The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  Nak was grilling him on Narashtovik verb tenses he hadn't yet mastered and in his frustration Dante let twenty minutes pass without checking on his spy. He rubbed his eyes and with a shock to his heart saw robed men seated at the table, heard tense voices arguing their points.

  "This isn't something we should be trying to hasten," he heard Samarand say in her lightly accented Mallish. "I'm not going to risk a false step for the sake of shaving off a few days."

  "But every day we spend on our haunches is one more day we give them to prepare," a man's voice said in an accent so thick it was a moment before Dante could make sense of his words.

  "And what are you doing about them? How is it they're able to prepare so close to our city?" a third voice said.

  "Enough, Tarkon," Samarand put in. "You know we're spread too thin to root them out right now. We'll lure them to us in the open field, then break their spine then."

  Dante heard Nak clear his throat and he scrambled to reply to the priest's obscure linguistic query only to get it wrong. Nak threw up his hands and sighed, and as he repeated his lesson for the third or fourth time Dante divided his attention between his bald teacher and the conversation high up in the keep, only to find it had turned to an overspecific discussion of payments due for the maintenance of their soldiers.

  "What's going on in that head of yours?" Nak snapped, leaning in so his nose was six inches from Dante's. "This may not be so exciting as Larrimore's little ventures, but it's just as important to your education, damn it."

  "I know," Dante said, rubbing his eyes again. "It just feels like I'm making so little progress."

  "You're doing fine," Nak said. "Better than fine. Your fundamentals are sound. No one can learn a new language overnight."

  "All this waiting is killing me," Dante said. Nak furrowed his brow at the boy, lifted himself from his seat.

  "Tell you what," he said. "Take a break while I go fetch us some tea."

  "Okay," Dante said. Without pausing to wonder what tea was he plunged back into the vision of the rat. The council was still going on about the finances of the soldiers. Did they usually talk about things like that? Or was it the prelude to military action? From the rat's vantage in the crack in the wall he could see no more than a few slippered feet and the hunched backs of old men. He leaned his senses forward, as if that would somehow shine light on everything that was now obscured. Why were such important people talking about such trivial things?

  "I sense—" he heard Samarand say, then cut herself short. There was a shuffling of robes, a moment of silence.

  "What is it?" one of the men said.

  "Nothing. Pardon my interruption, Baxter." Their conversation resumed. Dante slapped absently at the back of his neck, thinking he felt a fly. A hot prickle ran across his scalp and he realized it wasn't his nerves he felt, but the rat's on the other end of the connection. At once he could sense her the way you can sense the presence of a person in an unlit room. She had found the rat, felt the nether that kept it on its feet, was now tracing whatever line tied it to Dante as delicately as a spider climbs down its web when it knows there's something large stuck in the far end. Dante jerked himself away from the rat—some part of him registering he'd also jerked his back against his chair—but that cord held fast. Samarand's presence surged forward. Dante stood and cast about the chapel reading room as if looking for a physical axe with which to cut the connection, feeling her cold intelligence dropping down the line, ever closer, then with an exertion of will so forceful it made sweat stand up on his forehead, he took a breath, cleared his mind, gazed on that needle-thin shadow that bound him to the rat. He severed it quickly and cleanly, heard a sharp question from Samarand's consciousness: then darkness and softness, nothing more than his own five senses. He stood there a while, half dazed, trying not to move for fear it would somehow draw her back to him and this time identify him. He couldn't remember a time he'd tried anything more stupid.

  "What's the matter?" Nak said, returning to the room with a copper tray bearing a kettle of something that smelled like lan leaves. "You have the look of a man who just tried to puke up a live horse."

  "What?" Dante said. "Maybe. I mean, maybe it was something I ate."

  "Well, sit down and have some tea." Nak gave him a doubting glance. "Grammar isn't that upsetting."

  After they'd drank a bit they returned to their lessons, but Dante was too busy trying to convince himself he hadn't been caught to pay any more attention than he had before, and Nak dismissed him less than an hour later. Dante wandered to his cell, napped fitfully through the afternoon, rose and reread the translation of the Cycle until Blays returned from his training with the soldiers. Blays unbuckled his sword and threw himself down on his pallet, sighing into his pillow.

  "I feel the way a club must feel," he said muffledly. "Everything hurts."

  "I'm losing my grip," Dante said, double-checking the lock on the door.

  "How do you mean?"

  "They're up to something big. I can't find out what. They almost caught me today."

  "Then regrasp it," Blays said, wriggling onto his back. "Make a plan already."

  "The time isn't right."

  He heard Blays snapping straw in the dark. "And why does it matter what she's up to, exactly?"

  "Whatever it is, it's going to distract her," Dante said slowly. He hadn't tried to explain to himself just why the council's plans were relevant to their own, but he couldn't shake the need to know. "I think if we take her out then and she fails, this whole thing might fall apart. Break into too many pieces for someone else to put back together."

  "Can you find out what it is?"

  "Not unless it's dropped in my lap. I can't do any more snooping. It feels like I'm being quartered by my own cross purposes."

  Blays hmm'd. "Why don't you just ask them what they're up to?"

  "What?"

  "For some reason they think you're arrogant and ambitious, right?"

  "They do appear to be under that impression," Dante said. Blays tapped his chin, then went on.

  "A man like that wouldn't like feeling left out of the loop, right? You'd demand to know what's going on. You'd say 'Larrimore, tell me what you're up to before I smash this castle down around your head.'"

  "And he'd say 'Dante, grow the hell up.'"

  Blays shook his head in the gloom of their single candle. "And you go on to tell him you're being wasted as his errand-boy. Delivering letters? Guarding ambassadors? That's for servants, not Arawn's chosen. Ask him if they'd have left Will Palomar in the dark."

  Dante licked his lips. "And when he says no, remind him who killed him."

  "Exactly!"

  "I wonder who Will Palomar was."

  "Who cares? He was somebody around here, that's clear enough. And you can be damn sure they wouldn't be treating him like a trained bear."

  "Just ask them," Dante repeated.

  "Really, it'd be suspicious if you didn't. How's this look right now? The first day you barge in here and throw their most prized possession in the dirt like it's a used whorerag, all the while threatening their lives, and two weeks later you're bumbling around saying yessir no sir? You've got to act like a prick again! For the good of the land!"

  Dante laughed, buried his face in his rough cotton bedclothes. "If this gets us killed tomorrow, I'm blaming you."

  Blays snorted. "Then when it goes off like a dream, I get all the credit."

  "No way. I'll be the one that got it done."

  "Based on my brilliant idea."

  "I could have thought of that."

  "But you didn't," Blays said, lobbing straw at him. Dante grabbed some from beneath his pallet and threw it back. "You were over there, woe is me, I'm adrift in a cruel sea. Blays, won't you be my anchor? Bring me back to shore, Blays!"

  "That's not what I sounded like," Dante said.

  "Maybe not to your ears," Blays said. "To mine it was all I could do to keep from slapping you."

  "I'd have turned you
into a toad first. Then chopped you in half with your own sword."

  "You'd have to turn yourself into a man first so you could actually lift it."

  Dante had no answer to that. He closed his eyes and swiftly fell asleep. He brushed Nak off the following morning, and before Larrimore could find him and make him play sheepdog to letters and people for another day, he found Larrimore. He was in the room of the keep he considered to be his business quarters, drilling a bevy of servants in Gaskan. Dinner. They were talking about dinner, Dante understood. The particulars of this dinner remained obscure, but Dante felt a faint thrill to know Nak's lessons hadn't been a waste.

  "I need to talk to you," he called from the doorway to Larrimore.

  "Do you want our guests to starve?" the man tossed before turning back to his orders. Dante waited in the frame until Larrimore dismissed the servants and waved the boy over. Dante closed the door and took up a chair.

  "There shall be no mistakes regarding the gravy tonight," Dante said, trying to remember how he'd acted that first day.

  "Indeed not. I presume you came here for higher reason than mocking the skillful administration of a home this large."

  Dante steeled himself. "What's going on here?"

  "Yet another banquet," Larrimore said, waving a hand. "Fine fare is terribly important when you're a man of noble concerns."

  "I don't mean dinner, you oaf. What's Samarand preparing for? What's gotten the Citadel so busy?"

  "Oh, that."

  "Yes, that." Dante said.

  Larrimore clasped his hands beneath his nose and regarded Dante for a moment. "I wondered when you'd stop skulking around and come see me. I thought, Why the secrets? Why is the boy of infinite hubris creeping around like a mouse in the larder?"

  "None of that is any kind of answer."

  "Well, it's no great secret," Larrimore said.

  "Yes, I know." Dante leaned back in his chair. "You wish to release Arawn."

  "You see?" Larrimore said, tipping back his head. "Everyone knows."

  "And rather than involving me in what must be the most important moment in the history of the house of Arawn, you believe my time's best spent toting letters and playing wet nurse to fat idiots from faraway lands."

  Larrimore pressed his hands to his face and chuckled into them, his whole body bobbing with laughter.

  "Anyone else would have you whipped for that," he smiled.

  Dante rolled his eyes. "Do you have any explanations for anything? Or does your existence consist entirely of sitting around approving the chef's plans for supper?"

  "I should be so lucky. All right. What is it you wish to do, exactly?"

  "Be involved!" Dante yelled, long past the need to pretend to be frustrated and scornful. "I'm not even in the same sphere as the other students I've seen here. I can help if you'd let me."

  Larrimore laughed happily. "You really believe you're a boy of destiny, don't you? You think you're the one in that prophecy you quoted me."

  "I've made no such claims."

  "You certainly hinted, implied, and danced around them."

  "Only to keep the Hand of Samarand from strangling me prematurely," Dante said. He and Larrimore looked at each other, surprised, then exchanged a chuckle. Dante rubbed his nose and let the new thought he'd had take its course. "What's so important about the original copy of the Cycle, anyway? Aren't the others just as good?"

  "Look," Larrimore said, flexing his fingers against each other until they popped. "There's no guide written for what we're trying to do. At best, we've got a rough idea of the procedures involved. It's important to reduce uncertainties wherever possible."

  "Then why did you leave the book lying around in the first place?"

  Larrimore sighed. "We didn't."

  "Yes, but you thought you had. You locked me up over it. Or don't you remember that time you locked me in a cell and didn't feed me for a day?"

  "Oh please. You can't blame us for being suspicious. We weren't about to take a chance on that."

  Dante bit back his question about why they'd believed him about the fake. Or, he thought queasily, why they'd pretended to. There was something else he needed to know first, something he hadn't expected to find an answer for when he first sought out Larrimore this day.

  "Then how did you lose it in the first place?" he said.

  "We didn't lose it. Someone stole it."

  "How?"

  "Because he was technically its owner," Larrimore said, folding his arms and glaring across the room. "A couple decades back, there came a time when the old head of the order was supposed to step down. He didn't much like that idea, despite his obvious frailty and probable senility, and was even less fond of the idea of Samarand taking his place. After the council forced his ouster, it was found he'd absconded with the book."

  Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. "What was his name?"

  "Callimandicus," Larrimore said. He rolled his eyes. "Needless to say, that's caused us no end of trouble between then and now."

  "I read somewhere Samarand killed the previous head of the order." Dante felt as if he were speaking from a point a few feet distant from his body. "That she usurped the position."

  "Hardly. His time was up, figuratively speaking. Though surely he's with Arawn now. The old bastard had actually fought during the Third Scour."

  "But that would mean even twenty years ago he'd have been a century old!"

  "95ish, I think." Larrimore shrugged, gave Dante an odd look. "This was all before my time, in any event."

  "So what did he do after he left?"

  Larrimore laughed to himself. "A lot of intricate but ultimately failed scheming, for the most part. About a year after he ran away he made a rather pathetic attempt to retake control. When that didn't work, he spent the next four or five years in petty vengeance. Did manage to kill a few of our men, including one who meant something. He disappeared after that last fight. He's dust and bones by now. If he were still breathing, he'd be trying something even now."

  "I see," Dante said, groping mentally for the top of his head, which felt like it had floated free at some point in their conversation.

  "What's wrong? You have the look of a drunk lord who's just discovered he's shat himself."

  "Perhaps it was something I ate," Dante said numbly.

  "Shall we go for a walk? Cleanse out the blood?"

  "Let's."

  Larrimore was a lively man and he didn't so much rise from his chair as spring from it. He strolled in the direction of the main hall, passing servants and soldiers rushing about on their business of keeping the castle together, brushing by acolytes and students off on some duty for their instructors. Dante felt their eyes tracking him and Larrimore through the hallways.

  "You already have more responsibilities than some men who've been with us a year or more, you know," Larrimore said in a normal tone, not caring who heard.

  "I've earned it, haven't I?" Dante said through the screech of his thoughts. Had anything Cally told him been true? How much could he question Larrimore before he betrayed his split interest? What should he be asking now if he were here for no other reason than worshipping Arawn and culling his own power? Did Samarand deserve to die?

  "I suppose," Larrimore said. "You haven't failed us yet, anyway. I suppose you're of the school of thought that young men should be allowed to rise until they falter? To ascend like a hawk on an updraft until they can naturally go no higher?"

  "That seems fair."

  "Seems fair," Larrimore laughed. "Then it would be no stretch to assume you think a measured education, promotion through experience rather than raw potential, those are no more than meaningless hoops you have to jump through for the amusement of powerful men."

  "Aren't they?" Dante said, and he sensed they stood on a peak, that his answers now would determine which way everything else fell. "How close are you to your goal? How badly do you need strong backs to help shoulder the load?"

  "We're close. Very close. Do we r
eally need one more hand to help us shape the nether? Who knows? It would help more to have the book. Failing that, we're going to need all the aid we can muster."

  "Then stop throwing hoops at me and make me into something that can tip the balance."

  "Indeed." Larrimore snapped his fingers, looked surprised. "Oh, it didn't work!" He snapped again, then a third time. He shook his hand at the wrist, scowling at it. "Damn thing seems to have given out."

  Dante stopped mid-stride. He bit his lip, oblivious to the self-inflicted pain, until the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth. He opened the channels of his mind and let the shadows flock through them, calling out through the clear, open pathways Nak had showed him until he could actually see black streaks shooting from the dark places in the room to gather around his hands and at the trail of blood that leaked past his lips. So Cally too had used him and now Larrimore mocked him. Were all men treated this way? Or was it because when they looked on him they still couldn't see past his unlined, beardless face? They pretended to be wise, but none of these self-important men knew a gods-damned thing. Let Larrimore, at least, look on the full reach of his power.

  For a moment Dante didn't know how he'd make it manifest, simply letting the forces grow until his limbs shook and his blood burnt with a sheer energy he hadn't felt since he'd strained all his body in the battle to free Blays from the lawmen of Whetton. He saw Larrimore's natural state of ironic glee melt away, his smile recede until his lips were a taught line, the light of his eyes shift from amusement to alertness, and perhaps to alarm. Dante's throat felt too tight to swallow. His vision grayed at the edges. Release it, Cally would say, for the love of the gods let it go. Dante let it burn on until his skin felt ready to peel from his flesh, enjoying every hot second of the pain that held him in its palm. He spread out his arms, as much for the spectacle as for the need, and then he nodded, once, and set the shadows free, not in a focused fire or the bleeding edge that cut people's flesh, but in a pure sphere of unfiltered force.