EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (324 page)

Dawn broke, gray and gradual. He let Blays sleep. It was clear they wouldn’t be going anywhere until Robert had woken or croaked. Maybe it was the false hope of the daylight, but he doubted the temple men would even know their latest agents had failed for at least a few days. There was no use punishing Blays with sitting around waiting for something to happen when he could hold things down for himself. For once Dante didn’t feel like reading. He watched the fire burn and thought about the summers in the village.

“What’s going on? Why does hell look exactly the same as earth?”

Dante jerked his head. Robert’s eyes were open, crinkled in pain.

“You’re awake.”

“You’re brilliant.” Robert lifted his head and looked over his bandaged body. “How’d you get the wizard?”

“I smote him with fire,” Dante said.

Robert frowned at him. “Can never tell if the youth of today are being serious. A weakness of character, I think.”

“You’re right. I played dead until he ran away.”

Robert’s arms shook as he tried to sit up. He lifted his shoulders clear of the ground, then fell back, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment after the impact.

“That was unwise,” he said.

Dante bit his teeth together. “Stop making things worse. We’re already losing time.”

“You’ve always got more time,” Robert said. He chewed his beard. “Well, until you don’t.”

“Indeed,” Dante said. He decided against waking Blays. It would help if at least one of them kept in fighting condition. Dante felt like he’d been sewn up in a sack and beaten for three days straight. He could probably ride, but if at that moment a one-armed eight-year-old challenged him to a fight, he’d either run or cheat.

“How’s Blays?” Robert asked, as if reading his thoughts.

“Unhurt.”

“Is that right.” He chuckled. The sound was like gravel grinding together. “Robert Hobble himself gets flambeed by a sorcerer and stabbed by a bumbling bodyguard who only knows to grab the handle of his sword because it’s the part that sticks out when it’s put away, and that kid comes out without a scratch.” He wiped sweat off his forehead and smiled with half his mouth. “There’s something wrong with that.”

Dante shrugged. “He does seem preternaturally lucky.”

“Maybe he’s just got good taste in friends.” Robert stared at him with pain-hooded eyes. Dante kept quiet. “So what are you, exactly?”

“Why do people keep asking me that?”

“Oh, please.”

“I’m a young man! That’s all.”

“I’ve known plenty of young men,” Robert said, turning his head to face the sky, “and none of them can do anything like what I’ve seen you do.”

Dante hunched up his shoulders. “That’s why I’m learning all this. I don’t want to be like everyone else.”

“Lots of people say that, then ten years later you couldn’t pick them out in a crowd.” Robert shifted his hips to resettle his weight and stopped at once. He bared his teeth and let out a long breath. “I don’t suppose you’ve got anything for curing sword whacks.”

“I already tried,” Dante said. Inexplicably, shame stole over his face.

“Ah. Guess the dominion of steel still holds sway, then.”

“For now.”

Robert chuckled, then clutched himself. “Lyle’s holy bastard, that hurts.”

“Then don’t do it.”

“What’s cracking
your
acorns?”

“This is just the second day,” Dante said. He clenched a handful of leaves, flung them into the fire. “This is supposed to be the easy part.”

“And I suppose this is the part where I tell you nothing’s easy, as if that’s supposed to help.” Robert sighed and gingerly folded his hands under his head.

“It just doesn’t seem fair.”

Robert laughed some more. “Could be worse. You could be me.”

Dante nodded, glancing up a moment later. “You doing okay?”

“I’ve had worse.”

“I bet this feels like a joke to you,” Dante said, uncertain what he meant by “this.”

“For about the last ten years, everything’s felt that way.”

While Dante was busy trying to gauge if he was serious Blays stirred beneath the folds of his cloak. The boy emerged into the daylight, red-eyed, hair sprung out like a dandelion. He gave the world a sour look and belched.

“You’re disgusting,” Dante said.

“Shut up.” Blays draped his cloak over his head and shoulders and clutched it under his chin so he resembled a clothy mountain or a sack with a face. “What time is it?”

“Time to make me some breakfast,” Robert said.

“You’re up!”

“In a manner of speaking,” he said from his place on the dirt.

Blays swung his face at Dante. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

“You’re up now, aren’t you?”

“I’d have gotten
you
up.”

“And I’d have punched you for it.”

Blays jumped up, flapping his cloak against the cold, and wandered around the fire to lean over Robert.

“Does it hurt much?”

“Only always,” Robert said.

“I thought you were going to die! You should have seen all the blood! It looked like someone dumped a spittoon on your chest.”

Robert closed his eyes and made a noise through his nose. “You know what, forget about breakfast.”

“Well, it did,” Blays said. He straightened up and his eyes drifted to the tethered horses. “They’ve settled down a bit.”

“Yeah,” Dante said. “Moving the bodies may have helped.”

“I think they got a little spooked when I was chopping them up.” Blays folded his arms at the sudden silence. “What? One of them was moving.”

“Well done,” Robert said. “Now will you stop recounting the recent horrors and get me some gods damn food?”

“I’m not your maid,” Blays said, opening up one of the packs and rummaging around. “How’s some bread?”

“Marvelous.”

He brought it to Robert, who spent a minute propping himself up before trying a couple bites.

“Bread’s a dry substance, you know,” Robert said, spitting crumbs.

“Will water sate His Majesty?”

Robert pursed his lips. “If you don’t have anything stronger.”

“You know we don’t,” Blays said. He gave Dante a look. “You could get off your ass at some point.”

“I’m plotting our next move,” he said, twisting a blade of grass between his fingers. “While you’re up, grab me a bite?”

“I’m going to spit in it.”

“Oh no, don’t trouble yourself on my account,” Dante said. Robert laughed through his nose and winced. He’d live, but it would be three days before he felt well enough to ride. Three days waiting in the woods while the world moved on and Narashtovik drew three days closer to war. Dante spent each one training with the nether till he was close to passing out, vowing they wouldn’t be delayed again. Sooner or later—sooner, according to Cally, and if anyone outside the dead city itself would know, it was him—it would take more than two boys and a drunk to stop what was marching out of the north. It would take an army, if it could be stopped at all. A kingdom could be lost for the wounds to Robert’s body and the want of three days. If he hadn’t been frustrated enough to punch down a tree, Dante might have laughed.

Chapter X

R
OBERT
HAD
TO
STOP
WITHIN
a couple hours the day their path resumed and for the first few days their march was broken by an equal time spent resting away from the road. Dante and Blays kept a guard at all times, switching between watch and sleep while Robert slumbered or merely stretched out and waited for the throbbing ache to subside. Dante preferred to eat up the hours with sleep, but sometimes it took an hour or more to slip away. Things would go faster once Robert was better, he told himself. They would lose a few days, but it wouldn’t always be these stuttery steps of six or eight stops a day. They would make it in time.

The woods gave way to open grassland peppered with trees in the creases in the land. The road held out. The grass rose to their waists on either side of the rutted dirt, swirling in the winds that swept unbroken from the north, carrying with it the promise of winter. Traffic was heavier than normal, or so Robert said, but nothing like what they’d seen the day Whetton burned. The Chanset forked after three days and they curved along its tributary. The plains rose so imperceptibly they couldn’t feel it in their steps, but then the grass gave way to soft, rolling hills blanketed in stubby yellow and gray grasses that shot long-tailed seeds into the air when they led the horses off the road to graze or rest or camp. They lit no fires in the open land; there was talk on the road of a wider struggle, of bands of pike-wielding men marching through the fields. Rumor had the king’s legions assembling in a counter on Whetton and encamping outside Bressel. But, according to the few travelers they spoke with, the enemy had no strongholds, no apparent homeland whatsoever, and the militia spent more time leaning on their own pikes than carrying them; the cavalry combed out the glens and ponds around the cities, but found nothing more than the miserable camps of refugees from the cities.

After a week’s travel the dirt seemed to crackle under their feet and they saw snow streaking the hills ahead. It was no more than a dusting, two or three days old, and it melted in the sun that stayed strong through the day. As dusk fell the sunlight caught the chimney-smoke of a town. They had passed plenty of villages on the way, dropping in a couple times to purchase food but mostly skirting them entirely, cutting through the open lands until they could reconnect with the road. None seemed under siege. Nor were any more than a few hundred strong resident-wise—dots along the river where two roads crossed or traders found deep water moorings and docked their cargo of grain or hemp or hay or wood. The town they looked on in the buttery sunlight could properly be called a town. It could only be Shay. When they encamped Dante took Cally’s letter from his pocket and rubbed his thumb over the sigil-sealed lump of black wax. What did it say? An introduction of Dante to his long friend Gabe? A warning? A plea for aid? He put it back away and dreamed of a city built of the hollowed bones of giants.

They woke early and tramped through the stiff dirt of the road, breath fogging from their noses. Dante pressed his fist against a knot in his lower back. A night in an actual bed or even a thick lump of straw would be a nice thing. A fire, hot food. He liked to think he was too hardy to need such things, and in a way he was already used to the sparer ways of the road, but if they popped up he wasn’t about to turn them down. The town grew nearer, resolving itself into individual buildings lining the river. He bared his teeth, realizing he still hadn’t told Blays and Robert the full nature of their travel. He meant to go to Narashtovik, they knew, and somehow that could stem the tide of whatever was taking the cities of the south. They didn’t know its end would be the killing of a woman. They didn’t know he sought a knowledge of the
Cycle
only the dead city might reveal. How did Cally know Gabe? How big a role did he intend the monk to play toward them? If they were old friends, and Dante believed they were, perhaps it would all be spelled out in the letter, and when Gabe questioned him or gave him advice or whatever Cally expected from him, the two he traveled with couldn’t help having questions of their own. Dante watched the town grow nearer. He should tell them. Give them the story on his own terms. Act as if he had nothing to hide. But the day wore on, and soon they were too close to stop without looking foolish, and then they rode past huts and the small, squatty homes of full families, and it was too late. They’d meant to reach Shay in six days from Cally’s shrine, perhaps a week if they hit a delay. Instead it had taken them till the afternoon of the twelfth day.

Ten thousand people, if he had to guess, and most of the ones they rode by on the way into town gave them looks. Not dirty looks, exactly, but the kind with questions behind their eyes. Rumor had reached them, then, but not battle. They killed a few minutes wandering, turning down progressively broader streets, reminding themselves what housing and other people looked like.

“Fun though this is,” Robert said, head following an eaveside painting of a stag’s head dipping its tongue into a mug, “it’s neither enlightening nor intoxicating, and thus must be said to be beside the point.”

“It’s probably near a churchyard or some of the other temples,” Dante said, glancing down the street. He thought he saw the clean lines of Gashen’s red shield a few blocks down.

“Probably,” Robert said. He pulled up beside a heap of rags containing a man and eased himself down from his horse. “Well met, good man.”

The pile grunted at him. Robert smiled at it, then turned to the saddlebags and extracted a hunk of bread.

“We’re looking for the monastery of Mennok,” he said, “but all this food’s weighing us down. Afraid we’ll never make it unless we get rid of it.”

“Got anything of a more fluid nature?” the man in the rags said, pulling himself to a sitting position and squinting up at them.

“Ah,” Robert said, favoring the cobbles with a wry smile. “That lack is one of the many tragedies we wish to unburden on Mennok’s ears.”

The ragged man accepted the hunk of bread and snapped it in half. He munched down a couple bites, glancing between the three of them.

“Been on the road a while?” he said, crumbs flecking from his mouth.

“A fortnight or so,” Robert said, taking a bite of the bread he’d kept.

He nodded. “Did you travel through Whetton?”

Dante tensed. Robert bit his lip, as if trying to remember, then jerked up his chin.

“We passed around it about a week ago.”

“Is it true? That they burned it to the ground?”

“They?” Dante said.

“The rebels,” the man said, frowning. “The black-cloaks.”

“It was on fire,” Robert granted, “but not to the ground, as such. You’d still recognize the city if you saw it.”

The man’s whiskered face twisted up. He set his eyes on Dante. “You mean you haven’t heard of the rebels? From what I hear all the southland’s awash in blood.”

“We’ve been on the road a while,” Robert said, cutting Dante off.

“Weren’t there others on the roads with you?”