EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (333 page)

“It’s not working.”

“Funny,” Dante said. The temple had long since been scoured of nearly everything that could be sold or set on fire and they finished their search within minutes and reentered the street. The horses hadn’t been stolen from where they’d tied them in front of the old house by the wall, and finding the premises no less dirty than the streets and far cleaner than the temple or either of the house’s neighboring edifices, the boys settled in. The sun was just saying hello to the western horizon. Dante lit a couple candles looted from the temple and set them at either end of the house’s main room, i.e. the only other room besides the one the front door opened on.

“We should find the Cathedral of Ivars tomorrow,” he said, easing himself to the floor. He rocked back and forth on the hardwood. “Feels weird not to have bumps beneath your ass.”

Blays gave him a look, then moved on. “Going to be a lot of people. I get the impression we weren’t the first pilgrims the gatekeeper’d seen.”

“I’m just saying we know she’ll be there. We should see if it’s an option.”

“I doubt it’ll be a good one.”

“Thus the scouting.” Dante exhaled hard. “It can’t hurt to look. Maybe it’ll be perfect.”

Blays shrugged. “Let’s not be in some big hurry to make it the first option. I’d prefer to leave here on my feet than on my back.”

Dante got out one of the books he’d found in the old church. Its cover bore the inky silhouette of a man holding out his hand to a rat.

“It’s going to be a risk no matter how we do it.”

“There are risks and there are risks,” Blays said, wandering around the far side of the room. He slipped a finger under one of the slats nailed over the window and gave an exploratory tug. “You know?”

“I know,” Dante said, but three days from then they’d be looking on Samarand with their own eyes. Whatever risks it carried, whatever else it would mean for his other goal within the city of the dead, the opportunity would be there, and if it looked right, they’d be fools not to take it. “We’ll see how things look tomorrow.”

Through force of habit they were up well before the sun. Dante rose first and lit a candle in the other room and skimmed the new additions to his library. The first was a sort of rebuttal to the
Cycle
, fleshing out historical detail of its major figures and often diverging into windy lectures about the way its theology failed to account for the fundamental and contradictory truths of Mennok and Carvahal. Its penultimate chapter purported to examine the final third of the
Cycle of Arawn
, the part written in ancient Narashtovik, and Dante plunged into it with a pounding heart, but after a dozen-odd pages Dante found it scarce on actual references and long on opinion. Fascinating to the author’s scholarly circle, Dante was certain, and would perhaps have been of interest to him if he’d first been familiar with the source material, but for the meantime infinitely boring.

The second tome, the one with the man and the rat on its cover, was, as anyone could have guessed, a slim volume devoted entirely to Jack Hand. A lucky find, but irrelevant to his present purpose. He smiled and set it aside. The third told the tale of the Two-Part War, what later became known as the Second Scour. Dante’s knowledge of that time was hazy at best and he read until Blays woke, absorbing the tale of Mallon’s ill-fated crusade four hundred years ago through the Dundens into Gask, where hard winters had regularly left their forces under-armed and poorly fed, weakening them until they’d been in no condition to drive out the Gaskan counter-thrust into their northeast territories, which had menaced the neighboring lands until King Sarl I had been forced to sign treaty granting Arawn’s faithful in all Mallon freedom of worship, a treaty that had been broken eight years later when the other houses declared they could no longer stand for such blasphemy in their homeland. Sleep had mostly dried away the sunken mood Dante’d entered after their encounter with the arrow-firing gatekeeper, and as he read the last of his depression burned away, leaving his mind light and swift, renewed under the warm glare of written words.

But for Dante’s finds, interesting as they were, he was yet no closer to understanding the remainder of the
Cycle
than when they’d left Shay. Somewhere in this city he had to find the key.

They ate a cold breakfast and decided to venture out on foot, reasoning the horses might command respect, but they’d command double that in attention. Dante was certain the Arawnites were still searching for him, but was fairly convinced they’d lost his trail and didn’t know how to get it back. He doubted they had anything more than a vague description of his appearance and wanted to give no watchers any reason to look his way twice.

After twenty minutes of aimless walking and another thirty of fruitless attempts to get directions from other pedestrians, Dante was considering heading back for the horses if only so the next time his Mallish words were met with a sneer he could just trample the offender to death. Finally they lounged in an unused doorway on one of the busier streets and tried to look undisturbably dangerous till they heard words they could understand. They fell on the two men who’d spoken their language, swords swinging from their belts, maneuvering themselves between the men and the open street.

“I swear I’ll run the next man through who brushes us off,” Blays muttered loudly as they approached.

“Pardon me, but are you able to direct us to the Cathedral of Ivars?” Dante said to the pair, tilting back his head and shooting for an air of ironic embarrassment.

“Easily,” the taller of the two said, glancing between the road-worn faces of the boys. “Follow the road through the Ingate, then make straight for the Citadel. The Cathedral will be the rather large thing across from its gates.” He considered the cluster of structures toward the middle of the city. “In fact, you can see its spire there,” he said, pointing over the roofs to the titanic arm of a steeple standing across from what appeared to be a single enormous block of gray stone. The structures were a couple miles away, faint through the smoke and the early morning haze of the bay, but indisputable, the clear heart of Narashtovik.

“I see,” Dante said.

“Our thanks, kind sirs,” Blays said.

“Right,” Dante said. “We’d been warned of the aloofness of this city, but hadn’t warranted it would extend to the honest faithful.”

“Indeed,” the shorter man said, eyes flicking down their shabby clothing and unkempt faces. “You’ve traveled far?”

“From Bressel by the Aster Sea,” Dante said. The two men raised their eyebrows. Dante licked his lips. “But we left it months ago. And now we have a couple miles still to travel, it seems. Good day.”

“I told you,” Blays said once they’d headed up the street.

“We had no way to know that,” Dante said.

“It’s the tallest thing in town!”

“And if we’d guessed wrong we might have spent so long wandering we’d miss the sermon. That’s right, we’d be wandering for two days.” Dante glanced toward the Cathedral and Citadel whenever their great heights could be seen above the clutter of the streets. He had the unpleasant suspicion the clergy of Arawn didn’t limit their control of the city to its finest church.

Things got louder, busier, and fouler the further they traveled toward the city center. They walked through a decent number of poorly-dressed people speaking two or three different tongues and gazing up at the ruin and age like all newcomers to a major city, but despite the pilgrims’ presence and the locals hurrying on about their business it felt less alive than a place as middling as Whetton or the Gaskan town they’d stopped in along the way. They made good time through the modest traffic, reaching what the man had called the Ingate within a half hour.

Four men bearing pikes twice their height and dark-plumed helmets flanked the gate into the next ring of the city, the last set of walls besides the Citadel itself. The guards’ eyes tracked the comers and goers with the alert boredom of those used to standing on the same square yard of street all day. Dante and Blays settled against a nearby building to share a drink of water and watch the people pass. For no reason they could see, half the company peeled from their post and stopped a dirt-smeared man on his way through the gate. They spoke in the garrulous local language, voices pitching up, and then the guards flung down their pikes and dropped the man in a flurry of punches. They picked up his unconscious body by the armpits and dragged him through an iron-banded door set into the stonework beside the gates.

Abrupt shifts in the gray of the stone betrayed where attackers had successfully bombarded them down, but in contrast to the earlier walls, these ones were unbroken, unadorned by the heads and quarters of criminals and the unwelcome, clean from moss and lichen. These walls looked like the rock on which the enemy waters would break. When Dante crossed beneath them, sharp eyes meeting those of the pikemen, the city within the tight circle of the Ingate looked whole, as prosperous and peopled and mighty as the noble quarters of Bressel. At its center, no more than a quarter mile distant, the sheer, smooth walls of the Citadel dwarfed all but the spire of the Cathedral. It had once been a palace, Dante knew, the ancient capital, but now it looked more like a castle. Narrow slits were spaced along its curtain walls and the towers they connected; among the crenels he saw the far-off shapes of men standing watch on what lay below.

“Now that is a big building,” Blays said, letting himself look impressed.

“What do you want to bet it’s where Samarand calls home?”

“I don’t know. My life?”

Dante snorted. They strode down the street. Men with half a foot in height on them shuffled out of their way without seeming to know why they were moving. They turned another corner and before Dante looked up he thought he could sense the vast weight of stone pressing on him with greater force than the rocky walls of the mountains had. He lifted his eyes. They’d found it. To his right, the keep; to his left, the church.

The Cathedral of Ivars was built with clean lines and elegant swoops that made the intricate buttresses and delicate arches of the great churches of Bressel look like an unshaven man in a dress. For a full minute they gazed at the charcoal-hued stone spearing up into the sky. Two thick towers flanked a central one whose flattish face seemed sewn together by a series of vertical lines standing out from the stonework. From the gigantic block of the body of the church the main spire was stacked in three discrete levels: two of them squarish, the second somewhat narrower than the one beneath it, and crowning them, reaching so high as to stab the stars, a conical tower of dizzying steepness. At its apex Dante saw a plain ring of steel, the icon he’d come to know as Arawn’s.

“I think I need to sit down,” Blays said, falling back a step, arm held out behind him for balance.

“My gods,” Dante said. He fought the desire to fall to his knees.

“That must be...that is really, really tall.”

“Five hundred feet?” Dante guessed.

“I’ve got no gods damn clue.”

“Higher than the Odeleon of Bressel. That’s 366.”

“By a lot,” Blays said. He lowered his gaze and shook his head. Nobody was paying them much mind, Dante saw. A few others were standing on the far side of the street trying to catch the cathedral’s full perspective. Others filed in and out from its great doors, eyes downcast, speaking softly if at all.

“Let’s go inside.”

“What?” Blays said. “Just walk right in?”

“I think it’s okay,” Dante said, jerking his chin at the others. “They don’t look any cleaner than we do.”

“But what if Arawn knows?”

Dante frowned at him, then led them up its steps and to the double doors. Ten feet high and five inches thick, but they swung easily, noiselessly. Dante followed a couple other pilgrims through the foyer and then they were in its main chamber.

Captured space soared above them. The ceiling arched like the keel of an upside-down boat, or like the ribcage of Phannon’s leviathan. It was the single largest room Dante had ever seen. At its far end was a richly draped dais, a red pedestal and a number of metal trappings gleaming brightly in the light through the shadowcut glass windows and hundreds of candles lining each wall. The front half of the room was consumed by row on row of benches, their wood stained as dark as silt. Between where they stood and where the benches began lay a clean floor of creamy stone tiled with the twelve-part circle of the Celeset. Recessed alcoves along the walls sheltered icons and minor shrines to the prophets of Arawn. All that space looked empty as the air beyond a cliff, but there must have been eight guards and forty pilgrims in the main chamber, lighting prayer candles in the alcoves, kneeling before the altar, standing near the room’s edges with their hands over their mouths and eyes drifting across the wings of the ceiling.

“Awfully wide open,” Blays said. With small gestures Dante mimed sighting down an arrow shaft and letting fly toward the altar. He raised his eyebrows at Blays, who shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Imagine it packed,” Dante said.

“With soldiers, maybe.”