"Either I'm crazy or you are," Blays said. "Because it sounds to me like you do this on purpose."
"At this point I'm not even sure what 'this' is," Dante said.
Artag pressed his lips together as if regretting the whole conversation. "When necessary, the Pursuer of the Ways will find deep tunnels and extend them even further into the depths—until they open into hell itself, allowing its foul creatures to roam the land."
"I see," Blays said. "Uh…why?!"
There was a sudden and complete gap in the trees ahead of them, and Artag bent course. As he continued to speak, Dante saw why he'd changed direction: there were no trees there because "there" was a huge chasm. It whistled lowly to them and the wind that rose from it carried a smell of life that lived beyond the reach of the sun's light.
"The vileness of these creatures is what keeps outsiders away from Bagrad," Artag went on. "Otherwise, they would be drawn to try to claim the Fountain of Iron for themselves. It has happened many times before. But every time, the Pursuer opens a new portal, and the wretched hell-hordes drive the invaders away."
Dante gripped his temples. "And drives your people into a hole in the ground for the rest of eternity?"
"That is what we Cleansers are for. After the horde has overtaken the land, we scour the monsters from it, acre by acre and year by year, until at last it is safe for the people to live under the sky again. As a result, most generations know only the undertunnels, it is true. But that is simply how things must be."
"All that just to keep yourselves in control of the Fountain?"
"We do not control it. We serve it. And it is the greatest honor to do so."
"Far be it for me to question it, then. But I've been to more places than most and I have to say this system feels a little…unnatural."
Artag swung his head about, lifting one eyebrow. "The Fountain is not just some piece of land, or an old monument built by men of another age. It is a god, and it is among us. There could be nothing more natural than our love for it. You suggest we put ourselves through unnecessary strife and danger, but there must be just as much strife in your own country, or else you would have had no need to make yourself capable of such heights of murder as you have proven capable of." He lifted his arm, displaying the bracer and the blade that extended from it, which Dante abruptly understood was a claw. "Why, even the arms and armor we use are taken from the very creatures we cull! Thus the more that we cull, the stronger we get! Our ways are strange to you, but that is because you are strangers: each layer of who we are and what we do is in perfect harmony."
He was gesturing and speaking more excitedly than Dante had ever seen him, and it was a moment before Dante replied. "I will accept that your ways make sense to you even if they don't make any to me. In any event, you're not opening tunnels to hell. You're opening paths to a place called the Becoming."
"Might they not be the same thing?" Gladdic said.
"Whatever you want to call it, Nolost didn't even have to open any doorways to start laying siege to this place. Bagrad was already wide open to the Becoming. That's why things are especially crazy here."
"Sure," Blays said. "That, and the fact he's working very hard to kill specifically us."
"So far we've managed to shed a lot more of his blood than he has of ours."
Blays started to say something, then looked up at the branches they were passing beneath. "Artag, which is the deepest of the tunnels to hell?"
"The Great Navel, of course," Artag said. "That is why draining it drained so many of the lesser navels as well."
"Because there's tunnels and things between them, right? Is there a pathway between the Great Navel and the cavern the Fountain used to be in?"
"Nandang?" Artag said. "Yes. At least, there was such a thing while the Fountain was still there. When it moves, it tends to close the paths behind it so it can't be so easily found again."
"Right. So when we drained the Great Navel, what if that wasn't blood we saw in the water? What if it was rust?"
The others looked at each other in confusion. Gladdic scowled. "You believe the Fountain of Iron is within the depths of the Great Navel."
"And I don't think it moved itself there. I think Nolost took the Fountain to the Navel—and he intends to drag it down to hell."
23
Dante did some sputtering.
Gladdic only frowned more deeply. "Maralda did not believe the entity would yet have the strength to destroy the Fountain and those like it directly. Not within this world. But if he was to pull it down to the Becoming instead?"
Blays nodded. "He could tear it to shreds. And we wouldn't even know where it had gone."
Dante folded his arms. "This is wildly speculative. Even by our standards."
"It'd be a brilliant move to pull on us, right? Those portals have been down there for gods know how long. That means the entity's had just as long to come up with something like this."
"Artag, how long would it take us to get to the Navel from here?"
"Somewhat more than a day," the Cleanser said.
"A day to get there. Another day from there to our portal. And however long it takes to investigate the Navel. So if we go to check, and it's not there, we've just burned three days."
"True," Blays said. "On the other hand, if we don't go check, and I'm right, then Nolost destroys the Fountain and we all die."
"I know." Dante sighed through clenched teeth. "To the Great Navel, then. And let's hope we're not throwing away what little time we have left."
~
They ran. And ran. When they got too tired to run, Dante healed their muscles and they ran more. When even the shadows could do no more to soothe their legs, they walked. And when they grew too tired even to walk, they slept. Dante spent much of the journey contemplating how much of his kingdom he'd part with in exchange for a horse.
Artag spent long chunks of their travels telling them about the history and beliefs of the Cantag. He'd been so tight-lipped about them before and it took some time for Dante to understand why he was suddenly so chatty: he feared the Cantag, the Fountain, or both were about to be destroyed. In the event that happened, he wanted their memory to be carried on by whoever was at hand.
Considering that several of the gods had been recently trying to kill them all, Dante found himself oddly dismayed to learn that the Cantag believed in them (though they thought there were fifteen of them, and they went by different names, and some or even all of them might have been different people altogether), but didn't really venerate them, looking at them the way he might look at the rulers of a mighty but distant empire: impressive and all, but not especially relevant to his own day-to-day affairs. As for the Cantags' history, this was mostly being invaded by covetous foreigners, then driving out or massacring those foreigners through schemes ranging from the brutal to the sublime.
Some of these were clever enough that Dante made a note to remember them in case he ever needed to do something similar. Theirs largely struck him as a grim existence, though. One he wasn't really sure was worth enduring just for the sake of the Fountain, which didn't seem to do much for them aside from giving them lots of iron and occasionally serving as an oracle. It seemed as if they might be better off to wander away and become farmers somewhere that wasn't regularly infested by demons and monsters.
Then again, the finest warriors of the Cantag were proving very useful to him at that moment. Much more than peaceful farmers would ever be able to. He supposed to live in a way that knew nothing but peace might be a very fine thing, right up until the moment that war arrived, and you found that you didn't know how to fight back.
He killed a half dozen shiny four-winged flies to use as scouts. They passed the night in a shallow cavern; the Cleanser appeared to know the location of hundreds of such nooks. There were some howls in the night, but nothing worse.
Come morning, they ran more. Two hours later, with no insane storm and flooding happening, the approach to the Great Navel looked so dif
ferent that Dante didn't know they were upon it until he was gazing into its depths from the top of a hill.
"Well, we got rid of all the water," Blays said. "What else is down there?"
Artag rested his hand on a knife on his belt. "Those that claw their way up from the other side. If we are very lucky, they will all have been washed away in the flood."
"You know, now that it's empty, it looks less like a Great Navel and more like a Great A—"
"No," Dante said.
But now that Blays had put the image into his head, he couldn't get rid of it. The Navel was a round hole hundreds of feet across, cone-shaped as it dropped, its stone walls striated. It was wide enough that they should have been able to see the bottom, but through some trick of light or devilish glamour, its depths faded into obscurity.
Artag brought them down the hillside and along the rim of the Navel. There didn't look to be anything to get down to, but he pushed aside a strand of brush, revealing a hidden staircase. This led them beneath the overhanging rock that rimmed the Navel and to a rock ramp that spiraled downward along its walls. The ramp was only four or five feet wide and the fall from it was close enough to sheer that there would be no chance of catching themselves.
Blays exhaled through his nose. "This is going to take a really long time to get down, isn't it?"
"This was your idea," Dante said.
"This part wasn't."
"It is a long way down," Artag confirmed. "It is likely best if we cease talking about it and proceed to walk down it."
"You're about to learn I'm talented enough to do both at once."
Artag led the way. The ramp was angled just shallowly enough that Dante didn't have to brace his steps on the way down, but he wasn't looking forward to having to climb back up it. They wound their way clockwise, the surface retreating higher and higher behind them.
The pit had looked large from the outside and felt even bigger from within it. Halfway through a full turn of the spiral, Dante thought he heard someone humming, but (assuming he wasn't just imagining it) Artag gave no sign of being bothered by it. A minute later, Dante gave an involuntary shuffle of his feet as the inner wall vanished into nothing—they were passing by a huge hole.
Artag didn't glance back. "That is merely one of the feeds into the Navel."
Dante frowned. "Is there a chance that something unpleasant could come crawling out of it?"
"A great many things could lurk within it, all of them foul. It would be best to watch out for them."
Muttering curses, Dante drew his knife in case he needed to bleed his arm. The Navel dimmed as they continued to circle around it. As they went by another hole in the wall, Gladdic flooded it with ether, showing it was just an empty tunnel; even as it fell behind them, he hung onto some of the light to show the way forward. The humming grew louder, like a child growing more confident in their voice as they got further into a song. This song was not a sweet one, though. It was droning, slowly pitching up and down, vaguely menacing. A second drone joined it and they moved in and out of eerie harmony.
The walls were riddled with not a few but dozens of different tunnel openings. All were quiet and still, rarely even producing a breeze. The distant circle of light above them grew too wan to reach them and Gladdic kept a marble of ether floating in front of Artag. Dante's shins grew tired beneath the knee in response to the unusual angle of their walk.
The droning hums faded little by little until he could only sometimes hear them over the shuffle of their shoes. He'd meant to keep track of how many revolutions of the ramp it took to get them to the bottom, but he'd been distracted by the droning and the side tunnels. As they were swallowed within a sense of anticipatory stillness, the ground leveled out beneath them. Dante almost tripped.
Artag glanced upward; the overcast surface hung hundreds of feet above them. "We have come to the bottom. Let us hope we do not find the Fountain here."
"Unless that means it's already been dragged down to the Becoming," Dante said. "Besides, it might not be such a bad thing if—"
As Dante had been speaking, Gladdic was at work expanding his ether to illuminate more and more of the space they were within. It gleamed on something shiny and dark.
Dante's eyes couldn't make immediate sense of what he was seeing. A jumble of long edges. Assembled into a structure not unlike the steeple of a cathedral. And all of it metal.
"Well that's not what I was expecting," Blays said.
"That's the Fountain of Iron?" Dante blinked. He'd been expecting…well, more of a fountain, be it of the man-built kind you'd see in a city plaza, but flowing with iron, or else something more natural, like one of the volcanos on the Plagued Islands, but oozing iron. The thing he was looking at looked more like someone had combed the battlefield after a war between the gods, collected their fallen swords, and forged them into a monument to the dead. "It's much smaller than the others, isn't it?"
"No! No!"
The words were so screamed and high-pitched Dante startled and spun about, expecting to see a young girl running away from them. But all he saw was Artag, dashing toward the Fountain of Iron.
The Cleanser skidded to a stop in front of it and fell to his knees. He clutched his hands to the side of his head. "You must help it!"
"Er, help it from what?" Blays said, catching up to him. "It's a pile of sharp metal. It looks like it can defend itself pretty well."
"It is almost gone!" Artag jumped to his feet and whirled on them. He lunged at Dante, reaching for him, seeming to forget there was a fifteen-inch purple blade sticking from his wrist. Dante would have had his throat cut if the Cleanser hadn't slipped and fallen to the ground with a rattle of armor. Artag pawed at Dante's leg instead. "Help it! You bastard, help!"
Dante was about to slap the man and ask what exactly he was supposed to be helping when the Fountain—which stood less than forty feet high—dropped three feet into the ground. Several of its downward-pointing blades caught against the stone, screeching so loudly Dante clapped his hands over his ears.
"I was right," Blays said. "The entity's dragging it down to hell!"
Dante drew his knife and nicked his arm in the same movement, having perfected the gesture after years of practice. With the shadows streaking toward him, he flung his mind down into the ground.
He could only feel the rock. But through feeling the rock, he could make out the shape of whatever might be embedded within it. The Fountain extended for another forty or fifty feet underground. Then it came to a stop—and so did the rock.
"There's a portal underground," Dante said. "The Fountain's being drawn through it. We have to reverse it somehow!"
He clamped the earth down around the many limbs of the Fountain and pushed upward. Getting nowhere, he extended his hold through the rock to capture more mass and surface area, then pushed it up some more. The entire Fountain gave loose like a tooth, sliding upward for a foot before stopping with a jolt. Dante grabbed hold of even more earth and pushed for a third time until sweat popped up across his brow. Even when he liquefied all the rock around it except for what he was using to project it upward, it refused to budge.
"It's stuck," he said. "Gladdic, give me a hand!"
"How ought I do that?" Gladdic said. "You never thought to teach me the secret of moving the earth."
"Then come up with something else!"
"Such as what?"
"I don't know! Conjure up a giant dog and tell it to play tug!"
Gladdic gave him a dark look, then straightened, laughing brightly, and took several looping strides away from the Fountain. Dante could feel him casting about through the shadows, but he wouldn't have recognized what the other man was doing even if all his attention wasn't being consumed by the struggle to keep the Fountain from being drawn down to oblivion. Dante seized hold of every last foot of stone that he could and shoved again. The Fountain moved just enough for him to feel it, then ground to a stop. He relaxed for a moment, regrouping for another attempt, when the Fou
ntain tried to drop again. He held tight to the rock. So tight that his confused senses felt sure he was being dragged forward across the ground.
"Can I get a hand?" He reeled more shadows to his hand. "Blays, isn't there anything you can stab?"
"Trust me," Blays said, "I'm looking!"
A metallic scream cut across the chamber. But Dante hadn't felt the Fountain move. He yelled out as a towering specter raced silently past him. The apparition had the same color and texture of an Andrac, but its build was different from any Dante had seen, with shorter arms and claws and a squatter head. He caught a glimpse of features that made little sense to his eyes. A long, thick tail waved behind it.
The thing was almost as tall as the Fountain itself. It grabbed hold of two of the structure's thickest blades, planted its feet against the ground, and strained its legs.
"That is the fusion of the soul of every being that has died on these grounds," Gladdic said. "If that is not enough, I know not what else I can do."
Dante nodded. He'd shifted his hold to a defensive one to stop the Fountain from sinking further, but now shifted back to the one he'd used to drag the structure upward. The Fountain shivered. The Andrac-thing's legs did, too. With a groan and the grind of rock on rock, the Fountain of Iron slid upward by one foot, then three, then ten.
The demon's arms were now extended all the way above its head. It shot one hand downward for a better grip. The Fountain shuddered to a stop. Dante slammed his hold on the stone back into a more horizontal defensive position. Just in time to stand strong as the Fountain pulled down against them. He held it steady while the Andrac got itself in place to push upward again, then switched back to his former hold.
Even with the both of them working together, though, they'd lost whatever had given them the upper hand just moments before. The Fountain began to drop, a slow but steady loss of ground, until Dante had to revert to his defensive posture just to reach a stalemate.
"This isn't working!" Behind him, the others stood alert and ready—but what was it they could do? "Any ideas? If not, I suggest getting to work on your deathbed repentance speeches!"
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 37
