The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  "You're quite a ways from your homeland," Dante said.

  "My homeland moves as I do." Orlen gave Dante a blank look. "Has Mourn died yet?"

  "Would that make you happy?"

  "I won't know until I hear it."

  "He's fine," Dante said. "He's found a new home with the Clan of the Broken Heron. As have I."

  Orlen laughed. "I had heard that. I didn't know whether to believe that."

  "Where's Vee?"

  His smile became a small thing. "In the valley of Josun Joh. Or dead in the woods on a hill beneath the sun and shade. Whichever you prefer."

  Dante drew back his head, searching for words of condolence that wouldn't be as trite as all the rest, but the moment passed. Hopp stood and called the group to order, a process that involved naming all those present whose names he knew and asking the names of any he didn't. Once that was accomplished, he ran his hand down his stubbled face and gave the chiefs his sly grin.

  "What would you say if I said we could retake Borrull?"

  Kella glanced up. "Since you like humans and their ways so much, I would ask what you want carved on your grave. "

  "I would like it to say 'Why Do You Care Who Is Buried Here?' Moving on, I have the following to say: we can retake Borrull."

  "Is that something we need to do?" Kella said.

  "We don't need to do anything," Orlen said. "But I would like to kill any soldier who steps foot on our lands."

  "I haven't written any books on the art of war, but Borrull is a fort. Unless you like dying, you don't attack forts."

  "You do if you hate the people there."

  Kella cocked her head. "The Nine Pines is smaller than I last saw it. How did that happen?"

  Orlen's nostrils flared. His former impassivity seemed to have been replaced by something feral and reckless. For a moment, Dante feared he would stand, cross the circle of stones, and drive his clenched fists into Kella's face, ending the meeting then and there, but Orlen smiled abruptly.

  "And if that's what it takes to drive the redshirts out, the Nine Clans will shrink to none."

  "I would rather take my clan to new hills than bury them on Borrull."

  Stann scratched his beard with his three-fingered hand. "What's the strategy, Hopp? Tell me it's better than marching up and knocking down the gates."

  "You don't think that would work?" Hopp said.

  "I think we'd be better off fortifying the base of the hill and starving them out." Stann raised his eyes at Dante. "Humans eat, don't you?"

  "Whenever we're not too busy killing our neighbors," Dante said.

  "Well, then that would be my vote."

  "I'm not talking about chopping down the doors." Hopp pointed at Dante. "He's a nethermancer. How long would it take you to knock them down?"

  Dante tipped his head to the side. "If I'm not interrupted? A matter of seconds."

  "The gate is all they have," Hopp said. "If they retreat to the houses, then we burn the houses."

  Wult pushed his white hair away from his sun-lined forehead. "My clan will go if others go."

  "Why not try the siege?" Stann said. "They may do something dumb. Enough pressure cracks a stone."

  Kella waved her hand. "My clan lives on the wind. I don't care about a few hundred fools cowering behind a wall."

  Assault them, besiege them, ignore them—with no central authority to make the decision, the chiefs debated these options for more than an hour. Hopp pressed them opportunistically, darting in to ask pointed questions or interrogate unfounded assumptions about the dangers of a frontal assault after the fortifications had been essentially nullified, swaying two more chieftains to pledge support to an aggressive attack, but that was the best he could do.

  "They can't hurt us from behind their wall," Kella summarized. "If they come out to try, then they're no longer behind a wall. That's when we strike."

  Hopp stood. "Then the Broken Herons will watch the fort to make sure the redshirts do no harm while we wait. You know how to speak to me if you change your minds."

  As if the chiefs had been waiting for a moment like this, they stood as one, breaking into groups of two or three or wandering away from the circle of stones. Hopp set off without a word.

  "I never thought the clans would let an enemy stay in their lands," Dante said. "We could do this!"

  "Don't you think I know that?" Hopp said over his shoulder.

  "Then what now?"

  "Like I said. We watch the hill."

  Back at the camp, Dante found Mourn to tell him he'd seen Orlen. "He seemed wrathful. Vee died. It sounds like the Nine Pines have seen battle."

  "It's what they do," Mourn said. "Along with all the other things they do."

  "You're not...upset?"

  "Of course I am. It wasn't the clan's fault I left. Except for the portion of the clan that is Orlen and Vee. But I don't want them to die for that. Not when they were fighting for their cousins' lives."

  Dante nodded, falling silent. Perhaps Mourn was right. Orlen had manipulated them without shame, but it had been an impersonal act, collateral damage in pursuit of a noble goal. Still, if Dante had been in Mourn's place, he would have felt betrayed. Furious. Righteous. He might even have accepted news of Vee's death with something like a happy sense of justice served.

  Hopp relocated the clan to a pond a few miles from Borrull, rotating scouts in and out of the nearby hills. Dante took his turns with neither joy nor complaint. He checked in with Cally twice over the following week, but the old man had no major news. A few more border-skirmishes. The further enlistment of troops in the far west. After some hard words towards and from Gallador, both the merchant league and the king had reached a detente; according to Cally's sources, the lakelands had no intention of providing support to the king's armies, but showed no inclination to resist in any way, either. Cally congratulated Dante on that point before cutting off the loon to field a message from a norren chief.

  Eight days after the meeting, a low horn blasted across the pond. Dante pulled in his fishing line and sprinted towards the sound. Other Herons rushed down from the hills. The horn sounded again, rippling through the warm springtime air. At camp, the warriors strung bows, belted on swords, and strapped on leather breastplates and bracers.

  "What's happening?" Dante said.

  A woman named Gwenne tied her loose hair back into a tight bun. "The Clan of Laughing Foxes surprised a troop of redshirts. Redshirts fought them off long enough to make a run. They're headed for the fort."

  The clan was ready within minutes. Leaving behind their tents, blankets, spare shoes, and everything else except weapons and the small pouch of food, water, salt, and other small essentials each warrior carried at all times, they jogged east bound for the butte of Borrull. Four scouts sprinted ahead, bows in hand. Lira jogged between Dante and Blays. Her face was as calm as the pond they'd left behind.

  The scouts returned in minutes. The king's men were just beyond the next ridge, on the verge of reaching the slopes up to Borrull. Hopp gritted his teeth and shouted his clan on. Forty-odd warriors raced up the hill and spilled down the other side. In the shallow valley, a troop of some fifty men in red shirts marched up the base of the butte. The clan gained quickly until the enemy soldiers spotted them in the open grass. Faint shouts lofted from below as the redshirts broke into a jog, hampered by exhaustion and their wounded. The clan reached the bottom of the valley while the enemy was just a third of the way up to the safety of the wall.

  A high trumpet blared down from the fortress. Hopp swore. Riders spilled from the open gates, followed by dozens of foot soldiers.

  "We're too late," Hopp yelled. "Get back up the hill. Fast as you can!"

  Dante turned and retreated with his fellow warriors, several of whom snarled, frustrated by the lack of battle. He glanced over his shoulder, gathering up the nether in preparation for a fight, but the soldiers from the fort met those running up the hill and stopped to help them up to the cover of Borrull. When the clan re
ached the ridge, Hopp paused to let them catch their breath and assess the enemy. A mile away, the swarm of redshirts clustered outside the wall and funneled through the gates.

  They jogged back to their lakeside camp. Hopp dispatched scouts and spent several minutes exchanging loon-messages with the other chiefs. Blays went to the shore to towel off his sweat. He'd been bathing with some frequency lately. Shaving, too.

  "Well, that was fun," he said when he returned, damp-haired. "I suppose it beats maybe dying."

  Dante leaned over at the waist to stretch his back and legs. "But now they've got 250 men instead of 200, I'd say our overall chances of maybe-dying have shot right up."

  "Let me ask you something: do you care?"

  "Do I care if I might die soon?"

  "Yeah."

  "A bit," Dante said. "In the sense that yes, completely, I care. What are you, insane?" He paused, mouth twisting between a grin and a grimace. "Wait, you're not in love, are you?"

  Blays flapped his hand. "That's not what I'm talking about. Does this feel real to you? Does it feel like a war? The kind of thing bards sing songs about?"

  "Sure. I'm working on a song myself."

  "Really?"

  "I call it 'The Ballad of History's Greatest Sorcerer, and His Homely Sidekick Whose Name Was Unfortunately Lost to Time.'"

  "Come on."

  "Too long?"

  Blays shook his head at the pond. It wasn't long until sunset and yellow light poured in through the branches of the trees. Flies floated down to the water and disappeared in swift ripples of rising fish. Someone had lit a fire. Smoke and pan-fried fish drifted on the cool air.

  "Maybe it'll sink in soon," Blays said. "But right now we're standing by this pond. We're about to eat some fish. There'll be salt and white pepper and whatever those spriggy little herbs are. We'll get up with the sun and we'll fish and walk through the hills and come back and sleep."

  "And we just got back from chasing a gang of Gaskan soldiers until more mounted soldiers chased us off."

  "But now we're here. By this pond."

  "And it doesn't feel like five miles between us and those soldiers," Dante said. "It feels more like five thousand."

  "Exactly!" Blays nodded.

  "Nope," he said. "Feels like war to me."

  Blays made an exasperated noise and wandered off to find Lira. In truth, there were moments where it did feel like an idyllic dream, like one long voyage between streams and hills and mountains with no pressing destination in sight, but those moments were few, compressed between endless thoughts of days to come, of fishing to feed the tribe so it could fight, of practicing intricate tricks with the nether to keep himself sharp, of probing the earth to learn its language and raise walls to keep the enemy out. He tried to notice the light on the pond, but soon found himself thinking of the clans instead, and what he would do when it came time to knock the doors of Borrull right off their hinges.

  He was right to think that way. The next day, Cally contacted him to pass along the latest rumor. An army had departed from the borders not thirty miles to the west, hundreds strong. Dante told him to tell the other chiefs. Minutes later, Cally spoke to Hopp instead: the chieftains had requested another meet.

  "Think they're ready now?" Hopp grinned.

  Dante shook his head. "The more I learn about norren, the less I know. At this point it wouldn't surprise me if they suggested leaving the hills to the king and building a ladder to the moon."

  Hopp sent a quarter of the clan as pickets to the west. At the hill crowned by the seats of stones, the faces of the chiefs were hard and sober. Hopp didn't say a word. He planted himself on one of the long stones, smiling like a fox with a gosling hanging from its mouth.

  "So as far as I can tell," Stann said in a clear voice that quickly silenced the pockets of conversation, "we're seeing their strategy emerge. It goes something like this. Capture the strongest point in the region. Which they've done. Move in a force strong enough to hold it against any nearby clans, which they're doing right now. Once that's established, they hole up in their fortress to prevent counterattack while remaining able to deploy hundreds of troops at once to smash any clans in sight, pinning down the region and whittling our disorganized little bands into splinters. This lets them control a big old chunk of the border and keep their own lands safe until their real armies take the field."

  "Smart," Wult said, weathered face crinkling in annoyance. "Why can't Moddegan be dumb about it instead? Would make our job a hell of a lot easier."

  Orlen stood and gazed straight up at the clouds that had mounted over the last few hours. "If we don't want them to do this, we should stop them from doing so. If we don't stop them from doing so, we admit we want them to do this."

  Kella scowled. "It's not as as simple as that."

  "I think it is." Stann didn't so much as glance around the circle. None of the other chieftains moved, either, but Dante could feel their assent nonetheless—the norren had reached one of their mysterious unspoken agreements. Stann turned to Dante. "How close do you have to be to bring down the doors? Within bowshot?"

  "Thereabouts," Dante said. "It's subtler work than just smashing them down. Call it two hundred yards."

  "I assume you work best when you are not being punctured with arrows."

  "Unless I'm specifically working at bleeding, yes."

  "Then we attack under cover of night. And under the cover of a big wooden shield." Stann took a look around the circle. "We must move today. Prepare as we march. If this new army reaches Borrull before we do, we'll lose the whole region."

  Several chiefs stood immediately and jogged away from the hilltop. Hopp grinned and smacked Dante's back hard enough to stumble him.

  "You're sure you can do this?"

  "Fortunately for our chances, hinges don't fight back." Dante tugged the hem of his doublet to straighten it after his near-fall. "If you can give me a minute, I'll give you the fort."

  Hopp smiled proudly, glancing at the other chieftains on his way down the hill. The norren was proud of him, Dante realized, as well as being proud of his own canniness—taking three humans into his clan must have been a terrible risk on some level, a gamble of whatever prestige he held with all the other clans. Blays had fulfilled Hopp's "test" by managing to only half-drown himself in the stream, yes, but there was no higher law holding Hopp to his end of the bargain. Taim, Josun Joh, Arawn, none of them had formed in the clouds to scowl down at the chieftain until he relented and took the three humans into his tribe. Hopp was a man for whom pragmatism came before honor. He'd break his word without hesitation if he thought it would make for a better tomorrow. He'd seen something in the humans, then. Some use or potential that convinced him to roll the dice. Not only was that gamble about to pay off, it was about to do so in front of fifteen other clans.

  The Broken Herons moved east, covering half the distance to Borrull before nightfall. Dante gazed at the stars from under his blankets. He'd been in enough fights, scrapes, skirmishes, and battles to forget more than one, but he'd never been part of a siege of this size, let alone served as its cornerstone. As terrifying as that thought was, it was thrilling, too. A breath of cool air. The wind between an albatross' feathers. The night-dewed grass beneath a tiger's paws. Feared and fearless.

  Away through the brush, Lira moaned. Dante struck out with the nether, neatly slicing a twig from the tree above his bed.

  He woke sluggish and thickheaded. He wished for tea. The Broken Herons tramped east. They halted regularly to forage, rest, and wait for word from the scouts, but moved fast enough to encamp by mid-afternoon in a stream-fed valley some two miles southwest of Borrull. Several clans and some three hundred warriors were already there, mending shields, sharpening blades, fishing, wrestling in a foreign, upright style where victory was achieved by flinging the opponent to the ground. After each throw, sweep, or trip, the downed warrior bounced to his feet, laughing or wryly determined. More than once, he asked his partner to walk him through
the technique that had just introduced him to the ground. If any old rivalries lurked among the divergent clans, Dante didn't see them that day.

  Stann summoned Dante over at dusk to inspect the shield they'd rigged for him. It was more of a mobile wall than a shield: seven feet tall and ten feet wide, gently convex, with three horizontal slits at his eye-level. Leather handles had been nailed behind either flank, allowing for two warriors to carry it while Dante hid behind it. It smelled of fresh-cut wood, but had clearly been built by a craftsman whose nulla was woodwork—the planks sanded smooth and splinter-free, the viewing slits straight and perfectly parallel. Dante's doubts about the plan backed swiftly away.

  Scouts came and went as night settled on the hills. The last of the clans arrived under starlight, swelling their numbers past seven hundred, outnumbering the men behind the wall three-to-one. In a straightforward siege, the odds would be far from overwhelming. In one where the front door would be knocked to the ground within two minutes of first contact—one where the attacking size was larger not only in numbers, but in the tree-trunk-like mass of their individual warriors, too—it would not be an easy night for the redshirts.

  A ripple spread through the camp. It was time to march.

  Seven hundred pairs of feet flattened the grass of the hill. Scattered clouds dimmed the moonlight. Spears swayed over the high heads of the norren. Nether danced between pebbles and twigs. They reached the rim and spilled into the waiting valley. The butte of Borrull rose from the darkness. The clans carried no banners. They sounded no horns. Hunching along in loose formation through the breeze-ruffled grass, the warriors were nearly halfway up to the fort before the first trumpets sounded from above.

  Torches pricked up along the wall. Shouts tumbled down the slope. Blays grinned. "Think they've seen us?"

  "Either that or they've spotted an alarmingly large rat in the kitchen," Dante said.

  "Let's see how they feel about the one that's about to chew through their doors."

  "If it turns out I can't, and they shoot me, don't tell Cally I was trying to plink off a hinge. Tell him I was trying to lift the whole wall over my head."