EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (353 page)

“Did they do that?” Blays whispered. “Or did the tree?”

Dante shook his head, equally ignorant. The blue shadows of the snowfield flocked to the doorway. After five minutes he could no longer see the part of the tree that stood behind it. After ten it had darkened to the pitch of a moonless night. Samarand turned pages as she read on, dividing her gaze between the darkening rectangle and the words she invoked. The priests began to repeat her sentences, parroting the harsh consonants of Narashtovik. The wind faltered and blew itself out and the still-falling snowflakes settled into a lazy drift groundwards. After another ten minutes points of light brightened within the black frame, faintly at first, slowly hardening into icy white points that winked like the stars. In time, Dante could see they made all the designs of the Belt of the Celeset as arrayed to their opposite: the two rivers and the golden hammer, the hourglass and watchdog, the lion and the hare, maiden and cicada, fox and ship, the snake and the dragon. The constellations burned with fierce white purity, brighter in that doorway than he’d seen in the sky on the clearest nights of silent winter. Dante’s head swam with vertigo. Looking into the door was like standing on a roof and pretending your feet were stuck to the bottom of the world and the night sky was the ground beneath you, vast as the ocean, deep as an eternity of unbroken sleep. Samarand’s voice softened in the doorway’s presence. The words of the priests dropped to a rustle just above a whisper. The air felt charged, pregnant with a mutable power.

Something passed over the stars in the door like a face upon the waters, blacker, if possible, than the portal of sky behind it. Blays’ hand jumped out and gripped Dante’s shoulder. Dante hesitated, then put his hand on top of Blays’. His thoughts circled and bit each other’s tails: this was a mirage, a show; it was the touch of something greater, the sign he’d been waiting to see; it was as false and empty as all the world’s other so-called miracles. How could he tell the difference between the work of godlike men and the work of true deities? The stars flared brighter, as if Samarand’s words were breath blown on smoking embers.

A white-haired priest began to waver, his head tracing a wobbly circle in the air. He dropped to one knee and knelt there, shivering. The stars within the doorway dimmed. With a strength of will Dante could almost taste, the old man planted his hands in the snow and pushed himself back to his feet, his thin chest heaving. The man inhaled deeply and then his voice joined the others in the repetition of Samarand’s speech. The stars glared with all their former intensity, and as if lit by their newfound blaze the rings of bones around the White Tree erupted into pale fire, shimmering tongues of white and blue that reflected the snowscape and the skies and seas and mountains to the north. Samarand tipped back her head and shouted out the text of the
Cycle of Arawn
and the whole world seemed to go dark. A great black halo formed around the crown of Barden’s bone branches. Dante felt light and insubstantial as ether. The string-like vibration in his body increased until he thought he could predict Samarand’s words before she spoke them. That sense of connection extended to the priests, to the doorway they faced, to the constellations that shone from within it: Dante felt so close to the order of their revolution he could touch it if he reached out his hand, could hold in his palm the nature of existence.

“It’s almost time,” he whispered to Blays.

“I’m ready,” Blays said.

“Why did you come with me all this time? All those miles?” Dante no longer felt the need to cloak himself, to arrange his words like pinned insects before he let himself speak them. Arawn was about to appear from that door to the stars—he had no other way to explain what he was feeling, that sensation of attunement to the world—and as the god clambered free Dante would strike down the woman who’d freed him. Dante had no illusions of survival after that. He wanted one clear answer before whatever he was became parted from the meat of his body. “You could have left at any time, you know. They were only ever after me.” He felt the weight of the book in the pack on his back. “Me and this book.”

Blays let his hand rest on the haft of his sword and gazed on the motions around the tree.

“I wanted to do something important with my life,” he said. “Back when you insulted me in that square in Bressel, I knew if I followed you, you’d lead me to it.”

“Did you think it would be anything like this?”

“No,” Blays said, eyes fast on the tree, on the halo at its head, the rings of white fire at its feet, at the starry door and the dark auras around the six priests and Samarand. She lifted an open hand above her head and held the book before her with the other. Blays shook his head and smiled crookedly. “I thought we’d make some money, maybe. Overthrow a baron and marry his daughters, if we got really ambitious.”

“I’m glad I met you,” Dante said.

“Yeah.”

The nether surged and tossed. A subverbal hum quivered on the air. Samarand shouted what Dante recognized as the last passage of the Prophecy of the Three-Tailed Beast, the one he’d quoted in part to Larrimore when he was trying to keep from being tortured and killed down in the dungeon.

“Let the prison of the heavens be unmade,” Samarand said. She closed the book and faced the door.

Dante drifted toward her up the hill. Blays crunched through the snow at his side. Samarand waited, oblivious, arms dangling at her sides, transfixed by the black portal. One of the burning bones flamed out in a wiggle of gray smoke. The sense of a presence grew excruciating, maddening Dante’s mind like all the things he’d ever been unable to recall, like the panicked eyes of a birthing mother whose child won’t come, as chthonic as the fires of the earth forging the scaled body of a dragon. Samarand glanced over her shoulder at the priests, eyes wild, and Dante slowed his pace.

“Something’s wrong,” she said.

“There was no error,” Jackson said quickly.

“I don’t understand,” a balding priest said.

“I can feel him waiting,” said another.

“There is a flaw,” Samarand said. Her face was creased with an animal dread. Another bone burnt out, then a third. The halo around Barden was growing indistinct, muffled by the falling snow. Tears of exhaustion and frustration slid down Samarand’s cheeks.

“We don’t have the time or strength for a second attempt any time soon,” a dark-haired, middle-aged priest said, face blank with fear.

“No,” Samarand said.

“What are you saying?” the balding priest said. “What does this mean?”

“Nothing,” Samarand said. She gazed into the void of the doorway. “We’ve failed.”

“Then we’re lost!” the middle-aged priest said.

“We’re the only ones who know that right now.” Samarand drew a ragged breath. Some of her old sternness returned to her eyes. “It makes no difference. We’ll tell the people we have restored Arawn to his seat at the heaven’s twin rivers and they must do the same for him on this earth. Perhaps their faith will succeed where we have faltered. Perhaps we will find the true
Cycle
, and on that day we will try again.”

“Wait!” Dante blurted, reaching into his pack. He drew out the first copy of the
Cycle of Arawn
to ever be written and held it over his head. The white tree on its cover mirrored the bone oak that dwarfed them there on the plains of snow. “I have the true book!”

“You could have warned me this was your plan,” Blays hissed in his ear.

The eyes of Samarand and all six priests snapped to Dante’s face and the book in his hand. All the strings of his body hummed like a living chord. He gestured to the vault of stars shining through the doorway, as if that would explain to Blays what he felt lurking within the constellations. What if he held the key that would turn the final tumbler? Arawn, the god who’d made order of the mixed waters of the heavens, he who’d set the order of time from his seat in the light of the furthest roaming planet-star—in Arawn’s presence, would Whetton hold the trials that had condemned Blays to die? Would he allow the meaningless slaughter of the rebels outside Narashtovik? What other power could make the laws of nature sing in tune with what Dante felt in his bones? If he had the ability to bring that god to life, how could he prevent such justice for the world?

Destiny, perhaps, had guided Dante to steal the book, and through its subtle machinations, inevitable as the revolution of the Belt, had put him here to complete what the council had begun. Samarand could complete the rites, but none could deny she’d done so only by Dante’s mercy. If he cut her throat in that final moment, in the weakness of her effort, he could seize the reins of the order, ensure peace for the southlands as Arawn made for the earth what he’d set right in the skies.

This was the moment he’d been born for. This was the moment that would test his will to its limit.

“Give me the book,” Samarand said. She stepped forward and extended her hand. Dante held out the impossible weight of the
Cycle of Arawn
.

“You mewling
worm
!” Jackson thundered. He leapt forward and slapped the book from Dante’s hand. It sunk into the snow.

“What is this?” Samarand said, whirling to face him.

“Old debts repaid,” Jackson said. “I told you I’d come back for it, Sama.”

Samarand’s eyes widened, then narrowed to fearful slits. “
You
.”

“Me,” Jackson said in a nasally, clipped voice that wasn’t his own. He laughed unevenly, then swept a hand down his middle-aged face and body and became a skinny old man with a fiercely curled beard and sharp blue eyes that burned with their own ageless fire.

“When did you replace him? How?” Samarand said. Dante felt her clutching at the nether.

“I know things you couldn’t dream, you usurperous hag,” Cally said. “You’ve let your dream of conquest blind you. Your monstrous, braying ego. Let me remind you the look of righteous power.”

He thrust out with the shadows. Samarand jerked up her hands and their two forces met with an inhuman scream. Blackness burst over her and she was knocked to the ground.

Shouts hied up from behind them. Dreamlike, Dante turned to see Larrimore and his soldiers racing up the snow. The oldest of the priests flung his arm at Cally and Blays cleaved it off at the elbow.

“Who do we kill?” he yelled at Dante.

“Everyone!” Dante said, mind splintered. The cogs had turned again and yanked him from his solid ground. He didn’t know whether to help Cally or kill him. The old man had sent the assassin to the chapel, he knew at once, having seen Dante at Larrimore’s command and assuming he’d turned to their side, ignorant that Dante held fast to his first purpose. But the moment was too desperate for fine distinctions. For the moment Cally was on the side trying to kill Samarand. That was all that mattered. If it came down to it, Dante would deal with him once all the men who were about to try to kill them were dead themselves.

Samarand was scrabbling to her feet away from Cally. She curled her fingers and a ghostly blade spun for his face. He cursed and whacked it aside with a hastily-formed shadow sword of his own, then swung his bony arm and slung the weapon at her body. She twisted and it clipped her right arm. Blood pattered into the snow.

Around them, Dante felt the priests beginning to open their own overused channels to the nether that saturated the grounds. Blays crouched like a cat, then slashed his sword across the gut of the middle-aged dark-haired priest when the man made his move at Cally, dropping him without a word. A tall, stout priest clenched his fist and blue fire rushed at Blays. He yelped and threw himself into the snow. Dante flicked his wrist and sent all the snow between he and Blays to bury the boy in cold white and smother the remaining flames. He whipped out his sword and met the tall priest’s next assault with a wave of pure energy. The man had been weakened in the hours he’d spent in the ritual and when Dante tapped into the primal river flowing around Barden’s roots it roared past him and charred the tall priest on the spot.

“Is it really you, Cally?” the balding priest called out as Blays dug himself out of the snow and hunted for a victim.

“It’s really me, Baxter,” Cally said, then grunted as Samarand lunged forward and punched him in the ribs. The priest called Baxter chuckled wildly and turned on the last remaining man of his order, a fat man of some sixty years with a gray beard in place of his chin. If the fat man died, none but Samarand would be left to oppose them, and for a careering moment Dante thought they might actually win. Then Larrimore and his soldiers closed the distance between them, and Dante remembered the small army across the valley, and why he had resolved to die.

“Arawn’s come loose and is killing everyone!” Blays screamed, dropping into his defensive posture, fists holding his sword tight at his waist. He cut at the calf of the lone soldier who’d broken ranks to face him. “Head for the hills!”

“What’s going on here?” Larrimore shouted, sword in hand. Before his eyes Baxter grappled nether with the fat priest.

“Kill them, Larrimore!” Samarand commanded, dipping her hand in the wound on her shoulder and tossing burning drops of blood at Cally. “Baxter and the children! They’re traitors!”

Larrimore’s long face went blank. He stuck his sword through Baxter’s back and blood jetted where its point emerged from his chest. The fat priest fell back, wiping blood from his eyes. Dante ran him through before he could recover, and like that half the council of Arawn would be dead once Samarand and Cally’s fight was concluded. Blays finished carving up his soldier and then he and Dante stood to face Larrimore and his men.

“Dante! What are you doing?”

“She’s going to burn our home,” he said, sword arm quaking. “I have to stop her!”

Larrimore shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut.

“I’m sorry,” he said, then hurried uphill to the duel between Samarand and Cally, a couple armed men crunching along behind him. The remaining ten-odd soldiers and armed servants turned on the boys, swords out. One took a quick swipe at Dante and he jumped back, meaning to give the man’s blade a mere nick of his left arm, but his timing was off and he felt the steel bite deep, bringing with it far more blood than he needed for his next summons.