Dante took a minute to look around for roving bands of ramna barbarians, flocks of biting drakelets, or any of the other hazards known or unknown that populated the Realm. With everything looking safe enough for the moment, he led the way down the grassy flank of the crater, making way for Allamar, which appeared to be somewhere between ten and twenty miles away. The afternoon was getting on; the sun had fallen behind the western mountains, casting them in shadow, and judging by the coldness of the air, it was roughly the same season as in Rale. Meaning night would fall well before they came to Carvahal's city.
"We're marching straight there, then?" Blays said, apparently having similar thoughts.
"If we try to pass the night out here, we'll most likely wind up running straight to Allamar. And we'll be glad it's too dark to see what's chasing us."
Dante was just paranoid enough to think that the powers that be might be playing some perverse trick on them, so he dig into the earth and lifted up a lump of it to convince himself they truly were where they thought they were. He rubbed the inner corners of his eyes. Each layer of being seemed to be bleeding over into the others; Rale was growing more and more like the Mists and the Realm while the Mists and not-Mists seemed more like Rale and the Realm. He was starting to lose his grasp on what was real. Or maybe it was reality itself that was losing its grasp.
The grass was dead and thinned from winter and the scattered trees were leafless, and Dante felt highly exposed. Yet one mile after another fell behind them without incident. With true sunset close at hand, they hiked up to the low ridge of bright red rocks that ringed the forest that in turn ringed the city of Allamar. The tall sharp stones were a labyrinth, the city's first defense against ramna invaders and other enemies, but the three of them were through it in a matter of minutes. As though the maze knew they weren't on their way to do the land any harm, and had allowed them through it.
Darkness fell over them as they crossed the sward between the labyrinth and the woods, but none of them lit any lights. Wind rustled the dry grass. They came to the woods and to a stop.
"Last time we were here," Blays said, "I had the distinct feeling the trees would have eaten us if Neve hadn't been with us."
Dante hiked up his belt. "Well, if they try anything with us, we'll have to find out if trees can scream."
He entered the forest before the jitters could get the best of them. At once, he illuminated his torchstone, casting its light over the thicket of warped trunks, twitching vines, oily bulbs, and watchful flowers. The way forward was so clogged with branches and thorns it was hard to keep their bearings now that the sun was down, but Gladdic pulled his stunt with the floating ethereal compass needle to keep them aimed in the right direction. After a lot of grumbling, cursing, sweating, and bleeding, they stumbled free of the cursed forest, with no obvious major obstacles left between them and the city.
This, when they came to it, was just as they'd last seen it: three squat hills that acted as pedestals for the rotund pillars of packed stone that elevated the citizens 150 feet above the surrounding farmland. The ramp that spiraled around one of these pillars was blocked by guards wearing the orange and charcoal colors of the kingdom.
Dante braced himself for the run-around—they were seeking an audience, after all, with a god—but the guards were excited to see them, if not in a wholly happy way, and hurriedly escorted them to the top of the pillar, then to the white granite palace, and then to one of its receiving-halls.
Servants delivered them refreshments while various people who were almost certainly sorcerers hung around the periphery to make sure the visitors weren't about to break anything or launch a coup. Dante examined the paintings of pirates and thieves and rebel heroes that adorned the walls until a god entered the room.
Carvahal was handsome in the way that statues of princes were handsome and carried himself like a fencer who'd never been beaten in a duel—which he probably hadn't been until Blays had bested him. Soft light glowed from him and Dante wondered if that was intrinsic to the gods, or if some of them just did it for dramatic effect.
Yet even if the latter was true, and even though Dante had contended with and sometimes gotten the better of the gods, his eyes still watered as he looked upon one, and his knees and spine still softened. A force stronger than gravity or love tried to compel him to fall prone and grovel while babbling senselessly. Instead, he bowed.
Carvahal's green eyes glinted. "You again."
"Are you that surprised?" Blays said.
"More than you might think."
"Really? Our world's getting torn apart in ten different directions, and you thought we'd just wave it off? Or did you expect us to all be dead by now?"
The lord had a habit of moving about as he spoke—it was more like prowling than pacing—but he stopped short at this, considering the three mortals with what was for him an extraordinarily long pause.
"How well do you think we follow the workings of your world?" he said at last.
Blays folded his arms. "Close enough to try to destroy it. And when that didn't work, to try to destroy it again."
Carvahal resumed moving throughout the room. This had the air of a shark patrolling its waters. "We watch you much less than you think. We built your world to be your world. While it's possible for us to look into it, even to intervene in it, we deliberately built it so that neither would be easy to do. Besides, we often have more than enough of our own affairs to keep us occupied…as you might have noticed."
"Why am I getting the impression you're trying to tell me you don't have any idea what's going on?"
"Simple: because I don't. Not because I don't want to. But because, at this particular moment, none of us can. Or so I have been told, and experienced for myself."
"Taim has sent something else," Dante said. "It's worse than the White Lich. And it's only getting started."
Carvahal lifted a dark brow. "It?"
"Plagues. Disasters. Monsters like nothing I've ever seen in our lands. It's meant to erase us entirely. You really didn't know this?"
"You make a gross mistake to assume I've heard nothing, mortal. You've seen these plagues for yourself?"
"More often and more closely than we would have liked," Gladdic said.
"Then I would say it's time we lay all our cards down on the table and see just what we're up again—and then enact a conspiracy to oppose it." He clapped his hands. "Drinks!"
These were served almost before they had finished seating themselves. Given their past dealings with him, Carvahal was acting brazenly forthright, raising Dante's suspicions that he might have flipped loyalties to Taim, or that he was pursuing some secret interests known only to himself.
But if even Carvahal was working to betray them, he didn't see that they had any chance at all. So he launched into the tale of all they'd done and seen since they'd last seen Carvahal after they'd stolen the Spear of Stars from Taim's fastness and fled together down the river until Carvahal delivered them back to their own world.
It would have taken some time even if he'd told it straight through, and it took longer yet due to regular questions from the god, many clear and sharp, others whose purpose was obscure to Dante. Carvahal was quite interested in the details of the green strands, but less in the volcanoes, and even less so in the various leviathans and sea monsters.
"You're right," he said, interrupting their hunt for the first doorway at Lake Owlin. "The attacks on your world won't go away on their own. They'll only get worse. And greater in number."
Dante leaned forward in his chair. "Then you know what they are?"
Carvahal waved a hand. "Finish your story. There's still a small chance I'm wrong, and I'd dearly hate to have to admit that."
When Dante reached the part where he was swallowed alive, Carvahal laughed so loud and long that Majordomo Qualls stuck his head into the room to make sure everything was all right. Once matters moved to the not-Mists, however, the god sobered quickly, asking one terse question after another. T
he questions continued even after their transportation to the lake in the crater.
At the end, Carvahal fell into silence, rolling his silver goblet between his palms as he gazed at the floor. "I was not incorrect."
Blays took a sip. "For somebody who was right, you don't sound very enthused about it."
"I am not enthused. Damn it. Damn it all. Burn it all, salt the land it was built on, and find a way to salt the salt!"
"I mean, yes, it looks bad at the moment. But we put an end to Taim's last scheme. Is it that impossible to just stop him again?"
"Yes. Because this isn't him."
"Not to question the word of a god, my god, but his own angel flew in to tell us so herself."
Carvahal's anger was still upon him and he shot Blays a contemptuous look. "If Taim had the will and the power to do what's currently being done to Rale, why bother with those machinations with the Eiden Rane?"
"To keep his own hands from getting dirty? Wasn't that more of a crime of opportunity on his part?"
"You fail to grasp my point."
"Then that's your fault for endowing us with such puny brains."
Carvahal glared at him, then laughed, his mood changing as quickly as an island's weather. "Could Taim himself tear Rale apart? Well, maybe. But as I said, we put certain blockades in place. It would take many many years of preparation. Even then, the effort would so expose him that he would be very vulnerable to attack by anyone who didn't much care for what he was doing."
"Like yourself?" Dante said.
"Any of us, really. So it is wrong to say that this is being done by Taim. What is being done is at the behest of Taim."
Gladdic very rarely drank, but he was doing so that night. "If directly assaulting Rale would leave Taim vulnerable, then the same would be true for any god. You are saying that the force now at war with our world is something other than a god."
"It is certainly not one of the ones that you people seem to be aware of," Carvahal said. "Nor is it…human, in whatever senses we ourselves are. A 'force' would indeed be more accurate. Or an 'entity.' For instance, I am given the name Carvahal, distinct to me because only I am me, and nothing more, and no one else is me, either. Just as you are Gladdic, and you are Dante, and you are Blays. But while this thing has a name, that's mostly something we imposed on it, because it's difficult to comprehend beings like it. Its real name would be something like Chaos. Or Entropy. Or perhaps I Demand the Crumbling of Everything: And Preferably in a Violent and Awe-Inspiring Matter."
"Can this entity be reasoned with?" Dante said. "Or destroyed?"
"You always rush right to the end, don't you? No wonder there doesn't seem to be a lot of women in your life." The god flipped his goblet in the air, snagged it, and drank, somehow all without spilling a drop. "You don't even understand the situation you find yourself in yet. So you should probably take advantage of the fact that a deity is sympathetic enough to your cause to explain key details about matters we have otherwise always kept the very existence of hidden from you.
"Now. The realm you passed through on the way here? The one that appeared to you like the Mists, but which you suspect is not? You're right about that. There used to be a loftier name for the place, but some time ago—well, several eons, to be more accurate—I started calling it the Soup, and it stuck."
"Sounds charming," Blays said. "But when we were there, it kind of felt like hell."
"Well, that's because much like the Mists, it isn't fixed, which is very disorienting to the type of minds that mortals have. And unlike the Mists, it is very dangerous. That's what makes it so useful."
"Because none of us who manages to stumble into the place will live to tell anyone about it?"
"A mere side benefit. The Soup is a place of becoming and of forms. If I wanted to menace the populace with, say, a hydra, I couldn't just snap my fingers and poof out a hydra. But with some effort, I could conjure one out of the Soup. That's where the portal guardians came from. And that's what was used to populate Rale."
"And, I assume, the monsters swarming Gallador Rift," Dante said.
Carvahal nodded. "And every other land in your world, soon enough."
"You can just manufacture these things at will? Then why don't you use them to eradicate the ramna?"
"First off, we're not producing these things. The entity is. Second off, think, you dimwit. Any monsters powerful enough to eradicate the ramna would by definition be even worse for us to deal with than the ramna." Carvahal beckoned for a refill. "What I'm trying to get through to you is that the Soup is a very different world than you're used to."
"We're growing increasingly used to that."
"No. You still don't understand. It is a realm that's very different from what we're used to. It shouldn't even be opened up and accessible the way it appears to be now."
"And it's where this 'entity' resides?"
Carvahal grimaced. "Sort of."
"Is it more powerful than you?"
"There are ways that it is and there are ways that it is not. Do not be mistaken: it is immensely powerful, one of the foundational forces we drew on when constructing your world—and this one. While it—"
"Wait." Dante held up his hand. "You built the Realm of Nine Kings, too? Then what came before it?"
"Why would you imagine I'd tell you that?"
"Because if we're going to beat this thing, we need to know everything that we can."
"Do you really think you can lie to the lord of them? You don't need to know anything about that. You want to know, because your mind is greedy for knowledge the way a merchant is greedy for coin. It's irrelevant to you: this is who and where we are now." Carvahal rolled his eyes in thought. "Where was I. Ah: while the entity has a will, and seems to have an intelligence, that intelligence takes a different form than yours or mine. This means it can be manipulated and deceived. To make a long story short, a very very long time ago, it and others like it were sealed away. Much like your Eiden Rane was."
"And Taim has just unsealed it? To wield it against us?"
"I don't know that."
"If it was sealed away once, can it be resealed?"
"You would think so. But I don't know the answer to that either."
Gladdic looked up. "Can it be destroyed?"
Carvahal chuckled. "Can destruction be destroyed? Now that's an interesting question. One we asked ourselves when all this was first done. We thought so, for various reasons, but we'd also done a lot of fighting at that point, and decided that trying to destroy destruction was more likely to get one or all of us destroyed instead, and anyway, we might someday have use for its abilities again. That's why we went with imprisonment—although it was a very nice prison."
"So how do we reimprison it?" Dante said.
The god shrugged. "I wouldn't have any idea."
"But you just said that you'd already done it!"
"No I didn't. We used one of the other entities to do that. Yes, I know: so how do you get that entity to do it again, or how can you speak to it to convince it to do what you want it to, or whatever your tiresomely predictable next question will be. That can't be done. It certainly can't be done within the scale of time you need."
Silence claimed the hall.
"Are we doomed, then?" Blays swirled his glass. "If so, can we open up some of the really good stuff?"
Carvahal watched them from the corners of his eyes. After a moment, Gladdic uttered a grunt that might have been laughter. "Yet you know another way to save us."
Carvahal placed his hand to his chest. "I don't have any idea how to do that. But I know someone who might."
"Arawn?" Dante said. "He knows a thing or two about being imprisoned. Or Barrod? Could he build us a cage like the Riya Lase the White Lich was locked inside?"
"Maralda."
"I'm not sure I've heard of her."
"You haven't. You wouldn't even have heard the faintest, most garbled legends about her. Unless I'm mistaken, none of your kind has ever met h
er."
"Who is she?"
"That's not the easiest question to answer. I can tell you what she was. In the early days, she was one of us."
"A…god? Then how could we not have heard of her?"
Carvahal gave him a meaningful look. "Because you're the very reason she parted ways with us. She hated the idea of making Rale. Thought it was an act of unimaginable cruelty to separate you from us like that. Just didn't see the point at all."
"What was the point?"
The god chortled scornfully. "I would tell you good effort, but that was pathetic."
"You can't blame me for trying."
"Yes I can. Not only am I your god, but your only hope of salvation rests in me. I can do whatever I like."
Dante didn't have the slightest idea if Carvahal was being serious, mocking him, or both at once, so he made the decision not to respond at all.
"Where was I," Carvahal said. "Right. Maralda's ludicrous decision to betray us. There was a war, of sorts—I'm not going to get into it, it was so long ago and we already touched on it earlier—and after the dust settled, she left to walk her own path. To explore. She always liked going out to look at strange places, especially ones where there weren't any gods or people. That's what she's still doing to this day."
"Why do you think she'll be able to help us?"
"Because she knows more about crossing between worlds than anyone else in any of them. She knows more about the entities than any of us, too. She might know how to trap the entity within the Soup. Or lock it out of it."
"And you think she's the only chance we've got?"
"It's the only one that I can think of. I'll try to take you to her, if you like. If you don't like, you're free to walk away."
"I think," Dante said slowly, "that we'll take it. I don't know what else we could do. There's just one issue."
"Yes?"
"Do we really have to call it 'the Soup'? It's so undignified. I don't want to call it that when the entity's using the place to try to wipe us out. What's its original name?"
"Varalandramar an Donnaheid Ule," Carvahal said.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 15
