The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  They stretched the wounded man on the damp planks. Dante knelt, stripping the norren's shirt away from the arrow buried in the side of his furry chest. Blood slid to the wood. The man's eyes were open and moving, but he did no more than grimace as Dante tested the arrow, then yanked it wetly from the wound. Dante slung it aside and clamped his hands to the bleeding. Within moments, the blood stanched, scabbing.

  Dante rose, wiping his hands on his pants. "Get him below."

  "Will he be okay?" one of the clan warriors asked.

  "He's less fit to fight than a dropped baby bird, but he'll be fine."

  The norren knelt to offer the wounded man his shoulder. They limped towards the stairs. On the castle, men shouted. The Ransom loomed above the railing, oars pulled in as it swung alongside the smaller craft. Hooks and grapnels arced from the pirate vessel, clunking into the Boomer's planks and rails. Sword-bearing norren charged to the railing to hack at the ropes drawing the two ships together. Arrows whisked from above, dropping two warriors and driving the others back.

  Men with knuckles wrapped in red cloth vaulted down the eight-foot rise between the ships. The norren met them, heavy swords hammering the pirates to the deck. Sabers and short swords flashed in the enemy's hands. Norren dropped along the line. Blays charged a tall, ragged-haired man, intercepting the enemy's incoming thrust with his left-hand blade, flicking his wrist and elbow in an upward snap. The parry deflected the pirate's sword past Blays' shoulder; Blays' right-hand weapon buried itself in the enemy's gut. Dante moved to Blays' flank. A spear jabbed at his ribs. He battered it down with a clumsy strike, then thrust out his empty hand. The nether punched straight through the spearman's neck. He collapsed into the railing.

  Nether speared down from the upper vessel, knocking three clan warriors from their feet. Blood pattered the deck. Above, a man in a long coat with a single stripe of hair atop his shaved head raised his hand in an eagle's claw. Dante fell back from the clanging melee, lashing a bolt of shadows at the chest of the man in the coat. The sorcerer's face blanked in shock. He jerked backwards, blasting raw nether at the incoming force, dashing it into the night. His gaze snapped to Dante. A rush of piercing energy followed. Dante knocked it aside with a wedge of shadows. They struggled this way for some seconds, needles of nether twining around one another and boiling away into nothing.

  Dante eased his resistance, falling back a step as the other man's dark tendrils wormed forward. The man in the coat smiled. Dante lashed out for the Ransom's railing instead, pelting the man with a hail of hard splinters. His focus collapsed. Dante drove forward, lancing the man's heart with a bolt of raw force.

  To his right, a blade flicked at his face. Blays intercepted with crossed swords, scissoring the enemy weapon into the planks, then rolled his forearms, swinging his blades through a tight circle and snapping them into the attacker's jacket-padded collarbones. As the man staggered, Dante took him under the ribs with his sword.

  Humans and norren flopped and bled. No member of the Bloody Knuckles remained standing on the Boomer. The norren warriors sheathed their swords and clambered up the ropes marrying the two vessels, archers covering them from below. Dante climbed up, too, but the Ransom's topdeck was nearly empty. As two small skirmishes broke out, a handful of men with red-wrapped knuckles fled belowdecks or leapt off the side.

  "Think you've got this?" Dante said to Blays.

  "Considering I've got thirty sword-wielding norren monsters on my side, I'm going to say yes."

  Blays raced to catch up with the pursuing norren. Dante slid back down the rope to the barge, treating the wounded until his command of the nether faltered and the shadows refused to venture from their crannies. His nerves felt as raw-scraped as a fresh hide. By the time the battle finished, the five surviving members of the Bloody Knuckles matched the total number of Nine Pines dead. Their original numbers had been roughly equal, but that was the nature of armed conflict, particularly in smaller scale, where an advantage in strength, size, and the sudden removal of the enemy's nethermancer could be exploited for an overwhelming victory. The man in the long coat had been the cornerstone of the Bloody Knuckles' terror. There were likely just a few hundred men and women in all of Gask with any real talent in the use of nether or ether, and mere dozens with the skill to match the dead man's. Combined with the pirates' willingness for stark and sudden violence, it was no wonder they'd terrorized the local waterways for over a decade.

  Orlen's response to the pirates was no less violent. The few who tried to hide among the oar-slaves were quickly ratted out, then just as swiftly executed and flung over the side of the galley. The five survivors were brought to the Boomer, where the deck was still being cleared of bodies and swabbed of blood. A man with a shaved head and a bleeding, smashed nose was forced to kneel in front of Orlen. The norren chief's heavy sword hung from his hand.

  "I'm going to ask once, because the question is so simple failing to understand it will tell me you have no brains to spill. One month ago, you took possession of a group of norren of the Clan of the Green Lake. Where did you take them?"

  The man hawked blood on the planks. "Their rightful owners."

  Orlen's sword flashed in the torchlight. Pink matter spattered the deck. Orlen blinked at his sword in surprise.

  "Oh. Brains! I was wrong." He beckoned to two warriors, who thrust another pirate to his knees. Orlen stepped forward. "Where did you take the norren of the Clan of the Green Lake?"

  The man tried to wriggle away. He toppled, crashing to the floor. "Dollendun. One of the beefers there. Uglier than dysentery. Name's Perrigan. Don't know from there."

  "Thank you," Orlen nodded. He slit the man's throat. The man gaped at him, eyes bright with betrayal. While he bled out, the warriors took their blades to the other three survivors, dumping their remains into the river.

  "Seems wrong," Blays muttered.

  "I know," Dante said. "Should have at least interrogated them properly."

  "I'm talking about the part where they were butchered like hogs. Treasonous hogs. Hogs who tried to stick their hog noses up the farmer's daughter's skirt."

  "They were murderers."

  "We don't know they all were. There must be some good pirates. Maybe we executed the guy who wanted them to change their wicked ways."

  Varlen cleared his throat. His face was haggard and sooty. "We got a few things to figure out before weighing anchor. The Ransom, for instance—"

  "Will be scuttled," Orlen said.

  "Hold on a minute. That thing is a proper galley of war. You could threaten a barony with it. You taken a look at the old lady you're standing on?" He gestured to the Boomer's slashed sails, its torched canvas and smashed rails and bloodstained decks. "I'll be lucky to break even from what you paid me. The point of pirate-busting is to thrust your hands into their deep and jingly pockets."

  "Thrust away. The ship itself was a vessel for killers and slavers, who can continue to enjoy it as their tomb."

  Varlen rolled his thick lips together. "You hairy bastard. This is dumber than a cotton bottle."

  Dante wasn't surprised. As a whole, norren tended to treat wealth with indifference or disdain, particularly the clans, who were perfectly able to fend for themselves. When it came to the galley slaves waiting below the Ransom's decks, however, he had no idea which way Orlen would break. He could see the norren chief, without a whiff of hypocrisy, ordering their slaughter as accomplices; just as likely, he would treat them as his most honored guests, leading them by the hand into the daylight and striking off their chains.

  Instead, Orlen went to bed, leaving Vee, Varlen, Dante, and Blays to hash out an agreement that the slaves be freed and offered the option to sign on with the captain's crew; he'd lost three men to stray arrows. The families of the dead crew, meanwhile, would be compensated with whatever was found on the boat, minus half to be divided among the former slaves to give them a chance to make it once the Boomer made port in Dollendun. It was the kind of compromise that left
both parties mad. Vee was talked out of whippings for the slaves (she considered the lashes cleansing, for the slaves' own good). Meanwhile, Varlen demanded all the Ransom's wealth; Blays reminded him he'd had more than a little help wiping out the Bloody Knuckles, the most-hated local raiders of the last generation, and that by the way, greed had been the Knuckles' chief motivation, too.

  By the end, Dante was frustrated, impatient, and exhausted, but helped search the captured ship anyway, both to ensure the agreement was honored (the ship's crew was noticeably more sullen than before the battle, giving the norren long looks of barely-concealed resentment) and to make a personal search of the captain's cabin, where he overturned drawers, smashed open chests, and knocked on walls for secret compartments until Blays asked him what the hell he was doing, which took several minutes longer than Dante expected.

  "Somebody knew something." Dante stepped back from a bolted-down desk, surveying the scree of papers, gold-plated trinkets, and strings of what he suspected were knuckle bones hanging from the wall. "If the Ransom just attacked every ship heading downstream, the traders would have dug themselves a new river years ago."

  "Think somebody tipped them off?"

  "Unless Josun Joh is playing both sides, how else would they know to attack the Boomer?"

  "So you're looking for evidence of this little theory," Blays said.

  "Yes."

  "Hard proof that someone told them we were after them and let them know how to find us."

  Dante set down a curved ornate knife and stared at Blays. "Why the hell else would I be tearing the room apart? Should I go try yelling at their corpses instead?"

  "Oh, just thought you might be interested in this."

  Blays passed him a thick, grainy piece of paper, folded twice. Inside was a sloppy, almost childish drawing of a barge, wide and single-masted. It could have been any of the cargo vessels plying the river, but its prow extended into a figurehead of an owl, wings swept back, preparing to launch into flight.

  "What are they doing with a drawing of the Boomer?"

  Blays nodded. "And who drew it?"

  There was, of course, no signature. No words whatsoever. The only way to determine the sketch's authorship would be to force everyone in a 500-mile radius to draw another barge and compare the output to this child's scrawl on a fuzzy sheet of pulp. In practical terms, that plan was only slightly better than attempting to snag the sun in a net and putting it in his pocket so Dante could have toast wherever he went.

  They found nothing else of interest. The galley-slaves, a mixture of norren and human men, were transferred to the suddenly crowded Boomer. The Ransom was made to drop anchor. Clansmen piled the bodies of the Bloody Knuckles in its hold, spilled oil over them, and splashed its topdeck to boot. The grapnels joining the two ships were severed. The Boomer weighed anchor, letting the current carry it away. In the first light of dawn, a woman of the Nine Pines ascended the steps of the stern, bent her bow, and sent a flaming arrow winging toward the Ransom. It snapped into the topdeck, fire dwindling until it looked like it would wink out completely: then an orange wall flared across the former slaver. Thick white smoke roiled into the sky.

  Dante emerged from his cabin late that afternoon. Mourn quickly informed him both Orlen and Lira were waiting to speak to him. Dante drank some tea, stretched the soreness from his muscles, and went to see Lira. Her cabin's scent had the moist, mushroomy pall of the wounded, but she looked better already, a touch of pink to her broad cheeks.

  "You killed them without me," she said. Accusation gleamed from her eyes.

  "Would you have liked us to drag them in here for you to club from your bed?"

  "You could have brought me out to watch."

  "There were no guarantees we'd even win. If just one of them had broken through, you would have discovered that steel tastes a lot like horrible pain."

  "I've been cut before." She gazed out the cabin's round window. "I hoped to be healed when you caught them. To pay them back. And you."

  "The info you gave me about the attack on your ship is the reason we're here talking instead of sitting at the bottom of the river waving to each other for eternity."

  "Still. I'll pay you back."

  He folded his arms. "Enough of this 'debt of honor' nonsense. You don't owe me for saving you any more than you owe everyone else on this ship for not stabbing you in your sleep." He gestured in the vague direction of the other cabins. "Anyway, it was Blays who made us go to the wreck."

  "Then my debts just doubled."

  "For the love of—"

  "Don't think of my life as dedicated to you. Think of it as dedicated to goodness. Your act deserves praise. Support. Protection. My debt's not to you, but the ideal your act of rescue embodies."

  Dante narrowed his eyes, seeing her in a light completely separate from the waning rays angling through the window. "I'm not all good."

  She leaned back into her blankets, weary. "Then may my devotion be a double-edged sword that inspires you to do better."

  His reasons for objecting weren't yet shaped well enough to hammer into words, so he left it at that. It wasn't that he disagreed with the premise of a personal loyalty that ran so deep you'd put your own life in harm's way. He supposed he'd done that for Blays. More than once, in fact. Often enough that Dante's just afterlife would feature a full servant-crew composed entirely of Blayses. Meanwhile, he might not give up his life for Cally, but he'd probably give up a leg or an arm. His left arm, at the very least. For semi-friends like Mourn, he'd sacrifice a finger or two. Even for strangers—a woman being beaten in the street, say—he'd risk a black eye or a bloody nose, although he reserved the right to complain about it later.

  But Lira hardly knew him. If she were serious, in a sense she already had committed suicide for him, submerging her identity and desires beneath a sea of principle. He and Blays protected and fought for each other because they believed in the same causes. Sure, the original cause they'd fought for had been basic self-preservation, but that was a pretty good one, he thought. On a deep-down level, Lira's desire to rid herself of her own personal goals disturbed him.

  He headed belowdecks to snag Blays and find Orlen among the close, smelly yurts. Orlen insisted they head back upstairs to the foremost section of the bow, which aside from the ship's cabins was perhaps the one spot on the Boomer with any major privacy: not only could they see anyone approaching, but the rustle of water around the prow cushioned their words from anyone wandering too close.

  Orlen sat on his heels and gestured them to do the same. "I think it's time to clear the air."

  "Or at least to choke it with a different brand of smoke," Vee said.

  "There aren't to be any more secrets."

  "Certainly less secrets," Vee said. "We might inadvertently maintain secrets we weren't aware were secret."

  Blays stared dumbly. "I hope the melted substance in my ears is wax."

  "In short," Orlen said, "it's time we pool resources. Work together. Achieve as one."

  "I'd complain that it's about time," Dante said, "but it took so long to arrive I'm too puzzled to resent you."

  Vee screwed up her orange eyes and gazed up at the gently flapping sails, which had been restored, with gruesome stitching, to an approximation of their pre-battle wholeness. "There are two reasons. At least two reasons. We may have others."

  "First," Orlen said, "for the Clan of the Nine Pines, trust needs more than a handshake. I'm sure this seems quaint to you, or a series of pointless hurdles, but that is because when you look at yourselves, you see Dante the Noble and Blays the Also Noble. But when we look, we see two of the species that has enslaved so many of our own."

  Vee nodded. "Better to look like the hole of an ass than to look from behind the bars of a cage."

  Dante tapped his thumbs together. "That's all well and good, but wasn't the business at Cling enough to earn your trust?"

  Orlen frowned, rippling his beard. "For blackmailing a mayor? Anyone can do that. N
ot everyone can save our ship from being rammed."

  "Specifically," Vee said, "only you did."

  "And fighting alongside the clan is, in a sense, to become a part of the clan."

  Vee nodded again. "But only in a sense."

  Blays twirled his hand in a let's-move-it-along gesture. "Let's get to the second reason before we forget what we're talking about and who we are."

  "We're about to pass into human lands," Orlen said. "We'll need humans to move us forward."

  "Our trust will still be circumscribed," Vee said.

  Blays cocked his head. "Well, you should at least get it drunk first."

  "What more can we do?" Dante said. "Should I put the king of Gask in a headlock and knuckle his scalp until he renounces norren slavery forever? We're here to help."

  Orlen nodded, eyes closed. "So you keep repeating. We're very grateful. There is no question of your sincerity."

  "The question is whether Narashtovik might be angling for independence of its own," Vee said.

  Dante smiled in disbelief. Not at the question itself. The question was good enough that Dante had considered it several times himself. Cally's entire support of norren independence stemmed from a single promise to a single norren who'd helped Cally reclaim his seat at the head of the Council of Narashtovik. That debt deserved repayment, no doubt, but if that were the only source of Cally's motivation, the scale of his repayment was somewhere between generous and a level of insanity normally associated with bottling your own urine.

  Maybe the old man just believed in liberty. In Cally's own cynical way, he did believe in the principle of self-rule. At the very least, he thought it was pretty stupid to decide rulership of an empire based on which blueblood's family tree had the most tightly-snarled and inbred branches. But neither was Cally a banner-waving proponent of the islands south of Mallon, where they appointed leaders based on some sort of common vote—when the matter had once come up in passing at a council meeting, Cally had dismissed the notion by asking "Why not just put a pig in charge?"