The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante reached Cally via loon and learned the old man had sent Somburr and Hart, the old norren councilman, down to the Territories to try their hand with the tamer clans. They'd already distributed a handful of loons. More surprisingly, most of the chiefs who'd accepted the artifacts appeared to be using them as intended. Cally had already helped organize a successful raid on the outskirts of Dollendun; three clans acting in concert freed sixty prisoners from the farms they'd been taken to after the first riots. Cally was trying to put together a series of attacks on the road to cripple the king's supply line into the city, but rumors from Setteven claimed the first major force would be arriving within weeks—a thousand men or more.

  Dante passed that on to Hopp. Hopp nodded. "Thank you. Now go fish."

  Mid-spring became late spring. Warm breezes smelled of pollen and green. The Broken Herons moved camp twice more. Two of their scouts killed one of the enemy and brought his body back to be buried out of sight. A visitor from a friendly clan told them about a skirmish on the fringes of Tantonnen. She didn't know which clan was involved. Dante wondered whether it was the Golden Fields, and whether Waill and her people were all right.

  He was eating a lump of pan-cooked flatbread and watching the dragonflies skim the stream when his loon pulsed. He assumed it was Cally, but the signal was coming from Blays.

  "Hello," Dante said. "I wasn't aware you knew how to use these."

  "Sure I do. Me and Lira talk dirty through them all the time. Where are you?"

  "On the sudden verge of vomiting."

  "Well, finish that up and get over here. I think we've found a scout."

  Dante chawed off a chunk of bread. "So kill him," he said, spitting crumbs.

  "I don't like what I'm seeing." Blays described the lay of the land, a double-crowned hill not a mile west of the camp at the stream. Dante grabbed his sword and ran west up the ridge, sweating in the buttery sunlight. He headed down a slope thinly wooded with birches. At the bottom, marshy grass sprayed water from his thumping boots.

  "Yeah, I see you," Blays said. "You run funny. Arms out like a drunken bird. Keep heading straight up the hill. Okay, go right a bit. A little more. Can you see me yet?"

  Dante smacked away a branch before it hit his face. Below the hilltop, a figure emerged from a stand of trees and waved its hands above its head.

  "Arawn's liver!" Dante said. "A hideous monster just leapt out from the woods."

  As he approached, Blays closed down the connection and put a finger to his lips. "Follow me."

  Blays hunkered down as they reached the ridge, weaving behind thick bushes with sweet-smelling purple flowers. On the other side, two of the clan's warriors lay prone behind a screen of shrubs. They didn't look up as Blays and Dante slid in beside them.

  A small valley bowled out below them, flanked on all sides by hills. A couple hundred yards away in the valley's swampy bottom, a man in plain brown dress moved across the flooded ground, stepping between tiny islands of turf. He stopped regularly, bending down to examine the weeds and muck. Each time, he glanced at the horizons, stood, and walked on to the next island.

  "He's tracking you," Dante whispered. "Don't you think you'd better move?"

  "We've got a while yet," Blays said. "Question is, who's he tracking us for?"

  "You want to follow him back?"

  "And if he starts to get too close, I figured you could kill him as quietly as killings get."

  Dante nodded. A fly landed on his sweaty neck. He shrugged it away. Down in the bog, the tracker plodded along, checking for bootprints, scanning the ridges, and repeating. After several minutes he turned and hurried for the far hill.

  Blays frowned. "Does this seem off to you?"

  "What's his rush?" Dante said.

  "There's no way he saw us through this brush. He didn't even look this way before running off."

  The man retreated between the birches, topping the hill and dropping over the far side. One of the warriors turned to Blays. "If we're following, let's follow."

  Blays stood. Dante dug his fingers into the soil and pushed himself off the ground. His fingertips thrummed. He paused there, as if frozen in the middle of a pushup, honing in on the faint vibration.

  "Wait," he said.

  The thrumming flickered away. Had he imagined it? Had his hands fallen asleep? He lowered his mind through his fingers to the dirt. He could feel movement there—not with his fingers, not in the way you feel the kernels on a corncob or the grain of wood on a chair, but in the way you feel an intruder moving through a pitch-black room.

  "We're going to lose him," the warrior said.

  "Wait!"

  The thrumming wavered, threatening to fall away completely. Dante delved deeper, tracking the vibration through the solid earth until it burst around him like a heavy rain, pattering and irregular. He followed it further until he could feel it physically, a light tapping on his ribs and shoulders, a dozen or more blows per second.

  "What are you doing down there, hiding an erection?" Blays said. "Just get up and walk it off. I promise not to make fun of you until we're back in public."

  Dante shook his head sharply. "I think...the earth is talking to me."

  "I am too, and I've known you for longer. Let's go."

  The taps tapped on, harder than they'd been mere moments before. There was a pattern to them, too, far too complex for him to break it down, but just prominent enough to recognize it was there.

  "In five minutes, you can laugh at me all you want," Dante said. "Until then, get down and be quiet."

  Blays gave him a long look, then crouched back down behind the brush. The warriors murmured to each other. For a second, Dante thought the whole farce of him being a fellow clansman was about to break down, then they too hid themselves behind the budding branches. Dante's arms quivered. He pushed himself upright and knelt. He brushed his hands off on his pants and touched them back against the dirt. The feeling was gone.

  It didn't came back. He sat perfectly still, watching the silent valley with a thunderous heart. One of the warriors sniffed. Dante scowled at the ground, willing the thrumming to come back.

  "Holy shit," Blays breathed.

  Dante snapped up his head. Back the way the scout had retreated, men in red spilled over the hilltop. Horses along the flanks, lances shining in the sun. Dante reached for his loon and turned the brooch to Mourn's setting.

  "Okay?" Mourn said after some moments. "Is this working?"

  "Tell Hopp to move the clan," Dante said.

  "All of it?"

  "Yes."

  "To where?"

  "Anywhere the army I'm watching isn't."

  "Oh," Mourn said. "And where is that? Just out of curiosity. And my desire to be of any help to Hopp at all."

  "Two hills to the west. About a mile and a half away and shrinking fast."

  "Oh. I'm just going to tell him that it may be time to run, then."

  "Let me know once the clan's on the move," Dante said. "If you guys take too long, we'll come up with something to distract them."

  "Like running away screaming?" Blays said.

  Dante shut off the loon. "That works for me."

  Over the next few minutes, he discovered he was wrong about the army. Specifically, it wasn't an army—more of a legion, some two hundred footmen and 21 riders. At the bog, the soldiers stopped to rest their horses and themselves, stoking fires to boil the stagnant water. Mourn reported in. The clan was heading north. Dante and the scouts backed up the hill and over the ridgeline. On the other side, they ran to the northern hill and waited behind a screen of leaves for the legion to reappear and continue its march to the west.

  When they rejoined the clan to be spelled by fresh scouts, Hopp nodded at Blays first, then Dante. When they ate dinner, a warrior named Rone invited them to eat with him and his friends beside the banks of the stream.

  The walls came down. Warriors greeted Dante in the morning. Blays and Lira joked with the other couples. Mourn was invited t
o another wrestling match, which he won. When Dante expressed wonder at how quickly the clan's reception of them had thawed, Mourn just shrugged.

  "'Thaw' is the perfect word for group decisions among norren. The ice looks stable for weeks, then you wake up one morning to find it's cracked and swirled away."

  However the thaw had happened, Dante was glad to see the ice depart. He'd been feeling displaced. Not lonely, exactly. As much time as Blays spent with Lira, he was still around, as was Mourn. He spoke to Cally every two or three days, too. But each had concerns of their own. Between that and being surrounded by nearly forty warriors who had treated him like an ill-dressed stranger at a fancy party, their new nods, chuckles, and hellos felt as warm as the midday sun.

  Four days after he, Blays, and the two scouts had narrowly averted a most unwelcome battle, Hopp shook him awake before dawn and then moved on to roust Blays from his tangle of blankets and Lira.

  "Up for a trip?" Hopp asked once Dante had been to the latrine and had a cup of wintrel tea boiled from fresh leaves.

  "I don't know. Wouldn't you rather I go catch breakfast?"

  "There will be time for that later." The chieftain brought three more warriors with him, leaving the old woman in charge of the clan, and led the trek south. Dante followed without question through the chilly dawn and dewy morning. Miles and hours later, Hopp trudged up a hill. Dante startled. At its top, a dozen norren sat on a circle of lichen-encrusted stones. Several greeted Hopp by name. Several more stared unabashed at Dante and Blays.

  Hopp wandered to the middle of the circle of stones. A general silence followed him. He smiled at Dante. "I thought it was time for you two to be introduced." He swept his hand around the circle at the seated norren. "These are the chiefs of your clan-cousins. My chiefs?" He gestured back at Dante and Blays. "These are the two newest brothers of the Clan of the Broken Heron."

  19

  The chirrup of insects swelled in the silence. Dante laughed softly. He didn't know what he'd been expecting: to be upgraded to hunting deer, perhaps, or taken on a historical tour of the places where the Herons' most famous philosopher-warriors had died. He'd stopped actively pursuing Hopp's trust about three days into his fishing career. He'd expected Cally to call him off long before he had the chance to convince Hopp into taking the loons.

  "I'm not sure if you've noticed this, Hopp," a white-bearded man said at last. "But those appear to be humans."

  "The Broken Herons must have one shocked father," said a red-haired woman.

  Several chiefs laughed. Hopp smiled back wryly. "Do you trust me?"

  "Up to about here." The white-bearded man placed his hand halfway between navel and heart. "Sometimes more about here." He grabbed his crotch.

  "I made the decision to bring them into the clan. I then decided they were worthy of it. If you trust me, trust my decisions."

  "Even the sun's too hot some days," said a man missing the first two fingers of his left hand.

  "And when the sun is too hot, do you send it away?" Hopp said. "Or do you bear it and walk on, knowing it will be tolerable again tomorrow?"

  The red-haired woman blew her bangs from her eyes. "When the sun chooses to scorch us, it can't be replaced. You can."

  "You must not trust me very far at all if you think I'm choosing to burn you."

  "Trust who you will." She folded her arms across her chest. "We'll do the same."

  Hopp tipped back his beardless face to stare at the sky, as if he couldn't take what was down on earth any longer. "Do you think I think this is a joke? A whim? Since joining our clan, these humans have fed us. Healed us. Delivered us from danger. Before joining our clan, they helped the Nine Pines liberate the Green Lakes. Josun Joh's rainbow beard, I hear they almost killed Cassinder of Beckonridge. Have any of you done half as much?"

  There were a couple murmurs. The white-bearded man peered between Dante and Blays. "Did you really nearly kill him?"

  "Twice," Blays said. "Does that make it better or worse?"

  "If the third time succeeds, it will be better, because he is an arrogant man, and will assume his previous escapes weren't flukes but his natural blessings. When death comes, then, his surprise will be outmatched only by his terror."

  "That's a hell of a thing to be smiling about," Blays said.

  The white-bearded man's eyes glittered. "Cassinder was behind the proposal to siphon slaves from the clans every three years. Mark my words."

  "What's his problem with you guys, anyway? Did one of you slap him around as a kid?"

  The red-haired woman shrugged. "He wants us for our work in mines and fields and homes."

  "Interesting, isn't it?" Hopp said. "By inference, he must think the product of labor is divorced from the spirit of that same labor. Otherwise, he'd be afraid his tomatoes, ore, and freshly washed clothes would sprout legs and strangle him in his sleep."

  A few of the chiefs chuckled. The three-fingered man waited for it to stop. "Tell us the plan so we can say no and be on our way."

  "Do you know about loons?" Hopp said.

  Dante watched their expressions closely. Three nodded casually and immediately. Four more nodded hesitantly, as if they'd heard of such things, but weren't certain whether they existed. The remainder were more guarded yet.

  "These two brought a set from Narashtovik," Hopp said. "Enough for every chief to have one. No more fire-signals or horns. This is a chance for all of us to strike on the same cue, to switch strategies on the fly, to adapt our tactics before the redshirts have even caught on to our last move."

  "I know my own clan," said the redhaired woman. "I'm not going to be bossed around by the gnarled warlocks of Narashtovik."

  Throughout the talk, Dante had hung back outside the circle of fallen stones. He walked forward until he was a couple paces behind Hopp. "We won't tell you what to do. All we'll do is provide you the means to draw your plans together."

  She shook her head. "Still, I know my own clan."

  "That shit doesn't matter anymore!" Hopp hollered. The chiefs sat straight in shock. Hopp stalked among them, spit flying. "Do you think this thing with Setteven is nothing more than a clan-feud? Do you think isolated clans scattered across hundreds of miles will even slow their armies down? Is a bear turned back by a single sting? It takes a hive, Kella."

  Kella swept her red hair from her face. "We've always survived."

  An old man looked up from his seat on one of the fallen stones. The skin of his face and arms was tanned and sun-slackened. "Applying old ways to new challenges is a guaranteed grave."

  "Try this with me." Hopp produced Dante's bag of loons with a flurry of clicking bone and metal. "If it fails, curse my name on Josun Joh's front steps. Kill me in my sleep and piss on my bones. I've seen the human soldiers trampling our grass. The Clan of the Broken Herons can't drive them out. Nor can the Nine Pines or the Snarling Cougar. The clan-of-clans? They might have a chance."

  The white-bearded chief rose from his seat, hand extended. "I will take one."

  "Then I will, too," said the three-fingered man. "If only to argue down all your dumb ideas."

  One by one, all the others stood and received their loons. Through it all, Kella stood with arms folded, face sliding into a deep scowl. When all the others were busy glancing between their new loons and her, she flung up her hands.

  "I should take your lands when you die," she said. "But if you're bound for Josun Joh's starry hills, I'm coming too, if only to have eternity through which to mock you."

  Hopp smiled and handed her a loon. Dante explained how to bind it with themselves with a drop of their own blood, which two chiefs balked at, fearing dark sorcery, until Dante convinced the white-bearded chieftain to try it. The man sealed the loon and concentrated on the link. A few seconds later, he jumped back a step.

  "There's a voice in my ear!"

  "Does it sound 12,000 years old?" Dante said.

  The man's gaze dulled. "He says insulting your elders is a good way to ensure you'll ne
ver have the chance to become one."

  "That would be Callimandicus, high priest of Narashtovik. All your messages will be routed through him."

  "Or his assistants, he says," the white-bearded man said. "He can't be up for all hours of the day."

  This display broke any remaining resistance from the chiefs. Once their loons were all operational, they ran down the hill like children, dispersing among the rocks and grass until line of sight was broken. There, they passed riddles and jokes and insults through the loons. Sudden bursts of laughter racketed over the whisper of wind in the grass. Once they'd all tried them out and Dante had warned them not to leave the connection open for more than an hour per day, the chiefs said their goodbyes and went their separate ways.

  "Thank you for defending me," Dante said as they headed north down the hill.

  Hopp glanced at him sidelong. "You expected different?"

  "I thought you thought I was a backfired practical joke who would be cut loose as soon as I failed to bring back a fish."

  "That would be a funny thing for a chief to think of one of his clan-sons." Hopp handed over the bag of loons. It was notably lighter. "Keep these safe. I have the feeling we'll need more soon."

  * * *

  With the loons distributed across the local clans, they quickly located the 200-man legion that had nearly caught the Herons unaware. Too large for any of the clans to have opposed on their own, the legion had advanced unmolested twenty miles east to Borrull, a norren village that had grown inside a former fort. According to a refugee, the residents had been caught unawares, forced to surrender and leave their homes with whatever they could carry. Borrull was positioned on a butte, protected on three sides by sheer cliffs and on the fourth by a thick stone wall. The dozen nearby clans could muster five hundred fighters between them. Hopp doubted it would be enough to retake the fort.