Done taking this in, he moved his eyes back to the threatening clouds, waiting for the lightning to begin, but didn't see any bolts in the time it took Tono to scale his way back to the ground.
"Taga is drink-water," he said. "Ugan is as befouled ahead as when we left it."
"Assuming you mean the Taga is clear," Dante said, "it sounds like we have a much better shot with it than sticking to—"
He jumped back as something hissed downward and thumped into the ground just two feet to his right, spraying turf. An eye-sized rock rested within a shallow crater.
"Oh." Blays tipped back his head at the putrefied clouds. "We're about to die, aren't we?"
Dante scrambled for the nether. Another rock hit the ground beside them. The two Talso ran for the cover of the tree. Dante swung his mind into the earth and shoved it apart, opening up a cavern ten feet beneath the surface.
"In here!" He hopped inside the entrance, sliding down the slope. The dirt was moist from prior storms and smelled extremely strong.
Behind him, Gladdic called up enough ether to light the small space. Blays slid face-first after him.
"Adi!" Dante called. "Tono!"
A face appeared in the entrance, looking scared out of its mind; the day was too storm-dimmed to tell which of the twins it was until Adi was rolling in beside them. Before Dante could ask what happened to Tono, the young man threw himself through the entrance, covering his head with his arms as he tumbled down the slope to the cavern proper.
"Tell me that's normal here," Blays said. "And that it stops five seconds after it starts. And that the rocks don't hurt to get hit by and are filled with delicious egg pudding."
"The storm is not of Kalabar," Adi said. "It's enemy-sent."
"I didn't say I was going to believe you. I just wanted to hear it." Rocks drummed into the surface faster and faster until the sound of one could no longer be isolated from the others. Some of them began to roll down the incline and into the chamber. Blays tipped back his head to consider the ceiling, which dribbled a few grains of dirt down on them. "What if this doesn't let up?"
"It has to." Dante narrowed the entrance to stop any more pebbles from getting in. "Nolost doesn't have the strength to keep it up forever."
Even though he was pretty sure this was true, he was annoyed to get delayed again. There now seemed little hope of reaching the Titan in anything less than another full day. And that was only if the Taga remained "drink-water," and no other events like the storm of stones befell them and stopped their progress again.
The fall of rocks crescendoed to an unholy roar, then receded like a wave, until two or three seconds were passing between each impact. That was still more than enough to make travel impossible, though, and as they waited for it to stop altogether, night claimed the belowlands as quickly as the closing of a fist.
"We might as well get some sleep," Dante said. "We'll leave before dawn."
"If it's stopped by then," Blays said.
"You have no reason to think it won't. It's barely sprinkling already. Or whatever the equivalent of sprinkling is when rocks do it."
"Maybe so. I've just got this funny feeling that something even worse is about to get in our way."
"You don't look very scared. You've already got your bed half made."
"That just means I'm even more afraid of missing out on my sleep."
Dante brought most of his scouts—the ones that had survived, anyway—close to the entrance to the surface, which he rearranged into a few small holes so that the air couldn't become foul as they slept.
He sat back. "Is there any chance we can still reach the Titan tomorrow?"
"If we start early," Adi said. "If our travel is not interrupted. And if we walk with high spirit."
"Let's do our best to do all that, then. Thank you again for acting as our guide."
He meant the words. But then he remembered what the man at the shrub had said—for he'd already forgotten this, thanks to the storm and the general madness of their travels—and his gratitude receded. Then again, what did it matter who they were allowing themselves to be helped by? The Dunite man could have been lying after all, or at least leaving out some crucial facts. And in any event, who cared? He wasn't doing anything to help the Talso. Once he was gone, he'd almost certainly never see Kalabar again.
Self-assuaged, he was able to get some sleep, although he was woken up twice early on by rocks hitting the ground above them. After the second one roused him, though, he didn't hear any more strikes, and slept easy in the knowledge the storm had come to an end.
Some time later, his loon went off. Before he could wake up enough to activate it, it twinged so hard that it was like someone was screaming in his ear.
He sat up sharply, pawing at it; he almost yelled out of pain, but the smell of the earth made him remember that he was in a small cavern with the others, who were trying to sleep.
He kept his voice low. "What the h—"
"Dante!" Nak's voice was a raw shriek. "We're all going to die!"
Dante stood, groping about in the darkness. He could hear men and women screaming through the loon. Thousands of them. His heart went mad as sweat broke out across his body.
"Nak, what's happening?"
"We got ready to march from Gallador. Fast as we could. We…" Nak trailed off, grunting. Nether sizzled against some other substance. "There, almost got…he was expecting us. To march. He'd sabotaged the ground, too far away for us to feel what he was doing. And then when we walked over it—demons. And hell with them!"
"You're under attack? Withdraw from the trap first. Get as many of our people out of harm's way as you can. Don't worry about launching a counteroffensive until—"
"Counteroffensive? We're being massacred!" Nak's voice broke. "We're about to die. There's nothing we can do about it. We're all about to die, and—"
The screams peaked. Dante heard fast breathing, the thuds of a man running as fast as possible. Then he heard nothing at all: for the loon had gone dead, and perhaps Nak with it.
27
"Nak?" Dante pulsed his loon. And got no response. He sent his mind into it, but the shadows that made it function were circulating exactly as they should be. "Nak!"
Ether flared through the room, making him cringe from the light.
Gladdic stood. "What is going on?"
"I just heard from Nak." Dante felt as though the top of his head had been removed and everything inside was wafting out into the air. "I'd ordered them to leave Gallador. But Nolost was ready for them. When they got on the move, he sprung his trap."
"A trap? Of what kind?"
"I don't know! Nak thinks they're going to die. All of them. I've never heard him like that before, but I've heard it in our enemies—as we were killing them. We have to save them!"
"How can that be done?"
"We just have to get back to them. We go back through the portal and—"
"Disaster has disordered your thoughts. It would take us two days of travel merely to return to the portal we entered Kalabar through. Yet whatever is happening in Gallador is happening right now. Its outcome will be decided long before we could ever reach them. To abandon our task when we are so close to it would achieve nothing, and risk everything."
"But these are my people. The people of Narashtovik. I can't just abandon them to the entity!"
"Yes you can. For there is nothing you can now do for them, while many other parts of this world may yet be saved."
Dante felt something inside him fold. He reached out to steady himself against the earthen wall. "But there must be something we can do."
"There is: to finish the duty before you, and allow no distractions to keep you from it, no matter how sharp the ache it might bring to your soul. You have done this a thousand times before. That is why you—and I, and Blays—are the only ones who could ever have gotten this far. To throw that away now is to throw away all that you have spent your life building yourself to become!"
Dante lowered
his gaze to the Kalabari dirt that he had never seen before and would never see again. The dirt that he walked on while, halfway around the world, the blood of his people was at that moment being spilled upon the dirt of a land that wasn't their own.
"I know that," he said. "We finish our journey to the Emerald Titan. Right now. The faster we finish this, the faster we can get back to do whatever we can for whoever is left."
Gladdic gave him a single slow nod. Adi and and Tono gave each other a look, as somber as pallbearers. Dante crawled up the earthen slope and swept open the dirt he'd packed across the opening. Dour, smoky air buffeted his face.
"But what if there was a way to go back?" Blays said.
"Gladdic's right," Dante said. "It would take days. It's futile unless we had a way to get there right now."
"Yeah, and what I'm saying is that you do."
He stared dully at Blays. And then his mouth fell open. "The shard. Celden. Could it really do that?"
"Beats the hell out of me. But Carvahal said it could do just about anything."
"He also said that if you try to use it to do something it can't do, then you'll just waste it."
"Yeah, that could happen. But the problem for you is that now that I've put the possibility into your mind, you're going to find a way to do it no matter the drawbacks or risks."
Dante clenched his right hand and looked to Gladdic. "What do you think?"
"That we should not burn up resources that we might find ourselves in grave need of later," Gladdic said. "And that even if the shard could be used in such a way, there is a clear danger that whatever is of such danger to your people will claim our lives as well."
"That's all very reasonable. But I'm afraid Blays is right. So I can either waste a bunch of time talking myself into why this is a good idea. Or I can just do it." He reached under his doublet and lifted the chain that bore the shard, casting its pearly light across the small tunnel. He looked up. "Adi. Tono. Stay here until we return. It shouldn't be more than a few hours."
"And if you don't come back at all?" Adi said.
"Wait here for three days. If there's still no sign of us, go to the Emerald Titan and ask it to do what it did during the War of Forging, when the Four That Fell gave the gods a chance to stop their creation from being pulled into the abyss. The Titan will know what you mean."
Saying this, he realized that, although the conspicuousness of the Eye-Hill might make things a lot easier, he didn't quite know where they were or how to get back to this spot to meet back up with Adi and Tono. He cut his arm and smeared the blood on the wall in the hopes that he could use it to track his way back.
He held the shard in his hand. "How do you suppose I do this? Do I just sort of wish or think really hard about opening a portal between us and where Nak is, or—"
Blinding light flashed across the little cavern. Then everything went black. Dante lurched, feeling as though he'd been snatched up by a giant hand that was carrying him toward some unseen destination. He didn't know whether to laugh or vomit and concentrated very hard on doing neither.
Greenish light glowed to his left, growing stronger as it zipped toward them, illuminated a hazy world of vague shapes around and behind it. Dante reached his mind into the substance around them. It felt familiar. Like the same matter he'd ripped apart beneath the Fountain of Iron.
The light leaped forward, circling around them from head to toe, then rushed away in opposite directions, stretching itself into a long tube. It was all over in the blink of an eye, too fast for him to understand anything but the simple fact of it: it had built a passage for them. A black doorway stood across from them. Dante filled his hands with nether and ran toward it.
"We have no idea what's on the other side, do we?" Blays had the unlengthened spear in hand. "What if we're about to jump into a monster's mouth?"
"It's not as bad as you think," Dante said. "Just try not to swallow anything."
The portal hung before him, perfectly black and perfectly unknowable. He threw himself through it and into a nightmare.
People screamed from all sides. The temperature was thirty degrees lower than the neutrality of the passage. He could tell at once from the purple of the mountains and the blackness of the lake that it was just after nightfall in Gallador, but the air was awash with lights, strange blues and greens and purples shining up from deep pits in the earth, rendering it almost as bright as the clouded days had been everywhere for the last few weeks.
Nether flew from his priests and sorcerers in volleys as thick as those launched by a legion of archers. It plowed into the enemy, swarms of the smaller scythe-legged things that had overwhelmed Attahire.
Dante gave himself a few heartbeats to take in the scene. His people were, at that moment, in a pass between two cliffs. The earth had collapsed in semicircular lines in front of and behind them, trapping them within the pass. To one side of them, on the north, one of the cliffs had burst its top and was spitting streams of lava below it, driving the people southward—and into the hordes of demons clawing their way up from the pits there.
Thousands of bodies lay upon the ground. And more were being felled with each moment.
"You two stop the horde from advancing," Dante said. "I've got to plug up that volcano before it decides to blow."
"I'll try to save a few for you," Blays said. He bounced on his toes, then took off for the front lines at a dead sprint, snapping the Spear of Stars out. Gladdic ran behind him.
Dante ran the opposite direction toward the fiery cliff. Molten rock shot from it in great streams, spattering heavily and erupting into flames as it landed on the ground below, where it flowed toward the citizens as implacably as an advancing army. The people pushed themselves steadily away from it, glancing between it and the calamitous fighting in the other direction that they were soon going to have to choose between.
Dante rushed past them. The heat of the rock beat against his face. He had only partially healed himself after marking the dirt-cavern in Kalabar with his blood and the nether came readily. He sent his mind into the advancing lava in a line running back toward the cliff. The molten stone wailed as it hardened and cracked.
Behind him, people screamed as he jumped up onto the now-inert rock, expecting him to be melted right into it. Yet he felt no heat under his feet. Just from either side of him, where it lapped at him from the still-flowing lava that ran past the solid roadway he'd made for himself, so hot against his face and hands that he was afraid he might catch fire, gasping at the air that seemed to be burning his very lungs. As he ran forward, he widened the path in hopes he could reduce the heat trying to bake him.
He came within range of the clifftop. He stopped and felt inside it, reaching downward in search of a reservoir or the like to drain, but found nothing but a hollow tube. He supposed he'd just have to plug it, then. After all, the solution didn't need to last forever. Just long enough to get his people out of Gallador.
As he moved his mind into the lava flowing up the tube, he glanced over his shoulder at the battle. The ethereal Spear of Stars whirled ceaselessly, trailing its beautiful light behind it, but for all the damage it was doing—hurling scores upon scores of the monsters away from it through the air—the horde was still pushing the defenders backwards. Squeezing them toward the lava. Soon, they'd run out of space altogether. While a seemingly endless flood of the creatures kept boiling up from the pits.
He clamped down on the lava, attempting to harden it in place—and felt a strange force grab hold of his will and push him away just as a wrestler would to a foe.
Sweat ran down his face. A glob of lava came down to his right, spraying hot orange bits toward him. He dropped the portion of tube he'd tried to make solid and reached down deeper, moving as fast as he could, but the unseen force stayed with him, pulling him back from it once more. He yelled out in rage and bull-rushed it as hard as he could. He felt it "stumble" back from him, and he seized hold of the lava and squeezed it solid, stopping the flow, but he o
nly managed to form a small plug of it before the power regained its balance and grappled him away. As he strained against it, stalemated, the plug blew apart. A geyser of lava shot from the top of the cliff.
The people had started doing a lot less screaming after Blays and Gladdic entered the fray, but it was pitching up again. Meaning they weren't having any better luck than Dante was. He darted a look behind him. Sure enough, even the light of the spear was pulling back, and the lines of priests and soldiers to either side of Blays were on the brink of collapse.
The night was pierced by a shriek like the scrape of a vast plate of glass. Something popped up from the ground in the middle of the fray. Its body was lit up by the spear, and between that and Dante's vantage from the ramp of hardened lava, he could see that this new abomination was sleek black in color and three times the height of an average man, and that while its legs looked humanoid enough, its long arms bristled with more blades than Dante had seen since the Fountain of Iron.
Both sides shrank back from it. It turned to glare across the humans, cocking back both of its lethal arms. Gladdic ran before it, bellowing at it while thrusting his hand at the mob of scythe-limbed horrors. The thing cocked its head at him, lifted its arm, then swiveled about and trampled toward the demons. Blays led the charge behind it.
Dante turned back to his work, still buffeted by the relentless heat, but he was grinning now. He moved his mind back into the lava. The force was there, waiting for him. This time, as it rushed forward to grab him and push him back, he fell back with it instead. It plunged past him on its own momentum. He froze the lava tube solid. As the power tried to rearrange itself against him, he planted his focus on top of it and held it down. It felt weaker than before. It struggled against him, thrashing madly, then fell away.
The lava had completely stopped. Keeping his focus in case the thing made another run for him, he assessed the state of the battle. The charge looked to have regained a little ground and then stalled out. At the moment, neither side was gaining. Yet there could be tens of thousands more demons ready to spill forth from the pits. Any stalemate was only temporary.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 45
