The Great Rift (63 page)

Three of the upstairs rooms were empty. They found her in the fourth lying on a scratchy straw mattress. She wore nothing but bruises.

"Corra?" Blays said. She blinked at him, blanket pulled to her chin, eyes as bright as stars. The norren girl was shorter than Dante, but the lankiness of her limbs belied the fact that wouldn't last. Blays beckoned her forward. "We're friends of your granddad's. You need to come with us."

She glanced at the floor as if she could see through it, then uncurled and stood, blanket pulled tight around her bony shoulders. Lira's gaze dropped to her bare and black-soled feet.

"Go down and watch the door, Blays," Dante said. "I'm going to get her some boots."

He descended to the second floor while Blays continued downstairs. He wrenched the boots off one of the bodies and brought them back up to the girl, who sat and mechanically laced them up. Her white shins stuck from the tops of the boots like broken wishbones. She looked up at Dante with eyes like forgotten silver.

Blays led the way back to the boat. They heard no horns or bells or cries. The city was dark, silent, as if holding its breath. Dante climbed into the boat and offered Corra his hand. Blays waded into the river to push them off, then rolled over the side of the boat. Their paddles stirred the black waters.

They reached the eastern shore without incident. At the outskirts of the army's camp, Blays found an empty home and led the girl inside. He and Dante filled a basin with water from the well and brought it to Lira, then closed the front door and walked into the street.

Blays booted a pebble down the cobbles. "Thanks."

"Of course."

"They deserved to die."

Dante nodded absently. "She looks okay. Just quiet."

"I'll show her the painting tomorrow," Blays said. "You should be there too."

Dante didn't think he'd be able to sleep, but he was wrong. Sleep always found a way.

Mourn and the Nine Pines arrived in Dollendun at noon. The clan had hunted down the soldiers who'd massacred the village and slaughtered the redshirts in the night. Mourn relayed this news with no joy. His voice held an implacable justice, as if the vengeance meted out on the soldiers hadn't been caused by him, but through the unstoppable clockwork of the cosmos. Dante had thought it more than strange the Nine Pines had been so swift to appoint him as their new chieftain, but their decision couldn't have been better.

Blays found Dante in the square and brought him back to the abandoned home. By daylight, Corra looked less pale and bedraggled. Lira had combed the tangles from the girl's dark hair. As Dante and Blays came into the house, she didn't say a word, merely followed Dante with her star-bright eyes. Blays untucked the painting from under his arm and presented it to her. Corra leaned forward like a leery terrier approaching a stranger.

"Grampa," she said.

"That's right," Blays said. "He asked us to give this to you. He said—"

Corra picked up the stretched canvas, carried it into her room, and quietly closed her door. Blays smiled in frustration. "Well, that's one way to respond to your dying granddad's last gesture."

Lira stared him down. "It's the first word she's said."

"I'm not complaining. I'm commenting. That that was weird. Because it was."

"Given what she's been through?"

Blays held out his palms. "I'm not complaining!"

Dante escaped to let them work through their disagreement for themselves. Five days after they norren occupied Dollendun, their scouts came back from the north. Downstream, the next two bridges had been burnt, too. The nearest intact crossing was some 150 miles down the river. More than halfway to Setteven itself.

At the war council, Stann laid out his case. Continue to occupy the eastern shore. Send a peace treaty to Setteven requesting the return of all slaves and the immediate cessation of hostilities. Offer to remain a part of greater Gask, with all the requisite taxes and tributes that involved, in exchange for the revocation of the king's ultimatum and for the total dissolution of norren slavery. If King Moddegan refused, let him come try to take the Territories for himself. The army of clans wouldn't leave until the treaty was signed.

A part of Dante knew Stann's plan was the wise course. What more could they do? March on Setteven, and plague the capital with norren dead? Leave the Territories undefended to rush out and terrorize Old Gask? The empire's heartland wasn't like the sparsely-peopled Norren Territories or the yawning woods around Narashtovik. Even with Dollendun and Gallador taken out of the equation, any of the cities of Setteven, Yallen, Voss, or Fonneven could raise five thousand fighting men in an instant if they felt genuinely threatened. So long as the norren stayed put on their side of the river, the king's war effort would be hobbled by the usual politicking, apathy, resentment, and costs. No peasant wanted to die fighting a race of towering giants who just wanted to be left alone. Anyway, if there was to be a clash of armies, let it come here, on their home ground, behind their own defenses.

Yet another part of him thought it was a mistake. The liberation of the Norren Territories must have been a shock to the king. But no step of their campaign had yet touched
human
lands. To talk Moddegan into peace, they would first have to cast the shadow of fear on his heart. They should take the western shore. Torch the palace. Carve Moddegan's name in hundred-foot letters on a hill above Setteven, and then carve an equally large dagger above it.

Instead, they were settling in to be sieged.

The chieftains found a warrior whose nulla was calligraphy and began drafting their peace proposal. Dante wandered off to a deserted house and pulsed Cally through his loon.

"We need more sorcerers," he said once the old man answered.

"Why would you need more of
those
? They're such trouble. Always turning things into other things. Knocking down walls when walls are sorely needed."

"Because right now our mighty troop numbers all of me. I've heard of one or two among the norren here, but they sound like minor talents. I don't know where Hart and Somburr got to—either they went off to rally more clans, or they're here and I've lost track of them."

Cally hmm'd. "Are you admitting you're insufficient?"

Dante rolled his eyes at the dirty wall of the silent house. "Aren't we supposed to be famed for our priests who can shape the nether like Arawn himself? How will it look when the ethermancers of Setteven smear us across the streets?"

"Bloody?"

"Gutty, too."

"I'll see if any of the Council would like to volunteer," Cally said. "Then I will pull rank on the monks, because that is what rank is for. Do you think you'll be able to survive two more weeks without them?"

"If I don't, we'll know who to blame," Dante said. "You."

The chieftains sent their messenger downstream to the king. Dante spent a day walking around the city. If a fight came, he didn't like the look of the north end of town. The south and east were far from impregnable, but there were some hills there to aid the defense, and a tightness to the streets that would squeeze enemy troops into vulnerable narrows. By contrast, the north of Dollendun was set on a flat plain. The houses were scattered and rural, the streets perversely wide. It would be no task for the redshirts to overrun them with sheer numbers, then use the structures for cover as they advanced on the heart of the city.

So just past the last of the northern houses, he started raising ramparts of dirt. He didn't use a shovel. He used the nether, taking hold of its earth-embedded weave to drag the ground up with it. Slow work. He'd only lifted a mound six feet high and twenty feet long before he had to lie down in the shady grass for a nap. Still, it wasn't his intention to build a wall around the city all by himself. He just wanted to see if such a thing could possibly be done.

Judging by his first day of work amongst the grass and flowers and beetles and bees, the answer was no. After putting together a stretch of rampart fifty feet long but just waist-high, his touch passed through the nether like water through river-weeds; it stirred, swayed, and stayed put. The following day, three norren emerged from the houses and stared at him for ten minutes. He figured they were just gawkers, killing time watching the man who could move dirt by waving his hands, but an hour later they returned with shovels and picks and ten more men. Wordless, they set in beside him, hollowing broad ditches on the exterior of the fortifications and pitching soil up the growing slopes. Dante squinted at the river and smiled.

The next morning, the norren at the ditches doubled in number. By the end of a week, hundreds of men and women toiled with shovels throughout every minute of daylight, putting their restless nomad energy to work protecting the city that had become their present home. Citizens trickled in, too. Some dug. Others brought food and water for the workers. A handful sang or danced or told stories while the warriors rested in the shade. Blays showed up of his own accord for a few hours every day before returning to Lira and Corra. Whenever Dante walked back to the house, Corra watched him with those sparkling silver eyes.

Blays was there in the fields when a hunched young norren approached Dante with his hands tucked into his sleeves. Dante straightened, letting the nether slip away, and wiped his arm across his brow. The days had turned warm.

"Excuse me," the norren said. His beard was patchy enough he might have been a teenager. Instead of meeting Dante's eyes, the youth gazed past his shoulder.

"Yes?" Dante said.

"Is the idea here to keep the enemy out?"

"That's the general theory of fortification, yeah."

"And you're doing this with earth?"

"Sure enough." Dante gestured at the river flowing bluely to his left. "If we can, we might flood the ditches with water, too."

The young man nodded and frowned at the ground as if asked a particularly fiendish arithmetic problem. "What are your feelings on explosions?"

"I prefer not to be near them."

"Oh." The norren turned to walk back to the city.

Dante jogged after him. "You can't ask a question like that and then just trot off. What brought you out here?"

"Well." He folded his hands back into his sleeves and furrowed his brow, staring past Dante's shoulder again. "Explosives. I can make them."

"And you think an incoming army might not appreciate being blown up."

"Wait, won't they?"

Dante hid his smile. "What's your name?"

The boy straightened. Freed from his hunch, he was a good four inches taller than Dante. "Willers."

"How do you set off your explosives, Willers?"

"Fire works good. Yeah, you touch the fire to the explosives and then the explosives explode."

"I'll take all you can give me."

The kid was so shocked he looked Dante straight in the eye. "Really? It won't be
too
much. I have to mix a few things and two of the things are hard to find even when you know where to look."

"Whatever you can get." Dante gestured at the half mile-long line of raised dirt and the scores of norren working to make it even longer. It was a quarter of the way to a small hill. If they could reach it, the north face of the city would be sealed by the rampart. "We've got a lot of ground to cover."

Willers nodded quickly and scurried back the way he'd come, leaning forward so far into his strides it looked like he'd topple right over.

"I didn't know we'd get to blow things up," Blays said. "If I had, I would have conquered a city much sooner in life."

"Well, we all have regrets," Dante said.

"At least we're here now and have the prospect of blowing things up in the future. I feel like that's what's truly important."

Around them, warriors dug on. Messages came and went from Cally and the scouts, but from the only one that mattered—the message to the king—there was no word. Day to day, Dante's movement of the earth felt no different from the one before, but after a week, he could pile up dirt or sweep it down without conscious thought. He was stronger, too, able to add a hundred yards to the ditches and ramparts each day before the nether grew fluttery and weak.

Two weeks to the day, the messenger returned. Most of him, anyway. All his possessions had been confiscated; he'd been forced to walk naked for miles from Setteven before a farmer, finding he had no clothes that would come close to fitting, offered the norren a long cloak. His right hand had been confiscated, too—the hand that had delivered the treaty.

He had another message, too. The armies of Gask had finally mustered. They would begin their march to Dollendun in days.

23

"Well, that's a relief," Blays said, wandering away from the plaza where the announcement had been made.

Dante goggled. "It's a relief that we're days from being attacked by thousands of people with bows and swords and devices that can crush us with rocks?"

"It beats digging ditches all day."

"Yes, and now we can use those ditches for our own graves."

Blays gave him a skeptical look. "It's a relief to know that whatever's happening, it's probably not going to continue happening for much longer. Either we'll use the streets to bleed to death in or to dance down with funny little hats on our heads. I'm tired of waiting to see what they'll do next. Well, pretty quick I won't have to."

"That is sort of comforting," Dante said. "In a very horrifying way."

"See, it's all about perspective. You'd be lost without me."

Within hours, norren citizens began filing into the camps to enlist in the makeshift army. It became quickly apparent there wouldn't be enough proper weapons to go around. Smiths took to forges and banged on metal. Fletchers sent their clansmen out to gather wood and feathers while they carved fresh shafts. Others found flaky stones and sat in circles, swapping stories while they chipped the rocks into points for arrows and spears. The Clan of Dreaming Bears proposed a raid on one of the barracks across the river. They planned to send scouts that night to find where the redshirts' arms might be cached.