The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  "What good does bowing do for anyone?" Riza said. "I know my place. Do I need you to show it to me? If I need you to bow, doesn't that imply I wouldn't be a lord if you didn't? Doesn't that grant you power over me?"

  "Sure," Blays answered. "Right up until the moment you remember the extra special power granted to you by the armed gentlemen you brought into the room with you."

  The lord smiled. "I am Do Riza. And I expect you're wondering why you're here. The answer is simple: I desire more connections with Mallon. I understand you carry some very strong ones."

  "We don't represent King Charles," Dante said. "Nor any of the major lords."

  "Glad to hear it, since I was to understand you work with merchants. Just as you had trouble getting into our nation, some of us have trouble getting things out of it. I'm not talking about anything untoward. I'm talking about simple trade."

  "You can't do this through Aris Osis?"

  "I should be able to, shouldn't I? They're my goods. I should have the right to sell them where I please."

  "That's what most of us believe."

  Riza clasped his hands and paced across the room. "Yet shouldn't a king have the right to govern what comes in and out of his kingdom? When there's a dispute between these rights, shouldn't the king's will prevail?"

  "If I answer yes," Blays said, "does that mean the two of us illegal foreigners should leave? Forgive the suggestion, but isn't this the sort of thing you should have worked out before you smuggled us into your manor?"

  "I'm about to make a vital decision. How can I be sure I'm making the right choice if I don't test my beliefs against other arguments?"

  "Well, let me know when you've worked it out. In the meantime, got any wine?"

  Riza smiled thinly. "I have decided that a king doesn't necessarily make decisions based on what's best for his kingdom. Sometimes, he makes decisions based on what's best for himself. We will proceed. Regarding Aris Osis, trade through its port is highly regulated. For a person in my predicament, it's made much easier if outsiders approach my agents seeking trade."

  Dante nodded. "What if our employers were to come to Aris Osis looking for something only you can provide?"

  "Then I would be well-positioned to secure the right to provide it. We can start small. Once the stream's flowing, it'll be easier to divert it into other areas."

  "Our superiors would be happy to expand their reach into Tanar Atain. But isn't it dangerous for you to be working directly with a pair of outlaw hari who've infiltrated the capital itself?"

  "That depends on what you intend to do here."

  Dante was suddenly aware that he didn't know how much Riza knew. "Right now, we don't even know why our associate was arrested. Once we've determined that, we might be able to broker a deal with the authorities. But we'll need a go-between."

  "Or I could get you a permit to speak with them yourselves."

  "There are permits for this? Why didn't they tell us this in Aris Osis?"

  "Because it requires the favor of a Do, which I'm guessing you lacked. Even then, it would have been difficult to acquire until you were here in person."

  "Get us our permit, and we'll get you your partners in Mallon."

  Riza grinned and entwined his fingers with Dante's in a way that suggested the braid of a rope—either this was the Tanarian way of shaking hands, or Riza was crazy. He made various promises about beginning the process of securing them a permit, then left them in the company of Ki the servant, who showed them upstairs to a pair of rooms decorated with dyed pieces of glass and wall hangings that vaguely resembled harps made of dangling knotted strings.

  "Okay, I'll ask the obvious question," Blays said once they were alone. "Do we trust him?"

  Dante picked up a green glass figurine shaped like a rearing swamp dragon. "He was awfully fast to help."

  "That makes you less suspicious?"

  "There are political rifts here. We've seen them firsthand. If we're lucky, we just might be able to get Naran out of here without a fight."

  "Are you betting on that vanishingly unlikely outcome? If so, hold still while I find some dice so I can part you from the rest of your money."

  "I'm not counting on it. In fact, I'm going to explore other options right now."

  Dante sent for Ki, asking where foreign prisoners were typically held. After Dante repeatedly reassured Ki that he wouldn't use that information to go running around the city unescorted, Ki informed him that foreigners of note were kept in the Blue Tower, which was within bowshot of the Bastion of Last Acts, all of which was a little bit to the north. Before leaving, Ki noted that even if Dante did try to sneak out, he would find it impossible to reach the tower.

  Dante's mattress was elevated on a short wooden platform, presumably to reduce his exposure to bugs. He poked around underneath it and found an oval-shaped red beetle. He killed it with a pin of nether and bound it to himself. He was afraid it was going to have to make the journey on foot, but when he opened the shutter, he discovered the rain had slowed to a manageable rate.

  He sent the beetle north. It gained altitude slowly, fighting hard against the rain. It trundled over sloped rooftops speckled with water barrels. Dante had seen a number of cities from above in this way and the view never ceased to delight him: the way the neighborhoods blended and shifted, the patches of greenery, the spokes and veins of the streets (or, in this case, waterways). What it exposed was that there was no single unifying plan, yet there was order nonetheless, one that emerged as the people who lived in a place built on the past and each other, forming everything from miserable slums to the soaring spires of cathedrals.

  Ahead, the islands and manors stopped cold. They weren't in the innermost ring of the circle. There were three more: a narrow band of dirt, another stretch of open water, and then, in the very center of the city, a walled fortress several times larger than the Sealed Citadel.

  This, presumably, would be the Bastion of Last Acts. A dock extended from its front gate, but even though there was no real way to deliver siege engines to it, the painted iron doors looked strong enough to outlast time itself.

  Rather than the brick used elsewhere in the city, the fortress' walls were made of faintly blue granite blocks. There was both an inner and an outer curtain wall, regularly spaced with towers, along with a generous bailey and an intimidating keep. It was all very impressive. Really, given the general lack of large-scale fortifications elsewhere in Tanar Atain, its scale struck Dante as a little ostentatious.

  As soon as he looked for it, the Blue Tower was obvious: a tall building of stone so blue it had to be dyed. It was set apart from the main fortress by a span of twenty feet. A wooden crane-like object had been erected on the Bastion's nearest tower. It appeared capable of lowering a wide plank across the gap to the Blue Tower.

  Windows ringed the tower's periphery. Little more than slits, but plenty wide enough for a beetle. Dante went from cell to cell. In Narashtovik, the dungeons only held a handful of souls at any given time, but here, each cell held at least one prisoner, and usually two to four, which hardly give them the space to all lie down at once.

  Dante only had to travel one floor down to find him. Naran sat alone against the back wall of his cell. He looked as gaunt as a desiccated lemon, his eyes open but unmoving. Cuts scattered his face, arms, chest, and the soles of his feet. They had been precisely drawn.

  "Found him," Dante said in a low rasp. "They've been hurting him."

  Blays' jaw tightened. "Bad?"

  "Nothing that can't be healed."

  "Ah, good. Can I kill them anyway?"

  "No more incidents. If we can't talk or bribe him out, we're grabbing him and getting the hell out of here."

  "That sounds so reasonable," Blays said. "And yet I have the uncontrollable urge to dull my swords on jailers' skulls."

  Dante flapped the beetle back and forth in front of Naran's face, but the captain didn't so much as glance at it. Or blink. Suddenly afraid he was sitting up dead, Dante
landed the beetle and confirmed Naran's chest was rising and falling. This accomplished, Dante turned the beetle in a circle, searching for anything small he could pick up, but the cell was swept clean.

  Dante trundled under the door and into a neighboring cell. Those with three or four people inside were scattered with dried reeds to soak up any fluids the cellmates might find objectionable enough to start screaming about. Dante grabbed a shred of reed in the beetle's jaws, laboriously dragging it under the door and back to Naran's cell.

  Naran still hadn't looked over, but Dante was already planning to go so far as to spell out his entire message, then bite Naran's foot with the beetle. He sent the bug out for a second mouthful of reed, then a third. He had almost finished spelling Naran's name when footsteps whispered in the hallway.

  A key chittered in the lock. The door swung outward. A tall man stepped inside, a plain gray robe swirling around his long limbs.

  Gladdic cranked his cadaverous face into a smile and turned it on Naran.

  22

  Less than two miles away, Dante choked on his own spit. "He's right here."

  Blays made a show of looking around the guest room. "Thoughtful of Naran to save us from—"

  "Gladdic! Gladdic!"

  In the cell, Gladdic tucked his hands into his sleeves and gazed down at Naran. "Are you aware that the Ban Naden considers it an offense to keep every promise that one makes?"

  Naran said nothing. Gladdic took a step toward him, lips slightly parted to show the tips of his teeth. "You are receiving spiritual wisdom, sirrah. It is polite to not interrupt. But it is rude to not listen."

  Naran's eyes shifted toward the priest.

  Gladdic waited a moment, then nodded. "Taim grants the measures. Among these is time, and it is a property of time to change things. When one makes a promise to do something, that promise is specific to the context in which it is made. Yet later, when it comes time to fulfill that promise, time will have changed the context in which it is now to be fulfilled.

  "Sometimes, it no longer makes any sense to honor that promise—but men will do so anyway, mistakenly believing that this serves their own sense of honor. The Ban Naden states that this is a falsehood, for time has changed things. Since Taim has purposely allotted time to enact these changes, when you defy time, you defy Taim."

  Gladdic allowed Naran to absorb this, then went on. "Thus, to honor Taim, I do not keep all of my promises. In fact, I scorn those who do. But I kept this promise: I have returned."

  "Nothing has changed." Naran's voice grated like an iron plate dragged over cobbles. "If you wish to get from here to the Isle of Fanshain, that I can tell you how to do. But I can't tell you how they destroyed your demons."

  "You believe this is about me, don't you? You pox-cocked sailor. This is about the world."

  "And your wish to control it."

  Gladdic went still for five long seconds. "How strong is your friendship with them?"

  Naran snorted, eyes flashing. "Do you even understand friendship?"

  "Answer my question or answer to the knives."

  "I consider them my friends. I hope they think the same of me."

  "Then I think we will test this. We shall see that they know where you are, and then see whether they care to come get you. What do you think of this?"

  "I think—"

  As Naran spoke, Gladdic glanced directly at the beetle. Dante severed his connection to it, senses returning to the room in Riza's manor.

  "Gladdic's in the cell with Naran," he said. "They've been torturing him. Trying to get him to tell them how we fought the Andrac. Either Naran doesn't know, or he's got a spine of steel—but he looks broken."

  "Then it's only fair that we break something of Gladdic's. Should we start with his face and work our way down?"

  "The good news is he has no idea we're here. He wants to use Naran to lure us down here, then get the answers out of us."

  "So he can fix up his demons and take a second run at obliterating every native citizen of Collen?"

  "Presumably. We're going to have to think of a way to off him without ruining our efforts to petition the rulership."

  Blays gave him a level look. "The petition's out the window. Gladdic's paranoid enough that if he hears foreigners are speaking to the Drakebane, he'll pop by for a look. When he sees us, he'll bring the throne room down on our heads."

  "So we grab Naran, then take a run at Gladdic?"

  "Or just grab Naran. Either way, we can't tell Riza to call off the petition. It wouldn't make any sense. That means we need to get this done before we get invited in to see the officials."

  "Then it's a good thing it takes less time to grow a new orchard than it does to schedule a meeting with high officials." Dante paced around the room, head tilted up at the ceiling. "So how do we get to Naran?"

  "Well, you can start by telling me anything at all about the place we're breaking into."

  Dante described the general layout of the Bastion of Last Acts. "The Blue Tower shouldn't be that hard to get into. This isn't the High Tower of the Tauren. It's just your ordinary pile of stone. It's surrounded by water, but we could always swim out to it."

  "Swim?"

  "When you're in the water and you move your arms and legs because you suspect drowning might be unpleasant?"

  "Do you suppose a ruler who builds a giant castle surrounded by an even gianter moat isn't going to fill that moat with the plentiful water-horrors these swamps are literally swimming with?"

  "Right. So how do we figure that out? Other than dipping a toe in the water and seeing if we pull back a stump?"

  Blays shrugged. "Rat?"

  "Rat?"

  "Rat."

  "Ah," Dante said. "Rat."

  He called for Ki and received permission to go take the air in one of the island's many courtyards. While he pretended to admire a topiary of pink flowers trimmed in the shape of a thick serpent, he surreptitiously murdered a rodent digging at the base of the house. Once he'd revived it, he sent it scampering to the north end of the island, where it jumped into the water and continued swimming until it reached the ring of earth enclosing the Bastion.

  Dante lowered its head close to the moat. The water was cloudy from all the rain, but he could make out the outlines of several placid, carp-shaped creatures lurking around and not causing any particular trouble. He backed the rodent up a few steps, then ran forward and leaped into the water with a rat-sized splash.

  Through its beady little eyes, the Blue Tower looked as tall as a mountain and as distant as the moon. It churned its paws, holding its nose above the water out of habit.

  Something tugged at it from below. Dante sighed and instructed it to keep going. A few seconds later, another tug jerked it to the side. The water frothed madly. If the rat had been capable of feeling pain, it would be squealing loud enough to make the dead wake up and tell it to shut up.

  Within a minute, its bones were sinking to the bottom, taking Dante's spirits with them. His link to the creature fizzled away.

  "Ziki oko," he muttered. "Swimming's out."

  "Unless you want to try scaring Gladdic to death with our spooky skeletons." Blays thumbed his chin. "What about the skeletons?"

  "Seeing as our flesh and guts require those skeletons to move around, I think it would be unwise to separate ourselves from them."

  "Not ours. The rat's. Do the fish eat the bones?"

  "They might. It wouldn't surprise me if they'd eat a steak, the bone inside it, and the plate beneath it."

  "Would it be too much trouble to find out?" Blays said. "I mean, if you're not too busy petting the flowers over here."

  It took him a few minutes to locate another rat. Blays kept watch while Dante flensed it. Once it was down to bloody bones, Dante reanimated them and lobbed them into the water. They sank into a dark, burbly confusion. Once it touched bottom, Dante sent it dawdling forward, stumbling over roots and unseen debris.

  An hour later, it nosed up onto the banks o
f the rampart enclosing the moat and looked around. Seeing no nearby observers, it ran across the dirt and jumped into the ziki oko-filled waters. A few silvery fish darted up to it and took exploratory nips at its flanks and limbs, then drifted away, uninterested.

  "Bones work," Dante said. "So what? How do we get Naran out of there with a measly rat skeleton?"

  Blays plucked a black flower and sniffed its center. "That depends on whether Volo can get us a rope."

  Dante made an inquiry with Ki, who informed him that Volo was currently out on business, but that he would see she got Dante's message. As the clouds dimmed, they were summoned to eat in a wood-paneled dining chamber. Pink and white fish were served on plates of powder blue glass. They were also brought frogs' legs, which Dante privately designated as tasting of the worst parts of both chicken and fish.

  "I've made my initial inquiry," Riza informed them. "It wasn't rebuffed. Assuming everything proceeds smoothly, I expect to attain an audience within two weeks."

  "Two weeks?" Blays said. "You Tanarians move with the swiftness of stallions. In Bressel, I'm still waiting to hear back on some inquiries I made three pairs of boots ago."

  Preoccupied though Dante was, the meal was a highly pleasant one, with Do Riza asking any number of penetrating questions about Mallish politics and commerce. Through a combination of vagueness, fabrication, and the odd fact, Dante and Blays skated their way through the discussion. When the ice they treaded grew thin, Blays pushed the conversation onto Tanar Atain, and what Riza might be able to offer a trade partner. Riza waxed at length about Dara Bode's glass industry and the multiple workshops he operated.

  "The wealthy are always happy to throw silver at exotic new baubles," Blays said after Riza had claimed Tanarian glassblowers were the best on the continent. "But while their fickleness can be a virtue when it allows us to conjure up new trends from thin air, it also makes them apt to flee en masse when something spooks them. Your country is fascinating, but I've detected an undercurrent of…" He gestured searchingly. "Conflict."