He jerked back his head, then smiled again. And reached under the ground. He ran toward the fighting, working as he went, descending the ramp of lava down to the trampled turf. The cold of winter night had never felt so good.
"Clear a path!" he yelled to the mobs of citizens taking cover at the rear. "I said get out of my way!"
They obeyed. As he ran down the corridor they'd opened through themselves, they began to yell his name—first as a question, then as a cheer.
The smell of blood hung in the air, as did that of the oily ichor of the demons. Bodies lay underfoot everywhere, threatening to spill him time after time. Somehow he managed to avoid it while keeping his mind on his task. The shouting and clunk of swords on chitin swelled as he knifed through a group of monks throwing nether into the ranks of the foe. And then he could see Blays again, swinging and twirling the spear in his violent dance among the endless invading throngs of the Becoming.
He'd meant to grab Blays, but they were barely holding out against the hordes even with him present. So he gathered a few priests to him instead. "Push forward! And give me cover!"
He led them past the fringe of the engagement, pausing his work to kill several dozen of the blade-legged things as they took interest in him. Once those were out of the way, he pushed south through largely open ground, with the priests picking off the scattered demons that tried to gallop toward them. The pits glowed ahead and to his left, casting beams of green and purple light upward through the haze risen from the lake. Scores of demons swarmed up from them with each moment.
As soon as he could feel the holes in the earth ahead of him, he came to a stop. And extended the tunnel he'd been boring from the lava chamber toward the pits. It was only then that the force returned—either it had finally realized what he was doing, or it had been dazed by their first encounter and only shook it off just then—but he ducked under its unseen assault and punched the tunnel forward.
Screams tore apart the night. But not from his people. From the pits. A demonic chorus of wails so hateful to the soul that Dante punched his hands to his ears as tears leaked from his eyes. Plumes of smoke boiled from the depths.
"What have you done, lord?" said Hana, one of the priests who'd escorted him. "It's like you've thrown open the gates of hell!"
"It was the entity that opened the gates," Dante said. "I just filled them with lava."
He backed up, watching the pits for signs that Nolost was trying to block the flow of molten rock, but all he saw was masses of demons hurling themselves frantically up from the murderous underground, some of them trailing smoke behind them, others hobbling on half-melted limbs.
He might have cut off the supply of reinforcements, but there were still thousands of the things carving into his people, and Dante turned and ran to join the battle, calling for his escorts to follow. The enemy hordes were shifting northward. Away from him. He knew that something was wrong, but not what it was until the bowed line of priests and soldiers reached their limit and broke, overwhelmed by sheer numbers.
And rather than pursuing the routed flank, the demons bounded past them, toward the masses of civilians behind them.
"They're trying to massacre the citizens!" Dante said. "Protect them!"
He ran pell-mell forward. The ground was covered in thousands of shallow dents from the pointed feet of the creatures and it felt like he might trip with each step. Blays and Gladdic drove into the army of the Becoming from the side, Gladdic's hideous Andrac slashing through a swath of demons with each swing of its bladed arms while Blays' spear carved hole after hole in the masses. Yet there were so many of the things that the trio was hardly able to advance.
The first of the demons was almost upon his people. Dante veered leftward, to the northwest, and reached his mind far ahead of him through the earth. He took hold of the nether within it and prepared to yank open a crevasse just in front of the charging scythe-legs.
The force plowed into his consciousness from the side so hard he staggered and almost fell. He yelled out, as much in dismay as in shock. The demons leaped forward and slashed into his people.
In mere moments, the two sides were too mixed-up for him to try to open another hole without killing a thousand of his own people as well. He threw a barrage of nether into the enemies, dropping a dozen. The others didn't even notice. The crowd screamed, pressing against each other and tripping over each other, hemmed in by the demons to their east, more of the citizenry to their south and west, and the abyss carved through the ground to their north.
Dante's eyebrows jumped. He shoved his way through the crowd, groping through the earth again—to the north this time. He grabbed hold of the shadows within it—a feint; as the power swung at him, he rolled his mind under it—and pulled the land forward, building a bridge to the other side.
"Get our people across it!" he called to his captains. "We'll hold the enemy here!"
Officers bawled orders. The horde was still clawing its way forward. Sword in his right hand, Dante lifted his left and ripped into them with as much nether as he could channel. Shards of splintered chitin spun through the air and clattered over the ones behind those he'd just obliterated. Bolt after bolt of shadows flew past him from behind. The bodies mounded up on the ground, but the creatures were agile, leaping over and across the dead with the ease of mountain lions. Dante couldn't spare so much as a glance at his bridge, but he could hear people running toward it, calling to each other. In the corner of his vision, he watched the first torches burn from the other side as citizens arrived there.
Priests stood beside him, blasting at the enemy with all they had. Yet the demons fought with no sense of self-preservation at all, as mindlessly furious as the Blighted but faster and more deadly, hurling themselves at the defenders like loosed arrows, and for as many hundreds of times that they were cleaved down mid-air by a black blade, piling up like loose rocks on the shore of a raging sea, one would fly through all that was thrown at it to gash its limbs into a priest. As soon as a nethermancer fell, the soldiers behind him would drag him away to clear the lines and (if possible) seek healing, and though the fallen was replaced at once by another, they were being driven back step by step.
Southward, to Dante's right, the Spear of Stars flashed rhythmically. Scythers crawled over the Andrac, chipping at it with their blades. The beasts came at him in an unending wall of smooth, dark gray bodies and half-featureless faces, throwing themselves forward and dying to his sword and his shadows less like living things and more like a storm or a landslide. His people were rushing across the bridge—he caught a glimpse of them as he pivoted left to cut through one of the creatures—but most remained stuck on the killing fields, waiting to cross over. From what he could tell, at least, the scythers that had broken through had all been put down.
The next time a monk fell and was dragged away, there was no one to replace him. Nor the woman who was cut to the ground by a demon even as she split its head in half. A few began to yell that they'd exhausted their powers, holding their hands in the air as they backed away from the lines.
At first they'd been shuffling back every few seconds, but they now retreated steadily, one measured step at a time, holding their discipline as best they could for the moment. Blays and Gladdic were actually making forward progress through the masses, but Dante could see they wouldn't reach the line in time. Not all of the people would be across by the time the scythers pushed Dante and the defenders to the edge of the crevasse.
But most of them would be safe. He could retreat with his priests, then collapse the bridge. Leaving the remaining demons trapped and harmless. And Gladdic and Blays, too, but Blays could slip off to safety through the shadows, while it looked like the Andrac was capable of throwing Gladdic across the chasm if it came to that. Most of his people would be saved, alongside himself and nearly all of his remaining nethermancers.
Foot by foot, step by step, they fell back toward the bridge. More and more of the priests exhausted themselves and ran to join
the river of people fleeing to the other side. Just as he was about to order his sorcerers to break and get across the bridge, the flow of enemies slowed. Not by much—and perhaps only because they now had so many bodies to traverse—but just enough that Dante was able to stay in position for several seconds before being made to edge back another foot.
"Stand your ground!" he commanded. "Don't give up one more inch! Until the last of our people stands safe!"
His Odo Sein sword crackled through the body of a scyther, cleaving it in half. He punched his fist forward, spraying a cone of shadows before him that killed more of the creatures than he could count. Footsteps and whimpers sounded behind him. They were only thirty feet from the entry to the bridge. The thinnest of lines between the people of Narashtovik and annihilation. There were just twelve of them left, like a small and mortal pantheon of the Celeset standing against the last dimming of the world—and just as he had that thought, a man turned and ran, all shadows spent.
"Hold!" he bellowed. "Until the last of your strength deserts you! Until their bodies are heaped up so high there's nowhere left to stack them!"
He had been holding back slightly, the way he would in a battle with another sorcerer, where it was best to be cautious and not expose oneself, to keep a little in reserve in case the enemy did something unexpected. But they were beyond that now, and he opened up a floodgate to join the torrent of shadows he was already unleashing on the horde.
The nether streamed so densely the creatures behind it were little more than shapes, like their own shadows. Dante felt the earth tipping beneath him and reached down to steady it but found no interference within it. Realizing he was about to swoon, he dropped to one knee. Two of the scythers leaped through gaps in his storm of murder and launched themselves at him. He slashed one down with his sword and fell away from the other. It stretched itself toward him as far as it could, the tip of its cubit-long claw scraping down his left arm.
Coldness swept down his arm to his fingers and up it to his heart. A grayness tried to shade his thoughts. If he'd been in his right mind, he would have faltered, but he was so nether-drunk that his power didn't so much as flicker. The scyther landed, winding into a crouch as it prepared to spring at him. A black dart swooped in from the side and shattered the thing's head.
He yelled out, wordlessly this time, and got back to his feet. For a time he lost track of everything but the flow of the power through him and the slaughter it incurred on what was trying to break past him. Then he looked around himself and realized that every other nethermancer who'd been by his side was gone: fallen, or having fled, exhausted and of no more use.
He understood, then, that he'd made a huge mistake: for if all of the others had run their powers dry, there would be no one left to bring down the bridge behind them and strand the creatures on the island of rock. With this thought, his command of the shadows faltered just long enough for three of the scythers to race through and toward him. He chopped through one's head. Another raked its forelimb across his chest, the coldness of it biting far more deeply than steel.
He fell. The horde bounded toward him, past him, making for the bridge. The last thing he saw was not darkness, but a blinding flash of white.
28
This time there were no thoughts. No dreams. No sojourns into the warm fog of the Pastlands or malevolent forces deceiving him into entering a phantasmagoric nightmare-scape. This time, there was nothing at all.
He opened his eyes. It was the night and an old man hung above him, muttering to himself. When he saw his patient awakening, Gladdic nodded and got to his feet.
Dante sat up. He felt light and tingly, almost euphoric. "What happened?"
"We did," Blays said.
"You broke through the scythers just in time. What about our people? Are they safe?"
"A mere handful of the Becoming made it onto the bridge," Gladdic said. "They were put down before more than the faintest damage could be done."
Dante squinted across the field. The eldritch lights of most of the pits had faded and the grounds were much darker than before. "What about the rest of them?"
"Slain. The battle is finished."
There was no sign of Gladdic's Andrac, and he and Blays both bore countless cuts and scrapes. But they looked healthy enough, all things considered. Blays offered Dante a hand up to his feet. A small crowd surrounded them, full of familiar faces, including Hart, the towering old norren Councilman, and Somburr, the spymaster who had apparently suddenly reappeared from wherever he'd vanished to in the final battle with the White Lich.
They were excited to the point of delirium by both the fighting itself and its outcome, and had many questions and even more praise for him. But one face was missing.
"Where is Nak?" he said.
"It isn't known," Hart rumbled. "But our people have only just begun to search for survivors."
"Then we search, too. No more talk until he's found."
They might have spent all night searching for him, and been too late because of it. But one bloody and ragged soldier remembered where he'd last seen Nak, and they pawed through the bodies there until they found him bleeding from a half dozen wounds that were beginning to go black around the edges. Dante and Gladdic were the only ones who could still command more than a shred of nether, and they worked on Nak until he took a long deep breath and opened his eyes.
"Have I died?" the former monk said. "Is this the Pastlands?"
"If it was, you wouldn't think to ask that," Dante said.
"But you're here. So are Blays and Gladdic. That's not possible. We must all be dead together."
"It wouldn't have been possible without a gift from the gods. Carvahal gave us a shard of the pole star. It was like Cellen. We used it to get here from Kalabar in a matter of seconds."
"A thing like Cellen? But wouldn't that have been a useful thing to use against Nolost?"
"If you had died," Dante said, "and all our people with you, any victory we'd have had over Nolost would have been left as hollow as Blays' head."
"Unnecessary," Blays said.
"Then know that if you hadn't come here, we would have died," Nak said. "I have no doubt in my mind. Even with you here, I'm not sure how we're talking to each other right now."
"My duty is always to Narashtovik," Dante said. "And you've served it as well as anyone."
This was true: and so it was an immense relief to have found Nak. Yet as Dante gazed across the dim field and saw the bodies of many thousands of his citizens, soldiers, and priests, many he'd known by face or by name, a heavy hand seemed to rest upon his shoulders.
"I know it's asking a lot," he said. "But we need to get back to Kalabar. Can you get them out of here like we planned?"
"You're eager to get back to it, aren't you? You'd think the whole world was about to fall down around our ears." Nak gave a sour look to his cloak, which was even more shredded than his flesh had been. "If you stayed with us until we had the chance for the priests to recover, and Nolost launched another attack before then, would it even matter?"
"Not if it was anything like what we just went through."
"Then I will lead our people out of here, and then we'll all take a very long nap, and try not to walk into anything like this again."
"Just a few more days. As soon as we've made the land stable again, we'll return—and this time, we will be the ones waging war on Nolost and the Becoming."
He clapped Nak on the shoulder. Nak did the same to him, then rejoined his captains and Council members, relaying new orders.
"Now here's one we didn't really think about," Blays said. "The shard got us here, but it's gone now. So how are we supposed to get back to Kalabar?"
"Ah," Dante said. He wanted to be certain they'd already worked out a perfectly viable solution to that, but nothing was coming to mind. "We didn't seriously not think about how we were going to do that, did we?"
"As I recall, we had about three seconds to decide whether to come here. And as soon a
s we did, we had to start killing everything in sight. There wasn't a lot of time to work out the logistics of a round-trip journey."
"Shit. Shit! How could we have been this stupid?"
"The chance for errors such as this was among my reasons to oppose coming here," Gladdic said. "But there is still a way for us to reach Kalabar: the same way we traveled there to begin with."
"Head back to the cavern the leviathan took me to, cross through to the Becoming, make way for the portal under the mountain to the Realm of Nine Kings, head to Allamar and hope Carvahal's there to take us to Yent to find Maralda again so she can send us back to that big tree in Kalabar, from which we'll travel across the Vault of the Sky to the Undazim, take it down to the belowlands, and find our way back to Adi and Tono?"
"Just so."
"That will take way too long. Between then and now, Nolost will almost certainly be able to build the power to launch an assault on the Emerald Titan—or to make a second one against our people."
"That is the risk we took on by coming here."
Dante's jaw tightened. "Do you have anything to say that can actually help us?" He pointed across the stone bridge to where tens of thousands of people were getting back on the march. "Or are you just going to keep telling me what a bad idea it was to stop all those people from getting slaughtered by demons?"
Gladdic shrugged. "There is no need to do any more talking. For there is only one path open to us."
"Gods damn it, you're right. I'll loon Nak to ask exactly where we are, then we'll make for the lake and grab the first sloop we can find. We can rest on the way to the leviathan's lair to have our full strength back before entering the Becoming."
"That's a not terribly appealing thought," Blays said. "Are we anywhere close to Wending?"
"I'm not sure. Why?"
"Because that's where Winden is, right? It's going to take us a day or more just to sail to the portal. If we grab her, we can at least use that time to slip over to the Mists and see if we can find a doorway to the Realm. It could save us a little time."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 46
