The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Dante Galand," the remaining man said, and they heard the high, reedy voice from the stream two mornings before. He had a long, pale face, black hair queued at the base of his neck and falling past his shoulders. He was wearing nothing but a dirty gray set of underclothes which sagged at the ass and elbows.

  "Some son of a bitch who won't leave us alone," Blays said back at him, twisting his sword in the other man's body and hauling it free. Blood sprayed over his hand and the corpse dropped onto Dante's feet, pulling his sword from his grasp. The man splayed his fingers at them and Dante saw the air go dark. By instinct he punched back and a black gout rippled like flame from his hand. The two forces met and became nothing.

  The man curled his lip, gestured with index and middle fingers. Dante felt the nether enfolding him like a cloak. He swung his arm from the elbow as if to say "Behold!" and again negated the man's power.

  "Stop that," the man said.

  "Burn in hell!" Blays shot, chopping the air and spraying the man with blood. He stepped forward.

  "Don't move," Dante warned.

  "They didn't tell me you shared the talent," the black-haired man said, fists held out from his sides. A temporary stillness stood between them.

  "What did they tell you?"

  "You'd stolen the Cycle." He smiled with half his mouth. "I can see that much is true."

  "Can you?"

  "It's cleared your mind," the man said, eyes and voice pinched with suspicion. "Opened the paths to the nether."

  "I see," Dante lied.

  "Indeed," the man nodded, glancing between Dante and Blays' blood-slick sword. "This may change things."

  "How's that?" Blays said.

  "They may welcome another into the fold, that's how."

  Blays laughed. "The only fold's going to be the one I cleave into your forehead."

  "Then it's a good thing it's not your decision to make, because I'd crush you like a bean."

  "You've been trying to kill me for weeks," Dante said.

  "That was then," the man said, drawing back his shoulders. "What you need now is proper training."

  "I've stopped you well enough without it."

  "If kicking down a door should impress me, then I'm impressed," the man said, brushing the shoulder of his underwear. "But I'm not much, really. Nothing compared to the ones who'd teach you, or the ones who'd come after you if you deny me."

  Dante said nothing. To accept would be to part with Blays. He knew there were parts of the book that would take years to untangle, that its pages held knowledge he'd never learn in isolated scholarship—the powers he saw when he slept. He didn't even know how it had caused him to come in tune with the nether in the first place. He did know he didn't like this man and didn't trust the sect he represented. They may not be the amoral, bloodthirsty force the histories tried to paint them as, but Dante suspected a force as primal as the nether couldn't be tapped without a certain recklessness of spirit that must taint their entire order.

  "Who are these others?"

  "The holy of Arawn," the man replied, as if he'd asked which direction the sun rose.

  "And what is it they want?"

  "Open worship of our lord. An equal place among the houses of the Belt."

  "Their temples are smashed," Dante said. "Their people are slain."

  "The gods can't be killed! And neither can the ones who'd praise them. As for temples, we have ours within Mennok's, with Carvahal's. Even the houses of Gashen count priests of a deeper alliance."

  Dante drew back his chin. "What? You've been seeding them with your own people?"

  The man snorted. "Am I supposed to think it's dishonorable? What's the honor in getting slaughtered in the open field? What's the glory in a Fourth Scour when you're the one getting scoured?"

  "I don't understand," Dante said, trying to remember all the men of cloth he'd met in the temples and cloisters and cathedrals of Bressel. How many of them served a second god in secret? The very one whose knowledge Dante had been seeking? "How long has this been going on?"

  "That's enough." The man held up his hand, palm out. From the corner of his eye Dante saw Blays' arms tense up. "Come with me back to Bressel and we'll sail to Narashtovik. There, you'll learn whatever you want. Things you don't yet even know to ask about."

  Agreement ached in Dante's chest so hard he'd almost said yes before he could think. He glanced at Blays and the blood sliding down the boy's sword. Say Dante left now with this man for Bressel, for this Narashtovik. Say Dante had thirty or fifty years left to his life: three to five decades to spend forging a name so bright he'd rival the stars. And every day of which he'd spend regretting the moment he'd left Blays to whatever mean fate awaited him.

  "I won't be bound to anybody," Dante said, knowing there would be other ways. "Not even the gods."

  "I thought the same thing when I was your age," the man chuckled. "Have faith in those above and some day you'll be the one looking down."

  "I'm not much for waiting," Dante said, and when he flung out his hand he sent the opposite edge of the shadows that would heal. The man jerked his hands up to his chest, but before he could speak his stomach spilled open like a sword had torn across it. His hands plunged to catch the intestines that slithered to the floor. Blays screamed.

  The man hunched, clutching at his belly, gaping at Dante. The man raised shaking fingers thick with the blackish blood of the body. Dante reached for more shadows to meet the man's summons and found only a flicker. Blays' arm blurred and his sword spun across the room, pinning through the man's neck. The black-haired man made a choked gasp, tongue jutting from his mouth. He rolled his eyes, as if exasperated it had come to this, killed in his underwear in a foreign town by two dirt-caked boys. Then he went limp, hanging from the sword embedded in the wall.

  "What in the name of whoever you hold holy was that?" Blays said, planting his foot against the wall and clearing his sword. The body thumped. He wiped it clean and sheathed it.

  "I healed him," Dante said.

  "No you didn't!"

  "I mean, I did it backwards." Dante lowered himself and groped for his own sword beneath the body of the first man they'd killed. He touched the warm stick of blood and drew back. "I didn't know it would do that."

  "I don't think he did either!" Blays kicked the corpse, then shuddered so hard he fumbled his sword. He turned to Dante, face white and misted up with sweat. "Did you mean what you said? About not being bound to anyone?"

  "I'll find my own way. I don't need them or anyone else to find what I'm searching for."

  Blays nodded and looked away. His face soured. "This place stinks like a slaughterhouse."

  They left down the stairs. For whatever racket their disturbance may have raised, there was no sign the drunk keepers and drunker patrons of the common room had heard a thing. The two of them took to the streets, hunting their way back in the bath of the moon till their eyes found the painting of the Foaming Keg. Dante pushed down his nausea. His shoulders felt as broad as a bear's. There was no power in the world that could stop him and Blays, he thought. They'd bend the world to its knee.

  5

  "They arrested your friend."

  Dante spun for the high-pitched, sexless source of that news. He backed in a circle, then saw the dark head of one of the two brothers. Now that they weren't standing next to each other he couldn't tell which was which.

  "Arrested? For what? How do you know?"

  "I saw them go in after you left," the kid said. "There were a whole lot of watchmen. They carried him out on their shoulders." He tipped his head till his ear touched his shoulder. "He said lots of nasty words."

  Dante grabbed the boy by the collar and hauled him into the alley he'd just come out of. If they'd been after Blays, they'd be after him. It was only blind chance the kid had found him on his way back from the market before he'd returned to the Keg.

  "Where are they keeping him?"

  "They keep them all at the old bailey. They have the trial on
the Saturday, and then if they're guilty they hang them the next Saturday."

  "How do they tell who's guilty?"

  "I don't know," the boy said, sweeping the dirt with his toe. "I guess they all are, 'cause they're all at the hanging."

  "Go see what you can see, kid. I'll reward you beyond your dreams."

  "I can count to a hundred," he said, then spun off down the streets.

  Dante rested his hand on his sword, glancing down both ends of the alley. He double- then triple-checked his pack to make sure the book was still there. Anything at the Keg was lost. Going back would mean arrest. His prayer books, his histories, his candles and his notes and spare paper, all that was replaceable. It hurt to leave it, but he had no choice.

  His first instinct was to skip town. His second was to hunker down in the woods until the Saturday after and make a one-man assault on the city when they brought Blays down to the gallows. He saw several flaws in this plan, however, not least of which was he'd have no chance of surviving and Blays would be killed anyway. The gesture would be nice, noble even, and if there were a bard in the crowd maybe Dante would have a song written about him everyone could sing and forget in a season or two, but that would make him no less dead, except possibly in a metaphorical way that would do nothing to stop the worms from eating his skin.

  He picked up a shard of cobble and hurled it against the alley wall. He took a breath and looked around again. What did he have? Time, in some small measure. He had time. He should juice that for all its worth before getting sucked into anything rash. The trial was two days off, the hanging a week from then. The first order of business was to find a place to hide so he couldn't be caught before he had a chance to try anything tremendously stupid.

  He drew his cowl over his head. Rule out the docks. The boys were too easily bought if any of the watch were canny enough to throw a little coin their way. Plenty of other inns in town, but inns attracted traffic, and traffic attracted do-gooders and bounty-vultures. Even if he holed up in his room, coming and going by cover of darkness, someone would see him. He needed isolation. The kind of place no one went without being dragged. An abandoned building could work, if he could trust himself to differentiate between the truly abandoned and the merely decrepit, but that could be little better than an inn—abandoned buildings attracted vagabonds and vagabonds attracted lawmen. The basement beneath a slaughterhouse would be avoided by anyone with a working nose, but he'd have to do an awful lot of sneaking to avoid the laborers, and anyway it was a place of trade. A churchyard, maybe. No one went to graves except on the anniversaries of the faithful departed, but he'd feel too foolish skulking around the tombstones. Leaving for the woods would cut him off from the clockwork of the city. He had to stay close. If for some reason the courts changed their schedule, Blays could be killed before Dante'd heard word one.

  The graveyard, then. He set his mouth. At least his shame would be private.

  Dante fake-limped through the foot traffic, coughing wetly like a man on his way out and enthusiastic about sharing his imbalanced humors. The first man he stopped drew his sleeve over his mouth and waved Dante to the south. Not knowing local landmarks or much other than what Bressel had taught him of how cities worked, he kept to the main streets, trusting his hood and his cough to deflect wandering eyes. Twice he crossed paths with officious men in cleanish brown uniforms. They walked without hurry, sweeping the crowds. Dante steeled up and strolled past them. If they had his description, he'd either run, fight, or die.

  Finding the churchyard wasn't hard. He just kept heading south until he saw a steeple surrounded by green lawns and gnarled old trees. Its lower stretch was coated in simple wooden poles, flat stones, fieldstone piles, and the dicklike obelisks of Simm, Lia's wayward husband who made sure to come back her way every spring. Just as often there were no markers at all, just scruffy grasses on an ankle-high mound. The yard was big and quiet and empty. The shouts and hooves of the city faded behind him, blending into birdsong and the rustle of the wind. He made for the towering markers and mausoleums that clustered at the crest of the short hill a ways inside the yard.

  The first mausoleum door he tried didn't budge. The second swung with a sound of grating stone, but before he'd taken two steps inside he was floored by the meaty stink of the recently deceased. He backed out, tenting the collar of his cloak over his nose. The fifth vault he tried opened reluctantly and he eased inside, breathing through his mouth.

  All he smelled was dust and things turning into dust. Old flowers rested on the shelves with the urns of the cremated, but they were gray things, and when he touched them they crumbled away, paffing against the stone floor. With the door propped part open, there was enough light to read by if he squinted.

  He sat down on a cool stone shelf at the back of the room. He could bribe the bailey guards, maybe. He didn't have much, but the collected purses of all the men they'd put down between Bressel and here would make a decent temptation to spring a nobody like Blays. Just as likely they'd see right through him and lock him up and take the money. He could use George and Barnes as a go-between, but that was no better; they'd be beaten or killed if they showed up with that much silver, and them showing up at all after he'd handed them that much coin was no sure thing. He could try getting Blays a note, notes were simple enough and maybe Blays could tell him something that would help Dante break him out, but Blays couldn't read. Dante covered his eyes with one hand. He'd relished his solitude not a month ago. Now it felt empty, powerless as a childless old woman.

  Blays had been arrested for the crime of being caught keeping himself alive. Those were the facts, but Dante had the sense the arrest itself would be proof enough of his guilt. He grabbed a vase and hurled it across the vault. The lacquered pottery exploded, shards tinkling on the stone. Ashes billowed low on the floor like a fog. Where had the law been when they'd been hunted like foxes? The watch had only shown their fat faces after the blood had been spilled, the blades put away. Blays had been sleeping when he'd left. No doubt they'd crept up on him that way, catching him in his bed. They wouldn't have the decency to meet him with a sword in his hand. Whatever his fate, Dante resolved to slit as many of their throats as he could reach before it was over.

  He spent the daylight with the Cycle, groping for answers that would bring him the strength to find a solution. Jack Hand kept showing up:

  Jack Hand's kingdom grew to hold the two rivers at its north and the golden forge at its south; he married the maiden of the west and saw the sun rise over two hatches of cicadas, but as with all growths it began to take forms he could neither guess nor control. He wiled the days in the Tower of Venge and brooded on the new powers he could feel stirring within his lands. Shadows played in the hands of men he'd never met, men who owed him no homage. In the time-honored right of a king to own the hearts and minds of those who live by his grace in his lands, he dispersed the army of rats to train their eyeless sockets on the men who practiced in secret. He called his advisers to the Tower, trading tactics over maps and oaths over ale.

  At the end of seven days he knew the names of the 54 conspirators and the homes of their families. Wise to the ways untreaten roots will bear poison fruit even when the trunk and its branches are hacked and burnt, he dispatched his bluecloaks to reach every manor within an hour's span, and in that way he cut short that threat in a single long-armed stroke; the wails of the doomed had no time to reach the ears of the next in line, and they perished before they could take to the road and plant the seeds of retribution.

  He'd meant to send a signal of fire that night to all who watched, but when he gazed from his tower at the fresh green folds of land and the fine white houses of the dead, he puzzled on the balance of destruction and creation. Instead of burning the houses of the traitors, he washed them clean of treachery and bequeathed them to the priests of his patron, and they sang the miracle of the man who'd turned crippling poison into the strength of blood.

  He napped through the twilight and first hour
s of night, then cut out for the docks. Boys shrieked and punched and threw dice. He lingered in the shelter of doorways, wasting half an hour before he spotted the kid who'd told him of Blays' arrest.

  "Hey. Barnes."

  "I'm George," the boy said, separating from his group.

  "Did you find anything?"

  "No," George said, waggling his head. "They won't let me into the bailey."

  Dante swore. "Doesn't it have windows?"

  "Why would a bailey have windows?"

  "There has to be some way in."

  George shook his head more. "Vance tried to go in when he wasn't supposed to last year and we never saw him since."

  "You're smarter than him, aren't you?" Dante said. The boy shrugged and anger flashed through his veins. "I'm beginning to doubt your value."

  "You smell," George said, and before Dante could strike him he'd retreated to a pack of eight or ten other boys. Dante took a step toward them and their eyes glittered like animals beyond the light of a fire. They moved forward as one, faces and hands tight. He spat in the dirt and turned away. Once he left their sight he ran and didn't stop until he reached the churchyard. He called out for the nether, released it, called again, convincing himself it was his to command.