The Great Rift (27 page)

"I don't—" said the loon still resting on the cloth.

Dante sprawled back, banging his spine into the side of the bunk. He crumpled forward in pain. Several seconds later, when he was fit to walk again, he snatched up the second loon, burst from the cabin, and plowed through the neighboring door. Blays sat straight up, bedsheets flapping, and pawed at the recessed shelf beside his bed, rattling his scabbards.

"I've got it!" Dante said.

Blays glowered, face puffy. "Unless 'it' is an unstoppable fire, or a giant hole in the floor, you can tell me about it later."

"Take this." Dante pushed one of the loons at Blays' groggy face.

"What is this? It looks like a bunch of bones wrapped up in string."

"It is. Now stay there." Dante ran back outside and slammed the door, drawing a stare from Lira, seated a short ways down the hall. He ducked into her room, closed the door, and brought the loon to his mouth. "Blays Buckler prefers the company of aquatic mammals."

"Holy shit!" Blays' voice piped from the bundle of bone in Dante's hand, followed by a painfully loud clatter. Something hard scraped against wood.

"Are you dropping my priceless artifact?" Dante said.

"No! I mean, it talked! I mean,
you
get hard from dolphins."

"I will now be accepting nominations for sainthood. Of me."

"That requires proof of godly ancestry," Blays said through the loon. "No more than four generations removed, if you can trust my mom." The door to Lira's cabin jarred open. Blays wandered inside, still speaking into the loon held in front of his mouth. "Which I do. Because she also told me I was the handsomest boy in Mallon."

"Close the damn door," Dante said, hustling to do just that. "So there now exists the non-zero chance Cally won't use us to mulch his garden."

Blays turned the bundle of bone and string over in his hand. "I'll admit this is impressive. Not impressive enough to redeem yourself for sparking a war. But probably impressive enough to get you off the hook if you'd slept with his sister."

"Cally's sister would be a hundred years old."

"And no doubt bearded. But hunger turns stones into soup."

"Once I had the idea, it really wasn't that hard to piece together." Dante reached for the other loon, holding one up in each palm. "It's based on the same principle I use to delve into the senses of dead animals. Through forming two such linked pairs, then splicing those pairs together, you more or less have the basis for a functional loon. Except only I can use it, because I'm the only one with the nethereal link. If I then go on, however, to exploit the object's own inborn nether to support the structure instead of using my external focus to do so, it turns out that—"

"Fascinating," Blays said. "Now shut up and let's tell the others. Except not like that, unless you're sick of them and want them bored to death."

Dante glanced at the closed door. "I need to ask Mourn a few questions. I don't think Lira needs to know, though."

"Why not?"

"Because I don't really trust her."

Blays raised his brows. "Of course not. It's not as if she's pledged her life to you."

"I pledge to serve you bacon shaped to spell your name every morning so long as we both shall live," Dante bowed. He straightened and met Blays' eyes. "Guess who's going to be deeply disappointed tomorrow morning?"

"Come on, she's been nothing but trustable. She could have turned us in to Cassinder's people any time in the last week."

Dante took another look at the door. "Unless she's holding out for an even bigger reward for bringing them a working loon."

"Fine, she gets to know nothing," Blays said. "But only because it's a genuine war secret."

Dante went to fetch Mourn and found him wave-watching from the bow. Empty gray waters rolled to the eastern horizon. To the south, far white hills slept under new and gleaming snow. A steady wind assaulted Dante's ears. One of the crew struggled with the rigging of the mainmast; atop the stern, another two argued with the rotund captain. The deck was otherwise clear. In the isolation, Dante gave Mourn a quick demonstration of his loons.

"I can hear the wind coming out of both of them," Mourn said after a moment. "The clan's loons spoke directly into your ear, and only when someone had something to say."

"Well, I'm not done." Dante wrapped the bones in cloth and tucked them away. "I just wanted to see what you thought."

"Why would you want my opinion? I didn't have anything to do with making them. The only reason I know about them is because I had the privilege of being born into the Clan of the Nine Pines. I may as well build a castle and ask that gull over there what it thinks."

Dante frowned out to sea. "I think we should rename you Cheer."

He wanted to construct a second set of loons and confirm his success with the first wasn't some confusing fluke, but he still wasn't sure what would come of the first. Besides, despite having sailed for several days, he'd spent less than an hour with the ocean. So he sat down beside Mourn, legs folded, and watched the incoming swells, the subtle tilt of the horizon as the
Bad Tidings
climbed each watery hill and slid down the other side. Waves hissed and splattered. A cold and constant wind grazed his face and forced its fingers past his collar. He reached his mind out toward the pair of loons every two or three minutes, unable to stop himself despite knowing there would be little or nothing he could do if the delicate nether-sheaths began to crack. Still, this ceaseless doublechecking reassured him, releasing a growing pressure that began in his head and slowly filled his gut.

An hour later, he checked the loons and found the nether was gone. He brought one to his mouth and spoke. He heard nothing but his own voice.

The nether had simply disappeared, reducing the loons to inert matter. He returned to Lira's cabin and assembled another functional pair, but an hour later, it too reverted to dumb, simple bone. He tried again, watching the third set without interruption. A little over an hour later, shining white cracks appeared in its shadowy sheath. The cracks thickened little by little; without warning, the black case burst apart. The trapped nether that linked the bones together dispersed at once, absorbing into the rag and floor beneath the loon.

Nothing he tried that day made any difference. He stayed up late and woke early. His head was heavy, but he forced himself to get up, wash his face, and return to work. Something strange had happened with the broken loons: the droplets of internal nether he'd used to form their sheaths had returned, but were unshaped. He took that nether and reforged it into fresh sheaths, wrapping these around new globs of nether drawn from foreign sources. An hour later, however, the sheaths collapsed again. Dante fell back on the cot, exhausted. What good was a loon that could only last an hour?

Late that morning, bells and shouts yanked him from his labor. Narashtovik grew on the horizon. Within hours, he'd be brought before Cally and held accountable for setting off the war.

8

Not long ago, Narashtovik had been called the Dead City. It was known as such even among its own citizens—what few remained, anyway. No one thought anything of the ghastly appellation; that was simply its name, earned through centuries of warfare and sackings that had reduced the city's outer rings to crumbling ruins. For those who stayed, it was a home, no more and no less, and while it was true that you could find ribs and skulls if you chose to poke through the fallow houses on its fringes, life at the core of the city was still normal enough.

Things had changed since Samarand's aborted war against Mallon some six years ago. The pine forests that infiltrated the city's old borders had disappeared, cleared for timber and tilled for crops. Fresh-cut wooden homes replaced most of the old stone ruins. The rasp of saws was like steady breathing; the rap of hammers a heartbeat. To the north, a high green hill considered the city, the site of the cemetery where Larrimore was buried. Past the outermost homes, the Pridegate circled Narashtovik's interior. Further yet, the Ingate that surrounded Narashtovik's oldest quarters was hidden behind steep black roofs, but at the city's very center, the staggering spire of the Cathedral of Ivars punctured the sky. Beside it, the keep of the Sealed Citadel rose like an upthrust fist.

As far as Dante had a home, Narashtovik was his. He hadn't seen Bressel since before the war, and anyway, he'd hardly lived there a handful of weeks. Before that, he spent his childhood and middle teens in a farming village in Mallon's breadbasket. Memories of his youth were a golden haze of streams and fields. Since leaving, he rarely thought of it.

Because in a way, he had been the midwife to Narashtovik's rebirth. He'd helped put down Samarand's holy war on Mallon. The refugees and survivors of that aborted conflict flocked to time-withered Narashtovik, making their claims on half-ruined homes that had lain empty for generations. When he wasn't busy on council business or one of Cally's endless errands, Dante enjoyed exploring those abandoned homes. They felt secret, sacred. Yet he'd been happier to see new families making them their own. Between the chimney smoke and fresh fields, it was clear the city had swelled all the more in the two-three years he and Blays had spent arming, supplying, and scouting the Norren Territories. Dante had missed that growth, that bustle, the knowledge he could step out into the street and see or buy or experience whatever he wished.

So he was worried about Cally's reaction to their news. And fearful of whatever fate might befall the city in the next months or years. But he was also glad, plainly and rightly, to be home.

"Think it still stinks?" Blays said beside him on the deck of the
Bad Tidings
.

"Absolutely."

"Figure out those things of yours?"

Absently, Dante touched the cracked bones in his pocket. "Not by half."

"Well, we're still a ways out. Plenty of time to finalize your will."

"It's not going to be that bad. Maybe he hasn't even heard."

"You're leaving me all your stuff, right?" Blays said. "Because I'm going to say you are anyway."

There was no point in a last-gasp scramble to perfect the loons. Dante was simply out of ideas. Instead, he descended to his cabin, nodding to the scurrying sailors belowdecks, and packed up his spare clothes and blanket and the cracked skulls of the rats. Back abovedecks, the
Bad Tidings
slipped past the western banks of the bay where a thicket of grounded ships rested in the silt where the river met the sea. There, an impromptu neighborhood had assembled among the wracks. The ships' sails were long gone, the bronze and iron stripped from figureheads and railings. Instead, clean white laundry flapped from masts. Residents jogged across planks nailed between half-submerged decks. Improbably, smoke curled from more than one of the grounded cabins; slant-walled shacks clung to masts and forecastles. The last time Dante had seen the bay, the old ships had been completely uninhabited, their hulls crusty with salt, gulls piping from rotten rigging.

"I almost hate to make port," Mart said behind him, startling him. "We're bound to pick up some new rats."

"So you're happy with the outcome of our arrangement?" Dante said.

"Happy? We'll have the only shit-free barley in all of Gask."

"You must be very proud."

"I've got half a mind to pressgang you." Mart's eyes glittered above his beard. "But then the sensible half suggests my body would wind up piled with the rats."

The boat came to port and sailors debarked to tie her off. Over the last few weeks, Dante had become so familiar with the process he could have pitched right in. By the time the crew secured the gangway to the dock, a crowd of longshoremen, merchant's aides, and would-be travelers had gathered at the base of the pier, babbling and jostling, breath visible in the harsh light bouncing off the sea. A queue of carriages idled in the open square beyond the waterfront, but Dante decided to walk. No need to hustle to his fate.

Few norren lived in Narashtovik, and Mourn drew more than one look as their group thumped down the damp pier toward the waiting crowd. His hulking presence was enough to open a gap in the throng. Dante led the way, composing his route to the Sealed Citadel. Canden Street would be the shortest, but it was the first day of Thaws, and the main streets would likely be clogged with a plague of potters, tailors, and shoppers all looking to—

Metal flashed from the forest of fur coats. A short man plunged from the crowd, knife darting forward, his gaze locked on Dante's chest. Too late, Dante grabbed at the nether, his panic whipping it into a charcoal froth. The man's arm straightened, preparing to drive the blade home.

Lira flung herself forward, ramming her shoulder into the man's ribs. They thudded to the boardwalk, hands locked together, grappling for the knife. Lira rolled the small man onto his back and flicked her fingers at his eyes. As he flinched, she clamped both hands on his knife hand and twisted his wrist toward his body, bearing down hard. The man screamed. His wrist gave with a fleshy pop. Blays' sword snaked past Lira and speared the attacker through the left lung.

The retreat of the crowd left Dante in the middle of an empty circle. He stood there, shaking, as pink blood burbled from the attacker's mouth, the man's broken wrist flapping against the boardwalk.

Blays pulled his blade from the dying man's ribs with a wet
shup
. "I didn't think Cally would be
that
mad."

Jittery fury flooded Dante's veins. He knelt beside the assassin and grabbed him by the collar, yanking his head from the pier. "Who hired you?"

The man blinked, glassy-eyed, and coughed thickly. Dante shoved him down by the collar, banging the back of his head into the planks. "Was it Cassinder? All you have to do is nod."

The assassin choked, coughing bubbly pink blood over Dante's heavy cloak. He fell back, spasming, fishlike.

"He looks pretty dumb to me," Blays said. "Let's ask his pockets instead."

He crouched on the other side of the body and turned out the pockets of the man's cloak and doublet and trousers, revealing three more knives, one long and two small, a handkerchief, a plain leather purse clinking with coins, a bag of dried venison and cherries, a sewing kit, comb and scissors, and a pinky-thin vial of a viscous, black-brown liquid. Boots jogged the planks. Two armed men hurried down the pier, dressed in the black leather and silver trim of the city. They stopped cold when they saw the body. Drawing swords, they shuffled forward, right feet extended. Blays pocketed the vial.