The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We were rats recently enough," Dante said, gazing over the houses in their various states of decay. "Larrimore said he'd been seen in this quarter. If you were a rat, where would you hide from our soldiers?"

  "A basement, to hide my light," Blays said. He sucked his teeth. "Or the second floor of a place where the stairs had caved in. If someone came for me in my sleep I'd hear them scrabbling around before they could get up to me."

  Dante nodded, impressed, but didn't say so. They made a few circles of the weed-choked streets, examining the houses with fresh litter or footprints in the yellowed grass and snow-patched dirt, spooking a few grimy men ensconced in their filth in single underfurnished rooms. In the sixth or seventh house of their search they saw a tuft of long black hair beneath a blanket. Dante called their quarry's name, got no response. He walked toward the man and nudged him with his boot. Stiff. Blays took out his sword. Dante knelt and pulled back the blanket. The body's cheek looked bruised where it rested on the dirt floor, its open eyes dull and glassy. Dante shook his head.

  When twilight came, the hour of roaming, they returned to the gateless gap in the wall and sank down against the stone, watching the shadowy figures of men in the distance. Footsteps echoed from the other side of the walls and they put their hands on their weapons. A blond man walked through, eyes darting to the scrape of swords being put away. He hurried into the growing gloom.

  "Are they going to string you up if you don't find the guy?"

  "They'll probably start with you," Dante said. "Give me something to think about for next time."

  "I'd give them something to think about," Blays said. He picked up a stick and flipped his wrist in a tight circle, stabbing at the air.

  "Been learning much?"

  "A bit," Blays said. "They don't fight as dirty as Robert showed me."

  Dante grinned. He hadn't thought of Robert in days. "Then they won't be expecting it when we make our move."

  "Nor will I, at this rate."

  Dante put a finger to his lips. More bootsteps, slowing as they approached the walls, as if their wearer were nearing the end of his journey. The man began whistling. In the day's last light Dante saw a bristle-bearded man emerge from the wall into the dirty street. A light, steady wind tossed locks of black hair over his eyes and nose. Dante let him get a ways down the street, then stood and moved to cut off the way back inside the gates, Blays half a step behind him.

  "Ryant Briggs!" he called in the husky, cheerful voice Larrimore liked to use when he was delivering bad news. The man spun, his smile freezing on his lips.

  "Who are you?" he said in Mallish, which came as only a mild surprise. His name was southern. He squinted at the pair. Dante edged forward, falling out of the long shadow of the wall and into the soft light of dusk. Ryant's gaze dropped to his neck. "A trained dog? Can you play dead?"

  "My name is Dante Galand. You're to come with me."

  "And you're to kiss my puckered ass," Ryant said, face gone tight. His left hand lowered to the short sword on his right hip.

  "I wouldn't," Blays said.

  "They'll give me much worse at the Citadel."

  "You've been robbing monks," Dante said. He took another step.

  "I had a brother in Bressel," Ryant said, and Dante stopped short to hear the city's name. "I say'had' because I heard he died on the road a few weeks ago. Killed in a skirmish." He glanced beyond the wall to the hulking mass of Cathedral and Citadel miles deeper into the city. "Surely you've read the scriptures," he said, returning his eyes to Dante's. "Do you remember the part where they compel the church to drag the innocent into its squabbles?"

  "What's happening in Bressel?" Blays said. His hands hung at his sides, empty for the moment.

  "For all their talk, these people can't take the city," Ryant spat. It was like he'd been waiting for them, Dante saw, had been stewing in his reasons with no audience to which he could explain them. "So they camp in the woods and ambush the nobles and guildsmen and clergy and soldiers whenever they leave the walls. The sure sign a god's on your side, when you're forced to squat in the woods like a cur. They say the people are remembering the old ways, though, that they're joining the fight. For all I know Bressel's burnt by now."

  The boys looked at each other for a long moment. They'd speculated sometimes on how things were going in the south, but no one had been able to give them any real news. Dante wanted to press for more, but Ryant would be in the hands of the Citadel soon, might say anything to ease his time if he were put to the knife or the boots—could even, unlikely as it may seem, speak about the boys' unnatural interest in the events of their homeland.

  "Unbuckle your blade and come with us," Dante said to Ryant. "They may find mercy when they hear your story, but if you try to run or resist, I'll grant you none.

  "Yeah, go on. Do as you're told."

  "You don't know a thing about why I'm here," Dante said. He tensed himself. Ryant smiled with half his mouth.

  "I know enough," the man said. He pinched his fingers together and the boys were swallowed in pure blackness. Blays' sword rang out from somewhere beside Dante. He drew his own and heard boots pounding away from them.

  "Careful," Dante said, then ran after the sound of the man's feet, clenching his teeth at the blind plunge over uneven ground. He managed not to trip and dashed free of the shadowsphere and into the sudden brightness of twilight. Ryant disappeared around the rough-edge corner of a house a score of yards ahead. The boys sprinted after him, making a wide turn around the house in case he'd planted himself against its wall in waiting. Up ahead Ryant glanced over his shoulder and slipped in the snow, cursing as he bounced against the ground. He hauled himself up before he'd finished falling, faltered on his right ankle, then cursed again and ran on with little drop in speed. Dante closed to twenty feet. Ryant weaved through pines, ducking branches. A foot-high fragment of what had once been a full wall sprawled out in front of him and he vaulted it, crying out as his feet hit frozen dirt. He popped up, jogging backwards, and waved a hand at Dante. Fire whoomped up and Dante bent double, hand trailing the ground to steady himself. A strange anger took him—as if it were somehow offensive this man should try to kill him in order to save his own life—and Dante blanked his thoughts and wrapped the nether around Ryant's body in the opposite trick of what Gabe had shown him. Ryant's legs froze up and he toppled forward, sliding facefirst through the snow. Dante approached quickly, Blays circling to his right.

  Dante dug his knee into the man's back and yanked his arms behind him. He bound his hands and elbows tight with the rope he'd taken for his task, leaving Ryant's legs unsecured. Let him walk his own self all that way. He gave the knots at the man's wrists another tug.

  "I'm going to let you up now," Dante panted, "and if you try anything other than walking exactly where I tell you I'll reduce you to a fine red mist."

  Ryant only gurgled in reply, his throat caught by Dante's shadowy grip. Dante let the nether fall away, feeling its reluctance to part, its primal urge to clench Ryant's throat until his breath stopped. Freed, the man gagged, gasped, curled up as his body rediscovered it could move. Dante gave him a moment to regain his wind, then grabbed the ropes around his arms and, with Blays' help, hauled him to his feet.

  "I'm going to curse your name the instant before they trim my thread," Ryant said, still half-choked. "One morning you'll wake up dead and never live again. Or maybe your arm will go black and drop off. Or maybe it won't be your arm, it'll be—"

  "Get moving," Dante said, shoving him in the back.

  Ryant had twisted his ankle in his first fall and their progress was slow. Blays took point, cloak thrown back over his left shoulder to keep his sword visible. Dante walked behind Ryant, eyes on anyone who drew too close while he kept his mind open to any surge of shadow from their prisoner.

  "You can still let me go," Ryant said when they were waved through the Ingate after Dante'd shown the wall-guard his badge. The city lay under full dark by then, lit by sporadic lante
rns outside public houses and at the more major street corners and by the weak aid of the moon through an overcast sky.

  "Be quiet," Dante said.

  "Look in your heart. I haven't hurt a soul. That's more than can be said for them."

  "Boo hoo," Blays said from over his shoulder.

  "It isn't a matter of justice," Dante said.

  "What, then?" Ryant pressed, trying to catch Dante's eye. Dante shoved him forward again. "Do you like to hear men beg? Is that what tightens your trousers? The sound of a man's voice who knows he's at your power?"

  "Shut up," Dante said. He grabbed the knots at Ryant's wrists and twisted them so the ropes cut into his skin. Ryant cried out softly. "You don't know a damned thing."

  The man went quiet. From there, like the prisoners Dante'd seen brought up to the Crooked Tree outside Whetton, even Blays and Robert themselves, Ryant was docile, following their course without speaking, accepting orders of movement with a downturned face. Why did they do that? Why didn't Ryant try to kill him? Did the man's dead brother mean so little to him? For that matter, how was robbing monks supposed to honor his memory? It made as little sense as whatever divine scheme had necessitated his brother's death in the first place, or why the house of Arawn had ever had to face the Third Scour, or why Dante had been chosen to stop a war he couldn't be certain was unjust. He felt no pity for Ryant. So the man had snapped awake enough to see something was wrong. Bully for him. All he'd done with that fresh vision was skulk around the ruins taking pennies from those who'd wronged him. Dante's own ambition was no less than the killing of the order's head. If, as Gabe believed, even that was no guarantee for any kind of change, what chance did a man like Ryant have to make some sense of his life? No wonder he didn't struggle when it came time to give it up.

  Dante bore his prisoner to the eastern door from which he and Blays had set out and hailed the guards with his name. They opened it and led Dante's troop single-file down the dark passage through the Citadel's walls, the entry being too narrow to comfortably walk shoulder to shoulder; not content with that precaution, the passage's interior was lined with holes meant for firing arrows and stabbing pikes at anyone with the right combination of strength and stupidity to try to force their way through it. Perhaps they could kill her, Dante thought, and then just walk on out under color of Larrimore's errands. On the other hand, what was the hurry? Who said killing her would solve anything? Couldn't he see a while longer to his training with Nak while he worked out a safer route to the process of transmuting Samarand's living body into a rotting corpse?

  "Excellent," Larrimore said when he saw the three waiting for him inside the keep's main hall. He tucked his lower lip beneath his upper teeth and grinned, nose sticking out like a fox's. "That room downstairs has been feeling a touch empty since you left it. It'll be glad to once more be a home."

  "He tried to set me on fire," Dante said.

  Larrimore's eyes flicked up and down his form. "You don't smell burnt." He spoke orders in Gaskan to a pair of guards and they led silent Ryant away. He turned back to Dante, who lingered in the hall, uncertain what he was expecting. "Well done. If only we'd had you to send after yourself."

  "We'd still have gotten away," Blays said.

  "Probably," Larrimore said. He raised an eyebrow their way. "What are you waiting for? A knighthood? Get off to sleep. Busy days ahead."

  He strode away into the belly of the keep. Probably to let Samarand know of the capture. A strange pride crept across Dante's chest as he exited to the yard. He'd done the service of the enemy, but he had done it well. An average man-at-arms would have died to Ryant's simple sorcery. In his brief time in the Citadel Dante had vaulted from a life of self-education and fleeing for his life to one of formal, rigorous instruction and meaningful work. He could be important here, he knew. He was already useful in a manner he'd never been. Nak thought he was bright, if occasionally too aware of it. Already Larrimore trusted him enough to give him tasks beyond the grasp of 99 men out of 100. With no other obligations splitting his focus and loyalty, Dante felt certain he could one day have been one of the twelve men on the council. But he would have to give that up for the well-being of his homeland, a place that banned the light of Arawn and had recently tried to execute Blays and Robert, two of his only friends. He could see no way in which that was fair.

  For all those thoughts, as he returned to his cell in the chapel he could see nothing more than the slump of Ryant's shoulders, his slack face, the hollows of his eyes as he disappeared into the dungeons. Ryant probably thought the wrong done onto him was the rightful price of his resistance. He was probably even so vain as to think there was some meaning to whatever would be done to him next—whether it was torture and execution or no more than interminable imprisonment. Well, Ryant was an idiot. Either way he'd be forgotten, just one more body in a city already choked with the yards of the dead. His brother was gone and now he would be too. That was the way of things, Dante decided. With the gods and the stars so far removed from human matters, the only justice to be found was what you took for yourself.

  15

  By morning he learned language with Nak and by evening they trained with the nether. Dante's methods were undisciplined, Nak noted, crude if effective, and the monk showed him cleaner paths to channel the nether and more closely bend it to his thoughts.

  "Most men have to struggle with every step of this, you know," Nak said in mild confusion after Dante had mastered another lesson on his third attempt. "You fly through it like a bolt. It's less like I'm teaching than that I'm revealing things your mind already knows."

  They worked in the cold of the open yard beside the chapel, filling the space with shadows and light, with bursts of flame that melted the snows on the grounds and spikes of force that could crack small rocks. When soldiers suffered injuries in training or in scuffles in the streets, they were brought to the chapel and Nak showed him the proper methods of mending flesh and bone. Through all his education, the bald priest made no mention of the peculiar talents of Jack Hand and the few men like him mentioned in the Cycle. It was as if death, for as much as the prayers and studies of the priests and acolytes of Arawn centered on the life after life, were a thing beyond them, the one depth forbidden to be plumbed. It was a blind spot, Dante saw. A thing he could exploit.

  Larrimore came to him with a new task most every day and Dante'd cease his lessons with Nak to deliver sealed letters across town and wait for a hastily-scribbled reply; to place orders with smiths and tailors; to escort priests and monks and nobles and ambassadors through the danger of the city to the relative peace of the wilds; to tail emissaries and messengers from other cities and lands and see to whom they spoke away from the eyes of the Sealed Citadel. Once he was sent to capture another man, and when the man drew his blade instead of letting himself be tied, Dante struck open his guts with a thrust of his hand. He left the body where it fell and went back to the keep to let them know to send a team if they wanted to pick it up.

  A week into this routine, Blays asked again about Samarand, about their true purpose, and Dante answered him like before: in time. He kept his eyes and ears open as he did Larrimore's bidding, and between gossip at the keep and the fragments of conversation he could understand from the well-dressed men bearing the colors of lords and territories all throughout Gask and beyond, he began to piece together that something was coming to a head. The council factored heavily in this intrigue, meeting frequently behind closed doors high up in the keep. More doors opened to Dante by the day—he'd had a reputation before he'd arrived at the Citadel, he discovered, based on the gruesome tendency for none of the men dispatched to kill him to ever be heard from again, and as he carried out Larrimore's will in the field it only grew: he was grimly efficient, they said, already more talented than half the priests who weren't on the council, cold and harsh as sunlight glinting from snow. He was on the rise. Nothing was shut to his blend of ambition and ability.

  Nothing, for now, but the doors t
o the council.

  He learned the Citadel's regular orders for weapons were being sent to the city smiths rather than their own forges, which were busy dealing with the bricks of silver as big as his forearm that disappeared behind their walls each day. Dante explored and lingered as much as he dared, intentionally losing himself in the twisting halls of the keep so that, when the time came to still Samarand's heart, he could flee the halls without a wasted step. Priests and guards sometimes caught him in places he had no strict business to be in and he'd lie about an errand of Samarand's Hand or walk on by without a word, as if he were too wrapped up in his latest responsibilities to even notice their questions and turned faces. Once he'd learned the general lay of the keep he started waking earlier, finding excuses to slip away from Nak and walk alone in its halls in the hopes of at last hearing the details of whatever they prepared for—and perhaps, though Dante didn't think it outright, to hear something that would push him into completing the task Cally had sent him here for. When he delivered letters he crowded close to their recipients, daring glances at their responses as they wrote them. He was cutting it close, he knew. He was earning their trust, but he was still an outsider. He wasn't certain they'd believed him about the book, and if they hadn't, why they were giving him so much rope. Sometimes when he heard Larrimore's laughter it no longer sounded innocent (at least, as innocent as Larrimore could claim to be), but scored with an undercurrent of scorn, as if the man could see the treachery hidden in Dante's heart. The slightest noise could make him start like a rabbit. His nerves were getting too frayed to maintain his double purpose.

  If he couldn't breach the council doors in person, perhaps he could do it by proxy. The Sealed Citadel was secured against the intrusion of men, but wasn't meant to keep out rats. The night before the next council was scheduled he lay awake in bed until the chapel was long silent, then crept out to the pantry. He waited no more than a minute before the dark blot of a rat wiggled across the floor in search of crumbs. Dante snapped its neck with a brief flicker of nether, then surrounded it with a stronger hand of shadows and reanimated it as he'd done in the past. He closed his eyes and saw the pantry from its alien perspective so near to the ground. Heart racing, he opened the front door of the chapel and sent the beast scurrying toward the keep. Its doors were shut firm and Dante had to wait for half an hour before someone opened them on a midnight errand. He made the rat run inside, head swimming as the ground rushed past its nose.