The Great Rift (20 page)

His next step led him to a proper foothold, a flat chunk of step protruding a full foot from the wall. Blays extended his front foot and stepped onto the widened ledge.

"Whoa!" He threw out his arms. Dante cringed, throwing his hands above his face. Blays chuckled brightly. "I'm fine. Good to see where your first instincts take you, though."

Blays caught his breath, then carried on along the narrow lip of ruined steps. Within a minute, he reached the far side. Dante maneuvered around Gala and climbed up to the edge of the gap.

"What now?"

Partly occluded by the curve of the stairwell, Blays jerked his thumb upstairs. "There are some sconces and stuff on the walls. If I tie one end of the rope up here and you secure the other down there, it should be a lot easier to cross."

Dante frowned. "If they don't pull right out of the walls."

"Well, you don't have much choice. If you stay down there, I can tell everyone you're a coward
and
have three witnesses to back me up."

Blays disappeared upstairs, rope dragging along behind him. He returned seconds later to sling the loose end downstairs. Dante caught it and wound down the steps until he located a wall sconce, then knotted the rope tight around its upturned iron fingers.

He began the crossing before he could have second thoughts or face further taunts. Aided by the rope, against which he could lean most of his weight when toeholds were sparse, he proceeded quickly, heart racing; grit twisted under his soles as the rope's rough fibers chafed his palms. He stepped onto the solid ground of the far side with physical relief.

"I think you've got a future in the carnival," Blays said.

"I've got plenty of experience working with freaks."

"Stop!" Mourn called, strangled.

Dante whirled. Through his beard, Mourn was pale, features pulled in a tight rictus.

"We're only kidding," Dante said, confused yet gently. "You don't have to—"

"Don't go upstairs."

"What are you talking about? We're fine, Mourn. We're not going to turn around with the bow right up these steps."

"I just heard from Josun Joh."

Dante rolled his eyes. "Josun Joh's less reliable than a choleric's bowel movements. What's he got to say this time? That by 'the highest place' he meant the bow's been stolen by eagles, and we'll have to enlist the Vulture King to get it back?"

"He says we've been betrayed and Cassinder's personal army has surrounded the tower downstairs."

Blays blinked. "That's...specific."

A prickling, dreadful heat washed over Dante's skin. "This is a thing that's happening now?"

Mourn's eyes were bright beneath his heavy brows. "Look outside."

An icy wind knifed from upstairs. Dante headed up, Blays on his heels, into a dusty and cobwebbed storage room. He dimmed his light until the chests and sacks littering the floor were dim shapes of black and gray. Beneath the torn flaps of a burlap sack, a glimpse of tightly-sheafed arrows sent his heart thumping. He moved past them to a window of tall sectional glass with a couple broken panes. Stars twinkled silently over the black field. Dante extinguished his light, Blays his candle.

"See anything?" Dante whispered.

"A bunch of dark stuff. Think Cassinder's army is made out of coal-men?"

"Wait." As his eyes adjusted, he began to pick out movements that couldn't be ascribed to breeze-ruffled weeds. Starlight glinted on steel. Eighty feet below, a row of men kneeled across the road from the tower's front door. "Mourn's right."

"You're sure? Because that would mean bad things for us. Stabby things."

"Twenty of them. Maybe more." Dante retreated from the window and relit his candle, crouching to hide the light from the soldiers below. "It's all right. The bow's up here. We can use it to escape."

"There is no bow." Mourn's voice filtered up the stairway, ethereal, dolorous, shamed.

Dante returned to the top of the gap in the stairs. Mourn hadn't moved. "Their soldiers are at our feet, Mourn. Very soon, they're going to come up this tower, or set a fire below, and you will be roasted like a very hairy and treasonous pig. Now tell me what you're holding back."

The norren looked down at his heavy palms. Fear and doubt added years to his face. He closed his eyes. "There is no bow. Or anyway, if there is, it's just a bunch of legends that built up around a very normal weapon. When you came in questing after it, Orlen let you believe it was real."

"What?"

"He saw what you could do. That you're a sorcerer. He thought he could use you to—"

Gala rose behind the seated Mourn, blade in hand. "That's enough."

Lira's sword flashed from its sheath to point at Gala's back. In the same instant, Dante shaped the nether into a swirling black ball. "Silent. Or you die."

Gala's face took on a resigned smile. "I don't fear death. I do fear my clan."

"We're going to die down there anyway, aren't we?" Blays shouldered past Dante, nearly toppling him down the empty gap. "What does it matter what we know? Our brains aren't tea leaves. When our skulls get split, all that will leak out is a bunch of goop. So sit your giant ass down and let the man talk."

Fleetingly, Gala's smile widened. She lowered her curved blade, sheathed it. "Fine. If he wants his final act to be the dishonor to his clan, let Josun Joh judge him."

Mourn kept his gaze on Dante. "Orlen was using you to get back the cousin-clan."

Dante swallowed against the tightness in his throat. "And now he's sold us out to the enemy while he rescues his people from the mine."

"No!" Mourn's face jerked up, tight with pain. "Orlen just wanted your help. He didn't think he could secure it without making you believe you'd get the bow. You were sold out to Cassinder by one of our other clansmen. He thought it was the only way to get his family back. He's the one who tipped off the Bloody Knuckles, too. Once he saw we were poised to take back the Clan of the Green Lake ourselves, he confessed to Orlen and Vee."

"Is that it?"

The norren's gaze flicked past his shoulder. "The raid on the mine is real. So is the timing."

"Meaning there's hope of an even bigger distraction." Dante glanced at Blays. "What do you think?"

"That they'll kill me over my dead body." Blays grabbed hold of the rope and searched for a toehold down the ruined steps. "We should get downstairs. Block the door or see if we can make a run."

"I'll be right behind you." Dante turned and jogged back upstairs. His mind whirled with anger and the helpless sense of being duped, of illusions torn away like shabby clothes. But there was no time for the self-pity or humiliation that welled beneath his outrage. On the upper floor, he lit his remaining candles and hurriedly placed them throughout the room. Cassinder's forces thought they had surprise on top of numbers. No reason to disabuse them of their own illusions.

The others had already disappeared downstairs. Dante hardly slowed on his way across the rope spanning the gritty ledge. On the other side, he lit his feet with tiny white lights to show him the way and hurried to the ground floor, where the others waited in starlit darkness.

"I count about forty versus five." Blays slid down from the narrow window to give Gala a pointed look. "Or should that be four?"

She shrugged her broad shoulders. "I hope to see my clan again."

"With that kind of enthusiasm, let's bump it up to four and a half. We could just let them siege us. Mourn and Gala are very large, so it should take several weeks to eat them."

"We need to run," Dante said.

"I'll lead the charge." Mourn gazed at the black window. "To erase my betrayal, I'll try to absorb as many arrows as I can."

"You getting shot to death is not a plan." Dante crept to the window. Beyond, silhouettes of soldiers arranged themselves on the other side of the road. A picket of three or four troops waited further down the road toward the mine; presumably a similar group was blocking the opposite route to the manor. More than two hundred yards of open downhill slope separated the tower from the pine forest to the west, the obvious place for Dante to lose their pursuers—or to string them out and battle them in clusters rather than en masse. "Suppose they've got cavalry, too?"

"In reserve at best," Blays said. "A horse snort carries pretty far at night."

"So the good news is the cavalry might trample the arrows right out of our backs."

"Can you make us invisible?"

Dante shook his head. "Too complicated. I would have to match the illusions to whatever was around us. On all sides. Constantly."

"Is that all?" Blays gritted his teeth. "But you could make illusions
of
us. Which could run out to do battle, swords in hand."

"While the real usses make a break for the woods."

"While you wrap us up in one of those balls of darkness. Like back in Bressel."

"Wouldn't be able to see where we're going. We'll trip constantly. The'll be on us in seconds."

"Will you stop making this so damned hard?" Blays laughed. "So we hold hands. Mourn's in the middle. I'm at the front. You focus on keeping the sphere centered around Mourn's big head, keeping the darkness just wide enough so I can peek out the front and make sure we're not about to plunge into a ditch."

"That is insane." Dante laughed, too, waving one hand in dismissal. "Don't bother to ask. No, I can't think of anything better."

Lira shook her head. "I don't understand a word of what you two just said."

"Don't worry, neither did I," Blays grinned. "Just hang on to my hand and cut anyone who tries to take me away."

"Are those the same orders you'd give a man?"

"I don't know. Become one and we'll find out."

Dante wasn't troubled by the idea of maintaining the shadowsphere during their run. In that alley in Bressel, the ball of darkness had been the very first time he'd used the nether—in fact, it had appeared completely by accident, a physical manifestation of his quite conscious desire to escape the men who'd been pursuing them. In much the same way he could hold a conversation while watching a play, he was certain he could keep up the sphere and their illusory doubles even while being tugged along blind down a hill. If he tripped, however, or inhaled a fly, all bets were off. Then it would be them, in the open, before some forty armed men.

There was just enough space in the tower for the five of them to string themselves out hand in hand. Dante conjured the shadowsphere, concealing them inside a ball of perfect black. He shrunk the sphere until Blays called out that he could see, then held its size in his mind, memorizing the influx and arrangement of nether that would keep it at its present circumference.

When he let the sphere fall away, the starlight was so crisp and silvery he could see the faces of the soldiers across the road. Dante drew the wavy knife he'd won at Nulladoon and traced a stark red line down the back of his arm. Nether fed on the blood as it ticked to the floor. One by one, he shaped the shadows into doppelgangers of their waiting crew. The matches were far from perfect—their flat eyes and chunky hair would easily be discredited in direct sunlight—but under full night, the hulking forms of two norren would be unmistakable. He finished the illusion with two human males, one blond and one dark-haired, and a woman with her long brunette locks clamped tight in a ponytail. Lira watched her double walk to the door with the strange half-smile of someone who's just heard something unspeakably rude.

"Well," Dante said slowly, his focus splintered between the five stiff figures. "I hope I don't die with a stupid look on my face."

Mourn lifted the board braced across the entry. Dante leaned into the heavy wood door and flung it wide, leaping back into the safety of the tower. Someone whistled sharply from the enemy lines. Dante narrowed his eyes. The five images hunched down and crept out the door, one by one.

"Stop!" a man called from outside in a clear tenor.

Dante straightened the figures and sent them racing north, paralleling the road to the mine. The man repeated his order. The five real people gathered just inside the tower doorway, linking hands, Blays at the front, Mourn in the middle. With the illusions fifty feet away and gaining distance fast, Dante summoned the shadowsphere to center on Mourn's head. Total blackness painted his eyes.

"Go!" Blays hissed.

A moment later, Mourn's thick hand yanked Dante forward; his right arm jangled, tugging Gala behind him. His feet swished into the weeds. Dante could no longer see the illusions except in his mind's eye, where they pumped their feet and sent horrified glances at every shout and command of Cassinder's troops, but he heard the arrows slashing the air, the thump of soldier's boots in sprinting pursuit. His own foot slipped in the damp grass; the shadowsphere flickered, allowing a ghostly glimpse of sword-bearing men charging away after the illusory silhouettes. For an instant, both of Dante's feet left the ground, his arms straining between the two norren's unholy strength, and then he found his footing and ran and ran. He redoubled his focus. The shadowsphere returned to total darkness.

His feet struck packed dirt, jarring painfully. Some ways to his left—what he hoped to the gods was the south—hooves thudded the turf. Then he was back in the grass, feet churning. Mourn grunted in pain but didn't break stride. Up the road, a man cried out a string of incredulous profanity.

Dante kept hold on the doubles and the shadowsphere. The confusion spread to a babble of voices, each soldier demanding, in his own specific phrasing, to know what in the nine hells was happening. Dante relaxed his hold on the sphere. Across the road and a couple hundred yards toward the mines, a man poked his sword into one of the false norren and waggled the weapon from side to side. Dante sent a final pulse of nether to the images. They popped in a rainbow-hued burst of silent light.

Men cried out in surprise. The woods waited just ahead, thrusts of pines mixed with harvested stumps that could easily break an ankle. Dante dropped the shadowsphere completely. His hands slipped from Mourn's and Gala's. Behind them, men scattered across the grass, hollering frustrated updates; torches flared, casting yellow light and long shadows. Dante pounded into the fringes of the wood. For a moment, he thought they might escape without being seen at all.