The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  Willers came to him that afternoon with a cotton bag the size of Dante's fist. It was unnaturally heavy and shifted like sand. It smelled sulfurous, hellish, like something dredged up from a lake inside a steaming cave.

  "What's it made of?" Dante said.

  Willers blinked past his shoulder. "Materials."

  "That only you know about?"

  "No, lots of people know about them. It's how they're put together they don't know."

  Dante hefted the lumpy bag. "How big a burst will this produce?"

  "If you are within five feet of it, it will quickly spread you across many more feet. If you are within twenty, you might fall down, or be upset with your ears for refusing to stop ringing."

  Dante walked across the grass to a stop some forty feet away, set down the bag on top of a small mound of dirt, and walked back to Willers, who was staring at the bag with horrified anticipation, as if it were a puppy about to piddle on his neighbor's rug. Dante sent the nether to it in a flash of heat. A white flash seared his eyes; as the heat touched his skin, thunder rolled across the plain and smacked him deep in his chest. He blinked away the stars. A claw of black smoke rose from the scorched dirt.

  "How did you make it burst without touching it with fire?" Willers said.

  "I've got tricks, too." Dante rubbed his ear. He could smell the smoke now, ashy and acrid. "It won't stop them altogether. But it may give them something to cry about."

  "If they're sad, will they go home?"

  "Who knows?"

  He looned Cally to ask for all the soldiers Narashtovik could put together. Cally said he'd see what he could do. He did not sound optimistic.

  Neither was Dante. For all their tricks and troops, it would still be a numbers game. And the numbers favored the king. What happened if the norren were defeated here? There were still many clans scattered throughout the Territories, but not all that many. Too few to resist if the redshirts broke through. Once they were quelled, he had the sick feeling the king would turn his armies to the north. To Narashtovik. Cassinder would see to that. Their meddling would not go unpunished.

  His expression must have been dark enough to chill the dead. As he sat in a chair in the front room of the abandoned house, Corra wandered from her room and fixed him with her shining eyes.

  "What's wrong?" she said.

  He glanced up sharply, so shocked to hear her speak he nearly forgot what he'd been brooding on. "It's nothing."

  "This is nothing." She swiped her hand through the air, fingers trailing, then pointed at his head. "That is something."

  "Do you really want to talk about the war?"

  "Why are you afraid? I saw the soldiers in that house."

  Dante managed to smile and frown at the same time. "Four soldiers is one thing. But there's an army on its way. No man can reverse the tide by himself."

  She folded her hands at her waist. "So why don't you run away?"

  "I can't. This is my fault. And the fault of hundreds of others dating back to the day the first human took a norren for a slave. So maybe I'm blameless. Reacting to the mistakes of long-dead men. Trying to set right what was set wrong." He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at the dirty wooden floor. "But I don't think there would have been a war right now if we hadn't been tempting one. For that, I do share blame. I wonder if it would have been better to leave the norren alone to suffer the lesser burden of bondage. Soon enough, win or lose, thousands of them will die."

  "But what if the lives of their children are better for years and years and years?"

  "I doubt I'll be alive to see that."

  Corra clutched her arms to her ribs. "Why wouldn't you leave to live upon a mountain? Where no one can hurt you and you will never know about everything that's wrong?"

  He glanced up. Her eyes were their brightest yet, burning from the hollows of her cheeks. He took a breath. "You know that painting your grandpa made you? He had to finish it with his left hand."

  She cocked her head. "Why would he do that? He always painted with his right."

  "Because someone destroyed his right hand. For fighting back. But he finished the painting. It was the last thing he did before he died."

  "He painted me?"

  Dante nodded. "You're his granddaughter. You've got his blood. Even if they ruin your hand, you can finish your painting."

  She blinked several times, face pinched together by an invisible hand of emotion. "Thank you for telling me that. About Grampa."

  Dante nodded. That, too, might have been a mistake, telling her. At times it would haunt her, knowing her grandpa's dying moments were spent slumped over her picture. But she needed it. A knowledge of defiance. That until the day you met Arawn in that starry field, no matter what arose against you, you could stand and stare it in the eye.

  Perhaps he'd needed to hear that, too.

  He continued his work with the norren on the ramparts. The Clan of Dreaming Bears sailed across the river and sacked a lightly-guarded barracks, bringing home barrels of swords and spears. The citizens drilled in the squares. Steel flashed in sunlight. Stone points clacked against the cobbles. Arrows thrummed, smacking into bales of hay. Men and women hauled water from wells and the river. Through the loons, the scattered scouts let them know the king's army had left Setteven, eight thousand strong at the least. More would join as the army crossed the miles between the capital and Dollendun.

  A contingent arrived from Narashtovik two days later. Three of the Council's priests—quiet Varla, brusque and vulgar Ulev, and dark-haired, cunning young Wint—along with ten monks of lesser talents, including Nak. Dante met them with a smile, even Wint. It was good to see old faces. They would help greatly, too. The least of the monks was worth any ten soldiers. Together with Dante and the two norren adepts, it would make for a troublesome force.

  "How did you get reined into this?" he asked Nak.

  Nak puffed his cheeks in embarrassment. "I volunteered."

  "Why the hell would you do that?"

  "So that when you triumph, I can boast to the ladies I taught you everything you know."

  "You're not much of a monk, are you?"

  Nak's plump cheeks bulged in a frown. "If a monk can end lives in the name of his god, he ought to be able to create lives, too."

  Dante showed them around. Introduced them to Mourn and Hopp and a few of the other chiefs. When Dante explained he'd joined Hopp's clan, the priests gave him curious looks, but raised no questions about what that meant for his loyalties to Narashtovik.

  The incoming army was covering nearly twenty miles per day. By the time it ranged within a hundred miles, norren scouts estimated it had gathered another thousand men. On the evening it camped some forty miles from Dollendun, the boats arrived. The oars of fifteen war galleys lashed the water, plying upstream to dock on the west bank. Blays watched with Dante from their own piers.

  "I don't think they're bringing more troops," Blays said. "I think they're here to ferry the redshirts in Dollendun over to our side of the river."

  Dante peered through the twilight. "What makes you think that?"

  "You know how bad those boats stink. But have we seen a single soldier hop off since they've docked?"

  "Makes sense. Use their fleet to divert us to the shores while their main army marches in from the north."

  "Those things move like ducks on the water," Blays grumbled in grudging admiration. "Big, stupid ducks filled with hundreds of people who want us dead."

  "That isn't a very duck-like want," Dante said.

  "Then why are they always honking at people? Does that sound like something that wants to be friends?"

  "I once spent several days thinking about ducks."

  "What would possibly possess you to do that?" Blays said.

  "Cally."

  "Oh."

  "Yeah."

  "Wait," Blays said. "Hey. Wait. Then you must know the thing it is that ducks do best."

  "Quack?"

  "Sit." A grin spread over
Blays' face, unstoppable as a blush. "They sit there. Like feathery, bug-eating idiots."

  Dante drew back his chin. "You've got an idea."

  "I've got an idea."

  It was foolish and wonderful and perfectly Blays. Best of all, it would work. As night fell, Dante burst into laughter, his giggles rippling over the waters. He told Blays to tell Hopp to get to work on fortifying the shore, then ran north to get to work himself, the torchstone lighting his way.

  The next day passed with terrifying swiftness. He obsessed about hours. Each hour meant a mile. One mile closer for the king's army to approach. Of course it didn't quite work like that. Some hours the army would be stopped to rest. Other hours they would march and march, covering two or three miles every sixty minutes. But in the aggregate, for each hour the army existed, it would cover the better part of a mile. It had been forty miles away whenever it set out that morning. It could cross that distance in two days. 48 hours. He had 48 hours left. Not that he was certain he would die in the fighting. But in the normal course of life, you wake in the morning with the expectation you will continue to live for years or even decades. For tens of thousands of hours. Hours too many to mark or measure or care; in fact, there was no conscious expectation of decades of life at all. Just an unconscious assumption running so deep you never thought of it at all.

  Dante could count 48 hours. After than, he might have no more hours, or a single one, spent in battle, or 40,000 until he died in bed with a smile embedded in his long white beard. He didn't know. He didn't know and he couldn't know, and so his heart beat as if it were trying to work a lifetime of beats into the few hours he had left.

  The norren finished connecting the rampart to the northern hill. A couple inches of groundwater had seeped up through the ditch below the earthworks' outward slopes. Dante strode to the river, where a small dam of land held the waters from the ditch, and took hold of the nether lurking beneath the dark soil. He slid the damming earth up onto the rampart. Cold brown water sluiced into the ditch, flooding it to a depth of three feet.

  They sent away those unable or unwilling to fight—the children, the elderly, the crippled, those whose beliefs forbade the shedding of blood. Most of the women stayed to fight. They sent Corra away, too, her painting in one hand, one of Blays' knives in the other. She didn't wave. Just watched Dante from over her shoulder as she walked down the road southward from the city.

  24 hours. Twenty miles. Both went by in a blink. The scouts confirmed the redshirts' movement. In all likelihood, they would cross the remaining few miles in the day, camp nearby for the night, and attack with the dawn.

  Clan warriors drilled civilians in advances and retreats. Others helped erect barriers of wooden spikes across the main roads and dumped debris across others. The chiefs finalized their strategy. Assuming the main body of the king's forces would come down through the north on their side of the river, while the troops quartered on the western shores landed via boat to attack from the flank or rear, the norren forces would be divided similarly—most deployed to the northern edge of the city to man the ramparts or shadow the army south if it tried to swing around on them, while a smaller force would be left near the shore to fend off the amphibious assault. In true norren fashion, several clans would be dispatched to roam the streets, killing any scouts, delaying expeditionary forces, and keeping watch for any major flanking movements.

  Dante and Blays would be posted on the shore to oversee Blays' plan. Six hundred norren would be with them, including their clan and the Nine Pines. They might be outnumbered twofold or more. Then again, so would their main troop.

  He didn't touch the nether that day. Typically, a few hours of sleep would refresh him, but he wasn't certain he would sleep at all that night.

  As twilight fell, the smoke of scores of fires rose from the forest north of town. Dante watched from the docks. The last gray light flickered on the water. Blays and Lira were a ways up the shore; Blays stood behind her, arms around her waist. They didn't appear to be talking. Just watching the smoke bloom and the light fade.

  As the night took hold, firelight shined through the black pines. Waves sloshed against the docks. Dante's loon pulsed, startling him.

  "How does it look?" Cally said.

  "Like we're in line for morning introductions."

  "How do you think you'll do?"

  "Oh, I expect I'll kill at least twenty people, personally. We'll see where it goes from there."

  "I meant as a whole, you dolt," Cally said.

  "Well, we're outnumbered. By a lot. Then again, I would bet on a norren clan-warrior over a redshirt grunt ten times out of ten. Then again again, the norren aren't used to fighting in groups this size, and many of them have never fought before."

  "Well, I sent five hundred men your way earlier in the week. I'm sorry I couldn't get them to you sooner, but if you can hold out for a few days, they may arrive in time to help."

  "Good." Dante shook his head. "You know what? I have no idea how it will go tomorrow. Put me in a room with four men with swords, and unless I trip and break my head, I can tell you what's going to happen. Fifteen thousand armed men shaking their spears at each other across one of the biggest cities in Gask? River-borne invasions? Sorcerers on both sides? I don't have a clue, Cally. Not the skinniest, most malnourished, runtiest little clue. This time tomorrow, I could be recounting you our great victory, or I could be telling you nothing at all, because I am at the bottom of a mountain of bodies. What if this is the last time we ever speak?"

  "I think you should calm down."

  "Should I? How often have you stared across the night at a thousand enemy campfires?"

  "Just once," Cally said.

  "When?" Dante scoffed.

  "During the Third Scour."

  Dante was about to declare him a liar; the Third Scour had taken place over a century ago. He remembered, with the usual jolt, Cally was well older than that. "What happened?"

  "As it turns out, I lived."

  "In the battle."

  "It was in the Collen Basin. Just after we took the palace." Cally cleared his throat. "If you're any student of history, then, which I know you're not—"

  "I know about the battle for Collen Basin."

  "Then why am I telling you this? We had the palace for two weeks before the baron's reinforcements returned. A true rabble. Disgusting. But they had fine steel while we had pitchforks and dysentery. What kind of a universe is this where a case of diarrhea is in charge of deciding who's right and wrong? The gods are laughing, I say.

  "Regardless of our gastrointestinal distress, we dug in while they advanced. I remember thinking we had better than half a chance; that the enemy were primarily conscripts out of Larkwood who didn't give a damn about the Basin. That and mercenaries, also from Larkwood, who'd been mere bandits until their silver started flowing from the baron rather than from whoever they could rob. Meanwhile, I was right around your age, however old you are now, except significantly more advanced."

  Dante snorted. "I highly doubt it."

  "My attitude exactly! So you can understand why I was less worried than I perhaps ought to have been. They simply had too many men, you see. That's what it came down to. That and the dysentery. We stuffed the buildings around the palace plaza with archers, and gummed up all the doorways in with tables and garbage and the like, but the enemy lit fires. What do you know! Archers don't like breathing smoke and flame any more than the rest of us. They pushed us back inside the palace, then smashed out those great red windows—have you seen them? No, of course not, they were smashed—and poured inside. We fought in the halls until you could hardly stand from the blood.

  "Things got so desperate a group of us decided to lock ourselves in the old-fashioned dungeon cells and shoot anybody who got near the bars. Which doesn't make a lot of sense, in hindsight, but as I said, desperate."

  "What happened then?" Dante said.

  "Oh, we couldn't find the keys. So we ran away instead."

 
"If I've got this right, then, what you're saying is just when things look their darkest, I should run away as fast as I can."

  "What I'm saying is I was certain I would die, but then I lived for another hundred years. Most of them happy." Cally stopped; through the loon, Dante heard him swallow some water or tea. "Look, right now you don't know how the next day will turn out. Yet you fear the worst even though you can't possibly know it will come! How can these things coexist? You don't know what tomorrow will bring. You might win. You might lose. You might win and die or lose and live. In the end, a single thing among all these possibilities will be the one thing that happens—and you won't know what it will be until it does. Probably not even then! Discovering these unknowns, these possibilities, that should be a joy. Whatever happens, you'll get the gift of knowing what!"

  It sounded like nonsense, yet Dante found himself comforted. He wanted to tell Cally as much, but something held him back, an emotion oddly like resentment. Instead, he gazed at the black water, the campfires burning through the forest.

  "Thanks, I think."

  "Well, if it gets that bad, you can always run."

  He closed the connection. Dante wandered up the shore, smelling mud and fish that had been dead for so long they barely stunk. If he had thoughts, he didn't remember them afterwards. Just the memory of the cool evening and the wash of waves upon the shore. It calmed him. He wanted it to be this way forever.

  Blays found him there a couple hours later. The blond man grinned. "Figured you'd be here. When it comes to water, you're like something that loves it."

  "Where's Lira?"

  "Bed. In no condition to walk."

  "Don't say anything more, or this night will come to blows."

  "Oh, it already—"

  Dante pushed his tented palms against his nose. "Forget it. I'm just going to go challenge the entire enemy myself."

  Blays laughed. "Listen, whatever happens tomorrow, the first bit's going to be fun."

  "I'm sure it will provide fond memories as I'm gargling my own blood."

  "I think we're doing the right thing, you know."