“I see,” Dante said.
“Our thanks, kind sirs,” Blays said.
“Right,” Dante said. “We’d been warned of the aloofness of this city, but hadn’t warranted it would extend to the honest faithful.”
“Indeed,” the shorter man said, eyes flicking down their shabby clothing and unkempt faces. “You’ve traveled far?”
“From Bressel by the Aster Sea,” Dante said. The two men raised their eyebrows. Dante licked his lips. “But we left it months ago. And now we have a couple miles still to travel, it seems. Good day.”
“I told you,” Blays said once they’d headed up the street.
“We had no way to know that,” Dante said.
“It’s the tallest thing in town!”
“And if we’d guessed wrong we might have spent so long wandering we’d miss the sermon. That’s right, we’d be wandering for two days.” Dante glanced toward the Cathedral and Citadel whenever their great heights could be seen above the clutter of the streets. He had the unpleasant suspicion the clergy of Arawn didn’t limit their control of the city to its finest church.
Things got louder, busier, and fouler the further they traveled toward the city center. They walked through a decent number of poorly-dressed people speaking two or three different tongues and gazing up at the ruin and age like all newcomers to a major city, but despite the pilgrims’ presence and the locals hurrying on about their business it felt less alive than a place as middling as Whetton or the Gaskan town they’d stopped in along the way. They made good time through the modest traffic, reaching what the man had called the Ingate within a half hour.
Four men bearing pikes twice their height and dark-plumed helmets flanked the gate into the next ring of the city, the last set of walls besides the Citadel itself. The guards’ eyes tracked the comers and goers with the alert boredom of those used to standing on the same square yard of street all day. Dante and Blays settled against a nearby building to share a drink of water and watch the people pass. For no reason they could see, half the company peeled from their post and stopped a dirt-smeared man on his way through the gate. They spoke in the garrulous local language, voices pitching up, and then the guards flung down their pikes and dropped the man in a flurry of punches. They picked up his unconscious body by the armpits and dragged him through an iron-banded door set into the stonework beside the gates.
Abrupt shifts in the gray of the stone betrayed where attackers had successfully bombarded them down, but in contrast to the earlier walls, these ones were unbroken, unadorned by the heads and quarters of criminals and the unwelcome, clean from moss and lichen. These walls looked like the rock on which the enemy waters would break. When Dante crossed beneath them, sharp eyes meeting those of the pikemen, the city within the tight circle of the Ingate looked whole, as prosperous and peopled and mighty as the noble quarters of Bressel. At its center, no more than a quarter mile distant, the sheer, smooth walls of the Citadel dwarfed all but the spire of the Cathedral. It had once been a palace, Dante knew, the ancient capital, but now it looked more like a castle. Narrow slits were spaced along its curtain walls and the towers they connected; among the crenels he saw the far-off shapes of men standing watch on what lay below.
“Now that is a big building,” Blays said, letting himself look impressed.
“What do you want to bet it’s where Samarand calls home?”
“I don’t know. My life?”
Dante snorted. They strode down the street. Men with half a foot in height on them shuffled out of their way without seeming to know why they were moving. They turned another corner and before Dante looked up he thought he could sense the vast weight of stone pressing on him with greater force than the rocky walls of the mountains had. He lifted his eyes. They’d found it. To his right, the keep; to his left, the church.
The Cathedral of Ivars was built with clean lines and elegant swoops that made the intricate buttresses and delicate arches of the great churches of Bressel look like an unshaven man in a dress. For a full minute they gazed at the charcoal-hued stone spearing up into the sky. Two thick towers flanked a central one whose flattish face seemed sewn together by a series of vertical lines standing out from the stonework. From the gigantic block of the body of the church the main spire was stacked in three discrete levels: two of them squarish, the second somewhat narrower than the one beneath it, and crowning them, reaching so high as to stab the stars, a conical tower of dizzying steepness. At its apex Dante saw a plain ring of steel, the icon he’d come to know as Arawn’s.
“I think I need to sit down,” Blays said, falling back a step, arm held out behind him for balance.
“My gods,” Dante said. He fought the desire to fall to his knees.
“That must be…that is really, really tall.”
“Five hundred feet?” Dante guessed.
“I’ve got no gods damn clue.”
“Higher than the Odeleon of Bressel. That’s 366.”
“By a lot,” Blays said. He lowered his gaze and shook his head. Nobody was paying them much mind, Dante saw. A few others were standing on the far side of the street trying to catch the cathedral’s full perspective. Others filed in and out from its great doors, eyes downcast, speaking softly if at all.
“Let’s go inside.”
“What?” Blays said. “Just walk right in?”
“I think it’s okay,” Dante said, jerking his chin at the others. “They don’t look any cleaner than we do.”
“But what if Arawn knows?”
Dante frowned at him, then led them up its steps and to the double doors. Ten feet high and five inches thick, but they swung easily, noiselessly. Dante followed a couple other pilgrims through the foyer and then they were in its main chamber.
Captured space soared above them. The ceiling arched like the keel of an upside-down boat, or like the ribcage of Phannon’s leviathan. It was the single largest room Dante had ever seen. At its far end was a richly draped dais, a red pedestal and a number of metal trappings gleaming brightly in the light through the shadowcut glass windows and hundreds of candles lining each wall. The front half of the room was consumed by row on row of benches, their wood stained as dark as silt. Between where they stood and where the benches began lay a clean floor of creamy stone tiled with the twelve-part circle of the Celeset. Recessed alcoves along the walls sheltered icons and minor shrines to the prophets of Arawn. All that space looked empty as the air beyond a cliff, but there must have been eight guards and forty pilgrims in the main chamber, lighting prayer candles in the alcoves, kneeling before the altar, standing near the room’s edges with their hands over their mouths and eyes drifting across the wings of the ceiling.
“Awfully wide open,” Blays said. With small gestures Dante mimed sighting down an arrow shaft and letting fly toward the altar. He raised his eyebrows at Blays, who shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Imagine it packed,” Dante said.
“With soldiers, maybe.”
Dante headed over to one of the walls. Footsteps and coughing echoed from front to back, but as long as they kept their voices to a murmur he didn’t think their words would carry. He contemplated an alcove presenting a three-foot statue of a holy man he didn’t recognize, a work of thickly impressionistic muscles and blunt features. Its clean lines mirrored the greater build of the cathedral.
“Could take cover in one of these,” he said. “Nearer the front.”
“I’m guessing those benches aren’t intended for the huddled masses. Might not be able to get too close.”
Dante nodded, trying to gauge the distance from alcove to altar. It was a ways. Somehow it was harder to guess indoors, inside a building where a full-grown man had no more presence than a mouse.
“How’s your archery?” Dante said.
“Shitty.”
“That much better than mine?” Dante sighted in on a couple of decently-dressed men standing in front of the main altar. He couldn’t tell one from the other. He and
Blays would have to be closer to stand any good chance of landing an arrow—if they could even get the bow through the door. If they had a straight line of sight, which was doubtful when the crowds filled the place up. And the closer they got for the purpose of improving their chances of a true strike, the further they’d be from the doors that would let them outside. “No. Won’t work.”
“Spell?” Blays said, catching his eye.
“Not sure my range is any better.” Dante rubbed his eyes, trying to remember the furthest he’d fired the nether. The tree in the graveyard in Whetton, probably, and that had been barely half the distance they may need. They had two days yet till the sermon of Samarand. They could return to the wilds to let him test and flex the reach of his mind, but such an attack would rest on a full foundation of assumptions. Was this sanctuary warded against hostile employment of the nether? For that matter, was there any such thing as wards? Samarand’s priests, would they be as wary for otherworldly assaults as her pikemen would be for those of steel? “I’m thinking this isn’t the place.”
“I’m rather doubting that castle outside would be any easier.”
Dante bit his lips between his teeth. “She’ll have to walk here and back from it.”
Blays huffed, the puff of air ringing from the walls. He lifted his eyes and lowered his voice.
“From just across the street.”
Dante nodded. “There’ll be crowds. Confusion.”
“And probably no more than a minute when she’s in the open. Not much time for the right moment.”
“You know, this was never that hard all the other times.”
“Not counting all the times we were nearly killed,” Blays said, eyes full of scorn. “Can we go back outside? Talking about this in here’s creeping me out.”
“Yeah. Gods, it’s beautiful.”
They left its hushed shelter for the bright daylight and the relative roar of the babble of pedestrians. Across the way the Citadel stood as solid as if it had been carved straight from a hillock.
“We’ll get here early,” Dante said. His voice wasn’t yet back to a normal level. “Watch how she comes in. They’ll probably follow the same route back.”
Blays bit his pinky nail, spat it into the street.
“How is it,” he said, staring at the battlements, the flags snapping in a wind they barely felt at ground level, “they seem to know our every move when we’re 1200 miles away, but here we are close enough to piss through their bedroom window and we’re free as an eagle?”
“Probably don’t recognize you with your hair down in your eyes,” Dante said. “Not to mention that stupid beard.”
“Yours is so much better. Looks like you sewed a rat’s tail to your lip.”
“Rat tails are hairless.”
“Well, imagine they’re not.”
“Two days,” Dante said.
Blays bit another nail. “Only if it looks good.”
“Maybe the whole city’s lit up with the stuff of the book,” Dante said. “It’d be like trying to find a lantern held in front of the sun.”
Brays wrinkled his brow. “Are you basing that on anything at all?”
“Well, it would make sense.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“Nobody’s come through that gate the whole time we’ve been here,” Dante said, nodding at the closed doors in the frontside of the Citadel’s walls. “Do you think that’s odd?”
“Oh yeah. When I was growing up in our castle back home we let people in and out all the time. The walls were just to impress the neighbors.”
“I mean you don’t need to keep them closed all the time when you’ve got all those soldiers. You’d think we’d at least have seen someone carrying food in or garbage out. Or couriers waving letters around so we can see how important they are. There hasn’t been a thing. Closed in the middle of the day.”
“Yeah,” Blays said, folding his arms. “It is a little odd.”
“I’m going to ask someone,” Dante said, straining his ears for the sound of their native language.
“What? What did Robert tell you about questions?”
“Suddenly you’re on his side?”
“Just because he’s a prick doesn’t make him wrong.”
“Excuse me,” Dante said, flagging down someone who wasn’t dressed in fur. “Excuse me.” He put a hand on the man’s shoulder. The man spun, face dark, but his eyes went guarded when he met Dante’s. “Can you tell me why the Citadel’s gates are closed midday?”
“No one goes in,” the man said in a thick accent.
“Ever?”
“Ever.”
“No one?”
The man rolled his eyes. “Priests go in. No one else. That’s why they call it the Sealed Citadel?”
“Ah,” Dante said. “I thought that was just an expression.”
“No, this is an expression,” the man said, following up with something obscene. He walked away.
“Did you hear that?” Dante said to Blays.
“Yes, but I think you’d break your back before you reached it.”
“About the Citadel.”
“Yeah.” Blays tipped his head at its high walls. “So what?”
“So we can’t get in. We might just have this one shot at Samarand.”
“Yeah, and maybe she’ll recant her wicked ways and off herself before we have to do it for her.” Blays’ mouth twitched. His brows drew together, creasing the skin between and above them. At that moment he no longer looked in any way young. “There’s no way we can know until the moment comes. Let’s not talk about it till then.”
13
Instead of talking they prepared. The next day Dante sold the horses, reasoning it was better to take whatever they could get now than to get nothing when they were stolen. In his haste he received perhaps a third their worth, and in coin noticeably blacker and irregular than the Mallish chucks that had been minted within his lifetime, but to him it seemed a fortune, a rogue’s retirement in the coin of the realm. They blew half of it on clothes, on fur-lined black cloaks and gloves, on unpatched trousers and padded doublets of the high-collared fashion popular in the rank of Narashtovik. Dante chose red, Blays a deep pine green. No one would mistake them for princes, but neither would they any longer be indistinguishable from the gutter-sewage. They found a barber, were shorn of their wispy beards, had their shaggy hair shortened and straightened. In the clean sunlight of the street, Blays brushed stray hair from the back of his neck, a strange smile on his face.
“I feel like a jacketed ape,” he said.
“We look like traders,” Dante said, feeling the weight of the coins in his pocket. “Maybe even minor nobles. They won’t turn us away.”
They walked around the city till long after dark, not yet ready to forfeit the long hours to sleep. At last, legs weary from the trip to market and back to the cathedral and two circles around the Sealed Citadel and a trip to a public house, they returned to the home they’d made inside the first wall and stretched out on a pile of their old clothes and blankets.
“I wonder how Gabe fared,” Blays said into the quiet and the darkness.
“I bet he turned that monastery into a fortress.”
“And knighted the monks?”
“Why not?”
“Picture it,” Blays said. He laughed through his nose. “Those bony old men sallying forth on goatback. Waving butcher knives and rakes.”
“The rebels don’t stand a chance.” Dante chuckled. They were silent for a while. “He’ll be fine,” he said, mind on all the weeks that had gone by since they’d last seen him. All the southlands had been under threat of fire when they’d left that world behind. “We’ll see to that.”
In the ethereal dawn hours before Samarand’s sermon they walked to the bay at the north edge of the city and gazed out at the subdued waters of the northern sea. Gray, brackish on the breeze, calmed by the sandbars at the bay’s mouth and the arms of land to either side.
“How m
any men can say they’ve seen both this and the Aster?” Blays said, kicking rocks through the fine dirt of the beach.
“I’m glad we came,” Dante said, uncertain what he meant. The sun struggled against the mists of the waters, cloaked and concealed. He wished he could have watched it rise one last time.
They arrived some three hours before the sermon. Already the streets were thick with people. Men in rags with strips of burlap tied around their feet, men in finery to shame Dante and Blays’ new clothes, passels of boisterous merchants whose rings shone in the sunlight. Norren loomed above the crowd like the Cathedral of Ivars above the dead city. Dante shifted the sword at his belt. Robert’s warning about the curiosity of foreigners had cowed him into asking no questions about the legality of bearing arms in this place, but they’d seen many men in the streets who wore blades without worry, including men of obvious lowness and poverty, and this day was no different. He supposed a couple thousand years of constant invasion had made lax the laws of arms so strict in Bressel.
Dante’s nerves felt as tight as the morning before the Execution That Wasn’t. He sipped often from his water skin and halfway wished he had something stronger. The boys spoke little, eyes on the crowds, eyes on the men standing post on the walls above the keep’s great gate. An hour before noon they entered the cathedral. Half full already and still the streets were packed. They returned outdoors, restless and beware, ambling down the broad way, then leaned against the side of the thick walls of the house of some noble estate. The shield above its gate wore the black and white of Barden and the same spiral horns Dante still wore around his neck. He’d seen other men wearing them, too, men dressed in the plain and frill-less clothes of traders who profit too little to ever stop for festivals and feasts, but he had no idea what the horns meant to those who saw them, whether they were doing him any good to wear them.
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