"Huh," Blays said into the darkness. "Any chance we can do this meeting tomorrow, Mourn?"
There wasn't. Mourn claimed the Clan of the Nine Pines was too far away. Instead, the three of them would reconvene in three days at the old norren ruins on Kerrin Hill. In the morning, he said his farewells. Dante and Blays hopped on the wagon and made their delivery.
Three days later, the two of them climbed Kerrin Hill under cover of night. Mist curled up the hillside. A face loomed downhill, obscured by gray vapor and black branches. In fact, between the distance and the gloom, Dante couldn't be certain there was a face at all—that pale, unflinching shape could be a patch of trunk rubbed of its bark, the wilting white flower of a five-foot shrub. He glanced at Blays. The blond man was tracing an obscene drawing on the mist-slick surface of a fallen stone. When he looked back, the face was gone.
"I think someone's following us."
Blays added another curve to his outline. "No one is following us."
"What I'm proposing is the radical idea that they are."
"For one thing, you can't really be followed when you're just standing around. For another, we're six miles from nowhere in a graveyard that hasn't been used since we started putting points on the ends of our sticks."
"It's not a graveyard."
Blays smacked the table-sized stone with his palm. Dozens like it littered the hilltop, a handful of others still standing upright, weathered and patchy with lichen. "Then what do you call this?"
"A rejected bed." Dante peered into the mist. The weather had warmed in the last three days, shrinking the snows and feeding the fog. Streamers wafted between the pine needles, carrying the mud-and-clams scent of the river with them. "It was a holy place, once."
"Whatever it is, I'm cold as hell. Does Cally even know about this little mission of yours?"
"More or less."
"Oh really? I'm guessing that 'less' is going to be upset to learn it's being used in place of 'not at all.'"
Dante put on his haughtiest voice. "The purview of my authority is as far-ranging as its cruelty and you would be wise not to disrespect it."
Blays smeared his forearm across the sketch he'd drawn in the dew. "Wasn't Mourn supposed to be here an hour ago?"
"Yeah."
The shape reappeared among the pines, oval and unmoving. Too pale and small to be Mourn. Dante leaned forward on the stone he'd seated himself on. Blays shoved his shoulder, spilling him into the sodden grass.
"If you're that concerned with being watched, let's go ask that guy what he's doing here."
"You can't just ask him."
"Of course I can." Blays stalked downhill. "If I don't like his answer, I can punch him, too!"
Dante hustled after him, boots skidding in the grass. Instinctively, he reached for the nether, drawing the dark power from the shadows of rocks, the undersides of leaves, the night air itself. It coiled around his fist, so perfectly black most people couldn't see it at all. Blays swished through the carpet of brown needles, one sword swinging from his hip, the other bouncing from his back. Dante threaded through the gnarled trunks. By the time they reached the base of the hill, the stones at its crown were blurs in the mist.
"Well?" Blays said.
"If the watcher was here, you probably spooked him."
"Sounds like he'd deserve it, creeping around in the fog like that."
Dante turned in a slow circle, scanning the trees for movement, flashes of color, but saw nothing but the pressing gray air. A stick snapped among the trees. Blays' smile vanished. Dante drew the nether closer. Just ahead, a hulking figure plodded through the fog, seven feet tall, shoulders so solid he looked as if he could walk straight through the trees without slowing down.
"Hello, Mourn." Dante said. "Bit late, aren't you?"
"Aren't we all, sooner or later," the norren said. He gazed down at his sodden pants-cuffs with exasperation too deep for a sigh. His silver-and-bone earrings glinted in the darkness. "Can we do this down here? Or do we have to trek up to that fallen-down garbage up there?"
"Your people built them."
"So they claim."
"Here's fine," Blays said.
"Good." Mourn ran a thick hand over the equally thick beard that grew from every inch of his face besides a gap around his eyes and a small patch directly below his cavernous nose. "So. About the bow."
"Yes?" Dante said.
"The clan would like to know how they can be sure they can trust you."
Dante scowled. "We've been in and out of these hills for two years now."
"Spend two thousand more and we'll be on equal footing."
"Our word?" Blays said.
"Is good for a laugh." Mourn's bovine eyes considered Blays. "Nothing personal."
"Who could take offense to that?"
Dante glared into the fog. Over a year ago, he stopped thinking of his duty in the Territories as a political favor to be discarded at the first sign of trouble; instead, he now regarded it as something he wanted to do, a cause he'd fight for even if Cally weren't forcing him to be here. He liked the norren. He believed in them. The problem was such feelings were rarely mutual. The norren, in large part, distrusted anything that came from beyond the Territories. Hell, most of the time they distrusted anything that came from the wrong part wthin the Territories, meaning anything beyond their village or their clan's roving-range. No matter how much time Dante spent here, he kept having to prove himself to each new norren and clan he met. Sometimes he built up a relationship with a group, returned six months later, and found himself treated as a stranger again, the trust he'd established eroded like a beach during the storm season. The whole experience was so frustrating there were times he wanted to smash a block down on the norren's oversized heads.
By norren standards, Mourn had been extremely trusting to date. Against his better judgment, Dante had cultivated hope his whole clan would be the same. Open. Helpful. Faced with the truth, his hopes came crashing down.
"I don't even know what the Clan of Nine Pines is, exactly," Dante said. "How am I supposed to know what they consider worthy of trust?"
"Oh." Mourn's disappointment was as thick as the fog. "Well, I'm off, then."
Blays glanced between them. "That's it?"
"It's a long walk home."
Dante stood stunned, watching the norren slog into the trees. At times he believed it was all a game the norren played, these endless spirals of approval-winning and worth-proving, and that when Mourn returned home to tell this story, he'd be met with bearish laughter and grinning shakes of the head: Gullible outlanders! Would probably give their own balls a whack if you told them a man's testicular fortitude was considered an equal sign of the fortitude of ther loyalty.
He shook his head. This business with Mourn and the clan was just the latest fence they'd have to hop. Under Cally's direction, he and Blays had burned two years arranging and bodyguarding shipments to and from the Norren Territories to the south—silver, swords, spears, great wains of grain. He met with village leaders, brokered peace and pacts with the human settlements on the fringes, delivered memorized messages too sensitive to be trusted to a page. Days and weeks and months spent preparing the Territories for something they would never have dreamed possible: independence from the empire of Gask.
Throughout his travels, he began to hear rumors of the Clan of the Nine Pines, who, along with the Dreaming Bear and Three-Part Falls, were widely considered one of the fiercest clans in all norrendom. But—again, according to rumor—they had something else on top of that: the Quivering Bow. When Dante asked what that was, the norren had smirked knowingly. Why, it was just a legendary weapon whose arrows sent enemy walls shivering down like the banks of a flash-flooding river.
From that point on, Dante learned all he could about the Nine Pines. Which wasn't much. Like most of the other clans, they were nomads. They traveled on foot, were rarely seen, and almost never spent time among the civilized city-dwelling norren. In the past, the Nine Pine
s' paintings sold for sums that could have established estates. In present times, they were said to forge swords that never lost their edge.
That in itself was interesting. But what had really snared the bunny was the bow. A bow that maybe—probably—didn't exist. When he first voiced his interest to Blays, Blays had dismissed the whole thing with a broad swipe of logic: If the bow were real, why wasn't the Clan of the Nine Pines picking their teeth with the king's bones right now? To Dante, that didn't prove anything. You couldn't free a people or conquer an empire with a single weapon, no matter how powerful that weapon may be. You needed soldiers. Lots and lots of soldiers. Most clans only had forty or fifty of those. And the fact the clans weren't exactly fond of banding together was perhaps the main reason so many of their people were enslaved across Gask.
Still, in the months since learning about the bow, his hope had cooled. Until he met Mourn, the first member of the Nine Pines he'd seen with his own eyes. Because what if the bow were real?
"It's all bullshit anyway." Blays' virtual mindreading had grown increasingly common—and somewhat unsettling—the more time the two spent with each other. "If it comes to war, our best weapon's going to be stabbing. Lots of stabbing."
"That's your answer to everything."
"That's because it's such a good one. Now can we get out of here already?"
Dante stirred fallen needles with the toe of his boot. "I'm sick of these games. If they'd drop all the ritual and let us do what we're here for, we'd already be hoisting their flags over the ramparts of Setteven."
Blays gave him the sort of frown reserved for the unanticipated expulsion of something that was just in your body. "Then cut through the games, dummy. Follow Mourn back to them."
"The clan would not care for that at all." He scanned the forest floor for anything white. "Hope you've got your chasing shoes on. Now help me find something dead."
"I'm beginning to hate those words."
"If it makes you feel better, it can be alive."
"Until you get your hands on it."
"If the rabbit's family comes seeking satisfaction, I promise to stand as your second." Dante stooped and shuffled through the damp mulch. Finding a spare body, he had long ago learned, was much trickier than common sense tells you. In a world of living things, you would imagine the ground would groan with the fallen dead, that beneath the forest's skin of leaves and needles would lurk a second layer of bones and fur. But animals occupied a small corner of any given space. They were so rare, in fact, that when they dropped dead, their remains tended to get snapped up by any other creatures who shared the area. A nice enough truth when the goal is walking through the woods without plunging ankle-deep into a former muskrat. Not so nice when the goal is to put that muskrat to one last use.
Blays crunched through leaves uphill. Dante smelled fresh mold and wet dirt. Mourn was getting further away by the moment. Dante straightened, relaxing his gaze until his vision blurred. It was perhaps that very rarity of remains that made them stand out so sharply if only you knew how to look. Possibly, it was that corpses still held on to some trace of the nether, the grist of Arawn's flawed mill, that quickens all mortal life. Whatever the reason, within moments a cold, silver light glimmered at the base of a nearby pine, flickering like moonlight on a pool. Dante knelt to brush away the leaves. A faded whiff of decay rose from a scatter of small bones. Hair and sinew clung to ribs and joints. Dante smiled.
Black wisps gathered in his fingers. Needing no more than a dab of blood, he picked a shallow scab on the back of his hand, waited for the small red bubble to rise, then touched his blood to the bones. Like rain on a window, shadowy nether slid from his hands to the body. Claws twitched. As if drawn by a string, a loose femur drew to the hip. The creature stood, swaying. It might have been a rat, once. A squirrel. Now, it was a silent automaton, and if Dante closed his eyes, he could see through its perspective instead. He nodded in the direction Mourn had gone minutes earlier. The creature turned and dashed away in a spray of leaves.
Dante called Blays from down the hill. "We'll stay a mile behind him. He'll never know we're here."
"Next time, I demand a plan with less walking. Like sitting around being fed roast pork."
"I'm not sure how that forwards the cause of norren independence."
Blays shrugged. "They can figure that out for themselves."
The creature raced along the forest floor, skidding through leaves, leaping over roots and dips, unhampered by the need to breathe or rest or slow for treacherous footing. Within minutes, it—and by extension Dante—could hear the norren threading through the brush with surprising grace. He and Blays began their pursuit.
Mist drifted between the hard-barked pines, thinning the further they got from the river. After a couple miles of woods, the forest dissipated in favor of grassy hills, the draws and folds furred by spicy-smelling pines. The light of a half-moon drenched the trailless earth. Dante's breath rolled from his mouth in thin clouds. His nose and ears numbed while sweat dampened his underclothes, which were already a good week in need of a wash.
Mourn didn't take his first break until dawn took its first pink glance at the east. Blays sat, blear-eyed, scowling at the block of bread Dante had taken along in case they didn't wind up returning straight to town after the meet.
"This stuff's hard as a brick," he said, spraying crumbs. "Tastes like one, too."
"Yet you're eating it. Remind me not to invite you to my house."
"What's that hairy jerk doing now?"
Dante closed his eyes. More than a mile away, the creature watched from beneath a bush while Mourn pried the bark from a fallen log and ate the pale grubs beneath. "Enjoying a pan of bacon. I think I can smell it—crisp meat, smoking fat."
"Gods damn it."
Mourn rose, then crouched beside a body of water that was more puddle than pond. "The wine looks good, too."
"At least tell me he looks sleepy." Blays stretched out his leg, massaging his calf with his thumbs. "I've had a few hours to think here. Which, for one thing, is a few hours we're not spending getting swords into the hands of villagers. For another, what's the point of chasing after the world's greatest bow when the whole idea is to avoid war?"
"Every day we're down here is a gamble. If the wrong person gets wind that we're arming the norren and brings that to the palace in Setteven, how long before the entire Gaskan Empire is marching on the Norren Territories? Three seconds?" Dante crunched into a bit of bread, chewing thickly. "Now what if we have a bow that can drop their towers as fast as you drop your trousers? Won't that give them second thoughts?"
"And you really think this thing exists?"
"A bow that can win a war by itself? What are you, an idiot?"
Blays threw up his hands. "If this is a joke, then so is the fist I'm about to put through your teeth."
Dante pulled his mind from the creature's, where Mourn was chopping long, straight branches and leaning them against the low crotch of a tree. "I just think it's worth sacrificing a couple days to confirm it doesn't exist. At least we'll have finally seen the Clan of the Nine Pines for ourselves."
"I heard they once killed an entire Setteven troop over the suggestion they start paying taxes."
"Donn told me they give their children knives as soon as they can stand. Accidentally cutting themselves is part of the process of learning to use one."
"Well, we've got to get those guys on board. King Moddegan's army doesn't stand a chance against the knife-babies." Blays blew into his hands. "I'll give it two more days. Past that, and I will begin shrieking until you admit your mistake."
Two days later—two long, cold, relentless days of aching feet, stiff fingers, and dwindling bread that didn't taste good even when his belly was empty—and Dante was ready to turn back himself. Mourn's course kept his resolve from dissolving completely: the norren was headed straight into nowhere. An eastern course into grassy hills and patchy woods too removed from the roads to see any signs of people bes
ides the occasional hermit or roving tribe. Desolate and windy. A person could spend weeks combing these lands without finding a trace of the people he was after.
That afternoon, Mourn and his undead pursuit entered a wall of trees whose small green buds were just beginning to displace the stubborn, brittle leaves still hanging from the branches. Deep shadows pooled the ground. Mourn walked noiselessly, hardly stirring the crackly blanket of leaves. After spending a good portion of the last few years learning to do the same, Dante envied the large man's effortless skill.
Yet with the sun a hand's-breadth from the hills, its light fading from the soil like a summer rain, Mourn suddenly began scuffling his feet, tramping through great beds of leaves as if shouting his name to the world. Ahead, a quiet blue lake winked between the trees. Above its shallow, grainy banks, Mourn was greeted by a trio of tall, stone-faced norren.
"Found them," Dante murmured.
"How many?"
"Um." He stopped, ordering the distant skeleton to take a quick jaunt. Men and women sat around fires, hauled wood, reeled in nets from the shore. "Fifty. Maybe more."
"I have a thought," Blays said. "If these people are as brutal as they all say, is it wise for two strangers to burst in on their secret forest lair?"
"Good question," rumbled a voice to the left.
Adrenaline bloomed from Dante's solar plexus. He dropped into a low stance, drawing his sword with his right and the nether with his left. Blays whipped out his blades with a leathery hiss. Twenty feet away, a man stepped from the trees, young enough that his beard only climbed halfway up his cheeks, but still a foot too tall to be mistaken for a human. A cleaver-like blade hung from his hand, the weapon as oversized as his bearish body.
"We're not enemies," Dante said.
"The clan will be here to judge that in a minute."
Dante flicked his eyes closed. At the camp, men and women grabbed up swords and bows and raced into the woods, backtracking Mourn's route. He ordered the creature to follow them back. He reopened his eyes on the lone norren. "How did you alert them?"
"Josun Joh watches out for us all."
The Great Rift Page 2