The Great Rift Read Online Free Page B

steak," Blays said. "I'm starving."
    He put away his swords, a motion so smooth it was like watching a feat of actual magic. Dante, unable to draw his blade without glancing at the handle first, left his out. He didn't say another word until Mourn arrived in the dusk with a dozen other norren, each dressed in the same supple deer-leather and silver ear piercings. Surprise, confusion, and anger battled for control of Mourn's heavy eyebrows.
    "Hi, Mourn," Dante said. "We followed you."
    "I would have seen you from a mile away."
    "That's why we stayed two miles behind."
    The other warriors regarded Dante with blank eyes, thick swords held before them. Dante had guided the dead watcher into some shrubs behind him. He blinked, glimpsing a silent woman stalking straight for him, a knife gleaming in her hand. Without turning, Dante knocked her to the ground with a club of nether, forceful enough to rattle her plate without cracking it.
    "I am Dante Galand, council member of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik. We're here for the cause of norren independence."
    "I'm a guy in the forest," said a middle-aged norren whose left cheek was nearly beardless for all the scars. "And you are a long way from Narashtovik."
    "Consider it a sign of our sincerity," Blays said.
    "'Sincerity'? You have strange words for 'trespassing,' strangers."
    Slowly as a stalking cat, Dante drew his lowered blade across the back of his left hand. The cold metal bit into his skin, replaced by the warmth of a fresh wound and the hot blood dripping from the edge of his palm. Nether flocked to the fluid in swerving twists of darkness.
    "You know why we're here," he said. "With that bow, we could guarantee Setteven wouldn't dare set foot in the territories."
    "There is a problem," the scarred man said.
    "A problem the severity of which depends greatly on your perspective," said a female norren, no shorter than the males yet significantly less hirsute. Her eyes were as orange as a harvest moon. "From your perspective, it is not so auspicious at all."
    The scarred man waved the point of his ponderous sword at knee-level, as if it were too heavy to lift without great cause. "Strangers who come to the Clan of the Nine Pines are required to leave as ash on the wind."
    A dozen norren lifted their weapons. Further back among the trees, others nocked arrows, sighting down the shafts.
    "Why does everything have to be a fight with you?" Blays said sidelong. He bared his teeth and raised his blades. Dante summoned the nether to him in a great and hungry rush.
    For months, he had spent his free hours practicing the creation of lights and illusions—bending the nether into gigantic patterns, letters, and symbols that could be seen and interpreted from miles away. If some of Narashtovik's priests and monks were placed along the border, they could fling up the signs at the first sight of Gaskan troops. Other scouts could then recreate the signs with fires and mirrors, passing the information deeper and deeper into the territories. Enough of these signalmen in the right locations, and in the span of hours, crucial news could be transmitted hundreds of miles to Narashtovik and the territories. Those in the path of the coming storm would be given precious extra days of warning.
    This was the theory. In practice, men and women able to bend the energy of ether and nether were somewhat too rare to exile to mountaintops across the countryside. Yet the potential of this notion compelled Dante to look past the impracticalities, and he'd spent many nights, when he wasn't too bone-tired to do anything at all, turning the darkness of the nether inside-out, painting the air with blazing red letters spelling "BLAYS IS DUMB" or with crude animations of the blond man getting repeatedly whacked on the head by a succession of hammers. It was a challenging task, more subtle than skewering an enemy with a sudden spike of raw energy, and at first his concentration had been unable to sustain a moving