The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Rocks?" Blays said.

  "But rocks turn into dirt when they're old enough."

  "Dirt dust?"

  The man opened his mouth, then closed it and raised his brows. "Have you ever considered our order?"

  "Can't say I have," Blays said. He wriggled his back. "Got anywhere to sit down? All that riding's put a pain in my ass."

  "You can wait in the parlor." The man glanced over their shoulders toward the gates. "I'll have a boy see to your horses."

  "Thanks," Robert said. "You just let us know when Gabe wakes up."

  "Meditation's the opposite of sleeping."

  "Sounds awful," Robert said. He snagged Blays and Dante by the sleeves before the conversation could go on and drew them toward the room the man had indicated. The floor was of slate, the walls painted a steely gray. A statue of a droop-eyed dog sat vigilant in the corner. For all the room's simplicity, it was furnished with padded benches, and they plunked down and stared at each other.

  "Doubt Gabe will be like that," Robert said to the look on Dante's face. "Mostly it's you young ones who want to preach at you."

  "I don't preach at you," Dante said.

  "I meant monks and things," Robert said, waving a hand. "Suppose it can be applied to all youth, now that you mention it."

  "You're the one always explaining things for hours."

  "Because you're too dumb to know things for yourself."

  Dante set his mouth and tried to think of a reply.

  "You sure Mennok's not the god of death?" Blays said, raising a brow at all the gray and black.

  "He was originally just this guy who sits around and mopes," Dante said, examining the walls. "When Arawn was expunged, people did start to look to Mennok about death. But it's not the same."

  "Arawn?" Robert asked, face suddenly drawn.

  Dante unlatched his teeth from the thumbnail he'd been biting. "You know about Arawn?"

  "Enough to be suspicious of the fact you do."

  They sat with their thoughts. Maybe a quarter hour went by before the man who'd met them at the door stuck his head around the corner.

  "Gabe will see you shortly."

  "Good to know the universe has been solved," Blays said. He kicked his legs against the base of the bench and waited some more. "Next time, suppose we can go to Simm's temple instead? Get some apples? Fresh pears? Some—ahh!" He bolted upright as a massive, fur-covered beast lumbered through the door on two legs. Blays fumbled out his sword and held it before him. "Get out! I'll hold it off!"

  "Put that away," Robert hissed, barring his arm over Blays'. The thing in the doorway blinked at them. Dante saw human-like eyes in its face, that it wasn't furred but deeply bearded, that the man's whiskers climbed so far up his cheeks they nearly met his eyelashes. "He's a norren, you sack of rocks."

  "Boo," the man said. His voice rumbled like the gurgles of the earth. He'd had to duck when he walked through the doorway—six and a half feet, Dante guessed, if not taller, and at least three hundred pounds, though it was hard to tell beneath his loose black cassock. For a moment he couldn't see his ears, then noticed they were just small and round as fresh-cut coins and pressed flat against his densely-haired head.

  "A norren?" Blays said.

  "From the north," Robert said, smiling with embarrassment at the monk. "Usually."

  "Was too cold for my blood," the man said. He smiled, showing broad, flat teeth that looked like they could grind Dante's bones. "You're here to see me?"

  "You're Gabe?" Dante said.

  "That's right," the norren said.

  "We're friends of Cally's. He sent us to you."

  "Cally?" Gabe blinked at them.

  "The old man," Dante said, biting back further words. He had the notion, reinforced somewhat by the fact he was a hermit, Cally's popularity wasn't great. What if, in a slip of his twilight years, he'd sent them to an enemy instead? Or a friend he'd forgotten he'd quarreled with? Or someone he didn't know in the slightest?

  "You know," Blays said. "Lectures a lot. Thinks he's quite funny."

  Gabe chewed on his mustache, nodding blankly. Dante reached in his pocket and took out the letter.

  "He sent you this."

  Gabe's hand reached out. It was large as a plucked chicken.

  "Oh," he said, scratching the wax seal. "Cally. It's been a while."

  "So you know him," Dante said.

  "Yes," Gabe said, showing his teeth and looming forward till he seemed to take up all the room, "and now your fates are sealed."

  Blays gasped and went for his blade. Its bright snap cut over Gabe's barking chuckles.

  "I see he's up to no good again, then," the norren muttered. He considered them a moment. "Come with me."

  They followed him deeper into the monastery. He glanced balefully at a cell that would barely have room for his shoulders, let alone all of them, then led them up a set of spiral stairs and down a hall into a kind of sitting room or library. A great many books lined the walls, at least, though who knew with pious types. Gabe settled onto a mat, sitting on his heels, and nodded the others into some normal-sized chairs next to the window. An odd, dreary light cut through the smoke-stained figures worked into the glass. Gabe slid his thumb under the seal with a dry crack and unfolded the papers onto his lap. Dante examined the window while Gabe examined the letter. The figures were impressionistic, shadows of men, but he thought the window depicted the scene of Mennok soothing Gashen's anger before he could blast the land with sunfire after he discovered his priest Ennan had lain with his daughter.

  "You didn't read this, did you?" Gabe asked once he'd finished a couple minutes later.

  "Did the seal look tweaked to you?" Dante said.

  "I assume you're a clever lad, if Cally took you up."

  "That may be," he said, meeting Gabe's stare, "but however much I may have wished, I didn't read that letter."

  Gabe frowned, then nodded. "So you're off to kill Samarand."

  "Kill who?" Blays said.

  Gabe glanced at Dante, then laughed, a bubbling thing that may have been called a giggle if it hadn't sounded like a bull choking to death.

  "He thinks it will stop all the things that've started in the last few weeks," Dante said, staring at his hands. "The fighting. The burning of Whetton. He says Samarand's driving it all."

  Gabe scratched the beard on his neck. "I think he overestimates her."

  Blays gaped. "Her?"

  "Quit shouting," Robert said, touching his temple.

  Dante twisted his hands around. "Cally thinks she's a firebrand, that she's whipping up the radical elements of the order of Arawn and leading them into open battle. He thinks with her death, they might fall back from the brink to a more reasonable course."

  "What do you think?" Robert said to Gabe.

  He shrugged. "I think someone else will step into her place."

  "So it's a fool's errand."

  "I didn't say that," Gabe grumbled. He frowned at the filtered light in the murky window. "I've renounced all violence as an abomination against the brotherhood of man, but if I could I'd pop that bitch's throat with my bare hands."

  "I'm getting mixed messages," Blays said.

  "From a moral standpoint, I condemn all sides," Gabe said. "From a practical standpoint, killing her would be grand. I just doubt whether that would put a stop to anything."

  "What's so bad about her?" Dante asked.

  "How long are you here for?"

  "Long enough to learn a little about the woman you all so dearly want dead."

  "Samarand's a priestess," Gabe began in a soft voice. "For a long time, the god she serves has been worshiped only in secret. Do you know what they do to anyone caught with a copy of the book you carry?"

  "Cut off the hand that turns its pages," Dante said.

  Gabe pushed up his lower lip. "They used to kill you. The march of progress." His mouth twitched down as he remembered more. "When she was young, she'd give speeches about how believing in secret was li
ving in slavery. She resented that we'd be persecuted for following a god they want us to forget but was integral to the forging of the world and its people. We all resented it, of course, but some of us recalled the lessons of the Third Scour, and thought it best to continue to live in the fringes than to provoke the war that would obviously follow the path she advocated. There had always been extremists who considered their freedoms a worthy cause of all our lives."

  "You saying they're wrong?" Robert said.

  "Arawn's glory isn't lessened if his supplicants can only bow to him in the shadows. He's a god, not a king. In truth he doesn't need our prayers and sacrifices at all—he helped forge the fixed stars themselves, for the sake of the gods, he doesn't need me telling him 'Arawn is great' to know it's true—but it does help keep us focused on matters celestial rather than earthly.

  "Anyway, we'd have been crushed like a beetle," Gabe said. He paused a moment, glancing from Dante to the others, then back, as if rearranging long-abandoned furniture of his mind. He cleared his throat. A shadow crossed his face. "Samarand. She became de facto voice of the dissenters. Over the years she swelled their numbers to a full third of our ranks. She herself rose to the council, though the continued unpopularity of her views, combined with the insistence of how she expressed them, prevented her from reaching the direct line of succession. She was charismatic. Fiery. Plain-faced, but when she spoke a light took her eyes and men sworn to celibacy hoped Arawn might forgive them for their thoughts. The surprise would have been if she didn't attract a following. Nor were the things she rallied behind wrong, exactly—just impractical. The Belt of the Celeset is broad, splintered to its own interests, but there are those things that may reunite them, however temporarily, and the resurgence of the faithful of Arawn is one of them."

  Gabe fell silent, staring at the creases of his massive hands.

  "How did she come to power, then?" Dante said to break the silence. Gabe looked surprised to see others in the room.

  "The usual way," he said, looking out the window. He brooded for a long moment. Distracted, Dante thought, perhaps by old memories. The norren closed his eyes, as if reaching some thorny decision, then went on. "The head of the order dies suddenly and unexpectedly, and she takes advantage of the vacuum to reassemble the hierarchy in the manner she considers proper."

  "Did she kill him?" Blays said, perking up.

  "Cally thought so. It's why he left, along with the fact those of us who'd been content to stay hidden no longer had much role in the order, and left Narashtovik, where it was safe."

  Dante licked his lips. "You disagree with Cally?"

  "Who said that?" Gabe clasped his face with his palms, running his fingers through his thick beard. "Always putting words in my mouth. He's probably right. The old man was old, but not that old. When he left—well, his death was unexpected. Convenient enough to render an accident unlikely. Samarand's power had grown stagnant. Did she do it? Probably. Even if she didn't, the way she strongarmed the council was reprehensible." He gave Dante a strange look. "She's the one who revived the idea of using the Cycle as bait for powerful recruits. That should give you some idea of her methods."

  "In other words," Robert said, gathering his words and parsing them out one at a time, "menace she may be, but there are plenty of others who'd take her place easy enough if she were to wake up with a knife in her face."

  "More or less," the norren rumbled.

  Robert glanced between the boys. "What do you think?"

  "What I think is I don't know what the hell's going on," Blays said. He tried to catch Dante's eyes. "This sounds like the kind of thing that gets you hanged. Remember that? Hangings?"

  Gabe itched his nose. "Well, only if you're caught."

  "Know what I think? I think this thing's a runaway boulder," Robert declared. "Difficult to pry out of a slope, but once the descent's begun, the only way to stop its momentum is to throw a bunch of bodies in its way until it's bashed itself to a halt." He glanced between the boys. "We can either fling our own bodies beneath it in the hopes of slowing it some tiny fraction," he said, shaking his head, "or let lots of other people waste themselves on it while we go get drunk," he concluded, nodding emphatically.

  "That's the most cowardly thing I've ever heard," Dante said. He stood and gazed out the window into the filth and decay of the street. "Cally thinks it will work, that we'd be enough to stop it. We have to reach Narashtovik. We have to try."

  "Can't promise to follow you there," Robert said, shaking his head. "Sounds virtuous enough, sure. But also like I'd end up six feet under."

  "I'll go." Blays rose and joined Dante at the window. "I don't know why. It sounds dangerous and stupid. But I'll go."

  Dante nodded. He listened to the muted shouts and whip-pops of the city streets, thinking how to say thanks.

  "Well enough," Gabe said. "Cally told you about the dead city's views toward foreigners?"

  "He said they're a little aloof," Dante said.

  "I've got something that should keep them from killing you on sight. A token the traders use to prove they've been there before without causing problems. It's why Cally sent you here."

  "Ah," Robert said, ticking his nails on the pommel of his sword. "Only if it's no trouble."

  "No more than anything else."

  "Right then. Got any food?"

  "Preferably something you don't have to eat with a hammer?" Blays said.

  "There is a kitchen downstairs. I'll have a boy fetch the token. You'll stay the night?"

  "Wouldn't turn it down for a full keg," Robert said. He patted his stomach. "Well, I wouldn't turn it down, leastwise."

  "Well enough," Gabe said. "I'll see to your quarters." Dante turned to go and felt a heavy hand weighing on his shoulder. "A word, young master?"

  Dante nodded and watched the others go. Blays waved on his way out the door. Dante took up a chair and scratched the wispy hair on his chin. He needed to learn how to shave.

  "How do you know Cally, Gabe?"

  "The order. And before that we fought in a war together."

  Dante tried to imagine Cally swinging a sword or charging a line of armsmen. He couldn't even see him without the gray beard or bent back.

  "Which one?"

  Gabe sniffed. "The one twenty or thirty years after the one before it. When a new group of eager young men had had time to grow up without its memory and decided it was time to leave their own mark on the world."

  "Oh," Dante said. "That one."

  "I left when he did. It was clear the place we'd called home had become something different. Something we no longer felt right to support."

  "Thus why you came to lie low in the receptive arms of Mennok?"

  "No," Gabe said. He painted Dante with a scornful gaze. "I came to Mennok because of a philosophical understanding with the god. We should spend our lives brooding by ourselves. It makes more sense than the egoistic struggles for supremacy of every other sect, including the one whose tome you carry." Dante didn't reply. Gabe let loose a long, slow exhalation and removed some of the edge from his voice. "Tell me how you came here."

  "We followed the road from Whetton."

  "I'm speaking in a broader, less literal sense."

  "Ah." Dante cleared his throat. He thought a second, then, in abbreviated detail, told the monk how he'd heard of the book hidden in the temple outside Bressel, of the men that had come after him once he'd taken it, how they'd chased him and Blays to Whetton, how he'd met Cally when preparing to rescue Blays from execution, how he'd sprung Blays and the other prisoners and fled to Cally's shrine to hide and recover, how Cally'd told him the secrets and menace of Narashtovik and why he had to go. The whole tale took less than ten minutes. When he concluded he thought how unfair it was, that everything that had happened to him since the fall could be summed up so readily. So much got lost in the telling.

  "Let me see the book," Gabe said at its end.

  "All right," Dante said. He picked up his pack where he'd set
it by his feet and held it to his chest. Gabe raised his eyebrows, then Dante opened it and drew out the Cycle. He handed it over.

  "I see," Gabe said, tracing the cover-image of Barden with one thick finger. He opened it. "I see." He flipped a few pages, then leaned his nose toward the text. Dante saw his eyes scanning lines. His mouth opened a little, showing those big flat teeth. He turned to the back, to the sections written in Narashtovik, and Dante tried to read the emotions that roiled across the stolid flesh of his face: surprise, amusement, wariness, urgency, at last back to guarded brooding. "I see."

  "What?"

  "I see," he said, "why they want it back so bad."

  "You said they use it to discover recruits. Cally, too."

  "Yes, but they use copies. Things they can afford to lose if the trail goes cold or the thief goes down with a ship."

  Dante actually blinked. "This—?"

  Gabe ruffled his beard and tucked in his chin, chuckling in a way that wasn't entirely happy.

  "I once knew a man who hated Samarand's idea of how to use the book. Thought it manipulative, dangerous to the order. He once joked about switching out the copy for the original. See how smart they felt without their special book."

  "I think I've met that sense of humor," Dante said. "How can you tell it's the one?"

  "You know who's conscripted to transcribe these things?" Gabe said, offering Dante a rare smile. "Men like me. Bored with bad eyesight. The mind wanders, you misspell a word. Transpose things. Maybe you editorialize a little. Every copy has errors." He lifted the book. "This one's clean."

  "Oh," Dante said. Gabe tapped his fingers together. "Meaning?"

  "Objects collect power through age and use. That one's different from its copies."

  "I can't tell if you're speaking literally."

  "Me neither." Gabe twiddled with one of the black cords around his neck that dangled from the cassock. "You should tell Blays to name that sword he used when you freed him from the law of Whetton."

  "Will that make it..." he trailed off, not wanting to sound stupid. "Special?"

  "If not, it might make him think it is. These things can't exactly be measured."

  "The book," Dante said, taking it back from Gabe and running his fingers over its cover. "Does that mean—"