The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante slung himself atop his horse and trotted south. The nether set into the cliff was rectangular, dark as moonshadow. The size of a doorway. He dismounted and walked up to the shadows. He let his focus fade. The rectangle of nether disappeared, replaced by solid stone. He reached for the cliff. His hand disappeared into the wall.

  Lira gasped. Blays laughed. Dante peered at the nether set into the cliff. The rectangle of false rock hung like a tapestry from three strands of shadows. He snipped them—one, two, three—and the nether collapsed like a watery blanket, oozing into the clutter of real rocks below. Where it had hung, a narrow staircase gaped from the face of the cliff.

  "I'll stay with the horses," Mourn said.

  Blays snorted. "Bravely volunteered."

  "I'm not going up those stairs. My shoulders will get stuck. Along with all the rest of me. Then you'll have to cut off my arms, and I won't be able to do anything with the horses at all, except watch sadly as they flee into the wild."

  "You're staying with the horses," Blays said.

  Dante didn't bother asking Lira what she wanted to do. From his horse, he grabbed his sword and shitsack—which was not at all what the word suggested, but rather a highly portable bag of dry rations, extra waterskin, flint and steel, bandages, and other small necessities, a bundle Blays had named based on the word you'd yell while grabbing it up and running away—and made sure Mourn still had his loon.

  "Speak up if anything strange happens," Dante said to the norren. "We'll let you know when we're on our way back."

  "And just how fast we're retreating," Blays said.

  The stairs were so narrow Dante's heels stuck past their edges. On the second step, he threw out his hands, convinced he was falling, then leaned forward and started up. The staircase turned 90 degrees, leaving him in encased in dazzling blackness. His breathing echoed from walls which sometimes brushed both of his shoulders at once. Tingly heat flowed from his stomach. It smelled musty, dusty. It was perversely warm and humid. He fumbled for his torchstone. White light spilled over the darkness. The stairs seemed to widen, to fall away from his shoulders. He could breathe.

  "Lost already?" Blays said behind him. "I suggest trying 'up.'"

  Dante grinned. His nausea faded. He continued up. The stairs switchbacked every thirty vertical feet, each flight identical to those before and after. Was he certain the shroud of nether had been nothing more than an illusion of rock? What if it housed a doorway into another world composed entirely of this stairway? What if he lifted his foot from the final step and found himself back on the first?

  A draft tickled his nose, wet and salty. He cornered another switchback and blinked against the faint light. He rubbed his thumb across the torchstone, extinguishing it; Blays yelped, then emerged into the diffuse sunlight, swords in hands. Around another turn, Dante faced a rectangle of gray light. He edged forward, shielding his eyes with the blade of his hand. He emerged from a massive black boulder onto a high, misty plain. Streamers of fog coursed between irregular pillars of black stone. Moss and short green shoots clung to ledges and faults. Water trickled down the weathered pillars, pooling in algal puddles. A frog sprung from Dante's path.

  "We didn't just die, did we?" Blays said. "This is how I always pictured the fields of Arawn."

  Dante shook his head. "The fields of Arawn have no sun. Only starlight."

  "Remind me to die in another country," Lira said.

  Somewhere above the mist, the sun hung in the west, reorienting Dante after the twisting passage up the steps. He headed the direction of the murky sun, keeping the nether close. Water dripped ceaselessly. Thumb-sized black birds flitted through the mist-scoured boulders. As Dante passed beneath a lintel of shrubs strung between two pillars, a centipede as long as his arm unspooled from the waxy leaves. He dropped back with a strangled gasp. Blays whacked it in half, leaving one end metronoming from the high shrubs while the other half smacked the ground and wriggled sinuously.

  Blays wiped off his sword. "Maybe it's never been conquered because nobody wants the damn place."

  "Remind me to never close my eyes again," Dante said.

  Lira stepped around the writhing carcass. "When I signed on to protect you, I didn't imagine it would lead me to realms like this."

  "Turn back whenever you want," Dante shrugged.

  With a thick crunch, she stepped on the centipede's head. "Did I say I was scared?"

  The going was hampered by puddles and slick rock and sudden bogs of mud. After an hour's travel, they might have made three miles. The flat highlands slanted down into slick soil loosely bound by flatulent-smelling clumps of kelpish plants. Dante's boots pulled and squelched. Despite the chill, a thin, clammy sweat glued his shirt to his back. A hundred feet downhill, more boulders loomed in the mist.

  The shadows flickered. Mud slurped beneath Dante's foot. He stopped dead. "Run!"

  He charged downhill, muck yanking at his feet. Blays and Lira smacked along behind him. The ground quivered, rumbling; uphill, a shelf of mud dislodged like a god slurping a crater of pudding. At first it flowed slower than their heavy, slogging steps, but soon gathered speed, a semi-solid tumble of mud and vines and death.

  Dante stumbled, pitching forward, clawing at the mud while his momentum carried him forward. Somehow, he found his feet. The slope flattened. Pillars poked through the muck, misty and mossy. He dodged through the first line. A thirty-foot-high blade of rock stuck from the ground. He leapt against its face, palms tearing as he pulled himself up the slippery stone, muddy boots kicking for purchase. Ten feet up, he rolled onto a broad ledge and reached down to pull Blays up. Together, they hauled Lira up behind them.

  With a deafening gurgle, the wave of mud hit the flats. Sludge poured between the boulders. Dante forced himself higher, nails scraping through the cushy moss. A stench of cold, damp rot engulfed him. He reached the crest of the ridge and flopped on his side, panting, feet dangling from the other side. Blays and Lira followed, soaked and muddy.

  Mud burbled among the boulders, swallowing some whole. Stones ground and groaned. Dante wiped his hands on a patch of fuzzy green lichen.

  "Gashen's bursting hemorrhoids," Blays said. "Got out of there just in time, didn't we?"

  "Too soon for the liking of some," Dante said.

  "Like who? The centipedes?"

  Dante stood, wincing at the pain in his elbows and knees. The spar of rock was nearly four feet wide, but in the breeze-blown mist, he felt like he could fall at any moment. He cupped his hands to his mouth. "I know you're there!"

  His shout died in the silent gray world. Blays sighed. "What do you think a centipede's voice sounds like, anyway? I'm thinking a raccoon choking on a rattlesnake's tail."

  "Come out!" Dante hollered. "Before I make you find out what's at the bottom of this mud!"

  Water trickled down the stones. On a rise of rock forty feet away, a woman materialized in the mist.

  "Holy shit!" Blays said.

  She gazed at them, motionless, dark hair framing her face. She smiled, raised one hand, her wrist wrapped in red, and waved. "Goodbye."

  Black, mothlike force gathered in her hands. Dante's eyes went wide. He drew on the shadows, too, feeding them with the blood welling from his scraped hands. The woman tipped back her head, pausing her work.

  Beside him, Lira held out both hands, palm down, and rolled them at the wrist until her palms faced the sky. "Worlds within worlds."

  The nether flowed away from the woman's hands. "What are you doing here?"

  "We came to—" Dante snapped his mouth shut. In a rush, he understood. "We came to discover why Pocket Cove has never been invaded. But I suppose we can leave now."

  The woman's red wrap fluttered around her wrist. "Do you find our world hostile?"

  "Yes. And I've just figured out how you keep it that way."

  "Unfortunate," she said. "Now that you know, you cannot leave."

  "That's downright uncivilized," Blays called across the gap. "I feel so u
nwelcome, I think I might just turn around and go home!"

  "Please come with me. What happens next is not for me to decide."

  Blays dropped his voice. "Alternately, we kill her and run away before her friends come out to find what happened."

  Lira gave him a dark look. "The People don't kill as indiscriminately as you. We should go with her."

  Dante stared through the mist. It would be easy enough to turn back; the woman's hold on the nether was strong, but not strong enough to save her from what he could command. Still, though he knew how they protected their land, it wasn't the type of knowledge that would allow him to use their methods himself. He needed to know more.

  "We'll come with you as friends," he said. "The kind of friends who don't try to kill each other."

  The woman nodded and climbed off the edge of her ridge. Dante followed suit. The descent was much trickier than his terror-aided climb up, and he nearly slipped three times, banging his knee hard enough to draw blood. At the bottom, he lowered himself to the thick layer of mud. His boots sunk to the ankles, but he could walk.

  The woman introduced herself as Asher and squelched west across the mud. Dante followed absently, lost in his second-sight, keen for any telltale glimmers of nether around her hands. Hard stone once again thumped beneath his boots.

  "When have you met our people?" Asher asked Lira some time later. "Who taught you that sign?"

  Lira didn't take her eyes from the misty horizon. "I grew up in the Carlon Islands. When I was old enough, I began hiring on ships as a swordsman. This lasted a few years. My final assignment was with the Shadow. It did a lot of business with your people."

  "I know of the Shadow," Asher said. "I saw it just last fall."

  "Good to know it survives. My last voyage with it was three years ago. It was the summer. We were meeting one of your vessels at Harl Island to buy all the barnwhelks it could carry."

  "Barnwhelks?" Blays said.

  Lira nodded. "Snails."

  "Snails?"

  "When fresh, or properly dried, they can be used to treat the venom of most other creatures of the sea," Asher said. "In most parts of your country, a handful of barnwhelks will buy you a household."

  "New idea," Blays said. "We forget all this slave business and become snail-hunters instead."

  "This is enough about snails," Asher said. "You were saying?"

  Lira stepped around a knee-high swell of slick black rock. "We were on the piers finishing the exchange when the pirates struck. The Eyeteeth Gang. We were outnumbered—grossly. Those of us with blades went to the docks to hold them off while the Shadow and the People of the Pocket shoved off. We managed to hold them off just long enough. Most of my fellows fell. I tried to fight to the death, but the Eyeteeth took me instead.

  "They wanted to know where the Shadow had gone, as well as the vessel of the People of the Pocket. I didn't tell them."

  Asher's expression darkened. "What did it cost you?"

  Lira pulled back her lips and pointed at the gaps where her eyeteeth had been. Dante looked away. He'd assumed they'd been lost to simple rot.

  "Those," she said, "as well as two of my toes, and all my toenails."

  "But you didn't speak."

  Lira shook her head. "I was sworn to protect the Shadow."

  Asher cocked her head. "But not the people they did business with."

  "Revealing the People of the Pocket's destination could have compromised the Shadow's location. In any event, it would have compromised the Shadow's interests, and would have been a violation of the spirit if not the letter of my vow. After a few days, the Eyeteeth knew my cause was lost. They readied to kill me.

  "But a few days was all the time the People of the Pocket needed to return. The Eyeteeth had taken several of their crew as well. The People's nethermancers wiped them out. They would have killed me, too, for what I had seen, but a woman named Istvell had seen me keep my tongue throughout it all. She gave her name for me. I was saved."

  Asher held her hands out palm-down and rolled her wrists until her palms pointed at the fog-matted skies. "And she showed you worlds within worlds."

  "She showed me worlds within worlds," Lira nodded.

  "That is why you're here with me and not back there beneath one hundred feet of mud."

  "I don't think that's the only reason," Dante muttered.

  Asher smiled as coldly as the mist. For the next two hours, they walked in silence through the sweating stones. The sun waned, its fog-blocked glare drifting toward the horizon. The mist thinned abruptly. They stood on black cliffs above light blue seas, rhythmic waves hissing over a beach of black sand. Asher crossed to a doorway carved into the side of a rocky mound. White light blossomed in her hand. She led them down another long, enclosed stairwell, emerging from the bottom into the pink rays of sunset.

  Lira took a long breath of salty air through her nose. "Have outsiders ever seen this?"

  "Sometimes." Asher walked south across the strand. "Then they are given the choice to stop being outsiders or stop being alive."

  To the north, a spectral call of oot oot oot floated down the shore. Asher's feet whispered on the sand. Down the beach, a proper door opened into the cliffside. Asher opened it, revealing a high tunnel lit with the unblinking white glare of torchstones. Their feet echoed in the closed space. Laughter rang down the halls. Asher turned down two side passages, stopping in front of a door made from something papery and semi-translucent.

  "Please don't leave this spot." She opened the door, revealing mounds of blankets and white light, then closed it with a whisper. Low voices seeped through the thin door. She returned a minute later and gestured them inside.

  On the far side of the stone room, a woman sat on a pile of blankets, her black hair shot through with gray. She wore snug, featureless black clothes and a red scarf on her wrist, which fluttered as she gestured to the blanket across from her. Dante sat, trying not to gape. Nether rolled from her like heat from a stove. She did nothing with it—in fact, she didn't even appear to have summoned it—but he could feel it nonetheless, a dark ocean he'd never felt from anyone besides Cally himself.

  "Please tell me what you know," she said. "Please don't try to lie."

  Dante forced himself to meet her eyes. "All I have are guesses."

  "Then kindly tell me what you guess."

  "The cliffs keep most out. I don't know whether you shaped them or simply found them useful. When armies came, you buried the soldiers in mud or sand until they stopped coming at all. If even that doesn't work, you seal off your caves and leave the invaders to wonder where you've gone."

  She gave him a look as sturdy as the walls. As stony, too. "Where are you from?"

  "Narashtovik."

  "Is Narashtovik still a possession of Gask?"

  He risked a short laugh. "Not for long, though our independence might be as short-lived as a dayfly. The king will march on us soon. I came here to learn how you've resisted every army that's come your way—in the hopes we might do the same."

  She nodded, gazing toward the ceiling. "I see. Every people should rule themselves, if ruling themselves is what they want to do."

  Dante leaned forward. "Then you'll teach me how to move the earth?"

  "Of course not," she laughed. "I'm afraid we don't give a shit. Why do you think we're behind these great black walls?"

  Dante blinked. "But we have a common enemy. If you help us, you help yourself."

  Her brows lifted as slowly as a sunrise. "They're not my enemies. Enemies can only be enemies if they have the ability to hurt you."

  "I'll swear on anything never to tell. Never to use it against you. Why are you the only ones with the right to defend yourselves?"

  "We aren't. But we are the only ones with the right to our secrets, if you please." She leaned back, folding her hands in her lap so her fingers overlapped at a right angle.

  Helpless fury rose in Dante's throat. He wanted to shake her until the knowledge popped right out her throa
t. What she knew could change the world. Could forge him into a weapon every bit as strong as the Quivering Bow. To deny him that felt not just heartless, but monstrous.

  "This isn't just for my sake." He fought to control his voice. "This is for the entire norren people. King Moddegan will cross their lands before he gets to us. And he doesn't consider them human."

  "I sympathize. That's why I'm letting you leave. Which I urge you to please do now." She shut her eyes.

  Asher detached from the wall. "I will take you back to your land, please."

  "It's time for us to go," Lira said softly.

  Dante wanted to scream. Instead, he stood. Asher took a torchstone on her way out. It lit their way across the twilit beach, up the stairs, and across the miles of misty plateau. They crossed the last hour under full cover of night, their path through the rocks and mud lit only by an unseen moon and the lunarly glow of the torchstone. Dante stayed silent all the way to the staircase back down to the plains.

  Asher halted there atop the carpet of broken rocks. "Please don't come back."

  "But you've been so helpful," Dante said.

  "Worlds within worlds," Lira waved.

  Asher nodded. "Worlds within worlds."

  She disappeared up the staircase. Mourn's fire flickered in the grass. Dante didn't speak on the way there. As Mourn rose to greet them, a crackling, banging rumble rolled from the cliffs.

  Dante whirled. Rocks and dust sprayed from the black wall. The remains of the staircase crumbled to the plains in a pile of rough shards.

  13

  The plains rolled away, the same empty miles they'd crossed just days before. Dante let Blays and Lira fill Mourn in on what had happened in the Pocket. He pushed his horse until it sweated and heaved. The return to Wending and the lakes of Gallador was their last chance to stave off the coming strife. He resolved not to fail.

  A day's ride from the western peaks of the rift, he pulsed Cally's loon. The old man answered at once. Dante related the details of their trip to the cove, expecting Cally to respond with derision and complaints, but he turned thoughtful instead.