What had it been, then? Trick of the light? Widespread hysterical blindness, like the kind he’d read afflicted soldiers on the eve of a battle so they couldn’t fight? The first signs of a degenerative and apparently infectious ocular condition, or a priest watching from the windows, drunk, using parlor tricks to toy with them? Lunar eclipse? Any of those was about as likely as father Taim strolling down from his constellation and shaking Dante’s hand. The one explanation that fit was he’d done something without knowing how he did it and that was no explanation at all; as wrong as Blays was to suspect him, Dante knew he was equally powerless to tell him why.
They passed from the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses inside the Westgate to the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses outside the Westgate. This whole range of city looked like it had been built within the last five years. The roofs were mudcaked reeds, the doors flimsy things, firelight visible in the gaps of their frames. Blays’ feet swept over the rinds and pebbles in the roadway.
“Tired?” Dante asked.
Blays shrugged. “We can’t exactly stop here.”
He nodded, conceding the point. “We could rest a minute, though.”
“Why?” Blays met Dante’s eyes for the first time since the fight. Something dark lingered in his face. His lips curled. “You too worn out to keep going?”
“I’m fine,” Dante said, feeling the dullness in his knees, the burn in the backs of his thighs. “It’s just a couple miles to the woods. We should be all right there for the night.”
“Then we’ll stop when it’s safe.”
He had thought there would be some triumph if they survived their first skirmish, but instead of standing back to back against a shared danger, it had made Blays hate him. The wind kicked up, dragging leaves and trade papers and a few forgotten scraps of cloth past their feet. Graying things he was glad not to recognize moldered in the gutters. Since the time Dante’d left the village of his birth he’d enjoyed his solitude, his total freedom. Other people only intruded on his ability to learn. If Blays was going to part his company because he was as scared as a little girl about whatever Dante’d done when Dante himself didn’t know what that thing was, he wouldn’t mark it as a loss.
Open fields showed between the houses after another half mile. Within two more minutes the last of what could be said to be the city had been replaced by brittle cornstalks and the puzzled moans of cows. The city fires died away and overhead a thousand stars pricked out from the black curtain. A god was there, if the Cycle of Arawn could be believed, turning the stone, milling the substance that changed men’s hearts to darkness.
3
They rose with the dawn and ate a cold breakfast in colder silence. They’d slept back to back, Dante’s stolen cloak thrown over them both, and when Blays stirred Dante felt him freeze with a jerk before jumping up and jogging some ten yards off. Face buried under the cloak, Dante heard Blays slapping his arms, his face, working up the circulation. Dante sat up, glared at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. His legs hurt. So did his hand, where that merc had nearly torn away his knife and his fingers along with it. Most of the flies had died in the first snap of frost earlier that week, but the ones that remained found the two of them and sizzled fatly in the breezeless morning. He tossed his head when they landed on his neck, waving halfheartedly at their stupid black bodies, imagining every buzz was a bee about to sting him.
Blays wandered off as soon as he saw Dante was up, mumbling something about having seen some mushrooms, and Dante waited till he’d merged with the trees to open his pack and then the book. He thought the words would feel different, that the act of reading them after the night before would fill him with some deep and nameless force, but there it was, the same old clean black hand of a meticulous scribe recounting legends and troubles of succession no one’d cared about since the moment the last man who’d known those heroes and kings had died. Dante found it interesting, in its way, was somewhat mystified to be confronted with hard evidence life had been going on for so many hundreds of years, but none of that vague awe explained how he’d been able to summon the darkness. Leaves crackled and he plopped the book shut and stowed it, watching the treeline.
“Found a few,” Blays said, emerging and holding out a double handful of mushrooms with smooth pink-gray caps and pleated black undersides.
Dante twisted his mouth. “You’ll die if you eat those.”
“Right,” Blays said, and when he lifted one to his mouth Dante bolted up and hit his wrist hard enough to sting them both. Mushrooms flew to all sides.
“It’s poison.” He nudged one with his toe, then crushed it into the dirt. “Probably wouldn’t kill you, but you’d barf up anything else you put down with it.”
“Pardon me for not wanting to starve. We can’t all be from the middle of nowhere,” Blays said, but he dumped the couple he was still holding into the leaves and kicked them away. He brushed his hands clean on the front of his trousers and looked up at the angle of the sun. “Wasting light.”
“I can teach you those things.” Dante bent over and slung his cloak and his pack over his shoulders.
“I just want to get the hell out of here.” Blays started off and kept a couple steps ahead. For a while they just walked. They’d made about five miles from the city before they’d gone to sleep, Dante figured, though they’d been traveling in the dead of night without a road, so who the hell could tell. Blays kept a quick pace through the sparse grass and falling leaves. Not too smart, Dante thought, not when he’d lost some blood the night before and there was no chance they were still being followed. He kept his mouth shut. He had the impression Blays wasn’t in a talking mood.
They broke off for camp before the sun had finished cradling itself in the mountains. Dante gathered up some tinder, meaning to risk a fire. He doubted the temple men would figure out he’d left the city for another few days. They could spend weeks combing Bressel before they could be certain. He and Blays were off the trails in open country; there was no rhyme to their course other than a vague northerly direction so they wouldn’t lose total track of the river. Three more days like today and they could be a hundred miles away. Their trail, as he saw it, was cold from the moment they’d left the men dead in the alley.
“Cold again,” Blays said, shifting the night-facing side of his body toward the fire. His thick straight nose threw a broad shadow over the far side of his face. He prodded the dirt with a twig, snapping off a couple inches at a time and tossing them into the flames.
“Yeah.”
“It hasn’t bled since this afternoon,” Blays said after a moment, peeling back a half inch of the strip of cloth over his left arm.
“That’s good. Does it look red?”
“No.” He sniffed. “What about you?”
“I wasn’t hurt.” Dante watched tiny flakes of ash sail into the smoke and the heat. “Just bruises.”
“I see.” He broke the twig in two and dropped it into the fire. “Isn’t there a bark you can chew to make it hurt less?”
“It’s not the bark,” Dante said, “you just can’t feel pain when you’re chewing.” Blays waggled his jaw and Dante put a hand over his own mouth. “I can’t believe you believed that.”
Blays looked away. “Shut up. I’m not a physician.”
“There is a tree like that,” Dante said, squelching his laughter. “I’ll find some tomorrow if you want.”
“I’m going to sleep.”
Dante watched him stretch out on the ground, back to the fire, and wondered if he should apologize when it was Blays who couldn’t appreciate a joke. Before he’d made up his mind, the boy was breathing deep and easy. Dante stayed up a while, letting his eyes drift over the branches of the forest, but for however hard he tried he couldn’t make the black speck come back.
* * *
Blays stayed silent the next day, but he kept close by, didn’t range ahead or disappear into the woods when they sat to eat or rest. The bread ran out at noon. They f
ound a linberry bush, but the berries were fat, wrinkly, an overripe maroon. They took a break at late afternoon, hunkering down in the tall grass of a clearing. Tomorrow they’d head dead east, Dante thought, toward the river. Find a town. From there, Blays could leave and Dante could—do something. Hitch a boat downriver and make for the coast below Bressel, maybe. Sail for Albardin in the Western Territories. It wasn’t as big as Bressel, but it would be a port town, lots of weird lore from foreign lands, and plenty far from the eyes of the temple men.
“It’s working,” Blays said, a hunk of bark sticking from his lips. “Tastes like shit.”
“It’s bark.”
“Animals eat it, don’t they? Don’t they have tongues?”
“You can’t trust animals. They eat their own vomit.”
“Dogs, maybe. I’ve seen dogs eat things from both ends of cats.” Blays spat flecks of wood, wiped them from his tongue. “But that’s why they’re dogs.”
“You’re eating bark. What does that make you?”
“I’m not eating it.”
“Chewing it up, then. That’s even more like a dog.” Dante bit the skin around his thumbnail, tasted blood. “Are you ever going to show me how to use this stupid sword? Or am I just carrying it around to impress all the girls out here?”
“Go stick it in a goose,” Blays said, stretching out in the grass. The bark wiggled in his mouth.
“I don’t think that would be fun for either of us.” Dante leaned back on his elbows. He tried to picture a map of the lands north of Bressel. Whetton was up there somewhere, it was decent-sized. Not that it mattered where they ended up. If they followed the Chanset long enough, they’d find somewhere with some people.
“Hold it while we’re walking.”
“What does that even—? What would your mother think of you saying that?”
“My mom’s dead. And I’m talking about the sword, idiot,” Blays said, the bark between his lips jumping with his words. “Carry it in your hand. Swing it around. Get a feel for it. A sword doesn’t react like a knife. It’s heavy, it takes a while to respond to whatever it is you’re trying to get it to do, and you’ve got to learn to account for that.”
Dante gave him a look. “Is that how you learned?”
“It was wooden and I was about ten years younger, but otherwise, yeah.”
“And then you’ll teach me.”
Blays shrugged, hands behind his head. “Why don’t you go find us some food.”
“Why don’t you take a dive down a hill,” Dante said, but he got to his feet and walked out of the clearing. The light yellowed as he searched, plucking berries, gathering the bland, low-slung fungus that took more time to clean the dirt from its folds than it did to eat. Orange and red leaves drifted from the boughs and settled to the ground in the windless silence. He spooked a grouse, heart bursting at the thrash of its wings. He could try a few snares, but that would mean setting them up, then remembering where they were and checking them later, then the several centuries it’d take to pluck feathers—hours of work when he’d already gotten no thanks for all the other food he’d found them. On the way back to the clearing he saw the green sprigs of wild carrots and pried them from the soil. They had the end of a rind of cheese left, too. Even if Blays ate like a pig it would be enough for dinner and breakfast. The carrots dangled from his left hand and the sword from his right. He whooshed it over the grass, lopping the heads from burrgrass and the brittle, straw-like elkwood where it grew in the damper dirt.
He’d readied a few choice taunts about how Blays would starve the first five minutes he spent on his own, but returned to find the boy sacked out in the grass. A couple hours of daylight left, he guessed. It would hardly be worth it to wake him up and deal with his nonsense. They could walk by night if they had to. Dante tamped down a patch of grass, plunked down. Got out the book.
His constant urge was to read through without stopping, but he knew whatever was between its covers was too important to treat like a fruit pastry, something to be devoured as quickly as possible. It deserved patience, deliberance, the kind of disciplined caution Dante’d never managed in any other part of his life. This, though, this was different. He could nearly recite the first dozen pages by memory. Already he remembered the tales of the first hundred pages like the nursery rhymes that stuck in his head whenever he gave them a foot in the door, like the dry-as-sand history of the royal house the churchman had made him read whenever he came late to supper or didn’t sweep the corners. He’d separated the proper names from the words of Narashtovik, teased through their context until he had at least a vague concept of their meaning, and in many cases could readily define them. He no longer had to page back to figure out which displaced brother had slain which usurping regent. Its pages were becoming a part of him. With no other leads on an entry into the world of his desire, he read with no less a goal than branding the book’s pages on his mind so brightly he’d remember them to the day his eyes went dim.
After half an hour he glanced up and saw a world drenched in shadows. They flowed like water, pooling on the undersides of leaves, drifting through the air as fine as mist, defying the sunlight that still stretched through the branches. He blinked and his head rushed with the warm, tingly delirium he got when he stood up too fast. Like that, the vision was gone.
Blays’ snoring snagged so hard his head jerked. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with his fists.
“How long have I been out?”
“I don’t know,” Dante said. His voice sounded far away. He cleared his throat. “An hour, maybe.”
“Why’d you let me do that? I’ll have all night to sleep.” Blays bounced to his feet while Dante struggled with a reply. “Let’s go. Let’s move.”
The sun slanted through the trees in buttery bands, that thick yellow light Dante’d only seen on cool autumn days, a light that reminded him of the years when he’d been young. An hour left till dusk, maybe less. He could see but not hear knots of tiny flies bobbing around each other. Dustmotes hung in the windless air. Dante wiped his right eye.
“You did that, you know,” Blays said, swinging the walking stick he’d picked up before they’d started back out.
“Did what?” Dante said.
“Made it go dark.”
He avoided Blays’ eyes, suddenly aware that an entire future depended on what he said next. His pause grew too long to pretend he wasn’t lying.
“I couldn’t do it again,” he tried.
Blays whacked a branch in his way, snapping it clean. “Too bad. It probably saved us.”
“Saved me, maybe. You had a chance without it.”
Blays grunted. They walked on. “What’s in that book, anyway?”
“History and a lot of stories,” Dante said, gripping the straps of his back. Blays stopped, tapping Dante on the shin with his stick hard enough to welt.
“Bullshit,” he said. “That thing you just said is the product of a cow’s ass. You wouldn’t be risking your life over a bunch of stories. They wouldn’t be trying to kill you to get them back, either, whoever they’ is.” He reached for the pack and Dante drew away. “What’s so damned special about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop it.”
“I don’t!” Dante worked the muscles of his jaw, reaching for an explanation he couldn’t define. “I heard it was supposed to teach you how to do the things the priests say they can do, throw fire and change the weather and whatever other crazy things, but I haven’t read anything that tells you how to do that. So far it’s just like the Ban Naden of Taim.”
Blays snorted. “I don’t know anyone who read the Ban Naden and then made a whole street go dark.”
“Oh yeah? You want to read it and see?” Dante slid the pack from one shoulder.
“No way!” Blays said, jumping back. He narrowed his eyes to bright slits. “You know what I think it is?”
“What do you think it is?”
“I think,” he said, raising his blond brow
s, “it’s a spellbook.”
“Yeah, that’s what it is.”
Blays raised a palm. “Well, just look at it! It’s got a big old bone tree on the cover. What else could it be?”
“If it’s a spellbook, it’s the worst damn one I’ve ever read.”
“Just how many have you read?”
“There’s no such thing.” Dante closed his eyes and sighed through his nose. “Have you ever heard of the Third Scour?”
Blays kicked a rock at his feet. “No, I’m a halfwit.”
“Then what was it?”
“One of those things where all the people kill each other? What do you call those?”
“It was a war,” Dante said. “A big one.” He paused. From his right he heard the chirr of a redwinged blackbird. Pond nearby, then. Fish. He frowned at himself, glanced back at Blays. “It was a little over a century ago. All the sects of the Celeset sort of banded together to wipe another one out.”
“I presume their reasons were perfectly noble.”
“Most of the histories I’ve read say the sect was a death cult that served a god named Arawn. You know, sacrificing babies, no respect for human life, whatever.” Dante looked away, feeling stupid. Somehow exposing his knowledge of such boring, dusty histories was like admitting he collected pornographic illustrations of centaurs and mermaids, or saved up his coin for the commemorative daggers of the Explorers Clubb. “Supposedly, since the serfs no longer respected the law of the righteous gods, they stopped listening to the rule of the king. You know,’this life is short and the next one is long, so who cares what that guy says.’ That sort of thing. There were rebellions. The one in the Collen Basin worked—they hanged the count, burnt his wife. But when the cavalry came the renegades didn’t have much more than pitchforks and the bows from the manor’s armory. The steps of the house were stained so red they painted them crimson to cover it up. If you believe that stuff. That’s why the new count established it as his colors.”
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