"Yield, you menace!"
"Never!" Dante said, cocking his elbow to strike at Blays' neck, and Blays rammed his stick forward. It bent against cloak and doublet, then snapped two-thirds down its length. Dante waggled his weapon. "Ah ha! You're unarmed!"
"And you're minus one heart," Blays said, throwing what was left of his stick at Dante's feet. Dante turned toward the river and slung his like a spear. It disappeared into the waters, then bobbed back to the surface, straightening in the current. Blays jogged up the bank a ways and called Dante over to a janberry bush crouched against the foot of a pine. The purple berries were small and hard and sour, never truly in season, but it was good to taste anything fresh. All the food in their saddlebags was as dry as licking paper. They ate all they picked, then gathered a handful each for Robert, popping a few in their mouths as they backtracked toward the camp.
They climbed a short ridge and saw Robert on his hands and knees in the grassy snow peering across the waters. The boys froze and leaned into the nearest tree, following Robert's gaze. All Dante saw on the other banks was a few squat pines surrounded by bushes. He had a word half-formed when one of the bushes moved.
Norren. Four, make that five of them, swords at their belts, bows slung over their massive shoulders. Staring right back at them. Robert motioned for them to get down. Blays made a long face at Dante and Dante shrugged. The river washed between the two groups. Not quite a bowshot across, and the weapons the norren carried looked as tall and potent as the men who wore them. Blays crammed the rest of his janberries into his mouth, then hesitantly raised a juice-stained hand.
The norren stood as stolid as the hills behind them. Dante reached out for the nether, awaiting their move. One of them lifted a hand and waved back. Another dropped its eyes to whatever he'd been examining in the dirt and poked at it with a long staff. Their voices rumbled over the water. They talked a while, gesturing upriver, then turned as one and walked on.
"What was that all about?" Blays said. He spit out a stem.
"Looked like hunters," Dante said. They started toward Robert, who was already striding their way down the shore.
"Next time try not to bumble right into the war party," he said, glaring between them.
"Well you could have said something," Blays said.
"Yes, I really should have just shouted 'Watch out! There's some men over there that could probably kill and rob you if they wanted to bother!' Would that have done it?"
"What about a signal? Whistling like a bird?" Dante said.
"What about you look around once in a while?" Robert said, poking him in the chest. "We're five hundred miles from home. You've never stepped foot here and I've only been here twice, neither of which was recent. Things are different now. If you don't keep your eyes open, you could be killed, you can't just be goofing around. Have some gods-damned sense."
There was a long silence. "I brought you some janberries," Dante said. He held out his berry-stuffed hand. "Blays ate all his."
Robert closed his eyes and sighed. He grabbed a few from Dante's palm and lobbed them into his mouth.
"Sour," he said.
"They're janberries."
"I know janberries are sour. I was just saying." Robert ate a few more, face slackening as he munched. "May as well follow the river for now. Should be the Lagaganset, if I'm reading the map right. Find a town eventually, pick up some fresh food, then find a road straight to Narashtovik."
"Plus plenty of janberries on the way," Blays said, tipping his chin at another bush a short ways down the bank.
"Just keep your stupid eyes open," Robert said, shaking his head. "Those norren were tracking deer, looked like. Water attracts all kinds of men and beasts. Probably see more of them before we see any chimney smoke."
Blays gazed into the current. "Laga...Lagagaga...what the hell was it?"
"The river. Call it the river."
"Right."
The norren-sightings increased their frequency the further they penetrated into the territories of the north. Blocky silhouettes on dawn ridges. Silent hunters crouched along streambeds, eyes gleaming from the thicket of their beards, tracking deer and elk through the snow. Sometimes Dante saw tracks so big it looked like two drunk children had been falling down every four feet. He tied the set of horns Gabe had given him to a length of leather string and draped it over his neck. They saw men, too: a single-sailed boat coasting down the river one afternoon, the twists of farmhouse smoke out on the flat expanse of the basin, a pair of raggedy travelers on foot who gave them one look before cutting away from the river into open land. It snowed one noon, adding a couple inches to the two or three already on the ground, going mushy and soggy once the sun broke back through the clouds.
Villages began sprouting up every ten-odd miles. Farming, fishing, the smoke of smithies. They'd pass two or three a day. Not yet wanting for food, desiring no contact with the locals, they toured around, cutting through the lightly-treed fields and fallow farmlands. The ground got lower and the snow got thinner until one day it gave out altogether. For the first time in two weeks they were able to light a fire. The boys leaned so close their damp clothes and blankets steamed. Dante doused his bread in water and let it warm until it wouldn't crunch between his teeth for once. In the mountains and the hills they'd sometimes slept without keeping a watch, but in these lowlands, with the spark of their camp visible for miles in the night, they split shifts between watch and sleep. The nights were coming on the longest of the year and even with three hours of guard duty spent sitting with their backs to the fire or pacing around the rim of light they'd wake before dawn, fixing breakfast, chatting idly, waiting for the ground to grow gray enough for the horses to see.
"That spire there," Robert said the day they saw their first real town in these lands, pointing to the tall, dark finger of a temple sprouting from the middle of the city. "I've been there. Almost twenty years ago, but I was there."
"Does that mean we should go around?" Blays said, giving Dante a smirk.
"What? Of course not. Anyone who'd remember that's probably dead by now." Robert rubbed his beard. "Or wouldn't recognize my face, at least. I'm sure they've forgotten."
"Oh," Blays said.
From a few miles out it looked the same as the cities of the south. From half again as close it smelled the same. Once they drew near enough for the buildings to resolve from grayish lumps to individual structures, Dante could see some of the outlying houses seemed to be roofed with sod. Not even the poorest houses were thatched, like he'd always seen in the outer ring of Bressel or down by the docks; these homes were roofed with steeply piled dirt or tight-set planks or overlapped tiles of shale. The nobler manors and wares-houses were set from firm, chunky, mortared stone. It looked like a city that would last a thousand years after its last occupant had died.
"Looks all right to me," Dante said.
"Wait a minute, I'm sure it will get horrible soon enough." Robert took the lead toward the town.
"I mean, no fires. No fighting. No hordes of armed men. Where are Arawn's faithful?"
"Maybe it's already over," Blays said.
Robert rubbed his mouth. "Could be it hasn't started."
"But this is much closer to Narashtovik," Dante said. "That's where Samarand and her council lives. Things should be ten times as crazy up here. What's going on?"
Robert shrugged, then gave him a sharp look. "Don't go asking any questions."
"They'll know we're foreigners anyway."
"But they don't know we're
stupid
foreigners."
"They won't think I'm stupid!"
"I do," Blays said.
"Yes, they will." Robert ticked the numbers off on his fingers. "First they'll think you're stupid because your accent's bad or you can't even speak the language and you dress funny. Smell, too. Second they'll think you're stupid because you don't know the things that everyone knows. 'Why isn't your city burning to the ground?' you'll ask, and they'll look at you like you just tried to eat a loaf of bread through your asshole."
"That's what's stupid," Dante said. "They'd be stupid to think that."
"Well, why don't you just educate them as to the error of their ways, because that's how people think everywhere. Go on. You're not in any hurry, are you?"
"Fine."
"I thought we were in a hurry," Blays said.
"We are," Dante said. "Quit dawdling."
They rode into town. Other than the sturdier buildings, the occasional presence of norren rather than neeling, and the foreign language—Gaskan, Dante presumed, since for the last few hundred miles they'd been in Gask and its territories, as far as anyone could be said to rule over the worthless lands around the Dunden Mountains—it didn't feel that much different. He'd never really paid attention to the traders and travelers who'd spoke Gaskan back in Bressel, but with an ear cocked toward the tongue he started to think he was going mad. It was a thicker, more imperative-sounding tongue, but it sounded just enough like Mallish to make him think he could catch about every tenth word, if only they wouldn't speak so maddeningly fast. With a jolt, he realized he understood one of their words, and not from his native tongue, but from the
Cycle
: to release or unlock.
"
They
dress funny," Blays said, nodding to a couple men wearing long, open-bottomed clothes that struck Dante as some kind of fur-lined dress. Robert sighed. He took the lead and headed for the market, where they wandered around until they found a merchant who spoke enough Mallish to sell them some fresh bread and dried meats and could barter with Robert over a couple bottles of wine. Eventually they reached some kind of agreement and Robert cradled his bottles and smiled out on the bustle of the market, the cries of the sellers and the guarded eyes of the buyers. Not all the smells here were bad, either. For every whiff of old fish there was one of cinnamon, for every sulfurous blast of hide-tanning there was the sweet, sagey lilt of lan leaves.
"Don't suppose we can spare a day or two here," Robert said.
"No," Dante said.
"That's why I said 'don't.'" Robert kept lingering, though, arguing with tradesmen in a broken combination of the two languages, sometimes resorting to exaggerated gestures and repeating himself very loudly. He bought some salt, some fresh-cooked crayfish which he sucked from the shell, a bag of strong, bitter-smelling leaves.
"We'd better get moving," Dante said, checking the light. Good for another ten miles, maybe.
"One last thing while we're here."
"Robert."
"Dante."
Dante squeezed his teeth together. "We're not here to stuff ourselves with treats or take a wife. We need to go."
Robert bit his lip and took one last long look at the flash of coins changing hands, the laughter of men sharing a bottle, the wry faces of women sweeping doorways or naming the price of their vegetables. He nodded. Dante mounted up and led them on. Robert lagged at their tail, head turned over his shoulder, watching all those people fade into the waning light.
The river unspooled across the land, bowing east and then back north, and they followed it across the days. From the berth of a few miles' distance they saw the steeply pitched black roofs of another town dotted with snow. Three days from the dead city, Dante reckoned. He tried to imagine what Narashtovik would look like, but all he could see was the twisting alleys of Bressel, the damp-rotted docks, the overgrown clusters of houses ringing the city on three sides to the river; half the city was fresh-cut wood, houses and halls that hadn't existed fifty tears ago, to hear the old men talk. He couldn't picture a city that had been Bressel's rival when the last pages of the
Cycle
had been penned a thousand years ago. And once he was there? How would he complete his two tasks? Who would teach him to read the final third of the book? Would they have an academy? A forgotten library? Monks eager to teach the good word to those who'd come to hear? How could he hope to learn the dead language of Narashtovik and track down and kill Samarand at the same time? He didn't imagine it would be as simple as walking up behind her in the street and sticking a sword between her ribs. She was chief architect of all the chaos in the south. From what little he'd gathered, she was practically queen of a city that paid service in name only to the greater kingdom of Gask. He knew he wasn't nearly potent enough to kill her in a fair fight and wasn't nearly stupid enough to think her army of priests and retainers would let him get close enough to die that way in the first place. He wished Cally were with them. The old man would know what it would take. How had all this dropped on his shoulders? He and Blays to end a war? It had seemed far less insane back when they were nestled safely in the temple outside Whetton. Here and now, with less than a hundred miles to the end of their journey, it seemed to Dante the caprice of colossal miscalculation. This warranted armies or hardened assassins, not a pair of boys whose faces didn't even wrinkle when they smiled. They were going to die. Three days from now, perhaps a week from now, but they were going to die.
"What's so funny?" Blays asked.
"Our 'plan,'" Dante said. "The brilliant part about it is we can get as drunk as we want, because if we accidentally tell someone about it they'd never believe a word."
"Hilarious. Does that mean you've been working on it, then?"
"Yes."
"Oh?" Robert said.
"I've got to the part where we get to the city."
"Ah."
It was two more days till they climbed the brown mound of a low hill and saw the dead city. It consumed an entire quadrant of their horizon, a boundless smear of black and gray buildings broken here and there by the windy spires of cathedrals and the closed fists of keeps, circumscribed by two concentric rings of walls, a bigger bulge of accumulated industry than Bressel itself, ten miles across if it were an inch. Two of its arms reached north to hold the gray waters of a bay, and beyond it the haze of the sea. Dante's face split with a smile. He'd come from shore to shore, well more than a thousand miles, a distance he'd ever only dreamed of crossing. Whatever else befell him, by noon tomorrow he'd step foot in Narashtovik, the city of the book, the city of the dead. He had dreamed it and then willed this dream to life.