Sorrowen paged through the copied documents she'd brought, repeatedly shaking his head. "Some of these talk about Collen, but it's just about keeping track of which Mallish people of note are still in the Basin. I don't think this guy gets much of a say in things."
Raxa had been afraid of that. Over the next two weeks, she made another couple of trips into Laxley's quarters, but nothing she turned up seemed significant.
She had just about given up on seeing the Minister of the Eastern Reach when she was summoned to his presence.
Harald Walpole was a tall man with a craggy beard, a frown carved from granite, and eyes that looked like they could see your secrets. When Raxa entered the hall, he barely nodded.
"Lady Yera," he said. "I know your story. Why should I care?"
She raised an eyebrow. "My husband is missing, milord. He might have been taken hostage. Or even…" She trailed off, letting her voice quiver.
Walpole's rock-like expression didn't budge. "Your husband is a northerner who means nothing to me. Thousands of my men have died in Collen. For the moment, the fighting has stopped, but the slightest nudge could cost me thousands more. So I will repeat myself one time. Why should I care that your husband went somewhere he shouldn't have?"
"Want the truth? You shouldn't."
This got him to raise his eyebrow. Raxa was surprised it didn't creak.
"Let me guess how this normally goes," she went on. "Woman walks in with a tragic story. She beseeches you. Cries at you. And demands you make it your business to make it better."
"Wrong," he grunted. "It isn't just women."
"You should care about me because you don't have to do anything for me. I'm taking care of this for myself. The only thing I need from you is to know what I'm getting into."
He'd stayed on his feet and hadn't offered to let her sit down. Still standing, he crossed his arms. "What do you need to know?"
"When I go to Collen, will I be walking into a war?"
"Can't say what the Colleners will do."
"I'm not asking what the Colleners will do."
"Then you're asking me for state secrets."
Raxa sucked her upper teeth. "My men will get here one month from now. Will there be fighting by then?"
Arms folded, tapping his right upper arm with his left hand, Walpole turned his back on her to regard an oversized map of the region mounted on the wall. "Collen's bunged themselves up like a keg. An outsider looking at the situation would conclude that it would take months for anyone to mount an effective attack on their defenses."
She smiled. "Thank you, Lord Walpole."
He dismissed her with a nod. This time, she'd brought her spider with her. She let it crawl down her dress and onto the floor. Walpole soon left the hall they'd met in, the spider hitching a ride on his trousers. He retired to a high tower in a room by himself. He worked well past dark. He took no visitors.
Raxa ate dinner. Drank wine with the Boscaynes. Napped. At midnight's bells, she woke and slipped outside.
The tower was deep into the palace. Raxa ran as hard as she could, deep in the shadows, the stars overhead burning like white coals. She entered the building, following the path she'd laid out for herself to minimize the distance she'd have to travel. Even at this late hour, guards stood silent, polearms in hand.
She dashed up the spiral steps to Walpole's tower. Shooting through the wall, she threw herself back into the real world. The run had taken several minutes. She'd have enough juice to make it home, but not much more.
The chambers included a larger study and a smaller room furnished with stuffed chairs and a cabinet stuffed with stout liquors. A window in both rooms looked down on part of the palace roof, a secret courtyard of flowers and shrubs chopped up into animal shapes.
Raxa got out her parchment and went to work. The room was laden with documents. Way too much to get in one go. She copied the first page of everything that mentioned Collen—one of the few Mallish words she recognized instantly—then moved on to everything recent. It was laborious work. Time-consuming. She'd deactivated her spider long ago—couldn't suffer the drain on her powers—so she kept one ear cocked to the stairwell, straining for any sound above the scratch of her quill.
Finished, she dried her ink, the smell of which she was starting to hate, rolled up her pages, and ran fast as hell back to the Fabians. Climbing was easier in the shadows, but even so, her grip on the netherworld was starting to quiver by the time she had scaled the balconies up to her window.
Two days later, she brought what she'd found to Sorrowen. In the darkness of the park, he shuffled through her copies.
A third of the way through the stack, he swung up his head so fast a lock of hair flopped down his forehead. "You got it! Raxa, you—!"
She reached out and bopped him on the side of the head. "Keep your voice down, you idiot. We're holding our own death warrants right now."
Sorrowen rubbed his head, still grinning. "This is a payment order. For enough money to raise a small army!"
"Is that what it's for? An army?"
"It doesn't say. It doesn't say who it's for, either. All it says is that it's about the east. About the coming fighting there."
"There were other pages to this. If I get them for you, can you tell what the crown is paying for?"
"Well I can't know that until we have the rest of it!"
"I'll bring you the rest two nights from now," Raxa said. "I've spoken to the man who runs the eastern reaches. Tell Galand war is coming. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when."
She spent the next day fending off a steady dose of nerves. When midnight finally came, and the uninteresting people were snoring in bed, she climbed out the window, ran across the mall, and reentered the palace. The entire hall smelled like roast grouse with rosemary; scullions were still cleaning up the mess.
She ascended the tower to Walpole's private offices. These were dark, but down in the rooftop courtyard, lanterns glowed and courtiers laughed, crystal glasses glinting in their hands.
Raxa lit a candle, keeping it back from the window. She moved to the desk and opened the top drawer. Half of the parchment she'd gone through the day before was gone. She pawed through what was left. The payment order was missing. Heart pounding, she opened the drawer below and found another stack. Recognizing them from the day before, she paged through them until she found the order.
It was three pages in all. She got out her stuff and started copying. She was just moving on to the third page when a key scratched in the lock of the door.
21
Teeth scraped against his ribs. The beast's jaws squeezed him on both sides, threatening to crush him. It felt like his head was spinning—because it was; the monster was rolling in circles, dragging him under, meaning to drown him.
He called out to the nether, feeling it surround him, drawn to the blood leaking into the water. He shaped it into a spear and drove it blindly into the creature's midsection.
It relaxed its jaws. Pressure relieved, with his face momentarily above water, Dante gasped for air. He'd barely gotten a breath in when the creature clamped down again. His assault should have blown straight through its body, but it didn't seem weakened at all.
He was back under the water and its jaws were forcing the air from its lungs. He gathered a second strike and hammered it toward the beast's middle. Yet the black bolt seemed to waver, impacting sidelong. Dante felt it do little more than scrape across the bark-like scales.
The monster squeezed harder yet. He felt a crack, a gush of pain that made his vision go white. He forced his mind to return to its tethers. The nether swirled around the edges of his eyes, as if impatient to be put to use. He formed a third bolt and rammed it into the top of the beast's head. He held tight to the bolt all the way through, guiding it home, yet it felt like trying to punch someone underwater, the attack's strength sapped away.
His lungs were screaming now. So were his ribs. As it rolled him over again, he waited until the light br
ightened, then drove up his head and fought for a gasp of air, but a slug of water came with it, choking his lungs. He coughed, tasting blood.
He tried to draw the nether together for another strike, but he was coughing and writhing and drowning; trying to shape the shadows was like trying to shape dry flour. His pain and anguish peaked until he thought he couldn't stand it, then withdrew like a boat leaving a pier.
In his state, he could hardly think, yet he knew exactly what was happening: it was ending. A part of him embraced it—an end to this pain, yes, but also to all the strife, the loss of friends and mentors and innocence, and all for what? To make things slightly better? Or too often, just to keep things from getting worse? The gains were so small and the costs were so big: better to have been a farmer, a fisherman, a scribe for a kindly monk in a backwater village.
Anger. Anger like a thunderclap. A great hand reached down through his mind, plucked up these thoughts, and shook them until their skinny spine broke. He wouldn't let it be over. He had touched the world, and he'd made it better. He'd freed people. Saved lives. Exposed fetid lies and learned soaring truths. He had rebelled against kings and resurrected a friend.
And his power was too great to let it end here.
He pumped nether into his own body, strengthening his ribs, bolstering his blood. He sent it charging into his lungs and it wasn't air yet it was enough to let him see and think and move again. He tried to reach for his sword, but it was pinned against his thigh by the monster's teeth. He pounded his fists against its head, scrabbling for an eye.
It grunted, a blast of foul air bubbling over his body, then spat him out. Dante knew he was still in incredible pain, but the removal of the crushing pressure felt like being reborn, and inhaling a full breath of air felt like winning a war. Through watering eyes, he watched as Blays withdrew his sword from the monster's back, then stabbed it beneath two overlapping plates, wrenching one loose.
Dante forged the shadows into a dark blade and rammed them through the hole Blays had cut in the creature's hide. Blood showered into the trees. He ripped the nether toward him through the inside of the monster, shredding the flesh in a vortex of destruction. The creature reared back its neck in an S-shape. The nether exploded from its mouth in a hail of blood and teeth and pink goo.
The monster went slack, collapsing into the water with a splash. Including its thick tail, it was thirty feet long, an enormous lizard with a broad, snake-like head.
Blays stood from its back, chest heaving. "Did we just slay a dragon?"
Dante tried to answer, but his voice wouldn't work.
Blays hooked a hand under his armpit and hauled him halfway up the corpse. "Get on top of it. If they kill our guide, we're as dead as this beast."
Seeing Dante was in no immediate risk of drowning, he dived off the side of the monster. Through the trees, Dante glimpsed soldiers in green jabats firing arrows at Volo's canoe. She was nowhere to be seen.
Something tugged at Dante's leg, which was still dangling in the water. He jerked his foot away, but the tugging repeated, followed immediately by more to his other leg. It was like something was pinching him with its fingernails.
Or with little mouths.
Swallowing down the urge to vomit, he scrambled for a handhold. The water frothed around him, red with blood. Silver scales flashed. A small fish darted for his hip, only for a whiskered red fish to dart forward and snatch the smaller fish in its teeth. Unseen others continued to tug at his legs. He grabbed tight to a knob on the beast's flank and tried to pull himself up, but the pain in his ribs was so punishing he slipped. He poured nether into his side and heaved again, kicking his way up to the top of the monster's back.
He looked down at his legs and fainted.
After a period of warmness, he could see again. No thoughts yet, just a dull sense of confusion. People were screaming, but it wasn't him, was it? Right: his legs. They were still bare, but they were now pocked with dozens of red divots. Some ran deeper than they looked. He tried to wiggle his toes. His left foot did fine, but his right wasn't responding very well.
Beyond the screen of trees, a man yelled out in triumph. Dante turned in time to see Blays falling from the roof of the war canoe and diving into the water. But he was still holding onto both his swords: good sign of life. A few bodies in green uniforms were floating facedown by the canoe, the water around them boiling with fish.
Others in the canoe took aim with their bows, trying to pick Blays out from the dim water. Dante gathered the shadows in his hands and packed them into a ball. He sent it skimming along the water to plow though both hulls of the enemy vessel just at the waterline. Splinters twirled through the air. Soldiers yelled out.
One leaned over the hull to inspect the damage. Volo popped up from the arrow-riddled prow of her boat and loosed a slim arrow. It took the man in the ribs, dumping him into the water. Soldiers fired back on her, forcing her out of sight.
Blays reappeared inside the war boat, stabbing a man in the back. Volo stood again, shooting a soldier as he charged at Blays. Dante gestured to the nether, meaning to rain hell on the remaining enemies, but his vision went gray and he crumbled to his side.
He was bleeding heavily, inside and out. Woozily, he sent nether streaming to the holes in his legs, filling them with drops of darkness. He'd mended countless cuts and broken bones, but replacing lost flesh took ten times the effort. After healing a few bites, he stanched the bleeding in the rest and turned his focus toward the damage to his chest.
His jabat was hanging off him in shreds. A row of puncture marks traced his upper chest, with another cutting across his hips. One by one, he erased the cuts in his skin, then delved beneath to mend the punctures to his organs. Once these felt stable, he glanced back at the war boat. Only a handful of soldiers were still standing. With Blays blinking in and out of the shadows, and Volo sniping them from her canoe, the enemy would be wiped out within the minute.
Though his torso wasn't fully mended, Dante switched back to the gouges in his legs, fearing they might never be healable if he didn't take care of them now. Shadows rolled to him in great waves and sank into the ragged bites, filling them with pale new flesh that left his legs spotted and dappled. Sweat broke across his forehead. Head swimming, he finished his right leg and moved to the left, starting with any damage deep enough to hobble him.
His hold on the nether grew looser and looser. As he neared the end of his powers, he made a rough pass of the remaining bites, stopping up the remaining bleeding.
Hearing a splash behind him, he turned. The boat was silent, bodies draped over gunwales and floating in the water, jerking as fish plucked at them from below. Volo stood in her canoe, looking forlorn. There was no sign of Blays. Dante tried to stand for a better look, but the corpse of the monster bobbed beneath him and his wobbly legs gave out.
Blays snapped into being in front of him—he'd shadowalked across the waters to avoid the storm of fish within them. Blood spattered his limbs and clothes.
He cracked a smile. "Don't suppose you've got any arrow medicine left?"
He wavered. Dante's eyes lowered to his torso. A broken stick projected from the right side of Blays' chest. A branch? How had he gotten a branch stuck to himself? And there was a second one in his stomach. Both spots sopped with blood.
Realization flooded over Dante's reeling mind, horrific and ashamed. They weren't sticks. They were snapped-off arrow shafts.
Dante reached for the shadows, but it was like trying to pick up the floor. He tried again, then a third time, working with the patient deliberateness of a barber shaving the king's neck. His next efforts were increasingly frantic. On other occasions, he'd been able to channel beyond his capacity at the cost of damaging himself, but he had nothing left to prime the pump with. As he understood what he was facing, cold panic prickled up his spine.
His throat closed on itself. "I'm out."
"Ah," Blays said. "Well, don't let Volo stick me in one of those cages, will you? The
re's no room to build a statue underneath."
Blays fell to his knees, clutching the broken shaft jutting from his stomach. He slumped backward, bent awkwardly. Volo was calling to them from the other side of the trees, but Dante barely heard it. Bile crept up his throat. He had nothing left. Too wrapped up in undoing the horror that had befallen him to imagine the others might wind up hurt, too. Sick anguish curled around his bones. For all that they'd been through, all of the ludicrous odds and fearsome powers they'd defeated, they'd been undone by a patrol of common soldiers, a wild animal, and a school of fish.
He had healed himself quite thoroughly. But in that moment, he wanted to draw his knife, open his veins, and sink into the warm darkness. He would be alone in the Pastlands, but once he muddled his way through to the Mists, he could rejoin Blays on their next journey.
A memory snagged in his mind. The whiteness of the Mists, glimpses of mountain and ocean through the gaps in the fog. The light that came from everywhere, because everywhere was light.
He closed his eyes, inhaling deeply, exhaling through his nose. Light shined through his eyelids. He blinked. A glowing speck hovered above his bloody palm. It was smaller than one of the fireflies they'd seen dancing in the night, but the dot expanded with every breath, growing to the size of a marble.
His focus shuddered. The light twinkled, growing translucent, shrinking on itself. Dante stared into it, his will hard enough to shatter steel. The light steadied. Became opaque. And swelled to the size of a plum.
Holding the light in his hand and mind, he saw the shape of what Blays had been, unhurt and whole. The ether yearned to restore it. That was its entire purpose: to hold fast to order no matter how hard the storms of chaos battered against it. Just as Dante was doing as he gazed down on his dying friend.
He nodded. The ether streamed toward Blays, moving not with the turbulent torrent of the nether, but with linear precision, exactly like a shaft of sunlight beaming through a knot in a barn wall. It gathered around the base of one of the arrows and absorbed into Blays' skin.
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 125
