EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (336 page)

“She tells a good story,” Blays said.

“Reconsidering?”

“Pretty words don’t change what she’s doing down in Mallon.”

Dante nodded. “No swords.” He glanced around the square, shielding his eyes against the glare of the day after the dim of the church. “I may be able to do it unseen.”

“Right.”

They drifted a short ways from the straight line between church and keep. The square was filled with men just milling about, talking over the speech, discussing what they’d do for lunch, a confusion of Gaskan and Mallish and a couple other minor tongues Dante couldn’t place. The gates to the Sealed Citadel were open, but blocked by a black mass of guards. They weren’t expecting Samarand to be long, then.

“I wonder how she does that,” Dante said.

“Does what?”

“Reconciles what she’s saying with the burning of Whetton. All the things they’re doing down there.”

Blays rubbed his left eye with the back of his hand. “She probably doesn’t think she’s doing anything wrong. Otherwise she wouldn’t be doing it, would she?”

“But it’s acting more like the townsfolk than Ben.”

“So? That was just a story. That’s just something they say to keep everyone else in line.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t bother her.” Dante stared into the space above the heads of all the people. “I really think she believes it. It’s so hypocritical.”

“Ben’s a dream, you dummy. Something to keep little people like us happy and faithful while she’s off getting things done. She’s not moping around worrying over the state of our souls. She’s off fitting the world like a glove to her hand.”

Dante looked at Blays, alarmed. He was supposed to be the clear-eyed one, not Blays. Blays was supposed to be breezily unconcerned, unflappable. Something in his speech reminded Dante of the careful parsing he imagined Samarand must do to cleave her beliefs to the things she did.

“How does someone get like that?” he said.

Blays shrugged, spat between his feet. “We’ve killed a lot of people to get here.”

“But we
had
to!” Dante said. Blays only shrugged once more.

Dante watched a half dozen troops march with pikes on shoulders across the square. A few pilgrims continued to trickle from the church doors. No sign of the priests. He took a drink of water. Though he could feel the pressure of his blood beating in his veins, his hand was oddly calm. He smelled the stink of the city and its people, the shit and the rot and the sweat, odors his nose had ignored since the day of their arrival. If he concentrated he could isolate a score of different conversations. The sun shone from the stones of the street and the faces of the buildings. It was a nice day.
 

“Did I tell you,” Dante said, a grin replacing the brooding on his face, “the morning they were set to hang you, I wrote a letter to be read after my death?”

Blays’ face lifted with laughter. “What did it say?”

“I can’t remember. Something about how I was off to save my friend and I expected to die in the doing.”

“I’d have traced my middle finger.”

“I wasn’t in the best of moods,” Dante said, shuffling his feet. “That was actually the least hysterical thing I could come up with.”

Blays nodded. He rubbed his clean-shaven jaw. “What would you say now?”

Dante thought a moment, giving the question its due. “I’d say hello to Cally and Gabe and Robert.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. What would you say?”

“I’d ask them to catapult my body through the roof of a nunnery.”

“You wouldn’t!” Dante said, wiping cold sweat from his temple.

“Why not?” Blays yawned into the sunlight. “What would you do if a body came crashing through your roof? Scream, right? Get all excited? I’d like to think my last act was to give the sisters a little fun.”

“Shut up,” Dante laughed.

“They spend all day reading holy mumbo-jumbo and squeezing their legs together. Don’t tell me they don’t deserve a good time.”

“There she is,” Dante said, grabbing Blays’ arm. He bumped him toward the cathedral. Men clustered up around the doors and called out to Samarand from the midst of her retinue. She met their wide-eyed gazes with a look of pleased shock. Men called out for blessings, falling to their knees at her feet. She touched their hands and brows and Dante could see her lips moving. He called out to the shadows just enough to make sure they were there. They waited, restless and snapping, as if aware of his intent. Samarand waded through the penitent. A number of armed and uniformed guards followed the troop of holy men, but they cleared no path, letting Samarand mingle with the faithful. Dante grasped Blays’ cloak and forced them forward, trying to guess her course. A dozen priests at her side, as many guards. Not a chance for a straight fight. He had it, then, the plan that had till that moment been so nebulous and abstract. A single dark stab at the woman when she was too close to detect it before it opened her belly—then blend off through the crowd. Simple enough. His ribs felt prickly, like a hill of ants were walking up and down his skin. Samarand made no hurry through the surge of men and women seeking her touch, her words. More pushed forward to fill up the spaces as soon as they opened.

She came closer. Men walked away dazed and smiling with parted lips. The process was orderly in a way mobs weren’t. Dante pulled his lips from his teeth, turned it into a tight smile to try to match the faces of those around him. He heard the musing tones of Samarand’s voice and then the laughter of men. The priests clasped hands with men in gold-threaded capes and soft-furred cloaks, leaning in to exchange counsel and well-wishes. The knot grew nearer. Thirty feet off, now. The eyes of her bodyguards were clear, casting through the men who thronged around her for the glint of daggers or the shadow of nervous faces. Someone bumped into Blays and he fastened his fist tight. The boys exchanged a look. Blays’ eyes were flat, cold, ready. Dante imagined his own as their mirror. Samarand smiled, bowed her head to someone’s kind words, and Dante remembered all the men she’d sent to kill him. The dragging gasps of their last breaths. The way they’d hounded him through city and forest. Letting him be baited by the book, then making him fight his way to their favor or die on their blades. Like beating a pup until it was ready to prowl the grounds with nothing but hate for any man it saw. She would deserve it, he knew. She wasn’t like Ben. She treated people like tools to keep her safe behind her high walls.

Twenty feet away, ever closer. Ten. He could hear each of her words now, the thick-tongued scrape of Gaskan. He moved to put Blays to his left, between him and the Citadel. He slid his knife from his belt and sliced a shallow line over the ball of his left thumb. Blood wormed into the folds of his hand. A single bead rolled down his palm, dripped to the street. He closed his eyes to catch his breath. When he opened them she was standing in front of him. Their eyes met. Samarand’s were a sky blue, airy with the peace of her fifty-odd years. He saw no violence in them. She was a good liar, then.

She murmured something in Gaskan and he steeled himself against a flinch as she reached out for his forehead. Her fingertips were warm. She looked at him again with kind creases in the corners of her eyes and he felt a yawning fear sweep through the marrow of his bones. He let the nether wait. When she moved down the line, when she turned her back. He dipped his head to mimic the gratitude of the others. He kept his left hand clenched, blood slick between his fingers. Samarand smiled at him again and turned to Blays, who doffed an imaginary hat. She laughed, took his hand. Dante held his bleeding fist against his stomach and sent for the nether. He found nothing, an emptiness he’d never before felt. His breath shuddered. At once the shadows flooded forward, filling his vision with gray. He looked down and saw a violent darkness surging around his hand. Samarand said something holy-sounding to Blays and moved along to the next man. It was time. Release it. Split her chest so no man could mend it. Use his blood to spill her own.

She shuffled along. Blays glanced at him from the corner of his eyes. Dante licked his lips. The high collar of a priest brushed his nose and he jolted back and nearly blasted the man with the shadows he intended for her. Heads craned and waggled between his and hers, now. He thought he could feel the weight of her presence, the deep substance that bulged beneath her skin. Release it, strike her down. His fingernails bit into his palm. Blays’ elbow nudged his hip. He shook his head, paralyzed but quivering. She was well into the crowd now, hidden by the upraised chins of those she’d passed, by the bulky shoulders of monks and men-at-arms. Dante let the shadows fade, felt them burn along his hand as they dispersed back to the cracks of the earth.

“I couldn’t,” he whispered.

“I know,” Blays said softly, but Dante saw the doubt in his eyes. Dante closed his own. Laughter and chatter battered his ears.

“I was waiting for the moment, but when it came I couldn’t get a hold on it.”

“We can find another,” Blays said. “We know where she keeps herself.”

They threaded their way from the square. Dante didn’t reply to Blays’ simple stabs at jokes and after a while of walking Blays began humming a hopeful tune he’d sounded along the river beyond the mountains. Dante let out a long breath. His feet ticked over the cobbles. He rubbed dried blood from his hand. Blays led the way; he gave no thought to their path or the city around them and was mildly surprised some blank time later to find themselves back at the house they called theirs. She had meant to take his life: she’d tried it on four separate occasions. Yet he couldn’t end her own.

“I wonder if she always travels with so many guards,” Blays said. He shut the door behind them and gazed at its iron handle.

“I expect so,” Dante said, the first words he could remember saying since the square.

“The priests, could you tell? Were they all swoll up with the same power you’ve got?”

“Some of them. There’s a stillness around the ones who do. A heaviness.”

“Maybe it was for the best, then,” Blays said. “They probably could have told it was you.”

“Probably,” Dante said, and wasn’t consoled.

They burned a week walking endless circles through the dead city, scouting the Sealed Citadel for ways inside, waiting for open gates, searching for tricks of passage. Every time the doors opened and the grille raised forty armed men watched the entry of the man they had parted the gates for. Wagons were searched before they were allowed through. They saw nothing more of Samarand, heard of no other sermons or appearances. They could bribe their way in, perhaps, or try to scale the towering walls by cover of night, but the keep was a city to itself, and even if they stood inside the courtyard they’d have no way to find the woman priest within its alien layers. Every measure seemed too desperate, its hopes far too trivial to risk their lives for.

They killed the rest of their long hours sifting through the rubble in the outer regions of the city, kicking around the trash of houses for anything they could use or sell. It was a tedious business, dirty and exhausting, and they did it in their rough old clothes. At four hours a day, they found more to sell than they spent on food enough to keep themselves alive. Dante rose each day feeling hollowed out, torn open. He’d missed his chance, and as time raced on, time that surely saw the spread of unrest and death in their homes in the south, he saw no way to amend his mistake. His weakness. It had been a single moment, but it had confirmed every fear and close-held hate for himself he’d ever felt. He thought of nothing else, knew his life from now till death would be defined by the single minute when he’d thought himself strong but found himself wanting. Whatever else he’d done well or done right meant nothing. Blays’ attachment to him was hollow. His skill with the nether, a talent he’d once allowed himself to think would one day enshrine him in immortal glory, that was a sham, a delusion. There was only his failure, that non-act that loomed cyclopean from his memory, sharper and more crippling than any wound to his body. He began to wish he’d never existed; he daydreamed of standing at the foot of a hill and being consumed by the damp, cool dirt, leaving no trace of himself on the stupid earth.

By night he found some small comfort losing himself in his books. Dense works, dripping with intricate thought and elevating efforts of logic, it was a week before he finished the three he’d found in that abandoned temple on their first day within Narashtovik. The day he finished the last of the tomes, he and Blays walked the roads between the two sets of walls until they found another edifice bearing the marks of Arawn and none of recent use. Dante combed its floors and shelves for more books with which to salve his mind, and there, among the rubble and the ruin, at last he found the answer.

Chapter XIV

“H
ERE
’
S
YOUR
DAMNED
BOOK
,” D
ANTE
said, flipping the
Cycle of Arawn
at the feet of one of the priests they’d found inside the Cathedral of Ivars. The bald man raised an eyebrow at its sprawled pages.

“A copy of the
Cycle
,” he said, replying in Mallish. “Shall I add it to the hundred others in the cellars?”

“Not
a
copy,” Dante smiled. “
The
copy.”

The priest glanced at him, then at the book on the floor, then shot Dante a sharper look. His shoulders jerked at the cold defiance on the boy’s face. The priest tripped on the skirts of his robe as he bent to snatch up the book. He cupped it with both palms, the White Tree of Barden shining up at his face. A tall, willowy priest, silent till now, leaned over his shoulder to gaze on its cover.

“Dante Galand,” the bald priest said, and Dante willed his face to keep composed. “Why have you decided now to return it to its proper owners?”

“I’ve read it all,” Dante said, tossing his head. “Besides, I’m tired of killing your men.”

“It’s not even sporting anymore,” Blays added from his side.

“You wouldn’t know a real man if you were staring straight at his kneecaps, boy,” the tall priest spoke down to them.