The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7)

by Edward W. Robertson

  "Hello?" Dante cupped his hands around his mouth. "Barden?"

  "Really? 'Hello, Barden'?"

  "If you've got a better idea how to talk to this thing, be my guest."

  "Well, it's not really a tree, is it? Maybe we should…sacrifice something to it?"

  "Sacrifice? What?"

  Blays motioned to the bones that formed its trunk. "It sure looks to me like it wouldn't complain. All gods like sacrifices, don't they?"

  Dante swiveled his head around, then looked back to Blays. "Even if you were on to something, we're in the middle of nowhere in the dead of winter. The only thing we're going to find to sacrifice to it is the fellow I'm looking at."

  "Gladdic's way older. It'd be less of a loss."

  "And hence less worthy of a sacrifice," Gladdic rumbled.

  "We're not doing any sacrificing," Dante said. "Sandrald's been dead for an eternity. He probably just takes a very long time to wake up."

  He hesitated, then reached forward and placed his palm against the trunk. It wasn't as cold as he thought it should be. He reached into the nether. Feeling nothing out of the ordinary, he sent some from his hand and into the tree. It received it, but didn't respond in any way.

  Dante circled a ways around the trunk, glanced at Blays, then whispered to the White Tree again, calling it by all three names that he knew. Then, bracing himself, he stepped back, lifted his finger, and shot a black dart straight into the broad bole. With a sharp crack, the nether shattered into flecks, leaving no mark.

  He tilted back his head. "Is it asleep?"

  "When a god dies, does it pass into the Mists?" Gladdic said. "Or something else like them? And if they have a Mists, can they also cross over into the Worldsea, to meld its soul with all that once was?"

  "They better not. And this one definitely better have not."

  Dante made a thorough circumnavigation of the trunk, stopping often to take a closer look at it or probe it with nether. Despite the grandeur and awe of the tree, not to mention its significance to the faith, he'd spent very little time in its presence. Though perhaps that was exactly why he hadn't: to spend too much time around such a thing was, in a sense, to defile it, or at the very least to numb yourself to something that should always be wondrous.

  He finished up and came to a stop next to Blays, shaking his head. "I've got nothing. Feel like giving it a climb?"

  "What exactly do you expect me to find by climbing it?"

  "I don't know. Maybe there'll be something we can…speak to."

  "Do you really think I'm going to find a face up there? Or maybe just a big bony ear?"

  "I don't know! But what can it hurt to check?"

  "Me, if I slip. But I can give it a shot."

  Blays shrugged off his pack and unbuckled his swords, though he kept the shortened rod of the spear with him. Then he started up the trunk. With all the different bones fused together, there were constant seams and holds for him to make use of, and he got off to a ripping start. Some twenty feet up, though, he stopped, looked up at the towering heights of the tree, then made a face down at the ground.

  "I just figured out this is insane," he called down. "Why don't you send that dirty old moth of yours up there instead?"

  Dante was tempted to goad him to go higher just for the fun of it, but decided that it wasn't really the time. As he recalled his moth and sent it fluttering through the cyclopean branches, he continued his inspections, but nothing stood out. Blays shadowalked around the tree with no better results.

  "Maybe I was right," Dante mused. "Maybe we do need to make an offering."

  Hoping he wasn't about to gravely offend it, he cut open his palm, wincing, and pressed it to the trunk, letting the nether flock to the blood there. But this had no luck either, and he withdrew his hand and healed himself.

  "If we can't work this out, we can always go back to Maralda," Dante said. "Maybe something we saw here will jog her memory. Or maybe we can try at one of the other places instead and try again here later."

  Gladdic shook his head. "I am possessed by the feeling that if we fail here, we will fail everywhere else as well."

  "Then we'd better work this out. Have you seen anything at all in the ether?"

  "No." The old man narrowed his eyes, mouth falling half open. "What if this does not call for skills or tricks? What if it calls for faith?"

  "In what? Our ability to get this done?"

  "This might be a dead god. But it remains a god nonetheless."

  Having said this, Gladdic kneeled before the tree and bowed his head. Dante followed, as did Blays.

  "Lord," Gladdic said, holding his one hand up before him. "The one that we are told is named Sandrald. You do not know us—or perhaps, in your mysteries, you do—but a great threat has come to this world. More than a threat: a force and an entity. One that we are told is named Nolost. One that intends to break this world apart and dissolve it into nothing. One that we cannot resist on our own. We come seeking your protection: for we are told that if you, and the three others like you, would stabilize the chaos shooting through this world, then we might be able to beat back the fiends that assail us, until this storm has passed, and the danger to our world with it."

  The tree hung above them, titanic and silent. Dante was tempted to add words of his own, but Gladdic began a poem to the gods, one that varied between praising them, berating them, and pleading with them. It wasn't one that Dante had heard before, but it was full of both love and wrath, and if it had been delivered to the faces of the gods of the Celeset, he felt sure it would offend at least a few of them.

  The snow began to melt into the knees of his trousers. He shifted, cursing silently as he waited for Gladdic to wrap up his display so they could get back to trying things that might actually work.

  Gladdic recited a few more lines that sounded like an ending, then looked up. "If any spark of self remains, I ask but that you show it. Grant us your aid—or send us on our way, that we might waste no more time in your presence."

  Dante gazed up into the motionless branches far overhead. With a peeling rasp, a portion of the trunk before them fell inward, opening a hole the size of a church door.

  "Now that's something," Blays said. "Think it could be a trick?"

  Dante cautiously got to his feet. "Why would you think that?"

  "For the same reason that, if a strange woman were to flash me her rear and beckon me toward an alley, I might wonder what else is lurking there."

  "Then Gladdic is right. It's time to set all else aside, and have faith."

  The doorway was perfectly dark and he could see nothing behind it. No scent or stir of wind came from it, either. Yet Dante had the sense some unseen eyes were watching him—and waiting to judge him.

  He drew back his shoulders, lifted his chin, and entered Barden.

  For some reason he'd expected the interior to light up once he was inside it. It didn't. He got out his torchstone and blew on it. The others had already joined him and the three of them looked about themselves warily. They stood within a chamber—or perhaps a cavern—with walls and floor of what looked like porous white stone.

  "Reminds me of the grimstone," Blays said, lifting one of his boots from it and peering at the spot he'd uncovered. "Please don't tell me that one of the Four is in Tanar Atain. If I have to see that wretched place again, I'll find a way to become the first man to ever burn down a swamp."

  Dante waited, listening, but the interior remained as perfectly still as the doorway had been. He didn't see any obvious passages from the chamber, but as he started forward, keeping the nether close to him, the torchstone illuminated a wrinkle in the back wall. This turned out to be a short corridor to a second larger chamber.

  Dante stopped for another look around. "It's bigger inside than outside, isn't it? How does that work?"

  Blays nudged the floor with his toe. "We just met a god we never knew existed, who at first was a huge panther, and who transported us here the way you or I might stroll dow
n to the baker's in the morning, and you're wondering how this magic tree—which also came from a god we didn't know about—can be a little different inside than out?"

  "So you're saying you don't know."

  "Maybe it's not any bigger. Maybe when we stepped inside, it shrank us."

  That was an oddly troubling thought, but Dante had little time for it as he advanced into the second chamber, the ground elevating underfoot. A rugged natural staircase brought them to another corridor. But while the first one had been short with a single exit, this one turned out to be lengthy and winding, with several forks and side passages. Acting on instinct, Dante chose whichever one led further uphill, until the way forward opened into another cavern.

  Something dry and hard rattled under Blays' foot. He yanked back his foot. He was standing over a human skeleton, part of which he'd just kicked.

  "Are we sure we're headed in the right direction?" Blays said.

  Dante glanced around himself. "No?"

  "Are we even sure this place wants us here? I bet this poor bastard was let inside, too."

  "Quit worrying. That could be anyone's bones."

  "Is that supposed to be comforting?!"

  "He probably came here with ill intent. We, however, are good and noble and just want Sandrald to do a little more of what he originally pledged himself to do. Surely no harm will come to us."

  "Yes. Surely."

  "Although it wouldn't be unwise to take some steps to ensure no harm comes to us. Do you have any string?"

  "String?"

  "Thin floppy stuff, tends to come in one long strand, often found in a ball or spool—"

  "Of course I have string. Why don't you have string? And what do you need mine for?"

  Dante mimed stretching it out behind them. "So we don't get lost."

  "What, that old trick?"

  "I thought it would be more respectful than smearing my blood around."

  "Not half as useful, though. I've only got enough string to get us to another chamber or two. But I bet you're filled to the brim with blood."

  They continued, ascending wherever possible, Blays reeling his string out behind them. As he'd predicted, though, this soon ran out, and the next time they came to a branching tunnel, Dante cut his arm and smeared his blood down the wall of the branch they'd chosen to take.

  The ground shifted and rumbled underfoot. Dante dropped into a crouch, pulling the nether to his hands as he watched the ceiling for cracks or other treachery. The rumbling gentled until it ceased altogether.

  Blays stood and jerked his chin at the blood gleaming on the wall. "I feel like you should either do that again right now, or never do that again."

  "I think," Dante said, "that I will not do that again until there's no other path left open to us."

  Which meant advancing inward with neither string nor blood to mark their way back out. Causing Dante to wonder to himself if the dead person they'd found hadn't been intentionally killed by Barden, but had simply gotten lost inside it. They came to what looked to be a dead end, a blank wall of white bone, but Dante had thought to bring his moth inside with them, and with a bit of looking about, it discovered a crease that fed them into an uncomfortably tight tunnel.

  Once they'd endured this, though, it spat them out into an expansive cavern. Unlike the others they'd been through, which had been completely empty, except for the lone corpse, this one held a dais and an altar at its far end. Dante exchanged a look with the others, then led the way toward the altar.

  His torchstone winked off, submerging them in the total blackness of a cave. Dante swore and breathed on the stone to try to reactivate it. It should have been good for another thirty or forty minutes. It refused to so much as flicker.

  "A little light, Gladdic?" He tipped back his head, staring upward in that wide-eyed way he felt compelled to do whenever he found himself in such darkness. "Gladdic?"

  Still no response. The chamber was as silent as a tomb.

  "Hilarious," he said. "You really got…" He'd been summoning the ether, but his voice trailed off as it failed to shed any light at all. "Gladdic? Blays? Can either of you hear me?"

  He edged toward where they'd been, stretching his arms and hands out wide before him, shuffling his feet over the rough floor so as not to trip. Once he was certain he'd gone past where they'd been, he crouched low, patting his way over the ground. He let the ether come to him for a second time, then a third, but while he could handle and mold it, it refused to illuminate the chamber. Baffled, he called the nether to him and sent it overhead, ordering it to burst into flame.

  It did—he could hear the whoomp of it, could feel its heat on his cheek—but the fire produced no light at all.

  "Something is seriously fucking wrong here." His pulse doubled as he realized he might have gone blind. "Blays! Gladdic!"

  The chamber creaked and groaned. Dante spun about, keeping his arms stretched out wide, and sent his mind into the cavern wall.

  It was closing in on him.

  He yelled for the others again while trying to take hold of the matter that made up the walls. But while they were made of something like stone, they weren't stone, and refused to yield to him. The ground shuddered underfoot. He reached into the walls once more, yelling wordlessly as he failed to find any grip on them.

  He ran back toward the tight tunnel they'd come in through. But it had already sealed shut. He hammered it with the shadows, yet couldn't damage it any more than he could the exterior of Barden.

  "Barden!" he screamed out, panicking as he failed to remember its other name. "Sandrald!" he blurted the instant it came to him. "We're not here to harm you! Please! My people have always revered you!"

  The rumbling of the closing chamber doubled in volume—then stopped altogether. Dante froze, gazing up into the blackness—or his blindness.

  "Are you there?" he said, not sure if he was speaking to the tree or to his friends. "Can you hear me? Is there—"

  Light blasted across his eyes.

  ~

  He was, but he wasn't.

  He had no sense of how long he was or wasn't of this state: it could have been a tenth of a blink, it could have been ten million years.

  And then, like that, he was.

  His eyes filled with so many sights he couldn't make sense of them; his ears filled with so many sounds he heard a roar like the end of the world. He could smell every shift of the wind. His skin felt like it was being walked on by fairies of ice and fire.

  It was too much to take. Much too much. Feeling like his mind was being burned from the inside, he fought to shut his eyes to it, to shut himself to it, but it poured itself into him all the more intensely, until he forgot who he was, or that he had ever existed as anything but what he now saw.

  And what he saw was how it felt to be immortal.

  Everything was more. More vivid. More intense. More subtle. More colorful and rich and intriguing and close. Things that had been invisible were now starkly obvious. He knew more as well, understood things just by glancing at them, and not in a shallow or summarized way, but in total, the way a poet knew his own lines or a father knew his children. He knew things so well that he could create them.

  And it was in that that he was at his highest. For the act of creation was the act of beauty itself. And to have the power to create was to have power itself, a power unimaginable to any human king or tyrant, even to the greatest of sorcerers, who were no more to him than a chip of ice was to a glacier. To have that power, and to wield it, was to be of the gods.

  And then they turned that power to the creation of Rale.

  The unfolding of a new world. Each moment was a miracle, and they were the wielders of these miracles. Within this great act nestled an astounding seed: the implication that if they were to wright one world, they carried the power to craft dozens—many hundreds—an infinity of worlds.

  But their great act of making, of conjuring, drew others up from the depths. Things like them, but not. Powers even m
ore ancient than themselves. Next came struggle. War. Devastation. The destruction was also beautiful but in a different way. It was in the middle of this struggle that something happened which he hadn't known could happen: he died.

  In death was agony. Not so much the physical pain of the death itself (which was also beautiful, in its own even more distinct way). But because he was so reduced. Where once he'd had a thousand eyes, now he was blinded in every one of them. Where once he'd been able to peer into the deepest core of a thing, now he could but paw and grasp at its surface. Where once he could create, now he could but watch—and only that through his rheumy, blinded eyes.

  Still, he was given purpose. Tasked with ending the war that had slain him. He played his part, along with the others who shared his fate. The fighting ceased, along with the deaths, and the new world of Rale was at peace.

  There was much devastation to be undone, and for some while the other gods worked at this, and then on finishing their act of creation, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the entities. Done, they returned to their own world. After what had taken place, they doubted they would ever attempt to create another. He and the other three great ones remained where they had fallen in the new world.

  He expected the consolation of gratitude. That the mortals whose world he'd helped birth would come to him (or what remained of him), and sacrifice animals to him, and burn offerings, and lay flowers, and mark his name in ochre, and give praise and thanks and prayers.

  Instead he stood desolate. Alone in a cold field. The few that ever came near him didn't love him or worship him: dimly though he could feel, it was enough for him to tell that much. He had given them everything—more than they could even comprehend—and they had repaid him with fear and loathing, with isolation and exile, with the pettiest of scorn.

  And he could do nothing about it.

  Except very, very rarely. When he found what remained of himself capable of inflicting on one of them some small part of what he had suffered for himself.

  ~

  The vision fell away from him. Dimly, he could feel himself on hands and knees, gasping for air. But he could barely taste the air, or feel the ground beneath him, even though it was very hard and rough. He thought that he had died, that in fact he'd been dead forever, but then he remembered.