The White Tree (5 page)

"That's not what I asked."

"At the end," Dante said, rubbing his finger along the pebbled leather of the book's cover, "there's a kind of gurgle, a bubble of their final breath, and you wonder how they lived so long at all."

"Sick," Blays said. He drew his sword and swushed it through the air. "Why do people have to die at all?" he said, but he kept swinging his sword, slashing the space between himself and Dante, air whistling over his steel like the wind in the pines.

The sun had dropped into the jaws of the western mountains before the monks kicked them out of their cloisters a few nights later, suggesting if Dante had such interest in their order, he should speak with them rather than poring over old manuscripts that really didn't reflect the modern understanding of Mennok. Dante thanked them and made vague noises about doing so. Crazy old idiots. How could the gods change when they were already perfect?

The door to their room at the inn creaked open while Dante was still trying to insert the key. His breath caught. Blays shouldered him out of the way, side-sword ringing as he wrenched it free. He edged into the room, leading the way with the point of his blade.

The only room Dante could afford was little bigger than one of the monks' cells and even before he lit a candle it was obvious there was no one else inside. Their few possessions were scattered on the floor, the table tipped on it side, books thrown from the shelf, lying face-down with their pages spread like the bodies of birds. The pallets had been gutted, scattered from corner to corner.

"Funny," Blays said, stirring the spilled straw with his sword. "I don't remember wrecking up the place."

"They were here," Dante said.

The kid shuttered the window and turned to face him. "For the book?"

"Do we have anything else worth a pair of pennies?"

"Could have been thieves," Blays said, eyeing him. "I hear you can't walk down an alley in this town without bumping into one."

"Grab your stuff."

"Okay," he said, and stood there. "Done."

Dante ignored him and started scooping up his gear. He smoothed the pages of the tossed-off books and piled them in his pack.

"You're serious," Blays said.

"Very."

"What, some hired thug comes poking around and you light out like a rabbit?"

"If that's what rabbits do, then rabbits are smarter than you are." Dante bundled up his dwindling supply of candles. Senselessly, some appeared to have been struck in half.

"It really could have been vagabonds."

"It wasn't vagabonds."

"Well, if you're so sure it's some shadowy cabal, doesn't running away mean they win?"

"In what sense," Dante said, raking up the last of his notes, "can I be said to win if I'm beheaded in my sleep?"

"Now I don't understand that at all." Blays glanced at the open door, then shut and bolted it. "What about standing your ground? Sword in hand?"

"I don't have a sword."

"Symbolistically."

"That's for idiots. Idiots who don't know anything." Dante stood and looked around for anything he'd missed, dismayed at the sight of his old clothes shredded and mixed up in the straw. He liked wearing them when he could get away with looking like he'd been run over by a herd of pigs. "Let's go."

"I know plenty," Blays said, setting his mouth. He put his sword away but kept it loose in its sheath. They bustled down the stairs. "My dad knew how to read."

"Do you?"

"What's your point?"

They exited the inn and Dante led them up the larger of the roads that crossed outside. The evening had grown brisk and their breath billowed from their mouths in a visible fog. A team of horses rattled past, forcing them into the gutter. The heat of the animals' bodies rushed past them, followed by a flickering wind that grew steady a moment later, like the team was dragging a stormhead behind it.

"We're being followed," Blays murmured a few minutes later. "Don't look back."

"Do you believe me now?"

"Anyone who didn't would be some kind of moron."

After a quarter of an hour of brisk walking Dante began to get winded. Blays seemed fine and Dante tried to keep his breathing quiet. His brain wasn't working well enough to take advantage of the fact they were relatively safe for the moment; the arterials carried decent traffic yet, and would for a few hours more. He stepped over a reeking puddle and was glad for the minimal lighting of corner torches and the half-moon. He had to think. They couldn't just walk forever.

"We can't just walk forever," Blays said.

"Yeah, I'd figured that out."

"They'll follow us wherever we go."

"They've got to sleep, too."

"Even if we somehow gave them the slip tonight, do you really think that's going to stop them?" Blays glanced briefly over his shoulder. "They've found you twice now."

Dante touched the knife in his belt. "Bressel's big enough to get ourselves lost in."

"Oh, that's worked so well so far."

"Well what do you suggest?" he spat, then looked around to see if anyone had heard. The street was quiet, a few brisk footsteps and the occasional clatter of a team or the reeling song of a drunk.

"Stand and fight," Blays said, resting his hand on the pommel of his sword. "Once we don't have anyone right on our ass, we'll have plenty of time to figure out our next step."

"That's crazy."

"Is it? You've killed people before, haven't you? Why run this time?"

Dante shook his head, feeling pale. "You're just a kid and the only thing I know about fighting is it helps to stab them in the back. We'd be slaughtered."

"Then let's do that."

"Getting slaughtered is not a plan."

"Stab them in the back, stupid."

Dante frowned. "I suppose you think we just hide in an alley, then jump out and say boo."

"It beats waiting for them to catch us." Blays glanced behind them again, brows knitting. "At least we'd take them on our own terms."

"How many are there?" Dante pressed a palm against his right eye. The black speck was back. "Two?"

"Three. There's another trailing a block behind the first two."

"Those are not the world's greatest odds."

"Well, make a decision. If we just keep walking, eventually we're going to turn down the wrong street and that will be it."

Dante shook his head. He never should have stayed in Bressel. For all his reading, he still couldn't
do
anything. For all the times the book's authority had made him feel holy, it wasn't like learning about history and creation stories that contradicted what he'd been taught would help him stand against armed men. There weren't any instructions in it, nothing about the proper way to sacrifice a calf to gain a godly blessing, no words of power, no maps for a pilgrimage to sacred lands and artifacts. The mail-shirted man had been real, but Dante's hopes were faint as smoke. There were men after Dante now, men who knew how to kill, and he was nothing more than another kid from the middle of nowhere.

"Shit," he said. "Gods damn son of a bitch."

"That about sums it up."

"I can't keep doing this," Dante said. "My luck's going to run out. Once we get rid of them, I'm running as fast and as far as I can."

Blays crooked up half his mouth. "I've got strong legs."

Dante shook his head again. "Money runs out in a few days."

"I don't think that will stop them from sticking cinders under my toenails and chucking me in the river when I can't tell them where you've gone."

"Gross," Dante said, then shut his mouth. If Blays wanted to throw in his lot with Dante for a while longer, that was his business. "So what's your big plan?"

"You strip down and run at them naked while I circle around behind them."

"Shut up."

"When we get to this corner," Blays grinned, "we make like we just saw them—you know, get all scared and shouty—then we run down this alley and hide. When they run past us, we jump out and stab them."

"That," Dante said, "is a really poor plan."

"You've got better?"

"Not at all," Dante said. They reached the corner a moment later. Blays stopped and turned in a slow circle, gesturing broadly at the landmark of a finger-thin spire in the heart of the city. Dante caught on, shrugging like a stage-actor. Blays glanced back down the street, dropping his jaw when his eyes settled on the men following them, then cried out and darted for the dark mouth of the closest sidestreet. The heels of his boots disappeared into shadow before Dante had the presence of mind to run after him.

The footsteps of pursuit rang out immediately from so close behind him Dante didn't know whether they'd have time to hide. From twenty yards down the alley, Blays looked back, then seemed to blink right out of existence. Dante's mouth went dry—a ruse, he'd run off, left Dante as bait to make his escape—then a hand snaked from a doorway he hadn't seen until he'd gone by it. Blays yanked him from sight and they huddled in the dark, struggling to slow their panting before the men rounded the corner.

"Here," Blays whispered. He handed Dante the little ratsticker he'd been carving the windowsill with a few days ago.

"I've got these." He brandished his knife and the neeling's dagger. They weren't much, but next to Blays' offering they looked lethal enough.

"Throw it at them or something."

Boots echoed down the narrow-windowed walls of the alley. Dante couldn't catch his breath. The gray figures of three men strode by, swords in hand, and he made a rodent-like peep. He felt Blays' hand on his shoulder and then he was being pulled back into the street and his hands were shaking so hard he was sure he'd drop both knives.

Blays lashed his sword from its sheath and raked it across the back of the trailing man. The others spun, points raised, and Dante cocked his arm and hurled the knife. It winked in the moonlight, then somehow hit and stuck in his target's shoulder. The man shouted and yanked it free, hurling it back at Dante, but he threw it like you'd throw a stone and its butt bounced from Dante's chest. The third man closed with Blays and they circled like crabs, trading exploratory strikes. Neither of the other men were exactly giants, but they were full-grown, and as Dante's opponent recovered and menaced him with his two-foot blade he saw how much each inch of reach meant in a fight. Dante pulled the dagger from his belt and waved it in front of him, wondering how it would feel when he lost his hand.

The black mote was back in his eye. He batted at it with his left hand, narrowly avoiding putting out his eye with the point of his knife, and the man across from him laughed and swung. Dante ducked, hearing the sword whine over his head. Blays fell back under a harsh assault and bumped him in the shoulder. His man swung again and when Dante blocked it with the dagger a sting jolted up his arm so hard his eyes fogged over and he couldn't tell whether he still held his weapon. Blackness spread across Dante's eyes, rushing over his vision like ink poured on quiet waters, and he cried out, feeling no pain and not even having seen the man's killing stroke, but knowing he was dying.

He heard cursing, then, which probably wasn't uncommon in hell, but also the oafish shuffles of men who've gone blind suddenly and without reason. Dante dropped to his knees and heard blades whiffing the air. Beneath him the earth felt solid as ever. Steel clanged into a stone wall. As he'd passed from the world of the living to this confusing netherland, Dante'd had the presence of mind to keep Blays' location fixed in the map of his head well enough to know the boots scraping a few feet in front of him weren't the boy's, and, touch returning to his shock-numbed fingers enough to know he still held his dagger, he struck out, blind but no more than everyone else, waving the short blade back and forth somewhere around knee level, stabbing out at every stutter of the man's steps.

The first swipe missed, the second landed and glanced away, and the third dug deep into yielding flesh. He heard a shriek and screamed back as the man folded into a heap, clubbing Dante's outstretched arm with his falling body. Dante launched himself forward, arms held in front of his chest to prevent himself from being gutted if the guy had his weapon ready, but landed on the man's unguarded torso. He stabbed down with both hands, knives tearing through soft things and thudding into bone until the body's blood was sopping from his fingers and dripping down his face.

Not six feet to his left Blays and the last man struggled and he heard the tentative squeal of their swords meeting. The man under Dante's knees was dead enough to stop worrying about. He stabbed him again, tasting bile, then flopped back on his ass. He'd lost track of who was Blays and who was the last enemy standing. Loose gravel grated under his trousers as he scooted back. His eyes grew damp, and then the darkness shimmered in a way he'd only seen light do. Two silhouettes faced each other, blades straining, and then they were whole under the moon and the stars and the torchlight trickling from the main streets. Dante planted a palm on the dirt and buried his dagger in the attacker's side. The man twisted away, flicking him across the chin with the very end of his sword. Blays leaned into his open body and swung sidelong. The sword cut into the softness of the man's side and clicked when it met his spine. The man bent his head, mouth wide. He neck strained into cords, working with some final words he couldn't quite voice, then he slumped over the sword. His weapon banged against the ground, his hands hanging like gutted fish. He fell and didn't rise.

"Screaming, weeping Lyle," Blays said, jerking his sword free. He wiped it on the body and Dante saw a deep red crease over the boy's left arm, a spreading stain on his upper ribs.

"You're bleeding."

"Shut up and take his sword. It's a good one."

"I've never used one before," Dante said, putting away his knives. He looked down the empty length of the alley and shuddered.

"You can learn, dummy." Blays' mouth drew into a long, thin line as he looked down on the bodies. He made a closed-mouth gasp from deep down in his throat and Dante had to turn away to keep from puking. After a few quavering breaths, Dante bent over the man they'd killed together and unbuckled his belt, tightening his throat when his hand brushed the warm body. He sheathed the dropped sword, then bit his lips and pulled open the body's cloak.