The White Tree (30 page)

"Good. Don't panic if they sneak it past your guard. Clear it away like brambles in your path."

"Easy enough," Dante said. "Don't see why Cally never mentioned it."

"He's always been more of a theorist," Gabe said, shrugging. He smiled a little, his first since before the fighting. "Here." He reached into his pocket, revealed the object he'd taken from the spire. A set of spiraling horns, bound in the middle by a flat section of skull, neither prong longer than a man's middle finger. "Wear it around your neck. It should get you into the city."

"Should?" Robert said.

"They're the horns of a nasty little thing called a kapper that lives in the snows of the north. Should prove you're a native, or at least you're a frequent visitor." He bit his lip. "Of course, they are a wary people. And it's been a while since I've been there."

"Would be nice to shrug off a little trouble," Robert said, shaking his head. "Seems to follow on our heels."

Gabe cocked his head. "Does trouble follow you? Or is it trouble's found all corners of the world?"

"Afraid it's a combination of the two," Robert said, favoring Blays and Dante with an unflattering glance.

"I see what you mean."

"Come with us," Blays said, stepping forward and tilting back his head to meet Gabe's deep-set brown eyes. "We need you."

"They need me here. I'm not a warrior."

"But there's only going to be more of this. If this won't convince you to hit back, what can?"

Gabe drew himself up to his full height and breadth and stared Blays down. The boy's eyes danced away.

"I knew the horror they brought before they touched this temple," the norren said. "I'm supposed to reverse my beliefs because men I'd called friends betrayed me? How petty do you think I am?"

"I didn't mean that," Blays said, dropping back a step.

"I know," Gabe said in a softer tone. He looked over the black outlines of the roofs visible above the willows of the yard. "I couldn't live with myself if I went with you and found out the monastery had fallen. Who knows. Perhaps we can keep Shay from falling to what's taking the south."

"Perhaps," Robert said. He kicked the dirt. "Good luck to you."

"What way will you take through the mountains?"

"The pass, I thought."

"It'll be snowed. The Riverway should be open yet."

"Yeah, and add a week to the journey," Robert said.

Gabe nodded. "You'll see more norren on the other side. Leave them be and they ought to extend the same to you. We look more beastly than we are." He pursed his mouth. "No more beastly than any of you, at least."

"We're not beastly," Blays said.

"If they do come at you with suspicious intent, say 'Hannan,'" Gabe said. "It means 'peace,' more or less. Draw it out, though. Briefer vowels mean something more anatomical."

"Hannan," Dante tried.

"Longer."

"Haaannaaaan."

"Better to err with caution, I suppose." He nodded at Robert. "Wounds should be fine. You'll need sleep soon, though. And food."

"Anything else, mum?" Robert said.

"That's it." Gabe drew up his brows at Dante and opened his mouth as if to say more, then shook his head and looked off toward the street. "You're good men. Don't go dying up there."

Robert nodded and swung himself into the saddle, registering surprise when he felt no pain.

"Good work," he said down to the norren. The boys saddled up and Gabe untied their leads. They exchanged goodbyes and they walked the horses to the gates.

"One last thing!" Gabe called from the steps of the monastery. "When you see Samarand, put a stake through her heart!"

Dante twisted in the saddle. "What? Is she a vampire?"

"No," Gabe yelled, "but I imagine it will hurt a lot."

Robert wrinkled his nose. "Mennok's men are strange ones."

They turned into the street, leading the horses past shattered glass and the strewn refuse and fallen knives of a recent struggle. Further up the street they saw blades flashing in the torchlight.

"What do you think?" Blays said.

"I think," Robert said, hand drifting toward his sword, "if we stop to fight everyone's fights for them we'll have no time left to reach the end of the world."

"Yeah," Dante said, touching the scabbing wound on his sternum. "No more delays."

They cut down a side street. The sounds of skirmish peaked and faded in the still air. Robert kicked his horse up to a trot. They had done something good, Dante thought. When other man spoke of winning a battle, they simply meant they'd survived and stood their ground while the other side had fled and died. In Shay, they'd preserved a spark of thought that would have been blown out by the winds of upheaval if they hadn't risked themselves to save it, and as he rode it was with a centered pride that he'd chosen to act and had chosen well. By the time he remembered he'd forgotten to ask Gabe what it meant that he held the true
Cycle
the town of Shay was nothing but points of light behind them.

11

Cold, Dante thought, and then he thought it some more. He toed the inch of snow on the ground until he could see dead yellow burrgrass. Cold and hills. With the promise of more hills ahead. He scowled at the blue mounds of mountains on the northern horizon. A couple days away. He tucked his chin into the collar of his second shirt and wondered why anyone bothered to do anything.

They'd stopped at a farmhouse the day after they left Shay, where the owner had waved a pitchfork in their faces until Robert used the fact they hadn't already ridden down and slaughtered the man to convince him they weren't bandits. This established, the man accepted a decent chunk of their remaining coin for extra clothes and blankets and bread and cheeses and meats from his cellar. The clothes were rough-spun things, thick with the scent of sweat and dirt, and scratchy as falling into a barrel of drunk cats, but Dante figured it was better than dying of the cold that seemed to grow deeper with every step toward the mountains. They passed a few more fields and farmhouses that afternoon, but had seen nothing but wind-scabbed hills in the day and a half since. Just enough snow to get their boots wet whenever they dismounted. Just enough damp to let them hope they'd find some dry wood down in the draws, but when they settled down for the night they couldn't get a spark to catch. Dante cupped the nether in his hands and set a white burst among their tinder and got nothing but thick plumes of pale smoke. They huddled together, breath steaming, shivering until sleep overtook them.

The road roughened, narrowed. The ruts disappeared. Ostensibly others took this way, and Dante knew entire caravans crossed it in the half the year they could count on the pass to be clear, but they saw no specks of other riders, saw no sign of the campfires and gutted game and other spoor of travelers. The mountains hung huge as ground-hugging clouds, blue with pines and white with snow, distant and implacable as the fixed stars. The wind seemed to grow colder by the hour.

Robert sang crass drinking songs. A couple times, Blays told stories about the battles his dad had seen. Mostly he'd rolled around Bressel as a merchant's bodyguard, but in his early years, when he was just a couple years older than Blays, he'd been a swordsman of the young king's army during the annexation of the southwest coasts. None of the dirty brawls Blays and Dante had seen, Blays said. Formations. Ranks. Thousands of men and scores of wagons and when the battle was over a far greater army of magpies and crows and kites. Blood so thick you could smell it for miles. Blays told these things with a faint smile, a flicker of envy in his eyes. Robert tutted about how those things really weren't so grand, and besides, if Blays liked them so much, there was always another war and the need for men to die in it. Blays rebutted with the belief he'd make a fine soldier. Earn himself a knighthood. Robert just laughed. Kind words from the king, maybe, but he'd never eat at the same table. Men were born into such things, he said, not made.

Dante told them of half-mad Jack Hand. How he'd sacrificed his brothers' wives to see if he could bring them back, how his brothers had mutilated him for it and his long imprisonment, his insurrection and how he'd bested the rebellion meant to replace him. He'd lived 180 years, Dante said, and had 12 sons whose own sons staked out an empire from the far eastern shores all the way to the wide fields of Collen. Robert dubbed them good stories, if the incestuous intrigue of royalty was what tightened your drawers, but the oldest man he'd met had claimed 87 years, and that man had looked like something left in the ground a season too long. Dante shrugged. Things were different then, he said. Jack Hand was a sorcerer. Before he could die, he was taken to the right wrist of the constellation of Arawn, the sign whose crown had burst countless years ago into a pink cloud you could see during the day's full light. The book said its light had lasted for a complete year and rivaled the moon in the night. After it had faded from sight, when people looked up at that headless alignment of stars, they'd seen not the body of Arawn but the currents of twin rivers flowing across the heavens.

The clouds bulged blackly above their heads and tiny flakes of snow twinkled like dust in an autumn sun. Within another hour it was falling as thickly as a burst pillow, paffing against their faces. Dante pulled his collar over his nose and his hood over his brow. He looked out on the whitening world through a slit of fabric, breath warming his nose, and tried to imagine what the world would look like on the other side of the mountains.

"Let's camp up now," Robert said a couple hours before nightfall. "I want to have a full day to tackle the pass."

"How does it look?" Blays said, peering up at the deep fold between two sky-scraping peaks.

Robert shrugged. "It looks like a pass."

"And you look like you're stupid, but that doesn't give me any idea just
how
stupid."

"Well, it's got snow, see? That white stuff?" Robert pointed to a barely visible squiggle along the flank of the left-hand mountain. "Guessing just a foot or two so far, other than the drifts."

"What if it's deeper?" Dante said.

"Start praying it isn't." Robert patted his horse's shoulder. "Shouldn't take more than two days, unless one of you does something especially dumb. Not that it's very far mile-wise. Just takes a lot longer."

Dante woke three times that night to shake snow from his blanket. They'd bedded down in a gulley right off the road, which this close to the mountains was little more than a scraped path of rock and dirt, but the scrubby little pines weren't enough to stop the winds from pouring down the slopes and pelting them with small powdery flakes. He tried without success to wring his blanket dry that morning. He stuffed it in a sack. Maybe when it froze he could just beat the ice away.

"Careful where you lead your horses," Robert told them as they started up a steep incline after a predawn breakfast. "They can't tell a ten-foot drift from solid ground. Try to stick close to the slope and away from any really smooth-looking snow."

"I think I'll just follow you," Blays said.

"Probably a better idea."

The snow stopped falling shortly after the morning broke but what was already underfoot got thicker with every hour of travel. By midmorning Dante turned in the saddle and saw the last of the hills sprawled beneath them like frozen whitecaps. Pines clung to the slopes to their left; chunky black rocks fell away to their right, crusted with ice and snow. Dante had imagined the pass would be an impossibly narrow line carved out of the mountain face, but it averaged about thirty feet wide, sometimes opening into an expanse that might be a meadow in summer weather. They rode single file, slowing to a crawl the couple times the pass closed to the width of two horses abreast. At those times Dante tried to keep his eyes from the way the snow tumbled down for a couple hundred feet before ending in a valley bottom broken by the black bodies of snow-dusted boulders. Winds knifed through the peaks, throwing fine, stinging snow in their faces. Dante's clothing grew stiff. Tiny drifts formed in its folds. The horses plowed through foot-deep snow, sometimes plunging past their knees. The beasts stepped high, snorting, tossing their heads. Robert spoke softly, clucking his tongue, letting his mount hug the rising slope. Just after noon his horse swooped to its chest in the snow and bounded forward, its whinnies carrying on the wind. Once it scrambled clear to snow below its knees Robert halted, panting in the cold.

"How much further?" Dante said, drawing up behind him.

"Can't see too well," Robert said. He hunched his shoulders and gazed uphill into the mists of the clouds. More than half their daylight was gone. Dante blew into his hands. They were stiff, inflexible, as if their motions lagged a second behind his thoughts.

"It's still going up."

"I can see that much." Robert brushed snow from his cloak. He folded down his collar and wiped ice from his eyebrows and mustache. "Should be close to the crest. Dark's going to come fast up here. Won't want to press the horses once it does."

"I don't exactly want to stay here overnight," Dante said.

"And I don't want to get old," Robert said, "but I'm afraid it's my best alternative."

"Can we get back to somewhere less freezing already?" Blays said. "I need to take a piss and I don't want it snapping off."

They waited around to eat a handful of bread and drink from skins filled with melted snow, then got the horses going again. Dante watched steam rise from the shoulders of Robert's mount. He was tired. Cold. He glared across the snow-crusted slopes. They had hundreds of miles of travel after this. A wrong step, a hidden drift, and his voyage would be over. The places where men lived were full of people who wanted him dead and the places where men didn't live were hellholes of ice and snakes and sudden cliffs. How did anyone get as old as Cally? Pure stubbornness? Luck? Hanging around a forgotten temple while he sent the young men out to tramp around the wilds? That was a part of it, he'd wager. He'd further wager it had something to do with the book in his pack and the things it represented. Cally could make him explode by looking at him. Gabe could scrape up his chunks and patch them back together. That monk Hansteen could lock Dante in his tracks, could have killed him at his leisure if Gabe hadn't been there to snap his spine. Even Will Palomar, the man he'd slain with the bolt of fire in the woods outside Whetton, could have struck him down, he thought, if not for the man's arrogance and the blind chance of Dante's sentry. Sometime, he
would
die: if not during this journey to head off the war coming for the southlands, then in another two or three decades. One moment he'd be alive, the thing that made him him embedded firmly in the fortress of his skull, and then the next instant, perhaps before he understood what was happening, he'd be separated from his body—and if his body held a part of whatever it meant to be Dante, he'd never be the same again. Maybe he wouldn't remember anything once he'd gone from earth to the space beyond the stars. Maybe he wouldn't be able to think at all. Why did people have to die? Why couldn't they know what happened once your body died and rotted to waste?