The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  "I see."

  "Maybe even an entire town."

  Dante let the taut branches relax. The shadows faded from his hands. "Then I'll put myself on the line, too. I'm from Narashtovik. I'm the agent of Callimandicus, highest priest of Arawn. I'm here to help."

  "Narashtovik is a part of Gask like anywhere else."

  "And if the capital finds out we're here, we'll be invaded the minute they're finished with you."

  Banning slung the wrapped painting onto the forest floor. "Tell them anything you like. I don't give a damn about my reputation. And I don't know who took your people or who they sold them to." He stepped on the package. The wooden frame cracked beneath his weight. "But I do know who took them downriver."

  "Who?"

  "You give me your word."

  Dante nodded. "No one will know who told me."

  The old man grinned, a savage thing that bristled his beard like a wall of thorns. "Oh, I want the ones who did it to know. What I want you to promise is you'll scream my name before you kill every last one of them."

  3

  Haggling for the barge strained Dante's patience as hard as the days-long process of watching Banning's meetings. Before he could even begin to bargain with the captain, Dante first had to convince Orlen and Vee that hiring a boat was necessary to begin with, a requirement that seemed self-evident to him—when your quarry is river pirates, you won't have much luck hunting them down on foot—but which took the better part of the night to hash out. By the next morning's walk to the docks, he was ready to give up on talking and try hitting instead.

  River pirates. It was simple enough that Dante considered it a major blow to Josun Joh's credibility that the mercurial god hadn't passed that info along directly rather than shooing them in the vague direction of a recalcitrant old man. But once Banning had been ready to speak, he'd spoken like he might never have the chance to speak again.

  The slaveship had docked in Cling just over a month ago. The dockhands had seen the eyes glittering from the darkness belowdecks. There had been talk in town, when the pirates debarked, of slaughtering them then and there, but none of the captives were known to be family of anyone in Cling, and it had been pointed out that these weren't just a slapdash rowboat of common pirates, but the Bloody Knuckles, a multi-vessel armada headed by the three-decked galley the Ransom. The last village to threaten the Bloody Knuckles had been so thoroughly robbed, raped, murdered, and torched that six years later the only remnant of the settlement were the cinders of its dead and the nightmares of their relatives.

  And so a conspiracy of silence had been enacted by the town of Cling—or those few who knew about the slaves, anyway, a shortlist including the dockside witnesses, Banning, and a handful of the port's elders and most highly-feared warriors—which Banning didn't break until witnessing Dante summon the nether from the forest floor. In that moment, he decided the Clan of the Nine Pines and its two human allies had a real chance to wipe out the Bloody Knuckles in a single blow.

  If only Dante could afford a boat.

  In theory, he had access to the full treasury of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik. The city had grown substantially in the last few years, propelled by Cally's new policies and the refugees from the war with Mallon, who, finding abandoned homes available for the taking in the city's outer rings, had flocked by the thousands to the foreign city, bringing new businesses, trade routes, and labor in equal measure. Despite Cally's covert funding of the operations in the Norren Territories, the city was rich by any objective measure.

  In practice, Dante couldn't just sign his name to a receipt of credit for the same reason a traitor can't stroll into the palace with a smile and a wave. Strictly speaking, he was a traitor. To Gask, anyway. He had plenty of silver cached in their base of norren operations in Dunran, but that was 150 miles overland in the wrong direction, and even on the horses he couldn't afford, making that trip would set them back at least a week on a venture that was already weeks behind. He and Blays had enough on their person to buy decent lodging and board for a couple weeks apiece, but that was hardly enough to rent a boat and its crew for a journey of 200 miles or more with a passenger manifesto of some thirty armed warriors. The clan, meanwhile, had essentially nothing (with the exception of an armory of immaculately forged swords, which were priceless in the very real sense they refused to sell them). In the end, Dante had to resort to requesting credit from Banning, who agreed readily, going so far as to refuse all offers of repayment, be they sooner (wealth recouped from the pirates) or later (the weeks it would require to get word to Cally and hard funds).

  By the time all this was arranged, the crew of the Boomer was already drunk, and Captain Varlen, a stout man whose barrel-shaped body looked like it could serve as a ship of its own if properly hollowed, showed unusual concern in insisting they not shove off until the crew slept off their rum, wine, and beer. Dante boiled with the specific annoyance of a delayed journey. To occupy his mind, he practiced with the nether inside the yurt, forming images of Blays falling off a variety of cliffs, treetops, and towers.

  Mourn woke him shortly after dawn and they tramped down the pier to the Boomer, a nondescript grain barge with a flat bottom and a single deck, below which spilled wheat was lodged into every corner and cranny. The clan, evidently confused by the concept of boats, set about erecting their tents belowdecks while Captain Varlen shouted the vessel into open water. A solid sheet of gray clouds tarped the sky. A low wind rippled the sails, chilling Dante at the side railing where he watched them depart from Cling. On the receding docks, men lugged bales and barrels from and into waiting ships. The steep hill rose behind town, pocked with doors, slashed from top to bottom with the zigs and zags of its seamless, perfect road. Varlen nudged the barge to the middle of the river, clearing them from the port town's miasma of river muck and feces. Cling disappeared behind a bend.

  Dante had always wanted to take an extended trip via water, but he was soon glad he hadn't. In a word, it was boring. In another word, it was repetitive, a slow-scrolling vista of shoreline trees, short hills, and sudden cliffs with rocky piles collected at their bottom. Shacks dotted the banks every mile or three. Every few hours, the current pushed the Boomer past a norren village. Their high, conical roofs, designed to keep the snow off, jabbed from the shores like pins in a knitter's cushion. For two days, this was all Dante saw, and though he wasn't one to bore easily, the trip was doing its best.

  His condition wasn't helped in the slightest by the clan warriors, who continued to treat him and Blays like off-duty farm dogs—fed occasionally, otherwise ignored—despite the fact that if not for them, the clan would still be sitting on a muddy bank waiting for their one-eyed god to stop chasing female mortals long enough to clue them in about where to go next. (When he'd brought that very point up, Orlen had brushed it off; Josun Joh had sent them to the right place, he said, but left it up to them to find what they'd come for.) The exception was Mourn, who now spoke to them regularly, readily answered questions, and generally showed all signs of having abandoned his task of minding the two humans. Possibly because they were trapped on a boat, where the only opportunities to sneak off into trouble involved getting very wet. Still, Dante thought Mourn's shift in priorities was genuine.

  "Somebody do something already," Blays said from his seat on an out of the way portion of the deck. "I'm so bored I'm about to start counting my own fingers."

  "You have ten," Mourn said.

  "Don't be so sure. I've been drumming this deck so hard I might have worn some of them down to the nub."

  "You could try watching for pirates," Dante said.

  "Oh, look, there aren't any."

  "Try napping. You're cranky enough."

  Blays pounded his fists on the deck. "But I don't wanna nap!"

  Dante laughed. "We could...tell stories."

  "That actually doesn't sound horrible." He glanced up at the overcast sky, whose threats of rain had gotten as tedious as the scenery. "What about this Qua
king Bow? It would be nice to have some idea exactly why we're sailing after a band of professional murderers on this terribly fearsome wheat-bucket."

  "The Quivering Bow."

  "I don't care what it's called. I care about a graphic recounting of all the things it's destroyed."

  Dante gazed at a gray granite cliff, its face striated with white. "I'm not sure I know any true stories. Some legends, perhaps."

  "I don't care if it's true or false. All I want to hear is how a bow convinces a castle to blow up."

  Mourn lowered himself from the barge railing to sit on his heels. "Tell him about how the Quivering Bow got made."

  Dante shrugged. "I don't know how the Quivering Bow was made."

  "Everyone knows how the Quivering Bow got made."

  "I didn't grow up in Gask, Mourn. I hadn't even heard about the Quivering Bow until a year ago."

  "Then I'll tell him how it was made. And you. Wouldn't do at all for you to have the thing and not have any idea what went into making it. Is that a human thing, rushing off to use things up without caring where they came from?"

  "I think it's a Blays thing," Dante said.

  Blays pressed his palm against his forehead. "Right now, the Blays thing is praying you both die if you don't get on with it."

  "You should pray for yourself to die," Mourn said. "Then you'd get to do something really interesting." He cleared his throat and frowned down at his hands, which he'd placed palms-down on the hard wood deck. "I'll take a wild guess that you haven't heard of Corwell, either. Thought not. He's only the half-mortal son of Margon, brother of Josun Joh himself. The first thing I would ask is why Corwell is half mortal, but then again I wouldn't need to ask, because I actually have an education."

  Blays rolled his hand through the air. "Get on with it before your education and the body that holds it find themselves at the bottom of a river."

  "Margon had a thing for norren women. The bigger the better. I think this is because he was a small god. Small like you, I mean. This meant he had nimble fingers and was very good at making clocks and flutes. And in picking the locks of sleeping norren women. Which he did. A year later, Corwell was born.

  "Corwell, being half-mortal, wasn't allowed in the heavens. Kind of for the same reasons you're not allowed to speak to Orlen, really. Instead he grew up among norren, where he used his norren strength and divine quickness to become an archer so fine he could shoot out a hawk's eye from so far away the hawk couldn't see him. This won the heart of Velia, a woman everyone agreed was the most beautiful norren born in seven generations.

  "They married. They were happy. But Margon wasn't, because Corwell had gotten to Velia before he could. So he crept into their house one night and stole her. Which, can I pause for a moment? That's not really acceptable in any form. A dad's supposed to be an example for his sons. I don't think anyone wants their sons to grow up to be a kidnapping rapist."

  "Maybe he just wanted to keep the family business alive," Dante said.

  "I would guess he was just selfish, but to each his own. Naturally, Corwell found it as despicable as I do, but couldn't do anything about it, because Margon lived in a tower of solid iron with a top so high it was lost in the clouds, and the tower itself stood on a mountain so high it makes you too dizzy to stand. Corwell only made it up because he was half-god, but as much as he pounded on the tower's walls, he couldn't leave a scratch. It just gonged like a giant bell, resounding through the clouds, which was probably a good thing, because when Corwell, in his completely relatable despair, flung himself from the mountain, his uncle Josun Joh had already been drawn there by the bell, and was able to catch him.

  "Josun Joh offered to help, because unlike Corwell's own father, he is a man of principles and upright character. Plucking a seedling from the base of the White Tree, he bent it into a bow, stripping its leaves—this was a fairly normal tree, unlike its hideous progenitor—to be tied into a fan. He gave these to his nephew and told him the tower's outer wall was invincible, but that it was just a shell around a very normal stone structure. If Corwell could fire an arrow through the single window just below the tower's peak, he could strike the inner stone, sending the whole thing crumbling down.

  "So Corwell went back to the iron tower and called to his father Margon, who didn't even bother to come out and explain himself, which again shows you what kind of man he was. Corwell waved the fan, blowing away the clouds. He drew back his mighty bow and sighted in on the window, which was just a black speck so tiny you couldn't even see it, let alone shoot an arrow through it. In fact, it was so far away it took a full minute after he released his arrow for it to fly right through the distant window.

  "Once more, the tower rung like a bell. Its note was so strong it knocked the birds from the sky. Half the mountain slid into the sea, which probably killed a lot of people if anyone lived on the nearby islands. And the tower itself crumbled, dashing down in a hellstorm of thudding stone and screaming iron. Horrified that everyone in it was dead, Corwell waved his fan, flushing the dust out to sea, and found Velia alive under the broken body of his father."

  Mourn frowned again at the backs of his hands. "Which sounds like a happy ending, except when you think about it Corwell killed his own dad and Velia was abducted and ravished by her husband's father, which she couldn't have been too happy about either. But that's how Corwell got the Quivering Bow, and at least nobody ever bothered him or his family again."

  "Neat," Blays said. "No one will want to mess with us then, either."

  "Now do you see why we're after it?" Dante said.

  "Sure. Sounds like we'd be invincible. So why not go after the Hammer of Taim while we're at it? Or find a way to catapult the sun straight into Setteven?"

  "Origin stories are always exaggerated. If you don't buy Mourn's, I know one I think actually happened."

  "I wasn't just making that up," Mourn said.

  "All I'm saying is—"

  "These are things we believe, you know. I don't know where you're from that you don't even pretend to take them seriously, but it must be a rude place. Many shoving-related deaths."

  Dante glared off at the cliffs drifting by at the speed of the current. "I don't know what's true and what isn't. If the bow's real, then maybe Corwell's story is, too, along with the one I've heard. It's about a norren named Wenworth, who only died about fifty years ago, so—"

  "Wenworth the Mole died 56 years ago."

  "—it's at least reasonably trustworthy. In short, Wenworth was a norren warrior exiled from his clan after his younger brother convinced them he'd burned down their ancestral shrine—but his brother stole some of the relics from the shrine, and sealed them up in a stone tomb. A tomb in which his treachery would soon cause him to be interred.

  "It began from jealousy. Wenworth and his brother Bode were sons of the chieftain, and Wenworth, as the elder, was naturally in place to—"

  "All hands!" Captain Varlen bellowed from the barge's aftercastle. "All hands take arms!"

  A sailor leapt on the mainmast, climbing hand over hand up the rigging. Others rushed for the ship's bow or passed around spears stored in a closet on the face of the stern's castle. Dante rose and peered across the gray waters. Small waves smacked the hull. The men called back and forth, adjusting sails, swinging the Boomer starboard and angling it at the eastern shore. Norren warriors swarmed up the ladder from belowdecks. Dante and Blays exchanged a look, then jogged to the bow and up the steps of the aftercastle, where Varlen relayed orders to a bald, gnomish old man who in turn barked them to the crew in a voice far larger than his wiry body would seem to allow.

  "What's happening?" Dante said to the barrel-chested captain.

  "Someone's distracting me from my duties," the captain said.

  "If you think you see pirates, we need to know."

  "No pirates."

  "That's good," Blays said.

  "Just the bodies they left behind."

  Varlen nodded across the river and resumed jabbering a
t the gnomish man. Upriver near the far bank, something flat yet jagged floated a short distance from shore, a plane interrupted by sudden snagging upthrusts of snapped wood.

  "Is that a shipwreck?" Blays said. The captain nodded. "Then what are we doing sailing away from it?"

  "Avoiding a trap." The burly man pointed to a steep rise, its top lightly wooded, where the river curved downstream. "Such as a man left ashore on yonder hill, with a signal-mirror ready to flash the vessel hidden around the bend."

  "So what? We've got to check it out."

  "Anything worth taking's already been took by the ones that burnt their ship."

  Blays rolled his eyes. "To help the survivors."

  "That isn't a part of our mission," Dante said.

  "Our mission is to help the people of these lands. When you're brought to Arawn's hill in the sky, don't you want to be able to point to a few good deeds to balance out all the killings?"

  "Arawn doesn't judge."

  "Well, he should. And we should, too." Blays turned to Varlen. "Take us to the wrack."

  "That thing looks days old. The only comfort they'll need is a burial." The blocky man rubbed his stubble. "Well, you're paying for this trip. But one whiff of anything fishy and we're shoving off."

  "Cowardice isn't a free meal," Blays said. "It isn't something we should be lining up for."

  He turned on his heel, brushing shoulders with Orlen, who'd joined them on the aftercastle. Dante followed Blays down the steps. The gnomish sailor roared out new orders. Men clambered the rigging, tacking the sails to swing the barge larboard. Blays set up position on the bow, swords sheathed. Mourn procured a bow and hastily strung it. As they neared the wreckage, Dante kept one eye downstream for enemy boats, but the waters were empty, gray as the clouds.

  The wreck, it turned out, wasn't drifting so much as lodged in the rocks and mud ten yards from shore. Its hull stopped a few feet above the water, charred and broken. Submerged white sails flapped in the current like bleached seaweed. Wood creaked on rocks. Soot and rot rolled over the clammy, muddy smell of the river. Varlen anchored and set his crew to preparing the Boomer's single life raft, which had just enough room for Dante, Blays, and two sailors manning the oars. Though the wreck was as silent as the clouds, Mourn crouched over the Boomer's rails, bow at the ready, joined by a dozen other warriors of the clan. Two crewmen dipped their paddles into the cold water and pushed the rowboat forward. The tiny vessel rolled on the waves, swells thudding hollowly against its wooden sides.