“Your pack’s on that peg over there,” the old man said, tipping his chin past Dante’s shoulder. “You wouldn’t let go of it even after you’d been knocked out.”
“Praise the gods,” Dante said, sinking back into the bedclothes, then glanced in fresh panic at the door as Blays burst back into the room, followed by the bearded swordsman, who Dante now recognized as the noosed-up man who’d asked for more whiskey before they turned him off, and the staff-wielding man who’d made a poor horseman and, Dante noted with a strange thrill, was still carrying the staff, as though Dante’s touch had made it into something more than a snapped-off branch. The two ex-prisoners exchanged a smile, then looked back at Dante.
“Was some talk of whether you’d pull through,” the bearded man said, glancing at Blays and jingling some coins in his pocket. “My name’s Robert Hobble.”
“I’m Dante.”
“No, I mean, I’m Robert Hobble.”
“And well met,” Dante said.
“Guess I’m not as well known as I thought,” Robert smiled. “Thought I was a corpse for sure up there. I had this half-assed notion the mob, once they saw it was me, would rush right up and uproot the Crooked Tree for now and for ever, but I guess they thought I deserved it after all.” His face went blank, just a light crinkle around his eyes like he was trying to fight off a headache. “Don’t know what to make of getting rescued by you.”
“Think nothing of it,” Dante said quickly. The man with the staff stepped forward.
“They don’t tell stories about me like they do for Robert,” he said, ducking his head, “but I appreciate what you’ve done just as much. It’s like I’ve been given a second chance.”
“Then spend it well,” Dante said, avoiding Blays and Cally’s eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Edwin Powell, sir.”
“We might not have made it if you weren’t fighting alongside us, Edwin.”
“Might be,” Edwin said. He leaned on the stick and nodded at the far wall. “But I’d be strangled and buried if you hadn’t led the charge.”
“I’d planned to die there,” Dante said. “I think I would have if you two hadn’t discharged yourselves so well.” To his ear, his words didn’t sound entirely his own. He had the sense he was repeating sentiments he’d once heard from someone else, and while he meant what he was saying, there was something platitudinal in it, a blandness that made him feel as if he were lying. He flushed, and before he could find a way to thank them that felt real he coughed so hard he sat up straight, eyes watering.
“The young lord needs his rest,” Cally said, restraining his smile till the two men had turned back to Dante. “In other words, get the hell out.”
“I pledge to spend my second chance better than I did my first,” Edwin said. He tapped the staff against the stone floor. “I won’t make you regret what you did for me.” He looked down. “My family’s worried, no doubt. With your leave, I’d like to go back to them now.”
“Of course,” Dante said.
“No one’s eager to see me back,” Robert said, scratching the stubble on his throat. “Would probably be best if I stayed out of sight for a while, in fact. Maybe I can pay you two back by teaching Blays all the ways he’s embarrassing himself when he waves around that sword of his.”
“My dad taught me how to fight,” Blays said, hands gripping his belt.
Robert held up his palms. “I just mean no education worth its salt ends at twelve.”
“I’m fifteen and a half.”
“My mistake. I try not to pay attention to anyone under twenty. They have the habit of dying right around the time you start to like them.”
“Maybe you’ve got a habit of boring them to death,” Blays said.
“Enough,” Cally said, tugging at sleeves and shoving at backs. “Go yammer at each other out in the yard.” He overruled their objections and ushered them out of the room, then closed the door and pressed his back to it. “Country hens. The real crime was not letting the watch turn them off when they had the chance.”
“I couldn’t find a way to thank them,” Dante said.
“You sounded fine to me. I once heard a duke say the same thing after a successful siege.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
“You want to be you and you alone,” Cally said knowingly. “The key is to be less civilized.”
“What does that mean?” Dante said. The old man just stared at him through the gray halo of his beard and ruffled hair.
“What are you going to do now?”
“Sleep,” Dante said, stretching his arms over his head and sliding back beneath his blanket.
“Yes, but I presume at some point, hours or even days from now, you’ll wake up and be wanting for something to do.”
“Finish the part of the Cycle I can read. Then learn how to read the part I can’t.”
“I see,” Cally said. His eyes flickered wide with something that looked bizarrely like hunger. Then he nodded, inscrutable as ever, and went for the door. “First, rest. Once you’re done coughing up blood, then you can think about what comes next.”
* * *
Dante could stand after the first day and walk around after the second. When he felt well enough to hobble outside his room he found the building really had been a temple. A poor one, most certainly, more of a shrine, given that it had only four rooms and the largest of these wouldn’t have held a congregation of more than forty. It was a sturdy edifice, though, all mortared stone, with high arched ceilings that stole up the heat even when the main hearth was blazing. The walls were covered in bas relief from Dante’s knees to a foot above his eyes, filled with hand-sized figures of bearded men in crowns and robes with stars flaring from their hands and a number of smaller figures who appeared to be getting killed by those stars. Concealed among the kingly shapes was a frame of a man standing in a cell. Rags hung from his shoulders in abstract tatters. At his feet, three rats stood on their hind legs, front paws dangling. His outstretched hand bore four fingers.
He saw Blays no more than two or three times a day, at meals or when the boy came in from hours of traipsing around the open wood as he’d done when they lived by the pond. In the mornings and late afternoons of the shortening days Dante heard the crash of swords out in the yard mingled with the phlegmy laughter of Robert Hobble as he doled out some new lesson. Cally all but quarantined himself to his room, as if he couldn’t stand sharing the same space with other bodies for more than a few minutes a day. Dante sat by the fire reading the last sections of the Cycle that were still in the Mallish tongue and tried to shut his ears to the shouts and play of blades outside.
By the fourth day he could have joined them, he thought, in that he felt physically well enough to spar. It wouldn’t hurt to improve his training; his current worth with a sword was about one notch above being able to take a swing without chopping off his own face. Instead he stayed indoors. He didn’t want to slow Blays down. Robert had skill, that much was clear from how he’d acquitted himself in the field. Blays must know that, unencumbered by Dante’s clumsy swipes and plodding advancement, he could learn something that might end up saving his life—probably Dante’s as well. If they thought it would do any good for Dante to be out there, they’d have asked him.
So he read and reread, scribbling notes, flipping forward and backward, doing his best to place the fractured chronology in some kind of order, borrowing from Cally’s bountiful stacks of blank paper to compose small essays on the Cycle’s curious symbolism and authorial shifts and veiled concerns. He wrote these not because he intended to amend or refute in the public arena the other scholars he’d read (though he hoped, with a desperation he could never wholly admit to, Cally would some day read them and confirm he was on the right track), but from a compulsion that felt as elemental as the stone walls and wood chairs that surrounded him. It was trying work, but it wasn’t tiring; it was slow and uneven and he was constantly frustrated by how little the words on his pages
matched the ideas in his head, but he was propelled by the momentum of a boy’s first-found love in the subjects of men. By the end of a week he reached the final page of the Mallish chapters before it shifted to the dead language, and in the last light of afternoon finished what he’d started an age ago in Bressel.
The final times will come as they began, blinded by the white blanket of the northern snows, settled at the foot of the Tree of Bone where the Draconat spilled the Father of the Heavens’ heartblood on the snow and planted his knuckle within the soil. The skies will be black, though it be full day, the winds will howl with the laments of the slain as the starry vault is shattered and all things thought passed once more come forth. A scaled beast will arise with three tails and four wings and lay waste to the land.
Rivers will reverse their direction and graves will spit the dead to mingle with the living. Fire will consume the cities of man: the gift never meant to be given turned in hot cleansing against those who tainted its power. The beast will make himself known, lashing out with his tails to smash the false temples of men who have forgotten the true faces of the Belt of the Celeset.
Eric the Draconat is dead, though he lived long, and in this twilight time he alone will not return. The beast will hold its judgment, and its judgment will be that of the scythe to the wheat.
He knew some priests put great stock in apocalyptic prophecies, but Dante couldn’t escape the sense whoever’d written this hadn’t meant a literal three-tailed dragon was going to show up in the end days and bring a physical end to the world. It was like this story was an ancient cathedral buried up to its steeple—men could see the spire’s tip, but few could guess there was something grand beneath it, and no one could imagine what shape that cathedral might take. An understanding had been lost. Possibly, the man who’d written it hadn’t even understood exactly what he was passing along. This story, though, was a thousand years old at the least, possibly many times that, told and retold until it had been embedded in the Cycle; how could Dante unearth its true shape when the men who’d first conceived it had been dead for so long none of their names survived? Where on earth would he even start to look?
“Finished?” Cally said, startling him from this tangle of thoughts, as garbled as the web of a whirlpool-spider.
“As far as I can get.”
“Good. Then start thinking about where you’re going next, because you can’t stay here.”
Dante’s head snapped up. “You want us to leave?”
“I’ve got my own business to get back to,” Cally said, frowning at him. “What did you think was going to happen?”
“I thought you were going to teach me how to read the rest,” Dante said, finding his hopes sounded much less ridiculous now that Cally had dashed them. “The nether, too.”
“Well, you were wrong.”
“Surely you know as much as anyone about these things.”
“Miles more.” Cally sighed when Dante started in on another objection. He waved his hands in front of his face, brushing it away. “Even if I had the time, which I don’t, I’m not an instructor. I was bad at it when I was young and now that I’m old I’m as likely to kill you as tutor you. Things are muddled. I know how to navigate my own coasts, but trying to explain it to fit someone else’s mind is worse than impossible.”
“Where can I go, then?” Dante said, grasping the cover of the book. “Even the Library of Bressel doesn’t have the rest of it. It’s like the whole world’s forgotten.”
“Not the whole world.”
“Where, then?”
Cally’s blue eyes flinched. “The dead city. Narashtovik itself.”
“That’s where the Arawnites wanted to take me once they saw I knew the nether,” Dante said. He stared hard at Cally. “You think I should go to them now? Why? I thought you hated them.”
“No doubt you heard some news in Whetton. About the skirmishes in the plains of Collen. The riots down in Bressel.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“They stem from the same source as the language of the Cycle’s last section.”
“The dead city,” Dante said, ignoring the embarrassment that came with using its nickname. He shuffled the pieces of what he’d learned and what Cally had told him of their motives around in the workshop of his mind. “They mean to start a war, then. How does that help them release Arawn?”
“It doesn’t,” Cally said, squinting at him, “but they have this idea it would be somewhat disrespectful to restore Arawn to his seat when barbarians like us still beat people to death for having the audacity to praise him.”
“Have you ever seen Arawn?”
“Of course not. He’s imprisoned.”
“Okay,” Dante said. He worried his lip for a moment. “Have you ever seen any of the gods? One of their stellar messengers, even? Anything at all that stands as hard proof of the divine?” Cally shrugged at him and Dante bulled on. “So who cares what the Arawnites are up to, then? They’re just a bunch of dopes in robes. They’re going to sacrifice a few goats, turn their eyes to the heavens, and see nothing but the stars. Arawn’s not going to ride down on a flaming chariot and lay ruin to the earth.”
“But they will in his place!” Cally thundered, striding forward till his face was no more than a foot from Dante’s. “Blaspheme all you like. Maybe Arawn exists and maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he’s nothing but foofaraw. Fine! They still believe he does and they’re still going to war for it. Thousands are going to die for it, including a few who don’t deserve to.”
Dante drew back, silent until the anger worked its way from Cally’s face. He had a long time to wait.
“So why bring this up?” Dante said at last. “What does that have to do with me going to Narashtovik?”
“Two fish, one spear.”
“Will you drop the oracular nonsense and talk like a person for once?”
Cally snorted as if making himself clear would be beneath his dignity. Dante maintained his silence and Cally snorted again, tugging at his sleeves.
“What I’m saying, since during your escape you evidently sustained a blow to the head, is it may be within your power to abbreviate the coming bloodshed.”
“That’s a load of it, isn’t it? Why don’t you stop it?”
“I know, it’s hardly in your nature to prevent people from bleeding,” Cally returned. “You’re much more comfortable rupturing organs and spewing people’s brains out their ears. That seemed especially unnecessary, by the way.” The old man tapped a finger against his teeth. “It’s my very power that prevents me from going there and doing something myself.”
“Now that’s just stupid,” Dante said.
“It’s of equal probability that you’re the one being stupid. I was known in the dead city, once. They’d no sooner let me through their walls than they would a horde of hooting savages. As soon as I got within a hundred miles they’d strike me down with a pike, then chop me into fragments, stick me on any number of other pikes, and dance around a bonfire. You, on the other hand, appear completely unremarkable, and would stand out no more than any other foreigner.”
“Probably because I’m not any more dangerous than a pilgrim.”
Cally chortled at that. “I’m not about to fawn on you like those peasants you saved. In fact, if you actually believe the words you just said, I should crush your skull as a service to the collective human race. The truth is, you’re a sharp young knife, and so’s Blays, in his way. There’s a reason sharp knives are the favored arms of assassins.”
“Even so,” Dante said, flushing a little. Caught off guard—these were the first kind words he could recall Cally saying—it was a second before he understood those words weren’t purely poetical. “Assassins?”
“Well yes. If I thought we’d have to kill every citizen of the dead city I’d send an army, not two boys. As it is, I believe we can stave off war with the death of a single priest.”
“There are people in the dead city?”
Cally gave him a look. “You thought it was full of talking corpses, maybe? Walking skeletons?”
“Of course not,” Dante lied.
“They just call it that to keep out the pilgrims.” Cally looked blankly at the carvings on the wall behind Dante’s chair. “It was sacked a few times. More than a few. After the fourth or fifth time they’d rebuilt it and plotted out all the new cemeteries someone got wise and moved the palace inland a few hundred miles. Now Narashtovik is sort of a kingdom within the wider kingdom of Gask. A few stubborn dunces who equated their land with their identity stuck around and have continued getting sacked ever since. It’s become an isolated place. Weird in a bad way. No one goes there on purpose, and over the years it’s become a shell of its former self, but there are those who still live there. Including an awful lot of Arawn’s chosen, since in that city they could worship a stuffed donkey for all anyone from civilization would care.” He wiped his nose, sniffed. “Some do claim it gets its nickname from the regional practice the people have—suspicious of outsiders, as I hope you see why—of stringing up strangers from the city walls, but I believe it’s just those little differences that makes the world special.”
Dante ignored him. “Whenever the Cycle mentioned it it talked about a place as big as Bressel. Not some horrid backwater.”
“Bigger,” Cally said. “But the Cycle’s a thousand years old, and that’s just the young parts. When a text becomes sacred you can’t just run around updating it for the modern era. It would throw the whole thing into suspicion.”
“So what about this priest?”
“How did we—?” Cally sighed. “Right. It’s difficult to tell what kind of idiocy might be in the heads of the council, but I think if its leader were rendered persona non grata, by which I mean dead, the forces of reason may be able to cajole and flatter the dogs of war back from their madness. Her name is—”
“Her name? They take orders from a woman?”
“Death doesn’t discriminate, does he? Why should his followers? I’m beginning to think you should travel to Narashtovik just to broaden your horizons.”
Magic, Myth & Majesty: 7 Fantasy Novels Page 73