The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We're a thousand miles from Bressel. To the norren, the things you make are a reflection of your soul. That's why it's such a big deal. Passing off someone else's work as your own is like plagiarizing the Cycle of Arawn."

  "A great way to get lynched by humorless scolds?"

  "And to get him to talk."

  "Now?"

  "He's miles from town. We can catch him on the way back."

  "What about him?" Blays nodded at Mourn, who idled at a bakery across the plaza, crumbling bread into his mouth. Out of shame or confusion, the young norren hadn't mentioned suddenly falling asleep the other night, but he hadn't ceased following them, either.

  "Let him follow. If Banning tries to kill us, we'll have a witness."

  Blays went back to the tent for his swords. While he was gone, Dante sat down and closed his eyes. Banning was still in the woods to the north, traipsing Cling-ward with the help of a tall staff, a package tucked gently under his other arm. Dante didn't bother fetching his own sword. He doubted Banning would attack them outright, whether in feigned outrage to their accusation or to stop them from telling others, but if Dante was wrong—and given how seriously the norren took these things, there was always a chance—his middling swordplay wouldn't be much use against the towering mayor.

  They puffed their way up the switchback road, then followed the dirt trail traced across the hill's flat crest. Mourn lagged a hundred feet behind, but once the trail gave out and the two of them cut across the high brown grasses of the open field, the young norren jogged to catch up, his face dark with annoyance at being forced to run after his troublesome human charges.

  "Where are you going?" Mourn said when he reached their side.

  "Our daily stroll across the middle of nowhere," Blays said.

  "You're not supposed to leave town."

  "And my mother didn't want me to grow up a swordsman like my dad, either, but that didn't stop me from disgracing her dearly departed memory."

  "Turn around and get back to your tent."

  Dante scowled over his shoulder. "If you'd like to try to stop us, please let me know where to send your remains. Now go back to town and beseech Josun Joh to tell you what to do next. It's worked great so far."

  "Josun Joh's words are real." Mourn's voice sounded so hurt Dante almost stopped.

  "You've heard him?"

  "Not me personally. Vee and Orlen do most of the talking."

  "Then how do you know they're not making it all up?"

  "Some summers ago, the clan headed to the highlands to wait out the heat. The peaks are high and jagged there, ready to tear open the belly of any stupid and lazy clouds who get too low. But it was dry there too, because sometimes the gods hate us. And who can blame them, when every smart lad in the land is ready to denounce their very existence." Mourn waited a moment before going on. "We were gathering jen-nuts when Orlen went stock still. Josun Joh had spoken to him, he said. There was a fire past the western ridge. We needed to move.

  "We traveled east. Within an hour, the fire jumped over the ridge and swept over the valley where we'd been earlier that morning. Maybe we'd have had enough time to get away. But we were on foot, like always, and fire can outrun any man when it's hungry enough."

  "Orlen probably smelled smoke," Dante said.

  "When Josun Joh spoke to him, the wind was blowing westward."

  "So he saw the smoke. Fire has a unique property of being visible."

  Mourn tromped through the weeds in silence. "At least tell me where you're going."

  Blays touched the pommel of the sword at his hip. "Oh, just to kick the mayor until the stars whirring around his head show him the sign to tell us where the hell your cousins are."

  "I think Vee hates me," Mourn declared. "Why else would she assign me to you two?"

  "Maybe she hates us."

  "It's a stupid thing, really. You're running off to gods know where, and what am I supposed to do to stop you? Attack you? I don't think any good will come of that. Except for the local worms. So I'm supposed to run off and tell mommy and daddy like a spited toddler?" Mourn shook his head at the state of things. "You know what, to hell with them. If they want to guard you, they can guard you themselves. We're beating up the mayor? Let's go beat up the mayor."

  The hill sloped down into a low forest of birches and young pines. Star-shaped yellow flowers dotted the roots of the trees. Dante shut his eyes to glance through the fly's and tripped into a pile of pine needles. Smelling sap, he kept his eyes shut.

  "Are you okay?" Mourn said. "I think he's dead."

  "I'm not dead." In the fly's fractured vision, dozens of Bannings hiked up the side of a hillside more or less identical to their own. He ordered the fly up, stomach lurching. He managed to prevent himself from puking until the bug had located them among the trees, confirming the mayor was no more than a half mile away. When Dante was finished, he kicked pine needles over the hot, sour mess, gargled with cool water, and gestured down the hill. "Stop staring at me and start looking for our man."

  They need hardly have bothered. Within a minute, Banning began singing to himself, an eerie, droning tune that carried down the hillside like the honking of morbid geese. When Dante stepped in his path, the spire-tall norren stopped less than a foot away. Dante tensed, preparing to fling himself out of the way.

  "I know you." Banning's face darkened. "Just because the cliff isn't here doesn't mean I won't throw you down it."

  "You should at least hear what I'm about to say," Dante said. "Then some people might even not blame you for what you've done."

  "Talk sense or talk less."

  "That package under your arm. Is your name on it?"

  Banning didn't glance down. "It's the last stroke I make."

  "Typical of most artists, I imagine. Except, apparently, the man who actually paints yours."

  The mayor's gaze was as still and deep as a lake. "Pick up a weapon."

  Dante cocked his head. "What?"

  "So I don't have to say I killed an unarmed man."

  Sudden anger rippled through Dante's veins. With it came the nether, great pools he gathered in his hands. With a thought, he shaped them into shadowy ropes which looped around the tree branches and clawed at Banning's rugged face. The air dimmed like an instant sunset. Dante gave form to the nether for those who couldn't see it, viscous, liquid shadows that dripped from his hands like reluctant blood.

  "I could have threatened you with violence," he said softly. "But I could tell at a glance it wouldn't work, and I'd have to either back down or hurt you, which I don't much like to do. But if you don't answer my questions about the missing norren, I will tell the city where your masterpieces really come from. You'll be exiled from Cling to die as an old man in a place you do not know."

  Anger flowed over Banning's face, followed by a quiver of fear that was clearly visible beneath his thatchy beard. "If someone were to have up and enslaved a clan, you think their fellow norren would be happy to point those people out."

  "Unless?"

  "Unless saying such would threaten the ones that they hold dear."

  "I see."

  "Maybe even an entire town."

  Dante let the taut branches relax. The shadows faded from his hands. "Then I'll put myself on the line, too. I'm from Narashtovik. I'm the agent of Callimandicus, highest priest of Arawn. I'm here to help."

  "Narashtovik is a part of Gask like anywhere else."

  "And if the capital finds out we're here, we'll be invaded the minute they're finished with you."

  Banning slung the wrapped painting onto the forest floor. "Tell them anything you like. I don't give a damn about my reputation. And I don't know who took your people or who they sold them to." He stepped on the package. The wooden frame cracked beneath his weight. "But I do know who took them downriver."

  "Who?"

  "You give me your word."

  Dante nodded. "No one will know who told me."

  The old man grinned, a savage thing that b
ristled his beard like a wall of thorns. "Oh, I want the ones who did it to know. What I want you to promise is you'll scream my name before you kill every last one of them."

  3

  Haggling for the barge strained Dante's patience as hard as the days-long process of watching Banning's meetings. Before he could even begin to bargain with the captain, Dante first had to convince Orlen and Vee that hiring a boat was necessary to begin with, a requirement that seemed self-evident to him—when your quarry is river pirates, you won't have much luck hunting them down on foot—but which took the better part of the night to hash out. By the next morning's walk to the docks, he was ready to give up on talking and try hitting instead.

  River pirates. It was simple enough that Dante considered it a major blow to Josun Joh's credibility that the mercurial god hadn't passed that info along directly rather than shooing them in the vague direction of a recalcitrant old man. But once Banning had been ready to speak, he'd spoken like he might never have the chance to speak again.

  The slaveship had docked in Cling just over a month ago. The dockhands had seen the eyes glittering from the darkness belowdecks. There had been talk in town, when the pirates debarked, of slaughtering them then and there, but none of the captives were known to be family of anyone in Cling, and it had been pointed out that these weren't just a slapdash rowboat of common pirates, but the Bloody Knuckles, a multi-vessel armada headed by the three-decked galley the Ransom. The last village to threaten the Bloody Knuckles had been so thoroughly robbed, raped, murdered, and torched that six years later the only remnant of the settlement were the cinders of its dead and the nightmares of their relatives.

  And so a conspiracy of silence had been enacted by the town of Cling—or those few who knew about the slaves, anyway, a shortlist including the dockside witnesses, Banning, and a handful of the port's elders and most highly-feared warriors—which Banning didn't break until witnessing Dante summon the nether from the forest floor. In that moment, he decided the Clan of the Nine Pines and its two human allies had a real chance to wipe out the Bloody Knuckles in a single blow.

  If only Dante could afford a boat.

  In theory, he had access to the full treasury of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik. The city had grown substantially in the last few years, propelled by Cally's new policies and the refugees from the war with Mallon, who, finding abandoned homes available for the taking in the city's outer rings, had flocked by the thousands to the foreign city, bringing new businesses, trade routes, and labor in equal measure. Despite Cally's covert funding of the operations in the Norren Territories, the city was rich by any objective measure.

  In practice, Dante couldn't just sign his name to a receipt of credit for the same reason a traitor can't stroll into the palace with a smile and a wave. Strictly speaking, he was a traitor. To Gask, anyway. He had plenty of silver cached in their base of norren operations in Dunran, but that was 150 miles overland in the wrong direction, and even on the horses he couldn't afford, making that trip would set them back at least a week on a venture that was already weeks behind. He and Blays had enough on their person to buy decent lodging and board for a couple weeks apiece, but that was hardly enough to rent a boat and its crew for a journey of 200 miles or more with a passenger manifesto of some thirty armed warriors. The clan, meanwhile, had essentially nothing (with the exception of an armory of immaculately forged swords, which were priceless in the very real sense they refused to sell them). In the end, Dante had to resort to requesting credit from Banning, who agreed readily, going so far as to refuse all offers of repayment, be they sooner (wealth recouped from the pirates) or later (the weeks it would require to get word to Cally and hard funds).

  By the time all this was arranged, the crew of the Boomer was already drunk, and Captain Varlen, a stout man whose barrel-shaped body looked like it could serve as a ship of its own if properly hollowed, showed unusual concern in insisting they not shove off until the crew slept off their rum, wine, and beer. Dante boiled with the specific annoyance of a delayed journey. To occupy his mind, he practiced with the nether inside the yurt, forming images of Blays falling off a variety of cliffs, treetops, and towers.

  Mourn woke him shortly after dawn and they tramped down the pier to the Boomer, a nondescript grain barge with a flat bottom and a single deck, below which spilled wheat was lodged into every corner and cranny. The clan, evidently confused by the concept of boats, set about erecting their tents belowdecks while Captain Varlen shouted the vessel into open water. A solid sheet of gray clouds tarped the sky. A low wind rippled the sails, chilling Dante at the side railing where he watched them depart from Cling. On the receding docks, men lugged bales and barrels from and into waiting ships. The steep hill rose behind town, pocked with doors, slashed from top to bottom with the zigs and zags of its seamless, perfect road. Varlen nudged the barge to the middle of the river, clearing them from the port town's miasma of river muck and feces. Cling disappeared behind a bend.

  Dante had always wanted to take an extended trip via water, but he was soon glad he hadn't. In a word, it was boring. In another word, it was repetitive, a slow-scrolling vista of shoreline trees, short hills, and sudden cliffs with rocky piles collected at their bottom. Shacks dotted the banks every mile or three. Every few hours, the current pushed the Boomer past a norren village. Their high, conical roofs, designed to keep the snow off, jabbed from the shores like pins in a knitter's cushion. For two days, this was all Dante saw, and though he wasn't one to bore easily, the trip was doing its best.

  His condition wasn't helped in the slightest by the clan warriors, who continued to treat him and Blays like off-duty farm dogs—fed occasionally, otherwise ignored—despite the fact that if not for them, the clan would still be sitting on a muddy bank waiting for their one-eyed god to stop chasing female mortals long enough to clue them in about where to go next. (When he'd brought that very point up, Orlen had brushed it off; Josun Joh had sent them to the right place, he said, but left it up to them to find what they'd come for.) The exception was Mourn, who now spoke to them regularly, readily answered questions, and generally showed all signs of having abandoned his task of minding the two humans. Possibly because they were trapped on a boat, where the only opportunities to sneak off into trouble involved getting very wet. Still, Dante thought Mourn's shift in priorities was genuine.

  "Somebody do something already," Blays said from his seat on an out of the way portion of the deck. "I'm so bored I'm about to start counting my own fingers."

  "You have ten," Mourn said.

  "Don't be so sure. I've been drumming this deck so hard I might have worn some of them down to the nub."

  "You could try watching for pirates," Dante said.

  "Oh, look, there aren't any."

  "Try napping. You're cranky enough."

  Blays pounded his fists on the deck. "But I don't wanna nap!"

  Dante laughed. "We could...tell stories."

  "That actually doesn't sound horrible." He glanced up at the overcast sky, whose threats of rain had gotten as tedious as the scenery. "What about this Quaking Bow? It would be nice to have some idea exactly why we're sailing after a band of professional murderers on this terribly fearsome wheat-bucket."

  "The Quivering Bow."

  "I don't care what it's called. I care about a graphic recounting of all the things it's destroyed."

  Dante gazed at a gray granite cliff, its face striated with white. "I'm not sure I know any true stories. Some legends, perhaps."

  "I don't care if it's true or false. All I want to hear is how a bow convinces a castle to blow up."

  Mourn lowered himself from the barge railing to sit on his heels. "Tell him about how the Quivering Bow got made."

  Dante shrugged. "I don't know how the Quivering Bow was made."

  "Everyone knows how the Quivering Bow got made."

  "I didn't grow up in Gask, Mourn. I hadn't even heard about the Quivering Bow until a year ago."

  "Then I'll tel
l him how it was made. And you. Wouldn't do at all for you to have the thing and not have any idea what went into making it. Is that a human thing, rushing off to use things up without caring where they came from?"

  "I think it's a Blays thing," Dante said.

  Blays pressed his palm against his forehead. "Right now, the Blays thing is praying you both die if you don't get on with it."

  "You should pray for yourself to die," Mourn said. "Then you'd get to do something really interesting." He cleared his throat and frowned down at his hands, which he'd placed palms-down on the hard wood deck. "I'll take a wild guess that you haven't heard of Corwell, either. Thought not. He's only the half-mortal son of Margon, brother of Josun Joh himself. The first thing I would ask is why Corwell is half mortal, but then again I wouldn't need to ask, because I actually have an education."

  Blays rolled his hand through the air. "Get on with it before your education and the body that holds it find themselves at the bottom of a river."

  "Margon had a thing for norren women. The bigger the better. I think this is because he was a small god. Small like you, I mean. This meant he had nimble fingers and was very good at making clocks and flutes. And in picking the locks of sleeping norren women. Which he did. A year later, Corwell was born.

  "Corwell, being half-mortal, wasn't allowed in the heavens. Kind of for the same reasons you're not allowed to speak to Orlen, really. Instead he grew up among norren, where he used his norren strength and divine quickness to become an archer so fine he could shoot out a hawk's eye from so far away the hawk couldn't see him. This won the heart of Velia, a woman everyone agreed was the most beautiful norren born in seven generations.

  "They married. They were happy. But Margon wasn't, because Corwell had gotten to Velia before he could. So he crept into their house one night and stole her. Which, can I pause for a moment? That's not really acceptable in any form. A dad's supposed to be an example for his sons. I don't think anyone wants their sons to grow up to be a kidnapping rapist."