The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Read online

  So he read and reread, scribbling notes, flipping forward and backward, doing his best to place the fractured chronology in some kind of order, borrowing from Cally's bountiful stacks of blank paper to compose small essays on the Cycle's curious symbolism and authorial shifts and veiled concerns. He wrote these not because he intended to amend or refute in the public arena the other scholars he'd read (though he hoped, with a desperation he could never wholly admit to, Cally would some day read them and confirm he was on the right track), but from a compulsion that felt as elemental as the stone walls and wood chairs that surrounded him. It was trying work, but it wasn't tiring; it was slow and uneven and he was constantly frustrated by how little the words on his pages matched the ideas in his head, but he was propelled by the momentum of a boy's first-found love in the subjects of men. By the end of a week he reached the final page of the Mallish chapters before it shifted to the dead language, and in the last light of afternoon finished what he'd started an age ago in Bressel.

  The final times will come as they began, blinded by the white blanket of the northern snows, settled at the foot of the Tree of Bone where the Draconat spilled the Father of the Heavens' heartblood on the snow and planted his knuckle within the soil. The skies will be black, though it be full day, the winds will howl with the laments of the slain as the starry vault is shattered and all things thought passed once more come forth. A scaled beast will arise with three tails and four wings and lay waste to the land.

  Rivers will reverse their direction and graves will spit the dead to mingle with the living. Fire will consume the cities of man: the gift never meant to be given turned in hot cleansing against those who tainted its power. The beast will make himself known, lashing out with his tails to smash the false temples of men who have forgotten the true faces of the Belt of the Celeset.

  Eric the Draconat is dead, though he lived long, and in this twilight time he alone will not return. The beast will hold its judgment, and its judgment will be that of the scythe to the wheat.

  He knew some priests put great stock in apocalyptic prophecies, but Dante couldn't escape the sense whoever'd written this hadn't meant a literal three-tailed dragon was going to show up in the end days and bring a physical end to the world. It was like this story was an ancient cathedral buried up to its steeple—men could see the spire's tip, but few could guess there was something grand beneath it, and no one could imagine what shape that cathedral might take. An understanding had been lost. Possibly, the man who'd written it hadn't even understood exactly what he was passing along. This story, though, was a thousand years old at the least, possibly many times that, told and retold until it had been embedded in the Cycle; how could Dante unearth its true shape when the men who'd first conceived it had been dead for so long none of their names survived? Where on earth would he even start to look?

  "Finished?" Cally said, startling him from this tangle of thoughts, as garbled as the web of a whirlpool-spider.

  "As far as I can get."

  "Good. Then start thinking about where you're going next, because you can't stay here."

  Dante's head snapped up. "You want us to leave?"

  "I've got my own business to get back to," Cally said, frowning at him. "What did you think was going to happen?"

  "I thought you were going to teach me how to read the rest," Dante said, finding his hopes sounded much less ridiculous now that Cally had dashed them. "The nether, too."

  "Well, you were wrong."

  "Surely you know as much as anyone about these things."

  "Miles more." Cally sighed when Dante started in on another objection. He waved his hands in front of his face, brushing it away. "Even if I had the time, which I don't, I'm not an instructor. I was bad at it when I was young and now that I'm old I'm as likely to kill you as tutor you. Things are muddled. I know how to navigate my own coasts, but trying to explain it to fit someone else's mind is worse than impossible."

  "Where can I go, then?" Dante said, grasping the cover of the book. "Even the Library of Bressel doesn't have the rest of it. It's like the whole world's forgotten."

  "Not the whole world."

  "Where, then?"

  Cally's blue eyes flinched. "The dead city. Narashtovik itself."

  "That's where the Arawnites wanted to take me once they saw I knew the nether," Dante said. He stared hard at Cally. "You think I should go to them now? Why? I thought you hated them."

  "No doubt you heard some news in Whetton. About the skirmishes in the plains of Collen. The riots down in Bressel."

  "What does that have to do with anything?"

  "They stem from the same source as the language of the Cycle's last section."

  "The dead city," Dante said, ignoring the embarrassment that came with using its nickname. He shuffled the pieces of what he'd learned and what Cally had told him of their motives around in the workshop of his mind. "They mean to start a war, then. How does that help them release Arawn?"

  "It doesn't," Cally said, squinting at him, "but they have this idea it would be somewhat disrespectful to restore Arawn to his seat when barbarians like us still beat people to death for having the audacity to praise him."

  "Have you ever seen Arawn?"

  "Of course not. He's imprisoned."

  "Okay," Dante said. He worried his lip for a moment. "Have you ever seen any of the gods? One of their stellar messengers, even? Anything at all that stands as hard proof of the divine?" Cally shrugged at him and Dante bulled on. "So who cares what the Arawnites are up to, then? They're just a bunch of dopes in robes. They're going to sacrifice a few goats, turn their eyes to the heavens, and see nothing but the stars. Arawn's not going to ride down on a flaming chariot and lay ruin to the earth."

  "But they will in his place!" Cally thundered, striding forward till his face was no more than a foot from Dante's. "Blaspheme all you like. Maybe Arawn exists and maybe he doesn't. Maybe he's nothing but foofaraw. Fine! They still believe he does and they're still going to war for it. Thousands are going to die for it, including a few who don't deserve to."

  Dante drew back, silent until the anger worked its way from Cally's face. He had a long time to wait.

  "So why bring this up?" Dante said at last. "What does that have to do with me going to Narashtovik?"

  "Two fish, one spear."

  "Will you drop the oracular nonsense and talk like a person for once?"

  Cally snorted as if making himself clear would be beneath his dignity. Dante maintained his silence and Cally snorted again, tugging at his sleeves.

  "What I'm saying, since during your escape you evidently sustained a blow to the head, is it may be within your power to abbreviate the coming bloodshed."

  "That's a load of it, isn't it? Why don't you stop it?"

  "I know, it's hardly in your nature to prevent people from bleeding," Cally returned. "You're much more comfortable rupturing organs and spewing people's brains out their ears. That seemed especially unnecessary, by the way." The old man tapped a finger against his teeth. "It's my very power that prevents me from going there and doing something myself."

  "Now that's just stupid," Dante said.

  "It's of equal probability that you're the one being stupid. I was known in the dead city, once. They'd no sooner let me through their walls than they would a horde of hooting savages. As soon as I got within a hundred miles they'd strike me down with a pike, then chop me into fragments, stick me on any number of other pikes, and dance around a bonfire. You, on the other hand, appear completely unremarkable, and would stand out no more than any other foreigner."

  "Probably because I'm not any more dangerous than a pilgrim."

  Cally chortled at that. "I'm not about to fawn on you like those peasants you saved. In fact, if you actually believe the words you just said, I should crush your skull as a service to the collective human race. The truth is, you're a sharp young knife, and so's Blays, in his way. There's a reason sharp knives are the favored arms of assassins."

&n
bsp; "Even so," Dante said, flushing a little. Caught off guard—these were the first kind words he could recall Cally saying—it was a second before he understood those words weren't purely poetical. "Assassins?"

  "Well yes. If I thought we'd have to kill every citizen of the dead city I'd send an army, not two boys. As it is, I believe we can stave off war with the death of a single priest."

  "There are people in the dead city?"

  Cally gave him a look. "You thought it was full of talking corpses, maybe? Walking skeletons?"

  "Of course not," Dante lied.

  "They just call it that to keep out the pilgrims." Cally looked blankly at the carvings on the wall behind Dante's chair. "It was sacked a few times. More than a few. After the fourth or fifth time they'd rebuilt it and plotted out all the new cemeteries someone got wise and moved the palace inland a few hundred miles. Now Narashtovik is sort of a kingdom within the wider kingdom of Gask. A few stubborn dunces who equated their land with their identity stuck around and have continued getting sacked ever since. It's become an isolated place. Weird in a bad way. No one goes there on purpose, and over the years it's become a shell of its former self, but there are those who still live there. Including an awful lot of Arawn's chosen, since in that city they could worship a stuffed donkey for all anyone from civilization would care." He wiped his nose, sniffed. "Some do claim it gets its nickname from the regional practice the people have—suspicious of outsiders, as I hope you see why—of stringing up strangers from the city walls, but I believe it's just those little differences that makes the world special."

  Dante ignored him. "Whenever the Cycle mentioned it it talked about a place as big as Bressel. Not some horrid backwater."

  "Bigger," Cally said. "But the Cycle's a thousand years old, and that's just the young parts. When a text becomes sacred you can't just run around updating it for the modern era. It would throw the whole thing into suspicion."

  "So what about this priest?"

  "How did we—?" Cally sighed. "Right. It's difficult to tell what kind of idiocy might be in the heads of the council, but I think if its leader were rendered persona non grata, by which I mean dead, the forces of reason may be able to cajole and flatter the dogs of war back from their madness. Her name is—"

  "Her name? They take orders from a woman?"

  "Death doesn't discriminate, does he? Why should his followers? I'm beginning to think you should travel to Narashtovik just to broaden your horizons."

  "I just didn't know a woman was their leader," Dante said. He resolved to stop interrupting.

  "Samarand," Cally said. "She's not terribly old, though all you young people look alike to me. She's a wretched firebrand. Always going on about how Arawn's faithful have let themselves be pushed from their proper place at the table. I think if she were to stop rushing around exhorting violence and mayhem, the moderate elements would snap out of their collective nightmare and go back to grinding the radicals beneath their heels, as is just and proper."

  "Fascinating," Dante said. "I won't do it."

  Cally's eyebrows shot up. "What?"

  "I'm not a dog of war, either. I'm not going to travel ten thousand miles to kill some woman on your say-so. Do you have any idea how insane this sounds? You don't, do you? This sounds reasonable to you. No way."

  "First off, it's barely a thousand miles. Second, you must have killed a dozen men by now."

  "That was completely different."

  "Was it? It seems to me a dead man's a dead man no matter why he's dead."

  "We were defending our lives," Dante said. He clutched his copy of the Cycle to his chest. "I shouldn't have to apologize for that."

  "Will you apologize when this war kills thousands, then?" Cally said, leaning in again. The old man looked like he should stink like a dock, but Dante was constantly surprised to find he had no odor at all, even when he was practically spitting in his face. "If Samarand lives, thousands will die. How will you split that hair to wash your hands of guilt? What if she was going to kill a million people instead? The entire world? Would you do something then?"

  "Stop it," Dante said. He stood up and faced Cally, meeting the man's age-honed glare with his own raw outrage. "Find someone else. This mess is none of my concern."

  He started back for his room. He didn't know where he would go if not Narashtovik, but he'd begun to understand just how large the world was once you'd learned to face the fear of leaving everything you knew behind. There were way too many kingdoms, baronies, chiefdoms, and rogue cities out there for all knowledge of the Cycle to be confined to Narashtovik. He was only sixteen. It galled him to have to wait a single day to read the rest, let alone however many months or years it would take him to track down a Mallish translation on his own (or, he supposed with an inward groan, to learn whatever foreign language it might have been translated into), but if nothing else, a period of far-flung wandering would give the Arawnites some time to forget him, to stop hunting him through the towns and the wilds and go back to their own business.

  "Barden is real," Cally said from behind him. Dante closed his eyes, hand on the handle to his room.

  "A huge tree grown out of bone is real."

  "Yes."

  "Sprouted from Taim's severed knuckle and watered from his gushing heart."

  "I'm a few eons too young to know that," Cally said. "Nor do I know whether'its limbs bear the waters above the world while its roots rest in the waters beneath the world,' as the book would have it. But I have looked on it."

  Dante turned, then, knowing it for a ploy, but unable to stop his pulse from thumping till he could feel it in his chest and in his ears.

  "What was it like?"

  Cally started to speak, then shook his head. "Looking on it was like living in a world without light and air." His eyes drifted from Dante's, lids wrinkled so hard his eyelashes fluttered. The old man pulled his lips back from his teeth. He suddenly looked immeasurably older than his 60-odd years, as old as a wind-scoured mountainside, ages older than all the years of man. "I've seen many things I'd call miracles if I didn't have the training to know how to do them myself. But if the gods left a single fingerprint on our world, it was in the White Tree."

  "The book says it's north of Narashtovik."

  "Just over a hundred miles." Cally stood there, arms dangling down his sides, hands coarse and spotty and useless, as if nothing existed beyond the walls of his skull.

  "Is that supposed to make me agree to kill a woman I hadn't heard of till two minutes ago?"

  "That's for you to decide." Cally's eyes snapped to his, some of their former light restored. "If you won't, maybe I'll find another way. Maybe I won't. But if you want to see the White Tree for yourself, the road leads through Narashtovik."

  * * *

  Dante caught Blays before he disappeared the following morning and arranged to have lunch with him down by the clearing with the stream that ran a couple hundred yards from Cally's forgotten old shrine. Hours later, they sat down in the tall grass in that cool November light, listening to the stream gurgle through the rocks. It was the first time since their arrival they'd been by themselves, free of Cally and Robert bossing them around and making jokes and story references Dante almost but couldn't quite understand. As he and Blays swore and laughed at each other's insults, Dante realized he always acted differently when he was around the adults, as if he had to be his smartest and most sophisticated or else they'd stop listening to him altogether, and it was some time before he could make himself interrupt their breezy mood with what he'd come here to say to Blays in the first place.

  "Something's going on out there," Dante said after a short lull following the laughter that had followed an unbelievably obscene joke from Blays.

  Blays cocked his head. "I don't hear anything."

  "I mean, out there," Dante said, gesturing his palms up away from each other to take in the woods and the sky. "Something violent."

  "If you're talking about life," Blays said with light anno
yance, "that started a long time ago." He bit into the leg of a rabbit he and Robert had caught the day before. Dante shook his head and tried to look serious.

  "There's going to be a Fourth Scour or something. Cally says we might be able to help him stop it."

  "And you trust Cally?"

  "You don't?" Dante said with honest surprise. Blays shrugged at him. "It's not just him," Dante went on. "I don't know what you heard while you were in the clink, but it was all over the streets. There's riots down in Bressel. Other places, too. People are getting hurt."

  "City people riot over everything," Blays said. He plucked some grass and tossed it at Dante one blade at a time. "One day they're rioting over how it's too hot. The next day they're back in the streets about how it's not too hot enough."

  "We'd have to go to Narashtovik. It's on the north coast of Gask."

  "That far?" Blays examined him. "Do you want to go?"

  "I don't know," Dante said, and found that though those words hid a sea of desires and doubt, they were nonetheless true. "Do you?"

  Blays took a last bite from his drumstick and lobbed it into the fast, shallow waters of the stream.

  "Whatever you want," he said. "If you think we need to go, we'll go."

  Dante nodded. "If we're going, we should leave tomorrow. Waiting will just make things worse."

  "I'll tell Robert."

  "Think he'll take it okay?"

  "I think he'll come with us," Blays said, and Dante could only nod again, silenced by an emotion he couldn't grasp and wouldn't want to put into words. Blays popped up, brushed grass from his legs and dirt from his seat. "Don't tell him I told you, but he thinks you're on to something." He laughed, ruffling his own hair. "He wants to hop onboard your wagon before it rolls off for the land of mead and honey-haired women."

  "This needs to stop," Dante said, then laughed too. "I'm serious."

  He went back to the shrine and started packing. With little else to do and possessing the brand of spirit that couldn't devote a whole day to any one thing, Blays and Robert had hunted more meat than the four of them had been able to keep up with. Most of it was salting in the cellar, the rest was hanging from a lattice of branches they'd arranged to soak up the smoke from the outdoor firepit and that so far hadn't been molested by a passing bear. Dante gathered up as much as he thought wouldn't spoil on the trip (the nights had been flirting with freezing, giving his guess a lot of leeway) and stuffed into a sack the meat and some of the breads and vegetables Cally had smuggled in from the city twice a month. He gathered his things, his candles and books and papers and knives, and leaned them inside his bedroom door. In the morning, he'd be able to leave as soon as they'd eaten. Cally bumped into him as he was making a final scan of the temple, sized him up, and offered him a slight, solemn nod.