The White Tree (33 page)

Robert stopped them the following morning some ten miles from the city. He pawed through a pack and passed around meat and cheese, stabbed a knife into the cork of a wine bottle and twisted it open. He tipped it back into his waiting mouth, bubbles glugging into the bottle's upturned base, then wiped his lips and passed it to Blays. Blays chugged and passed it to Dante and Dante had a sip. Robert sighed through his nose and considered the distant lumps of the city.

"Never feels right to say goodbye without a drink of wine," he said.

"I've never liked it at all," Dante said. Robert nodded.

"Who's leaving?" Blays said, handing the bottle back to Robert. "Are we sending off the horses? Why would we send off the horses?"

Dante frowned at the ground. Robert chuckled, then went quiet when he realized Blays meant no joke.

"We're not sending off the horses."

"Then what are you talking about?"

"It's time," Robert said. He tapped his nails against the side of the bottle. "Here's where I leave you two to yourselves."

"Why?" Blays said, just the one word, and Robert had to look away.

"You two have your mission. I'd just get in the way."

"No you wouldn't! You're the best swordsman I've ever seen!"

"What you need right now's not a sword, it's a story to tell the locals why you're here. Two young men could be anything—lordlings out to see the world, a pair of hired blades, a scholar and his man-at-arms. Whatever you say, they'll never imagine the two of you could be a threat, and that's the thing that will save your asses." He took a drink and pushed his mouth against his sleeve, face red. "Some old bastard tagging along's just going to confuse them. Make them wary where you want to be a snake among the reeds."

"This whole thing seemed stupid and crazy when there were just the three of us." Blays' eyes shone with anger and some rawer hurt. "Now we're supposed to do it all with two?"

"Trust me, you'll be better off. This calls for subtlety beyond my means."

"And what if we're not enough to take her down?" Blays said, flinging his hand at the city. "What if they go and unleash Arawn? Maybe he
will
eat the world. Even if that's a steaming pile meant to rile things up, they look pretty damn safe up here. The king's not going to march an army to the ends of the world when Samarand's got mobs burning up his back yard. People are going to die!"

"Quit that," Robert barked.

"Quit what? Saying what we've all been thinking?"

"Trying to shame me into this, you whelp," he said, stepping forward and sticking his finger into Blays' chest. "If I thought for a moment you two were skipping off toward suicide I'd make you turn back right now, or at least rob you before the others could get to your corpses. First time I met you Dante was busy lighting up the entire town watch, for gods' sakes, and you killed plenty yourself as soon as your hands weren't tied. You two could set the world on fire if you wanted."

Blays snatched the bottle away from him and had a pull.

"Fine," he said, rapping the glass with his knuckles. "Run off to your whores and your booze and your brawls. If you ever had a set of balls, they're far too shriveled to help us now."

Robert started to reply, then bit his teeth together, lips curled. He looked away. When he spoke at last his voice was forcibly softened.

"Spill as many words as you want. I'm leaving. I know in my heart it's the right thing to do. Nothing can change that. The only thing left to settle is whether you'll remember me with darkness in
your
heart."

"Get out," Blays said. Nobody moved. He raised his arm and smashed the bottle against the frozen dirt. "I said get the hell out!"

"Well enough." Robert turned to Dante, face blank but eyes bright. "I think I've repaid whatever debt I owed you."

"I never held you to any debt," Dante said.

"I know." Robert grinned. "That's the only reason I stuck around at all."

Dante nodded, gazed back the way they'd come. "Where will you go?"

"Should have a few friends still kicking around these parts. Would be plain rude to come all this way and not say hello." He sniffed, wiped his nose against the cold. "I'll be there in Whetton, Blays. You know where to look."

"Passed out in your own filth behind any public house," Blays said, back turned.

"You were listening after all." Robert smiled for just a flicker, then flashed his eyebrows at Dante. He climbed into the saddle, wheeled his horse, began to backtrack the first of the miles. He halted thirty feet out and faced them. Blays turned his head at the sudden silence of the horse's hooves. "Walk with the gods, boys. Don't you dare let them get you before you get them."

Dante watched him ride away. At a hundred yards Robert dropped down a ridge and left his sight. Dante nodded to himself. He'd see Robert Hobble again, he pledged, and when he did he'd bring Blays with him.

"You don't look too surprised," Blays said, face matching the dark clouds overhead that hadn't yet decided to spill their burden.

"You saw how he was in that town. He's been saying he meant to leave us since Gabe's."

"I didn't think he meant it."

Dante shook his head, a flare of frustration budding in his chest. "He means every word he says."

"He does," Blays agreed. He kicked a stone. Dante couldn't think of a single thing to say to soften what had happened. He stared dumbly at the dead city, thinking ten miles, ten miles, two hours if we hurry and three if we don't; ten miles, ten miles, as if all he had to do was think hard enough and they'd shrink away to none. He risked a look at Blays.

"Want to rest before we finish it?" he said.

"When we're this close? What are you, a girl? A baby? I want to see this fancy city of yours."

"It's not mine. Yet." He nudged his horse forward. A breeze followed him. He imagined he smelled the faint scent of saltwater. "Gabe told me, before the attack, you ought to name your sword."

Blays glanced at his side as if he'd forgotten it was there. "Name my sword?"

"He said it might give it power."

Blays laughed and pulled it free. Sun glinted down its steel as he waved it in front of his face.

"You believe him?"

"All the famous warriors do it," Dante said, lifting half his mouth. "They must be on to something."

Blays slitted his eyes, nodded. Air whistled over his swing. He smiled grimly.

"I dub thee Robertslayer."

"No, come on," Dante said.

"It's my sword. I can name it what I want."

"What kind of a name is 'Robertslayer'?"

"It's a vow," Blays said, brows furrowed like Dante was stupid for asking. "Next time I see him, I'm going to challenge him to a duel."

"What about all the help he gave us?" Dante said. He tried and failed to see any hint of humor in Blays' eyes.

"I'm not saying I'm going to
kill
him." Blays held the sword level with his arm and peered down its length. "Just slosh some of his blood around. Show him who's the whelp."

"All right." Dante freed his own weapon from its sheath. "I think I'll name mine Blayschopper."

"The gods will know you're copying. Your blows will land as falsely as its name."

"You've got a direct line to them, do you? You have chats?"

"I know how these things work," Blays said, cutting the air between them. "You can't just name your sword a joke."

"You named yours Robertslayer!"

"And it's going to taste his blood," Blays insisted. His lips twitched. "The only blood of mine you'll ever taste will be my skinned knuckles on your teeth."

"I'd burn you to a cinder first," Dante said, pointing to him with the first two fingers of his right hand.

"You'd set me on fire?" Blays gave him a look of mock horror. Dante laughed, looked off toward the city, for a moment felt as if things were back how they'd been before they'd ever met Cally and been so ensnared in all these problems of churches and kingdoms. Things were different now, though. They rode not solely for the lives of themselves, but for those of thousands in the southlands. They rode with the cold force of a mortal purpose. Through it all, they carried the weight of the men they'd killed on the way. The dead city took the land before them, boundless and ragged, black and ancient as the earth's first wound.

12

Narashtovik grew wider with every step, taller with every minute. Its outskirts were a tumble of old stone and moldering wood, tainted everywhere by a confusion of indistinct black smears, as if a hundred years ago an all-consuming fire had chewed the city up and left the ashy remnants to the slow erosion of time. But from the city's interior wispy columns of smoke twisted into the seaside haze of sky.

"Stay sharp," Dante said. "Someone still lives here."

"Sorry. I was lost in the rugged beauty of that giant mound of trash up there."

Once they drew nearer, Dante saw the black spaces weren't charcoal and shadow, but the deep green needles of northern pines. Thick in the streets, pushing up among tumbled stones, choking out the places where men once lived. They'd make easy firewood, but there they were, unmolested, undisturbed. Dante touched the pair of horns that hung from his neck. The tracks of others broke the crust of snow that lay on the road. From within the jumble of houses and trees he thought he could see the shadows of movement. Far too few for a city of this scope—the silhouettes he saw lived in the lawless ruins, wouldn't necessarily bear the mantle of docility that seemed to affect most men who lived in the company of thousands of others. Dante closed one eye, reached out for the nether, felt it reach back.

He led his horse around a tongue of rubble that lay in the roadway. They left the pine-specked fields and crossed into the sprawl of empty buildings. Once or twice a minute he saw a man hurrying across one of the streets ahead, heard the footfalls of inhabitants from somewhere within the alleys and cross-streets; further toward the city's heart he'd catch a shout, a bell, a few moments of breeze-scattered blacksmith's hammerblows. He slowed his horse, watching both sides of the road as they passed the moss-coated stump of a home that couldn't have stood for two hundred years; then an open patch of half-buried timbers that may once have been an innhouse but now looked one strong rain from washing down to a square of dirt no different than any of the rest; then a weed-choked foundation resting bare of walls or roof. From the distance of a mile or more an uneven line of gray stone showed behind the worn roofs of those buildings that still stood.

"Tell me why this feels wrong," Dante said.

"Where should I start?"

"I don't mean that," Dante said, jerking his chin at the detritus.

"Cally made it sound like we'd be trussed up in a net and thrown in a stew the instant we showed up." Blays chewed the inside of his lip. "I don't see a damn thing, and all I hear's one smith who can't keep time."

"That's it. There's not enough noise. You can separate one sound from another."

Blays nodded. He loosened his sword. They followed the road. Not all was empty, not all was ruin; some houses boasted all four walls and a roof without holes, and here and there wooden structures that didn't look completely decrepit shared walls with older ones. The chock of a solitary wood axe echoed from no more than a hundred yards away. Down a street where the cobbles were as gappy as the teeth of a serf Dante caught the unexpected flash of a garden, an ordered spread of green amongst the defeated crumble of housing. A man's soughing footsteps came from the other side of the street and he turned in time to see a pair of wary eyes before the figure disappeared behind a damp wall. They moved on.

Voices and the clanking of men at their labor grew thicker as they approached the city's first wall. It shared the disrepair of the lands around it, webbed with cracks, its top as jagged as the peaks they'd crossed weeks earlier. Graying, fluttery lumps dangled from spears planted in the stone. In places there was no wall at all, just a carpet of stones and beyond it a view of a city that looked half normal. The road led to a gate of sorts, or at least one space in the stonework that was intentional, though Dante saw no sign of a grille or doors to shut the twenty-foot walls against invasion. They halted a stone's throw from its base and moved off to the sod at the side of the road to dismount, stretch their legs, have a bite. Foot and carriage traffic moved on the other side of the gates. If they hadn't just crossed through a couple miles of desolation, Dante could almost imagine it was a city no different from any other.

"I don't suppose you have any idea what you're doing," Blays said.

"Not really," Dante said, and the admission lifted a weight from his shoulders. He gazed back at all the empty buildings. "At least we won't have any trouble finding a place to stay."

"Yeah." Blays flexed up on his calves and crossed his arms, watching the signs of life past the gate. "I was kind of expecting to've had to kill someone by now."

Dante nodded and chewed on a bite of bread. Dirt peppered their legs and they jumped back. Six feet in front of them, an arrow vibrated in the soil like a plucked string.

"Outstanding," Blays said. He twisted it from the dirt and gazed up at the walls, patting the arrow's head against his leg. "I believe that was a warning."

More dirt spattered them and again they heard the twang of an arrow coming to rest in the earth. The second had landed a mere cubit from Blays' boots. He gaped.

"Who shot that!"

Dante lifted an open palm and turned a slow semicircle in front of the gate. He didn't know whether Mallish customs would mean anything here, but figured if they were bright enough to know how bows worked they'd get the picture. Blays yanked out the second arrow and snapped it in half, casting the fragments into the street.

"Don't," Dante said, scanning the crest of the wall for movement.

"Tell them not to shoot at me."

"We're travelers," Dante called up to the fortifications.

"That's why I shot at you," a voice came back from up and to the right. In Mallish at that, not the barking language of this land. Dante squinted at the horizon of stone and sky.