It wasn't the grandest feast they'd been treated to since entering the Realm—it wasn't even the grandest Gashen had thrown for them—but Dante had the feeling that would come later, and anyway it was very enjoyable nonetheless, especially once the sun went down and torchlight spilled across the laughing faces of men and women and the puddles of beer they'd spilled on their tables. Some of them were afraid that the ramna might invade Denhild as well, but unlike everyone else they'd met in the Realm other than the ramna, the people here didn't seem at all concerned with dying, at least as long as it was in honorable battle.

  Eventually, knowing that if he stayed any longer his evening would stretch into about three too many drinks, Dante took his leave and retired to his quarters, taking the tarp of spear shards with him. Gladdic accompanied him while Blays waved him off, saying something about how he'd earned the right to celebrate and sleep in.

  Their quarters were adjoined by a common room. Dante crossed through this to his room, set his candle on the table and the tarp by the foot of his bed, and looned Nak.

  They were equally cheerful to hear from each other. Dante told Nak to go first.

  "The bad news is the White Lich has recovered faster than we'd hoped," Nak said. "The very good news is that he seems hesitant to come after us in Gallador again. He's gone north instead, sweeping through all of the little towns there, although most have been abandoned. It looks as though his course is for Dollendun. We suspect he wants to replenish the Blighted he lost against us."

  "Or to stop with all the detours and continue the general depopulation of the land," Dante said.

  "Yes, or that. But this will force Gask to take to the field against him too, won't it? That ought to slow him down a little. Doesn't this give us some hope that you'll be able to assemble the spear before the lich comes for Narashtovik?"

  "I don't know. Do you think tomorrow is soon enough?"

  "Tomorrow? Just to make sure, they do use the same definition of the word in the Realm, don't they?"

  "As we speak, I'm looking at eight of the nine pieces of the Spear of Stars. We think we can get the last piece within the next few days. I'm a little unsure of our timeline after that. If we have to use the same portal to get back to the Mists, that brings us to Barsil, meaning that we'll exit the Mists outside Bressel, and this is starting to make my head hurt just thinking about."

  "But the point, if I am following you, is that you'll have a long ride ahead of you to the north."

  "Right. Unless there happens to be a portal that would spit us out in the north, and we can use that one. Either way, we're close, Nak. All you have to do is hold on for a little longer."

  They went through a few details, possibilities, and contingencies, then brought the conversation to an end. Dante felt as though he ought to be able to fall asleep right away, but it was stubbornly elusive, and seemed to take hours—wrapped in sheets that smelled like cut lumber, startled by sudden eruptions of hearty laughter from the hall somewhere downstairs—before at last he drifted off.

  ~

  Light danced over his eyelids. Not daylight. No. Not even moonlight—close, but the color wasn't quite right, feel wasn't quite right, like waking up in a strange bed.

  That thought woke him fully, and he indeed found himself in a strange bed. The light wasn't coming from the sun or the moon, or even through the window at all. Instead, it was coming from a female figure who was even now reaching for the bundle of spear shards Dante had set on the table across from the bed.

  He chomped down on his lip, tasting copper. And brought a tidal wave of nether to him.

  Five beams of ether leaped from Ka's fingers. Dante pulled together the shadows he had intended to beat her to death with and made a panicked attempt to save his life with them instead. The two forces struck like an unstoppable sword against an invincible shield. Dante couldn't have said exactly what happened when nether rammed into ether, but he found himself blasted against the wall, half trapped under a heap of smoldering sheets and the sharp flinders of what had very recently been his bed.

  Dante struggled to free himself, broken boards rattling to the floor. A door banged open somewhere outside his room. Ka had taken the tarp up in her left hand, cradling it like a baby as she readied a second attack. Her fist disappeared within the blinding light of the ether. Dazed, half-wrapped in a smoking sheet, Dante drew forth the thickest wall of shadows he could command. It was just enough to turn aside the blazing ether, but he found himself right back in the middle of the bed-rubble.

  The door flew open with a crack of wood; he'd locked it, but Gladdic ripped it down with an abstract axe of ether, which disintegrated into beautiful ashes.

  His robe swirled about him as he planted his feet and turned a furious gaze on Ka. "Drop what you now hold!"

  "It's Ka!" Dante yelled. "The Angel of Taim!"

  He was about to start screaming for help, but soldiers were already barking the alarm from below. Ka hit at Gladdic with an ethereal whip. He deflected it into the wall, which dented and cracked, but the blow was enough to knock him back into the door frame. Gladdic grimaced as the wood and his back decided whether or not to break.

  Dante stabbed at Ka's throat with a black blade. She broke it into a thousand pieces, baring her teeth. "It would have been sweet to kill you. But it will be even sweeter to know how you will despair for how close you came to your goal."

  She blurred, flying toward the window. Dante and Gladdic rained hell at her, but she shaped a circle of light behind her that blocked each dart and sling. She exited the window. And vanished from sight. Dante tried to feel his way through the ether to find her, but he was clumsy while she was surgical. Within moments, she was gone altogether.

  Gladdic gazed out the window. "We are lucky to have survived."

  "Lucky?" Dante could barely spit out the word. "She took the spear. She took all of it. It's gone!"

  "Yes."

  "How can you be so gods damn calm?!"

  "Because when I died, I came to believe that in the end, our world would not find a way to outlive me for much longer."

  The outer door to the chambers banged against the wall. Blays rushed inside with both swords drawn, a troop of Gashen's soldiers at his heels.

  "Dante?" Blays swung into the room, assessing it at a glance. "Who?"

  "Ka." Dante's throat still felt like it was about to rip itself apart. "She took the spear."

  "All of it?"

  "Yes. But would it even matter if she'd only gotten half? Where were you, anyway? You've been the spear's guardian. You were supposed to be watching it, not downstairs drinking into the middle of the night!"

  Blays cocked his head. "If I'd been asleep in my room with the spear parts, how could I have done anything to stop her? Seems to me she'd still have the spear and I'd just be dead."

  Dante pressed his palms to his eyes, little lights dancing across his vision. Most of his mind was going uselessly insane, but he corralled what he could of it. "We have to speak to Gashen. He's the only one who can fix this."

  Several of Gashen's soldiers stayed to keep the chambers secure, which was utterly useless at that point, but Dante restrained himself from saying as much. Down in the great hall, General Lars was just arriving from his own quarters, half drunk but quite alert. When Dante told him what had happened, the general went stone-faced. He swore once, then swore a great many times more, then composed himself and told them to follow him.

  He made them wait outside the inner sanctum. A minute later, he returned, tight-jawed, and motioned them inside.

  Gashen stood on the sand, awaiting them. "I am sorry to hear what has happened. It's a great loss."

  "Not if we can undo it," Dante said. "Ka won't reach Taim's realm for many hours yet. Do you have any Angels of your own you can send after her?"

  "I cannot do that."

  "We may be able to ride her down, then. But we'll need help. How many sorcerers can you send with us?"

  "You do not understand," Gashen said firmly. "I cannot help you because your situation has changed. In losing the parts of the spear, you've lost your claim to them as well."

  Blays sucked air through his teeth. "Before my friend does something crazy like, oh, say, insulting the god of war in his own sanctum, am I understanding you right? You won't help us recover what's been stolen from us because it's not really ours anymore?"

  "Correct."

  "This is bullshit!" Dante took a step forward. "We're in your city. You should have extended us your protection!"

  Gashen gazed down at him. "If you were not confident in your ability to keep the pieces safe, you should have asked me to keep them safe for you. Ka would have found it a far greater challenge to take them from me." The god didn't move, but his presence loomed forward. "You did not do that. You proved you were unable to hold onto the spear."

  "I'm not asking you to get it back for us yourself. Just to lend us a little more help."

  "My aid to you has been generous enough to satisfy any warrior's sense of honor. You can remain in my city for as long as it pleases you; you still have my gratitude for the return of my axe. But as for the spear, you are now on your own."

  He nodded to Lars, who escorted them out of the room and back to their chambers. The outer door was guarded by a pair of soldiers. Though they'd only been gone for a few minutes, the soldiers had employed military precision to remove the wrecked bed and replace it with a new one. Lars offered them different quarters altogether if they didn't feel safe where they were, but Dante informed the general that he strongly doubted Ka would return that night.

  As soon as Lars was gone, Dante hammered his fist against the wall. "What kind of bullshit is this? An hour ago, we'd proven ourselves as worthy heroes. Then just because some crazy glowing woman flies in through the window, steals our stuff, and flies away, that suddenly means we're no good?"

  "And yet we could not stop her," Gladdic said. "Nor can we recover the spear from her without Gashen's aid. Does that not proven Gashen's point?"

  "No!"

  "Yelling a thing does not make it so."

  "We'll see about that!"

  Blays half sat, half flung himself onto a sofa, legs sprawling. "When you think about it, we've been pretty lucky just to make it his far."

  "Is that supposed to console me?"

  "When we got here, it didn't seem like we'd be able to get our hands on a single piece of the spear. The ball only got rolling because Carvahal decided to be a bastard to his friends. Even then, we wouldn't have gotten any further than that if Neve hadn't helped us track down Gashen's axe. And then saved us from getting murdered by Ka, along with teaching us how to defend ourselves from her in the future. An awful lot of things had to go right before we could get to the point where you could be devastated by something finally going wrong."

  Dante stared at him. "Bad things may happen, but good things happen too, so don't worry about it? You're choosing now to become a devotee to Lithic philosophy?"

  "What I'm saying is you're being a fool. You've convinced yourself that Ka's done something bad."

  "I'm going to kill you."

  Blays waved his hand. "Has it even occurred to you that she might have done us a favor?"

  "How's that? By annihilating the last dregs of our hope, clearing the way for us to commit shameful suicide?"

  "Ka's carrying eight parts of the spear. As soon as she returns to Taim's realm, that will unite all nine in the same place. All we have to do is break in and rob the place—then we head home."

  27

  Dante considered this idea for a second, then shook his head with a jerk. "All we have to do is break into the fortress of the lord of the gods while he will absolutely be expecting us to try just that?"

  "Yeah."

  He lifted his hand. "Don't be alarmed when mud starts sliding out of your ears. I'm just using my powers to remove all the rocks from your brain."

  "For one thing, I'm not convinced Taim will be expecting us to break in. He might be wary of it, yes, but the upside of it being an insane idea is he'll expect us to try something less crazy first. For a second thing, even if he is waiting for us, I still bet we can do it."

  "Yeah, because if you lose that bet, we all die before you have to pay out on it. Anyway, I don't see how this is better. We were days away from having the whole thing."

  "Assuming Taim could have been talked into giving us the last piece. But instead of giving it up, he might rather have tried something like, you know, sending his Angel to assassinate us."

  Dante felt the urge to object to this and at least two other levels of this new plan, but the possibility of having a new plan had cleared his mind. This allowed him to accept the hard truths: the spear was gone. No one else was going to go wrest it away from Taim for them.

  So they would have to do it themselves.

  "All right." He walked to the window. Outside, soldiers were patrolling about with lanterns. "We'll go speak to Gashen again. Tell him that we're not asking for direct military support. But that we do need his help figuring out how to get inside Taim's keep."

  "Gashen has just told us that he will grant us no further aid," Gladdic said. "We cannot return to see him right now, or we will look as fools who give no weight to his words. Petitioning him in the morning will prove that we took the proper time to reach our new conclusion, and so he might also reconsider his denial."

  Blays propped his foot on a table. "When did you learn to politick like that?"

  "You forget that I spent decades maneuvering within the hierarchies of the Mallish priesthood."

  Something about going back to sleep after tragically losing everything felt idiotic, but Dante went to bed anyway, and even got some sleep. He greeted the morning with the overwhelming urge to smash things. Not something like a glass or a plate, either. More like a neighborhood.

  They made themselves presentable, requested to see General Lars, then went to eat what breakfast they could stomach, which for Blays turned out to be all of it. Lars sent for them while Dante was relentlessly chewing a hard-boiled egg that he couldn't seem to swallow. They met the general in his chambers. These were filled with weapon racks and paintings of people wielding weapons.

  He gave them the sort of sympathetic smile often seen at funerals. "My friends. I am sorry to see it end like this. Have you figured out where you'll go next?"

  "Yeah, we're going to rob Taim." Blays picked up one of the general's swords and examined the scabbard. "And you're going to help us."

  "Gashen himself made it clear to you that we have nothing more we can offer you."

  "So?"

  "What my friend is saying," Dante said, stepping into the role as if they'd rehearsed it, "is that while we might have lost our claim to the spear, that doesn't change the fact that we're dead without it. We have no choice but to try to take it back. We're not asking Gashen to knock down Taim's walls for us. We just need some information on what we're getting into."

  Blays took a practice swing with the still-sheathed sword. "And some quality equipment to do it with."

  Lars looked between them, face growing less stern. "I understand why you think you must do this. But if I was planning such an action for my men, I would warn them to expect none of them to return. I don't see my lord supporting a venture that has no hope."

  "Fine, then we'll head back to Carvahal, who will definitely help us out, and then when we succeed you'll be left out in the cold. Aren't you tired of him getting all the glory? If we're about to go out in a suicide run fit for a ramna poem, don't you want to be part of it?"

  Lars looked away, scowling, made a kind of barking noise, then looked back at Blays. "I would have said no to any argument, whether it was fueled by emotion or by reason. But I cannot say no to good spirit! The venture itself will be yours to shoulder. But I will make sure that you are prepared to undertake it."

  ~

  They reconvened in a rotunda above the great hall that owned a 360-degree view of Denhild below it; the walls were largely made of glass windows, not just one pane thick but two, which Dante had never seen before. To shut out the winter cold, sturdy shutters could be drawn across them from the outside while heavy curtains could be drawn across them from inside.

  The largest portion of wall that wasn't filled with windows was faced with the cross-hatched shelving of what appeared to be a giant wine rack. This made no sense, as the room was just about the exact opposite of a cellar. Cylindrical objects rested in the X-shaped shelves. General Lars strolled toward them.

  "What's going on?" Blays said. "Are we about to celebrate our new arrangement with a bottle or nine?"

  Lars reached the shelves, walking parallel to them, apprising them. He stopped short, reached into a cubby, and withdrew a long, narrow cylinder.

  "It's even better than wine," Dante said. "They're maps!"

  Lars did a little more searching. There were many hundreds of map-cubbies, possibly well more than a thousand, and it took him a moment to pick his way through the assortment.

  "Why don't I have one of these?" Dante reached his hand toward one of the rolled-up maps, but didn't touch it. "If we don't all die, the first thing I'm doing in Narashtovik is building myself a map room."

  Lars took out a second scroll and brought his prizes to a wide, round table. He set the smaller scroll to the side and carefully unrolled the larger. Just as Dante thought, it was a map, enormous and incredibly detailed. Lars had brought a few servants with him, who placed metal weights along the edges of the map to keep it from rolling back up.

  "Here is Denhild." Both the map and the table were too big to reach across, so Lars indicated the city's position with a slim wooden rod. The map appeared to be just a portion of the Realm; within the territories it covered, Denhild was located in the northwestern quadrant. Lars next tapped a city in the southeastern quadrant. "And here lies Chronus, the realm of Taim."

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60