EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (356 page)

At first the council resisted, citing Dante’s youth and his newness to their order, but Cally held fast and in the end Dante was named to their ranks, by far the youngest to have ever held a seat. They promoted two monks of long standing and left the other three seats vacant for the time being, reasoning it was better to wait until they had worthy candidates than to fill them in haste and risk erring. After two days of discussion, the council agreed now was not the time for open war with Mallon, and Cally sent riders for points across the south. Their agents were to be recalled, asylum granted to any Mallish rebels who may have lost their homes and families in the struggle. The orders with the smiths were canceled. It was a time to rebuild, the council declared, to restore their strength and study what may have gone wrong with the rites to free the vaulted god. For the time being, the business of the southlands was beyond their scope.

The funerals were to be held the day after that decision. Dante ran down the keep’s stairs the minute the council concluded and galloped through town to the stoneworker they hired for their markers. He paid the craftsman three times the worth of the work and told him to put all his others on hold.

“But we don’t even have a queen right now,” the stoneworker said when Dante explained his order.

“That’s what makes it so impressive,” Dante said.

It was delivered to the Citadel the next morning in time to join the wains headed for the hill overlooking the bay. The stone was simple, but then so had been Larrimore’s looks. The procession of council and monks and an honor guard of soldiers walked quietly from the Citadel to the top of the hill where the order kept its vaults. The bodies were laid at rest in the walls of the current sepulcher. Those who still lived stood on the hill, gazing at the gray, white-capped waters of the bay to their north and west, the city spread out behind them, buried in white; the same snows covered the ruins of the outer housing, the age-spotted buildings past the first wall, the well-kept temples and manors and business-houses inside the second; the same white snows draped the black spires of the Cathedral of Ivars, lay on the gray stone walls of the Citadel, the roof of the keep. Now and then a single shout from down in the city caught a freak gust and reached their ears atop the hill, but mostly they stood in a soft breeze that blew unabated over the shin-deep snows.

“These bodies, they’re just things,” Cally said once he’d readied himself to address the few score men and women who gathered outside the simple columns and cuts of the vault. He had actually combed his beard for the occasion, had switched his torn clothes for the elegant wear of his station. He looked old but ageless, thin but potent, as if he weren’t a man but a marble statue of himself. He moved his blue eyes over the waiting crowd. “The people they were, the people we knew, they’re not what’s turning into dirt in that tomb behind his.” He narrowed his eyes until the folds of his skin threatened to squeeze out his sight entirely. “No,” he said. “We’re here for a while, in these fleshy shells, and all the while we ask Why? What’s this pain I feel? Why do I feel so cut off from the men around me, from the skies above? I don’t think any of us ever receives the answers to those questions. Have any of you?” He raised his eyebrows at the men. A few of them cleared their throats and murmured soft negatives that could be mistaken for coughs. “Neither have I. And I’ve lived a very long time!”

He looked out on all that snow, the silent violence of the cold-torn sea, the banks of clouds that hung over the land from one horizon to another. It was threatening to snow again.

“The people that wore those fading cases in there no longer have to face those questions. They’ve found their answers. Don’t let’s feel sorry for the dead! Perhaps they’ve moved on to paradise at the right arm of Arawn. Perhaps they howl into the oblivion of the starless void. Hard to say. Hard to know. One thing of which we may be certain is they’re no longer alone. In some form, they’re reunited with Arawn and all those he’s culled from this earth through all the long ages. I imagine that’s an awful lot of people. As many as the flakes of snow that look like one big sheet from our position way up here. It stretches as far as we can see; who knows how much further it goes beyond our sight.”

He paused, frowned at himself. Wind blew strings of his gray hair into his eyes. He brushed them away, then rubbed his hands together against the cold. Someone coughed.

“We all want to be back there,” he said, nodding at the cloud-covered skies. “Well, now a few more of us are. The rest of us aren’t yet ready. We must still live this earth.”

“Live this earth,” the men sighed.

The priests spoke long, generous words about Samarand, about Baxter and Pioter and the other dead members of the council Dante couldn’t remember. He wondered if he should feel something for his part in putting them in their vault, for causing the grief that lined the faces of the men on the hill. Did it mean anything that every man who died had those who wept for his passing? How many had mourned for all the soldiers and trackers and hired blades he’d killed along the way? He found he didn’t care, and not just because they’d all been trying to kill him as well. The gods didn’t oversee justice in this lowly place, or if they did, it was a godly brand no human could understand. No one could be surprised when the living became the departed, no matter how young they may be, no matter how abruptly it had caught them.

He heard words about Samarand’s iron will but fair heart, about some old man’s thoughtful wisdom, about a less-older man’s noble spirit. They droned on for a long time. When the last man wrapped it up, they looked to Cally, who stepped forward and cleared his throat.

“Since no one else has,” Dante said before the old man could conclude things, “I’d like to speak a few words about Larrimore.” Cally quirked his brow, then gave him a nod. Dante wandered from the safety of the crowd to where those who’d spoken had faced the mourners alone. His heart railed against his ribs. How could he find any words that weren’t hollow? How did a eulogy become anything more than simple-minded words meant to comfort those who went on?

“Larrimore was a good man,” he started. His voice sounded thin, false. The eyes of all the men who watched him were already glazed. His cheeks burned. He thrust out his chin and looked past them all, past the condolences and aphorisms he’d heard repeated here and at a half dozen other funerals, stared through the poets’ words for dead lords and ladies and all the singers’ sad songs until all that was left was a burn beneath his sternum and a cold anger behind his eyes and then he was speaking before he had a chance to weigh his words inside his head.

“I think he’d laugh at us here,” he said, glaring over the heads of the crowd. “Make sport of our sober words and somber faces. He was fearless in that way. Unstained by the harsh opinion of others. Yet he treated every man as his equal, even when they were just a boy. Perhaps if we had more like him the judgments we pass would be more aligned with the stars where he now rests.” Dante stared at the snow at his feet, searching for more words, but realized that was enough. “Goodbye, Larrimore.”

A few of the men uttered agreements. Cally said a few standard words of closure and then the men dispersed from the mass to smaller groups, talking and laughing in quiet, gentle voices.

“He’d have liked that,” Blays said, coming up to Dante’s side.

“He’d have made fun of me for it.” Dante walked to the wagon that carried Larrimore’s stone and spoke for a while with the men who’d borne it. They found a clear patch beside the sepulcher where his body lay with the others and hacked at the hard ground with spades until they could lower in the marker’s broad base. They firmed it in place with the overturned dirt, stamping the soil flat. By the time they’d finished most of the mourners had started back down the hill toward the Citadel. Cally stood beside Dante and gazed down with him at the gravestone.

“That’s disrespectful,” he said softly. “The jaws of a dragon?”

Dante smiled tightly. “Only if you didn’t know him.”

“Hm. I suppose I’ll trust your judgment.”

Snowflakes began to coast down through the sky. Blays pulled his cloak tighter around his body. He put his hand on Dante’s shoulder. He smiled at the marker, then they too turned and started back toward their home, leaving the dead to theirs.

Dante turned seventeen. He sat through meetings of policy and doctrine, met with Nak to resume his language lessons, attended the fortnightly sermons Cally’d made himself responsible for giving at the cathedral across the street from their closed gates. Winter carried on. Dante hadn’t realized how much administration went into running the place and had to fight to keep up with all the communiques with distant monks and their tangled questions of scripture, the delicate politics of the courtiers from the capital, the ambassadors from small-fish baronies and earldoms looking for support from the ancient authority of the dead city. Days spun by. Sometimes Dante went sunup to sundown without seeing Blays, who spent equal time investigating Narashtovik’s pubs as he did drilling with the soldiers.

After six weeks the first of the rebels and refugees began to trickle in from the lands they’d left in Mallon. Dante, as a southlander, was assigned to clear their passage with the guards of the Pridegate and establish their housing in the more recently abandoned quarters therein. They arrived with dirt-streaked faces and travel-torn clothes, some with the stumps of their limbs hanging in slings, others bearing illness and disease their war-weakened bodies had been unable to resist, or blue-black toes suffered in the frosts of the mountains. He asked Nak’s aid and requisitioned some of the younger initiates to help him, overseeing their treatment of the wounded and the infirm. Two dozen or more arrived each day and he called out to the nether to heal what he could. Those he and his aides couldn’t make whole were deposited in a new cemetery cleared at the edge of the woods on the southern border of the city. They weren’t happy times, but for once they weren’t bitter times, either. In some small way, Dante thought, he was making up for all the things he’d done between Bressel and Barden.

Blays started to go along with him, speaking to those refugees strong and willing enough to swap stories and news of their homeland. Whetton had been retaken by King Charles, they told him; the renegades had deserted the forests outside Bressel; a lasting treaty had been established in the Collen Basin between the Arawnites and the clergy of the other sects. The dead had been buried and a few new temples bearing the symbol of Barden had been burnt to cinders. Those who arrived a month after the first refugees spoke of a lasting peace, a return to the relative order of the political jockeying between the aging nobles and the growing guilds of Bressel, to the same minor sparks and threats that had always existed between the wide kingdom of Mallon and the lesser-settled territories in its west and south. Blays began to wander off when Dante attended to the ceaseless treatment of the ill, staying gone until the evening, sometimes not returning till the next day’s noon. As time softened Dante’s mood, it seemed to stir up Blays’ in a way that was too active for melancholy and too pensive for wanderlust. He talked little, even when they found the time to drink together. Dante didn’t know what to do. If it were him, he’d want the space to work it out for himself. He let Blays be. The sick kept coming, scores per day, and he lost himself restoring them to health, countering the name of the dead city one man at a time.

“Let’s go up top,” Blays said to Dante at the conclusion of a council session concerning the feelers toward independence that kept arriving from the norren territories around the foothills of the Dundens. Being recognized by Narashtovik would all but guarantee their freedom in the capital.

“There were more refugees this morning,” Dante said, tugging the collar of his cloak straight. “They need me.”

“Just for a moment. The city doesn’t look so nasty from up there.”

“Fine. Just for a moment.”

Dante left the council chambers and walked with Blays down the hall to the cramped stairway that led to the peak of the keep. The stairs spiraled so tightly he always feared he’d get halfway up and meet someone on their way down, then have to find a way to turn himself around, climb back down to the landing, and start all over again. They met no one else, though, and emerged into the wood-roofed battlement alone. Blays walked past where the roofing stopped, out into the open wind, and leaned himself against a crenel. The city spread out beneath them.