The White Tree (16 page)

Was a duck its quack? Nothing else he knew of quacked. Geese honked, but that was different. Hens clucked and roosters crowed and chicks peeped; meadowlarks sang and starlings chirped and crows cawed; a duck, it seemed, was the only thing that quacked. That must be a part of it. If a duck walked up to him and asked him about the weather, that would make it, in some sense, a man. Still a duck, but less duckish. He bounced his heels against the stone wall beneath his seat. How long could you spend sitting around thinking about ducks? Was there a point where you'd know everything there was to know? He decided to go back to basics. Ducks lived in pairs, but sometimes they lived in flocks. Ducks laid eggs. Ducks also hatched from eggs, which he thought might be a slightly different thing from laying them. A duck ate water-weeds and bugs, he thought, though he wasn't certain of that. He realized he was just listing their traits without conclusions. Duckiness was something more than what it ate or how it looked or lived or quacked. All those things were true, but if he told someone who'd never seen a duck all the things he'd just thought, they might be able to visualize one, but they wouldn't really know what made a duck a duck, would they? How could he explain the nature of duck-kind so an outsider would understand?

Footsteps jarred him from his maze. How long had it been? The sun was all but set. Dante stuck his head out the door, hand on sword, and saw Cally's bent-backed figure trudging up the hill through the drizzle.

"Have you dwelt on the nature of duckhood?" he said as he entered.

"I have."

"What have you learned?"

"A duck is a duck," Dante said.

Cally pinched the bridge of his nose. "Go on."

"It's not a chicken or a goose or any other bird, though if you told someone that's what a duck is like they'd start to be able to see one. It's got a bill and feathers and wings. It swims, flies, and walks; so what element can be said to be its home?" He stuck his tongue between his teeth and waited for a cue. Cally screwed up one eye, shrugged. "It quacks," he tried. "Nothing else quacks."

"Except a duck call."

Dante went pale. He hadn't thought of that. "I don't think you can ever define a duck," he said slowly. "If you could, you'd have created one. I think all you can do is describe it, piece by piece, until you've got an animal like nothing else."

"An interesting theory," the old man said.

"Well? Am I right?"

Cally pulled back his chin and snorted. "How the hell should I know?"

"Well why did you make me do all that thinking about ducks if you don't know what one is yourself?" Dante said, pounding his fists against his thighs.

"You weren't doing well with the discursive approach. What else do you want?"

"Why ducks?"

"To hear you quack," Cally shot.

"That doesn't—" Dante snapped his jaw shut. He walked to the back of the room and glared at the inscriptions on the wall. His face felt hot as a branding iron. "Making sport of one's students doesn't strike me as enlightened instruction."

Cally laughed brightly. "Were you so petulant with whoever taught you to talk like that?"

"Do you always expect the ones you teach to read your mind?"

"Youth," Cally spat, a grunt so hateful Dante's scalp tingled. He spun around and Cally's pinched face opened with laughter. "You take yourself too seriously, do you know that?" He rubbed his hands together and got the look of a man who's just had his first puff on a pipe. "I suppose you want to get down to business."

"That had crossed my mind."

"Double-crossed it, maybe," Cally said, looking worried. His eyes flicked to Dante and he smiled tightly. "Think about the nether the same way you taught yourself to think about the duck."

"That's it?" Dante's mind flashed with the notion this had all been a mistake, that he was wasting what short time he had left. "What about this ether stuff?"

Cally waggled a hand. "Forget it. We're taking a new approach. Dwell long on the nether and we'll see where you are in the morning."

"But the night's just started. You haven't shown me anything!"

"Patience!" he thundered. "It's a week from now till your destiny becomes known. That's as long as it took the gods to build the world. Do you really think this will be harder than the creation of everything in existence?" Dante worked his throat and Cally stepped forward, craning his thin neck. "You know what happens to apprentices who try to work gold before they've hammered iron, don't you?"

"They're commended for their initiative?"

"Their masters stuff them into the forge." Cally patted his palms against his stomach. "If you unravel all the secrets of the nether tonight, read your damn book. Lyle's wrinkly, sweaty sack, boy, haven't you ever heard the tale of the tortoise and the hare?"

He spun on his heel and left the tomb. Dante closed the door and lit a candle. He yawned, tired as he'd been after a full day's march through the woods. He didn't think the shadows would help. He sat down on the cool stone floor and let his mind unspool. What was Blays doing at that moment? Sleeping? Staring at the ceiling? He had no doubt the boy was alive, at least. If the condemned died before they could be killed the whole process was thwarted.

The man they'd killed to get them in this mess, the long-haired man at the inn, had said the priests of Arawn had infiltrated the shrines of the other gods. Somehow this inclined Dante to believe Cally's ludicrous assertion that they wanted people to find the book. There was a strange intuitiveness to it all, a compelling alternate logic in sacrificing a few pawns to expose the people like Dante and draw them into the fold. What were they after? Rebellion? Build influence in the temples while they scared up talented men to—he still didn't know if he believed it—to release Arawn from his starry prison? How would they do that, exactly? Build a really tall ladder? Or better, hold a fake olympics to find who could jump the highest and then launch him into the heavens. He tried to laugh. They were going to take a shot, though, no matter how stupid their plans sounded. Where did they get that kind of power?

It would come from the nether, he knew that much. What was it? He stretched out on the floor and plumped his pack under his head. He closed his eyes and tried to picture what it looked like when he called the darkness to his hand. It was darkness, yes. Intangible, but it moved less like light and shadow than like water. Flowing where resistance was least, pooling in the low places, filling the gaps between things like water filling up a box of pebbles. But it wasn't water. It moved with a mind of its own. What was it? When he drained his thoughts and let the black tide take their place, what was it he held inside his head?

"Get up! It's the guards!" Fists pounded on the door. Dante's heart jump-started itself right off a cliff. He couldn't see a damn thing, just the faint light wriggling through the chinks in the wall and the narrow line that traced the door. Pretend he wasn't here. They might be dumb enough to believe it. More likely they'd force their way inside and chop him into geometry. He'd need to think fast. Act fast. He cleared his mind and let the nether come. He rose then, drawing his sword with a steely hiss, left hand wrapped in darkness, and swung open the door.

"No, it's just me," Cally said in his normal nasal pitch. "Be proud. You looked like you could have scared someone."

"I suppose this is a lesson on the virtue of vigilance," Dante mumbled, sheathing his sword. He stepped out into the yard.

"I just thought it would be funny." Cally blew into his cupped hands and stood in the feeble sunlight. "Make any progress with the
Cycle
?"

"I fell asleep."

"Good. Sleep's more important than history, as evidenced by the fact the latter puts you to the former." Cally spent a minute gazing over the graves. The morning was foggy, the grasses bent with dew. Their breath roiled from their mouths and hung in the air. One of the yard's many crows cawed out, waited, then cawed again, as if it were asking if anyone was home. "Did you think on the nature of the nether?"

"It's like the ocean at night," Dante said. His face bunched in thought. He shook his head. "I feel like the moon, in a way. When I look on the dark water with the fullness of my face, it rises and heaves to meet me."

"Poetic," Cally judged, "but ultimately as inaccurate as all poetry."

"What do
you
think it's like?"

"Were you listening at all yesterday? What do you think all that talking was for, my health?"

"Maybe it's not the subjects that are slippery," Dante said, a thrill in his skin, "but the manner of their instruction."

Cally frowned at him. His gray eyebrows were so thick Dante worried they'd pull his brow right over his nose. The old man looked away, letting it pass.

"It's not the answers, it's that you remember to seek them. Each definition you find brings you one step closer to an unreachable ideal. Don't take that to mean you shouldn't try just because you can never reach it, of course. That's what babies do. Are you a baby?"

"No," Dante said through his teeth.

"Of course not! Who said you were a baby?" He sighed like all hope had faded from the world. "Don't think of it as hopeless. If you had no name for it, would that mean it doesn't exist? We have no single word for this pre-winter breeze that teases you into thinking it might snow although it's not really that cold and which kind of buffets against your face rather than streaming or lashing," he took a breath, "but does that mean you don't feel it, and in a different way than you'd feel a dozen other kinds of wind'? Defining the nether's the work of a lifetime. The only way to keep reaching closer to its central duckiness is to know you'll never be done."

Dante waited to see if there was more. "So you'd define the nether as semantics."

Cally shook his head. "Just—keep trying to think about it in new ways, but don't get so wrapped up in trying to understand what it is you stop learning how to use it. That's all I'm saying." He blinked, chuckled. "Well, not really. But let's pretend that's what I said."

Dante thought, and not the first time, taking the man as a teacher might have been a blunder. So the old man had thoughts so deep he couldn't capture them with words. Cally whistled something mournful and keening, ignoring him for the moment. Dante's eyelids fluttered. He clumped the shadows in his hands and unleashed them on the old man, just a sort of probe, and before it reached Cally it disappeared like spit on a summer flagstone.

Cally stopped whistling. "What was that?"

"Just how much do you know?"

"Enough to know how little you do."

Again Dante gathered the nether. This time it boiled off his hands before he could unleash it.

"I said stop that." Cally's voice echoed against the walls of the vault.

"What's your mind like, when you call out to it?" Dante asked, clasping a coin-sized pool of the stuff between his palms.

"You're not used to it yet. That's why you have to think so hard." Cally regarded him with one eye closed. "To me it's like scratching my ass, my hand's there before I have to tell myself I'm itchy."

"That's beautiful." Dante opened his hand and blew the shadows at Cally in a puff of tiny motes. Cally flinched, scowled.

"You could punch me in the stomach and it wouldn't make a difference," the old man said, tossing his head. "You could probably stick a sword through my heart and I'd still strike you down, though that must remain a regrettable hypothetical."

"Do something," Dante said. "I want to see how someone else does it."

"Could be useful," Cally said. His face kept its vaguely bored expression. Dante was about to ask when he was going to start when he felt Cally's summons looming in front of him like the empty space beyond a cliff. Dante laughed and punched the old man in the stomach.

He woke up some time later. The world was fuzzy and gray. A toe nudged his side and he realized it had been doing so for some seconds.

"What happened."

"You expressed a sudden urge to cease existing," said a blurry, Cally-shaped object. The object helped Dante to his feet and the boy faltered and leaned against the old man. "See what you wanted to see?"

"I'd had enough talk," he said when he trusted himself to speak. His nose tickled. He wiped it, saw blood.

"We'll start there," Cally said. "The nether will come once the mind is ready to receive it, but it's the nether's nature to thirst for the water of life. And I'm not talking about whiskey."

"Blood?" Dante said, wiping his fingers in his palm. Except for that last part, Cally had sounded like something from the
Cycle
.

"Blood."

"I'd wondered about all those scars on your arms."

"Most of them are actually the product of an oversized mouth." Cally smirked, then pressed a knuckle between his eyes and peered at Dante. "Call to it. It's going to look like it's eating you. It's not, so don't be afraid."

"It can sense fear?"

"What? It's not a bear. Being scared just makes you do stupid things."

Dante counted his exhalations for most of a minute, then unlimbered his mind. They came at once, swirling in his outstretched palm, minnow-like wraiths that seemed to flash black.

"So far you've worked the nether in its most basic state," Cally said. "Blood amplifies its strength, allows it to truly alter what it touches."

Dante waited, watching them circle one another. Others came without being called. The ball expanded from a large marble to the size of his closed fist, but mostly it grew denser until he thought he could feel an icy weight denting his skin.

"It's a fragile thing in this state. It burns as violently as Souman's oil."

Little pricks and tingles rippled across the flesh of his palm, as if the leechish things were nibbling with razor teeth. He no longer felt the dull throb from when Cally knocked him out. His vision flickered, then returned brighter than before. The scent of grass stuffed his nostrils. It would snow that night, he knew, he could feel it in the breeze. The muscles of his arm began to twitch.