The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Your world exists to make this one feel like a blessing. You can feel it's true, can't you?"

  Blays folded his arms. Steam rose from his sleeves. "Why are you still here? Why not move on to the Worldsea? That's what you're supposed to do, isn't it?"

  She smiled at him. "Hate. Hate for those who flensed us from our land."

  "And we hate the Tauren," Niles said. "That's why we have to go back."

  The woman's smile fell away. She moved before him, gliding, and stuck her finger in his face. "You lie. You tell yourself tonen so you don't have to face the darkness. It isn't the Tauren that propels your struggle."

  His voice was a whisper. "No."

  "Then why? What drives you to come here where you don't belong?"

  "Because we hate ourselves! For what we did to you! We've devoted everything to your forgiveness and it's still not enough."

  She sputtered with laughter. "How could it be? All your pleading and sobbing, has it brought any of us back? Returned the island that was taken from us?"

  "We know we can't do that," Niles said, voice ragged. "Sometimes I don't know why we try. None of us were alive when it happened. Why do we still feel responsible?"

  "You didn't just kill us. You took our skin. You're still wearing it today."

  "I think we—they—did that to honor you, in their way. To let you live on in the only way they knew how. They would have undone it, if they could. But they couldn't. Neither can we. But we'll do anything to make it right."

  The Dresh woman sighed out all her anger, turning to face the sea. "You say this. Yet you let the Tauren profane our sacred place."

  "The Dreaming Peaks?"

  "The only part of your world that still matters to us."

  "Do you want us to clear them out?" Dante said. "And then you'll tell us what we need to know?"

  "We're getting so tired of this." She crouched beside the waves, letting her fingertips dangle in the lapping water. "All the bowing and scraping. The Dreamers—so patient. So kindly. So exhausting. Maybe it's time we set the past aside." She clawed her fingers into the purple sand, scooping up a handful and casting it into the waves. "Toss the Tauren out of our place. And I'll find out what you want to know."

  "But they're too strong," Niles said.

  "No—you're too weak. Until you've proven your strength, you'll have nothing." She picked up her spear and stood. "Don't come back until then. If you do, all of the Dresh will pass into the Worldsea. And all forgiveness will go with us."

  She walked down the shore. The three jone padded beside her, nosing at the shells dotting the beach.

  "Well, we still don't have answers," Blays said. "But we weren't dropped into anything hideous, either. I'll count that as a win."

  Winden shifted her feet. "I don't know if we can trust her to keep her end of the bargain."

  "We have to," Niles said. "If we had any better options, we would never have come here in the first place. We have to take back the Dreaming Peaks."

  Dante eyed him. "Is this why you're helping me? To continue your fight against the Tauren?"

  Niles folded his arms. "Like I knew what they'd ask of us? Coming here was your idea."

  "Still, it's mighty convenient. To get what I want, I have to help you get what you've wanted all along."

  "This is the path we've been given. If you'd rather walk it alone, that's your call."

  Overhead, the fog returned, blocking out the sun. "We'll deal with whoever's in the Dreaming Peaks. But that's as far as I'll get involved."

  "If we hit them there, you know they'll retaliate," Blays said. "They might even come for Kandak."

  "They'll do that eventually no matter what we do. By hitting them in the Peaks, at least we'll have softened them up for the Kandeans."

  Niles had said that all they had to do to go home was to fall asleep. They headed into the shade and lay down. Despite the dense atmosphere, there was plenty of light. Between that and everything swimming through his head, Dante was afraid it would take hours to fall asleep. But after a few minutes, it greeted him as if it had been waiting for him.

  He inhaled through his nose, taking in the dewy mountain air. He opened his eyes. He lay on the blankets in the temple. Outside, it was dark. He felt so hungry and shaky that he could have believed they'd been under for days.

  The others stirred on their blankets and mattresses, groaning. While they stretched and rubbed their eyes, Dante extended his hand and reached for the ether. The room remained dark. His heart beat faster. Frustration twisted a cold knife in his heart.

  And then light glimmered on the back of his hand.

  He grinned. "Winden. I need paper and ink."

  She sat up, massaging her temples. "And I need a minute to recover before I start taking orders."

  Blays stood, planting his palms in the small of his back and stretching backwards. "You have got to be the most boring person I know. We just got back from the underworld, where we were tasked with casting down an awful villain, and the first thing you want to do is write in your diary about it?"

  Dante got up to search the room. "I have to get this down. What we saw there—it's worthy of a Cycle of its own."

  He found quills and a pot of ink—possibly the same instruments Niles had used to write him the fraudulent paternal letter of summons—and located a blank book among the volumes on the shelves. He retired to one of the back rooms and began to write. An hour later, the light of his torchstone faded and he ignited a candlefruit. Hours later, this dimmed and he used it to light another.

  Before the second fruit faded, daylight crept through the open walls. Dante finished, leaving some thirty blank pages for later notes, and sat back. His hand was cramped and his back wasn't much better off, but he felt energized. At last, some small good had come from traveling to the islands. Even if he couldn't leave here, his work could. And what he'd learned would change everything they knew in Narashtovik.

  The others had gotten some sleep, but were soon woken by the cardinals cheeping from outside. After a meal of san gruel, the four of them gathered in the shade of the porch.

  "Do we know how many people the Tauren have in the Dreaming Peaks?" Blays said.

  Niles pursed his lips. "Both our scouts have been lost. We had to pull back behind the Broken Valley. Before that, reports were they had some twenty men there. And at least one sorcerer at all times."

  "That doesn't sound like much."

  "They may be counting on us not wanting to fight on sacred ground. Or they may believe we wouldn't dare provoke them. It's also possible they intend to use it as a staging ground for more raids, but don't want to commit too many troops there before they're ready."

  "Can we call on your warriors for help? Or do we still need to keep our endeavors a secret?"

  "I'll tell our people we have to drive the enemy out of the holy peaks." Niles smiled wanly. "It won't even be a lie. It's a strategical maneuver, too. Seizing the overland route will make it much harder for the Tauren to strike Kandak."

  "We need hard numbers," Dante said. "Or planning is pointless."

  "I might be able to drum up thirty troops. Would that be enough?"

  "If your reports on the Tauren are accurate. How soon can you have them ready?"

  "This same afternoon. It will take time to cross the valley, though. We tore down the ropes to keep the Tauren from using the crossing against us."

  Dante nodded. "Winden and I will deal with that. You bring your troops up to us as fast as you can. If you can spare any shells, I'm sure we could use them."

  "What about me?" Blays said.

  "I think it's time for you to deal with your fear of narrow ropes over high places."

  Niles headed down the trail toward town. Dante, Blays, and Winden traipsed deeper into the mountains, crossing the bridge above the raging ocean on their way to the Broken Valley.

  There, as promised, all the ropes had been torn down. But vines hung from the branches like leafy cloaks, trailing down the sides of
the plateaus and mingling with the roots holding tight to the cliffs leading to the bottom.

  Dante gazed down into the thicket crushing the passage between the plateaus. "Any idea where the ropes wound up?"

  "Most were hauled away," Winden said. "Those that weren't? Tossed down there." She pointed to the right. Below, ropes and tackle tangled the brush.

  "Want to be useful?" Dante said to Blays. "Go get those."

  Blays eyed the ravine. "Know what, I don't think this is where my talents are best spent. I want Niles' job instead. I can walk down a hill and go yell at troops with the best of them."

  Tree roots held fast to the sides of the rock. Blays worked his way down, aided in a handful of spots by harvested vines. He carried a machete with him.

  "There won't be nearly enough ropes to cross," Winden said. "You mean to harvest across the gaps?"

  "That's right." Dante moved to the cliff's edge. "It'll be hours faster than getting the ropes back up. Now let's find out how strong these vines are."

  They tested several, hanging from them with all their weight. Some of the single vines snapped, dumping them to the ground, but two vines together was more than enough for one person, and three braided could hold both of them at once.

  Dante kneeled by the cliff's edge and drew the nether to a length of vines. They extended, tumbling down like rivulets of water. They snaked across the tops of the brush, wriggled up the roots on the side of the next plateau, found hold in the nearest tree, and pulled taut.

  By the time he had the first gap bridged, Blays had climbed back up with the first of the ropes, which they used to haul up the others. Methodically, they worked their way across the valley. Where the ropes were long enough to cross, Blays tied them to a tree, climbed down into the ravine below, and then climbed back up the neighboring plateau, securing the end of the line there.

  Dante had been hoping to span the entire valley that same day, but Winden's hold on the nether flagged less than a quarter of the way across. He still wasn't all that skilled at harvesting, but he made it almost halfway before his own strength gave out. He tried feeding what little ether he could draw to the plants, but they didn't so much as budge.

  Warriors started trickling in by mid-afternoon. They carried spears and knives, some metal and others bone. Their arrows were tipped with bone or obsidian. Unlike the armies in Mallon and Gask, there were as many women as men, their hair pulled back into braids. Some bore ropes and climbing gear they used to span several more gaps. As night neared, Niles arrived with a final band of four more soldiers, putting their numbers at 23.

  "It was as many as I could muster," he said. "The people are scared to strike back. They know it will provoke a war."

  Blays scratched his neck. "Then why did any of them agree to fight?"

  "Because if we give up the Dreaming Peaks, then we've already lost."

  They camped on the plateaus overnight. During all the thrashing about down in the ravines, Dante had stumbled on any number of dead animals. He raised a rabbit and something that resembled a ring-tailed squirrel to stand watch on the far side of the valley.

  By morning, they'd seen no sign of Tauren scouts. With the help of Blays and several soldiers, Dante and Winden finished crossing to the other side.

  It took a day and a half of travel to reach the fringe of the jungle. Beyond, the trees thinned, replaced by grass and rocks.

  "Blays and I will scout ahead," Dante told Niles. "Be ready to march after sunset. We'll strike in the middle of the night."

  He and Blays continued on, with the rabbit and the ringtail scouting ahead. As the undead vermin neared the colorful, bubbling pools, a man carrying a short bow and a thin sword made his way down the slopes. He wore iron bands around his joints and moved from rock to rock with the fluid lope of a lifelong scout. Dante grabbed Blays' sleeve and pulled him behind a shelf of basalt.

  "Please tell me you're not about to try to kiss me," Blays said.

  "Scout ahead," Dante said. "Quarter mile."

  "Then let's leave him be."

  "Don't tell me you think we're getting out of this without killing anyone."

  "We shouldn't kill this one right now. Because if we do, we'll tip off the others before we're ready to strike."

  "Oh. Right."

  The scout jogged onward, pausing on outcrops to survey the long downward slope. Dante shadowed him with the rabbit. The man stopped well short of the jungle, turning back for the mountains. Dante and Blays continued upward toward the high single peak and the pass running beside it. The steam from the flatulent-smelling pools obscured them, providing decent cover.

  They crossed a small ridge. In the dip below, flies buzzed as thickly as rain. No less than thirty of the golden-furred monkeys lay strewn across the rocks, hacked and bashed. Judging by the smell (bad, but not gut-turningly so) and the level of bloat (minimal), they'd been dead less than a day.

  Blays kneeled beside the nearest. He reached out and touched the beast's golden fur. "Why would they do this?"

  Dante pointed to the pieces of a broken shaden shell scattered around one of the bodies. "Looks like they were thieving."

  "I'm going to pretend we were sent here to get their revenge."

  "I think we're close enough. Let's hunker down and I'll send in the spies."

  They stopped in a hollow. Dante sent the ringtail and the bunny the rest of the way up the slopes. The Tauren had been busy since claiming the Dreaming Peaks. Rocks had been dislodged from the heights, clogging the entry from the north. A wooden hutch had been built on both sides of the rise overlooking the rubble. Both structures contained a sentry. As the ringtail advanced past them, Dante made sure to make it stop to poke around the pebbles, flick its tail, and otherwise not look like it was a puppeted zombie.

  Beyond the wall, the fields of flowers were empty of workers. A single warrior walked down the path to the great hall where the Dreamers had slept. The ringtail followed the man inside. There, a dozen soldiers snored in the beds or kneeled around low tables playing dice games that looked like woten, but involved the exchange of iron coins rather than truths.

  "Counting at least fifteen soldiers so far," Dante murmured. "No sign of sorcerers."

  Outside, the rabbit hopped languidly through the grass. It came to a trail at the base of the cliffs. Dante directed it up a switchback too narrow for two people to pass each other. Very easy to defend. Dante wasn't that surprised when the rabbit emerged on a shelf of rock where two soldiers sat before a round wooden structure. Small branches stuck from the building's sides, sprouting leaves. It was new—probably to keep out the monkeys—and had been harvested here. A door stood in its face, but the rabbit found nothing to crawl through. The windows were placed too high for monkeys to get to, let alone a bunny. A stem-like chimney jutted from the middle of the roof.

  Dante still hadn't seen any of the Dreamers or their monk wardens. He sent the rabbit back down the slopes and the ringtail up the rocks behind the harvested structure, meaning to search for a way in.

  While the ringtail was still working its way up the crags, the rabbit entered a grassy field. There, people in plain clothes dug listlessly at sprouts and weeds, their bodies rickety from disuse. They appeared to be preparing fields to grow crops for the occupiers. When Dante had last seen the place, there had been roughly forty Dreamers. Now, there were only a dozen, with no sign of the monks. The laborers were overseen by three armed soldiers seated in the shade, along with one of Vordon's nethermancers, a hefty man who wore short pants and no shirt.

  While the ringtail searched fruitlessly for a way inside the round structure, one of the two guards rose and opened the door. The creature scampered in beside him. Seamless wooden bins were grown to line the sides of the walls. They were covered tightly with nets. The soldier grabbed a sack from a shelf, tossing shelled nuts into his mouth.

  After he walked out, the ringtail hopped on up one of the bins. A foot of water filled its bottom. Shaden oozed across a layer of sand and rocks
.

  Dante withdrew from the eyes of his scouts and leaned back against a rock. "They've got roughly twenty soldiers and, as far as I can tell, a single nethermancer. On numbers alone, we could take them."

  "Then what's the wrinkle?" Blays said.

  "Shaden. They have a storehouse full of them. We can't go against that. With that many shells for them to draw on, our people could be torn apart."

  "So kill the nethermancer first."

  "That might work," Dante said. "But if they've got another one I don't know about, we'll be walking into a deathtrap. And you know how I feel about deathtraps."

  "Then the solution suggests itself. We steal the shaden."

  "Can you shadowalk in?"

  "Depends. What are they housed in?"

  "A house."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "And what is this house made out of?"

  "Harvested wood. Basically seamless."

  "No good, then. I can only walk through stone."

  "How is it you can move through rock—proverbial for its hardness—but a few boards will stop you in your tracks?"

  "Don't ask me. You're the expert in mystical doings, Sir High Priest of Arawn. And if the People of the Pocket haven't figured this out in the last thousand years, I doubt whether we'd be able to do so in the next few hours."

  "So we sneak in together," Dante said. "I'll heat the lock. Break it off. And you shadowalk through the door."

  Blays squinted at him. "Why do I need to be invisible to walk through an open door?"

  "For one thing, it will be a lot harder to see you."

  "But not you. Is there any other way inside?"

  "It's got a few windows," Dante said. "But they're barely a hand's span wide. Way too narrow to squeeze through."

  "For a person, maybe." Blays grinned. "It's time for the revenge of the monkeys."

  ~

  Under cover of darkness, twenty golden-furred monkeys climbed through the heights to the right of the sentries, picked their way across holds far too small for human hands, and came to the bluff above the Harvested building.

  Below, a single sentry watched the switchback trail. The monkeys were reanimated corpses, prone to clumsiness, but they retained some of their long-limbed grace in death. They formed a chain down to ground level, descending in silence. The windows were too high for them to jump to, but at the back of the building, they assembled a simian pyramid. Once this was several monkeys high and in reach of the window, the other monkeys climbed up their peers and squeezed through. Inside, they plucked the snails from their bins and used the shelves to climb back up to the window. Any rustling they made was covered by the steady winds.