The Wound of the World

by Edward W. Robertson

  Blackness welled from the guard, unreeling up the blade like spilled ink. Dante's heart galloped. The inky substance spread upward, reaching the tip and enclosing the blade.

  Blays leaned forward. "Did you—?"

  Dante shushed him. Nerves thrumming, he withdrew the trickle of nether from the Odo Sein blade. His own sword remained black. He sheathed the knight's sword.

  Blays looked at him, eyebrows lifted.

  "I think it's drawing from me," Dante said. "But something's still missing. The nether isn't crackling along the edge like it should be. It's like I've built a body, but I still haven't given it life."

  "Okay, then what does life need?"

  "Air. Water. Food."

  "I don't think you need to feed your sword a rasher of bacon to get it going."

  "Nether doesn't eat," Dante said. "But it does need sustenance."

  He lifted the sword and drew its edge along his left arm. A red line appeared along his skin as if by magic—and purple-black light erupted from his sword like a bruise of fire. Still touching his skin, the madly whirling nether ripped into his arm.

  He yelled out and jumped to his feet, flinging down the sword. His motion rocked the canoe. Volo swore; Dante stumbled against the gunwale. Naran, jolting from sleep, grabbed Dante's right arm and pulled him down into the bottom of the boat.

  The sea captain scowled, rubbing his puffy eyes. "Are you aware you're bleeding?"

  Blood coursed down Dante's arm. Around him, strange trees twisted together like muscly orange snakes while bulbous flies drifted about with scorpion-like claws dangling from their upper bodies. He was traveling into a nightmare, yet he felt as free as a hawk on the wind.

  ~

  It was one thing to create a weapon. It was another to learn how to use it.

  While the swords wouldn't simply chew through whatever you touched them to, the nether along the blade exaggerated the force of a strike many times over. Even a relatively gentle swipe would cut deeply and harshly into its target. Dante had some experience with this property from wielding the bone sword, but the bone sword was a heavier weapon.

  And to Blays, the blade's ability was largely foreign. He spent much of the day performing a number of subtle exercises with his sword, practicing for a minute or two, then sheathing the weapon for as long as half an hour before attempting another set of maneuvers.

  That evening, as soon as they made camp, Blays motioned Dante to a clear spot on the edge of the little island and drew his sword. Black light glowed in the gloom.

  "Whipping motions," Blays said. When Dante shrugged, Blays spun to the side and snapped his wrist, swinging his sword at the braided trunk of a sapling. The blade clicked right through, sending the tree-collective to the ground in a whisper of long leaves. "You see?"

  "What did that tree ever do to you?"

  "You don't have to spend much strength to cause a lot of damage. That means you can be quicker, less committed. A snap of the wrist is all it takes."

  He motioned for Dante to draw his sword, then began to fence with him, leading him through a few techniques at quarter speed. The techniques were subtle but uncomplicated: engage the enemy's weapon, flick it aside, then whip the point of your blade at your foe.

  Too soon, they began to feel sickly. Blays stepped back and put away his sword. "When we're in the thick of things, don't overthink it. Thinking makes you slow and we don't have enough time to train these skills into our bodies. But these aren't normal swords. If you can fight with them like they're meant to be fought with, you'll be the one left standing at the end." He tipped back his head, thoughtful. "Although the downside of that is you'll be the one who has to mop up the mess."

  In the waning light, Dante practiced for a little longer, keeping the sword sheathed as he repeated the simple forms Blays had shown him. With his footwork taking him near the edge of the island, he took a fleeting glance at the water, then gasped.

  A pale face had lifted itself clear of the surface to stare at him, its eyes blank wells of darkness. Dante did a double-take, but by the time he looked again, the face was gone. The water wasn't troubled by so much as a ripple. Shaken, he sent a tendril of nether into the depths, questing after whatever he'd seen—a person? Some bizarre fish?—but found nothing.

  The night was a quiet one. When he woke, the pressure in his head indicated their quarry had returned to a northerly course. Riza accepted this information indifferently enough, yet when they started out, the commander barked out a pace that left the oarsmen huffing and straining. Until that day, Volo had done almost all the paddling—she insisted, as if it were a point of pride—but the fleet was now moving so fast that Dante and Blays had to spell her regularly.

  At noon, they broke to eat and rest. Dante boarded Riza's war canoe and nodded to the Do. "We've been gaining on them all morning. At this rate, we'll be on them by tomorrow."

  Riza made an approving noise. "Encouraging news. We might have reclaimed the capital from the Drakebane's dynasty, but I won't trust that our nation is safe until his flame has been snuffed."

  "Then why haven't we been traveling this fast all along?"

  "To preserve our strength for the coming battle."

  "Has something changed? Things suddenly feel…urgent."

  "This isn't a part of the swamp we wish to delay in," Riza said. "Speaking of which, I believe we've rested long enough."

  The fleet got underway. Within half an hour of Riza's cryptic warning, men shouted ahead. Scouts paddled back through the trees, faces taut with the strain of their haste.

  "Boko mai!" The trooper's voice was nearly a scream.

  Three canoes darted forward. Archers stood up on the decks propped atop the twin hulls, nocking arrows to their short but strong Tanarian bows. Beyond, scores of dark, slender shapes raced through the branches of the trees. They moved so fast Dante initially thought they were flying. Rather, they leaped from bough to bough with frightening agility.

  "Loose!" a sergeant bawled.

  Arrows slashed into the trees, but it didn't so much as slow the boko mai. As the swarm closed on the lead boats, the archers released a staggered volley. Their arrows crashed into the branches and exploded in shocking bursts of fire. The air thundered with the noise of the blasts.

  Smoking bodies fell from the racked branches, the beasts squealing as they plunged into the water. A few of the survivors scattered, but the others were undeterred, dropping onto the decks of the canoes. They ripped at the soldiers with scything claws, carving away chunks of meat and dashing away with their prizes.

  Men stabbed at them with spears and loosed arrows at the marauding creatures, but the boko mai twisted their lithe bodies, dodging nearly everything that came their way. Dante's instinct was to unleash a hellstorm of nether at the attacking vermin, but he held back. This wasn't his fight. If he exposed his abilities now, they'd expect him to use them whenever they ran into trouble. Worse, they'd look to reel him into their conflict against the Drakebane.

  He watched with no particular discomfort as the beasts returned in a second wave, hacking off hunks of flesh. Was he wrong for not intervening? If you could help, and didn't, wasn't your negligence as criminal as those committing the act itself? Then again, if a person was wrong for not acting, then so were the gods. And if you couldn't expect the gods to be good, why should a mortal be expected to be better?

  Arrows and swords dropped a few more of the boko mai. The rest disappeared in the trees, leaving bloody decks and sobbing men. The Tanarians temporarily converted two of the more barge-like ships into floating physicians' tents, then continued north.

  Within the hour, the trees grew taller, the leaves pressing out the light as if the sun had been wounded in a chase and was being dragged away by some great predator. Crags of narrow, angular rock sprouted from the swamp, spattered with moss in all shades of green. Buildings, or what was left of them. The ruins of walls jutted from the water like broken bones. Others lurked just below the surface, ready to disembow
el any boat that tried to sail over them.

  Commander Barain ordered the fleet into a double-file procession. The sailors in the leading canoes thrust long poles into the water ahead of them, feeling for submerged ruins. Wherever their poles jabbed into rock, they dumped a thick blue dye over the surface, where it clung fast to itself, barely troubled by the paddles of the passing canoes.

  Dante's head swiveled to follow an upthrust of stone that might have once been a tower. Its lower reaches were blue, but its upper section was blackened and slagged. Moss grew on the blue stone, but wouldn't touch the melted segment.

  "What was this place?"

  Volo eyed the gnarled arm of rock. "Some people say it was the home of a bunch of people who went someplace they shouldn't have. Others think it was people looking to free themselves from the Drakebane dynasty."

  "Which do you believe?"

  "That people tell whichever story best fits their hate."

  Rain sifted through the leaves. Within seconds, it strengthened to a spatter, then to the roar of a waterfall. Dante spent the rest of the day bailing out the boat. They made camp two hours before sunset, though the clouds were so dark it already felt like twilight. The swelling in Dante's forehead was getting harder to ignore, beating like a slow heartbeat under his skull.

  Some time before dawn, his loon pulsed. It was Sorrowen. His voice was ragged with exhaustion yet pitched up with fearful excitement. He explained what they'd seen at the docks. Dante asked him a few questions, then thanked him and shut off the loon.

  Blays was sitting up, a lump in the darkness. "Well?"

  "Mallon's built a fleet of warships," Dante said. "They're flat-bottomed. They could sail into the inlet we made in Collen, or land on a beach somewhere behind the Colleners' lines."

  "How dare they react to our reactions! So now that we know they're planning another attack, does that change our stance?"

  "I still plan to do nothing."

  "That will show the Colleners for looking after their own self-interests."

  "We've been over this. We had a plan all set. One that didn't involve subjugating multiple Alebolgian cities."

  "Yeah, just overthrowing their governments."

  "One government," Dante said. "And more like one wealthy house within that government. One that had been making all the other cities bow down to it."

  Blays scoffed. "Don't tell me that had anything to do with you deciding to work with House Osedo."

  "No, but executing our plan would have caused incidental good. Collen's solution caused incidental harm."

  "Point is, the only thing we had was a plan. The Keeper saw a way to make their goals real then and there. So she seized it."

  "Don't tell me that's the same thing we would have done. Or that you agree with her."

  "Obviously, only an idiot of the highest order would doubt our ability to do everything we promise to do. Like, say, kill a single priest." Blays took a swig of water from his skin. "I don't think the Keeper was wrong to do what she thought needed doing. But I do think that in making that decision, she also decided to end our alliance. Meaning you are free to do whatever you want here—whether that's to rush off to Collen's defense, or to ask Mallon to tell you where they make the Basin's grave so you'll know where to piss."

  Dante rubbed gunk from the corner of his eye. The Colleners' abandonment of their agreement was, in a sense, a claim that they no longer needed Narashtovik's help. There would be grim justice in doing nothing at all with his spies' information. To let the Mallish fleet arrive without warning and put the Colleners' claim to the test. After everything he'd done for the place, that choice would best satisfy his anger.

  For grim justice was satisfying. It had a cold symmetry with the original offense. But the thing about ripping everything out by the roots was that it left you with nothing but a bunch of dirt. Or perhaps it was more like having a childhood friend who won't share his toy with you, so in a fit of pique, you smash it. You'll feel quite pleased with your power in the moment, but when you wake up the next day, nobody will have a toy to play with.

  "We'll have Jona tell the Colleners about the fleet," he said. "That should keep things reasonably friendly between us. Besides, there's no need to make it easy for Mallon."

  Blays chuckled. "I suppose it's one of those 'incidental goods' that keeping Collen strong means Mallon will have a tougher time turning its eye toward Narashtovik."

  "The thought had crossed my mind."

  Commander Barain had them on their way as soon as it was light enough to see the ruins sticking from the water. It was still raining, the swamps popping with droplets.

  "Do you hear that?" Blays said.

  Dante cocked his hear. "I don't hear anything."

  "Exactly. No birds. No bugs. Nothing but rain."

  Now that Blays pointed it out, the lack was unsettling. He searched for hints of fish in the orange waters, or birds nesting in the trees, but saw nothing. Just as he was about to ask Volo what this meant, the morning grew lighter. At first he thought the clouds were breaking up, but the sky looked as gloomy as ever. Rather, the trees were going pale. Abruptly, the small islands of trees and muck were replaced by bare white knobs.

  Dante thought they were limestone. But as they floated past one, he saw the island was a heaped mound of bones.

  Blays blinked. "We didn't just sail into one of your dreams, did we?"

  "Volo," Dante said. "What?"

  She seemed to have some trouble getting her mouth to open. "The Remains. Only been here once. I didn't stay."

  Nearer the center of the fleet, Riza looked mildly unsettled, but the commander's face was as stony as ever. Neither looked especially surprised by the shift in terrain. Around them, the trees grew whiter and whiter. Aside from the trees and a few patches of thorns, weeds, and pale flowers, Dante saw no signs of life. Yet the nether—the sign of life that had been—was thick in the air.

  The slow build of pressure in his forehead sped up rapidly. After a few miles, he directed Volo to rendezvous with Riza's boat.

  "We're gaining fast," Dante told the nobleman. "If this keeps up, we'll be on them within hours."

  Riza's smile lacked all humor. "I had assumed as much. Make your preparations."

  Dante motioned to one of the ghastly bone islands. "Were you intending to tell me what we're getting into? Or is it common in Tanar Atain to sail past mass graves?"

  "This is the Wound of the World. The place where your enemy—and those who came before him—first learned to create the shadowmen."

  "The Andrac? That knowledge came from your people?"

  "They aren't my people." Riza spat over the side of the boat. "When the Odo Sein cast down the rebellion of sorcerers, they didn't slay all of the magicians. Instead, they turned a few into slaves. These they bent to the task of creating something that could patrol the borders of the Deep Swamp. In time, the slaves produced the shadowmen. At first, the Odo Sein used the abominations as intended, serving the land. Yet as soon as the first rebellion arose, they turned the shadowmen against their own people. This only engorged the demons' bloodlust. As the Odo Sein began to lose their grip on the shadowmen, they had no choice but to destroy them."

  "How long ago was this? The Andrac have been used in other lands as well. Nearly four hundred years ago, they appeared in the Collen Basin."

  "Learned by dark pilgrims to Tanar Atain, no doubt. As for the when, I can't say with any certainty. The Drakebane's ancestors have altered our history so often we're lucky to have preserved any truths at all. That, among other reasons, is why we fight him: for he destroys our history, and what is a people without their past?"

  Dante wanted to learn more—for all the time he'd spent in Tanar Atain, it still felt like he barely knew anything about the place—but Riza left to talk strategy with Commander Barain. As the flotilla carried on, the ocher water turned rusty, streaked with crimson. It smelled like old iron. If not for the thinness of it, Dante would have thought it was blood. Some of th
e trees were now no more than bent white trunks.

  By the afternoon, the force in Dante's brow had become so intense it nearly hurt. Gladdic was within a mile. Hearing this, Barain dispatched small scout canoes ahead. Dante would have sent undead creatures ahead as well, but there was nothing to use—there were no flies or fish, no rats or lizards. He would have tried raising some of the bones, but they were so scattered it would have been impossible to gather up a single body.

  The scouts returned within minutes. Barain called for a stop to discuss the situation with his advisors. Awakened by the lack of motion, Naran stirred from one of his lengthy naps. The rain was still coming down, striking the trees and bones with hollow tocks.

  The war council seemed to reach a decision. Riza summoned Dante's canoe to him. The nobleman pointed north into the white forest. "Ahead lies the Wound itself. This must be where Gladdic and his aides have decided to craft his new breed of shadowmen."

  Dante peered through the trees. "Why here?"

  "Besides the fact it looks like a demon's garden," Blays said.

  "It is a site of ancient power that will make their task simpler," Riza said. "They might also have believed that we wouldn't follow them into the Go Kaza, considering that they would either starve here, or be forced in time to return to where the animals dwell and the fruit grows—and be slaughtered by the beasts there. Whatever their motives, they've already been here for hours. We must stop them before they create their demons."

  "Have you formed a plan?" Dante said.

  "Our scouts could only advance so far without risking discovery. They know the Odo Sein have formed a wide perimeter around the grounds, meaning to stifle any outside sorcery. For Gladdic to wield light and shadow, he'll have to be somewhere near the center of the circle inscribed by the Odo Sein, where their powers can't impact him.