The Great Rift (6 page)

"He did."

"And here we are," Orlen said. "Which is closer than we were before."

Vee raised her right fist and held it to her coin-sized ear. "Where we'll wait to hear from Josun Joh again."

Dante nodded, too wound up to speak. Blays gestured downriver. Dante followed him along the pebbly shore, where the smell of wet moss and faint fish carried on the river's gentle waves. Mourn walked some ways behind them. When they paused, the norren did too, crouching beside the water and pretending to investigate the rocks. He pursued Dante and Blays all the way to the other side of the piers where the town ceased and the waterfront woods resumed.

Dante stopped there, gazing out across the wide black river. "I'm beginning to think they
should
be enslaved."

"Is this because they live longer?" Blays stooped. He picked up a pebble and slung it over the flat waters. It sunk without a single skip. "They think they can just wait around for a god to billow orders from the clouds?"

Dante stared at the steep hill beyond the plaza. Skeins of smoke curled from its crown, venting the hearths of the homes in its side. "Does encamping their warrior-band in the middle of town strike you as unusually aggressive?"

"The kind of thing you'd do when you wanted to provoke answers from someone who doesn't want to give them?"

"Exactly."

"Maybe." Blays skipped another stone. "Can you really see them turning on each other?"

"I don't know. The norren aren't exactly a unified people."

"But they've hardly been clawing at each other's throats the last few years."

Dante glanced upstream, where Mourn was kneeling, butt on his heels, and staring out over the water. "Still, if waiting around is their only goal, there is plenty of non-town space for them to occupy instead."

"So let's go feel the mayor out for ourselves."

"What about our shadow?"

Blays knew better than to glance at Mourn. "Point your finger at him and make him fall down."

"That isn't how it works."

"Yes it is."

"All right, that's basically how it works." It was, in the scheme of things, a simple task, with no need for theatrics or even any blood to feed the nether. Dante squinted at the mossy rocks, the waves slurping through them. The nether pooled in his hand like the shadow of quicksilver. For Blays' benefit, he pointed at Mourn as one would point out a thief. The kneeling norren leaned forward like a toppling tree, spilling facefirst into the grass. "Wait. Do you even know where the mayor's house is?"

"Of course. When somebody tells me I can't come with them, the first thing I do is watch where they go."

They headed back for the plaza. Light and laughter poured from the windows of the public houses; a longboat had pulled in during their walk along the shore, its crew beelining for the likeliest sources of liquor. It provided more than enough cover for any noise Dante made skirting the square. Was he being paranoid? Orlen and Vee wouldn't let them up to see the mayor themselves. They'd assigned Mourn to follow Dante and Blays wherever they went, presumably as much to keep tabs on them as to ensure their own safety, but why let the pair of humans come along at all if the norren chiefs didn't consider their presence useful? As usual when dealing with the norren approach to outsiders, Dante felt like he'd nodded off in the middle of a carriage ride and been dropped off in strange streets with no idea which way was north.

He started up the switchback at a swift but unremarkable pace. Cave-houses sat in the rocky face of the hill, doors cut to fit the irregular contours of the caves' natural mouths. Torch sconces projected from each side of the doors, some lit, illuminating the path ahead and the family names painted in gorgeous runes above the entries. They climbed until Dante was panting and Cling lay below them in the haze of the river-mist. Torches flickered around the salmon-mosaic in the central plaza.

"Just ahead." Blays nodded to a cave-door little different from the dozens below it or the handful above. It wasn't that late, perhaps an hour past supper-time, but Dante was suddenly aware of the questionable etiquette of barging in on a city official under dark of night. Blays promptly resolved this dilemma by planting himself in front of the cherrywood door and knocking like the hand of Death himself.

Faced with the sudden prospect of confronting the mayor, Dante wished he could run right back down the hill instead. Positions of leadership in the norren territories were filled through a process that baffled human commoners and horrified the nobles. In contrast to the process of power-accumulation typical to human government—birthright, nepotism, wealth, and well-paid armed killers—norren men and women were promoted to chieftancies, mayordoms, and regional stewardships based solely on the public perception of and appreciation for their opinions. Not their political opinions, either. Nobody cared what a man had to say about taxes or trade or the distribution of the commons. Or anyway, if they did care, it wasn't over the political positions themselves, but rather for the theophilosophical reasoning that had led the leader in question to take those positions in the first place.

Most of the time, it was even more abstract than that. Say a young woman appeared to live a noble, upright life among her clan. She also had bright, wise things to say about the holy scrolls and the right way to lead a well-lived life—and her deeds matched her words. These things would be noticed by her clansmen. Tucked away. And if a crisis struck—if the current chief died, or went mad, or had a philosophical revelation indistinguishable from madness—that bright, noble young woman might find herself elevated to the chieftancy in the blink of an eye.

How the public reached these decisions as to whose integrity was greatest and whose position was most convincing was as nebulous as it was sudden. Sometimes there was no open discussion at all, yet with less warning than a flash flood, a formerly beloved clan-chief wound up replaced. Most perplexing of all, most leaders
welcomed
being replaced. To the norren, leadership was a burden, a leaden net of unwanted responsibilities, judgments, arbitrations, and bureaucratic wheel-spinning that left them precious little time to pursue the highest virtues: arts, craftsmanship, and tribal warfare.

Meanwhile, the few norren who desired political office were typically those who lacked the brains to ever be granted it. Many of the most thoughtful spoke little at all, preferring to be thought of as mentally crippled rather than exposing the wisdom of their philosophies and thus putting them at risk of a sudden promotion to power. And the more cunning leaders, upon discovering firsthand how unpleasant the demands of the crown, scepter, or wolf's-head could be, took to deliberately espousing theories of life and scripture that were flawed, flagrantly heretic, or outright nonsense, hoping to have the mantle snatched from their shoulders and draped over those of some other sucker. Often, the public saw through these deceptions and played along anyway in a stubborn effort to call the chieftain's bluff.

The result was twofold: the policies of clans, villages, and territories could suddenly become bizarre or outright self-destructive, leading to regular turnover at the top and a widespread degree of low-level chaos that the regimented politics of the capital in Setteven found laughably easy to exploit (and which Dante found maddening to try to keep up with). And in the rare cases when a mayor or chief stuck fast to his or her position for years or decades, their realm might be stable, but the leaders themselves were often resentful and bitter of their responsibilities—sometimes poisonously so.

The man who opened the door was one of the latter.

Old even by norren standards, gray colored the mayor's head, brows, and beard. He was lean like jerky is lean, but had lost none of his 7' 6" height to old age, or in any event had plenty to spare. As he towered two full feet above, Dante suddenly understood how it felt to be a dog that's just been discovered snatching up the roast.

"Are you the mayor?" Blays said.

"Are you knocking on the mayor's door without knowing who the mayor is?"

"We're friends," Dante put in quickly.

"Doubt that. Don't often feel like taking a hammer to the heads of my friends."

"We're here to help. A clan of norren was taken as slaves—"

"And now they're gone, and the rest of us still got to look out for ourselves." The old norren lowered his face inches from Dante's, filling him with the same vertigo that might come from being stared down by a mountain peak. "Unless you're looking to become a part of my doorstep, get off of it."

Blays stood his ground. "If you change your mind, we'll be sleeping on your town's lawn."

Something shifted in the old man's eyes. He closed the door hard enough to make Dante blink. Laughter trickled up from the plaza far below.

"He's got my vote," Blays said.

"He's hiding something."

"Tall as he is, he could be hiding a pike up his ass and you'd never be the wiser."

"That would explain the general tightness of his character." Dante kicked a pebble down the trail. It bounced awry, bouncing over the edge and clattering on the stone incline below. "He knows something. That's why the clan came here. That's what he meant about looking after themselves now."

"Sounded like typical norren fatalism to me."

"I think he thinks talking would put him in danger. Maybe pose a risk to whole town. If so, how do we make him talk?"

"I predict he's impervious to threats."

"
Physical
ones."

A smile began to spread on Blays' face. "Bribery? Blackmail? We don't even know the guy's name."

"Then it's a good thing we have absolutely nothing better to do than plot and scheme to ruin his life."

"I'm sure you're aware that tradition and logic dictate the best place to scheme is in a pub."

"My thoughts exactly."

"Wait, really?"

Dante nodded downhill. The lanterns of the public houses flickered over the sprawling stone mosaic. "If there is one thing you can always find in a pub, it's people willing to badmouth public officials."

"We'll have to be careful not to draw suspicion. I'll disguise myself by getting drunk."

No less than three public houses stood in the square. Dante chose the loudest, a two-story structure with a ground floor of clamshell-studded clay bricks that must have been fired from river mud. Its upper level was unpainted pine boards; that and a visible slant to many of its windows marked the second story as a later and somewhat hasty addition.

An old man poked at meat grilling over the fireplace. Scents of fish oil, beer, and sweat miasmaed the wide room. Though few humans peopled the norren lands, the pub's patrons, like those of any decent port, were a diverse bunch, evenly split between human and norren. The furniture didn't reflect this democratic spirit. Human legs dangled from chairs built for much larger bodies.

Blays ordered while Dante found a promising seat at the end of a long table just high enough to make resting his elbows on it entirely awkward. The wooden bench was worn shiny and smooth from the butts of countless travelers. His pint was pleasantly bitter and just as cold as the wintry air outside. Blays bought a platter of steaming, flaky white fish, nearly doubling the price with a side of extra salt.

Dante had expected the dozen-odd norren and humans at the table to begin criticizing, insulting, and slandering the mayor at a moment's notice—from their supple leather coats, they were native to the territories, if not Cling itself—but three pints and an hour later, he had nothing to show for himself but a decent buzz. Blays seemed happy enough, chatting away with a shaven-headed norren about various flavors of norren beer, a topic which, given the hundreds of varieties of norren wheat (they approached the cultivation of their staple crop with the same rigor and vigor they brought to their art), could fill a solid month of discussion, and Blays gave every indication of doing just that.

"Excuse me," Dante finally said to the gray-bearded norren to his right. "Can you tell me who's mayor here?"

The man didn't look up from the chipped clay mug he'd been staring at the last five minutes. "Why do you ask?"

With a drunk's skill for plucking up lies as easily as fallen scarves, Dante said, "I'm looking to do some shipping here."

"You're not from here. It's obvious as a sunrise. So let me spare you the speeches about Mayor Banning and say this: he's great. You couldn't ask for a better leader. Honest. Forthright. A man who looks out for his town."

"I see."

"Put him in charge, what, forty years ago.
Stoics of Barnassus
. After he wrote that, they tried to put him in charge of the whole territory, but Cling wanted him too—hometown and all. Fought themselves a little war about it. Cling's victory inspired him to write
The Posture of Virtue Is Not Kneeling
."

"I've read that," Dante said. "He argues that taking a stand against a stronger foe guarantees the eternal blessings of both Haupt and Josun Joh. Very spirited."

The norren eyed him, drawing back in the universal gesture of reappraisal. "Should try to take a look at his paintings if you get the chance. Landscapes so real you could tip them back and pour their rivers right in your mouth."

"Really? Where can I find them?"

"Not his workshop, that's for sure," the old man laughed. "He keeps that locked down tighter than the princess' panties. Couldn't even tell you where it is." He gulped his beer. "Can't blame him, either. He'd never get one stroke down with a crowd of gogglers pressing in over his shoulders."

Over the course of the night, Dante struck up conversations with the pubkeep, another norren local, and a trio of human bargemen who made regular call at Cling. On the starlit walk back to their tent, he detoured back to the river shore.

"They all said the same thing. A man whose integrity and talent is matched only by his prolificness." He spat beery aftertaste into the slow-moving waters. "I hope you came up with something more helpful."

"Oh," Blays said. He reached down for a stone and wobbled, slapping both palms into the muck to steady himself. "That."