EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (303 page)

“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.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re going to need money.”

“That’s sick,” Blays said, backing up a step.

“You’re the one that just killed him,” he said, but Blays made no move to help. Dante hurried through the pockets, fishing for coin, then rifled through the clothing of the two other corpses. It wasn’t a fortune, but it would last long enough if they were careful. After a moment of staring he pulled off the least bloody cloak and swung it over his shoulders.

“His cloak, too?” Blays wrinkled his nose. “What are you, a ghoul?”

“We need to leave. Now.” Dante stood and headed for the other end of the alley, refusing to let himself run. His legs were shaky and weak beneath him. The whole thing had taken less than two minutes. Ninety-odd seconds for three dead bodies and a wall of darkness he couldn’t explain. The looted sword bounced against the side of his left knee and he hoisted his belt over his waist. He tipped his head to the stars, trying to regain his direction. In the weeks he’d lived in Bressel he’d learned no more than a smattering of its streets (he had the sense you could live there all your life without knowing more than a single district) and had never gotten the hang of which way was which. He picked out the seven-starred bow of Mallius pointing the way to Jorus, the north star, and led Blays west at the next intersection, away from the direction of the docks. They moved down a broad street and passed cloaked men, armed men, men on horseback, ragged men missing ears or noses and clutching flasks. The unlicensed sword felt like a beacon on his hip. He put it out of his mind. For now their only worry was putting some distance between themselves and the bodies.

“What are you?” Blays asked, and Dante felt his bones try to leap out of his skin. They crossed Fare Street, Bressel’s old outer boundary, and the cobbles gave way to dirt.

“I’m fine.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I’m a sixteen-year-old man,” Dante said flatly.

“Most men I know can’t blot out the stars.”

“They’re there now, aren’t they?” Dante said, waving at the whorls of constellations. Blays grunted and bumped into Dante’s shoulder. He gripped Dante’s collar, steadying himself, and Dante leaned into the boy’s weight. He felt blood seeping through his sleeve. “Shut up and sit down. I can bind those up.”

Blays didn’t say anything, just seated himself on the dirt road and stared at the wooden walls of the rickety two-story rowhouses that didn’t look any older than ten or twenty years. Dante cut strips from the bottom of his new cloak and pulled them tight around the boy’s forearm. What he really needed was stitches, but Dante had forgotten his needle and thread back at the room. The gash across Blays’ ribs was bleeding more but wasn’t so deep. He let a strip of cloth soak up some blood so it would stick to Blays’ skin, then wrapped another long piece around it.

“I didn’t see him hit you,” Dante said.

“Big surprise,” Blays said. Dante frowned, knotting the cloth over Blays’ shoulder. The kid was off somewhere else, working something over when he should have his eyes out for the watch or other pursuit. Dante didn’t think it had anything to do with the shock of battle or Blays’ loss of blood. He wanted to say he’d had no control over the darkness, which was true; he wanted to say he had no idea where it had come from, which might not be. The way it blacked out like ink and then flickered away when Dante’s emotions had changed reminded him exactly of a passage around the twentieth page of the
Cycle
when Stathus the Wise, facing six armed warriors, had encased them and himself in a lightless sphere and slain five of them one by one. The last of them then struck Stathus and clouded his mind with fear, causing the sphere to fade at once—a coincidence of patent ridiculousness, since it had said nothing about how Stathus had gone about dropping them in darkness in the first place. All Dante’d done was try not to drop a load in his trousers. There was no way the mere act of reading the book had somehow limbered up his mind to the point where he could do things like Stathus.

What had it been, then? Trick of the light? Widespread hysterical blindness, like the kind he’d read afflicted soldiers on the eve of a battle so they couldn’t fight? The first signs of a degenerative and apparently infectious ocular condition, or a priest watching from the windows, drunk, using parlor tricks to toy with them? Lunar eclipse? Any of those was about as likely as father Taim strolling down from his constellation and shaking Dante’s hand. The one explanation that fit was he’d done something without knowing how he did it and that was no explanation at all; as wrong as Blays was to suspect him, Dante knew he was equally powerless to tell him why.

They passed from the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses inside the Westgate to the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses outside the Westgate. This whole range of city looked like it had been built within the last five years. The roofs were mudcaked reeds, the doors flimsy things, firelight visible in the gaps of their frames. Blays’ feet swept over the rinds and pebbles in the roadway.

“Tired?” Dante asked.

Blays shrugged. “We can’t exactly stop here.”

He nodded, conceding the point. “We could rest a minute, though.”

“Why?” Blays met Dante’s eyes for the first time since the fight. Something dark lingered in his face. His lips curled. “You too worn out to keep going?”

“I’m fine,” Dante said, feeling the dullness in his knees, the burn in the backs of his thighs. “It’s just a couple miles to the woods. We should be all right there for the night.”

“Then we’ll stop when it’s safe.”

He had thought there would be some triumph if they survived their first skirmish, but instead of standing back to back against a shared danger, it had made Blays hate him. The wind kicked up, dragging leaves and trade papers and a few forgotten scraps of cloth past their feet. Graying things he was glad not to recognize moldered in the gutters. Since the time Dante’d left the village of his birth he’d enjoyed his solitude, his total freedom. Other people only intruded on his ability to learn. If Blays was going to part his company because he was as scared as a little girl about whatever Dante’d done when Dante himself didn’t know what that thing was, he wouldn’t mark it as a loss.

Open fields showed between the houses after another half mile. Within two more minutes the last of what could be said to be the city had been replaced by brittle cornstalks and the puzzled moans of cows. The city fires died away and overhead a thousand stars pricked out from the black curtain. A god was there, if the
Cycle of Arawn
could be believed, turning the stone, milling the substance that changed men’s hearts to darkness.

Chapter III

T
HEY
ROSE
WITH
THE
DAWN
and ate a cold breakfast in colder silence. They’d slept back to back, Dante’s stolen cloak thrown over them both, and when Blays stirred Dante felt him freeze with a jerk before jumping up and jogging some ten yards off. Face buried under the cloak, Dante heard Blays slapping his arms, his face, working up the circulation. Dante sat up, glared at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. His legs hurt. So did his hand, where that merc had nearly torn away his knife and his fingers along with it. Most of the flies had died in the first snap of frost earlier that week, but the ones that remained found the two of them and sizzled fatly in the breezeless morning. He tossed his head when they landed on his neck, waving halfheartedly at their stupid black bodies, imagining every buzz was a bee about to sting him.

Blays wandered off as soon as he saw Dante was up, mumbling something about having seen some mushrooms, and Dante waited till he’d merged with the trees to open his pack and then the book. He thought the words would feel different, that the act of reading them after the night before would fill him with some deep and nameless force, but there it was, the same old clean black hand of a meticulous scribe recounting legends and troubles of succession no one’d cared about since the moment the last man who’d known those heroes and kings had died. Dante found it interesting, in its way, was somewhat mystified to be confronted with hard evidence life had been going on for so many hundreds of years, but none of that vague awe explained how he’d been able to summon the darkness. Leaves crackled and he plopped the book shut and stowed it, watching the treeline.

“Found a few,” Blays said, emerging and holding out a double handful of mushrooms with smooth pink-gray caps and pleated black undersides.

Dante twisted his mouth. “You’ll die if you eat those.”

“Right,” Blays said, and when he lifted one to his mouth Dante bolted up and hit his wrist hard enough to sting them both. Mushrooms flew to all sides.

“It’s poison.” He nudged one with his toe, then crushed it into the dirt. “Probably wouldn’t
kill
you, but you’d barf up anything else you put down with it.”