"That is so." In the echoing hall, the Keeper's deep voice sounded like a godly command. "And that is what brings us here. For the first time in years, Collen is free. For the first time in ages, we will keep it that way. We have secured our borders with Mallon. We request that Cavana closes its port to their army."
"Why would we do such a thing?"
"It's as you just said. If you let them land their troops, and they steal our lands from us once more, then they also steal the balance of the region."
Itiego leaned back. Without breaking eye contact with the Keeper, he accepted a glass of wine from a nearby servant. "Do you understand why the cities of Alebolgia fare so well?"
"An abundance of wise leadership?" Blays said.
"Which includes an immunity to flattery. Are any of you familiar with The Gold Road?"
Dante nodded. "I've read it."
Itiego smiled strangely. "I would have thought you'd consider it heresy."
"Do you think that makes it less interesting?"
"In Cavana—indeed, across the entire Strip of Alebolgia—you might say our only heresy is the concept of heresy itself. This is taught in The Gold Road. In it, Carvahal shows that everything must flow. Oceans and rivers. People and currency. And ideas, too. Just as still water goes stagnant, so does a still mind. It must be fed with a constant flux of ideas."
"That sounds good enough," Blays said. "But flowing water is the kind with all the monsters in it."
"To dam the waters is to damn your self," Itiego continued as if Blays had never spoken. "That is why we call nothing heretical; to do so would be to place a dam on ideas. It is just as important not to place a dam on trade, for currency is the water that nourishes civilization." He paused, thin eyebrows raised, letting that sink in. "This is why I can make no agreement to cease business with Mallon."
"You could still sell them whatever you like," Boggs said. "All we're askin' is you don't let them march an army in through our back door."
"You fail to understand. They pay for the right. To sell them this right costs us nothing. To take it away is to take prosperity from my people. And to threaten my people with war. For picture this scene."
Itiego stood, pacing around the table, gazing up at the sails strung from the walls. "You are Charles IV, upon your throne. Your province of Collen has thrown out your military. Repulsed a second attack. Now, when you approach Cavana—long a friend, open to all offers—Cavana shuts you out of its ports.
"Very curious. This act violates Cavana's deepest principles. Why would it do such a thing? Has Collen paid them to close their port? So you make an offer of your own to reopen it. It is a good offer, but sadly, Cavana turns it down. So you make a second offer. One that Collen can't possibly have matched."
He clicked his heels together and swiveled toward Boggs. "What happens now? If Cavana accepts Mallon's offer, then the agreement with Collen is null. If Cavana rejects the offer, it exposes an alliance between itself and Collen. This means that Cavana is now an enemy of Mallon. Isn't it thus within Mallon's rights to pursue war against Cavana? To pluck the jewel of Alebolgia and add it to its own crown?"
Itiego stopped, face titled forward, hands clasped behind his back. Silence fell over the room, as heavy as wet canvas.
Cord stood. "Have faith in your strength! You can defeat them as we did!"
"But General, that is not the point. Win or lose, war destroys both sides. I will have no part of it—not today, and not ever."
9
Raxa stood in the doorless room behind the chapel wall, feeling the nether drain from her body. Another two seconds, maybe three, and it would be gone.
She'd come too far to lose the loot. She snatched up the second Cycle of Arawn and stumbled toward the wall she'd walked in through. She was already falling out of the shadows, the light and smoke fading to plain darkness. Her right heel caught in something firm. She spilled onto the floor of the room beyond, the boot ripping from her foot.
She spun about. The boot jutted from the wall, its heel embedded in the rock. In dumb disbelief, she set down the book, grabbed her boot, and pulled. It was like trying to uproot an oak with your bare hands. She fell on her back, breathing hard.
She was on the fourth floor of the chapel, with two guards outside the doors, in the middle of the Sealed Citadel.
And she didn't have a drop of juice left.
Squeezing her eyes tight, she gave herself a moment to scream—internally, mentally—and to pound her fists against the lush rug.
With that task completed, Raxa took inventory. She had the book. And judging from the way it had stolen the shadows from her, as well as the blinding, terrifying light it had cast when she'd seen it within the netherworld, it was the true copy. The first copy. The one that, according to rumor, could turn you into a sorcerer.
She also had a way out. Vess' exit. What she didn't have was a way to get to the exit without being riddled with arrows, spears, and bolts of shadow.
Would have to do it the old-fashioned way.
On her arrest, the guards had confiscated everything but her clothes. Searching the room, she found a small knife, if you could call it that—designed for trimming quills and such, you'd have to put it in the exact right spot to kill someone with it. Still, better than nothing.
No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't pull her boot loose from the wall. Instead, she took off her other shoe and hid it under a chair, then draped a table cover over the stuck boot. She put the book she'd taken from the case back on top of the glass. Somebody might wonder what idiot had left it out of its case, but at least it wouldn't look like anything was stolen.
Long black curtains hung beside the windows. She took one down. Using the knife to start the tear, she ripped off a length of cloth and wrapped it around her head, leaving a slit for her eyes. She wrapped the remainder of the curtain around her torso, tucking her book underneath it snug against her back.
She climbed into a window and took a peek out. Forty feet down to a cobbled surface. Not the sort of thing you wanted to fall from. At the same time, she didn't want to leave a makeshift rope dangling forty feet to the ground. Someone would spot that before she'd made it over the walls. She pulled down a second curtain, cut it into four wide strips, and knotted them together. She tied one end around her left wrist.
She went back to the window and checked the stars. Closing in on one o'clock. At three o'clock, the guards were scheduled to make a change. One of the sentries had been paid very well by Vess to leave a door unlocked in the outer walls. Raxa would enter the door, climb the stairs to the top of the wall, then jump down into a hay wagon Vess had parked outside.
Raxa was tempted to kill time reading the book, but you never played with your loot before you had it home. Good thing she waited. Not five minutes later, a key scrabbled in the lock to the door.
She popped to her feet and into the window. As she dropped out, the door's hinges squeaked open. Raxa gritted her teeth, stomach flopping as she began to fall. With the rope of curtains tied around her left wrist, she grabbed hold of the loose end with her right hand, forming a loop. She snared this around the body of a gargoyle. The rope snapped taut, slamming her against the outer wall of the chapel.
She dangled, heart racing like it was ready to gallop out of her throat. Above her, men's voices murmured from inside the room she'd just vacated.
She was secure, but if they glanced out the window, she was done. Holding tight to the loose end of the curtain, she let out some slack, lowering herself until her foot touched another gargoyle. She crouched atop it, holding on with her left hand, then let go of the curtain with her right, gathering it in.
Looping the curtain around the gargoyle she was standing on now, she lowered herself to the third floor window. This looked into a dark room. She stuffed herself into the window and waited.
Two hours later, the bells of the Cathedral of Ivars rang, the clapper muffled so as not to wake the entire city. Raxa bided another five minutes, then
used the loop of curtains to descend the face of the chapel. The feel of her bare toes against solid ground had never felt so good.
She untied the rope from her wrist, watching the night. She'd spent the last two hours watching the patrol routes of the sentries. She waited for a gap in the coverage, then crossed the courtyard at a brisk walk, coming to the tall outer wall. She counted down doors to the one Vess had bribed the guard to keep unlocked. She tried it. Stuck fast. Heart back to doing its best impression of a stallion, she tried again. It jerked open.
Whispering a dozen curses, she moved into the gloomy stairwell. Smelled like sweaty men. She jogged up it, bare feet silent on the stone treads, and barged right into a guard on his way down.
He swore, slapping a palm against the wall for support. "What the hell—?"
Raxa swept the rope of curtains around his throat and pulled it as tight as she could, entangling the fabric around her elbows for extra leverage. The man gave a single strangled gasp, then whacked at her head with his fists, but they were so close he couldn't put any strength behind the blows. Within seconds, he sagged. She kept the pressure on until his eyes bulged from his purple face. His weight dragged down against her makeshift rope.
Shit. Shit. Nowhere to put the body. Would have to get over the wall before someone found him. She left it and hurried up the stairs, poking her head from the trapdoor-style entrance to the top of the wall. And caught her first break: no guards in sight in either direction.
The wagon was supposed to be ten paces ahead. Raxa hurried along the merlons, counting steps. At ten, she stopped and leaned over the wall. The wagon wasn't there.
Her chest froze. Had Vess betrayed her? Gotten arrested? It was a thirty foot fall to the ground. The walls were smooth rock, deliberately unclimbable. The ground below was dirt rather than pavement, but that wouldn't help much. Looking closer, she spotted a small pile of something directly below her, but it was too dark to say what.
A silhouette moved along the wall. Coming her way. She grabbed both ends of her makeshift rope, slung it around a merlin, and swung over the side. She jerked to a stop after falling six feet, the rope sliding from her right hand. Between the length of the rope and her arms, she'd cut nearly ten feet from the descent, but there was still a hell of a lot of space between her and the ground.
The rope slipped out from her fingers.
She flattened herself against the wall, slowing herself, but this pushed her away after a fall of a few feet. Empty air whisked past her, the rope of curtains fluttering behind her. The pile rushed to meet her. She got in position, landing with a crunch of straw. As she tucked into a roll, pain speared through her right ankle. She popped to her feet, ankle giving out beneath her.
Broken. No doubt. But hurried steps were smacking along the top of the wall. Already sweating cold drops, Raxa hobbled into the city as fast as she could.
~
"You're hurt."
"It's nothing." Raxa took a step toward the bench, limping hard. "That's not true. Hurts like Gashen whacked it with an axe handle."
"Let me see." Vess kneeled beside her, undoing the cloth Raxa had wrapped tight around her bare foot and lower leg, revealing an ankle so swollen you couldn't tell where the calf ended. "Broke good. Or else you need to start eating less frybread and more fish. What happened out there?"
Raxa stared through the darkness of the sweet-smelling courtyard. She'd considered stashing the book on her way there, claiming she hadn't been able to find it. If she had what she thought it was, it was worth killing for.
But if she was going to pay back the Citadel for what they'd done to the Order—and what they'd tried to do to her adoptees—she was going to need help. If Vess had inclinations to betray her, she'd had plenty of opportunities already.
Raxa gave Vess the rundown, altering everything that had to do with shadowalking. At the end, she shot Vess a dark look. "What happened to your end of the deal? Not a great time to cheap out on the wagon."
Vess shook her head. "We put the wagon where I said the wagon would be put. The guards, they ran us off. I dumped out some straw for you. Best I could do."
Vess offered her a drop of whiteweed to help with the pain. Raxa swallowed it, working her tongue around to be rid of the bitterness.
"Guess a broken ankle is a great excuse to get some reading done," she said. "Want to take a look?" She removed the book from the makeshift sling she'd wrapped around her back.
Seeing the white tree on the cover, Vess' face went as sober as a Mallish priest. "Sure this is safe?"
"It's a book that can supposedly turn ordinary people into sorcerers. It's about as safe as swinging a sword by the wrong end."
"Well, we got it. Waste of good taking not to check it out."
Raxa propped the heavy tome on her knees and opened the front cover. There were no signatures in this copy. She flipped through a few freakish illustrations to the first page of text.
She frowned. "What the hell is this?"
Vess leaned over, neck extended as she examined the page. "Mallish."
Raxa paged forward. "Why would the holiest book of the Gaskan region be written in Mallish?"
"Don't know. Want to complain? Or to hear me tell you what it is that it says?"
Raxa examined her for signs she was joking—Vess couldn't even speak Gaskan right. With nothing to lose, she handed the heavy book to the other woman. "By all means."
Vess ran her finger over the first few sentences, muttering under her breath. She cleared her throat. In slow and sometimes backtracking words, she began to read. Within the first minute, Raxa knew what she was hearing: the story of how Arawn came for and eventually spared the life of a man named Janth.
Vess stumbled here and there, complaining that she hadn't seen several of the words before and doubted if they were Mallish. Despite this, Raxa got the gist of nearly everything, helped by how often she'd heard the story before.
After they talked briefly, concluding that there was nothing that stood out to them, Vess read onward, telling tales of kings, heroes, sorcerers, and gods. After the better part of an hour, Raxa stopped her.
Vass raised an eyebrow. "Feel anything?"
"From what?" Raxa pinched her upper lip. "These are just…stories."
"In the church every week, what do they do? Tell stories."
"How is any of this going to teach us to throw the nether around?
"Don't know. How do stories teach you how to live? Act? Be?"
Raxa quashed a sigh. Vess read on, but it was more of the same. As dawn neared, Raxa was having a hard time keeping her eyes open despite the steady throb of pain in her ankle.
Noticing this, Vess tucked a ribbon into the book to mark her place and closed the covers. "Think we done for tonight, yeah?"
"Yeah." Raxa rubbed her eyes. "Question. When we go our separate ways for the day, who gets the book?"
"I do. You can't even read it."
"But I'm the one who snagged it. At great personal risk."
Vess shrugged. "Don't have a head full of dumb. You're the master thief in this city. I take it from you, and you just take it right back."
"Ha," Raxa said. "We'll split it."
"Cut it in half? Good thinking." Vess reached for a knife.
Raxa slapped at Vess' hand. "Are you crazy? If this is what we think it is, we can't desecrate it. Arawn would burn us to a cinder, then send a plague of locusts to eat the ashes. We'll alternate nights with it. You can have it first."
"You got more trust than most of us."
"Maybe. Or maybe I'm just that sure that if you run off, I will find you."
Vess grinned and helped Raxa to her feet. The other woman whistled softly to one of her goons, ordering him to send for a horse. He came back with a donkey. Raxa didn't care. At that point, her ankle hurt so bad she would have ridden home on a flatulent goat.
Before sleeping, she had the Order's physician set her ankle. Wasn't fun. A hefty swallow of rum and whiteweed helped.
&nbs
p; When she woke up, she grabbed a mug of tea, spiked it with more whiteweed to take the teeth from her pain, and tore through the day's business. As soon as she was done, she sent a runner to Vess, who showed up an hour later.
Raxa smiled. "You didn't run off with it."
"Decided it wouldn't be fair." Vess nodded at her splinted leg. "With that, you'd never catch me."
They retired to Raxa's office. Vess opened the book and began to read. As she narrated stories of Jack Hand and Stathus the Wise, a weight mounted in Raxa's gut. Even when the Cycle was talking about the feats of the greatest nethermancers in the history of the shadows, there was no mention of how they did what they did. What if the rumors she'd heard about its power to train you were as wildly off the mark as most rumors were? What if they reached the end of the book—a process that could waste weeks, given how long it was—and found they were no different from when they started?
"That's that." Vess closed the book, standing and stretching her arms about her head.
Raxa glanced at the window. It had gone dark, which was a surprise, but it couldn't have been that late. "Come on. There's way more night than this."
"Got a thing needs doing that needs me to do it. Keep the book. Maybe you can't read it, but it's thick enough you can use it to prop your foot on."
Raxa grinned. "See you tomorrow, asshole."
Once Vess was gone, Raxa hobbled to her door, locked it, and sat down across from the book. Sitting in front of her, the Cycle didn't look like anything special. Old, yeah. But nothing like the nethereal hellstorm that had nearly gotten her trapped inside a doorless room that was hardly big enough to sit down in. Had that been the book itself? Or a boobytrap set to protect the book?
Grimacing, wary, she eased into the shadows.
As before, light spewed from the book like a lord expelling his fourth bottle of wine. Tendrils of darkness lashed from her to the pages. The shadows poured from her like blood. Her instincts were to jump out of the darkworld as fast as she could, but the book didn't seem to be hurting her. And this time, there was no danger of getting trapped.
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 101
