Other than the few days at the start and finish of his captivity, however, Naran had mostly been left to himself. If Dante had been trapped in a dingy cell with nothing to read and nothing to do, he would have spent each day practicing with the nether (assuming, for the sake of the scenario, he couldn't use it to open the walls or blast the entire tower apart). He couldn't imagine what it had been like to be so alone—and worse, to be separated from all of your interests, studies, and pursuits.
With these dreary thoughts sliding around his mind, he alternated between studying the authentic Odo Sein blade and trying to make his copy imitate it. As the afternoon wore on, a sluggish, mild nausea crept over his body. He tried to push through it, but soon found himself on the verge of vomiting and passing out, not necessarily in that order. He put away the swords and tried to soothe himself with nether, but it didn't seem to help.
At sunset, the commanders ordered the canoes to a halt. Some of the soldiers bivouacked on small islands while others bedded down in their boats. There was almost no chance of an attack, but the troops seemed less rowdy and argumentative than any group of Tanarians Dante had witnessed up to that point. After a dinner of fish and root paste, Riza sent a messenger to summon Dante to his island.
Riza greeted him with no pretense of dana kide. "How far?"
"It's not precise enough for me to say for sure," Dante said. "But we're closer than we started the day. Maybe as much as five miles."
The lord stared into the north, face pinched. "I fear we won't catch them for many days."
"I thought they'd be recruiting help. Won't that slow them down?"
"Mustering their loyalists is only a part of their plan. I believe they're making for the Go Kozo—the land's wound."
"Sounds cheery."
"They'll hope we won't follow," Riza said grimly. "It might be wiser if we didn't. But I don't think they're traveling to the Go Kozo to hide where we dare not follow. I think they're going there to summon something unholy to their cause."
"Gladdic's demons?"
"Maybe. Or maybe something worse."
Dante tried to press him for more, but Riza had fallen into a dark mood. Dante returned to his island camp. Was Riza trying to sway him into supporting the rebels against the Drakebane's heinous tactics? It was hard to say for sure; perhaps he was only venting. Yet a subtler approach was always more effective at convincing a neutral party to your side than it was to preach at or berate them.
Whatever the case, he didn't care. Caring was Riza's job, along with the other leaders of the movement of the Righteous Monsoon. Dante didn't even have to care if the Righteous Monsoon won or lost. With that thought, he fell asleep with a smile.
Morning came. The pressure in Dante's brow told him the enemy's northern path was drifting eastward. Hearing this news, Riza looked unhappy but unsurprised. As they set out, an unsteady rain beat at the waters.
Whatever illness had afflicted Dante the day before was long gone, so he resumed trying to duplicate the captured sword. After an hour of getting nowhere, he sat back and got out the other artifact he'd successfully reproduced: the loon. The loons worked for two reasons: they used their own internal source of nether, requiring no input from him—in fact, they could easily be used by someone who had no talent with the shadows whatsoever—and their function was based on qualities found in the objects they were made from. In order to hear from and be heard by someone else, you built the loon from the skull bones of a creature that had once been able to hear.
Being such a poor user of ether, he'd never tried to make a torchstone, but he understood the concept was similar. By using a base of azamite, a particular kind of cloudy gemstone that could focus ambient light into a brighter, condensed illumination, and imbuing it with ether, you could cause the stone to magnify and even create light.
By comparison, it seemed as though the nether in the Odo Sein blade could magnify the cutting strength of the sword. But how to access the sword's inner virtue of sharpness? The ability to cleave? To take a whole and sunder it into two?
In the afternoon, the flotilla came to a stop. Their force had been skirting the settlements they'd passed, but the scouts reported that a nearby village appeared empty. Fearing the Drakebane had orchestrated another massacre, the Monsoon diverted to investigate.
The adda paddies had been ripped up, the roots plundered. The docks were intact, but most of the houserafts were gone. There were no bodies. It was as if everyone there had picked up and left—or been taken.
They gathered food from what little remained and moved on. Dante had hoped the interruption would jar an idea loose from his mind, but he felt thoroughly stalled.
"Volo," he said. "Do you know any stories about the Odo Sein?"
The girl laughed. "I got more stories about those bastards than a frog has pollywogs."
"Are there any involving their swords?"
"You mean like the Red Tide of Falo Loc? Before I was born, the Drakebane's father Evo Yoto decreed his soldiers needed more adda so they could fight back the interlopers from the Deep Swamps. He said that when harvest time came, he needed ten percent more from each village. Well, the people of Falo Loc worked hard to meet their quota, but halfway through the growing season, a blight killed five out of every six plants.
"Harvest came, and Drakebane Evo sent the Odo Sein to collect the empire's share, but Falo Loc couldn't meet their obligation. So the Odo Sein killed everyone. Chopped them into bits!"
Dante waited for more, but Volo's laughter indicated that was the end of the story. "What the hell does that have to do with the Odo Sein's swords?"
"What do you think they used to kill the villagers?"
Blays shrugged. "The shame of not meeting their quota?"
"I'm looking for something that gives me insight into anything unique about their swords. I'm already well-versed in the notion that swords as a class are capable of cutting people up."
Volo stuck out her lower lip, swerving around a bare branch reaching out of the water. "Well, that's about the only thing the Odo Sein do."
"Know what? Tell me any story that comes to mind. You never know when something vital's going to spring up."
Volo launched into a string of tales, starting with the story of how the Odo Sein had created swamp dragons as mounts and ridden them to battle to expand the Tanarian Empire across the marshland. After several successful campaigns, however, the dragons had escaped their masters. They'd been living in the swamps—and killing innocent travelers—ever since.
Next was the legend of Ro Woto, widely regarded as the greatest swordsman of all the knights of his time. For years, his loyalty was as unparalleled as his skill. One day, he and several other knights were sent to travel into Yataga, a lesser kingdom that had been at war with the fledgling Tanar Atain. The knights were ordered to pick up a large group of Yatagan children orphaned after a recent battle. Once they had their young charges in their war canoes, the knights started back toward their homeland, where the orphans would be resettled.
Ro Woto was supposed to return by himself to Dara Bode to inform the Drakebane of their success, but he'd only gone a short ways before spotting a group of Yatagan warriors ahead. He turned back to warn the others, and witnessed his fellow knights tossing the Yatagan children into the open swamp, then canoeing away as the ziki oko feasted.
Seeing this, he was overcome with black wrath. He flung himself at his former brothers, striking down one after another until their bodies lay so thick on the water you could walk across them without getting your feet wet. It wasn't until seven Odo Sein surrounded him on the central platform of a war canoe that they were able to wound him. Even then, he fought on, his sword crackling against theirs as he slew first one, then two, then four.
But in the effort, the surviving three wounded him a second time. Ro Woto collapsed to the deck. As they closed on him, he was too weak to lift his sword arm. Yet he reached inside himself and his soul streamed forth to his sword, and it lifted of its own accord
, dancing between his foes like a skipperfish. When it finished, all three enemies fell dead. Then Ro Woto smiled and died—but his soul stayed always with his sword, and whenever it was carried by another Knight of Odo Sein, the bearer was inspired to help the helpless.
After that, Volo told three quick stories about the Pacification of the West, where the Odo Sein were deployed to put down an insurrection in the western territories that had been spearheaded by a division of Mallish priests sent to gain a foothold in Tanar Atain. The knights were described as whirling through the enemy's soldiers like tree-nodders—a type of local windstorm that made the trees seem to bob their heads.
When the priests came forth to stop the slaughter with their magic, the Odo Sein called upon the Stillness of Rocks in the Stream. When both light and dark were fastened in place, the Odo Sein lifted their blades, which blazed with shadows forged of the knights' own spines. The priests looked on in terrified wonder, spending their final thoughts to ask their gods why their magic had failed them while the enemy's swords whistled down upon their necks, uniting them with the awful darkness.
"That's as morbid as something out of Dante's diary." Blays eyed Volo. "You said your people tell that story to children?"
"It's the truth." Volo cocked her head. "Do you foreigners lie to your children?"
"We practically make a sport of it! How else are you going to get them to do what you want?"
"Have you tried the truth?"
"Truth doesn't work on them."
"Not when you've trained them to be unable to tell truth from lies, and why it matters."
Blays gave her a dirty look, sputtering for words. "Dante, help me out here. You justify lying to people all the time."
"We lie to them to control them," Dante said. "And because we're so frail we can't imagine that they're not. When we lie to them, it isn't really to protect them. It's to protect ourselves. To allow us to pretend that they're the weak ones."
Volo had stopped paddling, her head twisted around to watch him. Her face had the stunned, almost alarmed look of a worshipper hypnotized by a sermon. "Do you really believe that? Or is that just dana kide?"
"I don't know. I wasn't even thinking about it until I said it."
"That's the sign the gods are speaking through you." She narrowed her eyes. "At least, that's what the Drakebane wants us to believe. But we all know we already have the truth inside us. So what do we need the gods to tell us anything for?"
Before Dante had the chance to respond, she turned and drove her oar into the water, stroking hard to regain her place in the loose formation of boats. Dante was momentarily annoyed by her withdrawal from a debate she'd started, then remembered that he didn't give a damn.
Instead, he silently recapped the stories she'd just told them. Usually, he thought he had a good ear for what was historical fact and what was myth, but in Tanar Atain, the borders of truth felt as foggy as the Mists. Even so, he thought he might have a lead. In both the last stand of Ro Woto and the massacre of the Mallish priests, the stories had said the Odo Sein had drawn on something inside themselves to lend strength to their swords.
He handed the knight's sword to Blays. "Take that into the shadows, will you? Watch it close and tell me if you see anything like you do when somebody's reading the Cycle."
"Like nether flowing between me and the sword?"
"Yes. But don't limit yourself to only looking for that. That's a good way to miss what's right in front of you."
Blays blinked from sight. Through the ripples in the shadows, Dante could feel him moving in slow, deliberate motions, like he was practicing a new sword form. Two minutes later, he reappeared in the canoe.
"The traces are moving around like crazy." Blays rolled his wrist, twisting the sword back and forth. "But I'm not seeing anything coming out of me."
"You're sure of that?"
"Why do you need me to test this? Do you think the sword's drawing on another trace? One we haven't seen yet?"
"I think that's a possibility."
"Then we know how to test that, don't we? Give me the torchstone." Blays reached out. Dante handed it over. Blays walked into the shadows again. This time, he was back within a matter of seconds, the torchstone glowing in his hand. "Just lit myself up good. Now watch and tell me if you see anything."
Blays propped a knee on a seating bench and tilted his sword through a chain of techniques. The ether shining from the torchstone threw each mote of nether into sharp relief. Shadows gushed up from the handle of the sword, jagging along the blade before returning to the grip. As far as Dante could tell, however, none of these shadows were coming from Blays himself.
He watched for another couple of minutes, then cursed, pressing his fingers into his brow. "There's nothing I hate more than having a great idea refuted by stupid reality."
Then again, just because it didn't appear to be the traces, that didn't rule out all forms of nether. What if they'd been powering the swords with the common nether inside their own bodies? Dante lifted the sword he'd been working on, reached inside himself, and summoned the shadows from his blood and bones. It looked and acted no different from the nether he could have called out of the water or the mud, but it was always possible that it contained properties he didn't know about. He sent it into the traces in the sword's handle.
This accomplished nothing. Except, he supposed, that it ruled out one more possibility for how to craft the swords. This might have been useful, except that he suspected that the ways to not create the swords were infinite in number.
He was getting frustrated again. Frustration was the enemy of discovery. Before it could poison his mind, he set down his sword and picked up the Odo Sein weapon. As the nether swept out of the handle and coursed along the blade, it sizzled and jerked, flowing and branching as unpredictably as turbulent water.
Yet the longer he watched it, the more convinced he became that there were small patterns within the chaos. Or if not patterns (for they didn't repeat themselves exactly), then tendencies. It was like watching water pour down an uneven slope: while it looked like it was going whichever way it pleased, and often did just that, over time, it was prone to follow the same routes.
He didn't think the nether's course along the blade had to do with the shape of the sword itself. At least not its physicality; nether could pass straight through the steel without knowing it was there. Why, then, did it follow these patterns? And if it wasn't following the physical planes of the sword, what was it following?
As he turned these questions over in his mind, a dull ache formed in his head. His stomach started to toss and turn like a young soldier whose fear of the coming battle won't let him sleep. He found it more and more difficult to concentrate. Bad airs from the swamp, probably, but when he tried to cleanse his blood with nether, it didn't help in the slightest. Blays and Volo appeared unaffected. Even Naran, thinned and weakened by captivity, slept peacefully.
If it was a bad air, it seemed unusually interested in him. And come to think of it, it only seemed to afflict him when he was handling the Odo Sein blade.
"Do me a favor?" he asked Blays. "Will you hold the sword for a while? My wrist's getting tired."
Blays shook his head in disgust. "Should I find a pillow for your delicate ass, too?"
"Just trying to find a way to make you useful."
Blays took up the sword. Dante resumed observing the shadows snapping along the blade, sketching out any tendency that repeated more than twice. He'd run out of ink many days ago, and the Tanarians didn't seem to use writing instruments at all, just their string-harp things. This had required him to fill his ink pot with a small quantity of his own blood. Running low, he paused to refill it.
Blays made a gagging sound. "That's easily among the five grossest things you've ever done. And I've seen you stick your hands inside corpses like you're looking for prizes."
"You're afraid of blood now? What do you think is the red stuff that comes out of all the people you stab?"
> "I just set it free. I don't…play with it."
Dante rolled his eyes and continued sketching, filling one page and moving on to the next. The effort helped distract him from the illness he felt, which was slow in fading. After ten minutes, Blays was making swallowing noises. After fifteen, Dante glanced up and saw that his tan skin was ashy, with sweat beading across his forehead.
He set down his quill. "Something the matter?"
"It feels like I've been stricken with a hangover. If so, I'd really like to know where I found all those spirits, so I can do it again."
"How long have you been feeling this way?"
Blays shrugged. "The last few minutes. It came on fast."
"How would you describe it?"
"I'm not a physician, but I'd say it's a general shittiness of the head, followed by a shittiness of the gut. Feels like something's sucking the strength right out of me."
"Have you experienced something like this before?"
"Like I said, hangovers." Blays frowned. "Hold on, you're deducing something! Were you expecting this?"
"I think," Dante said, "that the sword is consuming our traces."
"What do you mean, our traces?"
"The one each of us carries inside. The one that's left behind in the shadows when we die."
Blays swallowed again, then glanced in horror at the sword and flung it to the bottom of the canoe. As soon as he let go, the purple nether vanished from the now-inert blade.
"You mean it's been sucking my soul?" Blays wiped his hand on the side of his jabat. "When were you planning to tell me?"
"Once it happened."
"What if that part of my soul's gone for good? I'll turn into you!"
"Lyle's balls, will you calm down? The same thing happened to me yesterday and I'm fine today. It happened again about an hour ago and I'm already feeling better. Slightly."
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 135
