"He wards off the vermin," Adi said. "And hope he wards well!"
Dante didn't get any sense of treachery from the twins, but for all he knew the Kalabari were as good at lying as the people of the Plagued Islands, and he slew a nearby beetle, reanimated it, and sent it crawling up a tree to watch over them.
As he did so, Tono finished his wards and approached him. "When you spoke before Juleni, a thing was said that made me sway. Did you truly speak to the gods?"
Dante looked up from where he was sitting; the words were the first that Tono had spoken to them all day.
"Not only that," Blays said, "but we kicked their asses, too."
Dante snorted. "I distinctly remember that it was us that ran away."
"That's one way to look at it, sure. But from where I'm sitting, we stole his greatest weapon from out of his own palace, fought him to a standstill, and then got away. So whose ass really got kicked?"
Tono stared down at them, eyes gleaming in the darkness.
"But yes," Dante said to the young man. "We spoke to many of them."
"What were they like?"
"Us. But much much more. They carried such noble bearing that you could close your eyes and feel their presence when they entered the room and how much smaller you were. And that was just the part of themselves they manifested when they needed to speak to us. There was another part of themselves they kept in a realm beyond us—and if we could somehow get a look at that part, I don't think our minds would comprehend what we were seeing."
Tono stood there a moment, then gave a slight bow and left to sit on a fallen tree to keep first watch. Dante went to bed and tried to ignore how loud the animals were being.
He had just fallen asleep when his loon pulsed in his ear. He sat up with a start, sucking air in through his nostrils. "Nak?"
"Yes," the Councilman said. "Er, sorry, were you asleep? What time is it there?"
"Dark-time. What is it?"
"We've found out why our people have been going missing."
Dante sat up straighter. "Yeah?"
"There are more caverns. Not underwater this time, but up in the hills. The first scouts to find them never returned, so we sent in some undead ones. Very small and unobtrusive."
"And they found portals. To the Becoming."
"Yes, lord."
Dante stared off into the darkness. "This is Nolost's work."
"Er, yes, that was my assumption?"
"This is something more than the usual unfocused havoc. He's targeting you. Either to punish the three of us, or to goad us into making a mistake."
"Precisely what are you saying, sir?"
"He's going to amass an army and try to overwhelm you with it by surprise. Just like at Attahire. Nak, you need to put together a team—sorcerers, and skilled ones. You need to send them into the caverns and destroy the portals."
"Destroy? The portals? We can do that?"
"That's just what we did in Bagrad. There's not a single doorway, you see, but two of them, with a passage between then. Tell the team to enter the passage, then rip into it. It can be damaged by both nether and ether. Once you've torn the fabric of it deeply enough, it will start to unravel on its own. Once that starts to happen, they have to get out before it collapses. And Nak…"
"Yes, lord?"
"Do not under any circumstances allow them to enter the realm on the other side of the passage."
"Ah, understood. How swiftly should we move?"
"This same day. I'm starting to understand how the entity's mind works—and what he's capable of. If you don't deal with this right now, it will mean the end of you."
He fell back asleep much faster than he feared he would. In the morning, a bird screamed from what felt like right next to his ear. There was just enough light filtering through the clouds and the canopy to confirm that the night had passed, but if anything Dante felt less rested than ever, and he almost spilled on his side when he tried to stand up.
"Excellent work on the wards there, Tono." Blays looked like he'd either been drinking or was grouchy that he hadn't. "You can set those every night, can't you?"
He stood at the edge of the camp. The nethereal wards had faded, but Dante didn't need to guess where they'd been, because they'd been replaced by a ring of dead insects. Some were vivid red or blue or yellow while others were a glossy jet black, but all of them were two inches to half a foot long, with jaws and stingers to match.
Their talk woke Gladdic. He sat up, closed his eyes, and rubbed his head.
"You feel it, too?" Dante said. "Something's wrong. We've been inflicted with some sickness. Is this a new plague?"
Adi laughed. After all the chirping and squawking, the brightness of it was pleasant. "You are ground-landers, aren't you?"
"I've been experimenting in ways that some might find unholy to figure out how to grow wings on people. But yes, for the moment, we still live on the ground."
"But the ground you live on is belowlands."
"Yes. Normally no more than a few hundred feet…" Dante sighed and pointed to a nearby spike of raw red rock a hundred or so yards tall. "Rarely any much higher than that."
Adi made a circular gesture through the air. "You are height-sick."
"Height-sick?"
"The air-spirits at the Vault of the Sky are of different species than those that float the belowlands. They may be hostile to your flesh."
"Are you serious? Can they be…banished?"
"They probably won't cause you more hurt than you're already feeling. Descending the Undazim should banish them. Until then, these might ease you." She reached into a pocket made by one of the wraps of the fabric around her and extracted a small leather pouch, from which she tapped out three small globs of a grainy greenish substance. "Place them here," she said, opening her mouth and pointing to her lower cheek. "Wait for the waters of your mouth to take it away."
After a quick inspection of the pellet offered him, Dante did as she said. It tasted sour but not too bad and within moments of inserting it between his cheek and his jaw his flesh there began to slowly pulse with an intensity that almost veered into pain. As they put themselves together and got back underway, though, the ache and fog in his head had already cleared somewhat, so he was reasonably sure he wasn't being poisoned.
An irregular wind blew at their backs and brought with it the smell of smoldering earth. The flaming bits and ribbons in the dark gray sky looked closer than the day before and Dante stared at them for some time trying to decide if that was true. Far beyond them, slow lightning squiggled sideways across the clouds, as if the sky itself was about to crack apart.
It was calm enough at ground level, though, and except for two more run-ins with the Dunites (another raiding party, which they avoided, and a pair of scouts, who they killed), they advanced without interruptions, alternating between a swift walk and a light jog. They spooked or were spooked by several animals, half of which looked like nothing Dante had ever seen, and almost all of which had comically large eyes and ears, as if there was never a moment when they weren't hunting something or being hunted by something else.
"Stop!" Adi hissed after they'd been on the move for several hours. "Back into the—"
Something very large emerged from the trees just fifty feet ahead of them. Its fur was so black that at first Dante thought it was something from the Becoming, but its eyes were much too big and bright for that, to say nothing of the fur itself: things from the Becoming tended to be perfectly smooth, but whatever this was had a great mane that flowed from its head and shoulders and down both of its flanks. It was the size of a bull, but its teeth and claws and the power of its build made it clear it was a predator.
"Away from the trees," Adi urged them. "Before the axe falls."
They shifted into the open, keeping one eye on the beast and the other on the trees. Wide green eyes gleamed within the forest. Three more of the things emerged behind the first, moving in perfect silence despite their bulk, their short tails held
out straight behind them. Two others stepped out where the five humans had been trying to hide before Adi told them to move.
Dante had already filled his hands with nether. "I'll take the three—"
"Stop yourself," Adi insisted. She poured shadows from one hand to the other. "They are urdu, and urdu are not killed without great need."
The first of them took a step closer, waited just long enough to see if the humans were going to pose any threat to it, then took three paces toward them, coming upon them with such swiftness that Adi barely had time to jerk up her hand and throw the shadows at it. The nether struck the beast in its stoutly wolfish face and sank through its fur.
The urdu had been advancing in a crouch. It stopped and straightened, staring into Adi's eyes. It was close enough that Blays could have hit it with his spear if he'd had it out and Dante could smell the musk of it: not earthy, like most barnyard beasts smelled, but chilling and sour.
"Are your eyes as weak as water?" Adi cocked her head, meeting the animal's gaze. "Look at what I wield."
The urdu made a subtle tightening of its eyes.
Adi stamped her foot. "What good would that do you when the four that are left would kill you along with all you call kin?"
It lowered its head to stare down at her more deeply.
"It is you that threatens us, life-stalker," she said. "But there is much simpler prey for you to find."
It looked past her then, and glanced toward the pair of urdu that had meant to ambush them. It flicked its triangular ears three times.
Adi laughed. "If they were normal amber-bringers, I might give them to you. But we need these ones. Life-stalker, be as wise as you are strong. Or else pride makes the cliff crumble under paw."
The beast stared, motionless. It exhaled loudly through its stout black muzzle, then walked to its left and reentered the woods. The others watched the humans, moving nothing except their tails, then followed their leader into the trees.
"Forward we move." Adi walked onward alongside the grove, although she gave it a wider berth than before. "It is still the urdu's land."
Blays let his hand drift from the handle of his sword. "At the risk of sounding crazy, did you just…talk to that thing?"
"No."
"Then who were you speaking to? Its invisible jockey?"
"We didn't talk like you and I now talk. So I didn't talk to it. It is called rogo by us. I speak words, and the sorcery turns words into understanding. Then the animal feels its own understanding, and rogo turns it into words for my inside-ear to hear."
"Can you do this with all creatures?" Dante said.
She opened and shut her mouth twice, the Kalabari shake of the head. "It is clearest with those that kill, like the urdu. And with those that are large, like the things urdu most like to kill. Rogo with lesser creatures is dim. It almost hurts to try to hear their thoughts, and hurts them to hear ours."
"How do you do it?"
"Through the connection to all things that exists through the blackwater."
"That makes me feel like I've just been enlightened, but what I'm asking is how do you learn the act of rogo?"
Tono made a noise Dante couldn't interpret. Adi gave Dante a disgusted look. "If you don't know a thing, you are not meant to know it."
"But that's exactly what learning is."
"No. That is not true."
He tried to argue with her, but she wouldn't have any part of it. The land around them had been a mix of groves and meadows since their arrival, interrupted by nothing more than the occasional formation of red rock, but as they emerged from a small forest, they looked across a rolling and uneven expanse of turf scarred by long, deep gouges down into the rock. At first Dante thought they might be ravines or cenotes, but while the first of them they passed by did smell like standing water, the rusty rock walls were far too harsh and jagged to be a natural water-pit.
"Did the entity do this?" he asked.
Adi quickly opened and shut her mouth twice. "It was many awelos ago, when the Dunites betrayed us and first began the War of Sundering. Most of our best sorcerers were lost here in the Riftyard in a single day. Do not breathe as you walk among their spirits."
Beside her, Tono ran his finger through the air in a circle around his face.
"How are we supposed to hold our breath that long?" Dante said.
The twins gave each other a look. "It is just a house of words," Adi said. "Be respectful, that is all it means."
The grass in the Riftyard grew to their waists and as they pushed forward Adi kept a bundle of shadows in her hand at all times. Vicious-looking rodents and brightly painted snakes scampered and slithered between the stalks, but Adi and Tono kept them at bay with quick bursts of the rogo—or, if that failed, the nether. A pair of rivers flowed in the distance, their waters dark gray in the gloom of the day.
They soon passed the ruins of a city. But as torn apart as its round red buildings were, it was far from abandoned. Instead, orange-shirted Talso battled the raggedy Dunites in the streets while sleek gray beings scuttled over broken bricks and bodies. Dante had spent enough time rebuilding the ruins of his own city to tell that only some of the damage to the city was recent. Most of it was decades older or more. Their travels since the start of the plagues had given him the insight that the general prosperity of the kingdoms he'd called home was not the norm of things. Most other lands were far grimmer and bare, with many if not all of their days spent in the presence of death and the struggle to outrun it. It was a precious thing to be able to lead a kingdom to a place where its people might still have to work long days in the field, but could at least go home to a fire and something warm to eat.
A third river emerged from the grasses while the two others merged into a larger one. The five travelers converged on the main channel shortly before the third river did as well. The combined flow of water was more than half a mile wide and deep enough that its surface ran smooth. The clean smell of fresh water was a welcome respite from the tang of smoke and an unidentifiable scent of malaise.
Something hissed in front of them. Dante glanced every which way for a snake, but neither of the twins broke stride. The steady rustling noise grew louder with each moment until they would have had to shout to hear each other. The riverbank they were walking along was only a few feet higher than the water and so they couldn't see what they were coming toward until they were almost upon it.
"A fall," Gladdic murmured.
"No," Adi said. "The Greatfall. And the Undazim."
Dante yanked the shadows to him. "The place where everyone keeps never returning from?"
"Yes. And I see nothing here. Maybe the devil that deviled this place is now gone."
"If Nolost cut this place off, he did so for a reason. It's much more likely that whatever is here is hiding."
"Your mind is like something not meant to be seen."
"You are definitely right about that," Blays said. "But what, ah, exactly do you mean?"
She gestured searchingly. "Dark. Of things real but unwanted." She smiled. "This way, and we discover if the devil remains."
A bit of mist hung in the air and the river bank shifted from turf to thick and springy moss that had Dante watching his footing. They were still some distance from the cliffs and at the moment he could only see the most distant horizons of cloud and land below them. The closer they got to it, though, the faster it revealed itself, until there was no more ground before them at all, and they looked down on more of the land than they'd ever been able to see at one time.
Blays shuffled a couple of inches closer. "It's like staring over the edge of the world."
"It's like how the gods looked down on Rale when they first made it." Dante knew the words were true as he spoke them. If anything, it looked further down than the first time they'd glimpsed the belowlands, closer to three miles than two. "Adi, why isn't it colder way up here?"
"Why should it be cold?"
"Because that's what mountains are."
"Yes, but it's as tall as one."
"And as tall as is not the same as."
Dante decided he wasn't confident enough in his position to keep pushing. They stared together in silence. The water hissed and rumbled as it fell over the edge, but they were much too far away to hear it land, and the noise wasn't half as loud as it felt like it should have been. The belowlands would have looked like something from a fairy-story by simple dint of being able to see so much of them at once, but it would have felt just as enchanted to walk through them, for the forests were blue in color, and the earth was littered with irregular oblongs of pink, orange, purple, and vivid green.
"Those colorful spots," Dante said, gesturing vaguely. "What are they?"
"The Painted Ponds," Adi said.
"That's water? Why are they like that?"
"Because that's how the gods made them."
"Are they, ah…" Blays cleared his throat. "What I mean to say is, does drinking from them impart any special qualities to the imbiber?"
"Do you try to ask if they can make you magic?"
"Well?"
"Some are magic at certain times for certain people," she said. "But these are close secrets of Mogo priests."
"Mogo?"
"The people that live there."
"Well if we run across any of these ponds on our way to the Titan, I might have to find out for myself."
"There are several." Adi pointed at something in the distance. "See them on the path to the Titan there."
Dante frowned, trying to home in on whatever she was pointing at. Then his eyes locked in on a deep green figure. "That's the Titan? We can see it from here?"
Adi did her opening-and-closing her mouth gesture. The object looked to be roughly twenty miles away, though it was harder to tell from their current vantage. If the terrain was favorable enough, they could be at it within a day of reaching the belowlands. Dante did some squinting, but he couldn't make out anything about the Titan other than that it was tall and green.
Yet there was something in the way it was posed that suggested that, whatever it was, it might start striding across the countryside at any moment.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 42
