The Great Rift (47 page)

Kneeling in the dirt, Dante shaped a finger of nether and pushed it into the top of the hill.

He meant to dislodge a single grain. Instead, the rod of shadows shoved over the hill's entire top into a crumbling caldera. Ants wriggled in the sand, forcing their way into daylight and air. Dante stripped the shadows away until they were as nimble as a pin, then brushed sand up the half-ruined hill. Grains slid back into a lazy pile.

If he wanted, he could push a boulder. He could crack the side of a cliff, shearing rubble into a lethal rain of falling rocks. He could pound the anthill into a hard-packed hole, killing everything inside it. But all that was physical brawn, nothing more. The People of the Pocket hadn't been moving the earth by brute force. They had reshaped it. Made it grow like the body and branches of a tree. And however much Dante fiddled around in the dirt, he couldn't begin to replicate that.

Still, he practiced during every stop they made along the eastward road. The mountains of Gallador faded into the spring haze. Grass bent in the wind and danced in the rain. They saw no sign of pursuit from the lakelands. Still, they rode swiftly, trotting and walking until their horses grew tired, then swapping them out for their spares.

He looned Cally two days out from Wending to let him known they may have led a revolution.

"
May
?" Cally said. "What part is uncertain? The torches and pitchforks, or your participation in waving them?"

"We don't how it turned out," Dante said. "The king's soldiers might have come back and put it down."

"The king's soldiers?"

"The ones we fought." Dante sucked in his breath. "Unintentionally."

"Were they in disguise?"

"Uniforms."

"Were you?"

"Disguises wouldn't have helped. Cassinder was leading them."

"So you fought—with swords and the like—against the king's own troops." Cally's fingernails clicked against something hard. "Well, this ought to help the norren quite a bit."

"You think so?" Dante said.

"Certainly. Now Moddegan will ignore them altogether and come straight for us instead."

"Cally, at this point do you really think there's any hope we can stop this?"

"Sure. So long as every last norren agrees to a treaty they'll never, ever agree to."

"That's what I thought. Wending's merchants were ready to enlist themselves at the king's side. We just turned them into rebels."

Cally sighed. "I suppose you've done me a favor. Now when I tell the Council this is all your fault, I won't have to lie."

Pedestrians and horse-teams trickled west, outnumbering the eastern traffic ten to one. After two days of this, curiosity got the best of Blays, and he planted himself straight in the path of a man, his wife, and their three children, all on foot. The man stopped, stiff, fist clenched near his belt.

"Don't worry," Blays said. "We're not bandits. Anymore. Why are you headed west?"

The man glanced at the odd assortment of Dante, Lira, Mourn, and Fann. "To get out before the soldiers get in."

"Think it'll come to that?"

"Norren won't budge." The man gazed at Mourn. "Guess we have to instead."

Mourn stared at the road. "We're not the ones making threats."

The man tightened his fist. Blays raised his eyebrow. The man hunched his back and continued down the road.

Dante made no detours until the wheatfields of Tantonnen. At the town of Shan, he broke north to Brant's estate. Again, Brant opened the door himself, greeting them with a grin, his thick arms crossed over his gut.

"Heard you've been sowing troubled seeds."

"Doesn't sound like us," Blays said. "Must have been some other Blays."

"Funny. I heard two young men from Narashtovik fell in love with the daughter of some mucky-muck teamonger. When they tried to abscond with the lady, the merchant objected, so they dumped a sack of tree-cobras in his room while he slept."

"Definitely not us," Blays said. "Me, I'm promised to my one and only. And as for him," he said, jerking a thumb at Dante, "I don't think he even knows what a woman is."

"Nonsense," Dante said. "They're the ones with the dresses and nice smells, aren't they?"

Brant beckoned them inside. "Whatever the case, the whole deal wound up in some ripping nighttime brawl. Last I heard, King Moddegan sent a half dozen galleys upriver to put down the fighting."

Over dinner, Dante gave the farmer a more accurate if censored version of events, and was happy to hear that not only had the Clan of the Golden Field ceased their banditry, but were suspected of having slain a crew of human highwaymen who'd begun attacking wagons themselves. Narashtovik's first payments had already arrived, too. In response, the farmers had dispatched their first load of grain to the Territories not two days ago.

"Nice to know one thing in the world's going well," Dante said.

"It's the best things have looked for us in years," Brant said. "If you could just get Moddegan and the norren to let go of each other's throats, we'd have to build you a statue."

They rode on. Smoke hung on the western plains. At a bridge over a swift and noisy stream, Blays stopped to stock up on water and feed the horses. Dante picked through the reeds on the muddy banks and called to the nether hiding under the algae-slick stones. Shaping it into a black stylus, he folded his hands in his lap and traced his name into the muck. Nether lurked in the mud, too, as well as in the water that welled up in the letters of his name, pinpricks of darkness that he pooled in his palm. How could he speak to the soil? Make it move in tune with the nether it contained? Shadows rushed to his hands. He pounded the nether into the mud, splattering himself and the stream, obliterating his name.

A hundred miles from Narashtovik, the black woods swallowed them up. Cally raised Dante on the loon and told him to hurry home. He wouldn't explain why. Dante resumed at a gallop. They reached the city in two days. Cold spring rains battered the rooftops, swirling the streets into a slurry of horse dung and mud. Men ran from doorways with their hoods pulled tight over their heads. Atop the Pridegate, guards watched Dante pass; they were as still as the rooftop gargoyles, rain ticking on their metal helmets. Compared to the ebullience of Thaws, the streets were desolate, tense, a place to be fled rather than enjoyed.

At the gates of the Sealed Citadel, Dante pulled back his hood and called out his name. A guard leaned over the battlements and disappeared inside the gatetower. The portcullis cranked into the walls with a cacophony of clunks and shrieks. A footman splashed across the courtyard. Cally was waiting.

Inside the keep, Dante shed his sopping cloak and jogged up the stairs, Blays behind him. Cally sat behind his desk, tapping the blunt end of a quill into a blob of ink spilled on the surface of the dark wood. He nodded at them without looking up. His eyes were sunken, ringed with wine-dark circles. His white hair lay flat against his head. Blue veins traced his unusually pale face, as if he'd already joined Arawn in the other world where sunlight was a stranger, left to wander endless fields under the silver of the stars.

"You got here quick." His voice was as flat as his hair. "That's good."

Blays rested his hand on the hilt of his sword. "Either something's wrong or you're starting to show your age. Since you haven't crumbled into a pile of dust, I'm guessing the former."

Cally smiled wryly at the spilled ink. "Is it that easy to tell?"

"Oh, no. Only if you've got eyes."

Cally dropped the quill and steepled his fingers against his chin. "There was another riot in Dollendun. Moddegan's troops marched across the river to put it down. They did. They burned down half the norren quarter, too."

"Are you kidding me?" Dante said.

"The clans have gone berserk. At last count, 23 had rejected the treaty. The chieftain of the Clan of Twinstreams actually shoved his copy up his own ass just so he could shit it back out."

Dante pushed his fist to his forehead. "I'm guessing Moddegan didn't lay down his crown and do the apology dance."

Cally gazed at the congealing ink. "I haven't received the official announcement yet. But rumor, as always, outraces the sun. The clans have been outlawed. Any norren who resists the commands of Gaskan soldiers, lords, or officials elected or appointed is to be seized as property of the crown. Or killed without penalty." Cally looked up, impossibly old. "It's been decided. He's going to war."

"Well shit," Blays said.

"You're the one who's been saying this could happen all along," Dante said. "Or was I getting you mixed up with some other 120-year-old head of the Council of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik?"

The stormheads of Cally's brows collided. "Yes, but among the manifold risks and rewards of supporting the norren, early war was literally the worst outcome. It's hardly fair."

"Fair?" Dane laughed. "Even if this was our worst nightmare, I assume you planned for it."

"That doesn't mean I have
good
plans. When the most powerful man in the known world decides to come stamp you into paste, there's not a whole lot
planning
can do for you."

"You always have options," Dante said. "You can always fight back."

Cally rolled his eyed, mustache twitching. "You can leap off a cliff, too, but it won't get you any closer to the moon."

"Let's assume we've only got a few months left to our tragically brief lives," Blays said. "What's going to be the most fun for us to do in the meantime?"

A smile fought through the thicket of the old man's beard. "Okay. Fighting back."

Blays thrust up his fist. "So let's take a cue from the norren, stuff that treaty right up our ass, and shit it back out!"

"We're not doing that."

"Then at least let us go drive those red-shirted sons of bitches out of the Norren Territories."

"The Council's going to hate this," Cally smiled. "Brace yourselves for shouting."

He scheduled the meeting for four days later. In the meantime, he dispatched riders to recall Olivander from the villages of the eastern foothills, where he was running headcounts on men of fighting age, and to fetch Kav from his estate on the northwest shores. The rains continued, tumbling from the tight ceiling of clouds. Sometimes it poured down in great seaside squalls, solid sheets of water that flushed down the hills and flooded the basement of the barracks. At other times, the rain descended in a dewy mist, glomming Dante's eyelashes and slicking the cobbles. It was in such a rain that Cally insisted on taking Dante to the graveyard.

Most of the graves on the northern hill were centuries old. A scant handful were adorned with the pine boughs marking the anniversary of their occupant's passage. Moss clung to stone markers. Some of the tomb-pillars had toppled, lying cracked in the weeds. Cally passed Larrimore's marker, clean and white. Damp grass soaked the legs of Dante's pants. His cloak hung heavy and damp from his shoulders. His hands were as frigid as the dead.

"Are we scouting your future resting place?" Dante slicked rain from his eyes. "Or have you decided you'd rather die by a cold than a sword?"

Cally glanced over his shoulder, his beard as disheveled as a dog after it crawls from a lake and gives its first shake. "This is for your benefit. You seem incapable of learning in civilized settings, so I thought I'd return our classroom to the site of your greatest success."

"This is another lesson? I hope it's more useful than your last one."

"If a sponge fails to absorb a puddle, you don't blame the puddle."

"That's assuming the puddle is made of something that can be absorbed rather than something thick and intransigent and altogether muddy."

"Odd you should say that." Cally stopped in front of a rain-churned flat of dirt and grass. "Mud is precisely what we're about to dive into."

Dante frowned at the grave-studded field. "I hope you're still speaking metaphorically."

"Honestly, I'm not sure." With some difficulty, the old man knelt in the grass, splaying his hand into the muck. "Let's see if we can get this to move."

"I was trying that the whole trip back here. Nothing came of it except a few dead ants."

"That's because you are stubborn, and occasionally stupid." Cally squinted at the sloppy ground. "My theory is that mud, being muddy, will be easier to move than rock, what with its rockiness. Yet we should think of both when we think of how to move either. The commonalities will allow us to stab nearly at the heart instead of flailing in the dark."

Dante knelt beside him, rain soaking into the knees of his pants. "They're both nonliving substances."

"But do we know they're pure of life? What if these fine grains include bits of bone? What if the water that made this dirt mud once passed through a bear's bladder or a goat's veins?"

Dante paused with his hand halfway to the mud. "Then this is a very disgusting world we live in."

"Few things have ever been only themselves. This is part of what I meant to impart to you about cycles. In a way, all the world is Arawn's mill, grinding old into new in a ceaseless turn."

"If it's all the same substance, does that mean the rock is the nether and the nether is the rock?"

Cally cocked his rain-sodden head, staring into the brown sludge as if Dante had just swept it aside to reveal a cache of rubies. He shook his head sharply. "No. We'd feel it. But that's good thinking. What else?"

Absently, Dante picked up a twig and began drawing a bunny in the mud. He stopped with the second ear half-sketched. "What if there is no stick?"

"You're beginning to talk like me. I don't like it."

"To draw a rabbit, I have to use this stick." He held it up, mud clumped around its tip. "If I want to knock down one of those grave-pillars, I have to call the nether to me, shape it, and send it slamming into the rock. What if I found a way to throw out the stick?"

Cally's eyes slitted. He snatched away the stick and poked at the wet soil. "Now that is an idea."

Dante burrowed his focus into the mud, plumbing it for drops and trickles of shadows. He grabbed these up and tried to shake them like a dog shakes a squirrel. Cally smacked him in the side of the head just hard enough to dislodge his hold on them.