EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (332 page)

Once they drew nearer, Dante saw the black spaces weren’t charcoal and shadow, but the deep green needles of northern pines. Thick in the streets, pushing up among tumbled stones, choking out the places where men once lived. They’d make easy firewood, but there they were, unmolested, undisturbed. Dante touched the pair of horns that hung from his neck. The tracks of others broke the crust of snow that lay on the road. From within the jumble of houses and trees he thought he could see the shadows of movement. Far too few for a city of this scope—the silhouettes he saw lived in the lawless ruins, wouldn’t necessarily bear the mantle of docility that seemed to affect most men who lived in the company of thousands of others. Dante closed one eye, reached out for the nether, felt it reach back.

He led his horse around a tongue of rubble that lay in the roadway. They left the pine-specked fields and crossed into the sprawl of empty buildings. Once or twice a minute he saw a man hurrying across one of the streets ahead, heard the footfalls of inhabitants from somewhere within the alleys and cross-streets; further toward the city’s heart he’d catch a shout, a bell, a few moments of breeze-scattered blacksmith’s hammerblows. He slowed his horse, watching both sides of the road as they passed the moss-coated stump of a home that couldn’t have stood for two hundred years; then an open patch of half-buried timbers that may once have been an innhouse but now looked one strong rain from washing down to a square of dirt no different than any of the rest; then a weed-choked foundation resting bare of walls or roof. From the distance of a mile or more an uneven line of gray stone showed behind the worn roofs of those buildings that still stood.

“Tell me why this feels wrong,” Dante said.

“Where should I start?”

“I don’t mean that,” Dante said, jerking his chin at the detritus.

“Cally made it sound like we’d be trussed up in a net and thrown in a stew the instant we showed up.” Blays chewed the inside of his lip. “I don’t see a damn thing, and all I hear’s one smith who can’t keep time.”

“That’s it. There’s not enough noise. You can separate one sound from another.”

Blays nodded. He loosened his sword. They followed the road. Not all was empty, not all was ruin; some houses boasted all four walls and a roof without holes, and here and there wooden structures that didn’t look completely decrepit shared walls with older ones. The chock of a solitary wood axe echoed from no more than a hundred yards away. Down a street where the cobbles were as gappy as the teeth of a serf Dante caught the unexpected flash of a garden, an ordered spread of green amongst the defeated crumble of housing. A man’s soughing footsteps came from the other side of the street and he turned in time to see a pair of wary eyes before the figure disappeared behind a damp wall. They moved on.

Voices and the clanking of men at their labor grew thicker as they approached the city’s first wall. It shared the disrepair of the lands around it, webbed with cracks, its top as jagged as the peaks they’d crossed weeks earlier. Graying, fluttery lumps dangled from spears planted in the stone. In places there was no wall at all, just a carpet of stones and beyond it a view of a city that looked half normal. The road led to a gate of sorts, or at least one space in the stonework that was intentional, though Dante saw no sign of a grille or doors to shut the twenty-foot walls against invasion. They halted a stone’s throw from its base and moved off to the sod at the side of the road to dismount, stretch their legs, have a bite. Foot and carriage traffic moved on the other side of the gates. If they hadn’t just crossed through a couple miles of desolation, Dante could almost imagine it was a city no different from any other.

“I don’t suppose you have any idea what you’re doing,” Blays said.

“Not really,” Dante said, and the admission lifted a weight from his shoulders. He gazed back at all the empty buildings. “At least we won’t have any trouble finding a place to stay.”

“Yeah.” Blays flexed up on his calves and crossed his arms, watching the signs of life past the gate. “I was kind of expecting to’ve had to kill someone by now.”

Dante nodded and chewed on a bite of bread. Dirt peppered their legs and they jumped back. Six feet in front of them, an arrow vibrated in the soil like a plucked string.

“Outstanding,” Blays said. He twisted it from the dirt and gazed up at the walls, patting the arrow’s head against his leg. “I believe that was a warning.”

More dirt spattered them and again they heard the twang of an arrow coming to rest in the earth. The second had landed a mere cubit from Blays’ boots. He gaped.

“Who shot that!”

Dante lifted an open palm and turned a slow semicircle in front of the gate. He didn’t know whether Mallish customs would mean anything here, but figured if they were bright enough to know how bows worked they’d get the picture. Blays yanked out the second arrow and snapped it in half, casting the fragments into the street.

“Don’t,” Dante said, scanning the crest of the wall for movement.

“Tell them not to shoot at me.”

“We’re travelers,” Dante called up to the fortifications.

“That’s why I shot at you,” a voice came back from up and to the right. In Mallish at that, not the barking language of this land. Dante squinted at the horizon of stone and sky.

“Stop shooting at us!” Blays said.

“State your business,” the voice said.

Blays sucked air and looked at Dante. Dante pushed out his lip and shrugged.

“A critical error of preparation,” Blays murmured. Dante nodded.

“Um.”

Another arrow hissed over their heads and tinked off a wall somewhere behind them.

“State your business in Narashtovik or join the others on this wall!” the voice called out, and Dante took a step back as he reexamined the gray things stuck from the spears along its top. What was wrong with mankind?”

“Got it,” Dante said to Blays, then raised his voice and tipped his face toward where he thought the guard was emplaced. “We’re pilgrims of the south. We’ve come to pay homage to Arawn in the city that is his most holy.”

“Arawn?” Blays hissed. “Are you trying to get us killed?”

Dante waited, sucking breath through his teeth. No more arrows creased the air. The walls stood silent.

“What should I have said?” he whispered to Blays. “We’re merchants here to sell our invisible wagons of riches? I didn’t hear you brimming with suggestions.”

“What about all those great lies Robert came up with?”

“At least they’ve stopped trying to kill us.”

“Unless they’re on their way down so they can get their hands involved.”

“What are your names?” the voice said, and the two boys jumped.

“John Girdle and Bob Oxman,” Blays called before Dante could give their real ones. “Him being John, of course.”

“What kind of names are those?” Dante whispered.

“What kind of names are those?” the voice shouted.

“The ones our fathers gave us!” Blays roared back.

He was met with more silence. The breeze ruffled the needles of the pines, the refuse in the streets.

“Very well, John Girdle and Bob Oxman,” the voice said at last. “You may enter. The sermon of Samarand will be at noon three days from now.”

The boys looked at each other. Dante cupped his hands to his mouth. “Where, exactly?”

“The Cathedral of Ivars,” the voice said slowly. “Where did you say you were from?”

“The south,” Blays said.

“Indeed,” the voice said. “Enter, then.”

They grabbed the reins of their horses and walked them forward. Dante kept his eyes on the part of the wall where the man had spoken from until the stone cast its shadow on them and they stepped into the next circle of the city. He glanced toward Blays as they made their way up the road and into the company of others. John Girdle and Bob Oxman indeed. What if the gatekeeper hadn’t let them pass? What would they have done then? Would they have died in the street among the filth and the ruin? It was a strange world, he thought, a horrible world, an ongoing rush of violence and confusion where no place felt like home. The wrong words could make his stomach churn with loathing for his failure, could make others move to strike him down. Where did Blays find his bluster? For all his own mind had opened since he’d found the book, the only moments that didn’t feel like a test that found him wanting were when he was reading or he’d said something to make Blays laugh. What was the rest of it? The running from those who would kill them, the riding to this city for the one they would kill? And if they managed to make that so, would anything be different once Samarand was dead? Wouldn’t he always feel this way? Wouldn’t he always be worried to the nub of his nerves by the memories of the foolish things he’d said, the times he’d tried and come up short, the moments he’d reached within himself and found he didn’t have the strength to act at all?

“She’s here,” he said, staring dumbly at the space between his horse’s ears.

“Where?” Blays said, hand snapping to his sword.

“I mean, in the city.”

“Didn’t we know that already?”

“Not for certain, did we?”

Blays screwed up his face. “I thought you and Cally were certain she was here. I thought that’s why we decided to ride a million miles to get here. Are you saying we could have come all this way and had to turn right back around?”

“No,” Dante said, slowing as they reached an intersection with another broad avenue. “Well, yes.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“All’s well that ends well, right?” He was about to make fun of Blays’ concerns some more but was suddenly too busy collecting his dropped jaw. “Do you see that?”

Blays followed his finger. “See what? That you haven’t washed your finger in five years?”

“That’s a temple of Arawn,” Dante said, pointing down the street at the white tree standing in relief above the double doors on the face of a tall, spired structure missing most of its roof and pitted with wear on its walls. Fine-boned gargoyles stood watch on its eaves.

“So? I thought this was their capital.”

“Out in the open like that? It looks hundreds of years old. It would have been burnt down a dozen different times back in Bressel.”

Blays made a smacking sound with his lips, then just sighed instead.

“I suppose you want to look inside.”

“Hells yes I do,” Dante said. All the dread he’d felt toward himself and his surroundings a minute earlier lifted like a fever dream. What was this place?

“Should we just put these horses in our pockets?”

“What? Oh.” Dante glanced around the square, the couple of men on about their business, the dark-windowed faces of steep-roofed buildings. “Let’s just stash them behind some place empty. It still looks pretty clear.”

Blays snorted. “Thieves are like roaches. Everything looks clear till the moment they’re running off with your food.”

“Then we’ll steal someone else’s horses later,” Dante said. “Just carry anything you can’t replace. Don’t forget your blankie.”

“And just leave our mounts for the first guy with an eye for easy money?”

“Yes? We’re in the city now. They’re practically a burden. Oh, what should we do with the horses. Should we stable them? When did we last pay the groomsman? Should we just tie them up? What if someone robs us? The horror! Oh, if only we didn’t have these horses!” Dante stopped waving his hands around. “You see?”

“But I like them,” Blays said, patting his horse’s neck.

“There’s a time to let things go,” Dante said. He turned his horse down a narrow road and they wandered a while in the rows of mostly-whole buildings lined against the city wall. He chose one that looked particularly abandoned—the trash looked old and gray, no bootprints in the yard, no smoke from the chimney or any of the other holes in the roof—and they tied their horses to a pine sapling that had shot up through the front stoop. Dante led Blays back toward the temple, orienting himself by the wall behind him and the cluster of spires toward the city’s center.

The door creaked like the planks of a ship but opened easily enough. Weak sunlight diffused through the broken and shutterless windows. The ground floor was filth. Apple cores and chicken bones and eye-wild potatoes and small moldering piles that may have been edible a year or five ago or, judging by smell, may already have been eaten once. Clouds of crumpled paper sat in front of the fireplace of the front hall. Dante smoothed one against his knee. The alphabet was foreign, but he knew enough to know the name of Arawn when he saw it.

They stepped carefully past the refuse to the back rooms beyond the mostly-empty great hall and found more of the same. Clearly the temple had been used more recently for the housing of the penniless than as the home of the god. A wooden staircase, missing only a few slats, rose to the second floor. Dante tested its footing, keeping close to where the steps met the wall. They squeaked like cancerous rats. Blays followed him up, face tight, spitting curses each time the boards popped or groaned.

“We could have found these same wondrous treasures out in the gutters, you know.”

“But not this,” Dante said, crossing the landing to a bookshelf behind some smashed-up tables. Three-quarters empty, and when he picked up what works were left most of them sloughed rotten pages over his feet or dangled as empty covers, their leaves stolen for starting fires or far less dignified ends. A handful of intact and legible volumes remained, however, and three of those were even in a language he could read. He wedged them into his pack and turned in a circle, looking out on the dust and the kipple. “Let’s try the spires.”

“Let’s,” Blays agreed much too enthusiastically, but he tailed Dante up the solid stone stairs they found at the far rear of the temple. The only things left in the upper floors were a number of plain iron candelabras and horn-hewn statuettes, a lot of wood chips, and a few axe-scarred tables which had evidently been too much trouble to haul downstairs and burn. Dante picked up a thumb-sized carved imp and handed it to Blays.

“Here. He’ll ward away your troubles.”

Blays held it up in Dante’s face and frowned. He held it beside his ear, shook it.