The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  Specks of darkness floated in the air, like mist churned up by the torrent of nether. She looked closer. The specks were tumbling toward her. Landing on her skin and sinking in. The book was draining her, yes.

  This time, though, it was also giving something back.

  Within moments, the book had sucked her dry, booting her out of the nether. Compared to the shining silver of the other world, the room around her was as dark as a cave. The weight on her stomach eased up. There was something potent about the book. All she had to do was find out how to unlock it.

  ~

  They fell into a comfortable if frustrating routine: handle their responsibilities each morning, meet up by early afternoon, read the Cycle together until well after the sun had set. Day by day, Raxa's ankle hurt less and less. In the normal world, she still couldn't walk without a crutch, but in the netherworld, she was so light on her feet she felt no pain at all. If anything, visiting the other realm seemed to hasten her healing.

  "Feel any power?" Vess asked a few nights into their efforts. "Any feel like you could clench your fist and make the walls fall down?"

  Raxa shook her head. "The only thing I feel is the urge to go ask a priest why all their old heroes were so murderous. How about you?"

  "Feel like I need to get one of my lowlings to write a book about me. Maybe we call it The Cycle of Vess."

  It was like being dumped overboard far from sight of land. No way to tell which direction to head in. No way to tell if they were even getting close to something. It didn't take long before she was frustrated. Angry. Ready to toss the book in the bay and forget it.

  But she had to press on. Until the nether was hers, she'd never be able to protect her people from the Citadel—or to take her revenge.

  Whenever Vess hit a point where a nethermancer was doing his or her thing, Raxa took notes, quoting anything that might point to their methods. At the end of each session, she and Vess went back over everything Raxa had jotted down, phrases like "When Eyosa's breathing matched the nether, at last she felt it on her fingers" or "and so Kamrates spilled his blood, and the darkness flocked, and his foes fell before it."

  Each night she had the book to herself, she stood before it in the shadows, watching it pull the nether from her body and into its pages, the black dust rising from it and settling into her skin. The first time she'd encountered the book, the process had been almost instant. After having four nights with it, though, it was taking twenty seconds before the Cycle drained her to nothing. And each time took a little longer than the last.

  Because she was making progress? Or was the opposite true, and the book was slowing down because it was petering out, like an unbunged barrel getting down to its last few drops?

  Midway through the night's reading session with Vess, Raxa stood, stretching her back. "Gonna hit the privy."

  She walked into her office's front room, opening and shutting the door to the hallway. She shifted into the nether and moved back into her main office, where Vess was hunched over the book. Dark tendrils stretched between Vess and the Cycle, but they were much thinner than Raxa was used to, more like threads than yarn. There were hardly any dark specks in the air, either. Though the specks were sinking into Vess' skin, they seemed less excited about it. Like snow landing on cobbles and taking a long time to melt.

  Whatever was happening to the two of them, it was happening at different rates. In hindsight, not that surprising. Everyone had the nether in them. According to some people, everyone could learn to use it, but in practice, the talent varied widely. Most could train for years and never learn to summon more than a drop.

  That thought exposed a hundred others. Like ruins unearthed by a sudden flood. Funny how much you could forget if you tried. You didn't have one life, you had many, as separate from each other as towns strung out along a road. People liked to think their lives were a progression, a building-upon, as cohesive as a song, complete with crescendo. But it was more like a bard who'd gotten so drunk he couldn't remember which story he was telling. Every ten minutes he'd switch to a new one, leaving his audience annoyed and confused.

  Vess turned a page. Raxa blinked. Still in the shadows. She returned to the foyer, dropped back into the plain world, and rejoined Vess at the table.

  Vess glanced up. "Ready to go on?"

  "Where else am I going to hear about how Jack Hand killed another rat?"

  Vess smirked. She launched into a new story about one of the nethermancers who'd been imprisoned in a tower or a dungeon and was fiddling around with the rats in it. Raxa tried to listen, but it felt like her mind was ready to vomit. And her whole dinner was on its way up.

  She closed her eyes and let it come.

  ~

  Her mom had died giving birth to her. Her dad was a woodsman and they lived in a log shack in the pine forests outside the city. She remembered being happy. She remembered little else except for the way the sunlight pierced through the pine needles. The feeling of a blizzard outside while you had a fire and blankets inside. The spicy smell on her father's breath that she would recognize, years later, as rum.

  When she was five, he cut himself while felling a tree—he'd probably been drunk—and the wound became infected. She told him to see a priest. He said they didn't have the money. He lay in bed with his rum, which he said would drive the infection out.

  Within five days, he was too weak to get out of bed. He was pale and had dark streaks on the arm where he'd been hurt. He asked her to go get their neighbor, a young farmer named Garren who always talked about finding a wife. She did so. She brought Garren in and her father sent her outside. After a few minutes, Garren exited, gave her a tight smile, and headed to the city.

  It was hours before Garren came back. Raxa's dad sent her outside again. When Garren walked out, he told her that her father wanted to see her.

  The inside of the cabin smelled funny. Her dad gripped her hand tight. "Your aunt and uncle will be here tomorrow morning. They'll care for you."

  "What about you?"

  "I'll come for you when I'm better." He smiled. "It won't be long."

  By morning, he was dead. Raxa waited all day, and then the next. Then she went through the forest to Garren's and told him what had happened. He said he was sorry to hear that.

  "I can take care of you," he said. "And when you're older, we can take care of each other. After all, time turns stems into flowers."

  He smiled. It was a selfish smile. When he went out to tend to his fields, Raxa ran into the city.

  She looked for her aunt and uncle every day. As she searched, she learned the city was a place where if you wanted to eat, you had to steal. She got used to the taste of hard bread and soft cucumbers. There were other children there too, filthy and quick-footed. Most would steal from her if they saw she had something, but some became her friends. They helped her look for her aunt and uncle, warned each other when the city watch was coming, shared crusts and cheese when they'd nicked more than they could eat.

  The streets had a fleetingness to them. People came and went. Sometimes they came back after a few days, but sometimes she saw them months later, servants in the retinue of the rich. Often, she never saw them again.

  Often, she was cold. Always, she was hungry. In winter, which in Narashtovik lasted nearly five months, she was both. She still wasn't sure how she'd made it through the first winter. By the time the air began to warm, the points of her hips and shoulders could pierce leather. Before the snow melted, her shoes rotted off. She tried to eat them, but her jaw got sore before they were soft enough to swallow.

  The snows still hadn't thawed. Ice cut the soles of her feet, leaving bloody tracks behind her. Every day, the pain got worse; soon, she might not be able to walk at all. In the streets, your feet were your life. Couldn't walk, and you couldn't steal. Couldn't run, and someone would catch you.

  And the kids and the crazies weren't the only ones out there. Men walked through the crowds, faces as cold as a blizzard. Hunting those like Raxa
. The children of none that no one would miss. If your feet hurt too bad to run, they'd take you. You'd be one of the street people who disappeared and never came back.

  She tried to hole up, giving herself the chance to heal, but if she hid out for more than a day, her stomach hurt worse than her feet. She limped from block to block, trailing blood through the snows that fell every afternoon. Raxa prayed to Arawn to melt the ice, but it only got worse.

  One day, on her way to the alley where Waldon the baker sometimes took pity and gave them his old bread, the hurt got worse than it had ever been. Like nails were being pounded up through the bottom of her feet. Her vision speckled over from pain. She dropped to her knees, palm braced on the freezing ground.

  She could get up. Maybe she could get home. But that would be it. The only question from there was whether she froze or starved.

  She hung her head. Footsteps crunched in front of her. Raxa opened her eyes, expecting a beating from a city watchman sick of yet another of Narashtovik's fleas falling in the middle of a public street. Instead, she saw another girl, a year or two older, too dirty to be from anywhere but the streets.

  "Take these." The girl held out a pair of shoes.

  Raxa frowned. Trap? But it didn't matter anymore, did it? She reached out, took the shoes. They were worn and cracked, but they were only a little bit loose. She smiled and tried not to cry.

  The girl's name was Alna. She helped Raxa until Raxa's feet healed up. Like that, they were best friends. For a year, they roamed the city together, fishing coins from pockets, nabbing broccoli and apples and squash from stalls, ducking the older kids. Alna was keen-eyed, fast to make a decision. She could read the mood of the street like a farmer read the weather.

  The day it happened was sunny, warm, a day and a season after Alna had saved Raxa's life. Raxa had only been away for a minute—running back to one of their stashes to pick up their fishing hook to try in the bay—but when she jogged back to the alley where Alna was waiting, it was empty.

  She ran into the street. Her eyes leaped at once to a tall man striding down the street, a young girl held limply in his arms. Raxa sprinted after them. She hadn't gotten three steps before another man turned. His face was as cold as all the other takers. He strode toward her, hands open by his sides.

  Raxa turned down a side street. Empty except for a few vacant stalls merchants had parked out of the way. The man was almost on her. He lunged for her. His sleeve pulled back, revealing a tattoo of a spider on his wrist. She dived behind a stall.

  Footsteps moved around the side of the stall. A shudder racked Raxa. A shadow and a shimmer seemed to pass over the world, dimming it. The man swung around the side of the stall. He seemed to look right through Raxa, then swore and ran further down the alley. As the world brightened around Raxa, the man's steps faded to nothing.

  She edged back to the way she'd come in. Alna was gone.

  Raxa never saw her again.

  Alone, she grew reckless. Stealing coin purses, whole meat pies, packets of spice. She knew the city well enough to get away—most times. Other times, she caught a beating, but it almost felt good. And now and then when she was running or hiding, the dimness came over her, and it was like they couldn't see her at all.

  She was jogging away from one such escape when she bumped right into a pair of legs. A woman stood over her, tall and tanned, looking as calm and strong as one of the statues outside the big cathedral where the monks shooed her away with brooms.

  "Do you like this life?" the woman said.

  Raxa turned to run. The woman made a subtle gesture. Invisible hands seemed to grab hold of the bottoms of her shoes—the shoes Alna had given her—locking her in place.

  The tall woman gazed down at her. "I can give you a different one."

  Raxa thought about spitting at her. "Different what?"

  "A different life. No more hunger. No more stealing. No more being hunted."

  "And what do I have to do for you?"

  "The hardest thing of all: you have to learn."

  Raxa should have been afraid, but she'd come to hate the city. If she tried to leave it, and something happened to her, then maybe that was okay. Maybe that was what was supposed to happen after what she let happen to Alna.

  The tall woman's name was Yona. She had a horse. They rode out of the city through fields, pine forests, and hills full of huge, watchful men. Next came mountains, a valley of lakes and another city; past this, a grassy plain. Then black cliffs like storm clouds strung across the end of the world.

  Yona called it Pocket Cove. There was no city, just the cliffs, the beach, and the ocean beyond. A few dozen women and girls lived in the cliffs. For the first time since her dad had died, she was given proper food: crab soup in salty broth; mussels mixed with crispy, brackish reeds; chunks of whitefish on beds of seaweed mixed with tiny orange eggs that popped between her teeth in salty little snaps.

  If the food was the best thing, the second best was that she no longer had to look over her shoulder every second she was awake. There was no town watch. No bigger kids looking to rob her. No frozen-faced men with spiders tattooed on their wrists.

  "Why did you bring me here?" she asked after a few days.

  "Because I think you can do something special." Yona softened her face in what was almost a smile. "You're starting to look healthy enough. It's time to begin."

  And then she taught Raxa to shadowalk.

  Raxa had already been touching the fringes of the other world. But only enough to hide herself from view, and only if she didn't move. Under Yona's tutelage, Raxa learned to enter the netherworld itself. To walk in a land of blazing silver and deepest shadow. Finding it was like finding home.

  "That was almost too easy," Yona said after a few months of honing her skill. "But that's only a small fraction of what I think you can do. The nether you follow into the darkness—you're going to learn to wield it."

  It was nearing the end of the year, the waves lashed by wind and rain. Even so, Yona took Raxa out on the beach and told her things about the shadows. Raxa already knew how to see them, so Yona tried to show her how to touch them. Lesson after lesson, Raxa tried, and she failed.

  The rains turned to snow. One morning, with the wind biting Raxa's ears, Yona told her to strip down to her skin and swim out into the waves until Yona told her it was okay to come back.

  "But it's so cold," Raxa said.

  "That will bring you closer to the nether."

  "Why?"

  "Because it will help you to understand death."

  Raxa didn't understand any of that. "But I don't want to."

  "When you agreed to come with me, you made a vow." Yona stood over her. "Now strip. And swim."

  Raxa looked up and down the beach. There was no one to go to. The cliffs hemmed them in; there was nowhere to run. Hating Yona, trying not to cry at the unfairness of it, she took off her clothes.

  The water was so cold her muscles locked up like rocks. Yona yelled her onward. She paddled into the waves, the breakers smashing down on her head. Salt water flooded her lungs. She turned back for shore, fighting to keep her head above water. Another wave swept her into the icy, swirling madness. Just as she was ready to let out her breath and inhale the cold water, sand scraped underfoot. She heaved herself ashore, bedraggled with kelp.

  "I didn't tell you it was time to come back." Yona's voice was low, the warning of a growling dog. "Go inside."

  She was left alone in the darkness of her room. After three days of solitude, Yona brought her back to the beach. Again, she tried to show Raxa how to touch the shadows. Further down the beach, a young girl swam in the swells, vanishing under walloping walls of gray water. She was watched by a grown woman standing among the kelp stranded above the tideline.

  In time, the woman waved her in. The girl crawled in on hands and knees. She was nude. Her sodden black hair was stuck to her face, but Raxa identified her as Luru, who'd been brought to the Cove a few weeks before her. At the woman's
orders, Luru stood naked to the wind. She shuddered so hard she fell to her side. The older woman made no effort to help her up.

  Day after day, Raxa got no closer to being able to touch the nether. Yona, once so optimistic about Raxa's potential, grew puzzled, then short. She sent Raxa out on another swim, then a third. Raxa tried her best to do as Yona said, but the shadows always seemed to be just out of her reach.

  Two months later, with the worst of the storms behind them and hints of spring in the air, Yona told her she was to go up to the Fingers, the black cliffs above the bay. She would be there alone for three days. It would be tough, and it would be painful, but it was that same fear and pain that would help her understand the shadows.

  Raxa thrust out her lower jaw. "It's going to be cold and wet, isn't it? How come you make me do these things?"

  "Our ancestors were hunted for years before they came to Pocket Cove. Since then, they've fought off half a dozen Gaskan invasions with no more than a hundred people. We have to be tough, Raxa. Tougher than everyone who might want to kill us."

  Raxa lowered her head. They took her shoes, but at least they let her keep her clothes. The Fingers were named like that because the of the rocky spires that stuck up into the air, slick with moss and mist. Between the mist and the spires, you couldn't see more than sixty feet around you, which was terrible, because the banks of moss were full of centipedes as big as rats.

  Going back to old habits, the first thing she did was try to find food. When her feet started to hurt—scraped by rocks, numbed by cold—she found a place in the lee of one of the spires where the wind-driven mist wasn't so bad and sat down.

  It wasn't that much different from winters in Narashtovik, but it was still awful. On the second night, she broke down in tears. Why were they so mean? Were they bad people? Was she? Was that why her aunt and uncle hadn't come for her? Was this meant to punish her? For not saving her dad? For not stopping the man with the spider tattoo from taking Alna away?