He was Dante.
"Lord god," he said, his voice sounding tinny and weak. It was still dark, or else he was still blind, just as the spirit within Barden was. "We didn't turn our backs on you. We didn't know what you had done for us."
HOW?
The voice sounded in his mind with agonizing sharpness. He clutched his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. "How? I don't understand."
AGES OF LIES, AND STILL YOU LIE!
"I would lie to many, lord. But never to you."
A brief pause. WHO ARE YOU?
"Dante Galand, High Priest of Narashtovik. Half my lifetime ago, I stood beneath you as the order I now lead tried to bring Arawn, who we serve, forth into our world. We have always held you as holy. But we had no idea what you'd done for us."
YET YOU KNOW MY NAME.
"We only learned it earlier today."
HOW?
"The gods told us. Maralda and Carvahal. We just learned about her today, too."
A LIVING GOD CANNOT BE UNKNOWN TO YOU!
"But she didn't want to be known to us. Listen, it's—do you know how long it's been since you created Rale?"
FOR SOME, ETERNITY. FOR OTHERS, NO TIME AT ALL.
"I'll have to take your word for it, all I know is that it was a shitload of years ago. Er, lord. And I don't think anyone else on Rale knows any better. Until last year, I thought you'd forged our world perhaps two thousand years ago, three thousand at the most. But it was at least ten times that long ago, wasn't it? Or even fifty times as long?"
YOU RAMBLE LIKE A RIVER WHOSE MOUTH IS ITSELF!
Dante gazed up into the darkness. He'd stayed on his hands and knees this whole time, and now he slowly stood, holding one hand above his head in case there was a low ceiling waiting to find out if its bone was harder than his skull.
"It's been tens of thousands of years," he said. "And our world has nearly been lost more than once since then. I had this same conversation with Carvahal, despairing how much of the truth has been lost to us. Sometimes it feels like we know nothing at all. He told me that, considering how long it's been, and how much has happened between the first days and now, it's a miracle that we still have as much of the truth as we do."
DO YOU TRUST CARVAHAL?
"I have no choice. But I think I would even if I did have other options."
The chamber, and Dante's head, were silent for several seconds.
WHY SAVE IT?
"My world?" Dante said. "Because I get the impression you lot aren't in the mood to make us another one?"
IT IS NOT DIVINE: AND IT IS FILLED WITH LIES: AND THE OLDER IT BECOMES, THE FURTHER IT FALLS FROM THE TRUTH. IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED LONG AGO. WHEN IT FIRST LOST SIGHT OF THOSE WHO FORGED AND FOUNDED IT.
Dante cocked his head. "How do you mean? I'm here speaking to you right now, aren't I? So what if we lost the truth? As long as it still exists somewhere, the right people will find it again. No matter how many years it takes."
He blinked: he thought, at last, that he could see something before him, though it was no more than the vaguest of silhouettes, and it was gone a moment later. With no response from the tree, he looked up once more.
"Let me go, will you? If you won't help us, you can take further pleasure in the knowledge I'm about to die in a hopeless fight."
Though the space he was in remained as silent as ever, he could feel a presence withdrawing from it. When he felt like he was alone—if such a thing was possible, given that he was inside the structure that either housed, or was, the spirit of a god—he opened his mind to the ether.
But the room began to brighten before he had so much as a single spark in hand. Quickly, he drew the nether to him, doubtful that it would do any good if the light was the start of a new assault. He stood in a new chamber, a long oval one; at its center sat a squat cylinder of bright red stone, waist-high and twelve feet across. There was nothing else in the room except a black doorway at its far end.
Dante raised his eyebrows, then started forward, trying to make it less than completely obvious that he was trying to keep an eye on all directions at once. As he neared the table-like red platform, light flashed above it. He felt the tug of nether, too. He braced himself, shadows in hand. Yet the ether and nether weren't hurtling toward him. Instead, they slowly chased each other in a circle above the platform, following the exact same path with each circuit, as if they meant to keep it up for as long as the stars followed their own rotations across the sky.
"Hello?" He tipped back his head. "Lord Sandrald?"
No answer came. He felt nothing of the presence, either. He waited a more than reasonable amount of time, then shrugged and headed past the platform to the dark doorway. And entered.
The cold of winter punched him in the nose. He was back outside in the snows beneath the tree—and someone was shoving a weapon in his face.
14
That person turned out to be Blays, however, and as he realized who he was about to stab, he jerked the spear to a halt before it could expand in size.
"What's wrong with your face?" Blays said. "It's even funnier-looking than usual."
Dante gestured up at the branches. "Did you speak with him?"
"The dead guy? I didn't have the pleasure."
"He did not seem very happy with us." Best he could, for some parts of it were still confusing to him, he related what had happened.
When he finished, Blays took a step back from the tree. "He meant to do that from the start. Didn't he? Bring us inside, let us get deep enough to have no hope of escape, and then kill us."
"No," Dante said. "I don't think he would have killed us that fast. He would have drawn it out for as long as he could. He hates this world for abandoning him."
"You'd think he's had long enough to get over it by now. Anyway, what did it mean, there in the last chamber? With the red thing? And the ether and nether?"
"I'm not entirely sure. But since he didn't torture us for as many years as he could keep us alive, I'd say he either magnanimously decided to help us, or is cruelly making us think that he is. Maralda will know better than us, and we need to return to her anyway." He stared into the distance. "But I believe the lord decided to have mercy on us."
He turned to the tree and lowered himself to his knees. There, he said a silent prayer.
Once he was finished, he rose and hiked eastward, following the footprints in the snow they'd left on their way to the White Tree. They wouldn't be able to get anywhere close to the portal that same day, but with an early start in the morning, they could be back in Yent as early as noon. He presumed the next three would be a little more difficult than Barden, but it wasn't insane to think they could be done with the entire ordeal within another week, or two weeks if you wanted to be quite generous.
It had already been longer than that since Taim had unleashed the entity on Rale. Sure, between the parasites, the monsters, the crop failures, and the blotting out of the sun, they weren't doing great, and kingdoms that couldn't bring the same quality of sorcerers to bear as Narashtovik might be getting hit rather harder. But they were still alive and kicking. For the first time since the early days of their troubles, he was feeling optimistic. Enough so that he voiced some of these thoughts out loud.
"Let our hopes not rise too high," Gladdic answered. "It is more than possible the three others will be every bit as embittered as Sandrald. Yet given the eons they have suffered—and that two of them are not gods, but entities—they might be much less forgiving."
"Or much less sane," Blays added.
Dante frowned and kept trudging. The west held nothing but plains and ocean, and he'd hoped the sunset would keep until after they were nestled in the relative safety of the foothills. But this, like so many of late, turned out to be a poor hope, for the light soon vanished like droplets into dust—except where red lightning cracked in violence from the clouds, casting its bloody colors across the snow and their surprised faces.
Still, the disquieting storm only motivated Dant
e all the more to get out of the open field. They had just made it to the safety of the rocks and trees clustered at the base of the trees when the two demons rushed out to assault them.
Their eyes were angry and much too large, their grotesque mouths hanging empty like wet socks. Their legs were long and spindly, gnarled with lean muscle, as was one of their arms, but the other arm was thick like a tree trunk. Both hands sported long yellow claws. They were naked but had no genitals.
Blays yelled out, as much in disgust as in surprise, and grabbed the spear from his belt. In the same motion, he stabbed it forward. Pure white ether reflected from the snows, dazzling in the darkness. Blays jabbed the closer of the two square in the chest. Rather than running it through, though, the spear sent the demon flying. It bounced off a boulder and lay still. The second one hurled itself at Blays, but he swung the spear sideways, whacking the enemy in the side and sending it cartwheeling through the air as well.
Blays stamped the butt of the spear against the ground. "Being ugly as an asshole didn't save you this time!"
Any person would be dead twice over—once by the spear, the second from the brutal impact of their landing—and for a moment, the demons appeared to be, too. Then the both of them stirred and sat up, gazing at Blays with raw hate.
"They are wights," Gladdic said. "And they do not die easily. You must first—"
He cut himself short as the two horrors dashed at Blays again, unfazed by the complete lack of success they'd had with their first attempt. Blays bent his knees and hopped forward, jabbing one in the gut, then jumped back, buying himself the space to stab the other one before it could get too close for him to use his spear. The attacks sent them both skidding through the snow, but the wounds were much shallower than they should have been, and started to close before the two wights had even come to a halt.
"Wound them," Gladdic continued. "Then reach inside that wound, and tear out the core of their being."
He stalked forward, left hand stretched claw-like before him, as if he meant to reach inside them physically. Dante felt him move his mind into the chest of a wight as it got back to its knees. Gladdic found a structure of nether there—to Dante, it looked something like a rope—and grabbed it, pulling it tight.
Then hacked into its base, cutting the rope free.
The wight arched its back and retched purple gore from its mouth. Its ribs fell open; discolored viscera slithered from its chest to land in the snow, though unlike a man or a deer, its guts weren't warm enough to steam. The thing fell on its back, limbs twisting against each other as nether boiled from its body like smoke from greenwood.
"You people never fail to disgust me," Blays said.
He looked away from the collapsing guts and burning skin to focus on the one that was still alive. It had gotten to its feet, but instead of charging, it stood in a crouch, its heavy arm held before it. Blays circled to its left. It watched him closely, but still couldn't react fast enough as he launched himself forward, the spear finding its chest as it tried to twist away. As soon as he saw the gleam of its ichor, Gladdic dived within it, grabbed the rope of shadows, and ripped it loose. The demon died as messily as the first.
Gladdic cast the ether across the night, but there didn't look to be any more of the undead. Even so, it didn't feel like the greatest place to make camp, and they moved on through the darkness.
"Those things," Dante said. "You called them wights. How do you know about them?"
Gladdic raised a white brow. "You do not?"
"Never heard of them."
"I first learned of them from a tome I tracked down after discovering that all other copies of it—and even references to it—had been burned. I considered using them in my work, before I discovered the Andrac, who are more fearsome."
"Where do you suppose those two came from?"
"If you do not know of them, then I would not believe any of your people do either: and as I said, all mention of them was destroyed more than a century ago."
"Meaning they came from something older than that," Dante said. "Like Nolost."
"No other guess fits half as neatly."
"Will he know we just killed them?"
"I do not know the entity's capabilities. He is waging war on the entire planet, after all, and surely cannot pay attention to every piece of it at the same time. But if you or I had commanded the wights, we would know that they had been lost."
"Then we might have just tipped him off to exactly where we are."
"Which might also tip him off to our purpose here as well."
Dante frowned. "We can't be sure of that."
"What else is here but Barden?"
"Maybe we came here to add to our snow collection," Blays said.
"You're right. Except for the tree, this place is desolate," Dante said. "If the entity was there for the War of the Forging, he won't have a hard time figuring out what we're doing here."
That made an argument for pressing on to the portal with all haste. But they had already done a great deal of traveling on the day—a supernatural amount of it, in point of fact—and the thought of trying to climb all the way back to it that same night made Dante's bones want to abandon his body. After they'd put a mile between themselves and the remains of the wights, Dante molded a shelter from the face of a cliff, pulling the rock over them and leaving just a few small holes to keep any foul vapors from accumulating within. With that and the aid of his undead moth, there wasn't even need for one of them to keep watch.
They were awakened several times through the night by the shaking of the earth beneath them. Each time, Dante woke in a panic, flinging his mind into the stone walls to ensure they weren't about to collapse. When morning came and he got up for good, he felt like he'd been beaten.
He sent the moth ahead to scout, then looned Nak, who had little to report except that the Galladese had started to fall victim to the green strands as well, and that he'd loaned some of their monks and priests to the local towns to save as many of the afflicted as they could. Naran still hadn't arrived in Gallador, either. Once they finished speaking, Dante tried to loon Naran, but he'd been trying each day since the captain had gone silent, and he wasn't surprised when he got no response.
The ground shook on and off as they steadily gained altitude. For the moment, though, the quakes remained alarming but harmless, and they came to the pillar of rock Dante had raised unscathed by any encounters or injuries. The doorway didn't look to be there, but when he sifted a little nether into the air, it crashed into existence with the suddenness of a struck gong.
He entered. Inside, the passage looked the same as when they'd come through it with Maralda, though he couldn't say if the constellations that surrounded them were identical. He took a dozen-odd steps, then came to a stop.
Blays blinked at him. "How have you managed to get lost in a place where the only directions are 'that way' and 'the other way'?"
Dante moved his mind into the walls. "I'm not lost."
"Then what are you doing? Sightseeing?"
"Testing if Nolost's not the only one who can conjure horrors up from the abyss."
"What?"
Dante smiled to himself. "I'm not doing anything. Just looking at the structure of this place."
"That's going to help us stabilize Rale, is it?"
"It might if Maralda decides to run off and be a panther some more instead of aiding us. Or if someone finds out that she's working with us and decides to kill her."
"Then what? You're going to open the portals for us?"
"Why not?"
"Because that's a god-thing? And you're not a god, which I can prove by punching you, which will make you cry, which a god definitely wouldn't do?"
"The White Lich made them."
"Yes, but he was the White Lich, wasn't he. Anyway, his were different. They just let him skip a few miles of our own world. You're talking about making one between worlds."
"It's probably harder than what he did," Dante said. "But we d
on't know if it's impossible."
As Dante followed the strange curves of the unseen walls, Blays turned to Gladdic. "What do you think?"
"That this is likely a waste of time," Gladdic said. "But on the small chance that it is not, it may become our greatest weapon."
Dante didn't want to say it, but he'd already run into a problem: after he'd followed the structure of the passage to a certain point, he stopped being able to feel it anymore. Almost like it had passed out of this where and into another.
"Where are we right now?" he said.
Blays frowned. "Gladdic, inspect his head, will you? Barden seems to have scrambled it."
"I don't mean what is this place. I mean where is it? We're not in Rale right now, are we? And I don't think we're in the world of the Realm, either. So are we just…floating between the two?"
"We have to be somewhere, don't we? My brain is starting to hurt."
"Is this place a plane of its own? Are all the portals here? If you have the knowledge, or the right materials, can you build a passage here as simply as you'd build a bridge in Rale?"
He thought there was a pretty good chance that he was on to something. Yet he seemed to have hit a dead end in terms of being able to glean any more about this place, and after a few more minutes of fruitless searching, he continued down the passage to its other end.
Instead of biting cold, he felt stifling heat; instead of smelling snow, he smelled green leaves. They appeared to be right back in the part of the jungle where they'd last left Maralda, but she was nowhere to be seen—at least not in any form that Dante recognized.
"Hello?" Remembering the giant snakes, he drew a generous helping of nether to him. "Maralda? Are you there?"
Blays surveyed the tumultuous foliage. "What are we going to do if she's betrayed us? Or if she did wander off to be a cat again?"
"We'll take the portal back to Barden, ride to Gallador as fast as we can, and return to the Realm to find Carvahal. Either that, or we'll stagger around the wilderness until a vine takes pity on us and strangles us."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 21
