The Great Rift (29 page)

"I found something else instead. Something—"

Cally raised his splayed palms to his shoulders. "The Council meets tonight. The issue, to put it indelicately, is whether Narashtovik will stand with the norren or abandon them to the war-hounds of Gask."

Dante cocked his head. "How did they know I'd be back today?"

"They didn't. As it turns out, the world goes on without you. Try to make it a better place for once."

Cally's weary disappointment stung worse than any wrath. There was too much to say, so Dante said nothing. In time, they returned to the Citadel together, wordless the whole way. Pantsless and begrimed as Cally was, the gatekeepers still recognized him. Dante supposed it wasn't the first time they'd seen him in such a state.

"That could have been worse," Blays said once they were alone in the stairwell.

"Oh really?" Dante said.

"We could be dead."

Dante gazed at the walls of the musty walls. "I think I'd rather be."

"Maimed, then. Weighed down by a brick of guilt
and
two broken legs."

"Pain would be a welcome distraction."

Blays grabbed Dante's shoulder, jarring him. "Will you knock off the self-pity? This thing has hardly begun. What do we do to de-disaster it?"

"We have no choice." Dante lifted his face. "We have to help the norren. We're the ones who got them into this mess."

"Great. So quit moping and figure out what you'll say to the Council. I'll go get the molten silver."

"Molten silver?"

"To pour on your tongue."

Dante shook his head. A floor down, he discovered his long-vacant room had recently been cleaned. The bedsheets smelled like soap and the pine needles the servants pestled to scent the linens. There was no fire, of course, and it was too cold to take off his cloak, but he left his door shut and locked. For the moment, he needed isolation.

In time, he belled a servant for a bath, which he sat in until the water grew lukewarm, letting the slow work of water wear the salt and dirt from his skin. He shaved and dressed himself in the Council's colors, then faced himself in the small mirror above his basin. His jaw and cheeks had gone harder. Suggestions had become definitions.

Under normal circumstances, he was the type to plot out every word of what he might say at the meeting. To sketch the branch of every argument he could make or anticipate facing. Instead, he closed his eyes and opened his inner sight to the nether, watching it trickle through the room's dark places, its minute pools under his bed and dresser, its shining dust glittering from every surface. A servant knocked. It was time.

Dante returned to the upper floor and made for the Council's chambers. The cherrywood double doors bore the image of the White Tree of Barden, ghastly and beautiful, its trunk and limbs fused from spines and ribs, molars and canines forming its flowers and thorns. Inside, a long, plain table dominated the room. Sectioned glass windows overlooked the vivid pink sunset on the bay. Dante was among the last to arrive. Old Tarkon was already seated, his cane leaned against the table. He winked Dante's way, heavy wrinkles bunching around his eye. Hart sat, too, a mountain of a norren with thick clouds of beard swirling about his head. Olivander's head was bent in apparent prayer, muscly soldier's shoulders bunched around his neck. Joseff's ancient eyes were closed. He may have been asleep.

These were the lone survivors of Cally's uprising beneath the boughs of Barden. Some of the dead had been replaced within days: wiry Kav, whose carved features betrayed his noble birth but not his age, which must have been passing sixty; Ulev, chubby, a simple monk raised above his station; Merria, the old woman whose blue tongue would better suit a stevedore than one of Arawn's chosen; Somburr, quick-eyed and twitchy, his brown skin and elusive accent a product of one of the southern isles; Varla, who spoke as rarely as an oracle. The last to arrive (besides Cally, whose habitual lateness was more a product of indifference than a conscious display of his station) was Wint, who in his mid-30s was the youngest councilman besides Dante himself.

Assorted servants orbited the table, too. Behind Dante's right shoulder, Blays leaned against the wall. Cally ambled into the room and the Council rose as one.

"Excellent," Cally said, seating himself. "I can't remember the last time we didn't have at least one empty chair."

Tarkon pursed his lips, ruffling his beard. "Then again, you can't remember the last time you emptied your bowels, either."

"Nonsense. On matters of importance, my scribe takes the strictest notes." Cally's smirk faded. "I'm not going to rehash every detail. If you're not up to date, it's your own damn fault. In short, a clan of norren burned Lord Cassinder's estate to the foundations. In response, King Moddegan has levied a new tax. He's begun headcounts in Bonn and Lattover. Headcounts means troop counts. Troop counts mean we'd better grab our balls and run for the hills."

"The debacle with Cassinder was my fault," Dante broke in. "We led a clan on a mission to rescue their enslaved cousins. Things turned violent."

Wint lifted a thin black brow. "I heard the search for a few missing norren was just one of the reasons you were there."

From behind Dante, Blays snorted. "Of course it was. Do you think we'd cartwheel through some lord's door, torches in hand, all for the sake of a single clan?"

"It doesn't matter
why
it happened," Cally said, cutting off any potential objections to lowly Blays speaking out of turn. "What matters is what course we take from here. If none of you want to figure that out,
my
next course is straight to bed."

The other members glanced between each other. A servant coughed. Olivander leaned forward and clasped his heavy hands on the table. "If Moddegan marches, it will be on the norren, not us."

"Sounds like the very reason we should stay clear," Wint said.

"They're counting on our loyalty."

Somburr's head jerked back and forth. "Since when is suicide the best expression of loyalty? We preserve ourselves. Stash our loyalty away. Then return it to the table when it's actually worth playing."

Tarkon rolled his eyes. "Would that be before or after the Norren Territories are converted into the world's largest charcoal bed?"

"I've met Moddegan," Kav said in his academy-honed tones. "He doesn't believe in half-measures. If we throw our sticks in with the norren, he'll burn us without blinking."

Cally grimaced. "Olivander, what kind of numbers can we muster? Reliably, I mean. You military men seem cursed with double vision whenever you survey the troops."

"Three thousand?" the big man shrugged. "A tenth that in cavalry. Between the last war and the immigrants, our infrastructure hasn't had time to rebuild."

"And what can Moddegan come up with?"

"Ten thousand by July. At the very least. Maybe double that."

"I'm no algebraist," Wint said, "but that sounds horrible."

"They'd have to thread their campaign through a narrow needle," Varla said softly. "The Dundens are often snowed in by October."

"And that snow won't fall on whatever hill we huddle on?" Kav countered.

"Why are we arguing
whether
to help?" Dante said. "We're the reason they're facing invasion. If we hadn't been stirring up trouble the last five years, they'd still be just another unhappy territory."

"'We'?" Wint said.

"The institution of this council and the higher lord we serve."

Kav gazed at the white plaster ceiling and the chandelier's twelve clusters of candles. "The key fact is that promise was made five years ago. If we were looking at the world as it lies right now, would we make that same promise?"

"Which of course has nothing to do with the fact we did make that promise," Cally said. "Anyway, the thinking here is very all-or-nothing. There are ways to aid and resist that don't involve a field of troops, a rousing speech, and a million kegs of blood."

"If we commit one man, we may as well send a thousand," Wint said. "You think they can sweep through the norren without picking up our tracks as well? With proof of our involvement and an army at our doorstep, what king in his right mind wouldn't take the chance to finally annex us properly?"

Talk went on for another half hour, but Wint's cold logic effectively settled the issue. Cally called for a vote. He, Dante, Tarkon, and Olivander favored continued support. The remaining eight decided to cease all involvement in norren matters until a later date.

While the others filed out, Dante slumped in his high-backed chair. Blays sat on the table and kicked his heels. "Well, good luck to the clans, I guess."

"This is bullshit," Dante said. "How can they just turn their backs? We've been working towards this for years."

"Maybe the norren will do all right. I'd rather break rocks with my balls than try to scour the clans from their own hills."

"You think so?"

"Well, probably not. I'd only expect to lose
one
ball fighting the norren."

Tarkon tarried with Cally for some time. With nowhere else to go, Dante sat and stewed, seething over every insipid argument and call to cowardice. Had he just wasted the last five years of his life? Had he actually made a bad thing worse? What was the plan from here? To sit in the Citadel making faces of concern while the armies of Gask stamped, raped, and gorged their way across the norren lands?

Once Tarkon left, Cally ushered out the last of the servants, retook his seat, and hoisted one slippered foot to rest upon the table. "Disappointed?"

Dante smiled grimly. "Why would I be disappointed? It's only my fault the norren are facing war. I've just been ordered not to help them. I couldn't be happier if you told me my mom had walked back from the dead."

"I see."

"I suppose you think I deserve this. Well, the norren are about to be punished far worse than me."

"Deserve it?" Cally laughed scornfully. "I'm no Taim. I don't hand down judgment from my righteous throne. By and large, everyone deserves nothing. The rightness of this belief is proven by the fact that's precisely what they get."

"Now that's a rousing philosophy," Blays said. "The kind of thing that inspires you to spring out of bed, rub the grit from your eyes, and dive right back under the covers."

Cally flapped his hand. "Listen, dribblemouth, I'm no happier about their decision than you are."

"Could have fooled me," Dante said.

"Well, the answer to that quandary is very simple." Cally reached out to lower his stiff leg from the table. He stood, cracking his knuckles. "We're not going to do a damn thing the Council says."

9

Dante blinked. "You mean to help the norren anyway."

"That quick brain is precisely why I appointed you to the Council."

"In that case, I have something to show you." Dante jogged out the door to his rooms, gathered up his satchel, and returned to the meeting chambers, where Cally and Blays passed a badly-rolled cigarette between them. Dante closed the door behind him. Under the tobacco, Dante smelled siftspring, an odor of sage and cold winter mornings. It would perk their nerves a little bit; Cally favored it when he did his deepest thinking. Dante placed a lumpy rag on the table and unfolded it, revealing several pieces of cracked skull.

Cally leaned over, smoke rising dragonlike from his nostrils. "Very nice. Bits of dead things."

"There's more."

"Yes, I saw the string, too. Those are some tidy little knots."

"Hang on a minute, you old goat." Dante stood over the pieces and summoned the darkness to his fingers. Cally glanced away from the cigarette in his hand, frowning slightly as Dante drew his nethereal connections between the bones and sheathed them tight in the bones' own power. Dante had built loons a score of times now and the ritual took him less than two minutes. Blays, meanwhile, wandered to the fireplace to poke at the embers with a brass gaff. Dante set one of the completed loons in front of Cally. "Wait here."

He unlocked the glass doors, stepped onto the cold, windy balcony, and shut himself outside. He pressed his face to the glass to watch the old man, then lifted his loon to his face. "Callimandicus!"

Cally jerked back from the table, gnarled hands twisted in front of his face. Dante chortled and went on. "This is the voice of Arawn! You are to give the one you call Dante Galand a tower! And a harem to fill it with!"

Cally gaped at the door, beckoning furiously. "Where did you learn to do that?"

"I tried to tell you." Dante locked the door behind him, shivering in the sudden warmth. "We didn't find the Quivering Bow. But we found these."

"This is brilliant. I don't understand why I didn't think of this myself." He turned the bones over in his deep-lined palm, tapping them with his yellowed fingernails, peering into the crevices between the strung-together pieces. He cackled and flicked the loon into the air, snatching it at its apex. "Two simple links! Who taught you to make this?"

"The norren who came here with us had one. I think they severed its connection when he left the clan, so I had to deduce how it worked on the trip here."

"It won't hold together for long, though, will it? Perhaps a couple of hours."

"How can you tell?" Dante said.

"Because this little wrapper you've got holding it in place is already evaporating." Cally set down the loon and sat back, beard rolling into a smile. "Still, this changes things, you know. Things are very changed."

"Do you think we have a chance?"

"Hardly," Cally snorted. "But now's not the time to be worrying about trivial things like
chances
. Get your norren up here. We have work to do."

* * *

Cally worked with the discipline of a scholar and the enthusiasm of a fieldball fanatic. He examined Mourn's earring for five seconds before declaring the tiny wishbone-shaped bone was that from the inner ear of a human. He dispatched a servant to the basements to find as many such bones as he could, then set to work on making the loons permanent. Cally had it figured out before the servant returned: the norren loons weren't always active, allowing the nethereal sheath to "re-charge," as it were, whenever they were silent. If ever the sheath were exhausted, it would collapse, permanently severing the link, but so long as the loons were used sparingly—less than an hour a day—they could hypothetically last forever, or at least as long as the physical object maintained its coherence. They could be further stabilized by employing a second sheath of ether drawn from an inorganic mineral such as the silver used in the earring. Dante could no more command the ether than he could leap and kiss the moon, but he took Cally's word for it.