Rettinger’s expression flickered as he gazed on the wreckage of the woman and men he’d so recently followed. He shook his head. But he was a born lieutenant, Dante knew, had seen it in the course of the battle with the rebels.
“That’s the only smart course,” Rettinger said. “I won’t risk adding to this tragedy, no matter how hard I might wish to.” He turned around to face his men. “Gather up the bodies. It’s time to go home.”
Dante let the nether bleed away from his grasp. Blays bent over Larrimore’s body and plucked at his cloak. Dante dropped his jaw to see his friend looting the body of the only other man he trusted in the entire kingdom, but before he could upbraid Blays or punch him in the face the boy stood and held out Larrimore’s badge. It was nearly the same as Dante’s own, the outline of the tree surrounded by a silver ring, but at the center of the tree two blue sapphires glittered in the overcast light.
“I think he’d want you to have it,” Blays said.
Dante nodded, unable to speak. The twin sapphires winked up at him from his palm. He turned away and wiped his eyes and shuffled around the snow until he found the Cycle of Arawn, the book that had been used to cause so much hurt. He brushed away the snow, held it to his chest. The soldiers piled the bodies on the wagon, wrapping loose limbs in the cloth of the slain. Hundreds had died on the journey to Barden and all that had changed was the position of power from an old woman to an older man. A hundred miles lay between them and the dead city. Dante closed his eyes and took the first step.
18
Cally led the soldiers through the empty miles of the road, encountering no one till they reached the fringes of the dead city. He took them over the river and through the outer sprawl, past the silent guards atop the Pridegate and Ingate and finally to the gates of the Citadel itself. Without attacks, with significantly fewer men to slow them down, it took them under four full days. The guards of the Citadel saw the colors of the order and the faces of their fellow armsmen and swung open the doors to let them through.
“What are you going to tell them?” Dante said to Cally as they approached the keep. The remaining members of the council stood on the keep’s front steps, awaiting them in the dull afternoon sunlight. Over the last few days, Dante’s anger toward Cally had sunk from the base of his skull to the pit of his stomach, leaving his mood sour but his mind clear. He’d resolved to use the old bastard. The council would never allow Dante as its leader, but with Cally seated at its head, he’d have a straight line to its decisions—perhaps a seat for himself. Whichever, he’d no longer be a pawn to any other man.
“I’ll tell them the truth,” Cally said. He scowled at Dante. “It’s not funny.”
Cally had sent no riders ahead of their march and they’d made no stops once they’d hit the city. The members of the council spilled down the keep stairs and as they saw how few had come back from Barden their faces switched from anxious expectation to wavering shock.
“Callimandicus?” Tarkon said as they drew up. The priest’s face wrinkled double as he squinted through the gleaming snow in the yard to look on Cally’s face. Cally waved at him.
“Where’s Samarand?” Olivander demanded.
“Dead,” Cally said.
“Dead?”
Cally nodded. “Very unfortunate.”
“And the others?”
“Check that corpse wagon back there,” Blays said, jerking his thumb behind him.
Olivander struggled for control of his face. “What about Arawn? Did they release him?”
The four other priests drew themselves as straight as their old backs would allow. Cally combed his beard with his hand.
“That,” he said, doling out the words syllable by syllable, “is the reason she’s dead.”
Olivander gaped. “Arawn slew her?”
“No, you halfwit, Arawn didn’t slay Samarand,” Cally said, giving Dante a look that suggested how little he’d missed some parts of this place. “She failed. She failed and she decided to lie to you and the people of Gask and say she’d brought him forth. We disagreed on the wisdom of such a plan.”
“How were you there to disagree with her in the first place, Callimandicus?” Hart said, looking down on Cally with all the height of the keep’s front stairs and his own seven-foot frame. “We thought you’ve been dead for fifteen years.”
“A very good question,” Cally said, tapping his chin. He thought for a moment, then laughed and gave them a bony-shouldered shrug. “No more lies. We’ve had too many already. Why don’t we try the truth for once?”
“Which is?” Olivander said.
“I killed Jackson when he was down in Mallon. Couple months ago now. Isn’t hard to duplicate a man’s appearance if you know what you’re doing. You probably won’t believe this, but I meant no more harm than to be a voice of moderation on the council. I was of the mind Samarand’s warmongering would set us back another hundred years.” He glanced between the remaining members of the council. “I know I’m not the only one.”
“That’s a convenient enough story, considering you ended up killing her,” Hart said.
Cally shrugged. “Well, it happens to be true. Things disintegrated at a regrettable pace when I revealed myself and questioned her intent to deceive you.”
Olivander stared hard at the old man. “So you say.”
“It’s true,” Dante said to bolster Cally’s lie. “Blays and I were there at the foot of the White Tree. Some of the council agreed with Cally, others with Samarand. When they attacked him, everyone else was killed.”
“Larrimore’s boy,” Olivander said, cocking his head at Dante. “So why didn’t you kill the old man when it started? Surely Larrimore went to her aid.”
“He also once told me this man had led the council. I hesitated. It all happened so fast. Most of them were dead before I knew what was going on.”
“Say I take this at face value,” Olivander said, shifting his gaze to Cally. “It sounds enough like her. You’ve had a few days to think about what the rest of us should do.”
“That is a delicate subject,” Cally said.
“I was next in line.”
Cally’s face grew guarded. “It was never Samarand’s to take.”
“I thought you weren’t here to take back your old chair,” Olivander said. His hands drifted toward his belt.
“You were here when she stole it from me, weren’t you? Botching your lessons in that little chapel while she and the others conspired?”
“I’ve been defending this city for thirty years,” Olivander said, dropping down a step. “I’ve been on this council for fourteen. Where have you been all that time? Hiding in a cave a thousand miles away? It seems to me it was the will of the council that you should step down, not an act of treason.”
Cally thrust out his chin and paced forward and Dante felt the nether shrouding the old man’s form. He clamped his lips between his teeth, ready to bite until he bled. If there was to be one more battle, he’d hit as hard as he could. He’d leave it all in rubble.
“I was driven out by treachery,” Cally said in a voice that wasn’t yet a shout. “She turned them all against me, bent the laws to her advantage. The passage of time doesn’t make it any less a betrayal.”
“Things kept going while you were gone, old man. This isn’t the same order you left behind.”
“I’m here now.”
“So am I,” Olivander said. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt of his sword.
“Stop!” Tarkon said, putting himself between Cally and Olivander. “You weren’t yet in a position to see how it happened, Olivander. All you know about why Cally left is what Samarand told you. Well, now she’s dead. So are five of our brothers. You want to see the rest of us killed over a dispute that was never right in the first place? You want to take your vengeance till there’s none of us left at all? Then time can finish turning our city into ruin.”
“You’re on his side?” Olivander said, flinging a hand at Cally.
&
nbsp; “I’m on the side of our order,” Tarkon said. “All of us are. I won’t see any more of our blood spilled.”
Olivander glanced between Cally and Tarkon and the three other living priests. No one spoke.
“Perhaps,” Hart said, breaking the long silence, “the full council should be given a say in who’s to replace the fallen.”
Cally opened his mouth, then clicked his teeth together and nodded. Dante wished Larrimore were here. He could hardly grasp the layers of politics flying between these old men.
“I’d ask it anyway,” Cally said. “I have been away too long to know who’s worthy to appoint.”
Olivander met eyes with Hart. He dropped his hand from his sword. “It’s been a long time since the laws of the Citadel were amended. Perhaps we should learn from Samarand’s death. Perhaps it’s a dangerous thing to collect too much power in the hands of a single man.”
“I thought so even when I had it,” Cally said.
“We could shift more responsibilities to the council,” Tarkon said. He smiled wryly at the few who remained. “If it’s time to make changes, the time won’t get any righter than this.”
“We’ll have open discussions on the council’s new structure,” Olivander stated more than asked.
“It will all be open,” Cally said. Olivander looked for a moment like he were trying to swallow a stone the size of his fist. At last he nodded.
“Then let it be remembered I laid down my claim in the name of rebuilding.”
Relief washed the faces of the council. Again it had all gone too fast for Dante to fully follow. He felt the nether the priests had held ready soak back into the substance from where it had come. They turned to smaller details: the horses of the troop were led away to stables, the armsmen dispersed to meals and barracks. Rettinger made orders for the storage of the corpses until they could be properly buried. Cally and the boys followed the council priests out of the cold and into the keep.
“Well done out there,” Cally told Dante once they’d freed themselves from the others; Blays, sensing he wanted a moment alone with the old man, had run off in search of real food. Cally smoothed his long, stringy hair back from his brow. “That could have turned ugly.”
“Shut up,” Dante said. “You’re naming me to the council.”
Cally scratched one of his brambly eyebrows. “Why am I doing that?”
“Because I’ll kill you in your sleep if you don’t. Olivander will back me.”
“Not if I kill you in your sleep first,” Cally chuckled. His face froze when he met Dante’s eyes. “You’re not joking.”
“Not at all.”
“Then what if I do get to you first?”
“Old men take five naps a day,” Dante said. A tendril of nether curled around his finger.
“They’re not going to like it,” Cally muttered. He grinned, then, as if acknowledging the weakness of that argument. “But what would be the fun in ruling if you never make men do things they don’t want to.”
Dante tightened his jaw. “I’m glad you’re so reasonable.”
“Don’t take that tone. I don’t need to be threatened to do what’s right. I’m not a recalcitrant child.” Cally tugged on the end of his beard. “You’ve earned your seat. All you had to do was ask.”
Dante said nothing, just stared at the old man who’d once given him safety in the maelstrom of the world. At one time Cally had looked to him like a font of wisdom. Dante had thought the old man could teach him not just to wield the nether, but how to live easily, to use his knowledge to rise above the petty concerns and emotions that threatened to drive him mad. Cally taught him how to use his blood to fuel the shadows, but the only thing he’d taught Dante’s heart was a hopeless bitterness he feared he could never escape.
“Do better with your rule than you did with me,” Dante said. He turned and left the old man alone in his chambers, the room that had once been Samarand’s. Blays was waiting for him in the hall.
“All finished?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Let’s go get drunk,” Blays said. He clapped Dante on the shoulder and led the way down the stairs. At last Dante saw its appeal.
* * *
At first the council resisted, citing Dante’s youth and his newness to their order, but Cally held fast and in the end Dante was named to their ranks, by far the youngest to have ever held a seat. They promoted two monks of long standing and left the other three seats vacant for the time being, reasoning it was better to wait until they had worthy candidates than to fill them in haste and risk erring. After two days of discussion, the council agreed now was not the time for open war with Mallon, and Cally sent riders for points across the south. Their agents were to be recalled, asylum granted to any Mallish rebels who may have lost their homes and families in the struggle. The orders with the smiths were canceled. It was a time to rebuild, the council declared, to restore their strength and study what may have gone wrong with the rites to free the vaulted god. For the time being, the business of the southlands was beyond their scope.
The funerals were to be held the day after that decision. Dante ran down the keep’s stairs the minute the council concluded and galloped through town to the stoneworker they hired for their markers. He paid the craftsman three times the worth of the work and told him to put all his others on hold.
“But we don’t even have a queen right now,” the stoneworker said when Dante explained his order.
“That’s what makes it so impressive,” Dante said.
It was delivered to the Citadel the next morning in time to join the wains headed for the hill overlooking the bay. The stone was simple, but then so had been Larrimore’s looks. The procession of council and monks and an honor guard of soldiers walked quietly from the Citadel to the top of the hill where the order kept its vaults. The bodies were laid at rest in the walls of the current sepulcher. Those who still lived stood on the hill, gazing at the gray, white-capped waters of the bay to their north and west, the city spread out behind them, buried in white; the same snows covered the ruins of the outer housing, the age-spotted buildings past the first wall, the well-kept temples and manors and business-houses inside the second; the same white snows draped the black spires of the Cathedral of Ivars, lay on the gray stone walls of the Citadel, the roof of the keep. Now and then a single shout from down in the city caught a freak gust and reached their ears atop the hill, but mostly they stood in a soft breeze that blew unabated over the shin-deep snows.
“These bodies, they’re just things,” Cally said once he’d readied himself to address the few score men and women who gathered outside the simple columns and cuts of the vault. He had actually combed his beard for the occasion, had switched his torn clothes for the elegant wear of his station. He looked old but ageless, thin but potent, as if he weren’t a man but a marble statue of himself. He moved his blue eyes over the waiting crowd. “The people they were, the people we knew, they’re not what’s turning into dirt in that tomb behind his.” He narrowed his eyes until the folds of his skin threatened to squeeze out his sight entirely. “No,” he said. “We’re here for a while, in these fleshy shells, and all the while we ask Why? What’s this pain I feel? Why do I feel so cut off from the men around me, from the skies above? I don’t think any of us ever receives the answers to those questions. Have any of you?” He raised his eyebrows at the men. A few of them cleared their throats and murmured soft negatives that could be mistaken for coughs. “Neither have I. And I’ve lived a very long time!”
He looked out on all that snow, the silent violence of the cold-torn sea, the banks of clouds that hung over the land from one horizon to another. It was threatening to snow again.
“The people that wore those fading cases in there no longer have to face those questions. They’ve found their answers. Don’t let’s feel sorry for the dead! Perhaps they’ve moved on to paradise at the right arm of Arawn. Perhaps they howl into the oblivion of the starless void. Hard to say. Hard to know. One
thing of which we may be certain is they’re no longer alone. In some form, they’re reunited with Arawn and all those he’s culled from this earth through all the long ages. I imagine that’s an awful lot of people. As many as the flakes of snow that look like one big sheet from our position way up here. It stretches as far as we can see; who knows how much further it goes beyond our sight.”
He paused, frowned at himself. Wind blew strings of his gray hair into his eyes. He brushed them away, then rubbed his hands together against the cold. Someone coughed.
“We all want to be back there,” he said, nodding at the cloud-covered skies. “Well, now a few more of us are. The rest of us aren’t yet ready. We must still live this earth.”
“Live this earth,” the men sighed.
The priests spoke long, generous words about Samarand, about Baxter and Pioter and the other dead members of the council Dante couldn’t remember. He wondered if he should feel something for his part in putting them in their vault, for causing the grief that lined the faces of the men on the hill. Did it mean anything that every man who died had those who wept for his passing? How many had mourned for all the soldiers and trackers and hired blades he’d killed along the way? He found he didn’t care, and not just because they’d all been trying to kill him as well. The gods didn’t oversee justice in this lowly place, or if they did, it was a godly brand no human could understand. No one could be surprised when the living became the departed, no matter how young they may be, no matter how abruptly it had caught them.
He heard words about Samarand’s iron will but fair heart, about some old man’s thoughtful wisdom, about a less-older man’s noble spirit. They droned on for a long time. When the last man wrapped it up, they looked to Cally, who stepped forward and cleared his throat.
“Since no one else has,” Dante said before the old man could conclude things, “I’d like to speak a few words about Larrimore.” Cally quirked his brow, then gave him a nod. Dante wandered from the safety of the crowd to where those who’d spoken had faced the mourners alone. His heart railed against his ribs. How could he find any words that weren’t hollow? How did a eulogy become anything more than simple-minded words meant to comfort those who went on?
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