The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 11
"I don't suppose you can build me a bridge to that thing?" Blays said.
"We mustn't wait," Kelen said. "More of them could arrive at any time!"
"Yes, but I could still kill that one."
"If I could get the dirt to move, I would have dropped a ton of it on him long ago," Dante said. The oval island shook beneath them. "I'd say it's time to go!"
Blays jabbed the spear toward the Xonos, who had retreated to a distance of a hundred yards. Electric blue light spiraled from the tip of the spear and crackled toward the unearthly being. The platform shook again, much harder, a crack shooting through its center.
Blays cursed the Xonos' name, swung about, and ran through the portal before he could see if the beam had struck home.
Dante waited for Kelen to enter the doorway, then entered. He stumbled, dizzied by the process, and stood to find himself within one of the now-familiar black tunnels spotted with stars.
"Through the other end," Kelen directed. "Quickly. They can follow us into this place."
Blays shook his spear, which cast its radiant light to all sides. "Can't we let them?"
"If you want to risk leaving yourself with no way to return to Olastar."
Blays muttered something and jogged toward the far end of the tunnel, collapsing the spear down to the dull, unlit rod.
"Where do you suppose we're about to wind up?" Dante said.
Blays shrugged. "There's only one way to find out."
As he reached the second doorway, Dante glanced back down the passage. Blue light rippled over the first doorway. He hopped through the one before him.
Everything swayed again. Dante fell to his knees, which he then had to crawl forward on lest someone stumble over him. "Where the hell are we?"
"I…don't know." Behind him, Blays stumbled forward, reaching out to maintain his balance.
Dante didn't know what world they were on. He couldn't even rule out the possibility they'd been ejected back to Ardos. The sky was glowering and gray, diffuse orange lightning flickering within the dark clouds. Before them, a forest of autumn-red trees swathed the hills, interrupted by towers and columns of pure white stone—which, now that he thought about it, at least ruled out Ardos, as it was unsettled, though it could easily be the Realm or even the Becoming.
Wherever it was, they were too exposed to it, being on a barren slope overlooking several settlements, one of them quite large and grand. They made their way uphill until they entered the treeline. The air smelled heavily of ozone and leaves, further ruling out the possibility they were in any part of the sterile-smelling Olastar.
"What just happened?" Dante said, turning on Kelen. "We're totally screwed!"
Kelen gave him a look of contempt. "We all look well enough to me."
"Well looks are pretty gods damn deceiving then, aren't they?"
"Now you will have to tell me what on earth you are talking about."
"The wildway just tore itself apart! We have no way to get back to Olastar, let alone Pholos!"
The Gothoi waved a dismissive hand. "You're only worried because you have no idea what you're talking about. It's perfectly fine."
"For the wildways are not fixed," Gladdic said. "It will repair itself in time."
"In probably less than a day."
"So what?" Dante said. "Then we go back and get attacked by the Xonos that knows the exact spot we'll be returning to?"
"It won't be there," Kelen said. "Not unless you summon it again."
"You try biting your tongue while you're getting stung by a giant venomous ant by surprise. What, then? The Xonos is just going to go off to sleep?"
"Something close to that, yes. They only leave their trance when something disturbs them. That's how people are able to use the wildways in the first place. If the Xonos were constantly vigilant, there'd be no chance."
"Oh." This had just caused Dante to undergo a momentous swing in morale from crushing despair to moderate enthusiasm and he felt more discombobulated than on his first trip through a portal. "So we just have to sit here for a while?"
"There is some news you won't find as positive. We won't be able to use the wildway again even if he wanted to. We will have to return to Gothon and travel to the kingdom of Harasphont after all."
"Then we've wasted days on this."
Kelen held up a finger. "If we make it back through the wildway. If we don't, then we've wasted everything."
"Inarguably," Gladdic said. "Yet that has been the case for us at every step of the way. It has done nothing to dissuade us before."
He flapped his robes with an air of finality. There was both smoke and movement down in the settlements and they withdrew a little further into the woods before settling on a toppled tree that made for good seating. Dante was now fairly sure they were somewhere in Rale, though it was somewhere he'd never seen nor heard of. It didn't have the heightened sensation of the Realm or the Becoming. That left their own world…unless there were still others they knew nothing about. Something he was now almost certain was true.
More interesting than this, however, was the thought of how many portals to Rale must be scattered across Olastar. If you were to assemble a map of them (including the ones that acted as shortcuts across the various layers of Olastar), you could probably use them get to any other part of Rale within a matter of days. If only they'd known about them sooner. Trade, knowledge, travel, it all would have been revolutionized. It was quite possible the lords of Rale could have used the passages to coordinate their efforts against Nolost and drive him out by themselves, without any need for anything so desperate as Dante and the others were now forced to.
Had the portals been open, waiting, that whole time? If all it took to reveal them was brushing them with stray nether, it seemed grossly unlikely that they hadn't been accidentally rediscovered by someone at some point. Then again, maybe they had been discovered, even multiple times—but the discoverers had entered the portals, trying to learn what they were, and then never returned.
The only real alternative was that they'd been inactive until fairly recently. Which in turn either meant someone, presumably the gods, had deliberately reactivated them, or that this reactivation had been triggered by some event. Like when the White Lich had opened his portals. Or maybe they had done it themselves through some strange sorcerous sympathy when they'd crossed over into the Mists or the Realm for the first time.
Or maybe they had been reactivated by coincidence by a total stranger in a faraway land as the result of something that had nothing to do with them in the slightest. That option was either the funniest or the most frightening. If it was true, that stroke of chance was the only reason they still had any hope at all.
"The Xonos, that was a demon of some kind?" Dante said. "What is that place?"
"Olastar. And its layers. You know that by now," Kelen said.
"But it's your home. Was, anyway. Until you decided you'd rather eradicate it altogether. What could provoke you to want such a thing? It can't possibly be the mere existence of the Xonos."
"How is that any of your business?"
"Because we're traveling together to do that very thing for you?"
"No we're not. We're traveling together to destroy it for your reasons."
"But you have to admit that we're helping you out, too."
"And? How does that oblige me to reveal my life to you? It is my own, and I don't owe you any part of it."
Dante frowned down at one of the white-pillared towns, which was beautiful even beneath the surreal skies of Nolost's wrath. He reminded himself what when they'd met Kelen, it had been twenty miles deep in a murderous living land, down in an escape tunnel he'd dug in case the enemies that had driven him to such a place decided to come for him there as well. He'd been alone there for years, and in exile for decades, possibly centuries. Even if he hadn't been born so disagreeable, it was hardly surprising that he'd become it since then.
"You're right," Dante said. "Your life is your own. Maybe it's better this way, for us to not know anything about these people or their world. That will make it easier to destroy them. And to forget them."
The four of them gazed out on wherever it was they had escaped to.
"This may be the most beautiful place that I have ever seen." Gladdic motioned to the sweep of blood-red forests and the ivory cities settled within them. "It reminds me of my youth."
"You had a youth?" Blays said. "I kind of always figured you hatched out looking just like this."
"I have mentioned it to you before," Gladdic said, without any irritability. "Though not of the period of my life I refer to now. I do not know what season it is here, but despite the color of the trees, I do not believe it is autumn. Yet this is very much how it looked in the autumn at Quent."
"Quent?" Dante said.
"It is in the Western Kingdoms, far upriver from Allingham, at the base of the Wirling Mountains that overlook the sea."
"The mountains across from the Carlons."
"Just so: if you have ever sailed from your city to Bressel, you will have seen them, although from the opposite side from Quent, which is on the northern side of the Wirlings. We traveled some, when I was a child. That was a part of the trade, travel. This was in the years of the Dappled Plague. The priests were too occupied by the disease to travel from the larger cities to places as remote as Quent, and so my father purchased medicines from afar to bring back home and to neighboring places. He could have sold his wares for as much as he wanted. Yet I believe he sold them to the people so cheaply that it drove him into deep debt, and he was all but ruined.
"I was deemed too young to travel with him, and so in his absence, I explored the woods—and gathered what I could to bring to my mother, who had little silver to keep our family fed. In the summer there were great heaps of blueberries, though these were also contested by the bears. I found I greatly preferred the autumn: five kinds of mushrooms grew then, two of which were so prized my mother would always sell them rather than let us eat them ourselves.
"There is also a sense in that time of year for the need to prepare, to be ready to endure. For if you fail in any way, you will freeze, or starve, or both, and not live to see the next fall. All people feel it, even in the cities, where the seasons are less pressing. But this sense of the coming cold is especially strong in the mountains. I carry it with me to this day.
"Even though this time of year is a mortal warning, that does not have to come paired with great worry and fear. For it also lets one appreciate that it is not yet winter, and that even when it is, winter will also pass, in time. The fall shouts this at you with the changing of the leaves of the trees. In Quent, they turn a bright red, as bright as the ones we now look at."
Gladdic picked one up from the ground by the stem and held it before his face. "Whenever I fall into dark thoughts that I cannot shake, I think of the leaves of Quent in the autumn. I am reminded, then, that whatever troubles lay before me today, they will some day be behind me. And something more: that even if I am now old and dour, incapable of undoing either, perhaps that is just the price I had to pay in exchange for once having been a young, carefree boy left to explore the forest as I pleased."
"That's not so different from when I was a little kid," Blays said. "Except my dad was out in the Western Kingdoms because he was fighting wars for money. I had a forest too, though. Somewhere west of Bressel. It was nice."
"Once this is over, and we return home, do you intend to have children of your own?"
"I do. And I intend to make Dante pay me a fat salary for doing nothing but sitting in front of my manor next to a well-supplied keg."
"I doubt anyone's going to have much in the way of riches after Nolost's torn half the world down," Dante said. "But the silver lining to having our lands and homes ruined is that everyone else's lands and homes will also be too ruined to cause us any trouble for a long, long time. We'll have an incredible amount of work in front of us. But I think we'll finally have peace, too."
"That would be a more hopeful age than the one that has led up to it," Gladdic said. "I would not be sad to live to see it."
The skies above the city darkened, orange lightning flashing erratically. For a moment, Dante thought he saw an immense face staring down at them from the black clouds. But the lightning flashed again, and it was gone.
"They arrested me for telling the truth," Kelen said.
Dante swung his head about. "In Olastar? That's what made you hate them?"
Kelen nodded.
"Not to make too little of whatever you went through," Dante said. "But in Rale, people get arrested for telling the truth all the time. In Mallon, for instance, they'll happily execute you for telling the wrong truths about the nether. Hell, there are parts of the Cycle of Arawn—my own doctrine—that I know are false. But if someone was using the truth to try to stir up trouble, I'd still arrest them."
"Then maybe you would have persecuted me, too. But I couldn't abide it any longer. I had learned the truth about the gods, and I had to tell the people of it."
"What was the lie? That a particular one of the gods was evil or something?"
"No. That they existed."
Dante blinked. "What now? They can't truly believe…"
"I said just what I mean. They don't believe the gods exist."
"You are referring to the Celeset, right? Arawn, Taim, all those fellows? Hang on, does Olastar have its own host of gods?"
"You still aren't listening to me, Dante. They don't have gods. They don't believe in any of them."
"I didn't know people could…do that," Blays said.
"Don't look so shocked," Dante said. "You're about the third least-pious man I've ever known."
"Well maybe you shouldn't hold services so early."
"They're at noon!"
"And?"
Dante turned to Gladdic. "Have you ever heard of such a thing?"
"I have known, in my time in service to the priesthood of Mallon, a small city's worth of heretics and infidels," Gladdic said. "But rarest of all among these was the man who believed nothing at all. Surely a whole kingdom of them—a whole world of them—would become unmoored from all morals, and soon turn on each other until all were dead."
"Well it turns out it doesn't work like that," Kelen said. "There are still kings and soldiers. And a land in anarchy is no use to its king. Are there times of unrest and anarchy nevertheless? Yes. There are. But I doubt it's any worse than in your world."
Dante leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees. "But there are gods. We've seen them."
"I know that. What do you think convinced me to open myself to persecution? I had already begun exploring the portals and what was beyond them. That's how I saw them with my own eyes."
"Do they just not know any better? Or are they lying to the masses?"
"Oh, most are true believers in their non-belief. Why wouldn't they be?"
"Because they're so obviously wrong!"
"That isn't obvious. Not at all. Other than me, when was the last time anyone on Olastar set eyes on a god? Or had divine messages delivered to them? Functionally, there aren't any gods. No one ever sees or speaks to them. They might as well not be real."
"I don't think anyone on Rale has seen or heard from them in an age, either. But we still never lost our faith in them."
Kelen gave him a smug look. "That doesn't make you any better than us. In some ways it makes you more stupid. Really, you might be better off if you didn't know anything about the gods. If you didn't, they might not be trying to kill you right now."
"I doubt it. Taim seems dead-set on redoing the afterlife and getting it right this time. But that's another thing, isn't it? If your people deny the gods, what do they think happens to you when you die?"
"You die."
"That's it?"
"Some profess that there is an essence within us that merges with the essence of the world upon death. Which really isn't all that far from how it really works, now is it? Some others believe that after you die, you are reborn in a mirror-version of Olastar, and after you die there, you are then reborn to Olastar, and so on forever. There is even one sect—though it's more accurate to call them a school—that thinks we are all part of a single great soul, and we just don't know it. So when we die, we're not really dead. It's just that one minute part of the soul has winked out, like a single ember going dark in a huge bonfire." He plucked a blade of grass and flicked it away. "But these sects aren't all that common. Most people just believe that you die."
"So you're born, and live sixty or seventy years if you're lucky—or three years if you're not—and then you die, and that's all? You're gone for the rest of eternity? I can't imagine believing something so bleak. Why isn't everyone just killing themselves?"
"Who cares?" Blays said. "If they're wrong, they're wrong. We were certainly wrong about a whole bunch of stuff for a whole lot of time. And if we get done what we're trying to get done, our lives are going to be just like theirs anyway."
"What do you mean?"
"We're not going to keep worshipping the gods, are we? The guys who tried to exterminate us? Who can no longer see or hear us, or have anything else to do with us? Beings who can no longer punish us for our misdeeds, or reward us for our virtue?"
"I…hadn't thought about that," Dante said. "But we don't know they won't be able to keep watching us, somehow. They're gods, after all. Anyway, what does it matter if they can't see us anymore? That doesn't mean they'll stop existing. That doesn't mean they'll stop being true."
"Maybe not. But it's going to be different. Maybe a lot different. Just wait and see." Blays motioned to Kelen. "Anyway, this is insanely off-track. You were supposed to be telling us why you were arrested."
"I already told you that," Kelen said. "I told the truth."
"Right, that the gods actually exist and so forth. Surely there was more to it than that?"
