The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  The horn held.

  The knight, anticipating that his sword would cut through whatever it was wielded against, was already leaning forward, attempting to continue a strike that was now stalled. Blays slipped inside the knight's guard and speared the horn into the side of his neck. As blood showered into the air, Blays jerked his elbow back as hard as he could, ripping out the man's windpipe.

  The knight reeled backward, dropping his sword and clutching at the loose tubes flopping down his chest. Blays flipped the horn to his left hand, took up the sword, and slashed it into the knight's ribs. The armored vest seemed to slow the sword a little, but it still passed halfway through his chest.

  Someone shouted a question from down the hall; it sounded like a name. The query repeated, more insistent.

  Blays closed the door, muffling the other man's calls. "There's blood all over the hall. They can't miss it. Don't suppose you've got your nether back now that this bastard's dead?"

  Dante shook his head. "Think that sword can cut through the bars?"

  "It snipped my sword easily enough."

  Blays hustled to the window. He drew back his arm and swung. With a sharp metallic ping, the sword clipped halfway through the bar. Another swing severed it. As Blays chopped through the other bars, Dante dragged the knight's body in front of the door.

  Blays took a final swing, sending the bars tumbling down into the night. "Say what you will about these pricks, but they have excellent taste in swords."

  Dante leaned out the window. They were on the east side of the keep, lacking a clear view of the southern bailey the rebels had stormed through. Fires flickered to his right. Some yelling and screaming was going on, but it sounded stifled, as though it was happening within the lower floors of the keep.

  He and Blays were currently fifty feet above the ground. If he'd had the nether at hand, he could have built them a staircase down the side of the keep. Or simply massacred the horde of people who were currently thundering down the hallway toward their room. Faced with nothing but mundane solutions, he had no idea what he was supposed to do. Die?

  Blays was busy slicing up a sheet and knotting the thick strips together. Dante tied the other end of the makeshift rope around a stump of the iron bar that remained in the corner of the window. As Blays continued to work on his end, Dante picked up a bench and added it to the corpse-barricade at the door, supplementing this with a low, compact desk.

  "I got blood here!" a man yelled directly outside the door, startling Dante back. "They're inside!"

  Blays tied another strip to the rope, pulling it tight. "Bad news. I'm out of sheet."

  "That's it?" The rope wasn't quite thirty feet long. Dante gritted his teeth and tossed the free end out the window. "Climb down as far as you can."

  "It isn't long enough!"

  "So Minn tells me. Now go!"

  Blays' hand went to the hilt of his sword, as if he was ready to argue they'd have a better chance fighting off the small army that was even now starting to push on the door. Seeing the look on Dante's face, he calmed down, grabbed the rope, and jumped out the window. As Dante grabbed the sheets and swung his legs outside, someone banged into the door, jarring the debris he'd thrown in front of it.

  Blays slid down the rope, looking about for other windows they could climb into. "There's nothing here!"

  He reached the end of the line. Dante stopped just above him. The air smelled smoky. The clamor of battle echoed throughout the bailey. He'd overestimated the length of the rope: it would be a fall of close to thirty feet, directly onto hard ground. He glanced up. A pale face protruded from the window. The man produced a bow, nocked an arrow, and rather awkwardly drew it back.

  "Jump!" Dante yelled.

  Blays looked up at him like he was crazy, then noticed the archer drawing down on them. "Well that's just rude."

  Dante coiled his feet against the wall, pushed himself off, and let go of the rope. Blays did the same. An arrow whistled past them and thumped into the dirt. Dante's head dizzied as he fell into empty space. He threw his mind in all directions, beseeching and berating the nether. The ground raced to meet them—and smash them apart.

  Like the lighting of a candle dispelling the darkness, the oppressive stillness vanished. Heart beating so hard he couldn't form coherent thoughts, Dante dived into the nether in the ground beneath them, softening it, letting water flood in from beneath. The two of them splashed down into a pool of thin mud.

  Disoriented, he fought his way to the surface. The bow twanged above them, the arrow slapping into the muck. Dante reached the edge of the pit and pulled himself free. Blays got out beside him, covered from head to toe in blackish mud that smelled of rotten eggs. The color made for the perfect camouflage as they ran across the bailey.

  Blays slicked mud from his face. "How did you know you'd be able to reach the nether again?"

  "I didn't," Dante said. "But I figured that I could heal our broken legs once we dragged ourselves away from whatever was blocking it. How did you know the knight's sword wouldn't cut through the horn?"

  "Because my intelligence is matched only by my keen powers of observation." Still running, Blays held up the knight's sword and the severed horn. Next to each other, it became obvious that the sword's pommel was a swamp dragon horn. "Did you see the nether on the blade? The knights use the shadows the same way you do: to cut through things steel can't."

  "They're powered by nether. Since the swamp dragon's hide was hardened against nether, you thought the horn would turn the sword aside."

  "You're the almighty wizard, you tell me. I'm just the guy who swings a few pounds of metal to make enemies dead."

  Dante swerved around a dozen bodies strewn in the grass, half of them wearing the green of the crown. "Right now, I think we should both be the people who run as fast as they can from whatever the hell's going on here. I'm all but spent."

  They made for the looming inner curtain wall. Reaching it, they walked briskly along it until they came to the gap Dante had opened through the stone. Blays took the lead through the narrow passage. He walked out into the wide avenue between the inner and outer walls and stopped short.

  Across from them, a squadron of un-uniformed soldiers jerked to attention, brandishing a motley assortment of spears, short bows, and a single sword.

  "Just who we're looking for," Blays said, keeping the point of his black sword pointed at the ground. "You're the rebels?"

  The man with the sword cocked his head. "Rebels?"

  Blays pointed back toward the keep. "The not-those-guys?"

  "We're not 'rebels.' We are the liberators of our country. The fighters of the tyrant who beguiles us with illusions of freedom while knotting our bodies in traprope. And we are here to cut those bonds."

  "Excellent! As you can tell by choice of mud, we're unsophisticated foreigners, and we're very confused about what's happening here. Would you be so kind as to ferry us across the moat so we can leave you to your glorious revolution?"

  The rebel considered them, face slowly darkening. "What are foreigners doing in the Bastion of Last Acts?"

  "Trying very hard to get out of it."

  "Or pretending to. I think you're tools of the Drakebane. Spies sent to beseech our aid, and then take advantage of our pity by undermining us from within." He motioned to the other soldiers. "Arrest them."

  Blays smiled and backed toward the gap in the wall, which he might be able to defend interminably, or at least until someone came up with the idea of attacking him from both sides at once, or shooting arrows at him. The soldiers trained their weapons on him and shuffled forward warily.

  As Dante reached for his sword, the gears clicked into place. He let his hand fall to his side. "Is Do Riza here?"

  The rebel lieutenant stiffened. "What do you know of the Do Riza?"

  "I know he likes drinking expensive adda yin. And that he has a very nice estate."

  "Though the beds could be more comfortable," Blays said, dropping his voice to a
gossipy tone. "Then again, enough adda yin, and you could sleep on the point of a spear."

  The rebel shifted his weight from foot to foot, then gestured to his troops. "Take them to Soulcast Tower. I'll find Do Riza."

  Six soldiers escorted Dante and Blays to a staircase in the outer wall, delivering them to the domed top floor of a stout tower overlooking the southern approach to the fortress. Though they could still hear the clamor of fighting further into the bailey, along with the nearby groans of a makeshift physician's ward, the tower itself was serene and secure, its interior painted with pastel geometry, along with murals of knights in dragon armor doing battle with hideous creatures of all kinds.

  Dante found a bench and picked off the patches of mud that were starting to harden on his skin. Blays seemed perfectly content to leave it be, leaning back against the wall and whistling an old Mallish drinking song.

  They didn't have to wait long before Riza joined them. His hair was a bit bedraggled, and his jabat sported a few dabs of blood, but otherwise, he looked hale and untroubled. He dismissed the sentries, along with the pair of secretaries and bodyguards who'd accompanied him.

  He stood across from them, face unreadable. "Did you accomplish your goals tonight?"

  "One of them," Dante said. "The other one got complicated. Did Volo tell you who we are?"

  Riza smiled like a Nulladoon player admiring the opponent's move. "Don't blame her for it. I could see the guilt in her face from the moment she arrived with you. When I questioned her, she did her best to hold back."

  "How did you convince her?"

  "I simply spoke the truth. That if what you were here to do could upset the balance of our plans, we'd lose everything."

  "Was that true?"

  "It could have been."

  Blays sighed. "Are you two trying to talk like a pair of old lovers?"

  "They've had this attack planned for a long time," Dante said. "I presume it wasn't scheduled for tonight, but they had to move it forward after Riza discovered we were going to break into the Blue Tower."

  "Correct." Riza moved to the northern side of the tower for a better look at the keep. "If you'd succeeded or failed, it could have prompted the Bastion to enhance their defenses even further—and to investigate their soldiers for signs of disloyalty. Additionally, as your sponsor, I might have been implicated. Either event would have spelled disaster for our movement."

  "Which is?"

  "Why, the overthrow of the Drakebane Yoto dynasty, of course. What were your goals here?"

  Dante glanced at Blays. Blays shrugged. Dante said, "To kill a priest."

  "What was his crime? Heresy?" Riza's eyes twinkled. "If so, should I fear for the safety of the entire realm? None of us believe in your squabbling northern gods."

  "Do you believe in the extermination of the Collen Basin? If not, we should be all right with each other. But we need this man dead. Do you think you'll take the keep?"

  "I don't have to wonder. We've already done it."

  "The man we're after is named Gladdic. He's a sorcerer, and an extremely dangerous one. You need to hand him over to us."

  Riza's amusement left him as neatly as if he'd tucked it into his back pocket. "Your warning is appreciated. Once I better know who you are, I may decide to make him yours. Until then, I have business to prosecute."

  He left them in the tower. As it turned out, there was no decision to make: along with the Drakebane, his cabinet, and his coterie of knights, Gladdic had fled from the city and into the swamps. No one knew where they had gone.

  ~

  "I see." Naran lowered his eyes to the table. "If we try to follow him into the wilds, are we cutting the gray?"

  Blays wrinkled his brow. "Are we whatting the what?"

  "It is a sailor's term. When a captain finds himself on the fringe of a storm, if he's skilled, he can harness the winds to his benefit. But if he's not skilled, or he's too reckless, he can find himself overtaken and wrecked by that storm. We call that 'cutting the gray.'"

  "We landlubbers have a term like that, too. We call it 'having a dumb idea.'"

  The three of them were seated on rolls of fiber that were apparently used as chairs in the more formal parts of the land, such as the secondary dining hall in Do Riza's manor. Outside, starlight glinted from the dark waters. Smoke bleared the sky where it rose from the Bastion.

  Lanterns burned across the city, with patrols of armed commoners paddling around in canoes to scout the waters for signs of resistance, but the city was oddly peaceful. If someone was to wake up for a glass of water and glance outside, they would have no idea an insurrection had just thrown down the government.

  "This whole thing feels strange," Blays went on. "We have no idea where Gladdic is headed. I've got a bad feeling that if we try to find out, we're going to find ourselves sucked into a maelstrom of awful."

  "What if we did know where Gladdic went?" Dante said.

  "Then I'd like to think I wouldn't have said otherwise."

  Dante reached into his pocket, withdrew a rat bone the size of an apple stem, and set it on the table. One of its knobs was stained red. "That's Gladdic's blood."

  Blays grinned. "You can follow it right to him. Though that still leaves the small matter of navigating a bunch of swamps that were deadly enough before a civil war broke out amongst them."

  "I think we can talk the locals into giving us a hand. They want this Drakebane captured or dead. If Gladdic stays with him, I can lead Riza straight to him."

  "Sounds like that's enough to buy us passage. I'm in. Naran?"

  Naran thrust out his lower jaw in thought. "As long as we confine ourselves to Gladdic. I have no issue with the Drakebane or these rebels."

  "The rebels clearly have popular support," Dante said. "And from what we saw on our way here, they deserve it. Even so, I have no intention of getting involved in their struggle. If Riza tries to twist our arm into fighting for them, we'll make our own way."

  As far as Dante could tell, Riza wasn't the chief conspirator, but wherever he stood, he was far enough up the pecking order that he would likely be embroiled in strategic talks for the rest of the night. Dante stressed to Ki that he had information that could deliver the Drakebane to the rebels.

  Even so, it was close to an hour before Ki returned and instructed them to get into one of the Do's canoes. Ki brought them to the Bastion, where rebel eyes gazed down at them from the battlements and troops sang drunkenly in the bailey. The front steps of the keep were darkened with blood. They were led through a great hall into a smaller adjoining chamber furnished with a few low tables and a rack of seating-rolls. The air smelled of the fresh smoke of wood and the stale smoke of an unfamiliar herb.

  Riza entered a minute later. His face looked tired, but his movements were energized. "You say you can bring us to the Drakebane. How can you know our land better than we do?"

  Dante shrugged. "Magic."

  "What do you care if we find the tyrant?"

  "I don't. I care that he's traveling in the company of my enemy."

  As Dante spoke, Riza leaned closer, craning his neck owlishly, watching Dante's face as if concerned that a predator lurked beneath it.

  "This man is a priest, yes?" Riza said. "A man of your gods? What has a holy man done to make you want him dead so badly that you would travel into Tanar Atain and gamble your own life for the chance to take his?"

  "He killed one of our friends." Dante squared his shoulders to the lord. "And in the Collen Basin, he killed thousands of civilians."

  "Unprovoked?"

  "During a war."

  "Isn't one of the properties of war that when it comes, people will die? Guilty and innocent alike?"

  "By definition, the innocent are innocent. Those that murder them have to be punished for it, if only to dissuade others from doing the same thing."

  "What were his reasons for war? Were they just?"

  "His goal was to pacify a region that wanted to govern itself, then kill everyone th
ere and replace them with colonists from his own people. Even a Tanarian couldn't argue the justice of that." Dante might have said more, but Riza was leaning in again, staring into Dante's eyes as if they were texts that could be read. Dante drew back his head. "I'm sorry, but do I have something on my face?"

  "You will forgive me. I'm merely attempting to ascertain if you've laced your claims with rido ashe."

  "Rido ashe?"

  Riza twirled his right index finger. "A manner of insidious sorcery. What you might call black magic."

  "Impossible. Nether can't touch words."

  "I don't claim that it can. I claim—I insist—that words themselves are rido ashe. That they can be used to cloud your mind, to trip it and ensnare it, to confuse it and turn it against what is right. You see, we already know what is true. All we have to do is turn our ears away from the babble around us and towards the words waiting in our hearts.

  "This is why the Drakebane tells us it's so important for the people to say anything they like. So that the people, and in particular the people he designates to do so, can flood us with lies and nonsense. He fills the land with so much empty water that when we try to swim down toward the truth, we'll drown before we ever reach it."

  Dante frowned. "You think giving people the freedom to speak their minds is a bad thing?"

  "When those minds have been swept out on a tide of ideas as poisonous as sea water and as treacherous as the swamps? Absolutely. Thus we must limit what can be said—dike the seas, drain the swamps—until the truth thrives once more."

  "This sounds like it could be a belief of convenience." Dante fully believed this, but tried to couch it in the casually interrogative tone employed whenever Tanarians engaged in ritual debate. "Couldn't this just be a way for you to protect yourself from having to listen to their arguments?"

  Riza pulled back from Dante's face as if it had just split open with oozing sores. "That is the exact manner of falsehood that threatens to wash the truth out beyond anyone's finding. It's pure rido ashe. The very reason we must put a stop to it."