EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (342 page)

Chapter XV

B
Y
MORNING
HE
LEARNED
LANGUAGE
with Nak and by evening they trained with the nether. Dante’s methods were undisciplined, Nak noted, crude if effective, and the monk showed him cleaner paths to channel the nether and more closely bend it to his thoughts.

“Most men have to struggle with every step of this, you know,” Nak said in mild confusion after Dante had mastered another lesson on his third attempt. “You fly through it like a bolt. It’s less like I’m teaching than that I’m revealing things your mind already knows.”

They worked in the cold of the open yard beside the chapel, filling the space with shadows and light, with bursts of flame that melted the snows on the grounds and spikes of force that could crack small rocks. When soldiers suffered injuries in training or in scuffles in the streets, they were brought to the chapel and Nak showed him the proper methods of mending flesh and bone. Through all his education, the bald priest made no mention of the peculiar talents of Jack Hand and the few men like him mentioned in the
Cycle
. It was as if death, for as much as the prayers and studies of the priests and acolytes of Arawn centered on the life after life, were a thing beyond them, the one depth forbidden to be plumbed. It was a blind spot, Dante saw. A thing he could exploit.

Larrimore came to him with a new task most every day and Dante’d cease his lessons with Nak to deliver sealed letters across town and wait for a hastily-scribbled reply; to place orders with smiths and tailors; to escort priests and monks and nobles and ambassadors through the danger of the city to the relative peace of the wilds; to tail emissaries and messengers from other cities and lands and see to whom they spoke away from the eyes of the Sealed Citadel. Once he was sent to capture another man, and when the man drew his blade instead of letting himself be tied, Dante struck open his guts with a thrust of his hand. He left the body where it fell and went back to the keep to let them know to send a team if they wanted to pick it up.

A week into this routine, Blays asked again about Samarand, about their true purpose, and Dante answered him like before: in time. He kept his eyes and ears open as he did Larrimore’s bidding, and between gossip at the keep and the fragments of conversation he could understand from the well-dressed men bearing the colors of lords and territories all throughout Gask and beyond, he began to piece together that something was coming to a head. The council factored heavily in this intrigue, meeting frequently behind closed doors high up in the keep. More doors opened to Dante by the day—he’d had a reputation before he’d arrived at the Citadel, he discovered, based on the gruesome tendency for none of the men dispatched to kill him to ever be heard from again, and as he carried out Larrimore’s will in the field it only grew: he was grimly efficient, they said, already more talented than half the priests who weren’t on the council, cold and harsh as sunlight glinting from snow. He was on the rise. Nothing was shut to his blend of ambition and ability.

Nothing, for now, but the doors to the council.

He learned the Citadel’s regular orders for weapons were being sent to the city smiths rather than their own forges, which were busy dealing with the bricks of silver as big as his forearm that disappeared behind their walls each day. Dante explored and lingered as much as he dared, intentionally losing himself in the twisting halls of the keep so that, when the time came to still Samarand’s heart, he could flee the halls without a wasted step. Priests and guards sometimes caught him in places he had no strict business to be in and he’d lie about an errand of Samarand’s Hand or walk on by without a word, as if he were too wrapped up in his latest responsibilities to even notice their questions and turned faces. Once he’d learned the general lay of the keep he started waking earlier, finding excuses to slip away from Nak and walk alone in its halls in the hopes of at last hearing the details of whatever they prepared for—and perhaps, though Dante didn’t think it outright, to hear something that would push him into completing the task Cally had sent him here for. When he delivered letters he crowded close to their recipients, daring glances at their responses as they wrote them. He was cutting it close, he knew. He was earning their trust, but he was still an outsider. He wasn’t certain they’d believed him about the book, and if they hadn’t, why they were giving him so much rope. Sometimes when he heard Larrimore’s laughter it no longer sounded innocent (at least, as innocent as Larrimore could claim to be), but scored with an undercurrent of scorn, as if the man could see the treachery hidden in Dante’s heart. The slightest noise could make him start like a rabbit. His nerves were getting too frayed to maintain his double purpose.

If he couldn’t breach the council doors in person, perhaps he could do it by proxy. The Sealed Citadel was secured against the intrusion of men, but wasn’t meant to keep out rats. The night before the next council was scheduled he lay awake in bed until the chapel was long silent, then crept out to the pantry. He waited no more than a minute before the dark blot of a rat wiggled across the floor in search of crumbs. Dante snapped its neck with a brief flicker of nether, then surrounded it with a stronger hand of shadows and reanimated it as he’d done in the past. He closed his eyes and saw the pantry from its alien perspective so near to the ground. Heart racing, he opened the front door of the chapel and sent the beast scurrying toward the keep. Its doors were shut firm and Dante had to wait for half an hour before someone opened them on a midnight errand. He made the rat run inside, head swimming as the ground rushed past its nose.

He kept it tight to the walls of the main hall, eyes out for guards. A few stood watch, faces hooded by gloom, but either they had no interest in vermin or were sleeping on their feet, for his rat made it to the corridors beyond the hall without drawing their attention. He sent it down the passages he’d memorized in his wanderings, running from doorway to doorway, pausing to listen for the sound of footfalls—would the priests be able to sense its intrusion?—but saw no more than one stock-still guard before it reached the stairwell to the upper floors. The dead rat leapt tirelessly from one step to the next, clambering ever upward, until at last it reached the seventh-floor landing where they held their counsel. The hallway was silent, still, lit by a single lantern. The doors of their chamber were open. Dante willed the rat inside, then sent it snuffling around the room’s edges until he found a crack in the stone just wide enough to lodge its body and look out on the dark blurs of the great table and its chairs. The task had taken no more than an hour, but he was exhausted, and despite his pulsing nerves he fell asleep within minutes of hitting the bed.

Dante woke an hour after dawn and drew breath so sharply he choked on his own spit. He sat upright, muffling his cough to keep from disturbing Blays, then closed his eyes and sought the sight of the rat. Sunlight diffused through a north-facing window, illuminating the same furniture he’d seen by the darkness of the previous night. It remained empty of people, but as Dante went about his breakfast and then his morning grammar lessons with Nak, he’d briefly shut his eyes and catch glimpses of servants sweeping the room, straightening the sashes on the windows, lighting candles along the walls. In still-framed flashes he watched the council chamber grow tidied for its use.

Nak was grilling him on Narashtovik verb tenses he hadn’t yet mastered and in his frustration Dante let twenty minutes pass without checking on his spy. He rubbed his eyes and with a shock to his heart saw robed men seated at the table, heard tense voices arguing their points.

“This isn’t something we should be trying to hasten,” he heard Samarand say in her lightly accented Mallish. “I’m not going to risk a false step for the sake of shaving off a few days.”

“But every day we spend on our haunches is one more day we give them to prepare,” a man’s voice said in an accent so thick it was a moment before Dante could make sense of his words.

“And what are you doing about them? How is it they’re able to prepare so close to our city?” a third voice said.

“Enough, Tarkon,” Samarand put in. “You know we’re spread too thin to root them out right now. We’ll lure them to us in the open field, then break their spine then.”

Dante heard Nak clear his throat and he scrambled to reply to the priest’s obscure linguistic query only to get it wrong. Nak threw up his hands and sighed, and as he repeated his lesson for the third or fourth time Dante divided his attention between his bald teacher and the conversation high up in the keep, only to find it had turned to an overspecific discussion of payments due for the maintenance of their soldiers.

“What’s going on in that head of yours?” Nak snapped, leaning in so his nose was six inches from Dante’s. “This may not be so exciting as Larrimore’s little ventures, but it’s just as important to your education, damn it.”

“I know,” Dante said, rubbing his eyes again. “It just feels like I’m making so little progress.”

“You’re doing fine,” Nak said. “Better than fine. Your fundamentals are sound. No one can learn a new language overnight.”

“All this waiting is killing me,” Dante said. Nak furrowed his brow at the boy, lifted himself from his seat.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Take a break while I go fetch us some tea.”

“Okay,” Dante said. Without pausing to wonder what tea was he plunged back into the vision of the rat. The council was still going on about the finances of the soldiers. Did they usually talk about things like that? Or was it the prelude to military action? From the rat’s vantage in the crack in the wall he could see no more than a few slippered feet and the hunched backs of old men. He leaned his senses forward, as if that would somehow shine light on everything that was now obscured. Why were such important people talking about such trivial things?

“I sense—“ he heard Samarand say, then cut herself short. There was a shuffling of robes, a moment of silence.

“What is it?” one of the men said.

“Nothing. Pardon my interruption, Baxter.” Their conversation resumed. Dante slapped absently at the back of his neck, thinking he felt a fly. A hot prickle ran across his scalp and he realized it wasn’t his nerves he felt, but the rat’s on the other end of the connection. At once he could sense her the way you can sense the presence of a person in an unlit room. She had found the rat, felt the nether that kept it on its feet, was now tracing whatever line tied it to Dante as delicately as a spider climbs down its web when it knows there’s something large stuck in the far end. Dante jerked himself away from the rat—some part of him registering he’d also jerked his back against his chair—but that cord held fast. Samarand’s presence surged forward. Dante stood and cast about the chapel reading room as if looking for a physical axe with which to cut the connection, feeling her cold intelligence dropping down the line, ever closer, then with an exertion of will so forceful it made sweat stand up on his forehead, he took a breath, cleared his mind, gazed on that needle-thin shadow that bound him to the rat. He severed it quickly and cleanly, heard a sharp question from Samarand’s consciousness: then darkness and softness, nothing more than his own five senses. He stood there a while, half dazed, trying not to move for fear it would somehow draw her back to him and this time identify him. He couldn’t remember a time he’d tried anything more stupid.

“What’s the matter?” Nak said, returning to the room with a copper tray bearing a kettle of something that smelled like lan leaves. “You have the look of a man who just tried to puke up a live horse.”

“What?” Dante said. “Maybe. I mean, maybe it was something I ate.”

“Well, sit down and have some tea.” Nak gave him a doubting glance. “Grammar isn’t that upsetting.”

After they’d drank a bit they returned to their lessons, but Dante was too busy trying to convince himself he hadn’t been caught to pay any more attention than he had before, and Nak dismissed him less than an hour later. Dante wandered to his cell, napped fitfully through the afternoon, rose and reread the translation of the
Cycle
until Blays returned from his training with the soldiers. Blays unbuckled his sword and threw himself down on his pallet, sighing into his pillow.

“I feel the way a club must feel,” he said muffledly. “Everything hurts.”

“I’m losing my grip,” Dante said, double-checking the lock on the door.

“How do you mean?”

“They’re up to something big. I can’t find out what. They almost caught me today.”

“Then regrasp it,” Blays said, wriggling onto his back. “Make a plan already.”

“The time isn’t right.”

He heard Blays snapping straw in the dark. “And why does it matter what she’s up to, exactly?”

“Whatever it is, it’s going to distract her,” Dante said slowly. He hadn’t tried to explain to himself just why the council’s plans were relevant to their own, but he couldn’t shake the need to know. “I think if we take her out then and she fails, this whole thing might fall apart. Break into too many pieces for someone else to put back together.”

“Can you find out what it is?”

“Not unless it’s dropped in my lap. I can’t do any more snooping. It feels like I’m being quartered by my own cross purposes.”

Blays hmm’d. “Why don’t you just ask them what they’re up to?”

“What?”

“For some reason they think you’re arrogant and ambitious, right?”

“They do appear to be under that impression,” Dante said. Blays tapped his chin, then went on.

“A man like that wouldn’t like feeling left out of the loop, right? You’d
demand
to know what’s going on. You’d say’Larrimore, tell me what you’re up to before I smash this castle down around your head.’”

“And he’d say’Dante, grow the hell up.’”

Blays shook his head in the gloom of their single candle. “And you go on to tell him you’re being wasted as his errand-boy. Delivering letters? Guarding ambassadors? That’s for servants, not Arawn’s chosen. Ask him if they’d have left Will Palomar in the dark.”