The Great Rift (23 page)

For Dante, however, trying to wield the ether was like trying to wrestle a full-grown tuna to shore using nothing but his elbows. He didn't know why the ether resisted him so strongly. Maybe his inborn talent for handling the nether had come at the cost of being able to work its stabler counterpart. Not everyone who could work nether could work ether, and vice versa. Even among those who could handle both, most found one far easier to work with than the other, and thus specialized in it. In fact, if Dante devoted years to learning the ways of the ether, there was a fair chance he could learn to harness it. But why spend all that time learning to walk with the ether when he could already fly with the nether?

A decision he regretted quite bitterly now that he was faced with the loons. As the others had bedded down on the hard dirt, he walked a short way from camp and delved into the loon. Physically, the main body of the earring was a single knuckle-sized talon or tooth scrimshawed with norren runes too fine to read. A short silver chain contained two pea-sized bones, one shaped like a wishbone or stirrup, the other resembling a C or the curve of a jaw. The chain connected the talon to a silver icon resembling an arrowhead; Dante suspected it was a stylized pine tree. On its back, a blunt hook helped secure the arrowhead to a fold of the inner ear while allowing the talon to dangle free. Meanwhile, a clasped ring would connect it securely through Mourn's piercing.

Dante closed his hand over the loon and shut his eyes. He breathed slowly, deadening his thoughts, focusing on the feel of moonlight on his skin, the taste of the wind, the noise of the stones. Nether pooled around his hand and sunk through his knuckles. Where it touched the loon, his inner eye saw its shape. Threads of ether wound through both silver and bone, the hair-fine strands as bright as sunlight on a pane of glass. His mind-sight swam closer and closer until each thread loomed as big as a rope. Perhaps it
was
a rope—at closer look, what appeared to be a single thread was composed of hundreds of other minute fibers. He moved closer yet, examining a fiber, and saw it too was woven from hundreds of threads of its own...

He pulled back, dizzy. The bright white threads faded. The loon was a simple thing again, a physical trinket of metal and bone. It felt like short minutes had passed. In the gaps in the canopy, the stars had leapt a quarter of the way across the sky.

He closed his eyes and delved again. Did the structure of these threads within threads lend the item its power? Or did that just happen to be the form that power took when the ether that formed them bound to the matter? This time, he kept his focus broad. The gleaming white threads converged at three distinct points. One node met inside the tiny wishbone. The other met inside the tiny C. The other was less densely-packed around the blunt hook on the backside of the arrowhead, more resembling a tight net than a solid ball of ether. Other threads tangled through the earring as well, sparse by contrast. Structural support, perhaps.

Subjectively, he spent an hour or so poking at the loon with delicate probes of nether, exploring crannies, turning it over for a better feel for its whole. And when he emerged, the dawn approached the eastern shore.

He rose to urinate, then rooted through his pack for his water skin and a torn-off handful of bread. Long stale. At least the humidity kept it moist. Then he fitted the loon to his ear, holding it in place—he had no piercing himself—and listened.

A minute later, he'd heard nothing but the pinejays greeting the sun. He waited for Mourn to wake up, empty his bladder, and gargle a mixture of water and salt, then held up the loon. "You both hear and speak through this?"

Mourn tipped his head to one side. "I used to."

"Was it always active? Or did it only speak to you when someone had something to say?"

"It spoke like an old monk. Rarely, and only when telling me what to do."

Dante smiled. The others woke soon, stretching, rubbing their limbs. Blays spit the dryness from his mouth. Lira stretched and executed a choreographed set of martial exercises. After a cold breakfast, they cut through the woods toward the town on the river. Dante's head felt like a bruised cloud. They paused at the edge of the woods. Gray light touched the wet timbers of the town. A few pedestrians mingled with the mule teams hauling sacks and wagons to and from the piers. Smoke rose from the chimneys of pine-board houses.

"Look like anyone's planning to kill us?" Blays said.

Dante squinted. "No more than usual."

Lira frowned between them. "That's usual?"

"We have an unfair share of detractors."

Blays hoisted his sword belt up his hips. "Probably because I'm so pretty."

Two barges creaked at the piers. A rowboat inched downstream. Seagulls soared over the gray waves. Dante's pockets felt very light. He needn't have worried. Down on the docks, where the water smelled like wet rocks and fish bones, Blays haggled with a bargemaster. The captain expected a load of coal and timber that morning. He'd be taking it all the way to Yallen. Shorthanded, he offered the four of them passage in exchange for helping to load the barge and guard it from pirates on their way to the sea.

Dante teetered on the planks of the dock, gazing forlornly at the broad barge. "I could use a nap."

"That's what nights are for," Blays said. "If you plan it right, you can even get two or three good naps in a row."

"I was working on Mourn's jewelry."

"Is that all it takes to make you swoon? If Lira gave you a pair of her bloomers, you'd die of starvation."

Lira gazed pointedly toward the river. A pink blotch appeared on her turned cheek. Dante left for the nearest inn, a two-story place with a flagstone-paved porch and a mast rising from its roof, a towering trunk of pine stripped of all branches and bark. The wood was lacquered smooth, shiny under the overcast skies.

The innkeeper was in the process of blessing plates of eggs and potatoes and bread, flicking drips of water over the steaming bowls, then snapping sprigs of wintrel and depositing them in a small wire basket suspended over the hexagon of candles at the center of the table. Toasted mint filled the warm room. The innkeeper said a quick prayer to Arawn, then finished the rite by blowing a pinch of flour mingled with black sand—the grist of Arawn's broken mill—over the candles. Dante watched, transfixed. However many times he saw such open worship of Arawn, he couldn't help his shock. Back in Mallon, it would get the man tortured at the least. Probably, he'd never be seen again.

Dante rented a room for the day and collapsed into the straw mattress. Lira knocked an hour later. He rose confused and aching, feeling worse than before. Down at the docks, mules and wagons crowded onto ramps, unloading cords of wood and crates of coal.

A crewman with a salt-and-pepper beard gave Lira a wink. "No need to dirty your hands, ma'am. Prefer a tour of the ship instead?"

She stared him down. "Do you think my breasts get in the way if I try to lift a crate?"

The man backed off with his palms raised, muttering an apology. Behind Lira's back, Blays shot Dante a smirk.

It was the last smile Dante would see for some time. The next two hours were a monotony of picking up a cord of wood, crossing the flat gangplank, and tromping downstairs to one of the holds. Dante's leather gloves and the front of his doublet grew crusty with resinous sap. Blays was panting within a few minutes, too. Lira shuffled back and forth and up and down, face gray with pain, pausing regularly to catch her breath and rest her leg. Mourn came and went without slowing down, strong as a flood, inevitable as the tides.

Before long, Dante lost track of everything but the lessened gravity of setting down a bundle of wood. Two hours later, he rose to the docks and blinked in confusion. They were empty. Removed of everything but stray twigs, flakes of bark, and black patches of coal dust.

They were done. So was he. Ensconced in a hammock belowdecks, he slept until darkness. On waking, his body was sore from neck to soles, but his mind felt as if he'd just emerged from a warm bath. For several minutes, he did nothing more than breathe the cold air, smell the clean water, and listen to the soft slap of waves against the hull. Then he retired to a quiet corner of the empty deck and considered the loon until dawn.

Examining its physical and ethereal structures wasn't doing him any good. He didn't know enough about artificing to tease any meaning from the knotted and netted lines of ether. Instead, he needed to approach the loon from a theoretical standpoint. If he understood the thinking that allowed it to be created in the first place, he could, if nothing else, present Cally with a framework to allow the old man to duplicate the earring's function.

Not that this was any easier.

What did the loon do? It sent your voice and allowed you to hear back from someone who might be hundreds of miles away. Earlier, Mourn had informed him the effect was instantaneous, or something very near it. So its principles didn't rely on those of noises that carried long distances—thunder, for instance, could be heard miles from its source, but it could take several seconds after the lightning for the roar to reach your ears. If a trumpeter sounded his horn across a valley, you wouldn't hear the first note until after he finished blowing. Sound traveled fast, but it wasn't instant.

That implied the distance itself was somehow shortened. As if a piece of the speaker and the listener had been embedded in the loon, so when the speaker spoke, the loon spoke with him, however far away he might be. Mourn dashed that theory, too. According to him, a loon could be used by anyone. That was part of why the Clan of the Nine Pines kept their secret so close. Any enemy could listen in as easily as a member of the clan.

Alternately, the loons themselves were perfect duplicates, identical twins who resonated as one. But Dante'd never heard of such a thing. You couldn't just copy a
tooth
. Silver cast in the same mold from the same ingot did not make the pieces the same. He couldn't rule out the idea completely, but as a solution, it didn't compel him in the slightest.

Four days cycled along. Blays gambled with the crew by nights, winning more than he lost. It wouldn't be enough to buy them passage on a ship to Narashtovik, but at least they'd be able to pay for food and lodging while they worked out those logistics. Lira fended off the advances of sailors and paced around the deck to keep her leg limber and strong. Mourn whittled arrowheads from scrap wood, embellishing his pieces with hooks and grooves and jagged edges.

"Is that supposed to kill someone?" Blays said, leaning over a piece shaped like a devil's sawblade. "Or circumcise him?"

Mourn frowned up from his makeshift workbench. "What's a circumcise?"

Blays grinned. Dante walked off before he could explain.

After the turmoil of the last few weeks, the peace of their passage downriver was like an evening beer after a day behind the plow. Occasionally they were called on to haul cargo to the piers of various villages and towns, but for the most part, those four days passed in total quiet. The morning of the fifth day since they'd hopped ship, the river widened until a mile of water separated its shores. Craggy islands jutted from the slowing current, furry with pines. The western shore neared as the river swung due north. Smoke curled from the damp trees. Sections of forest disappeared in favor of dark brown fields and young green shoots of winter wheat. Above an inlet protected by a high spar of limestone, docks jutted into the gray water. Downstream, three more barges coasted toward the sea; a two-deck galley thrashed the water with its many oars.

They reached Yallen by mid-afternoon. The city consumed the western bank of the delta. Two high-arched bridges spanned the sluggish water, connecting the larger islands and the eastern shore with its smoky tents, shacks, and furnaces. Masts piked the river, clustering thickly on piers that bustled with sailors and merchants and travelers. Instead of a wall, the city was banded at intervals by greasy canals some forty feet wide and spanned by low wooden bridges. Flat-bottomed boats navigated the canals with poles or ropes strung along the brick-lined walls. Inland, three hills considered the sprawl, their crowns heavy with towers and high wooden manors. Beneath, three-story row houses stood shoulder to shoulder, capped by sharply canted roofs of tar-sealed pine. The shining gray sea waited beyond the last of the islands. Dante smelled salt and shit and the cold of northern waters.

"What do you think?" he said to Blays, who watched beside him.

"It looks," Blays said, "like a place where things happen."

"I think it looks like a place where
you
figure out how to get us a boat."

"Why do I always have to be the one who gets things done?"

"I'm sorry," Dante said, twirling the loon between his fingers. "I've been a little busy trying to save us all from decorating the spires of Setteven with our skulls."

Blays snorted. "You've got nothing to worry about. Your skull's too ugly to show in public."

"Seriously, do you have any ideas?"

"I have a very firm thought, in fact."

Dante raised his brows. "What's that?"

"That you should shut up and let me do my thing."

The barge angled toward the crowded docks. A couple hundred yards from the crush of ships, an oared tug-pilot met them in the waves. Ropes flew between the vessels. Ashore, a team of oxen churned their hooves in the mud, guiding the barge in to port. Hulking norren and well-tanned men coiled ropes, lowered barrels, and argued on the briny planks.

Dante pulled up the cowl of his plain black cloak. The barge squeaked against the dock. Sailors flung ropes over the railing, followed by their own bodies. They landed lightly and tied knots as nimbly as the toe-dancers of Sweigh. Across the deck, Lira climbed into the sunlight. Dante moved to intercept her.

"There's a fountain at the far end of the plaza," he pointed, then pulled her behind the safety of a cabin wall. "The one shaped like a leaping salmon. I want you and Mourn to wait there while Blays and I see about finding us a boat."