The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  This understanding lent him no tactical advantage. Knowledge of her cards was enough to slip the noose around her neck; Worring was highly skilled, but not one of the highest masters, and when his bear cavalry pressed her gnomes against the shore of a lake, the pesky skirmishers were eliminated to a man. But when his sorcerer finished its turn and Worring extended her finger to topple her last drake, Dante knew he hadn't allowed her to see the nature of himself. Worse yet, perhaps he had. He hadn't played the game. He'd cheated.

  And he had won.

  5

  Perrigan's smile made Dante want to wring his well-bred neck. The man held the parchment at arm's length, as if he didn't want Worring's bare signature to come too close and taint him. After a long moment of admiration, he rolled up the writ of nulla, stuffed it in his desk, and turned that smile on Dante.

  "I sold the Clan of the Green Lake to Lord Cassinder of Beckonridge. The estate is some miles east of Setteven. If he hasn't broken up the sale—and I believe he'd just sunk his latest mine, so I don't see why he would—you'll find them there."

  Dante thanked him stiffly. "Let's hope the right price can convince him to part with them regardless of his plans."

  Perrigan turned to gaze at the woven faces of his ancestors hanging from the wall. "Well, there's always a price, isn't there?"

  "And often a later one to boot."

  The lord gave him a curious look, but Dante turned on his heel. The carriage descended through rowhouses and a crisp sunlight that was too early in the season to be warm. They rattled over the bridge, smelling freshwater and windborne pollen, and halted in a plaza on the eastern shore. He relayed Perrigan's intelligence to Gala and Mourn.

  "Go tell your clan to get ready to move. I have one last thing to do before we leave."

  "Don't tell me it's another game," Blays groaned.

  "I hope you didn't have plans for the rest of the week."

  "What!"

  "It wasn't that boring, was it?"

  "Two weeks of watching you read books and play an even dorkier version of chess? I'd have more fun learning to piss through my eyeballs."

  Dante's grin faded. "No more games. Just one last debt."

  As they entered her dark shop, Worring's face folded as fast as her troops had in the final battle. "I already know what you want."

  "And for that I'm sorry." Dante met her eyes. "But I didn't come here to claim my nulla. I'm here to pay you mine."

  She laughed, deep and bitter. "Beaten by a human who doesn't even know the rules. D'you think I'd be shamed more or less if I killed myself before I finish your order?"

  "I know the rules perfectly well. Now close this shop and take me to your father."

  Worring drew back her head. "He lives on the far north of town."

  "I spent a fortnight playing games. I think I can fit a few more hours into my busy schedule."

  Even so, Dante hired another carriage, spending most of what little he'd gained selling nulla and placing side bets on other games. Wheels splashed mud and other substances across unpaved streets. A score of hammers rang from a dozen anvils. The metallic clanks faded by the time shacks replaced the proper houses. After a half mile of dirt alleys and thatch-roofed, single-room homes, Worring called a stop in front of one no different from a thousand others.

  She stepped into the cold dust, pausing before a door that fit worse than an older brother's hand-me-down trousers. "Give me a minute."

  She slipped inside, tugging the door several times before it squeaked shut. Low tones filtered through the drafty wallboards, one voice female, the other male and coarse as a raven. Clinks, shuffles, and clatters overcut the talk, as if many small things were being converted into one large pile.

  "I think she's into you," Blays said.

  "I highly doubt that."

  "Who else cleans just because a near-stranger comes to their house?"

  "Women," Dante said. "A good deal of men, too. Just about everyone, in fact, except those whose servants do it for them. We need to get you out more, don't we?"

  "Not if it's to the sort of places where people clean."

  The door opened, pouring sunlight into a single tight room. A blanket covered thigh-high lumps piled along the back wall. A rickety stove pumped smoke up the narrow chimney of fieldstone and clay, pouring heat into the sievelike shack. A pale leg projected from a cot half-visible behind the doorway.

  The norren it belonged to was well past middle age. The gray of his beard had begun to seep into his dark brown hair, coloring it like milk dribbled into unstirred coffee. He had the usual flabbiness of age, but his right leg was a bony broomstick beneath grimy pants. The room smelled faintly of urine.

  "My father Shone," Worring said.

  Dante introduced himself and Blays. "Your daughter's work is spectacular."

  "No doubt," Blays said. "I stared at one weaving of a lady so long I feared she'd reach out of the thread and slap me."

  "Well, she stole all she knows from me." Shone struggled to swing his legs from the cot, bracing himself on a block of wood that served as a table.

  "Please don't get up," Dante said. "That's why I'm here."

  "To gape at a cripple?"

  "Sir, I can assure you—"

  The old man held up a roughworn palm. "Shut up. Worring told me why you're here. She's expecting a miracle."

  "And what are you expecting?"

  "To learn one more time that 'I told you so' is always more satisfying in your head than spoken aloud." He lay back on the cot, glaring at the bare, cobwebby rafters. "Let's get to it."

  "You might want to leave," Dante said to Worring. "I expect this will hurt."

  It did. The knee was hard and knobby as dry coral. To set it, Dante first had to rebreak it, dissolving the old mending with hard rasps of nether. Shone screamed, sweat trickling through his ashy beard. Blays helped hold him down, offering gulps from a flask. Once the knee was disjointed—to the nether's touch, it felt like loose pebbles among an internal creek of hot blood and lymph—Dante aligned the old break as cleanly as he could, filling the gaps with nether-prompted growths of new bone. Most of Dante's intensive work had been done on the vibrant young, on warriors and soldiers (not to mention himself and Blays), and the old man's flesh and tissue responded sluggishly, accumulating and binding only through Dante's constant, steady focus on the nether. Grain by grain, the bone returned.

  After some time—a half hour, perhaps twice that long—Dante plopped on the floor, as sweaty as the old man. As for Shone, he regarded Dante coolly, as one watches a lone wolf from across an open meadow.

  "Why did you come here?"

  Dante wiped his sleeve across his forehead. "Your daughter's a very fine Nulladoon player, too."

  "That she got on her own. Damn game ran me right out of business." Despite the old man's cynicism, a decade of anticipation was etched on his face. Shone swung his leg off the bed. The skin around his eyes relaxed. "Josun's toes, son. A man who can do what you do's got no business wasting time with games."

  Dante smiled and stepped outside. Worring pulled her finger from her mouth and spat a ragged bit of nail into the dirt. "Well?"

  "Better," Dante said.

  "Such modesty," Blays said, eyes rolling. "That old crank will be fit enough to kick your ass again in no time."

  "Maybe you can come see for yourself." Worring glanced toward the door. "If you come here again."

  "Soon." Dante climbed inside the carriage. In the moment, he meant it: he and Blays could come back here on their return from the estate outside Setteven. He'd like to play Worring again, a rematch where he competed without the knowledge of every one of her cards. He would even enjoy losing, he thought, and if he won, to have a weaving made for himself.

  But he wouldn't return for years. When at last he did, Worring would be old herself, and retired from the tables, even friendly matches. She would tell him how Shone had healed: walking to the shop with her each morning, this time not as her master but her partner,
his earnings from weaving just keeping up with the nulla he incurred from gaming. He would die three years before Dante made it back to Dollendun.

  * * *

  While Dante played, the others had worked. The Boomer's sails were whole and white. Bright blond wood stood out from the railing where wind- and spray-chapped timber, smashed in the battle with the Bloody Knuckles, had since been replaced. More surprisingly, Lira stood on the deck to greet Dante.

  "Leg better?" he said.

  "Fit to start working off my debt."

  "Saving you was my idea, you know," Blays said. "If he doesn't want to boss you around, I'll bear that burden for him."

  She swept breeze-blown hair from her face. "But I do owe you."

  Blays raised his brows. "In that case, you should know I can do my fighting on my own. It's other realms where it helps to have a partner."

  "I don't know," Dante said. "You seem plenty capable of handling that on your own, too."

  Orlen was striding across the deck on a beeline for him. Dante met him halfway.

  "Good work of it," the chieftain said. "When we heard the lord refused to name his buyer, we began our battle-prayers to Josun Joh."

  "Hope nobody went stir-crazy during the wait."

  "We are accustomed enough to waiting. That's what we do all winter. What we're not accustomed to is other people fighting our battles for us."

  "Good," Dante nodded. "Because whenever I rescue a clan of slaves from the bottom of a mineshaft, I prefer to do it with thirty howling warriors at my side."

  "It may not come to that." The tall man smiled. "But I hope it does."

  The Boomer pushed off that same day, negotiating its way through the pilings and river-traffic of rowboats and flat-bottomed schooners. An hour later, Dollendun was a black mass of buildings to their back, a blocky forest of stone and hard-fired mud. Dante had a firm enough grasp on Gaskan geography to know the Cricket River on which they'd been sailing this whole time was a tributary of the Rommen that ran through Setteven, meaning they could more or less float the whole way to Beckonridge, debarking however many miles away to complete the journey overland. What he didn't know was how far that was. Varlen reported it was just over 250 miles—less than a week's journey, if they sailed through the nights and made minimal stops.

  Dante had spent twice that long at Nulladoon, but the remainder of the trip felt much longer. Towns drifted past, but none nearly as large as Dollendun. Barges came upstream and down, and on two occasions the oars of war-galleys slashed the gray water, but neither vessel showed the faintest sign of interest in the Boomer. Even the land seemed to grow bored, flattening into an endless prairie of winter-yellowed grasses, hawks circling and screeching, mice and gophers ruffling the fields on their hunt for seeds, the skies clear and cool, but not quite cold and far from warm.

  He got out his boxes to play some desultory games of Nulladoon with Mourn, but he was missing pieces and tiles, and the game suffered for it. He watched Blays and Lira practice swordplay on the deck, their blades glinting in the sunlight until the fighters' faces gleamed and their chests heaved. Lira limped, but was able to lean and feint through all but the most delicate footwork. Out of eyeshot of the major towns, clan warriors took to the decks, too, sparring or just sunning themselves to break up the closeness belowdecks.

  On both banks, the land rose, first into yellow hills, then high bluffs with pale green shrubs and scraggly pines. The sides of the gorge were so steep Dante could see bare rock slanted in layers, great crumbles of loose stone mounded around the feet of the cliffs. The way grew fraught with sudden bends and jutting spurs of rock; Dante stayed up through the night, lighting the way from the prow with a white beam that flowed over black waters and cliffs. Snow capped the heights and the shadows where the sun rarely touched.

  The Boomer emerged from the gorge into brackets of pine-heavy hills. The air was wet and dense and deceptively cold, a damp hand that snatched your warmth while you weren't looking. That night, Varlen put to port in a small town where the docks were slick with algae and the log houses were fuzzy with moss. He returned from the dockmaster to confirm this was their port.

  Orlen held the troops belowdecks until all the town's lanterns but those on the docks had been extinguished. Then the warriors padded down the gangway single-file, as silent as snow, and gathered a short way into the woods. Dante, Blays, and Lira were the only humans to join them. The rest of the crew remained onboard the Boomer; according to plan, the ship would shove off in the morning, then turn around after two days to rendezvous with the clan and its cousins upriver in something like a week. If Captain Varlen hadn't seen or heard from the clan in a fortnight, he'd be free to leave without further obligation.

  The clan slipped into the forest along a plain dirt road that was frequently muddy and patchy with holes. Scouts returned to let them know the way ahead was clear. Vee estimated a two-day march to Beckonridge. Along with Orlen, she dropped back from the body of warriors to speak to Dante and Blays alone, glaring at Lira until she took the hint. With a cold nod, Lira dropped back further yet, out of range of their murmurs but close enough to watch their backs.

  "We expect the situation at Beckonridge to be much the same as Dollendun," Orlen said.

  Vee glanced in the direction of a hoot from the darkness. "Except in the sense that everything will be different."

  "But once again, a full body of warriors will be unwelcome, so we must present a human face instead."

  "Don't worry, we're experts at pretending to be what we're not," Blays said. "Like bathed."

  "We'll use the same story we did in Dollendun," Dante said. "Less suspicious. And with the added bonus of not requiring any more work."

  "I can't agree with that fast enough."

  Orlen pulled his soft leather collar tight against the cold. "As before, taking Mourn and Gala should—"

  The chieftain collapsed to his knees. In the darkened roadway, his head spasmed side to side, earrings flashing, as if he were attempting to shake a demon out of his skull. Spittle gleamed in the corner of his mouth.

  Dante knelt beside him, reaching for the nether. "What's happening?"

  Vee slapped his hand away with enough force to crack walnuts. "You mustn't touch him. Josun Joh is upon him."

  Orlen's violent jerks subsided to irregular twitches. He was overcome by a stillness as perfect as the meditations of the supplicants of Urt. His eyes flicked open. "Josun Joh says the Quivering Bow is in the highest place; the Clan of the Green Lake in the lowest. Yet if one has two hands, both may be taken."

  "You know," Blays said, "Josun Joh might get more done if he said things that made any damn sense."

  "The meaning of his words often comes later, in singular moments of clarity." Orlen stood, wiping his eyes. "We'll understand soon enough."

  The march was pleasantly uneventful. Scouts watched for carriages and riders; at their whistle, the clan melted into the woods like a morning fog. On the second day the westward path sported a northern fork, leading them through shallow, rolling hills and the sharply sweet scent of pine.

  "You realize we're showing up on foot," Blays said when the scouts returned with word the manor was less than five miles away. "They're going to think we're the type of people who show up on foot."

  "Leave it to the norren to forget the wealthy treated their feet as the decorative bulbs at the end of their pants," Dante said. "We'll tell Lord Cassinder we were robbed."

  "That will never work."

  "You're right. Much more credible that we walked a thousand miles from Mallon before suddenly realizing what we'd left at home: horses."

  "Come on," Blays said. "Who's going to believe I could get robbed?"

  Dante nodded. "We'll tell them you look strong, but inside you beats the heart of a coward."

  "How about this? You thought our map was actual-size, and declared we'd have no need for horses."

  "We're the type of noble who boasts as much as he drinks. We decided to walk from the rive
r to remind ourselves of ancient days, to partake of the brisk forest air, and to feel the strength of our legs beneath us."

  "Suppose we'd better get drunk, then. To get in character."

  The pair of forward scouts returned. Beckonridge was scant miles ahead. Orlen led the clan offtrail into the woods single-file. The last member dragged a stone-filled sack behind her to confuse their tracks. Miles out of sight of the manor, the Nine Pines bivouacked near a minor creek trickling between the ferns and the mossy roots of colossal red trees. Warriors turned their axes on saplings and low branches, raising inconspicuous lean-tos while Vee and Orlen rehashed the plan. There existed the fair chance that, as visiting aristocracy, and foreign ones at that, Dante and Blays would be taken in as guests, and might find it difficult to slip away; in that event, their "servants," particularly Mourn and Gala, would find it much easier to sneak away and get word to the rest of the clan about what was happening inside. The clan itself, meanwhile, would investigate the mine as best they could while exploring the woods for escape routes and sound places to defend from in the event enemy riders overtook them. That was it; the rest was left to chance, or rather, to their ability to improvise on the fly.