The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I could have, but I didn't." He gave Dante a long look. "Regardless, if we arrive in Narashtovik and discover you've missed any, I can simply pass your debt along to Callimandicus."

  That wiped the fog from Dante's brain. "If you want a safe trip, I wouldn't speak a word of who we are."

  "I'm not going to give your name away. I'm responsible for all my ship's cargo, human or otherwise. Now fetch your friends."

  He did just that. At the fountain of the salmon, Lira and Mourn looked enviably well-rested. Back on board, they were shown to two cabins belowdecks—one for the three males, one for the lady.

  Lira's jaw drew tight. "I am sworn to protect this man." She inclined her head at Dante. "I can't do that isolated in my room."

  The young sailor ducked his eyes. "Ma'am, barring storms or giant squid, I think he'll be perfectly safe. After seeing what he's done to those rats, nobody's going want to find out what he'd do to a human."

  That only raised further questions from Lira, but at least it settled the arrangement of sleeping quarters. Dante meant to see the ship's departure into open ocean—he'd sailed enough rivers, but never the sea—but on settling into his down mattress to rest his body, the rest of him quickly followed suit. By the time he woke in early afternoon, the shore was a far line of pine green across miles and miles of whitecapped gray.

  According to a crewman whose superhuman focus on reining in his flapping sail may have been due to the fact he'd lost two fingers earlier in life, the trip to Narashtovik would take six days, allowing for the wind and their planned stop in port at Kannovar. All told, they'd span a good 400 knots, which struck Dante as a miracle. Even with good roads and spare horses, traveling overland would have taken them more than twice as long and been far more dangerous. In fact, the duration was perfect. Six days ought to be plenty of time to confirm his operational theory of Mourn's loon. If Dante was equal parts lucky and dedicated, he might even have a fresh one to show Cally. If anything could blunt the old man's wrath, it would be an item of immense practicality that came wrapped in the priceless ribbons of secret lore.

  Lira happily lent him the privacy of her cabin. She sat outside on a stool while Dante set to work. The boy who'd shown them their cabins turned out to own a two-book library consisting of the Cycle of Arawn and a picaresque novel about pirates who spent more time clinging to the wreckage of their ship than in committing any actual piracy. He lent Lira the book without a second thought, and even through the closed door, Dante could occasionally hear the rasp of pages or Lira's warm, low chuckle. Besides that, however, his only distractions came from the pitch of the ship, which his stomach hadn't begun to adapt to, the occasional holler from the crew up above, and rarest of all, the carrying cry of the huge-winged birds that scoured the ocean's surface for prey.

  In truth, the rodent body count had been 246. Dante had slipped six of the smaller adults into his pocket before rising from the slaughter to show Mart his catch. Because he had a theory. If his theory proved seaworthy, he expected he'd need more than one body to refine it before landfall.

  The idea had arrived from a special kind of nowhere, a place no other human had been: from inside the dead rats' own heads. Yet the concept was simple enough Dante could have put it together years ago.

  When he was linked to the body of a rat, he could sense whatever they sensed. See what they saw. Hear what they heard. Assumedly, he could taste what they tasted. This worked whether they were in the palm of his hand or miles away. Essentially, they were doing the exact same thing the loons did.

  He borrowed, requisitioned, and gathered more than just the dead rats. In addition to these, which lay in neat lines atop a cloth on the cabin's floor, he had a hand axe, his small knife, a tin spoon, the strips of what had once been one of his older shirts, and perhaps most important of all, a bucket of water. He separated one of the rats from the others, took up the hand axe, and severed its head less than expertly. With a concentrated effort to ignore the noises and smells his next actions made, he used the knife to peel away all the skin, flesh, and tendons from the skull, then picked the axe back up and whacked it once along its long axis. A splinter of bone pattered across the pinewood floor. He noticed the smell then, the thickening blood and hours-old flesh, and opened the small round porthole. After a few breaths at the window, he raised the axe again.

  The next strike split the skull from snout to base. Pink mush splattered the deck. The bone hadn't broken completely along its bottom edge; Dante cracked it in half, then used the spoon and knife to dig out everything he could reasonably extract. Uncertain the leftovers would be of any use, he set these aside on one of the cloths, then spent a long time cleaning his hands and the two pieces of mostly-empty skull.

  He knelt beside the mess and brought forth a palmful of nether, which he sunk into the bones like a wave into sand. He reestablished the nethereal link between the two halves, then opened another line between himself and the half he dubbed the "Ear." He set the Ear to his own ear, aligned the earhole of the second piece (which he thought of as the "Mouth") to his mouth, and said "Hello." Had he heard—? He put the Ear to his other ear and tried again. As previously, the word sounded strange, somehow distorted, but not conclusively different from whatever he was hearing aloud.

  Perhaps it was simply too close for his senses to separate the sounds. He cracked the door. Lira looked up, closing her book around her finger. Dante flushed with sudden embarrassment.

  "Lira." He held out the Mouth. "I need you to do something for me. I'm going to go back into your room. Three seconds after I close the door, say something into that."

  She reached out for the cracked bone, then jerked her hand away. "Is that a rat's skull?"

  "Of course not. It's one half of a rat's skull."

  "What am I doing with one half of a rat's skull?"

  "Helping me win a war."

  She considered him for a long moment. "Are you being serious?"

  He held up his palms, discovered the underside of one forearm was globby with gore, and hurriedly wiped it off on the leg of his pants, which he immediately regretted. "I'm sure this looks very strange."

  "It looks like you've decided to become a butcher. Or a pervert. Or some combination of the two."

  "You don't have to touch it." He bent and placed it on the floor. "Just speak into it. Directly. Where the ear would be, ideally. Oh, and don't speak loudly enough for me to hear what you're saying through the door. Understand?"

  "As much as that's possible."

  He closed himself inside the cabin and held up the Ear. Three seconds later, he heard Lira murmur "If you're hearing this, then perhaps you're not crazy"—but rather than hearing the words through his ear, the way Mourn had described the loon as functioning, he heard them inside his head, the same way he'd perceived such things when he was piloting the dead rat around the hold to hunt down the living. He returned to the hall.

  "I spoke into it," Lira said with the unconcealed disgust of a childless adult watching another person's kids paw through an apple cart.

  "I'm not crazy."

  She blinked at him. "Perhaps not."

  He took the Mouth and went back inside her room to kneel beside the mattress and think. So it was possible to take pieces of a skull, link them together, and share the senses experienced by one of those parts by the other pieces of the whole. In a sense, then, he had just created a very poor loon: it was one-way, only he could use it, and it would cease to function the moment he dropped his focus from the link between Ear and Mouth. Still, it felt like he was onto the principle. Now all he had to do was refine it.

  He understood how to solve the one-way problem at once. If he could be either a Mouth or an Ear, either to able speak or hear, all it would take to be able to do both would be to combine two sets of these things. To create a linked Mouth A and Ear A, a second Mouth B and Ear B, then combine Mouth A and Ear B into one loon and Mouth B and Ear A into another such that words spoken into one loon would be heard through the
other and vice versa. He did just that, axing his halved skull into quarters so each fraction contained part of the original structure of the skull's ear port. He then formed two proto-loons and had Lira speak into each in turn while he listened from the cabin. He could hear her through both pieces. She couldn't hear him, of course, because she lacked any link to the loons herself, but if he could solve that problem, all that would remain was to make the items permanent.

  Day faded from the porthole. He opened the window and flung the rat's headless body and bits of brain into the sea. He hid the intact corpses as well as his skull-pieces in his pouch, wishing for some ice or a cool hole in the ground. They were already starting to get a bit squishy. He cleaned his tools and his hands in the reddish water and then sloshed that out the window as well, splattering just a bit on the interior wall.

  Feeling work-worn but energized, he went to the second cabin to find Mourn, whom he engaged in a makeshift game of Nulladoon using pieces cobbled from stray barley, pennies, and bits of cork, with clay tea plates standing in as terrain. They set up on one of the common tables belowdecks. Before the end of their second turn, a pair of offduty sailors stood over their shoulders, brows knit, asking questions about the intricacies of play. Soon, most of the free crew stood about them, placing bets over mugs of watered rum.

  Dante lost, drawing sighs and curses from those who'd wagered on him and cheers from the opposition, but he grinned anyway. He'd already determined the shape of the puzzle of the loon. Now it was just a matter of filling in the pieces.

  * * *

  They made port in the Houkkalli Islands two days later. Dante scowled at the jagged crags and churning windmills. He was no closer to any solutions. Whenever he tried to load up his loons with enough nether to keep them functional after he dropped his focus, the bones leaked his shadows like a punctured waterskin. He'd done no better with the problem of getting the loons to make audible noise rather than restricting their transmission to the braincase of their creator. In fact, on dwelling on that problem, he'd only discovered another: that unless he wanted the loons to yammer aloud to everyone in earshot, he needed to find a way to make them whisper to their intended recipient alone. It was a reminder, and not a welcome one, that for all the ways he'd learned to command the nether—to forge killing spears, to make the dead walk, to bend reality to illusion—he lacked the scantest understanding of many of its subtleties. For him, trying to make anything permanent was like pouring water on a flat floor and expecting it to take the shape of an angel.

  "You look," Blays said beside him on the windy deck, "like someone's been squeezing your nuts all night."

  "That would be bad?"

  "Maliciously."

  Sailors called back and forth, trimming the Bad Tidings to angle it toward the island of cliffs and cold marshes where round houses hunkered in the wind.

  "It's the loons," Dante said. "I know the effects I need, but I have no idea how to create them."

  "Well, that's a bit of luck then."

  "Yes. About as lucky as a starving man with a net and no ocean."

  "No, I mean that we're here. In Keyote." Blays gestured to the modest city of stone homes and wood huts buffeted with shedwind stalks, tall reeds which held uncannily still in all but the harshest gales. "The Hanassans have their temple here. On Mount Sirini. You know, I don't get why mountains are so popular among the monks. Like it's such a feat of piety to walk up a hill. Anyway, the Hanassans know everything."

  Dante cocked his head. "How do you know about the Hanassans?"

  "What, you're the only one who gets to know things? They were my favorite as a kid. Used to make my mom tell me stories about them every night."

  He considered this a moment, then shook his head. "Even if they could help me, which they can't, they wouldn't want to."

  "We'll be in port all day," Blays snorted. "What else are you going to do? Dress those little rats of yours up in bonnets and booties?"

  Dante laughed, flushing. Once the Bad Tidings had completed the rather tedious process of nosing up to the deepwater docks and tying off, he clambered down the ladder and made for town. He knew very little about the Houkkallians other than that they rarely left their homeland, they favored fur hats from the skin of a biskin (a ferocious bear-like predator that, as far as Dante knew, didn't actually exist), and it was virtually impossible to tell whether they were serious or pulling your leg. He couldn't even trust the directions to Sirini Temple he got from a local stevedore—"Walk up the mountain until you can't walk any more."

  Just in case the stories of the biskins were true, he took his sword with him, but left Blays and the others behind. This mission had the feel of a pilgrimage or an embarrassment, and either way it was best faced alone. The streets were paved with broad slabs of basalt with irregular sides but which fit together with minimal cracks between, as if they'd all been snapped off from the same massive table of stone. Live shedwind lined the paths to most houses, their straight green shoots eight feet tall. The road climbed a rolling hill. Behind him, the sails of the Bad Tidings gleamed white against the glittering gray sea.

  The town and the pavement ceased abruptly. Round stone farmhouses stood off the dirt road. Fields of green and brown stretched for half a mile or more; at their borders, dark firs rose in a towering kudzu. Ahead, the road led straight to the tallest of three modest mountains with white-painted peaks. The nearest mountain was banded with alternating shades of green.

  Dante saw why an hour later. With the ground rising beneath him, the madly hissing forest that had swallowed the path suddenly vanished in favor of motionless fields of shedwind. A couple hundred yards later, the forest resumed, only to cease just as abruptly for more shedwind some ways past that. Meanwhile, waist-high stone dogs bracketed the road at the border of each change. They had the straight spine and pricked ears of the watchdog of Mennok, but the statues' ears were decidedly foxy, their tails flaring and puffy. The eyes were simply hollows in the stone, but their sockets canted in a cunning expression. Which made no sense at all. Mennok was as somber as it got, his distanced gloom untouched and unaffected no matter how chaotic the earth or heavens became. The fox of Carvahal, meanwhile, lived to cause trouble. To play gods and humans against each other in any combination. He'd probably trick the trees if he could. Combining these two icons into one watching, laughing canine was either blasphemous or an incomprehensible joke.

  The alternating bands of firs and shedwind continued for four or five miles. Just when Dante thought the path would never end, it did. A flat and grassy plateau abutted a sheer black cliff. Crumbled basalt slumped against the cliff face. The road branched four ways, leading to four caves set into the vertical stone. Thirty yards ahead, a man stood across the path, dressed in furry leggings and several layers of jackets.

  "So you made it."

  "Is this it?" Dante said. "The temple?"

  "You were expecting lofty spires?" the man said without smiling. "Delicate stained glass that paints the floor in rainbows?"

  In truth, Dante had expected something quite like it. "Are you waiting here for me?"

  "Anyone who'd walk up a mountain must have an interesting question."

  "What if he doesn't?"

  "Then it is fun to laugh at him." The man touched his blond beard. "What is your question?"

  Dante went as still as the shedwind. What was his question? He couldn't flat-out ask about the mysteries of the loon; if its secrets got out, their entire advantage would be nullified, leaving them to face the armies of Gask with nothing but inferior numbers and prayer. Anyway, what would this cave-dweller know about the nether? Of bending it to form artifacts that could outlast an age?

  The man tipped back his head, as if reading Dante's mind. "You came all this way without knowing your question?"

  "Maybe it's too complicated to pose simply."

  "Maybe you're too simple to make it simple."

  Dante tightened his jaw. "What do you know about the nether?"

  "Wha
tever it allows me."

  "Nice dodge. Has anyone who knows what they're talking about ever fallen for it?"

  The man stuck out his hands at arm's length, face contorted in revulsion. Black slime dripped from his fingers, pattering soundlessly on the dirt path and evaporating like water on a griddle. The viscous slime climbed his forearms, swallowing his elbows and then his shoulders. As it slithered up his neck and began to form a black mask, the man went motionless and smiled like a painting. The nether disappeared.

  "Oops," he said.

  "I spoke too fast," Dante said. "But that display was awfully fast itself. My problem lies in making such things last."

  "A lasting mark," the man nodded. "The concern of every young man. And likely every young woman, too. But they hide it better."

  "If the nether comes from my hands, how do I make it stay once I take my hands away?"

  The man tipped his forehead forward, frowning. "You think the nether comes from your hands?"

  Dante blinked. "That's not what I meant."

  "Strange. Because that is what you said."

  "Well, where do you think it comes from?"

  "Me?" The man looked genuinely surprised. "Oh, I believe I'm Arawn in human skin. I have yet to be proven wrong."

  "Do you know how to get it to stick to a thing?"

  "This is no longer interesting." The blond man nodded downhill. "I think you belong back there."

  "Already? But I came all this way."

  The man raised a brow. "It really isn't that far, you wimp. Now move, for I have praying to do."

  Wind gusted through the plateau, stinging Dante's eyes with grit. The man didn't seem to notice. Dante waited for several awkward seconds, then turned and started back down the banded mountain.

  In town, he found Blays ensconced in a bench recessed into the floor of a tavern just past the docks. Blays smiled over a stein of kaven so heavily spiced it must have been brewed locally.

  "Well?" he sipped. "How'd it go?"

  Dante shook his head. "I think he made fun of me."