The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  He extended it to Sorrowen. "Do you know what this is?"

  The boy glanced at Dante, then down at the bone, then back at Dante. "Uh. I didn't know you made jewelry, sir. I'll wear it with pride."

  "It's not just jewelry, you fool. It's a loon. It's linked to this one." Dante dangled his half. "Put it in your ear, and activate it like so—" He paused to illustrate. "And we can speak to each other from hundreds of miles apart."

  Sorrowen gave it a try. When Dante's voice sounded in his ear, his jaw dropped, completely awestruck. Dante couldn't help laughing: there were few things funnier than a sorcerer who acted like he'd never seen magic before.

  "Keep it secret," he said. "Don't even tell Raxa. And when you enter the priesthood, don't wear it around them—they might be able to sense it. You'll have to hide it somewhere. Only use it when you or Raxa has something to pass along."

  Sorrowen bounced the loon in his hand. He licked his lips. "Are you sure this is going to work?"

  "You just heard it for yourself."

  "I don't…" Sorrowen pocketed the loon. "Nevermind. It's stupid."

  "You're worried about your mission. You should be. You're about to be dropped into the lion's den. If you have a problem with that, you need to let me know now."

  "But…I mean…what would it matter now? We're hardly two days from Bressel."

  "Which gives you two days to decide you'd rather go back to Narashtovik."

  "You'd let me do that?"

  "I would," Dante said. "But first, I'd tell you that this will be dangerous. You could be hurt. You could even be killed. But I think you can do this. You're quick on your feet. That's one of the only two skills you need to survive anything."

  "What's the other thing?"

  "Resilience. The ability to take a punch, get back on your feet, and throw one back."

  Sorrowen frowned. "You think I can do that?"

  "You can find out in Bressel. Or you can return to Narashtovik, rejoin the monks, and never have to find out. Which life do you want?"

  The boy was quiet for a few seconds. He glanced through the trees at Raxa and Blays, who were still laughing next to the fire, as if they'd burned all their worries along with the kindling. Sorrowen drew a wisp of shadows to his fingers. For a moment, he looked older.

  "I'll go," he said. "It's what Narashtovik needs from me, isn't it?"

  "Actually, I'm hoping you turn out to be worthless, because Mallon doesn't intend to do anything more threatening than wear those ridiculous pants of theirs."

  Sorrowen laughed. They returned to the fire. Dante felt pleased with himself until it occurred to him that he'd never really believed that Sorrowen would have given up the mission to return to Narashtovik—and that if he had feared that outcome, he might never have asked at all.

  Two days later, with the sun fading from the overcast sky, they gazed on the spires of Bressel.

  "From here, you're on your own," Dante said. "I wish I had some final trick or lesson to teach you."

  Blays shifted in his saddle. "I've got one: 'Never get in a fight with someone who can turn you inside-out.'"

  "Try not to get in any fights at all. Especially not with their priests. Even if you think you're stronger, next to the nether and the ether, we're nothing but watery, helpless flesh. If you make a single mistake, you won't get the chance to make a second one."

  Raxa sniffed. "Are you always this inspiring before you send your troops into battle?"

  "This is why I encourage him to shut up and make things explode," Blays said. "Much better for morale."

  Raxa grinned, gave the mounts that had carried her all this way one last pat, and walked onward toward the city. Sorrowen followed. When he was twenty feet from them, he turned and gave a hesitant wave.

  "We're not sending them to their deaths, are we?" Blays said.

  "Don't worry, this one's all on me," Dante said. "Although if they do wind up caught and executed, you really should have done something to stop me here."

  He called the rangers over to him. He'd wrapped the Cycle in an oiled leather bag to keep it dry. He handed it over to Echels, who would lead the four escorts home to Narashtovik.

  "If the pass isn't clear, wait for it to thaw," Dante said. "In fact, if there's ever a choice between getting the book home sooner, and getting it there safer, choose the safer option. If you run into any trouble north of the Dundens, the norren will help you. Otherwise, don't stop for anyone. Not even to help them. This book can't be replaced. Unless you're faced to decide between saving the book and saving the world, always go with the book."

  "All right, Mother Dante," Blays cut in. "If you're ready to part with your precious child, perhaps we can get on with our job?"

  Echels smiled, eyes crinkling. "We'll take perfect care of it, sir. We are aware that if we didn't, you'd use our skin for your bedsheets."

  Echels secured the book in a pouch in his saddle next to his sword. With a clipped, birdlike call, he ordered his men to turn about and ride north. Dante tried not to think about how the Cycle would be on the open road for at least the next month. Anyway, safer with the riders than where he was headed.

  They backtracked to a ferry they'd seen a few miles up the Chanset and crossed to the eastern bank. Once they were oriented southeast, meaning to hit the shore and ride straight along the coast and into Alebolgia, Dante sent a pulse to Jona's loon.

  "Hullo?" It wasn't yet sundown, but Jona sounded well on his way to a good night. "That you, Dante?"

  "In the voice," Dante said. "We're a few days outside of Collen, but we'd like to get to Tanar Atain as fast as possible. That means heading straight to Cavana. Can you ask the Colleners to meet us there?"

  Jona chuckled roughly. "Wish all my jobs were so easy. The basin's already got a delegation in Cavana."

  "Really? What are they doing there?"

  "Diplomacy or some shit. You think they tell me anything? To them, I'm just a sailor who forgot which way the ocean is."

  "Right," Dante said. "I'll let you get back to your rum, then."

  Many miles east of Bressel, they came to the coast. The wind off the ocean wasn't as cold as it had been inland, leaving the way free of snow. They trotted along the pathway all the way to the inland sea Dante had created to block off the Mallish.

  The Colleners had already established a small fort on the other side. They sent over a flat-bottomed sloop to transport Dante, Blays, and the horses to the other side. The Colleners were in high spirits, offering them food and drink, congratulating them in having secured the basin's freedom at last. Never one to pass up a feast, Blays talked Dante into staying overnight.

  In the morning, they made all haste for the Strip of Alebolgia. After a stretch of desert, the starkness was textured with grape trellises and fields of low green winter wheat. They passed through the hills of Poloa and came to Cavana. Securing lodging at an inn, they sent a messenger to the Collenese delegation, who were apparently being quartered at House Itiego.

  Within an hour of their arrival, a fist hammered on their door. Dante glanced at Blays, who shrugged and loosened his swords in their sheaths. Dante bit his lip until he tasted blood, gathering nether in his hands.

  He opened the door. Lady Vita Osedo barged inside, her face clenched in wrath. She jabbed a thin, curved sword against Dante's chest.

  "There's the liar from the north," she said. "Time to answer for your betrayal."

  17

  Raxa had always thought Narashtovik was the pinnacle of a sprawling, potent city. The kind of place you could get lost in. In her line of work, you couldn't ask for more.

  But as she neared the capital's gates, she was starting to think you could fit Narashtovik into a single quadrant of Bressel. The city was big. Bigger than big. People scurried everywhere, tan and dark-haired, supplemented by a goodly number of others with light brown faces and hair as yellow as corn silk, and speckled by citizens and visitors who seemed to be from every limb of the world: pale, black-haired Gaskans; tall people
with skin as reddish-brown as chestnuts; others with short orange hair and faces that were nearly as dark as charcoal.

  Ahead, blue-shirted guards examined the flow of people coming through the gates, stopping everyone who hit their eye the wrong way. Her mission felt suddenly real in a way it hadn't during the long ride from the north. She'd taken Galand up on his offer for many reasons. Including a few she didn't fully understand. What she knew for sure was that she was tired of being hunted. Of feeling like a rat who had to dash for cover whenever one of the sharp-eyed and sharper-clawed agents of the Citadel came prowling by.

  And maybe after Gaits, she'd been pushed away by disillusionment with what Narashtovik's underclass liked to call the "brotherhood of scum." Not that she was walking out on the Order. More like taking a break. While seizing the opportunity to learn how to not just walk in the shadows, but to kill with them. When she came back home, not only would the Citadel no longer be their enemy, but she'd be equipped to protect her people and her kids from anything short of a barbarian horde.

  She passed through the gates. A pair of guards moved in front of her, eyes roving up and down her body. Maybe they were inspecting her for swords, or maybe they were just enjoying the benefits of a job that allowed you to look at whoever you wanted for as long as you liked without being criticized for it.

  The shorter of the two guards raised his eyes to her face, then her hair. Unimpressed with what he saw, he said something, but it sounded like a foreign language.

  Oh shit. It was.

  Raxa tried to reconstruct the words in her mind. Something about…doing? No, about business. Was she here on business?

  "Yes," she said in Mallish. "Business."

  The guard looked at her like she was trying to stick her tongue up her own nose. He repeated himself, slowing the words. "What's your business?"

  Raxa smiled, buying herself a few moments. Despite weeks of lessons with Dante, hearing Mallish spoken in real time and in a full vocabulary threw her for a loop. It was like she'd been taught to swim in a knee-deep pond and then been tossed into the ocean during a winter squall.

  She took in the scene around her. They were letting almost everyone else through without question. Including a number of men whose clothes were as tattered as the Lady of Whispers' maidenhead—obvious vagabonds, if not highwaymen. Why were they being allowed inside? They looked like…

  Mallishers. Like they belonged.

  "Here to serve," she said, or tried to. Her grammar was awful, slapping words together like a drunkard hammering wooden cut-offs together in the hopes they'd form something chair-like enough to sit on. She smiled at the guards, playing up her naive innocence. "Family in the church."

  They exchanged a look, then stepped aside and waved her in. She was well past them before she allowed herself to smile.

  For there was one more reason she'd agreed to come to Bressel: to see new places, and cause them trouble.

  The spires of temples jabbed at the gray, late winter sky. Blocky towers squared their shoulders against the city below them. The roofs weren't half as steep as in Narashtovik, and everything was so whitewashed it made her eyes hurt. Even so, while the forms were different, the function was the same. Tenements and public houses, markets and churches, makeshift buildings that had started as a cottage or barn and grown into an unholy mishmash of additions and expansions.

  For the better part of an hour, she let herself walk the city, guided by nothing more than the want to feel the streets with her feet and inhale them into her lungs. Much like the buildings, Bressel's classes of people looked a little different than she was used to, but if you didn't get hung up on the small details, it was easy enough to recognize who was who. Shopkeepers and stall vendors calling out their wares. Beggars and the passersby who pointedly ignored them. Nobles and the rich rattling past in their sleek black carriages.

  Best of all, though, was the greatest freedom of them all: being lost in a crowd. Anonymous and ignored, able to wander and observe without so much as a drop of fear. In Narashtovik, she hadn't been able to do that for a long time. She'd forgotten how much she'd missed it.

  Somewhere, a bell rang, melodious but foreboding. Like it was warning the little people below it that judgment was always on its way. Raxa smiled again, adjusted her pack on her shoulders, and got on her way. Business was business. It was time to get down to it.

  Blays had told her that the city's main liberators of imprisoned wealth were an outfit called the Red Ghosts. He'd claimed that the last time he'd spent time in Bressel, the Ghosts had favored the taverns of the Cutlery District. Raxa didn't know why the city had a cutlery district, to say nothing of why its cutpurses and cutthroats preferred to hang out there, but people like that tended to have warped senses of humor. Maybe they liked that it kept them closer to the knives.

  The bigger streets had their names carved on posts set into the corners, but she was even worse with written Mallish than the spoken variety. As she asked directions, she quickly discovered the locals didn't think too much of people who spoke broken Mallish in thick Narashtovik accents.

  Ultimately, though, their politeness was stronger than their prejudice. An hour and only two wrong turns later, she found herself in a cobbled square of shops interspersed with pubs. Outside many shops, carved wooden forks and knives thrust up from the cobbles, taller than a norren, like the sacred idols of a lost dinner-worshipping kingdom.

  Raxa wandered up for a closer look. Clever metal cutlery glinted behind glass windows, couched in dark velvet. Each set of gob-stuffers was unique: in one, the ends of the handles were shaped like seashells; another set bore the roaring heads of bears and eagles and cougars; others were more abstract, hewn from stark angles, or etched all over with delicate spirals. Pretty. Artful. But also one of the silliest fashions Raxa had ever seen.

  She ducked her head into a public house. A glance at the normals inside told her more than enough. She moved on to a pub painted garish orange, its sign illustrated with a turtle standing on its hind legs with its front paws put up like a pugilist's. The Boxing Turtle?

  Inside the dim common room, she spotted her own kind at once: sprawled in their booths and propped on their stools, they looked leisurely enough. But their eyes always seemed positioned to watch you and everyone else in the room, and their bodies, though momentarily relaxed, looked spring-loaded to run or fight at a moment's notice.

  All that aside, the fussy hair and glittering jewelry was a dead giveaway.

  A low wooden bar ran across the back of the room. She seated herself at it, glancing at the foamy mug of the man next to her and confirming Mallon knew the glory of beer. She ordered a mug. It was as bitter as a husband whose wife had left him for a man with straight teeth. Where was the sourness? She didn't know if she could trust a land that couldn't be trusted to make good beer.

  The man to her left watched her with a smile. He wore a short brown beard that got thin over his cheeks, like a baker that had tried to stretch their dough too far. "Something the matter with your drink?"

  Raxa summoned her words. "Do I make faces?"

  "Like you're swallowing something that's still alive. Not what you're used to?"

  "No. I am used to good."

  He barked with laughter. He was about her age and he was handsome, in a slightly too intentional way. She wasn't big on men whose ponytails looked like they'd been coiffed in the king's stables. She preferred the type who looked like they cut their hair with their own blades.

  He leaned forward, reaching for her mug. "Could be a bad batch. Better let me try." He hefted it, sipped, and swished it around. "Tastes good to me. I'll drink it if you won't."

  She took it back. "I must get used to it. Or have no beer at all."

  "Are you new in town?"

  "Is my talk that obvious?"

  "Speech," he corrected. "And I'm afraid so. Along with your eyes. And your hair. And the way you walk."

  "You watch me come in?"

  "Guilty. But you chose to s
it next to me."

  "I sit where there is chair."

  She winced at the clumsiness of her grammar, but the man laughed as if she was the wit in a play. "What brings you here?"

  "I look for work."

  "What kind of work?"

  "The work of this place." She gestured around the room. "The work that is done on nights and streets."

  "You're looking for a brothel? I took you for a nice girl."

  "Not a brothel." Raxa gave him a disparaging look as she searched for the phrase she'd made Galand teach her. "The merchants of the black market."

  "Oh. That." The man took a long swig from his mug and set it down a little too abruptly. "We don't do that here. Sorry."

  "Do I look like…" She searched for the word. "King's men?"

  "The king's a cunning fellow. It would be just like him to enlist a Gaskan to waltz in and trick poor, innocent men into lives of crime."

  Gaskan? Had the man never seen somebody from Narashtovik? She was about to scorn him when she realized he probably hadn't ever left the confines of Mallon. Giving him a second appraisal, she understood she'd snapped at the wrong fly. He was what the Order called a quiver-filler: the type you wanted to have plenty of at hand, but who was utterly replaceable—and expendable. He couldn't make recruiting decisions. He was probably under direct orders to deny the Red Ghosts' existence.

  "I am sorry," she said. "I make a mistake."

  He grinned. "Happens to the best of us. If you want to make it up to me, I'm happy to let you buy me a beer."

  She begged off—not a good move, getting mired down with a quiver-filler when she needed a person who aimed the arrows—and left the Boxing Turtle, wandering for a while to clear her head.

  She was working with steeper hardships than she'd accounted for. Limited as her speech was, it was hard to persuade. And impossible to be subtle. Among her kind, subtlety was a far more important skill than picking pockets or locks. A clumsy thief was a dead thief—or much worse, a captured thief who gets tortured until she gives up her friends.