The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  "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 cynica
l. 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-recrimination 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.

  ~

  They took the pass early the next morning. The snows were worse than Dante had expected, forcing him to tunnel through a short stretch of rock. They emerged into a blizzard so thick that he would have been lost if not for the dim shapes of the mountains around him.

  There was nothing to do but press on. After two miles forward and a few hundred feet of vertical descent, the winds eased back. The snow changed from a stinging curtain to slow, cottony blobs that landed with little whispers.

  After a quick shadowalk ahead, Blays returned to the group, mounted up, and maneuvered next to Dante. "Were you ever going to explain what you figured out yesterday?"

  "Why would the wise master reveal all his secrets?"

  "If I ever meet one, I'll have to ask him. Besides, the only thing you like more than being seen as wise is being seen as clever."

  Dante smiled. "Typically, nether is visible in both the physical world and the netherworld, right?"

  "As far as I know. But you can write everything I know about the nether on a husk of corn."

  "Can you think of any forms of nether that aren't visible in our world?"

  "No?"

  "Funny, considering one such form repeatedly tried to eat you."

  Blays tipped back his head. "Traces. What Gladdic used to make the Andrac. The little bits of you left behind when you die."

  "That's the only type of nether I know of that would explain this."

  "That would mean the original Cycle is full of dead souls."

  "It's like the nether inside it is circulating through those who read it. Especially those who are talented with the shadows. I wonder if it's taken pieces from everyone who's ever read it. Then it mingles those bits with you, and takes a few from you to it, and this opens a channel."

  "Sort of like the loons?"

  "Sort of," Dante agreed. "This would explain why, when I read it, it seemed like I just learned to wield the nether out of nowhere. The Cycle was altering me—I just couldn't see it happening."

  "You know what would be amazing? If the ink was made from traces. Now that would be style." Blays glanced over his shoulder. "This channel-opening, you think that's what showed Raxa how to make her pile of bones sit up and squeak?"

  "Putting her in contact with my skills—and those of everyone in the traces—might have shown her how to do it. It could even have enhanced her own skills."

  "Now that's interesting. If you and I tapped into the book, think it'd finally teach you how to land a wife?"

  "Hilarious. The book's ability is exciting on its own, but there's something more going on here. I can't see it manipulating the nether at all. Only shadowalkers can—and as far as I know, the only people who can shadowalk are the People of the Pocket and their refugees. If I can figure out how to replicate the Cycle's source of nether, I could hide my attacks from other sorcerers."

  "Replicate it? You mean by taking people's souls and putting them into a staff or something?"

  "Traces aren't souls, per se."

  "We don't know that!"

  "I'm just saying that we could do this," Dante said. "Apparently whoever made the original Cycle did it."

  Blays gave him a crooked look. "Yes, and some others in your vaunted institution once raised a mountain range that nearly killed an entire civilization. Last time I checked, everyone still considered that a regrettable move."

  They dropped out of the mountains and into the patchwork of plains and forests that made up the sparsely inhabited reaches of northern Mallon. Sorrowen was already versed in basic healing, but Raxa was unfamiliar with the techniques. Keeping the Cycle spread next to them, Dante had her healing small cuts by the end of the night.

  Using the last of her energy, she sealed a nick on her palm, turning her hand back and forth. "How much can you do with this? If I cut Sorrowen's throat, could you stop him from bleeding out?"

  Sorrowen scowled at her. Dante grinned. "I've saved people from worse wounds than that. Ether's better at this—it wants to restore things to the way they were—but the nether likes to grow things. Like veins, and flesh, and bones."

  "Can you cure disease?"

  "Everything I've run into. Well, almost everything. It's trickier than sealing up a wound, but a skilled priest can cure a lot of common ailments."

  She sucked on her upper front teeth. "What about death?"

  "We're still working on a cure for that one. As far as I know, once you pass into Arawn's hands, you're his for good." Next to him, Blays coughed. Dante kept a straight face. "Although people always like to tell crazy stories about people coming back from the dead."

  A few days later, they spotted uncovered grass for the first time since leaving Narashtovik. Now that Sorrowen and Raxa were capable of raising mice by themselves, Dante had them use their undead minions to scout ahead for patrols, highwaymen, or other sources of potential unpleasantness. He had
the two of them describe what they saw along the way. Raxa had a natural eye for detail. Sorrowen didn't—though he could sustain his mice for upwards of three hours while Raxa struggled to keep hers going for an hour.

  As they neared Whetton, a column of black smoke climbed from the horizon. Dante took them close enough for a glimpse of the city. It now bore wooden walls, the gates closed tight. Something inside them was burning, but the fire appeared to be under control.

  Wary of patrols, they traveled a good mile off the road before making camp. Dante used a spark of ether to light the firewood the rangers gathered.

  He sat close to the fire, steam rising from his wet boots. "Have you figured out what you're going to do in Bressel, Raxa?"

  She pulled her hair loose from the string she'd used to bind it back. "Thinking of hiring on as a messenger. They get sent to all kinds of important people. Nobody pays them much attention, either." She grinned. "Or maybe I'll find an outfit like the one I just left. Thieves know more about the comings and goings of the nobility than everyone but the courtesans."

  Blays picked something from his teeth and spat it into the fire. "Try the Red Ghosts."

  "Red Ghosts?"

  "They're Bressel's version of the Order. Flash a few of your skills at them, and I'm sure they'll be happy to take you aboard. Only show your mundane skills, mind you. Show them you can shadowalk, and they're apt to drink your blood to try to absorb your power."

  Dante raised an eyebrow. "How do you know about the operations of Mallish brigands?"

  "Robert Hobble used to work with them, that's how. Any organization smart enough to work with the esteemed Mr. Hobble is going to be a great fit for our friend here."

  As Blays and Raxa fell into a detailed conversation regarding the customs of outlaws in Mallish society, Dante took the opportunity to pull Sorrowen aside.

  Dante removed a piece of mouse skull from his pocket. "Give me a dab of your blood."

  Without missing a beat, Sorrowen got out his knife, scratched the back of his arm, and held it out for Dante. Dante smeared the piece of skull with a drop of blood, then sealed a layer of nether into the bone.