The Great Rift (25 page)

A second set of stairs descended to the main hold. This was split between three main spaces front, middle, and rear. It was pitch black; Dante drew out his torchstone and breathed on it until white light expanded over the casks, barrels, sacks, crates, and chests. Some sections were packed higher than his head, held fast through arcane packing techniques that required few if any ropes or restraints. White grain dappled the deck. So too did tiny black droppings.

He would work his way down. The creatures of the dark always descended in times of crisis.

He ascended to the lower deck and knelt beside the stairs. He drew the slender knife and traced a line of blood across his left forearm. He'd never summoned the nether on open water before, but if it differed from the sources on land, it was too subtle for his eyes—the same mothlike shadows fluttered from the cracks and corners, coating his hands, turning gently as they waited to be shaped. He rubbed his thumb against the torchstone until it faded, leaving him in the weak light of the catchlamps.

It didn't take long. Submerged in the nether, his sense of time was somewhat blurred—destabilized, perhaps, by the eternal cycles of the shadows—but no more than five minutes could have passed before the first rat crept from the maze of cargo. It moved in stops and starts, stopping to haunch back, nose and whiskers twitching, before it lurched forward to snatch up a stray kernel of barley and crunch it down to nothing.

Dante stilled his mind and struck the rat with a narrow spear of nether. It flopped to its side, legs kicking, smearing blood across the timbers.

All creatures great and small carried a pulse of nether within their skin or shells. By the
Cycle of Arawn
, all life itself was nether-born, brought to motion by the black grist ground from Arawn's cracked mill. With his fear and rage and pain, man carried the most nether of all, but if Dante made himself go quiet enough, he could feel the thin thread waning in the struck rat's veins. Even once each of its organs went still and dark, the nether didn't disappear. It simply quieted, too. Dormant. Only when the body decayed and dissolved would the shadows also pass away into the earth.

Dante seized this snoozing nether, melding it with a strand of his own. With a thought, he returned the rat to its feet, where it waited in perfect undead stillness.

Go
, he told it.
Find the others. Bring them to me
.

It skittered into darkness. A moment later, a short, inhuman shriek pierced the silence. Fur whispered on wood. The undead rat backed into the cleared space around the steps, tugging a fresh corpse along in its teeth. Dante brought this one back to its feet, too. Before he ordered it away, he closed his eyes and shifted his sight into it. Vertigo bent his head—he looked back on himself, terribly tall even when kneeling, a pale-faced giant whose features were sharpened with the cruelty of one whose role is to kill. He sent the rat his command. His second-vision swung as it turned on its claws and raced into the towering alleys of crates. Its whiskers tickled along the splintery wood. It reached the wall of a cabin and squeezed into a crack that would be invisible to a standing human. Dante felt it rustling among loose shreds of chaff, splinters, and the browning rinds of lemons. In total darkness, its teeth clamped down on something hairless and pink. The baby vermin screamed. Dante opened his eyes and gazed at nothing.

It was dawn by the time he returned to the deck. Mart raised thick and skeptical brows, then lowered his gaze to Dante's left arm, laced with paper-fine cuts and crusted with rusty layers of blood. The man's face softened into something that might have been concern.

"Sleeping Arawn," Mart said. "Did you challenge them all to a fistfight?"

Blays shouldered past the quartermaster, puffy-eyed with the grueling sort of hangover that comes from burning off one's liquor without the help of sleep. "Well?"

"Well what?" Dante said.

"Did you get all the rats?"

"Oh, that? I ferreted out the last one hours ago."

Blays gaped. "Then what have you been doing down there all that time? Napping? I want to nap!"

Dante let out a long breath. "I understand the loons."

7

Fortunately, Mart brushed that off as the delirious statement of a man who's spent hours in the dark with no company but his thoughts and a growing heap of dead rats. As hand-counted by a teen boy who was clearly on the outs with Mart, these totaled 240 all told, a bleeding and mutilated heap that had the growing crowd of sailors eyeing Dante with some emotion between respect and disgust. Mart took a tour belowdecks while Dante leaned against the railing and let the ocean wind wash the scent of blood, fur, and feces from his nose.

Mart thumped up the steps a few minutes later. He leaned against the rails beside Dante and gazed seaward. "The fact of the matter is there's no proof of your achievement."

Dante turned, incredulous, and gestured at the mountain of motionless rodents. "What do you call that? Coincidence? Did I smuggle them aboard in my pockets?"

Contempt hardened Mart's eyes, quickly fading. "Our agreement insisted you kill every single rat."

It took a moment for this to penetrate the fog of sleeplessness around Dante's mind. He stiffened. "And there's no way to prove they're all dead."

"Not without tearing the ship apart board by board."

"I see." He supposed he should be angry. He supposed he would be, after he'd had some sleep. After the
Bad Tidings
had sailed away.

"But if I left you ashore, my crew would tear
me
apart board by board." Mart nodded to the idling men. One scooped up a rat and waggled it in a bearded man's face, earning himself a meaty punch in the shoulder. The rat bounced from the deck. Men laughed. "You've earned your passage."

"You could have told me that from the start."

"I could have, but I didn't." He gave Dante a long look. "Regardless, if we arrive in Narashtovik and discover you've missed any, I can simply pass your debt along to Callimandicus."

That wiped the fog from Dante's brain. "If you want a safe trip, I wouldn't speak a word of who we are."

"I'm not going to give your name away. I'm responsible for all my ship's cargo, human or otherwise. Now fetch your friends."

He did just that. At the fountain of the salmon, Lira and Mourn looked enviably well-rested. Back on board, they were shown to two cabins belowdecks—one for the three males, one for the lady.

Lira's jaw drew tight. "I am sworn to protect this man." She inclined her head at Dante. "I can't do that isolated in my room."

The young sailor ducked his eyes. "Ma'am, barring storms or giant squid, I think he'll be perfectly safe. After seeing what he's done to those rats, nobody's going want to find out what he'd do to a human."

That only raised further questions from Lira, but at least it settled the arrangement of sleeping quarters. Dante meant to see the ship's departure into open ocean—he'd sailed enough rivers, but never the sea—but on settling into his down mattress to rest his body, the rest of him quickly followed suit. By the time he woke in early afternoon, the shore was a far line of pine green across miles and miles of whitecapped gray.

According to a crewman whose superhuman focus on reining in his flapping sail may have been due to the fact he'd lost two fingers earlier in life, the trip to Narashtovik would take six days, allowing for the wind and their planned stop in port at Kannovar. All told, they'd span a good 400 knots, which struck Dante as a miracle. Even with good roads and spare horses, traveling overland would have taken them more than twice as long and been far more dangerous. In fact, the duration was perfect. Six days ought to be plenty of time to confirm his operational theory of Mourn's loon. If Dante was equal parts lucky and dedicated, he might even have a fresh one to show Cally. If anything could blunt the old man's wrath, it would be an item of immense practicality that came wrapped in the priceless ribbons of secret lore.

Lira happily lent him the privacy of her cabin. She sat outside on a stool while Dante set to work. The boy who'd shown them their cabins turned out to own a two-book library consisting of the
Cycle of Arawn
and a picaresque novel about pirates who spent more time clinging to the wreckage of their ship than in committing any actual piracy. He lent Lira the book without a second thought, and even through the closed door, Dante could occasionally hear the rasp of pages or Lira's warm, low chuckle. Besides that, however, his only distractions came from the pitch of the ship, which his stomach hadn't begun to adapt to, the occasional holler from the crew up above, and rarest of all, the carrying cry of the huge-winged birds that scoured the ocean's surface for prey.

In truth, the rodent body count had been 246. Dante had slipped six of the smaller adults into his pocket before rising from the slaughter to show Mart his catch. Because he had a theory. If his theory proved seaworthy, he expected he'd need more than one body to refine it before landfall.

The idea had arrived from a special kind of nowhere, a place no other human had been: from inside the dead rats' own heads. Yet the concept was simple enough Dante could have put it together years ago.

When he was linked to the body of a rat, he could sense whatever they sensed. See what they saw. Hear what they heard. Assumedly, he could taste what they tasted. This worked whether they were in the palm of his hand or miles away. Essentially, they were doing the exact same thing the loons did.

He borrowed, requisitioned, and gathered more than just the dead rats. In addition to these, which lay in neat lines atop a cloth on the cabin's floor, he had a hand axe, his small knife, a tin spoon, the strips of what had once been one of his older shirts, and perhaps most important of all, a bucket of water. He separated one of the rats from the others, took up the hand axe, and severed its head less than expertly. With a concentrated effort to ignore the noises and smells his next actions made, he used the knife to peel away all the skin, flesh, and tendons from the skull, then picked the axe back up and whacked it once along its long axis. A splinter of bone pattered across the pinewood floor. He noticed the smell then, the thickening blood and hours-old flesh, and opened the small round porthole. After a few breaths at the window, he raised the axe again.

The next strike split the skull from snout to base. Pink mush splattered the deck. The bone hadn't broken completely along its bottom edge; Dante cracked it in half, then used the spoon and knife to dig out everything he could reasonably extract. Uncertain the leftovers would be of any use, he set these aside on one of the cloths, then spent a long time cleaning his hands and the two pieces of mostly-empty skull.

He knelt beside the mess and brought forth a palmful of nether, which he sunk into the bones like a wave into sand. He reestablished the nethereal link between the two halves, then opened another line between himself and the half he dubbed the "Ear." He set the Ear to his own ear, aligned the earhole of the second piece (which he thought of as the "Mouth") to his mouth, and said "Hello." Had he heard—? He put the Ear to his other ear and tried again. As previously, the word sounded strange, somehow distorted, but not conclusively different from whatever he was hearing aloud.

Perhaps it was simply too close for his senses to separate the sounds. He cracked the door. Lira looked up, closing her book around her finger. Dante flushed with sudden embarrassment.

"Lira." He held out the Mouth. "I need you to do something for me. I'm going to go back into your room. Three seconds after I close the door, say something into that."

She reached out for the cracked bone, then jerked her hand away. "Is that a rat's skull?"

"Of course not. It's one half of a rat's skull."

"What am I doing with one half of a rat's skull?"

"Helping me win a war."

She considered him for a long moment. "Are you being serious?"

He held up his palms, discovered the underside of one forearm was globby with gore, and hurriedly wiped it off on the leg of his pants, which he immediately regretted. "I'm sure this looks very strange."

"It looks like you've decided to become a butcher. Or a pervert. Or some combination of the two."

"You don't have to touch it." He bent and placed it on the floor. "Just speak into it. Directly. Where the ear would be, ideally. Oh, and don't speak loudly enough for me to hear what you're saying through the door. Understand?"

"As much as that's possible."

He closed himself inside the cabin and held up the Ear. Three seconds later, he heard Lira murmur "If you're hearing this, then perhaps you're not crazy"—but rather than hearing the words through his ear, the way Mourn had described the loon as functioning, he heard them inside his head, the same way he'd perceived such things when he was piloting the dead rat around the hold to hunt down the living. He returned to the hall.

"I spoke into it," Lira said with the unconcealed disgust of a childless adult watching another person's kids paw through an apple cart.

"I'm not crazy."

She blinked at him. "Perhaps not."

He took the Mouth and went back inside her room to kneel beside the mattress and think. So it was possible to take pieces of a skull, link them together, and share the senses experienced by one of those parts by the other pieces of the whole. In a sense, then, he had just created a very poor loon: it was one-way, only he could use it, and it would cease to function the moment he dropped his focus from the link between Ear and Mouth. Still, it felt like he was onto the principle. Now all he had to do was refine it.

He understood how to solve the one-way problem at once. If he could be either a Mouth or an Ear, either to able speak or hear, all it would take to be able to do both would be to combine two sets of these things. To create a linked Mouth A and Ear A, a second Mouth B and Ear B, then combine Mouth A and Ear B into one loon and Mouth B and Ear A into another such that words spoken into one loon would be heard through the other and vice versa. He did just that, axing his halved skull into quarters so each fraction contained part of the original structure of the skull's ear port. He then formed two proto-loons and had Lira speak into each in turn while he listened from the cabin. He could hear her through both pieces. She couldn't hear him, of course, because she lacked any link to the loons herself, but if he could solve that problem, all that would remain was to make the items permanent.