"The same thing I told the others."
"Let's pretend I haven't heard because I'm not the others," Blays said.
"Then I would tell you, in a tone of increased annoyance, that the redshirts fled their posts three hours ago. They retreated across the river. An hour after that, the bridges went up in flames."
"Their scouts must have seen us," Dante said. "Either that or those bridges insulted them for the last time."
"How strange," Blays said. "For a moment I imagined we just drove the king's armies from one of the largest cities in his empire."
"Sounds like a tactical retreat." Lira touched the handle of her sword. "What do they care if we take the norren shore?"
Dante suspected she was right and the next few hours bore that out. Among all the round-windowed wooden cottages, the courthouses, pubs, and guard stations, they found no living humans and few dead ones. Most of the bodies lay in the burnt places, bones and twisted limbs poking from entire blocks of blackened timbers. The norren they spoke to repeated the recalcitrant woman's story: the soldiers had pulled out just hours before the army's arrival, torching the bridges behind them. There had been neither explanation nor violence. Just a swift and total withdrawal.
The chiefs encamped at the road along the piers. Scores of scouts roamed the streets. Others struck north to find the nearest bridge. Despite the lack of any official announcement, a brief meeting of chiefs assembled in the public room of one of the pierside taverns.
"Did anyone anticipate this?" Hopp said.
Old Wult shrugged his bony soldiers. "Never figured the redshirts would run from a city just to get away from a bunch of—what do they call us? Grass-munchers?"
"Too dumb to build homes," said the braided woman.
"Shaggies," volunteered a man who wasn't much older than Mourn, reminding Dante he hadn't heard anything from Mourn since the prior night. He touched his loon.
"Duckies," Hopp said. "Since you're ducking the question of where we go next."
"Would have to find a bridge if we wanted to press the attack," Stann said.
"If?" Dante said.
"That was one of the words I said."
"The biggest of them, I'd say. Why back down now?"
Stann tapped the stumps of his fingers against the table. "Bloodthirsty, aren't you?"
"Not especially." Dante jerked his head westward toward the river. "I'm just not looking forward to waiting around to learn what's to come from the heartland."
"Crossing a river to attack a fortified city is a bad idea. Unless the idea is to spend the next decades of your life watching your bones be slowly flushed down the river."
That was the end of discussion. Everyone was too tired from the two marches and the anticlimactic fizzling of their battle-nerves. In the morning, Blays and Lira were nowhere to be found. Dante reached Mourn through the loon and learned the Nine Pines had been delayed and wouldn't reach Dollendun till the following day. There was a listlessness to the troops in the tents. Dante felt it, too. He went down to the docks to think amidst the smell of clams and the sound of gentle waves against the rocks. A mile across the river, the western shores waited.
He was still trying to plot out their next move when Blays thunked down the dock in a dead run and pulled up beside him, panting. "Come on. Need your help in the north end of the city."
"Did you just run all that way?"
"I was going to fly, but I must have left my wings in my other pants."
Dante tapped his brooch. "You do know you could have used your loon?"
"Yes, but then I wouldn't have been able to throw you in a sack and drag you along behind me if you said no."
Dante stood, knees cracking. "What's up, anyway?"
Blays ran his hand down his mouth. "I found where Corra lives."
"Who?"
"Corra. Banning's granddaughter. From the painting, you heartless, shriveled-up tuber."
"Oh." He jogged after Blays, who'd already started back up the boards. "Is she all right?"
"I said I found her house, not her. Up all night searching." Blays looked it, too: his blond hair flat and greasy, his eyes red and puffy, filled with the haunted glaze of the sleepless. "One of her neighbors recognized her from the painting."
Dante frowned over the quiet streets. Dollendun was in better shape than Cling, at least. For all the early riots, there was little sign of war. Two square blocks of rowhouses were torched. Shattered windows here and there. Anti-human graffiti on the sides of the Chattelry Office. The corners of homes showed strange sigils Dante assumed were the urban equivalent of wildsign.
There were living norren, too, mostly female and young. They walked the streets uneasily, double-taking as they saw the two humans running down the cobbles. Most relaxed when they saw the colors of Narashtovik. Others fled down alleys and slammed doors.
Blays stopped in front of a shack on the north fringe of town. Lira waited inside a room furnished with a cot and a chair and a table with a scattering of pencils. Drawings covered the walls, clearly childish, with shaky lines and distorted proportions of faces and dogs. Yet parts showed a clear sophistication, too, with swoops and fine details that suggested the girl had already found her nulla.
"What now?" Dante said, sure he was missing something.
Blays pointed at the floor. "Do your thing."
"My thing?"
"With the blood."
"You'll have to be more specific."
Blays sighed in frustration and knelt, tapping the ground beside crusty red spots that blended into the dirt floor. "The thing where you follow the blood to the person. The neighbor said she was dragged off by soldiers. We have to help her."
Dante crouched down beside the dried droplets. "How do you know it's hers?"
"Who else would it belong to?"
"Her brother? One of the soldiers? Her very unlucky cat?"
"What does it matter if it's a soldier's? Then we'll find him and break his arms until he tells us where she is."
Dante nodded absently, drawing the nether from the corners of the room. It came readily, smelling blood. "What if she's across the river? There must be hundreds of captives over there."
Blays' brow crinkled. "And if I'd made a promise to their hundreds of granddads, I'd be tracking them down, too. I made a pledge to Banning. If we don't keep our pledges, what separates us from the skunks?"
Dante let the nether flow to the dried blood and asked it where it could find more of that blood. A dull pressure sprouted in his head. It pointed west, of course. "Why are you so ready to risk your life to rescue her from the terrible fate of scrubbing the floors of some barracks?"
"She's a 13-year-old girl!" Blays exploded. He hooked his fingers into Dante's hair, clawlike, and rattled his head back and forth. "That's why they took her! She's not scrubbing any fucking floors!"
Dante waited for Blays to release his hair. He sat down and calmed his breathing. "She's alive. Across the river."
"Just point me in the right direction." He glanced at Lira. "You coming?"
She nodded once. "If it's important to you, it's important to me."
Dante cocked his head at her. "What about your pledge to protect me?"
"You've got two thousand norren clansmen camped out in town. If they can't protect you, I don't know what good I'd be."
He smiled with half his mouth and pointed in the direction of the pressure in his head. Blays strode out the door, Lira behind him. Dante followed into the warm afternoon sun. "How exactly are you going to cross the river?"
"What do you care?" Blays said over his shoulder.
"Are you taking a boat?"
"I thought I'd just run myself at the water real hard and try to skip myself across."
"Then either go at night or go far downstream first. They'll be watching the river like hawks. Hawks who hate people who try to cross the river in boats."
Blays tipped his head back at the sky. "It's hours till nightfall. Tell me if she changes location before we g
o."
"Of course," Dante said. "I'll be there at the oars with you."
"Oh."
"You thought I was staying here?"
"I must have been tricked by your resistance to every single aspect of my plan."
"Well, I do think it's moronic," Dante said. "But in my experience, that's when we do our best work."
Blays grinned. As they waited for the sun to slide behind the trees, Dante checked on Corra's direction several times, but if her location changed, it was too minor to make out. They took the rowboat shortly after nightfall. Scattered torches flickered across the western half of the city. After rowing hard to the river's middle, they slowed to lessen the splashing, pulled a foot downstream by the current for every foot they pulled themselves closer to land. Two hundred yards from shore, Dante cast a cloak of shadows over the boat, just thin enough to see through. The hull ground against the smooth pebbles of the bank. While Dante watched the dark houses, Blays and Lira hauled the boat halfway from the water. The grinding wood sounded loud enough to shake Dante's teeth loose.
The current had dragged them more than a mile north of the girl. They'd dressed in dark clothes, non-uniformed, and slipped down the streets at a light jog. Oval shutters hid whatever was behind them. Candlelight slipped through the cracks of a few, but most were dark, abandoned as the redshirts retreated and the norren army arrived just across the waters.
Bootsteps scraped in rhythm around the corner. Dante ducked into the lee of a high-steepled church encrusted with Narashtovik-style gargoyles. Lira and Blays pressed in beside him. Three soldiers scuffed down the street, clubs in hands, swords at their belts. Their voices carried on the calm, cool air.
When the soldiers' footsteps faded, Dante cut through a neighborhood of slanted shacks and hungry-eyed dogs that barked for blocks after they'd departed. He skirted a plaza where a single inn remained open, low talk filtering from its shuttered windows. Three stalls had actually been abandoned. Scraps of cabbage and bread lay sopping on the cobblestones. The pressure in Dante's head grew each minute, drawing them closer to whoever's blood had been spilled upon the shack's dirt floor. If they were lucky, and Corra too, it would be hers.
The pressure spiked to the point of pain. Dante stopped in the shadow of a rowhouse and turned in a slow circle until that almost-pain was aligned like a third eye in the center of his forehead. He pointed across the street to another rowhouse on the corner of a wide and empty intersection.
"If she's here, she's in there."
Blays showed his teeth in something that wasn't a grin. "Let's go."
"Hang on," Dante said. "See anything small and dead?"
Lira pointed to a lantern on the side of the rowhouse. A moth fluttered above the dim light. "How about small and living?"
Dante knocked it down with a flick of nether and delved into its eyes. His stomach lurched. Its flight was slower yet more erratic than a fly's, dropping suddenly before boosting itself back to its prior height. He directed it towards a crack in the shutters. It banged into the wall four times before slipping through, leaving Dante with an instant headache that could have been the result of the nethereal link or simply out of sympathy.
Inside, diffuse lamplight showed a man in a chair with a blackly gleaming bottle tucked into the crook of his elbow. The man swung his head to stare straight into Dante's eyes. A note of panic rose in Dante's gut—but he was watching the moth, nothing more. Dante spun the moth into a cramped kitchen and then up the stairs into a dingy room lit by candles and whatever moonlight fell through the open windows. Two men in red cloaks murmured to each other across a table. Another slept fitfully on a bed of blankets and clothes. Up the next set of stairs, a tight hallway showed four doors, all closed.
Dante let the moth fall into death and waited for his head to start spinning. "One soldier on the ground floor. Three more on the second. I don't know what's on the third."
"Corra?" Blays said.
"Whoever's blood we're following is on the third floor. I couldn't squeeze my moth under the doors."
"Whatever that means, it sounds disgusting. So, what—bust down the door, stab everything in sight?"
Dante shook his head. "I've got something subtler. Watch my back."
He opened a cut on his arm and sneaked across the street to press his eye to the crack in the shutters. The man with the bottle slipped his hand in his pocket, fumbled with his crotch, and glanced upstairs. Unwilling to risk a lesser wound that might give the man time to cry out, Dante called forth the nether, shaped it into a wicked blade, and slung it through the man's neck.
His head tumbled to the ground. The bottle stayed tucked in his elbow. Blood jetted from his neck. On the floor, the head blinked, jaw tensing. Dante tried the door and found it bolted.
"What's the holdup?" Blays whispered. "Forget where your foot goes? The answer is through the door."
"Wait." Dante recalled the nether to his hands and sent it flowing into the headless body. Its limbs shivered. It reached for the bottle, quivering, and set it on the floor with a soft thunk. It stood and stumbled to the door to claw at the lock. Blays whipped out his swords. Dante held up his palm. "It's all right."
The body grabbed the bolt, snicked it open, and stepped back. Dante swung open the door. The headless automaton stood perfectly still besides the blood coursing down its neatly bisected neck.
Blays choked, swallowing down a scream. "What's the matter with you?"
"I don't like getting slaughtered by hordes of soldiers?" Dante jerked his chin at the stairs at the back of the room. "The others are up there."
Blays shuddered. His feet creaked on the floorboards. He eased up the stairway like a stalking ghost. Dante followed, Lira right behind. At the landing, a tight corner concealed them from the room beyond. Blays paused there, blades pointed down, and charged.
The two men at the table bolted upright, shouting. Dante knocked one back down with a spike of nether straight through the heart. Blays hacked down the raised arm of the second man and stabbed him through the throat. The sleeping man woke without a word and leapt from his pile of clothes. He backpedaled toward the window. With her free hand, Lira grabbed his flapping cloak and swept out his legs with a crescent-shaped kick. She drove her sword into him as he fell, pinning him to the floor.
Three of the upstairs rooms were empty. They found her in the fourth lying on a scratchy straw mattress. She wore nothing but bruises.
"Corra?" Blays said. She blinked at him, blanket pulled to her chin, eyes as bright as stars. The norren girl was shorter than Dante, but the lankiness of her limbs belied the fact that wouldn't last. Blays beckoned her forward. "We're friends of your granddad's. You need to come with us."
She glanced at the floor as if she could see through it, then uncurled and stood, blanket pulled tight around her bony shoulders. Lira's gaze dropped to her bare and black-soled feet.
"Go down and watch the door, Blays," Dante said. "I'm going to get her some boots."
He descended to the second floor while Blays continued downstairs. He wrenched the boots off one of the bodies and brought them back up to the girl, who sat and mechanically laced them up. Her white shins stuck from the tops of the boots like broken wishbones. She looked up at Dante with eyes like forgotten silver.
Blays led the way back to the boat. They heard no horns or bells or cries. The city was dark, silent, as if holding its breath. Dante climbed into the boat and offered Corra his hand. Blays waded into the river to push them off, then rolled over the side of the boat. Their paddles stirred the black waters.
They reached the eastern shore without incident. At the outskirts of the army's camp, Blays found an empty home and led the girl inside. He and Dante filled a basin with water from the well and brought it to Lira, then closed the front door and walked into the street.
Blays booted a pebble down the cobbles. "Thanks."
"Of course."
"They deserved to die."
Dante nodded absently. "She looks okay.
Just quiet."
"I'll show her the painting tomorrow," Blays said. "You should be there too."
Dante didn't think he'd be able to sleep, but he was wrong. Sleep always found a way.
Mourn and the Nine Pines arrived in Dollendun at noon. The clan had hunted down the soldiers who'd massacred the village and slaughtered the redshirts in the night. Mourn relayed this news with no joy. His voice held an implacable justice, as if the vengeance meted out on the soldiers hadn't been caused by him, but through the unstoppable clockwork of the cosmos. Dante had thought it more than strange the Nine Pines had been so swift to appoint him as their new chieftain, but their decision couldn't have been better.
Blays found Dante in the square and brought him back to the abandoned home. By daylight, Corra looked less pale and bedraggled. Lira had combed the tangles from the girl's dark hair. As Dante and Blays came into the house, she didn't say a word, merely followed Dante with her star-bright eyes. Blays untucked the painting from under his arm and presented it to her. Corra leaned forward like a leery terrier approaching a stranger.
"Grampa," she said.
"That's right," Blays said. "He asked us to give this to you. He said—"
Corra picked up the stretched canvas, carried it into her room, and quietly closed her door. Blays smiled in frustration. "Well, that's one way to respond to your dying granddad's last gesture."
Lira stared him down. "It's the first word she's said."
"I'm not complaining. I'm commenting. That that was weird. Because it was."
"Given what she's been through?"
Blays held out his palms. "I'm not complaining!"
Dante escaped to let them work through their disagreement for themselves. Five days after they norren occupied Dollendun, their scouts came back from the north. Downstream, the next two bridges had been burnt, too. The nearest intact crossing was some 150 miles down the river. More than halfway to Setteven itself.
At the war council, Stann laid out his case. Continue to occupy the eastern shore. Send a peace treaty to Setteven requesting the return of all slaves and the immediate cessation of hostilities. Offer to remain a part of greater Gask, with all the requisite taxes and tributes that involved, in exchange for the revocation of the king's ultimatum and for the total dissolution of norren slavery. If King Moddegan refused, let him come try to take the Territories for himself. The army of clans wouldn't leave until the treaty was signed.
The Great Rift Page 48
