The riders pulled up ten yards from the gate. A lean-muscled man with a thick black beard shucked off his helmet and squinted up at Dante. "Hail and such."
"To you too," Dante said, doing his best to neutralize his Mallish-Narashtovik accent.
The rider gazed across the battle-churned field and boot-stomped sod. "All's well?"
"Had an attack a couple nights back. One of the tribes—a big one. Put them down easily enough."
"Typical," the man laughed humorlessly. "Well, the rest of us are just thataway. Be seeing you in a couple hours."
Dante nodded, heart bumping. The rider turned his horse and headed down the dirt path. The others followed. As the men hit the valley, Dante prayed to Arawn they wouldn't circle around the butte and find the pile of bodies bloating between the rocks, but the mounted scouts continued straight back the way they came. Dante dispelled the shadow-figures. The men crossed beyond the hill.
He signaled to Stann. Stann tipped back his head and let out a long, upward-lilting note. The norren burst from the houses, jogging to positions along the wall. Others continued to make last-minute additions to the wooden palisade and the earthworks supporting them. Men carried up water and food to those on the walls. The sun inched along the sky.
Less than two hours later, the far hill turned black with men. Scores of horsemen, hundreds of footmen, a flock of ox-driven wagons that slowed their progress to a casual walk. Dante sweated in his false clothes. He returned his silhouettes to the battlements and probed at the dirt in the tunnel beneath the gates. It too was freshly blood-soaked, thick with death and nether. Ready to respond.
Warriors flattened themselves behind the merlons. Dante sharpened the lines of his illusory guards. The army rumbled down the hill and started up the butte. Dante's nerves thrummed. Impossibly, the king's men continued on, oblivious to the counter army lurking among the fortifications. The human soldiers carried unstrung bows and sheathed swords, shoving each other, joking, faces grimy with the sweat and dirt of a long march through hostile lands. And then they stood before the gates, a blanket of troops smothering the grasses. Horses snorted. The smell of their sweat climbed the walls. Dante straightened atop his tower, raising a hand to the rider who pranced forth, his lightweight red cape snapping behind him.
"General Varrimorde, Earl of Junland," he called in the crisp and regal accent of his homeland, a rich farming county bordering Setteven itself. "I request entry for the king's army of the Varton Forest and surrounding lands."
Dante saluted and barked a command down to the gates. Wood and hinges creaked. The Earl of Junland faced his troops and hollered them forward with the elegant nonsense of martial commands shouted loudly enough for an army to hear. Dante fought down a giggle and the urge to vomit. Were they really letting an enemy army stroll through their front door? The first troops emerged on the far side of the wall, a mixture of cavalry and their aides. Infantry with spears and swords and studded armor followed them through.
Varrimorde frowned at the empty grounds, the fresh ramparts, the burnt and disassembled husks of houses. "What has happened here?"
Hopp screamed like it was the end of the world. Scores of norren popped up from behind walls of wood and stone, unleashing a punishing volley of arrows. Men screamed among the twang of bows. Varrimorde whipped out his sword.
"To arms! Treachery! To arms!"
Confusion rippled through the men outside the gates. They reached for bows and swords. Inside, the surviving soldiers fumbled out swords and spears and charged the palisaded archers. With a great cry, the men outside the walls surged into the tunnel.
Time to cut them off. To plug the gates and slaughter those trapped inside. Dante dispersed his shadow-figures with a wave and plunged his focus into the dirt beneath the redshirts' trampling feet. The nether waited. He grabbed hold and yanked—but the dirt held firm.
21
Dante froze. Soldiers rushed through the open gates and into the storm of arrows and blades raging around the ramparts. Varrimorde jolted from his mount, an arrow sticking from his hip. His cavalry screamed in anger and galloped behind the palisades, swords glinting in the sun.
Again Dante grasped the nether in the soil between the gates. Had he pulled too hard the first time, like whipping a tablecloth out from under a set of dishes without spilling a one? Or had his entire control of the earth been a fluke, only to falter when his failure might mean the death of everyone here? He pulled again. Again, the nether moved, but the dirt between its shadowy strands stayed put.
His head went dizzy. He forced himself to slow his breathing to a steady tide. He saw at once. Knifelike, he had honed in on the nether itself. He needed to relax. To move not just the nether but all it was bound to. Like that, he could feel the weight of the dirt, the solid strength of the pebbles and stones. He yanked on the dark net a third time. A great rumble boomed from below. Men shouted in alarm. Dante sucked in the dirt like an outgoing wave and mounded it to the top of the tunnel. A half dozen soldiers were swept up in the rush, instantly crushed beneath a tide of dirt. The flow of men into the village stopped cold. On the other side of the plug, swords whacked into the earthen wall, as if the locked-out soldiers could simply chop their way through.
The norren on the walls poured fire into the shattered ranks trapped inside the fort. At the base of the steps, Blays and Lira fought side by side, falling back under a throng of redshirts hoping to push up the steps and carve into the archers crouched behind the walls. Dante ran forward, slinging a bolt of nether through the neck of the foremost soldier. He fell in a red spray. The man behind him stumbled. Blays jabbed forward, impaling the man on his own momentum. The man's dying weight forced him back, unbalancing him against the steps and exposing his lead leg to an incoming sword. Lira knocked it aside with a backhand sweep and grabbed the attacker's wrist with her bare hand. The man pulled back on his arm. Lira flowed after him, keeping clamped on his wrist while her elbow bent and slammed into his face. His sword clanged on the steps. She buried her sword in his belly.
Dante struck out again, aiming for another neck, but his hold on the nether was wobbly, weakening. The lance of shadows clipped the man's collarbone. He shrieked, flailing at an enemy who wasn't there. Blays stabbed him in his turned back and kicked him down the stairs.
The crowd at the steps had been reduced to a couple. Something similar had happened along the ramparts, where the cavalry had cut their way through the norren lines before succumbing to spears and arrows. Horses thrashed in the dirt, trying to rise and flopping to their bellies. Scattered redshirts fought on, falling swiftly beneath the hammerblows of the norren's outsized weapons. A group of four of the king's men cut down a pair of warriors from a clan Dante didn't recognize. A band of norren rushed them, howling, and the four soldiers bolted toward the stone houses across the field.
Cut off from the rest of their troop, with all their officers dying or dead, the few survivors flung down their weapons and raised their hands. The norren on the wall swiveled to the opposite side and fired down on the men still trying to dig through the dammed gate. In less than a minute, the survivors outside broke, fleeing downhill in a mad run, arrows whisking between them, felling them into the hot grass. They abandoned the wagons and the wounded. A knot of men remained trapped under the gates, unwilling to risk a run. Instead, the archers climbed down inside the walls to set up behind the arrow slits. The redshirts' screams filtered up to the wall where Dante sat to catch his breath.
Like that, it was over. All that was left was to tend to the wounded—death, for the king's men, who were cut down and dragged to the cliff's edge. Their own warriors were carried on shoulders and stretchers to the great hall above which Orlen had killed the commander and Mourn had killed Orlen, where the benches had been emptied out to build the palisade. Warriors set to work digging out the gates. A handful leapt down from the walls into the grass to chase down the oxen and bring the wagons up to the village. When Dante called, the nether hesitated, sapped by hi
s struggles with the earth, but he left to the hall to do what little he could for the wounded.
Inside the hall, he could hear the screams from the cliffs. This wasn't war with all the niceties between squabbling kings. It had passed beyond that; in mere days, it had become something twisted and vicious; the norren fought the way a wounded lion fought, half-mad and pitiless. Any humans who came to the Norren Territories to hurt the norren would never go home again.
Dante washed his hands of blood and returned to the hard yellow sunlight. Warriors milled everywhere, washing up, hauling the barrels and sacks from the captured wagons into a pair of the houses built into the ground. Others dug a mass grave for their own dead. Their apparent lack of regard for the departed was curious, almost disturbing. There was nothing organized about it. Some cried while others dug. When the hole was deep enough, they filled it with bodies, then walked away. There were no public words. No tombstones or eulogies. Within minutes, the fallen returned to the hills that had birthed them. Was this, too, the product of their nomadic lives? Why leave a gravestone when you might never return? Was it one more sign of their stoicism? And why did it bother him? It somehow seemed more final, as if the dead were already long gone and soon forgotten. He hadn't been with them long enough to understand.
Hopp again came through without a scratch. He grinned at the torn-up ramparts, but his eyes were pained. "Cut it a little closer there with the gates, didn't you?"
"Considering I just learned how to do that yesterday, I'd say I did pretty good."
"We are alive. It could have been worse."
Dante nodded at the blood-soaked wall of raw dirt. "How many losses?"
"Fifty. Sixty." Hopp's grin soured. "Do they always have so many horses?"
"The rich ones do. Fortunately for us there are always more poor."
"Well, I don't like them. The horses. Or the men who ride them. What can we do about them?"
"Spears help," Dante said. "If you can figure out something more effective than that, we'll never lose another battle."
Dante had felt oddly detached from the victory. Moody, unenthused. The talk with Hopp helped a little. So did the contents of one of the wagons: casks of beer and rum, which the norren quickly distributed throughout the yurts and houses of the village. Others hauled broken chunks of the palisades and piled them into crackling bonfires—not because there was any need for warmth, but because lighting huge fires was simply what one did after a big victory. Some sang songs, minor-keyed and angrily joyous. A pair of Broken Herons slung Dante up on their bumping shoulders and hauled him to a spot beside the fire. A mug was sloshed into his hands. The undiluted rum brought tears to his eyes. The wet wood threw thick white smoke into the sky. Strangers joined the circle around the fire to ask his name and give theirs. He found himself laughing. When they urged him to tell them what he'd done to make the earth rise, he told them of his first two failures and how he thought they might all die because he'd promised the impossible, and they laughed, too.
He was far from sober when Blays found him. Blays' grin was crooked and devilish, and at first Dante assumed he'd been off in a bedroom with Lira somewhere. And maybe he had, but he also bore something far more interesting: General Varrimorde's marching orders.
Dante stood, open-mouthed, and extricated himself from the celebrants at the fire. Inside the stone house where he was quartered, he sat down in the lamplight with the leather-wrapped bundle of papers.
The orders were more or less as Stann had surmised. Varrimorde had been charged with taking command of the fort at Borrull and operating as the backbone of Gaskan military operations in the region—checkmating any major threats, should they appear, while smaller divisions were dispatched to the front to take the towns beyond the border one by one. There were no contingency orders for what to do if the fort was lost. It simply hadn't been planned for. Furthermore, no legions larger than a couple hundred men were expected to arrive in the Territories within the next four weeks. Everything had hinged on Varrimorde's campaign at the fort.
Dante sat back and rubbed his hand over his mouth. "It'll be days before the survivors make it back across the border. Days after that until they get word to anyone who can make a decision about what to do next. Even if they push up their schedule, we have two weeks or more before they can mount another threat against the Territories."
"I'm sensing something fiendish," Blays said.
"Well shouldn't we?"
"Of course. We're can't let the norren in the border towns sit there in chains when we could be stomping redshirt ass so hard the king tries to outlaw boots."
Dante rolled his lip between his teeth. "Would still be risky. If we get knocked out trying to retake the towns, the Territories will be back to defending themselves with scattered clans."
"We can't not take that risk." Blays stood up to prowl around the table. "All the mucking around we've done down here, that boils down to a pledge to the norren to protect them. To keep them out of trouble. If we've got norren cities occupied by Gaskan troops, we're honor-bound to liberate them."
Dante set down the papers and peered at Blays. "Honor-bound? You've been spending too much time with Lira."
"Well, it's true, isn't it? We made a bond to better their lives. If we don't keep that bond, we've betrayed them."
"Maybe the best way to better their lives is to consolidate what we've got before we go dashing about with banners in hand."
"What's this? You were the one who brought up striking back."
"And then your reasons for agreeing were so dumb I reversed my mind."
Blays snorted. "It's a smart play either way you look at it. Our whole philosophy is to press every advantage we get, isn't it? Well, we've got an army of angry giants. I'd say that trumps their nothing of nothing."
"I'm going to get ahold of Cally," Dante said. "Then we'll see what Hopp and the chieftains have to say."
To Dante's mild surprise, Cally answered in an instant. "I hear a certain someone convinced a certain substance to flow in ways that substance never should."
"It turns out you don't move the earth," Dante said. "You move the nether, and the earth moves with it."
"That doesn't make any sense. You always move the nether. If what you say is true, I'd be knocking down walls and tearing down ceilings every time I summoned it."
"You have to kind of relax when you do it. Go slow but strong. Like pushing a bookshelf across the room. If you push too fast, the whole thing topples over."
"I see," Cally said. "My suggestion to you: never try teaching."
"If I could show you it would make a lot more sense."
"Next time you're back in Narashtovik, then."
"In the meantime, we've got a conundrum," Dante said. "As far as we can tell, we just smashed the enemy's only major force in the region."
"So counterattack."
Cheers thundered from outside. Dante glanced out the window. "What, just like that?"
"Is there a better time to counterattack than when the enemy has nothing to counter-counterattack with?"
"Sure. When he's got nothing and he's drunk in bed."
"Moddegan and his viziers thought conquering the norren would be like plucking bearded, cave-dwelling flowers," Cally said. "You just broke their advance legion. What if you can kick them out of the Territories entirely? Would they sign a peace treaty then?"
"You think so?"
"Arawn's bowels, no," the old man chuckled. "But you never know."
Dante clicked off and wandered outside. Drums beat steadily, as low and monotonous as a heartbeat. Norren moved about the fires in what some might call a dance. To Dante, it looked more like sparring: warriors crouched low, lashing out with straight kicks their partners intercepted with kicks of their own. In unpredictable rhythms, they pivoted on their heels, lurching in to deliver slaps to their partners' faces and chests. The snapping fires cast long, swift shadows over the battle-torn grass. Dante found Hopp smiling wickedly on the perimeter.
&
nbsp; "Didn't get enough fighting during the day?" Dante said.
"You've never seen our dance of conquering before?"
"Why would I have? I've only been warring alongside your people for months now. You're normally so open with outsiders."
"You wouldn't have had the chance," Hopp said. "You don't see this before any old skirmish. This dance is reserved for the big invasion of enemy lands."
Dante tried to read Hopp's face, but his head was clouded by the headache of departing liquor. "Invasion?"
"We've decided we don't like seeing any of our cousins in chains." The fire washed Hopp's branded face in white and red. "We're going to take our lands back."
* * *
It didn't wind up as much of a fight.
Two more clans came to Borrull the next day. The chiefs left a token force to hold the fort while the main army headed south at a jog. They hit the river three days later. The first village they reached was defended by fewer than twenty redshirts crowded into a single house. The norren shot them down as they fled out the back door, arrows sprouting from the redshirts' backs like sudden weeds. It was over in minutes. After, norren wandered from their hillside houses, gazing on the dead soldiers with secret smiles before rushing to embrace the sweating clansmen who'd set them free.
A handful of villagers joined them as they camped outside town. Another clan met them in the fields the next day. They captured a second village that morning and a third by afternoon. The Gaskan troops in both were token forces that might not have been able to withstand a single clan. If General Varrimorde's army had been in place at Borrull, with roving legions sweeping away any clans that poked up their heads, the village garrisons may have been able to keep their norren charges in check. Before the combined army of the clans, they were snuffed out like embers that had strayed too far from the fire.
The Great Rift Page 46
