The rebel considered them, face slowly darkening. "What are foreigners doing in the Bastion of Last Acts?"
"Trying very hard to get out of it."
"Or pretending to. I think you're tools of the Drakebane. Spies sent to beseech our aid, and then take advantage of our pity by undermining us from within." He motioned to the other soldiers. "Arrest them."
Blays smiled and backed toward the gap in the wall, which he might be able to defend interminably, or at least until someone came up with the idea of attacking him from both sides at once, or shooting arrows at him. The soldiers trained their weapons on him and shuffled forward warily.
As Dante reached for his sword, the gears clicked into place. He let his hand fall to his side. "Is Do Riza here?"
The rebel lieutenant stiffened. "What do you know of the Do Riza?"
"I know he likes drinking expensive adda yin. And that he has a very nice estate."
"Though the beds could be more comfortable," Blays said, dropping his voice to a gossipy tone. "Then again, enough adda yin, and you could sleep on the point of a spear."
The rebel shifted his weight from foot to foot, then gestured to his troops. "Take them to Soulcast Tower. I'll find Do Riza."
Six soldiers escorted Dante and Blays to a staircase in the outer wall, delivering them to the domed top floor of a stout tower overlooking the southern approach to the fortress. Though they could still hear the clamor of fighting further into the bailey, along with the nearby groans of a makeshift physician's ward, the tower itself was serene and secure, its interior painted with pastel geometry, along with murals of knights in dragon armor doing battle with hideous creatures of all kinds.
Dante found a bench and picked off the patches of mud that were starting to harden on his skin. Blays seemed perfectly content to leave it be, leaning back against the wall and whistling an old Mallish drinking song.
They didn't have to wait long before Riza joined them. His hair was a bit bedraggled, and his jabat sported a few dabs of blood, but otherwise, he looked hale and untroubled. He dismissed the sentries, along with the pair of secretaries and bodyguards who'd accompanied him.
He stood across from them, face unreadable. "Did you accomplish your goals tonight?"
"One of them," Dante said. "The other one got complicated. Did Volo tell you who we are?"
Riza smiled like a Nulladoon player admiring the opponent's move. "Don't blame her for it. I could see the guilt in her face from the moment she arrived with you. When I questioned her, she did her best to hold back."
"How did you convince her?"
"I simply spoke the truth. That if what you were here to do could upset the balance of our plans, we'd lose everything."
"Was that true?"
"It could have been."
Blays sighed. "Are you two trying to talk like a pair of old lovers?"
"They've had this attack planned for a long time," Dante said. "I presume it wasn't scheduled for tonight, but they had to move it forward after Riza discovered we were going to break into the Blue Tower."
"Correct." Riza moved to the northern side of the tower for a better look at the keep. "If you'd succeeded or failed, it could have prompted the Bastion to enhance their defenses even further—and to investigate their soldiers for signs of disloyalty. Additionally, as your sponsor, I might have been implicated. Either event would have spelled disaster for our movement."
"Which is?"
"Why, the overthrow of the Drakebane Yoto dynasty, of course. What were your goals here?"
Dante glanced at Blays. Blays shrugged. Dante said, "To kill a priest."
"What was his crime? Heresy?" Riza's eyes twinkled. "If so, should I fear for the safety of the entire realm? None of us believe in your squabbling northern gods."
"Do you believe in the extermination of the Collen Basin? If not, we should be all right with each other. But we need this man dead. Do you think you'll take the keep?"
"I don't have to wonder. We've already done it."
"The man we're after is named Gladdic. He's a sorcerer, and an extremely dangerous one. You need to hand him over to us."
Riza's amusement left him as neatly as if he'd tucked it into his back pocket. "Your warning is appreciated. Once I better know who you are, I may decide to make him yours. Until then, I have business to prosecute."
He left them in the tower. As it turned out, there was no decision to make: along with the Drakebane, his cabinet, and his coterie of knights, Gladdic had fled from the city and into the swamps. No one knew where they had gone.
~
"I see." Naran lowered his eyes to the table. "If we try to follow him into the wilds, are we cutting the gray?"
Blays wrinkled his brow. "Are we whatting the what?"
"It is a sailor's term. When a captain finds himself on the fringe of a storm, if he's skilled, he can harness the winds to his benefit. But if he's not skilled, or he's too reckless, he can find himself overtaken and wrecked by that storm. We call that 'cutting the gray.'"
"We landlubbers have a term like that, too. We call it 'having a dumb idea.'"
The three of them were seated on rolls of fiber that were apparently used as chairs in the more formal parts of the land, such as the secondary dining hall in Do Riza's manor. Outside, starlight glinted from the dark waters. Smoke bleared the sky where it rose from the Bastion.
Lanterns burned across the city, with patrols of armed commoners paddling around in canoes to scout the waters for signs of resistance, but the city was oddly peaceful. If someone was to wake up for a glass of water and glance outside, they would have no idea an insurrection had just thrown down the government.
"This whole thing feels strange," Blays went on. "We have no idea where Gladdic is headed. I've got a bad feeling that if we try to find out, we're going to find ourselves sucked into a maelstrom of awful."
"What if we did know where Gladdic went?" Dante said.
"Then I'd like to think I wouldn't have said otherwise."
Dante reached into his pocket, withdrew a rat bone the size of an apple stem, and set it on the table. One of its knobs was stained red. "That's Gladdic's blood."
Blays grinned. "You can follow it right to him. Though that still leaves the small matter of navigating a bunch of swamps that were deadly enough before a civil war broke out amongst them."
"I think we can talk the locals into giving us a hand. They want this Drakebane captured or dead. If Gladdic stays with him, I can lead Riza straight to him."
"Sounds like that's enough to buy us passage. I'm in. Naran?"
Naran thrust out his lower jaw in thought. "As long as we confine ourselves to Gladdic. I have no issue with the Drakebane or these rebels."
"The rebels clearly have popular support," Dante said. "And from what we saw on our way here, they deserve it. Even so, I have no intention of getting involved in their struggle. If Riza tries to twist our arm into fighting for them, we'll make our own way."
As far as Dante could tell, Riza wasn't the chief conspirator, but wherever he stood, he was far enough up the pecking order that he would likely be embroiled in strategic talks for the rest of the night. Dante stressed to Ki that he had information that could deliver the Drakebane to the rebels.
Even so, it was close to an hour before Ki returned and instructed them to get into one of the Do's canoes. Ki brought them to the Bastion, where rebel eyes gazed down at them from the battlements and troops sang drunkenly in the bailey. The front steps of the keep were darkened with blood. They were led through a great hall into a smaller adjoining chamber furnished with a few low tables and a rack of seating-rolls. The air smelled of the fresh smoke of wood and the stale smoke of an unfamiliar herb.
Riza entered a minute later. His face looked tired, but his movements were energized. "You say you can bring us to the Drakebane. How can you know our land better than we do?"
Dante shrugged. "Magic."
"What do you care if we find the tyrant?"
&nbs
p; "I don't. I care that he's traveling in the company of my enemy."
As Dante spoke, Riza leaned closer, craning his neck owlishly, watching Dante's face as if concerned that a predator lurked beneath it.
"This man is a priest, yes?" Riza said. "A man of your gods? What has a holy man done to make you want him dead so badly that you would travel into Tanar Atain and gamble your own life for the chance to take his?"
"He killed one of our friends." Dante squared his shoulders to the lord. "And in the Collen Basin, he killed thousands of civilians."
"Unprovoked?"
"During a war."
"Isn't one of the properties of war that when it comes, people will die? Guilty and innocent alike?"
"By definition, the innocent are innocent. Those that murder them have to be punished for it, if only to dissuade others from doing the same thing."
"What were his reasons for war? Were they just?"
"His goal was to pacify a region that wanted to govern itself, then kill everyone there and replace them with colonists from his own people. Even a Tanarian couldn't argue the justice of that." Dante might have said more, but Riza was leaning in again, staring into Dante's eyes as if they were texts that could be read. Dante drew back his head. "I'm sorry, but do I have something on my face?"
"You will forgive me. I'm merely attempting to ascertain if you've laced your claims with rido ashe."
"Rido ashe?"
Riza twirled his right index finger. "A manner of insidious sorcery. What you might call black magic."
"Impossible. Nether can't touch words."
"I don't claim that it can. I claim—I insist—that words themselves are rido ashe. That they can be used to cloud your mind, to trip it and ensnare it, to confuse it and turn it against what is right. You see, we already know what is true. All we have to do is turn our ears away from the babble around us and towards the words waiting in our hearts.
"This is why the Drakebane tells us it's so important for the people to say anything they like. So that the people, and in particular the people he designates to do so, can flood us with lies and nonsense. He fills the land with so much empty water that when we try to swim down toward the truth, we'll drown before we ever reach it."
Dante frowned. "You think giving people the freedom to speak their minds is a bad thing?"
"When those minds have been swept out on a tide of ideas as poisonous as sea water and as treacherous as the swamps? Absolutely. Thus we must limit what can be said—dike the seas, drain the swamps—until the truth thrives once more."
"This sounds like it could be a belief of convenience." Dante fully believed this, but tried to couch it in the casually interrogative tone employed whenever Tanarians engaged in ritual debate. "Couldn't this just be a way for you to protect yourself from having to listen to their arguments?"
Riza pulled back from Dante's face as if it had just split open with oozing sores. "That is the exact manner of falsehood that threatens to wash the truth out beyond anyone's finding. It's pure rido ashe. The very reason we must put a stop to it."
The room was suddenly very quiet.
Dante lowered his chin a fraction of an inch. "You'll have to pardon me. I was attempting to participate in dana kide."
Riza looked unconvinced. Blays cleared his throat. "This thing about rido ashe. That's why you're out to stick the Drakebane's head on a pike?"
"It's but a symptom." Riza's anger pivoted back toward the crown; Dante silently appreciated Blays' gambit. The lord strode across the chamber. "In obscuring and diluting the truth, our great master is better able to hide any number of unfortunate facts about his empire. Primarily, the fact that our citizens don't really have the freedoms they're promised, and are instead kept subservient through a number of cunning systems.
"Among the most wicked of these is the idea that anyone can build and own land. Is this true? Well, yes, I'm sure it's written into the law. But a whole spiderweb of related laws comes with it. The raising of land requires the payment of an initial tax that most laborers can't afford. Even if you can afford it, and spend the time and effort necessary to create your plot of land, it is then taxed even more heavily. Given that it can take years to make a piece of land profitable, most would-be freeholders wind up bankrupted by taxes. At which point the land is forfeited to the state."
Blays grunted. "Did they set it up to work like this on purpose?"
"Does it matter? Either way, the outcome is the same: what the peasants lose, the crown gains." Riza snorted archly. "This hasn't even broached the subject of the Body of the People. We are told that we each have our part and that each part is vital to the whole. Perhaps so, but some parts are clearly more vital than others—and rewarded in kind. The crown's answer to this, of course, is so what? Anyone can become whatever part they wish!"
"Now, I'm no genius, but I'm picking up the idea this might not strictly be true."
"A few people attain their desired part, yes. But most aren't allowed beyond the simplest trades, following the same rut laid down by their fathers and mothers. It is believed that just enough of us are allowed to drag ourselves out of the swamps to convince everyone else that it's possible."
Riza stopped his pacing and turned to regard the three of them. "I'm not particularly concerned whether our reasons satisfy you, because they are for us, not you. But this is why we fight."
"Our only concern is Gladdic," Dante said. "We won't interfere with your business."
"Which doesn't mean we want any part of yours. You came here under the guise of merchant enforcers from Mallon. To Volo, you revealed yourself as sorcerers. Where are you really from and who do you represent?"
"I'm from the north. And I represent myself."
"That's not good enough. My time is valuable. Continue to waste it, and I'll see you out of the city."
Dante exhaled through his nose, searching for the right admixture of truth and omission. "I'm from Narashtovik. I'm a priest of our holy order—but my involvement here is purely personal."
"Narashtovik." Riza tipped back his head, mouth pursed. "The city where the dead are on constant march against the walls?"
"Such reports are highly exaggerated."
"Fortunate for you. If your interest is merely personal, why should I be concerned with it myself?"
"Oh, because of the demons," Blays said. "Gladdic makes them, you see. And we know how to kill them—assuming he hasn't come up with anything worse in the meantime." He drew the black sword, purple light crackling silently along its edges. "Though this might help even the odds."
Riza's lips parted. "Where did you get that?"
"From the body of a man who was trying to turn us into bodies."
"That came from a Knight of Odo Sein." The nobleman put his right fist into his left palm, clasping them over his navel. "We will pursue the Drakebane. If you can help us find him, Gladdic is yours. We leave in two days."
24
The key scraped for its hole, metal on metal. Raxa's heart threatened to blast out the top of her head. She stuffed the stopper into the ink bottle and swept the documents into the desk's top drawer. She stuck her thumb and forefinger in her mouth, then snuffed the candle with a quick sizzle. As the tower door swung open, Raxa tumbled into the shadows.
Harald Walpole entered the room. He wasn't carrying a candle and from inside the shadows, the silver pools of his eyes seemed to be looking right at her. He held a dagger against his thigh. In perfect silence, he moved across the room, pressed himself to the doorway to the sitting room, and swung inside. A moment later, he returned to the larger chamber, sheathed his dagger, and went to the window overlooking the rooftop courtyard and the happy party that laughed on below.
He glanced back and forth between the festivities and the wall opposite the window. He'd been below, hadn't he? He'd seen light in his quarters, and rather than sending a servant or a sentry, he'd come to investigate for himself.
He made a noise low in his throat and walked back out. He close
d the door. Locked it. Raxa waited for the shuffle of his first step, then eased from the shadows. Whispering a curse, she reached for the desk drawer.
The footsteps reversed. The key clicked into the lock. Raxa jumped back into the black and silver. Walpole reentered and moved to the desk. He leaned over the snuffed candle and sniffed. Reached out and felt its wick. He drew back to stand in brooding darkness.
Raxa could feel each second sapping her stamina. Should have grabbed up the papers rather than stuffing them into the desk—she'd been blindsided by haste, moving too fast to think things through. Now, she'd shifted in and out of the darkness twice, sucking away her juice each time. She could walk out right now, but if she did that, she'd leave the documents behind. Including an obvious half-finished copy. If Walpole found it, he'd take the original somewhere else. Or, from what she'd seen of him—decisive, hard-nosed—he'd destroy it.
Walpole exited to the hallway, leaving the door open. He returned with a candle and lit the one on his desk. He sat, planted his elbows on the desk, laced his fingers together.
From his bearing, Raxa wouldn't be surprised if he stayed there until dawn. And every second she wasted waiting for him to go away brought her that much closer to a rude boot out of the shadows.
She moved into the sitting room. Weak candlelight fanned through the doorway, but the walls lay in darkness. Raxa emerged into reality, opened the drink cabinet, and smashed a bottle of brown liquor in the corner. As the sweet smell of rum gushed through the room, she dived into the shadows and ran past Walpole as he charged into the room, dagger drawn.
She moved to the desk, flicked back to the real world, and stole the papers from the drawer, both the original and the copy. She closed the drawer with a tight wooden squeak. Vaulting back into the nether, she booked it through the stone wall and into the hallway.
The shadows were already getting slippery. Wouldn't have nearly enough to get her all the way back to the Fabians. Needed to get away from Walpole and out of the nether as fast as she could. She thought about climbing to the top of the tower to hide and sneak down later, then growled to herself and loped down the stairs. She'd barely gotten one floor down before Walpole's boots racketed on the steps above her.
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 131
