EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (338 page)

It was there. It was all there. Everything he’d wanted collected within the walls of this simple temple: copies of the
Cycle
; references and interpretations; versions with the final third translated into Mallish. He reached toward the shelf of the chapel library and heard Nak, who’d been sent back to their room an hour later to settle them in and show them around, say something about reading it in the original. Dante slid free a Mallish translation and sat down in the strong sunlight of the south-facing reading room, glad to be off his feet, which had felt swimmy beneath him. He hadn’t realized just how long he’d been kept from finishing the
Cycle
, just how much its version of the world had come to underpin his own.

“Much simpler than your idiotic mishmash,” Nak was saying.

“What?”

“The grammar. Unlike your’tongue,’ if it can be so called, ours actually follows rules.” Nak scowled at him as Dante leafed through his book. “Certain subtleties are lost in the translation. Besides, you sound like a barbarian. You’re in Gask now.”

“Tomorrow,” Dante waved.

“I’ve been charged with your instruction,” Nak said, slipping his hand beneath its cover and folding it closed, “and if the remainder of the
Cycle of Arawn
is still beyond you, I need you reading at least as well as a child before I can direct you through the rest.”

“I said tomorrow!” Dante swung to his feet, sucking air through his nose. “I’ll be your student then. I’ll be as diligent as the course of the sun. I just need this one day with what’s eluded me for so long.”

Nak ran a finger around his flabby jaw, then nodded. “Very well. This day is yours. Tomorrow is mine.”

It was a translation, and for that he was wary, but the difference between the
Cycle
’s first sections and that final third were too clear to be caused by the liberties of any scribe. It felt older. Primal. They were the words not only of a different man, but of a different race of men, a men whose waking thoughts were just as much a dream as the hours they spent in sleep. As Dante read the same basic story that had begun the
Cycle
, he felt as if he’d found a cord between himself and the deepest, purest knowledge of that first and brightest spark of man—that at last, the riotous chaos of civilization might be put into some kind of sense.

In the days before day, in the nights before night, all things swirled, all things mixed with another, the waves broke but there was no shore, the foam foamed without light to see its crest on the waters, great Arawn and Taim fought the serpents and the dragons of the stormy north and roiled the water with their struggle, Arawn’s great mill cracked and fell.

The bodies rolled on the surface, scale and claw, eye and tooth, and from their spines Taim grasped them and formed them to the shores and the peaks, he plucked their knuckles and set them to the islands, and Arawn split the first sky from the second sky, where he left to grant the measure.

And what of man? Carvahal said, and from the blood of the serpents and the blood of his own shining wounds Taim packed them into the mud where the river met the banks, the wind filled their lungs and they stood and saw what Taim had made.

To the men he gave the earth, and he made the sun to warm them and coax the seeds of plant and babe. To the heavens Arawn forged the thrones of the gods and he planted the stars of his law. Carvahal left his seat, he left his house and found the northern fire where once a dragon watched its waters, he cupped that star-light in his hands and bore it down to minds of men, he showed them where the two rivers rose into the skies.

And so Taim cursed men to wither and return to mud. Arawn cried out, he cried to see the men so used: he took their dust and ground it in his mill where he ground the grist that fed all things, and there the wind would carry the last breath of men, there it would take them to the black fields, again they would mix with all that once had been.

But Arawn’s mill was cracked, it had broken in the struggle with the north-laired dragon, it had fallen when that dragon fell and cracked upon the earth. And when it ground again, this broken mill, it ground no more of stars and plenty; the stars had shifted; now strife was ground with man.

“What?” Blays said, and Dante realized he’d been laughing.

“I just read how the gods made the world.”

“You mean like you could have done in any temple back in Bressel?”

“Their story is like this one’s shadow,” Dante said. His shoulders felt like hilltops, his fists like boulders. “We didn’t make the world a terrible place, like the priests of Taim say. The gods did.”

Blays grunted. “I thought you didn’t believe in the gods.”

“I don’t. But maybe they just died a long time ago, and this is what they did before they went away.” His smile fell as Blays continued to watch him. Did he suspect it? The second layer of the plan that had gotten them inside? That the only way Dante could think to get close enough to Samarand to kill her would also take him to the one place he knew would have a
Cycle
he could read? It wasn’t that Dante had lied. He’d gotten them inside the Sealed Citadel, meant to learn its layout well enough to figure out how they could murder her and then escape back to the south. That hadn’t changed. But neither had his other need. He could do both. Learning the
Cycle
’s last secrets could only help him when it came time to snuff Samarand’s candle. If suspicion tickled Blays’ mind, let him hold his guesses. Dante had been the one who’d gotten them through the gates.

He read on. He heard Blays’ boots knocking around the confines of the chapel, the whisper of pages as the boy pawed through the monks’ stash of romances, presumably in search of saucy pictures, then more footsteps and the close of the front door. Dante read without cease, lighting a candle once he realized he’d been squinting into dusklight for the last half hour. He read without pausing to take down all the names or map out all the places like he’d done when he’d started the book. That would come later. For now he had this one night to read it through, and when he turned its last page a couple hours before dawn, he felt the breath stir in his lungs, the blood in his veins. He felt elevated, touched by a mood of lightness and wholeness. From that vantage, his worries and doubts looked like malborn vermin, things he could pick up and snap into two dead halves. He closed his eyes, pressed his palms together, felt the fiber of the shadows mingle with the flesh of his self, felt it pour into the empty places in his body, in his skin, in his blood, in his hair and eyes and heart, felt his own position as an extension of the eternal burn of the stars. He opened his eyes and the world was changed, he a part of it and it a part of him, and he knew that when he died, it would mean no more than a retreat from the isolation of this body back into the blood-warm swell of nether.

Dante woke the next morning the same way he always had—confused, vaguely angry, already weary toward whatever the next hours would bring in a way he thought unfair for any 16-year-old to feel—and it was a while before he remembered he should feel any different. But sleep had robbed him of that elevation he’d had on finishing the book, that sense of oneness and rightness, like if he had to die it would be all right if it just came then. He had its memory, though, the thirsty knowledge it was possible to feel that way, for however brief a time, and instead of feeling cheated, he lay beneath his blanket in a mood of deep removal, not at peace but too far from his worries to be hurt by them, and passed an hour coldly dissecting the facts of his life until Nak knocked on his door.

“Get teaching,” Dante said once he’d let him in.

“Oh, so it turns out you’ve still got things to learn?” Nak said, and in the mental coldness that hadn’t quite left him Dante could tell Nak’s jest wasn’t meant to run him down, but came from a sense of admiration the monk could never voice in plain words.

“I finished the
Cycle
,” he said.

“And?”

“It felt like I’d been lifted to the moon,” Dante said. He frowned. That wasn’t right—it was incomplete, at least. “It felt like a foundation. Now it’s time to quarry more blocks and keep building my tower.”

“Ah,” Nak breathed. “You felt the touch of Arawn.”

“Perhaps,” Dante said, not because he thought it might be true, but because he found he didn’t care how Nak wanted to classify it. Nak scratched his bald pate and led Dante to the reading room. A spread of sparsely-worded primers lay in the soft winter sunlight on the desk. Dante picked one up, felt the last of his clear-eyed coldness seep away. “These look like they’re made for children.”

“And unfortunately you know less than a child,” Nak said, “but they’re as simple as we have.”

Nak stepped him through the Narashtovik alphabet, which was nearly identical to Mallish but lacking three letters, and the subtleties of its pronunciation, which unlike the Mallish stew was regular and orderly as the board of a game of cotters, and which Nak claimed was close enough to Gaskan to sound like no more than a regional accent. He made Dante write it out five times, then speak each letter five more. He drilled Dante on the verb conjugations of Narashtovik and its relation to modern Gaskan. He showed him the structure of its grammar in simple sentences, taught him a handful of words, the precise laws of how a verb cycled through the tenses of the present, the past, the future, the subjunctive. He bade Dante write out a dozen verbs through each of their forms and left on some monkish errand. Busywork, Dante thought, and far too much to take in at once. That Nak wanted him to learn through rote memorization struck him as an insult. He did it anyway, writing out Nak’s precise little tables. Nak returned and nodded at his work, correcting his past pluralizations, then went over it all again before leaving the boy with pages of hand-prepared vocabulary to study through the evening. The next day he had Dante write out maddeningly simple sentences about cats chasing balls and boys throwing sticks. The next day was the same, but working in the other tenses, repeating and repeating until Nak was satisfied what he’d taught had stuck.

“When are we going to read something real?” Dante asked as Nak prepared to leave him once again.

“Once we’ve laid a few blocks on your foundation.”

Dante rolled his eyes and turned back to his lists of words.

“Learning much?” Blays asked him when he came back to their cell for the night.

“Conjugates,” Dante said, staring at the shadows on the ceiling.

“How do you say to murder’?”

“Natus,” Dante said. He lifted his head, stared at Blays. “We knew this wouldn’t work overnight. They have to learn to trust me before I’ll be able to get close.”

Blays shook his head at the cold night and silent yard past the cell’s small window.

“There’s a world outside this keep.”

“Give it time,” Dante said. “I haven’t forgotten why we’re here. You just keep your eyes open while we wait for something to happen.”

Their wait didn’t last long. Nak bent over Dante’s latest lesson, following his sentences with the sharp tip of his pen, striking out words and muttering corrections, when the door banged open and slammed against the wall, shuddering to a stop.

“Knuckles possess a great facility for knocking,” Nak said. He looked up and his teeth clacked shut. “Uh, my lord.”

“The boy,” Larrimore said, beckoning with a single flick of his finger. Three guards crowded in behind him.

“I have a name,” Dante said.

“That will only be an issue if we decide you’re worthy of a tombstone.” Samarand’s Hand nodded to the guards. They grabbed Dante by the elbows and dragged him toward the door. The bluster he’d come at them with back at the cathedral and ever since crumpled into nothing. He could only gape at Nak, plead dumbly for help from the middle-aged monk.

Nak tapped his fingers together. “May I ask—“

“Their
Cycle
is a fake,” Larrimore said, running his tongue along his teeth.

“Ah,” Nak said. “Upsetting.”

Larrimore ignored him, turning on his heel. The guards hauled Dante out the door and out the chapel. He struggled to keep his feet, toes scraping the stone yard. Blays shouted from behind them. Dante winked at him and tried not to throw up.

“I have legs,” he said, boots scuffing through the dirt.

“For now,” Larrimore said.

“I don’t know what this is about.” He wriggled his shoulders, twisting his body to find a way to meet Larrimore’s eyes. “Do you hear me?”

Larrimore looked down on him, face impassive, then reached out and flicked Dante’s nose hard enough to make his eyes water. They carried him up the steps and inside the keep, through its airy entrance and down a hall adorned by tapestries of Arawn and his deeds, by gray-bearded men hoisting pennants and flags over their foes. The guards slowed enough to let him catch his feet as they reached a stairwell that descended to a cool, well-lit subfloor. Larrimore took out a heavy iron key and opened the second door they reached. Dante was yanked through the doorway and heaved into a heap on the plain stone floor. Other than a single lantern by the door the room was empty, chilly, hard rock with dust on every surface.