Novels by Nifty

They were halfway up the tunnel when the first scream came.It was a thin sound, very far away, and for a moment Kaelen could not tell whether it came from above or below. He had Pell by one arm and Julian by the other. Neither could walk without help. The lantern swung wildly, throwing shadows up the walls. He had been counting stairs since the cavern, and he had reached two hundred and nine, and he was beginning to think the world had grown a great many more of them than it had on the way down.“Come on,” he said. “Come on.”“Master Kaelen...” Pell’s voice was thin and strange. “Something’s wrong. It’s not only the thread. The whole tree, it’s...”“Save your breath.”“No, you don’t understand. It’s letting go.”The floor lurched.It was a small, sick tilt, like a ship rolling in a swell, and it flung all three of them against the wall. The lantern went out. For a moment there was nothing but the hot rush of their breathing and the dark pressing down. Then, somewhere above, wood crac

They did not touch it.It was Kaelen who gave the order, and he gave it twice, in a voice he scarcely recognized as his own. He drew the others back to the mouth of the tunnel and set the lantern on the floor, where its light fell in a long gold bar across the cavern. For a time all three of them simply stood and looked.The thread lay as it had lain before, loose and slack along the pillar’s face, scarcely stirring in the draft. It looked entirely harmless. It looked, if anything, a little pathetic, like a bit of ragged string snagged on a nail.“It’s only the one,” Julian said, very low. “Only one strand.”“It’s the one we can see.”“What do you mean?”“I mean, look at the grain.” Kaelen crouched. He had brought a long brass probe from the ship, a surveyor’s needle, and he laid it carefully against the floor. “Look at the color. There’s a pale band along the thread, here. A hand wide, no more. But it goes up. And down. All the way to the floor.”“And through it,” said Pell.Kaelen l

The sixth came up out of the dark like a green coast at dawn.Kaelen had been to the revived worlds a dozen times, but he had never quite stopped being struck by them. When the old gray stump of the Sixth had woken, in the golden light of the seating of the keystone, it had been little more than a hollow trunk with a few shy leaves. Fifteen years on, it had become a country. A great round continent of bark and branch lay beneath the Quiet Grain’s keel, its boughs wide as valleys, its hills green with new growth, and its rivers of sap running silver in the sun. Little villages dotted the slopes like scattered toys. Smoke rose from chimneys. Orchards stood in rows on the terraced branches, and somewhere a bell was ringing, tinny and sweet, for the noon.“It’s lovely,” said Julian, beside him at the rail.“It is.”“I almost can’t bear it.”Kaelen glanced at him. Julian had barely slept in a week. He looked thinner and quieter, and somewhere in the last few days he had stopped apologizing

Kaelen brought the boy on the third morning, when the Council had settled into an uneasy recess and the Saddle had begun to hum with rumors.Leon was at the Academy, correcting a student’s dovetail, when he heard the knock. It was a soft, hesitant knock, the sort given by someone who would rather have been anywhere else. He looked up and saw Kaelen in the doorway with a tall, thin young man half hidden behind him, one hand on the doorframe, the other clutched in the pocket of his coat.“Master Leon,” said Kaelen, with a formality that was entirely for show. “I’ve brought someone. I thought you should meet him.”“I know who he is.”Kaelen blinked. The young man looked up, startled.He was twenty or so, with a long, pale face, dark untidy hair, and the stooping shoulders of someone who had spent his whole life trying to be less in the way. His eyes were large and brown and watchful. They were Leon’s first surprise, because he had seen them before, a long time ago, on a different face, t

Marshal Edric Vael arrived in the morning, and by noon the whole Saddle had fallen in love with him.Leon watched it happen from the porch of the Academy. A fleet of small bright emerald ships came sliding into the lagoon in perfect formation, their sails the color of new leaves, and a tall man in a green cloak stepped off the first one onto the pier. He did not make an entrance. He thanked the pilot. He asked a dockhand’s name and remembered it. He walked up the shore to the Council Hall with an escort of only four, and along the way he stopped three times, once to lift a fallen child, once to look at a carving a Bark-Dweller grandmother held up to him, and once to touch the hand of an old, bent carpenter who had stopped to watch him pass.Leon had met a great many men who wanted to be loved. He had never met one who had it done so easily.“That’s him,” said Lissa, at his elbow. She had her chin on her fists. “Marshal Vael. The Hero of the Rim.”“Is that what they call him?”“My moth

“I owe you a cage,” Varek said. “And a life.”It was late. The council had broken up at midnight, in confusion, with a hasty vote to reconvene in ten days, and the delegates had scattered to their ships in knots, arguing in whispers. Leon had come back to the cottage tired to the bone and found a figure sitting on his porch in the dark, with all four hands folded on his knees.“I thought you might be waiting,” Leon said.“I wasn’t sure you’d let me in.”“I let people in. It’s a failing.”He lit the lamp. In its light Varek looked very old. He had been a young man, as such creatures counted it, when Leon first saw him pressed against the bars of a cage on the deck of the Quiet Grain, spitting grease and defiance. Now his gray skin had gone ashen at the temples, and his four arms, once as broad as beams, were thinner, and the brass piston brand on each forearm had faded to a pale scar. He wore the plain gray robe of a council delegate, with a small brass pin at the collar, and he looked

The prison column was Rook's idea, and the information was Sefa's."Six wagons, barred," the scout said, crouched in the frozen bracken above the Banner Road with her chin on her fists. "Twenty living guards, riding. No dead. They go to the Grave Road at the new moon, and what goes to the Grave Road doesn't come back." She chewed a bit of straw. "There's a fellow in the fourth wagon they keep apart. I heard the sergeant say Verrin. Say it like a curse.""Why?" said Kael."Because he's an officer, captain of a banner, for the third. They don't put captains in the wagons, Captain." She grinned at her own joke and let it fade. "I think he said no to something."Rook had gone very still beside him. She had been that way since Sefa began, with a look in her slate eyes that Kael had seen on men who were about to be asked to forgive something. "A Red Host captain," she said, "who's been arrested by his own lord. That's a man who knows how the army's put together. And he's got a reason to hat

Serai had not dreamed in twenty-two years, and so for a moment she did not know what was happening to her.They had left Harth the morning after the renewal, in the grain carts, with Rook driving and nobody speaking. By nightfall they were camped in a fold of the high country with a stream at their backs and the Banner Road a grey thread below. Someone had made a fire. Someone had cooked. She had eaten and said goodnight and lain down in her blanket between Kael and the Clerk with her eyes closed, listening to the Lanterns settle into sleep around her one by one.Then the light came.It was not like the old sight. The old sight had been a window, a clean wide pane through which the world and its futures lay laid out in order. This was a crack. A single sharp line of brightness, as narrow as a blade, that went through the middle of the dark and showed her, for the space of a heartbeat, a thing.A lantern in a window. A hand, closing over the flame.It was gone before she could breathe.

The Renewal took place at noon, and Kael stood at the back of the crowd and said nothing.The Chainhouse was a long hall of grey stone with a black iron door, and on the day of the vote every household in Harth filed through it, one by one, and set a pebble in one of two urns. White for yes. Black for no. The baker with the thin ring went in with her husband and her daughter, and Kael watched her set a white stone down as lightly as a woman putting a coin in a plate. The chain-revee stood on the steps in her grey and called the tally at dusk."Nine in ten," she said, and the square roared.It was a good roar. There was nothing in it that had been ordered. People embraced. Children were lifted onto shoulders. The old woman from the bakery found him in the press and pressed a piece of cake into his hand without knowing who he was.He had read the margin of a ledger two nights earlier. He had stood in a dark room and known that the compact they were celebrating had already been rewritten

The three kings came to Harth for the Renewal, as they came every midwinter, and the city dressed itself to receive them.Banners went up along the Banner Road. The chainhouse steps were swept, then swept again. By the second morning the streets were lined with the retinues of three crowns, plumed and polished and a little ill at ease in the presence of a city that did not seem to need them, and Kael, who had spent a week trying to understand what Molgraeth had built, found that the quickest way to see it whole was to watch the people who had sworn to it."We want the gallery," said Rook."We want the kitchens," said Bram. "Nobody looks at the kitchens."They got both. The Lanterns had hired themselves out for the feast, as cooks and carvers and pot-boys, with the two singing brothers, Hob and Tam Harker, engaged as the evening's minstrels for a fee that would have embarrassed a lesser company. Kael carried wine. Serai, veiled, sat in the minstrel's gallery with a lute she could not p

Harth had no guard on its gate, and that was the first thing that frightened Rook."Nobody's watching the road," she said, low, from the front bench of the lead grain cart. She had her cropped hair under a cataract's hood and a whip across her knees, and she was looking up at the city walls like a woman checking a ledger she suspected of lying. "Head of the Banner Road. Richest granary city in the Marches. Portcullis up, barbican empty. I've never seen it. Not in twelve years of contracts.""Maybe they trust the Hosts," Kael said."Nobody trusts the Hosts."The carts rolled in under the arch. There were six of them, loaded with sacks Rook had bought with the last of the company's silver, and in them, between the sacks, rode the people she had chosen for a city: Bram to count, Sefa to climb, Iven for his steady hands, and the rest of the crew as drivers and porters. Kael sat in the third cart with a sack for a pillow and a hood over his face. Serai sat beside him with her hair covered

Rook laid the map out on the head of a drum, and for the first time in two months Kael saw what he was up against as a shape.It was a plain map. A trader's chart, with a river down the middle and the marshes spread across it like a hand, but Rook had worked on it for four nights with a stub of charcoal, and now it was a different thing. Three black roads ran east from the river into the high country, and where each of them ended, she had drawn a small square."Granaries," she said. "Not his. Nobody's, strictly. The villages bring the tithe grain in, and the hosts draw from it. But everything the War God's living armies eat comes through one of these three." Her finger moved. "Here, in the north, the Banner Road. Here, in the center, the Red Road. Here, in the south, is the Grave Road, which feeds the dead. They don't eat, but his priests do, and the priests are how the dead are made to march. Cut all three, and the hosts go hungry in six weeks. They don't break. They scatter. And a g