The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Assorted servants orbited the table, too. Behind Dante's right shoulder, Blays leaned against the wall. Cally ambled into the room and the Council rose as one.

  "Excellent," Cally said, seating himself. "I can't remember the last time we didn't have at least one empty chair."

  Tarkon pursed his lips, ruffling his beard. "Then again, you can't remember the last time you emptied your bowels, either."

  "Nonsense. On matters of importance, my scribe takes the strictest notes." Cally's smirk faded. "I'm not going to rehash every detail. If you're not up to date, it's your own damn fault. In short, a clan of norren burned Lord Cassinder's estate to the foundations. In response, King Moddegan has levied a new tax. He's begun headcounts in Bonn and Lattover. Headcounts means troop counts. Troop counts mean we'd better grab our balls and run for the hills."

  "The debacle with Cassinder was my fault," Dante broke in. "We led a clan on a mission to rescue their enslaved cousins. Things turned violent."

  Wint lifted a thin black brow. "I heard the search for a few missing norren was just one of the reasons you were there."

  From behind Dante, Blays snorted. "Of course it was. Do you think we'd cartwheel through some lord's door, torches in hand, all for the sake of a single clan?"

  "It doesn't matter why it happened," Cally said, cutting off any potential objections to lowly Blays speaking out of turn. "What matters is what course we take from here. If none of you want to figure that out, my next course is straight to bed."

  The other members glanced between each other. A servant coughed. Olivander leaned forward and clasped his heavy hands on the table. "If Moddegan marches, it will be on the norren, not us."

  "Sounds like the very reason we should stay clear," Wint said.

  "They're counting on our loyalty."

  Somburr's head jerked back and forth. "Since when is suicide the best expression of loyalty? We preserve ourselves. Stash our loyalty away. Then return it to the table when it's actually worth playing."

  Tarkon rolled his eyes. "Would that be before or after the Norren Territories are converted into the world's largest charcoal bed?"

  "I've met Moddegan," Kav said in his academy-honed tones. "He doesn't believe in half-measures. If we throw our sticks in with the norren, he'll burn us without blinking."

  Cally grimaced. "Olivander, what kind of numbers can we muster? Reliably, I mean. You military men seem cursed with double vision whenever you survey the troops."

  "Three thousand?" the big man shrugged. "A tenth that in cavalry. Between the last war and the immigrants, our infrastructure hasn't had time to rebuild."

  "And what can Moddegan come up with?"

  "Ten thousand by July. At the very least. Maybe double that."

  "I'm no algebraist," Wint said, "but that sounds horrible."

  "They'd have to thread their campaign through a narrow needle," Varla said softly. "The Dundens are often snowed in by October."

  "And that snow won't fall on whatever hill we huddle on?" Kav countered.

  "Why are we arguing whether to help?" Dante said. "We're the reason they're facing invasion. If we hadn't been stirring up trouble the last five years, they'd still be just another unhappy territory."

  "'We'?" Wint said.

  "The institution of this council and the higher lord we serve."

  Kav gazed at the white plaster ceiling and the chandelier's twelve clusters of candles. "The key fact is that promise was made five years ago. If we were looking at the world as it lies right now, would we make that same promise?"

  "Which of course has nothing to do with the fact we did make that promise," Cally said. "Anyway, the thinking here is very all-or-nothing. There are ways to aid and resist that don't involve a field of troops, a rousing speech, and a million kegs of blood."

  "If we commit one man, we may as well send a thousand," Wint said. "You think they can sweep through the norren without picking up our tracks as well? With proof of our involvement and an army at our doorstep, what king in his right mind wouldn't take the chance to finally annex us properly?"

  Talk went on for another half hour, but Wint's cold logic effectively settled the issue. Cally called for a vote. He, Dante, Tarkon, and Olivander favored continued support. The remaining eight decided to cease all involvement in norren matters until a later date.

  While the others filed out, Dante slumped in his high-backed chair. Blays sat on the table and kicked his heels. "Well, good luck to the clans, I guess."

  "This is bullshit," Dante said. "How can they just turn their backs? We've been working towards this for years."

  "Maybe the norren will do all right. I'd rather break rocks with my balls than try to scour the clans from their own hills."

  "You think so?"

  "Well, probably not. I'd only expect to lose one ball fighting the norren."

  Tarkon tarried with Cally for some time. With nowhere else to go, Dante sat and stewed, seething over every insipid argument and call to cowardice. Had he just wasted the last five years of his life? Had he actually made a bad thing worse? What was the plan from here? To sit in the Citadel making faces of concern while the armies of Gask stamped, raped, and gorged their way across the norren lands?

  Once Tarkon left, Cally ushered out the last of the servants, retook his seat, and hoisted one slippered foot to rest upon the table. "Disappointed?"

  Dante smiled grimly. "Why would I be disappointed? It's only my fault the norren are facing war. I've just been ordered not to help them. I couldn't be happier if you told me my mom had walked back from the dead."

  "I see."

  "I suppose you think I deserve this. Well, the norren are about to be punished far worse than me."

  "Deserve it?" Cally laughed scornfully. "I'm no Taim. I don't hand down judgment from my righteous throne. By and large, everyone deserves nothing. The rightness of this belief is proven by the fact that's precisely what they get."

  "Now that's a rousing philosophy," Blays said. "The kind of thing that inspires you to spring out of bed, rub the grit from your eyes, and dive right back under the covers."

  Cally flapped his hand. "Listen, dribblemouth, I'm no happier about their decision than you are."

  "Could have fooled me," Dante said.

  "Well, the answer to that quandary is very simple." Cally reached out to lower his stiff leg from the table. He stood, cracking his knuckles. "We're not going to do a damn thing the Council says."

  9

  Dante blinked. "You mean to help the norren anyway."

  "That quick brain is precisely why I appointed you to the Council."

  "In that case, I have something to show you." Dante jogged out the door to his rooms, gathered up his satchel, and returned to the meeting chambers, where Cally and Blays passed a badly-rolled cigarette between them. Dante closed the door behind him. Under the tobacco, Dante smelled siftspring, an odor of sage and cold winter mornings. It would perk their nerves a little bit; Cally favored it when he did his deepest thinking. Dante placed a lumpy rag on the table and unfolded it, revealing several pieces of cracked skull.

  Cally leaned over, smoke rising dragonlike from his nostrils. "Very nice. Bits of dead things."

  "There's more."

  "Yes, I saw the string, too. Those are some tidy little knots."

  "Hang on a minute, you old goat." Dante stood over the pieces and summoned the darkness to his fingers. Cally glanced away from the cigarette in his hand, frowning slightly as Dante drew his nethereal connections between the bones and sheathed them tight in the bones' own power. Dante had built loons a score of times now and the ritual took him less than two minutes. Blays, meanwhile, wandered to the fireplace to poke at the embers with a brass gaff. Dante set one of the completed loons in front of Cally. "Wait here."

  He unlocked the glass doors, stepped onto the cold, windy balcony, and shut himself outside. He pressed his face to the glass to watch the old man, then lifted his loon to his face. "Callimandicus!"

  Cally jerk
ed back from the table, gnarled hands twisted in front of his face. Dante chortled and went on. "This is the voice of Arawn! You are to give the one you call Dante Galand a tower! And a harem to fill it with!"

  Cally gaped at the door, beckoning furiously. "Where did you learn to do that?"

  "I tried to tell you." Dante locked the door behind him, shivering in the sudden warmth. "We didn't find the Quivering Bow. But we found these."

  "This is brilliant. I don't understand why I didn't think of this myself." He turned the bones over in his deep-lined palm, tapping them with his yellowed fingernails, peering into the crevices between the strung-together pieces. He cackled and flicked the loon into the air, snatching it at its apex. "Two simple links! Who taught you to make this?"

  "The norren who came here with us had one. I think they severed its connection when he left the clan, so I had to deduce how it worked on the trip here."

  "It won't hold together for long, though, will it? Perhaps a couple of hours."

  "How can you tell?" Dante said.

  "Because this little wrapper you've got holding it in place is already evaporating." Cally set down the loon and sat back, beard rolling into a smile. "Still, this changes things, you know. Things are very changed."

  "Do you think we have a chance?"

  "Hardly," Cally snorted. "But now's not the time to be worrying about trivial things like chances. Get your norren up here. We have work to do."

  * * *

  Cally worked with the discipline of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a fieldball fanatic. He examined Mourn's earring for five seconds before declaring the tiny wishbone-shaped bone was that from the inner ear of a human. He dispatched a servant to the basements to find as many such bones as he could, then set to work on making the loons permanent. Cally had it figured out before the servant returned: the norren loons weren't always active, allowing the nethereal sheath to "re-charge," as it were, whenever they were silent. If ever the sheath were exhausted, it would collapse, permanently severing the link, but so long as the loons were used sparingly—less than an hour a day—they could hypothetically last forever, or at least as long as the physical object maintained its coherence. They could be further stabilized by employing a second sheath of ether drawn from an inorganic mineral such as the silver used in the earring. Dante could no more command the ether than he could leap and kiss the moon, but he took Cally's word for it.

  The servant returned with several miniature bones and three intact skulls, one of which was still wrapped in withered flesh, its hair like dried seaweed. Cally picked the bones apart with scalpel and tweezers and quickly bundled them into two new loons. After some fiddling, he sent Dante to the balcony. With the loon pressed to his ear, Dante heard Cally's voice as a low murmur. On attaching bits of scrap silver, the old man wrangled two different sheaths, one ether, one nether. He and Dante spent a half hour running through the keep like children, loons pressed to their ears as they exchanged insults, commands, and cryptic aphorisms. Early morning sunlight splashed through the curtains. Still, Dante could hardly sleep. By the fourth time he woke, he didn't bother trying to lie back down. He dressed, dashed up to Cally's room, and knocked softly. Cally replied at once, clear-voiced, to call him in.

  Dante slammed the door behind him. "Well?"

  Cally grinned, blue eyes flashing. "I think I'm going to declare a holiday in our honor."

  "They still work!"

  "And now comes the hard part: we can't tell a soul about our godlike greatness."

  "To be perfectly frank," Dante said, "I don't understand why this is a secret in the first place."

  Cally raised the thickets of his brows. "Are you kidding? This is a highly sophisticated concept. Few enough know how to animate the dead, let alone sense through their senses."

  "Variations of the idea, then. Like what if I killed a bunch of eagles, then returned them to the sky with a red cloth in one claw and a white cloth in the other? They could pass a message to everyone watching them in moments. Or I could park a dead rat in your room, go to the palace in Setteven, spy on the king, and then have the rat tap out exactly what the king was saying."

  The old man chuckled. "Have you ever tried to make a dead bird fly?"

  "Well, no."

  "It works exactly as well as when a normal person tries it. As far as commanding a rat from five hundred miles away goes, have you ever tried that?"

  "I've commanded them two or three miles from me," Dante said. "I didn't notice any loss of control or need for additional focus."

  "Try it at ten miles sometime," Cally said. "Or twenty. Anyone can waggle a three-foot stick. Try holding up a fifty-foot branch sometime. Building such a speech-web would require an army of nethermancers dedicated to nothing but making rats tap-dance 'Yes' or 'No' to other nethermancers. There aren't enough sorcerers in all Gask for that."

  "Then why do the loons work at such long range?"

  "Those rats of yours tax your hold on the nether at every moment of the day. It's the same way it taxes a warrior to wave around his sword. Most of the time, the loons are sheathed. A sheathed weapon draws no strength from the wielder."

  "I get it, more or less," Dante said. "So we've got the loons. What's next?"

  "We plan your next trip," Cally said.

  "I don't know about that," Dante frowned. "The last time I was let out of the house, I accidentally touched off a war."

  "That's precisely why I'm sending you out to undo it. Not for a couple of weeks, of course. I'd like to let tempers cool before we throw you back into the field."

  "Well, that should give me plenty of time to figure out who tried to kill me yesterday."

  Cally drew back his bearded chin. "Someone tried to kill you?"

  "You didn't hear? When I got off the boat. They were expecting me."

  "Well, I can't say I blame them." Cally beckoned toward the door. "Now go get ready for diplomacy. Bathing was a good start."

  "No sense going to the tailor just yet," Dante said. "Not before I know whether I'll need new clothes for the bluebloods, or to wear at my own funeral. Speaking of which, I'd like you to take a look at something. It might be poison, so don't eat any of it unless you'd like to make my day."

  He brought Cally the vial of black-brown liquid, then found Blays eating toast and bacon and dried peaches in the dining hall. After querying two servants and a blacksmith, he tracked Mourn down in the armory, where the norren was discussing serration with the house arrowsmith. Lira took somewhat longer to locate; she had taken to the gymnasium of the auxiliary barracks, which was presently empty. Dust motes swirled in the sunlight slashing through the empty windows. Cobwebs strangled the exposed rafters. Lira practiced in the space at the far end of the barn-like barracks, short sword in her left hand, her right hand empty. She moved as slowly and fluidly as cool honey, her blade tracing crisp patterns while her free hand moved in concert, clawing, grasping, and twisting imaginary foes. At times, she exploded into furious motion, hand and sword flowing through combinations far too fast for Dante to follow. After one of these flurries, she sensed him and turned, lowering her arms to her side. She wore a light and simple shirt and sweat shined from her temples and neck.

  "What are you doing with your off hand?" Dante said. "That seems pretty intricate for shield-work."

  "There's no shield."

  "But a lot of the time you were leading with it. I'll admit I'm an amateur, but that looks like the First Form for Loss of Unwanted Hands."

  She sheathed her sword and ran the fingers of her left hand from elbow to wrist of her right. "Armor goes here. You need the fingers free. Combat is sensitive."

  "Not in my experience. Anyway, I don't see how you'll ever get close enough to use your bare hand."

  She gave him a look, then went to the wall where the wooden swords were racked. She handed one to him hilt-first. "Come at me."

  He took two steps, then lunged, his longer blade keeping his body well separated from hers. She shifted her heels, thrusti
ng her short sword left-handed over top of his. As it slid harmlessly past her side, she grabbed his wrist with her empty right hand and collapsed into the gap between them. Her sword pressed against his gut, its short length a sudden advantage.

  "That's how it works." She held the pose, steel tapping his stomach, then withdrew.

  With a hollow clatter, he returned the sword to the rack. "Very clever. Unless they come at you with two blades."

  "Then my bare hand takes one of the knives from my belt." She swept her arm across her sweat-smudged forehead. "I'm not making this up as I go along. I spent my youth in the Carlons. Their warriors have been dealing with Anyrrian pirates for 800 years."

  "I'm going to speak to the guards again about the assassin. I'd like you to come with me."

  "Afraid to walk the streets alone?" she said, perfectly expressionless.

  He narrowed his eyes. Was that a joke? "No, I thought I'd do the right thing and turn you in for assault. Come on. The others are in the courtyard."

  He stepped into the cold sunlight while she toweled off and dressed for the wintry air. The gate cranked open as they approached. The streets were subdued; the rowdiest revelers were sleeping it off, regrouping their strength for another afternoon of beer and a long evening of whatever drinks were set in front of them. Dante caught a whiff of vomit. Urine, too, but it always smelled like that.

  The guards who'd taken the body were out on rounds. The attendant in the short stone tower told Dante the body had been moved to the carneterium for storage and study. Figuring it would be faster, Dante climbed the tower stairs and set out across the top of the Pridegate. Exposed atop the stone, the bayward wind streamed across his face.

  "The carneterium?" Mourn asked.

  "Don't worry," Blays said. "It's just as bad as it sounds."

  "Only if you have the constitution of a daisy," Dante said, mildly insulted: the establishment of the carneterium had partly been his doing. Four-odd years back, city guards had been dying in the streets at night. Throats torn. Bodies clawed bloody, hearts torn from their chests. Witnesses confirmed the attacker had been a great shaggy beast. For a few weeks, there had been something of a werewolf panic. Dante didn't buy that for a second, even after he and Blays had taken on the case and seen the shredded dead for themselves, and he had been vindicated after discovering the culprit was nothing more than a vengeful sorcerer and his undead dog.