"As Franric marched on Collen, I shaped my weapons. My Andrac. My Star-Eaters. The battle for Collen began. At first, I had no need for the Andrac. But as Franric's ethermancers struck down my servants and soldiers, and his army climbed past my defenses, I brought forth that which would end it.
"The Andrac brought an end: but not the one I sought. They turned on me. Dropped my people as blackened husks. I tried to turn them back against the Mallish. I failed. I tried to banish them back into darkness. I failed. Then I thought to destroy them. But in seeking to defeat the Mallish, I had created the one thing more insidious and invincible than my enemy. How does one harm that which has no flesh? How can one destroy the eternal nether?
"If I can't undo what I've done, the demons I brought will slay the people I love. I have an idea. I will not speak it—I can't risk the enemy finding this confession—but I will see this idea through. Will I fail? Or drive the Mallish from Collen for the last and final time? History will see."
Nak went quiet. The sound of glugging water came through the loon.
"Is that it?" Dante said.
"That's where the confession ends."
"After this, Kon the White-Haired went into a Collenese shrine and was never seen again. Whatever his idea was, it must not have been very good."
"So," Nak said. "About that promotion?"
"Where did you find this?"
"Well, the tale of that is every bit as epic as your current imbroglio. First, I mustered a great host of monks, archivists, and apprentices. Then we marched on our leather-bound foes. They put up a ferocious fight, snarling our passage with an endless labyrinth of words and obscurities, but after ransacking each shelf and cubby, our prize was delivered."
"You need to get out more," Dante said. "What about the story from the Cycle?"
"There doesn't seem to be much there. No description of how Kennen summoned his dark servant. Nor was there any mention of a glowing throat. If it helps, though, Vanya banished the servant in a flourish of light."
"I think I have enough to move forward. But keep looking for more information. Otherwise, I may have to do something very stupid."
He shut down the loon. The others were away from the room in a discussion with a woman named Gena, one of Dog's Paws most prominent farmers. Trying to convince her, and thus all the other farmers, that it was a good idea to fight back. This was a tricky proposition, given that marching armies tended to treat enemy farmland with the courtesy of a swarm of locusts. But Blays had hit on the idea of presenting that outcome as an inevitability—unless the towns banded together to keep the Mallish confined to Collen.
The four of them trooped into the room two hours later, their clothes dusty, their faces long.
"No luck?" Dante said.
Blays flopped into a chair. "Gena's afraid of the Star-Eaters, too. If we're going to talk anybody into picking up their swords, we're going to have to rename the demons something with less nightmarish associations. Like…'shadowbunnies.'"
"I heard from Nak. He found an incredible source. It was an account of the Andrac from Kon the White-Haired himself."
Dante read the transcribed confession out loud. When he finished, he looked up with a grin. Rather than sharing his excitement, the others looked alarmed, glancing between him and the Keeper.
After so many decades in the basement, the Keeper's face was far paler than the average Collener. Now, it was flushed red with wrath. "Why do you have Kon's confession in Narashtovik?"
"I don't have any idea," Dante said. "Surely you don't think we stole it?"
"Of course you did. It was our story. Thus for you to have it means you stole it!"
"But how can you steal a story? They don't belong to any one person. They belong to everyone who wants to learn from them. The best ones are so eager to be heard they seem to spread themselves."
"This is wrong." The Keeper hobbled forward, pale blue eyes burning from her wrinkled cheeks. "This history isn't an insect to be dissected by scholars in Bressel and Narashtovik. It's a piece of Collen's heart. To be kept in the body of Collen."
Dante pinched the bridge of his nose. "I can't tell you why we have this piece of your history and you don't. For all I know, Cally took the confession for his research when he was living here. I can't change what's happened, but I promise you, once this is over, we'll make you a copy of every book and scroll relating to Collen we've got in our archives."
She murmured wordlessly. Deep as her voice was, it sounded like the growl of a dog. "You don't understand. These are our secrets. The Mallish ply us with torture to learn them and use them against us."
"You say this knowledge was stolen." Cord's back was to the windows, leaving her face shadowed. "But I say it was hidden. Kept safe in a vault much like what you do in the basements beneath the shrine."
"Kon said he was leaving his confession to his Keeper. His writings couldn't have gone missing unless they were stolen."
Cord's shoulders bounced with wry mirth. "Unless the one who watched over them didn't want anyone to know the truth: that the great Kon the White-Haired called the demons that killed his own people."
"A Keeper would never betray her oath to preserve our history!"
"Just as she would never betray her oath to leave the Reborn Shrine?"
The Keeper sagged. At once, she looked every day of her vast years, her face crinkling on itself until it looked as gray and withered as the trees buried beneath the dust of the Spiderfields.
"Our vows are supposed to make us strong," she said. "But we are too weak to uphold them. We think we are ether, but everything turns to nether, doomed to rot and ruin."
"No!" Cord's voice rang like a clap of hands. "Only an honest woman is shocked by dishonesty in others. As for your vows, to hell with them. Why would you wish to hobble yourself? Walk free and carry a long sword, for sometimes steel is the only thing hard enough to cut through the lies."
"We can only guess why the Keeper of that era covered this up," Dante said. "But if I'd been in her position, I wouldn't keep records of a weapon the Mallish could use to destroy me. I would have burned them."
The Keeper nodded vaguely. "Perhaps she couldn't bear to destroy it. And sent it to Narashtovik, where Mallon could never reach. That, I think, is what I would have done."
Silence fell over the room. Naran found Dante's eye. "You seem enthralled by this information. But I don't see how it changes our circumstances. The Andrac remain as invincible as ever."
"The confession told us how the demons were formed," Dante said. "I can use that to figure out how to destroy them."
"By reversing the process?"
"I wish it was that easy. Hope you're ready to get your hands dirty. Next, I have to create an Andrac for myself."
21
Blays gave Dante his most dubious look. "Your big idea to eliminate the demons is to make a bunch more of them? How well does it normally work out for you sorcerers when you summon terrible beings you're not sure you can control?"
"I'm not going to try to use it against Gladdic," Dante said. "I'm going to kill it."
"You want to create a demon. And then kill it. Here's an alternate suggestion: why don't you cut to the chase and not summon the demon in the first place?"
"Because then we'll never learn how to destroy them."
"This seems extremely dangerous. Then again, I suppose it's less dangerous than trying to learn how to fight them while also fighting Gladdic and his army."
"Exactly." Dante gazed at his transcription of Kon's confession. "We do it in a controlled setting to minimize risk."
Naran laced his fingers together. "If you wish to minimize risk, shouldn't you wait until your priests arrive?"
"That would minimize the risk of getting hurt while learning to fight the demons. But it increases the risk that Gladdic will make his next move before our reinforcements arrive."
"In all things, it's best to act with vigor," Cord said. "Smite or be smited."
"We're going to ne
ed a graveyard," Dante said. "Or a battleground. Anywhere that's seen death."
The Keeper laughed unpleasantly. "Do you forget where we are? Every inch of this land has seen death."
"Will you help me fight it? We're going to need every drop of ether we can muster."
"I am not supposed to fight. Then again, I've recorded history my entire life. Perhaps I've earned the right to finally make some of it."
"Our first step is to isolate these 'traces' Kon mentions. Once I figure out how to combine them, then we'll have our test subject."
"Hold on." Blays began to walk in a ponderous circle around the table. "Kon didn't actually summon any demons, did he? He had to make them himself."
"That's exactly what I'm talking about doing."
"Bear with me. This is about learning to fight them, right? If I'm looking to learn how to fight people, and I walk into a bar meaning to set off a brawl, who should I start with? The blacksmith with the shoulders you could build a castle on? Or the kid who isn't tall enough to see over the bar?"
"Obviously, you should beat up the kid," Dante said. "What are you getting at?"
"Kon wanted the mightiest demons he could get his hands on. Monsters that could shred the Mallish into sandwich filling. But we want the wimpiest demon we can get."
Dante tapped his upper lip. "So I should make the smallest, weakest one I possibly can. Sounds like a plan."
Despite the Keeper's claims, the Collen Basin wasn't actually paved with the bones of the dead. In need of bodies, Dante consulted with Cord and the Keeper about where he could locate and potentially experiment on a number of corpses without grossly offending the locals—or Cord and the Keeper themselves. After some discussion, they struck on the idea of using a site where the Colleners had won a decisive victory over the Mallish, meaning most of the bodies at rest would be Mallish as well, and hence no one would care if they got a little desecrated.
The nearest such site to Dog's Paw was known as the Bloodlake. Two hundred-odd years ago, a Mallish battalion had been on the way to Dog's Paw only to run into a rockslide across the road. Rather than clearing it, which would have taken all day, they diverted through a game trail nestled between two hills.
And found themselves ambushed by the combined forces of the towns of Tanner, Kaline, and Darstow. After the last Mallish soldier had fallen, the blood was said to be so deep you could catch fish in it.
Dante struck out with the others on the following morning, taking the road toward Franks, which the ill-fated Mallish battalion had been marching from. It was a rare cloudy day and the desert was quiet and still, as if afraid of scaring off the clouds before they'd dropped their precious rain.
"I've been thinking," Dante said to no one in particular. "If Gladdic's using the bones to summon the Andrac, then it's unlikely he can create them himself. That means he must have a limited supply."
Blays waved away a fly. "I thought the idea was to limit his supply by limiting his existence."
"That's Plan A. But if we've learned anything, it's that it never hurts to have a backup."
Four miles outside Dog's Paw, the road cut through a line of hills. Cord examined the landscape, then took them off the road to a trail running between two of the hills. This brought them to a small bowl-shaped valley.
Cord stopped and stamped her right foot. "This was the Bloodlake. A great victory. Let's see that what lies here makes the fuel for the next one as well!"
Dante wandered among the shrubs and the dense, thorn-filled balls the Colleners called tumbleweeds. He sent his mind down into the soil. The dirt ran deep. A few feet below the surface, it was filled with hard, jumbled objects. Bones.
Dante nicked the back of his arm. The nether appeared in his hands of its own accord; there had been death here. And that, according to Kon, was what left the so-called traces behind. Dante inspected the shadows he'd collected for irregularities, but the moiling streams of nether looked the same as they always had.
He sent them into the earth, drawing the soil back layer by layer. Once the pit was eighteen inches deep, the first of the bones broke the surface. Some were held together by mummified flesh or desiccated uniforms. Others were alone, forever parted from their old bodies. As the dirt continued to sink, the bones on top lowered with it until they covered the surface in a solid mat.
Dante withdrew from the shadows. Beside him, Naran looked thoughtful while Cord looked proud. Dante shaped a ramp into the side of the excavation, which was a circle four feet deep and ten across, and descended. As he reached the bottom, several bones snapped beneath his feet.
If there was any stink of rot, it was faint enough to be masked by the pleasant smells of damp earth and the coming storm. He picked up a skull and closed his eyes. The nether within it appeared perfectly normal. He summoned it. Its flow looked as typical as its appearance. Were the traces mobile, like the rest of the nether? Or did they get stuck fast to the body they'd once lived inside? He drew out every drop of shadows from the skull, then peered inside its crannies. No nether of any kind remained.
He released the nether and set down the skull. Where would the trace left by death be found? The ribs, the house of the heart? He separated a rib from a jumble of bones and sought the shadows within it. As with the skull, the rib's nether was unremarkable, and when the bone was wholly drained, no traces of darkness remained in its marrow.
He tried four more ribs, a pelvis, a femur, another skull, then a large collection of the delicate bones of the digits, which always seemed to contain a disproportionate amount of nether to their size. None revealed any secrets.
He sat back, knuckles resting on the span of a femur. "I'm not seeing any of these traces at all. Then again, I've worked with the nether every day for the last ten years and I've never seen a 'trace' before."
Blays climbed down the earthen ramp. "Or you've seen them so many times they've become completely unremarkable to you. Much like how I'm now able to look at that beard of yours without bursting into tears. Here, let me have a try."
Dante observed as Blays moved into the nether lodged in a clavicle's marrow. Blays pulled the darkness this way and that, stretching it so thin you could almost see through it, then letting it snap back. This accomplished—if "accomplished" was the right word—Blays tugged out a black lump and batted it around like a cat with a spider.
Dante frowned. "What are you doing?"
"Punishing it for being part of an invading soldier. What does it look like? I'm trying to see if anything's hidden inside it."
"I hope I'm not as clumsy with a sword as you are with the shadows."
"No, you're all right with a sword. With women, on the other hand…"
Blays returned to his attempt to beat the answers out of the nether. Dante could barely make himself watch, but Blays' unorthodox methods often worked where traditional routes failed.
After a couple of minutes, the nether in Blays' hands grew fuzzy. Black streamers trailed away from the gob he'd been working with, returning to the bones he'd taken them from.
Blays snapped the rib he'd been using, then looked surprised with himself. He gently set the two pieces back on the ground, patting them. "Sorry about that, old dead soldier. No hauntings, please."
"Nobody's going to come haunt you."
"We've been to the actual afterlife. Are you telling me you don't believe in the ghosts we saw there? Including the ones we talked to? Like your dad?"
"What I doubt is their ability to come here. When we went into the Mists, our physical bodies remained in the Plagued Islands. But these spirits don't have a body, do they? They left that behind when they died. They're just a soul."
Blays screwed up his face. "What's the soul made out of?"
"I don't know. It's just a soul."
"But everything in the Mists was made out of ether. The people there—wouldn't they be made of ether, too?"
Dante tipped back his head and gazed up at the gray sky. "When we die, we awake in the etherworld. A part of us must t
ravel there. But whatever comprises that part, we know it isn't all of us. Our body remains here. What if a piece of us travels to the netherworld as well?"
"What if that's the trace?"
"Then it's not necessarily going to be in the physical remains. Or even visible in the earthly realm." He pressed his fist to his forehead, which felt like it was about to burst. "Is this completely crazy?"
"You're the gods' authority on Earth. You tell me. Maybe when we die, a piece of the ether in us goes to the afterworld. And that's our soul. Carrying us with it away from this world."
"If our soul is ether, what part of us becomes the trace?" Dante glanced up at the Keeper. "What do you think? Are we talking nonsense?"
She gazed down from the lip of the excavation. "I think you've seen things no living soul has witnessed. Set aside what others have told you and trust what your eyes have shown you."
Dante gazed down at the carpet of bones. "There's a certain symmetry to it. Ether to ether, nether to nether, and the body to the dust."
"Question," Blays said. "Are we figuring out the secrets of the world right now?"
"That depends on whether we're right."
"A followup to the question. If are right, that means the books of the gods are wrong."
"The books of the gods were written by mortals," Dante said. "And if there's anything mortals do right, it's be wrong. Anyway, we already know the holy books have…holes in them. For instance, there are multiple accounts of the same events in the Cycle of Arawn. They can't all be correct."
"So we've flown past questioning and crashed right into heresy. If Gladdic could hear us, he'd skin us alive. And then knit our skin into demon-mittens."
"Let's get back to the traces. Across the wars, we've seen thousands of people die. Have you ever seen anything leave their bodies?"
"You mean besides blood and feces?" Blays picked up a jawbone and turned it in his hand. "We haven't seen any ether depart them, either. But we know it must. I mean, unless our souls are already up in the ether hanging out without us."
Dante racked his memory for anything unusual he'd seen during the deaths of others, but nothing sprung to mind. Not that this surprised him. If it had been anything that obvious, then someone besides Kon would have noticed it long ago.
The Cycle of Galand Box Set Page 75
