  "Dynastic houses," Boggs said.

  "Families with fancy titles. Go straight to the top and see if they'll support you."

  "I been running the Twill business for years now. I know that no
body does nothin' out of the goodness of their hearts."

  "It's one thing to run a business. It's another to run a kingdom. There are always houses who aren't happy with the current order. If the ruling house isn't willing to help you, we might have to replace it with one that is."

  They prepped for the trip that same day. Dante was fairly sure the news of the battle would reach the coastal cities on its own, but just in case rumor was sleepier than normal, he had Boggs dispatch a rider to the south. It would be best if the houses had a few days to gossip and scheme amongst each other before the Collenese delegation arrived.

  They left the next morning: Boggs, Dante, Blays, and the Keeper, who seemed hellbent to take every opportunity she could to violate her oath not to leave the Reborn Shrine. Then again, considering the Reborn Shrine was in the midst of being rebuilt from the ground up, remaining in it would be something of a health hazard.

  They took a small retinue of servants and soldiers as well. Dante thought about using the time to ask the Keeper to show him more of the ether, but the thought of spending so much time talking with her was exhausting. Maintaining his temper while he traveled with her was hard enough.

  After two days of riding, the landscape shifted to rolling hills of tall grass and stunted trees. Small farms scattered the slopes, trellises of vines growing in orderly rows. Most had already been harvested, but a few sections sagged with bunches of red grapes hanging from the vine.

  "What do they think they're doing?" Blays said. "Aren't the frosts due any day?"

  "Yes, forget the Strip." Dante tightened his reins. "We must save the wine!"

  "Laugh all you like. When dinner comes, and you have nothing to drink but water, you'll have no one to blame but yourself."

  "Freezing them's the whole point," Boggs said. "Makes the sweetest wine you ever drank. The price they pull is even sweeter."

  According to Boggs, whose trade had left him well-informed with regards to Collen's neighbors, the land they were currently crossing was under the control of a hilltop city called Poloa. Originally, it had been a colony of Cavana, the port city they were headed toward, but over the last several decades, its burgeoning wine trade had swelled its wealth and influence to the point where it had broken loose.