The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Early this morning. They're nearly to Cavana."

  "Let them know we're in position. That it's only a matter of time until we'll have what they're looking for."

  He peered at her, his eyes lit like the candles of a scholar working late into the night. "How did you get like this?"

  "Like what?"

  "So…sure of yourself."

  "By having been through much worse. Now let's get out of here before somebody sees a young male monk fraternizing with an older female roughneck in the middle of the night."

  Raxa went back to the Fabians at a jog. Despite her haste, by the time she got home, she'd been out for nearly three hours. When a servant came around in the morning to see to her, Raxa was so thick-headed from exhaustion that for a moment she couldn't remember where she was.

  The day was filled with more gossip-mongering. Maura emphasized that Raxa's husband had chosen to do business with the Collen Basin over Mallon, implying that it was because of the unfavorable tariffs Mallon placed on northern goods. Even so, sensing some resentment toward Collen, Raxa was careful to guarantee Mallon's bluebloods that her husband had wanted to come to Mallon, but the dictates of business had thwarted him.

  The day after that, she got her writing tutor. Along with enough parchment to cover the sails of a ship, and enough ink to dye them. Within minutes of starting her lessons, Raxa was incredibly bored, but she gritted her teeth and did her best. Combined with the bits and pieces she remembered from Galand's lessons, she learned fast.

  Maura assured her that she'd requested audiences with several ministers who could apprise Raxa of the situation in Collen, and how she could best look into her husband's disappearance there. She also gave Raxa a flippant warning about how long such requests could take to be fulfilled.

  Several days drifted past, a tasteless porridge of court chatter, writing lessons, and strolls around the mall. At least this gave Raxa a good look at the palace. Each night, she catnapped, then got up in the darkest hour to slip outside and shadowalk into the palace itself, getting to know its escape routes and its exits.

  A handful of them, anyway. The palace was gigantic. A town unto itself. She could only spend a few minutes inside it each night until she had to hoof it back home before she ran out of juice and got kicked out of the shadows. Using dead bugs, she tried spying at a distance, but she had a hard time hearing anything the people were saying. It was like she didn't know how to get her ears to work with the bugs' ears. She tried to hone her skill, but it was slow going. And any energy she spent on the bugs was juice she couldn't put toward shadowalking.

  She preferred to do her work in person anyway. And as day after day passed with no word from the royal cabinet, Raxa was starting to think she'd have time to memorize every stone in every room of the palace.

  ~

  "I possess good news," Maura announced one morning after breakfast. "The Minister of Foreign Dignitaries has agreed to see you this afternoon."

  "This afternoon?" Raxa said. "But I've only waited twelve days. Is he sure he doesn't need twelve more to prepare his office for my arrival?"

  "You can make japes now. Your Mallish is improving. Shall I inform the Minister that you will be there? Or would you prefer to pout that the men you need to speak with because of their importance also have concerns that don't involve you?"

  Raxa smiled. There was no denying that Maura was a cold-blooded aristocrat who couldn't imagine anything better to do with her wealth than try to make more of it. As Lady Yera's story had rippled through the court, Maura had begun to openly question whether the newly-opened Galladese Passage was enriching the Middle Kingdoms at the cost of Mallon's coffers—and if so, whether the king had any choice but to reduce tariffs on all goods out of the north. Raxa had zero doubt Maura had only taken her in to use her as a political bludgeon.

  Yet Raxa liked her anyway. "Tell the Minister I'll see him."

  "And thank him for his attentions on this matter."

  "And thank him for his attentions."

  Servants helped Raxa garb herself in various undergarments and the dress Maura had had made for her to wear to any such audiences. At the appointed time, Maura accompanied Raxa into the palace, where a royal servant delivered them to a modest-sized hall.

  A man rose from a table. He was dressed in a pine green doublet with floppy sleeves cinched at three points along the arm, making them resemble a string of moldy onions.

  He bowed. "I am Odden Laxley, King Charles' Minister of Foreign Dignitaries. I am sorry to hear the conditions that brought you here, but I am glad to meet you nonetheless."

  Raxa thanked him and grabbed a seat. Laxley had already heard her story, but he prompted her to tell it herself.

  "I'm waiting for my soldiers to come from Dollendun," she concluded. "Anything you can tell me about the situation in Collen will help me find my husband."

  Laxley frowned, the ends of his long mustache hanging past his chin. "It is not advised that anyone should travel into Collen at the present time. The locals have savagely murdered many of our people. They have made raids across our own border. There is even talk of witchcraft."

  "But I must find him. If there's to be another war, I have to get him out before anything happens to him."

  "It is not not known whether our king will dedicate more resources to quelling rebels who may be incapable of accepting civilization. However, we do possess certain assets within Collen. They might make inquiries of your husband on your behalf."

  Raxa did her best to pry more from him, but either he truly had no idea about Mallon's plans for Collen, or he had no intention of revealing them to a northerner. She did a careful dance around the Mallish spies he'd implied were working in Collen, but he stonewalled her there, too.

  "He wasn't altogether unhelpful," Maura decided once they'd returned to the Fabians. "But I assume a woman like yourself is not satisfied by the assurances that strangers will ask questions on your behalf."

  "Not in the slightest," Raxa said. "I need to know more."

  "I will inquire of Harald Walpole. But it will mean more waiting."

  "Fine by me. The longer he makes me wait, the more time I have to spread my story."

  That drew a smile from Maura.

  Once Raxa was alone, she killed a spider, painstakingly reanimated it, and sent it on the long crawl toward the palace. When Laxley concluded his day, it followed him to his chambers. That night, Raxa snuck into his rooms, rifled through his writings, and spent hours copying down a page from each. If Sorrowen found anything interesting in one of them, she'd go back for the rest.

  At her next meet with Sorrowen, Raxa told him that Mallon had spies operating in the Basin. He told her that Galand and Blays had diverted to a place called Tanar Atain—something about one of their other people getting arrested while snooping around. She didn't know whether to be concerned that Galand's other spies were getting snatched up, or relieved that he was bothering to rescue them.

  Sorrowen paged through the copied documents she'd brought, repeatedly shaking his head. "Some of these talk about Collen, but it's just about keeping track of which Mallish people of note are still in the Basin. I don't think this guy gets much of a say in things."

  Raxa had been afraid of that. Over the next two weeks, she made another couple of trips into Laxley's quarters, but nothing she turned up seemed significant.

  She had just about given up on seeing the Minister of the Eastern Reach when she was summoned to his presence.

  Harald Walpole was a tall man with a craggy beard, a frown carved from granite, and eyes that looked like they could see your secrets. When Raxa entered the hall, he barely nodded.

  "Lady Yera," he said. "I know your story. Why should I care?"

  She raised an eyebrow. "My husband is missing, milord. He might have been taken hostage. Or even…" She trailed off, letting her voice quiver.

  Walpole's rock-like expression didn't budge. "Your husband is a northerner who means nothing to me. Thousands of my m
en have died in Collen. For the moment, the fighting has stopped, but the slightest nudge could cost me thousands more. So I will repeat myself one time. Why should I care that your husband went somewhere he shouldn't have?"

  "Want the truth? You shouldn't."

  This got him to raise his eyebrow. Raxa was surprised it didn't creak.

  "Let me guess how this normally goes," she went on. "Woman walks in with a tragic story. She beseeches you. Cries at you. And demands you make it your business to make it better."

  "Wrong," he grunted. "It isn't just women."

  "You should care about me because you don't have to do anything for me. I'm taking care of this for myself. The only thing I need from you is to know what I'm getting into."

  He'd stayed on his feet and hadn't offered to let her sit down. Still standing, he crossed his arms. "What do you need to know?"

  "When I go to Collen, will I be walking into a war?"

  "Can't say what the Colleners will do."

  "I'm not asking what the Colleners will do."

  "Then you're asking me for state secrets."

  Raxa sucked her upper teeth. "My men will get here one month from now. Will there be fighting by then?"

  Arms folded, tapping his right upper arm with his left hand, Walpole turned his back on her to regard an oversized map of the region mounted on the wall. "Collen's bunged themselves up like a keg. An outsider looking at the situation would conclude that it would take months for anyone to mount an effective attack on their defenses."

  She smiled. "Thank you, Lord Walpole."

  He dismissed her with a nod. This time, she'd brought her spider with her. She let it crawl down her dress and onto the floor. Walpole soon left the hall they'd met in, the spider hitching a ride on his trousers. He retired to a high tower in a room by himself. He worked well past dark. He took no visitors.

  Raxa ate dinner. Drank wine with the Boscaynes. Napped. At midnight's bells, she woke and slipped outside.

  The tower was deep into the palace. Raxa ran as hard as she could, deep in the shadows, the stars overhead burning like white coals. She entered the building, following the path she'd laid out for herself to minimize the distance she'd have to travel. Even at this late hour, guards stood silent, polearms in hand.

  She dashed up the spiral steps to Walpole's tower. Shooting through the wall, she threw herself back into the real world. The run had taken several minutes. She'd have enough juice to make it home, but not much more.

  The chambers included a larger study and a smaller room furnished with stuffed chairs and a cabinet stuffed with stout liquors. A window in both rooms looked down on part of the palace roof, a secret courtyard of flowers and shrubs chopped up into animal shapes.

  Raxa got out her parchment and went to work. The room was laden with documents. Way too much to get in one go. She copied the first page of everything that mentioned Collen—one of the few Mallish words she recognized instantly—then moved on to everything recent. It was laborious work. Time-consuming. She'd deactivated her spider long ago—couldn't suffer the drain on her powers—so she kept one ear cocked to the stairwell, straining for any sound above the scratch of her quill.

  Finished, she dried her ink, the smell of which she was starting to hate, rolled up her pages, and ran fast as hell back to the Fabians. Climbing was easier in the shadows, but even so, her grip on the netherworld was starting to quiver by the time she had scaled the balconies up to her window.

  Two days later, she brought what she'd found to Sorrowen. In the darkness of the park, he shuffled through her copies.

  A third of the way through the stack, he swung up his head so fast a lock of hair flopped down his forehead. "You got it! Raxa, you—!"

  She reached out and bopped him on the side of the head. "Keep your voice down, you idiot. We're holding our own death warrants right now."

  Sorrowen rubbed his head, still grinning. "This is a payment order. For enough money to raise a small army!"

  "Is that what it's for? An army?"

  "It doesn't say. It doesn't say who it's for, either. All it says is that it's about the east. About the coming fighting there."

  "There were other pages to this. If I get them for you, can you tell what the crown is paying for?"

  "Well I can't know that until we have the rest of it!"

  "I'll bring you the rest two nights from now," Raxa said. "I've spoken to the man who runs the eastern reaches. Tell Galand war is coming. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when."

  She spent the next day fending off a steady dose of nerves. When midnight finally came, and the uninteresting people were snoring in bed, she climbed out the window, ran across the mall, and reentered the palace. The entire hall smelled like roast grouse with rosemary; scullions were still cleaning up the mess.

  She ascended the tower to Walpole's private offices. These were dark, but down in the rooftop courtyard, lanterns glowed and courtiers laughed, crystal glasses glinting in their hands.

  Raxa lit a candle, keeping it back from the window. She moved to the desk and opened the top drawer. Half of the parchment she'd gone through the day before was gone. She pawed through what was left. The payment order was missing. Heart pounding, she opened the drawer below and found another stack. Recognizing them from the day before, she paged through them until she found the order.

  It was three pages in all. She got out her stuff and started copying. She was just moving on to the third page when a key scratched in the lock of the door.

  21

  Teeth scraped against his ribs. The beast's jaws squeezed him on both sides, threatening to crush him. It felt like his head was spinning—because it was; the monster was rolling in circles, dragging him under, meaning to drown him.

  He called out to the nether, feeling it surround him, drawn to the blood leaking into the water. He shaped it into a spear and drove it blindly into the creature's midsection.

  It relaxed its jaws. Pressure relieved, with his face momentarily above water, Dante gasped for air. He'd barely gotten a breath in when the creature clamped down again. His assault should have blown straight through its body, but it didn't seem weakened at all.

  He was back under the water and its jaws were forcing the air from its lungs. He gathered a second strike and hammered it toward the beast's middle. Yet the black bolt seemed to waver, impacting sidelong. Dante felt it do little more than scrape across the bark-like scales.

  The monster squeezed harder yet. He felt a crack, a gush of pain that made his vision go white. He forced his mind to return to its tethers. The nether swirled around the edges of his eyes, as if impatient to be put to use. He formed a third bolt and rammed it into the top of the beast's head. He held tight to the bolt all the way through, guiding it home, yet it felt like trying to punch someone underwater, the attack's strength sapped away.

  His lungs were screaming now. So were his ribs. As it rolled him over again, he waited until the light brightened, then drove up his head and fought for a gasp of air, but a slug of water came with it, choking his lungs. He coughed, tasting blood.

  He tried to draw the nether together for another strike, but he was coughing and writhing and drowning; trying to shape the shadows was like trying to shape dry flour. His pain and anguish peaked until he thought he couldn't stand it, then withdrew like a boat leaving a pier.

  In his state, he could hardly think, yet he knew exactly what was happening: it was ending. A part of him embraced it—an end to this pain, yes, but also to all the strife, the loss of friends and mentors and innocence, and all for what? To make things slightly better? Or too often, just to keep things from getting worse? The gains were so small and the costs were so big: better to have been a farmer, a fisherman, a scribe for a kindly monk in a backwater village.

  Anger. Anger like a thunderclap. A great hand reached down through his mind, plucked up these thoughts, and shook them until their skinny spine broke. He wouldn't let it be over. He had touched the world, and he'd made it bett
er. He'd freed people. Saved lives. Exposed fetid lies and learned soaring truths. He had rebelled against kings and resurrected a friend.

  And his power was too great to let it end here.

  He pumped nether into his own body, strengthening his ribs, bolstering his blood. He sent it charging into his lungs and it wasn't air yet it was enough to let him see and think and move again. He tried to reach for his sword, but it was pinned against his thigh by the monster's teeth. He pounded his fists against its head, scrabbling for an eye.

  It grunted, a blast of foul air bubbling over his body, then spat him out. Dante knew he was still in incredible pain, but the removal of the crushing pressure felt like being reborn, and inhaling a full breath of air felt like winning a war. Through watering eyes, he watched as Blays withdrew his sword from the monster's back, then stabbed it beneath two overlapping plates, wrenching one loose.

  Dante forged the shadows into a dark blade and rammed them through the hole Blays had cut in the creature's hide. Blood showered into the trees. He ripped the nether toward him through the inside of the monster, shredding the flesh in a vortex of destruction. The creature reared back its neck in an S-shape. The nether exploded from its mouth in a hail of blood and teeth and pink goo.

  The monster went slack, collapsing into the water with a splash. Including its thick tail, it was thirty feet long, an enormous lizard with a broad, snake-like head.

  Blays stood from its back, chest heaving. "Did we just slay a dragon?"

  Dante tried to answer, but his voice wouldn't work.

  Blays hooked a hand under his armpit and hauled him halfway up the corpse. "Get on top of it. If they kill our guide, we're as dead as this beast."

  Seeing Dante was in no immediate risk of drowning, he dived off the side of the monster. Through the trees, Dante glimpsed soldiers in green jabats firing arrows at Volo's canoe. She was nowhere to be seen.

  Something tugged at Dante's leg, which was still dangling in the water. He jerked his foot away, but the tugging repeated, followed immediately by more to his other leg. It was like something was pinching him with its fingernails.