“Kiel sounds like a hardass,” Blays said.
“He does. And Kiel saw they meant what they said. He also knew they deserved no role in the punishment, that their lust for blood and vengeance was driving them rather than a natural hunger for justice. Harron was, Kiel knew, his friend, and he wouldn’t let his friend be burnt as Harron had burnt his barn.
“‘I see I cannot stop so many of you from killing him,’ Kiel said, leaning on the barley-scythe he’d carried into town.’But I am this man’s friend, and if it is his time to be rejoined with Arawn in the black skies, I will send him there in the manner I deem just.’ Before the townspeople could stop him, Kiel swung his scythe and cut out Harron’s throat.
“‘You fool!’ the townspeople cried.’You’ve murdered, and so stolen our justice! You will take his place on the pyre.’ Kiel only shook his head. He could not fight them all, and so he let them take him and lash him beside the corpse of Harron. They lit the pyre. Kiel closed his eyes and even as his skin crackled and his fat popped he made no sound but to thank Arawn for giving him the strength to send his friend to that great place with the peace Harron deserved. The men were humbled then, and slit his throat with his own scythe before the fires could roast him. They carried his scythe to the altar of Arawn, where it has stood ever since.”
Blays shuffled snow with his feet. “I’d have swung that scythe at the mob till my arms dropped off.” He stole a look at the priests, who were again bowing their heads beneath the tree. “Did that really happen?”
“I don’t know,” Dante said. “It’s a story from the book. One of the Mallish parts. It’s too old to know which parts were true.”
“Do you think anyone will know?” Blays said, squinting into the snow. “The whole town saw the good thing Kiel did. Then they told his story till we heard it now. Will anyone know what we’ve done here?”
“Cally might,” Dante said. “He’ll be able to figure it out, at least.”
“And probably claim credit for himself.”
“The people will know someone did something right when there’s no war in the spring.”
Blays shuffled the snow with his toes some more. “But they won’t know our names.”
The priests started another chant, saving Dante from trying to answer that. He made the faintest touch to the nether and saw Barden’s skeletal canopy go dark with the shadows of unseen leaves. Around its roots bright black rings marked where Samarand had scattered the bones. Each of the priests was enveloped by a hazy nimbus; a gray umbilicus traced from their chests to Samarand’s. Their auras pulsed with the tune of their words. Dante looked on a power he’d never imagined possible, and still they added to it.
“Larrimore’s going to try to protect her,” Dante said softly.
“I’ll see to him, then. You stay with Samarand.”
“Thanks.”
Dante had never seen the nether in any form but small, swift parts that sometimes gathered in swirling orbs or shifting planes. It was ever moving, amorphous and unbounded as water. As he watched, the priests ceased their chant and held up their hands and the disordered shadows snapped into a stark geometry of lines between them and Samarand and the White Tree: she at its nexus, six dark lines converging from the priests to a single point at the middle of her back and emerging from her front to meet six equally-spaced points on the branches of the tree. Samarand held her arms perpendicular to her body and dipped her fingers in the slow currents passing from priests to her to Barden, as if it were bathwater in need of testing. Minutes went by that way, the silence broken by the splitting of the wind through the bony branches, by the cough of one of the men at the wagon, by taut, whispered words among a couple of the soldiers. Dante began to feel a tension in his nerves, almost like an all-over sting, but it was never quite enough to hurt—more of a constant vibration, like the strings of his body were being plucked by the forces being summoned to the tree. A high whine sounded in his ears. He fought the urge to slap at a bug that wasn’t there.
“How about this,” Blays mused. “Take her down, then run away from the priests and back toward the troop. Steal a couple horses. Ride hell bent for leather.”
“Sounds dubious,” Dante said.
“Can you make us fly?”
“No.”
“Teleport us back to snug beds in Bressel?”
“No.”
“Conjure up a giant mole that can dig our way to freedom?”
Dante looked up into the clouds. “I could always try.”
“Then we’ll steal some horses and run,” Blays shrugged. “Who knows what happens after that.”
Dante laughed. “Try to shout something confusing when we’re running up to grab their horses.”
“I’ll tell them the whole hill’s about to explode and it’s every man for himself.”
Dante clasped his hands over his mouth so his laughter wouldn’t be heard by the others. It was a strange thing, talking about their death in this way. He didn’t think he could have faced it with a too-serious mind and he didn’t think he could be anything but serious without Blays to ease his thoughts. It made him mad to think it would all be over soon: but that, too, was foolish. He was beginning to learn how little it meant to be angry.
The rites went on. Samarand reached into a satchel at her side and drew out an age-weathered copy of the Cycle. She spread the book’s broad pages and read aloud from the verses of prophecy and malediction. Black sparks crackled and spritzed from her hands, visible to Dante without any help from the nether. His ribs thudded like when a door was slammed in his face or the wall of a building crumbled down in one big boom and a vague rectangle coalesced at Barden’s foot, ten feet high and half as wide, hazy as a twilight fog. Some of the soldiers gasped. One of the priests took a half-step back, then forced himself back into place.
“Did they do that?” Blays whispered. “Or did the tree?”
Dante shook his head, equally ignorant. The blue shadows of the snowfield flocked to the doorway. After five minutes he could no longer see the part of the tree that stood behind it. After ten it had darkened to the pitch of a moonless night. Samarand turned pages as she read on, dividing her gaze between the darkening rectangle and the words she invoked. The priests began to repeat her sentences, parroting the harsh consonants of Narashtovik. The wind faltered and blew itself out and the still-falling snowflakes settled into a lazy drift groundwards. After another ten minutes points of light brightened within the black frame, faintly at first, slowly hardening into icy white points that winked like the stars. In time, Dante could see they made all the designs of the Belt of the Celeset as arrayed to their opposite: the two rivers and the golden hammer, the hourglass and watchdog, the lion and the hare, maiden and cicada, fox and ship, the snake and the dragon. The constellations burned with fierce white purity, brighter in that doorway than he’d seen in the sky on the clearest nights of silent winter. Dante’s head swam with vertigo. Looking into the door was like standing on a roof and pretending your feet were stuck to the bottom of the world and the night sky was the ground beneath you, vast as the ocean, deep as an eternity of unbroken sleep. Samarand’s voice softened in the doorway’s presence. The words of the priests dropped to a rustle just above a whisper. The air felt charged, pregnant with a mutable power.
Something passed over the stars in the door like a face upon the waters, blacker, if possible, than the portal of sky behind it. Blays’ hand jumped out and gripped Dante’s shoulder. Dante hesitated, then put his hand on top of Blays’. His thoughts circled and bit each other’s tails: this was a mirage, a show; it was the touch of something greater, the sign he’d been waiting to see; it was as false and empty as all the world’s other so-called miracles. How could he tell the difference between the work of godlike men and the work of true deities? The stars flared brighter, as if Samarand’s words were breath blown on smoking embers.
A white-haired priest began to waver, his head tracing a wobbly circle in the air. He dropped to one knee and
knelt there, shivering. The stars within the doorway dimmed. With a strength of will Dante could almost taste, the old man planted his hands in the snow and pushed himself back to his feet, his thin chest heaving. The man inhaled deeply and then his voice joined the others in the repetition of Samarand’s speech. The stars glared with all their former intensity, and as if lit by their newfound blaze the rings of bones around the White Tree erupted into pale fire, shimmering tongues of white and blue that reflected the snowscape and the skies and seas and mountains to the north. Samarand tipped back her head and shouted out the text of the Cycle of Arawn and the whole world seemed to go dark. A great black halo formed around the crown of Barden’s bone branches. Dante felt light and insubstantial as ether. The string-like vibration in his body increased until he thought he could predict Samarand’s words before she spoke them. That sense of connection extended to the priests, to the doorway they faced, to the constellations that shone from within it: Dante felt so close to the order of their revolution he could touch it if he reached out his hand, could hold in his palm the nature of existence.
“It’s almost time,” he whispered to Blays.
“I’m ready,” Blays said.
“Why did you come with me all this time? All those miles?” Dante no longer felt the need to cloak himself, to arrange his words like pinned insects before he let himself speak them. Arawn was about to appear from that door to the stars—he had no other way to explain what he was feeling, that sensation of attunement to the world—and as the god clambered free Dante would strike down the woman who’d freed him. Dante had no illusions of survival after that. He wanted one clear answer before whatever he was became parted from the meat of his body. “You could have left at any time, you know. They were only ever after me.” He felt the weight of the book in the pack on his back. “Me and this book.”
Blays let his hand rest on the haft of his sword and gazed on the motions around the tree.
“I wanted to do something important with my life,” he said. “Back when you insulted me in that square in Bressel, I knew if I followed you, you’d lead me to it.”
“Did you think it would be anything like this?”
“No,” Blays said, eyes fast on the tree, on the halo at its head, the rings of white fire at its feet, at the starry door and the dark auras around the six priests and Samarand. She lifted an open hand above her head and held the book before her with the other. Blays shook his head and smiled crookedly. “I thought we’d make some money, maybe. Overthrow a baron and marry his daughters, if we got really ambitious.”
“I’m glad I met you,” Dante said.
“Yeah.”
The nether surged and tossed. A subverbal hum quivered on the air. Samarand shouted what Dante recognized as the last passage of the Prophecy of the Three-Tailed Beast, the one he’d quoted in part to Larrimore when he was trying to keep from being tortured and killed down in the dungeon.
“Let the prison of the heavens be unmade,” Samarand said. She closed the book and faced the door.
Dante drifted toward her up the hill. Blays crunched through the snow at his side. Samarand waited, oblivious, arms dangling at her sides, transfixed by the black portal. One of the burning bones flamed out in a wiggle of gray smoke. The sense of a presence grew excruciating, maddening Dante’s mind like all the things he’d ever been unable to recall, like the panicked eyes of a birthing mother whose child won’t come, as chthonic as the fires of the earth forging the scaled body of a dragon. Samarand glanced over her shoulder at the priests, eyes wild, and Dante slowed his pace.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
“There was no error,” Jackson said quickly.
“I don’t understand,” a balding priest said.
“I can feel him waiting,” said another.
“There is a flaw,” Samarand said. Her face was creased with an animal dread. Another bone burnt out, then a third. The halo around Barden was growing indistinct, muffled by the falling snow. Tears of exhaustion and frustration slid down Samarand’s cheeks.
“We don’t have the time or strength for a second attempt any time soon,” a dark-haired, middle-aged priest said, face blank with fear.
“No,” Samarand said.
“What are you saying?” the balding priest said. “What does this mean?”
“Nothing,” Samarand said. She gazed into the void of the doorway. “We’ve failed.”
“Then we’re lost!” the middle-aged priest said.
“We’re the only ones who know that right now.” Samarand drew a ragged breath. Some of her old sternness returned to her eyes. “It makes no difference. We’ll tell the people we have restored Arawn to his seat at the heaven’s twin rivers and they must do the same for him on this earth. Perhaps their faith will succeed where we have faltered. Perhaps we will find the true Cycle, and on that day we will try again.”
“Wait!” Dante blurted, reaching into his pack. He drew out the first copy of the Cycle of Arawn to ever be written and held it over his head. The white tree on its cover mirrored the bone oak that dwarfed them there on the plains of snow. “I have the true book!”
“You could have warned me this was your plan,” Blays hissed in his ear.
The eyes of Samarand and all six priests snapped to Dante’s face and the book in his hand. All the strings of his body hummed like a living chord. He gestured to the vault of stars shining through the doorway, as if that would explain to Blays what he felt lurking within the constellations. What if he held the key that would turn the final tumbler? Arawn, the god who’d made order of the mixed waters of the heavens, he who’d set the order of time from his seat in the light of the furthest roaming planet-star—in Arawn’s presence, would Whetton hold the trials that had condemned Blays to die? Would he allow the meaningless slaughter of the rebels outside Narashtovik? What other power could make the laws of nature sing in tune with what Dante felt in his bones? If he had the ability to bring that god to life, how could he prevent such justice for the world?
Destiny, perhaps, had guided Dante to steal the book, and through its subtle machinations, inevitable as the revolution of the Belt, had put him here to complete what the council had begun. Samarand could complete the rites, but none could deny she’d done so only by Dante’s mercy. If he cut her throat in that final moment, in the weakness of her effort, he could seize the reins of the order, ensure peace for the southlands as Arawn made for the earth what he’d set right in the skies.
This was the moment he’d been born for. This was the moment that would test his will to its limit.
“Give me the book,” Samarand said. She stepped forward and extended her hand. Dante held out the impossible weight of the Cycle of Arawn.
“You mewling worm!” Jackson thundered. He leapt forward and slapped the book from Dante’s hand. It sunk into the snow.
“What is this?” Samarand said, whirling to face him.
“Old debts repaid,” Jackson said. “I told you I’d come back for it, Sama.”
Samarand’s eyes widened, then narrowed to fearful slits. “You.”
“Me,” Jackson said in a nasally, clipped voice that wasn’t his own. He laughed unevenly, then swept a hand down his middle-aged face and body and became a skinny old man with a fiercely curled beard and sharp blue eyes that burned with their own ageless fire.
“When did you replace him? How?” Samarand said. Dante felt her clutching at the nether.
“I know things you couldn’t dream, you usurperous hag,” Cally said. “You’ve let your dream of conquest blind you. Your monstrous, braying ego. Let me remind you the look of righteous power.”
He thrust out with the shadows. Samarand jerked up her hands and their two forces met with an inhuman scream. Blackness burst over her and she was knocked to the ground.
Shouts hied up from behind them. Dreamlike, Dante turned to see Larrimore and his soldiers racing up the snow. The oldest of the priests flung his arm at Cally and Blays cleaved it off at the el
bow.
“Who do we kill?” he yelled at Dante.
“Everyone!” Dante said, mind splintered. The cogs had turned again and yanked him from his solid ground. He didn’t know whether to help Cally or kill him. The old man had sent the assassin to the chapel, he knew at once, having seen Dante at Larrimore’s command and assuming he’d turned to their side, ignorant that Dante held fast to his first purpose. But the moment was too desperate for fine distinctions. For the moment Cally was on the side trying to kill Samarand. That was all that mattered. If it came down to it, Dante would deal with him once all the men who were about to try to kill them were dead themselves.
Samarand was scrabbling to her feet away from Cally. She curled her fingers and a ghostly blade spun for his face. He cursed and whacked it aside with a hastily-formed shadow sword of his own, then swung his bony arm and slung the weapon at her body. She twisted and it clipped her right arm. Blood pattered into the snow.
Around them, Dante felt the priests beginning to open their own overused channels to the nether that saturated the grounds. Blays crouched like a cat, then slashed his sword across the gut of the middle-aged dark-haired priest when the man made his move at Cally, dropping him without a word. A tall, stout priest clenched his fist and blue fire rushed at Blays. He yelped and threw himself into the snow. Dante flicked his wrist and sent all the snow between he and Blays to bury the boy in cold white and smother the remaining flames. He whipped out his sword and met the tall priest’s next assault with a wave of pure energy. The man had been weakened in the hours he’d spent in the ritual and when Dante tapped into the primal river flowing around Barden’s roots it roared past him and charred the tall priest on the spot.
“Is it really you, Cally?” the balding priest called out as Blays dug himself out of the snow and hunted for a victim.
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