The Great Rift (73 page)

The buzz of activity became an ear-drilling whine. Dante went to the outskirts of the city to ruin the roads, littering them with ditches and holes. The day before the redshirts were expected to arrive, a man ran in from the outlying houses, screaming and waving his staff above his head.

"They're coming! The enemy is here! The king's army is upon us!"

The nether leapt unbidden to Dante's hands. His heart leapt unbidden to his throat. A quarter mile of low houses blocked the view between himself and the southbound road. He jogged to the road and headed out among the deserted homes, many of which had been abandoned decades and decades ago during the repeated sackings of Narashtovik. Some were no more than empty lots, weeds growing among the teeth-like foundation stones. He peeled off his shirt, a light doublet emblazoned with the sigil of Narashtovik. The redshirts might ignore a shirtless commoner. An official of Narashtovik would face a much more critcal reception.

He passed a row of pine trees, their scent thick on the sun-baked air. Three hundred yards down the road, a legion of men marched into the hinterlands of the city, hundreds strong.

He turned to dash back to the walls and raise the alarm, then stopped dead in his tracks. The men weren't wearing uniforms. There was something wrong with their builds, too. Their heads were too high, their shoulders too bulky. Dante turned to meet them. He carried the nether, too, but as he grew closer, he let it fizzle away. When he saw the man at their front, he broke into a grin.

"Mourn!" he cried. "I thought you were dead!"

"Surprise." Mourn's beard was thicker. Beneath smears of soot and dirt, his bare arms showed fresh scars and half-healed cuts.

"Are you all right? How have you been?"

"If the period of my life before the last few weeks can be considered good, the last few weeks should be classified as not-good."

"Same here. I was imprisoned for murder, but it turned out I didn't do it." Dante smacked his thigh, smiling so hard his cheeks hurt. "What's happening in the Territories?"

Mourn tipped his head. "A lot of losses. A lot of deaths. For the redshirts, too, but those creatures multiply like they are not actually humans, but flies in crafty human disguises."

"I know what you mean. They're supposed to be here tomorrow."

"Supposed? Did you invite them? Because it would be strange to invite someone in to burn down your city and forcibly impregnate your women."

"It was an accidental invitation," Dante said. "I believe it was left on His Lordship Cassinder's doorstep during some ridiculous hunt for a make-believe bow?"

Mourn smiled for the first time since his arrival. "The world is very odd, isn't it?"

He had some four hundred norren with him. The Nine Pines and Dreaming Bears, along with the remnants of five other clans and a hodgepodge of survivors separated from their warrior-families during the skirmishes ongoing across the Territories. Mourn's troop would be no small addition to the city's numbers.

Blays clapped when he saw Mourn. Lira gave him her small polite smile. Many of the guards stared; norren freemen weren't uncommon in Narashtovik, but few lived in the city on a permanent basis. They probably hadn't strolled into the city in such numbers in generations.

Dante offered to put them up in the rowhouses just beyond the Citadel walls, but Mourn refused, electing to encamp in a park down by the bay instead. That night, the four of them went to a public house as they had so often months before, but something had changed. Silence stalked their halting conversation. Even Blays was hunted by it, smiling vaguely and nodding distantly when addressed. As soon as they finished swapping news of the days since Dollendun, they paid more attention to their beers than to each other.

Scouts came and went throughout the morning. Dante stayed close to the Citadel and the news the riders brought there. In the morning, the redshirts were ten miles away. By noon, they'd cut that to five. Guard-commanders shouted orders across the courtyard, directing their troops to the walls. The three sets of doors to the Pridegate were sealed. Horns squawked from across the city. Young men hauled arrows and swords and bows and spears to the walls. Olivander saddled the cavalry and ran sweeps of the outskirts in search of enemy scouts and sneak attacks.

Mid-afternoon, Narashtovik's scouts reported the king's army had encamped in the pine forests a mile from the city. The smoke of scores of campfires rose from the black woods. As the army showed no signs of coming any further that day, Olivander pulled most of the men from the Pridegate but doubled the scouts beyond it.

In the neverending dusk, Dante went to his balcony to read and soothe his nerves. Instead, in the warmth of the setting sun, he fell asleep. He woke in total darkness and bolted to his feet. Not because of any horns or fires or signs of war. But because he'd meant to see his friends before whatever came with the morning. Now it was too late.

He paced his room, angry with himself. A few minutes later, a door clicked in the hallway. He poked out his head, hoping to see Blays, but Lira strode down the hall instead, wearing shorts, a thin shirt, and a knife.

"Is Blays awake?" he said.

She shook her head. "Wore him out."

"I'm sure he's as happy about that as I am unhappy to hear about it."

She laughed. She didn't do that often. "What did you need to talk to him about?"

Dante shrugged. "Nothing much. Impending death. The end of the world. That sort of thing."

"Are you nervous about tomorrow?"

"Does feeling the urge to barf up your skeleton count as nervous?"

"That depends. Have you done anything to provoke your skeleton?"

Dante laughed. "I need to ask you something."

She raised an eyebrow. "If you really need to ask, you wouldn't ask whether you could."

"Do you two love each other?"

"Does that matter?"

"It probably does to Blays."

She answered without hesitation. "Yes."

"Good," Dante said. "Then you don't owe me any longer."

"Says who?"

"You owe him—and he owes you."

Lira tipped back her chin. "I can have more than one duty or loyalty. He knows who I am. I won't change for him."

Dante scowled in the darkness of the hallway. "What if I told you I value his life above mine? So the highest service you can pay me is to keep him safe tomorrow?"

"Then I'd call you a liar."

"Don't you dare."

She'd been flirting with a smile, but quickly cast it aside. "Are you serious?"

"It's probably safer to pretend that I am."

"Lyle's balls, you're intense sometimes." Lira stared him down. "You saved my life. That kind if debt isn't penciled onto a ledger. It's chiseled on stone. Unerasable."

His jaw tightened. "This war probably would have come eventually. The norren would never stand to be enslaved forever. It's a war I still believe in. But I share too much of the blame for why it's happening here and now. If that caused any harm to come to him..."

"Then what?"

"I don't know."

"I don't either." She nodded once. "I'll keep him safe."

She drew her knife and cut her right palm. Her eyelid twitched. She handed him the knife. He followed suit, but had taken a blade to his own skin too often to flinch.

"What's this?" he said.

"It's how we seal agreements in the islands."

They shook. Her hand was wet and warm. When their hands dropped, he sealed both wounds with a balm of nether. She flicked her hand, glancing down sharply.

He smiled. "No sense going to war with a cut on your sword hand."

"I wouldn't have noticed." She smiled back. "I'll see you in the morning."

She walked toward the stairwell and headed down. On a whim, Dante decided to roam the city himself. He descended to the basement and took his tunnel to the carneterium. There, he emerged into the sweaty night and climbed the cemetery to the hill. Cally was there. So was Larrimore. Samarand and the Council members who'd died beneath the White Tree were there, too, although he'd forgotten where their tombs stood.

He nodded in whatever direction they may be in and continued up the grassy slope. He wasn't here for them anyway. It smelled like fresh leaves and a warm sea. Bugs of all kinds chirped and whirred. Beneath the ground, they silently ate. He touched the nether in the soil, felt the blank spaces of the coffins embedded within it.

Fires twinkled in the forest to the south. At the crown of the hill, Dante tipped back his head. The stars twinkled just as brightly. Jorus, too. The polestar. The crux of Arawn's mill. Some people prayed to Arawn—god of death, god of cycles—but Dante didn't. He knew the ancient god would pay him no mind.

So he hoped instead.

When he finished, he returned to his room and slept dreamlessly. He was up with dawn's first deathly blue hints. He dressed, put on his metal armbands and his sword, and went to the walls of the Pridegate without stopping for a breakfast he might not be able to keep down. The city was as silent as a snowfall. In the gray of the mounting dawn, Olivander was already atop the Pridegate, watching the city as if preparing to grab it by the throat.

"You didn't have walls in Dollendun, did you?" the middle-aged man said.

Dante shook his head. "We built a rampart, but that just encouraged them to come in through the side instead."

"I think we'll hold," Olivander said, as if convincing himself. "I think we'll spill too much blood for them to push through. They'll siege. Cally's been stocking up provisions for years. Will it be enough? Will the norren who still survive in the Territories push back hard enough to force the king to leave us in peace? That, I think, is how we do this."

"A siege? You mean I'll finally get to stay in Narashtovik for longer than two weeks?"

Olivander's trim beard quirked with a smile. "Don't get ahead of yourself. Someone will have to head the daring runs through enemy territory."

"Here I thought there would be a silver lining to Cally's passing—that I would no longer be called upon every time we need to do something ridiculous."

"I thought you and Blays did these things because you liked them."

"Maybe," Dante admitted. "But even the wicked can use a vacation."

As the sun rose, proper light scared away the ghostly land of predawn. It was already hot enough to have Dante sweating. Mourn brought the norren to the walls. They stuck together, saying little. A scout pounded up the road to the gates. The redshirts had broken camp a quarter hour ago.

Olivander sounded the horns. Soldiers jogged from the inner ring of the city to take up positions on the outer walls. Several members of the Council joined Dante and Olivander; the others were spread out along the miles-long sweep of the Pridegate, ready to react to any enemy sorcerers.

"What's going on?" Blays said when he appeared on the wall a few minutes later. "Boy, it looks like you guys are gearing up for a fight or something."

"Nothing of the sort," Dante said. "We were just going to sit down with the redshirts and discuss Allandon's
Transubstantiated Ethics and the Deceit of Carvahal
. A war's only broken out over that twice."

"I'm not even going to pretend to pay attention to that."

Atop the Pridegate's twenty foot walls, which in turn stood halfway up the rising slope of the city, Dante's line of sight ran to the edge of the city with few obstructions. It was from this clear vantage that he watched the king's army enter the city.

At first they flowed blackly from the forest, a dark, sluggish, molasses-like mass. That flow broke into separate streams as thousands of men diverted into four columns, each of which took a different one of the four main north-south roads to this flank of the Pridegate. Once this mass drew within a mile, its individual features grew more distinct. Red banners flapped above ranks of swordsmen wearing hauberks and spearmen clad in the oaky hues of boiled leather. A line of warhorses strode at the head of the main column, riders masked in plates of solid metal that glinted in the summer morning sun.

The stomp of their steps rolled through the sticky air. Rhythmic. Maddening. A planned avalanche. Dollendun had been different. Dante had only seen the boats, not the army's main body. The gathering of so many men intent on murdering them was eerie and awesome and terrifying.

"Is it too late to tell them the city's full of deadly ghosts?" Blays said.

"We may get a chance to find out," Dante said. "I think I'm about to start moaning."

Narashtovik's commanders hollered last-minute orders. To Dante's left, walltop defenders shuffled nearer the gates to meet the attackers. The king's army continued on, step by step, eating up what little distance remained between them and the walls. Close enough now to make out individual faces, to smell their miasma of travel and sweat. The front lines stepped within easy bowshot and stopped cold. The waves of men behind them rippled to a halt.

A lone rider emerged from the front lines, his warhorse stepping as lightly as the summer rains. Some ten yards in front of his troops, he halted and turned sidelong. Instead of the king's red, he wore pine green.

"I will now deliver the king's terms," he said. His voice was soft, almost soothing, yet it carried on the air like the streamers of morning mist that blew in from the bay and threaded through the city streets.

It was a cold voice, but that wasn't what gave Dante goosebumps. "Son of a gods damned bitch!"

"What?" Blays said.

Dante pointed below. "That."

Before the Pridegate, the man in green tilted back his head to regard the black-clad troops lining the walls. "Surrender. Lay down your arms. Swear fealty to King Moddegan of Gask. Disband the Council of the Sealed Citadel. Hand over all norren within Narashtovik to the custody of the king and his appointed executors. Turn over control of the city to me, Cassinder of Beckonridge."

"What the hell?" Blays said. "We killed that guy!"

"Apparently he got better," Dante said.

"You've met Cassinder, yes?" Kav said from beside them.

"Sure," Dante said. "In the sense we've spent the last few months trying repeatedly to kill each other."