The memory of the day he’d killed Larrimore came to Dante, as it always did, with a dizzy jolt – jarred, this time, by the dead guard sprawled in the street, the man’s left hand tucked under his body, elbow jutting like the bones of a chicken – and for a long moment Dante hunched over the body in perfect stillness, as if examining the ragged wounds in the guard’s throat and chest for the killer’s signature, or as if overcome, momentarily, by the cold sick insanity of it all. Instead, he remembered a snowfield.
“Do these look like bite marks to you?” Blays said from beside him.
Dante flinched, glancing sidelong, but Blays leaned forward, probing the fist-sized hole in the dead guard’s throat with his fingers. Dried blood flaked away, a bright black in the flickering torchlight. The soldier wore the black cloak of the Citadel, clasped beneath what was left of his neck by an iron brooch of an oak tree. The second this week: the fifth since the start of October, all guardsmen. Dante rubbed his face, unable to remember if he’d met this man in the Citadel courtyards.
“How should I know?”
“Come on, you know about anatomy and things.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen a lot of chewed-up corpses in my day.”
“They look like bite marks to me.” Blays tipped back his head, tapped his nails against the hilt of his sword. “What do you think?”
“I think you’re as bad as they are,” Dante said, jerking his chin at the muttering knot of men and women some twenty feet down the street.
“I’m not saying for sure. But just look at it, will you?” Blays tugged the hem of Dante’s cloak, pitching him toward the body. Dante swatted his hand away, scowling.
“Lyle’s balls. I’m looking.”
“I know you barely know which end to hold, but swords, as a general rule, make these long smooth gashes. This one’s all chunky at the edges. And there’s a big lump missing.”
“So?”
“Yeah, you could be right. Maybe he was just born without a throat.”
Dante tugged his nose. “What kind of a wolf could have bitten his heart out, too?”
“You’re useless,” Blays said. He stood, knees popping, and wiped his hands on the thighs of his breeches. “Totally without use.”
“I’ve never seen a werewolf. I’ve never known anyone who has. Cally hasn’t, either. They’re made up.”
“The world’s a big place, jackass. I’m just saying what I see here.” He glanced over at the crowd. “Speaking of.”
“Yeah,” Dante said. He headed toward them, Blays at his side. Twenty-odd people, all twenty-odd of whom, no doubt, would claim to have seen something, and all twenty-odd of whom would disagree as to what that something was. He rolled his lower lip between his teeth. “Any of you here when this happened?”
“I saw a dog sniffing around him about a half hour before you two showed up,” a short man said, stepping forward. He wore a rabbit-fur coat, past his knees in the Gaskan style, and at places the fur had fallen loose, the leather shiny with wear beneath. “Ran him off before he could start chewing things up.”
Dante tugged his nose again. “What did the dog look like?”
“Was it big?” Blays said.
“Not very,” the man said. “Ribs sticking out. Ears about mid-thigh.”
“That was a stray, you idiot,” Dante said, pushing him aside. The man’s eyes went hard, then dropped to the sapphired clasp of the White Tree at Dante’s throat. He fell back into the crowd.
“Did anyone see the attack itself?” Blays said, glaring at Dante before he turned back to the group. Men and women exchanged looks, soft words.
“Do you think it was a werewolf?” A young woman stood on her toes to be seen above the crowd, pretty, her black hair pulled tight behind her head, setting off the lines of her cheekbones.
Blays shrugged. “I’ve never seen a werewolf. Have you?”
“I’d never seen Blays Buckler till this moment, either,” she said, smiling, “but I still believed in him.”
“I hope the stories about me are only half as scary.”
“Three-quarters, I’d say.” The woman grinned.
“Right over there there’s a man with all kinds of parts ripped right out of him,” Dante said, staring at her. “Can you wait till we’re done here to start tearing off your drawers?”
The young woman blinked, her face pinching up. A couple men laughed; others muttered to each other. The man in the fur coat shouldered his way forward again, poking Dante in the chest.
“You expect us to help when – ”
Dante hit him across the face with an open palm. The man fell back, arms splayed. There was laughter again and a single shout. The man stared at Dante, face flushing, then glanced to Blays, who swore and grabbed Dante by the arm.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“This is pointless.” He turned his burning face past Blays to stare at the dead body. “Let’s get out of here. Go tell Cally to run his own errands.”
Blays pressed his lips together until they went white. He let go of Dante’s arm, glanced back at the clusters of people.
“If any of you remembers anything, or talks to anyone who’s seen anything, come see me at the Citadel.” Blays locked eyes with the young woman, smiled tightly. “I’m sorry. We’ve lost a lot of men recently.”
Dante started down the cobbled street. Blays jogged up beside him, started to say something, cut himself off. They walked half a mile in silence.
“She was just being friendly,” Blays said at last.
“They didn’t know anything, anyway.”
“I’m serious, though. You didn’t even know him. What’s going on with you?”
“People are dying out here and they’re fooling around.” He shook his head, remembering the hurt in the girl’s eyes, bright as sunlight on the snow. He bunched his shoulders against a sudden and fierce urge to apologize. “We’ve got to come up with something better.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” Larrimore had said when Dante’d returned from the riot that winter two years ago when the whole damn world seemed taken up by madness. There were times it was hard to take the man seriously – Larrimore’s boots were as rough and worn as pine bark, his black cloak crisscrossed with the stitches of mending, more patches than original material; he kept his black hair and beard clipped to a uniform fraction of an inch in length, and Dante had the sense that, if he had some way to stop it from growing altogether, Larrimore would seize the chance without a thought. He treated his body like a shell, Dante thought, like a vessel useful for no more than shuttling around whatever was inside it. At the moment, Dante didn’t look much better: his doublet was torn, caked with mud and on his knees, too. Dried blood had congealed around a wide scratch on his forehead and a spatter of someone else’s lay smeared to the left of his nose. Larrimore gazed right past him. “So you fumbled the draw on this one. There’s always tomorrow.”
“Someone died. A bunch of people got hurt. That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Thank the gods you didn’t say something about how there won’t be any tomorrow for them.”
“Will you cut it out?” Dante glared at the man’s chin. “What am I supposed to do?”
Larrimore spat a sliver of thumbnail onto the floor. “Those people wanted a riot. I sent you out there because I thought you had a good chance of stripping them of that desire before stupidity ruled the day. What’d you tell them?”
“I told them nobody here wants to drive out Gashen or his people. That’s just talk from the capital.”
“And?”
“They said as soon as we were done with whatever’s going on down in Mallon, we’d turn our eyes back home. They said we did the same thing in the Third Scour.” Dante dropped his eyes to the floor. “Then someone threw a rock at me.”
“And then live people started turning into dead people,” Larrimore said. Dante nodded. Larrimore smiled with half his mouth, gazing over Dante’s head. “Any live person who wants to become a dead person is also a crazy person. Crazy people don’t listen to reason.” He reached down to his shirt, plucked at a loose thread. It pulled free with a soft pop and the fabric parted, showing his skin beneath. “Damn it,” he laughed. He tossed the thread away and it floated to the floor. “I’m going to tell you your problem. Not because it will do you any good, since you’re too stupid to listen, but because I want you to remember when I say ‘I told you so’ a few years from now. You have this strange idea the gods have ordained you for perfection. Everything you do, by virtue of being done by you, should be equally perfect. No failures. No screw-ups. Anything goes wrong and you take it all personally. Do you know how childish that is?”
Dante’s cheeks went hot as the face of a pan. “I don’t think the gods have anything to do with me.”
“That’s a figure of speech, smart guy.”
“If I’d done something different tonight, someone would still be alive. Words don’t change that.”
“I keep forgetting you’re from Mallon and have no sense of history.” Larrimore leaned back in his chair, holding his elbows. “Read Tannigen some time. Build your own temple. There are absolutely no rules, and if anything is to be accomplished or created it can only be through forgetting what everyone else has done in the past, and above all else, forgetting your own past. You think you have this identity, but it’s a prison. Mountains and comets don’t know their own names. If some part of you tells you you’re weak because of something you’ve done wrong, you laugh like it’s wearing its stockings for a hat.”
Dante hadn’t thought much of that at the time. By the time the sixth guardsman was killed, Larrimore’s old consolation shredded as easily as gauze. The truth of the matter was their people were dying and no one, himself included, had a better idea how to stop it than to wait until the killer made a mistake, a mindset that almost guaranteed there would be more deaths. Cally doubled the watch. Witnesses came asking for Blays, and Dante listened alongside him in silence as they delivered their outlandish hearsay. It was a numbers game, Cally assured him, just a matter of time until one of the city’s thousands of potential witnesses became an actual one, or until Dante and Blays’ ceaseless midnight rounds caught the attacker red-handed (”Red-fanged,” Blays had prompted). Dante wasn’t so sure. Narashtovik was the second-biggest city he’d ever seen, and even after two years of refugees and pilgrims most of its outer ring remained abandoned. In those hundreds of crumbling buildings, a man who meant to stay hidden might do so for a long, long time. Three days later, the commander of the guard told him another soldier had been found dead.
“This isn’t working,” Dante said, staring over the tangle of the city from the Citadel roof. Late afternoon sunlight angled off the waters of the bay. Beside him, Blays ran his hand through his short blonde hair.
“It’s obviously good at what it’s doing. But we are, too.”
“It.” Dante pressed his teeth together. “If what we’ve been doing hasn’t got us any results in the last two weeks, why do you think it ever will?”
“So let’s look at it like we’re fresh to it. Like we don’t know anything at all.”
“That won’t be any great leap.”
Blays rolled his eyes. “What do we know?”
“He strikes at night.” Dante leaned forward, elbows on a stone crenel, and forced himself not to let the trivial stupidity of what he was saying prevent himself from saying it at all. “He’s violent. He’s attacking soldiers. He’s never struck inside the Ingate.”
“It’s mostly operated around the eastern gate of the Pridegate, actually,” Blays said, scratching the line of his jaw. “He goes for the throat and the heart. Some people think he’s a werewolf.”
“Some people are superstitious morons.”
“It’s not superstitious if I’m saying what people think it is.”
“It’s just dumb.”
Blays scrunched up the left half of his mouth. “You say you want to list the things we know, then you want to toss half of it out because you think it’s dumb. Well, that makes you dumb. What’s the point of your little exercise here?”
“Some people – some brain-addled people who let their imaginations overrule their reason – think it’s a werewolf.”
“Now say ‘Blays is much smarter than me.’”
“It’s no good.” Dante pressed his palms against his eyes. “We know who and where he attacks, but there hasn’t been one real witness yet. He’s too careful for us to count on him screwing up.”
“Let’s just never let any of the guard go anywhere in groups less than a thousand,” Blays said. “Or better yet, pull them all inside the Citadel until he dies of old age.”
“Good gods.” Dante drummed his hands against the stone wall until his skin stung. So far, seven men had died. Eventually, yes, they would catch him, but in the meantime, how many more would they lose? A vee of geese drifted overhead, honking faintly. They were trusting in the killer to make a mistake. Build your own temple: force him to err. He turned to Blays, eyes bright. “Mountains don’t know their own names.”
“Huh?”
“This is so obvious I should slap you for not thinking of it first.”
“I would advise against that.”
“We go out dressed like normal guards,” Dante said, arms and neck tingling, “and just hang around the eastern gate until he attacks us.”
“Right.” Blays tapped his thumb against his jaw. “We’ll have to split up. I don’t think he’s ever attacked anyone who wasn’t alone.”
“You don’t think it’s crazy? Or dangerous?”
“Well—yes. Who knows, though. Maybe if you catch a werewolf by surprise, he’s just a big baby.”
Cally didn’t like the idea, saying flat-out he didn’t want to risk one of his most useful tools as bait in some half-brained scheme, but Dante stared right through him. They were going to do it with or without his approval, he said, so he could either tell Cally where they’d be in case something went wrong or promise they wouldn’t and then head into the city tonight anyway. Cally snorted, told Dante he hadn’t heard him speak like that in almost two years – since they’d returned from the slaughter at the White Tree, he didn’t say. Go, he said.
They went. Dusk lay on the city like bitter thoughts, a cold wind sweeping in from the bay. Dante pulled his rough, plain cloak tighter around his shoulders. They’d kept their own swords – guards were supposed to provide their own – but otherwise wore the standard uniform: new cloaks, boots, and clasps, and had traded their fine-stitched doublets for simpler, scratchier cloth. They left the modest traffic inside the Ingate for the sparser bustle of the city’s middle ring, where a full quarter of the buildings still stood abandoned, windows gaping or boarded over, doors kicked in, roofs pocked with holes.
“We’re going to have to act like actual guards, you know,” Blays said, wiping his nose and giving Dante a quick glance. “I think it’ll know if we’re faking.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, there’ll be crowds. People wanting things. Disputes to mediate.”
“Shouldn’t be hard.” Dante frowned, remembering the way the young woman’s chin had drawn back. “I’ll be okay.”
“All right.” Blays loosened his sword. “What do we do if one of us is attacked?”
“Scream loudly? I wouldn’t assume you can take him on your own.”
“You should talk. You probably want him for yourself.”
“Hardly.” Dante glanced at Blays, decided he was joking. “Those soldiers knew what they were doing, too.”
Dead dogs lay in the gutters of every street, some missing paws or heads. The two of them moved down the shallow slope of the street toward the dark lump of the Pridegate, its thick stone visible above the shorter houses or in the gouges of the avenues. Night had thickened by the time they reached the eastern gate. A fat wedge of moon hung on the eastern horizon.
“See you at dawn,” Blays waved, and after a moment’s hesitation, Dante waved back. They moved away, settling into the slow pace of their rounds. The hours strolled by and the traffic thinned down. Dante was called into a public house, where on the floor a drunk shouted and clawed at any woman who came within ten feet; Dante put him to bed and turned down a beer from a smiling, slender girl. He returned to the street. Near two o’clock, when a minute passed him more often than a pedestrian, a stray dog trotted from an alley and Dante started and the dog dashed down the street. The air was freezing, but he was sweating.
“Anything?” Blays asked when they met with the dawn in Candovar Square.
“Nothing.”
They slept through the day, rising in time for dinner. Dante went to see Cally and was told there’d been no attacks that night from anything more threatening than ale-battered drunks. When he told Cally they should do something about the bodies of the dogs, the old man rolled his eyes and told him to go right ahead. For two more days they went out with the dusk and came in with the dawn. Each morning Dante returned to the Citadel with a cold energy at the base of his skull, a prickling disquiet somewhere between anxiety and anticipation.
It was a windless night, hazy but cloudless, again below freezing. Dante’s breath left his mouth in a gray cloud and dangled in the air like smoke. The moon, a couple nights from half full, had slid past its zenith hours ago – half past three, judging by Jorus, the polestar. When they’d started this thing, he’d feared what might happen if that strange anger took him when he was supposed to be helping a robbed man or an injured woman. He found instead that, dressed in the white-trimmed black of the city watch, people looked to him with sober eyes even when they were stinking drunk, a half-pitying look he’d never seen aimed at the watch as recent as a month ago, before the attacks began. Men went out of their way to be calm when he was called over to speak to them. He was offered drinks whenever he passed near a pub, but smiled them off, an expression that didn’t fade until the next time he saw a furry body lumped in a gutter.
From up the way, the rhythmic ticking of something small and hard struck the stone of the street. He moved toward it, touching the hilt of his sword. A black shape emerged from an alley some twenty yards up from him.
The dog trotted into the moonlight. Huge – its shoulders might reach his waist, he guessed, though he was shorter than most, and its dark, coarse fur, clustered thickly at the ruff of its neck and around its paws, gave its size the illusion of a half-grown calf or a court-bred pony. Its head swung towards him, light glinting from the bulges of its eyes.
It stared at him, still as a stone imp on the eaves of a temple of Arawn. Its nails clicked against the cobbles. Then it was rushing toward him, a length of sprinting muscle. Dante yanked out his sword and the dog bowled into his belly. The blade flew from his hand. He crashed into the street and its jaws jumped for his throat and he drove his forearm into its teeth, ramming it as far into the thing’s mouth as he could. Pain snapped up his arm. He slammed his right fist into its throat, feeling the thud of his knuckles against the cords of its neck. It shook its massive, shaggy head, teeth tearing his arm. He punched it again, rolling up on one shoulder, tangling his fingers into the fur of its neck, meaning to wrestle it down. It tensed its body and yanked him a full foot forward and he fell, face thumping into its muzzle, his left arm locked in its teeth.
Dante craned his neck and bit its snarling lip until he felt his teeth connect. It barked, dropping his arm, skipping back a step as he bolted to his feet, holding his left arm tight against his chest. The silvery line of his sword lay just to the left of the dog. Dante took a circling step toward it and the dog feinted forward, blood and slobber flecking from its snarling mouth. It watched him and he watched it and he knew he could neither run away nor kill it with hands and feet alone. He spat the chunk of its lip onto the ground.
Blood slid down his elbow, soaking into his shredded sleeve. He took a hard, shuddering breath, cut off the screams in his head, and called out for the waiting nether, the power that lurked in the marrow of the world, the grist that spilled from the mill of the gods to be used by men on earth. Shadows snaked along the lines of blood down his arm and pooled in his left palm, collecting into a formless weapon. The dog stopped snarling and trained its eyes on Dante’s hand. Dante halted the killing spike, puzzled, and in that instant the dog turned, bolting up the street and plunging into an alley before Dante could move. The sound of clicking claws faded into the darkness, and so faintly it could have come from any side, the clop of hurried bootsteps.
He’d taken two steps after it before he knew what he was doing. Dizziness crowded his skull and he sat down hard.
“Blays!” he yelled into the hazy, quiet gloom. “Blays!”
His vision went gray, then fuzzed over by pulsing black and white specks. He came to a moment later, propped on his good elbow, left arm limp against the ground. Dante peeled back the tatters of his sleeve, saw angry red flesh and deep furrows that bled freely. The dizziness remounted. He shouted for Blays again, heard his call repeated by someone a couple blocks away, then summoned back the nether. This time when he fed it with his blood, he sent it back into the tears in his arm, where the wriggling shadows sunk into his punctured skin like water into sand. The bleeding slowed. He shouted again. By the time boots rang out down the street, carrying Blays with them, the cuts and holes from his wrist to his elbow had scabbed, the red of his skin gone a warm pink. Pain still thudded with every heartbeat.
“What happened?” Blays bent down to get a look at his arm. “Lyle’s gritty ashes!”
“It attacked me. Big gods damn dog. Don’t know if it was a werewolf or what, but it was huge. Lucky it didn’t tear my throat out.”
“Where’d it go?”
“Ran down an alley. Parallel with the Pridegate.” A fist seemed to be squeezing his stomach. Dante leaned forward, panting, working his throat, arms clamped to his gut. “It was huge. It was like twelve oxen in one dog.”
“So that was it. This is crazy.” Blays stared up the street, then noticed the moonlight on Dante’s steel and stooped to pick up the sword. He handed it over, struggling with his face. “It got away, then.”
“Not really.” Dante grinned up at him, his face a mess of blood and sweat. He swiped some off his mouth and groped around the dirty cobbles, then stuck a chunk of something rubbery and black in Blays’ face. “I’ve got this.”
“What on earth is that?”
“It’s a piece of the dog’s lip.”
“What!” Blays slapped it back down onto the ground. Dante scowled at him and picked it back up. Blays wagged his head from side to side. “You make me want to vomit.”
Dante got to his knees and then his feet. Specks swam in the edges of his eyes. He waited for them to dissolve, then made for the alley a short ways behind Blays.
“Where are you going?”
Dante didn’t answer. He kicked at a pile of leaves and straw, at moldering scraps of cabbage and the green stems of carrots. He moved on a step, kicking again, and a pair of rats scrabbled out into the alley. He made a swift gesture with his right hand and a small lance of shadow streaked between him and the trailing rat and it skidded in the dirt and was still. He knelt to pick it up, then walked back out to the street, where Blays was waiting, eyes and mouth scrunched into tight slits.
“There is something wrong with you. Do you realize that? Do you even know how gross you are?”
Dante bounced the rat in his hand. “A couple years back, those guys found us in the woods outside Bressel when we had two weeks’ head start. No tracks, no nothing. You know how they did that?”
Blays frowned. “Yes.”
“No, I mean, you know how they did it?” Dante dangled the dog’s lip from one hand and the body of the rat from the other. “First time I fought them, they cut me up pretty bad. Bled everywhere. With the nether, that’s all you need – got the blood, got the man. That dog’s blood is all over the place.”
“And you killed the rat because why? You hate rats?”
“I killed the rat because it can track that thing a lot easier than I can.”
Blays wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Why didn’t you use one of the dogs? I saw three on the way over here.”
Dante frowned at him. “That would be a little morbid.”
“At least they’re already dead.”
Dante set the corpse of the rat on the ground. He brought the nether to his blood-flecked hand and channeled it to the small body. The rat quivered, lurched to its feet, raised its snout up at his face. He brought the scrap of lip down to its face and it hesitantly sniffed, then rubbed the line of its jaw against it.
“No time for reinforcements,” Dante said.
“All right,” Blays nodded. “Let’s go whack that thing into steaks.”
The dog’s eyes, when it looked at him, had been as glazed as a dead man’s. Dante jerked his chin at the rat. It bobbed its head at him, then skittered up the street, swerving into the alley the dog had taken minutes before.
After Larrimore had died, Dante went to the Citadel archives and asked the monk on duty for everything Tannigen had ever written. The monk delved into the stacks, then returned with four leather-bound books: two volumes of romantic adventures, one drama about the War of Wallevy, and one treatise on the rituals of feuding of an eastern kingdom that hadn’t existed in 800 years. Dante read them all in that first numb week and found nothing about building your own temple or comets that didn’t know their own names. Once more he felt betrayed (in those days, it seemed betrayal was all he could feel), but he could guess why Larrimore had lied about the wisdom of Tannigen. Anything to get Dante to quit moaning about a single man killed in a riot. Just as likely, it was another of Larrimore’s obscure and private jokes, a chance to fill Dante’s head with nonsense and see how far the kid would take it
Two years later, Dante was no longer sure. Larrimore had been a swordsman who never failed to get done whatever needed getting done, and through that he’d made himself more invaluable to Samarand, the city’s former leader, than any of her council. For those brief weeks between Dante’s arrival in Narashtovik and the battle beneath the White Tree, Larrimore had thrown him into every task that cropped up: putting down those riots, meeting with minor ambassadors, bodyguarding and man-hunting and all the other minor duties that kept the wheels of the Citadel turning, as if Larrimore sensed, somehow, that his own time in the city was coming to a close, and unless he found an apprentice before that time came, the gap he left would be as dark and mystical as the ways of the nether to a beet farmer.
Their time together had simply been too short. In the hunt for the killer, Dante had groped for a solution Larrimore would have seized on as soon as the death of the second guard established a pattern. That lag had cost five lives. It came to him, irreversible as a broken glass, that Larrimore hadn’t been born a force of nature, a clown with a blade, as worldly and unyielding as the northern wind. Not that it was an act, but that he’d learned it, perhaps been taught it, becoming the person Samarand and the Citadel needed with an obsessive discipline at total odds with his appearance to the world. It was possible, even, that he had forgotten his own name – “Larrimore” was standard polysyllabic Gaskan aristocrat, but the man’s skin was several shades darker than Dante’s own, and Dante had been born twelve hundred miles south of this wintry bay. If that whole speech had been a joke, it had been something else, too. An absurdity, but no less than the city around them and the world around that. The kind of nonsense that bludgeoned your brain into clarity. Why had their lives overlapped so briefly?
The rat pattered forward, nose a hair from the ground, looping through the Old Fletcher’s Quarter toward the south gate, pausing when they flagged down a guard and sent him to Cally with word of what they’d found. The rat trotted through the Pridegate, and Dante and Blays jogged behind it into the city’s outer fringes. Here the ruin was everywhere. Not one in ten houses had lighted windows or smoking chimneys. Often there were no houses at all, just the bare stretch of a foundation, grassed over and forgotten. Trees sprouted like weeds in the yards, green-black pines that made easy firewood but could grow five or fifty years before someone from the city’s inner rings bothered to come and chop them up. The streets were furry with grasses and dense with rubble, the pavements gappy as a drunk’s mouth. The rat’s course grew slower, weaving. Pressure mounted in Dante’s head, the same feeling he got when he dove too far below the surface of a lake. He halted for a moment, gazing into the fog seeping over the sprawl of tumbled houses.
Blays’ hand moved to his sword. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s stopped moving.” Dante scratched a scab from his left arm and a bead of fresh blood trickled down his skin. The shadows of the mist-blurred moonlight crept toward him.
“What do you think it is?”
Dante shook his head. “It’s not normal. When I was about to kill it, it knew what I was doing.”
He stepped forward and the rat took the lead. For five minutes the pressure grew in his ears. He thought he could almost see whatever dark thread the rat was following. They turned a corner into another silent street and he stopped short, pressing his fist against his forehead.
“Right there,” he whispered, pointing to a house with a whole roof that leaned against the crumbling walls of its neighbor. He drew his sword in one hand and the nether in the other. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
They walked on, picking their way over loose stones and rotting timbers. The rat ran up to the door and turned in a maddened circle. Blays glanced at Dante, planted his feet, then spurred forward, leading with his left shoulder. The door sprung open and Dante rushed behind him, throwing pale light into the black of the house. There was a shout, hollow against the room’s thin walls; a dark shape launched itself at Blays, flattening itself under the sweep of his sword. Dante saw a wild-eyed man standing against the far wall and felt a bolt of nether flying for his body. He met it with his own and the shadows boiled away. The man bent, hurled a rock. It clipped Dante’s temple and he stumbled, cursing. To his left he heard the clack of teeth and the whistle of a blade cutting nothing but air. He edged forward, gathering himself, and willed a black spike for the man’s chest. The man grunted, flinging up his hands; the nether seemed to bounce against the air a foot from his body, crackling into the wall behind him. Dust billowed from a fist-sized dent as pebbles clattered against the floor. Back near the door there was a grunt and a thud and a yelp and the scrape of claws on the planks of the floor.
“Wait!” the man yelled, throwing his thin arms above his head. His face twisted and Dante followed his gaze to where Blays leaned over the dog, the point of his sword on a line with its heart. Dante blinked. A black thread seemed to hang in the air between the man and the dog, gone as soon as Dante concentrated on it.
“Why?” He lifted his eyes from the dark thread to the man’s face. “It’s already dead, isn’t it?”
“You can’t,” the man said, mouth an oval, the inner corners of his eyebrows pinched and raised. “He’s all I have.”
Dante met Blays’ glance, then turned back to the man. He wore a cloak that looked like little more than a blanket knotted over his collarbones, a rough brown shirt that sagged from his bony elbows. His face was a web of wrinkles and lines.
“Why the guards?” Dante said. “Why their hearts? With what you can do, the Citadel would have welcomed you with open arms.”
A hard gleam took the man’s eyes. “My son was in the Battle of the Broken Forest.”
“They were rebels,” Blays said, gaze locked on the silent dog. “They attacked us.”
“Cowards. Killing children and free men.”
“And this is how you honor them,” Dante said. He made a line of his mouth. They’d lost plenty of their own in that battle, the first and only resistance on their march toward the White Tree. He’d nearly died himself. “Murder and hurt of your own.”
“They killed my son,” the man said, his face an empty pit, as if he were a shell around the memory of the day his kid had gone into battle and never come back. “What else can I do?” Goosebumps stood up on Dante’s arms and thighs. For all he knew he’d killed the man’s son himself. For a long moment the man couldn’t meet his gaze; when he did his eyes were fever-bright, searching, like the taint that lay in his blood had to be spread to others or risk bursting right through his veins. “You’re just a child. You don’t know.”
“Like you’re the only one who’s ever lost,” Dante said. Whatever twinge of kinship he’d felt burned off like a fog at midmorning. “There are no rules to when you die. Be happy you knew your son at all.”
The man opened his mouth, then pitched into a shriek as a wave of nether left Dante’s hands and drove him into the wall so hard he stood upright for a full second after he was dead. The man fell, knees folding like the hinges of a door, then sagged to his side, palms dangling, breath ceased.
“Kill the dog,” Dante said over the sound of liquid like fingers drumming on the floor.
Blays bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “Wasn’t it just doing what he told it to? Like your rats? Why’s it still on its feet?”
“Nether’s still in it. It could go on for years.” The shadows held fast before coming to Dante with a jerk – he’d need to rest soon. The dog’s ears twitched. He lashed out for its head, meaning for a clean kill; the dog uncoiled, leaping past him, and the nether struck it across the back, sending fur and mucous-thick blood wheeling into the air. The dog disappeared out the door, nails tapping.
“What’s gotten into you?” Blays scowled. “It’s not going to be eating people without that guy.”
“That guy is all it had.”
“It’s a dog. It’ll forget all about that old guy first time a lady-dog winks at it.”
“I don’t think dogs are that lucky.” Dante stared out the doorway into the mist and silent houses. At times he felt himself crumbling away, a cliffside sliding into the bay. He would have welcomed it. He closed his eyes, knowing there was a world where that day had not ended with a man lying dead in the snow beneath a tree. He glanced at Blays, then away, wiping the salt from his forehead and eyes. “I told you it wasn’t a werewolf.”
“It was worse.” Blays considered the rat, now scratching obsessively at the threshold, as if beneath the planks lay all the world’s treats. “It’s like something you’d do.”
“No,” Dante said. “I wouldn’t get caught.” He gazed out on the street – seeing himself running after it, approaching it palms out, then kneeling, peeling back one of its shaggy ears and telling it time would make things better – but the dog was gone, swallowed by the empty wilderness of the city, as lost as a stone beneath the sea.