"You think you're saviors? You're nothing but children wearing your fathers' capes and swords. You can't stop this. You can't even save my daughters!"
"But I can orphan them."
Blays plunged forward. Ranala was waiting for this, and spun back and to the side, but Blays moved with her, as if he was reading her mind. The Odo Sein blade entered her chest, pierced her heart, and passed through the other side. Ranala groped at him, fingers bent into claws, eyes shining with tears. She tried to say something. Instead, she collapsed, hands falling to her sides, gazing up at Blays even as her eyes glazed over with death.
The shadows coursed through Winden's neck, restoring her flesh with a ferocity fed by her own blood. Her chest heaved. Blood was still bubbling from her mouth, but it was just trickling from her throat, and quickly stopped altogether. Dante worked smoothly and without error, some central chamber of his mind keeping its calm even as everything else raced and whirled.
It was done. She breathed evenly. She brought her hand to her throat, touching it hesitantly, then grabbing it madly to reassure herself that she was whole.
"My life," Winden said. "I saw it over."
"You left enough blood on the ground to raise three armies of rats. But you'll have your strength back faster than you know."
She smiled at him. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she went limp. But her blood was still flowing, and her heart was still pumping, and he knew that she'd be all right.
Dante got up and moved beside Blays, who stood over Ranala, sword still in hand. "You killed her."
"She tried to kill Winden. Would have killed us next."
"Do you want to bury her? Or burn her?"
"I've got half a mind to toss her in the lake and feed her to the fish." Blays glanced at his sword and put it away. "Do what you want."
Dante had half a mind to burn her, just in case she was also possessed by the strands. But he wasn't exactly in love with the idea of setting off a signal beacon to whatever might be lurking in the night. After double-checking that she was dead, he opened a hole in the earth, deposited her body into it, and covered her with the wet dirt.
"Why did she do it?" Blays asked.
"You heard her. She was mad with grief that we wouldn't help her daughters."
"Mad enough to try to kill us all."
"Her children are dying. She'd just been attacked by a leviathan. It must have felt like the end of days to her—and on that front, she wasn't wrong."
"Believable enough." Gladdic joined them to consider the grave. "If you believe a word of what she said she was."
Dante swung his head around. "What else would she have been? An infiltrator?"
"A ridiculous notion, of course, considering how few enemies you have made across the years."
"If she was an infiltrator, how would she have known to find us out here?"
"Could be a mole in the TAGVOG," Blays piped in. "Someone might never have forgiven us for killing…that guy, I don't remember his name, just the privy we snuck in through. Or maybe someone just sold us out for silver. These aren't the most money-averse people in the world."
Dante considered this, then shook his head. "And then staged a leviathan attack? Moments before we showed up to see it? If this is part of a conspiracy, it's an insanely deep one."
"Given the circumstances, that's not exactly out of the question, is it? We were assuming she attacked Winden because Winden was the one on watch. But it was the first watch. Why not wait until second watch, when everyone would be groggier? Unless Winden was the main target all along—because she's the one who stewards the dreamflowers."
"I very much hope you're right."
"Er, you do?"
"If all that's true, then it means we're getting close to something they don't want us to find."
He wasn't sure he bought the theory—why not just overwhelm them with sea monsters?—but it was just enough to make him doubt. His dreams that night were troubled, and when it was his turn to take watch, he made himself recall every detail of the attack on Ranala's ship that he could, searching for any hints that it might have been a setup. Yet everything about it had felt fully real.
The following day was just as dark as the one before. They let Winden sleep until it was time to get to work.
"How are you feeling?" Dante asked.
She rubbed her throat. "Like a person with a cut neck, who lived."
After a quick talk with Wanders about the Golden Dart's safe sailing depths, Dante went down to the water's edge and raised the underwater causeway between them and the islet until it was almost shallow enough to stand in. They hopped aboard the boat and glided over the makeshift fortifications until Dante was able to raise the ground all the way out to the submerged island.
"Excellent," Blays said. "Have we figured out a way to breathe underwater, then?"
"Yes," Dante said. "We make someone else do it for us."
While there were fewer fish in the water than Gallador was used to, plenty still remained, and he only had to wait for a minute before he spotted one rise to the surface to bite at a passing scrap. He struck it dead, reanimated it, and brought it swimming to the side of the boat, where he leaned over and put something in between its sharp little teeth.
"What are you doing?" Blays said. "Feeding it?"
Dante shrugged. "I want to stay on its good side. Fish are notoriously quick to turn on you."
He sent it swimming toward the low thrust of rock ahead of them. As it neared it, he veered the fish to the southeast. The lake bed fell away beneath it and it followed the decline. Visibility plunged to a few feet in front of its snout, but it had some strange senses that made it less important to be able to see, and Dante could feel its position in relation to the broad pillar of rock that made up the underwater island.
It came to the opening there—which was large enough to sail the Dart through, and seemed much larger yet to the fish—and swam inside. At once, it became as dark as the cavern that it was.
Dante wasn't sure if the next bit would work, but luckily, it was way down where no one else could see how ridiculous it was. He tried to make the fish exhale. It turned out that it couldn't do this, at least not in the way that he wanted it to. But it could burble water out from its mouth, and as this washed over the torchstone clenched between its teeth, pale light sprang across the tunnel walls.
And blinded the fish. For a few moments, at least. Once it adjusted, he sent it onwards. The tunnel curved steeply, angling downward into a spiral that ran just within the outer walls of the rocky pillar. After a few turns of the loop, the tunnel leveled out and expanded into a chamber larger than any of the others they'd encountered.
The water above the fish was a shiny silver plain. Perplexed, Dante sent it swimming upward. He only grew more perplexed as its head broke free of the water and into the air.
"There's a cavern down there," he said. "And it's filled with air."
"Air?" Blays said. "Way down under the lake? Where the fish is?"
"If you turn a cup upside down and push it down into a tub, it keeps the air in it. This must be the same principle."
Blays started to try to argue with him more, but Dante moved his focus back into the fish. He made it turn in a circle, sweeping the torchlight across the interior. It resembled the first chamber they'd found, except not only was it larger, but the eggs clustered around the rim of the pool were, too. And more than half were unhatched.
Dante ordered the fish closer so he could get a better idea of their size.
"Dante?" Blays said. "Dante!"
He partially withdrew, annoyed. "What?"
"That!"
Blays pointed south, but Dante's eyes had already locked on the movement there. A hundred yards out, two V-shaped ripples were speeding towards them.
Dante gathered nether to him. "More sharks?"
"Let's hope that's all it is."
Wanders adjusted the Dart to point its bow toward the incoming creatures. Dante had planned
to just let them come for the boat and deal with them then, but as they drew closer, a fit of pique rose in him. He extended his hand and sent his mind into the flat ground he'd raised earlier. He pulled it upward as hard as he could right in front of the sharks.
One bent away from the earthen wall with almost impossible agility. The other plowed right into it, sending muck flying. The creature bounced upward into the air. Instead of a thick, bulbous fish, it was long and slender, its narrow head wriggling in confusion.
Blays extended the Spear of Stars to its dazzling length. "That is not a shark."
The waters churned where the shallows Dante had crafted dropped off to the depths. The entire surface heaved upwards—and the water slid away, revealing something scaled and immense.
"It's the gods damned leviathan!" Dante yelled. "Wanders, get us back!"
The ever-reliable captain nimbly started the boat about. A third tentacle slid over the earthen barrier and shot toward them. As Wanders reoriented the Dart, Blays shifted to keep himself and his spear aimed toward the threat. The tentacle jabbed toward them, stretching itself thin. Blays stabbed at it with the spear and it pulled back. The leviathan brought another tentacle beside it, and a third, then launched them forward in tandem.
Just before they reached the Dart, Dante pulled up the earth in front of them, snarling them in thick lake-mud. Blays yelled out and plunged the spear into the one closest to him. Something trumpeted from beneath the water; it pulled back its limbs, withdrawing the wounded one from sight, but replacing it with two more.
These advanced on the boat. Yet as they stretched further and further, they slowed, until they came to a stop thirty feet from the stern. The two in the middle made exploratory jabs, but only closed half the distance to the ship.
"Keep us right here," Dante said to Wanders. "I just need another minute."
Blays motioned with the spear. "And what would you like to do about the kraken?"
"Considering it can't get to us, I'd suggest taunting it. They built that island so it would be impossible for anyone to get into its main chamber. There has to be a reason for that."
He delved back into the eyes of the fish. If there was a doorway within the underwater chamber, he couldn't see it, but he also wasn't convinced that it had to be inside the Mists instead. He didn't think the sea monsters were carrying dreamflowers with them, that was for sure. So what could the mechanism be? Was it merely hidden from sight, like the doorway to Arawn's realm of Rovan had been in the Claimless Reach? If so, it might be as simple as finding a way inside the chamber, spreading the nether around, and—
The ship jerked toward the bow. Dante crashed back into his own vision, whipping his head to the south where the leviathan had been menacing them. The tentacles were still hanging in the air, well out of range.
The boat jolted again. Dante wrapped himself in nether. "What the hell's going on?"
"There is not just one of the great ones." Gladdic's voice was gravelly. "There are two."
Wanders wrestled with the till, trying to point them back toward shore. Yet with a terrible heave, something pulled the Dart to the north, toward where the underground cliff tumbled away into the darkness below. Dante moved to the gunwale and sent the nether gushing down into the mud, meaning to lift it well above water and dislodge the grasp the second beast's tentacles had on the underside of the boat. The thing jerked them toward itself harder than ever just as the earth jumped up toward the surface.
It hit the Dart from below. Dante spilled against the gunwale and fell head over heels into the lake. Wanders shouted out in anger. The Spear of Stars gleamed somewhere above Dante. He kicked toward the mound of earth that had upended the boat.
Something slid around his waist and tightened like a noose. It dragged him backwards from the embankment, skimming him over the water. Then he was soaring upward, the Dart suddenly below him, the faces of his friends upturned in horror, their mouths yawning wide as they shouted and screamed, the noise drowned out by the sudden crash of a waterfall.
His view of them vanished as he was flipped about like a doll. A hillside had thrust forth from the surface of the lake below him. But it wasn't one he had created—and it was moving. Its surface was scaled and mottled, its colors shifting to match the churning waters around it. The many tentacles extruding from it waved and grasped, some toward the Dart, some toward nothing. A large oval lump rose from the center of it—three round, black holes that might have been eyes, two slits that might have been nostrils—and the whole thing flared open, hinged like the mouth of a crocodile, except the mouth it revealed was much stouter, and ringed with an iron-hard beak that looked as old as the crags of Gallador's mountains.
And inside this, a ring of broad and pointed teeth gnashed and scraped.
Dante swung his fist against the tentacle, slamming it with a shockwave of shadows. He put everything he had into the attack, and it was just enough to make the limb twitch open, dropping him: but another tentacle snapped toward him, snagging him in midair.
It gave him a lazy toss upward. The mouth gaped below him, stinking and wet. Everything around him slowed to a crawl. He gathered another mass of shadows to his hands. He meant to throw them at one of its eyes, see if he could make it flinch away, but he'd already fallen too far. The beak swung wider. The teeth stayed where they were. Ready to snap shut.
They rushed toward him. They began to swing together, ready to slice him in half. He drove the nether toward the ones just below him with every ounce of his power. Two teeth shattered with a nauseating crunch.
He fell through their gap, joining its shards in the leviathan's maw. Teeth clashed together. The beak closed with a bone-jolting crack. Something squeezed him, forcing him downward. Then darkness was all that he knew.
8
He landed with a splash. He might have only been out for a few seconds. Felt like longer. He didn't know where he was—it was dark, it smelled wretched, worse than anything he'd known, worse than he'd thought possible. He snapped his fingers. Light flashed across gray folds of damp land and greenish puddles. Plants and dead fish bobbed in the water. The smell was too much for him. He vomited, clutching his gut.
Watching the falling stream of the contents of his stomach, he understood that he was inside the leviathan's.
He retched harder and harder until there was nothing left to get out. Even then he couldn't stop. He was breathing too fast and too shallow and he couldn't stop that either. Getting dizzy. From the speed of his breathing? Or was the air here befouled and spent? He grasped at the nether, washing it down his throat and stomach like a soothing tonic. His retches lessened and finally stopped.
The great beast shifted, slopping the fluids of its stomach halfway up Dante's thighs. He knew his anatomy as well as anyone on the continent, maybe better than anyone in all of Rale, and knew well what the digestive fluids did to flesh immersed in them. Trying to prevent himself from dry heaving some more, he pulled himself up a gray wrinkle of gut, extricating himself from the awful liquid. The monster shifted again, splashing him with more. He swore, though this was hard, given how tightly his throat was closing, and climbed his way to a shelf of disgusting flesh higher up the side of the stomach wall.
He took a moment to collect himself. His head grew somewhat clearer, suggesting the air was breathable, at least for the time being. He had an assortment of loons, including one linked to another that Blays carried, and he dug this out of a pouch he carried around his neck, placed it to his ear, and activated it.
No response. The leviathan shifted again, forcing him to sink his hands into the oozing tissue to keep himself from falling. The creature underwent a series of hard maneuvers that might have involved fighting. Dante tried the loon again. Nothing. Either Blays was busy battling the thing, or there was no one left to reply to him.
Rage flashed through his mind. He yanked out his sword, anchored himself, and hacked into the stomach lining of the beast.
A roar sounded above him, echoing dow
n into the stomach. Which convulsed like a dying man. Dante was flung down from his perch and into a shallow pool, which closed on him and clenched him beneath its foul waters. His arm was trapped and he couldn't swing his sword. He scrabbled for the nether. The sides of the pool relaxed. He jumped bodily free of it, swiping gunk from his eyes and mouth while managing to only retch a few more times.
Stupid. Very stupid. Even if he could chop his way out of the stomach without getting crushed by its convulsions, there was no way he'd be able to cut through its elephantine hide. He'd be stuck. He was going to have to exit one of the two ends of the digestive tract.
He'd gutted enough animals, and people, to know that there was much more tube going down from the stomach than coming up from it. The mouth it was, then.
Having reached this decision, he sat glumly on his ledge, trying to figure out how he was ever going to do that. After some peering around at the "ceiling," he located what was probably the entrance to the stomach: there was nothing as obvious as a big round hole, but there were some of the thick, muscly flaps that stomachs used to allow things to pass down into them while preventing things from shooting back up out of them.
It was way up over his head, though. And his pockets weren't exactly full of rope and pitons. The stomach lining wasn't textured enough for him to find handholds in, either, certainly not ones strong enough for him to dangle from. Just as he was about to despair and resign himself to a nightmarish descent through the Lower Passage, the entire chamber tilted hard forward.
The leviathan was diving. Or something, it was hard to visualize when he was down in the middle of it. Whatever was happening, he had to slide down from his perch to keep from getting dumped down to the new ground, while the valve that had once been overhead was now forward. He crash-landed in a pile of horrible muck and dashed toward the pulsing flaps as fast as he could. He flung his arm over his mouth to protect it from the spray kicked up by his boots.
The room began to tilt again, back toward its original position. He flung himself heedlessly forward and scrambled up the angling wall of the stomach. With a last leap, he grabbed hold of one of the flaps, bracing his weight against the lining and wrestling it like he might with a seal. It opened so easily he almost fell off it in surprise.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 11
