The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Blood lay maroon and drying on the rocks and broken limbs. It wasn't hard to follow into the soil. He simply followed the nether, the unstable streams of shadows waiting below the surface. He grabbed hold of them and yanked.

  Stones scraped and groaned. A chasm veed apart, four feet long and two feet wide. Crows shrieked and took flight. A shattered body tumbled into the short abyss, landing with a wet crunch. Its feet jutted above the parted rocks. Dante skipped back a step, then laughed at his own skittishness. Dust sifted onto the corpses and stones.

  He repeated this on a smaller scale, parting the dirt into furrows fit for planting potatoes. Moving the nether and the earth with it taxed his strength at a fraction of what it would cost to muscle aside the earth itself. Were Arawn's shadows acting as a lever? A net knit through the tumble of earth and rock that, when tugged, exerted its power over everything within its weave? The weakness in his legs and the faint pain in his back stopped him from running all the way back to Borrull. It was late afternoon. After confirming with Hopp the Gaskan army was still encamped ten miles to the west, Dante set himself to the earthen ramparts the norren were piling behind the stone wall. At his command, dirt flowed uphill, forming loose mounds the warriors tamped down with shovels and their own feet. In the scheme of things, his efforts weren't much. By the time his strength gave out, he'd added some ten feet to the left wing of the rampart, raising that stretch just above his head. But it helped. And he was there as much for the practice at earthmoving as for the aid he could give to the fortification. As with all things, skill could only come through effort.

  The effort and its immediate results left him flushed with wonder and hope. Cally's loon remained blank, however. Ravenous, he paused for dinner, then went to find Blays and explain what he could do.

  Blays nodded slowly. "So you can move dirt from one place to another, can you?"

  Dante snapped his fingers. "Like that."

  "That's going to come in very handy if we're attacked by a wild pack of sand castles."

  "Look, this is just a start. In time, I may be able to form whole ramparts overnight."

  Blays jerked his thumb at the norren toiling on the earth wall despite the twilight. "Looks like they've tapped into the same magic."

  Instead of speaking, Dante sought the ground-up bones and powdered skin embedded in the dirt beneath Blays' feet, then yanked it six inches to the left. Blays fell straight on his ass.

  "Make more sense now?" Dante said.

  Blays hopped up, smacking dirt from his pants. "All that proves is I'm drunk."

  "Are you?"

  "What, you aren't? We're going to be attacked tomorrow!"

  "You're right. I have the sudden urge to start drinking until I can't stand up. Think they'll kill a man with a hangover?"

  Blays waved a hand through the darkening air. "Quit bitching and start thinking. You may have forgotten this, what with your fancy loons that let you talk to someone hundreds of miles away, but that army doesn't know a thing about what happened here. As far as they know, this fort is still manned by two hundred of the king's finest."

  Dante folded his arms and considered the ground. "There's a chance, however small, they'll reappraise the situation when they see the walls are manned by a horde of bearded giants."

  "So don't let them see that."

  "Sorry, I still don't know how to stop the sun from rising. I'll see if I can work that one out before bedtime."

  "It's a lot simpler than that, dummy. We've got three humans here—and we can stick a lot more on the walls."

  Dante gaped. "Those bodies down there look like overcooked stew. We can't just prop them on the merlons and expect the enemy to wave hello."

  "Lyle's balls, do I have to do everything?" Blays said. "Conjure up some of those visions of yours. A score of red-shirted soldiers watching impassively from the battlements. Lure a bunch of the king's men into town, then seal up the gates with a big plug of dirt to cut the rest of them off. The norren behind the walls get to go all choppy on the troops inside while the warriors on the wall go all shooty on the redshirts trapped outside."

  "That," Dante said, "is not a bad idea."

  "Of course it's not. It's a great idea. If I were paid by the idea, I could retire off that one, that's how great that idea is."

  "I'm going to talk to the chiefs." Dante glanced across the grounds. "Meanwhile, I've got a much more important mission for you."

  Blays straightened. "What's that?"

  "Fetch us the celebratory rum."

  Blays nodded solemnly and ran away. Dante found Hopp speaking with Mourn inside the foyer of one of the round earthen homes. He laid out the plan. Hopp chuckled, grinning his foxy grin, and raised his brown brows at Mourn. "What do you think?"

  Mourn stiffened. "I'm not a strategist. Unless speaking unlearnedly about strategy makes me one. But I have no formal training in strategy."

  "You think I do? Strategy's about guts and intuition. You're a chieftain now. Don't you want to act like one?"

  "I would argue that chieftaincy is not defined by the role itself, but rather by the individuals who fill that role." Mourn gave Dante a dubious look. "But it sounds like a pretty good plan."

  "We could just post the real-life norren along the wall," Dante said. "Convince the redshirts this isn't the hill they want to die on."

  Hopp shook his head sharply. "We're going to have to kill an awful lot of them before we can convince the rest to go home. Don't you think we're better off behind these walls than meeting them in the field?"

  Dante had no rebuttal for that. In the streets, norren worked by torchlight to carve arrowshafts and fletch them with the feathers of the village's geese and turkeys and chickens. Dante returned to the house he'd been quartered in. The clank of the smiths' hammers woke him more than once. In the morning, the gates were back up and ready to be closed, though a soft-spoken smith whose nulla was clearly ironwork assured him the new hinges were ill-fitting and brittle, prone to breakage under any serious assault. Too starved to think straight, Dante thanked him and headed out for a breakfast of chicken and bread.

  The scouts returned while he was still belching. Gask's army was on the move. At rough count, it bore a thousand footmen and some eighty cavalry. Half again what the depleted clans could muster. Good odds regardless, if one were behind strong gates and not battle-worn from a previous engagement. Less so when the day's plan involved letting scores of the enemy walk straight through the gates.

  Dante climbed the turret on the left side of the mended doors to watch the green valley and the opposite ridge. Behind him, warriors scooped away the rampart immediately behind the gates to hide it from the enemy until the redshirts had already passed into the killing zone. Norren lugged sheafs of arrows up to the walls and distributed them at intervals.

  Just before noon, ten riders crested the far hill. Dante hurried to put on a uniform claimed from one of the dead bodies. It had been scrubbed and restitched, but it still smelled like blood and worse. The gates closed with a boom. A stern call silenced the work of hammers and axes and chisels and shovels. Blays and Lira, the other two real humans participating in the farce, ran up to the battlements, kissed, and spread out along the wall.

  Dante waited for the riders to start up the base of the wedge to Borrull, then summoned the images of several more guards. At first these were nothing more than fuzzy silhouettes, shadow-figures that took none of his strength to maintain but looked perfectly real from a half mile away; as the riders grew near, he filled the figures in with increasing layers of detail until you'd have to be standing right next to them to see they weren't breathing.

  The riders pulled up ten yards from the gate. A lean-muscled man with a thick black beard shucked off his helmet and squinted up at Dante. "Hail and such."

  "To you too," Dante said, doing his best to neutralize his Mallish-Narashtovik accent.

  The rider gazed across the battle-churned field and boot-stomped sod. "All's well?"

  "Had an
attack a couple nights back. One of the tribes—a big one. Put them down easily enough."

  "Typical," the man laughed humorlessly. "Well, the rest of us are just thataway. Be seeing you in a couple hours."

  Dante nodded, heart bumping. The rider turned his horse and headed down the dirt path. The others followed. As the men hit the valley, Dante prayed to Arawn they wouldn't circle around the butte and find the pile of bodies bloating between the rocks, but the mounted scouts continued straight back the way they came. Dante dispelled the shadow-figures. The men crossed beyond the hill.

  He signaled to Stann. Stann tipped back his head and let out a long, upward-lilting note. The norren burst from the houses, jogging to positions along the wall. Others continued to make last-minute additions to the wooden palisade and the earthworks supporting them. Men carried up water and food to those on the walls. The sun inched along the sky.

  Less than two hours later, the far hill turned black with men. Scores of horsemen, hundreds of footmen, a flock of ox-driven wagons that slowed their progress to a casual walk. Dante sweated in his false clothes. He returned his silhouettes to the battlements and probed at the dirt in the tunnel beneath the gates. It too was freshly blood-soaked, thick with death and nether. Ready to respond.

  Warriors flattened themselves behind the merlons. Dante sharpened the lines of his illusory guards. The army rumbled down the hill and started up the butte. Dante's nerves thrummed. Impossibly, the king's men continued on, oblivious to the counter army lurking among the fortifications. The human soldiers carried unstrung bows and sheathed swords, shoving each other, joking, faces grimy with the sweat and dirt of a long march through hostile lands. And then they stood before the gates, a blanket of troops smothering the grasses. Horses snorted. The smell of their sweat climbed the walls. Dante straightened atop his tower, raising a hand to the rider who pranced forth, his lightweight red cape snapping behind him.

  "General Varrimorde, Earl of Junland," he called in the crisp and regal accent of his homeland, a rich farming county bordering Setteven itself. "I request entry for the king's army of the Varton Forest and surrounding lands."

  Dante saluted and barked a command down to the gates. Wood and hinges creaked. The Earl of Junland faced his troops and hollered them forward with the elegant nonsense of martial commands shouted loudly enough for an army to hear. Dante fought down a giggle and the urge to vomit. Were they really letting an enemy army stroll through their front door? The first troops emerged on the far side of the wall, a mixture of cavalry and their aides. Infantry with spears and swords and studded armor followed them through.

  Varrimorde frowned at the empty grounds, the fresh ramparts, the burnt and disassembled husks of houses. "What has happened here?"

  Hopp screamed like it was the end of the world. Scores of norren popped up from behind walls of wood and stone, unleashing a punishing volley of arrows. Men screamed among the twang of bows. Varrimorde whipped out his sword.

  "To arms! Treachery! To arms!"

  Confusion rippled through the men outside the gates. They reached for bows and swords. Inside, the surviving soldiers fumbled out swords and spears and charged the palisaded archers. With a great cry, the men outside the walls surged into the tunnel.

  Time to cut them off. To plug the gates and slaughter those trapped inside. Dante dispersed his shadow-figures with a wave and plunged his focus into the dirt beneath the redshirts' trampling feet. The nether waited. He grabbed hold and yanked—but the dirt held firm.

  21

  Dante froze. Soldiers rushed through the open gates and into the storm of arrows and blades raging around the ramparts. Varrimorde jolted from his mount, an arrow sticking from his hip. His cavalry screamed in anger and galloped behind the palisades, swords glinting in the sun.

  Again Dante grasped the nether in the soil between the gates. Had he pulled too hard the first time, like whipping a tablecloth out from under a set of dishes without spilling a one? Or had his entire control of the earth been a fluke, only to falter when his failure might mean the death of everyone here? He pulled again. Again, the nether moved, but the dirt between its shadowy strands stayed put.

  His head went dizzy. He forced himself to slow his breathing to a steady tide. He saw at once. Knifelike, he had honed in on the nether itself. He needed to relax. To move not just the nether but all it was bound to. Like that, he could feel the weight of the dirt, the solid strength of the pebbles and stones. He yanked on the dark net a third time. A great rumble boomed from below. Men shouted in alarm. Dante sucked in the dirt like an outgoing wave and mounded it to the top of the tunnel. A half dozen soldiers were swept up in the rush, instantly crushed beneath a tide of dirt. The flow of men into the village stopped cold. On the other side of the plug, swords whacked into the earthen wall, as if the locked-out soldiers could simply chop their way through.

  The norren on the walls poured fire into the shattered ranks trapped inside the fort. At the base of the steps, Blays and Lira fought side by side, falling back under a throng of redshirts hoping to push up the steps and carve into the archers crouched behind the walls. Dante ran forward, slinging a bolt of nether through the neck of the foremost soldier. He fell in a red spray. The man behind him stumbled. Blays jabbed forward, impaling the man on his own momentum. The man's dying weight forced him back, unbalancing him against the steps and exposing his lead leg to an incoming sword. Lira knocked it aside with a backhand sweep and grabbed the attacker's wrist with her bare hand. The man pulled back on his arm. Lira flowed after him, keeping clamped on his wrist while her elbow bent and slammed into his face. His sword clanged on the steps. She buried her sword in his belly.

  Dante struck out again, aiming for another neck, but his hold on the nether was wobbly, weakening. The lance of shadows clipped the man's collarbone. He shrieked, flailing at an enemy who wasn't there. Blays stabbed him in his turned back and kicked him down the stairs.

  The crowd at the steps had been reduced to a couple. Something similar had happened along the ramparts, where the cavalry had cut their way through the norren lines before succumbing to spears and arrows. Horses thrashed in the dirt, trying to rise and flopping to their bellies. Scattered redshirts fought on, falling swiftly beneath the hammerblows of the norren's outsized weapons. A group of four of the king's men cut down a pair of warriors from a clan Dante didn't recognize. A band of norren rushed them, howling, and the four soldiers bolted toward the stone houses across the field.

  Cut off from the rest of their troop, with all their officers dying or dead, the few survivors flung down their weapons and raised their hands. The norren on the wall swiveled to the opposite side and fired down on the men still trying to dig through the dammed gate. In less than a minute, the survivors outside broke, fleeing downhill in a mad run, arrows whisking between them, felling them into the hot grass. They abandoned the wagons and the wounded. A knot of men remained trapped under the gates, unwilling to risk a run. Instead, the archers climbed down inside the walls to set up behind the arrow slits. The redshirts' screams filtered up to the wall where Dante sat to catch his breath.

  Like that, it was over. All that was left was to tend to the wounded—death, for the king's men, who were cut down and dragged to the cliff's edge. Their own warriors were carried on shoulders and stretchers to the great hall above which Orlen had killed the commander and Mourn had killed Orlen, where the benches had been emptied out to build the palisade. Warriors set to work digging out the gates. A handful leapt down from the walls into the grass to chase down the oxen and bring the wagons up to the village. When Dante called, the nether hesitated, sapped by his struggles with the earth, but he left to the hall to do what little he could for the wounded.

  Inside the hall, he could hear the screams from the cliffs. This wasn't war with all the niceties between squabbling kings. It had passed beyond that; in mere days, it had become something twisted and vicious; the norren fought the way a wounded lion fought, half-mad and pitiless. Any humans who
came to the Norren Territories to hurt the norren would never go home again.

  Dante washed his hands of blood and returned to the hard yellow sunlight. Warriors milled everywhere, washing up, hauling the barrels and sacks from the captured wagons into a pair of the houses built into the ground. Others dug a mass grave for their own dead. Their apparent lack of regard for the departed was curious, almost disturbing. There was nothing organized about it. Some cried while others dug. When the hole was deep enough, they filled it with bodies, then walked away. There were no public words. No tombstones or eulogies. Within minutes, the fallen returned to the hills that had birthed them. Was this, too, the product of their nomadic lives? Why leave a gravestone when you might never return? Was it one more sign of their stoicism? And why did it bother him? It somehow seemed more final, as if the dead were already long gone and soon forgotten. He hadn't been with them long enough to understand.

  Hopp again came through without a scratch. He grinned at the torn-up ramparts, but his eyes were pained. "Cut it a little closer there with the gates, didn't you?"

  "Considering I just learned how to do that yesterday, I'd say I did pretty good."

  "We are alive. It could have been worse."

  Dante nodded at the blood-soaked wall of raw dirt. "How many losses?"

  "Fifty. Sixty." Hopp's grin soured. "Do they always have so many horses?"

  "The rich ones do. Fortunately for us there are always more poor."

  "Well, I don't like them. The horses. Or the men who ride them. What can we do about them?"

  "Spears help," Dante said. "If you can figure out something more effective than that, we'll never lose another battle."

  Dante had felt oddly detached from the victory. Moody, unenthused. The talk with Hopp helped a little. So did the contents of one of the wagons: casks of beer and rum, which the norren quickly distributed throughout the yurts and houses of the village. Others hauled broken chunks of the palisades and piled them into crackling bonfires—not because there was any need for warmth, but because lighting huge fires was simply what one did after a big victory. Some sang songs, minor-keyed and angrily joyous. A pair of Broken Herons slung Dante up on their bumping shoulders and hauled him to a spot beside the fire. A mug was sloshed into his hands. The undiluted rum brought tears to his eyes. The wet wood threw thick white smoke into the sky. Strangers joined the circle around the fire to ask his name and give theirs. He found himself laughing. When they urged him to tell them what he'd done to make the earth rise, he told them of his first two failures and how he thought they might all die because he'd promised the impossible, and they laughed, too.