The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  The pace was steady and perhaps comfortable by norren standards, but to Dante, whose legs were several inches shorter, it was just this side of grueling, worsened by toe-grabbing roots and heel-sliding slicks of rain-rotted leaves. He had to soothe his physical exhaustion with draughts of nether every couple hours, a tradeoff that left his muscles relaxed and unsore but which left something at his core lacking and ground-down—not his spirit, but something with more physical weight. Something more like his wind. He could see the strain in Blays' face, too, the limp he tried to conceal as the sun shrank and his blisters swelled. Blays would never complain about anything real, of course. Not in earshot of Dante, the norren, or any other being with a set of ears and the capacity for speech. When he slept, Dante swept the swelling from Blays' feet, then collapsed into unconsciousness himself.

  By the second day, they were some forty miles from the camp by the lake and sixty miles or more from the village where, until rumors of the bow ripped them away, they'd been drilling norren militia to stand against cavalry. Too heavy to ride anything but the biggest workhorses, norren had as little experience defending themselves from mounted riders as Dante had defending himself from rainbows.

  "Quite the walk," Blays said once they'd pitched their yurt and sat down to rest in the twilight. "It's enough to make a man question where he's going."

  "After the one thing that can make a difference."

  "Wild geese?"

  "A stick. Specifically, a curved one that can destroy a fortress in a single shot."

  It was a concept, however simple, he hadn't been able to completely convey to Blays, at least not in terms the blond man found convincing. Cally had first laid it out to Dante a year and a half ago on a brief return to the Sealed Citadel in Narashtovik, a summer visit where the bayside humidity was nearly intolerable even at the top of the high, breezy tower where Cally liked to literally look down on the citizens shouldering each other aside in the narrow streets beyond the Citadel walls. The sapling-thin old man hadn't spoken for some time after Dante joined him on the stone balcony, which was fine with Dante; so long as he was standing still, he could almost stop sweating.

  "How do you fight a war that isn't a war?" Cally said at last. "More properly, how do you avert the war in the first place?" He ran knob-knuckled fingers through a beard he refused to comb despite years of protests from the servants tasked with making the Council look properly holy. "Think of it this way: a man with a club only has to shake it around and scream a little to convince the man without a club to back down. We're the man with the club, but we don't actually want to strike Setteven, the unarmed man. Just to menace them into doing what we want, i.e. letting the norren do whatever they want."

  Dante frowned. "But in this case, the other man is actually many thousand men, and instead of being unarmed, they're actually carrying an army's worth of swords, spears, bows, axes—"

  "Yes, well, no need to get literal. It's about the idea. It's about convincing them they feel like a helpless man while believing we're waving about a frightening and lethal club."

  "Have you ever considered writing a book? It would be a shame for this wisdom to be lost to the ages."

  Cally's brows arched into a scowl, a movement which, given their shrubby mass, might have forced a lesser man to sit down. "I am trying to impart to you a philosophy of preparation that could save the lives of thousands. You could at least pretend to take it to heart."

  "I'll take it to spleen."

  "As there's no chance you'll take it to brain, I will consider that good enough. The point is we couldn't possibly win a conventional war of army versus army. The alternative, then, is to explore all the ways to fight that aren't conventional—to find new clubs, and to steal them from the enemy."

  Despite his efforts to wind the old man up, Dante had taken the idea to at least one and possibly several of his organs, and felt confident Cally would approve of his current detour. It was, after all, the pursuit of a very large and nasty bludgeon. If Dante had passed the opportunity by, Cally would no doubt have spent more time yelling at him than he would have spent chasing down the bow.

  "You champion ideas like this all the time," he told Blays. "I think the only reason you're against it is because you didn't come up with it yourself."

  "I'm just tired of being in the dark here." Blays elbowed Mourn, who gave him a glare that could strike fire in a downpour. "Josun Joh told you anything about when we might stop walking and start arriving?"

  "Don't mock him."

  "Well?"

  "Any day now. The next one, I'd think."

  Dante didn't allow his hopes up, but the next morning they intercepted the river where it weaved between modest hills and short cliffs, a quarter mile wide and as gray as the clouds overhead. A dirt path followed the shoreline. Within miles, the clan stopped. Vee and a pair of warriors continued on to a cluster of dark holes speckling a rocky cliff above the stretches of flat green land bracketing the shores.

  "Cling," Mourn explained. "Home of the man who can point us toward our cousins."

  Blays nodded. "Who aren't here themselves."

  "Oh no. Do you expect everything in your life to be that simple?"

  "No, but it's easier to complain as if I do."

  Vee and the others returned a half hour later; though they made no specific announcements about it, Dante gathered that the coast had been cleared. The Clan of the Nine Pines moved on as a whole, slipping double-file down the hard-beaten path to Cling. From a distance, Dante hadn't seen anything but the caves, and had marked the place as a literal backwoods—just one step up, civilization-wise, from the nomad-warriors he traveled with. Closer, though, he could see docks and barges past the trees at river's edge, and smelled that particularly potent brew of hog shit that only arises from organized farming. On the other side of the path, the fields were empty, brown, and tilled. The path switched from dirt into a bizarre foreign material. Dante could see no seams in it, suggesting a single sheet of hard-fired clay or the like, yet the path's solid mass couldn't be anything but stone. He said as much to Mourn.

  "Best roadmaster in the territories, Codd," the norren said. "It's a wonder the humans haven't kidnapped him."

  Despite stooping for a closer look, Dante could only make out a handful of seams separating the stones that formed the road; most were artfully concealed as part of the sandstone's grain, with others too fine to see even when he knew they must be there. Nor did it try to imitate the straight lines of many well-paved roads. Instead, it followed the subtle contours of the landscape with the same integrity that the river followed the low places through the hills. Indeed, given its appearance as a single flow of stone, it was possible, if you looked at it in the right way, to see the road as another river, a heavy creek from a realm where frozen water didn't form ice, but stone.

  He grew dizzy and straightened up. "This must have taken an eternity to build."

  "Codd doesn't build. He sculpts."

  "Sorry," Dante said. He should have known better. When it came to tangible objects like the road, norren approached their craft with the same dedication and piety as a prophet approached his lord. He had once seen an old woman go on carving a soapstone owl while her house literally burned down around her. Only when she passed out from the smoke had her son been able to drag her from the flames. "I've never seen anything like it."

  "Of course you haven't."

  Ahead, Orlen came to a stop. The clan stood in a square as finely cobbled as the road, a shallow bowl of seamless stone, the natural colors of which painted a vast mosaic of a salmon, its upper jaw as wickedly curved as a hawk's. At one end of the plaza, a single boulder, smooth and rounded as a river pebble, served as a podium or dais. Wooden shops ringed the plaza, some utilitarian, some elegantly simple, but beside the mastery of the plaza and the roads feeding into it, all equally forgettable.

  The land between plaza and river was grassy and empty. Probably a field for festivals, prayer, and whatever else drew the crowds. Th
e clan set camp in a field between the docks and warehouses. Flat-bottomed boats drifted downriver, bulging with barrels and tarps. Uphill, the black eyes of caves gazed down on the mild bustle of the port town. While the rank and file warriors spread blankets and rolled out the yurts, Orlen and Vee started up the road switchbacking Cling's highest hill.

  Blays visored his hand against the afternoon sun. "Where are they off to?"

  "To see the mayor about the kidnappings," Mourn said.

  Dante gestured uphill. "Then let's go."

  "Oh, that's not allowed."

  "How are we supposed to help track down your cousins when we can't question the only people who know where they went?"

  "By letting Vee and Orlen ask the questions themselves. And then by following them."

  "To hell with that." Blays took off jogging. "And not the hell for fun people, either."

  Mourn dogged their heels, running close enough to trip them. "You can't go up there!"

  Dante didn't look back. "Our upward progress suggests otherwise."

  "Pedantically speaking, you can move up this hill. But don't say I didn't warn you when they throw you back down it. Because that is what I am doing right now."

  They caught the two clan chieftains before they were halfway up the switchback. Vee gazed at Mourn with distilled reproach, her orange eyes withering him. Orlen coughed into his hand and then considered the contents of his palm as if they contained a half-ruined map.

  "No," he said.

  "No what?" Dante said.

  "Further."

  "Why on earth not?"

  "Because you are a human, and this is norren business for norren ears."

  At first he thought this was a strange joke—in contrast to every other part of them, the ears of norren were bewilderingly small, coin-shaped and often lost beneath their tangled hair—but Orlen and Vee were staring at him with the gravity of a prince's funeral.

  "I'm aware of your tradition," he tried, "but given how many lives may be at stake, I think an exception—"

  Vee shifted forward. "The next step you take up this hill will be your last with the clan." She drew her brows together. "That sounded more ominous than I meant. I didn't mean we'd throw you down the hill. Just that you'd no longer be permitted to travel with us."

  "This is stupid," Blays said, but apparently had nothing more convincing than that. Considering the affair settled, the two norren chieftains turned and continued uphill.

  Mourn folded his arms. "See how futile that was?"

  "So what now? Sit around and wait to be told what's next?"

  "No," Mourn said. "You don't have to sit."

  But Dante was tired from yet another day of relentless walking, so sitting beside his tent in the field was exactly what he did, at least until he nodded off, at which point he slumped around waiting for word from above. News arrived after nightfall when Blays shoved him all the way over, jarring him awake. Orlen and Vee had returned from the hill.

  He rousted himself, knees popping, and headed to the shoreline. Boar roasted over a firepit, smogging the air with rich, crackling meat. At the water, bulky silhouettes cast nets fringed with small rock weights. The two chieftains sat on their heels by the fire, gnawing pork, wiping their greasy faces with their sleeves. Dante sat across from them.

  "Did you find anything out?"

  "Yes." Orlen thought for a moment. "That the mayor had nothing to say on the matter."

  "But I thought he'd seen them."

  Vee wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. "He said the slavers didn't pass through here after all. Which doesn't tell us nothing. It tells us the slavers didn't pass through here."

  Frustration welled in Dante's throat. "I thought Josun Joh told you to come here for answers."

  "He did."

  "And here we are," Orlen said. "Which is closer than we were before."

  Vee raised her right fist and held it to her coin-sized ear. "Where we'll wait to hear from Josun Joh again."

  Dante nodded, too wound up to speak. Blays gestured downriver. Dante followed him along the pebbly shore, where the smell of wet moss and faint fish carried on the river's gentle waves. Mourn walked some ways behind them. When they paused, the norren did too, crouching beside the water and pretending to investigate the rocks. He pursued Dante and Blays all the way to the other side of the piers where the town ceased and the waterfront woods resumed.

  Dante stopped there, gazing out across the wide black river. "I'm beginning to think they should be enslaved."

  "Is this because they live longer?" Blays stooped. He picked up a pebble and slung it over the flat waters. It sunk without a single skip. "They think they can just wait around for a god to billow orders from the clouds?"

  Dante stared at the steep hill beyond the plaza. Skeins of smoke curled from its crown, venting the hearths of the homes in its side. "Does encamping their warrior-band in the middle of town strike you as unusually aggressive?"

  "The kind of thing you'd do when you wanted to provoke answers from someone who doesn't want to give them?"

  "Exactly."

  "Maybe." Blays skipped another stone. "Can you really see them turning on each other?"

  "I don't know. The norren aren't exactly a unified people."

  "But they've hardly been clawing at each other's throats the last few years."

  Dante glanced upstream, where Mourn was kneeling, butt on his heels, and staring out over the water. "Still, if waiting around is their only goal, there is plenty of non-town space for them to occupy instead."

  "So let's go feel the mayor out for ourselves."

  "What about our shadow?"

  Blays knew better than to glance at Mourn. "Point your finger at him and make him fall down."

  "That isn't how it works."

  "Yes it is."

  "All right, that's basically how it works." It was, in the scheme of things, a simple task, with no need for theatrics or even any blood to feed the nether. Dante squinted at the mossy rocks, the waves slurping through them. The nether pooled in his hand like the shadow of quicksilver. For Blays' benefit, he pointed at Mourn as one would point out a thief. The kneeling norren leaned forward like a toppling tree, spilling facefirst into the grass. "Wait. Do you even know where the mayor's house is?"

  "Of course. When somebody tells me I can't come with them, the first thing I do is watch where they go."

  They headed back for the plaza. Light and laughter poured from the windows of the public houses; a longboat had pulled in during their walk along the shore, its crew beelining for the likeliest sources of liquor. It provided more than enough cover for any noise Dante made skirting the square. Was he being paranoid? Orlen and Vee wouldn't let them up to see the mayor themselves. They'd assigned Mourn to follow Dante and Blays wherever they went, presumably as much to keep tabs on them as to ensure their own safety, but why let the pair of humans come along at all if the norren chiefs didn't consider their presence useful? As usual when dealing with the norren approach to outsiders, Dante felt like he'd nodded off in the middle of a carriage ride and been dropped off in strange streets with no idea which way was north.

  He started up the switchback at a swift but unremarkable pace. Cave-houses sat in the rocky face of the hill, doors cut to fit the irregular contours of the caves' natural mouths. Torch sconces projected from each side of the doors, some lit, illuminating the path ahead and the family names painted in gorgeous runes above the entries. They climbed until Dante was panting and Cling lay below them in the haze of the river-mist. Torches flickered around the salmon-mosaic in the central plaza.

  "Just ahead." Blays nodded to a cave-door little different from the dozens below it or the handful above. It wasn't that late, perhaps an hour past supper-time, but Dante was suddenly aware of the questionable etiquette of barging in on a city official under dark of night. Blays promptly resolved this dilemma by planting himself in front of the cherrywood door and knocking like the hand of Death himself.

  Faced
with the sudden prospect of confronting the mayor, Dante wished he could run right back down the hill instead. Positions of leadership in the norren territories were filled through a process that baffled human commoners and horrified the nobles. In contrast to the process of power-accumulation typical to human government—birthright, nepotism, wealth, and well-paid armed killers—norren men and women were promoted to chieftancies, mayordoms, and regional stewardships based solely on the public perception of and appreciation for their opinions. Not their political opinions, either. Nobody cared what a man had to say about taxes or trade or the distribution of the commons. Or anyway, if they did care, it wasn't over the political positions themselves, but rather for the theophilosophical reasoning that had led the leader in question to take those positions in the first place.

  Most of the time, it was even more abstract than that. Say a young woman appeared to live a noble, upright life among her clan. She also had bright, wise things to say about the holy scrolls and the right way to lead a well-lived life—and her deeds matched her words. These things would be noticed by her clansmen. Tucked away. And if a crisis struck—if the current chief died, or went mad, or had a philosophical revelation indistinguishable from madness—that bright, noble young woman might find herself elevated to the chieftancy in the blink of an eye.

  How the public reached these decisions as to whose integrity was greatest and whose position was most convincing was as nebulous as it was sudden. Sometimes there was no open discussion at all, yet with less warning than a flash flood, a formerly beloved clan-chief wound up replaced. Most perplexing of all, most leaders welcomed being replaced. To the norren, leadership was a burden, a leaden net of unwanted responsibilities, judgments, arbitrations, and bureaucratic wheel-spinning that left them precious little time to pursue the highest virtues: arts, craftsmanship, and tribal warfare.