He placed his hand over the dead man's eyes. "So many of us have already been lost. And now Weltendet as well. Gods damn it! Is there no mercy? No fairness? In his battles, he had cleansed more than a score of infested-places—an entire brogyar. We hoped to make more progress than the ten generations before us. But then the Hell-Flood came. It undid everything we've built since the last Great Collapse. Soon, we will be undone altogether. Why? What sins and crimes have we done to deserve this?"
"We committed the crime of wanting to survive," Dante said. "The lord of the gods wishes all of us dead. When we thwarted his subtler efforts to make that so, it enraged him. Enough to make him turn to older and much cruder methods."
As if one of the gods was watching over them, at that very moment, crooked fingers of red lightning shot across the sky like bloody wounds, pulsing frantically before fading back into nothing.
"The Hell-Flood," the man said. "But why would he wish us dead? Are we not his own creations?"
"His design for the afterworld had a fatal flaw. He wants to correct that. To do that, we have to die." Dante was about to launch into the details of it all, then stopped himself. "We don't have time for this. Attack us and let us get this over, or stand aside so we can get on with our business."
"What are you here to do?"
"I think you already suspect the answer to that."
"You wish to find the Fountain of Iron. Why?"
"Long ago, the spirit within it once protected this world during a similar war. It can do the same for us now. We can bring the Hell-Flood to an end."
The man stood slowly to look down into Dante's eyes. "How do I know you are not an agent of the ones who wish to destroy us? That you have not been sent here to deceive me into delivering you to the Fountain?"
"You don't." Dante's patience had been leaking from him in a steady drip. All of a sudden, it gushed out of him like a breaking dam. It was all he could do to stop himself from murdering the stranger. And why not? One way or another, the man would almost certainly die soon anyway. He closed his fist and wrapped it in shadows. "Stand aside."
The fellow narrowed his eyes. "I can't know if you are to be trusted. But the gods can."
He reached inside an item of clothing he wore over his armor that resembled a cross between a vest and a bandolier. From one of the many pouches, he withdrew a black bag; from this, he withdrew a black cloth, which he spread across the ground. He tipped the bag out, spilling bones across the cloth. They were all miniature, an inch long or less.
Dante had seen soothsayers read the casting of bones before. But as the man dropped into a crouch, steadying himself against the ground with one hand, he didn't read the bones. He spoke with them.
"These men wish me to bring them to see the Fountain of Iron." He lowered his voice in both volume and tone, speaking the words like an oath or a poem. "But I do not know whether they intend to go to it as villains or saviors. For good or for ill, everything may depend upon my decision."
He leaned away from the cloth, watching it with unease. The ritual had the air of sorcery and Dante carefully reached his mind out into the surrounding shadows.
On the cloth, one of the bones twitched.
Dante tightened his attention on the bones. He could feel stirrings in the nether, but it was too obscure for him to make out what was happening. His eyes could see it much more plainly: the bones were drawing together, and assembling themselves.
The process unfolded in a matter of heartbeats. When it was finished, a small figure stood atop the cloth. It was vaguely humanoid, and was less than a foot tall.
The skeleton lifted its eyeless face at the armored man. "Show them the way." Its voice was like a knife scraped over dry stones. "Show them the way—but do not trust them."
"Why not?" He swayed toward the tiny undead oracle. "Why should I bring them to the Fountain if I cannot trust them?"
But the thing's right arm was already falling to pieces as whatever power had animated it was rapidly used up. It continued to stare at the man as it collapsed piece by piece, but it said nothing more.
The man sank back into a crouch. He wrapped the bones in the cloth and returned the bundle to the bag. He stayed like this, motionless, for the amount of time it would take for Dante to throw a rock as hard as he could and wait for it to hit the ground.
The man stood. "I will show you the way." He turned his back to them and stared off into the forest. "Though I am certain I will die in the attempt."
~
Before they left, the armored man—he said his name was Artag—took both of the bracer-blades from Chengya Weltendet. Then, through some process that looked like outright magic, he detached several patches of plate and hide from the dead man's armor, popped others loose from his own, and replaced them with the ones he'd taken, stowing the ones he'd replaced in his pack.
Then he led them east through the forest.
Ribbons of cloud flowed across the sky, but they weren't enough to stop the warm yellow sunlight from reaching down to the forest floor in tight beams. Dante had a superstitious urge to avoid being touched by them. Artag didn't seem inclined to talk, but Dante was quite inclined to try to draw information about Bagrad and the so-called Fountain of Iron from him, and could only keep himself silent for so long.
"We were told the Fountain was south of the…direction we came here from," Dante amended, realizing it might not be wise to clue strangers in to the existence of the portals. He pointed north, but angled away from exactly where they'd arrived. "From there."
"Who told you that?"
"One of the gods."
Artag stared at him, then simply nodded.
"How could they be wrong about a thing like that?" Dante said.
"It doesn't matter."
"It will if we run into the same problem elsewhere."
"Then you will have to find another like me to guide you. I will say no more."
Dante pursued this with another pair of questions, but Artag answered neither. The man wouldn't even answer when Dante asked how far they had to travel. It was possible that Artag was simply taking the oracle's warning to heart. But there were darker possibilities as well, like that the oracle hadn't been real, but an illusion of some kind, and that all of this was a trick meant to draw them away from their objective and into a trap instead. If such a thought was crazy, it was no less crazy than placing their trust in a man they'd just met.
The forest stayed quiet, like it was holding its breath. Wordlessly, Artag pointed to a pit in front of them and detoured around it. Dante glanced into it as they passed but he couldn't see the bottom. A draft whistled faintly from within it.
A quarter hour later, Artag stopped and peered into the trees ahead of him. Clouds had woven the sky shut and it was much dimmer than it had been earlier in the afternoon.
"Get down."
With impressive agility and silence, given the armor he was clad in, Artag inserted himself among the upturned roots of a fallen tree. The three others found spots beside him. This left Dante with no line of sight for himself, but he still had his fly-scouts, one zigzagging ahead of them and the other following behind. The latter was closer, and he sent it buzzing forward at full speed.
A breeze rustled the leaves ahead. He frowned: he didn't feel any wind on his skin. The birds had quit their chirping. Even the insects were silent. His fly shot forward far enough for him to glimpse the four of them huddled among the roots of the toppled tree. A hundred yards away from them, a horde of squirrel-sized animals marched its way across the forest floor.
Something was off about their movements, though. They were stiff, almost mechanical, and there was no bounce or lope to their progress, just smooth and steady forward motion. The fly drew close enough for him to see why: they weren't animals. They were huge bugs. Ants, maybe, though their bodies were bloated and pale green, and the stingers protruding from their abdomens were so grotesquely large they drew lines behind them in the dirt.
Remembering their nig
ht in the spider-field in the deep deserts of Collen, Dante shuddered. The swarm was crossing their path at an angle, though, and while there were thousands of the things, all they had to do was wait a few minutes for them to pass by. In time, both the birds and the bugs resumed their songs.
Slowly, Artag rose. "This way. Keep quiet."
Dante shook his head. "Not yet!"
The warrior gave him a look, both cross and curious, and sank back down among the roots. Moments later, a second wave of insects moved through the forest: wasps the size of Dante's hand, buzzing heavily along, the same sickly green as the ant-like pests, and bearing the same finger-sized stingers.
They buzzed louder and louder until Dante would have had to shout to be heard. He squeezed the nether within his fist. But the buzz began to fade, and was soon gone altogether.
Artag turned to him. "Well?"
"Looks clear."
The man grunted, stood, and made way into the forest. "How did you know there were more?"
"I'm a sorcerer," Dante said. "I can see ahead of us."
"Then what do you need me for?"
"Plenty. Trust me, having a god on your side isn't nearly as helpful as it should be."
Artag nodded vaguely, rubbing his red beard. "If the swarms are here, then it is even worse than I thought. We should take the undertunnels."
"See? We didn't even know there were tunnels."
Ignoring him, the man glanced about the woods, frowning, then broke to his right until they were traveling to the southeast. After a half mile of walking, during which they came across multiple sets of tracks that Dante really didn't want to meet the makers of, Artag brought them to a hole similar to the one they'd passed earlier. After some fishing about under the turf overhanging the limb, he discovered and deployed a ladder of rope and wood.
He tapped a spot on his helmet, a giant insect head like the other man had been wearing, and muttered. The bug's eyes glowed with green light. Mild though it was, as he started down the rope ladder, the light penetrated unnaturally far into the depths.
A stone platform waited ten feet down. Darkness fell away from it on both sides but an opening waited at its far end. Artag spurned the platform, swinging inward and vanishing from sight.
He popped his head into view and pointed to the platform. "Don't step on that. It will send you falling all the way to hell."
"Duly noted." Blays started down. Once he'd descended far enough, he swung toward the soft green light, disappearing as well.
Dante let Gladdic go next in case he had trouble with his one arm. Once the old man was down with the others, Dante climbed after them. They were all waiting on a ledge hewn out from the rock, their faces given an eerie paint by Artag's light.
Dante joined them. Blays gestured to the platform. "Trap, is it? Do you have much trouble from invaders?"
"You have no idea," Artag said humorlessly. "Keep your eyes and wits about you."
He moved to the back of the alcove and entered a gap in the rock that Dante could hardly make out even after he'd seen the man go through it. Beyond, the passage broadened out a little, though they still had to stoop at places. The floors were damp and smooth; the walls were rough natural stone, with little digits of rock poking down from the ceiling. Dante had brought one of his undead flies in with him, but when he sent it past Artag, it ran into total darkness, followed by one of the walls. He left the other fly circling above the hole in the ground in case anything had been following them.
The passage declined fast enough that there were times when they had to slow themselves and step down sideways for better balance. It bore the vaguely pleasant smell of water on cold stone. Soon, though, a breeze moved over their faces, carrying a different odor. Dante was still trying to figure out what it was when they stepped out of the passage and into a great cavern—or, perhaps, a hall.
"Here we are," Artag said quietly. "The undertunnels." The light of his helmet could reach neither the opposite wall nor the ceiling and his voice died in the space without any echo. "The laws here are much different than out in the land of the light. For now, I will only trouble you with the ones that apply to your cause. First, any light you use to see by, they can use to see you by. Second, if I tell you to run, then you run. And last? If you hear or see something you don't think is really there, don't you dare keep it to yourself. You must tell me what it is. No matter how stupid it sounds to say."
He made them all say out loud that they agreed to abide by these laws, then nodded simply and moved into the great hall, staying close to the wall. The little passage they'd taken from the surface had been almost featureless, but this place had far more to draw the eye. Loose rock, along with whimsical formations of stone produced by the cavern, round little waxy stalks of it painted with minerals of all colors. Shallow pools, the shadows of fish stirring within them. Sudden stands of mushrooms, some sporting caps as broad as the brim of a hat while others sent a hundred different stems up from a single base stalk, their tips like little pearls.
There were bones, too. Often sunken in the water or all but hidden under forests of fungus. They looked to be from animals, not people, but Dante wasn't sure he recognized a one of them.
"No!" Artag swung up his fist and knocked it against his brow. "How can this be? I was here not one week ago!"
Before him, a great crack ran across the cavern. It was thirty feet wide at its narrowest and as Artag ran alongside it, looking for a way across, his light followed it all the way to the far wall.
He drifted to a stop, shoulders slumped. "But things are changing so quickly. It was the big quake three days ago that must have done this."
Dante eyeballed the crevasse and the far side. "What's the trouble?"
"Are you blind? We have no way across!"
"Watch this." Dante lowered himself to one knee. "I'm about to do a miracle."
He sent his mind into the stone. It melted heatlessly and he drew it across the gap. Artag uttered a noise of exclamation. Dante lightly arched the bridge, drawing more stone from the far side and melding it together in the middle.
He stood, knocking dust from his knee. "It's stronger than it looks. But I'll go first, if you want."
"That won't be necessary." Artag gave him a sharp look. "How have you acquired the power to do such a thing?"
"I thought we weren't revealing our secrets to each other."
The warrior grunted and led the way across the bridge.
~
The caverns lay quiet. Even peaceful. If not for the creatures they'd run into above ground, to say nothing of the general state of the world, Dante would have felt as safe within them as he did walking the streets of Narashtovik.
Then again, Artag had already taken any number of turns and forks, and though Dante had tried to keep track of them, he would be hopelessly lost without the man. It helped to know that if anything happened to their guide, Dante could just open a new tunnel up to the surface. Then again, he wouldn't have any idea how to get to the Fountain—nor find his way back to the portal.
Without any sunlight or weather, he had a tough time telling how much time had passed. But he thought it had been about two hours since they'd gone underground when Artag took another fork through a narrow passage and out into a broad cavern hosting the ruins of a town.
Many of the homes had been carved out of the walls or existing formations of stone. As a result, they were solid enough that they'd only been half destroyed. Everything else, including the timber-based structures, had been more or less obliterated. Mixed among the ruins were the bones of creatures and people alike.
Blays crouched and nudged a scrap of crumbling cloth away from a human skull. "People used to live way down here? But why?"
"It's far safer down here than up there," Artag said.
"Apparently not that safe."
"It was, until it wasn't."
"Who were these people?" Dante said. "What happened to them?"
"They are of no matter to you. Pray for them, if y
ou like, and then forget them."
If Dante had been leading them, he would have taken at least a few minutes to inspect the ruins, as much out of sheer curiosity as for any practical reasons. But Artag was the one who walked at the front, and while he seemed to feel bound to follow the little oracle's advice, he also seemed determined to get the intruders out of Bagrad as fast as he could.
The way forward declined for some time. The sound of rushing water grew louder and louder, the noise of it echoing weirdly from unseen walls. Artag cast his green light across a swift and shallow river. This was spanned by a bridge, but the boards they'd used to replace its crumbled stone wound up so rickety underfoot that Dante was annoyed with himself for not just creating a new one.
They were still close enough to the river for it to drown out all other sound when Artag hunched low and ducked behind a fallen pillar. He touched his helmet and the light winked off. Dante had expected the darkness of the cavern would be total, but the faintest of blue light emanated from some of the rocks. It was just enough for him to make out the silhouette of a many-limbed creature weaving among the rocks and slipping into the river. Once it was out of sight, Artag motioned them onward.
They hid twice more over the next few hours, once from a band of goblinish beings with long arms and longer claws, and once in a room where there was no light at all to see the thing by. Yet they could still hear the whispers of its flesh as it dragged itself across the ground.
Hours later, Artag entered a small doorway to a chamber the size of a plain house. "We will make camp here. I will take first watch."
Blays shrugged off his pack. "You're sure we need to bother? We've hardly seen any trouble at all."
"Mind your thoughts. Even if our luck carries through the night, it won't be this peaceful tomorrow."
"No? What happens then?"
"We have been passing through the quonta, the Between Lands. Tomorrow we will enter the Uncleared Lands. That is also where the Hell-Flood has been worst."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 32
