The Cycle of Galand Box Set

by Edward W. Robertson

  He would carry that same acceptance into the depths of the Go Kaza. No matter the pains and horrors that awaited him, he would make his stand against the evil that brewed in the shadows.

  Either way, he would find peace. Either he would bring light to the darkness that would consume the world, and know redemption. Or what awaited him at the Wound would put an end to this wretched life, where gods played with men like toys, and evil stood proudly on all sides.

  He sat up in the boat. They were sailing in brute darkness, barely able to see what lay ahead.

  In the Go Kaza, it was better that way.

  ~

  The armada struck out from the captured city, oars churning the stagnant water. Dozens of canoes bore hundreds of soldiers away from Dara Bode. It wasn't the most overwhelming war band Dante had ever seen, but to the rebels' best knowledge, they easily outnumbered the forces that had escaped with the Drakebane.

  The goal would be to run the enemy down before they could gain recruits from other towns and garrisons.

  Dante sat in a double-hulled canoe next to Riza. Holding the mouse bone in his hand, a steady pressure built in his forehead.

  "Northeast." He pointed inland, adjusting his finger. "Straight ahead."

  Riza called the directions to Commander Barain, an older man with a piercing, hollowed-out glare, then turned back to Dante. "Do you know how far?"

  Dante closed his eyes, examining the shape of the pressure hidden beneath his brow like a third eye. "Fifty miles from here, give or take. But they're on the move, too."

  He'd tried more than once to send a dragonfly to shadow their foes, but whenever the insects had drawn close, his connection to them had been severed. He didn't know if that was the doing of Gladdic, the Drakebane's sorcerers, the so-called Knights of Odo Sein, or another force entirely.

  He had too many questions and too few answers. Do Riza had been so busy organizing the pursuit that Dante hadn't had the chance to speak with him since reaching their agreement. But now that they were underway, Riza appeared to have few immediate responsibilities.

  "I know how to deal with Gladdic," Dante said. "But I don't know how to combat the Knights of Odo Sein. What can you tell me about them?"

  Riza took a seat on a rowing bench, gazing ahead into the trees, vines, and clouds of gnats. "The Knights of Odo Sein exist outside the Body of Tanar Atain. Rather, they are its sword. They are devoted. They are potent. And they are vicious."

  "When we fought them, they seemed to be able to stop all sorcery in its tracks."

  Riza chuckled. "That is precisely what they were created to do. Above all else, they are the reason Tanar Atain lives in misery. Many years ago, an order of sorcerers sought to topple the Drakebane dynasty. To their credit, they succeeded. To their disgrace, when the deposed tyrant returned from the wilds with the Odo Sein, the sorcerers had no answer to their powers."

  "Do they use artifacts to suppress the nether? Or can they do this through a magic of their own?"

  "If I knew a secret like that, they would have killed me long ago."

  "Is it safe to assume they'll be traveling with the Drakebane?"

  "Oh yes. They are his bodyguards, servants, and executioners."

  "How many will there be?"

  The nobleman shrugged lightly. "The Odo Sein keep their ways secret. Their numbers, too. Personally, I'd count them at no more than a score, but the Odo Sein have always been more interested in the hinterlands than the cities. Who knows how many more they have lurking out in the Deep Swamps?"

  "And they were created to stop sorcery?"

  "The Drakebane will tell you that our own sorcerers forged them to defeat the Dragon of Ages and his manifold demons. But the Drakebane would say that. In the old ways—the ways that were drowned out in the babble of a billion beliefs—there was no mention of the Odo Sein. Our defeat of the dragon was always a temporary victory. And it was told that, one day, for all our efforts, we would finally lose."

  Dante was immediately intrigued: he knew almost nothing of Tanarian religious beliefs other than that they didn't seem to believe in the Celeset. Such a thing was bizarre, almost eerie. Gask, Narashtovik, Gallador, Houkkalli, and Tantonnen all more or less followed the same tenets. Mallon denied Arawn's status, but otherwise recognized the same gods and goddesses. Collen and Alebolgia emphasized things that were simply wrong—or beside the point, if you wanted to be charitable—yet the questionable branches of their faith extended from the same trunk Narashtovik grew from. Hell, even the Wesleans believed in a system that had its roots in the Celeset.

  Every corner of the continent believed in some form of the Twelve Gods. Well, except the norren, at least, who followed their own ways, as they always did. But Dante thought that human and norren beliefs could coexist without contradiction: it made sense that different races could be overseen by and responsible to different gods.

  But as far as he knew, the Tanarians were human. It was harder to see how their beliefs could coexist with the fact of the Celeset. Regretfully, he didn't have time to explore that just now.

  "I know I can put Gladdic down," Dante said. "But the Odo Sein are another matter. If you can think of anything that could help me deal with them, we'll all be in a better position to do less dying."

  He turned and waved his arms over his head, signaling Volo to bring her canoe beside Riza's vessel. They'd been offered space in one of the command ships, but Dante had thought it wiser to maintain some semblance of independence. Volo matched the double-huller's speed and course, drawing within inches of it. Dante hopped across.

  He explained what he'd learned. Blays listened with a singlemindedness he rarely displayed outside of their strategy sessions. Naran paid close mind, too, although he sat with his hands folded and his spine straight, as if he were an attentive student.

  Dante nodded at the sword sheathed at Blays' hip. "The short of it is that, right now, the only weapons we have to fight the Odo Sein with are one of their own swords, and a dirty lizard horn. We have to come up with more."

  "None of your skills worked in their presence?" Naran said.

  "I couldn't so much as touch the nether to put it to use. It was like it was locked behind a glass case. Same with the ether."

  "Same here," Blays said. "I couldn't shadowalk. Couldn't get a bridge going."

  The captain frowned at the looted sword. "Yet you say their weapons displayed unnatural powers."

  "Their swords were crackling with so much nether they were as purple as a twisted nipple."

  "That's a damn fine question," Dante said. "Why do the swords work when nothing else does?"

  The question lingered in the canoe like an odor no one wanted to claim. Blays brushed off a cobweb they'd just passed through. "Do you actually expect us to be able to answer this? While I'm at it, should I also explain why bad things happen to good people?"

  "I expect you to try to help." Dante reached out his hand. "Here, give me the sword."

  Blays unbuckled it, passing it over sheathed. Dante drew it slowly. Initially, the metal was a dull black, as inauspicious as a sleeping body, but once it was free of the scabbard and exposed to the light and air, bolts of silver-black nether sizzled from its cross-guard to its tip, turning purple and then fading from sight, only to be replaced by a new wave of shadows.

  Dante followed them down to their apparent source: the grip, crafted from a swamp dragon's horn. Yet the tough chitin deflected his efforts to move inside it. He could have used the nether to scrape a hole in it, but with extremely little desire to accidentally destroy their only working artifact, he turned to the swamp dragon horn instead.

  Wielding the nether like a carver's chisel, he chipped away at the horn's armored exterior. Minutes later, he broke through. He was expecting a reaction of some kind—a blast of shadows, or even, for some reason, a small explosion—but nothing happened at all. The hollow interior was nothing more than an empty chamber roughly the size of an index finger.

  Dante turned the horn
in his hand. "There's nothing there."

  "Maybe it's only a useful vessel," Blays said. "Try cutting into the one on the sword to see what's in it."

  "What if I damage it?"

  "So what? If you break it, can't you use the ether to restore it?"

  "That's just…" Dante was about to call it "idiotic," but once he stilled his metaphorical knee, he rubbed his chin in thought.

  "A good way to learn how to fight back against our lethal and mysterious foe?"

  Rather than verbally conceding Blays had a point, Dante carefully worked away at the pommel of the sword, leaving the blade sheathed. As the horn's outer shell thinned, Dante quieted his mind, preparing to send the ether to reverse his work. But on boring to the center, he found it was hollow, too.

  He gave it a good inspection with the nether, then sat back with a scowl. "Empty. I'll refrain from comparing it to anyone's skull."

  Naran cleared his throat. "You're certain that when the sword is in active use, the nether is coming from the horn?"

  "I'm not certain of anything. When you approach a problem, certainty is the enemy of the solution."

  "Could this be similar to your loons?"

  "I've been thinking about that," Dante said. "But if a nethermancer watched a loon in action, even if they didn't understand how it worked, they'd still be able to see the shadows powering it. With this, I'm not seeing anything."

  He drew the sword again. Dark lightning shimmered along the blade. This was an encouraging sight, as it meant he hadn't ruined anything—yet—but even with the hole dug into the horn, he still didn't see any source for the power. The weapon wasn't drawing nether from outside itself, either. He spent a good minute passively observing, then a long span poking, massaging, and vigorously eyeballing every square inch of the weapon.

  Satisfied that there was nothing to see, and highly dissatisfied that that was so, Dante became thoughtless, asking the ether to restore the item to its original purity. The hole in the horn faded.

  He sheathed the sword. "This makes no sense. It has to be coming from somewhere. Nether can't just appear like magic."

  Blays looked stupefied, then grinned like a kid who's discovered where his parents hid the cake. "Yes it can."

  "If that's what you believe, it's no wonder you can barely conjure up enough nether to dab a quill in. The shadows are always there."

  "True enough. But you can't always see them."

  Dante leaned back. His mind spit out the answer like a lemon pip. "Like the Cycle. You think?"

  "I do my best not to, but sometimes I can't stand to watch you flail about. So let's find out. Hand over your torchstone. The horn, too."

  Dante rummaged through his bag and handed over the stone and the horn. Blays picked up the sword, whisked it from its sheath with a flourish he'd obviously spent many hours practicing, and disappeared.

  Volo paddled on. The canoes were approaching a narrow gap through the trees; captains hollered orders, directing the armada into a double-file line. As soon as the force passed through the gap, they dispersed once again.

  Blays returned with a self-satisfied smile, the torchstone shining in his hand. He sheathed the sword and held the stone up to the hole in the horn. "Take a look."

  Dante peered inside, but the core was no longer hollow. Instead, it was filled with six black stars a couple of inches across, stacked one on top of the other. "Traces?"

  "That's what they look like to me. Then again, I'm just the humble sell-sword who sometimes has to do your job for you."

  Dante laughed; nothing raised his spirits like making progress toward an answer. "What if the Odo Sein are able to clamp down on the shadows in our world, but their ability can't reach into the netherworld?"

  "So if you're drawing on something from the netherworld—such as the traces—their ability can't stop you. Hence they get to wave around these amazing glowing swords."

  Dante gazed in at the motionless black stars. "There are enough traces in here to form an Andrac. Why aren't they merging?"

  "Maybe swamp dragons don't like having soul-eating demons sprout from their horns."

  "I could draw on these to fight the Odo Sein. They wouldn't be able to stop me."

  "Yeah, unless they think about using their nethereal swords to bat down whatever you throw at them." Blays drew the stolen sword a few inches, letting the ambient sunlight fall into the abyss of the blade. "There isn't much nether in one of those horns. Rather than wasting it on a few black arrows that are spent as soon as you've used them, I say we make another sword."

  Dante held the weight of the horn in his hand. He'd meant to use it to learn how to battle the knights, but he supposed that forging it into a killing weapon would satisfy that goal rather well.

  But there was one large assumption looming over that plan: that he'd be able to learn how to craft such a weapon before they ran into the Drakebane and his army.

  Yet there was nothing else to do but get started. Using the nether as a scalpel and a crowbar, he sliced and pried the wooden handle and leather wraps away from the tang of his plain sword. Once the steel rod was revealed beneath the cross-guard, he carved a slot into the flat end of the horn and wiggled it over the tang, forming a new handle.

  The fit was already quite snug, but deviled by paranoid thoughts of the blade slinging itself free mid-swing, he stilled himself, allowed the ether to begin to mend the slot, then cut off the light's progress as soon as it had started to close off the hole he'd cut in the horn's end. Dante tested the handle and found it gripped so tightly that none of them could budge it.

  He had hoped this process would take long enough for his mind to gin up the solution to how to make his sword do what Blays' did, but his hope was sadly misplaced. He drew the looted Odo Sein sword, observing the now-visible traces flow up from the handle and into the blade, then turned to his weapon and instructed the traces in his dragon horn to follow suit.

  They moved, but there was nothing crackling or purple about them—they moved less like lightning and more like viscous oil, which they were about as sharp as. And rather than circling of their own accord, as soon as he stopped guiding them, they quit whatever they were doing and returned to the hilt.

  As he experimented with various configurations of the traces, he didn't seem to be making any progress whatsoever. But sometimes progress was just a matter of trying dumb things until you stumbled on a smart one. Early that afternoon, the pressure in Dante's forehead began to increase slowly but steadily: they were catching up.

  At the rate it was going, he feared they might reach the deposed ruler—and Gladdic—by the next morning, but as the sun tumbled toward the hazy horizon, the pressure stabilized. The enemy was on the move again.

  He took a break to clear his head. He'd tried to loon Sorrowen a few times over the last two days, but hadn't gotten any response. This time, the young man answered within moments.

  The boy told him that he and Raxa were on the verge of unraveling what seemed to be a major Mallish military investment. One that was being overseen by Mallon's Minister of the Eastern Reach. All signs pointed to the renewal of hostilities with Collen. Sorrowen didn't know the nature of the investment, but seemed to think they'd have the answer within a few days.

  "Let me know as soon as you've found it," Dante said. "We won't directly intervene in Collen again, but if Mallon's planning a final push to retake the basin, we can still warn them."

  "I think this is about more than Collen." Sorrowen hesitated. "I think they're starting a drumbeat against Narashtovik, too. The priests are saying strange things—beliefs that didn't exist when I left here a few years ago."

  The boy recounted the priests' stories of a resurgent Daris, Lord of the North. Dante listened with a furrowed brow.

  "You might be right," he said when the boy concluded. "But scriptures and parables are often designed to be impenetrable to people who aren't steeped in your beliefs. Keep your ears open. We need to learn more."

  He closed the l
oon's connection, relaying what Sorrowen had told him to Blays.

  "What if Mallon's preparing a third invasion?" Blays said. "Are we still going to leave Collen to face it on their own?"

  "We can't run off to Collen every time they're in trouble. Not without forsaking our own land. If things had been different between us, maybe I'd return a third time. But they decided they didn't need our help. Let's see if they're right."

  "That's a bit cold." Blays stared down at the murky water. "But I don't think I disagree with you."

  "Anyway, Gladdic's the architect of the Mallish plan. If we kill him, interest in fighting the Colleners might collapse."

  As soon as Dante spoke these words, he wondered if they were true, or merely the balm of wishful thinking that allowed you to turn your back without the sting of guilt. Either way, he couldn't spend time worrying about what might befall Collen. Not when he had his own troubles to tend to.

  He turned back to the matter of the swords. He thought to ask Naran whether Gladdic had ever said anything about the Odo Sein during his interrogations, but Naran was curled up on a tarp next to a bench. The captain had been sleeping—and eating—a lot since being plucked out of the tower.

  Other than that, Naran seemed healthy enough in both body and mind. According to him, his arrest had been sudden and unexpected: he'd been making inquiries among his merchant contacts at the docks and must have said something indiscreet in front of the wrong ears. Next thing Naran had known, he'd been snatched up by a gaggle of soldiers in green jabats and informed that he'd committed the crime of sedition for prying into imperial business.

  After a round of questioning, they'd whisked him off to Dara Bode, where they'd tossed him into the Blue Tower, questioned him again—these had focused on his interest in foreigners inside Tanar Atain—and then largely forgotten about him for multiple weeks.

  It hadn't been until Gladdic's arrival that the Tanarians had resumed their questions, more forcefully than before. This time, they'd seemed quite concerned to learn that Naran did most of his business from Bressel, asking repeatedly what he knew about the Tanarian enterprise in the city. At last, Naran confessed that he'd come looking for Gladdic, the Mallish priest. Which had only prompted them to cut him up a bit more and ask if that was really the only reason he'd come to Aris Osis?