"To our great relief, the four found a way to accomplish this. The world grew calm and still. In time, so did the war. Maralda is proposing that we employ that same power now. My thinking was stuck on stopping Nolost from being able to reach your world at all. But if the Four That Fell can prevent him from being able to wreak the worst of his ills, you mortals might have the strength to fight off the rest of it."
"You mean all the beasts and demons," Dante said.
"I'm sure that will still be daunting. But it at least gives you a chance." Carvahal crossed his arms and gave them each a significant look. "Weather the storm, and in time, it may blow itself out. In the meantime, I'll work on my end of things as best that I can."
Dante's brow had been furrowed in thought through most of this. "But this can't be right. Rale can be changed. Just a thousand years ago, a northern tribe used Cellen to raise up the entire Wodun Mountains."
The god shrugged. "Well yes. The Four stopped exerting their influence a long, long time ago."
"Why?"
"How would I know? They weren't the most talkative bunch, they were dead. I assume either they decided it was no longer necessary, or their powers eventually gave out."
"If their powers failed them, how can you be sure they can wield them again now?"
"When did I promise you that?"
Dante half choked. "So you want us to throw ourselves across the world chasing what could be a completely hopeless errand?"
Carvahal shrugged again. "Presumably you'll know whether or not it's possible upon visiting the first of them."
"Fine. Then how do we 'rekindle their souls'?"
"Hell if I know, we didn't have to do that the first time. As far as I can tell, the monuments that grew from them are still active, so some part of them is probably still present within."
Dante ran his hand down his face. "So you're telling me they might not even still be around. And that even if they are, you don't know how to rekindle them. And that even if we can figure out how to do that, they might not be of any actual use against Nolost?"
"Pretty much, yes."
"Well I'm inspired." Blays clapped his hands. "Just point us in the right direction, will you?"
Carvahal raised a brow at this. "As unpleasant a reality as it might be, this is your only hope. So I would recommend you quit bitching about it and go get to work on it."
"This sounds completely insane," Dante said. "But it also sounds like we have to just take your word that it's worth trying. Where can we find the Four That Fell?"
"Oh, I would just start with Barden. You're familiar with it already. No sense worrying about the others if you can't take care of the one in your own back yard."
"When can we leave?"
"How about right now?" Carvahal took a step toward them. What sounded like genuine concern entered his voice. "Once you start…keep moving as fast as possible, and don't you dare stop until you're done. You have to get this done before you draw his notice."
"I'll add that to the list of other impossibilities, then."
Carvahal gave this a nod, then turned to Maralda, who'd spent the entirety of the conversation with her eyes closed and her lips moving soundlessly. "Are you ready, milady?"
"For eons," she said.
"I don't know how I'll repay you for this. But anything I have—well, almost anything—is yours to ask." He grew thoughtful and turned back to the humans. "I am reminded of one last thing." He reached within his coat and rummaged for some seconds; Dante caught a glimpse of ether flashing about. He withdrew three small amulets of some happy silver metal. "Unless you instantly fail, you'll be traveling places where the language will be gibberish to your ears. These ought to help that." He eyed Dante. "Don't bother trying to figure out how they work. You'd only waste your time."
He handed them out. Dante was very curious what other trinkets he might have at his disposal, but decided not to press his luck.
"We may not see each other again," Carvahal said. "Which wouldn't be all bad, since I've spent more time explaining the ways of things to you three than I've spent speaking to mortals at all in the last two thousand years. But good luck to you. And if you find yourself stuck in an especially perilous situation—well, you can always send us your prayers."
Blays dropped his amulet over his neck. "Do you guys actually listen to those?"
"It can't hurt, can it?"
"Thank you," Dante said. "I barely understand what we're about to do, but it might be about to save everything."
Carvahal made a noncommittal gesture, then motioned off into the woods. Maralda gave him a lingering and unreadable look. Without a word, she turned her back to him and headed off between the trees. Blays strolled right along behind her like she was a childhood friend.
The cathedral-like stretch of trees soon returned to the disturbing riot of the jungle of Yent. Another snake hung from the branches ahead, even larger than the first, but seeing Maralda, it withdrew from sight and kept motionless until they passed.
The jungle around them blurred. Dante immediately suspected he'd been poisoned by something, but the others were glancing around themselves in confusion as well. Vines and branches rustled softly, slithering about each other to form a green tunnel through the growth. It lengthened before them until its end could no longer be seen.
"Close behind me now," Maralda said. "Don't stray."
They tightened their line. With no visible warning of any kind, Dante stepped free of the jungle and into…something else.
A dark space. An undefined passage. Either on the walls right in front of them or countless miles away in the distance, sparks of ether—or unknown stars—drifted across the firmament.
Dante moved to Maralda's side. "You're coming with us?"
"I am guiding you to the other side," she said. "Would you rather go alone?"
"That would be a firm no. Please, lead on."
She stared down at him, as if considering whether to leave them here in the dark, then turned and walked on. The ground was firm underfoot but Dante couldn't tell what it was made of and it was too dark to see.
"Er," he said suddenly. "That doorway we just stepped through. Did you make it?"
"It made itself," Maralda answered.
"Because if there's a way to conjure up new portals wherever we need them—"
"Are you so arrogant to think they would listen to you?"
"Absolutely," Blays said. "Trying to become the portal-king is just the ninth-most arrogant thing he's done today."
They might have their laugh, but Dante had been told too many times by too many people that too many things were impossible to trust that it was true even when it came to portals he hadn't known existed until that same day. After all, the White Lich had been able to open his own doorway at Bressel, hadn't he? So it couldn't be a skill preserved for the gods alone.
Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought he felt a faint cold tingle from the pocket of his doublet where he carried the lichstone.
With Maralda leading the way, he was free to do a little covert investigating of wherever they were now, which he was almost certain wasn't Yent. He reached his mind out into the surroundings. He found both nether and ether there—he wasn't sure if there was anything but nether and ether—but it was bound together in ways he'd never seen before, and the powers sometimes seemed to occupy the same points in space at once. At other times they bent and dived away in geometries he'd never seen, disappearing from his direct ability to see them, yet he thought he could still feel them, if only partially, as if he was groping things in the dark while wearing thick leather gloves.
He glanced at Gladdic and raised his eyebrows at their surroundings. Gladdic nodded, but it was several moments before Dante could feel him extending his mind into the energies around them, and even then the priest's motions were so subtle Dante sometimes couldn't tell them from the natural stirring of the nether.
Dante hadn't been given a great deal of time to study the passages the Whi
te Lich had crafted—mostly, he'd been rather busy trying to destroy them or the lich—but the general shape of wherever they were now reminded him of what he'd seen during the battle for Bressel. Where the curve of the portal led off into somewhere unseen. What if you could find a way to follow that curve away into the deeper parts of existence? Where would you find yourself? You had to be somewhere. Was the answer just "between"?
He was hoping for a long boring march that would allow him a solid hour to inspect wherever it was that they were. But it was only another few seconds before Maralda came to a stop. The way ahead looked no different than ever, but a cold wind washed over them, carrying the smell of snow.
"I leave you here," she said. "Wherever you emerge, remember the exact place, for that's where you must return to me through."
"Right." Dante leaned forward to see if he could make out the exit. "And, ah, what happens if we don't succeed?"
"Then I'm of no more use to you. And you should think about how you'd like to die."
"Indeed. Well, thank you for all your help." Dante started forward.
"Wait," Blays said. "What was his name?"
Maralda cocked her head. "Name?"
"Of the god. The one that died to become Barden."
An unreadable expression touched her face. "Sandrald. His name was Sandrald."
She turned from him and stared ahead, trance-like. Dante waited for any last words of encouragement or advice. When none came, he thanked her and stepped forward.
And found himself standing in the mountains of his home.
13
Dante stumbled as he adjusted to his new surroundings. He reached out to steady himself and his hand sank into the snow.
Blays planted his feet and drew the dim rod that could become the spear. "Is anything about to crush us? Devour us? Cast us down into a pit that's really a mouth that's going to crush and devour us?"
Dante wiped his hand on his cloak. "Looks normal."
"Suppose this is really Narashtovik?"
"Why would Maralda lie to us? She's a god. If she wanted to do us harm, she could have ripped us apart by sneezing on us."
"Maybe she was afraid of pissing off Carvahal. Or maybe she's just insane. When we found her she was a giant panther, after all. You think this has any chance of working?"
"Walking to Barden? If you think it'll be faster, you could try rolling there."
"Whatever this business with whoever the Four That Fell are is supposed to be."
"The two of them seemed to think so."
"Carvahal was rather gloomy about its prospects," Gladdic said. "And his spirits are never higher than when he finds himself in possession of a new scheme."
Dante snorted. "You and he go way back, do you?"
"When Blays has conceived of a new plot to cast down his enemies, does he grow morose and saturnine?"
"More like a monkey that's just found itself a jug."
"Speaking of," Blays said. "If we're doomed to fail, let's get it done with so we can go commiserate over the Citadel's best rum."
Blays glanced up, trying to get his bearings from the sun, but ashes smothered the sky, silent lightning crackling within it. Fortunately, the great heights of the Woduns to their east were a better marker than any signpost. Blays set his back to them and headed west through the thick snow.
"Just a second," Dante said. "Assuming we don't bungle it up, we'll need to be able to find our way back here."
He reached out his hand and drew up a pillar of black stone just behind where they'd stepped through from Yent. He gave a satisfied nod, then glanced westward at all the misty slopes; frowning, he stomped over to the pillar, cut the back of his arm, and smeared his blood across the cold stone. This done, he ambled over to a spot where the winds had scoured away the snow and started to flip over the broken rocks there.
"What are you doing?" Blays said. "If you really need to build a cairn, just use your damn magic."
"Haven't you ever seen a bear on a mountainside rooting around in the rocks? What do you think it's doing? Building a bear-chimney?"
"Trying to remember where it buried its honey?"
"Just because it looks foolish to us doesn't mean—aha!"
Dante reached down and plucked up a big fat moth. It was good and dead, but the cold had kept it in good shape, and he soon had it reanimated and fluttering around on the perilous winds. He sent it off to scout the way ahead, then started off downhill.
They were close to three thousand feet up in the foothills, and between the sudden plunges and the spots where the snow was too treacherous to cross, getting down to the plains below could have taken a day or more. But Dante was able to craft staircases and bridges through the worst spots, allowing them to descend as quickly as if they'd had a clear trail.
Blays gestured out across the landscape ahead of and behind them. "I wonder if anyone else out there is doing what we're doing."
Dante stepped around a slanted pine. "Chasing after a ludicrous task based on immensely ancient history that we'd never heard of until an hour ago?"
"Fighting back. Fighting to undo this. Think of all the places we've seen, all the different people out there. Maybe everything doesn't hinge on us after all."
"I badly hope you're right," Dante said. "But we'd still better act like it does."
Compared to their recent time in Gallador and the Realm, to say nothing of the jungle, the northern mountains were bitterly cold, and the snow twirling down from the hellish skies blurred out everything more than a few miles away. Even so, the moth had just gotten over the plain when it spotted movement.
"Blighted that way." Dante pointed downhill and to the south. "Two hundred or so. Gods, they're hideous."
"I've kind of thought that from the start," Blays said.
"These ones are even worse than normal. They're more gaunt than ever. Like they're starving. They look…tormented."
"They have been severed from their master," Gladdic said. "That which gave them order. Separated from him, they are no longer able to see themselves as a vital tool of that order. Instead, when they look at themselves, they see nothing but grotesque monsters, with no purpose but to wander the earth until they pass from it."
"You have an uncanny insight into the heads of undead freaks," Blays said. "I'd go slaughter the tortured souls for their own good, but unfortunately for them, we're still cleaning up the mess from their dead master."
There were no settlements anywhere near the White Tree, though, and apart from the Blighted, Dante didn't see anyone else out and about. Despite the desolation, as he glanced behind himself at the crags, he had a memory—one almost as clear as a Glimpse—of himself and Lew hiking up into the same mountains toward Soll, where they'd had to hide from their first sight of a rampaging kapper.
The young monk was long dead, of course. More than twelve years ago now. Along with countless others. Dante wasn't sure that what they were doing was anything but the longest of shots, but he owed it to all of them, to honor what they had given, and to preserve their souls within the Mists.
They came to the prairie, a wind-lashed snowfield. He still couldn't see Barden, but he knew the place well enough to be certain they were heading toward it. It seemed insane to think that something that had been in his back yard for so long was now one of the keys to saving the world. Then again, it had always been perfectly clear that Barden was something from beyond their world, hadn't it? Exactly the sort of thing that might turn out to be amazingly useful once the fate of your own world shifted into other realms.
They walked onward through the emptiness.
"Would it have killed Carvahal to provide us with some portable horses?" Blays muttered. "Or for you to have ever learned how to make us fly?"
"The nether doesn't work like that," Dante said.
"You probably didn't think it could lift up mountains until it suddenly turned out that it could. I bet there's all kinds of strange magic out there. You just don't know about it."
Dan
te scowled and pulled his hood tighter against the driving snow. Other than the thickening of the ash, as well as the lightning storms within it, he didn't see any signs of worsening devastation to the lands. Although it was possible that was only because there was no one here to devastate, and Nolost was focusing his energies where they could do the most damage.
A shape emerged at the edge of their vision. Hundreds of feet high, narrow in its lower sections and broad and rounded above that. The White Tree. For the moment, it remained indistinct, but Dante hadn't seen it in some time, and its otherworldliness—along with the sheer size of it—made him want to stop in his tracks.
That size made it seem closer than it was. It was another two hours before they found themselves standing beneath its dizzying height. Its trunk, fused from huge bones of all kinds. Its branches like giant ribs, reaching out to embrace all that it could grasp. The teeth and knuckles that grew like buds. Seeing it up close again, it was—
"Abominable," Gladdic said. "Your kind worships this thing?"
Dante folded his arms. "Considering it's grown from a dead god, I'd say we're pretty much right on the money."
"It is horrible to look at. Its ugliness is an affront to the eyes. Nothing that stands so starkly against beauty can be worthy of worship."
"Shut up, will you?" Blays hissed. "Do you want it to hear you?!"
"Anyway," Dante said more softly, "I think it's very beautiful, in its own way."
Gladdic shook his head. "There is no 'in its own way.' Beauty is not something that can be—"
"Gladdic," Blays said, "if you don't still your mouth, I'm going to take it away from you. Now if you two can stop arguing about things no one cares about for two minutes, does anyone have any idea what we're supposed to do here?"
"We have to…" Dante held up one palm, hunching his shoulders. "Get it to stabilize Rale, right? So we have to wake it back up. Or convince it to help us."
"I really didn't start this day thinking I'd wind up arguing with a tree."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 19
