Cally glanced over his shoulder, his beard as disheveled as a dog after it crawls from a lake and gives its first shake. "This is for your benefit. You seem incapable of learning in civilized settings, so I thought I'd return our classroom to the site of your greatest success."
"This is another lesson? I hope it's more useful than your last one."
"If a sponge fails to absorb a puddle, you don't blame the puddle."
"That's assuming the puddle is made of something that can be absorbed rather than something thick and intransigent and altogether muddy."
"Odd you should say that." Cally stopped in front of a rain-churned flat of dirt and grass. "Mud is precisely what we're about to dive into."
Dante frowned at the grave-studded field. "I hope you're still speaking metaphorically."
"Honestly, I'm not sure." With some difficulty, the old man knelt in the grass, splaying his hand into the muck. "Let's see if we can get this to move."
"I was trying that the whole trip back here. Nothing came of it except a few dead ants."
"That's because you are stubborn, and occasionally stupid." Cally squinted at the sloppy ground. "My theory is that mud, being muddy, will be easier to move than rock, what with its rockiness. Yet we should think of both when we think of how to move either. The commonalities will allow us to stab nearly at the heart instead of flailing in the dark."
Dante knelt beside him, rain soaking into the knees of his pants. "They're both nonliving substances."
"But do we know they're pure of life? What if these fine grains include bits of bone? What if the water that made this dirt mud once passed through a bear's bladder or a goat's veins?"
Dante paused with his hand halfway to the mud. "Then this is a very disgusting world we live in."
"Few things have ever been only themselves. This is part of what I meant to impart to you about cycles. In a way, all the world is Arawn's mill, grinding old into new in a ceaseless turn."
"If it's all the same substance, does that mean the rock is the nether and the nether is the rock?"
Cally cocked his rain-sodden head, staring into the brown sludge as if Dante had just swept it aside to reveal a cache of rubies. He shook his head sharply. "No. We'd feel it. But that's good thinking. What else?"
Absently, Dante picked up a twig and began drawing a bunny in the mud. He stopped with the second ear half-sketched. "What if there is no stick?"
"You're beginning to talk like me. I don't like it."
"To draw a rabbit, I have to use this stick." He held it up, mud clumped around its tip. "If I want to knock down one of those grave-pillars, I have to call the nether to me, shape it, and send it slamming into the rock. What if I found a way to throw out the stick?"
Cally's eyes slitted. He snatched away the stick and poked at the wet soil. "Now that is an idea."
Dante burrowed his focus into the mud, plumbing it for drops and trickles of shadows. He grabbed these up and tried to shake them like a dog shakes a squirrel. Cally smacked him in the side of the head just hard enough to dislodge his hold on them.
"What the hell was that for?" Dante said, rubbing his head through his hood.
"Don't just trample in like a puppy that's caught its first whiff of cheese. That's your whole problem. Look."
Cally's eyelids drooped. His eyes became as cloudy as the rain pooling in the dirt. Dante looked, too. Shadows webbed the mud, infesting it, inhabiting it, embedded within and containing it, diffusing it like cream stirred in tea, yet as separate from it as the planks of a wracked ship are from the swirl of a maelstrom. He didn't touch the nether, except to trace it with his mental fingers. He simply watched, looked, and listened.
After a full hour, Cally unfolded his legs with a grunt. He stood and stretched and flapped his rain-soaked cloak. "Well, I suppose that's enough of that. Try to work this out though, won't you? You could stroll across the Territories founding new forts with a snap of your fingers."
"Why don't you figure it out?" Dante shivered. "You're supposed to be the master."
"Yes, and the main perk of being the master is making your apprentices do your work for you."
The old man strode down the hill, stiff from the cold. The upcoming meeting of the Council was entirely Cally's business, leaving Dante with no immediate responsibilities for the first time since Thaws. He spent most of the following days watching the dirt. Twice, he tried to move it, but with the nether embedded in solid soil rather than collected and shaped in his hands, it was like trying to push a wall. Perhaps it was even more like trying to push a mountain.
The rains came and went. So did the riders, passing through the Citadel gates with news from the outlands and heartlands. Several clans had begun organized raids on the human border towns. Casualties had so far been light: a few soldiers and guards, a couple norren warriors. The first of Moddegan's conscripts—four hundred men from the Happark lowlands—were said to be inbound as an emergency stopgap against the clans.
At the pub, Blays nodded at the news. "That'll keep the local taverns in business. Zero of those men are going to step outside whatever town they're parked in."
"Think so?" Dante said.
"For certain," Lira said. "It'll be weeks before they have the strength to start striking out in force. It could be months."
Dante frowned. "Well, that's not how I would do it. The clans rarely number more than fifty people. If I were commanding the border troops, I would split them into three forces—150 to guard whatever city's at greatest risk, 150 ranging far afield to keep the clans scrambling, and the remaining hundred troops on regular sweeps between their base in town and the neighboring regions. This third force could reinforce the rangers when called for, too."
"Fiendishly strategic," Blays said. "Unless the norren decide one clan plus one clan equals all your men are dead."
"So you'd just sit in town and twiddle your thumbs?"
"Do I look like a coward?
"I can't tell with your back turned like that."
Blays snorted. "Moddegan doesn't need any bold stratagems and derring-do. Do you know how huge his empire is? He can just advance town by town, county by county, hill by hill. The same way Mourn plays Nulladoon. The same way time decays us all to empty dirt."
"That's a bit dark," Dante said.
Blays took a long pull of his palebrown, a spring blend of spiced rum and citrusy wheat beer. "You've spent enough time with the clans, Mourn. Do you really think a few scattered tribes can do anything to stop an army of 20,000 men?"
Mourn rolled his mug between his hairy hands. "That question is dishonest. If all you do is compare a small number to a big number, the small number will never be the favorite."
"But that's all it is," Blays said. "A numbers game. They've got them, we don't."
Dante set down his mug, arranging it so the handle faced him perfectly. "What about what you told Cally the other day? That we had to fight back?"
"Of course we'll fight back. But that won't mean we'll win."
The table went silent. The smell of roasted lamb hung in the air, greasy and savory, undershot by boiled carrots and garlic and onions. Men murmured, mugs clunking. Their grim tones and slow words echoed Blays' mood.
"Are you all right?" Dante said.
Blays gazed out the smeary window to the street, which was nearly pitch black other than the rain gleaming in deep pools. "I just wonder if we've done the right thing. We do these things, and at the time they look right, but you come home and you put them together and somehow they've added up to this bullshit war. If that's the result of all those good decisions, maybe they weren't so good in the first place."
"But they would look different if Moddegan had responded different," Mourn said. "If he only responds with badness, our decisions will look like wrongness no matter what we do."
"That's the truth right there." Lira gripped Blays' wrist. "You have to do what your heart and head tells you is best. No matter how the world might lash back. If you don't do what y
ou know is right, how can right ever happen?"
Dante kept his peace. That wasn't quite how he saw it—if getting eaten by a bear struck you as unfair, then perhaps you should keep your hands off a mother's cubs—but the discussion had already moved into the saferoom of platitudes. Blays drained his cup, plunked it down, and walked to the bar without a word. Dante scuffed his boots across the gritty floor, then ran his mind across the dirt there, seeking out the pricks of shadows contained within the grains.
Mourn nodded at the bar. "I think he is in trouble."
"He'll be fine," Dante said absently. "Everyone has moments of shadow."
"And Blays' are about to manifest in the punching of that man."
Dante twisted in his chair. At the bar, Blays faced down a man whose fists and mouth were bunched in anger. The man stepped forward, shoulders rolling beneath his deer-fur coat, throwing Blays into his shadow. His shoulders were those of a smith or a woodcutter: a man who spent all day swinging something heavy and metal.
Blays smiled, swaying. "Is this how you met your wife? Who can say no after they've been beaten into sleep?"
The man cocked his fist and threw a looping right hook. Blays stepped inside it, flicking his left wrist along the man's incoming arm to take control of the punch. In the same motion, he turned his hips and straightened up on his bent knees, driving a hard uppercut straight into the man's advancing chin. His teeth clicked so hard Dante winced.
The man reeled backwards like gravity had just turned sidelong. He banged into the chairs behind him, knocking another man to the ground with a yelp. A mug shattered. The man hung there from the chairs, muttering to himself, eyes fluttering. Blays grabbed the downed man's drink and gulped it down. Two men broke through the pressing onlookers. Like their half-conscious friend, they too had the hard-hewn arms of woodcutters.
Blays flipped the empty mug at their feet. "Back the fuck off or join him on the floor."
Mourn plowed up to the bar, Lira and Dante behind him. The taller of the woodcutters leaned toward Blays.
"Apologize. Do it good enough, and I won't take your jaw away."
"None of that is going to happen," Mourn said, dropping his voice even lower than its typical rumble of falling rocks.
The two men turned. They tipped back their heads to meet Mourn's eyes. The fight fled from their faces.
"What's this?" the man said. "Start up trouble, then send in your slave to bail you out?"
"Slaves aren't allowed to strike citizens." Mourn advanced, broad-bowed as a war galley. "I am not a slave."
Dante wedged his way between them, dwarfed on all sides. "It's time to stop doing dumb things."
"Then start by getting out of my way," the woodcutter said. Dante pulled back his cloak to expose the silver and sapphire brooch of the White Tree. The woodcutter lowered his hands, expression turning pensive. "We didn't come for trouble, sir. But I just saw my friend get punched by this whining mosquito here."
"Then maybe you should see if he's all right." Dante tipped his head at Blays. "That one happens to be my friend. We'll see he gets safely home."
"I'm not going anywhere." Blays pointed at the man he'd punched, who had lowered himself to the floor, head held between his hands. "He bumped into me."
Dante bulged his eyes. "There's plenty to drink at the Citadel."
Blays rolled his eyes. "Fine. I think I'll go vomit on your bed."
"I'll go with him," Mourn said.
"I don't need a nursemaid," Blays said. "Unless she's a damn sight less hairy than you."
"And I don't like the way I'm being stared at." Mourn rested his hand on Blays' shoulder. "Come on."
They left, followed by the steady gaze of the crowd. The woodcutters helped their friend to his feet. Dante returned to their table and pulled out a chair for Lira. She swept off her cloak, face flushed with battle-spirit, and let out a long breath. A hunched and wizened beerboy had followed them to the table, rightly guessing they'd be in the mood for a drink. Lira ordered two more palebrowns.
"I hope he's all right," she said after the drinks had arrived.
"He put that man down without getting touched," Dante said. "That woodcutter will be wearing Blays' knuckle-prints for a beard for the next week."
She glanced at the door as if Blays might have snuck back in, then leaned across the table, breasts pressing against her doublet. Involuntarily, Dante remembered how she'd fallen beneath the servants' towel as they dried themselves at Gallador, those flashes of pink and white.
"I mean what he was talking about before. He sounded defeated."
"It gets to him sometimes." Dante shifted in his chair. "This isn't baking pies. Our business requires making people unhappy. Sometimes we have to make them dead."
She held there, half-stretched across the table, eyes steady. "It doesn't get to you?"
"Only when I can afford to let it."
"And what do you do then?"
"Read. Research. Learn the nether."
Lira leaned back and sipped her drink. "Just like I stretch or run or practice my forms. I suppose that's best. The only person you can always count on is yourself."
He drank, too, buying himself a moment. The room felt suddenly warm. Thick, too. Lira's words felt like a letter written long ago, thick with references long lost to time, impenetrable. He took another drink.
"I've found a few people I can count on," he said. "But you have to hold them close. It's so easy to get lost in the wind."
She met his eyes and nodded. They finished their mugs and another round after that. The crowd thinned.
"There's something I don't understand," Dante said.
Lira glanced away from the window. "Just the one thing?"
"Among the universe of things I don't understand, there is one thing I would like you to help me understand right now," he amended. "How can you be so...inflexible?"
"I'm guessing you're not talking about my joint-locks."
Dante shook his head. "Not unless your ethics have joints. And if they do, they're bad ones, because I'm pretty sure there's a lot of stuff you'd never bend on."
"Like what?"
"Like, if it came down to you or me, your silly vow would convince you to sacrifice yourself."
She raised a brow. "You wouldn't do the same for these norren of yours?"
He sloshed his mug. "Not a chance."
"What are you talking about? I've seen you put your life at risk for them a dozen times."
"That's different. I don't know I'm going to die. In general, I'm foolishly certain I won't. But if I were ever in a situation where I knew with perfect certainty it would be my life or their freedom?" He shrugged. "You would be left staring at the cloud of dust in the spot I had just vacated with all haste."
Lira smiled at the corner of the ceiling. "I suppose you think you're being a clear-eyed, pragmatic realist."
"Are you scoffing at me? You're scoffing. Well, if the king and all his men strolled up to you with their swords and said, 'Listen, declare the norren should be slaves or I'll run you through,' I don't see what's so noble about telling the truth and being skewered like a truth-telling pig. What good does that do anyone?"
"Because—" She leaned back, waving her hand over the table. "No. I've had too much rum. I'll say no more."
"What?"
"It's stupid."
Dante waggled his empty mug. "Well, I've had too much, too, and will surely forget whatever is stupid by morning. So out with it."
She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. "If the king were in front of me, I'd tell him the truth: the norren should be freed."
"But you'd be stabbed. To death."
"It doesn't matter." Lira laughed at herself and shot him a quick glance before looking back to the cup in her hand. "I believe that if I impose my will on the world, the world will bend."
Dante blinked. "Wait, like sorcery? Why didn't you tell me?"
"No, not like that at all. I believe that when you stand up for what's right d
espite the consequences—because of the consequences—people take notice. Your will changes their minds. And maybe there is a mystical component, too. Like if the gods see right action, it reminds them to change the world for the better." She glanced up. "Is that stupid?"
"No." He set his mug on the table so gently it made no sound. "No. It's beautiful."
For a fleeting instant, her smile was happy, light. Then it became ironic once more. "But you disagree."
"I don't know. I don't think you can count on men or gods to remember what's right. To pick up the torch of your cause after kings and demons have struck it from your hands. If you want to change the world for the good, you have to be willing to put on the mask of the villain."
"Even if it means lying. Killing. Betraying all other values you hold dear."
"If that's what it takes."
"If it takes wrong to do good, then how do you know you're doing good at all?" She drained her cup and clunked it down. "Well, I've embarrassed myself enough. Shall we leave?"
They rose together, smiling and unsteady. In the streets, rain misted from black skies, hissing on the corner torches that burned with the smell of whale fat. Lira said something about the rain and sins; he laughed, his own voice racketing down the empty street. As they approached the Ingate, the clouds tore wide open, battering them with sheets of icy water. Dante grabbed her hand and ran for the gate. Beneath its stone cover, they laughed again, breath curling from their mouths.
Lira flung her hand at the pounding rain. "What d'you say happens first? That stops, or Moddegan sticks our heads on pikes?"
"Who cares?" Dante said. He grabbed her belt and pulled her to him. Her lips were rain-cooled. Her mouth tasted like hops and sliced orange. For a moment as sharp as shattered glass, she was there with him, alive and bright beneath the gates, together in a pocket of safety from the rain and the cold and the darkness. She drew back, stiff. He cocked his head. She shook hers briskly.
He stepped away. She turned to the rain still tumbling from the sky. "It's just rain, isn't it? What are we afraid of?"
She walked into the night. Rain beat Dante's hood. In the Citadel courtyard, he said goodnight. He took a fat bottle of beer with him to bed. Candles blown out, he listened to the rain against the window.
The Great Rift Page 37
