He was far from sober when Blays found him. Blays' grin was crooked and devilish, and at first Dante assumed he'd been off in a bedroom with Lira somewhere. And maybe he had, but he also bore something far more interesting: General Varrimorde's marching orders.
Dante stood, open-mouthed, and extricated himself from the celebrants at the fire. Inside the stone house where he was quartered, he sat down in the lamplight with the leather-wrapped bundle of papers.
The orders were more or less as Stann had surmised. Varrimorde had been charged with taking command of the fort at Borrull and operating as the backbone of Gaskan military operations in the region—checkmating any major threats, should they appear, while smaller divisions were dispatched to the front to take the towns beyond the border one by one. There were no contingency orders for what to do if the fort was lost. It simply hadn't been planned for. Furthermore, no legions larger than a couple hundred men were expected to arrive in the Territories within the next four weeks. Everything had hinged on Varrimorde's campaign at the fort.
Dante sat back and rubbed his hand over his mouth. "It'll be days before the survivors make it back across the border. Days after that until they get word to anyone who can make a decision about what to do next. Even if they push up their schedule, we have two weeks or more before they can mount another threat against the Territories."
"I'm sensing something fiendish," Blays said.
"Well shouldn't we?"
"Of course. We're can't let the norren in the border towns sit there in chains when we could be stomping redshirt ass so hard the king tries to outlaw boots."
Dante rolled his lip between his teeth. "Would still be risky. If we get knocked out trying to retake the towns, the Territories will be back to defending themselves with scattered clans."
"We can't not take that risk." Blays stood up to prowl around the table. "All the mucking around we've done down here, that boils down to a pledge to the norren to protect them. To keep them out of trouble. If we've got norren cities occupied by Gaskan troops, we're honor-bound to liberate them."
Dante set down the papers and peered at Blays. "Honor-bound? You've been spending too much time with Lira."
"Well, it's true, isn't it? We made a bond to better their lives. If we don't keep that bond, we've betrayed them."
"Maybe the best way to better their lives is to consolidate what we've got before we go dashing about with banners in hand."
"What's this? You were the one who brought up striking back."
"And then your reasons for agreeing were so dumb I reversed my mind."
Blays snorted. "It's a smart play either way you look at it. Our whole philosophy is to press every advantage we get, isn't it? Well, we've got an army of angry giants. I'd say that trumps their nothing of nothing."
"I'm going to get ahold of Cally," Dante said. "Then we'll see what Hopp and the chieftains have to say."
To Dante's mild surprise, Cally answered in an instant. "I hear a certain someone convinced a certain substance to flow in ways that substance never should."
"It turns out you don't move the earth," Dante said. "You move the nether, and the earth moves with it."
"That doesn't make any sense. You always move the nether. If what you say is true, I'd be knocking down walls and tearing down ceilings every time I summoned it."
"You have to kind of relax when you do it. Go slow but strong. Like pushing a bookshelf across the room. If you push too fast, the whole thing topples over."
"I see," Cally said. "My suggestion to you: never try teaching."
"If I could show you it would make a lot more sense."
"Next time you're back in Narashtovik, then."
"In the meantime, we've got a conundrum," Dante said. "As far as we can tell, we just smashed the enemy's only major force in the region."
"So counterattack."
Cheers thundered from outside. Dante glanced out the window. "What, just like that?"
"Is there a better time to counterattack than when the enemy has nothing to counter-counterattack with?"
"Sure. When he's got nothing and he's drunk in bed."
"Moddegan and his viziers thought conquering the norren would be like plucking bearded, cave-dwelling flowers," Cally said. "You just broke their advance legion. What if you can kick them out of the Territories entirely? Would they sign a peace treaty then?"
"You think so?"
"Arawn's bowels, no," the old man chuckled. "But you never know."
Dante clicked off and wandered outside. Drums beat steadily, as low and monotonous as a heartbeat. Norren moved about the fires in what some might call a dance. To Dante, it looked more like sparring: warriors crouched low, lashing out with straight kicks their partners intercepted with kicks of their own. In unpredictable rhythms, they pivoted on their heels, lurching in to deliver slaps to their partners' faces and chests. The snapping fires cast long, swift shadows over the battle-torn grass. Dante found Hopp smiling wickedly on the perimeter.
"Didn't get enough fighting during the day?" Dante said.
"You've never seen our dance of conquering before?"
"Why would I have? I've only been warring alongside your people for months now. You're normally so open with outsiders."
"You wouldn't have had the chance," Hopp said. "You don't see this before any old skirmish. This dance is reserved for the big invasion of enemy lands."
Dante tried to read Hopp's face, but his head was clouded by the headache of departing liquor. "Invasion?"
"We've decided we don't like seeing any of our cousins in chains." The fire washed Hopp's branded face in white and red. "We're going to take our lands back."
* * *
It didn't wind up as much of a fight.
Two more clans came to Borrull the next day. The chiefs left a token force to hold the fort while the main army headed south at a jog. They hit the river three days later. The first village they reached was defended by fewer than twenty redshirts crowded into a single house. The norren shot them down as they fled out the back door, arrows sprouting from the redshirts' backs like sudden weeds. It was over in minutes. After, norren wandered from their hillside houses, gazing on the dead soldiers with secret smiles before rushing to embrace the sweating clansmen who'd set them free.
A handful of villagers joined them as they camped outside town. Another clan met them in the fields the next day. They captured a second village that morning and a third by afternoon. The Gaskan troops in both were token forces that might not have been able to withstand a single clan. If General Varrimorde's army had been in place at Borrull, with roving legions sweeping away any clans that poked up their heads, the village garrisons may have been able to keep their norren charges in check. Before the combined army of the clans, they were snuffed out like embers that had strayed too far from the fire.
At Cling, the garrison of sixty human soldiers had dug a hasty trench across the switchback path up the cliffs, fortified on the trench's downhill side by a fence of sharpened sticks. From their perch, they fired down on the plaza, arrows peppering the clan-warriors and plinking off the mosaic of the salmon. A frontal attack would be as bloody as a birth. Instead, Hopp pulled Dante aside, then embedded the bulk of the troops in the shops around the plaza. As they took shelter, Hopp led Dante and two clans' worth of warriors up into the hills west of town. Two hours later, they emerged on the upper end of the cliffside roads.
Below them on the switchback, the redshirts shifted their ranks to point their spears uphill. Just four men shoulder to shoulder could block the road completely; with fifteen ranks of the king's men, clearing them out could cost dearly. Instead, Dante sat on his heels and followed the death into the ground beneath them. He found it and pulled.
It was a clumsy job, less powerful by half than what he intended. An eight-foot section of cliffside road—that seamless road laid down by a norren master, a road that would have stood for a thousand years—cracked away from the slope, crumbling downhill in a deadly
rain that swept a dozen men down with it. The others leapt away from the avalanche with panicked shouts. Hopp hollered and the norren pincered the human defenders from above and below. Bodies splashed into the plaza below. It was over in minutes.
A chunk of the docks and riverside houses had been burnt to the foundations. Most of the remaining houses were empty of norren and humans alike. The few residents they found told them both peoples had been taken inland, deeper into Gask. The humans, presumably, as refugees; the norren as slaves.
Not all had been taken. A few remained as servants to the soldiers. Others were prisoners, locked into a cave carved into the base of the cliffs. That was where they found Banning, the lanky graybearded mayor, chained in total darkness to a rough stone wall.
Dante's torchstone lit the way. Banning raised his shaggy head. One of his eyes had been put out, the socket crusty with blood and pus. His lean face had become skeletal, stretched over his broad cheekbones until his nose stood out like a lonely mountain. The fingers of his right hand were crushed, mangled. The room smelled like urine and sickness.
Recognition gleamed in Banning's remaining eye. "You again."
"Quit talking." Dante knelt next to him. He could feel the old man's heat before he touched his pale skin. Infection raged in his veins. His gums were white. He grabbed Dante's arm, chains clanking, but his norren strength had become childlike.
"My painting."
Dante called forth the nether. "Now's not the time for that."
"Now's the only time!" His shout broke into a hoarse croak. "Get me my painting, you baby-legged son of a bitch!"
"What's the matter with you?" Blays said. "We're here to help."
"My painting. The girl by the river. The paints, too. Remember where my workshop is?"
"Yeah, off in the woods with—"
"Good. Then quit gaping at me and go get my gods damned painting." Banning slumped against the cool wall and closed his eye.
Blays pressed his lips together, ready to object, then ran out of the cavern. Dante stayed with Banning, but the nether couldn't bring back the old mayor's eye or untwist his fingers. For all Dante's efforts, it couldn't fight off the fever, either. Banning's chest fell in shallow jerks. Sometimes he drifted off, head snapping upright whenever his chin fell too far. As Dante soothed his pain, two warriors braced Banning's chains, set a metal wedge against them, and struck them off with blows from a sledge. The iron bracelets dangled from the man's wrists. He let his hands rest on the grimy rock floor and closed his eye.
Feet pounded down the dim hall. Banning's eye whipped open. Blays hustled inside with a canvas on an easel and a rattling kit. Banning tried to lean forward and slumped back against the wall.
As the old man swore, Blays set down the kit and cracked it open. Bottles of paint sat in jostled racks, stoppers crusted with reds and blues and greens. He placed the easel in front of Banning and stepped back.
"All better?" Blays said. "Or should I go fetch your smock, too?"
Banning grinned up at him. "Don't think I won't stand up and slug you."
Dante helped him lean forward. Banning's skin burned. He had the sour, uric smell of something that hasn't moved in too long. His unbroken left hand trembled as he reached for his brushes and paints. To Dante, the canvas looked nearly complete: a portrait of a young norren woman beside a gray river, her smile as light as the waters were dark. Spidery trees hung over the banks, threatening to snag the girl's hair and shoulders, but a glowing halo held them at bay from her head. The image was so vivid Dante could almost hear her laugh.
Banning dabbed the brush into a pot of gray. His hand shook, flicking tiny driblets of paint. Sweat slimed his brow. Teeth gritted, he steadied first his breathing, then his hand. He touched the brush to the canvas.
That first touch was like the touch of a torch to dried hay. Banning's remaining strength coalesced into his hand, swooping and dabbing and flicking across the canvas. He croaked commands without looking from his work. Dante handed him rags and paint and brushes and a jar of cleaning-water. Ten minutes later, he signed his name in black on the corner of the canvas and wilted against the wall. His sweat had dried long ago. With a plunging stomach, Dante realized the aged mayor had simply run out of sweat: he was out of water, out of strength.
"Granddaughter in Dollendun," Banning whispered. "Corra." He nodded at the pretty young girl in the painting, then leaned his head back against the wall, eye squeezed tight. "That's her. Can you give her this?"
"Of course," Dante said. He blinked at the painting of the bright young girl warded from the darkness of the world.
He never knew if Banning heard. When he turned, the old man's face had gone slack and smooth, his pain forgotten. Dante pushed the man's shackle up his wrist. He felt no pulse.
One of the warriors had to turn away. Blays rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'll stay here until the painting dries. Her name was Corra?"
Dante nodded. He helped the warriors bring the body up from the cave. It was shockingly light, as limp as worn-out clothes. While they buried the town's dead norren together atop the cliffs, other warriors dragged the dead redshirts to the piers and pitched them into the river to feed the fish.
They stayed in Climb for three days, waiting on wagons of grain from Tantonnen. Warriors foraged and scouted the woods. One new clan joined them each day, swelling their army to more than a thousand. Once the wagons arrived, Hopp led them northwest along the river that marked the border between the Norren Territories and Old Gask. Blays took the painting with him. The next three villages were emptied of redshirts. Word had spread. At the fourth, the heavy corpses of norren lay in the streets. The only sounds and motion were the buzzing of flies, the guilty trot of dogs fleeing the gnawed bodies. At the next bridge, Mourn split the Nine Pines away from the army to hunt down the killers, taking his loon with him.
"Promise you won't fight unless you can win," Dante told him.
Mourn watched the wind blow the trees. "No."
"What do you mean, no? How is you dying going to help us?"
"The Nine Pines will die when we choose to die."
Dante frowned. "Taking to your new role after all."
"I may not want it. In fact, there is no 'may.' I don't want it. I would rather be asleep in a field somewhere, or alive in another time. But this is what my clan wants of me."
"I just meant it was fast. If you won't promise that, at least promise me you'll choose your last words in advance. Otherwise when the moment comes you might say something stupid, and we'll have to pretend we never knew you."
Mourn grinned sheepishly, the old Mourn again, if only for a moment. "I promise. Unless I drop dead before tonight. I think best at night."
They clasped hands. Mourn joined his warriors. The Nine Pines strode across the bridge with their bows and swords.
As soon as the body of the army made camp, Dante's loon pulsed. Across the long miles, Cally giggled.
"Got a surprise for you tomorrow."
"A good surprise?" Dante said. "Or a Cally-surprise?"
"I said it was a surprise. By definition, if I were to tell you what it was, it would not be a surprise, contradicting my original statement with a paradox we might never unravel. Best to leave the universe intact, then, and leave it a surprise."
"Whatever it is, it appears to have driven you insane."
"Only time will tell, my boy. Now get some sleep! You never know what the morrow brings. Best to be well-rested for it."
After that, Dante had no idea what to expect. Cally in the flesh, perhaps. A cask of flounders fresh from Narashtovik's north bay. A fine set of ponies. The next afternoon, two scouts came back at a run to speak to Hopp and Stann. As the army marched on, the river bent left. Around a rocky spur, the land flattened, revealing a great host of men.
The warriors laughed, jogging through the flat plain to meet their far-flung cousins. Hart and Somburr were there, too, dressed in the black and silver of Narashtovik, the silver brooch of B
arden clasping their cloaks around their necks. Hart looked younger than Dante'd ever seen the wizened norren councilman.
"We brought you something," Hart said.
"Looks like more like a thousand somethings," Blays said.
"About 1200, last count. I think we picked up a few more along the way."
Dante gazed in shock at the mingling warriors. "From the eastern reaches?"
"Mostly the northern grasslands." Hart smoothed his robe over his paunch. "We'd heard you were doing well enough for yourselves here in the west."
"Better than I feared," Dante said. "It's good to see you. I think I need to speak to my chief now."
Blays fell in step as Dante tried to spy Hopp among the towering crowds of norren. "This is an awful lot of warriors."
Dante shook his head. "I'd say it's leapt from an awful lot to a hell of a lot."
"You know what hells are good for? Unleashing."
"But who is sinful enough to deserve such unleashment?"
"First off, let's exclude ourselves from consideration. With that out of the way, King Moddegan would top my list, but like all good kings, he's whacking off in a tower while his soldiers get gutted. Next I would suggest Cassinder on grounds of general bastardliness, but I have no clue where he is." Blays took a breath. "At this point, I'm out of ideas and I'm getting frustrated, so I'm going to suggest we just go burn the shit out of Dollendun and see what happens next."
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Page 92