"Very good: the objective is in sight," Gladdic said. "Yet where is the means of achieving it?"
"The Undazim?" Tono said, breaking a long silence. "Right before us."
"You cannot mean the Greatfall."
"But what if I must mean that?"
"Right." Blays beckoned to the cliff's edge. "I'm not much of a diver. Maybe you'd better show us how it's done."
Tono jaw-nodded, then backed up a few steps to get a running start, gathering his resolve. He crouched and braced himself, aligned toward the rumbling waterfall, and took a deep breath. He stood, suddenly relaxed, and padded to the side of the water, where he casually fell from sight.
Dante edged in for a better look. The young man stood on a staircase carved into the cliffside. He waved for them to follow and Adi started down after him.
She glanced back at the three foreigners, wide-eyed. "Be ready."
Blays already had the rod in hand. Dante brought nether to his as Gladdic did the same. The awe of the land spread out before him had almost made him forget that they were probably about to have to contend with something monstrous. The steps were damp, but they weren't at all slippery; their surface had been scuffed to provide traction, and while the lips of stone stairs always grew rounded after years of use, these still held a sharp angle, and even seemed to be slightly bent upwards. They were wide enough that several people could descend them side-by-side and though nothing stood between them and a three-mile fall Dante didn't feel particularly bothered by the climb down.
Wind blew the fringes of the flood of falling water apart, layering their faces with mist. The staircase was headed right for the falls and it looked as though they were about to be washed away by it. Did the stairs double back on themselves just in front of the water and switchback all the way down to the belowlands? Was the Undazim just a staircase after all? If so, Dante did not relish the thought of returning back up it.
Nether stirred in Tono's hands and Dante's eyes darted about in search of the threat. The water hissed louder and louder; full drops of it fell upon Dante's face and pooled in every crack and uneven surface on the steps. Before them, the staircase delivered them mere feet away from the enormous stream of water and came to a stop. There was nothing below them but an endless plummet.
Tono stood before the wall of water. Impulsive winds twirled in one direction after another. The young man drew more shadows to his hands. He extended both arms, his rich earthen skin dampening under the heavy mists.
Streams of nether flowed from him to the tumbling waters. They quivered as if troubled by strong winds—and then began to draw apart like a pair of curtains.
Dante blinked and threw his mind forward into whatever it was that Tono was doing. He could feel the nether at work, but not how it was redirecting the water, an ability he'd only heard wild stories of and until that moment had doubted was even real.
Yet a passage now stood open before them. Dante could dimly make out a chamber of some kind in the rock wall fifty feet across from them, but if there had ever been a bridge across to it, that had been washed away a long time ago.
"I know how to move the earth," he said. "I can make a bridge for us. It will only take a—"
Tono ignored him and sent a black dart winging across the open space. It had a less savage energy than the kind used for killing, though, and wasn't as swift. It soared like a sparrow and melded into the gloom.
Adi had her head on a swivel, looking out for dangers, but Tono stared straight ahead. Something stirred in the darkness. Coming for them. Dante gripped the nether close. A shape emerged, wide and flat, accompanied by a noise that was all but washed out by the fuzz of the falls. About a third of the way along its length, two thinner strands ran at an upward angle behind it. At last it broke into the wan daylight, its top surface wooden planks, while its underside was cleverly girded with both wood and metal. Two stubby brass prongs stuck from its forward edge.
"A mechanical bridge?" Dante said.
"Yes," Adi said. "One that can only be reached by those who wield the water."
The bridge drew near, rumbling lowly. With the scrape of metal on stone, the prongs in its front slid into unseen holes in the side of the staircase. The bridge came to a stop and fell silent.
"Come," Adi said. "We enter the Undazim."
She stepped onto the bridge. It didn't sway or buckle beneath her, but Dante let Tono go next and take several steps along it before trusting that it was as sturdy as it appeared. Though it was cantilevered a long way from its base in the chamber across from them, it was supported by both the brass prongs set in the stone, and by two thick ropes of some gray-green fiber embedded in the bridge a little past its middle.
He passed under the falls, but not a single drop landed on his head. He glanced over the side. The water flowed back together fifty or sixty feet beneath them. Like the stairs, the bridge felt well-built and generous in its dimensions, and he crossed to the chamber without incident.
As they'd neared it, Tono had called up the ether to provide light—plenty of it, given that they might be walking into a den of demons—but as it cast itself through the chamber, it showed nothing more than six chairs near the back, some pieces of machinery, and taut ropes leading up into the darkness. The room was some twenty feet across and forty wide, small enough to be looked over in a matter of seconds. The walls were solid rock braced with spaced-out vertical bands of wood and metal.
Gladdic held his chin in his hand. "Could whatever was killing those who came here be hiding in the nether, as Blays does?"
Dante swept his mind across the shadows. "If so, they're too cunning for me to be able to feel them."
Adi and Tono walked in opposite directions, inspecting the room's corners and the gears and levers of the machines. They reconvened in the center of the chamber.
"We see nothing," Adi said.
Dante nodded. "What about the tunnel or whatever comes after this?"
"There is no after. This is it. Undazim."
"And there are no creatures or enemies here."
"No bodies, either," Blays put in.
"Which means either whatever was killing people cleaned up after itself, and could still be lurking somewhere, or else those people were killed before they got to the Undazim." Dante folded his hands, tapping his thumbs together. "Adi, if there's nothing here, is there any reason we can't just go straight to the belowlands?"
"That task varies from the one our word was given to," she said. "But yes. If it works, we will work it."
"What is it this place even does, anyway? How are we supposed to get to the ground?"
"When it is released, the Undazim lowers itself. Heavy weights make sure it does not do this lowering too fast. Then when it is to be brought up from the belowlands, the power of the Greatfall is used."
"It sounds and looks…complicated. How has it been kept in working order all these years when the rest of Kalibari is, uh…"
"Falling into crumbling ruins?"
"Yes. That."
"The Master-Smith exists, and with him he keeps his order of apprentices. They are kept away from the war so that at least a few works can be saved from destruction. Tono, has the Master-Smith done what he exists to do?"
Tono began a quick but competent-looking check of the machinery at the rear of the chamber. He then moved to a square desk or podium with several metal rods sticking from its flat top. He pushed one of the rods forward, then lifted his gaze and pulled another rod back. A clunk sounded through the room and Dante ducked into a crouch as the entire chamber shivered.
Tono smiled at Adi. "It works."
"Then we descend," she said.
He twiddled with the podium some more, retracting the bridge out of sight beneath them. With an air of finality, he pulled the third of the largest rods and rested his hands on the top of the podium.
The clunking sound repeated. The chamber jostled and began a hard drop that almost wrenched a scream from Dante's throat. But that was just its initial momentum as i
t was released from whatever had been holding it in place, and they began a gentle descent, accompanied by a series of creaks and rumbles. The stone walls moved upward while the wood-and-metal bars stayed fixed to the chamber—for the stone walls weren't part of the Undazim proper. The floor beneath them was solid enough, but the rest of the mechanism resembled a giant cage.
They'd no sooner started their descent than the Undazim jerked to a halt.
As they swayed back and forth, Tono pushed the rods around in various combinations, frustration etching deep lines into his face. "We are stuck."
"But you said the Master-Smith's work was right," Adi said.
"So it looked. But so we are also stuck!"
"Then find what is wrong."
Tono hissed through his teeth and shoved away from the podium. He underwent a longer investigation of the machinery he'd checked earlier, then returned to the podium and fiddled uselessly with the controls there until he grew so angry he stepped back with a stomp and glared up the dimness of the ceiling.
He narrowed his eyes. "Give me light."
Gladdic waved his finger. Ethereal light sprung across the heights of the chamber. The ceiling was no more solid than the walls, being composed of great bars instead, but erratic black matter was strung between them and the stone roof beyond them.
"What is that?" Adi said.
The hair stood up on Dante's neck. "That's not supposed to be there?"
"It is not part of the Undazim. It is—"
"Ambush!"
Dante bit the inside of his cheek, summoning the nether as the taste of blood filled his mouth. Above them, something detached from the black fibers and stretched its terribly long legs across the ceiling.
26
Dante's mind knew the shape of it before it had even finished revealing itself. An immense spider, its body fifteen feet across and its angular legs much longer than that, four of them pointed ahead of it and the other four behind. Yet for as familiar as its shape was, it was hatefully foreign too: as smooth as polished stone, a color that shifted between gray and black as best helped it match the lighting around it, and lacking any of the finer details of its features that all natural creatures of Rale possessed.
It was of the Becoming.
Dante yelled, "Don't let it—"
The creature emitted a hideous squirting sound. Black ropes sprayed from its abdomen. Dante flung himself away, lashing at them with the shadows. The ones that had been falling directly toward him frayed and disintegrated, as did most of the ones Gladdic assaulted with his ether. A cluster of them slapped down around Blays, gluing him to the floor just as he was attempting to extend the Spear of Stars. Tono sprawled beside him, pinned under more of the black strands.
"Webs!" Dante shouted. "For the love of the gods, don't let it trap us all!"
He fired three spears of shadows up at the monstrosity. It scuttled across the ceiling with paralyzing speed. Two of the bolts missed altogether, one smacking into the rocky roof beyond the Undazim while the other cracked into one of the joists of the cage, sending pieces of it fluttering to the floor.
Dante bent the final spear just enough to hit the spider in its pointed abdomen. He felt and heard the nether crunch through its carapace. But not so much as a puff of smoke or dribble of ichor ejected from the wound.
The spider rushed to the edge of the ceiling where it could skitter down the wall to the floor. Gladdic harried it with a flurry of ether that he was very careful to keep from smashing up any more of the cage. Near the middle of the Undazim, Blays and Tono lay prone, wriggling within the black webs. Dante sliced at the strands around Blays with a razor of nether, but they were so tough to cut through that he didn't think he could sever them from Blays without also severing Blays. Worse, he couldn't even tell if Blays had room to breathe within the webbing. He scrabbled for a handful of ether and sifted it over the black fiber, hoping it might somehow nullify or erase it, but the light merely bounced from it.
The spider produced another scatological blort. Dante broke to his right, but the webbing was aimed at Gladdic, not him. The old man ran hard as he could, pouring ether back over his shoulder. He tripped hard—his robe had caught on a lever—and hit the ground. Webbing splattered over his legs and lower back, cementing him in place.
"We have to do something fast!" Dante lobbed black bolts at the vermin. "I do not want to see what it has plans for if it webs all five of us!"
As his bolts neared the spider, it exploded forward, scrambling away from them. Dante personally guided the bolts that were obviously going to miss out through the bars of the Undazim, ensuring it suffered no damage. He heard the other bolts clapping into the creature's exoskeleton one after another, yet it didn't slow down.
Adi turned her back to it and ran toward the corner of the Undazim. Dante cursed her for her cowardice. Overhead, the spider bent its abdomen forward and aimed it at him. He launched a barrage of nether upwards moments before the spider let loose with a third round of black strands. Force and matter met each other with a ripping sound. Black confetti fluttered through the air.
A few squirts of webbing escaped destruction. One landed to his left. Another brushed his shoulder, a few strands of it sticking to him while the rest just missed. Yet another came down over his fully extended right foot. As it hit the boards of the floor, the webbing stuck tight.
He just had time to brace his arms in front of him before he hit the ground.
He yanked at his leg, but he may as well have been trying to uproot an oak with his bare hands. He rolled onto his side and chopped at the webbing with the nether. With enough brute force, he soon severed it, but he'd had to keep from getting too close to his own foot, and a big glob of it remained stuck to his boot. As soon as he tried to scoot back, the glob stuck to the ground once more.
Overhead, the spider streaked toward the wall and then down it. Dante pulled more nether to him and threw it at the demon while trying futilely to wriggle his foot loose from his boot. The bolts hit the spider in its face, and while this time they knocked some smoke from the creature, it didn't back off. It lifted its pair of nine-inch fangs and scrabbled across the floor toward Dante.
A wall of water blasted through the bars of the cage. He just had time to clap his hand over his nose and mouth and squeeze his eyes shut. Then it slammed over him, tossing him about while his foot remained anchored to the floor, just like an aquatic larva affixed to a rock by its own string, impervious to the pull of the current.
He could feel the webbing stretching. Pulling loose. Bubbles rushed over his ears, deafening him, as his eyes remained blind against the deluge; he grabbed for the nether, but once he had it in hand, he didn't know what he could do with it.
His foot tore free. The torrents swept him toward the back of the Undazim, where he would be flushed out into the miles-high fall. Yet the current was already slackening. He spread his arms and legs wide, left calf jarring into a piece of machinery. He curled himself around it until the waters drained away and exposed him once more to the air.
He gasped. Adi stood near the front of the Undazim, staggering across the damp boards. The others were still glued to the floor. Ether whipped from the half-covered Gladdic to the rear of the cage, where the spider had been pressed against the bars by the flood. It was currently lying on its side, twitching the long spikes of its legs.
Dante crawled toward it until he'd regained enough of his senses to get to his feet and run toward it. It writhed as the ether punched holes in its belly, ejecting plumes of black mist. Dante shaped the shadows into a giant cleaver and swung it down upon the demon's head.
It split apart. Black worms squiggled within. He ripped at these with the ether and they screamed as they sizzled into vapor. The spider sagged—and collapsed into a viscous sludge that began to drip over the ledge of the Undazim.
Adi limped toward him. "I did not run from you."
"Technically untrue," Dante said. "But I'm glad you did. Now let's get the others loose befor
e they smother to death."
~
After a few failed experiments, they learned a nethereal method of dissolving the webs without doing any harm to the people caught in them. One by one, they freed the spider's captives, who had suffered some bruises and scrapes but were otherwise no worse for wear.
Taking care not to disturb any of the support struts or rigging, the four sorcerers cleansed the webbing away from the roof of the cage where it was sticking it to the rocky ceiling. Finished with this, Tono took his place at the controls on the podium.
The Undazim descended.
It lowered itself without any hurry, graceful for its size, a steady and untroubled unreeling. Water poured past them at all times, much too much to see through. Except for once, when it thinned and a blast of wind parted it, and Dante saw, far to what he now knew was the north, the green monument of the Emerald Titan.
The air grew warmer and more humid as they lowered from the heights. After ten minutes, they could hear the roar of the Greatfall landing in its pool. As it grew louder, it sounded less like a typical waterfall and more like the patter of a downpour.
Dante's ears popped more times than he could count. The waterfall thinned out into something closer to a heavy storm. Through it, Dante could see a wide lake less than a thousand feet below them, its shores blood red while the forest around it was a soothing gray-blue. It was one of the prettiest things he'd ever seen.
Beyond it, smoke rose. Fires blazed. And the earth cracked and spewed.
His ears popped one more time. Then the Undazim slowed, rocking gently before it clunked against solid ground. Tono checked a few of the mechanisms, then motioned toward the front of the cage.
They walked out into a cavern hollowed out behind the falls. Adi led them to the right side of the exit. She parted the water there and they walked out onto a smooth stone path. To their left, the dispersed waters of the Greatfall fell in a constant storm across the gray waters of the lake. Winds tousled and tumbled. The path brought them to another chamber hidden behind a clever fold of rock. Within it, dingy-looking dugout canoes lay flipped upside-down in cubbies carved from the walls. Adi and Tono moved to drag one out.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 43
