“Couldn’t say.”
“There’s a couple…but that guy looks like he’s a billion years old. He looks like he died about five miles back.” Blays laughed and clapped his knee. Dante scowled at his pages. “And those two look like they’ve bathed in the last month. Can’t be them.” A couple minutes dragged by. “Oh, there’s a—”
“Enough,” Dante said.
“Hey, at least I’m doing something here.”
“Do it quietly.”
“There’s a couple,” he stage-whispered, then laughed at Dante’s glare. “All right. Fine. Read your damn book.”
“I will.”
“Good.”
“It is good,” Dante said, and found he’d lost his place. The skies grew dark. With fading frequency Blays would crane his face out the window to meet the clatter of hooves. Dante lost himself in the book, flipping between sections to make certain he was matching names to lineage and king to kingdom. A knock banged against the door and he bit his tongue.
Blays pointed at him, mouthed “You.” He lowered himself from the sill and stepped to the side of the thin door. Noiselessly, he drew his blade.
“Uh, who is it?” Dante called, giving Blays the eye.
“Barnes, sir,” a small voice said from the other side. Blays let out his breath and Dante unbarred the door.
“Did you see them?”
“George says to say we saw the two people you wanted us to see,” Barnes said.
“Where’s George now?” Dante asked.
“Following them.”
“Where’d they go?” Blays said.
“I dunno,” Barnes shrugged.
Dante looked at Blays over Barnes’ greasy head. “Shit.”
“It’s okay,” Blays said, eyes darting. “Uh. We should have at least a couple hours until they’d go to sleep. Barnes, do you think you can find George before midnight?”
“Yeah. He’s my brother!”
“Then go find him. You two keep following until they go inside an inn. Then George stays there while you come back here. You got that?”
“I think,” Barnes said, twisting his hips and swinging his arms.
“What’d I say?”
“You said go find George, then when they go to sleep come tell you.”
“That is what I said,” Blays said, giving Dante an impressed look. “Well, go do it, damn it!”
The boy disappeared without a word. Dante stared through the open doorway, wondering how many of them died before they reached his own age. His older brother’d been among them. Sending Barnes and his brother to spy on killers for a chuck apiece. But they were willing to take it. To them it must feel like the wealth of dragons.
He rebarred the door and yawned. The dawn in the woods felt like ages ago. He slumped back in the corner, massaging the back of his head. The rears of his eyes felt like someone were pressing against them with a thumb.
“I’m going to nap,” he told Blays.
“Switch you in a couple hours.”
He settled down on the pallet, wrapping up in his cloak. Some time later a knock stirred him from sleep and he drew a deep breath. There was the tick of a lock, a muted conversation, but in his half sleep he couldn’t make out a word.
“Get up, dummy,” Blays said. “Barnes is back.”
Dante sat up straight. His brain felt like it had been left in the thoroughfare for a season. He blinked at Blays’ wiry height, at the squirming Barnes who didn’t rise past his rib cage.
“Hello,” Dante said, scratchy.
“Hi,” Barnes waved. “The two men went to their room a while ago.”
“How’d you find George?”
“I asked the other boys if they’d seen him until one of them said yes.”
“Oh.” Dante got up. He emptied his pack of everything but the book and a knife and relooped his sword belt around his waist. He had no idea what time it was. He felt worse than when he’d gone to sleep. “What’s everybody standing around for?”
“Lead on,” Blays said, shoving Barnes lightly between the shoulders. They tramped down the streets. The night was cold. Wind channeled down the empty streets. Overhead the stars watched with blank eyes. For ten minutes Barnes led them through an impossible tangle of alleys, stopping briefly to greet other small boys who looked up at Dante and his sword with round and gleaming eyes. Barnes stopped in the mouth of a sidestreet and pointed across an avenue to a wooden building with a painting of a frog’s head above the door.
“They’re the third room on the second story,” said a voice behind them. They whirled, swords out, and saw George. “Don’t hurt me!”
“Sorry,” Dante said. “Get up already.”
“Do we get our other chuck now?” George said, scooting toward them, ignoring the fresh dust on his breeches.
“How long ago did they go to their room?” Blays said.
“A while,” George said. “First they had some drinks. I got thrown out but I sneaked back in.”
Dante handed him a blackened piece of silver. “Go buy yourself some bread.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” George said. He jogged into the depths of the alley. Barnes waved at them and ran to catch up to his brother.
“Did you hear what he said to me?”
“You’ll get over it,” Blays said. He put away his sword. “Sounds like they’re drunk. Couldn’t ask for more.”
“You ready?”
“Are you?”
“It’s the only way to get them off our backs,” Dante said.
The common room was stifling, rank with smoke and the sweat of men and the vinegary odor of vomited wine. The innkeep glanced up and they kept their eyes front and beelined for the stairs. At the second floor Blays brought out his blade and Dante followed suit. Blays counted off the doors, pointed to the third. Dante nodded. Blays squared himself in front of it, paced back. He waited till loud laughter pealed up from the first floor, then barreled forward, leveling his shoulder against the wood. It splintered to chunks and he hurled right through into the darkness. Dante yelped and leaped over the wreckage of the door, whacking at the first figure that wasn’t Blays, who was busy extricating his sword from the chest of the same man Dante’d just stabbed. The dying man gurgled and a candle flared from the far end of the room. They paused, wrists flexing when the dying man slumped forward on their blades.
“Dante Galand,” the remaining man said, and they heard the high, reedy voice from the stream two mornings before. He had a long, pale face, black hair queued at the base of his neck and falling past his shoulders. He was wearing nothing but a dirty gray set of underclothes which sagged at the ass and elbows.
“Some son of a bitch who won’t leave us alone,” Blays said back at him, twisting his sword in the other man’s body and hauling it free. Blood sprayed over his hand and the corpse dropped onto Dante’s feet, pulling his sword from his grasp. The man splayed his fingers at them and Dante saw the air go dark. By instinct he punched back and a black gout rippled like flame from his hand. The two forces met and became nothing.
The man curled his lip, gestured with index and middle fingers. Dante felt the nether enfolding him like a cloak. He swung his arm from the elbow as if to say “Behold!” and again negated the man’s power.
“Stop that,” the man said.
“Burn in hell!” Blays shot, chopping the air and spraying the man with blood. He stepped forward.
“Don’t move,” Dante warned.
“They didn’t tell me you shared the talent,” the black-haired man said, fists held out from his sides. A temporary stillness stood between them.
“What did they tell you?”
“You’d stolen the Cycle.” He smiled with half his mouth. “I can see that much is true.”
“Can you?”
“It’s cleared your mind,” the man said, eyes and voice pinched with suspicion. “Opened the paths to the nether.”
“I see,” Dante lied.
“Indeed,” the man nodded
, glancing between Dante and Blays’ blood-slick sword. “This may change things.”
“How’s that?” Blays said.
“They may welcome another into the fold, that’s how.”
Blays laughed. “The only fold’s going to be the one I cleave into your forehead.”
“Then it’s a good thing it’s not your decision to make, because I’d crush you like a bean.”
“You’ve been trying to kill me for weeks,” Dante said.
“That was then,” the man said, drawing back his shoulders. “What you need now is proper training.”
“I’ve stopped you well enough without it.”
“If kicking down a door should impress me, then I’m impressed,” the man said, brushing the shoulder of his underwear. “But I’m not much, really. Nothing compared to the ones who’d teach you, or the ones who’d come after you if you deny me.”
Dante said nothing. To accept would be to part with Blays. He knew there were parts of the book that would take years to untangle, that its pages held knowledge he’d never learn in isolated scholarship—the powers he saw when he slept. He didn’t even know how it had caused him to come in tune with the nether in the first place. He did know he didn’t like this man and didn’t trust the sect he represented. They may not be the amoral, bloodthirsty force the histories tried to paint them as, but Dante suspected a force as primal as the nether couldn’t be tapped without a certain recklessness of spirit that must taint their entire order.
“Who are these others?”
“The holy of Arawn,” the man replied, as if he’d asked which direction the sun rose.
“And what is it they want?”
“Open worship of our lord. An equal place among the houses of the Belt.”
“Their temples are smashed,” Dante said. “Their people are slain.”
“The gods can’t be killed! And neither can the ones who’d praise them. As for temples, we have ours within Mennok’s, with Carvahal’s. Even the houses of Gashen count priests of a deeper alliance.”
Dante drew back his chin. “What? You’ve been seeding them with your own people?”
The man snorted. “Am I supposed to think it’s dishonorable? What’s the honor in getting slaughtered in the open field? What’s the glory in a Fourth Scour when you’re the one getting scoured?”
“I don’t understand,” Dante said, trying to remember all the men of cloth he’d met in the temples and cloisters and cathedrals of Bressel. How many of them served a second god in secret? The very one whose knowledge Dante had been seeking? “How long has this been going on?”
“That’s enough.” The man held up his hand, palm out. From the corner of his eye Dante saw Blays’ arms tense up. “Come with me back to Bressel and we’ll sail to Narashtovik. There, you’ll learn whatever you want. Things you don’t yet even know to ask about.”
Agreement ached in Dante’s chest so hard he’d almost said yes before he could think. He glanced at Blays and the blood sliding down the boy’s sword. Say Dante left now with this man for Bressel, for this Narashtovik. Say Dante had thirty or fifty years left to his life: three to five decades to spend forging a name so bright he’d rival the stars. And every day of which he’d spend regretting the moment he’d left Blays to whatever mean fate awaited him.
“I won’t be bound to anybody,” Dante said, knowing there would be other ways. “Not even the gods.”
“I thought the same thing when I was your age,” the man chuckled. “Have faith in those above and some day you’ll be the one looking down.”
“I’m not much for waiting,” Dante said, and when he flung out his hand he sent the opposite edge of the shadows that would heal. The man jerked his hands up to his chest, but before he could speak his stomach spilled open like a sword had torn across it. His hands plunged to catch the intestines that slithered to the floor. Blays screamed.
The man hunched, clutching at his belly, gaping at Dante. The man raised shaking fingers thick with the blackish blood of the body. Dante reached for more shadows to meet the man’s summons and found only a flicker. Blays’ arm blurred and his sword spun across the room, pinning through the man’s neck. The black-haired man made a choked gasp, tongue jutting from his mouth. He rolled his eyes, as if exasperated it had come to this, killed in his underwear in a foreign town by two dirt-caked boys. Then he went limp, hanging from the sword embedded in the wall.
“What in the name of whoever you hold holy was that?” Blays said, planting his foot against the wall and clearing his sword. The body thumped. He wiped it clean and sheathed it.
“I healed him,” Dante said.
“No you didn’t!”
“I mean, I did it backwards.” Dante lowered himself and groped for his own sword beneath the body of the first man they’d killed. He touched the warm stick of blood and drew back. “I didn’t know it would do that.”
“I don’t think he did either!” Blays kicked the corpse, then shuddered so hard he fumbled his sword. He turned to Dante, face white and misted up with sweat. “Did you mean what you said? About not being bound to anyone?”
“I’ll find my own way. I don’t need them or anyone else to find what I’m searching for.”
Blays nodded and looked away. His face soured. “This place stinks like a slaughterhouse.”
They left down the stairs. For whatever racket their disturbance may have raised, there was no sign the drunk keepers and drunker patrons of the common room had heard a thing. The two of them took to the streets, hunting their way back in the bath of the moon till their eyes found the painting of the Foaming Keg. Dante pushed down his nausea. His shoulders felt as broad as a bear’s. There was no power in the world that could stop him and Blays, he thought. They’d bend the world to its knee.
5
“They arrested your friend.”
Dante spun for the high-pitched, sexless source of that news. He backed in a circle, then saw the dark head of one of the two brothers. Now that they weren’t standing next to each other he couldn’t tell which was which.
“Arrested? For what? How do you know?”
“I saw them go in after you left,” the kid said. “There were a whole lot of watchmen. They carried him out on their shoulders.” He tipped his head till his ear touched his shoulder. “He said lots of nasty words.”
Dante grabbed the boy by the collar and hauled him into the alley he’d just come out of. If they’d been after Blays, they’d be after him. It was only blind chance the kid had found him on his way back from the market before he’d returned to the Keg.
“Where are they keeping him?”
“They keep them all at the old bailey. They have the trial on the Saturday, and then if they’re guilty they hang them the next Saturday.”
“How do they tell who’s guilty?”
“I don’t know,” the boy said, sweeping the dirt with his toe. “I guess they all are,’cause they’re all at the hanging.”
“Go see what you can see, kid. I’ll reward you beyond your dreams.”
“I can count to a hundred,” he said, then spun off down the streets.
Dante rested his hand on his sword, glancing down both ends of the alley. He double- then triple-checked his pack to make sure the book was still there. Anything at the Keg was lost. Going back would mean arrest. His prayer books, his histories, his candles and his notes and spare paper, all that was replaceable. It hurt to leave it, but he had no choice.
His first instinct was to skip town. His second was to hunker down in the woods until the Saturday after and make a one-man assault on the city when they brought Blays down to the gallows. He saw several flaws in this plan, however, not least of which was he’d have no chance of surviving and Blays would be killed anyway. The gesture would be nice, noble even, and if there were a bard in the crowd maybe Dante would have a song written about him everyone could sing and forget in a season or two, but that would make him no less dead, except possibly in a metaphorical way that would do not
hing to stop the worms from eating his skin.
He picked up a shard of cobble and hurled it against the alley wall. He took a breath and looked around again. What did he have? Time, in some small measure. He had time. He should juice that for all its worth before getting sucked into anything rash. The trial was two days off, the hanging a week from then. The first order of business was to find a place to hide so he couldn’t be caught before he had a chance to try anything tremendously stupid.
He drew his cowl over his head. Rule out the docks. The boys were too easily bought if any of the watch were canny enough to throw a little coin their way. Plenty of other inns in town, but inns attracted traffic, and traffic attracted do-gooders and bounty-vultures. Even if he holed up in his room, coming and going by cover of darkness, someone would see him. He needed isolation. The kind of place no one went without being dragged. An abandoned building could work, if he could trust himself to differentiate between the truly abandoned and the merely decrepit, but that could be little better than an inn—abandoned buildings attracted vagabonds and vagabonds attracted lawmen. The basement beneath a slaughterhouse would be avoided by anyone with a working nose, but he’d have to do an awful lot of sneaking to avoid the laborers, and anyway it was a place of trade. A churchyard, maybe. No one went to graves except on the anniversaries of the faithful departed, but he’d feel too foolish skulking around the tombstones. Leaving for the woods would cut him off from the clockwork of the city. He had to stay close. If for some reason the courts changed their schedule, Blays could be killed before Dante’d heard word one.
The graveyard, then. He set his mouth. At least his shame would be private.
Dante fake-limped through the foot traffic, coughing wetly like a man on his way out and enthusiastic about sharing his imbalanced humors. The first man he stopped drew his sleeve over his mouth and waved Dante to the south. Not knowing local landmarks or much other than what Bressel had taught him of how cities worked, he kept to the main streets, trusting his hood and his cough to deflect wandering eyes. Twice he crossed paths with officious men in cleanish brown uniforms. They walked without hurry, sweeping the crowds. Dante steeled up and strolled past them. If they had his description, he’d either run, fight, or die.
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