"All better?" Blays said. "Or should I go fetch your smock, too?"
Banning grinned up at him. "Don't think I won't stand up and slug you."
Dante helped him lean forward. Banning's skin burned. He had the sour, uric smell of something that hasn't moved in too long. His unbroken left hand trembled as he reached for his brushes and paints. To Dante, the canvas looked nearly complete: a portrait of a young norren woman beside a gray river, her smile as light as the waters were dark. Spidery trees hung over the banks, threatening to snag the girl's hair and shoulders, but a glowing halo held them at bay from her head. The image was so vivid Dante could almost hear her laugh.
Banning dabbed the brush into a pot of gray. His hand shook, flicking tiny driblets of paint. Sweat slimed his brow. Teeth gritted, he steadied first his breathing, then his hand. He touched the brush to the canvas.
That first touch was like the touch of a torch to dried hay. Banning's remaining strength coalesced into his hand, swooping and dabbing and flicking across the canvas. He croaked commands without looking from his work. Dante handed him rags and paint and brushes and a jar of cleaning-water. Ten minutes later, he signed his name in black on the corner of the canvas and wilted against the wall. His sweat had dried long ago. With a plunging stomach, Dante realized the aged mayor had simply run out of sweat: he was out of water, out of strength.
"Granddaughter in Dollendun," Banning whispered. "Corra." He nodded at the pretty young girl in the painting, then leaned his head back against the wall, eye squeezed tight. "That's her. Can you give her this?"
"Of course," Dante said. He blinked at the painting of the bright young girl warded from the darkness of the world.
He never knew if Banning heard. When he turned, the old man's face had gone slack and smooth, his pain forgotten. Dante pushed the man's shackle up his wrist. He felt no pulse.
One of the warriors had to turn away. Blays rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. "I'll stay here until the painting dries. Her name was Corra?"
Dante nodded. He helped the warriors bring the body up from the cave. It was shockingly light, as limp as worn-out clothes. While they buried the town's dead norren together atop the cliffs, other warriors dragged the dead redshirts to the piers and pitched them into the river to feed the fish.
They stayed in Climb for three days, waiting on wagons of grain from Tantonnen. Warriors foraged and scouted the woods. One new clan joined them each day, swelling their army to more than a thousand. Once the wagons arrived, Hopp led them northwest along the river that marked the border between the Norren Territories and Old Gask. Blays took the painting with him. The next three villages were emptied of redshirts. Word had spread. At the fourth, the heavy corpses of norren lay in the streets. The only sounds and motion were the buzzing of flies, the guilty trot of dogs fleeing the gnawed bodies. At the next bridge, Mourn split the Nine Pines away from the army to hunt down the killers, taking his loon with him.
"Promise you won't fight unless you can win," Dante told him.
Mourn watched the wind blow the trees. "No."
"What do you mean, no? How is you dying going to help us?"
"The Nine Pines will die when we choose to die."
Dante frowned. "Taking to your new role after all."
"I may not want it. In fact, there is no 'may.' I
don't
want it. I would rather be asleep in a field somewhere, or alive in another time. But this is what my clan wants of me."
"I just meant it was fast. If you won't promise that, at least promise me you'll choose your last words in advance. Otherwise when the moment comes you might say something stupid, and we'll have to pretend we never knew you."
Mourn grinned sheepishly, the old Mourn again, if only for a moment. "I promise. Unless I drop dead before tonight. I think best at night."
They clasped hands. Mourn joined his warriors. The Nine Pines strode across the bridge with their bows and swords.
As soon as the body of the army made camp, Dante's loon pulsed. Across the long miles, Cally giggled.
"Got a surprise for you tomorrow."
"A good surprise?" Dante said. "Or a Cally-surprise?"
"I said it was a surprise. By definition, if I were to tell you what it was, it would not be a surprise, contradicting my original statement with a paradox we might never unravel. Best to leave the universe intact, then, and leave it a surprise."
"Whatever it is, it appears to have driven you insane."
"Only time will tell, my boy. Now get some sleep! You never know what the morrow brings. Best to be well-rested for it."
After that, Dante had no idea what to expect. Cally in the flesh, perhaps. A cask of flounders fresh from Narashtovik's north bay. A fine set of ponies. The next afternoon, two scouts came back at a run to speak to Hopp and Stann. As the army marched on, the river bent left. Around a rocky spur, the land flattened, revealing a great host of men.
The warriors laughed, jogging through the flat plain to meet their far-flung cousins. Hart and Somburr were there, too, dressed in the black and silver of Narashtovik, the silver brooch of Barden clasping their cloaks around their necks. Hart looked younger than Dante'd ever seen the wizened norren councilman.
"We brought you something," Hart said.
"Looks like more like a thousand somethings," Blays said.
"About 1200, last count. I think we picked up a few more along the way."
Dante gazed in shock at the mingling warriors. "From the eastern reaches?"
"Mostly the northern grasslands." Hart smoothed his robe over his paunch. "We'd heard you were doing well enough for yourselves here in the west."
"Better than I feared," Dante said. "It's good to see you. I think I need to speak to my chief now."
Blays fell in step as Dante tried to spy Hopp among the towering crowds of norren. "This is an awful lot of warriors."
Dante shook his head. "I'd say it's leapt from an awful lot to a hell of a lot."
"You know what hells are good for? Unleashing."
"But who is sinful enough to deserve such unleashment?"
"First off, let's exclude ourselves from consideration. With that out of the way, King Moddegan would top my list, but like all good kings, he's whacking off in a tower while his soldiers get gutted. Next I would suggest Cassinder on grounds of general bastardliness, but I have no clue where he is." Blays took a breath. "At this point, I'm out of ideas and I'm getting frustrated, so I'm going to suggest we just go burn the shit out of Dollendun and see what happens next."
"That's what I was thinking." Dante jerked his chin at the mountains due west, behind which lurked the northernmost lake of Gallador. "If we take Dollendun, the lakelands are the only major route into the Territories. Even if the merchants let the king's men through, they'll be delayed by days."
"Sure, it makes strategical sense, too. I was more interested in just really pissing them off."
Hopp was keeping his usual remove from the boisterous union of men and women, many of whom were distant relations of one sort or another. He gave Dante and Blays a nod. "Quite a troop, don't you think?"
"On a completely unrelated note," Blays said, "how far is Dollendun from here?"
Hopp's mouth bent in a wry smile. "Think we'd have enough?"
"Only one way to find out."
"We'll send the scouts tonight." Hopp rubbed his thick forearm. "Still a lot of norren on the eastern shore of the city, I hear. Wonder if they're happy about the king's troops keeping them locked in their homes?"
He conferred with the other chiefs while the two wings of warriors continued to integrate, passing news from their homelands and tracing family lines until they found common relatives. It didn't take long for the chieftains to reach a consensus. They'd bivouac behind the bend in the river while the scouts snuck into Dollendun. Equipped with loons, they'd report their findings, at which point the army would make its next move. Blays asked Hopp to tell the scouts to be on the lookout for a young girl named Corra.
The night was one of songs and drinks and fires. Dante couldn't have slept if he'd wanted to. The cheers and group holler-alongs didn't die down until two in the morning. They resumed, if somewhat less vigorously, by eight in the morning, propelled by the standard group sleeping dynamic: at night, no one gets to sleep before everyone's ready to sleep; in the morning, everyone's woken as soon as the first two people get up and start talking. While the warriors were more than friendly, and several of the new arrivals plumbed Dante for stories about the battles at Cassinder's manor and more recently those at Borrull, he found himself feeling isolated, pensive and restless. At a lull in the early afternoon, he excused himself to the latrine and wandered into the woods. For the rest of the daylight, he practiced moving the earth. Nothing major. The equivalent of a shovel-load at a time. Any more and his control tended to slip, the nether slicing through the rich brown dirt as quickly as if the soil weren't there at all. When it came to a handful of soil, however, he could move that as reliably and precisely as his own foot. He set his dogged mind to understanding each step of the process before allowing himself to move on.
He couldn't say how much progress he'd made by the time Mourn looned him two days later to tell him the Nine Pines had killed the killers and were on their way back to norren lands. Dante told him to hurry, which turned out to be wise. The scouts reported in that same day. Dollendun was manned by several hundred redshirts. Hard to say how many, given that they were distributed among five or six different barracks, towers, and walls, but at least eight hundred, perhaps twice that many. The norren outnumbered them, in other words, but not great odds when it came to the capture of a city.
Hopp invited Dante to the war council as his advisor of human affairs. Stann recounted the details with his typically slavish attention to numbers.
"Risky," he concluded. "A lot of troops in a city full of human citizens who could readily become troops. Cities aren't good things to attack."
A chieftain named Tenner shook her head, braids brushing her shoulders. "Everything is a good thing to attack if it is attacked in the way that is right to that thing."
Stann gave her a peevish look. "If you know of the right way to attack a city, I have two ears for you."
"I don't agree that Dollendun is a city."
"No?" Hopp smiled. "Then is it a very coincidental proximity of houses?"
"I think it is two cities," Tenner said. "One norren, one human. Only one of these is hostile to us."
"That's the spooked hare, isn't it," Stann said. "Don't know which way it will break."
Hopp lifted his brows. "Let me ask you this. Will we ever have a better chance of taking it?"
Stann exhaled noisily. "Not unless we find a way to become potato-people who can bud new warriors as we please. The question is whether we
need
to take it."
The council went silent in that particular norren way that meant everything relevant had already been said. Hopp clapped his hands.
"Next question, then. Do we attack by day? Or by night?"
Dante's grin was as wild as the hills. Reluctantly, Stann helped bash out the strategy: get the scouts to alert the norren still in Dollendun to prepare; march to within ten miles, sleep through the first half of the night, and resume movement at midnight to catch the city at dawn; meet up with the Dollendun norren rebels, who would act as guides and auxiliary support as the army branched out to strike as many of the redshirts' fortifications as possible before the king's garrison could retreat to a single defense. After that, the clans would reconvene and launch an assault on whatever was left.
It sounded good. It sounded better than waiting for the king to muster an army the norren could never match.
The army stirred in the afternoon and marched north along the river. "March" wasn't quite the word; there were no formations or drummers to the gathered clans. Just a steady, long-legged stride, the product of long generations crossing the hills and plains on their own two feet. At times Dante had to jog to keep up. At sundown, they stopped in the woods to eat and sleep. Whistles woke him while the sky was black and studded with stars. The march resumed within minutes. Dante's heart beat steadily and quickly, bringing him swiftly to alertness.
The clans poured from the forest into the bare lands surrounding Dollendun. The dark and sleeping city gave no sign it knew what was to come.
22
Something was wrong. Smoke rose from the middle of the river. Orange flames reflected from the black waters.
"Oh look," Blays said. "The river's on fire again."
Dante gazed across the water to the western shore, but it was too dark to make out any movement. "Some might consider that a sign."
"Of Arawn's favor?" Lira's eyes flicked to his brooch. "Or his disdain?"
Dante shook his head. "Of people who don't want us to cross the bridge."
Blays grinned at her. "I think you take his faith more seriously than he does."
"It just looks that way because Arawn doesn't care." Damp grass squelched under Dante's feet. The night was cool, but far warmer than the last time they'd been this far upriver. Despite the retreat of the cold, the city was quieter, too. "Men are the ones who keep trying to drag the gods down to earth. The gods don't give a damn what we do to ourselves."
"That's not how I was raised," Lira said.
"That's because you're not from here."
"Neither are you!" Blays said.
"Well, I learned better."
The advance troops jogged away from the thudding mass of marching warriors. Some paused at the tents and yurts flanking the city. Silhouettes of norren pointed to a three-story tower of fresh blond pine standing at the edge of the tents. The lead warriors sprinted up to it, ducking to avoid any fire, and found the door was unlocked. They disappeared inside. A bird's whistle sounded, halting the army mid-stride. Moments later, the warriors emerged from the tower, their postures upright and casual. They waved the army forth.