By the time that returned, and was deemed satisfactory by herself, she'd been away from Narashtovik longer than any time since her aborted apprenticeship at Pocket Cove. Returning to the city—the smell of horses and wood smoke; the trampled gray snow; the spires and walls and all the excellent things locked inside them—Raxa's heart lifted like the coming of a southern heartwind after weeks of freeze.
As nightfall neared, which she loved best of all, especially in winter when the air was so hushed and clear it was like the whole world was made of nether, Gurles rushed through the door of the pub, veered toward her table, and grabbed her arm. Raxa drew back her hand to give him a stiff-fingered jab in the armpit, but the look on his face dashed her anger. She skittered out the back door with him.
After a couple of minutes of rabbiting through a warren of alleys, Gurles came to a stop, glancing behind them. "Blays Buckler was right up the block. And he's asking about you."
"But they think I'm dead. If they don't think that, they wouldn't be dumb enough to make their disbelief so obvious."
"Oh, he wasn't looking for you. He was sniffing around for places you used to live."
She stared blankly, steam curling from her mouth. Then it hit her: he wasn't looking for her. Just the places she'd inhabited. The places she might have stashed the book and the sword. Blays and his master would never give up the hunt until they had them back.
She turned and crunched through the snow.
Gurles hustled up beside her. "Where are you off to?"
"Away. I'm endangering all of you by being here."
"So you're runnin' back to the woods? How long you mean to stay there? Until we're all so old the only thing we're fit to steal are glances at pretty young girls?"
That had been her plan, more or less. Remove herself from the city until it was safe to come back. But there was more than scorn in Gurles' voice. There was anguish, too. She suspected it wasn't so much for her as for the Order she was supposed to be leading.
She stopped and looked up into his dark eyes. "I'm not going off to hide like a sick cat. I'm going there to come up with a new plan. Until then, I need you to keep a steady hand on the Order. For just a little longer. Can you do that?"
He nodded. Raxa smiled. She turned and ran away, disappearing into the darkness and the snow.
~
The remains of the old wall reached up into the night like the arm of a heretic repenting to the heavens as he died—and getting denied.
Most of the ruins were much lower, no more than uneven piles of rubble. In two places, great stone blocks stood like dumb sentinels. Their sides were carved with what had once been runes or pictures, but time had worn their meaning away into dust.
Raxa had found the place a few days into her exile during one of her walks, which she told herself were about learning the surrounding terrain, but were mostly about staving off the boredom before it grew lethal. She'd asked Gurles to find out what the ruins were, and after looking into it, he reported they'd once been a fort. The big upright blocks had been part of a temple inside that fort. The fort itself had been built to protect Narashtovik, or at least to get some of the fighting outside the city itself, which in days of yore had been ransacked more often than the Order's liquor stocks.
She'd found it a good place to think. Especially on nights like this, when you could pretend that the entire world was empty ruins, every bit as barren and decrepit. A little morbid, but it also lent her a sense of distance she found helpful.
That night, though, she was distracted. Had it been time that had ruined the fort? Or had it been destroyed during one of the many, many wars? Looking for answers, she walked through the snow, which had only been disturbed by herself and a few birds that had left trident-shaped tracks in the white. Many of the walls had fallen into shattered piles. The result of sorcery in a heated battle? Or the work of an old thing falling and busting into bits?
She leaned in for a closer look at a slab of black rock, wiping away the snow with a gloved hand. The edges looked broken but worn. Its surface was patchy with pale green lichen. Too old to tell. All of it. Even if it had fallen down yesterday, she wouldn't have known what she was looking at.
She stood and pulled back her hood, unmuffling her ears and expanding her field of vision. What was she doing? Distracting herself from her real problems? Then again, her problem was that she'd gotten into a war with one of the most powerful orders of sorcerers on the continent. And she wasn't anything more than a trumped-up thief dabbling with the nether. So why not spend her time contemplating what had brought down this ancient old fort? At least that was a problem she had a chance in hell of solving.
Something about the place was bothering her, though. Setting aside the matter of what had destroyed the fort, if Narashtovik really had been getting attacked that much—and supposedly, it had been sacked more times than a field of potatoes—why hadn't it ever occurred to its people to go somewhere else? Had it really been that much easier for them to build the Citadel, then the walls of the Ingate, then the Pridegate, then these forts out here in the middle of nowhere? Even if their mighty defenses had prevented them from utter annihilation, how many lives had they lost clinging to this particular scrap of dirt?
The thought hit her so hard she stood up straighter: if she tried to hang around and duke it out with the Citadel, she'd be committing the exact same idiocy the city once had.
She hustled back to Narashtovik. The gates were closed, but the walls weren't; she shadowalked through them. She sent a messenger to Vess, then headed for the temple of Urt. Vess showed up an hour later. Her eyes were puffy and her cloak was dusted with snow.
Vess scowled. "Even for one of us, you keep late hours."
"This was a mistake. We can't fight the Citadel. It was naive to ever think we could."
"Eh? You got the book. You got the magic. That was the plan."
"That makes one of us who can use the nether. How many do they have? Sixty? A hundred?"
Vess shrugged one shoulder. "So you get strong, then you find more like you and you train them. And when you are enough, boom. No more Citadel."
"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," Raxa said softly. "The only way to beat them is to recruit people like them. Train those people like them. Become them. If we do that, we've lost the very thing we're fighting for."
The other woman instantly grew thoughtful. "You speak like that, and you make sense."
"I've been going about this the wrong way. Mistaking anger for wisdom. Getting hold of the Cycle was a good idea. But the power inside it—I should be using that to protect my people, not to provoke a war against them." She had a sudden vision of the six children she hadn't risked seeing since she'd rescued them from the bowels of the Citadel. "No one else will ever care about them. It has to be us."
"Lots of talk. What's the doing?"
"If I was smart, I'd get the fuck out of here. Move the Order to Yallen. Or Setteven. Or all the way to Bressel."
Vess wrinkled her brow. "Would be smart. But you talk like you don't want to be smart. Why not?"
Raxa shook her head, wandering toward the middle of the snowy courtyard. "Why do people kill themselves? Why not leave the city? The country? The continent? Find out if there's something better out there?"
"I don't know. Why not do that?"
She turned to face Vess, frustration boiling up from her gut. That was the logical next question—she'd asked it of herself—but people didn't just leave, and their decision didn't feel wrong. Why? It wasn't a connection to the land, was it? That might be a small part of it, but it wasn't the main cause. Then what force could be so strong that it made you stay even when you were certain that staying would destroy you?
"Because we want there to be justice here," Raxa blurted. "If we run away, we admit that there isn't. And if there isn't justice here, why would we believe we can find it anywhere?"
"Oh, that's the worry? Simple answer: no justice anywhere. Deal with it."
"I'm goin
g to try. In exchange for peace, I'll ask them for Cee. She was in bed with Gaits; literally, for all I know. She tried to get my kids killed. We can't have someone like that running their town watch."
"And we really can't have her escape the punishment."
"Naturally." Raxa began to pace. "But there's more to it than revenge. If they hand her over, it will prove they respect us—and fear us—enough to honor the peace."
"If they say okay, and you go there, and they betray you?"
"Then I kill them."
Vess rolled her eyes. "Just like the last time you tried that and ran away and barely lived?"
"I've got a new idea. Based on that fight."
"What if this new idea is also bad? What if this idea gets you killed?"
"Then I'm dead!" Raxa made herself take a deep breath. She lowered her voice. "And they have no reason to come after the rest of you."
Vess pursed her lips, taking a hard look into Raxa's eyes. "You think they're going to kill you, don't you? That's your plan. You sacrifice yourself, all our problems go away."
"I don't know what they'll do. All I know is that if I play my hand right, there's three outcomes, and we win each one of them. Either I die and the rest of you live. Or I kill them, and maybe we take this war after all. Or they give me the kidnapper and no one has to die."
"Except her."
"Except her."
Vess absorbed this, then chuckled. "Okay."
"That's it? No lecture about how stupid I'm being?"
"If I want to waste words, I'll ask my people to quit getting drunk so often. Always, you do what you do, and then tell me why it had to be so."
Raxa laughed wryly. It was the middle of the night, but she got straight to work on preparations. For one thing, she was already in the city. Beyond that, now that she'd made her decision, she couldn't stand to sit around waiting.
First thing was to speak to Gurles. She would rather have told no one at all, but the Order deserved better. He bore a flat expression as she explained that she was about to end the conflict with the Citadel—and it was going to be dangerous.
"If something happens," she finished, "I need you to hold the Order together. Don't elect a new leader until they're ready for it."
He looked her over. "You don't think you're coming back."
"I don't know. But for once in my life, I'm trying to be smart."
She put her endorsement of Gurles down in writing, then penned a letter to Galand laying out her terms and instructing them to meet her at the ruined fort the following night. She assumed he wouldn't be stupid enough to kidnap or torture the runner she sent to make the delivery.
After that, there was only one thing left to do. She hurried to the Pridegate, shadowalked through it, and slogged down the southern road, putting the city behind her. She stopped at the edge of the woods. She didn't think she'd been followed—she hadn't felt so much as a flicker of nether—but maybe all that meant was that he was too powerful for her to even notice he was there.
Heart racing, she cut into the shadows and ran into the forest as fast as she could. Five minutes later, with her juice running low and no sign of pursuit, she dropped back into the world. Wind sifted through the snow-coated pine needles.
She walked for what felt like forever. Just as she was growing certain she'd gone in the wrong direction, the house appeared ahead. It was silent, shuttered, but the smoke trickling from its chimney attested that Herrick and the children were still there.
It was a couple hours before dawn, but it wouldn't be too outrageous to knock on the door. After the last few weeks, they'd be happy to wake up and see her. She could see their smiles, feel the warmth of the house spilling out around her, smell their hair. It would be so easy to make that happen. All she'd have to do was walk a few more feet.
Yet she couldn't get her legs to move. She counted down from sixty, willing one of them to open a shutter or walk out for more firewood. But after a minute had passed, the house remained still. She lifted her hand, then turned and walked back through the forest.
~
Feet crunched through the snow. Fear stabbed hard into her guts, but rather than lingering, it faded like a cramp. She knew why: whatever happened next, in just a few more minutes, it would all be over.
Hidden behind a crumbling wall of the ruined fort, she peered into the darkness, picking up their movement within the trees. Three of them. As they neared, she got a clear look at their faces: Galand, Blays, and Cee.
She drew her knife, tugged down her glove, and nicked the back of her hand. Shadows uncoiled from the rocks. Had they been left there by the blood of the long-ago dead? If there were shadows everywhere, did that mean there was nowhere in the world where a thing hadn't died?
She stepped from behind the wall. "That's close enough."
Down the slope, they looked up in surprise. Even Galand. Good. That meant he'd honored her demand that he not send spies ahead of himself.
"No need to draw this out," she said. "Hand her over and let's get on our way."
Galand gazed up at her. "Did you bring the book?"
Raxa reached into her coat and withdrew the Cycle. She unwrapped the oiled canvas she'd used to keep it dry and set it on a flat piece of wall. "Send her up. We'll walk away. Once we're gone, the book's all yours."
"There's one small problem." To his credit, he didn't smile. "I don't give up my people."
A dark spear winged toward her chest. He was fast, unnervingly so, but she'd been expecting it. She grabbed the Cycle and jumped into the safety of the shadows. The spear sizzled past her, a bright but harmless shaft of silver fury. The two men drew their swords and ran up the hillside. Blays dropped into the nether.
Seeing her there, he winked. "Don't suppose you'll come along quietly?"
She grinned back at him. "Hold still and I'll give you all the quiet you could ever ask for."
She backpedaled, drawing Blays ahead of Galand, who was high-stepping through snows that rose past his knees. Cee followed a ways behind the priest. She had a bow in her hands, but against the shadows, it was nothing more than a prop.
Raxa vaulted a wall, landing lightly on top of the snow on the other side. Blays was closing fast. Galand was yelling out for directions, but unless Blays dropped out of the nether, he wasn't going to be any help. All of which was exactly why she'd chosen the snowy, maze-like site of the fort.
She hopped a patch of rubble. Blays landed right behind her. Just as she'd been practicing since their first encounter where Galand had tried to do the same to her, she gathered the nether close, then shoved it into Blays as hard as she could. With an audible pop, he burst loose from the shadows, forced back into reality.
Raxa grinned and followed him out into the dimness of the night. Where the nether could be deadly again. Galand was nowhere in sight. She shaped the shadows into a killing blow aimed for the soft part of Blays' throat.
As she moved to unleash them, a woman stepped out of the nether right beside her. Something slammed into the side of Raxa's head. The night was cold enough to freeze the spit in your mouth, but all she felt was warm.
14
Dante crouched over the woman's body, wary that it was yet another ruse. Then again, if it was a trick, Raxa Dosse was doing an admirable job of not caring about all the blood pouring out of her head.
He dumped shadows into her skin. To his utter lack of surprise, her skull was cracked. Her brain looked all right, but the trouble with brains was that they could appear perfectly normal even while the organ's owner was laughing at the clouds and pissing themselves.
Deep inside the nether, he smoothed the crack in the skull and knit her skin back together. She was breathing deeply but peacefully. He turned her face to get her cheek out of the snow. She looked like a nice young woman. Nothing like the terror who haunted the streets of Narashtovik.
He wiped a bit of blood on his trousers and swiveled his head to glare up at Minn. "What part of 'take her alive' was so hard to understand?"
"I thought," Minn said in an annoyingly reasonable tone, "I would worry about hitting her with the correct level of force once she was no longer about to murder my husband."
"Thanks for that," Blays said. He sheathed one sword but kept the other out. "I'd promise to return the favor some day, but I'd really rather you not get into any almost-murders in the first place."
"Are you suggesting I should leave before she wakes up?"
"No way. When she wakes up, we're going to need every sword, arrow, and scrap of nether we can get out hands on."
As Cee climbed over a patch of rubble to join them, Dante checked Raxa's coat and found the Cycle. He opened the cover and discovered it was a fake. His first instinct was to strike her, but his second was to laugh. Fitting. They'd shown up with no intention of turning over Cee, and Raxa had shown up with a fake copy of the book. He checked her again and was unsurprised to find she didn't have the sword on her, either.
He sat back on his cloak with a sigh. "We'll have to talk with her."
"I've only got one word," Cee said. "'Die.'"
"Duly noted. Now in the interests of not having to explode her like a rotten pumpkin, would you kindly stand way over there?"
Cee gave him a dark look, then walked forty feet away. She kept her bow nocked, eyes fixed on Raxa. Dante focused on the nether around the sleeping thief. If she reached for it, he'd knock her out again, then repeat the process until she was spent and harmless.
That was the idea, at least. In practice, trying to keep a sorcerer safely in captivity was about as effective as trying to imprison a rattlesnake in your mouth.
Raxa's eyes opened, locking on Dante.
"Don't even think about it." He summoned a hundred spikes of nether from the air, hovering them inches above her body. "If you so much as move, I'll impale you from head to toe. Then I'll heal you and do it again. I'll be happy to keep that up until you get the idea—or go so insane you can't get any ideas at all."
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 110
