"Think about me gutting you like a trout if you try one of your little spells again," Blays said, twitching the point of his sword at Paul's belly.
"Like a flounder for him," Dante said, pointing to the bald one. "It's fatter."
"And think about me gutting you like a flounder."
"I said let's calm down," the bald priest said, shuffling the anger from his face and waiting till Blays put away his blade. The man took a long, slow breath and gazed around the small living quarters in the back of the cathedral where the boys had ambushed them. "This is beyond my authority," he decided, nodding so the wattles on his neck ruffled like a lace sleeve. "Paul. Go see Larrimore and tell him the boy has come. Tell him he's brought us the book."
"And then what?" Dante said, pointing his chin at the bald priest's sternum.
"And then he'll figure out what to do with you," he said through his teeth. Blays' sword ground against its sheath as he worked free the first half foot. "Which I'm certain will be peaceable and amenable to both parties." He fixed Blays with a look. "They'll appreciate you've returned our property without any more bloodshed."
"What are you waiting for, Paul?" Blays said. "Move your bony ass."
The bald priest fought a smile as Paul hustled from the room. Blays glanced at Dante and bugged his eyes. Dante fought down a laugh that would have unmasked them both. They snapped their faces flat and dully contemptuous as the priest turned back to them.
"What's your name?" Dante said.
"Nak Randal," the bald priest said. He nodded to Blays. "And yours? We never learned your name. We'd taken to calling you 'The Pain.'"
Dante saw Blays swallow a grin. "Blays Buckler," he said.
Nak sucked his cheeks and darted his watery brown eyes between the two boys for any sign they were putting him on. Blays didn't need to act to make his face go red.
"Very well," Nak nodded quickly. "Dante Galand and Blays Buckler. You've come a long way."
"We heard of your city's legendary hospitality," Dante said.
"Thought we'd see it for ourselves," Blays said.
"I hope it hasn't disappointed," Nak said, wiping something from his eye and examining his nail.
"Someone shot at us on the way in," Blays shrugged. "It's been better since."
Nak nodded. "It might have helped to learn the language. Things are a bit bestirred at the moment, but some of the city's wary of foreigners."
Dante snorted. "We've been a little busy being snuck up on in the night by Samarand's hounds to work on our education."
"I suppose that's true," Nak said. He crinkled up his face and rubbed his eyes with one hand. "Things are going to get interesting a few minutes from now. Care for a seat until then?"
"Thanks," Blays said, thunking into a chair. Dante took the one beside him and Nak bent over the last one in the room and dragged it in front of them. He sighed as he sat down, then laughed, shaking his bald head.
"They're not going to like this."
"Too bad," Blays said. Nak crossed one leg over the other, wincing when his slippered toe snagged on his robe.
"Trouble with your feet?" Dante said.
"Bunions," Nak said sadly, then looked up, faintly embarrassed. He frowned hard at Dante. "Speak like that to Larrimore and he'll either kill you on the spot or take to you like a duck to water."
"Lots of non-duck fowl like the water," Dante said.
"What?"
"Who's Larrimore?" Blays said before Dante could expound.
"He's known as the Hand of Samarand," Nak said with a hint of irony around his mouth, "because he turns her will into something you can grasp."
"He's a priest, then?" Dante said, leaning forward.
"Just a man with an uncommon facility for getting things done. If he weren't so damned good at it, you can bet one of the council would have stilled his restless tongue a long time ago. Thus why he might actually like you two."
Dante cocked his head. "If he's that good, maybe his arrogance is accurate."
"Even if that were granted," Nak said, folding his robed arms, "he still lacks the wisdom to realize that fortress over there may be jammed with holy men, but it's no less a court than the palace in the capital, where respect and obedience are the highest virtues of all."
"I thought the winters up here were supposed to be cold," Blays interjected, cutting Dante off once again and refusing to return his annoyed look. Nak swiftly took this turn of the verbal crossroads, allowing it had been unseasonably warm, in fact the mildest winter he could remember from the last twenty years. He was still telling Blays about all the people who had died during last year's blizzard when the door swung open and a thin, sharp-boned man with the light brown face of one of the Marl Islanders from the sea south of Bressel strode into the room. Two guards bearing sheathed swords followed at his heels; Paul took up the rear, eyes locked straight ahead, as if he were afraid where they might land if he let them free.
"Nice of you to return our book," the sharp-boned man said, glancing between Blays and Dante as they stood. "It would have been a little less trouble if—"
"You're Larrimore, then," Dante said, taking in the man's unfashionably short black hair, the tears and stains to his thick, fine-stitched cloak. His boots looked like they had once been worth more than all Dante owned, including his life, but had since been scuffed and worn to the point where they resembled the bark of a pine. His black gloves and scabbard were the same. The only thing he wore with any hint for its care was the silver badge pinned to his collar: a gleamingly polished ring around the wide-branched image of Barden, and at the tree's center a pair of sapphires winked as richly blue as the glacier-fed lake they'd looked on with Robert. From his tight-trimmed hair to the knot-heavy laces of his boots, he gave off an air of almost willful disrepair, like it offended him to have to concern himself with anything as trivial as how he made himself not naked. Dante was thrilled in a way he couldn't explain. The man was thirty years old at the utmost and at the clear peak of his life, wholly vital but in no way boyish, and when Dante summed him up it was like looking on the man he could become if he grew into himself without flaw or injury.
"You weren't kidding," the man who must be Larrimore said, eyebrows raised at Paul. Paul nodded, eyes still fixed rigidly across the room. The man turned to Dante and spoke in a quick tone that nearly sounded bored. "I am indeed Larrimore, the Hand of Samarand, and as an acolyte of our order you will address me with the respect my station is due."
"So you've seen reason," Dante managed, thrown by the man's use of the word "acolyte." He hadn't known what to expect—this plan, like their plan for when they'd first come to Narashtovik, had been built on the desperate premise they'd show up with a goal in mind and let no resistance stop them from reaching it—but at his most optimistic he hadn't expected such ready acceptance.
"Did you really slay Will Palomar?" Larrimore said, tilting his head.
"I smote him down with a column of flame."
"Wonderful," Larrimore said. "Nak, how would you feel about a move?"
"A move, sir?"
"Across the street. The boy will need a teacher. He hasn't slapped you around. I assume that means he likes you." He raised an eyebrow at Dante and Dante nodded. "Well?"
Nak drew back his chins. "I'd be honored for the chance."
"Then it's settled." Larrimore nodded to the guards. "Take them to the chapel. Clear a cell for Nak and one for Dante. Throw out some of the monks if you have to."
"Blays comes with me too," Dante said, struggling to keep up with all that was happening.
"Only men of cloth may live within the chapel," Larrimore said.
Dante set his jaw. "He is my hand as you are Samarand's."
"Well, I do set the rules," Larrimore said, rubbing his throat. "I suppose no one can say anything if I'm the one who breaks them." He jerked his head at the two armsmen.
"By your will," one guard said through his beard. He gestured toward the door. Dante took the lead, Blays and Nak movin
g to flank him. The second guard moved toward the head of their sudden formation. Their bootsteps echoed through the vast emptiness of the cathedral. Dante and Blays exchanged another look, all but jogging to keep up. The lead guard held the front door and they broke into the overcast afternoon of the square. Across the way the castle gates stood open. Motionless pikemen lined the walls that led inside. They walked across the square and the shadow of the gate's thick stone cooled their faces as they crossed from Narashtovik to the separate city of the Sealed Citadel. A small squad of guards drilled in close order in the yards. A minor market lined the wall to the right of the main gates, peopled by keepers that spoke in normal tones with the men who handled and haggled for their wares. The clink of smithies underlined the modest chatter of the market and the barked orders of the soldiers. Directly ahead, the keep jutted straight up from the ground: shorter than the church on the other side of the square, but an immense thing in its own right, a powerful block of dun stone and pure strength, like a titan's front tooth sown in the earth. Dante's eyes tracked up its neck-bending height.
"I haven't been in here in a while," Nak said, pleased. One of the guards gave him a bored look. Behind them came the clank of chains lowering the grille and pulling closed the reinforced wooden gates. Before they reached the keep they heard the boom of tons of iron-hard wood clapping together.
The guards escorting them wasted no time taking them to a small but ornate chapel that leaned against the outer wall of the keep. Its main hall, perhaps thirty feet by twenty, felt toyish in comparison to the cathedral they'd so recently left. One guard led them to the cells at the chapel's rear while the other pulled one of the curious monks aside to confer about quarters.
"Don't leave this room," one of the guards said once the monk had shown him to an empty cell. He ushered the boys inside. "Someone will see to you in time."
"Goodbye, for the moment," Nak said, offering a wave.
"See we're not kept long," Dante said. "And bring us some food."
The guard's mouth twitched. He nodded to the monk and they walked on down the hallway. Blays waited for their footfalls to recede, then closed the door and pressed his back against it, palms spread wide across the wood.
"Lyle's parboiled guts," he said, gazing stupidly at Dante, lower lip tucked between his teeth. "Did what I think just happened actually happen?"
Dante sat down on the cell's feather pallet. When they brought in another for Blays there would hardly be room to walk around. Dazedly, he pinched the bridge of his nose until his eyes watered. The last half hour had felt like a completely different life than that of the prior week.
"Ow," he said. "I think it's real."
"Well what now?"
"I don't have the faintest idea," Dante said, rubbing his finger below his nose. "Really, I didn't want to think about what would happen after we threw the book at them."
Blays nodded, still grinning. "Let's try not to get killed."
"I promise nothing." He leaned back, gazed up into the timbers of the ceiling. He felt as if he could rip the roof down with a look. Why hadn't he been like this before? Why hadn't he known that what he was depended on no more than what he willed himself to be?
* * *
It was there. It was all there. Everything he'd wanted collected within the walls of this simple temple: copies of the Cycle; references and interpretations; versions with the final third translated into Mallish. He reached toward the shelf of the chapel library and heard Nak, who'd been sent back to their room an hour later to settle them in and show them around, say something about reading it in the original. Dante slid free a Mallish translation and sat down in the strong sunlight of the south-facing reading room, glad to be off his feet, which had felt swimmy beneath him. He hadn't realized just how long he'd been kept from finishing the Cycle, just how much its version of the world had come to underpin his own.
"Much simpler than your idiotic mishmash," Nak was saying.
"What?"
"The grammar. Unlike your 'tongue,' if it can be so called, ours actually follows rules." Nak scowled at him as Dante leafed through his book. "Certain subtleties are lost in the translation. Besides, you sound like a barbarian. You're in Gask now."
"Tomorrow," Dante waved.
"I've been charged with your instruction," Nak said, slipping his hand beneath its cover and folding it closed, "and if the remainder of the Cycle of Arawn is still beyond you, I need you reading at least as well as a child before I can direct you through the rest."
"I said tomorrow!" Dante swung to his feet, sucking air through his nose. "I'll be your student then. I'll be as diligent as the course of the sun. I just need this one day with what's eluded me for so long."
Nak ran a finger around his flabby jaw, then nodded. "Very well. This day is yours. Tomorrow is mine."
It was a translation, and for that he was wary, but the difference between the Cycle's first sections and that final third were too clear to be caused by the liberties of any scribe. It felt older. Primal. They were the words not only of a different man, but of a different race of men, a men whose waking thoughts were just as much a dream as the hours they spent in sleep. As Dante read the same basic story that had begun the Cycle, he felt as if he'd found a cord between himself and the deepest, purest knowledge of that first and brightest spark of man—that at last, the riotous chaos of civilization might be put into some kind of sense.
In the days before day, in the nights before night, all things swirled, all things mixed with another, the waves broke but there was no shore, the foam foamed without light to see its crest on the waters, great Arawn and Taim fought the serpents and the dragons of the stormy north and roiled the water with their struggle, Arawn's great mill cracked and fell.
The bodies rolled on the surface, scale and claw, eye and tooth, and from their spines Taim grasped them and formed them to the shores and the peaks, he plucked their knuckles and set them to the islands, and Arawn split the first sky from the second sky, where he left to grant the measure.
And what of man? Carvahal said, and from the blood of the serpents and the blood of his own shining wounds Taim packed them into the mud where the river met the banks, the wind filled their lungs and they stood and saw what Taim had made.
To the men he gave the earth, and he made the sun to warm them and coax the seeds of plant and babe. To the heavens Arawn forged the thrones of the gods and he planted the stars of his law. Carvahal left his seat, he left his house and found the northern fire where once a dragon watched its waters, he cupped that star-light in his hands and bore it down to minds of men, he showed them where the two rivers rose into the skies.
And so Taim cursed men to wither and return to mud. Arawn cried out, he cried to see the men so used: he took their dust and ground it in his mill where he ground the grist that fed all things, and there the wind would carry the last breath of men, there it would take them to the black fields, again they would mix with all that once had been.
But Arawn's mill was cracked, it had broken in the struggle with the north-laired dragon, it had fallen when that dragon fell and cracked upon the earth. And when it ground again, this broken mill, it ground no more of stars and plenty; the stars had shifted; now strife was ground with man.
"What?" Blays said, and Dante realized he'd been laughing.
"I just read how the gods made the world."
"You mean like you could have done in any temple back in Bressel?"
"Their story is like this one's shadow," Dante said. His shoulders felt like hilltops, his fists like boulders. "We didn't make the world a terrible place, like the priests of Taim say. The gods did."
Blays grunted. "I thought you didn't believe in the gods."
"I don't. But maybe they just died a long time ago, and this is what they did before they went away." His smile fell as Blays continued to watch him. Did he suspect it? The second layer of the plan that had gotten them inside? That the only way Dante could think to get close enough to Samarand to
kill her would also take him to the one place he knew would have a Cycle he could read? It wasn't that Dante had lied. He'd gotten them inside the Sealed Citadel, meant to learn its layout well enough to figure out how they could murder her and then escape back to the south. That hadn't changed. But neither had his other need. He could do both. Learning the Cycle's last secrets could only help him when it came time to snuff Samarand's candle. If suspicion tickled Blays' mind, let him hold his guesses. Dante had been the one who'd gotten them through the gates.
He read on. He heard Blays' boots knocking around the confines of the chapel, the whisper of pages as the boy pawed through the monks' stash of romances, presumably in search of saucy pictures, then more footsteps and the close of the front door. Dante read without cease, lighting a candle once he realized he'd been squinting into dusklight for the last half hour. He read without pausing to take down all the names or map out all the places like he'd done when he'd started the book. That would come later. For now he had this one night to read it through, and when he turned its last page a couple hours before dawn, he felt the breath stir in his lungs, the blood in his veins. He felt elevated, touched by a mood of lightness and wholeness. From that vantage, his worries and doubts looked like malborn vermin, things he could pick up and snap into two dead halves. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms together, felt the fiber of the shadows mingle with the flesh of his self, felt it pour into the empty places in his body, in his skin, in his blood, in his hair and eyes and heart, felt his own position as an extension of the eternal burn of the stars. He opened his eyes and the world was changed, he a part of it and it a part of him, and he knew that when he died, it would mean no more than a retreat from the isolation of this body back into the blood-warm swell of nether.
* * *
Dante woke the next morning the same way he always had—confused, vaguely angry, already weary toward whatever the next hours would bring in a way he thought unfair for any 16-year-old to feel—and it was a while before he remembered he should feel any different. But sleep had robbed him of that elevation he'd had on finishing the book, that sense of oneness and rightness, like if he had to die it would be all right if it just came then. He had its memory, though, the thirsty knowledge it was possible to feel that way, for however brief a time, and instead of feeling cheated, he lay beneath his blanket in a mood of deep removal, not at peace but too far from his worries to be hurt by them, and passed an hour coldly dissecting the facts of his life until Nak knocked on his door.
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