"And I need the sword to kill the son of a bitch we're going to hunt down."
She jerked a thumb at Blays. "He's the one who told me a sword is nothing compared to the almighty god-blasting power of the nether. You're asking me to put my life on the line for you and to trust you're not going to kill me as soon as you've got what you want. This is my insurance policy."
"What if you die in the line of duty?"
"Then you only have to hunt for one hidden treasure, not two."
Seriously contemplating an abundance of violence, he turned to Blays. "Help. Before I accidentally redwash the front of the cathedral."
"But the monks could stand to do a little honest labor," Blays said. "Look, if you were her, would you do any different?"
"I would trust the word and goodwill of my illustrious benefactor."
Blays cupped his right ear, tilting it to the sky. "Do you hear that? That's the sound of Cally laughing his ass off. I suggest we retreat to shelter until it crashes down."
Dante chuckled. At the mention of the old man, something shifted inside him. He had been young once, eager to learn. What would have happened to him if Cally hadn't taken him on and guided him down the path? Almost certainly, he would have died at sixteen, slain by the soldiers at Blays' hanging in Whetton. Even if he'd somehow made it through that, Samarand's agents would have gotten him soon after.
Instead, he'd been granted the chance to study under the guidance of one of the most intelligent and unusual sorcerers he'd ever known. And in the process, he'd advanced beyond any of his most secret hopes.
Maybe it was nostalgia. Or maybe it was the appeal of an unexplored form of arrogance: the role of teaching someone lesser, and shaping them into your vision of what they could and should be. Whatever the case, serving as mentor seemed to feel less like a burden and more like a privilege.
Nor did it hurt that sealing the deal would mean restoring peace to his city.
He favored Raxa with a critical eye. Regaining the sword had immediate appeal, but he wasn't even sure they allowed people to openly carry arms in Tanar Atain. From what Jona had said, they sounded unusually wary of outsiders. Besides, if he chose the sword and something happened to Raxa in Bressel, the loss of the true Cycle would be devastating. It was more than an object of power. It represented the legacy of Arawn in the north. A tradition that dated back over a thousand years. He wouldn't be the one that broke that honored chain.
"The Cycle," he said. "Three days from now, be at the Citadel gates at dawn."
She nodded. "That mean the war between us is over?"
"And if you want peace to remain in our absence, tell your people there can't be any more killings. No assaulting citizens, either. Now, if you want to rob the nobles, maybe they should hire better guards. But you might find it more interesting, and profitable, to look into certain Gaskan trade routes and warehouses. My friend Nak probably has a lot of information on the subject. I'll have to warn him not to accidentally drop a list outside the gates. Especially not at, say, ten o'clock tonight."
Raxa smiled. It was the first time she'd looked genuinely happy since they'd met. "See you in three days."
~
As the sun struggled to clear the heights of the Woduns, Dante waited outside the gates with Blays, Sorrowen, and four of Olivander's best rangers, who were mostly there to scout the route ahead, but would also help Dante keep an eye on Raxa.
That role was starting to look like it might be superfluous, considering there was still no sign of Raxa at all. Cold dread squirmed in his stomach like a ball of worms. If she didn't show—if this was yet another ruse—he would delay the trip until he hunted her down. And given that the delay meant additional risk for Naran's life, this time, Dante's mercy would be at an end.
As the first wan yellow ray poked out of the east, a lone silhouette walked lightly toward the gates.
"Hope you brought me a horse," Raxa said. "Otherwise, one of you is walking."
In fact, they'd brought two doughty raggies apiece, but were otherwise traveling light, intending to restock their provisions as they traveled through the Norren Territories and Tantonnen. Grooms helped Raxa into the saddle and redistributed her bulging pack into her two horses' saddlebags.
"I'll do my best in your absence," Olivander said. "Remember to know when to sheathe your sword."
As they rode out, Dante felt a twinge of guilt for leaving his city again so soon. Yet it helped to know that it remained in good hands. That, perhaps, was the most important thing a leader could do: assemble good people, and forge them into a group who could share the weight with you—and carry it onward after you were gone.
They headed south, clearing the gates and passing through the busy neighborhoods that had sprung up on the city's outskirts. As they left Narashtovik, Sorrowen glanced behind them, staring anxiously at the Citadel and the Cathedral of Ivars. Raxa didn't look back, but she did let her gaze linger on the forest ahead and to their right, a distant look upon her face.
Travelers had trampled a path through the snow. That day, they made excellent time. Yet by the point when the sun fell into the clouds hanging over the western hills, the road had already gotten worse.
"Mighty inconsiderate of Naran to disappear in the dead of winter," Blays said. "Next time he wants to get kidnapped or arrested, he better make sure it's spring."
Dante checked in with Jona, but the pirate still hadn't heard anything from Naran. As far as he could tell, the loon was dead.
They walked for half an hour past sunset, the rangers testing the way ahead, then got off the road to pitch their tents in the woods. While the soldiers gathered firewood, Dante called over Sorrowen and Raxa. He'd been thinking about this moment for the last few days, but finding himself in it, he had no idea where to start.
"If you're lucky," he said, "you'll have fifty days to learn. If I'm lucky, and the roads are fair, you'll have thirty. Either way, we'll barely have time to scratch the surface. So let's make each day count."
Feeling mildly foolish, he nodded at Sorrowen. "I know the monks have drilled you on the Cycle until you must have wanted to turn it into book soup." Dante turned to Raxa. "But you haven't had formal training. Were there any parts of the Cycle you didn't understand?"
"Yeah," Raxa said. "Such as the first half."
"You've had the book for almost two months!"
"I could have had it for two years. Wouldn't change the fact I can't read Mallish."
Somehow, that had eluded him. It pitched his plan right out the window. "We'll have to remedy that. Besides, learning Mallish will help you do your job in Bressel." He rubbed his temples. "For now, it doesn't matter. The book already unlocked your talent. We can come back to its pages later."
He shifted his weight on the downed tree he was sitting on. "As long as you're willing to run away before you run yourself dry, a skilled sorcerer doesn't have much to fear from the average soldier. There's no armor that can save them from the nether. That means that one of the most valuable skills you can possess is the ability to defend yourself from other sorcerers. Both of you know the basics of deflecting an incoming nether strike, but let's see if we can't refine your technique."
"Er," Sorrowen said. "You're not going to shoot at us, are you?"
"You have ten seconds," Dante said. "Get running."
The boy paled and popped to his feet, running headlong into the forest, snow spraying from his boots. He was about to disappear into the trees when the laughter of the others brought him to a stop.
He trudged back to them, giving Dante a peevish look. "What did that teach me?"
"That you can't trust everything your teacher says." Dante brightened—he hadn't intended to say that, but it sounded just like something Cally would have said. "We won't aim at each other. The target will be the lower branches of that tree." He pointed out a pine sixty feet away. "I'm going to attack it. It's your job to deflect my attack before it hits home."
He walked twenty feet away from the others.
He rolled up his left sleeve and got out his antler-handled knife. The blade was icy cold, practically sticking to his skin as he made the cut.
Checking that the two of them were ready, Dante shaped a handful of nether into an arrowhead, then sent it winging toward the designated pine tree. It was already a third of the way there before a black dart flew from Sorrowen's hands. The dart started strong, closing on the arrowhead, but then wobbled mid-flight, veering off course. The arrowhead smacked into the tree.
"You missed," Dante said.
"It was too dark to see."
"You don't want to try to watch it. Your eyes are too slow. Better to follow it by feel."
He sent another arrowhead straight at the tree. Sorrowen's counter dashed it from the air in a burst of silver sparks. On the third attempt, however, Dante put some spiral into his bolt and Sorrowen reacted too late. The nether crashed through the bough, sending it crunching into the snow.
Dante tried nine more times. Sorrowen only struck down a single one. His counters always seemed to be a little too slow, his adjustments a little too hesitant to overtake the looping arrowhead. Dante rejoined the others. Sorrowen looked like he was expecting to be smacked.
"You can't afford to be that slow," Dante said. "You know the attack is coming. That's an advantage you'll rarely have in real combat. Get the bolt up to speed, then worry about making adjustments to its course."
"But what if mine hits too hard?"
"No such thing. The whole point is to cause a wreck. Let's try again."
They got back in position. To Dante's surprise, after eight more bolts, Sorrowen apologized for being out of nether. He'd intercepted just one more strike.
"I don't understand," Sorrowen said. "I thought I was better than this."
"When the nether's flying right at you, I expect you are. We're working at a distance on purpose to develop your finesse."
"And to not kill you," Blays suggested.
The boy looked partially reassured. Dante motioned to Raxa. "Your turn."
They stepped apart. She called out that she was ready. He sent a straight shot at the tree, which was gouged and cracked from his earlier strikes. A blast of darkness shot from Raxa's hands and slammed into Dante's arrowhead, obliterating it in a spray of twinkling motes. He loosed a second attack and she knocked it down just as easily.
As the third flew toward the pine, Dante sent it into an irregular spiral. A great gob of nether overshot it, reversed course, and plowed into it from the other side less than three feet from the tree. Of the next three efforts, she nailed two and missed one.
"That's it," she announced. "Out of juice."
Dante let the nether dissolve from his fingers. "Already?"
"Was there supposed to be a lesson somewhere?"
He crunched back to the camp. The rangers had brought in wood and were striking a fire.
"You have good instincts," Dante told Raxa. "But you hit too hard. It's like you're dumping a bucket of water on a candle. Learn to conserve. Use as little as possible to achieve your goals. Often, defeating another sorcerer is a matter of wearing them down. Exhaust yourself in the first exchanges, and they'll rip you apart."
He ate and went to bed feeling good about having identified areas for them to work on. Yet after another three days of practice, having exhausted their supply of nether in each session, he couldn't feel the slightest bit of difference in their technique. During their fifth practice, they actually seemed worse: Sorrowen's hold was as wobbly as a toddler trying to lift his father's sword, and as for Raxa, in her insistence on doing her best to block every single one of his shots no matter the cost, she ran herself dry after a handful of efforts. On top of that, when she rushed in too hard, her counterattacks had such unsteerable momentum that it made it easy for him to slip under her guard.
"You better hope we fall down a crevasse and nobody finds us for twenty years," Dante said. "Because that's how long it's going to take for you two to learn to do this right."
Sorrowen flinched. Raxa just stared. Immediately regretting himself, and hoping the shadows and wavering light cast by the campfire would disguise his blush, Dante launched into a lecture about how they needed to imagine that his nether was a pigeon in flight while theirs was a plunging falcon with unerring aim.
Late the next morning, as they emerged from the forest into a stretch of rolling hills, one of Dante's loons twinged.
"O wise leader?" Nak said. "Is now a good time to receive a great deal of information that won't be useful to you for weeks?"
"As good as any." Dante tried to disguise his disappointment that it wasn't Jona with news about Naran. "I take it you've found something on Tanar Atain?"
"For various definitions of 'something,' yes. In the case of the history I found in the archives, the most important things to come out of Tanar Atain are the purity of its noble bloodlines, and the cleverness of the fashions they wore."
"Commissioned by the same royals he wrote about," Dante said. "Those books are always the worst. Makes me wish I could walk back through time and pay them to not write about the cuffs of their patron's jacket."
"I couldn't agree more. Yet once the author grew tired of chronicling the type and number of gemstones adorning that year's belts, or decided that even his patrons must have grown bored of hearing about the hems of tunics, he switched subjects to something the outsider might term 'interesting.'
"The history of Tanar Atain has been troubled, to say the least. It seems they've spent most of the last eight hundred years engaged in a series of dynastic successions, rebellions, and counter-rebellions, almost none of which can realistically claim to have ruled the entire area—or to have lasted for more than twenty years. In some cases, the ruling dynasty hasn't lasted twenty days."
"Are they that war-like?"
"Not especially so, at least from what I can tell. The trouble, you see, is that Tanar Atain isn't land as you or I know it. The area is so swampy and boggy that the areas of usable earth are difficult to get to, let alone assault. Thus various regions and settlements were constantly breaking away from their conquerors. And if those conquerors attempted to reclaim the rebel territories, it usually weakened the attackers so greatly it left them vulnerable to an uprising in their home city."
Dante gazed down the road, which was so buried in snow that it was a matter of faith as to whether it still existed. "Sounds like finding Captain Naran might be harder than we bargained for."
"Perhaps, but perhaps not. You see, over a century ago, which is when this text was written, the Yoto Dynasty arose, unifying the region and keeping it under their control through a series of harsh but—the author is careful to stress this—necessary and ultimately beneficial measures."
"Who are the Yoto?"
"Little is said on that matter except that they are a branch of an earlier dynasty that was cast down by rebellion many years earlier. I get the impression the author covered the Yotos' earlier history in a separate volume."
"Which we don't have."
Nak tutted. "Regrettably, I failed to prioritize the archives' collection of Tanarian lore. I can glean this much: they're proponents of rules, and they take them extremely seriously. Assuming the Yoto remain in power, my advice is to hew strictly to all of their laws, customs, statutes, rites, and precedents."
"But Nak, we would never dream of breaking someone else's laws."
"Forgive me, master. You can't see me doing so, but rest assured I have fallen to my knees and begun the first of dozens of appeals to Arawn's mercy for slandering you."
"Have you found anything about the city of Aris Osis? I'm hoping that's all the further we have to go."
"It was only mentioned in passing. Sounds like a thriving place, and slightly less strict, due to the nature of ports. The author seemed to look down on it for this reason." Nak paused; across the loon, Dante heard the flipping of pages. "The book concludes on a curious anecdote relayed thirdhand from a wandering soothsayer. The soothsayer, in turn, claims to ha
ve heard the story from something called a noto, which from context appears to be some sort of traveling merchant.
"This noto, by name of Eko Abu, had a dangerous business delivering various herbs, roots, and barks between the coastal regions and the wilder reaches of the interior. One of these was a swamp known as Go Kaza; since all of the other noto refused to visit it, Eko Abu was making a small fortune bringing back the swamp's medicinal herbs.
"On one such venture to Go Kaza, Eko Abu was on his way to a raft carpet—don't ask me what that is—when he heard a scream from a small, densely wooded island. Against his better instincts, he tied up his boat and scrambled onto the island to offer assistance.
"Moving as quietly as he could, he stumbled upon a scene born from nightmare: a pale man, gaunt yet powerful, feeding on the neck of a limp young woman. Eko Abu gasped in horror. The pale figure detached from its victim, face dripping with blood, and leaped at Eko Abu, crossing forty feet in a single bound.
"The vampire fell upon him, knocking him to the ground. Eko Abu attacked it with his longknife, stabbing it in the chest, but as he withdrew the blade, the wound sealed behind it. The beast knocked aside the knife and plunged its fangs into Eko Abu's throat.
"Coldness swept through him. The world seemed to fall away, as though he were viewing it through a pane of dirty glass. He reached for his pouch, trying to find his jackknife, but in his haze, he opened his satchel of herbs instead, spilling his bundle of freshly collected roto ari leaves over the monster.
"The vampire recoiled with a scream, the flesh of its face sizzling wherever the leaves had touched it. Eko Abu threw another handful of leaves at the beast. With a shriek, it bounded away. Eko Abu ran to his barge, poling through the fetid water as fast as he could.
"As soon as he was away from the swamps of Go Kaza, Eko Abu isolated himself in another bog, convinced he'd soon turn vampire as well. There, he stayed in a makeshift shelter, eating the roto ari leaves in an attempt to purge his system of the disease. After ninety days and ninety nights, with no change in his body or his soul, he returned home to his wife and children.
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