The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  "He's a second cousin or something. Are you telling me you didn't know that?" Blays turned to the waning sunset beyond the window. "Good work down there, by the way. You almost convinced me you can hold a normal conversation."

  "What? I can talk to people."

  "The same way a fish can wriggle out of a boat. Lots of flapping around, and someone's going to wind up all slimy."

  "If I had a club, it would be on its way to your skull right now." Dante glanced up at the plain ceiling. "Where do you suppose the Nine Pines' bow is?"

  "The armory?" Blays jerked his chin at the bare walls. "Judging from the other furnishings, it'll be the only thing there."

  "Josun Joh said it would be found in a high place. If the Green Lakes are at the bottom of a mine—the low place—where would that put the bow?"

  "At the top of a mine?"

  "That is definitely not the answer."

  "At the top of an anti-mine."

  "Of course!" Dante said. "By coincidence, it's rumored your brain is hidden there, too."

  "The attic, if this place has one. Or one of the towers. What do I look like, a Pennish bow-hound? We'll ask for a tour and see what there isn't to see."

  Which was actually a decent plan, given that it was low-risk, unsuspicious, and might even involve a helpful friend or servant stopping to specifically point out it out—with the implication that "Here is the Quivering Bow, a norren artifact of unsurpassed power, so what does it say that it's now in the hands of our esteemed lord?" Alternately, their tour leader might go the opposite route, conspicuously leaving a part of the manor unshown to avoid revealing their secret weapon to Mallish eyes. Either way, the search would be narrowed.

  Cassinder was gone again in the morning. Something about overseeing the latest extraction, said to be especially rich. Dante asked for and was reluctantly granted a tour of the household by its majordomo, a man near fifty with thinning gray hair and the tight, clipped gestures of a former soldier. He led Blays and Dante through the manor's numerous wings, floors, and cellars, pointing out ancestral heirlooms (an engraved chalice, a sapphire ring, a broken arrow, which excited Dante until the majordomo explained it had been retrieved from Cassinder's great-great grandfather after the battle of somewhere-or-other); the home's notable additions (along with which estate-owner commissioned them and which architect designed them); and an endless procession of guest rooms, which were of interest not for what was in them (nothing, for the most part, though a handful were appropriately if archaically furnished), but for who had once slept in them, a list of historical so-and-so's whose names Dante forgot as quickly as the balding man recited them.

  "Is there an armory?" Blays said as the majordomo returned them to the carpeted but otherwise blank hallway that opened to their rooms. "Any legendary weapons of yore? Nothing restores your sense of wonder like looking at a sword that's killed a king."

  "Unfortunately, there is nothing like that in the house itself," the man said. "With Lord Cassinder's permission, perhaps you might see the collection in the tower." He glanced down and to the corner. "Yet as with the house, the contents are...austere. Our lord is ever a minimalist."

  Blays took an expression of mock affront. "Except in his hospitality!"

  "Of course."

  The man left them to the quiet house. Cassinder returned by noon, flushed from the chilly ride. After convening downstairs along with the various servants and attendants of both parties, he offered Dante and Blays a carriage for the ride to the mine.

  "Horses or our own feet," Blays said, continuing the bravado. "Carriages separate a man from the world. You know what you get when you're separated from the world? Soft. And white enough to read by."

  Dante expected one of the man's chilly rebuffs, but Cassinder responded with a fragile smile. "It will be done."

  His people scattered for the stables, bringing back two fine-looking horses (for all the riding Dante had done between Narashtovik and the Norren Territories, he still couldn't tell any equine differences more specific than mare or stallion) and an adequate if less nobly statured mount for Lira. Gala and Mourn were left to accompany on foot. Cassinder's troop consisted of three mounted men and two unmounted norren of his own, who carried large packs on their broad backs.

  The trail curled up the hill. To both sides of the dark dirt, grass and ferns glistened in the sun, still damp. Vapor trailed from the horses' nostrils. Cassinder ranged ahead. From most nobles, Dante would take this as a sign of arrogance—the light, ongoing cruelty of constantly reminding everyone around him of their place—but Cassinder's long gazes over the green fields and his nature in general suggested he was simply the type to wander ahead because he was lost in his own thoughts. He was an odd duck, a strange bird among the social beasts that made up the aristocracy, and if Dante didn't have more pressing matters on his hands, he would have tried to get to know the young lord.

  "Do you do any fencing?" Dante said instead, trying to steer their host into martial matters. "Boxing? Archery?"

  "I train with the besette," Cassinder said, referring to a reed-thin blade that hadn't been popular in Gask for at least three generations. "It is a weapon of finesse."

  "Just that?"

  "It only takes one weapon to kill a man."

  Blays pushed out his lower lip. "If you don't care about having fun, sure."

  "Killing is a tool, not a sport." Cassinder blinked, then offered that same fragile smile. "I am sorry. My mother once told me I'd have to learn a blade to protect myself from my tongue."

  "Smart woman."

  Dante pried further, but Cassinder's responses turned monosyllabic until the lord shifted the discourse to chummy small talk—their trip, their families, etc. The hill apexed and began a shallow downslope into a valley cleared of trees. Trying to clear the lush landscape of all growth would have been futile, however, and the ground remained fuzzy with bushes, weeds, ferns, stump-mosses, and fungus. A few miles further along the road, the land swelled again. Atop its high crown, a narrow tower jutted into the sky.

  "Is that where you keep your armory?" Dante said without thinking.

  Cassinder looked at him from the corner of his eyes. "My armory?"

  "Your man gave us a tour of the household. We wanted to see the family arms, but he said they were kept in a tower."

  "The original site of the house." The blond man swayed with the roll of his horse. "But it is not a good time."

  "Are you that busy? Surely one of your people could show us up."

  "The steps to the top are in disrepair. Reaching the armory is currently impossible."

  "Damn," Blays said. "When are they going to invent ropes already?"

  Cassinder gazed at the finger of stone on the hilltop. "You would only be disappointed. There is only one item of note, acquired so recently it has not yet been given a proper display."

  Whatever Cassinder's claims, the tower looked intact and unblemished, an impression Dante confirmed when they crested the hill and rode under its noon-shortened shadow. It was a simple construction, smooth walls of white stone flecked with brown and yellow, its curves broken by narrow arrow-slits. The single door was average in size, but its ring handle was bulky enough to brain a bull. Cassinder stared past it as they advanced. Dante caught Blays' eye and raised his brows at the silent tower.

  They reached the mine within the hour. It sat halfway up a hill, a dirty sprawl of scaffolds surrounding a cavelike tunnel into the stone. Norren emerged with buckets, shoulders bent, dust sifting from their hair. Others turned the wheel of a listless windmill, siphoning water from the depths. Smoke poured from the chimneys of a smelter. A single long barracks stood a few hundred feet away. Men with swords and bows laughed, arms folded over their chests, sparing glances at the lean norren hauling rubble and ore up from the torchlit tunnels.

  Cassinder turned his horse sideways to watch the proceedings. Near the barracks, a one-armed norren tended pots above a firepit. A woman limped up to set a water bucket beside him. Othe
rs emerged from the smelter, trudged to a clearing by the mine's entrance, and hefted buckets, arms and backs straining, before returning to the smoking building. They showed no expression but the occasional wince. Over Dante's shoulder, the faces of Mourn and Gala were coldly blank.

  "It is a pinnacle of the intersection of purpose and meaning," Cassinder said softly, as if to himself. "The labor of would-be traitors is instead turned to extracting the silver of one of the nation's wealthiest new mines. In this way, their treasonous spirit is converted into strength for the very country they would sabotage."

  "Pretty fit punishment," Dante said.

  "It's not a punishment."

  "I didn't mean to imply they're not treated well."

  Cassinder shook his head, features contracted into something sharp and eager. "You misunderstand. It is a sign."

  "Looks like hauling rocks to me," Blays said. "I don't know what that's a sign of. Other than a lifetime of shit-work."

  "How do we know the things we do are right?" Cassinder said. "Praise from others? But they are just men, their vision and wisdom limited by a mortal span and the circumscribed perspective that comes with it."

  "Well obviously."

  "Others look to inner praise. The righteous pride one feels when one has done well. There is nothing purer than one's own spirit."

  "But we're just men ourselves," Dante said.

  Cassinder's head snapped down in a nod. "Exactly. Exactly. The praise of mortals—weak, flawed, rotting—cannot be trusted. Whose can? That of the gods. The heavens. But they do not speak to us. Not in words like these. They operate by signs." He gestured to a dust-blackened norren as the worker staggered to a stop, dropped two buckets with a hollow thump, and gasped for air. "The heavens are symmetry. Perfection reflected and reproduced. The dirt in those buckets becomes pure silver. So the dirt in that man's rebellious soul becomes the power of Gask. Between this symmetry, we glimpse the approval of Arawn."

  Dante had to literally bite his tongue to prevent himself from launching into an extensive, Cycle-quoting counterargument that Arawn doesn't in fact care about the acts of men at all—that we are all derived from and return to the same stuff, the nether, the grist of Arawn's mill, and so our time spent as men doesn't seem that significant to him at all. Instead he said nothing. He was all but certain the Quivering Bow was locked in that tower with its "broken" steps. If he did nothing to impinge on his host's goodwill for two more nights, the bow would be his.

  "You did not come here to see me speak," Cassinder smiled into the silence Dante had inadvertently let grow awkward. "Careful inside. There are rocks."

  Dante laughed, but Cassinder's quickly-hidden look of puzzlement suggested that hadn't been a joke. He provided them covered lanterns and warned them to let him know if the flame changed color, particularly green or blue. That much sounded exciting, but otherwise the mine looked exactly the way Dante would have guessed: stone tunnels, boards planking the walls and ceilings to lock in loose rocks, grit and dust and sweating men bunching their arms to assault the walls with heavy picks. Other norren gathered the rubble into buckets and lugged it up to the light. No surprises except the silver ore itself, gnarled rocks shot through with shades of rust and blue.

  Yet the banality of it all was a sign of its own. The norren struck the wall, rested a moment, struck the wall, rested. Others knelt among the clouds of dust and swept up loose rocks. It seemed suddenly foreign, even monstrous, that Cassinder should own men the same way he owned their shovels and buckets. Not that Dante was alone in this thought. There were abolitionists wherever there were slaves. Its wrongness was simply obvious to him now in the same way his acceptance of it had been obvious earlier that day. The servants at Narashtovik's Sealed Citadel, were they slaves or paid hands? Dante had no idea. In the darkness, his cheeks flushed red.

  He didn't speak much on the way back, which surely suited Cassinder fine. The midday sun was full but so lacking in warmth Dante could still see the foggy ghost of his own breath. The echoing halls of the house at Beckonridge were nearly as cool as the outdoors, but the fire in his sparse room had been kept stoked in his absence by able servants. The room was so hot his skin itched.

  "What do you think?" Dante said, shedding his coat and stripping off his doublet.

  "That you should do more pushups," Blays said.

  "About the bow, dummy."

  "That just maybe it's up in that tower he refused to let us see inside."

  "I agree with you. Which makes me very scared."

  Blays gestured at the squeaky-boarded floor. "How much longer can we depend on a nobleman's hospitality towards his own kind? Cassinder's the type of guy who wouldn't let the friends he doesn't have stay more than a few days."

  Dante circled the room, as if the motion would unwind the contents of his head. "We'll move tomorrow night. That will give us another day to search and the clan to prepare. Get your stealing shoes on."

  "Who says I ever take them off?"

  Dante passed word of the decision to Mourn, who promised to deliver the message that night. Dante didn't tell Gala or Lira, the former because he didn't think she'd care one way or the other, and the latter because Lira's earnest loyalty (she'd done nothing but play the part of a servant since arriving at Beckonridge) and almost too-convenient method of meeting them on the river had Dante privately concerned she might not be who she said she was. Which was perhaps paranoid, given the broken leg and the starvation and all, but if her life-debt nonsense was as heartfelt as she claimed, she would happily follow them into the gall bladder of a firesquid. By contrast, accompanying them on a midnight break-in to a crumbling tower would be no trouble at all.

  In the morning, a bleary-eyed Mourn told them word had been passed, with Orlen planning to raid the mine at 1 AM. In case the clan and Dante's party stayed separated, they'd reconvene at the Boomer. Dante and Blays spent the day pumping Cassinder's servants on the history and lore of Beckonridge, recruiting Mourn to do the same from his side of the social strata, hoping to induce a revelatory brag about the bow. In this way, they coaxed the majordomo into confessing the estate's purchase of the Clan of the Green Lake had come with the acquisition of a weapon of "no small power." When Dante pressed for details, the man implied in the politest and most deniable terms that Dante might be a lord, but he was still a foreign lord, and it was not the majordomo's place to reveal what might well be considered a secret of the state.

  Still, besides being shot with the bow itself, it was the best confirmation Dante could have hoped for. He went to bed with the same childlike anticipation he'd once felt for Falmac's Eve. Much like that day of meat pies, fermented cider, and tiny wooden one-eyed idols, it would probably all be over before he knew it.

  He met Blays in the hallway at midnight, or as close to it as he could reckon by the stars. Except for the sporadic crackle of fireplaces, the manor was silent and all but completely dark; the wall candles had burnt out or been put out, leaving the starlight to fight its way through windows that had iced over in the night. Dante crept down the spiral staircase, feeling the way with his feet. If they were intercepted by anyone with the courage and authority to question them, Blays' idea of a cover story was they were meeting with Lira in order to arrange a surprise feast for their host—a story which they would, through awkward phrasing and embarrassed glances, in turn imply to be a cover for your typical perverse aristocratic sex with the help—but by the time they met Lira in the servants' kitchen and its faded yet cloying scents of rendered fat and boiled beets, they hadn't seen another soul.

  She led them into the biting night. The dirt road was frozen underfoot. Frost glittered from the weeds. Dante heard no baying of hounds, saw no sudden lighting of lanterns. Under starlight, they'd be nearly invisible. He kept the nether close. Its cold pulse mirrored his own. His breath swirled from his mouth, hanging in the damp air. Mourn and Gala waited for them beyond the first ridge, swords on hips.

  "The clan will move soon," Mourn said. "Don't e
xpect subtlety."

  Blays snorted. "You guys are seven feet tall and weigh as much as a statue of yourselves. I don't think you do anything subtly."

  "This isn't just a rescue," Gala said. "It's vengeance."

  "Good," Dante said. "Then Cassinder's soldiers will be too busy dying to notice we're stumbling around in their tower stealing their things."

  He could see it already, a fingerlike silhouette rising from the opposite rim of the valley. He wanted to run to it, but maintained a brisk walk instead. The tower arrived soon enough. Standing beneath its hundred-foot rise of white stone, Dante could feel every ounce of its weight. Its very star-cast shadow pressed on him, simultaneously holding him down and compelling him onward. He pulled the door's huge iron ring; the door didn't budge.

  "What would you do without me." Blays knelt beside the lock, an outrageously huge pad that could be repurposed as an anvil at a moment's notice.

  "I'd ask Mourn to smash the lock right off," Dante said. "I assumed picking it would make less noise, but I forgot that would leave your mouth as free as ever."

  Blays unfolded a leather case of narrow metal prods, hooks, and squiggle-tipped wires. When they'd first met, Blays had been a devoted student of the school of "bash it once, and if that doesn't work, bash it harder," but over the last year or two he'd taken to practicing methods that left locks, knobs, and hinges intact, recognizing that much of their work in the Norren Territories was the kind that must be denied rather than gloated about. His interest in the skill had doubled at a party in Narashtovik at Duke Abbedon's manor which Dante's position on the Council forced them to attend. On hearing the Abbedon kept his best wines beside his own bed, Blays went upstairs, trailed by a young lady he'd been after all night. The duke's bedroom bore not one but three locks, but Blays had them off in seconds, so impressing the lady that it took no kits or tools whatsoever to pry her from her dress then and there.

  Beneath the white tower, Blays set to his task with uncommon sobriety, methodically wiggling a number of thin rods into the lock's keyhole, squinting into the empty night as he poked and worried the tools about its raspy interior, guided by touch and sounds far too arcane for Dante to differentiate. Exhausting one pick, Blays swapped it out for another and leveraged a third thicker tool into the tumblers and latches lurking inside.