The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  He ran as much as he could. Neither Blays nor Lira complained. The road from Dollendun would take them to Narashtovik, but he wanted to avoid that for several miles beyond the city. There would be scouts. Even if they dressed as refugees, dozens of men had witnessed them killing Cassinder. Someone would want them dead for that.

  At a farmhouse where winter wheat stirred in the summer breeze, heavy-headed and golden, Dante gave the farmer everything in his pockets for three workhorses. It was a fair price. Even so, the farmer didn't want to make the deal, but Dante didn't give him a choice.

  The workhorses weren't bred for distance running. Dante didn't care. He took to the road and spurred home toward the Dead City, sweating atop the galloping beast. Four days later, it died within sight of Narashtovik. He left it in the woods by the road and ran the rest of the way.

  The city was little changed from their last visit. Hotter. Sticky with the humidity curling off the bay. He arrived at the Citadel gates filthy and exhausted and half-starved. They'd eaten what little they could find along the way: boiled roots, dandelions and greens, a couple of fish. It didn't matter. His physical hunger was less than his hunger for answers and revenge.

  He parted ways with Blays and Lira and jogged up the stairs to his room. The windows were closed; it was stifling, cobwebbed, smelling of dust and evaporated water. He ordered up a bath and peeled off his clothes. The water was cool, relaxing, but he found himself shaking in the basin, stirring the water into ripples and blurps.

  The same servant who'd brought up the basin and his water returned as he dressed. Kav had requested Dante's presence.

  "No," Dante said.

  "I may have taken the truth for a dance." The servant's eyes darted. "It wasn't so much a request as a demand."

  Dante gazed at the young man, who looked away. "Has Kav taken charge since Callimandicus died?"

  "More or less."

  "Which one? More? Or less?"

  "More," the young man said. "You've got Olivander rustling up men to the east, Hart and Somburr off gods know where, you and Ulev and whoever else fighting redshirts—well, Kav took a step forward, and everyone here nodded along."

  "What happened to Cally?"

  "Don't you know?"

  "I want to hear from you," Dante said.

  "Well, he was...killed. In his room, what, five days back."

  "How?"

  The man lowered his face. "Somebody slashed his throat."

  "Who did it?"

  "Well, nobody knows. Except the fellow that did it, I suppose." The young man met Dante's eyes. "Will you see Kav now, sir?"

  "Tell him I'll be there shortly."

  When the servant left, Dante buckled on his sword, rolled up his left sleeve, and cut a small line on the back of his arm, just deep enough to draw blood should he need the nether. He pulled his sleeve over the wound and went to see Kav.

  Kav waited at the head of the table in the council hall. He sat comfortably in Cally's former seat, his carved, elegant features composed into a picture of concern. He gestured to an empty chair.

  "Sit, please."

  Dante stared at him for two seconds before slinging himself into a chair. "What do you want?"

  "To see for myself that you'd come back," Kav smiled. It didn't last, resolving quickly to his stony concern. "I assume you've heard."

  "That our leader died? You could have fooled me. Someone's sitting in his chair right now."

  Kav didn't glance down at his seat. "Someone has to take the reins while we go through the appropriate channels to appoint a successor. Things are too precarious to allow the stallion of Narashtovik to bolt in the meantime."

  "I suppose you're right." Dante leaned back. "Who found the body?"

  "Georg. The monk who'd been helping him run those loons of yours. Which I understand have since been broken. How did you hear so fast? Weren't you in Dollendun?"

  "Word of something like that travels fast. When I heard, I traveled faster."

  "I see," Kav said. "And will you be staying with us for the foreseeable future?"

  "Until I find the one who killed Cally."

  "We are, of course, already working on that. I believe we may be quite close."

  Dante leaned over the vast desk. "What have you found?"

  Kav eyed him, waving the fingers of his right hand a fraction of an inch. "I can't disclose that just yet. Obviously I will let you know as soon as it's plausible."

  Dante nodded. He flexed his hands to keep from strangling the aging blueblood. "Are we through here? I've got work to do."

  The creases at the corners of Kav's mouth deepened. "Then I wish you luck."

  He went straight to Blays' room. He barely had the presence of mind to knock before barging in.

  Blays was alone inside. "What's up?"

  Dante closed the door, bolting it. "Someone had Cally killed."

  "I thought we already knew that."

  "Nobody knows who it was. Not even Cally. If it was no one he knew, the killer must have been hired. So who would want Cally dead?"

  "Everyone in Gask?" Blays shrugged.

  "It's called the Sealed Citadel for a reason," Dante said. "The gates are manned at all times. Whoever got in would have to have been helped—by someone in the Citadel."

  "We broke our way in, once upon a time."

  "Yes. Sure. Anyone could have done it. A badger could have crawled up the storm drain with a knife in its teeth. But it's far more likely the killer was let inside." He jerked his chin in the direction of the meeting hall. "I just spoke to Kav. He's already taken Cally's place. He's being very tightlipped about his search for the culprit."

  Blays smiled. "Is someone jealous?"

  "He's got time and motive. It's no secret he's always wanted Cally's seat in the Council. He still talks with his old friends the lords of Gask all the time. He can clear our work from the board with the sweep of his arm—he curries favor with King Moddegan by killing Cally, steps in to take the old man's place while half the Council's scattered across the country, and immediately sues for peace."

  "I suppose you want me to break into his room, then."

  "Would you?"

  Blays grinned. "Well yeah. I liked Cally too, you know."

  Dante's own smile felt creaky. He wasn't sure he'd made one since Dollendun. "I'll try to snoop out his schedule. If he isn't planning to be away from the Citadel any time soon, we may have to manufacture a way to get him out of here."

  He went straight to the servants. He couldn't flat-out ask for Kav's appointments and time-tables, because servants talked as much as anyone else, and any whiff of his plans could cause Kav to change everything. But he could make inquiries. About when he could see Kav, for instance. Dante himself was too busy today, he explained, but what about tomorrow? Evening? It turned out that wouldn't do: Kav was scheduled to deliver Cally's weekly sermon at the Cathedral of Ivars. Too bad; what about the day after?

  Dante left with an appointment he had no intention of keeping and went to inform Blays of their window. The following evening, as half the Citadel's residents crossed the street to the cathedral, Dante locked himself in his room, feigning illness. When the horn blew to announce the mass, he slipped into the hall with Blays.

  Kav's door was just down the hall. Dante drew forth the nether and guided it into the lock. Blays was faster; with a flick of his picks, the door tumbled open.

  "That was awfully quick," Dante said.

  "They're all the same here."

  "That doesn't explain why you know how to pick them."

  Blays shut Kav's door behind them. "Because I'm regularly called on by you to break into people's rooms?"

  The room was lavish with rugs. Tapestries insulated the stone walls. Candles and books coated the windowsill and two desks. The bed was canopied in burgundy velvet. It was still the room of a priest, however, and thus was small. Quick to search. Dante rifled through drawers. Blays pawed through racks of finery. The third drawer of the desk was suspiciously s
hallow. Dante's knock was hollow. He pried away the false bottom of the drawer, revealing a cache of letters.

  He spread one in front of Blays. "What language is this?"

  "Gibberish," Blays said. "The native tongue of the Empire of Gibber."

  Foreign symbols covered the pages. It was not a script Dante had ever seen. He saw no names or dates, either. The paper looked relatively fresh—unyellowed, no scent of must on it. Of the thirty-odd letters, Dante stuffed three into his pocket, hoping Kav wouldn't notice so few had been taken.

  "It's some sort of code. What's he hiding?"

  "That mean we're done here?"

  "Let's go," Dante said. Blays spat on the floor. Dante gawked. "What did you do that for?"

  "Because spitting on people's floors when they don't know about it is fun." He eased the door open and snuck into the hall. As Dante stood watch, Blays tricked the lock back into place. Dante fought the urge to run back to his room. There, he spread the three letters on his desk and began to copy each one out onto a fresh sheet of paper.

  Blays stood before he'd finished the first paragraph. "I think I'm going to leave you to this."

  "But we're doing something sneaky!"

  "And it's fascinating stuff, the copying of nonsense from one sheet of paper to another sheet of paper. But I bet if I go see Lira right now, she will take off her clothes and throw me around."

  "Have it your way."

  The door clicked shut. Back in Kav's room, Dante had lost himself in the break-in, but with Blays gone, the raven of Cally's death returned to his shoulder. Dante kept copying, hoping to drive its impossible weight away through sheer tedium, the numbness of repetition. It helped. Darkness fell. A seaborne breeze stirred the curtains, flushing away the moist air stagnating inside his room. He began comparing the letters. Making a list of all the symbols, as well as how many times each was used, and examining where certain pairs occurred—particularly of the same symbol. He examined three-letter words in an attempt to nose out Kav's name, silently wishing Kav's parents had named him in the more traditional polysyllabic Gaskan style that would have made his name stand out like a midnight candle. Dante went to bed just before dawn, sleeping naked atop the sheets.

  It hardly helped; he woke up midmorning sweaty and flushed. On his balcony, he strung up a sheet to shield himself from the sun and got to work. The heat was tolerable so long as he didn't move. Four hours later, he'd made no headway on the code. The symbols blurred together, meaningless, aloof. He'd been interested enough in codes as a teenager to comb the library texts about substitutions and the like, but that interest had evaporated along with his fascination with snails and dead frogs. After dozens of false leads and dead ends, zero progress, and the mounting dread he was failing his mentor and friend, Dante folded up his notes and went to the scene of the crime.

  Cally's door was unlocked. The inside of the room felt cool and as prehistoric as the rings of stones where the norren chiefs met. A desk rested beside the door to the balcony. Next to it, a wine-dark stain dominated the wooden floor.

  Dante knelt beside it. The nether still clung to it sluggishly. This stain had been inside Cally just days ago. The nether, too. The floor was otherwise spotless. As hard as the servants had scrubbed, there was no erasing this marker of the man's death. If Dante closed his eyes, he could still picture him: his piercing eyes, typically full of mocking good humor, but capable of filling with insight or wrath in a moment's notice; his absurd white beard, dense as a thicket and twice as wild; his bony shoulders that bore the gnarled strength of a desert tree.

  All that reduced to a red-brown stain.

  Dante's sorrow hardened into hot-forged anger. On hands and knees, he scoured the room for stray drops of blood. If there were any here besides Cally's, it could be the killer's. A single drop would be enough to trace it through the nether back to the assassin. But he found nothing. He thought, for a moment, of searching for stray hairs or fingernail scraps instead, but the room had been swept, scrubbed, and scrubbed again. Anything left behind would be from the servants.

  He sat in the middle of the floor and gazed across the silent space. There was nothing he could do here. There was nothing to find. No one to question. He was the closest thing there had been to a witness. Unless the killer made a mistake—returned to the room, boasted drunkenly in a tavern—all he could do was work on the codes and hope they contained proof of what Kav had done. On the off chance the killer did return, Dante went to the pantry, slaughtered a mouse, and brought it to Cally's room, and brought it to unlife to act as his sentry. That done, he returned to the heat of his chambers and sat down with Kav's letters.

  Hours of scribbling and comparing got him nowhere. He went down to the courtyard and entered the monastery, combing the stacks for works on cryptography. Two hours later, he had two books. One was a history written three centuries ago, an account of the codes used during the Farraway Wars that took place some six hundred years earlier. The book looked to have few specifics, but the Farraway Wars had been a bizarre hotbed of espionage, secrecy, double agents and double-crosses between some eight mountain cities that no longer existed, and the conflict had been notable for their secret codes and symbols as well. The second book was a general theory of cryptography, or at least as the field had stood 140 years ago when it had been written. He began with that.

  Two days later, he was ready to burn his books, Kav's letters, and the whole stupid city. As he strolled through the courtyard to clear his head, he saw something that lifted his heart: Somburr passing through the gates.

  He looked haggard, even twitchier than normal. Dante went to him at once, but a servant beat him there. Kav must have been waiting for him. Hart was with him, but the servant paid the elderly norren no mind.

  Dante greeted Hart with a smile. "I'm glad to see you back."

  "Beats the alternative, doesn't it?" Hart scratched his white beard. His forehead was shiny with sweat. "I wish we'd brought back better news."

  "Oh?"

  "The king's army struck out from Dollendun two days after we lost the city. Somburr knows better than I do, but my impression is they mean to race across the Norren Territories, then turn north and come for us."

  Dante gritted his teeth. "So fast?"

  Hart sighed into his meaty fist. "I think the idea is that there are two brushfires threatening the kingdom: the norren army, and Narashtovik. If the king's men can douse the main blazes, they can use the rest of the year to stamp out the sparks of rebellious clans."

  "Bold," Dante said. "Maybe dumb. Why not spend a year or two to wrap up the norren? We're not going to be any stronger two years from now."

  "Again, I think there are two things at play," Hart said. "First, without Gallador's silver to back their armies, I think the lords of Gask are already feeling the pinch to their purses." He smiled wryly." Second, I think they are very, very mad at us."

  That brought a smile to Dante's face. "Then it's all been worth it."

  He propped open his door to coax the ocean breeze through his room and to defray suspicion as he sat in his doorway, one eye on his book, the other watching the hallway for Somburr. This tactic proved to be wholly useless. After an hour of a closed-door session between Somburr and Kav, Kav called a general assembly of the Council.

  The council chambers looked barren. Cally was gone. Varla, too. Wint and Ulev were still in the norren wilds. Olivander remained in the eastern foothills gathering troops. That left seven councilmen out of twelve. Dante hadn't seen their ranks so depleted since the battle at the White Tree more than five years ago.

  "Somburr's spies have paid off yet again," Kav said once everyone was settled. "If you would, Somburr?"

  Somburr's gaze flicked between the other priests. He squirmed in his chair. "I have some insight into the enemy's strategy. My source says it's straightforward. They'll knock out any major resistance left in the Norren Territories, then march on Narashtovik without delay."

  He fiddled with his collar, finished a
lready. The priests exchanged glances.

  "Well shit," Tarkon said.

  "How long are we talking until they're here?" Dante said.

  Somburr pinched the bridge of his nose with his brown fingers. "We'll all be dead in three weeks."

  Tarkon repeated himself. Merria leaned forward, a sneer creasing her lined face. "I'm sorry, did you say three weeks?"

  "Here is how my source expects it to play out," Somburr said. "The Gaskan army will make one more effort to confront the combined clans. My source anticipates this will result in the dispersal or outright destruction of the clans. Either way, a small portion of the army will be split off to control the Territories and destroy any holdouts, but it is further anticipated the Territories will surrender at this point. A few clans will still defy the king, but when haven't they?"

  Somburr paused, chin twitching. "Once that is accomplished, they will march straight here. That march is anticipated to take seven to ten days. Leaving a full timeframe of three to four weeks before the Gaskan generals are sitting in this room congratulating each other on their victory."

  "That is one potential outcome," Kav intoned. "And one somewhat less than sunny. Yet there is another option."

  Dante could see straight through the nobleman's thinking. "Oh no there isn't."

  Kav ignored him, meeting the eyes of the others instead. "We could surrender."

  "Bullshit," Merria said. "Olivander would never stand for that. You try to pull that off and Cally will burst from his grave and strangle you himself."

  Kav frowned delicately. "There is a point when the honor of resistance becomes the folly of futility. I fear we have reached that point."