EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (326 page)

Gabe fell silent, staring at the creases of his massive hands.

“How did she come to power, then?” Dante said to break the silence. Gabe looked surprised to see others in the room.

“The usual way,” he said, looking out the window. He brooded for a long moment. Distracted, Dante thought, perhaps by old memories. The norren closed his eyes, as if reaching some thorny decision, then went on. “The head of the order dies suddenly and unexpectedly, and she takes advantage of the vacuum to reassemble the hierarchy in the manner she considers proper.”

“Did she kill him?” Blays said, perking up.

“Cally thought so. It’s why he left, along with the fact those of us who’d been content to stay hidden no longer had much role in the order, and left Narashtovik, where it was safe.”

Dante licked his lips. “You disagree with Cally?”

“Who said that?” Gabe clasped his face with his palms, running his fingers through his thick beard. “Always putting words in my mouth. He’s probably right. The old man was old, but not that old. When he left—well, his death
was
unexpected. Convenient enough to render an accident unlikely. Samarand’s power had grown stagnant. Did she do it? Probably. Even if she didn’t, the way she strongarmed the council was reprehensible.” He gave Dante a strange look. “She’s the one who revived the idea of using the
Cycle
as bait for powerful recruits. That should give you some idea of her methods.”

“In other words,” Robert said, gathering his words and parsing them out one at a time, “menace she may be, but there are plenty of others who’d take her place easy enough if she were to wake up with a knife in her face.”

“More or less,” the norren rumbled.

Robert glanced between the boys. “What do you think?”

“What I think is I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Blays said. He tried to catch Dante’s eyes. “This sounds like the kind of thing that gets you hanged. Remember that? Hangings?”

Gabe itched his nose. “Well, only if you’re caught.”

“Know what I think? I think this thing’s a runaway boulder,” Robert declared. “Difficult to pry out of a slope, but once the descent’s begun, the only way to stop its momentum is to throw a bunch of bodies in its way until it’s bashed itself to a halt.” He glanced between the boys. “We can either fling our own bodies beneath it in the hopes of slowing it some tiny fraction,” he said, shaking his head, “or let lots of other people waste themselves on it while we go get drunk,” he concluded, nodding emphatically.

“That’s the most cowardly thing I’ve ever heard,” Dante said. He stood and gazed out the window into the filth and decay of the street. “Cally thinks it will work, that we’d be enough to stop it. We have to reach Narashtovik. We have to try.”

“Can’t promise to follow you there,” Robert said, shaking his head. “Sounds virtuous enough, sure. But also like I’d end up six feet under.”

“I’ll go.” Blays rose and joined Dante at the window. “I don’t know why. It sounds dangerous and stupid. But I’ll go.”

Dante nodded. He listened to the muted shouts and whip-pops of the city streets, thinking how to say thanks.

“Well enough,” Gabe said. “Cally told you about the dead city’s views toward foreigners?”

“He said they’re a little aloof,” Dante said.

“I’ve got something that should keep them from killing you on sight. A token the traders use to prove they’ve been there before without causing problems. It’s why Cally sent you here.”

“Ah,” Robert said, ticking his nails on the pommel of his sword. “Only if it’s no trouble.”

“No more than anything else.”

“Right then. Got any food?”

“Preferably something you don’t have to eat with a hammer?” Blays said.

“There is a kitchen downstairs. I’ll have a boy fetch the token. You’ll stay the night?”

“Wouldn’t turn it down for a full keg,” Robert said. He patted his stomach. “Well, I wouldn’t turn it down, leastwise.”

“Well enough,” Gabe said. “I’ll see to your quarters.” Dante turned to go and felt a heavy hand weighing on his shoulder. “A word, young master?”

Dante nodded and watched the others go. Blays waved on his way out the door. Dante took up a chair and scratched the wispy hair on his chin. He needed to learn how to shave.

“How do you know Cally, Gabe?”

“The order. And before that we fought in a war together.”

Dante tried to imagine Cally swinging a sword or charging a line of armsmen. He couldn’t even see him without the gray beard or bent back.

“Which one?”

Gabe sniffed. “The one twenty or thirty years after the one before it. When a new group of eager young men had had time to grow up without its memory and decided it was time to leave their own mark on the world.”

“Oh,” Dante said. “That one.”

“I left when he did. It was clear the place we’d called home had become something different. Something we no longer felt right to support.”

“Thus why you came to lie low in the receptive arms of Mennok?”

“No,” Gabe said. He painted Dante with a scornful gaze. “I came to Mennok because of a philosophical understanding with the god. We
should
spend our lives brooding by ourselves. It makes more sense than the egoistic struggles for supremacy of every other sect, including the one whose tome you carry.” Dante didn’t reply. Gabe let loose a long, slow exhalation and removed some of the edge from his voice. “Tell me how you came here.”

“We followed the road from Whetton.”

“I’m speaking in a broader, less literal sense.”

“Ah.” Dante cleared his throat. He thought a second, then, in abbreviated detail, told the monk how he’d heard of the book hidden in the temple outside Bressel, of the men that had come after him once he’d taken it, how they’d chased him and Blays to Whetton, how he’d met Cally when preparing to rescue Blays from execution, how he’d sprung Blays and the other prisoners and fled to Cally’s shrine to hide and recover, how Cally’d told him the secrets and menace of Narashtovik and why he had to go. The whole tale took less than ten minutes. When he concluded he thought how unfair it was, that everything that had happened to him since the fall could be summed up so readily. So much got lost in the telling.

“Let me see the book,” Gabe said at its end.

“All right,” Dante said. He picked up his pack where he’d set it by his feet and held it to his chest. Gabe raised his eyebrows, then Dante opened it and drew out the
Cycle
. He handed it over.

“I see,” Gabe said, tracing the cover-image of Barden with one thick finger. He opened it. “I see.” He flipped a few pages, then leaned his nose toward the text. Dante saw his eyes scanning lines. His mouth opened a little, showing those big flat teeth. He turned to the back, to the sections written in Narashtovik, and Dante tried to read the emotions that roiled across the stolid flesh of his face: surprise, amusement, wariness, urgency, at last back to guarded brooding. “I see.”

“What?”

“I see,” he said, “why they want it back so bad.”

“You said they use it to discover recruits. Cally, too.”

“Yes, but they use copies. Things they can afford to lose if the trail goes cold or the thief goes down with a ship.”

Dante actually blinked. “This—?”

Gabe ruffled his beard and tucked in his chin, chuckling in a way that wasn’t entirely happy.

“I once knew a man who hated Samarand’s idea of how to use the book. Thought it manipulative, dangerous to the order. He once joked about switching out the copy for the original. See how smart they felt without their special book.”

“I think I’ve met that sense of humor,” Dante said. “How can you tell it’s the one?”

“You know who’s conscripted to transcribe these things?” Gabe said, offering Dante a rare smile. “Men like me. Bored with bad eyesight. The mind wanders, you misspell a word. Transpose things. Maybe you editorialize a little. Every copy has errors.” He lifted the book. “This one’s clean.”

“Oh,” Dante said. Gabe tapped his fingers together. “Meaning?”

“Objects collect power through age and use. That one’s different from its copies.”

“I can’t tell if you’re speaking literally.”

“Me neither.” Gabe twiddled with one of the black cords around his neck that dangled from the cassock. “You should tell Blays to name that sword he used when you freed him from the law of Whetton.”

“Will that make it...” he trailed off, not wanting to sound stupid. “Special?”

“If not, it might make him think it is. These things can’t exactly be measured.”

“The book,” Dante said, taking it back from Gabe and running his fingers over its cover. “Does that mean—“

A high ring of shattering glass sounded from the street. Angry shouts followed at its heels. Dante waited for them to settle up who owed whom a bottle before going on.

“Do you think—“

The door burst open. Robert half-collapsed through it, sword in hand, face bearing that tight, flat expression he’d held the night of the fight around the campfire.

“Something’s going on downstairs,” he said.

“Just a couple drunks,” Dante said.

“No. Downstairs in the monastery.”

“What’s going on?” Gabe said, getting to his feet in a way cassocked hills shouldn’t be able to do.

“One of the monks killed one of the other monks,” Robert said. He leaned into the hall and a moment later Blays swung back into the room, sword out, breathing heavily.

“
Killed
?” Gabe said.

“A bunch of them have swords and staffs and things,” Blays reported. “It looked like a few of them came in from the street.”

“None of the monks would kill anyone.”

“It’s happening,” Dante said, the back of his neck tingling the way it did when he heard an animal creeping through woods by dark, or when he finished a book that read like it had been inspired by the gods themselves. “The fighting starts in the temples. That’s what they said.” Yells and crashes of wood and steel came up from the first floor, underlining his point.

“Shit,” Gabe took a long breath through his nose and nodded at the doorway. “You should leave. You’ve got other troubles to see to.”

“A compelling argument,” Robert said.

“No,” Dante said, drawing his sword. “We can stop this, here. They won’t take this one place.”

“Going to save the whole town, too?” Gabe said.

Dante stuck the point of his blade into the wooden floor. It came to him all at once: the idea that he was more than an arrow shot from another man’s bow, unable to deviate his course once he’d been set in motion. He’d known Gabe less than an hour, but already he liked him. By nature he had no patience for the self-important mysticism of the men of the gods, but something about this monastery and the quiet conviction of its men was too important to hand over to the Arawnites. Cally might say their passage to Narashtovik was too important to risk their lives in this place, but he was almost three hundred miles away, was too wrapped up in his own dealings to venture out into all this strife. Dante was here now, and here, he thought, was a place worth saving.

“We can’t defend the whole town,” Dante said. “But we will fight them off here before we run like rabbits. At least you’ll have time to prepare for whatever comes next.”

“Besides,” Blays said, “we still need that token. I’d rather die here than get eaten by barbarians a thousand miles from here.”

“Idiots,” Gabe said, with neither a smile nor a scowl. He lifted a sturdy, dark-wooded chair and snapped off a leg. He swung it through the air. “Well. Let’s go see what the fuss is about.”

“Yes,” Dante said, neck tingling again. He pulled at his sword and found it was stuck in the floorboards. He yanked again and stumbled into Blays’ back.

“What’s your hurry?” Blays muttered. He put an arm in front of Robert before they left the door. “Me first. You’re unsound.”

“Physically, perhaps.”

“Tell me who not to kill before I do it,” Blays called back to Gabe. They pounded down the stairs. At its base lay the still, bleeding body of the young man who’d answered the door. Blays and Robert flanked out, facing the two doors in. Gabe’s face went slack and he knelt beside the body. Dante stood over him, beginning a call to the nether.

“Don’t,” Gabe said. “He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Grieve later.” Gabe surged to his feet, chair leg in hand, and took them through the parlor and to the outer entrance of the monastery. Drops of blood shone on the slate flooring. Fresh gashes marred the table in the parlor; dusty old fabric spilled from a slash in one of the benches. The rooms were empty. Gabe cracked open the front door and peered into the gardens. From deeper inside the monastery they heard raised voices.

“Follow me,” Gabe said. Blays tried to stay at his side but the hallway was too narrow for any more than Gabe’s bearish shoulders. Dante and Robert jogged at their heels. The norren took a right turn and they emerged into a relatively open room of simple chairs and round, roughhewn tables, a dining area or meeting hall. At its far end, some forty feet away, a group of men were pounding on a closed door.

“What’s going on here?” Gabe shouted.

“We’ve trapped the usurpers in the kitchen!” a bald man in a cassock cried back.

“You have swords in your hands,” Gabe said, stopping after he’d crossed half the room. “And who are those men with you?”

“They’re the gardeners I was telling you about,” the monk said, glancing to the men at his sides, dirt-faced men wearing black cloaks and naked swords, one of which streaked blood down its length and tacked against the floor.

“Hansteen,” Gabe said in a quiet voice, “lay down your arms. This can end now.”

“I thought you were one of us,” Hansteen said.

“I thought you were one of
us
!” Gabe cried. “You killed Roger! He was a boy!”

“There was confusion.” Hansteen pinched the bridge of his nose. “Help us out and he’ll be the only one.”

“Have you ever even read the
Ganneget
? Do you remember that second rule? Where you may willingly harm no man?”

“Oddly, it mentions nothing of our conduct toward norren.” Hansteen smiled, briefly. “I know what you used to be. It’s time, Gabe. We will no longer let ourselves be hunted and killed for serving the first among the gods.”