The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  He stamped down a patch of snow and laid out the bodies. Rather than having them squander their limited shadows trying and failing to raise the mice, Dante brought them to their feet with a wave of his hand. The rodents stared up at him, eyes as dark as the mouths of fish.

  "Sorrowen. Bring the nether close. Be ready to use it."

  Feeling the boy summon the shadows, Dante reached into the nearest mouse, locating the nether within it. To this, he attached a cord—or perhaps a pipe—of fresh nether, extending it outside the mouse.

  "Connect yourself to it," Dante said. "You'll be taking it from me. Slow and easy. No need to rush."

  Sorrowen nodded once. Extending a thread-thin tendril of nether, he attached it to the hanging cord, tested the link, then thickened it. As its diameter matched that of the cord, it winked out.

  "I got it!" Sorrowen beamed, thrusting up a fist. "I—"

  He staggered, collapsing on his side in the snow.

  Dante ran to him, dropping into a slide. "Sorrowen? Are you all right?"

  "Ohh." Sorrowen rocked on his back, pressing a palm to his forehead. Dante drove the nether into his body, but at a glance, there didn't seem to be anything wrong. Sorrowen sat up, laughing, and pointed at the mouse. "I can see through its eyes! Does it always make you this dizzy?"

  Dante grinned. "Before you push yourself too far, try to—"

  The acolyte jumped to his feet. Eyes flying wide, he spun and vomited into the snow.

  Blays shook his head at Dante. "Why is there always so much barfing when you're around?"

  While Sorrowen was recovering, Dante prepared a second mouse. Transferring it to Raxa took a few tries, but learning from Sorrowen's experience, she'd seated herself, and only needed a short rest to acclimate herself to seeing through the dead creature's eyes.

  Sorrowen, still a little green-looking, lowered his chin, bent his brows, and ordered his mouse forward. The creature dragged itself ahead, veering badly to the left, a single paw gripping into the snow while the others spasmed and kicked at nothing. A second paw found its way, followed by the remaining pair. Dante offered snippets of advice as Raxa manipulated her mouse, whispering to herself as she learned the basics of its command.

  Within an hour, the two of them were able to make the mice run in whatever direction they liked. At a moment when the both of them had taken a step back to regard their little charges, Dante called them over to him.

  "When people think of sorcery, they imagine raging fireballs. Hammers of force smashing down castle walls. A sorcerer striding into an enemy army and striking down soldiers by the thousands until their blood flows around his ankles.

  "The nether can make you look like an avatar of the gods come to deal out wrath and ruin. But don't let yourself get so drunk on the vision of crushing and smiting that you forget the range of your power. Skilled nethermancers are more than a sledgehammer. They're also a scalpel. The nether can be used to solve any trouble you fall into—as long as you have the wit and imagination to put it to use."

  He crouched down and held out his palm. Sorrowen's mouse scurried into it. Dante lifted the undead rodent up to eye level. "When you're alone in Bressel, and the enemy's closing in on you, remember that it doesn't always take lightning and hellfire to save your life. Sometimes, all it takes is a mouse."

  The two students nodded. Dante set them back to their practice. They wandered into the edge of the firelight, following their mice.

  "Smart advice," Blays said. "Who'd you steal it from?"

  Dante laughed, but a flicker of doubt stirred in his chest. It was a thin line between wisdom and idiocy. Had Cally always been as confident as he sounded? Or had he been exploring as he went along, unsure of the truth of his statements until he'd seen his apprentices prove him right?

  The next day, as they crossed a ridge, a band of norren hunters watched them pass, but made no effort to approach. After Raxa's lunchtime reading lesson, which was progressing slowly, Dante took a look at his collection of mice and decided that they were starting to look a little haggard and gruesome. He used the nether as a fine blade, flensing the creatures down to their bones.

  That night, Dante instructed Sorrowen to use his mouse to build a block of snow, and for Raxa to have hers try to climb a shrub.

  "Too easy," Sorrowen declared as his skeletal mouse packed a final paw-load onto the foot-wide cube of snow it had been raising and brushed the surface smooth. "That's barely any harder than making them walk."

  Easy as the boy thought it was, Dante asked him to repeat the task until he ran out of strength. Smiling smugly, Sorrowen complied. Raxa had some initial difficulty getting the mouse's tiny claws to wrap around twigs, but by night's end, she had it ascending and descending the shrub with the grace of…well, certainly not a squirrel, but possibly a confused cat or a young child.

  They entered a snowy plain broken up by boulders of dark rock. The steady wind kept the snow shallow, allowing them to increase their pace. Night came, bringing a sudden snowstorm. They huddled in the lee of a boulder.

  "Last night, you proved you could build a block," Dante told Sorrowen. "Tonight, I want you to build a model of the Sealed Citadel. Including the outer wall."

  Sorrowen's eyes darted from side to side. "Are you kidding? Sir?"

  "What could possibly be funny about using a mouse skeleton to build a mouse-sized snow fort? Besides, you said your last task was too easy. I'd hate for you to get bored."

  Grumbling, Sorrowen motioned his mouse to start gathering snow. Raxa got a good chuckle at this.

  "Can't forget you," Dante said to her. "As for your task, you get to write out the first page of the Cycle. In Mallish. Using your mouse."

  Her mirth died on her face. He provided her with a quill, an inkpot, and a palimpsest, then spread open the Cycle. The mouse hoisted the quill over its shoulder and began to write in shaky, uneven letters.

  Dante watched until he got bored, then went to check on Sorrowen. The boy was having the mouse use a spoon to shovel snow faster. The Citadel's keep was already in place, though Sorrowen was neglecting its finer details. Dante watched the mouse pile up the foundation for the outer walls.

  He returned to Raxa and leaned over the mouse scratching at the parchment with a quill big enough to be its pike. "How's it going?"

  "I spilled the ink twice," she said flatly. "Then I thought, Maybe I should pack the inkpot down into the snow. So I did that. I haven't spilled it since."

  "Excellent. Sounds like you're making real progress. And what about your alphabet?"

  Raxa gestured to her pages. She'd written it down several times, in increasingly smaller and neater script. It still looked like children's writing, but considering she was copying a foreign language through the medium of a deceased mouse, her effort was deceptively skilled.

  He kneeled next to her. "Are you enjoying yourself?"

  Raxa squinted at him. "Would you be? I get why we're doing this, but that doesn't make it any less tedious."

  "In that case, you should probably go rob Sorrowen. For the sake of your morale."

  "Is that an order?"

  He nodded. "To war!"

  For a moment, she looked ready to call him stupid. Then her eyes lit up with mischief. She swiveled her head toward the mouse, concentration crinkling her face. The skeleton laid down its quill, bunged the inkpot, then slunk across the snow toward Sorrowen, whose nose was buried in the process of directing his own mouse around his half-built walls.

  Raxa's mouse slipped forward. Any sound it made was erased by the pop of the fire and the rush of snow in the wind. Like all of them, Sorrowen wore a thick cloak that hung past the backs of his knees. The mouse paused beneath him, gathered itself, and leaped high, snagging the hem of the cloak with its front paws. It kicked its back legs until they found purchase in the fabric.

  Raxa collected herself, then guided the creature up Sorrowen's back. It reached a large pocket near his right hip and climbed inside, emerging a moment later with a packet
of dried apples.

  "Agh!" Sorrowen spun, slapping at his cloak. The mouse spun through the air and landed inside the model Citadel's walls.

  Dante cupped his hands to his mouth. "You're being invaded! Protect your keep!"

  Sorrowen glanced from him to the thieving mouse. With an affronted scowl, he pointed at Raxa's mouse, which was currently trying to jump up the foot-high snow walls. On the other side of the enclosure, his mouse raced along the battlements, flinging itself down at the intruder. They met with a brittle clack.

  Raxa ran forward two steps, gesturing to her mouse. The two constructs ripped at each other, sending ribs and claws flying into the snow. Raxa ordered her mouse to spit out the packet of apple slices just as the enemy's oversized front teeth sank into its outstretched neck.

  Raxa's creature collapsed in a pile. Sorrowen blinked in surprise, then stared down at his mouse until it looked like the sweat was about to pop from his brows. At last, the rodent rose on its back legs and did a victory jig.

  Sorrowen picked up the packet of apples and returned it to his pocket. "Any further attempts to steal will be put down just as harshly."

  "Next time, you'll never see me coming." For a moment, Raxa looked angry with her defeat—then she burst into laughter, gazing down at the remains of her mouse. "Is that the end of Captain Grabs?"

  Dante leaned over the wall for a better look. "Afraid so. When they get too beat up, their nether leaks away, joining the residual shadows around them." He produced a small leather pouch and dumped out another pile of bones. "That's why it pays to carry replacements."

  The evening's practice had been far more childish than anything the monks at the Citadel would have allowed, but Dante had never thought much of the traditional scholastic model. In fact, it was one of the many things about the Citadel he intended to alter or reform at some point in the future when he had free time—which likely meant when he was too old and frail to leave his room on voyages like this one.

  For some reason, people believed that it was only real learning if it was boring, difficult, and unpleasant. For Dante, the best learning had always been when he was having fun. Sometimes, the subject itself was so compelling that it needed no other seasoning, but often, his interest in or ability to remember the details of that subject was due to the fact he'd had a blast while learning it.

  With this in mind, he made certain Sorrowen and Raxa had more to do than listen to him lecture and then recite back what he'd just told them. He assigned them both a rotation of thiefly pursuits: getting Raxa's mouse to pickpocket the others in their group without being noticed; to scurry up trees, climb out on branches, and leap to others; to carry a small vial—the kind that might be used to contain poison—unstopper it, and pour it into a hole in the snow no bigger than a mouth or an ear.

  Their favorite game was something they dubbed "the Little Gantlet," in which their mice were given a token to carry and protect across the landscape while Dante used his own mice to hunt them. Sometimes, Raxa and Sorrowen were on the same side. Others, they were in opposition. Sorrowen clearly preferred to work together, but Raxa didn't seem to care. The only thing she cared about was getting her mouse through the gantlet and dropping her token in the victory circle.

  After two weeks of travel, the Dunden Mountains condensed on the horizon. With their time together nearly half over, Dante switched their lessons from the control of the mice to the creation of them. He soon ran into a challenge to his philosophy of making all learning and practice into a game, puzzle, or contest: they were bad at reanimating the dead, and there was no real way to turn their acquisition of these skills into a game. Or at any rate, to make a game more complicated than "whoever does it first gets to mock the one who failed."

  Fortunately for their collective sanity, he'd already learned that it was counterproductive to lecture them as if they both had the same problems and solutions. Instead, he taught them individually. By the time they reached the mountains, Sorrowen was able to raise and command not just one, but two mice at once, if for limited periods of time.

  Yet Raxa still hadn't gotten it. As they hiked into a blizzard, Dante had to divert most of his time and power toward clearing and reshaping the ground ahead of them. Three days into the Dundens, they stopped in the middle of the afternoon and made camp below the pass, meaning to try to cross it once they had a full day to work with. Dante hollowed them a shelter in the rock, complete with a small flue.

  As the rangers struggled to get a fire going, Dante went over bits of the Cycle with Raxa. Particularly the sections involving Jack Hand, the adventurous sorcerer who'd used an army of dead rats to free himself from captivity. The original copy of the Cycle was far more than a book, and he was hoping exposure to these stories would jog something inside her or teach her something he couldn't. There was no guarantee she'd learn to use the little spies before they reached Bressel. If she couldn't, her chances of ferreting out Mallon's plans would drop sharply.

  "Jack Hand again?" Blays got to his feet, brushing snow from his trousers. "Tell me when you get to the stories about his cousin Jack Ass. Until then, I'm going to make use of the daylight to scout the path ahead."

  He exited into the falling snow. Dante finished up one of the passages about Jack Hand, then had Raxa try her hand on a mouse skeleton. After a few more failures, he switched back to reading the book. As he debated with Raxa about whether a single sorcerer could really command the number of rats the Cycle claimed Jack Hand had put to use, Blays materialized from nowhere.

  "Shit!" Dante scrambled backward. "Don't do that!"

  "If I didn't, I'd sink into the snow like an arrow fired straight down." Blays motioned in the direction of the pass. "I got nearly two miles ahead before I had to turn back."

  "I could have sent a mouse to do that."

  "Yes, but if you were off doing that, I couldn't teach your students, so from each their own and all that. In any event, the pass looks okay. Well, relatively okay. It won't definitely kill us." Blays waved a hand at the still air of the cave. "What were you guys doing in here, anyway? This place is swimming with nether."

  "That's probably what I was going to clobber you with for appearing out of the blue. We were reading. There wasn't any nether involved."

  "There was a second ago. It was flying around like a flock of crows the gods had forgotten to finish detailing."

  Dante glanced at Raxa. "Were you drawing on the nether?"

  She shrugged. "I'm saving it all for your gods damned mice."

  Blays frowned. "Either you're mistaken, or my brain is in the process of freezing solid. As we always do, let's pray you're wrong."

  He blinked out of existence. Now that Dante was expecting him, he could feel Blays' presence in the shadows. Blays took a couple of steps toward Dante, stopped, then moved to the open copy of the Cycle, which he seemed to stand over for a long time.

  "Er," Blays said, returning to reality. "Turns out we're both right. Or wrong, if you're feeling cynical. The nether's still here. It's tumbling around like dust in a sunbeam in a barn—or like a stream flowing between you two and the Cycle. Thing is, it seems to be confined to the netherworld."

  Dante examined the air in front of him and around the Cycle, but there were no more than a few particles of shadows drifting about, and nothing that came close to resembling a stream.

  "I don't see anything."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "Considering how poorly you use your ears, I'm not surprised your eyes don't work, either. You can't see it because you can't see into the shadows."

  "What's the nether doing? Besides being there?"

  Blays disappeared for another ten seconds before coming back. "Well, a lot of it's sinking into you. Although a bit is also going from you into the book."

  Dante's skin tingled. "You're absolutely, one hundred percent sure of this?"

  "That's what the book does," Raxa said. "You didn't know that?"

  "You've seen this, too?"

  A glimmer of self-recrimin
ation crossed her face, as if she'd regretted saying anything. She eyed Dante, then glanced out at the storm outside the cave, seeming to relax.

  "Yep." Raxa made a circular motion between herself and the book. "But only when I was inside the shadows. It doesn't react the same way to everyone, either. When one of my friends was reading it, she hardly stirred up any shadows at all."

  Dante gazed down at the book. He was annoyed that they could see this phenomenon and he couldn't, but the darkness of his jealousy was already being replaced by the lightness of curiosity.

  "It's still doing this right now?" He motioned to Blays. "What about you? Are you caught up in these streams? Or is it just me and Raxa?"

  Blays held up a finger and blinked away again. When he returned, he was shaking his head. "It's sprinkling a bit of shadows on me. But it's dumping plenty on Raxa, and you look like you're in the middle of a filthy blizzard."

  Dante was overtaken by that particular breed of thought where he wouldn't have been able to explain it to himself, let alone out loud to another person. Letting his inspiration propel him forward, he pointed at Raxa.

  "Put your hand on the book." As she complied, he followed suit. He tried again to sense the flow of nether, but it remained hidden from him. "Watch what I do. When you feel ready, you try."

  He got a bag of mouse bones from his pocket and dumped them on the cold stone floor of the cave. He drew the nether to his hand, matching his breathing to the slow expansion and contraction of the shadows. Thus synched, he waited for the nether to expand fully, then animated the skeleton. When the shadows shrank to their smallest, he withdrew the others from the mouse, collapsing it with a delicate rattle.

  With each cycle of the nether, he animated and deanimated the mouse again. At first, Raxa watched him. Then she watched the mouse. At last, she seemed to be looking at nothing at all—or gazing through their world and into another.

  She lifted her hand. Shadows swam from her fingers to the skeleton of the mouse. A bony tail twitched. Tiny claws flexed. The mouse rocked to its feet, turned around, and tilted its skull at Raxa.