“We speak of the houses of the Belt of the Celeset as if the gods were all one mind. Yet all the stories are about how they squabble and shift alliances whenever it’s expedient. And who could blame them? Their brothers and sisters and fathers and daughters are all bitches or the sons thereof. In similar fashion, the admirers of Arawn are fractured in their methods. The underlings who don’t know what’s going on see a book’s been stolen and are ordered to sprint off and plant you in your grave. Others, notably the ones who give the orders, put the book there for it to be stolen.”
“Why the hell would they want to do that?”
“Because it suits their purposes, obviously.”
“And what’s your purpose in telling me all this?” Dante said.
Cally just laughed. “A good question. Listen. Do you want to save your friend?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think you can do it alone?”
“I think a lot of them will die,” Dante said. A crow cawed from among the graves. Cally’s own mouth stayed shut. “No,” Dante admitted. “There’s too many of them.”
“It turns out true justice can always be made up for with numbers,” Cally agreed, clenching his fists and cracking his knuckles. “It’s enough to make a man wonder if there’s any such thing. On the other hand, a pure state of justice wouldn’t be sullied just because—”
“Can you help me or not?” Dante grabbed the old man’s arm. A cold shock ran from his fingers to his shoulder and he pulled away. “What are you?”
“You know what I am,” Cally said, deadly soft, and the whole world went dark. Dante staggered back, hands shielding his face until he saw the overcast light of mid-afternoon, the silent flight of birds, the fall of rain, the row on row of long-buried bones. When he looked back at Cally, he looked old and skinny as ever.
“Will you help me?”
“Teach you,” Cally corrected, holding up a finger. “‘Enhance your knowledge’ may be a more accurate phrase. I trust all that running hasn’t left much time for reading.”
“Right again,” Dante said slowly. “How do you know all this?”
“Simple deduction,” the old man said, “and having lived an awful many years in the company of men too given to scheming.”
“So why do they want people to steal the Cycle?”
Cally sucked his teeth, smacked his lips. “You should know that already.”
“Until a few minutes ago I was under the impression its theft was a capital crime.”
“Who is Arawn?”
“Is this a trick?”
“Humor me.”
“The god of death,” Dante said. His face flushed, but he let his simplification stand.
“More like the god who greets the dead and transfers them to what comes next. What else?”
“I don’t know. He’s Carvahal’s brother.”
A gleam took Cally’s eye. “And the history between the two?”
“Not very good.” Dante frowned. “He gave Carvahal the secret of fire, then Carvahal walled him up so he’d get all the credit.”
Cally raised his eyebrows. Dante thought he had the answer, but it was too wild, too conspiratorial. The old man sighed and dropped his eyes.
“And you seemed so promising.”
“They want to release Arawn from his prison,” Dante blurted. “And they want someone to steal the book because—they can’t do it themselves?”
“You’d make a decent rhetorician,” Cally said, applauding.
“I can’t do that! I don’t even know what I’m doing!”
“Oh, indeed. It’s more complicated than that. Much more complicated. But the book is bait for the kind of person who might be able to help them. Running you through all the rigamarole like that—”
“What?” He drew back. “To weed out the ones who can’t help?”
Cally bit his lip and wagged his head, weighing the statement. “Something like that.”
“Isn’t trying to kill me a little extreme? Couldn’t they just have me read a few pages and then have a go? Or, you know, ask whether I’ve ever seen a shadow slithering around like a snake? Wouldn’t that be easier than some big charade where either I die or a lot of them do?”
“First off, the minions who’ve been chasing you don’t know anything more than that you stole the book. They really do just want you dead.” Cally scowled. “I told you, it’s complicated.”
“Is that your word for insane?”
“Lower your voice, for the gods’ sakes,” the old man winced, patting the air with his hands. “It’s one of those things that’s worked, no matter how crazy it sounds, so it’s hardly worth getting into why it works. It has a lot to do with the fact everyone else thinks they’re dead in these lands, so if they don’t want to spill the beans they have to be elaborately sneaky about these things. The rest of it’s one of those webs of politics where understanding it would take a lifetime of history and then another lifetime of theology. If it turns out you’ve got two lifetimes to spare we’ll hash it out in front of a hearth some day, but for now, stop asking stupid questions and just believe what I’m telling you.”
“And what’s your role in this web?” Dante said, ignoring the bevy of suspicions that popped up whenever anyone talked about taking something on faith. “Why are we even talking right now?”
“Because I happen to think my brother believers are full of shit.” He looked around himself, as if noticing their surroundings for the first time. “What are you doing staying in a cemetery, anyway?”
“No one comes to a graveyard if they can help it.”
“Smart. Smart enough to ask your damned question a third time.” Cally sighed, wrinkling his nose, then laughed just as suddenly. It was supposed to be charming, Dante saw, but he found the man’s shifts of mood jarring, a sign of a mind more fractured than fanciful. “I am not a fanatic of their ends-over-means philosophy. That’s what caused all this trouble in the first place.” He tugged his beard, far away. “So. I’m cast out. Meanwhile, they’ve found a way to tell people about the power of the book and the truth of Arawn without exposing themselves, then recruit the few who can actually make any use of it. But you know what happens to tools that don’t get the job done, right? Or tools that ask too many questions?”
“What?”
“They’re thrown away, you idiot.” Cally huffed. His breath curled in the moist air. “But I know the same things they do.” He narrowed his eyes, sly. “The things that can’t be learned by reading the Cycle. I can turn raw men into great men, and in so doing steal them away from the hands of my foes.”
He smiled and with his gray beard and bright eyes Dante thought he looked like a grandfather who’d spoil a boy hardened by the father’s tough love. He shifted his feet.
“Every man of Arawn I’ve met so far’s wanted to make my head a separate entity from my body.”
“Indeed. And when you tried to throw that little trifle at me, what did you feel?”
“You barely had to think to deflect it,” Dante replied. “You could have smashed me to bits.”
“Tiny ones! But then I’d have blood and bone all over my cloak.” Cally cracked with laughter as he stroked his grime-streaked rags. Dante shut his eyes. He’d resigned himself to flinging himself at the men who held Blays in chains and dying in the attempt. Ever since he’d run out on the village he’d felt hemmed in, a minor part in an infinite play, casting out blindly for a force that could never be his. Three months since he’d left them behind. He could still see the grasses turning yellow in the heat of high summer as he ran down the path that led to Bressel, still smell the dairy-like stink of his feet when he’d unbooted them after that first day’s travel. Before he left he’d been taught nothing more than what the monk of Taim who’d housed him had seen fit: the stories of the gods, how they’d created man and then been betrayed by men’s foolish arrogance, how we wouldn’t know peace until we learned to return to them on our knees and seek forgiveness—a weak-minded
lie the monk told himself so he could accept his meager place. Dante owed nothing to anyone. And so he’d left, chasing the story of the book, but when he’d found it the monk’s threat of a mediocre existence had been replaced at once by the mortal threat of the men of Arawn. Never in his life had Dante been left alone to find his own way.
“I want to learn,” Dante said, gazing into Cally’s mirth-wrinkled face. “I’ll burn the whole city if they stand in my way.”
6
The vault was as good a place as any for their work, Cally had declared, if a little dramatic, so there they went. Cally swung the door shut behind them, closing them in darkness. Dante reached into his pocket and his torchstone bathed them in a pale light.
“Where’d you get that?” Cally said, seating himself on the pedestal near the front of the room.
“I’ve always had it.”
“I may have made it, for all I know.”
Dante lowered himself to the cold stone floor and tried not to sigh too loud.
“Made a lot of them, did you?”
“I did, actually, so stop making that face. We all need money.” Cally puffed out his cheeks and looked around himself. “So. Let’s see about tying some terminology to these vague things you’ve taught yourself so far. We’ll start at the beginning.”
“Oh good.”
“Modern understanding says the ether is the force that illuminates the firmament and bestows motility to man and beast. Some schools take this a step further, equating this original force with jurisprudential order, explaining that just as the laws of our courts are derived from the reflection of the perfection of the revolution of the heavens, so are the laws of man’s nature a reflection of the animatory power of the Belt of the Celeset. So. Personally, I feel these schools are unnecessarily harmonious, establishing a false dichotomy of order meant to reinforce the position of the elite in the minds of the blank-slate boys they’re supposedly educating. Any idiot can see this school is an artificial imposition of the human mind. As if the mishmash of vengeance and despotism we witnessed this afternoon bears any resemblance to the unabridged consistency of the stars. Do you think the ether’s responsible for poor Blays’ fate?”
“No,” Dante said, face stony. Cally barely noticed, launching into the next phase of his lecture with the intensity of a man who’s spent decades thinking without an audience to relieve the pressure of his head.
“Tell me what I just said,” he said some ten minutes later.
Dante turned his hands in his lap.
“You said the nether—”
“The ether.”
“You said the ether,” Dante said, pausing until he was certain there’d be no interruption, “lurks behind all things, and that’s where we draw our power.”
“That’s not what I said.” Cally snatched his cap from his head and twisted it in his bony hands. “You’re just parroting the book. Treating the ether like a mirror image of the nether. Is gold the opposite of silver? Is the sun the opposite of the moon? You’ve got it all backwards.”
“Backwards?”
“First the ether, then the nether. How can you define the primary when your view of the secondary’s all warped up? You don’t even have the grounding to understand the words ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ are themselves gross assumptions of a Taim-based perspective!” Cally scowled, combing out his beard with his fingers. “Listen, I’ve got some things to go do.”
“But I haven’t learned anything,” Dante said, rising to his feet.
“I’m beginning to understand how true that is. I’ll be back by dark.” Cally pushed his frail back against the door. It grated open and he wormed into the gap. “Meditate on what it means to be a duck,” he called back into the tomb.
“A duck?” Dante said, but the old man was gone. Dante wandered from the door and propped himself on a shelf. Somewhere across town Blays was in a room like this. Probably it was smaller, darker, had been home to more of the dead than this mausoleum. Dante punched the stone shelf, then sucked his bleeding knuckles. A duck? What the hell was that supposed to mean? If this was a game, why didn’t Cally just spell out what he wanted? If Dante was supposed to do all the work without any guidance, what was Cally doing there in the first place?
He took a long breath. There was a chance Cally knew what he was doing. He was very old, after all. If he wanted ducks, Dante would give him ducks. He’d give him so many ducks the old man would be ashamed he’d ever given him such a juvenile exercise.
Okay. A duck had wings. It had webbed feet, like the neeling, but that couldn’t be important. A duck had a bill. Feathers. Liked water. Could travel by land, sea, and air. Was that it? That its home was everywhere and thus nowhere? That sounded like the kind of shallow paradox that would send Cally twittering. What else? What made a duck a duck? Was it the feet, the bill, the feathers? The sum of its physical features? If you chopped all the duck-like parts from different animals and sewed them into one new animal, would you then find yourself holding a duck? Or was the opposite true—a duck was created with an inherent element of duckiness that informed its growth from the egg itself? Dante glanced at his torchstone as its light grew dim and found he was no longer angry. He dug a hunk of bread from his pack and chewed.
It wasn’t a chicken or a goose or a swan; it was close, but the differences were enough to earn it a separate name. It walked on two legs, but it wasn’t a man. It swam, but it wasn’t a fish. Dante traced a mallard in the dust on the shelf. He didn’t think Cally intended him to define it by what it wasn’t. In the end, a duck was very few things. There was a whole world it wasn’t.
Was a duck its quack? Nothing else he knew of quacked. Geese honked, but that was different. Hens clucked and roosters crowed and chicks peeped; meadowlarks sang and starlings chirped and crows cawed; a duck, it seemed, was the only thing that quacked. That must be a part of it. If a duck walked up to him and asked him about the weather, that would make it, in some sense, a man. Still a duck, but less duckish. He bounced his heels against the stone wall beneath his seat. How long could you spend sitting around thinking about ducks? Was there a point where you’d know everything there was to know? He decided to go back to basics. Ducks lived in pairs, but sometimes they lived in flocks. Ducks laid eggs. Ducks also hatched from eggs, which he thought might be a slightly different thing from laying them. A duck ate water-weeds and bugs, he thought, though he wasn’t certain of that. He realized he was just listing their traits without conclusions. Duckiness was something more than what it ate or how it looked or lived or quacked. All those things were true, but if he told someone who’d never seen a duck all the things he’d just thought, they might be able to visualize one, but they wouldn’t really know what made a duck a duck, would they? How could he explain the nature of duck-kind so an outsider would understand?
Footsteps jarred him from his maze. How long had it been? The sun was all but set. Dante stuck his head out the door, hand on sword, and saw Cally’s bent-backed figure trudging up the hill through the drizzle.
“Have you dwelt on the nature of duckhood?” he said as he entered.
“I have.”
“What have you learned?”
“A duck is a duck,” Dante said.
Cally pinched the bridge of his nose. “Go on.”
“It’s not a chicken or a goose or any other bird, though if you told someone that’s what a duck is like they’d start to be able to see one. It’s got a bill and feathers and wings. It swims, flies, and walks; so what element can be said to be its home?” He stuck his tongue between his teeth and waited for a cue. Cally screwed up one eye, shrugged. “It quacks,” he tried. “Nothing else quacks.”
“Except a duck call.”
Dante went pale. He hadn’t thought of that. “I don’t think you can ever define a duck,” he said slowly. “If you could, you’d have created one. I think all you can do is describe it, piece by piece, until you’ve got an animal like nothing else.”
“An interestin
g theory,” the old man said.
“Well? Am I right?”
Cally pulled back his chin and snorted. “How the hell should I know?”
“Well why did you make me do all that thinking about ducks if you don’t know what one is yourself?” Dante said, pounding his fists against his thighs.
“You weren’t doing well with the discursive approach. What else do you want?”
“Why ducks?”
“To hear you quack,” Cally shot.
“That doesn’t—” Dante snapped his jaw shut. He walked to the back of the room and glared at the inscriptions on the wall. His face felt hot as a branding iron. “Making sport of one’s students doesn’t strike me as enlightened instruction.”
Cally laughed brightly. “Were you so petulant with whoever taught you to talk like that?”
“Do you always expect the ones you teach to read your mind?”
“Youth,” Cally spat, a grunt so hateful Dante’s scalp tingled. He spun around and Cally’s pinched face opened with laughter. “You take yourself too seriously, do you know that?” He rubbed his hands together and got the look of a man who’s just had his first puff on a pipe. “I suppose you want to get down to business.”
“That had crossed my mind.”
“Double-crossed it, maybe,” Cally said, looking worried. His eyes flicked to Dante and he smiled tightly. “Think about the nether the same way you taught yourself to think about the duck.”
“That’s it?” Dante’s mind flashed with the notion this had all been a mistake, that he was wasting what short time he had left. “What about this ether stuff?”
Cally waggled a hand. “Forget it. We’re taking a new approach. Dwell long on the nether and we’ll see where you are in the morning.”
“But the night’s just started. You haven’t shown me anything!”
“Patience!” he thundered. “It’s a week from now till your destiny becomes known. That’s as long as it took the gods to build the world. Do you really think this will be harder than the creation of everything in existence?” Dante worked his throat and Cally stepped forward, craning his thin neck. “You know what happens to apprentices who try to work gold before they’ve hammered iron, don’t you?”
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