The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Er," Sorrowen said. "You're not going to shoot at us, are you?"

  "You have ten seconds," Dante said. "Get running."

  The boy paled and popped to his feet, running headlong into the forest, snow spraying from his boots. He was about to disappear into the trees when the laughter of the others brought him to a stop.

  He trudged back to them, giving Dante a peevish look. "What did that teach me?"

  "That you can't trust everything your teacher says." Dante brightened—he hadn't intended to say that, but it sounded just like something Cally would have said. "We won't aim at each other. The target will be the lower branches of that tree." He pointed out a pine sixty feet away. "I'm going to attack it. It's your job to deflect my attack before it hits home."

  He walked twenty feet away from the others. He rolled up his left sleeve and got out his antler-handled knife. The blade was icy cold, practically sticking to his skin as he made the cut.

  Checking that the two of them were ready, Dante shaped a handful of nether into an arrowhead, then sent it winging toward the designated pine tree. It was already a third of the way there before a black dart flew from Sorrowen's hands. The dart started strong, closing on the arrowhead, but then wobbled mid-flight, veering off course. The arrowhead smacked into the tree.

  "You missed," Dante said.

  "It was too dark to see."

  "You don't want to try to watch it. Your eyes are too slow. Better to follow it by feel."

  He sent another arrowhead straight at the tree. Sorrowen's counter dashed it from the air in a burst of silver sparks. On the third attempt, however, Dante put some spiral into his bolt and Sorrowen reacted too late. The nether crashed through the bough, sending it crunching into the snow.

  Dante tried nine more times. Sorrowen only struck down a single one. His counters always seemed to be a little too slow, his adjustments a little too hesitant to overtake the looping arrowhead. Dante rejoined the others. Sorrowen looked like he was expecting to be smacked.

  "You can't afford to be that slow," Dante said. "You know the attack is coming. That's an advantage you'll rarely have in real combat. Get the bolt up to speed, then worry about making adjustments to its course."

  "But what if mine hits too hard?"

  "No such thing. The whole point is to cause a wreck. Let's try again."

  They got back in position. To Dante's surprise, after eight more bolts, Sorrowen apologized for being out of nether. He'd intercepted just one more strike.

  "I don't understand," Sorrowen said. "I thought I was better than this."

  "When the nether's flying right at you, I expect you are. We're working at a distance on purpose to develop your finesse."

  "And to not kill you," Blays suggested.

  The boy looked partially reassured. Dante motioned to Raxa. "Your turn."

  They stepped apart. She called out that she was ready. He sent a straight shot at the tree, which was gouged and cracked from his earlier strikes. A blast of darkness shot from Raxa's hands and slammed into Dante's arrowhead, obliterating it in a spray of twinkling motes. He loosed a second attack and she knocked it down just as easily.

  As the third flew toward the pine, Dante sent it into an irregular spiral. A great gob of nether overshot it, reversed course, and plowed into it from the other side less than three feet from the tree. Of the next three efforts, she nailed two and missed one.

  "That's it," she announced. "Out of juice."

  Dante let the nether dissolve from his fingers. "Already?"

  "Was there supposed to be a lesson somewhere?"

  He crunched back to the camp. The rangers had brought in wood and were striking a fire.

  "You have good instincts," Dante told Raxa. "But you hit too hard. It's like you're dumping a bucket of water on a candle. Learn to conserve. Use as little as possible to achieve your goals. Often, defeating another sorcerer is a matter of wearing them down. Exhaust yourself in the first exchanges, and they'll rip you apart."

  He ate and went to bed feeling good about having identified areas for them to work on. Yet after another three days of practice, having exhausted their supply of nether in each session, he couldn't feel the slightest bit of difference in their technique. During their fifth practice, they actually seemed worse: Sorrowen's hold was as wobbly as a toddler trying to lift his father's sword, and as for Raxa, in her insistence on doing her best to block every single one of his shots no matter the cost, she ran herself dry after a handful of efforts. On top of that, when she rushed in too hard, her counterattacks had such unsteerable momentum that it made it easy for him to slip under her guard.

  "You better hope we fall down a crevasse and nobody finds us for twenty years," Dante said. "Because that's how long it's going to take for you two to learn to do this right."

  Sorrowen flinched. Raxa just stared. Immediately regretting himself, and hoping the shadows and wavering light cast by the campfire would disguise his blush, Dante launched into a lecture about how they needed to imagine that his nether was a pigeon in flight while theirs was a plunging falcon with unerring aim.

  Late the next morning, as they emerged from the forest into a stretch of rolling hills, one of Dante's loons twinged.

  "O wise leader?" Nak said. "Is now a good time to receive a great deal of information that won't be useful to you for weeks?"

  "As good as any." Dante tried to disguise his disappointment that it wasn't Jona with news about Naran. "I take it you've found something on Tanar Atain?"

  "For various definitions of 'something,' yes. In the case of the history I found in the archives, the most important things to come out of Tanar Atain are the purity of its noble bloodlines, and the cleverness of the fashions they wore."

  "Commissioned by the same royals he wrote about," Dante said. "Those books are always the worst. Makes me wish I could walk back through time and pay them to not write about the cuffs of their patron's jacket."

  "I couldn't agree more. Yet once the author grew tired of chronicling the type and number of gemstones adorning that year's belts, or decided that even his patrons must have grown bored of hearing about the hems of tunics, he switched subjects to something the outsider might term 'interesting.'

  "The history of Tanar Atain has been troubled, to say the least. It seems they've spent most of the last eight hundred years engaged in a series of dynastic successions, rebellions, and counter-rebellions, almost none of which can realistically claim to have ruled the entire area—or to have lasted for more than twenty years. In some cases, the ruling dynasty hasn't lasted twenty days."

  "Are they that war-like?"

  "Not especially so, at least from what I can tell. The trouble, you see, is that Tanar Atain isn't land as you or I know it. The area is so swampy and boggy that the areas of usable earth are difficult to get to, let alone assault. Thus various regions and settlements were constantly breaking away from their conquerors. And if those conquerors attempted to reclaim the rebel territories, it usually weakened the attackers so greatly it left them vulnerable to an uprising in their home city."

  Dante gazed down the road, which was so buried in snow that it was a matter of faith as to whether it still existed. "Sounds like finding Captain Naran might be harder than we bargained for."

  "Perhaps, but perhaps not. You see, over a century ago, which is when this text was written, the Yoto Dynasty arose, unifying the region and keeping it under their control through a series of harsh but—the author is careful to stress this—necessary and ultimately beneficial measures."

  "Who are the Yoto?"

  "Little is said on that matter except that they are a branch of an earlier dynasty that was cast down by rebellion many years earlier. I get the impression the author covered the Yotos' earlier history in a separate volume."

  "Which we don't have."

  Nak tutted. "Regrettably, I failed to prioritize the archives' collection of Tanarian lore. I can glean this much: they're proponents of rules, and they take them extremely se
riously. Assuming the Yoto remain in power, my advice is to hew strictly to all of their laws, customs, statutes, rites, and precedents."

  "But Nak, we would never dream of breaking someone else's laws."

  "Forgive me, master. You can't see me doing so, but rest assured I have fallen to my knees and begun the first of dozens of appeals to Arawn's mercy for slandering you."

  "Have you found anything about the city of Aris Osis? I'm hoping that's all the further we have to go."

  "It was only mentioned in passing. Sounds like a thriving place, and slightly less strict, due to the nature of ports. The author seemed to look down on it for this reason." Nak paused; across the loon, Dante heard the flipping of pages. "The book concludes on a curious anecdote relayed thirdhand from a wandering soothsayer. The soothsayer, in turn, claims to have heard the story from something called a noto, which from context appears to be some sort of traveling merchant.

  "This noto, by name of Eko Abu, had a dangerous business delivering various herbs, roots, and barks between the coastal regions and the wilder reaches of the interior. One of these was a swamp known as Go Kaza; since all of the other noto refused to visit it, Eko Abu was making a small fortune bringing back the swamp's medicinal herbs.

  "On one such venture to Go Kaza, Eko Abu was on his way to a raft carpet—don't ask me what that is—when he heard a scream from a small, densely wooded island. Against his better instincts, he tied up his boat and scrambled onto the island to offer assistance.

  "Moving as quietly as he could, he stumbled upon a scene born from nightmare: a pale man, gaunt yet powerful, feeding on the neck of a limp young woman. Eko Abu gasped in horror. The pale figure detached from its victim, face dripping with blood, and leaped at Eko Abu, crossing forty feet in a single bound.

  "The vampire fell upon him, knocking him to the ground. Eko Abu attacked it with his longknife, stabbing it in the chest, but as he withdrew the blade, the wound sealed behind it. The beast knocked aside the knife and plunged its fangs into Eko Abu's throat.

  "Coldness swept through him. The world seemed to fall away, as though he were viewing it through a pane of dirty glass. He reached for his pouch, trying to find his jackknife, but in his haze, he opened his satchel of herbs instead, spilling his bundle of freshly collected roto ari leaves over the monster.

  "The vampire recoiled with a scream, the flesh of its face sizzling wherever the leaves had touched it. Eko Abu threw another handful of leaves at the beast. With a shriek, it bounded away. Eko Abu ran to his barge, poling through the fetid water as fast as he could.

  "As soon as he was away from the swamps of Go Kaza, Eko Abu isolated himself in another bog, convinced he'd soon turn vampire as well. There, he stayed in a makeshift shelter, eating the roto ari leaves in an attempt to purge his system of the disease. After ninety days and ninety nights, with no change in his body or his soul, he returned home to his wife and children.

  "And whenever he went back to the swamps of Go Kaza," Nak finished with the satisfaction of all people telling the end of a good story, "he went wrapped in the leaves of the roto ari. He never saw another vampire again."

  "I have so many questions," Dante said. "Like why the hell did you tell me this?"

  "Because it's written in a book of history," Nak said. "And it's at the end of the book. The author must have included it for some reason." His voice shrank, sounding hurt. "Besides, this book is all that I've been able to find."

  "But vampires aren't real."

  "And neither are kappers, I suppose? Or the zombies you're so fond of raising when you feel like terrorizing your enemies? Those are nothing but myths too, are they? Excuse me for thinking that if you're traveling to a land where there might be vampires, you might want to know that you can protect yourselves by carrying roto ari with you."

  "I'm sorry," Dante said, not quite believing that he was apologizing for Nak having told him a fairy tale. "I do want to know all I can learn about Tanar Atain. Even if it's nothing but myth. Oftentimes, the legends people tell can teach you a lot about them."

  "Exactly as I thought," Nak said. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to return to the archives."

  One of the rangers returned to warn them that there was a group of armed and hungry-looking men in a grove of trees over the next hill. Dante was inclined to detour from the road: every delay was an annoyance, and besides, there was something troubling about the idea of riding into a group of people with the intention of baiting them into violence and then slaughtering them.

  Blays, however, pointed out that if they were murderous bandits, by riding around them, they'd leave the bandits free to attack the next people who came through—people who would be much less likely to be able to defend themselves. Angered by the idea that a gang of thugs was preying on his citizens and travelers, Dante led the party onward over the next hill.

  The bandits' attack was as predictable as its outcome: all the highwaymen died or fled into the wilds. Dante would have been happy to leave the corpses for the wolves, but Blays insisted on burning them. They left a roaring bonfire behind them.

  A piece of him was happy to have made his land a little safer. Yet it reminded him that for all you did, your work would never be done: things were always breaking down, falling apart, dissolving into chaos. That was the lesson of the cracking of Arawn's Mill: even the gods couldn't make perfection that would last down through the years. In that case, why did mortals even try?

  Behind them, smoke climbed to meet the clouds, the fluttering ashes of the dead mingling with the rising wisps of nether.

  16

  They made camp at sunset. Dante didn't really expect the bandits who'd fled the battle to try to take revenge—that was about as likely as a surprise attack by the offspring of the pigs in the sausage they ate for dinner—but he slew a pair of field mice regardless, assigning them to patrol a wide circle around the camp. Watching them begin their mindless circuit, he was struck with an idea.

  "Tonight, we're going to try something different," he told Raxa and Sorrowen. "The fine art of infiltrating a place without having to be anywhere near it. Given what you'll be doing in Bressel, this is more likely to save your skin than learning to defend against a direct strike from the nether."

  He paused to let this sink in, hoping it would provide them with an extra dose of inspiration.

  "Nether rests in all things," he said. "Including the dead. If you draw on the nether in a body, you can connect yourself to it, allowing you to move the creature in question around—and perceive through its senses." He smiled at Raxa. "Like those beetles I sent to track you down."

  She snorted. "You mean the ones I used to lure you into an ambush?"

  "You mean the ambush where we almost killed you? We can compare scores later. Right now, it's time to conduct some pest control."

  Normally, he would have taught them with bugs of some kind—they were typically more numerous, and he felt no guilt killing them—but the winter had already massacred them all. Besides which, insects were harder to control, requiring more precision. Fortunately, the field mice were plentiful, foraging for anything they could find. And though a mouse was cute when it was sitting in the open eating a seed, anyone who'd seen the horrors they could inflict on a larder—to say nothing of a granary—would carry their hate with them forever.

  Dante nodded to one of them pawing through the snow at the edge of the firelight. "Strike it down, then I'll show you how to connect yourself to it."

  Raxa poked herself with a knife, grabbed hold of the nether, and slung a bolt at the mouse. Rather than scaling it down to the size of her target, she used a bolt of the same size they'd been using to practice with. It slammed into the target so hard that the animal's head spun away, a burst of fur whirling over the bloody snow.

  "That seems excessive," Blays said. "What, was it a convicted war criminal?"

  Dante kept his face neutral, nodding at Sorrowen. "Why don't you give it a try?"

  The acolyte stood straight, liftin
g his right hand before him. Nether webbed his fingers. He thrust his hand forward, shooting a dark needle at an oblivious rodent. The mouse squealed so loud that two of the rangers leaped to their feet in surprise. As it went on squealing, Dante put a quick but gentle end to its suffering.

  He gave Sorrowen a dirty look. "Were you going to let it bleed to death?" He walked over to the fallen mouse and crouched above it, holding out his hand. "Watch close."

  Moving slowly, exaggerating his actions the best that he could, Dante reached inside the nether contained within the tiny body. The shadows had settled to resting positions, requiring him to send them flowing through the mouse's organs and limbs. Holding these in place, he poured a dollop of his own nether into the body.

  The shadows merged. The mouse stood.

  Most times, his two students couldn't have carried themselves more differently. But as they watched the little undead vermin lift its snout to test the night air, the fascination on their faces was an exact mirror of each other.

  Dante withdrew his nether from the mouse, letting it collapse. "Simple as that."

  Raxa went first. With the nether settling inside the body again, she yanked it this way and that, trying to force it into shape. Dante gave her a steady stream of directions, but it took her twenty minutes to get the nether apportioned and circulating as it should be.

  "Now connect it to yourself," Dante said. "Go easy—"

  Raxa flooded it with nether, overwhelming the careful balance she'd made of its shadows. "Gods damn it!"

  She booted the corpse as hard as she could, sending it arcing into the trees, then stomped off into the dark.

  Dante raised his eyebrows at Sorrowen. "I suppose that means it's your turn."

  Sorrowen went to work. He had the nether in position faster than Raxa had—he had more patience for fine tasks, and experience in general—but as he tried to meld it with his own nether, the shadows inside the creature seemed to slip away, as if he didn't have a tight enough grasp on them. Doggedly, he kept trying until his hold got so shaky he could no longer keep the nether in place.