WHY DID HE?
"I'm…not entirely sure," Dante said. "At first he didn't want to. He resented us for forgetting him. But I think he thought we might be able to restore the truth to this world."
BUT YOU ARE A LIAR.
"What? Every word I've said to you is true."
YET YOU ARE A LIAR.
"How I wish that I was lying about this. The fact of the matter is that the entity known as Nolost has been let loose on our world—and this time, none of the gods are here to fight him. Just us, and whoever we can rally to us. But we're only mortals. We need you and the others of the Four That Fell to do for us what you did in the first war for our world. Stabilize Rale. Give us the chance to survive."
NO, the voice declared. YOU MEAN NOTHING TO ME.
"Well that's definitive," Blays muttered.
Dante looked to Elis for help, but the boy was staring up into the water in an unknown mix of rapture and fear. Dante had had a hard enough time speaking with Sandrald and Farelin was almost incomprehensible to him. Gods though they might have been, what if their spirits weren't as stable as their living consciousness had been? What if they degraded and decayed, however slowly? It had been thousands and thousands of years since Farelin had given her life in the fighting. What if he couldn't reason with her not through any fault of his own, but because her mind had broken down to the point where she was no longer capable of reason?
Gladdic, silent this whole time, lifted his chin. "Great One. It is said that, in the first years, you gave your oath to protect the Astendi of this island. Does that oath no longer hold?"
OATH IS OATH.
"Without your aid, every last one of them will perish. Yet if you do this one thing, they might live on as they have since the dawn of the ages, and so will the oath that you made to each other. Or do you find me to be a liar as well?"
Dante thought he felt something brush past him, but saw nothing.
OF YOUR WORD, her voice sounded in their heads. WHO ARE YOU?
"I am Gladdic, once of Bressel, and Ordon of Mallon. But I no longer know what I am besides Gladdic."
DO YOU CARRY THE DIVINE?
"I am a mortal like any other."
"She is asking if you're a sorcerer," Elis said quietly.
"I am," Gladdic said. "I know both the light and the darkness—though there has been little light of late."
YOU ARE MUCH OR LITTLE?
"If you ask whether I am skilled, it is no brag to state that we all are. That is the only reason we have been able to come this far."
HELP LAST-OF-YOUR-KIND.
"You mean Elis?" Dante said. "We've already agreed to do that."
SWEAR IT!
"I do swear it. I have no problem doing that."
SWEAR TO ALL HELP. ANY HELP. ALL HELP!
"We have to weather the entity's siege first. Or else there won't be anything to help. If we can do that, then we'll return to help him however he needs it."
LAST-OF-YOUR-KIND.
Elis dropped to his knee again. "Yes, Great One."
RESTORE THE LAND.
"I will, Great One."
RESTORE THE WATERS AND THE WOODS.
"I will do that too."
RESTORE THE PEOPLE AND THE WAYS AND THE TRUTH THAT WAS YOURS!
The boy looked up. "We have lost so much, Great One. I fear it will take much longer than my own life to do all that you ask of me. But I'll do all that I can—and make sure there's someone after me to finish what I couldn't."
A second shadow appeared in the waters. It looked to be further away than the first, yet larger, maybe much so. Dante tried not to let his face betray him, but he felt his pulse quicken in his veins.
The sea lit up with an ethereal glow, harsher and harsher until Dante had to shield his eyes, until all he could see was the two shadows hanging in the water. Then he saw nothing but white.
The glare drained from his eyes like mead from a staved-in barrel. He staggered, throwing an arm out for balance. He was no longer being held up by the water. He stood inside a chamber with curved walls and ceiling, the surfaces smooth, ivory in color but shot through with orange veins. The three others were with him and the clothes they'd taken off before entering the pool sat on the floor in front of them.
A giant nautilus shell rested on its side in the middle of the chamber, at least a dozen feet across and a yard high. In the air above it, a teardrop of ether slowly chased after another of nether—or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe he was biased by recent experiences, but they almost looked like a pair of fish.
"That's almost the same thing I saw inside Barden," Dante said. "I think she's just agreed to help us."
Blays headed for the far wall. "Then let's get out of here before we do anything to change her mind."
Dante agreed with this so much he didn't say a word until they came to a black doorway. Blays vanished through it. Dante stepped through and found himself back in the cloudy night, the bulk of the Spire looming above them.
"Did you mean what you said to her?" Elis said. "That you'd help me however I need it?"
"She didn't leave me much choice," Dante said, pulling on his boots. "We've got a lot of other business first. Including total war against an army of nightmarish constructs conjured up in a place that might be hell. Even if we can make it through that, it might not be easy or even possible for us to get back here. But if you still need a hand by then, we'll see what we can do."
Blays hooked his thumbs into his belt. "All of which hinges on us getting out of here in the first place. Those outrageous bastards stole our weapons and our boat. Which one should we righteously liberate first?"
"The boat," Dante said. "Swords can be replaced. I haven't seen anything here to make a new boat out of and I'm guessing we'd have to wait a very long time for one to wash up."
"How about we go grab the spear first? It's just lying on the beach. Then if something goes wrong retrieving the other stuff, I'll have a nice bright spear to kill them with."
"This plan couldn't be motivated by the fact you love that spear like it's borne your children?"
"…you don't think that's possible for it to do, do you?"
"I suppose it's the least risky of the three. The spear first, then. Elis, care to show us the way?"
"That, ah…won't be necessary." They'd just reached the shore of the lake surrounding the Spire and Elis came to a stop there. He reached inside his coat of grass and withdrew the spear in its shortened form. "After Master Lidenda said she'd found your boat, I went to the beach to make sure they didn't get this, too."
Blays took it from him without being particularly gentle about it. "Forgot about it until just now, did you?"
"I was going to give it back." The boy glared at the ground. "I was just waiting to hear what the Great One thought of you. In case you were bad men who were lying to me."
"Or maybe you don't think you'll need it now that you've got our promise to give you a hand with your little revolution?"
"Well if I hadn't gone back for it you wouldn't even have it now."
"Yes, your selflessness has saved us several whole minutes of walking."
"I am too old to care about such matters," Gladdic said. "Whatever the reasons might originally have been, you have your spear in hand. Let us fetch the rest of our belongings and be gone from here."
Elis nodded and stepped onto the water. Dante still couldn't tell how he knew where the path was, but the fins that were soon breaking the surface to either side of them assured him that the lake was deeper off the path, and that he didn't want to wander from the narrow band of it that wasn't.
They were two-thirds of the way across when something the size of Blays' arm thrashed itself out of the water and speared toward Elis' head. The boy dropped to a crouch, throwing his hands out for balance. Dante glimpsed a flash of long white teeth and one large angry eye. The fish came down with a watery slap on the other side of the path.
Elis bounced to his feet and jogged forward, splash
ing shallowly. He didn't slow down until they came to the shore of the lake.
He frowned at the black waters. "That wasn't supposed to happen."
"The guard-fish are usually better-trained than that, eh?" Blays said.
"Yes. They are."
"What does that mean?" Dante said.
"I don't know." Elis lifted his eyes to the heights of the Spire. "Nothing, I hope."
They headed south, back into the hillocks and dunes. Wind stirred the grass but it hadn't stormed since their arrival and Dante hoped it would stay that way until they were back on the mainland. With any luck, they'd be off the island within another hour, and back in Yent before the morning.
"The Great One made us swear new oaths to you," Gladdic said. "Yet she made you swear some to her as well. What was their meaning?"
Elis shrugged. "It's just what I've told you. Master Lidenda and her predecessors in the Lineage have cast our island into ruins. I want to undo that."
"There is more to it than that. What are you concealing from us?"
"That's the business of the Astendi, which you are not."
"But the bond of our word to you means that our fates are now bonded as well."
Elis routed around a clump of tall dry grass, taking his time to reply. "As I told you, this island was once much more than what you see now. Because the sorcerers who ruled Attahire knew more than just magic. They also knew the ways of the land. There were forests, and they knew how to take wood from them without using up too many trees. They knew how to lure and trap and kill the biggest shells for use as homes. They knew how to farm the fish and the lesser shells so that there would always be more. They had brought us useful plants as well, some that you could eat, and some that were good for clothes and rope and shelters, and knew how to plant them and care for them and grow more.
"When the sorcerers were killed, all of their knowledge died with them. People took what they wanted from the fields and shores, but they didn't know how to make sure there would be more. For a few years everything seemed fine, but some people started to notice that there wasn't as much as there used to be. They tried to warn the others, but at first the others ignored them, and once it got too bad to deny, everyone started to grab whatever they could before all of it was gone. That was when the Astendi began to war with each other."
Elis took a look back at the Spire of the Nautilus. "The war destroyed much of what little was left. When the fighting had almost burned itself out, the Lineage seized power. They promised the people they could steward the land—that they could do it even better than the sorcerers had.
"To stop the same thing from happening again, they declared everything that had been stolen and depleted to be the product of forbidden-work. You couldn't just go and chop down all the trees for yourself anymore. Only slaves could do it. That put an immediate stop to the looting. But the Lineage didn't know how to regrow the forests or restock the fish pens or trap the house-shells. All these things were gone forever. And we had no way to leave here to try to get more of whatever had been lost.
"Now when someone broke the law, or transgressed against a family, they were made into a slave, granted either to the Lineage or the family they'd transgressed. You would also be enslaved by doing forbidden-work as a non-slave. But almost right away, people just stopped breaking the law. So there weren't enough slaves. Even after the Lineage made new laws and taboos. That's probably what saved your lives, you know: there is much work that needs to be done on Attahire, and few hands that are able to do it.
"But these laws have also all but destroyed us. Reduced us to misery and uselessness. We used to be loved and feared. Now we're little more than savages, cut off from everything. Even the sea that we used to love. That's why I have to undo it. That's why the Great One made me pledge to restore what was lost."
Gladdic sounded amused. "You are a sorcerer. The last one of your kind."
Elis jerked his chin down, locking his eyes on the ground. Dante could almost hear him blushing.
"Yes," the young man whispered. "And I'm the only one who can do this."
"If so much has been lost," Gladdic said, "is it even possible to restore it?"
"Maybe not all of it. But we will resurrect everything that we can, and build anew whatever we can't restore."
"Not all sorcerers are created equal. Some are quite weak. Most are talented enough to be of use. But only a few are truly great. You have set a great task for yourself. Do you believe you possess the power to achieve it?"
"Not yet. I have no one to teach me. Or even to compare myself to."
"But when you cast aside your doubts, and place your faith in your instincts, what is the potential you feel within?"
Elis lifted his chin and met Gladdic's eyes. "Greatness. Enough to reshape this entire island. That's why I have to reach the mainland. So that I can find someone to teach me to become what I must. Only once I have become capable will I return here, and return my people to the glory and plenty that was theirs for so long."
"As we've mentioned, we're a little tied up with other business at the moment," Dante said. "But there are many great nethermancers under my command who aren't doing much of anything right now. They've trained far more students than I ever have, too. I'd be happy to have them show you everything that they can."
"You'd do that for me?"
"It's no trouble. But you should know our land lies on the other side of an ocean that's almost never crossed. If you come with us and the pathway we took here gets closed off to us, you might not be able to make it back here."
"I will go with you. Fate has brought you here—and once I am made worthy enough to step foot on Attahire again, fate will bring me home to it."
Dante nodded. He was half tempted to start in on the basics then and there. Then again, it was the dead of night and they had a lot of skullduggery ahead of them. The boy's training had waited this long. It could wait the extra two or three days it would take to get him through the portals and into Gallador to meet up with Nak.
It wouldn't have mattered either way. Not five minutes later, they looked up in cold wonder as the first strings of fire appeared in the sky.
18
"Tell me that's not what it looks like," Blays said.
Dante's mouth was already going dry. "What does it look like?"
"A big chunk of fire. That's flying around in the sky. And that's big enough for us to see it from here."
"Then that's not what it looks like."
"Oh good."
"It's not flying. It's falling."
Rippling red and orange and white, it reached across the clouds like a snake of flame, writhing slowly as it floated downward. It was hard to say how high or far away it was, which made it impossible to tell how big it was, but it moved like something large.
"There is another," Gladdic murmured. "And a third."
Dante had just made them out for himself, their light obvious against the black of the sky. Two were to the south of them while the third was almost directly overhead. Glancing behind him, Dante spotted two more coming down somewhere to the north of the Spire.
"What is it?" he said. "A new plague?"
"If it's as fiery as it looks," Blays said, "and this place is as grassy as it looks, we're not going to like what happens next." He nudged Elis. "Given that there's any of you still alive, I'm guessing this isn't normal around here?"
Elis wagged his head. "I've never seen anything like it."
"Then I suggest we hurry. And don't stop hurrying until we're out in our boat in the middle of a hell of a lot of water."
They ran south across the turf. One by one, more of the gently writhing lines brightened the sky. They soon cast enough light that Dante no longer feared tripping over an unseen rock or shrub.
The conch-like honk of an otobi pealed across the night. Dante started, his blood running cold, but the creature was well to the south. It wasn't trying to sound a warning about them. It was alarming the Astendi to the fires.
The first one they'd spotted grew larger and larger as it swam toward the ground. It touched down three hundred yards to their right, draping itself over the curve of a hill, grasses smoldering beneath it. It dimmed, fading to little more than embers—then caught hold, huffing higher and higher. A stripe of fire blazed from the hillside, reaching forward from both ends to burn whatever it could reach.
A second touched down well ahead of them. Dante lost track of it until its flames rose, breathing smoke and sparks upward in whirlwinds of heat. Five minutes later, a score of fires burned from different points around the island where the strings had landed, some expanding slowly while others raced outward from their source to swallow up the grasses and brush.
As they came to the range of nothing that lay north of the settlement, agitated voices carried to them on the winds. The first batch sounded like arguing warriors. But the second conversation was dominated by a woman. One whose voice held the strength of command.
The four of them glanced at each other, then beelined toward her voice. They scampered around a dune of mangy hardpan and almost ran right into her. Dante had been concerned that they'd find her at the head of all her people, and that they'd have to find a way to talk down an angry mob while also threatening that mob's dear leader into giving them things. But she was only in the company of her powerless priest Uldrag, a handful of warrior escorts, and three or four of the members of other families she made part of her aristocracy to ensure their loyalty to her.
Lidenda skidded to a stop. She thrust her finger at them. "The sorcerers! The wretched slaves have escaped to commit their mischief. They are the ones that did this!"
Dante filled his hands with shadows. "The fires aren't our doing. But we might be the only ones who can stop them."
"How does it not hurt your heart and teeth to speak so many lies? I should have trusted myself and had you butchered for meat and bricks. But it is not too late!"
"You're only going to survive the night if you do three things. Give us back our weapons. Tell us where our boat is. And find some place to keep your people safe from what's happening."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 27
