The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

Over the next few minutes, he discovered he was wrong about the army. Specifically, it wasn't an army—more of a legion, some two hundred footmen and 21 riders. At the bog, the soldiers stopped to rest their horses and themselves, stoking fires to boil the stagnant water. Mourn reported in. The clan was heading north. Dante and the scouts backed up the hill and over the ridgeline. On the other side, they ran to the northern hill and waited behind a screen of leaves for the legion to reappear and continue its march to the west.

  When they rejoined the clan to be spelled by fresh scouts, Hopp nodded at Blays first, then Dante. When they ate dinner, a warrior named Rone invited them to eat with him and his friends beside the banks of the stream.

  The walls came down. Warriors greeted Dante in the morning. Blays and Lira joked with the other couples. Mourn was invited to another wrestling match, which he won. When Dante expressed wonder at how quickly the clan's reception of them had thawed, Mourn just shrugged.

  "'Thaw' is the perfect word for group decisions among norren. The ice looks stable for weeks, then you wake up one morning to find it's cracked and swirled away."

  However the thaw had happened, Dante was glad to see the ice depart. He'd been feeling displaced. Not lonely, exactly. As much time as Blays spent with Lira, he was still around, as was Mourn. He spoke to Cally every two or three days, too. But each had concerns of their own. Between that and being surrounded by nearly forty warriors who had treated him like an ill-dressed stranger at a fancy party, their new nods, chuckles, and hellos felt as warm as the midday sun.

  Four days after he, Blays, and the two scouts had narrowly averted a most unwelcome battle, Hopp shook him awake before dawn and then moved on to roust Blays from his tangle of blankets and Lira.

  "Up for a trip?" Hopp asked once Dante had been to the latrine and had a cup of wintrel tea boiled from fresh leaves.

  "I don't know. Wouldn't you rather I go catch breakfast?"

  "There will be time for that later." The chieftain brought three more warriors with him, leaving the old woman in charge of the clan, and led the trek south. Dante followed without question through the chilly dawn and dewy morning. Miles and hours later, Hopp trudged up a hill. Dante startled. At its top, a dozen norren sat on a circle of lichen-encrusted stones. Several greeted Hopp by name. Several more stared unabashed at Dante and Blays.

  Hopp wandered to the middle of the circle of stones. A general silence followed him. He smiled at Dante. "I thought it was time for you two to be introduced." He swept his hand around the circle at the seated norren. "These are the chiefs of your clan-cousins. My chiefs?" He gestured back at Dante and Blays. "These are the two newest brothers of the Clan of the Broken Heron."

  19

  The chirrup of insects swelled in the silence. Dante laughed softly. He didn't know what he'd been expecting: to be upgraded to hunting deer, perhaps, or taken on a historical tour of the places where the Herons' most famous philosopher-warriors had died. He'd stopped actively pursuing Hopp's trust about three days into his fishing career. He'd expected Cally to call him off long before he had the chance to convince Hopp into taking the loons.

  "I'm not sure if you've noticed this, Hopp," a white-bearded man said at last. "But those appear to be humans."

  "The Broken Herons must have one shocked father," said a red-haired woman.

  Several chiefs laughed. Hopp smiled back wryly. "Do you trust me?"

  "Up to about here." The white-bearded man placed his hand halfway between navel and heart. "Sometimes more about here." He grabbed his crotch.

  "I made the decision to bring them into the clan. I then decided they were worthy of it. If you trust me, trust my decisions."

  "Even the sun's too hot some days," said a man missing the first two fingers of his left hand.

  "And when the sun is too hot, do you send it away?" Hopp said. "Or do you bear it and walk on, knowing it will be tolerable again tomorrow?"

  The red-haired woman blew her bangs from her eyes. "When the sun chooses to scorch us, it can't be replaced. You can."

  "You must not trust me very far at all if you think I'm choosing to burn you."

  "Trust who you will." She folded her arms across her chest. "We'll do the same."

  Hopp tipped back his beardless face to stare at the sky, as if he couldn't take what was down on earth any longer. "Do you think I think this is a joke? A whim? Since joining our clan, these humans have fed us. Healed us. Delivered us from danger. Before joining our clan, they helped the Nine Pines liberate the Green Lakes. Josun Joh's rainbow beard, I hear they almost killed Cassinder of Beckonridge. Have any of you done half as much?"

  There were a couple murmurs. The white-bearded man peered between Dante and Blays. "Did you really nearly kill him?"

  "Twice," Blays said. "Does that make it better or worse?"

  "If the third time succeeds, it will be better, because he is an arrogant man, and will assume his previous escapes weren't flukes but his natural blessings. When death comes, then, his surprise will be outmatched only by his terror."

  "That's a hell of a thing to be smiling about," Blays said.

  The white-bearded man's eyes glittered. "Cassinder was behind the proposal to siphon slaves from the clans every three years. Mark my words."

  "What's his problem with you guys, anyway? Did one of you slap him around as a kid?"

  The red-haired woman shrugged. "He wants us for our work in mines and fields and homes."

  "Interesting, isn't it?" Hopp said. "By inference, he must think the product of labor is divorced from the spirit of that same labor. Otherwise, he'd be afraid his tomatoes, ore, and freshly washed clothes would sprout legs and strangle him in his sleep."

  A few of the chiefs chuckled. The three-fingered man waited for it to stop. "Tell us the plan so we can say no and be on our way."

  "Do you know about loons?" Hopp said.

  Dante watched their expressions closely. Three nodded casually and immediately. Four more nodded hesitantly, as if they'd heard of such things, but weren't certain whether they existed. The remainder were more guarded yet.

  "These two brought a set from Narashtovik," Hopp said. "Enough for every chief to have one. No more fire-signals or horns. This is a chance for all of us to strike on the same cue, to switch strategies on the fly, to adapt our tactics before the redshirts have even caught on to our last move."

  "I know my own clan," said the redhaired woman. "I'm not going to be bossed around by the gnarled warlocks of Narashtovik."

  Throughout the talk, Dante had hung back outside the circle of fallen stones. He walked forward until he was a couple paces behind Hopp. "We won't tell you what to do. All we'll do is provide you the means to draw your plans together."

  She shook her head. "Still, I know my own clan."

  "That shit doesn't matter anymore!" Hopp hollered. The chiefs sat straight in shock. Hopp stalked among them, spit flying. "Do you think this thing with Setteven is nothing more than a clan-feud? Do you think isolated clans scattered across hundreds of miles will even slow their armies down? Is a bear turned back by a single sting? It takes a hive, Kella."

  Kella swept her red hair from her face. "We've always survived."

  An old man looked up from his seat on one of the fallen stones. The skin of his face and arms was tanned and sun-slackened. "Applying old ways to new challenges is a guaranteed grave."

  "Try this with me." Hopp produced Dante's bag of loons with a flurry of clicking bone and metal. "If it fails, curse my name on Josun Joh's front steps. Kill me in my sleep and piss on my bones. I've seen the human soldiers trampling our grass. The Clan of the Broken Herons can't drive them out. Nor can the Nine Pines or the Snarling Cougar. The clan-of-clans? They might have a chance."

  The white-bearded chief rose from his seat, hand extended. "I will take one."

  "Then I will, too," said the three-fingered man. "If only to argue down all your dumb ideas."

  One by one, all the others stood and received their loons. Through it
all, Kella stood with arms folded, face sliding into a deep scowl. When all the others were busy glancing between their new loons and her, she flung up her hands.

  "I should take your lands when you die," she said. "But if you're bound for Josun Joh's starry hills, I'm coming too, if only to have eternity through which to mock you."

  Hopp smiled and handed her a loon. Dante explained how to bind it with themselves with a drop of their own blood, which two chiefs balked at, fearing dark sorcery, until Dante convinced the white-bearded chieftain to try it. The man sealed the loon and concentrated on the link. A few seconds later, he jumped back a step.

  "There's a voice in my ear!"

  "Does it sound 12,000 years old?" Dante said.

  The man's gaze dulled. "He says insulting your elders is a good way to ensure you'll never have the chance to become one."

  "That would be Callimandicus, high priest of Narashtovik. All your messages will be routed through him."

  "Or his assistants, he says," the white-bearded man says. "He can't be up for all hours of the day."

  This display broke any remaining resistance from the chiefs. Once their loons were all operational, they ran down the hill like children, dispersing among the rocks and grass until line of sight was broken. There, they passed riddles and jokes and insults through the loons. Sudden bursts of laughter racketed over the whisper of wind in the grass. Once they'd all tried them out and Dante had warned them not to leave the connection open for more than an hour per day, the chiefs said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

  "Thank you for defending me," Dante said as they headed north down the hill.

  Hopp glanced at him sidelong. "You expected different?"

  "I thought you thought I was a backfired practical joke who would be cut loose as soon as I failed to bring back a fish."

  "That would be a funny thing for a chief to think of one of his clan-sons." Hopp handed over the bag of loons. It was notably lighter. "Keep these safe. I have the feeling we'll need more soon."

  * * *

  With the loons distributed across the local clans, they quickly located the 200-man legion that had nearly caught the Herons unaware. Too large for any of the clans to have opposed on their own, the legion had advanced unmolested twenty miles east to Borrull, a norren village that had grown inside a former fort. According to a refugee, the residents had been caught unawares, forced to surrender and leave their homes with whatever they could carry. Borrull was positioned on a butte, protected on three sides by sheer cliffs and on the fourth by a thick stone wall. The dozen nearby clans could muster five hundred fighters between them. Hopp doubted it would be enough to retake the fort.

  "What does it matter?" Dante said, poking at his bowl of too-hot fish stew with a wooden spoon. "They're cut off. Miles behind our lines."

  "And what part of the body are people most afraid of being stabbed in?" Blays said.

  Dante frowned. "The balls?"

  "The back, you idiot. If we turn ours toward the frontlines, it could wind up sheathing two hundred Gaskan knives."

  "So post a scout with a loon near the fort. If they try to move out, he alerts the clans."

  "That's how you'd treat this blister?" Hopp said.

  The wind shifted, blowing sweet, dry woodsmoke into Dante's eyes and nose. He picked up and moved around the fire. "Is the fort actually impregnable?"

  "Have you ever known one that was?"

  "Pocket Cove might be. Aside from that? Unbreakable fortresses are as mythical as wish-granting fish."

  "You've caught enough to know, haven't you?" Hopp picked his teeth with a fish bone. "So what do you suggest?"

  "We go see this place for ourselves."

  "Anything else?"

  Dante gave him a look. "Do you always speak in questions?"

  "What form of speech is better than a question? A statement is certain. A question is fluid. To make progress, isn't it better to flow than to sit?"

  "I've got one for you then," Blays said. "What's stopping us from going and taking a look?"

  Hopp got out his loon and spread word to Cally they were looking for any information about Borrull, particularly routes inside. In the morning, Hopp decamped the clan and struck east through the low hills, covering most of the distance to the fort before settling down in a grass-lush draw, where he sent scouts to stand guard and search for water. Dante napped as soon as they made down. It could be a long night.

  At twilight, Blays splashed water on his face, startling him from his blanket. Dante swiped water from his eyes. "That is not an acceptable way to wake a person."

  "Yeah, but it seemed like it would be fun."

  "My thudding heart disagrees."

  "Tell it to shut up. We're on the move."

  Dante stretched, ate a few strips of dried venison, and joined the small team, which consisted of the three humans, Mourn, Hopp, and Erl, a relatively short norren with a long bow and the steady, quiet focus of those who know how to use them. A second contingent of warriors had already advanced to a high hill halfway between camp and Borrull. At its top, they'd gathered wood for a bonfire to light in case the king's soldiers sallied from the fort; ideally, the redshirts would be misled by the signal fire while Hopp's advance party rallied with the reserve contingent to the north. Dante suspected these preparations would wind up completely unnecessary, yet he admired their cunning nonetheless, the easy coordination between clansmen. No wonder the tribes still thrived hundreds of years after the Gaskan empire had swallowed their lands.

  Hopp led them through the early night's darkness in a brisk walk. They moved in silence, pausing whenever an unseen animal crackled through the dead leaves. With the hill looming ahead, hooves thumped across the grass not thirty yards away. Dante jerked down instinctively. There was nearly a second of silence between each bound—not the churning thumps of a charging horse, but the soaring strides of a deer. Hopp flashed him a grin, teeth white in the moonlight.

  The land rose in a wedge to Borrull, plateauing some three hundred feet above the surrounding ground. A couple small fires flickered atop the butte. Hopp circled around the sheer cliffs that surrounded three sides of the fort. He had expressed some optimism they'd find a hidden stairway, an old shepherd's trail or the like, but the cliffs were every bit as impassable as those surrounding Pocket Cove, with screes of loose rock slumped against their feet. After a few hours, their group returned to the front of the wedge convinced its slope was the only way up. The rise was half a mile long and a few hundred yards across, a blank stretch of open grass. Any trees had been lumbered long ago. It was a killing field, coverless and exposed.

  A road reeled straight up the slope's middle. Hopp paralleled it at a distance of fifty yards, grass brushing his thighs. It swallowed Dante to the waist. Mice hopped in the darkness. Near the top of the plateau, a wall of black stone stretched from one edge of the cliffs to the other, hiding the town behind it. A quarter mile from the fort, Hopp stopped and knelt in the grass.

  "What do you think?" he murmured. "Probably about as close as we get, huh?"

  Erl shook his head. Blays clucked his tongue. "I don't know how much more there'd be to see, anyway. It wouldn't be much of a wall if they'd left any man-sized holes in it."

  A mouse paused in the dirt eight feet to Dante's right. "Hold on a minute."

  He lashed out with the nether. The mouse fell in half, bisected through its ribs, twitching. Dante muttered. Another mouse hopped through the grass a few seconds later. This time, Dante shaped a pin of shadows and poked it through the mouse's skull. It fell down without a sound.

  He had it back on its feet a moment later. It waited in perfect stillness until he commanded it to run up the hill. It disappeared into the jungle of grass.

  "What did I just witness?" Hopp said.

  "Dante's love of animals in action," Blays said.

  The mouse hurtled through the high stalks, dew clinging to its fur. Dante withdrew his vision. "Spying. And if they can pick off that mouse
, we may as well pack up and go home right now."

  Sprinting all-out, the undead mouse reached the walls within minutes. Hints of smoke reached its nose. Two turrets flanked the iron-banded doors of the gate. Dante sent the mouse squirming underneath the doors. It entered a short, fat hall with a second set of doors waiting at its end. Black arrow slits were cut into the walls. If the norren were able to break through the first doors, the defenders would choke the hall with their dead before they could pound through the second.

  But there was no grille. He wouldn't have known what to do about a grille.

  He brought the mouse back outside the doors and ran it along the walls just to see what it could see. Another turret stood near both ends of the wall, commanding the plains. Besides that and the rounded merlons along its upper edge, the wall was all but featureless, solid granite several feet thick and some fifteen feet high.

  Dante dropped his sight from the mouse. "There are gates."

  "What, for getting in and out?" Blays said. "I would have thought they'd just jump off the cliffs. Much faster."

  "I can bring down gates."

  Hopp peered at him in the moonlight. "By yourself? Are you hiding a battering ram on your person?"

  "And it makes walking quite a chore," Dante said. "Listen. Doors are built to keep men out. They're not much good at stopping the nether."

  Hopp grinned, foxlike. "Do you suppose it's time for another meeting?"

  * * *

  As valuable as the loons had already proven to be, conducting a full-fledged discussion between a dozen chieftains was well beyond Cally's capabilities as the hub of their web. Instead, Hopp reached Cally, who in turn spoke to the chiefs about an in-person battle-council. Two days later, Hopp took Dante and Blays to reconvene at the hilltop with the circle of stones. All the chiefs from the previous gathering were there: red-haired Kella; sunweathered old Wult; three-fingered Stann. There were also two more chiefs Dante didn't recognize and one he did, a middle-aged man whose left cheek was nearly beardless from crosshatched scars—Orlen of the Nine Pines.