The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  His men shouted in protest and fear. Dante wedged through the throng of norren. "What the hell are you doing? He was surrendering!"

  "He moved," Orlen said.

  "And if you look closely you'll see he doesn't have a fucking sword!"

  Orlen smiled sickly. "Who do you think set fire to those houses outside? It wasn't us. What do you think they're hoping to burn?"

  Mourn moved past Orlen to crouch beside the body of the dead commander. The redshirted soldiers watched with stark expressions. Dante stood square on Orlen. Boots scuffed behind him.

  "There's no excuse for war crimes." Dante gestured to the unarmed soldiers. "These men are prisoners."

  "Of their consciences, for now," Orlen said. "Soon, of hell."

  Mourn unfolded the fist of the dead man. He blinked, then plucked something hidden in the man's hand.

  "I will tell you what Orlen is doing," Mourn said. "He is destroying the evidence of his crime." He unfolded his hand. In his palm rested an earring, part silver, part bone. A tooth dangled from a silver chain. "Why did this human have this?"

  Orlen went still. Dante's heart went dark. "It was you."

  "He was supposed to wait." Orlen didn't turn.

  "What is happening in this room?" Mourn said softly.

  Dante tried to force Orlen to meet his eyes. "Do I tell him or do you?"

  "I told them how to kill him." Orlen swiveled his chin toward Dante. "They were supposed to wait for my signal. They must have deduced you were bringing down the gate."

  Mourn sat back on his haunches, the loon forgotten in his hand. "Why would you want Dante dead? He is the one who should want you dead. Unless that is why you want him dead."

  Orlen laughed. "He's the reason Vee's dead, you traitorous coward. He's the one who touched the fire of war to the brush of our hills."

  Mourn's face flooded with horror. "You're the one who lured him into an attack on Gaskan royalty."

  "And you helped too."

  Mourn vaulted to his feet and grabbed Orlen in a clinch. Orlen gasped, face white. One of the Nine Pine warriors shouted. Three others advanced, swords in hand. Orlen staggered back and then lowered himself to sit crosslegged on the floor. The bone handle of a knife projected from his heart, twitching with each beat.

  "I only regret I didn't get to see both sides burn," Orlen said. He frowned down at his hands, then slumped to the side.

  A terrible silence descended on the room. Dante backed up a step to stand beside Mourn. Lira followed.

  The clansman who'd shouted out swiveled his face at Mourn, his loose black hair swinging below his chin. His words were barely audible over the patter of blood. "Why did you do that?"

  Mourn lowered his hands to his sides. "He tried to kill my brother after blaming him for his own faults. He risked the lives of every norren here to settle a delusional score. And he'd already betrayed Dante—an ally—once before! Why do you think I left the clan in the first place?"

  The long-haired man exchanged glances with the other warriors of the Nine Pines. Dante reached for the nether. Lira's hand drifted toward her sword. The clansman lowered himself to his knees.

  "I will follow you across the hills."

  The other eight warriors of the clan in the room followed suit in both gesture and word. Dante gaped. "You're not going to...kill him?"

  The long-haired warrior gave him a sly smile. "What would possess a clansman to kill his own chieftain?"

  "Oh no," Mourn said. "No!"

  "You are loyal. Thoughtful. But fearless to act on your conscience when it is stung. We all speculated why you had left the clan. If you did so out of honor to a man you barely knew, what kind of honor will you bring to the Nine Pines?"

  Mourn bared his teeth. "Tragically, I can't accept. That is, I could, but at the same time, I can't. I have since joined the Clan of the Broken Heron."

  The warrior stood and clapped Mourn on the shoulder. "Then we will see what your new chief has to say. Perhaps it is time for the Broken Herons to come to the Pines to roost."

  Dante shook his head in disbelief. Behind him, a man coughed. The soldiers. He tapped Mourn's arm. "Let's get these men outside. I mean, if that is in accordance with your wishes, my liege."

  Mourn groaned through his beard. To the Nine Pines warriors, he said, "Please see they are unarmed."

  The warriors removed the few weapons the soldiers still had and marched them downstairs, where a few more redshirts had decided to surrender rather than join the corpses draped over broken benches and splayed across the floor. Outside, the streets smelled like charred flesh. Lira quickly found Blays. The fighting was over. Hopp had survived, too. Kella hadn't. Stann had taken a spear in the gut and might not make it through the night. All told, three-quarters of the redshirts had died or were expected to, leaving sixty-odd prisoners. Norren casualties amounted to just over seventy, a tenth of their force. While a team of warriors set to work digging a mass grave, others reeled up pails from the wells to put out the fires still raging in four of the wooden houses.

  The king's soldiers watched this with sullen despair. Dante soon learned why.

  Once the first fire was out, two warriors went in to check for survivors. Their howls pierced the night. Inside, a dozen norren women lay dead. Some were burnt beyond recognition, but others showed staved-in skulls, the blood not yet clotted. All had splints on their broken shins.

  Dante didn't try to stop the norren. The warriors ordered the prisoners out of the great hall where they'd been temporarily quartered and marched them to the edge of the butte. Pairs of norren warriors grabbed the redshirts and, one by one, flung them over the side of the cliff.

  Only one of the soldiers tried to run. He was cut down mid-stride. The others went without speeches or anger. Once it was finished, no one went down to check whether any of the men had survived.

  Dante went to Stann to treat the strategist's spear wound. Midway through the process, Dante passed out cold.

  * * *

  He slept for two days, or so he was told when Blays woke him up. He sat up hard, the wound in his back twingeing. "Two days? What about that incoming army?"

  Blays shook his head. "Camped about ten miles west, say our scouts. Meanwhile, we just killed two of theirs a few minutes ago. Best guess is they'll arrive in force tomorrow afternoon."

  "What are we going to do? Are the gates still down?"

  "Sorta."

  "So we're only sorta exposed to the swords of a thousand soldiers?"

  Blays rolled his eyes. "You do remember what happened, don't you? That thing where you sliced the hinges straight in half, rendering them totally useless as hinges? One of the norren smiths is working on some new ones, but with as little time as we've got, they're not going to be half as strong."

  Dante swung his legs out of bed. A bed in a room he didn't recognize. His legs were shaky, but his bladder demanded he put them to use. Blays pointed out the privy and hung around outside while Dante made its acquaintance.

  "So did Mourn really stab Orlen in the heart?" Blays said through the door.

  "Assuming Orlen had one."

  "Hopp released him from the Broken Herons, you know. He's in charge of the whole Nine Pines. Is that clan very wise or very dumb?"

  "I think norren spend a lot of time thinking," Dante said. "If they've already worked out exactly what they want from a leader, they can choose a new one in a snap."

  "Mourn actually begged Hopp not to let him go. Hopp just smiled that dog's smile of his. I think he might be evil."

  "Considering we're still members of his clan, I hope he uses that evil for good." Dante finished up and stepped back into the hall.

  "Are you all right?" Blays said. "Judging by the smell, you've died and I'm talking to a ghost."

  Dante brushed past him. "Are you just now learning what toilets are for?"

  "If I had any lingering doubts, being forced to climb up one cleared those right up."

  "Well, let Lira and Mourn know I'm up and arou
nd, if they care. I'm going to get ahold of Cally."

  Blays headed outside. Dante returned to his room, found his loon, and clicked it over to Cally. Instead of Cally's ragged voice, he heard the pregnant nothing that told him Cally was already speaking to someone else. Five minutes later, he heard that same eerie non-sound. Ten minutes after that, there was no noise at all. Cally's loon was dead or shut down.

  Dante dressed, ate, wandered outside. Mid-afternoon sun painted the plateau in warm yellow light tempered by a winding breeze that still smelled lightly of ash and charred fat. Hammers rang on wood and metal. Norren were thick in the streets, pulling down wooden houses and hauling the planks to a fresh palisade in the throes of construction behind the main wall. Dante recognized several members of the Herons, Nine Pines, and the other clans he'd recently fought beside, but he found himself wandering away from their labor to the east end of the butte. It was just a couple hundred yards from the center of the village, but it felt as isolated as his last two days of dreams.

  He stopped at the cliffs where the king's soldiers had been chucked to their deaths. He'd been drawn here. Called by a voice too deep to hear. The smell was as faraway as the cries of the hawks. Not too bad just yet—that tolerable lull between the knifing stink of fresh guts and the lung-clogging reek of rotting ones. Far below, blackbirds hopped among the bodies, pecking eyes and tongues. Shadows flitted between broken fingers and teased the cracks in skulls. An unseen pressure pulled on Dante's collar, drawing him closer to the stark edge.

  He backed away, crossed the village to the disabled gates, and walked down the slope to where it met the valley floor. Within an hour, he stood before the scree of stones at the foot of the cliffs, corpses broken among the rocks like fat and fleshy eggs.

  Flies buzzed in schools. Birds squawked and hopped from dinner to dinner. But there was more than birds and flies among the swollen dead. There was nether, too. Lurking in half-seen pools that dissolved as soon as he looked at them straight on. Sweating from the men's pores and crow-pecked sockets. But it wasn't only escaping from the bodies to the ground. It was rising from the ground to the bodies, too, as if the violence of their landing had cracked a vein in the earth. As if the dirt had been waiting to reclaim the flesh that had been born from it.

  In an instant, his understanding shifted as roughly as thunder and as radically as a landslide. Moving the earth wasn't about speaking to the earth. It was about finding the death in the earth. Finding the death and making it move. Move the death, move the earth.

  Blood lay maroon and drying on the rocks and broken limbs. It wasn't hard to follow into the soil. He simply followed the nether, the unstable streams of shadows waiting below the surface. He grabbed hold of them and yanked.

  Stones scraped and groaned. A chasm veed apart, four feet long and two feet wide. Crows shrieked and took flight. A shattered body tumbled into the short abyss, landing with a wet crunch. Its feet jutted above the parted rocks. Dante skipped back a step, then laughed at his own skittishness. Dust sifted onto the corpses and stones.

  He repeated this on a smaller scale, parting the dirt into furrows fit for planting potatoes. Moving the nether and the earth with it taxed his strength at a fraction of what it would cost to muscle aside the earth itself. Were Arawn's shadows acting as a lever? A net knit through the tumble of earth and rock that, when tugged, exerted its power over everything within its weave? The weakness in his legs and the faint pain in his back stopped him from running all the way back to Borrull. It was late afternoon. After confirming with Hopp the Gaskan army was still encamped ten miles to the west, Dante set himself to the earthen ramparts the norren were piling behind the stone wall. At his command, dirt flowed uphill, forming loose mounds the warriors tamped down with shovels and their own feet. In the scheme of things, his efforts weren't much. By the time his strength gave out, he'd added some ten feet to the left wing of the rampart, raising that stretch just above his head. But it helped. And he was there as much for the practice at earthmoving as for the aid he could give to the fortification. As with all things, skill could only come through effort.

  The effort and its immediate results left him flushed with wonder and hope. Cally's loon remained blank, however. Ravenous, he paused for dinner, then went to find Blays and explain what he could do.

  Blays nodded slowly. "So you can move dirt from one place to another, can you?"

  Dante snapped his fingers. "Like that."

  "That's going to come in very handy if we're attacked by a wild pack of sand castles."

  "Look, this is just a start. In time, I may be able to form whole ramparts overnight."

  Blays jerked his thumb at the norren toiling on the earth wall despite the twilight. "Looks like they've tapped into the same magic."

  Instead of speaking, Dante sought the ground-up bones and powdered skin embedded in the dirt beneath Blays' feet, then yanked it six inches to the left. Blays fell straight on his ass.

  "Make more sense now?" Dante said.

  Blays hopped up, smacking dirt from his pants. "All that proves is I'm drunk."

  "Are you?"

  "What, you aren't? We're going to be attacked tomorrow!"

  "You're right. I have the sudden urge to start drinking until I can't stand up. Think they'll kill a man with a hangover?"

  Blays waved a hand through the darkening air. "Quit bitching and start thinking. You may have forgotten this, what with your fancy loons that let you talk to someone hundreds of miles away, but that army doesn't know a thing about what happened here. As far as they know, this fort is still manned by two hundred of the king's finest."

  Dante folded his arms and considered the ground. "There's a chance, however small, they'll reappraise the situation when they see the walls are manned by a horde of bearded giants."

  "So don't let them see that."

  "Sorry, I still don't know how to stop the sun from rising. I'll see if I can work that one out before bedtime."

  "It's a lot simpler than that, dummy. We've got three humans here—and we can stick a lot more on the walls."

  Dante gaped. "Those bodies down there look like overcooked stew. We can't just prop them on the merlons and expect the enemy to wave hello."

  "Lyle's balls, do I have to do everything?" Blays said. "Conjure up some of those visions of yours. A score of red-shirted soldiers watching impassively from the battlements. Lure a bunch of the king's men into town, then seal up the gates with a big plug of dirt to cut the rest of them off. The norren behind the walls get to go all choppy on the troops inside while the warriors on the wall go all shooty on the redshirts trapped outside."

  "That," Dante said, "is not a bad idea."

  "Of course it's not. It's a great idea. If I were paid by the idea, I could retire off that one, that's how great that idea is."

  "I'm going to talk to the chiefs." Dante glanced across the grounds. "Meanwhile, I've got a much more important mission for you."

  Blays straightened. "What's that?"

  "Fetch us the celebratory rum."

  Blays nodded solemnly and ran away. Dante found Hopp speaking with Mourn inside the foyer of one of the round earthen homes. He laid out the plan. Hopp chuckled, grinning his foxy grin, and raised his brown brows at Mourn. "What do you think?"

  Mourn stiffened. "I'm not a strategist. Unless speaking unlearnedly about strategy makes me one. But I have no formal training in strategy."

  "You think I do? Strategy's about guts and intuition. You're a chieftain now. Don't you want to act like one?"

  "I would argue that chieftaincy is not defined by the role itself, but rather by the individuals who fill that role." Mourn gave Dante a dubious look. "But it sounds like a pretty good plan."

  "We could just post the real-life norren along the wall," Dante said. "Convince the redshirts this isn't the hill they want to die on."

  Hopp shook his head sharply. "We're going to have to kill an awful lot of them before we can convince the rest to go home. Don't you think we're
better off behind these walls than meeting them in the field?"

  Dante had no rebuttal for that. In the streets, norren worked by torchlight to carve arrowshafts and fletch them with the feathers of the village's geese and turkeys and chickens. Dante returned to the house he'd been quartered in. The clank of the smiths' hammers woke him more than once. In the morning, the gates were back up and ready to be closed, though a soft-spoken smith whose nulla was clearly ironwork assured him the new hinges were ill-fitting and brittle, prone to breakage under any serious assault. Too starved to think straight, Dante thanked him and headed out for a breakfast of chicken and bread.

  The scouts returned while he was still belching. Gask's army was on the move. At rough count, it bore a thousand footmen and some eighty cavalry. Half again what the depleted clans could muster. Good odds regardless, if one were behind strong gates and not battle-worn from a previous engagement. Less so when the day's plan involved letting scores of the enemy walk straight through the gates.

  Dante climbed the turret on the left side of the mended doors to watch the green valley and the opposite ridge. Behind him, warriors scooped away the rampart immediately behind the gates to hide it from the enemy until the redshirts had already passed into the killing zone. Norren lugged sheafs of arrows up to the walls and distributed them at intervals.

  Just before noon, ten riders crested the far hill. Dante hurried to put on a uniform claimed from one of the dead bodies. It had been scrubbed and restitched, but it still smelled like blood and worse. The gates closed with a boom. A stern call silenced the work of hammers and axes and chisels and shovels. Blays and Lira, the other two real humans participating in the farce, ran up to the battlements, kissed, and spread out along the wall.

  Dante waited for the riders to start up the base of the wedge to Borrull, then summoned the images of several more guards. At first these were nothing more than fuzzy silhouettes, shadow-figures that took none of his strength to maintain but looked perfectly real from a half mile away; as the riders grew near, he filled the figures in with increasing layers of detail until you'd have to be standing right next to them to see they weren't breathing.