The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Mourn!" he cried. "I thought you were dead!"

  "Surprise." Mourn's beard was thicker. Beneath smears of soot and dirt, his bare arms showed fresh scars and half-healed cuts.

  "Are you all right? How have you been?"

  "If the period of my life before the last few weeks can be considered good, the last few weeks should be classified as not-good."

  "Same here. I was imprisoned for murder, but it turned out I didn't do it." Dante smacked his thigh, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. "What's happening in the Territories?"

  Mourn tipped his head. "A lot of losses. A lot of deaths. For the redshirts, too, but those creatures multiply like they are not actually humans, but flies in crafty human disguises."

  "I know what you mean. They're supposed to be here tomorrow."

  "Supposed? Did you invite them? Because it would be strange to invite someone in to burn down your city and forcibly impregnate your women."

  "It was an accidental invitation," Dante said. "I believe it was left on His Lordship Cassinder's doorstep during some ridiculous hunt for a make-believe bow?"

  Mourn smiled for the first time since his arrival. "The world is very odd, isn't it?"

  He had some four hundred norren with him. The Nine Pines and Dreaming Bears, along with the remnants of five other clans and a hodgepodge of survivors separated from their warrior-families during the skirmishes ongoing across the Territories. Mourn's troop would be no small addition to the city's numbers.

  Blays clapped when he saw Mourn. Lira gave him her small polite smile. Many of the guards stared; norren freemen weren't uncommon in Narashtovik, but few lived in the city on a permanent basis. They probably hadn't strolled into the city in such numbers in generations.

  Dante offered to put them up in the rowhouses just beyond the Citadel walls, but Mourn refused, electing to encamp in a park down by the bay instead. That night, the four of them went to a public house as they had so often months before, but something had changed. Silence stalked their halting conversation. Even Blays was hunted by it, smiling vaguely and nodding distantly when addressed. As soon as they finished swapping news of the days since Dollendun, they paid more attention to their beers than to each other.

  Scouts came and went throughout the morning. Dante stayed close to the Citadel and the news the riders brought there. In the morning, the redshirts were ten miles away. By noon, they'd cut that to five. Guard-commanders shouted orders across the courtyard, directing their troops to the walls. The three sets of doors to the Pridegate were sealed. Horns squawked from across the city. Young men hauled arrows and swords and bows and spears to the walls. Olivander saddled the cavalry and ran sweeps of the outskirts in search of enemy scouts and sneak attacks.

  Mid-afternoon, Narashtovik's scouts reported the king's army had encamped in the pine forests a mile from the city. The smoke of scores of campfires rose from the black woods. As the army showed no signs of coming any further that day, Olivander pulled most of the men from the Pridegate but doubled the scouts beyond it.

  In the neverending dusk, Dante went to his balcony to read and soothe his nerves. Instead, in the warmth of the setting sun, he fell asleep. He woke in total darkness and bolted to his feet. Not because of any horns or fires or signs of war. But because he'd meant to see his friends before whatever came with the morning. Now it was too late.

  He paced his room, angry with himself. A few minutes later, a door clicked in the hallway. He poked out his head, hoping to see Blays, but Lira strode down the hall instead, wearing shorts, a thin shirt, and a knife.

  "Is Blays awake?" he said.

  She shook her head. "Wore him out."

  "I'm sure he's as happy about that as I am unhappy to hear about it."

  She laughed. She didn't do that often. "What did you need to talk to him about?"

  Dante shrugged. "Nothing much. Impending death. The end of the world. That sort of thing."

  "Are you nervous about tomorrow?"

  "Does feeling the urge to barf up your skeleton count as nervous?"

  "That depends. Have you done anything to provoke your skeleton?"

  Dante laughed. "I need to ask you something."

  She raised an eyebrow. "If you really need to ask, you wouldn't ask whether you could."

  "Do you two love each other?"

  "Does that matter?"

  "It probably does to Blays."

  She answered without hesitation. "Yes."

  "Good," Dante said. "Then you don't owe me any longer."

  "Says who?"

  "You owe him—and he owes you."

  Lira tipped back her chin. "I can have more than one duty or loyalty. He knows who I am. I won't change for him."

  Dante scowled in the darkness of the hallway. "What if I told you I value his life above mine? So the highest service you can pay me is to keep him safe tomorrow?"

  "Then I'd call you a liar."

  "Don't you dare."

  She'd been flirting with a smile, but quickly cast it aside. "Are you serious?"

  "It's probably safer to pretend that I am."

  "Lyle's balls, you're intense sometimes." Lira stared him down. "You saved my life. That kind if debt isn't penciled onto a ledger. It's chiseled on stone. Unerasable."

  His jaw tightened. "This war probably would have come eventually. The norren would never stand to be enslaved forever. It's a war I still believe in. But I share too much of the blame for why it's happening here and now. If that caused any harm to come to him..."

  "Then what?"

  "I don't know."

  "I don't either." She nodded once. "I'll keep him safe."

  She drew her knife and cut her right palm. Her eyelid twitched. She handed him the knife. He followed suit, but had taken a blade to his own skin too often to flinch.

  "What's this?" he said.

  "It's how we seal agreements in the islands."

  They shook. Her hand was wet and warm. When their hands dropped, he sealed both wounds with a balm of nether. She flicked her hand, glancing down sharply.

  He smiled. "No sense going to war with a cut on your sword hand."

  "I wouldn't have noticed." She smiled back. "I'll see you in the morning."

  She walked toward the stairwell and headed down. On a whim, Dante decided to roam the city himself. He descended to the basement and took his tunnel to the carneterium. There, he emerged into the sweaty night and climbed the cemetery to the hill. Cally was there. So was Larrimore. Samarand and the Council members who'd died beneath the White Tree were there, too, although he'd forgotten where their tombs stood.

  He nodded in whatever direction they may be in and continued up the grassy slope. He wasn't here for them anyway. It smelled like fresh leaves and a warm sea. Bugs of all kinds chirped and whirred. Beneath the ground, they silently ate. He touched the nether in the soil, felt the blank spaces of the coffins embedded within it.

  Fires twinkled in the forest to the south. At the crown of the hill, Dante tipped back his head. The stars twinkled just as brightly. Jorus, too. The polestar. The crux of Arawn's mill. Some people prayed to Arawn—god of death, god of cycles—but Dante didn't. He knew the ancient god would pay him no mind.

  So he hoped instead.

  When he finished, he returned to his room and slept dreamlessly. He was up with dawn's first deathly blue hints. He dressed, put on his metal armbands and his sword, and went to the walls of the Pridegate without stopping for a breakfast he might not be able to keep down. The city was as silent as a snowfall. In the gray of the mounting dawn, Olivander was already atop the Pridegate, watching the city as if preparing to grab it by the throat.

  "You didn't have walls in Dollendun, did you?" the middle-aged man said.

  Dante shook his head. "We built a rampart, but that just encouraged them to come in through the side instead."

  "I think we'll hold," Olivander said, as if convincing himself. "I think we'll spill too much blood for them to push through. They'll siege. Cally's been st
ocking up provisions for years. Will it be enough? Will the norren who still survive in the Territories push back hard enough to force the king to leave us in peace? That, I think, is how we do this."

  "A siege? You mean I'll finally get to stay in Narashtovik for longer than two weeks?"

  Olivander's trim beard quirked with a smile. "Don't get ahead of yourself. Someone will have to head the daring runs through enemy territory."

  "Here I thought there would be a silver lining to Cally's passing—that I would no longer be called upon every time we need to do something ridiculous."

  "I thought you and Blays did these things because you liked them."

  "Maybe," Dante admitted. "But even the wicked can use a vacation."

  As the sun rose, proper light scared away the ghostly land of predawn. It was already hot enough to have Dante sweating. Mourn brought the norren to the walls. They stuck together, saying little. A scout pounded up the road to the gates. The redshirts had broken camp a quarter hour ago.

  Olivander sounded the horns. Soldiers jogged from the inner ring of the city to take up positions on the outer walls. Several members of the Council joined Dante and Olivander; the others were spread out along the miles-long sweep of the Pridegate, ready to react to any enemy sorcerers.

  "What's going on?" Blays said when he appeared on the wall a few minutes later. "Boy, it looks like you guys are gearing up for a fight or something."

  "Nothing of the sort," Dante said. "We were just going to sit down with the redshirts and discuss Allandon's Transubstantiated Ethics and the Deceit of Carvahal. A war's only broken out over that twice."

  "I'm not even going to pretend to pay attention to that."

  Atop the Pridegate's twenty foot walls, which in turn stood halfway up the rising slope of the city, Dante's line of sight ran to the edge of Narashtovik with few obstructions. It was from this clear vantage that he watched the king's army enter the city.

  At first they flowed blackly from the forest, a dark, sluggish, molasses-like mass. That flow broke into separate streams as thousands of men diverted into four columns, each of which took a different one of the four main north-south roads to this flank of the Pridegate. Once this mass drew within a mile, its individual features grew more distinct. Red banners flapped above ranks of swordsmen wearing hauberks and spearmen clad in the oaky hues of boiled leather. A line of warhorses strode at the head of the main column, riders masked in plates of solid metal that glinted in the summer morning sun.

  The stomp of their steps rolled through the sticky air. Rhythmic. Maddening. A planned avalanche. Dollendun had been different. Dante had only seen the boats, not the army's main body. The gathering of so many men intent on murdering them was eerie and awesome and terrifying.

  "Is it too late to tell them the city's full of deadly ghosts?" Blays said.

  "We may get a chance to find out," Dante said. "I think I'm about to start moaning."

  Narashtovik's commanders hollered last-minute orders. To Dante's left, walltop defenders shuffled nearer the gates to meet the attackers. The king's army continued on, step by step, eating up what little distance remained between them and the walls. Close enough now to make out individual faces, to smell their miasma of travel and sweat. The front lines stepped within easy bowshot and stopped cold. The waves of men behind them rippled to a halt.

  A lone rider emerged from the front lines, his warhorse stepping as lightly as the summer rains. Some ten yards in front of his troops, he halted and turned sidelong. Instead of the king's red, he wore pine green.

  "I will now deliver the king's terms," he said. His voice was soft, almost soothing, yet it carried on the air like the streamers of morning mist that blew in from the bay and threaded through the city streets.

  It was a cold voice, but that wasn't what gave Dante goosebumps. "Son of a gods damned bitch!"

  "What?" Blays said.

  Dante pointed below. "That."

  Before the Pridegate, the man in green tilted back his head to regard the black-clad troops lining the walls. "Surrender. Lay down your arms. Swear fealty to King Moddegan of Gask. Disband the Council of the Sealed Citadel. Hand over all norren within Narashtovik to the custody of the king and his appointed executors. Turn over control of the city to me, Cassinder of Beckonridge."

  "What the hell?" Blays said. "We killed that guy!"

  "Apparently he got better," Dante said.

  "You've met Cassinder, yes?" Kav said from beside them.

  "Sure," Dante said. "In the sense we've spent the last few months trying repeatedly to kill each other."

  Kav smiled ruefully. "Then perhaps you'd like to deliver our response."

  Down in the street, Cassinder pulled off his steel helmet. One of his eyes drooped. A mass of pale scars surrounded the socket.

  Dante straightened and advanced to the edge of the wall. "I am afraid to inform you that we are unable to accept your terms on the grounds that the only man in Narashtovik with the authority to accept them has been killed. As you ordered. As the king authorized." Dante did his best to look pained. "It is with great sorrow, then, that I am left with a single response: fuck you and the horse you rode in on!"

  Cassinder bobbed his head. "Very well."

  He wheeled his horse. As he returned to the ranks, he flung both hands above his head, open-palmed. Ether streaked from six points within the redshirts' ranks, glaring, as hot and white and angry as liquid steel. Dante didn't have time to shout. The ether crashed into the walls. The doors of the Pridegate came tumbling down.

  28

  Stone roared and groaned and crackled and burst. When Dante moved soil and stone, it was smooth, silent, graceful. The ethermancers' attack was not. Instead, it was a hammer-blow of pure force, the combined power of Setteven's strongest sorcerers blasting the gates and the surrounding stonework straight to the ground.

  Dante fell with them.

  Men shrieked. Nether whipped from Narashtovik's priests, too late to stop the attack, but perhaps in time to punish those who had made it. The floor disappeared beneath Dante. He tumbled through the open air, dust and pebbles pinging his face. As soon as he understood what was happening, he hit the ground.

  His spine jarred. His elbow cracked. His head whiplashed into the cobblestones. Fist-sized stones rained down around him, bouncing from the street. It was very quiet. The shouts, the screams, were they coming from another world? It was so gauzy, too. The dust. The dust was part of it. He could taste it, gritty and slightly bitter. But the gauze was more than the dust. Things were fuzzy. Soft and smeary at the edges. He tried to rise and flopped back down. His elbow hurt. Dimly, foggily, but it hurt. So did his head. So did his back.

  "Mourn!" he heard Blays call. "Take the norren and hold the gap! We have to hold them off while our men retreat!"

  Olivander's baritone barked across the screams. Black-clad soldiers ran uphill deeper into the city. To the Ingate? Already? Why would they fall back so fast? Dante gritted his teeth and swung himself to a sitting position. Towering norren thundered past him, swords and shields in hand. Bellowing. Finally, Dante saw the hole in the wall. The very large hole where there had once been gates. And the tide of redshirts swirling in through it.

  The norren met them head-on. Steel clashed. The screams changed pitch. Became shriller. Pained. Men died, cut down by the norren's pounding blades. Blood slicked the still-settling dust.

  "Come on." Someone hooked a hand into his armpit. Blays grimaced down at him, face coated with dust and sweat. Someone else took his other arm. Lira. Together, they hauled him to his feet, which were perplexingly reticent to follow his demands. Narashtovik's soldiers continued the retreat to the safety of the Ingate. Supported on both sides, Dante stumbled along behind them.

  The sounds of battle faded, replaced by the thump of scores of boots and the heavy breathing of men in full stride. The retreat was orderly enough. As orderly, at any rate, as could be hoped for in a movement involving thousands of men with swords running away from th
ousands of enemy men with swords. It was good they'd practiced the maneuver. Otherwise the battle might already be over.

  They maintained their orderliness at the Ingate, where soldiers waited to pass through its narrow gates. Heads popped up along the walls. Men took up bows, nocking arrows. Pain throbbed in Dante's elbow and head. That was good. He was stepping out of the fog.

  "I think I can walk on my own now," he said. Blays and Lira exchanged a look, then gradually lessened their hold on him until they were certain his feet were ready to fend for themselves. The three of them joined the crowd of soldiers in the wide plaza waiting to pass through the gates. Dante glanced downhill. "Do what I think just happened really just happen?"

  "You mean the part where they blew down the wall like an angry god?" Blays said. "I thought it was you priesty boys' job to stop the enemy wizards from ruining our day."

  "They were too fast. Normally these battles have a lot of preliminary pageantry. Speeches and the waving of flags and whatnot. They hit us the same way we hit the fort at Borrull."

  "Those assholes!"

  "Are you sure you're all right?" Lira said. "Heads shouldn't bleed. Yours is."

  Dante touched the throbbing at the back of his skull. His fingers probed warm, matted hair. He twiddled them in front of his face. "Well, I don't see any brains."

  "Not a surprise," Blays said.

  Lira nodded to the Ingate and the black-clad soldiers passing through it. "Why won't they just blow up this wall, too?"

  "They'll try," Dante said. "But they've already spent a lot of their power. And if you're alert, it's easy enough to stop. We'll have to post our people around the wall. Be vigilant."

  Within two minutes, the last of the troops were filing through to the other side. The three of them milled at the rear. Back in the direction of the Pridegate, the norren ran into view, long legs carrying them ahead of whatever pursued them.

  "Looks like our cue to get inside," Blays said.

  They crossed beneath the shadow of the gates. Dante lingered, scanning the approaching norren for Mourn. The warriors reached the plaza. Hoofbeats thundered to Dante's left.