The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante doubted that strongly, and wasn't entirely sure that it was a good idea to find out if it was true, but there was no denying the potency of the book, which he'd intended to spend more time studying at a time in his life that was less interesting. Aside from whatever magical properties it possessed, its value as a cultural and religious artifact was second to nothing in the Arawnite faith.

  Which was why he'd sealed it up behind a stone wall for safekeeping.

  "Other than the boot, the wall was intact?" Dante said. "No sign of entry?"

  "None."

  "Its floor and ceiling were undisturbed?"

  "I checked it as thoroughly as an empty closet can be checked, which is to say with extreme thoroughness. I found no evidence of the burglar—excepting, of course, that perplexing boot."

  Dante's mind spun in circles. "I'm coming back. We'll leave today."

  "Er, you are? Aren't you in the middle of terribly important business?"

  "That business can be left on hold until the spring. In the wrong hands, the original Cycle could be a lot of trouble—and anyone capable of stealing it definitely counts as the wrong hands."

  "I regret the circumstances of your return," Nak said. "But it will be good to see you home again."

  Dante shut down the connection, then gathered the Hand, explaining the change in circumstances. "My goal will be to recover the book and deal with the perpetrator as quickly as I can. Even accounting for travel time, I expect we can be back here before the first ship arrives from the Tallas Route."

  "'We'?" Blays said. "You're volunteering me for all this travel?"

  "You're free to go back to Pocket Cove if they need you. They've probably been overrun by crabs without you there to eat them all."

  "But you will return?" the Keeper said.

  Dante ran his hand down his mouth. "I don't like to make promises I'm not certain I can keep. But as soon as I've dealt with this, I'll be back here to complete our deal with Vita. Maybe this is for the best. I can clean up a few messes in Narashtovik without compromising matters down here."

  "Then let us depart. The sooner you leave, the sooner you can see to your affairs."

  They set about packing their things and gathering up the caravan. Some of their retinue was out in the city, running errands, trolling for gossip, or simply enjoying themselves. While servants went out to gather them up, Dante headed for their contact in House Osedo. The man was perturbed that Dante had come in person—quite understandably, Lady Vita didn't want to be seen working with the Colleners—but agreed to go see her. As soon as he left, Dante slew a nearby bee and sent it after the man to make certain he wasn't being followed by any Cavanese spies.

  The contact returned in half an hour, providing Dante with a set of directions. Dante followed them to the rear of a small church. It was a cold day and the scent of wood smoke mingled with the fog.

  After waiting long enough that Dante was starting to wonder if he had the right place, an old woman shuffled up to a statue of a pious-looking man, supporting herself with a cane. A heavy wool shawl warmed her against the chill. She kneeled before the statue.

  Without looking up, Vita said, "What is so important that we have to meet in such a reckless way?"

  "We're leaving," Dante said. "We'll be gone by day's end."

  "Is your word that worthless? We had a deal!"

  "We still do. And we know exactly how we're going to fulfill our end of it. Something's come up in my homeland that I have to see to myself. I mean to be back by spring."

  "This news couldn't have been brought to me by a messenger?"

  "I thought telling you in person would make it clear that I'm serious about honoring our arrangement."

  "Mm." Vita touched the statue's feet. "Then I will see you in the spring."

  That afternoon, they headed up the road to the top of the cliffs overlooking Cavana. Dante was hoping for a last look at the scenic coastal city, but the fog blurred everything to gray shapes. They rode forward. As they crested a line of hills a few miles north of the city, the temperature dropped abruptly, along with the coastal humidity. Ahead, the fields were dusted with snow.

  ~

  In the basin, fields of snow glittered under a distant sun. Buttes thrust from the whiteness like unfinished blocks left behind by a forgetful sculptor. They'd made good time, and with a rider ranging ahead to the city to make preparations, everything was set for Dante and Blays to continue to Narashtovik at once.

  Collen provided them with four horses. Asties weren't suited for the brutality of northern winters, so they went with raggies instead, shaggy and hardy beasts like oversized ponies.

  "Stay on your toes," Dante told the Hand as the provisions were being loaded onto the raggies. "Mallon won't be able to launch another invasion until spring, but snows won't stop saboteurs."

  Boggs smirked. "You think you're tellin' us something we don't already know?"

  "I have to say something before I leave. It might as well masquerade as wise advice."

  The three Colleners dispersed to go about their own business. Naran replaced them, crunching up through the thin snow. "Did you intend to depart without saying goodbye?"

  Blays tightened a strap on his saddlebag. "Maybe we're smart enough to know that you would come to us."

  "You asked me to stay in Collen while you're away. I've decided to leave as well."

  Dante looked up. "But we need a set of eyes here."

  "Why? If something happens, will you snap your fingers and teleport to the Reborn Shrine? While you're in Narashtovik, you can't do anything about what transpires here. So what does it matter if you know every detail?"

  "It would still be much more helpful than if you're in Narashtovik."

  Naran gave him a dubious look. "I don't have any desire to freeze my unmentionables in your blizzard-racked wasteland. I want to go to Tanar Atain."

  "To hunt Gladdic?"

  "That would be my main motivation."

  Blays put his hand on Naran's shoulder. "Captain, is your mind that troubled? Suicide is never the answer, my friend."

  Naran snorted, shrugging off Blays' hand. "Did I say anything about looking to assault him? My intention is to find him. I'll leave the matter of dying against his wicked sorcery to you two."

  Dante tapped his chin with his thumb. "There's no guarantee he's down there. That's only the rumor."

  "I appreciate that. However, my crew's growing restless—and light in the pocket. If the Sword of the South doesn't start earning money, my tenure as captain will be short-lived indeed."

  "Fair enough. But take a loon with you. And leave someone you trust in Collen to act as a relay between us. If you and I try to share a loon when you're heading that far south, I'm afraid the connection will be stretched until it breaks."

  They decided to leave two loons with Naran's trusted crewman Jona, who wasn't happy to be stuck in Collen while the Sword of the South would be out making cash and visiting fun new ports, but he was mollified when Naran doubled his regular earnings.

  With this and everything else settled, or at least as settled as it could be, Dante and Blays rode out from the city. The first few days were spent traveling overland through the desert of Collen and into the Mallish woods on the other side of the hills. The snow and lack of roads made it slower than Dante would have liked, but with two horses apiece, they still managed to keep a fair pace.

  Once they'd bypassed Bressel, they intercepted the Chanset River and struck north. Under the overcast skies, the mile-wide river was the gray of hammered iron.

  Though they were traveling through enemy lands, within a few days, Dante felt more carefree than at any time since they'd first left for the Plagued Islands. Some of that was the act of travel itself, which he always enjoyed, but putting physical distance between himself and the Collen Basin allowed him to get some mental distance from it as well.

  His anger at the Keeper's betrayal wasn't only about the act of manipulation. He'd done similar things in the pa
st, and expected to do more of them in the future. At least when you were manipulating someone, that meant you weren't killing them.

  Instead, he was angry because he'd thought they were friends. Untrue: to her, he was a game piece. This was disappointing, but it simplified his relationship with both her and Collen. Once his objectives were achieved there, he could walk away and wash his hands. He'd have no further reason to ever get involved there again.

  "The Keeper played us good, didn't she?" Blays said. He smiled wryly. "Just like the Kandeans."

  "Funny, I was just thinking about that."

  "Oh no. Please tell me your thoughts aren't a communicable disease."

  "Is being taken advantage of just the natural risk of trying to do good?"

  "We could test that theory by doing evil instead."

  "Have you ever been tempted to walk away?"

  "I'm tempted right now," Blays said. "If we never went back to Collen, I wouldn't blame us."

  "What's stopping you?

  "For one thing, the thought of leaving all those innocents in the lurch isn't my favorite idea of all time. For another, what if this sort of thing is like our calling?"

  Dante twisted in the saddle. "I thought you'd been getting cranky about getting dragged into everyone else's business."

  "I am. In large part because other people's business never seems to end. But when I saw what Gladdic had done—those people in the cave…"

  Dante nodded, gazing blankly through the leafless forest. Finding Gladdic's stash of bodies had troubled him, too. It wasn't so much the quantity of the dead—he'd seen many more during the war with Gask—but rather the methodicalness of it. Gladdic had stacked the corpses like the proverbial firewood. Like salmon packed in salt.

  "The deaths on a battlefield make a certain sort of sense," Dante said. "War is a storm. When a storm hits, people die without reason. But what Gladdic did was different. It was deliberate. Precise. The murder was the entire point."

  Blays grunted. "It's like he was a farmer of lives. How many people out there do you think could have stopped him?"

  "How many people could have destroyed the Andrac? Not many. The Council together might have been able to. Moddegan's sorcerer school could. And there are more than enough ethermancers in Bressel to take them on."

  "In other words, if we hadn't been there, the entire city of Collen would have been slaughtered. There are horrors out there. People who act like monsters, and monsters that are monsters with big sharp claws and fangs that could rip a pig in half. Maybe we were put here to smite them."

  "I don't think we were put here to kill the wicked. Arawn doesn't care about saving lives—he knows we're all his sooner or later. Wherever we are, we brought ourselves here."

  "That makes it all the more important." Blays ducked under a reaching bough. "If the gods aren't putting anyone here to kill the monsters, then there's no guarantee that anyone will fight them at all."

  As they neared Whetton, they left the road to ride around it; they were still telling stories about Blays in the city. Miles later, Dante considered detouring to Shay to check in on the norren monk Gabe, but it wouldn't be more than a pointless social nicety. Anyway, according to Nak, they still hadn't found any trace of the true Cycle in Narashtovik. Every day they lingered was another day for it to get more lost.

  The towns gave out, and the farms too, and there was nothing but wilderness: forests, hills, blue mountains beyond. The only sound was the thump of the horses and the snow sifting through the branches.

  They entered the mountains. The pass was ugly. It took Dante two days to alter the rock enough to where the horses could make it through. When he'd first seen the blue glaciers and searing green lakes in the heart of the Dundens, he'd thought they were the starkest, most beautiful things he'd ever seen. But after their crossing of the Woduns—a range that had been designed to be impassible—the mountains of his childhood homeland felt rather tame.

  The raggies handled the heights well, delivering them to the endless hills of what had once been southern Gask. The grass was buried under two feet of snow. Boulders and haggard trees poked from the white blanket.

  "Look." Blays nodded.

  Dante followed his gaze across the hills to where a pair of towering figures stood underneath a copse of trees, spears in hand. Norren. The two figures watched them for a minute, then turned and vanished over the hill.

  Dante didn't expect any trouble from the norren—after all, Narashtovik had helped liberate them—but norren were nothing if not unpredictable. Fractious, too. It wasn't out of the question that a clan would assault them simply because they were enemies of another clan that was friendly with Narashtovik.

  Unfortunately, winter had killed all the bugs, leaving Dante nothing obvious to scout with. As they entered a small forest, leading the horses by the reins, he kept his eyes open for field mice, getting so absorbed in the hunt that he nearly walked right into the waist of a norren warrior.

  The man gazed down at him from a height of seven feet. He wore a long cloak over weatherbeaten buckskins and carried a spear with an oval-shaped point the size of a human man's hand. Behind him, a score of others emerged from behind the trees. Dante pulled the nether close.

  The norren looked disappointed. "You got older."

  Blays laughed. "Mourn? What are you doing out here?"

  "Speaking to you. And wondering why you didn't recognize me."

  "Come on, man. Between the hood and the beard, I wouldn't be the wiser if you were a talking dog."

  Blays strode through the snow and wrapped Mourn in a hug. Mourn appeared to tolerate this. At any rate, he didn't look any more perturbed than he usually did.

  "How long have you known we were here?" Dante said.

  "Since we saw you." Mourn glanced up at the snowflakes trickling through the branches. "This wasn't a very good time to choose to go through the mountains."

  "It wasn't much of a choice."

  "Then I'll have to have my scouts beaten. They must have missed the hostile army marching you through the Dundens in the dead of winter."

  "Ah, how I've missed you," Blays said.

  Mourn invited them to the Nine Pines' wintering grounds, which it turned out were only a few miles northeast. The clan had set up its yurts in a stand of pine trees on the south face of a hill.

  "You look at least a hundred strong," Dante said. "The clan's recovered nicely. No wonder they won't let you step down as chief."

  "I know," Mourn muttered. "I need to trick a few of them into walking off a cliff. Or hunting kappers. See how long they tolerate that."

  Blays waved to a few of their old friends. "Is it really that bad? Leading these people?"

  "It's awful. The only thing worse would be if one of them was leading me."

  They found seating on a line of logs encircling the camp's central fire. Around them, many of the norren were casually working away at their nulla, the life-craft they dedicated years to perfecting. Some were carving wood or bone; two were dabbing black lines on a canvas, arguing after every stroke; some were carefully stretching hides into bossen, the seamless clothing that remained popular with humans across Gask.

  There was nothing hurried about their efforts. Presumably, the clan had already done the bulk of the work needed to see itself through the winter. They didn't depend on selling their work, either, although that did allow them to purchase weapons-grade steel, which was still rare in the Norren Territories. Yet bit by bit and day by day, they all became skilled enough that the least of them could turn their talent into a trade. Meanwhile, the best of them created art and artifacts that looked like they'd been handed down from another age, or burgled from the houses of the heavens.

  Warmed by the fire, enjoying the smell of the smoke, they caught up with Mourn. The Nine Pines had been rather quiet for the last few years. The occasional skirmish with another clan, but otherwise, the most exciting thing to have happened to them was the discovery of an ancient norren cave system loaded with
stone statues of such quality the Nine Pines' masons were still trying to reproduce their techniques.

  Behind the curtain of clouds, the sun moved toward the horizon. As the light began to dim, most of the norren who'd been at work on their nulla packed away their projects and set to work preparing dinner or tightening up the yurts for the night.

  As they set to their chores, others who'd been laboring earlier—chopping wood, cleaning a deer—cleaned themselves up and got out flutes and small drums. As they began to play, practicing their nulla, those working smiled, humming along with their favorite bits. The rhythm of the clan's actions felt as cyclical as the comings and goings of the tide from day to day and season to season. It was as if they were all players in some great symphony, yet they moved without a conductor, or any orders at all.

  They ate, talked more, fell asleep in the warm comfort of the yurt. In the morning, after a leisurely breakfast, Dante went to prepare the horses to continue their journey.

  Mourn crunched up behind him through the snow. "What are you doing?"

  "Preparing our dragons for the flight to Narashtovik."

  "You're leaving already?"

  "Trust me, if I could spare the time, I'd stay here for a month. It would be a thousand times more pleasant than what I'm off to do."

  "You should stay for another day. It will improve your mood. When you lighten your heart, you lighten your responsibilities."

  Dante gave Mourn a sidelong glance. "Don't tell me you've missed us that bad."

  Mourn sighed, breath steaming from his mouth. "Go on, then. I'll just tell Sonn he won't be able to play Nulladoon with a human after all."

  "You have a Nulladoon set?"

  "Would I lie to you?"

  "Have you forgotten how we met?"

  Behind his beard, Mourn might have blushed. "The hunt for the Quivering Bow led to every norren in Gask throwing off their chains. If every lie could accomplish that much, only sadists would tell the truth."