EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (334 page)

Dante headed over to one of the walls. Footsteps and coughing echoed from front to back, but as long as they kept their voices to a murmur he didn’t think their words would carry. He contemplated an alcove presenting a three-foot statue of a holy man he didn’t recognize, a work of thickly impressionistic muscles and blunt features. Its clean lines mirrored the greater build of the cathedral.

“Could take cover in one of these,” he said. “Nearer the front.”

“I’m guessing those benches aren’t intended for the huddled masses. Might not be able to get too close.”

Dante nodded, trying to gauge the distance from alcove to altar. It was a ways. Somehow it was harder to guess indoors, inside a building where a full-grown man had no more presence than a mouse.

“How’s your archery?” Dante said.

“Shitty.”

“That much better than mine?” Dante sighted in on a couple of decently-dressed men standing in front of the main altar. He couldn’t tell one from the other. He and Blays would have to be closer to stand any good chance of landing an arrow—if they could even get the bow through the door. If they had a straight line of sight, which was doubtful when the crowds filled the place up. And the closer they got for the purpose of improving their chances of a true strike, the further they’d be from the doors that would let them outside. “No. Won’t work.”

“Spell?” Blays said, catching his eye.

“Not sure my range is any better.” Dante rubbed his eyes, trying to remember the furthest he’d fired the nether. The tree in the graveyard in Whetton, probably, and that had been barely half the distance they may need. They had two days yet till the sermon of Samarand. They could return to the wilds to let him test and flex the reach of his mind, but such an attack would rest on a full foundation of assumptions. Was this sanctuary warded against hostile employment of the nether? For that matter, was there any such thing as wards? Samarand’s priests, would they be as wary for otherworldly assaults as her pikemen would be for those of steel? “I’m thinking this isn’t the place.”

“I’m rather doubting that castle outside would be any easier.”

Dante bit his lips between his teeth. “She’ll have to walk here and back from it.”

Blays huffed, the puff of air ringing from the walls. He lifted his eyes and lowered his voice.

“From just across the street.”

Dante nodded. “There’ll be crowds. Confusion.”

“And probably no more than a minute when she’s in the open. Not much time for the right moment.”

“You know, this was never that hard all the other times.”

“Not counting all the times we were nearly killed,” Blays said, eyes full of scorn. “Can we go back outside? Talking about this in here’s creeping me out.”

“Yeah. Gods, it’s beautiful.”

They left its hushed shelter for the bright daylight and the relative roar of the babble of pedestrians. Across the way the Citadel stood as solid as if it had been carved straight from a hillock.

“We’ll get here early,” Dante said. His voice wasn’t yet back to a normal level. “Watch how she comes in. They’ll probably follow the same route back.”

Blays bit his pinky nail, spat it into the street.

“How is it,” he said, staring at the battlements, the flags snapping in a wind they barely felt at ground level, “they seem to know our every move when we’re 1200 miles away, but here we are close enough to piss through their bedroom window and we’re free as an eagle?”

“Probably don’t recognize you with your hair down in your eyes,” Dante said. “Not to mention that stupid beard.”

“Yours is so much better. Looks like you sewed a rat’s tail to your lip.”

“Rat tails are hairless.”

“Well, imagine they’re not.”

“Two days,” Dante said.

Blays bit another nail. “Only if it looks good.”

“Maybe the whole city’s lit up with the stuff of the book,” Dante said. “It’d be like trying to find a lantern held in front of the sun.”

Brays wrinkled his brow. “Are you basing that on anything at all?”

“Well, it would make sense.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“Nobody’s come through that gate the whole time we’ve been here,” Dante said, nodding at the closed doors in the frontside of the Citadel’s walls. “Do you think that’s odd?”

“Oh yeah. When I was growing up in our castle back home we let people in and out all the time. The walls were just to impress the neighbors.”

“I mean you don’t need to keep them closed all the time when you’ve got all those soldiers. You’d think we’d at least have seen someone carrying food in or garbage out. Or couriers waving letters around so we can see how important they are. There hasn’t been a thing. Closed in the middle of the day.”

“Yeah,” Blays said, folding his arms. “It is a little odd.”

“I’m going to ask someone,” Dante said, straining his ears for the sound of their native language.

“What? What did Robert tell you about questions?”

“Suddenly you’re on his side?”

“Just because he’s a prick doesn’t make him wrong.”

“Excuse me,” Dante said, flagging down someone who wasn’t dressed in fur. “Excuse me.” He put a hand on the man’s shoulder. The man spun, face dark, but his eyes went guarded when he met Dante’s. “Can you tell me why the Citadel’s gates are closed midday?”

“No one goes in,” the man said in a thick accent.

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

“No one?”

The man rolled his eyes. “Priests go in. No one else. That’s why they call it the
Sealed
Citadel?”

“Ah,” Dante said. “I thought that was just an expression.”

“No, this is an expression,” the man said, following up with something obscene. He walked away.

“Did you hear that?” Dante said to Blays.

“Yes, but I think you’d break your back before you reached it.”

“About the Citadel.”

“Yeah.” Blays tipped his head at its high walls. “So what?”

“So we can’t get in. We might just have this one shot at Samarand.”

“Yeah, and maybe she’ll recant her wicked ways and off herself before we have to do it for her.” Blays’ mouth twitched. His brows drew together, creasing the skin between and above them. At that moment he no longer looked in any way young. “There’s no way we can know until the moment comes. Let’s not talk about it till then.”

Chapter XIII

I
NSTEAD
OF
TALKING
THEY
PREPARED
. The next day Dante sold the horses, reasoning it was better to take whatever they could get now than to get nothing when they were stolen. In his haste he received perhaps a third their worth, and in coin noticeably blacker and irregular than the Mallish chucks that had been minted within his lifetime, but to him it seemed a fortune, a rogue’s retirement in the coin of the realm. They blew half of it on clothes, on fur-lined black cloaks and gloves, on unpatched trousers and padded doublets of the high-collared fashion popular in the rank of Narashtovik. Dante chose red, Blays a deep pine green. No one would mistake them for princes, but neither would they any longer be indistinguishable from the gutter-sewage. They found a barber, were shorn of their wispy beards, had their shaggy hair shortened and straightened. In the clean sunlight of the street, Blays brushed stray hair from the back of his neck, a strange smile on his face.

“I feel like a jacketed ape,” he said.

“We look like traders,” Dante said, feeling the weight of the coins in his pocket. “Maybe even minor nobles. They won’t turn us away.”

They walked around the city till long after dark, not yet ready to forfeit the long hours to sleep. At last, legs weary from the trip to market and back to the cathedral and two circles around the Sealed Citadel and a trip to a public house, they returned to the home they’d made inside the first wall and stretched out on a pile of their old clothes and blankets.

“I wonder how Gabe fared,” Blays said into the quiet and the darkness.

“I bet he turned that monastery into a fortress.”

“And knighted the monks?”

“Why not?”

“Picture it,” Blays said. He laughed through his nose. “Those bony old men sallying forth on goatback. Waving butcher knives and rakes.”

“The rebels don’t stand a chance.” Dante chuckled. They were silent for a while. “He’ll be fine,” he said, mind on all the weeks that had gone by since they’d last seen him. All the southlands had been under threat of fire when they’d left that world behind. “We’ll see to that.”

In the ethereal dawn hours before Samarand’s sermon they walked to the bay at the north edge of the city and gazed out at the subdued waters of the northern sea. Gray, brackish on the breeze, calmed by the sandbars at the bay’s mouth and the arms of land to either side.

“How many men can say they’ve seen both this and the Aster?” Blays said, kicking rocks through the fine dirt of the beach.

“I’m glad we came,” Dante said, uncertain what he meant. The sun struggled against the mists of the waters, cloaked and concealed. He wished he could have watched it rise one last time.

They arrived some three hours before the sermon. Already the streets were thick with people. Men in rags with strips of burlap tied around their feet, men in finery to shame Dante and Blays’ new clothes, passels of boisterous merchants whose rings shone in the sunlight. Norren loomed above the crowd like the Cathedral of Ivars above the dead city. Dante shifted the sword at his belt. Robert’s warning about the curiosity of foreigners had cowed him into asking no questions about the legality of bearing arms in this place, but they’d seen many men in the streets who wore blades without worry, including men of obvious lowness and poverty, and this day was no different. He supposed a couple thousand years of constant invasion had made lax the laws of arms so strict in Bressel.

Dante’s nerves felt as tight as the morning before the Execution That Wasn’t. He sipped often from his water skin and halfway wished he had something stronger. The boys spoke little, eyes on the crowds, eyes on the men standing post on the walls above the keep’s great gate. An hour before noon they entered the cathedral. Half full already and still the streets were packed. They returned outdoors, restless and beware, ambling down the broad way, then leaned against the side of the thick walls of the house of some noble estate. The shield above its gate wore the black and white of Barden and the same spiral horns Dante still wore around his neck. He’d seen other men wearing them, too, men dressed in the plain and frill-less clothes of traders who profit too little to ever stop for festivals and feasts, but he had no idea what the horns meant to those who saw them, whether they were doing him any good to wear them.

Noon came. The bells of the cathedral pealed for three full minutes. The crowd quieted, then heaved with the volatile energy of anticipation, eyes on the silent gates. The last bell rang and wavered in the cold, crisp air. One moment slipped by, then another.

The groan of ropes and clank of chains cut through the babble. They hushed as if commanded by the earth itself. Guards emerged from a small door by the gate and helped guide the huge gates apart. Behind them a grille of iron bands as thick as Dante’s arm lifted a final foot and locked into place. A stream of footmen bearing swords and short pikes and dressed in the black and silver of the watch of Narashtovik marched from the walls of the Citadel to the street, carving an open lane to the doors of the church. They assembled into two solid lines, arms presented, chins lifted, heads held immobile as a small retinue of fancy-dressed men and clergy in soft, thick-folded robes entered into the open space. A chant thrummed through the silence, a foreign song shot through with grace and loss and renewal. Dante stood on his toes and at the center of the procession he saw a woman in a silver-trimmed black robe that clung to the swing of her arms and the sweep of her legs. Her open face was aged but not worn; rather than the crumbling edifice of something that had once been grand, her features looked like the accumulation of a strength that could only be built through long years, the way a cathedral as eternal as Ivars could only be built by two or three or five generations of architects devoting their lives to its completion. A single black braid ran down her back. Dante heard Blays draw in his breath. Her name rippled through the crowd.

“Straight from the keep,” Blays said, low. Dante nodded.

“Right out in the open.”

The men from the keep moved with formal deliberance. None looked younger than forty; most much older, bearing varying degrees of beardedness and baldness, walking on knees and hips stiffened by the clutch of time. A single norren walked with them with ponderous strides. Ninety seconds spent crossing the street, no more, and then they walked through the same cathedral doors as everyone else would. When the last priest had disappeared from the street the castle guard turned as one and filed back through the Citadel gates, leaving behind a small detachment of troops, half of which followed the retinue of clergymen within while the other half split itself to posts on either side of the church doors. The crowd woke from the spell of having looked on something holy and piled up through the doors. Elbows jostled Dante’s ribs and back. Blays clung to the back of his cloak to keep from being separated. They squeezed inside and after that crush of people the soaring interior of the cathedral felt as open as the head of a hill.

Seated to either side of the dais at the great hall’s rear were the monks and priests of Samarand’s detachment. She was nowhere to be seen, though through the close-pressed masses and the shaggy heads of norren and the faint smoke of candles and braziers she could have been standing at Dante’s shoulder without him having the wits to notice.

By habit and instinct as deeply felt as the drive that calls sea-salmon to take to the rivers and streams of their birth, the men with fine dress and tongue-tripping titles had settled in the benches at the front, and like the striations of rock the boys had seen in the shelves of the Dunden Mountains, the men and women who filled the temple grew progressively grubbier the closer they got to the front doors. Blays said something Dante couldn’t catch. He tugged Dante’s cloak and they slipped off to the right, cutting through the relatively loose crowds that filled the space between the solid clumps of men lining the alcoves and the clustered masses toward the church’s center. After a minute of rubbed shoulders and dirty looks their fresh clothes matched those of the men around them. They stopped roughly two-thirds of the way toward the altar, perhaps eighty feet from where Samarand would speak. It would have been impossible to fire a bow within these person-choked confines.