EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (299 page)

In the morning, Dante worked up his nerve and asked the monk who cared for him about living shadows and a silver star or tree. The monk’s face grew distant. After a moment, he explained that before anyone now alive in Mallon had been born, shadow-wielding men carried the book of the White Tree and worshiped the old god Arawn. But they’d been burnt out of the land, the men and their books, during the Third Scour. The monk had once read a fragment of the book. The rest was lost to the ruin of the past.

The monk retreated into the monastery in search of his notes on the fragment. Two weeks later, Dante went to Bressel in search of the book itself. There, he spent his pennies buying beer for the capital’s archivists and churchmen. One mug at a time, Dante learned the book wasn’t a sort of recipe of spells, but the holy text of the Arawnites, quite comparable to the
Kalavar
of Gashen or the
Silver Thief
of Carvahal. The scholars and priests agreed that all know copies had been burnt, but that if any remained, they could be identified by a cover bearing a white tree.

That had been it. Dante ran out of money. Ran out of ideas. Empty-handed and out of options, he tracked down one of their temples and headed into the woods.

The wind surged through the trees. A strange chain connected him from the dog to this place. Because of it, a man lay dead at his feet.

He wiped his knife and hands in the grass and headed around the back of the chapel. Gravestones dotted the swaying grass. The fourth stone of the third row was flinty and black and flat. Dante nudged it with his toe, then dug his fingers under its lip. He strained against the stone and pivoted it into the weeds.

It revealed a hole hardly wide enough for a man to pass his shoulders. Dante squinted into the gloom. The trapped air smelled musty, faint with the human odor of sweat and skin, the scent of another man’s house. He shrank back, fighting a sudden terror for what lay in the darkness below. It wasn’t anything as certain as eels or as vague as monsters that slunk through the outlands of his imagination, but something in between: pale things with the tentacles of squid, the intelligence of men, and the cruelty of the stars.

He leaned over and spat, counting two before it spattered. So it had a bottom. The rungs of a time-smoothed ladder descended from the starlight into blackness. Dante dropped his legs over the edge and scrabbled for a rung. The ladder creaked. Hand over hand, he descended, armpits slimy with sweat, until he stood in a circle of faintest light at its bottom.

Dante owned two things worth stealing. The first was his boots. The second was the only thing his father had left him before sailing into death or waters too warm to leave. He took it from his pocket, a torchstone, a small white marble. He held it in his palm and blew. It warmed and glowed. In the soft white light, dust caked the slanted shelves along the walls. Dante pawed through moldy cloth, water-spotted braziers, foul-smelling candles. A patina of age coated everything, greasy and yellow-gray.

There were two shelves of books. Dante’s heart leapt, but they were all copies of a common prayer manual he’d seen in the Library of Bressel and the vendors in the binding district. He stuffed the least mildewed in his pack anyway.

He swept through the basement wall to wall. He turned in a circle, hunting for anything he’d missed, then went through it again, piling up the junky relics in the middle of the room and prodding the shelves and drawers for hidden compartments. What he’d taken as a stool turned out to be a scuffed-up chest. He smashed its rusty lock with a brick and was rewarded with three sludgy bottles. With waning patience and waxing despair, he searched the small basement a third time, moving as slowly and carefully as he could make himself go. At the end, he wandered to the circle of starlight and gazed up the ladder. It would be dawn soon. At some point the guard’s relief would find the body cooling in the yard. Maybe not for days, but for all Dante knew a second guard had already arrived and was already scouring the grass for the killer of his friend.

Dante was wearing down, too. The scabs of his cuts dribbled blood with every too-quick gesture. He was tired and thirsty and sore. The sphere of light shrank back toward the torchstone. In thickening shadow, Dante sat down on a desk. It was too big to have been lowered down the hole as it was. They must have brought it down in pieces and nailed it together in the cellar.

His hope contracted with the light. The first frost would come any day. He’d used up half his cloak for bandages and didn’t have a cent to replace it. If he went back to Bressel, he’d starve and freeze. If he returned to the village, he’d regret it all his life.

The stone flickered, throwing the room into deep shadow, revealing a crease in the shelves near the ceiling. Before Dante could be certain it was there, the light blinked off for good.

He shuffled across the blackened room, candlesticks clattering away from his feet, and bumped into the wooden shelves. He climbed them until he could press his palm against the cobwebbed ceiling. He’d seen the crease just below the top shelf. He scrabbled his fingernails against the coarse wood. They slid into a crack.

Splinters drove under his nails. Bit by bit, he pried the false top away from the shelf. With a high-pitched groan, it fell away and whapped against the floor. He smelled dry paper and earthy leather. Dante reached blind into the crevice, heart beating hard. There couldn’t possibly be anything lurking inside; there was no chance he’d feel a sharp tug and pull back one less knuckle than he’d started the day with. His fingers brushed over a flat, pebbled surface. It was the first thing he’d touched down here that wasn’t dusty or greasy with neglect. He lifted the object loose. The shelf he stood on snapped in half.

He hit the ground hard. His hip and shoulder roared with hammerblows of pain. He waited for the ache to fade to a dizzy tingle before he tested them for breaks. His limbs moved freely and without fresh hurts. By right, the fall should have left him broke-legged or paralyzed, trapped in the ground beneath the graves. He shouldn’t have even made it this far. Except for dumb luck, he should have died two hours ago, struck down by the guard. His body splayed outside the chapel. Wounds long done bleeding. Body held down by the wind and the clouds until it merged with the dirt.

But his bones weren’t broken. The guard
hadn’t
killed him. He was bruised and weak and leaking blood from his side, but the thing in his hands was a book. He’d held onto it as he fell. After he hit the ground. Now, he stashed it in his pack and climbed back up the ladder.

Up top, he got it out once more, turning it to face the charcoal-clouded starlight. On its cover, a pale tree spread its branches to the darkness.

The White Tree. Barden, the monk had called it. Supposedly, it was as real as the hills and stood in the twilight valley at the north end of the earth. According to the monk—even when they’d talked, Dante had been skeptical; wasn’t it convenient that it existed so far away—it had sprouted from a god’s own knuckle. Instead of bark and leaves and wood, it had grown of bone and bone alone. Its knotty trunk hewn from thighs and spines. Its long limbs the arcs of ribs and the knobby curls of fleshless fingers. Instead of flowers, it budded teeth.

Book in hand, Dante laughed lowly, spooking himself. Why not just paint a bunch of flames around it, too? Or bind it in skin and ink it in blood? That would be no less ridiculous than the gleaming bones on its cover.

Yet there was something to it. He could feel its weight. Its age. When he closed his eyes, he thought he could feel the power the man in the mail shirt had used to raise the dog from the creek. Goosebumps stood out on Dante’s neck and arms. He packed away the book and hauled the heavy gravestone back over the pit into the cellar.

Ragged black mountains hung to the west. To the east, Bressel was a full day’s walk for a well-rested man. Dante slunk into the woods, shuffling along the rutted path hidden beneath the grass. As the sun rose, his legs faltered. He balled himself up under a squat tree, shading himself from the itchy light of morning.

Before he slept, he gave himself one last look at the book. Exposed by the daylight, the tree looked less absurd, less melodramatically morbid, and more like something that could be waiting in the wilds, if only the world were a slightly weirder place.

He’d wind up standing beneath it within half a year.

Chapter II

T
HE
FUNNY
THING
ABOUT
ROBBERY
, Dante thought as he crouched in the filth of an unlit alley, is how little the concept of property meant to him once he’d started going to bed hungry. So the watch would hang him if they caught him? That didn’t mean he was wrong to do it, that just meant he shouldn’t under any circumstances get caught. What kind of rule was so weak it had to be backed up by death threats? Who cares about being hanged when the alternative’s starving? And if they really didn’t want robbers in the city, why did they build their alleys exactly like the fish-pens that funnel careless salmon into waiting nets?

He heard footsteps at the other end of the alley and shrank down further. The moment the man passed Dante clubbed him above the ear with the polished horn of his knife’s hilt. The man dropped, voiceless. As Dante stripped the body of its purse and the pair of rings on its right hand he noted the man was still breathing. Good for him. The penalty for Dante, if caught, would be the same whether the victim lived or died. He didn’t understand that, either. A man of lesser principles would be tempted to kill the man he robbed so he couldn’t be identified to the watch. Dante opened the man’s jacket in search of a second purse and saw the taut-laced buckskin badge of the tanner’s guild. He frowned. He didn’t want trouble with guildsmen. They were too close to running the city these days. He hurried to cover the unconscious body with some shredded rags he found among the other garbage, then left the alley in something less than a jog.

The walk from the chapel had taken three days. He’d managed about ten stiff-legged miles the first day, then no more than two on the second before he collapsed at a waterway so small it was more puddle than lake. He laid down on its cool banks, moaning and burning, and whenever he closed his eyes the crystal-clear faces of men and women he’d never seen swam in his mind’s vision. When the fever broke early next morning he shuffled over the roots and rocks toward the city in the east, stopping frequently for rest and water, but he reached Bressel before sunrise and immediately spent the last of his silver on a room for a week. He haunted the corners of its common room those first couple days, snaking from the safety of the wall to nab meat and bread when their owners’ heads hit the table or they swayed off to find the privy. That had worked until the boy who worked the mornings threatened to throw him out if he caught him again. Dante nodded, face stony as he suffered the threats of a kid who couldn’t be more than fourteen, then retreated to his room to pass the day throwing his knife at the rats that skittered across the floor. It was a pointless task, though; he knew he’d never work up the courage to spit them and set them over the common room fire.

Robbing, from there, and after what he’d done at the chapel, came easily. His nerves had threatened to give out on him on his initial try, but when he left his first mark in forceful slumber in the shit-caked gutter of an alley, he wondered that it took so little effort to turn things they owned into things he owned. An average purse could feed him for a week—and this was just the money people carried around for luxuries and whims—what did they need it all for? He limited his own expenses to food, room, and candles to read by, but he knew he could have more if his interests had been in things instead of in the book. Whatever authority had given these men their wealth was no more substantial than the power of a rabbit’s foot—it felt good to carry, but when things went bad, it turned out all you were carrying to protect you was a lump of meat too nasty to eat and the knowledge that somewhere a bunny had left the warren and never come home.

He walked on. Bootsteps rasped from behind him in the alley and he started. He fingered the knife beneath his doublet, but let it be. Men who showed blades without a landed title or writ of the guild of arms were taught the things a whip could do better than a sword. Dante turned onto an arterial road and huddled in a doorway until the man passed without a glance.

He knew he’d been jumpy lately, but how else should he act after a killing, the possession of a banned book, and multiple acts of armed robbery? It sounded terrible when you said it all at once. Most of the time he carried it lightly, knowing any deed done out of necessity couldn’t be wrong, but other times he was struck by an emotion so powerful he wanted to cease existing altogether. At those times he muttered to himself, walking through the streets as if in a dream, drowning in the memory of the short shouts of those he’d robbed, the slackening face of the dead man at the temple, the snore-like expulsion of his last breath. It was clear he couldn’t go on like this. It wasn’t how he’d meant to live when he’d left the village for Bressel, but it was what circumstances had forced him to. His only hope was with the book. If it could somehow teach him what the man in the mail shirt had known, he’d no longer have to look over his shoulder at every footstep or risk his life in the alleys just to keep from starving. His thoughts on how that power would help him were vague—he could hire himself out at the courts, he supposed—but he knew that once he had it, the opportunities of great men would find him on their own.

The book was dense. Not just in the literal sense of its thick-as-a-brick 800 pages, but dense with dozens of unfamiliar places and names, with warlords and sorcerers and tales he dimly remembered hearing as a child, cluttered with huge but bizarrely precise numbers like 432,000, stuffed with scores of words from a language he didn’t recognize. Even its title was gibberish. Dante found some references to the book’s people and places in the other book he’d taken, the prayer manual, but three or four hours of careful reading and cross-checking would let him read no more than ten or twenty pages of the book itself. Yet when he tried to read it straight through he found he’d absorbed nothing more than an occasional phrase or, more often, an illustration. He went to bed angry, handling the words in his head for an hour before he could fall asleep.