EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (306 page)

He’d spent time in the wilds around the village before, but mainly in the summer, and when he tried to think about where they’d go when the snows came his mind turned its face from his worries. Years later, when Blays was gone and so was his youth, he’d look to this time as a beacon, the single span of his life after the warm haze of childhood that he could remember without the twin shadows of doubt and regret. These couple weeks in the woods would hold the weight of entire seasons of the years before and after; when he thought of these days, allowing himself the memory like an old dog getting up to bark at a fox he’d once chased, he thought of the yellow touch of sunlight through the trees, tasted the sweet, clean flesh of lake trout caught that day, heard the twitter of blackbirds and the laughter of two boys, saw Blays’ sword flashing before it crashed against his own.

A snake in every garden, the death of every pet. A day when one wakes to find his parents are gone. The bitter tail to those memories, all those years later, after the gray passage of decades, after everything had changed. There would have been a way to make things different, if he’d known enough to make them run to far-off lands and so avoid the treason and bloodshed and heartache to come, but then that would come at the cost of the man he’d become. He’d close the memories like a book, an irrelevant story from a place that no longer existed. There was no room for looking back on what couldn’t be undone.

When they saw what he’d done they clapped Jack Hand (as he came to be known) in thirty pounds of chains and locked him in the lowest level of the oubliette, where he was to be kept until his eldest brother’s hourglass ran dry, which was said to be fed by the sands of the endless Mandal Desert. He lived in darkness, fed once a day, nipped by lice and by rats. Before enacting his imprisonment they took the index finger from each hand—one finger for each of his brothers’ wives. There had been calls for more drastic justice, but royal blood was royal blood, which was more than could be said for the wives of his brothers, and not lightly spilled.

Dante looked up and wondered whether it were all right to laugh at history, and more specifically a history of the killing of women. The
Cycle
had taken a strange turn, abandoning the lumbering attempts to explain the skies and the encyclopedic catalogue of names and kings for digressive stories. Not that he’d read many of the Second Classical authors that had prospered in Gask centuries before, but that’s what its tone reminded him of. It read with a certain ironic distance, not so stiflingly self-serious as the recent works he’d absorbed back in Bressel. He hadn’t known books could be written in anything but the artless blunder of the holy books, the juvenile wit of romances and adventures, or the overelaborate posing of poetry and history—these last of which frustrated him most of all, seemingly written more with the intent of intimidating whoever opened them than to
say
anything—and he read on with half a smile and the small but sharp fear this new tone was an aberration, something that would disappear as soon as the story was over.

Jack Hand’s cell was as dark as the caves under the earth. They’d intended it as punishment. He recalled the things he’d learned, dwelled on the last few hours with the bodies. He hailed the shadows to slay the rats and plague the lice and sooner than later they no longer swarmed his cell. After a while he likely went mad, though the lack of observers and Jack Hand’s own questionable temperament render the status of his mind a matter of philosophy rather than fact. Who knows how we’d act, locked away, locked alone. The mind is a vast place and its hungers far sharper than the body’s.

The mind is a vast place and the black of his world was vaster. He drew that darkness, shaped it, and when, three years later, they opened his cell because the growing stink, reportedly legendary even by the spongy standards of dungeons, could mean little other than its occupant had died and was rapidly being converted to the kind of brown sludge kept only at bay by the continual intake of breath, his captors were met by a chattering horde of rats.

Skinless, fleshless, bloodless, the creeping bones of 72 life-sucked rodents flooding from each of 30 different cracks in the walls, forming into two streams of surging beasts that overwhelmed the guards as saplings before a tsunami. It’s been wondered how so great a force could be stowed in all the space of his constricting cell, but what is not under debate is how they maimed and murdered every living occupant of the keep. There they ceased, and Jack Hand took his throne; their bodies fed his armies, and he, in turn, was fed by that shadow that lurks behind all things.

Blays was off trampling grass, but for now Dante marked his page. He’d kept a smile till the final sentence, when at once he knew, in the same way he knew if he jumped he’d come back down, that if he stared hard enough and right enough at the deep morning shadows cast on his knees by the leaves, something would happen. Before the blushing hand of stupidity could grab him by the neck, he blanked his mind and settled his hands in his lap. He felt a pressure, a tangible presence, like water were being squirted into the front of his skull. Somehow it didn’t
hurt
—it felt wrong, but not so wrong to tempt him to stop.

Sweat welled from his temples. A hand’s span of the nearest shadows stirred as if by the wind. The illusion was so real he didn’t register shock until another part of his mind told him his hair wasn’t moving and he didn’t feel colder like he would if air were moving over his sweat-slick skin. He raised a hand and he had the queasy sensation of going blind as the dark substance swelled, casting him into a darkness as deep as the space between constellations.

His breath came hard but he stood slowly, not wanting to spook it, for as little sense as that made. He still felt nothing against his skin, not like if he were wading through something solid. He took a trial step. It wasn’t a disaster. He took another and tripped on a root. Pain shot through his palms and knees when they pounded ground and the delumination weakened till it was more like a gray fog than like he had no eyes. Dante saw the condensed shadow was roughly spherical, highest a few feet behind him—it had stayed put when he started moving.

He emptied his mind and the darkness ate up the light. After five paces in a straight line the world winked on again. When he looked down he saw his body rising from the mass of shadows at an angle across his waist, centaurian, as if his dad had mated with a globby black hemisphere. He wouldn’t put it past him.

“Hey! Dante!” Blays’ voice reached him in a hissed shout.

“I’m here,” he called back, matching the boy’s volume, and when he looked down the shadowsphere was gone. He picked up the book and walked toward where he’d heard Blays’ cry.

“What were you doing?” Blays peered past him into the trees.

“Reading.”

“Not riding horses?”

“Not recently,” Dante said, eyeing him.

“Then someone else is here. There were tracks down at the pond.”

“Travelers?”

Blays quirked his mouth. “We’re miles from any road.”

“Maybe it’s someone’s land. They’re out for a bit of fishing.”

“And maybe you’re about to get an arrow through your neck.” Blays rubbed his mouth, then his eyes. “We’ve got to go.”

“All right,” Dante said, spooked by the boy’s seriousness. They headed for the camp. A stone’s throw from it Blays barred an arm across his chest and pressed him down into the bushes. “What is it?” he whispered.

“Maybe nothing, but if it’s a damn trap I don’t want to walk right into it.”

The grounds looked empty. Their fire had gone out during the night and any smoke was hours gone. The stillness of the wood pressed on his ears like he’d dived underwater. Blackbirds chirped at each other. He heard the furtive rustle of small animals tracking through the fallen leaves. A crow cackled and he jerked his arms to his body. A sour tightness took his chest. He’d come to think of themselves as the only two in this place.

“We’ll circle around,” Blays whispered. “If it looks clear, we’ll grab our stuff. If you see or hear
anything
, freeze on the spot.”

Dante nodded, glad to follow Blays’ steps. The kid hunched down and advanced around their camp, pausing every twenty or thirty feet to cock his head to the silence. When they’d made more than half a circle around it he hunkered down for a minute, lips a white line. Dante culled small comfort in the fact horses were noisy by nature, always snorting and whickering at each other like big hairy idiots. They couldn’t take two steps in the dense forest floor without sounding like something falling down a mountain.

Blays tapped him on the shoulder and they stole straight for their gear. He saw no sign the ground here had been disturbed by anyone but themselves. They gathered weapons and vegetables, wordless, wrapping the two half-eaten fish from the night before in fresh-fallen leaves. Dante grabbed a stray book and that was all it took to be ready to move.

They drew back, Blays leading them direct away from the pond sitting a tenth-mile to the east. They moved quickly but without panic, feet crumpling leaves but not crashing them; still, Blays would halt them every couple minutes to crouch beside a trunk and listen to the forest. It was early morning yet, the sun bright without being warm. The season had begun to shorten its track through the sky, but it would be light another eight hours, maybe nine, and the thought of going on like this for hours on end made Dante want to lie down then and there.

“There’s no way they tracked us from Bressel,” Blays said at one of their halts. “They’d have been on us in two days, not two weeks.”

“We don’t know it was them,” Dante said, looking behind them.

“No one else has any reason to be out here.”

“Other people exist, you know.”

“Don’t be a fool.” Blays’ voice had jumped and he bugged his eyes and brought it back to a whisper. “It
could
be fox hunters. It
could
be vagabonds, though that would raise the interesting question of how the hell they got their hands on horses. Even if they were those things, it wouldn’t make us any safer. There’s no law here.”

“Just us,” Dante said, clenching his teeth. “How does anyone get anywhere when everything’s this screwed up?”

“By being so nasty mere sight of them makes everyone else run away. Let’s go.”

Despite living in the woods for weeks, he hadn’t truly noticed how many animals shared the land. Every crunch of leaves or sudden shrill cry made his neck go tight. The air was cool, almost cold, but he was tickled by icy lines of sweat down his ribs. Blays walked with his back bent, leaning forward and hurrying along like his nose weighed two hundred pounds and only constant motion could keep him from toppling. Dante urged the sun on, outraged that something so big could be so slow. Hours passed. His feet got sore but he found he wasn’t tired, not after the last few weeks of fake swordfights and stomping around the pathless woods. The back of his mouth tasted like the dry, sour aftertaste of cranberries. His head felt thick, fuzzy and no more substantial than puffwood seeds, and when he took his eyes off the ground and held his hand in front of his face he saw that it was shaking.

Noon. The sun came straight down and lay against his skin without warmth. He kept his eyes on the beat of his feet. There was no wind and when he saw the ripple of the shadows of the leaves his foot almost missed the earth. With a few more days of reading and concentration, he thought he would be able to do more with them than see them. He hadn’t had those days, though. All he could depend on, if things fell apart, was his blade and his training. He trusted the steel, at least.

He nudged Blays toward the subdued trickle of a stream and they knelt at its edge and drank away the sweat of the journey. He shrugged his pack from one shoulder, meaning to eat some carrots, then froze and listened to the language of the woods.

“Get back,” he whispered.

“What is it?” Blays’ hand went to his sword. Dante shook his head and retreated along the route they’d taken, breaking after thirty feet to head away from the stream. He pulled Blays down under a thick bush and closed his eyes, trying to hush his breath. Blays made as if to speak and stopped at the snap of twigs from the direction they’d just left. He pressed himself lower to the dirt.

“They crossed the stream,” they heard, a harsh, deep voice that rumbled through the air. Dante raised his head a couple inches, but the trees were too thick to see anything but branches. “What’ve you got?”

“Not far off. I can feel them.” The second voice was high but faint. Dante heard more words but couldn’t differentiate them, then: “It’s too close to tell.”

“Let’s take a damn break,” said a third man. “Haven’t eaten since sunup.”

“We can catch them now,” the first one said. “They’re close.”

“We can catch them just as easy without starving to death in the meantime. They’re on
foot
.”

The discussion dropped to a mutter of details. He strained his ears, made out the words “trail” and “book” and “carry the bodies.” They went silent a minute later, and after another minute Blays caught Dante’s eye and gestured north, away. Dante raised a finger to his own mouth. A few seconds later a horse blew air past its mouth. He thought he could smell its animal sweat over the gaminess of his own.