The Great Rift

by Edward W. Robertson

  Dante snatched the paper from his hand. His head filled with stars. The handwriting was his—the same tilt to the f's and t's, the e's drawn in a single outward-spiraling loop—but the words weren't anything he had ever put to paper. And the words spelled out death.

  "This isn't mine," he said.

  Kav bared his teeth. "Is that not your writing?"

  "It's a forgery. A fake. I didn't order Cally's death! Are you doing this, Kav? Are you implicating me to sweep away your tracks?"

  "Enough!" Kav thundered in the tones of a patrician who's spent decades in the pulpit. "I've told no lies and done no wrongs. We found what we have found. You will have time enough to rehearse your defense from the cells beneath the Citadel."

  Nether condensed around Dante's whole body, fog-like. The guards drew back, swords wavering. Dante forced the shadows to dissolve away. The act was as hard as drinking boiling water.

  "I'll find your lies," he said. "And then I'll kill you."

  Kav snorted and gestured at the guards. "Bind his hands."

  They locked him in chains and marched him to the disused dungeons beneath the keep. It smelled of must and old urine. As far as the scant torchlight showed, he was the only one there. The guards brought him to a room walled with stone and closed the iron door with a clang.

  "You will be allowed to speak on your own behalf at the appropriate time," Kav said through the grille. "Despite your treachery, you are still one of Arawn's children."

  "Then let me speak to Blays," Dante said.

  "This reminds me. If you make any attempt to escape, your friends will be killed."

  Dante pressed his face against the metal bars slitting the window. "Don't."

  "Then don't do anything stupid," Kav said.

  "Send Blays."

  Kav disappeared from sight. A torch in the hallway shed the barest light into his cell. He wondered if it was the same one Larrimore had locked him in long ago when he'd bluffed his way into the Citadel with the intent of assassinating the woman who'd ruled it. He walked the corners of the room, fingers trailing the cool stone walls. There was nether in them. Faint, but present. Was there anything in the world beyond the shadows' touch?

  He allowed himself to be angry for a while. He needed to let it boil away, leaving him with a clear head capable of establishing Kav's guilt and exonerating himself. Somburr's decryption of the letters might accomplish that, but he couldn't depend on it. His life—Narashtovik, norren freedom, everything—hung on proving Kav was the one who belonged in this cell.

  So he sat, reached out for the nether, breathed. Soon, he calmed. There could be something that would help him on the knife. There could be something on Cally's body. What about Cally's last words? Skunks and whispers—had he been attacked by someone who smelled foul? A fishmonger? A dung-shoveler? Unlikely to help just now, that. Yet if he could find the killer, he was certain he could make the man talk. If he could make the man talk, he could out Kav's treachery to the world.

  At least it was cool in the dungeons. He laid on the stones, hands clasped behind his head. He must have slept; footsteps woke him some time later. Blays' face appeared in the grille.

  "Man, what have you done now?"

  "Oh, nothing much," Dante said. "Just murdered Cally."

  "Very talented of you," Blays said. "Weren't we two hundred miles away at the time?"

  "You know how these things go. I must have hired an assassin in my sleep and forgotten all about it in the morning."

  "Oh, I assassinated five people that way just last year."

  Dante laughed lightly. "So."

  "How long you got before they post your head on the city gates?"

  "Three weeks at most. They may want to save me as a gift to the Gaskans. Executing me in front of the generals would send a strong message that Kav's ready to bring Narashtovik back in line."

  Blays nodded in the gloom. "And just to be clear, you'd rather not be drawn and quartered in front of the cathedral?"

  "Ideally, no." Dante explained Somburr's involvement with the letters, and his own thoughts about where to go next. "I could be one clue away from exoneration. But I can't do much from inside these walls."

  "If I can get you out, we'll have to find the evidence in a hurry," Blays said. "If Kav sees you strolling around the streets, he's not going to wave hello. Unless it's with a butcher knife."

  Dante smacked the stone wall. "Don't worry about breaking me out. Worry about finding something to tie Kav to Cally's death."

  "Got it." Blays pressed his eye up to the bars in the window. "You're taking this pretty well."

  "A prison is only a prison if you let it imprison you."

  "Nevermind. I see the madness has already set in." Blays disappeared.

  Dante faced the wall and sat and thought. He had no way to gauge the time. Trays of food were brought in. A bucket was brought out. Three days passed. Or was it four? Blays dropped by to let him know he hadn't been able to find where Cally's body was being kept, but that Wint and Ulev had made it back safely to Narashtovik. There had been another clash between the Gaskan army and the union of the clans. Both sides had been bloodied, but the norren had fallen back once more. The clans had splintered, dispersing into the woods beyond Dollendun.

  When Dante wasn't sleeping, he worked with the nether, letting his thoughts come as they may. The food came twice more. The bucket went away twice more. Blays returned.

  "I think I found something," he said.

  Dante rose. "Oh?"

  "You. It turns out you're in prison!"

  "Very good. Now please tell me you found a reason for me to leave."

  "Well." Blays paced beyond the iron door. "I can't find the body. But I did find someone who knows where it is."

  Dante ran to the door. "Who?"

  "I don't know, some servant who heard I was looking for it. Sounds none too happy with the way Kav's handling things. Guy's name is Amwell. Know him?"

  "No, but there must be three hundred employees of some kind or another inside the Citadel's walls. And in case you forgotten, we've spent most of the last three years off crapping in the woods. I don't recognize half the faces here anymore."

  Blays clapped. "All right. So here's the plan. Tonight, I come down and pick the lock. They've only got three or four guards up top, so it should be no problem for you to put them to sleep or kill them if we have to. I could try to drug them, too, if you know something I can get ahold of by tonight. Meanwhile, me and Lira will have a little wagon parked up top. I put you in a sack, I carry you outside in the sack, sling you in the wagon, and roll you out the front gates. Once we're past the walls, we'll meet up with Amwell and head off to see the body. If anything goes wrong, we'll have a grappling hook with a team of horses—"

  "Sounds complicated," Dante said. "How about I just walk out through the tunnel I dug?"

  "What?"

  "I dug a tunnel."

  "Let me see your hands," Blays said. Dante stuck them through the window grille and Blays turned them this way and that. "Funny, your fingernails still seem to exst."

  "I used the nether," Dante said. "I moved the earth until I was past the outer walls, then plugged it on either side so no one would see the holes. I can open it back up in seconds."

  "Well fine, if you want to be boring about it. How's 1 AM sound, then?"

  "When is that? I don't have any idea what time it is down here."

  Blays tapped his teeth. He smacked the wall between himself and Dante. "Can you open this up, too?"

  "Sure."

  "Then I'll come down at one, you let me inside the cell, and we'll both walk out the tunnel."

  "You want me to break you in to prison?" Dante said.

  "Just for a few minutes! It's perfectly sane in this context."

  "See you at one," Dante grinned.

  He napped immediately afterward—in the timeless darkness, sleep came whenever he wanted. When he woke, he felt the contours of the wall, the nether waiting there. Blays jogged dow
n the steps a couple hours later.

  "Guards didn't want to let me down again," he said. "But since you're their master and all, I feel I should warn you they're susceptible to bribes."

  "Sounds like I owe them a promotion." Dante pushed his palms together, then spread them apart. The wall between them curled inward, stone flowing like cool syrup.

  "That was disturbingly vaginal," Blays said.

  "If that's what you think, Lira may need to see a physician," Dante said. "Come on."

  He parted the thin layer of rock papering the hole at the back of his cell, revealing a smooth-walled tunnel just wide enough to walk down without turning his shoulders. He lit a white light on his fingertip and strode down the passage.

  "So there's basically nothing that can keep you imprisoned anymore, is there?" Blays said.

  "They could make the walls out of wood or metal," Dante said.

  "Which you could then smash through."

  "Well, it depends how thick it is."

  Blays tapped the side of the wall. "Or they could stick you in a big glass box and put the box underwater so if you broke the box you'd drown."

  "For the sake of global sanity, I'm glad you're not a fan of torture."

  Over the span of a few steps, the tunnel changed from stone to dirt, sloping up beneath them. After another hundred yards, a set of hard-packed dirt steps appeared, terminating in a blank wall and ceiling.

  Dante waved Blays away from the steps. "This probably won't collapse all over me, but you might want to back off."

  "I'm just going to head back to your cell. Better yet, back to my room."

  Dante took hold of the nether webbed through the dirt atop the staircase and pushed. A black hole opened above his head, spilling dirt and warm, moist air into the tunnel. Stars dotted the gap through the ground. Dante jogged up into the grass just outside the walls ringing the Citadel.

  Blays glanced up at the walls and gestured him forward. A slight and black-haired man waited for them in an alley two blocks from the Citadel. Blays nodded. "Dante, meet Amwell."

  Dante shook hands. "Thank you for meeting us."

  Amwell bobbed his head. "Thank you for meeting me. I never met Callimandicus—I've only served the Citadel a few months—but I admired him for years. I don't believe for a second that you killed him."

  "Well, we may be about to find out who did. Lead on."

  "He's in the carneterium." Amwell started down the street toward the hilltop cemetery.

  "Oh goody," Blays said. "Think we'll have to fight any wights?"

  "Do you know where, exactly?" Dante said. "That place is huge."

  Amwell nodded. "I work there, sir. And it's the most curious thing—since Kav brought his body to us, no one else has seen it. We've actually been ordered to keep the room sealed."

  Blays snorted. "Well, that is the standard procedure for investigating a murder, isn't it? Lock up all the evidence, then accuse someone at random?"

  "There's only one reason Kav wouldn't look at the body," Dante said. "And that's if he were already perfectly aware who killed him."

  "How will the body help, anyway?" Blays said. "You're not going to...do anything funny, are you?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "You know. Make him sit up and tell you what happened."

  "Are you crazy?" Dante said. "Why make him sit up when I can make him dance? Just wait till you hear what I've got in store for your corpse."

  "Oh no. No, that's not happening. If I'm ever about to die, I'm going to kill you first."

  "Then I'll have to preempt your preemptive strike." Dante wiped sweat from his hairline. After the stagnant must of the dungeons, the air tasted salty and fresh. It was still blood-warm even in the dead of night, however, humid and horrible. They strode through the grassy field surrounding the hill. "Just so you know, I'm totally out of ideas if this doesn't work."

  Blays nodded sagely. "Well, there's always suicide."

  Amwell led them to the hole in the base of the hill. Above the entrance, a stone plaque showed Arawn's millstone, the North Star perched upon the tip of its pole. Amwell unlocked the door and lit a lantern in the foyer.

  "Please follow me, lords." He turned and smiled. The lamplight gave his black hair a brown halo. The man led them through the mazelike catacombs. Within minutes, Dante was hopelessly lost; if Amwell were to drop dead, Dante would stand a better chance of tunneling back out than of finding his way back to the entrance. The passages smelled of death old and new. It was managable stench, however; the carneterium workers used balms and the nether to slow the decay, dousing the tunnels and rooms with perfumes. In spots, the scent of wildflowers drove the smell of rot away completely.

  At last, Amwell stopped in front of a closed door no different from the two score they'd already passed. He slipped the key into the lock and turned to Dante. "He is inside, my lord."

  Inside, a stained shroud covered the body on the stone platform in the middle of the room. A withered foot projected from the shroud's edge. Dante found a lantern on the wall and lit it with a thought. A hooked chain hung above the table. Dante affixed the lantern to it, ran his hands through his hair, and peeled the shroud from the body.

  It was easy to pretend it was just another corpse. He'd seen hundreds in his young life. When he'd helped establish the carneterium, he examined dozens just like this. The neck wound on his current subject appeared to have been the lethal strike. It stretched across the man's throat, black with crusted blood, with a gap like that, it was a wonder Cally'd been able to talk at all. The skin on the man's left hip, knee, and shoulder was white, marbled with reddish lines, but the areas around the blanched skin were brown-black and bruised.

  "Was he found resting on his left side?" Dante said.

  Amwell tipped back his head and considered the ceiling. "I believe so. How can you tell?"

  "That bruising there. Seen it on a lot of bodies. It looks identical to a beating, but I believe it's just where the blood comes to rest inside them once they die—it always shows up around the parts of the body that have rested on the ground." Dante made his way down the corpse. There were no other obvious wounds. That fit with what he'd heard through the loon. He went to Cally's fingernails, hoping the old man had fought back and scraped the man; if he found any foreign blood, he could follow it to the killer. But Cally's hands had been scrubbed and cleaned. Fingernails, too. Except a crease of blood along the thumbnail. Dante's heart leapt. He touched the nether within it, but there was no accompanying pressure to point him toward the man who'd done it. It was Cally's, remnants of his futile efforts to quench the gash cut into his throat.

  "Was anything removed from the room?"

  Amwell gazed at the ceiling again. "A small rug. Soiled. His clothes, of course." He frowned. "Oh. And this." He went to a desk at the side of the room and returned with a white handkerchief spotted with blood. "This was fresh when we found it. Strange, isn't it? If Lord Callimandicus had used this to stanch the bleeding, you would expect it to be drenched, wouldn't you? But there are just these little spots."

  Dante snatched it up and reached for the nether in the dried brown spots. Pressure bloomed near the middle of his forehead. "Which way am I facing right now?"

  "South. South-southwest, I think. Isn't that about the direction of the Citadel?"

  "It is."

  The man's mouth parted halfway. He stepped under the lamplight, gazing down at Cally. "Does that mean the man who did this..?"

  Dante stared at him. Beneath the light of the lamp, Amwell's hair had that same two-toned appearance Dante had noticed when they entered the carneterium. While most of it was black, a few patches were a rich brown, including a solid stripe that ran back from the left side of his head.

  "Do you dye your hair?" Dante said.

  Amwell didn't look up. Instead, he went still. Too still. "Can't say that I do. Why do you ask such an odd question?"

  Dante caught Blays' eye, then nodded at Amwell, making a small gesture they'd worked
out years ago for times such as these. Blays darted in behind the man, locking his arms behind his back.

  "What are you doing?" Amwell shouted.

  Dante closed on him, running his fingers through the hair on the man's scalp. His black hair was indeed black from root to tip, but his brown hair showed three shades: deep brown with a tinge of gray at the tips, where it was exposed to the sunlight; then black down to just above the roots. There, in a layer as thin as a cotton undershirt, the hair was stark white.

  Dante's skin prickled. "You skunk."

  "Let me go!" Amwell twisted to his left, trying to free his arms, but Blays bore down, cranking his wrist to the edge of breakage. Amwell gasped and went slack.

  "That's what Cally said as he was dying," Dante said. "'Skunk.' I thought he meant the killer was foul-smelling. But he was talking about hair. The stripe on your head that's white like a skunk's."

  "This is madness! I am a tender to the dead, not an assassin!"

  "You were too eager to lead me along. How long have you been spying on me? To learn what would set me at Kav's throat?" Dante waved the blood-spotted handkerchief. "This is Kav's blood, isn't it? Where did you get this? Did he toss it out after shaving?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about!"

  "He's not the only one," Blays said. "Why am I on the verge of breaking this guy's arms over here?"

  "Tell him," Dante said. Amwell wriggled again. Blays bent his wrist. Amwell went white as bleached parchment. Dante beckoned the nether to him, cupping it in his hands, spending some of its own strength to make it blackly visible to common eyes. Theatrically, he grabbed it in both hands and bent it into a wicked crescent. He extended his right hand, palm-up. As smoothly as a patrolling pike, the blade honed in on Amwell's throat. Dante smiled without humor. "Talk before this sorcerous sword bites through your throat."

  Behind Amwell, Blays grinned at Dante's show. Amwell jerked away from the nethereal blade. Blays shifted his hips to take the man's weight and rotated his arm. Something popped in Amwell's wrist.

  "Stop!" he shrieked. "I was sent by Cassinder of Beckonridge. I've been working with Wint for months."