Pryer lowered his head. "I'll make note of this policy at once."
Gladdic clenched his teeth, waiting for his anger to retreat. "The Tauren had subjugated nearly the entire island. How were they defeated?"
"An alliance united against them. Spearheaded by the Kandeans."
"What is the extent of the Tauren losses?"
"Vordon is dead. Deladi's army lost at least five hundred men, with reports of as many as a thousand. The Deladi tolaka have splintered. Most have already made peace with the other regions."
"And the shaden?"
"There are none available. Some were spent in the war, but there seems to be a great deal of hoarding. Even if supplies are restored, the Tauren won't be able to provide a tenth of what they were giving us before."
Gladdic closed his eyes. Years of work dashed apart overnight. And through no fault of his own. In fact, he had asked to send Mallish soldiers to the island to buttress the Tauren. He had been denied on the grounds that the soldiers would suffer the island's plague, and would hence be stuck there for the rest of their lives.
Yet now that their Tauren allies had fallen, it exposed how short-sighted such thinking had been. How many lives would it have cost to garrison the island? Three hundred? Five? What a paltry sum to pay for the permanent security of the Mallish nation.
Gladdic spoke slowly, keeping his emotions in check. "We made very certain the Tauren had all they needed to claim the island. I want a full investigation of how they could have lost the war."
"That may not be necessary." Pryer shifted his gaze past Gladdic's right ear. "The reason the Kandeans won is because they had the aid of Dante Galand."
The name hit Gladdic's head like a maul. "Dante Galand?"
"Yes, my lord. He used his skills with the dark art to lay waste to the Tauren army. There are rumors that he's the one who stirred up the war between the islanders in the first place."
"How reliable is this?"
"Any number of Kandeans will swear to it. Descriptions from the Tauren soldiers support their claim."
"Deeply troubling. If Galand is…" His mouth clicked shut. The loss of the shaden's power was a disaster. Yet if Galand was behind it, it was also an opportunity. One that could finally convince the king to move on Narashtovik.
Unlike others he knew, Gladdic had never spoken directly to the gods. Sometimes, however, he was granted flashes of insight so deep and pure that they could only have come from the divine. In an instant, he understood whose eyes had so disturbed him at the executions. And that Galand was here to kill him. He wasn't sure why—either the man had some personal tie to the Plagued Islands, or he'd discerned Gladdic's involvement—but Gladdic knew in his soul that it was so. His skin crawled with simultaneous dread and thrill.
"I require time to digest this information." He gestured toward the door. "Let Horstad know that no one is to disturb me tonight under any circumstances. Do you understand?"
"Not even the Eldor?"
"If the Eldor wishes to see me, he will summon me to him. Now leave me."
Pryer bent at the knee, backed up two steps, and turned for the door. Once he was gone, Gladdic bolted the door, climbed the stairs to the crow's nest in the temple's modest spire, and gazed across the raked pebbles and trimmed hedges of the yard. Again, he touched both ether and nether, and again, he felt no foreign spiders scrambling across the strands of the celestial web.
Yet they had returned to the city. And their first act had been to come watch him. To underestimate them, to downplay their intentions, would be to risk his life.
He remained in the spire until twilight. When at last he descended, he checked each room of the temple. All were empty. He barred the front doors, moved to his inner sanctum, and bolted the entry.
The bones were already in place, concealed beneath the floorboards, arranged in their hexagon. He walked to his desk, removed a knife from the drawer, and lifted his robe, exposing his stomach. He pressed the knife against his skin until blood welled forth. He held his arms out to the shadows. They rushed from all corners of the room. His outstretched hands shook. The ritual was wrong. Foul. A corruption of life and sky. He could feel its wrongness in the heat of his blood and the cool of the shadows. Yet experiencing its allure—the rush of it, the power—allowed him to understand the minds of those he stood against.
"Come forth," he whispered.
A silhouette emerged from the heart of the shadows.
3
One by one, the condemned were marched up the stage. Dante watched from the rear of the plaza, shaded by the overhang of a pub. Blays stood beneath the awning of the bakery next door. Close enough to support each other if they were spotted, but far enough away that they wouldn't be recognized together.
Across a sea of hundreds of citizens, Gladdic ascended his platform and spoke.
Dante listened to his rhetoric and condemnations with a growing sense of disquiet. Mallon had always persecuted Arawn's followers. That's what had driven Dante to Narashtovik in the first place. Back then, though, you heard very little talk of heresy and blasphemy, largely because every Arawnite with a lick of sense left Mallon at the first opportunity.
So what was the increased fuss about? Had an Arawnite underground blossomed in Bressel? Or had Gladdic and his ilk decided that, after witnessing the revival of Narashtovik, Arawn's ancient homeland, Mallon would be the next to fall—unless they put a stop to it here and now?
Whatever the case, Gladdic was a believer. Dante could see it in his gestures. Hear it in his voice. Dante was too, of course, but there was a frenzy within Gladdic's eyes that marked him as something more: the breed of fanatic for whom there can be no coexistence.
Gladdic made a final pronouncement. The red-trimmed haldac mounted the stage.
Dante moved to the neighboring awning and stood beside Blays. "Let's get out of here."
Blays kept his eyes on the stage. "Why?"
"We're not going to do this here, are we?"
"Not unless you want to be added to the main event. But I'd like to see what they're about to do."
"I'll give you a clue," Dante said. "It's going to involve a lot of dangling."
"Right. And seeing that will cement my resolve to see this through."
Dante fell silent. Once upon a time, Blays had held no qualms about putting the blade to anyone who needed it. But times had changed and so had Blays. If he needed to witness the executions to hone his motivation, Dante wasn't going to complain about having to see another twelve dead bodies.
The next few minutes unfolded exactly as expected. They kicked. Bulged their eyes. Spun in erratic circles. Dante thought, for a moment, about killing them from afar to put them out of their misery, but he couldn't risk drawing Gladdic's attention. Eventually, the stage went still.
"Well," Dante said. "Looks like justice has been served."
Blays turned down the corners of his mouth. "Justice is a bit like baking macaroons, isn't it? One misstep, and you've ruined everything."
"Not everything can be compared to cookies."
In front of the stage, Gladdic was banging on about heresy some more. As Dante and Blays withdrew from the plaza, Dante sent his two dead moths soaring high above the square, circling erratically. He might well have been able to kill Gladdic on the spot, but the assassination had to be clean. If the act exposed him, it could mean war between Mallon and Narashtovik. The city had had a few years to recover since the wars with Gask and then Spiren, but it could only bring to bear a fraction of the resources Mallon had at its command.
They returned to the inn without any trouble. Before leaving to see the execution, they'd left a note asking Naran to stay put if he returned in their absence. He awaited them now, along with Jona.
"We've located Gladdic," Dante said. "Wherever he goes, I'll follow him. We may be able to move on him this same night."
Naran smiled grimly. "I was hoping this news would bring me more joy. The most that can be said is that it feels like catching y
our breath after a deep dive."
"Considering the alternative is drowning, that sounds pretty great."
"Is there anything I can do to help?"
"As a matter of fact, there is. Some weeks ago, you told me a group of norren had set up trade in the city?"
"Indeed. They came to sell their craftwork for local silver."
"That's excellent," Dante said. "Because, before we risk our lives and nation going after Gladdic, I'd better alert my people as to what we're doing."
"There are any number of courier services in Bressel. Why the norren?"
"They're the only people I trust to deliver a letter. After all, Blays and I have been made official members of a clan."
"Hang on," Blays said. "You want to send a letter?"
Dante eyed him. "That's the idea. Or do you think we should yell really, really loud?"
"I think this is like Lyle's parable of the man who withheld a carrot from the starving family and showed them how to grow a garden instead."
"Rude and obtuse?"
"Send Narashtovik a letter, if you want to tell them something once. But if you want to talk with them, you should send them a loon."
"The loons were broken when we traveled to the Plagued Islands." Dante's cheeks went hot. "But I can make more."
"Allowing us to talk to them as much as we want. Though for the sake of your reputation, you might want to leave out the part where you thought it was a better idea to send them a letter."
"Captain Naran, please arrange a meet. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to give some rats a very bad day."
Jona and the other crewman gave him a quizzical look. Naran stood to go. Dante followed him outside and down the stairs. While Naran trotted off into the depths of the city, Dante located the nearest alley.
It smelled like most of the city's alleys did, which was to say like shit. For once, though, this was to the advantage. The very rot that repelled humans drew numerous rats. After a glance to all sides, Dante summoned the shadows, killed two rodents with lances of black force, and pocketed the bodies. He returned upstairs.
"Fair warning," he told Jona and the other sailor as he removed the corpses from his pockets and set them on the table. "This is about to get messy."
Without being asked, Blays provided him with three knives of varying length and thickness. With practiced quickness, Dante chopped off the rats' heads, peeled away the skin, and scooped out the pink-gray mush inside. After a thorough rinse in a bucket of water, he was left with two relatively clean skulls.
Blays scooped the shavings and remnants into an empty bucket. The two crewmen watched in fascination and disgust. Using the butt of his heftiest knife, Dante cracked the skulls, separating a portion of the ear canal and jaw from each, then pairing a piece of ear bone from one rat with the jaw from the other.
He got out his own knife—thin-bladed, with a handle carved from a deer's antler by a norren craftsman—and cut the back of his well-scarred left arm. At the first whiff of blood, nether flocked as thickly as migrating swallows. Dante poured the dark blots into the pieces of skull while at the same time drawing forth the shadows that lurked inside the bone itself. As carefully as he could, he linked the nether within each ear to the opposite rat's jaw.
He eased his touch back from the components. The links held true, the shadows within them moving as slackly as the currents of a broad and level stream. This was the most delicate part of the construction: if the links were faulty, the nether would bleed away, leaving the bones inert. Yet after a full minute, they remained strong.
Dante picked up a set of paired bones and handed them to Blays. "Excuse the blood."
Blays took the pieces. "If I had a penny for every time I've heard you say that, then I would have a few hundred pennies."
As the two smugglers watched in consternation, Blays headed into the hall, closing the door behind him. Dante held the other two pieces of rat to his ear. Muffled footsteps receded down the hall.
"Testing," Blays' disembodied voice said into his ear. "Ahem: the recipient of this message owes its sender a sum of no less than one thousand silver chucks."
"Denied," Dante said. "Now get back here."
"Er," Jona said. "Last time I checked, we are here."
Dante waved a hand. "I'm talking to Blays."
"No, you're not?"
The door swung open. Blays walked in, juggling the two pieces of skull in one hand. "Worked like a charm. Which I suppose it is."
Jona rose halfway from his seat. "Hold on. You mean to say that you—" he pointed at Dante— "were in here, and he was out there. And you heard each other?"
Dante eyed the two men. "What you're seeing is a military secret. If this fell into the hands of King Charles, or King Moddegan of Gask, it could cause the loss of thousands of innocent lives."
"What're you suggesting? That we'd sell them the secret?"
"Don't tell me it wasn't your first thought."
"My first thought?" Jona folded his arms. "Sure was. Luckily, I'm so rich with thoughts I had a second one. And this time, I thought about how Charles is the bastard in charge of the people who killed Captain Twill. As for Gask, they've been beheading pirates and smugglers since the days of Lyle. I've lost a dozen friends to their axes. To hell with all of them."
Dante turned to the other sailor, an older man named Fenk who grew profuse gray whiskers. "What about you?"
Fenk snorted, shoulders hopping. "I look like I give a shit and a half about the lords of the land? I'm a seaman, through and through."
"Glad that's settled."
"And without any death threats," Blays said. "That's a first."
Dante ran his finger over the delicate portion of rat jaw. "They're a norren invention. Ingenious design. If they get us back in touch with Narashtovik, we'll be able to call for aid against anything that crops up here."
Jona scratched his multi-colored beard. "You talk like we're starting a war. Ain't we only killing Gladdic?"
"That's the plan. But wars have been started for far less."
The loons were almost but not quite finished. Between the pockets of Blays and the two smugglers, Dante turned up twine, shell, and even a bit of wire. He used these to tie the pieces of each bone together. When he finished, he had a pair of dangling objects that resembled norren earrings. Of rather poor quality, admittedly. If they'd been in Gask, that would be a clue that they weren't norren at all—the norren being fastidious craftsmen. But they weren't in Gask. They were in Bressel, where norren were virtually unheard of.
With the loons completed, there was nothing left to do but keep the moths' eyes on Gladdic's temple, and wait for Naran to return from arranging the meet with the norren. A few minutes later, a robed monk departed the temple. Wary of the disguise stunt Gladdic had pulled on them in their last encounter, Dante sent one of the moths after the monk as he traveled on foot through the city. The man arrived at a temple of Gashen—there were no signs out front, but the brutal architecture identified it at once—and entered.
Dante kept the moth right behind him as he found a cell, got a book from the shelf, and began to read. Ten minutes later, Dante was reasonably sure the man was exactly what he appeared to be, yet he left the moth with the monk anyway.
There was no other activity until Naran came back at sunset, sweaty from travel. "The norren were disinclined to act as letter-carriers."
"What?" Dante lurched to his feet. "But they must be sending people back and forth to the Norren Territories all the time. It wouldn't cost them anything to bring something back with them."
"Which I argued to no avail. However, after I let slip that the interested party was from Narashtovik, they became rather more accommodating. They await you on the north end of the city."
Blays squinted at the captain. "You couldn't have opened with that part?"
They waited until the fall of twilight to head downstairs and trot north toward the meet. The trek took them through a number of piers, then around an enclave of white s
tone buildings, and at last to the northern fringe just outside the gates, which remained open despite the coming night. There, lively bunches of merchants haggled under the gleam of pungent oil lanterns. Shoppers and pedestrians circulated between the stalls and shacks.
The norren had staked out a small field between a stable and an inn whose frame leaned as off-kilter as the drunks supporting themselves against it. The norren had put up half a dozen of their characteristic round yurts. Typically, their walls were thickly insulated to deal with the harsh winters of the hills of the Norren Territories. To deal with the heat of high summer in Bressel, the yurt walls had been replaced with single-layered deer hides, most of which were currently rolled up to let breezes blow in and out.
Eight norren sat on the trampled grass outside their tents, gathered loosely around a small cook fire. Though they were seated, their size was as imposing as a bear. The shortest of them would top six feet, with most of the men closer to seven. Their bodies were as stout as barrels, their limbs as thick as the branches of a mature oak. The men grew beards that grew from the base of their throats to the heights of their cheeks. The only small thing about them was their ears. These were round and petite, almost lost in the tangle of hair and beard.
Dante came to a stop fifteen feet away. The norren looked up from their work on various wood carvings, paintings, and fletching that represented their nulla, the life-craft the norren dedicated themselves to perfecting.
"Pardon me for not introducing myself properly," Dante said. "But I believe my friend Captain Naran has already done so."
Two men and a woman rose from their seats around the fire. The woman took two steps toward Dante. She towered over him, hair collected in a single rope as thick as any they had on the Sword of the South.
"That depends," she said, "on whether you believe it's possible to introduce someone from afar."
Dante's mouth twitched. It had been a while since he'd dealt with norren pedantry. "If not, I'm here in person to complete that introduction."
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