The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy

by Edward W. Robertson

  For the most part, it was a place of weather and sky.

  The sixth day after leaving Ellan, they came to a village settled around a large pond. Most of the homes were leather tents insulated with wool and grass. A few were built from mud bricks. Fences penned in sheep and goats, the posts and rails built from ragged, warped wood that looked like it had been there for centuries.

  The trail led to the village. Since crossing into the desert, there had been nothing to forage for. Their supplies were growing light. After a quick discussion, they decided to approach the settlement, stopping outside of bow range while Dante and Ast went to speak to the locals. A sun-tanned and wind-beaten woman met them on the road, the tails of her white braids flapping in the wind. According to Ast, she spoke First (Weslean). He spoke enough to confirm they would be allowed to enter and trade. The tongue was similar enough that Dante could understand it in snatches. He prayed there would be no misunderstandings.

  Their attempt to barter did not get off to a strong start. Other than their knives, and a few metal tools the locals were in short supply of, they had very little to offer. While Dante and Ast haggled over the value of a steel knife, a man brought back his son from the wilds. The young boy's feet were both frostbitten.

  It took some time for Dante to convince them he could help—in the end, he had to cut his arm, then heal his wound in front of their eyes. A few of the men seemed to think that was a sign Dante ought to be sunk in the lake, or dragged behind a horse until there was nothing left of him, but the boy's father shouted them down and beckoned Dante into his tent. A few minutes later, the boy's green and red toes had gone pink, their swelling soothed.

  Dante cautioned the man that he still wasn't sure about one of the toes, but the man kissed him on both cheeks, slaughtered a sheep, and began preparations for a feast of mutton, blood-and-barley pudding, and fermented milk. Many of the villagers were disinterested, but some three dozen others came by over the course of the afternoon and evening, bearing small dishes or skins of beer.

  They were cautious at first. Then a young woman shyly showed Dante her rotten tooth. It was too far gone to save, but with the nether, he was able to push it painlessly from her mouth, her gums healing behind it.

  With that, the floodgates opened. He, Lew, and even Somburr were inundated with requests to heal cuts, infections, aches, and fevers. They couldn't do much for the older people's arthritis, and Dante had to inform one gentleman that even the nether had no solution for baldness. Yet by the end of the feast, they were stuffed, drunk, and gifted with a score of feather charms and bone talismans—along with sacks of barley, dried mutton, and skins of spiced blood the locals claimed would make you as strong as the horses it was harvested from.

  "Where are you going?" the father of the boy asked when things had wound down and the stars blazed from the sky.

  "Morrive," Dante answered.

  The man frowned. "I would not go there if I were you."

  "Why? Is it cursed?"

  He laughed. "Of course not. But this is the last village from here until the end of the desert. There is nothing else. Nor at Morrive."

  "I hope you're wrong. My home depends on it."

  Dante asked the others about the place, but while it was nearby, it stood across miles of sandy dunes the villagers rarely spent any time in. Those who'd seen it shrugged, dismissing it as no more interesting than any other hunk of rock in the desert.

  They were given space to sleep in a stranger's tent. In the morning, they were fed flatbread and farmer's cheese. They took water from the lake and continued south.

  The baked dirt mingled with sinuous arms of sand. Soon, the trail disappeared. Over the course of a couple miles, dunes replaced the plains, rippling north-south as the winds scattered their grains to the east. It was still freezing, but the snows were gone. The loose sand made for slow travel. At the top of each dune, Dante stopped to look in all directions, hunting for anything that looked out of place. With enough height, he could see for miles, but with no road to lead them through the shifting sands, it was possible they'd pass right by the ruins.

  As the sun fled west, he began to fear they had. But miles to the south, a shadow lay on the desert, elongated by the slant of the light. They pushed on. A squared stone tower projected from the sand. They reached it in the last of the light. The stone was a leopard-spotted granite, patterned with black rings enclosing a heterogeneous mash of orange minerals. It was some fifty feet tall and its walls were a hundred feet wide. Friezes and glyphs were etched in the rock. Those on the western face were worn smooth by years of wind-driven sand.

  Dante wanted nothing more than to investigate then and there, but they'd already pushed too far; if they didn't put together some sort of shelter, they might freeze. They moved to the shelter of the east wall and set up their tents. He feared the sand would provide no purchase for their stakes, but the ground right next to the tower was hard-packed, practically stone.

  Not long after the sun was down, the wind settled as well. They were left in silence broken only by their own breathing and the shuffling of the ponies. The stillness was so complete Dante could believe nothing had ever lived here at all, that the tower had been dragged out here by a crazed king who fancied himself an architectural critic.

  Dante woke multiple times during the night. But he was so tired and sore that despite his excitement—an excitement very much like the kind he'd had as a child waiting for Falmac's Eve—he was able to stay beneath his blankets until dawn. Once he was up, he ate quickly, then made a circuit around the tower of Morrive.

  Except for the occasional patch of glyphs or wind-weathered carving, the walls were blank. There was no sign of a staircase. There were, however, multiple windows on each side. Including a few that could be reached from the ground.

  He returned to the camp and explained he was going inside. To Dante's total lack of surprise, Lew offered to stay outside and copy the glyphs on the walls and attempt to translate them using the Speech of the Lost. As always, Cee wanted to join the more active part of the mission. Somburr's curiosity led him to volunteer as well. Ast preferred to stay outside and keep watch, but said that Dante should call him up if he encountered anything strange.

  Dante took Cee and Somburr back to the window. The tower was obviously long dead, but he wished he had a rat to send in first. Even a moth would do. Lacking scouts other than himself, he jumped up, grabbed onto the stone still, and hauled himself inside.

  Dust motes twirled in shafts of light. Sand sprawled across the floor. The room was otherwise bare stone. He gestured to the others and lowered himself to the floor. It smelled like dust, but there was no hint of mustiness. The other two climbed in behind him, landing on the floor with a burst of sand. The rest of the rooms were as empty as the first, but they found a stairwell, hard-packed sand cementing the steps into a ramp. They stomped their feet through the crust and headed upstairs.

  The sand on the second level drifted against the walls, but there was less of it, with stone showing in the middle of the floor. Shrunken piles of what might have been curtains were crumpled beneath the windows. When Dante touched one, it crumbled to ashy remnants. A metal bar lay on the ground, pitted and green with age. Loose timber sprawled around the room, but it was so chewed up and rotten that it was hard to identify what it might once have been.

  The next three floors presented similar results. The rooms weren't empty, but they may as well have been. The higher they got, the less sand rested on the floor. The fifth floor led to the roof.

  The tower was the tallest thing for miles and offered sweeping vistas of desert. Dante only had eyes for the roof itself. A circle of black stone dominated the surface, sixty feet in diameter and divided into twelve equal slices. As usual, sand dusted it all, but he immediately understood what it referenced: the twelve gods of the Celeset.

  A far smaller circle was inscribed in the center. Each of its foot-long wedges was carved with an icon: the twin rivers of Arawn, the hound of
Mennok, the anvil, the maiden. Some of the symbols didn't match what he was accustomed to, but what struck him was that there were twelve. Same as in Mallon and Gask. Here in Weslee, however, they worshipped the Thirteen Lords of the Broken Circle.

  The slices were filled with regal glyphs. Some were clogged with sand, others wind-worn, but he thought they'd be able to read them. He moved to the edge of the tower and hollered down at Lew until the monk agreed to join him on the roof.

  They set to work copying the glyphs. Somburr assisted. Cee slipped away. Ast stood on the roof and watched the desert. As the sun climbed, the air warmed enough for Dante to shed his cloak.

  The translations weren't easy business. The glyphs stood for syllables rather than letters, and the Morrivese grammar was crude. They'd had time to familiarize themselves with the Speech of the Lost during the walk from Ellan, though, and it turned out the words in the circle were familiar: paraphrased lines from the Cycle of Arawn.

  But Dante had found something outside the black circle. Near a corner of the roof, other glyphs had been hammered into the rock. They were sloppy, out of line, shallower than the orderly symbols chiseled into the Celeset. Dante called Lew over to help.

  Within an hour, they had several interpretations of the line. It was something close to "The stone has broken and brought the skies down with it." They consulted with Ast, who confirmed their translation.

  "Does that mean anything to you?" Lew said.

  "Sure," Dante said. "That I owe Horace a punch in the face for wasting our time."

  "I don't know. It sounds portentous."

  "What it sounds is vague."

  "Have you checked the whole roof? The inside of the tower? Maybe there's more to see."

  "Like a million acres of sand?" Dante folded his arms. "I'll check inside again. Maybe I missed something."

  Lew bobbed his head. "I'll get back to deciphering the walls."

  Dante went down to the fifth floor. This time, he forced himself not to rush, using his torchstone to light the gloomier corners, but there was simply nothing to find. Besides rubble and junk, anyway. He circled through the rooms, sketching a quick layout, but there were no obvious walled-off spaces that might contain a hidden room. He walked down to the fourth floor and repeated his search. Midway through his sweep of the third, someone whistled from outside. He went to the eastern window and stuck his head into the daylight.

  "Jump on down!" Cee said from below, shielding her eyes with her hand. "Or take the stairs, if you prefer. Either way, you got to come take a look at this."

  "What is it?" Dante said.

  "Nope. You have to come see for yourself."

  He clenched his teeth and headed down the stairs. On the ground floor, he hopped out the south window into the sand and headed over to Cee. There, the sand dropped a couple feet, exposing the tower's foundation. She beckoned him over and pointed to a rippled patch.

  "Very good," Dante said. "You found more desert."

  "Yeah. And it's all marked up with snake tracks."

  "Snake tracks? These look exactly like the patterns on every dune here. Should I be fleeing for my life?"

  "These tracks run the wrong way to be the wind," Cee pointed. "And there is no wind on this side. It's in the lee of the tower. The final reason you're wrong: these are shaped like snake tracks."

  Dante glanced around. "Okay, so what? Are you thinking of eating them? Be my guest."

  "Lew came by a few minutes ago. He said you hadn't found anything." She pointed at the base of the wall. "You checked in there?"

  A small hole peeped from the wall. The sand around it had a lot of marks similar to the ones Cee had found. Dante reached to scoop away the sand, thought better of it, and delved into the nether instead. Moving the sand turned out to be more difficult than he'd expected—it wasn't as sticky with itself as dirt or rock—but there were still shadows in it, even in this dry and lifeless place. Sand poured out of the hole.

  And kept pouring. The hole, initially large enough to admit a hungry mouse, expanded to the size of a plum, and then a fist. A sour, primal stink issued from within. Counter to his better instincts, Dante continued pulling sand away. A couple feet underneath the wall, sunlight spilled onto a ball of tan ropes someone had coiled up and thrown away. In a horrible, scaly, living pile.

  "Gross!" Dante jumped back. "Are you trying to get me killed?"

  "Think they're venomous?"

  "Even if they're not, I might shudder to death."

  She smirked. "Look harder, brave leader."

  He crouched back toward the ball of sluggish snakes, extending the torchstone into the space. It shined on a bunch of sand and more snakes. "What am I supposed to be looking at? The physical manifestation of the world's nightmares?"

  "Don't look at what's in the hole. Look at the hole itself."

  "Why don't you save yourself from being strangled by me and—" He cut himself short. The hole through the wall wasn't ragged or crumbled. It was a smooth line. He brushed away the sand crusted at its top, revealing a pointed arch. He was looking into a window. One identical to the one he'd clambered through to get into the ground floor. Rather, what he'd assumed to be the ground floor. "The stairwell's completely plugged with sand—and there's more building below it."

  He backed out, brushed off the dust, and ran to the window to the first floor.

  "Hey, Lew!" Cee shouted, still beside the hole. As Dante strode across the sandy floor to the stairs, Lew screamed bloody murder.

  The sand in the stairwell looked solid. It felt solid, too. Even when Dante stepped and then jumped on the place where more stairs must have been hiding. He moved back to the entry and plunged his mind into the grains, using the nether inside them to assess their shape. It was solid all the way down to the next landing.

  Dante nicked his arm and focused. A snake of sand oozed from the stairs and slithered toward the window, growing wider as it went. Its "head" hit the wall, diverted upward, and felt its way through the window. The stream leaving the stairwell was now thicker than his waist. Several unearthed steps were visible below what he had taken to be the start of the stairs. Within minutes, he had an empty staircase and a great big pile of sand outside the window.

  He stood on the landing, gazing down into the darkness. Listening. Sniffing, too. The air wafting from below didn't just smell like dust. It smelled...stale. And perhaps a little snaky. Basically, it smelled like the sort of place you should never willingly explore, especially by yourself.

  Drawing his bone sword with his right hand, holding the torchstone in his left, and keeping the nether at the ready in his mind, he descended into the darkness. Stray grains gritted beneath his soles. The stairs were clear all the way to the bottom, where a makeshift wall of rotten wood, fabric, and ruined debris plugged the doorway. He cocked his sword and swung. Chunks of detritus hit the ground with brittle thuds. Sand slumped lazily through the hole, spilling over his boots.

  Inside, it rested thigh-high, drifted deeper beneath the windows, which were cemented with sand. Nothing obvious stood out from the room. The stairs to the next level down were likewise clogged. He drew out the sand and piled it in the side of the "basement." Every few seconds, he glanced around himself, mistaking the hiss of sand for that of angry snakes.

  The air on the next level smelled less sour and more stale. From that point on, the stairwell became clear enough to walk down; sand still caked the windows and lay on the ground in little dunes, but in much lesser quantities than above. He continued down, floor by floor. On the ninth floor, counting down from the roof, timbers lay in heaps against the east wall. He touched one and it crumbled into dry mulch. Rather than wood, it smelled like dust and age.

  Two floors lower, the doorway was stuffed with a plug of brick. He sent the nether into it and discovered it was dried mud. It took a moment to get it moving, but soon enough it flowed away into the room, adding to the layer cemented atop the floor. This was thick enough that when he stood on it, he could just touc
h the ceiling. He found a window and knocked on the ramp of clay that had dried within it. It was as solid as the stone of the wall. He circled around the floor, but it was a featureless mat of dried mud.

  The level below this was much the same, but it bore an open floor plan with taller windows, and the mud had filled it nearly floor to ceiling. In fact, guessing by the stains visible in the torchstone's wan glow, the mud had reached the ceiling, then retracted as it dried. He thought the air smelled like a river bank after it's lost its flow, but that was impossible; this was the middle of the desert. The windows and the stairwell were clogged with branches and leaves. When he released them from the mud's hold, he smelled pine needles and sap.

  He cleared the way down to the next floor, the thirteenth below the roof. The stairs were twice as long as those leading to the other levels, but finally came to a stop. On this floor, he found no windows at all. As he sent the nether roaming through the hardened clay, he felt objects within it. These were mineral, too, and he could have moved them if he wished. But as he crawled onto the mud "floor," which lay less than four feet below the soaring ceiling, he saw the thin bones of arms jutting from the desiccated soil.

  The clay was embedded with skeletons. Scores of them. Mummified skin hung in flaps. The air tasted foul yet stagnant, as if it hadn't stirred in decades. He began to feel lightheaded. Panic surged through his nerves. He moved to the stairwell, the echo of his footsteps chasing him up the steps. A cool draft was working its way down the tunnel he'd dredged and he paused three flights up from the mass grave, catching his breath, letting his pulse normalize. He might have been able to force himself to go back down, but he didn't.

  As he climbed back to what was now the ground floor, a silhouette peered down the stairs.

  "Dante?" Lew said. "Where have you been?"

  "Below."

  "I checked the glyphs again. The ones you thought were written last. We were missing an accent on one of the words. The one for 'stone.'"

  "So?" Dante said.

  "So it doesn't really say 'The stone has broken and brought the skies down with it.' In this instance, 'stone' means a stone shaped for work. Like a work table. Or a grinding stone."