The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We're not committing a crime here."

  "Yes, but if we're meeting at midnight on a roof in the shitty part of town, chances are we'll be conspiring to do so."

  "Right now I'm more interested in conspiring not to break my leg." Blays pulled inside and knelt to paw through his pack, emerging with a steel hook and a line of rope as thin as his finger. He lobbed the hook up at the roof, hanging onto the rope's loose end. The hook screeched over the clay and fell down, banging against the shutters below them. Blays swore, then repeated this exact sequence a half dozen times while Dante gritted his teeth and listened for the angry thump of the innkeeper's boots on the stairs. Finally, the hook secured with a clink. Blays yanked to make sure it was secure, then knotted the loose end around the shutter's lower hinges. As casually as if he were hopping off a step, he swung into the open air and scrambled up the rope. Dante gaped up after him.

  "Come on, you sissy," Blays stage-whispered from the roof. "What's the worst that could happen?"

  "Dying?"

  "Only if you have overcooked-noodle arms."

  Dante reached for the rope. "I wonder what's killed more men over the years. Wild animals? Or masculine taunts?"

  It looked worse than it was. Though he lacked Blays' natural athleticism, years of travel and sporadic sword-practice had left him honed and lean. He pulled himself up hand over hand. When his elbow cleared the eave's lip, Blays grabbed his sleeve and hauled him in. There, the upturned edges of the roof proved beneficial, giving them something to bang into and grab hold of if they were to slip on the dew-slick tiles.

  Blays leaned forward and headed up the steep roof on all fours. On the other side of its peak, the roof plateaued in a shelf some three feet wide. Blays slid down to it and Dante followed, seating himself. The flat stone street waited sixty feet below. The midnight bells tolled while he caught his breath. He squinted at the roofs across the street, but it was too dark to see if Mourn had made it to the top.

  The bells rang a final time, were overtaken by silence. Blocks away, a man cackled and whooped, his voice bouncing down the streets.

  "Think Cassinder's pranking us?" Blays said.

  "I don't think he has the imagination."

  "Right?" Blays laughed. "He talks like a dead person trying to remember how it felt to be alive."

  A voice murmured behind them. "He's more dangerous than you think."

  Dante whirled, tipping. He flung out a palm and caught at the roof. A figure crouched just behind the roof's peak, dressed from head to toes in midnight blue. Eyes peeked from two diamond-shaped cuts.

  "My gods," Blays said. "Have we been ambushed by a towel?"

  The fabric over the figure's mouth puffed with a single laugh. The laugh was a woman's. "This is no ambush."

  "That's good, because we've prepared an elaborate counter-ambush that would wreak terrible harm on any real ambushers."

  She shook her head. "This is a proposal."

  "But we just met."

  Dante almost shoved Blays off the roof. "Propose away."

  The woman slipped over the peak of the roof, joining them on the narrow shelf. "Do you know what happened at Jocubs' today?"

  "Sure," Blays said. "We got royally screwed."

  "Jocubs represented the view of a slender minority," the woman said.

  "Then what does the fat majority say?" Dante said.

  Behind her cloth mask, the woman's look was unreadable. "That he struck a deal. One that will benefit him and those with him at the top. Everyone below will have to scramble to avoid the coming flood."

  Dante shifted his weight across the wet tiles. "Then what are you willing to risk to divert the flood altogether?"

  "That depends on what you're willing to risk to help us."

  "Easy answer. We've already risked everything."

  "Support for the capital hinges entirely on Jocubs' ability to whip the others in line." Her eyes were as gray as a winter sea and steady as the streets sixty feet below. "But no one likes the lash. Jocubs doesn't look out for our interests any more than he manages yours—he used you, leveraged your presence to get Setteven's financiers to give him everything he asked. I'm sure the terms were fat, too. But he favors his friends. When a road charges a new toll, he doesn't pay. The taxes on whatever blend of leaves he happens to be growing never rise. Whatever deal he's struck with Moddegan and Cassinder, most of us will never see it. Our words and our votes don't matter. As long as he's in charge, they never will."

  "Is this going where I think it's going?" Blays said.

  "What's the solution?" Dante said.

  "Very simple," the woman said. "If you want the merchants' backing, all you have to do is kill Jocubs dead."

  14

  A cold wind flowed over the roof. Dante rubbed his mouth. "Why don't you kill him yourselves?"

  The woman's mask shifted in a smile. "So you'll be blamed."

  Blays laughed. "Well, that's honest."

  "Who do you work for?" Dante said.

  "Change," she said. "That's all you need to know."

  Blays sniffled against the cold. "Generally, I prefer to do a little thinking before committing to an assassination. How can we reach you?"

  "Hang a flag from Lolligan's roof. White for no, black for yes. Our offer expires at this time tomorrow."

  "We'll let you know," Dante said.

  She nodded and vaulted over the roof's peak, disappearing with a single clink of tiles. Dante climbed up the roof, slid down to where their hook still clung to the eaves, and shimmied down to the open window. Half an hour had passed since they'd taken their room. On their way out into the alley, the innkeeper gave them a funny look.

  Lira's silhouette emerged from a doorway. "Someone vaulted across the rooftops a few minutes after you climbed up. They left the same way less than five minutes later."

  "Sounds right," Dante said. He cut across the main street and back into the alley where they'd left Mourn.

  "So what happened?" Lira said.

  "Bad things," Blays said.

  "But you look fine."

  "Oh, not for us."

  "All this coyness is getting old." There was a sharpness to her voice Dante hadn't heard before. "The less you let me know, the less I can help you take your goals."

  "You'll hear it when we explain to Mourn and Lolligan." Dante cupped his hands and hissed up at the dark walls of the alley. "Mourn!"

  "I exist," Mourn replied faintly. A foot scuffed high above their heads. Mourn lowered himself from a high balcony, stretching his toes to meet the deck a story below, clinging to a clothesline for support. He reached the ground, nodded to himself, and joined them without a single question. Dante headed toward the docks, staring down every man who glanced his way, looking over his shoulder at every scrape of foreign feet.

  At the island manor, Lolligan opened the front door himself, too bright-eyed to have slept. He sent a servant for tea and bread and fish spread.

  "The later the meeting, the more interesting it tends to be, eh?" The tradesman smiled, beard ruffling. "Now spill it before I drop dead of anticipation."

  For a moment, Dante considered lying, or claiming it was too sensitive a matter to discuss—he'd only met Lolligan a couple weeks ago, and there had always been an eagerness to the old man that suggested he was pursuing submerged angles of his own—but right now, he had no choice. He needed Lolligan's knowledge. He had to trust him.

  The story didn't take long to tell. By the end, a strange smile had worked its way across Lolligan's face.

  "This is funny to you?" Dante finished.

  Lolligan's eyebrows jumped. "In a way that's wry and sad. Over the years, there's been more than one attempt to dislodge Jocubs from his perch atop the swappole. Nothing ever changed. It's like corking up a tea kettle—and now the pot has burst."

  "So this is real? They actually want Jocubs dead?"

  "I'm positive all kinds of people want that old son of a bitch dead. I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone were
finally willing to do something drastic. I'll ask around tomorrow."

  Lira's mouth had been half open all the while. She glanced around the padded benches where they sat. "Are you seriously considering this? Murdering him?"

  "I don't think we have another option," Dante said.

  "Yes you do. The option to not murder him."

  "I'm going to choose to not choose that," Blays said.

  She set down her tea and stared at Blays. "You, too?"

  "Don't look at me like that. I won't enjoy it. Unless we make him slip in a puddle or something."

  "You can't just kill a man for disagreeing with you."

  "Really?" Blays said. "Isn't that what all killing is about? Who's going to stop us?"

  Her lips contracted to a tight line. "You should. You should know better. Warriors don't stab each other in their beds. The same is true if you're fighting in the field or in a council hall."

  "This is simple calculus," Dante said. "If we kill him, one man dies. If we leave him be, thousands of norren will be killed and enslaved."

  "You don't know that." She stood from her bench, pacing the snug room. "None of us knows the future. The only certainty is death. That's why we must always act in life in a way that will make us proud in death."

  Blays slurped the last of his tea. "I'd be pretty proud if we cut this fight off at the roots."

  "This has worked for us before," Dante said. He gazed at his hands. "It isn't pretty. But sometimes it's necessary."

  "Decisions like these are what define you." Lira crossed her arms and turned to the door. "I don't think I want to be part of this."

  "Then it's time for you to make a choice," Dante said. "This is who we are. When we need to, this is what we do. If that's not you, you can leave at any time. Nothing's keeping you here."

  "Except my honor." With her back to them, she turned her head over one shoulder. "But I suppose you'd only laugh at that."

  "Of course not," Blays said. "Not while you're standing right there."

  Mourn cleared his throat with a thunderous rumble. "I don't think anyone will judge you for going your own way."

  The room was silent. Lira nodded twice, as if to herself, and retook her seat. "I may yet. But if Jocubs has in fact betrayed us, then it is our right to take revenge."

  Dante lifted his eyebrows reached for his loon. "Guess I'd better raise Cally."

  "Why in the world would you do that?" Blays said.

  "Because he's in charge of this whole thing?"

  "Do you think we're making the right decision?"

  "Not really, no, but I figure we haven't destabilized a region's governing body recently, so we better go ahead with it anyway."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "Well, what's Cally going to say? Either 'Yes, go ahead and do that thing you were already planning to do,' or 'No, that's so dumb that if it were a person it would forget what food is for—and if you do it after I've told you not to, I'll wear your skin for socks.' Would that actually stop us? What's the point?"

  "When you put it like that? I guess there isn't one." Dante turned to Lolligan. "Find out if this is real, then. And ready the black flag."

  * * *

  Dante's attempts to sleep through the morning were thwarted by a steady clamor of boatsmen hollering their approach, knocks on the front door, and storms of laughter drifting from the rooms below. It sounded as if half the merchants of greater Gallador had spontaneously decided to pay Lolligan a visit. Dante didn't need to be told the truth: that they'd been invited over so Lolligan could determine whether they were serious about wanting to murder the leader of their order.

  This being the case, Dante spent most of the day in his room, venturing out only to visit the kitchen or one of the bathrooms that emptied into the lake. Instead, he read passages from Lolligan's copy of The Cycle of Arawn, which was a more recent translation than the one they favored in Narashtovik, and a firsthand account of the Rafting Wars, an 800-year-old conflict fought between the long-ago tribes of Gallador's lakes. Contrary to the title, these back-and-forth raids had primarily featured canoes and outrigger sailboats—the few bamboo rafts employed by increasingly desperate warriors had proven difficult to control and easy to destroy. Yet rather than accepting repeated offers of peace, the three tribes who'd used the quick-to-build rafts had pushed on until the very end, provoking their rivals into a final counterstrike that had left every man, woman, and child of the three tribes dead. Dante finished just after sunset and wandered his room, contemplating another trip to the kitchen even though he wasn't hungry. As he considered whether there was any meaning to the extinct tribes' steadfast refusal to quit fighting, Lolligan knocked on the other side.

  "I couldn't exactly ask them outright," the merchant said. "For the same reasons, they couldn't answer outright either. But the offer is legit."

  "How do you know?" Dante said.

  "Their anger. It felt genuine. Real enough to hold on to."

  "Got anything more concrete than that?"

  "Possibly." Lolligan touched the points of his mustache, swaying absently from foot to foot. "I saw my friend Ulwen today. She's a good woman. Harvests bamboo from the mountains. There's a lot you can do with bamboo. Chairs. Chicken coops. Interior doors, if you're not too picky. You can even eat it, if you cut off the right parts and boil it long enough. No one else bothers with it on a large scale, because they think bamboo is just for those too poor to afford stone or hardwood, but that's exactly what makes it worth Ulwen's while. Two decades of bamboo has earned her a small fortune. Her vision is just what the TAGVOG needs. But because her fortune's small, and her product isn't one they use or favor, the TAGVOG will never make Ulwen more than a peripheral member."

  "Everyone's frustrated with their position sometimes," Dante said. "Their solution usually isn't murder. Unless they're in the Assassins' Guild."

  "That isn't what tipped me off. That's the context behind the story she told me. A story everyone in Gallador already knows." Lolligan pointed to the history book on Dante's table. "Did you read that?"

  "It was fascinating. It's hard to imagine a time so long ago."

  "After that war, the tribes held a few more, and then discovered everyone else in the world seemed to want our tea, too. So instead of raiding each other's villages, we came together to raid the world's coffers. The city of Wending began to take shape. To keep order, it was decided to elect a tyrant every three years. One man who had to be obeyed no matter what your tribal or familial loyalties. This system had its snags, but it worked smoothly for several generations. Until the election of a man named Kayman.

  "Kayman was a teaman. Self-made. Worked for years as a sailor and bodyguard, then started his own farm, wound up one of the wealthiest men on the lake. Everyone loves a man like that. When he ran for tyrant, he was elected easily. At that time, the lakes and their cities all flew different flags. They all had their own tolls and taxes and regulations about what could come in and what could go out. To Kayman, this was terribly inefficient. Just as easily as he'd bought out the farms that made his fortune, he spent the next three years conquering, absorbing, and allying with every town, tribe, and county on the lakes. For the first time, Gallador was united.

  "He went unopposed in the next election. Not too surprising. Nor all that surprising when he announced his plans to annex the eastern plains. Some people thought it would be easy—just nomads thataways, they'll run right off—but others weren't so sure. Regardless, Kayman sent a legion over the mountains. Presumably, it was a disaster."

  "Presumably?"

  Lolligan nodded. "Gallador never heard from them again, but who knows. Maybe the soldiers all deserted and married five wives apiece and lived very happy lives. Again, regardless, Kayman assembled an even larger force. This time, his doubters outnumbered his supporters, but what could they do? He'd been elected. Still, the lakes had been weakened in the wars of unification. So far as they new, the first legion had been massacred to the last man, and Kayman's second wave was only thr
ee times as large. A few of the nobles feared another loss would leave us helpless against a counterattack. They held a meeting to decide whether to assassinate Kayman. After the meeting, they held a vote. Do you know what happened then?"

  Dante hunched his shoulders. "They killed the hell out of him?"

  "They left him be. They let him march into the east. His army was destroyed. The nomads, having enough, sent back a force of their own late in the summer. Gallador was theirs by winter. A hundred years later, Narashtovik conquered the nomads and Gallador too, and another hundred years after that, some upstart barbarians from the western woods destroyed Narashtovik and took Gallador for themselves. We've been owned by outsiders ever since." Lolligan rubbed his throat. "That's the story my friend Ulwen told me. The story every citizen of Gallador knows."

  "I suppose that's convincing enough," Dante said.

  "Also, after that, she told me she and some others had been setting aside a fund for years, and were ready to hire three hundred mercenaries from around the lakes as soon as the black flag flies."

  Dante didn't know whether to laugh or strangle him. "They've got a private army in the works? You left that until the end because why?"

  Lolligan smiled sharply, spreading his fingers wide. "Because that is how a salesman closes the deal. Are you buying?"

  "All the way," Dante said. "Run up the flag."

  * * *

  The flying of the flag wasn't half as dramatic as Blays would have liked. To conceal it from all eyes but the only pair that mattered, Lolligan waited until nightfall, then sent a servant to the roof, flag in hand. Dante and the others remained inside. Somewhat resentfully, the same servant returned to the roof fifteen minutes after midnight to take the flag back down.

  In the morning, Lolligan found a scrap of black fabric pinned to the front door. Following breakfast, most of the household squeezed into Lolligan's boat and headed for the city. Lolligan was off to hire a half dozen new servants—men whose arms would bulge under their sleeves. Fann headed toward the hills to make the rounds among his wealthy friends and gather any gossip concerning Jocubs, Cassinder, and whatever else was worth knowing. Blays and Mourn holed up in a dockside pub to watch the traffic from the lake for Jocubs or anyone close to him with the intent of following them into the city. And accompanied by Lira, Dante headed for the city's main library.