EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (314 page)

“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.

“This is when it wants to create or destroy. This is the nether in its most potent state. Release it now.”

The thing was so dark he could barely bring himself to look at it. The individual motes had stopped following each other’s tails and the ball pulsed slowly, almost as if it were breathing. A note as high as the clouds sounded between his ears. His hand had gone numb. He thought he could crack the tomb with a punch. Raze it with a look. Nothing seemed beyond him.

“Release it! For the sake of the gods, let it go!”

Dante turned his hand palm down and jabbed it at the trunk of an acorn tree thirty feet away. Its bole was a foot and a half across. It crumpled like paper. Splinters of bark shot into the air. A great crack thundered past him; he staggered, stripped of all strength and senses with the departure of the nether. He wanted it back. He wanted the shadowy outlines he’d seen around all things to retake their shape, for his eyes and ears and hands to once more feel like the world’s own will. He mewled, and as the tree’s wide head boomed into the grass he fell to his knees, paused there, then slumped in a heap.

“We should probably hide somewhere for a while,” some part of him heard Cally muse. “Oh. Right.” He grabbed Dante’s wrists and dragged the half-conscious boy into the sanctuary of the vault.

Dante squinted against the candlelight. He tried to sit up and the blood rushed from his head.

“They’re all going to die,” he said, and his laugh twisted into a cough. He slapped the stony floor, fighting for air.

“Always good for a boy to have ambitions,” Cally said. “For your next trick try something a trifle less flashy. Think of yourself as a channel through which the nether may flow. Like the narrow banks of a creek. If a meandering little stream suddenly finds itself engorged by a few hundred thousand cubic tons of water, it tends to no longer resemble itself once the flood has gone away.” He got to his feet, eyes glinting down at Dante. “A stream doesn’t really capture my meaning, however. Swollen streams aren’t all bloody and shrieking and flopping around until they die.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I doubt that. And for gods’ sakes, eat something. Stop making me sound like your father. These things will burn you up before you know it.”

Dante managed to sit up. Nausea and hunger battled for his stomach. He had a headache. He touched his face. It was still there. That was good.

“If you were my father I’d make patricide popular again.”

“Oh, shut up,” Cally said with no real annoyance. He furrowed his brow. “What were you thinking? Were you trying to destroy the city with your first attempt?”