EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (354 page)

“Get down!” Dante shouted, planting his hand on Blays’ neck and stuffing his face toward the ground. Blays fell into the snow with a sigh and Dante punched out with all the force he could draw from the White Tree.

Blood spurted from Dante’s ears and nose as the shockwave hammered outward from his body. Already he’d pushed it too far, drank too greedily of the bottomless energy drawn by the tree, but he had no intention to hold back at any stage of this fight. The men were blasted head over heels. He heard bones snapping, then the muffled thuds of their bodies bouncing in the snow. He lunged forward and hacked at the man who’d laid open his left arm. Blays staggered to his feet, half stunned. Six armsmen struggled and swayed upright. One had lost his sword and scuffled to find it in the churned-up snow. From over their heads, Barden groaned with an earsplitting shriek, and as the first man closed on the boys a two-foot rib fell free from the White Tree’s branches and pinned him to the earth. By instinct Dante grabbed the rib’s rounded end and his left arm went numb to the shoulder. He tugged it loose and snarled at the survivors. Shockingly, they fell back.

“Any other tricks?” Blays breathed, glancing between the five opponents that still faced them and the crackle of nether from further uphill where Cally fended off four of his own.

“A few,” Dante said, and his eyesight blurred and the world went mute as he poured the shadows into the veins of the recently slain. Three of the ruined bodies retook their feet, broken limbs dangling, blood still oozing from their wounds. Within a second the dead’s oafish blows had struck down one of their living comrades. A soldier swung at Dante and he brought up the rib to block it. The man’s sword shattered like an icicle, raining shards of steel into the snow. Dante stuck him in the gut with his sword. He swung the rib and it passed cleanly through the man’s trunk.

The walking dead overwhelmed another while Blays charged one of the remaining armsmen, who could do nothing more than fend off his wild blows. Blays drove him back and the man tripped on a corpse, arms flying out to break his fall, leaving his body exposed. Blays stabbed him in the neck and whooped.

A calmness had taken Dante, a stage beyond confidence. The shaking nausea that had hit him when he’d revived the dead flesh of the soldiers washed from him like it had never been there. He walked through the falling snow toward the last man standing.

“Please,” the man said, his face a rictus of terror. He let his blade hang loose from his grasp. Then the dead took him and pounded him into the earth.

“To Cally,” Dante said, sprinting up the hill. Cally had retreated steadily, outnumbered. One of the two men Larrimore had taken with him lay in a reddish heap in the snow, but blood flowed freely from Cally’s left hand, now missing a couple fingers, and from a gash on his thin chest. Nether sputtered from his fingers and Samarand wrestled up the strength to turn it aside. They were both near the end of their limits. Soon they’d simply be an old man and a middle-aged woman, no more potent than a beggar and a fishwife. Dante put himself between Cally and the others and brandished the fallen rib of Barden. Everyone stopped in their tracks.

“You don’t have to die,” Dante told Larrimore, meeting the man’s eyes.

“Don’t you ever get tired of being so cocky?”

“What’s this about?” Samarand said, blinking at the blood trickling from her split eyebrow. “Has Cally promised you a seat on his council? One you couldn’t wait for under my rule?”

“He’s promised me nothing,” Dante spat. “He’s told me nothing but lies since the day I met him.”

“I told you what you needed to hear to stop a war,” Cally said from behind him.

“And then you tried to kill me!”

“I thought you’d thrown in your lot with these vermin. Look at it from my perspective. You’d have tried to kill you, too.”

“You’ve cut enough holes in my order to make killing me moot,” Samarand said. “We can’t risk war with so few priests to lead it.”

“Shut up!” Dante shouted, chest heaving.

“What
have
you gotten yourself into,” Larrimore said softly. The man tightened his grip on his sword.

“More than these lordly figures ever intended,” Dante said.

“I gave you every opportunity under the sun,” Samarand said. “I let you study in the Citadel. I let you replace Will Palomar as Larrimore’s right hand. I even brought you here!”

“I taught you enough to save your friend,” Cally said. “You let me send you here through your own ambition.”

“Oh yes, everyone’s innocent!” Dante cried out, unable to tell if his face was wet from snow, tears, or laughter. “You’d use me as a tool in your harmless plot to kill thousands in my homeland,” he said, waving the rib at Samarand, “while you’d angelically send two boys to kill the political rival who cast you down,” he finished, poking his sword at Cally.

Cally raised his brambly brows and laughed. Larrimore gave him an odd look.

“You have to admit it was a keen enough plan,” the old man said. “What are you going to do about it, then? Kill us all?”

“Don’t tempt us,” Blays said.

“We couldn’t go to war now if we wanted to,” Samarand said. She flipped her battle-frayed black braid over her shoulder, gestured at the corpses of the priests melting the snow with body heat and blood, pointed at the hulking mass of the White Tree. “You have the book. You know how close we came today. We can try again.”

“Heaven must be a place where other people shut up,” Dante said.

“You know it can be done,” she said, locking eyes with him. “With your help and a few years.”

Dante sighed through his nose. He felt cold and bleak as November rain. They could come back and try again, but they didn’t need Samarand’s hard ambition for that. It seemed laughably cruel that Cally’s clear-eyed lies would be preferable to anything, but if one object of value remained in the ruin of Dante’s beliefs, it was the knowledge that killing her would guarantee Mallon’s safety. With Samarand’s death, they could start over. Perhaps whoever took her seat as lord of the dead city would come closer to the pattern of the heavens than she.

“Stand aside, Larrimore,” the boy said in an unsteady voice. “It’s time.”

Larrimore shook his head at the ground. He smiled then, a wan thing that marred his eyes with the first sadness Dante’d ever seen on his face.

“You know I can’t do that,” Samarand’s Hand said. “I’d have died a hundred times without her. Whatever conflict I may feel can’t erase that past.”

Dante nodded. His throat was dry. “I liked you better than any of them.”

“Considering you want them all dead, I think you damn me with faint praise,” Larrimore said, finding himself again. Dante’s spirit faltered. How could he kill the one man he’d met other than Robert who understood his place in the world so well? And not just understood it, but seized it, knew by instinct which things he could control and which he could only defy by mocking them? Of all Dante’s crimes, he knew killing Larrimore would wear on him the hardest. In time he might forget the rest, but Larrimore’s burden would weigh on him till the end of his days.

“I’ll do it.” Blays stepped forward, hand on hilt, sensing Dante’s hesitation. “You deal with her.”

“He’s my burden,” Dante said, seeing the face of a farmer through a sheet of flames. “I’ll be the one to send him to the banks of the two rivers.” He called over his shoulder to Cally. “Samarand’s yours. I never wanted her in the first place.”

“Oh good,” Cally said weakly.

“If you get a moment, you might think about what we’re going to say to them,” Blays said, jerking his chin toward the scores of men who’d left the encampment a mile down valley and were dashing through the snow toward the battle under the tree. Dante laughed tonelessly and lifted his weapons. Larrimore brought up the point of his blade. He winked.

“I’ll save you a room in that place behind the stars, you little bastard.”

He made a quick swipe for Dante’s throat and Dante turned it with the flat of the rib. Larrimore’s sword rang but stayed intact. To his right he heard Cally advance on Samarand and then the whisper of nether called and discharged. Blays headed for the last remaining soldier and, wisely, the man turned tail and ran downhill.

“I should have stomped your wrinkled ass twenty years ago,” Samarand said.

“Then good for me you’re such an idiot,” Cally laughed.

Larrimore struck again and if the two said anything else Dante didn’t hear it. He parried and stabbed for Larrimore’s stomach and Larrimore twisted his wrist to turn Dante’s blade. He swung the rib for the meat of Larrimore’s torso. The man sucked in his gut and swung back his hips and the rib tore through his cloak and cut a shallow crease across his stomach. Larrimore smiled harder and pressed the attack, blade flashing. With both his weapons Dante barely held him back. Blays grunted and tensed, but Dante waved him back. He lashed out with the rib and Larrimore spun away and slashed across Dante’s extended arm. He bled freely from both wounds to his left arm, grip unsteady on the bone’s natural handle. He felt himself nearing the end of his endurance.

Samarand screamed from off to their right, a bright note against the clash of weapons and the frazzled pop of spent nether. Larrimore’s smile broke. He glanced her way and in that brief moment Dante clamped the man’s sword between blade and rib and wrenched it from his grasp. It spun away and disappeared into the snow. Dante placed the point of his sword over Larrimore’s heart, willing himself to steady the quiver in his arm.

“Don’t make me do this,” he whispered.

Larrimore leaned into the blade. Dante’s wrist twitched as he felt the skin parting. Then he cried out and drove his arm forward, eyes closed to the steel burying itself in the man’s chest. He felt his sword tug from his hand as Larrimore slumped to his knees.

“One last thing, boy,” the man whispered. Dante’s eyes shot open and he knelt across from Larrimore’s strained face.

“What is it?”

“My gravestone,” Larrimore gasped. “Make sure it describes me as I was.”

“Anything.”

“’He died plucking the queen from the jaws of a dragon,’” Larrimore said. He smiled at the boy and slumped into the snow, breath rattling past his lips. Dante sat down beside the body and gently freed his sword. He wiped it clean on the white snow and put his hand on Larrimore’s still shoulder. For all the years he lived Dante could recall that moment as if living it for the first time: Larrimore’s prone form, warm but vacant, his empty hand stretched out in the snow, oblivious to the freezing cold, droplets of water melting on his fingers; his open-eyed face showing no pain or agony, just an enigmatic twist to his lips, a budding surprise in his eyes, as if he’d looked on the order that underpinned the turning of time. Dante’s eyes stung. An emotion as heavy as the hand of gravity pushed him against the earth. That Larrimore, a man of wit and action and utter disregard for the fearful opinions of the lesser men around him, that he had died in defense of a woman like Samarand—Dante wiped his eyes, so consumed by injustice he felt nothing but absurdity. He stood, sniffling, to see Cally thrashing around in the snow, strangling away Samarand’s final seconds.

Dante sheathed his sword, slid the rib down the right side of his belt. He drew a shuddering breath.

“You’re keeping that?” Blays said, scrunching up his face. “Why?”

He shrugged. “I’ll have a sword made from it.”

“That’s sick.”

“What isn’t,” Dante said, then felt dumb, however true it may be. Cally leaned back on his knees, chest heaving, scraggly white hair plastered to his brow. He scowled down at Samarand’s red, bug-eyed face and slapped her across her dead cheek.

“Look what you made me do,” Cally said. He clambered to his feet and kicked snow over her body. “If you’d known your place you could have been indispensable to me. Idiot pride!” He kicked more snow, stumbled forward.

“I don’t think she can hear you,” Blays said.

“If there’s any justice in the world a passing spirit will give her my message.” The old man’s green eyes gleamed in the glare of the snow. His gaze shifted to Dante and some of the wildness faded from his wrinkled face. “He’s dead, isn’t he.” Dante didn’t reply. “Larrimore was a good man, from what I saw of him.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Dante said.

“No, I don’t.”

“Then don’t speak as if you do.”

“Right,” Cally said. His eyes drifted downhill and he frowned at the walking dead standing rock-still a short ways down where Dante’d left them. “You’re dealing with dangerous forces.”

Dante shrugged, severed the bonds that kept them upright. They dropped like cut puppets.

“I’m not the only one,” he said.

“I’m starting to see that.” Cally ran his fingers through his beard. “So. Going to add me to the pile of bodies fertilizing this tree?”

Dante snorted, wanting nothing more. It wasn’t Cally’s assassin that tempted him to strike down the old man; that he could forgive. It was everything else that he couldn’t: betrayal and lies, the false friendship he’d let Dante believe so long as it would benefit him, the empty ache he felt to the marrow of his bones. Dante shook his head, sickness curdling his heart.

“I need you to tell that army down there they serve you now. They’d never follow me.”

“Wise beyond your years.” The old man considered the few dozen men running up the hill toward them, no more than a minute away. “It could work, though some of them probably weren’t even born the last time I ruled the order.”

“Deal with it.”

Cally chuckled to himself, brightening by degrees. He smoothed his hair away from his brow and looked shocked to see he was missing most of the bottom two fingers of his left hand.

“That’s unfortunate,” he said, watching blood pulse from the stumps with the beating of his heart. He shook his hand, like two new fingers might pop out, then sighed wearily. “Shit.”

He spent the minute before the troop arrived binding the wounds with a strip of his black doublet. The sixty-odd men who’d come slowed as they approached the otherworldly spread of the White Tree and the fresh carnage beneath its boughs. Rettinger separated himself from the pack and looked between the old man and the two boys, eyes thick with confusion.