"And whenever he went back to the swamps of Go Kaza," Nak finished with the satisfaction of all people telling the end of a good story, "he went wrapped in the leaves of the roto ari. He never saw another vampire again."
"I have so many questions," Dante said. "Like why the hell did you tell me this?"
"Because it's written in a book of history," Nak said. "And it's at the end of the book. The author must have included it for some reason." His voice shrank, sounding hurt. "Besides, this book is all that I've been able to find."
"But vampires aren't real."
"And neither are kappers, I suppose? Or the zombies you're so fond of raising when you feel like terrorizing your enemies? Those are nothing but myths too, are they? Excuse me for thinking that if you're traveling to a land where there might be vampires, you might want to know that you can protect yourselves by carrying roto ari with you."
"I'm sorry," Dante said, not quite believing that he was apologizing for Nak having told him a fairy tale. "I do want to know all I can learn about Tanar Atain. Even if it's nothing but myth. Oftentimes, the legends people tell can teach you a lot about them."
"Exactly as I thought," Nak said. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to return to the archives."
One of the rangers returned to warn them that there was a group of armed and hungry-looking men in a grove of trees over the next hill. Dante was inclined to detour from the road: every delay was an annoyance, and besides, there was something troubling about the idea of riding into a group of people with the intention of baiting them into violence and then slaughtering them.
Blays, however, pointed out that if they were murderous bandits, by riding around them, they'd leave the bandits free to attack the next people who came through—people who would be much less likely to be able to defend themselves. Angered by the idea that a gang of thugs was preying on his citizens and travelers, Dante led the party onward over the next hill.
The bandits' attack was as predictable as its outcome: all the highwaymen died or fled into the wilds. Dante would have been happy to leave the corpses for the wolves, but Blays insisted on burning them. They left a roaring bonfire behind them.
A piece of him was happy to have made his land a little safer. Yet it reminded him that for all you did, your work would never be done: things were always breaking down, falling apart, dissolving into chaos. That was the lesson of the cracking of Arawn's Mill: even the gods couldn't make perfection that would last down through the years. In that case, why did mortals even try?
Behind them, smoke climbed to meet the clouds, the fluttering ashes of the dead mingling with the rising wisps of nether.
16
They made camp at sunset. Dante didn't really expect the bandits who'd fled the battle to try to take revenge—that was about as likely as a surprise attack by the offspring of the pigs in the sausage they ate for dinner—but he slew a pair of field mice regardless, assigning them to patrol a wide circle around the camp. Watching them begin their mindless circuit, he was struck with an idea.
"Tonight, we're going to try something different," he told Raxa and Sorrowen. "The fine art of infiltrating a place without having to be anywhere near it. Given what you'll be doing in Bressel, this is more likely to save your skin than learning to defend against a direct strike from the nether."
He paused to let this sink in, hoping it would provide them with an extra dose of inspiration.
"Nether rests in all things," he said. "Including the dead. If you draw on the nether in a body, you can connect yourself to it, allowing you to move the creature in question around—and perceive through its senses." He smiled at Raxa. "Like those beetles I sent to track you down."
She snorted. "You mean the ones I used to lure you into an ambush?"
"You mean the ambush where we almost killed you? We can compare scores later. Right now, it's time to conduct some pest control."
Normally, he would have taught them with bugs of some kind—they were typically more numerous, and he felt no guilt killing them—but the winter had already massacred them all. Besides which, insects were harder to control, requiring more precision. Fortunately, the field mice were plentiful, foraging for anything they could find. And though a mouse was cute when it was sitting in the open eating a seed, anyone who'd seen the horrors they could inflict on a larder—to say nothing of a granary—would carry their hate with them forever.
Dante nodded to one of them pawing through the snow at the edge of the firelight. "Strike it down, then I'll show you how to connect yourself to it."
Raxa poked herself with a knife, grabbed hold of the nether, and slung a bolt at the mouse. Rather than scaling it down to the size of her target, she used a bolt of the same size they'd been using to practice with. It slammed into the target so hard that the animal's head spun away, a burst of fur whirling over the bloody snow.
"That seems excessive," Blays said. "What, was it a convicted war criminal?"
Dante kept his face neutral, nodding at Sorrowen. "Why don't you give it a try?"
The acolyte stood straight, lifting his right hand before him. Nether webbed his fingers. He thrust his hand forward, shooting a dark needle at an oblivious rodent. The mouse squealed so loud that two of the rangers leaped to their feet in surprise. As it went on squealing, Dante put a quick but gentle end to its suffering.
He gave Sorrowen a dirty look. "Were you going to let it bleed to death?" He walked over to the fallen mouse and crouched above it, holding out his hand. "Watch close."
Moving slowly, exaggerating his actions the best that he could, Dante reached inside the nether contained within the tiny body. The shadows had settled to resting positions, requiring him to send them flowing through the mouse's organs and limbs. Holding these in place, he poured a dollop of his own nether into the body.
The shadows merged. The mouse stood.
Most times, his two students couldn't have carried themselves more differently. But as they watched the little undead vermin lift its snout to test the night air, the fascination on their faces was an exact mirror of each other.
Dante withdrew his nether from the mouse, letting it collapse. "Simple as that."
Raxa went first. With the nether settling inside the body again, she yanked it this way and that, trying to force it into shape. Dante gave her a steady stream of directions, but it took her twenty minutes to get the nether apportioned and circulating as it should be.
"Now connect it to yourself," Dante said. "Go easy—"
Raxa flooded it with nether, overwhelming the careful balance she'd made of its shadows. "Gods damn it!"
She booted the corpse as hard as she could, sending it arcing into the trees, then stomped off into the dark.
Dante raised his eyebrows at Sorrowen. "I suppose that means it's your turn."
Sorrowen went to work. He had the nether in position faster than Raxa had—he had more patience for fine tasks, and experience in general—but as he tried to meld it with his own nether, the shadows inside the creature seemed to slip away, as if he didn't have a tight enough grasp on them. Doggedly, he kept trying until his hold got so shaky he could no longer keep the nether in place.
"Good effort," Dante said. "We'll try again tomorrow."
He forced a smile and went to warm himself on the other side of the campfire.
Blays plunked down beside him. "Want some unsolicited advice?"
"The question answers itself."
"Right." Blays stood back up. "Continue to enjoy your failure, then. I know it's your favorite thing."
Dante exhaled raggedly. "Let's get this over with."
"You know why you can't teach them? Because you're too good at this."
"Of course. Just like how I can't run, because I'm too fast. Or breathe, because I'm too breathe-y."
"You definitely don't have to worry about being too thinky. How long did it take you to learn to throw the shadows around?"
Dante shrugged. "A few weeks."
"And that was befo
re you met Cally. You were self-taught. You weren't even using blood yet. And you were still better than these two, who are using blood, and who've both had formal instruction in the past. You know how I had to learn? By practicing on a beach for months on end. And acquiring the help of a magic sea snail. Even then, I'm still terrible at everything but shadowalking. Learning the nether was so easy for you that you don't understand how hard it is for everyone else."
"So what should I be doing? Going back to the basics?"
"Beats me. You're the all-powerful sorcerer. I'm merely the guy who can throw just enough nether over your eyes for you to think a sunny day is overcast."
Dante spent the morning ride ruminating on this. By sundown, he'd come to the conclusion that he couldn't possibly do any worse by his students than he currently was, so what did it matter if he wasted a day or three exploring the fundamentals? Following dinner, he took Sorrowen and Raxa around to the other side of the fire, allowing them a small measure of privacy from the rangers.
"Tonight," Dante said, "I want to see how you summon the nether."
Raxa gave him a blank look. "You've seen us do that dozens of times."
"So tonight will make that dozens and one. The sooner you do as I say, the sooner we can move on to something more interesting."
Doing nothing to disguise her annoyance, she jabbed her shoulder, then brought the nether to her. Dante had her repeat this process three times, then made Sorrowen do the same.
Dante folded his arms. "If someone were to chop you two up and sew the best pieces into one person, you might make a decent nethermancer. Raxa, you rip the nether to you like you're tearing up weeds. When it hits you, it's raging like a flood. It's no wonder you have such a hard time controlling it, and that you use so much of it. As for you, Sorrowen, you're standing about like a helpless father waiting for his nine children to calm themselves down. You barely touch the shadows before putting them to use."
Sorrowen blinked. "But Brother Borrowen told us to let it flow like water."
"Then Brother Borrowen needs a dunce cap and a long sit in the corner. The nether may flow like water, but as a nethermancer, you're supposed to channel it. Like a funnel, or a canal."
Following his criticism, they were both staring at him like he'd passed out with his pants down.
"This is good," Dante said. "Because it means there's something to fix."
He cut his arm—on a whim, this time he chose his right one—and called to the nether, focusing it like water through a sluice or light through a lens.
"Not too fast," he said. "But not too slow. It might help to think of it as something alive. A dog of war, maybe. It has to be ready to obey you—but it also has to be hungry."
He released the nether, then brought it back, repeating the cycle until his students looked eager to try it for themselves.
Dante smiled. "Show me what you've got."
Sorrowen stepped forward before Raxa could move, face hardened with concentration. He held his hand aloft, fingers bent like winter-stripped branches. Shadows dripped from the nearby trees. At first they came slowly, as was his style, but then he bared his teeth, the cords in his neck flexing as he wrenched the nether to his hand. The shadows lurched forward, flinging themselves to his curled fingers.
"A little rough," Dante said.
Blays nodded, adopting a sage expression. "Then again, in a long relationship with the nether, it's good to keep things interesting."
Sorrowen repeated the drill time and again. The shadows started out reluctant to flow quickly, shuddering in resistance, but got a little smoother with each attempt. The practice was as basic as it got, yet Sorrowen was heartened by his obvious progress. When his strength gave out and the shadows refused to budge, he swore, kicking at the snow.
Dante jerked his chin at Raxa. "You're up."
She shook her hands as if to flick mud from them, then bent her knees, lifted her chin, and called to the darkness. The nether poured into her like an avalanche. Eyebrows flickering in irritating, she dismissed it, then tried again. Again, the shadows threatened to overwhelm her.
Blays scratched his jaw. "When we duked it out in the shadows, you came at me with a knife. Is that what you normally use?"
"You carry a sword when you want people to know you've got a sword," she said. "But a knife cuts just as deep—and no one knows you've got one until it's too late."
"Oh, I love all blades. But knives aren't about power, are they? They're about exerting the right pressure at the right moment."
She stared at him a moment, then held up both hands, palms out. A hazy cylinder of shadows swirled around her. This time, she seemed to be holding them back, damming the nether up through strength of her will. Arms trembling, she continued to hold it at bay, huffing steam as she sought some unseen sign. At last, finding what she was looking for, she nodded to the fringes of the light. A stream of blackness flowed toward her, forming a ball between her hands.
When she released it, Dante clapped his hands in triumph. "Do that every time, and you'll be a sorcerer before the year's out."
She tried again. A little shaky this time, but her third effort was better. Each time she repeated the summoning, she got a little faster and a little smoother. When at last the nether failed her, she grinned and stalked around the snow, walking it off like a tournament contestant who's just performed a great feat of strength.
"Now we're getting somewhere," Dante said. "Too bad we don't have anything to celebrate with."
"Yes," Blays said. "Too bad."
"Don't tell me you brought rum!"
"Okay, I won't tell you. The substance I'll be drinking with Raxa and Sorrowen is just…brown water. That makes us laugh too much and talk too loud. Must have come from a magical spring, this stuff."
He went to his saddlebags and fetched a leather skin that proved to be almost but not quite full of one of the Citadel's better batches. They sat by the fire and passed it around, sharing it with the rangers, who couldn't have been happier if Blays had discovered a pot of gold.
An hour later, Sorrowen poked at some embers with a stick, the brightening fire making his face look as stark as the canyons of the Collen Basin. "Is it true what they say?"
"Knowing 'they,'" Blays said, "whatever it is, it's a bloody lie."
"Then you didn't see the afterworld?"
"Oh, that? Yeah, we visited. Nice place."
Raxa had been staring into the fire. Hearing this, she swung her head about with drunken commitment. "You mean it's real? The hills and the stars and all that shit?"
Blays waved a hand about. "Oh, there's something beyond this. But as usual, the priests were completely wrong about everything."
Dante lifted his eyebrows at Raxa. "You don't believe in the afterworld?"
Raxa snorted. "Why would I? Everything the priests and kings have ever told us is a lie."
"Do you believe in the gods?"
"Have you seen any of them for yourself?"
"I might have."
She put her hand on her knee, pushing herself straighter. "You serious? Blays, pass that bag over here. I can't deal with this."
Blays complied. She swigged. Dante had always assumed there were nonbelievers out there somewhere. People were too different and too many for them all to believe the same thing; if you searched long enough, you could probably find someone who insisted the sun rose in the west. Even so, he couldn't recall ever having met a denier in person.
Then again, at that moment, he'd had enough rum that he couldn't recall much of anything.
Sorrowen licked his lips. "So what's it…like?"
"At first, you don't even know you're there," Dante said. "Then you get to live as you please for as long as you like. And after that…well, nobody knows."
Blays pointed at the boy. "Except all those dead people."
Sorrowen frowned, giving Dante a sidelong glance. "If that's what it's really like, then why does the priesthood tell us it's something completely different?"
"We didn't know," Dante said. "We've just been teaching what we were taught. What the Cycle tells us."
"Now that you know the truth, are you going to tell people about it?"
Blays laughed. "Can the High Priest of Arawn be a heretic to his own church?"
"Others have done it," Dante said. "It didn't go so well for Lyle." He reached for the skin full of rum. "Some day, I'll tell the people what we saw in the beyond. But they have to be made ready for it first. Their belief is who these people are. Challenge their identity with a new truth, and they'll hang you for it."
The following morning, Dante declared that it was time for Raxa to learn as much Mallish as she could. As they traveled, he, Blays, and Sorrowen spent hours pointing things out and naming them. Raxa didn't look thrilled, but she repeated the words dutifully. Seeing her dedication, Dante was almost but not quite convinced that she intended to hold up her end of the bargain, and that it wasn't just a ruse to find the right opportunity to murder him and Blays and skip back to Narashtovik. When they broke to eat lunch and swap horses, he started to teach her to read Mallish, too.
As night came, and they finished making camp, Sorrowen and Raxa resumed their training with an eagerness they hadn't shown since the first night. Dante spent a few minutes having them summon, dismiss, and resummon the nether. They still needed plenty of refinement, but each night of instruction was as precious as a gem. If they practiced their channeling as they practiced putting the nether to use, they could build two skills at once.
He got them started on intercepting bolts of nether again, but they were as clumsy as before. Even with their improved channeling, they were going to run out of strength before they'd had much chance to make any progress. He needed to teach them control, and then come back to interception.
"New plan," he said. "It's time for you two to learn to raise the undead. And do it right this time." He fished a few dead mice from his outer pocket.
Sorrowen gawked. "You…carry them with you?"
"It's easier than killing new ones every time I need them. Besides, in cold like this, they don't even smell."
The Wound of the World Page 24
