The Great Rift (60 page)

Inside the hall, he could hear the screams from the cliffs. This wasn't war with all the niceties between squabbling kings. It had passed beyond that; in mere days, it had become something twisted and vicious; the norren fought the way a wounded lion fought, half-mad and pitiless. Any humans who came to the Norren Territories to hurt the norren would never go home again.

Dante washed his hands of blood and returned to the hard yellow sunlight. Warriors milled everywhere, washing up, hauling the barrels and sacks from the captured wagons into a pair of the houses built into the ground. Others dug a mass grave for their own dead. Their apparent lack of regard for the departed was curious, almost disturbing. There was nothing organized about it. Some cried while others dug. When the hole was deep enough, they filled it with bodies, then walked away. There were no public words. No tombstones or eulogies. Within minutes, the fallen returned to the hills that had birthed them. Was this, too, the product of their nomadic lives? Why leave a gravestone when you might never return? Was it one more sign of their stoicism? And why did it bother him? It somehow seemed more final, as if the dead were already long gone and soon forgotten. He hadn't been with them long enough to understand.

Hopp again came through without a scratch. He grinned at the torn-up ramparts, but his eyes were pained. "Cut it a little closer there with the gates, didn't you?"

"Considering I just learned how to do that yesterday, I'd say I did pretty good."

"We are alive. It could have been worse."

Dante nodded at the blood-soaked wall of raw dirt. "How many losses?"

"Fifty. Sixty." Hopp's grin soured. "Do they always have so many horses?"

"The rich ones do. Fortunately for us there are always more poor."

"Well, I don't like them. The horses. Or the men who ride them. What can we do about them?"

"Spears help," Dante said. "If you can figure out something more effective than that, we'll never lose another battle."

Dante had felt oddly detached from the victory. Moody, unenthused. The talk with Hopp helped a little. So did the contents of one of the wagons: casks of beer and rum, which the norren quickly distributed throughout the yurts and houses of the village. Others hauled broken chunks of the palisades and piled them into crackling bonfires—not because there was any need for warmth, but because lighting huge fires was simply what one did after a big victory. Some sang songs, minor-keyed and angrily joyous. A pair of Broken Herons slung Dante up on their bumping shoulders and hauled him to a spot beside the fire. A mug was sloshed into his hands. The undiluted rum brought tears to his eyes. The wet wood threw thick white smoke into the sky. Strangers joined the circle around the fire to ask his name and give theirs. He found himself laughing. When they urged him to tell them what he'd done to make the earth rise, he told them of his first two failures and how he thought they might all die because he'd promised the impossible, and they laughed, too.

He was far from sober when Blays found him. Blays' grin was crooked and devilish, and at first Dante assumed he'd been off in a bedroom with Lira somewhere. And maybe he had, but he also bore something far more interesting: General Varrimorde's marching orders.

Dante stood, open-mouthed, and extricated himself from the celebrants at the fire. Inside the stone house where he was quartered, he sat down in the lamplight with the leather-wrapped bundle of papers.

The orders were more or less as Stann had surmised. Varrimorde had been charged with taking command of the fort at Borrull and operating as the backbone of Gaskan military operations in the region—checkmating any major threats, should they appear, while smaller divisions were dispatched to the front to take the towns beyond the border one by one. There were no contingency orders for what to do if the fort was lost. It simply hadn't been planned for. Furthermore, no legions larger than a couple hundred men were expected to arrive in the Territories within the next four weeks. Everything had hinged on Varrimorde's campaign at the fort.

Dante sat back and rubbed his hand over his mouth. "It'll be days before the survivors make it back across the border. Days after
that
until they get word to anyone who can make a decision about what to do next. Even if they push up their schedule, we have two weeks or more before they can mount another threat against the Territories."

"I'm sensing something fiendish," Blays said.

"Well shouldn't we?"

"Of course. We're can't let the norren in the border towns sit there in chains when we could be stomping redshirt ass so hard the king tries to outlaw boots."

Dante rolled his lip between his teeth. "Would still be risky. If we get knocked out trying to retake the towns, the Territories will be back to defending themselves with scattered clans."

"We can't not take that risk." Blays stood up to prowl around the table. "All the mucking around we've done down here, that boils down to a pledge to the norren to protect them. To keep them
out
of trouble. If we've got norren cities occupied by Gaskan troops, we're honor-bound to liberate them."

Dante set down the papers and peered at Blays. "Honor-bound? You've been spending too much time with Lira."

"Well, it's true, isn't it? We made a bond to better their lives. If we don't keep that bond, we've betrayed them."

"Maybe the best way to better their lives is to consolidate what we've got before we go dashing about with banners in hand."

"What's this?
You
were the one who brought up striking back."

"And then your reasons for agreeing were so dumb I reversed my mind."

Blays snorted. "It's a smart play either way you look at it. Our whole philosophy is to press every advantage we get, isn't it? Well, we've got an army of angry giants. I'd say that trumps their nothing of nothing."

"I'm going to get ahold of Cally," Dante said. "Then we'll see what Hopp and the chieftains have to say."

To Dante's mild surprise, Cally answered in an instant. "I hear a certain someone convinced a certain substance to flow in ways that substance never should."

"It turns out you don't move the earth," Dante said. "You move the nether, and the earth moves with it."

"That doesn't make any sense. You
always
move the nether. If what you say is true, I'd be knocking down walls and tearing down ceilings every time I summoned it."

"You have to kind of relax when you do it. Go slow but strong. Like pushing a bookshelf across the room. If you push too fast, the whole thing topples over."

"I see," Cally said. "My suggestion to you: never try teaching."

"If I could show you it would make a lot more sense."

"Next time you're back in Narashtovik, then."

"In the meantime, we've got a conundrum," Dante said. "As far as we can tell, we just smashed the enemy's only major force in the region."

"So counterattack."

Cheers thundered from outside. Dante glanced out the window. "What, just like that?"

"Is there a better time to counterattack than when the enemy has nothing to counter-counterattack with?"

"Sure. When he's got nothing
and
he's drunk in bed."

"Moddegan and his viziers thought conquering the norren would be like plucking bearded, cave-dwelling flowers," Cally said. "You just broke their advance legion. What if you can kick them out of the Territories entirely? Would they sign a peace treaty then?"

"You think so?"

"Arawn's bowels, no," the old man chuckled. "But you never know."

Dante clicked off and wandered outside. Drums beat steadily, as low and monotonous as a heartbeat. Norren moved about the fires in what some might call a dance. To Dante, it looked more like sparring: warriors crouched low, lashing out with straight kicks their partners intercepted with kicks of their own. In unpredictable rhythms, they pivoted on their heels, lurching in to deliver slaps to their partners' faces and chests. The snapping fires cast long, swift shadows over the battle-torn grass. Dante found Hopp smiling wickedly on the perimeter.

"Didn't get enough fighting during the day?" Dante said.

"You've never seen our dance of conquering before?"

"Why would I have? I've only been warring alongside your people for months now. You're normally so open with outsiders."

"You wouldn't have had the chance," Hopp said. "You don't see this before any old skirmish. This dance is reserved for the big invasion of enemy lands."

Dante tried to read Hopp's face, but his head was clouded by the headache of departing liquor. "Invasion?"

"We've decided we don't like seeing any of our cousins in chains." The fire washed Hopp's branded face in white and red. "We're going to take our lands back."

* * *

It didn't wind up as much of a fight.

Two more clans came to Borrull the next day. The chiefs left a token force to hold the fort while the main army headed south at a jog. They hit the river three days later. The first village they reached was defended by fewer than twenty redshirts crowded into a single house. The norren shot them down as they fled out the back door, arrows sprouting from the redshirts' backs like sudden weeds. It was over in minutes. After, norren wandered from their hillside houses, gazing on the dead soldiers with secret smiles before rushing to embrace the sweating clansmen who'd set them free.

A handful of villagers joined them as they camped outside town. Another clan met them in the fields the next day. They captured a second village that morning and a third by afternoon. The Gaskan troops in both were token forces that might not have been able to withstand a single clan. If General Varrimorde's army had been in place at Borrull, with roving legions sweeping away any clans that poked up their heads, the village garrisons may have been able to keep their norren charges in check. Before the combined army of the clans, they were snuffed out like embers that had strayed too far from the fire.

At Cling, the garrison of sixty human soldiers had dug a hasty trench across the switchback path up the cliffs, fortified on the trench's downhill side by a fence of sharpened sticks. From their perch, they fired down on the plaza, arrows peppering the clan-warriors and plinking off the mosaic of the salmon. A frontal attack would be as bloody as a birth. Instead, Hopp pulled Dante aside, then embedded the bulk of the troops in the shops around the plaza. As they took shelter, Hopp led Dante and two clans' worth of warriors up into the hills west of town. Two hours later, they emerged on the upper end of the cliffside roads.

Below them on the switchback, the redshirts shifted their ranks to point their spears uphill. Just four men shoulder to shoulder could block the road completely; with fifteen ranks of the king's men, clearing them out could cost dearly. Instead, Dante sat on his heels and followed the death into the ground beneath them. He found it and pulled.

It was a clumsy job, less powerful by half than what he intended. An eight-foot section of cliffside road—that seamless road laid down by a norren master, a road that would have stood for a thousand years—cracked away from the slope, crumbling downhill in a deadly rain that swept a dozen men down with it. The others leapt away from the avalanche with panicked shouts. Hopp hollered and the norren pincered the human defenders from above and below. Bodies splashed into the plaza below. It was over in minutes.

A chunk of the docks and riverside houses had been burnt to the foundations. Most of the remaining houses were empty of norren and humans alike. The few residents they found told them both peoples had been taken inland, deeper into Gask. The humans, presumably, as refugees; the norren as slaves.

Not all had been taken. A few remained as servants to the soldiers. Others were prisoners, locked into a cave carved into the base of the cliffs. That was where they found Banning, the lanky graybearded mayor, chained in total darkness to a rough stone wall.

Dante's torchstone lit the way. Banning raised his shaggy head. One of his eyes had been put out, the socket crusty with blood and pus. His lean face had become skeletal, stretched over his broad cheekbones until his nose stood out like a lonely mountain. The fingers of his right hand were crushed, mangled. The room smelled like urine and sickness.

Recognition gleamed in Banning's remaining eye. "You again."

"Quit talking." Dante knelt next to him. He could feel the old man's heat before he touched his pale skin. Infection raged in his veins. His gums were white. He grabbed Dante's arm, chains clanking, but his norren strength had become childlike.

"My painting."

Dante called forth the nether. "Now's not the time for that."

"Now's the only time!" His shout broke into a hoarse croak. "Get me my painting, you baby-legged son of a bitch!"

"What's the matter with you?" Blays said. "We're here to help."

"My painting. The girl by the river. The paints, too. Remember where my workshop is?"

"Yeah, off in the woods with—"

"Good. Then quit gaping at me and go get my gods damned painting." Banning slumped against the cool wall and closed his eye.

Blays pressed his lips together, ready to object, then ran out of the cavern. Dante stayed with Banning, but the nether couldn't bring back the old mayor's eye or untwist his fingers. For all Dante's efforts, it couldn't fight off the fever, either. Banning's chest fell in shallow jerks. Sometimes he drifted off, head snapping upright whenever his chin fell too far. As Dante soothed his pain, two warriors braced Banning's chains, set a metal wedge against them, and struck them off with blows from a sledge. The iron bracelets dangled from the man's wrists. He let his hands rest on the grimy rock floor and closed his eye.

Feet pounded down the dim hall. Banning's eye whipped open. Blays hustled inside with a canvas on an easel and a rattling kit. Banning tried to lean forward and slumped back against the wall.

As the old man swore, Blays set down the kit and cracked it open. Bottles of paint sat in jostled racks, stoppers crusted with reds and blues and greens. He placed the easel in front of Banning and stepped back.