The White Tree (34 page)

"Stop shooting at us!" Blays said.

"State your business," the voice said.

Blays sucked air and looked at Dante. Dante pushed out his lip and shrugged.

"A critical error of preparation," Blays murmured. Dante nodded.

"Um."

Another arrow hissed over their heads and tinked off a wall somewhere behind them.

"State your business in Narashtovik or join the others on this wall!" the voice called out, and Dante took a step back as he reexamined the gray things stuck from the spears along its top. What was wrong with mankind?"

"Got it," Dante said to Blays, then raised his voice and tipped his face toward where he thought the guard was emplaced. "We're pilgrims of the south. We've come to pay homage to Arawn in the city that is his most holy."

"Arawn?" Blays hissed. "Are you trying to get us killed?"

Dante waited, sucking breath through his teeth. No more arrows creased the air. The walls stood silent.

"What should I have said?" he whispered to Blays. "We're merchants here to sell our invisible wagons of riches? I didn't hear you brimming with suggestions."

"What about all those great lies Robert came up with?"

"At least they've stopped trying to kill us."

"Unless they're on their way down so they can get their hands involved."

"What are your names?" the voice said, and the two boys jumped.

"John Girdle and Bob Oxman," Blays called before Dante could give their real ones. "Him being John, of course."

"What kind of names are those?" Dante whispered.

"What kind of names are those?" the voice shouted.

"The ones our fathers gave us!" Blays roared back.

He was met with more silence. The breeze ruffled the needles of the pines, the refuse in the streets.

"Very well, John Girdle and Bob Oxman," the voice said at last. "You may enter. The sermon of Samarand will be at noon three days from now."

The boys looked at each other. Dante cupped his hands to his mouth. "Where, exactly?"

"The Cathedral of Ivars," the voice said slowly. "Where did you say you were from?"

"The south," Blays said.

"Indeed," the voice said. "Enter, then."

They grabbed the reins of their horses and walked them forward. Dante kept his eyes on the part of the wall where the man had spoken from until the stone cast its shadow on them and they stepped into the next circle of the city. He glanced toward Blays as they made their way up the road and into the company of others. John Girdle and Bob Oxman indeed. What if the gatekeeper hadn't let them pass? What would they have done then? Would they have died in the street among the filth and the ruin? It was a strange world, he thought, a horrible world, an ongoing rush of violence and confusion where no place felt like home. The wrong words could make his stomach churn with loathing for his failure, could make others move to strike him down. Where did Blays find his bluster? For all his own mind had opened since he'd found the book, the only moments that didn't feel like a test that found him wanting were when he was reading or he'd said something to make Blays laugh. What was the rest of it? The running from those who would kill them, the riding to this city for the one they would kill? And if they managed to make that so, would anything be different once Samarand was dead? Wouldn't he always feel this way? Wouldn't he always be worried to the nub of his nerves by the memories of the foolish things he'd said, the times he'd tried and come up short, the moments he'd reached within himself and found he didn't have the strength to act at all?

"She's here," he said, staring dumbly at the space between his horse's ears.

"Where?" Blays said, hand snapping to his sword.

"I mean, in the city."

"Didn't we know that already?"

"Not for certain, did we?"

Blays screwed up his face. "I thought you and Cally were certain she was here. I thought that's why we decided to ride a million miles to get here. Are you saying we could have come all this way and had to turn right back around?"

"No," Dante said, slowing as they reached an intersection with another broad avenue. "Well, yes."

"You son of a bitch."

"All's well that ends well, right?" He was about to make fun of Blays' concerns some more but was suddenly too busy collecting his dropped jaw. "Do you see that?"

Blays followed his finger. "See what? That you haven't washed your finger in five years?"

"That's a temple of Arawn," Dante said, pointing down the street at the white tree standing in relief above the double doors on the face of a tall, spired structure missing most of its roof and pitted with wear on its walls. Fine-boned gargoyles stood watch on its eaves.

"So? I thought this was their capital."

"Out in the open like that? It looks hundreds of years old. It would have been burnt down a dozen different times back in Bressel."

Blays made a smacking sound with his lips, then just sighed instead.

"I suppose you want to look inside."

"Hells yes I do," Dante said. All the dread he'd felt toward himself and his surroundings a minute earlier lifted like a fever dream. What was this place?

"Should we just put these horses in our pockets?"

"What? Oh." Dante glanced around the square, the couple of men on about their business, the dark-windowed faces of steep-roofed buildings. "Let's just stash them behind some place empty. It still looks pretty clear."

Blays snorted. "Thieves are like roaches. Everything looks clear till the moment they're running off with your food."

"Then we'll steal someone else's horses later," Dante said. "Just carry anything you can't replace. Don't forget your blankie."

"And just leave our mounts for the first guy with an eye for easy money?"

"Yes? We're in the city now. They're practically a burden. Oh, what should we do with the horses. Should we stable them? When did we last pay the groomsman? Should we just tie them up? What if someone robs us? The horror! Oh, if only we didn't have these horses!" Dante stopped waving his hands around. "You see?"

"But I like them," Blays said, patting his horse's neck.

"There's a time to let things go," Dante said. He turned his horse down a narrow road and they wandered a while in the rows of mostly-whole buildings lined against the city wall. He chose one that looked particularly abandoned—the trash looked old and gray, no bootprints in the yard, no smoke from the chimney or any of the other holes in the roof—and they tied their horses to a pine sapling that had shot up through the front stoop. Dante led Blays back toward the temple, orienting himself by the wall behind him and the cluster of spires toward the city's center.

The door creaked like the planks of a ship but opened easily enough. Weak sunlight diffused through the broken and shutterless windows. The ground floor was filth. Apple cores and chicken bones and eye-wild potatoes and small moldering piles that may have been edible a year or five ago or, judging by smell, may already have been eaten once. Clouds of crumpled paper sat in front of the fireplace of the front hall. Dante smoothed one against his knee. The alphabet was foreign, but he knew enough to know the name of Arawn when he saw it.

They stepped carefully past the refuse to the back rooms beyond the mostly-empty great hall and found more of the same. Clearly the temple had been used more recently for the housing of the penniless than as the home of the god. A wooden staircase, missing only a few slats, rose to the second floor. Dante tested its footing, keeping close to where the steps met the wall. They squeaked like cancerous rats. Blays followed him up, face tight, spitting curses each time the boards popped or groaned.

"We could have found these same wondrous treasures out in the gutters, you know."

"But not this," Dante said, crossing the landing to a bookshelf behind some smashed-up tables. Three-quarters empty, and when he picked up what works were left most of them sloughed rotten pages over his feet or dangled as empty covers, their leaves stolen for starting fires or far less dignified ends. A handful of intact and legible volumes remained, however, and three of those were even in a language he could read. He wedged them into his pack and turned in a circle, looking out on the dust and the kipple. "Let's try the spires."

"Let's," Blays agreed much too enthusiastically, but he tailed Dante up the solid stone stairs they found at the far rear of the temple. The only things left in the upper floors were a number of plain iron candelabras and horn-hewn statuettes, a lot of wood chips, and a few axe-scarred tables which had evidently been too much trouble to haul downstairs and burn. Dante picked up a thumb-sized carved imp and handed it to Blays.

"Here. He'll ward away your troubles."

Blays held it up in Dante's face and frowned. He held it beside his ear, shook it.

"It's not working."

"Funny," Dante said. The temple had long since been scoured of nearly everything that could be sold or set on fire and they finished their search within minutes and reentered the street. The horses hadn't been stolen from where they'd tied them in front of the old house by the wall, and finding the premises no less dirty than the streets and far cleaner than the temple or either of the house's neighboring edifices, the boys settled in. The sun was just saying hello to the western horizon. Dante lit a couple candles looted from the temple and set them at either end of the house's main room, i.e. the only other room besides the one the front door opened on.

"We should find the Cathedral of Ivars tomorrow," he said, easing himself to the floor. He rocked back and forth on the hardwood. "Feels weird not to have bumps beneath your ass."

Blays gave him a look, then moved on. "Going to be a lot of people. I get the impression we weren't the first pilgrims the gatekeeper'd seen."

"I'm just saying we know she'll be there. We should see if it's an option."

"I doubt it'll be a good one."

"Thus the scouting." Dante exhaled hard. "It can't hurt to look. Maybe it'll be perfect."

Blays shrugged. "Let's not be in some big hurry to make it the first option. I'd prefer to leave here on my feet than on my back."

Dante got out one of the books he'd found in the old church. Its cover bore the inky silhouette of a man holding out his hand to a rat.

"It's going to be a risk no matter how we do it."

"There are risks and there are risks," Blays said, wandering around the far side of the room. He slipped a finger under one of the slats nailed over the window and gave an exploratory tug. "You know?"

"I know," Dante said, but three days from then they'd be looking on Samarand with their own eyes. Whatever risks it carried, whatever else it would mean for his other goal within the city of the dead, the opportunity would be there, and if it looked right, they'd be fools not to take it. "We'll see how things look tomorrow."

Through force of habit they were up well before the sun. Dante rose first and lit a candle in the other room and skimmed the new additions to his library. The first was a sort of rebuttal to the
Cycle
, fleshing out historical detail of its major figures and often diverging into windy lectures about the way its theology failed to account for the fundamental and contradictory truths of Mennok and Carvahal. Its penultimate chapter purported to examine the final third of the
Cycle of Arawn
, the part written in ancient Narashtovik, and Dante plunged into it with a pounding heart, but after a dozen-odd pages Dante found it scarce on actual references and long on opinion. Fascinating to the author's scholarly circle, Dante was certain, and would perhaps have been of interest to him if he'd first been familiar with the source material, but for the meantime infinitely boring.

The second tome, the one with the man and the rat on its cover, was, as anyone could have guessed, a slim volume devoted entirely to Jack Hand. A lucky find, but irrelevant to his present purpose. He smiled and set it aside. The third told the tale of the Two-Part War, what later became known as the Second Scour. Dante's knowledge of that time was hazy at best and he read until Blays woke, absorbing the tale of Mallon's ill-fated crusade four hundred years ago through the Dundens into Gask, where hard winters had regularly left their forces under-armed and poorly fed, weakening them until they'd been in no condition to drive out the Gaskan counter-thrust into their northeast territories, which had menaced the neighboring lands until King Sarl I had been forced to sign treaty granting Arawn's faithful in all Mallon freedom of worship, a treaty that had been broken eight years later when the other houses declared they could no longer stand for such blasphemy in their homeland. Sleep had mostly dried away the sunken mood Dante'd entered after their encounter with the arrow-firing gatekeeper, and as he read the last of his depression burned away, leaving his mind light and swift, renewed under the warm glare of written words.

But for Dante's finds, interesting as they were, he was yet no closer to understanding the remainder of the
Cycle
than when they'd left Shay. Somewhere in this city he had to find the key.

They ate a cold breakfast and decided to venture out on foot, reasoning the horses might command respect, but they'd command double that in attention. Dante was certain the Arawnites were still searching for him, but was fairly convinced they'd lost his trail and didn't know how to get it back. He doubted they had anything more than a vague description of his appearance and wanted to give no watchers any reason to look his way twice.

After twenty minutes of aimless walking and another thirty of fruitless attempts to get directions from other pedestrians, Dante was considering heading back for the horses if only so the next time his Mallish words were met with a sneer he could just trample the offender to death. Finally they lounged in an unused doorway on one of the busier streets and tried to look undisturbably dangerous till they heard words they could understand. They fell on the two men who'd spoken their language, swords swinging from their belts, maneuvering themselves between the men and the open street.