The Great Rift (77 page)

"What happened, Nak?"

"Well, that was it!" The balding monk grinned. "A few hundred redshirts escaped the city alive and uncaptured. They headed west at humorously high speed. We're already hearing that the norren have driven the occupiers from the eastern half of the Territories."

"They have?" Dante sat up. He managed to stay up. "How long has it been?"

"A week? Make it six days. The first day just felt like two."

"I meant since I fell asleep."

Nak gave him a sidelong look. "It's been six days."

"That's not possible."

"I suppose it is possible that it has only been one day, and the sun has ambitiously decided to cross the sky six times instead of once. But I've been sitting here myself every day."

Dante gazed blankly. Six days. Then again, what did it matter? The Citadel stood intact. Narashtovik stood free until the king's next move. What else could—?

He whipped to face Nak. "Where's Blays?"

Nak frowned down at his hands, twisting them in his lap. "We don't know."

"Is he off getting drunk somewhere? Is he all right?"

"He left in the night," Nak said softly. "The same day you fell asleep. We haven't seen him since."

"What? Where did he go?" Dante struggled to swing his feet off the bed. His limbs moved as clumsily as if he were trying to drag a door through water, broad side first.

"He didn't say a word." Nak scowled, pushing Dante back into the covers. "Stop that, you fool. You haven't eaten in days."

"I have to find him."

"You
have
to do as I say. Eat something. Then we'll see about Blays."

Dante didn't have the strength to protest. He'd need Nak's help just to get out of bed. The monk padded off for several minutes, returning with a plate of oven-blackened toast and cold, boiled chicken. Dante gulped it down, spilling crumbs over the sheets.

"Okay," he said. "Help me up."

"I don't think that's a good idea," Nak said. "Why don't you eat and drink a bit more and then we'll see."

"You just said that. Now help me out of this bed before I drag myself over there and strangle you."

"Food first. Your nonsense can come later."

Nak took the plate and left again. Dante scowled at his useless legs. Well, he knew how to bring them back to order. He beckoned to the nether. It hesitated, flicking along the base of the walls, then rushed to his hands. He sent it coursing through his veins.

He seized. The nether's touch was icy, stinging, hungry. Dante shrieked. Nak rushed through the doorway, robes flapping, eyes wide. The world collapsed to a silver pinhole, then went dark.

When he awoke, the sun was brighter. Nak was gone. Dante propped himself on an elbow and reached for a glass of water waiting on the bedside table. It tasted dusty. The plate of bread and salami beside it tasted good enough. Nak crept through the door, saw he was awake, and gave him a frowning smile.

"Well, look who isn't dead after all."

"The nether stung me," Dante said, picking a bit of anise-flavored salami from between his teeth. "Like a hive of liquid bees."

Nak nodded. "Shadow sickness."

"What, you have a word for it?"

"We've been studying these things for centuries, you know. The condition's not unheard-of. It should fade within another few days." Nak glowered down at him as sternly as the pudgy monk could manage. "In the meantime, would you leave the gods damned nether alone already?"

"Where was Blays treated for his wound? During the battle?"

"Why in the world would you want to know that?"

"Because if I can find his blood, I can find him."

Nak slitted his eyes. "By using the nether. Which I have specifically forbidden you from touching."

Dante slung one leg out of bed and set to work on the other. "Then you can do it for me. And if you won't, I will. Who knows what'll happen then? I could explode. You'll be scrubbing Dante-pancreas from the walls for weeks. Is that what you want, Nak?"

The monk slapped his hands to his cheeks. "On the condition that you leave the shadows where they are." He pointed to the shadow of a candelabra painted on the floor by the thick sunlight. "You see that? Don't touch it."

"Agreed."

Nak went back out the door, giving him a worried look. Dante eased from bed. Standing made him dizzy. He waited for the rush of spots to fade. Still, he was stronger than the first time he'd woken up, able to walk with minimal support from the chairs and tables around the room.

Nak came back ten minutes later. "The barber recalls Blays being treated in the Winter Hall. I don't know how much good that will do us. Practically half the city was treated there."

He moved to lend Dante his shoulder. Together, they shuffled out of the monastery. Heat shimmered from the sun-stoked paving stones. Nak led him into the keep and the Winter Hall, a sprawling, high-ceilinged feast-hall whose southern-facing windows caught whatever sunlight was to be had during the winter's shortest days. The tables and chairs had already been replaced. The rugs, too. Beneath them, the floor was black granite, polished smooth. Any stains had been scrubbed away.

Dante's heart foundered. His stomach soured. "What about the rags?"

"What rags?" Nak said.

"The ones they used to clean this room."

"Seeing as they were full of blood, they got thrown away."

"Where?"

"In the graves with all the bodies, I think."

Dante turned for the door. "Take me to them."

"Oh no." Nak grabbed Dante's arm. "You aren't seriously considering rooting around in mass graves for a bloody old rag."

"I'm not considering that at all."

"Thank heavens."

"I've already decided to do it."

"I won't allow it," Nak said. "The men in those graves have been dead for a week. You'll catch the bad air for certain."

Dante pulled himself loose from Nak's fleshy fingers. "I have to find him, Nak! I have to tell him what happened! If Lira hadn't stopped Cassinder, we'd all be dead."

"You aren't going to find him by pawing around at a bunch of dead bodies."

"Then I'll ask a servant!"

"Fine." Nak circled in front of him before he reached the door. "Do you want to see the bodies? Do you want to see what there is to find amongst the rot and ruin? Then I'll take you to the dead."

"Good." Dante let himself be led to the foyer, where Nak ordered for a carriage. As it clopped up outside, Dante frowned at the hole in the ground where the gates had been. A passage had been cleared out of the rubbled stone to one side of the rift. The carriage was shaded but stifling. It bounced across the courtyard, slowing to a crawl as it eased through the gap between the walls and the chasm. Past the screened windows, the broken ground fell away into darkness.

The streets smelled of death. Not thickly, not of fresh decay, but with a faint insistence Dante soon grew used to. Pedestrians and riders strolled along the streets. Still fewer than before the army had made its march on Narashtovik, but moreso than in the ghostly days leading up to the battle. Hammers squeaked on boards, prying them free from sealed-up windows and doors. Brown blood and twinkling glass lay here and there, but there was shocking little notice that ten thousand hostile soldiers had entered the city just over a week before.

The carriage rolled under the intact Ingate and through the shattered Pridegate into the low shacks and decades-old ruins of crumbling houses. He could do it. It would be messy, but any rag bearing the blood of a dead person would produce no pressure in Dante's mind at all. Those who were still within the city would pulse strongly. All he had to do was find those that produced a faint pressure and follow them out of town.

He smelled the grave before he saw it. Thick, rancid, strong enough to purge the salami from his stomach. The carriage swung off the road over sun-hardened soil and yellow grass. Ahead, the ground was bare and deep brown, recently overturned. The carriage rocked to a stop. The horses snorted in dismay as Nak hopped down into the noonday sun and offered Dante a hand.

Past the filled graves, a giant, shallow gash lay open to the sun. Beside it, men toiled with leather gloves and thick smocks, slinging the dead into the last stretch of the mass grave. The bodies were impossibly fat, the skin greasy, black and green. Flies whirled in greedy torrents. The smell was monstrous. Evil. The workmen wore bandanas over their mouths and damp clothes stuffed with crushed mint. Dante swallowed down bile and lowered himself over the edge of the grave.

Moist soil spilled over his ankles. Bodies lay on top of bodies, limbs akimbo, skin sloughing. Yellowish fluid seeped into the dirt and muddied the bottom of the pit. A brown cloth lay under a man whose face was so swollen his skin had split around his eyes. Dante touched the rag with the lightest tickle of nether. He felt no sting. No pressure, either. He took a long, high step over the bloated man. His foot squished down into something that gave beneath him. He toppled, thudding down onto the swollen body. His splayed hand plunged straight through the man's stomach into hot, wet goo. Tears flowed down Dante's face.

"Good gods!" Nak called from the lip of the grave. "Are you all right?"

Dante nodded numbly at the field of bodies. It was hopeless. Blays was gone.

* * *

He asked every soldier, cook, porter, priest, and maid at the Citadel, but none had seen Blays leave. Blays' room had been emptied, swept, and scrubbed. Not by the servants. By Blays. To ensure he'd left nothing behind for Dante to follow.

Dante sat in his room amidst the heat. His thoughts were as useless as the dogs lying in the shade beneath the trees in the city below. When the world was so large, how could you find someone who meant to get lost?

Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Lira's smile as she fell into the void. He thought he'd have trouble sleeping, but instead that's how he spent most of his time, napping fitfully throughout the summer heat, waking to half-remembered dreams of guts hanging from bellies and arms that ended at red elbows. Everything took on a bitter taste. From the balcony, he thought he could smell the stink of fish dying on the beach. The days were so hot they left him gasping. His stomach churned at all times; he was hungry but had no appetite, and when he forced himself to eat more than a few bites of fresh bread, he felt as swollen as the men in the graves. He read, but couldn't remember the pages he'd just turned.

In the evenings, parties flowed into the streets. Bonfires roared in the squares. Their laughter was the cackling of demons. Their fires were the mouths of damnation. Dante drank himself to sleep.

Olivander summoned him three days after he'd woken up for good. The man's quarters were trim and quaint. The corners of his bed were tucked. Wooden carvings of stags and bears battled on the mantel.

"Glad to see you up and running." Olivander smiled, well-rested, no longer battle-gaunt. "We could use your help. Again."

"We?" Dante said. "Where's Kav?"

Olivander shook his head. "I'm what passes for leadership for the moment."

"Oh dear," Dante said, finding a brief spark of energy. "Sounds like I ought to defect."

The man chuckled before turning sober. "That's the thing. The threat isn't over. The king has more men yet. What if they arrive while we have no front gate?"

"I suppose we'll be killed."

"And we can't build a new gate so long as that bottomless crevasse is in the way."

"So you want me to reverse it."

"Can you?"

"Not as quickly," Dante said. "But I'll see what I can do."

The project did not enthuse him. Stand under the sun and will a hole to become a not-hole. He went to the courtyard and knelt beside the rift. A cool breeze wafted from its depths, stirring the stench of decay. At least it wasn't bottomless, then. He hadn't touched the nether in days, and he reached for it with the hesitancy of a man testing his leg after it's been freed from a splint. The shadows came readily, winging up from the mass of bodies lying at the bottom of the hole. Dante let the darkness soak into the walls of rock and dirt. Starting at the narrow crack where the touch of his finger had opened the world, he began to bring it back together.

Two hundred feet below him, rock flowed like mud, oozing into a seamless whole. Some parts responded to his every touch, as if waiting to be reunited; other sections were bullish, stubborn, forcing him to coax them from their slumber with deft jabs and caresses of nether. He soon forgot about Lira, about Blays, about the dying faces he saw in his sleep. The work absorbed him. Focused on his breathing, the sweat trickling down his hair, and the intricacies of creation, he forgot, for a while, to hurt.

Too soon, he lost his grip on the shadows. They wavered, refusing to weave through the cool stone. A warning tingle spread through his limbs. He sat back, waiting for it to fade, then returned to his room and went to bed.

At dawn, he stepped outside and found the air was nearly chilly. He thought about going back for a coat, but knelt beside the hole, letting his mind get lost in the labyrinth of nether. He buried the dead beneath a flood of limestone. After half an hour with the earth, his power was spent. He went to the monastery's archives and requested the most frivolous novels the monks could find, picaroon epics of pirates and bandits and rebels. He found himself chuckling over their dashing gambits and ludicrous escapes. He often woke with his face pressed against the pages, a dot of drool between the elegant penmanship of long-dead scribes.

On his third day with the rift, a wind sucked in a fog from the sea. Streamers of mist furled around the spire of the Cathedral of Ivars. The air cooled. When Dante was done for the day, he took a blanket to the balcony and read beneath the overcast skies.

On the sixth day, the day he was certain he would fill the last of the shallowing hole, he crouched in the space between the wall and the rift, lifting stone up from the depths. Hooves clattered across the square. As they neared, he glanced up. A rider galloped straight for him. The man's face was smudged with sweat and dirt. His horse was lathered and gasping. He gave no sign of slowing down. Dante leapt to his feet and ran from the narrow passage into the courtyard.