The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Not an insurmountable problem," Vee added. "It is not like the problem of why we are born only to suffer and die."

  "Really, a rather minor problem. A dim constellation in the vast starscape of all that is wrong."

  Blays pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. "Have you ever considered this problem only exists because you're too busy talking about it to solve it?"

  "You see," Orlen said, "we don't know where it is."

  2

  "I see," Blays said. "Do you remember where you put it last?"

  Orlen narrowed his eyes. Smoke rose from the fire in white walls, screening the stars. "In the hands of a Gaskan lord."

  "What!" Dante said.

  "It was taken, along with every member of our cousins the Clan of the Green Lake, some weeks ago. When was that, Vee?"

  Vee tapped her hairless chin. "Three weeks ago. That was when we found the lake-crabs, remember? On the way back from finding the bodies of our clan-cousins. The empty yurts. The wailing young who'd hidden in the woods."

  "Oh yes, the crabs. You do not often find the lake-crabs. I had begun to think they had all died out, or at least moved to another lake."

  Dante pressed his fist against his lips, waiting for his anger to subside enough to open his mouth. "If the Quivering Bow has been taken, I pledge our immediate support to getting it back."

  Blays cocked his head. "I call foul on that pledge. My support is thoroughly undecided."

  "If that bow has fallen into enemy hands—"

  "Yes, yes, then we'll all spend our next Falmac's Eve watching the bunny races in hell. I'd like to at least know why the clan hasn't already gone after the bow—and their cousins or whoever—before promising we'll do what they won't." He glanced at Orlen. "No offense."

  "None taken," the man said. "We were simply waiting on the word of Josun Joh."

  "Josun Joh?"

  "As in the god," Dante said.

  "Oh," Blays said. "That Josun Joh."

  "He looks out for the people, shows them the way when they're lost. Despite only having one eye."

  Orlen nodded. "He lost it in a bet. Over whether he could put out his own eye."

  "I thought it was to use it as bait to finally catch Sansanomman, the eternal catfish," Vee frowned.

  "That doesn't make any sense."

  "You say you were waiting?" Dante cut in.

  "Today, Josun Joh spoke to me," Orlen said. "Tomorrow, we move."

  "Then I'd like to come with you. I can't speak for my friend."

  The two norren leaders exchanged an unreadable glance. Orlen considered the fire. "Josun Joh said we'd find an unexpected and powerful ally. If you help us recover our cousin-clan, you may have the Quivering Bow."

  Dante extended his hand. "Agreed."

  "Good." Orlen waved his thick hand. "Now please leave the fire and go to your tent. Outsiders aren't allowed here."

  Dante forced his eyes not to roll. He stood. "I understand."

  Mourn appeared beside the fire. "Your yurt's over here. It doesn't smell very good."

  He was right. Inside the deer-leather tent, its fluffy cloth padding smelled musty and faintly fishy, conditions made worse by the fact it was notably warmer than the outside air. Dante conjured a soft white light to illuminate the bare interior. Blays slung out his blanket and sat down with a sigh.

  "This whole thing could be a wild goose chase, you know. And I don't see how a wild goose is going to do any good if the Territories get invaded."

  Dante licked his thumb and smudged away the black fringes of the fresh scab on his hand. "Even if we don't come out of it with a weapon of awful power, rescuing their cousins will only strengthen one of the nastiest fighting units in the entire region. It's the opportunity to put down a group of norren-slavers, too. How is there any downside?"

  "First, we don't know the timescale. Second, if Cally needs to reach us, he may as well shout up his own ass for all the good it'll do him."

  "Since when did you care about what Cally wants?"

  "It's not Cally I'm concerned about." Blays gestured at the wilds beyond the yurt wall. "My worshippers will have a tough time reaching my grave if I'm struck dead in some stupid forest."

  "A long trek will just prove the purity of their faith."

  "True enough. Make it a tasteful marker, though. No more than twenty statues of weeping women."

  Dante woke in the predawn darkness to the sound of feet squelching in the mud. He brought the nether to his hands, lying silent, until he remembered he was among a strange but hospitable people. He had been dreaming of walking through a forest like this one, but beneath the layer of leaves and grass lurked a gaping abyss, and his feet kept plunging into the open nothing, exposing them to the unseen and unknown beings lurking beneath.

  Outside, looming silhouettes stalked the shoreline, rolling up yurts and drawing in the nets. Others knelt beside flat rocks, spread cloths to soak up any dew, and smoothed yellow parchment atop the cloths, preparing for the dawn light considered best for their stark line-paintings. Smoked fish carried on the cold breeze. When Dante returned from relieving himself, Mourn waited by the tent. He had clearly been designated the go-between, the buffer between the strangers and the tight circle of the clan.

  "We move in an hour," the norren said. "Assuming you want him to come, alert the snoring thing you call your friend."

  Blays groused and hacked like an angry duck, but calmed down quickly over a breakfast of dried fish and herb-crusted bread. Minutes after dawn, the clan split into two parts: the young warriors and hunters ready to track down their cousins of the Green Lake, and those who'd stay behind—those too old, young, or injured for travel, along with a small contingent of the battle-ready to provide for them and see them from harm. There were no tears shed, no speeches or goodbye ceremonies. The travelers simply walked from the lake while the remainder continued to mend nets, add brushstrokes to parchments, and pluck herbs from the boisterous woods.

  "Now that's a farewell party," Blays said. "Did anyone even bother to look up?"

  "Either we'll be back or we won't," Mourn said. "What's there to get so excited about?"

  "Rum? Corsets? The promise of rest at the end of a long day's travel?"

  "Fleeting distractions from the only thought worth having: you're going to die."

  Blays glanced from him Dante. "You two should talk. You're like two peas from the same moldy, withered, sprouted-from-a-grave-at-midnight pod."

  Dante snorted. "Death's inevitability makes it the very thing least worth thinking about. You don't see hermits retiring to mountaintops to contemplate the nature of smelling bad after a hard day's work."

  Mourn exhaled through his nose, the steam of his breath condensing in his mustache. "Well, you'll have plenty of time to think about how wrong you are once you're dead."

  Birds twittered from bare branches. Warmthless sunlight fell from the canopy like an old acorn. When the group stopped to rest before midday, a quartet of hunters quickly returned with a steaming boar. The clan fell upon it, skinning, gutting, and butchering. A broad-shouldered middle-aged woman who Dante thought but wasn't certain was Vee's sister allotted slices of liver and raw muscle to everyone on the march—Blays sucked his down so fast Dante doubted he'd chewed—then handed off the remainder to be packed in thick fern leaves. The clan resumed the walk two hours later.

  The pace was steady and perhaps comfortable by norren standards, but to Dante, whose legs were several inches shorter, it was just this side of grueling, worsened by toe-grabbing roots and heel-sliding slicks of rain-rotted leaves. He had to soothe his physical exhaustion with draughts of nether every couple hours, a tradeoff that left his muscles relaxed and unsore but which left something at his core lacking and ground-down—not his spirit, but something with more physical weight. Something more like his wind. He could see the strain in Blays' face, too, the limp he tried to conceal as the sun shrank and his blisters swelled. Blays would never complain about anything real, of course.
Not in earshot of Dante, the norren, or any other being with a set of ears and the capacity for speech. When he slept, Dante swept the swelling from Blays' feet, then collapsed into unconsciousness himself.

  By the second day, they were some forty miles from the camp by the lake and sixty miles or more from the village where, until rumors of the bow ripped them away, they'd been drilling norren militia to stand against cavalry. Too heavy to ride anything but the biggest workhorses, norren had as little experience defending themselves from mounted riders as Dante had defending himself from rainbows.

  "Quite the walk," Blays said once they'd pitched their yurt and sat down to rest in the twilight. "It's enough to make a man question where he's going."

  "After the one thing that can make a difference."

  "Wild geese?"

  "A stick. Specifically, a curved one that can destroy a fortress in a single shot."

  It was a concept, however simple, he hadn't been able to completely convey to Blays, at least not in terms the blond man found convincing. Cally had first laid it out to Dante a year and a half ago on a brief return to the Sealed Citadel in Narashtovik, a summer visit where the bayside humidity was nearly intolerable even at the top of the high, breezy tower where Cally liked to literally look down on the citizens shouldering each other aside in the narrow streets beyond the Citadel walls. The sapling-thin old man hadn't spoken for some time after Dante joined him on the stone balcony, which was fine with Dante; so long as he was standing still, he could almost stop sweating.

  "How do you fight a war that isn't a war?" Cally said at last. "More properly, how do you avert the war in the first place?" He ran knob-knuckled fingers through a beard he refused to comb despite years of protests from the servants tasked with making the Council look properly holy. "Think of it this way: a man with a club only has to shake it around and scream a little to convince the man without a club to back down. We're the man with the club, but we don't actually want to strike Setteven, the unarmed man. Just to menace them into doing what we want, i.e. letting the norren do whatever they want."

  Dante frowned. "But in this case, the other man is actually many thousand men, and instead of being unarmed, they're actually carrying an army's worth of swords, spears, bows, axes—"

  "Yes, well, no need to get literal. It's about the idea. It's about convincing them they feel like a helpless man while believing we're waving about a frightening and lethal club."

  "Have you ever considered writing a book? It would be a shame for this wisdom to be lost to the ages."

  Cally's brows arched into a scowl, a movement which, given their shrubby mass, might have forced a lesser man to sit down. "I am trying to impart to you a philosophy of preparation that could save the lives of thousands. You could at least pretend to take it to heart."

  "I'll take it to spleen."

  "As there's no chance you'll take it to brain, I will consider that good enough. The point is we couldn't possibly win a conventional war of army versus army. The alternative, then, is to explore all the ways to fight that aren't conventional—to find new clubs, and to steal them from the enemy."

  Despite his efforts to wind the old man up, Dante had taken the idea to at least one and possibly several of his organs, and felt confident Cally would approve of his current detour. It was, after all, the pursuit of a very large and nasty bludgeon. If Dante had passed the opportunity by, Cally would no doubt have spent more time yelling at him than he would have spent chasing down the bow.

  "You champion ideas like this all the time," he told Blays. "I think the only reason you're against it is because you didn't come up with it yourself."

  "I'm just tired of being in the dark here." Blays elbowed Mourn, who gave him a glare that could strike fire in a downpour. "Josun Joh told you anything about when we might stop walking and start arriving?"

  "Don't mock him."

  "Well?"

  "Any day now. The next one, I'd think."

  Dante didn't allow his hopes up, but the next morning they intercepted the river where it weaved between modest hills and short cliffs, a quarter mile wide and as gray as the clouds overhead. A dirt path followed the shoreline. Within miles, the clan stopped. Vee and a pair of warriors continued on to a cluster of dark holes speckling a rocky cliff above the stretches of flat green land bracketing the shores.

  "Cling," Mourn explained. "Home of the man who can point us toward our cousins."

  Blays nodded. "Who aren't here themselves."

  "Oh no. Do you expect everything in your life to be that simple?"

  "No, but it's easier to complain as if I do."

  Vee and the others returned a half hour later; though they made no specific announcements about it, Dante gathered that the coast had been cleared. The Clan of the Nine Pines moved on as a whole, slipping double-file down the hard-beaten path to Cling. From a distance, Dante hadn't seen anything but the caves, and had marked the place as a literal backwoods—just one step up, civilization-wise, from the nomad-warriors he traveled with. Closer, though, he could see docks and barges past the trees at river's edge, and smelled that particularly potent brew of hog shit that only arises from organized farming. On the other side of the path, the fields were empty, brown, and tilled. The path switched from dirt into a bizarre foreign material. Dante could see no seams in it, suggesting a single sheet of hard-fired clay or the like, yet the path's solid mass couldn't be anything but stone. He said as much to Mourn.

  "Best roadmaster in the territories, Codd," the norren said. "It's a wonder the humans haven't kidnapped him."

  Despite stooping for a closer look, Dante could only make out a handful of seams separating the stones that formed the road; most were artfully concealed as part of the sandstone's grain, with others too fine to see even when he knew they must be there. Nor did it try to imitate the straight lines of many well-paved roads. Instead, it followed the subtle contours of the landscape with the same integrity that the river followed the low places through the hills. Indeed, given its appearance as a single flow of stone, it was possible, if you looked at it in the right way, to see the road as another river, a heavy creek from a realm where frozen water didn't form ice, but stone.

  He grew dizzy and straightened up. "This must have taken an eternity to build."

  "Codd doesn't build. He sculpts."

  "Sorry," Dante said. He should have known better. When it came to tangible objects like the road, norren approached their craft with the same dedication and piety as a prophet approached his lord. He had once seen an old woman go on carving a soapstone owl while her house literally burned down around her. Only when she passed out from the smoke had her son been able to drag her from the flames. "I've never seen anything like it."

  "Of course you haven't."

  Ahead, Orlen came to a stop. The clan stood in a square as finely cobbled as the road, a shallow bowl of seamless stone, the natural colors of which painted a vast mosaic of a salmon, its upper jaw as wickedly curved as a hawk's. At one end of the plaza, a single boulder, smooth and rounded as a river pebble, served as a podium or dais. Wooden shops ringed the plaza, some utilitarian, some elegantly simple, but beside the mastery of the plaza and the roads feeding into it, all equally forgettable.

  The land between plaza and river was grassy and empty. Probably a field for festivals, prayer, and whatever else drew the crowds. The clan set camp in a field between the docks and warehouses. Flat-bottomed boats drifted downriver, bulging with barrels and tarps. Uphill, the black eyes of caves gazed down on the mild bustle of the port town. While the rank and file warriors spread blankets and rolled out the yurts, Orlen and Vee started up the road switchbacking Cling's highest hill.

  Blays visored his hand against the afternoon sun. "Where are they off to?"

  "To see the mayor about the kidnappings," Mourn said.

  Dante gestured uphill. "Then let's go."

  "Oh, that's not allowed."

  "How are we supposed to help track down your cousins when we can't q
uestion the only people who know where they went?"

  "By letting Vee and Orlen ask the questions themselves. And then by following them."

  "To hell with that." Blays took off jogging. "And not the hell for fun people, either."

  Mourn dogged their heels, running close enough to trip them. "You can't go up there!"

  Dante didn't look back. "Our upward progress suggests otherwise."

  "Pedantically speaking, you can move up this hill. But don't say I didn't warn you when they throw you back down it. Because that is what I am doing right now."

  They caught the two clan chieftains before they were halfway up the switchback. Vee gazed at Mourn with distilled reproach, her orange eyes withering him. Orlen coughed into his hand and then considered the contents of his palm as if they contained a half-ruined map.

  "No," he said.

  "No what?" Dante said.

  "Further."

  "Why on earth not?"

  "Because you are a human, and this is norren business for norren ears."

  At first he thought this was a strange joke—in contrast to every other part of them, the ears of norren were bewilderingly small, coin-shaped and often lost beneath their tangled hair—but Orlen and Vee were staring at him with the gravity of a prince's funeral.

  "I'm aware of your tradition," he tried, "but given how many lives may be at stake, I think an exception—"

  Vee shifted forward. "The next step you take up this hill will be your last with the clan." She drew her brows together. "That sounded more ominous than I meant. I didn't mean we'd throw you down the hill. Just that you'd no longer be permitted to travel with us."

  "This is stupid," Blays said, but apparently had nothing more convincing than that. Considering the affair settled, the two norren chieftains turned and continued uphill.

  Mourn folded his arms. "See how futile that was?"

  "So what now? Sit around and wait to be told what's next?"

  "No," Mourn said. "You don't have to sit."

  But Dante was tired from yet another day of relentless walking, so sitting beside his tent in the field was exactly what he did, at least until he nodded off, at which point he slumped around waiting for word from above. News arrived after nightfall when Blays shoved him all the way over, jarring him awake. Orlen and Vee had returned from the hill.