The White Tree (43 page)

"What, then?" Ryant pressed, trying to catch Dante's eye. Dante shoved him forward again. "Do you like to hear men beg? Is that what tightens your trousers? The sound of a man's voice who knows he's at your power?"

"Shut up," Dante said. He grabbed the knots at Ryant's wrists and twisted them so the ropes cut into his skin. Ryant cried out softly. "You don't know a damned thing."

The man went quiet. From there, like the prisoners Dante'd seen brought up to the Crooked Tree outside Whetton, even Blays and Robert themselves, Ryant was docile, following their course without speaking, accepting orders of movement with a downturned face. Why did they do that? Why didn't Ryant try to kill him? Did the man's dead brother mean so little to him? For that matter, how was robbing monks supposed to honor his memory? It made as little sense as whatever divine scheme had necessitated his brother's death in the first place, or why the house of Arawn had ever had to face the Third Scour, or why Dante had been chosen to stop a war he couldn't be certain was unjust. He felt no pity for Ryant. So the man had snapped awake enough to see something was wrong. Bully for him. All he'd done with that fresh vision was skulk around the ruins taking pennies from those who'd wronged him. Dante's own ambition was no less than the killing of the order's head. If, as Gabe believed, even that was no guarantee for any kind of change, what chance did a man like Ryant have to make some sense of his life? No wonder he didn't struggle when it came time to give it up.

Dante bore his prisoner to the eastern door from which he and Blays had set out and hailed the guards with his name. They opened it and led Dante's troop single-file down the dark passage through the Citadel's walls, the entry being too narrow to comfortably walk shoulder to shoulder; not content with that precaution, the passage's interior was lined with holes meant for firing arrows and stabbing pikes at anyone with the right combination of strength and stupidity to try to force their way through it. Perhaps they could kill her, Dante thought, and then just walk on out under color of Larrimore's errands. On the other hand, what was the hurry? Who said killing her would solve anything? Couldn't he see a while longer to his training with Nak while he worked out a safer route to the process of transmuting Samarand's living body into a rotting corpse?

"Excellent," Larrimore said when he saw the three waiting for him inside the keep's main hall. He tucked his lower lip beneath his upper teeth and grinned, nose sticking out like a fox's. "That room downstairs has been feeling a touch empty since you left it. It'll be glad to once more be a home."

"He tried to set me on fire," Dante said.

Larrimore's eyes flicked up and down his form. "You don't smell burnt." He spoke orders in Gaskan to a pair of guards and they led silent Ryant away. He turned back to Dante, who lingered in the hall, uncertain what he was expecting. "Well done. If only we'd had you to send after yourself."

"We'd still have gotten away," Blays said.

"Probably," Larrimore said. He raised an eyebrow their way. "What are you waiting for? A knighthood? Get off to sleep. Busy days ahead."

He strode away into the belly of the keep. Probably to let Samarand know of the capture. A strange pride crept across Dante's chest as he exited to the yard. He'd done the service of the enemy, but he
had
done it well. An average man-at-arms would have died to Ryant's simple sorcery. In his brief time in the Citadel Dante had vaulted from a life of self-education and fleeing for his life to one of formal, rigorous instruction and meaningful work. He could be important here, he knew. He was already useful in a manner he'd never been. Nak thought he was bright, if occasionally too aware of it. Already Larrimore trusted him enough to give him tasks beyond the grasp of 99 men out of 100. With no other obligations splitting his focus and loyalty, Dante felt certain he could one day have been one of the twelve men on the council. But he would have to give that up for the well-being of his homeland, a place that banned the light of Arawn and had recently tried to execute Blays and Robert, two of his only friends. He could see no way in which that was fair.

For all those thoughts, as he returned to his cell in the chapel he could see nothing more than the slump of Ryant's shoulders, his slack face, the hollows of his eyes as he disappeared into the dungeons. Ryant probably thought the wrong done onto him was the rightful price of his resistance. He was probably even so vain as to think there was some meaning to whatever would be done to him next—whether it was torture and execution or no more than interminable imprisonment. Well, Ryant was an idiot. Either way he'd be forgotten, just one more body in a city already choked with the yards of the dead. His brother was gone and now he would be too. That was the way of things, Dante decided. With the gods and the stars so far removed from human matters, the only justice to be found was what you took for yourself.

15

By morning he learned language with Nak and by evening they trained with the nether. Dante's methods were undisciplined, Nak noted, crude if effective, and the monk showed him cleaner paths to channel the nether and more closely bend it to his thoughts.

"Most men have to struggle with every step of this, you know," Nak said in mild confusion after Dante had mastered another lesson on his third attempt. "You fly through it like a bolt. It's less like I'm teaching than that I'm revealing things your mind already knows."

They worked in the cold of the open yard beside the chapel, filling the space with shadows and light, with bursts of flame that melted the snows on the grounds and spikes of force that could crack small rocks. When soldiers suffered injuries in training or in scuffles in the streets, they were brought to the chapel and Nak showed him the proper methods of mending flesh and bone. Through all his education, the bald priest made no mention of the peculiar talents of Jack Hand and the few men like him mentioned in the
Cycle
. It was as if death, for as much as the prayers and studies of the priests and acolytes of Arawn centered on the life after life, were a thing beyond them, the one depth forbidden to be plumbed. It was a blind spot, Dante saw. A thing he could exploit.

Larrimore came to him with a new task most every day and Dante'd cease his lessons with Nak to deliver sealed letters across town and wait for a hastily-scribbled reply; to place orders with smiths and tailors; to escort priests and monks and nobles and ambassadors through the danger of the city to the relative peace of the wilds; to tail emissaries and messengers from other cities and lands and see to whom they spoke away from the eyes of the Sealed Citadel. Once he was sent to capture another man, and when the man drew his blade instead of letting himself be tied, Dante struck open his guts with a thrust of his hand. He left the body where it fell and went back to the keep to let them know to send a team if they wanted to pick it up.

A week into this routine, Blays asked again about Samarand, about their true purpose, and Dante answered him like before: in time. He kept his eyes and ears open as he did Larrimore's bidding, and between gossip at the keep and the fragments of conversation he could understand from the well-dressed men bearing the colors of lords and territories all throughout Gask and beyond, he began to piece together that something was coming to a head. The council factored heavily in this intrigue, meeting frequently behind closed doors high up in the keep. More doors opened to Dante by the day—he'd had a reputation before he'd arrived at the Citadel, he discovered, based on the gruesome tendency for none of the men dispatched to kill him to ever be heard from again, and as he carried out Larrimore's will in the field it only grew: he was grimly efficient, they said, already more talented than half the priests who weren't on the council, cold and harsh as sunlight glinting from snow. He was on the rise. Nothing was shut to his blend of ambition and ability.

Nothing, for now, but the doors to the council.

He learned the Citadel's regular orders for weapons were being sent to the city smiths rather than their own forges, which were busy dealing with the bricks of silver as big as his forearm that disappeared behind their walls each day. Dante explored and lingered as much as he dared, intentionally losing himself in the twisting halls of the keep so that, when the time came to still Samarand's heart, he could flee the halls without a wasted step. Priests and guards sometimes caught him in places he had no strict business to be in and he'd lie about an errand of Samarand's Hand or walk on by without a word, as if he were too wrapped up in his latest responsibilities to even notice their questions and turned faces. Once he'd learned the general lay of the keep he started waking earlier, finding excuses to slip away from Nak and walk alone in its halls in the hopes of at last hearing the details of whatever they prepared for—and perhaps, though Dante didn't think it outright, to hear something that would push him into completing the task Cally had sent him here for. When he delivered letters he crowded close to their recipients, daring glances at their responses as they wrote them. He was cutting it close, he knew. He was earning their trust, but he was still an outsider. He wasn't certain they'd believed him about the book, and if they hadn't, why they were giving him so much rope. Sometimes when he heard Larrimore's laughter it no longer sounded innocent (at least, as innocent as Larrimore could claim to be), but scored with an undercurrent of scorn, as if the man could see the treachery hidden in Dante's heart. The slightest noise could make him start like a rabbit. His nerves were getting too frayed to maintain his double purpose.

If he couldn't breach the council doors in person, perhaps he could do it by proxy. The Sealed Citadel was secured against the intrusion of men, but wasn't meant to keep out rats. The night before the next council was scheduled he lay awake in bed until the chapel was long silent, then crept out to the pantry. He waited no more than a minute before the dark blot of a rat wiggled across the floor in search of crumbs. Dante snapped its neck with a brief flicker of nether, then surrounded it with a stronger hand of shadows and reanimated it as he'd done in the past. He closed his eyes and saw the pantry from its alien perspective so near to the ground. Heart racing, he opened the front door of the chapel and sent the beast scurrying toward the keep. Its doors were shut firm and Dante had to wait for half an hour before someone opened them on a midnight errand. He made the rat run inside, head swimming as the ground rushed past its nose.

He kept it tight to the walls of the main hall, eyes out for guards. A few stood watch, faces hooded by gloom, but either they had no interest in vermin or were sleeping on their feet, for his rat made it to the corridors beyond the hall without drawing their attention. He sent it down the passages he'd memorized in his wanderings, running from doorway to doorway, pausing to listen for the sound of footfalls—would the priests be able to sense its intrusion?—but saw no more than one stock-still guard before it reached the stairwell to the upper floors. The dead rat leapt tirelessly from one step to the next, clambering ever upward, until at last it reached the seventh-floor landing where they held their counsel. The hallway was silent, still, lit by a single lantern. The doors of their chamber were open. Dante willed the rat inside, then sent it snuffling around the room's edges until he found a crack in the stone just wide enough to lodge its body and look out on the dark blurs of the great table and its chairs. The task had taken no more than an hour, but he was exhausted, and despite his pulsing nerves he fell asleep within minutes of hitting the bed.

Dante woke an hour after dawn and drew breath so sharply he choked on his own spit. He sat upright, muffling his cough to keep from disturbing Blays, then closed his eyes and sought the sight of the rat. Sunlight diffused through a north-facing window, illuminating the same furniture he'd seen by the darkness of the previous night. It remained empty of people, but as Dante went about his breakfast and then his morning grammar lessons with Nak, he'd briefly shut his eyes and catch glimpses of servants sweeping the room, straightening the sashes on the windows, lighting candles along the walls. In still-framed flashes he watched the council chamber grow tidied for its use.

Nak was grilling him on Narashtovik verb tenses he hadn't yet mastered and in his frustration Dante let twenty minutes pass without checking on his spy. He rubbed his eyes and with a shock to his heart saw robed men seated at the table, heard tense voices arguing their points.

"This isn't something we should be trying to hasten," he heard Samarand say in her lightly accented Mallish. "I'm not going to risk a false step for the sake of shaving off a few days."

"But every day we spend on our haunches is one more day we give them to prepare," a man's voice said in an accent so thick it was a moment before Dante could make sense of his words.

"And what are you doing about them? How is it they're able to prepare so close to our city?" a third voice said.

"Enough, Tarkon," Samarand put in. "You know we're spread too thin to root them out right now. We'll lure them to us in the open field, then break their spine then."

Dante heard Nak clear his throat and he scrambled to reply to the priest's obscure linguistic query only to get it wrong. Nak threw up his hands and sighed, and as he repeated his lesson for the third or fourth time Dante divided his attention between his bald teacher and the conversation high up in the keep, only to find it had turned to an overspecific discussion of payments due for the maintenance of their soldiers.

"What's going on in that head of yours?" Nak snapped, leaning in so his nose was six inches from Dante's. "This may not be so exciting as Larrimore's little ventures, but it's just as important to your education, damn it."

"I know," Dante said, rubbing his eyes again. "It just feels like I'm making so little progress."

"You're doing fine," Nak said. "Better than fine. Your fundamentals are sound. No one can learn a new language overnight."

"All this waiting is killing me," Dante said. Nak furrowed his brow at the boy, lifted himself from his seat.