"There's a portal down there, isn't there?" Blays drew the rod and snapped it to the side, the Spear of Stars springing to life. "Why don't we take a look inside it and see if there's anything to kill?"
"How am I supposed to do that while I'm hanging onto the Fountain for dear life?"
"Encase the Fountain in a plug of some kind. It only has to last long enough for us to pay Nolost a visit."
Dante nodded. "Gladdic! On my word, get that thing away from the Fountain!"
Shaking with the effort, still holding fast to the Fountain, Dante sent his mind into the rock, softening it into mud, then sent it flowing toward the Fountain like a tsunami. He yelled to Gladdic; the Andrac bounded away. Rather than battering the structure with the mudslide, Dante enfolded it—and then returned the mud to solid rock. With the core in place, he surrounded the Fountain with even more stone until the plug it was encased in was wider than the null zone of the portal beneath them.
Praying that it would hold, he eased his mind free of the plug and knifed into the ground. He carved out a tight spiral toward the portal.
Dante extended his hand toward the hole in the floor. "Demons first."
Gladdic motioned to the Star-Eater, which rumbled forward, ape-like, and hopped into the passage. Dante headed in after it, Gladdic lighting their way. The tunnel smelled of fresh-hewn stone. Forty feet down, it came to an abrupt end. The floor looked like a window of a starry sky. Without waiting for orders, the Andrac jumped down through the portal.
Dante stopped at its edge. Blays knocked into him from behind and Dante slapped his hand against the wall to catch himself.
"Oh," Blays said. "It just goes straight down through the ground, does it?"
"It is a portal to hell. What were you expecting?"
"And we're just going to jump into it? What if there's nothing on the other side?"
"We don't have any choice. If it turns out we're falling to our death, try to scream something brave-sounding before you hit bottom."
Dante took a deep breath, as if readying to dive into the water—and for all he knew, he was—and jumped. His sight went dark and so did his mind.
He emerged in a dim, gaping shaft. And he was falling. Into the void. To his side, the countless massive blades of the Fountain of Iron reached into the depths, but they were too far for him to try to grab and arrest his fall. A scream welled in his throat.
He swerved toward the wall of the shaft, skidded against it, and came to a stop. Trying to find something to hold onto in case gravity decided to become sane again, he sat up and gazed down into the pit. His head swam and stomach rolled as his senses reoriented themselves: he wasn't looking down into anything, he was looking across the flat ground of the interior of the portal.
Blays landed beside him with a yelp. They had enough presence of mind to crawl out of the way before Artag and Gladdic spilled in behind them.
Artag got to his feet and reeled like a sailor. "What devil magic is this?"
"I'm less concerned about his magic," Dante said. "And more concerned about him."
The tube-like space they were within was much larger than any of the other portals they'd passed through. Large enough for the Fountain of Iron to fit comfortably inside it. Artag hadn't been exaggerating about how much danger it was in: the full thing was of the same scope as the White Tree or the Spire of the Nautilus, hundreds of feet tall—or, given its current orientation, long—while the largest of its blades were the size of sloops. It was all iron, same as its exposed tip had been, and gleamed like it was wet.
And its base, which at that moment was being dragged toward the other end of the portal toward the Becoming, was currently in the grasp of a colossal hand.
"That is him," Gladdic said. "Nolost. The entity."
Blays held his spear by his side. "We're going to fight that thing? It looks like it could flick me from here to Snarjlend!"
Dante started jogging toward it. "What's the matter? You already fought it once."
"I don't think the thing I fought in the storm was really it. I think it was more of a projection, like the aspect. Well, except a thousand times bigger. And made of crazy lightning."
"Stop saying that."
"What? Why?"
"Because I don't want it to be true."
The passage was as dark as twilight. Red constellations gleamed from the walls while wisps of fog or steam tumbled through the air. Tiny lightning bolts flashed silently. The Andrac, which seemed much more impulsive and excitable than the others Dante had known, blundered toward the hand as it worked to rip the Fountain loose from their world. The hand of the entity was smoky, its edges indistinct, and as the demon ran, it stirred up drifting tendrils of this essence. It threw back its head, light glaring from its thick throat, and leaped.
It stretched its claws before it and slashed them into the underside of the entity's wrist. Dark smoke puffed from the wounds, but though it would have gutted a human from the mouth down to the other end, it was less than a pinprick against the scale of Nolost. The Andrac landed, collected itself, and jumped again, tearing into the smoke with both sets of claws. The entity bled a little more smoke.
Frustrated by how little harm it was doing, or perhaps encouraged that it was able to do any harm at all, the demon jumped up and down like an angered primate, cutting into the arm over and over again. Each strike did almost nothing, but the sheer volume of them whipped up enough smoke to partly obscure the Andrac from sight.
The entity's hand eased from the base of the Fountain, the smoke of its fingers moving more like flowing water than like cohesive flesh. The Andrac spun to face this, bending its knees in readiness. The entity swung its hand. It wasn't especially fast, not overwhelmingly so, but though the Star-Eater tried to outrun it, the hand was too large to avoid. It hit the demon in the side.
The Andrac flew across the passage at a perfectly flat angle. Dante didn't think it had dropped so much as an inch in elevation by the time it hit the starry wall. It burst into a cloud of shadows. These settled toward the ground, stirring like they wanted to reconstitute themselves, but were too addled to do so.
"Now we know exactly what to do," Blays said. "Don't let it hit you."
Dante came to a stop. "I'm not sure we can just fight this thing."
"The gods once beat a whole bunch of these things, didn't they? And we beat the gods. So what's the problem?"
"We beat one god. With the help of our own god. This isn't that."
"What do you suggest we try instead? Reasoned debate?"
"I don't know. But if we see an alternative, be ready to seize it."
He edged closer, filling his hands with nether. Then again, if they couldn't fight the entity, what good would it do to get the Fountain free of the portal? Wouldn't Nolost just come right back for it the second they left Bagrad? But perhaps the Fountain could move itself somewhere safer, or Dante could uplift it through the rock to a hiding place. It didn't have to a permanent solution. All it had to do was buy them a few days to finish the fourth and final task.
"Hit the fingers as hard as you can," Dante said. "If we can get it to let go—or better yet withdraw—we can drag the tower right out of here."
The scraps of the Andrac were still wriggling by the wall. Dante extended the nether into a long blade. Long enough to cleave through one of the fingers outright.
Why are you here?
The voice was not human. Or anything like it. It was more of a rustling. Like parchment being shredded or the trees tossing in a storm at night. Whatever it was, it made Dante stop in his tracks and his hair stand on end.
I asked you a question. The timbre of the voice had changed to something like snakes writhing through course sand. You should answer me.
"Or what?" Blays said. "You'll destroy us and our world and everything in it? There's not a whole lot you can threaten us with at the moment!"
Yes. There is.
"Why do you think we're here? To foil your idiot plan."
W
hy would you do that?
Blays glanced at Dante, then Gladdic. "I've never dealt with inhuman god-like entities before. Are they all this deranged?"
"What is the point of this talk?" Dante called out. "Another ruse to delay us, like at the Spire? You can't truly believe you can convince us to stop fighting you."
I like the thought of infecting your heads with thoughts you won't be able to cleanse from yourselves. The voice shifted to a sound like glass crumpling underfoot. You only fight me because your understanding is so limited by a mortal mind that is no more than a prison of your self. Why do you fear annihilation?
"I assume it would hurt," Blays said.
It is the very opposite of pain. Something far beyond the mere absence of it. To be annihilated is to experience a greater pleasure than any other you will ever know. For it is to be reunited with everything else your body has been separated from.
"I think I'll stick with my body. It lets me do useful things, like call you an asshole."
Why do you think the gods crafted the highest level of the afterlife as the annihilation of self? They meant it as the greatest gift they could give you. One you could only appreciate after enduring this life, and the lesser afterlives before that last level.
"Even if that's close to true," Dante said, "given the way the Mists have skewed from how they were supposed to function, I'm not about to trust the gods got the Worldsea perfect, either."
The Worldsea is just as it was meant to be. Again, you must understand that annihilation is not what you think it is. The life-stuff—the thing you call the nether—you will be made one with it. You will all breathe together in a single existence. You will merge into a divine conscience much like my own and sing to the cosmos in the language of its soul. You will exist as far beyond your mortal bodies as the gods who created you do.
"You're trying to sell me a lie. You are disorder. There would be nothing darker and more disordered than convincing us we're giving the whole world eternal bliss as we're damning everything to erasure."
It is not me that you should trust. It is the gods. This was always the final end they meant for you.
"But we're not in our final end," Dante said slowly, working his way on the fly through the confusion of what he thought had been true and all that he had learned since breaking through to the realm of the gods. "We're mortals in the midst of mortal life. The purpose of mortality is to fight like mad against every single force that would destroy you. That's what the gods designed us to do in this realm. Until we pass on to the next one, fighting like mad is what we will do."
The gods no longer care for you. Their design for you no longer matters. That is why we're here together.
Dante glared at the other end of the portal, where he imagined the entity was watching from. "I asked your aspect this, but I want to hear it from you. Just what are the gods giving you to do this to us?"
They give me…the act itself.
"That's it? You're destroying everything just to destroy everything?"
That is the heart of my nature. This act will be the most that I am ever able to express that nature. Do not fear what is to come. Walk toward it with me. Together, we ascend.
"Even if you're telling me the truth," Dante said, "and even if it was perfectly reasonable, you're forgetting one thing: I am mortal. That means I'm not reasonable. I am petty and vengeful and hurting my enemies makes me feel great. So I think I'll do this instead."
He hurled his nethereal blade at the closest of the fingers holding tight to the Fountain. To his mild surprise, the blade successfully gashed into the digit, venting a plume of smoke high into the passage. Gladdic had already launched a bee hive of white darts and bent them from his target to strike the place Dante had wounded instead. They shredded through the smoke. As with the Andrac's assaults, the finger was so big that an attack that would have slain a score of men ripped a few puffs of smoke loose from it but wasn't nearly enough to get the finger to let go of the Fountain. Dante honed another blade and threw it on the same arc as the first.
You will beg me to end what is to come for you.
Blays jogged forward. "An endless line of women who want to bear our children after we saved the world?"
He lunged forward and drove the spear into the same finger. Smoke gouted past the weapon's shaft. The finger lifted from the Fountain and swung down to smash Blays flat, but he planted the butt of the spear and vaulted back, slashing at the finger as he spun away from it.
He landed in a crouch. "Looks like we can fight it after all. Who's ready to give Nolost a stump?"
Dante shuffled closer, hacking at the finger with a steady stream of shadows while Gladdic did the same with swarms of shining needles. Blays ducked in and out, stabbing the digit as many times as he could. Every time it lifted to crush him, he cartwheeled away or sprinted beyond the finger's stiff reach. The air grew hazy from smoke. It didn't smell like burning wood, nor even like sulfur, but like coal and scorched copper.
The finger went rigid, then collapsed into ash, whirling away on winds that Dante couldn't feel. He shouted and pointed to the one next it. Artag had been fooling with something all the while, and now leveled a stringed device that was either a very odd crossbow or an even stranger fiddle.
With a twang, he loosed his missile. Before it even found its mark, the device twanged again, a second bolt hissing along behind the first. The device launched for a third time just as its first missile hit home. A plume of electric blue fire erupted from the thick smoke, leaving a large crater in its target.
Blays juked away from the eruption. "What was that?"
"We have fought the creatures of the void for a very long time," Artag said. "We have developed the weapons we needed to survive."
Both his other shots had already landed, blasting holes in the entity that would have been horrifically gruesome if it had been made of flesh. The others carved into the same finger with nether, ether, and whatever power it was that animated the spear. Though it was able to absorb an immense amount of punishment, it also had no counter to the flurry of attacks, and in less than half a minute since they'd started going after it, the finger disintegrated into ashes just like the first had done.
The hand let go of the Fountain and drew back, cruising through the air like a galleon crossing the open sea.
"Get the other fingers!" Dante said. "Destroy them, and it won't ever be able to grab the Fountain again!" He ran after the retreating hand, piercing the thumb with all the shadows he could muster.
"Beware!" Gladdic pointed to the far end of the portal.
Its dark surface rippled. Hazy tendrils emerged from it, cohering as they extended further. Dante ripped into the beleaguered hand for as long as he could, then turned toward the tendrils. They were each three to four feet across and made of the same smoky substance as the hand. Their ends were rounded, slightly bulbous.
Blays ran at Dante's side. "I'm not going to be able to stop asking what the hell things are any time soon, am I?"
"That depends on whether you're about to die." Dante came to a stop. He shot a glance behind them at the Fountain, which didn't seem to be making any progress in extracting itself from the portal. Because it was stuck inside the plug of rock he'd crafted? "If you three can hold these things off, I'll go and—"
The tendrils closed on them with freakish speed. Just before they made contact, their bulbous heads split in half like walnuts, exposing forests of sword-like teeth.
"In all my life among such spawn," Artag said, "never have I seen such foulness!"
One of the eyeless heads darted at Dante. He scrambled back, almost tripping on his own feet, and slugged the attacker with a crude club of nether. The head burst apart, teeth spinning through the air before vanishing into smoke. Yet the stump this left was already swelling and splitting apart at its end, fresh teeth sprouting within the just-formed mouth.
Blays slashed his spear forward and back, carving the heads off three more of the worm-like apparitions. Artag
held his flank, impaling one of the things as it lunged at him. He bounced a second one off his bracer with a clunk and jammed his wrist-blade through the underside of what might have been its throat. The heads of each one perished, but replacements began to grow from the stumps an instant later.
Dante drew his sword and hacked at one as it snapped its teeth at him. At the same time, he sent a blade of nether shooting past the thing's head and along its body. Halfway along it, he swerved the shadows into the worm, slicing it neatly in twain. He was hoping the entire severed half would disintegrate—if it did, he'd cut them all off right where they emerged from the portal—but it waved itself around until the other end found it and fastened the two halves back into one.
A second wave of worms poured from the portal. The first ones they'd cut down had already regenerated their heads and rejoined the fray. Across the passage, the wounded hand was slowly regrowing its two missing fingers.
"Can you hold them off by yourselves?" Dante called.
Blays was too busy with his spear to look his way. "Even with you here, we're falling back. How long do you need?"
"Two minutes. No more."
"Ha! We won't last thirty seconds."
A cluster of worms flung themselves at Dante, champing their long teeth, forcing him back three more steps. "You'll have to try. It's the only way to get the Fountain out of here!"
Blays cursed, ducking a worm as its jaw clapped shut. It overshot him so much that it wound up right on top of Gladdic. Dante shouted the old man's name. Gladdic turned about as the worm opened its mouth and lunged at him, meaning to impale his torso on its iron maiden of fangs. Gladdic twisted away and hacked at the thing with the ether, knocking it enough off course that its teeth merely glanced across his hip.
He hissed in pain and fell to one knee, grabbing for the wound as a red stain spread across his gray robe. He balmed the cuts with ether while driving a shining lance through the worm. Others were writhing through the air toward him and Dante came for them at a dead run, chopping through them with wild abandon, shadows and smoke obscuring the already dark air. The effort allowed Gladdic to heal himself and get back to his feet, but it had made Dante give up thirty more feet of ground. They'd already been pushed back to the base of the Fountain. Another minute, and the entity's hand would restore itself enough to take hold of the Fountain again, while they were kept busy fighting for their lives, unable to resume their assault on the hand.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 38
