The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "That's what I was thinking." Dante jerked his chin at the mountains due west, behind which lurked the northernmost lake of Gallador. "If we take Dollendun, the lakelands are the only major route into the Territories. Even if the merchants let the king's men through, they'll be delayed by days."

  "Sure, it makes strategical sense, too. I was more interested in just really pissing them off."

  Hopp was keeping his usual remove from the boisterous union of men and women, many of whom were distant relations of one sort or another. He gave Dante and Blays a nod. "Quite a troop, don't you think?"

  "On a completely unrelated note," Blays said, "how far is Dollendun from here?"

  Hopp's mouth bent in a wry smile. "Think we'd have enough?"

  "Only one way to find out."

  "We'll send the scouts tonight." Hopp rubbed his thick forearm. "Still a lot of norren on the eastern shore of the city, I hear. Wonder if they're happy about the king's troops keeping them locked in their homes?"

  He conferred with the other chiefs while the two wings of warriors continued to integrate, passing news from their homelands and tracing family lines until they found common relatives. It didn't take long for the chieftains to reach a consensus. They'd bivouac behind the bend in the river while the scouts snuck into Dollendun. Equipped with loons, they'd report their findings, at which point the army would make its next move. Blays asked Hopp to tell the scouts to be on the lookout for a young girl named Corra.

  The night was one of songs and drinks and fires. Dante couldn't have slept if he'd wanted to. The cheers and group holler-alongs didn't die down until two in the morning. They resumed, if somewhat less vigorously, by eight in the morning, propelled by the standard group sleeping dynamic: at night, no one gets to sleep before everyone's ready to sleep; in the morning, everyone's woken as soon as the first two people get up and start talking. While the warriors were more than friendly, and several of the new arrivals plumbed Dante for stories about the battles at Cassinder's manor and more recently those at Borrull, he found himself feeling isolated, pensive and restless. At a lull in the early afternoon, he excused himself to the latrine and wandered into the woods. For the rest of the daylight, he practiced moving the earth. Nothing major. The equivalent of a shovel-load at a time. Any more and his control tended to slip, the nether slicing through the rich brown dirt as quickly as if the soil weren't there at all. When it came to a handful of soil, however, he could move that as reliably and precisely as his own foot. He set his dogged mind to understanding each step of the process before allowing himself to move on.

  He couldn't say how much progress he'd made by the time Mourn looned him two days later to tell him the Nine Pines had killed the killers and were on their way back to norren lands. Dante told him to hurry, which turned out to be wise. The scouts reported in that same day. Dollendun was manned by several hundred redshirts. Hard to say how many, given that they were distributed among five or six different barracks, towers, and walls, but at least eight hundred, perhaps twice that many. The norren outnumbered them, in other words, but not great odds when it came to the capture of a city.

  Hopp invited Dante to the war council as his advisor of human affairs. Stann recounted the details with his typically slavish attention to numbers.

  "Risky," he concluded. "A lot of troops in a city full of human citizens who could readily become troops. Cities aren't good things to attack."

  A chieftain named Tenner shook her head, braids brushing her shoulders. "Everything is a good thing to attack if it is attacked in the way that is right to that thing."

  Stann gave her a peevish look. "If you know of the right way to attack a city, I have two ears for you."

  "I don't agree that Dollendun is a city."

  "No?" Hopp smiled. "Then is it a very coincidental proximity of houses?"

  "I think it is two cities," Tenner said. "One norren, one human. Only one of these is hostile to us."

  "That's the spooked hare, isn't it," Stann said. "Don't know which way it will break."

  Hopp lifted his brows. "Let me ask you this. Will we ever have a better chance of taking it?"

  Stann exhaled noisily. "Not unless we find a way to become potato-people who can bud new warriors as we please. The question is whether we need to take it."

  The council went silent in that particular norren way that meant everything relevant had already been said. Hopp clapped his hands.

  "Next question, then. Do we attack by day? Or by night?"

  Dante's grin was as wild as the hills. Reluctantly, Stann helped bash out the strategy: get the scouts to alert the norren still in Dollendun to prepare; march to within ten miles, sleep through the first half of the night, and resume movement at midnight to catch the city at dawn; meet up with the Dollendun norren rebels, who would act as guides and auxiliary support as the army branched out to strike as many of the redshirts' fortifications as possible before the king's garrison could retreat to a single defense. After that, the clans would reconvene and launch an assault on whatever was left.

  It sounded good. It sounded better than waiting for the king to muster an army the norren could never match.

  The army stirred in the afternoon and marched north along the river. "March" wasn't quite the word; there were no formations or drummers to the gathered clans. Just a steady, long-legged stride, the product of long generations crossing the hills and plains on their own two feet. At times Dante had to jog to keep up. At sundown, they stopped in the woods to eat and sleep. Whistles woke him while the sky was black and studded with stars. The march resumed within minutes. Dante's heart beat steadily and quickly, bringing him swiftly to alertness.

  The clans poured from the forest into the bare lands surrounding Dollendun. The dark and sleeping city gave no sign it knew what was to come.

  22

  Something was wrong. Smoke rose from the middle of the river. Orange flames reflected from the black waters.

  "Oh look," Blays said. "The river's on fire again."

  Dante gazed across the water to the western shore, but it was too dark to make out any movement. "Some might consider that a sign."

  "Of Arawn's favor?" Lira's eyes flicked to his brooch. "Or his disdain?"

  Dante shook his head. "Of people who don't want us to cross the bridge."

  Blays grinned at her. "I think you take his faith more seriously than he does."

  "It just looks that way because Arawn doesn't care." Damp grass squelched under Dante's feet. The night was cool, but far warmer than the last time they'd been this far upriver. Despite the retreat of the cold, the city was quieter, too. "Men are the ones who keep trying to drag the gods down to earth. The gods don't give a damn what we do to ourselves."

  "That's not how I was raised," Lira said.

  "That's because you're not from here."

  "Neither are you!" Blays said.

  "Well, I learned better."

  The advance troops jogged away from the thudding mass of marching warriors. Some paused at the tents and yurts flanking the city. Silhouettes of norren pointed to a three-story tower of fresh blond pine standing at the edge of the tents. The lead warriors sprinted up to it, ducking to avoid any fire, and found the door was unlocked. They disappeared inside. A bird's whistle sounded, halting the army mid-stride. Moments later, the warriors emerged from the tower, their postures upright and casual. They waved the army forth.

  Norren citizens popped from the tents to watch them pass. Blays beckoned a woman over to ask what was going on.

  "The same thing I told the others."

  "Let's pretend I haven't heard because I'm not the others," Blays said.

  "Then I would tell you, in a tone of increased annoyance, that the redshirts fled their posts three hours ago. They retreated across the river. An hour after that, the bridges went up in flames."

  "Their scouts must have seen us," Dante said. "Either that or those bridges insulted them for the last time."

  "How strange," Blays said. "For
a moment I imagined we just drove the king's armies from one of the largest cities in his empire."

  "Sounds like a tactical retreat." Lira touched the handle of her sword. "What do they care if we take the norren shore?"

  Dante suspected she was right and the next few hours bore that out. Among all the round-windowed wooden cottages, the courthouses, pubs, and guard stations, they found no living humans and few dead ones. Most of the bodies lay in the burnt places, bones and twisted limbs poking from entire blocks of blackened timbers. The norren they spoke to repeated the recalcitrant woman's story: the soldiers had pulled out just hours before the army's arrival, torching the bridges behind them. There had been neither explanation nor violence. Just a swift and total withdrawal.

  The chiefs encamped at the road along the piers. Scores of scouts roamed the streets. Others struck north to find the nearest bridge. Despite the lack of any official announcement, a brief meeting of chiefs assembled in the public room of one of the pierside taverns.

  "Did anyone anticipate this?" Hopp said.

  Old Wult shrugged his bony soldiers. "Never figured the redshirts would run from a city just to get away from a bunch of—what do they call us? Grass-munchers?"

  "Too dumb to build homes," said the braided woman.

  "Shaggies," volunteered a man who wasn't much older than Mourn, reminding Dante he hadn't heard anything from Mourn since the prior night. He touched his loon.

  "Duckies," Hopp said. "Since you're ducking the question of where we go next."

  "Would have to find a bridge if we wanted to press the attack," Stann said.

  "If?" Dante said.

  "That was one of the words I said."

  "The biggest of them, I'd say. Why back down now?"

  Stann tapped the stumps of his fingers against the table. "Bloodthirsty, aren't you?"

  "Not especially." Dante jerked his head westward toward the river. "I'm just not looking forward to waiting around to learn what's to come from the heartland."

  "Crossing a river to attack a fortified city is a bad idea. Unless the idea is to spend the next decades of your life watching your bones be slowly flushed down the river."

  That was the end of discussion. Everyone was too tired from the two marches and the anticlimactic fizzling of their battle-nerves. In the morning, Blays and Lira were nowhere to be found. Dante reached Mourn through the loon and learned the Nine Pines had been delayed and wouldn't reach Dollendun till the following day. There was a listlessness to the troops in the tents. Dante felt it, too. He went down to the docks to think amidst the smell of clams and the sound of gentle waves against the rocks. A mile across the river, the western shores waited.

  He was still trying to plot out their next move when Blays thunked down the dock in a dead run and pulled up beside him, panting. "Come on. Need your help in the north end of the city."

  "Did you just run all that way?"

  "I was going to fly, but I must have left my wings in my other pants."

  Dante tapped his brooch. "You do know you could have used your loon?"

  "Yes, but then I wouldn't have been able to throw you in a sack and drag you along behind me if you said no."

  Dante stood, knees cracking. "What's up, anyway?"

  Blays ran his hand down his mouth. "I found where Corra lives."

  "Who?"

  "Corra. Banning's granddaughter. From the painting, you heartless, shriveled-up tuber."

  "Oh." He jogged after Blays, who'd already started back up the boards. "Is she all right?"

  "I said I found her house, not her. Up all night searching." Blays looked it, too: his blond hair flat and greasy, his eyes red and puffy, filled with the haunted glaze of the sleepless. "One of her neighbors recognized her from the painting."

  Dante frowned over the quiet streets. Dollendun was in better shape than Cling, at least. For all the early riots, there was little sign of war. Two square blocks of rowhouses were torched. Shattered windows here and there. Anti-human graffiti on the sides of the Chattelry Office. The corners of homes showed strange sigils Dante assumed were the urban equivalent of wildsign.

  There were living norren, too, mostly female and young. They walked the streets uneasily, double-taking as they saw the two humans running down the cobbles. Most relaxed when they saw the colors of Narashtovik. Others fled down alleys and slammed doors.

  Blays stopped in front of a shack on the north fringe of town. Lira waited inside a room furnished with a cot and a chair and a table with a scattering of pencils. Drawings covered the walls, clearly childish, with shaky lines and distorted proportions of faces and dogs. Yet parts showed a clear sophistication, too, with swoops and fine details that suggested the girl had already found her nulla.

  "What now?" Dante said, sure he was missing something.

  Blays pointed at the floor. "Do your thing."

  "My thing?"

  "With the blood."

  "You'll have to be more specific."

  Blays sighed in frustration and knelt, tapping the ground beside crusty red spots that blended into the dirt floor. "The thing where you follow the blood to the person. The neighbor said she was dragged off by soldiers. We have to help her."

  Dante crouched down beside the dried droplets. "How do you know it's hers?"

  "Who else would it belong to?"

  "Her brother? One of the soldiers? Her very unlucky cat?"

  "What does it matter if it's a soldier's? Then we'll find him and break his arms until he tells us where she is."

  Dante nodded absently, drawing the nether from the corners of the room. It came readily, smelling blood. "What if she's across the river? There must be hundreds of captives over there."

  Blays' brow crinkled. "And if I'd made a promise to their hundreds of granddads, I'd be tracking them down, too. I made a pledge to Banning. If we don't keep our pledges, what separates us from the skunks?"

  Dante let the nether flow to the dried blood and asked it where it could find more of that blood. A dull pressure sprouted in his head. It pointed west, of course. "Why are you so ready to risk your life to rescue her from the terrible fate of scrubbing the floors of some barracks?"

  "She's a 13-year-old girl!" Blays exploded. He hooked his fingers into Dante's hair, clawlike, and rattled his head back and forth. "That's why they took her! She's not scrubbing any fucking floors!"

  Dante waited for Blays to release his hair. He sat down and calmed his breathing. "She's alive. Across the river."

  "Just point me in the right direction." He glanced at Lira. "You coming?"

  She nodded once. "If it's important to you, it's important to me."

  Dante cocked his head at her. "What about your pledge to protect me?"

  "You've got two thousand norren clansmen camped out in town. If they can't protect you, I don't know what good I'd be."

  He smiled with half his mouth and pointed in the direction of the pressure in his head. Blays strode out the door, Lira behind him. Dante followed into the warm afternoon sun. "How exactly are you going to cross the river?"

  "What do you care?" Blays said over his shoulder.

  "Are you taking a boat?"

  "I thought I'd just run myself at the water real hard and try to skip myself across."

  "Then either go at night or go far downstream first. They'll be watching the river like hawks. Hawks who hate people who try to cross the river in boats."

  Blays tipped his head back at the sky. "It's hours till nightfall. Tell me if she changes location before we go."

  "Of course," Dante said. "I'll be there at the oars with you."

  "Oh."

  "You thought I was staying here?"

  "I must have been tricked by your resistance to every single aspect of my plan."

  "Well, I do think it's moronic," Dante said. "But in my experience, that's when we do our best work."

  Blays grinned. As they waited for the sun to slide behind the trees, Dante checked on Corra's direction several times, but if her location
changed, it was too minor to make out. They took the rowboat shortly after nightfall. Scattered torches flickered across the western half of the city. After rowing hard to the river's middle, they slowed to lessen the splashing, pulled a foot downstream by the current for every foot they pulled themselves closer to land. Two hundred yards from shore, Dante cast a cloak of shadows over the boat, just thin enough to see through. The hull ground against the smooth pebbles of the bank. While Dante watched the dark houses, Blays and Lira hauled the boat halfway from the water. The grinding wood sounded loud enough to shake Dante's teeth loose.

  The current had dragged them more than a mile north of the girl. They'd dressed in dark clothes, non-uniformed, and slipped down the streets at a light jog. Oval shutters hid whatever was behind them. Candlelight slipped through the cracks of a few, but most were dark, abandoned as the redshirts retreated and the norren army arrived just across the waters.

  Bootsteps scraped in rhythm around the corner. Dante ducked into the lee of a high-steepled church encrusted with Narashtovik-style gargoyles. Lira and Blays pressed in beside him. Three soldiers scuffed down the street, clubs in hands, swords at their belts. Their voices carried on the calm, cool air.

  When the soldiers' footsteps faded, Dante cut through a neighborhood of slanted shacks and hungry-eyed dogs that barked for blocks after they'd departed. He skirted a plaza where a single inn remained open, low talk filtering from its shuttered windows. Three stalls had actually been abandoned. Scraps of cabbage and bread lay sopping on the cobblestones. The pressure in Dante's head grew each minute, drawing them closer to whoever's blood had been spilled upon the shack's dirt floor. If they were lucky, and Corra too, it would be hers.

  The pressure spiked to the point of pain. Dante stopped in the shadow of a rowhouse and turned in a slow circle until that almost-pain was aligned like a third eye in the center of his forehead. He pointed across the street to another rowhouse on the corner of a wide and empty intersection.

  "If she's here, she's in there."