The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 13
Gladdic blasted the bladeling to bits. Dante reached into the ground underfoot and yanked them upward. Hard. A pillar of stone lifted them into the air so fast it threw him from his feet toward the edge of the platform. Gladdic fell on him, smashing them both to the ground.
"Thanks," Dante grunted, trying to push himself free.
He'd lifted them a dozen feet in the air. Just high enough that Blays could still reach the enemies with the spear. Blays was back on his feet, bleeding freely from his leg as he jabbed and slashed at the bladelings dragging themselves up the sheer sides of the pillar. Gladdic had already disentangled himself and was tending to Blays' wound, so Dante headed to the opposite side of the pillar, drawing his Odo Sein sword.
They were there, too. And some could jump high enough to stab their forelegs into the rim of the pillar. Dante slashed his sword back and forth at anything close enough to strike while spraying the nether into anything further away. It was mindless work, grim, but the creatures' undetailed forms—they hardly even had faces—provoked a bone-deep revulsion in him. When he killed them, he was happy to kill.
There were no more major threats to them after that. Still the bladelings didn't retreat or regroup, even as their numbers were cut to half, then a quarter. Only when a few dozen of them remained did they stop assaulting the pillar, backing away from it as they stared with their eyeless faces up at the three men.
"Don't let them get away," Blays said. "Even that many could be enough to overtake the town."
Dante nodded and sank the platform almost as fast as he'd raised it. The crowd of beings—much-reduced—turned and loped toward the village. Gladdic and Dante laid into them with bolts dim and bright. In the end, Dante had to pull up spikes of stone to trip the last of them before they could romp beyond their range.
After glancing about to make sure nothing was moving, Blays retracted the spear to its dull rod. "See? Told you we could do it."
"And you only got stabbed once," Dante said.
"That's not even worth mentioning in the diary."
"You keep a diary?"
"Up here." Blays tapped the side of his head. "For the future generations."
"Let us hope that no poisons are held within their bodies," Gladdic said. "Or else all the land will be blighted with their rot."
It felt like only a slight exaggeration. The ground between the slope and the bare circle of earth where Dante had raised the pillar was scattered with scores of corpses, most of them in multiple pieces. And the turf directly around the former pillar itself was so laden with chitin that it looked like the black fields of volcanic rock they'd seen in the Plagued Islands.
"Why did you do that?"
The voice was Kelen's; he'd come upon them with almost perfect stealth. Either that or they'd been too distracted by the field full of bodies.
"Kill the swarm of demons?" Blays said. "I'm sorry, are those holy back on Olastar?"
"It was an unnecessary risk."
"We did it for lots of reasons. But frankly, it's because I'm sick of them. And sick of Nolost thinking he can do this wherever he pleases. I don't know if these things or the entity itself can even feel fear. But I want to try to make them."
"Right," Dante said. "Now let's get back up to the forest before anything else happens."
"We cannot do that," Gladdic said. "Or else we have just done this for nothing."
"You must be succumbing to senility. Unless you're trying to tell me Nolost has a second, invisible horde here."
"He has no second horde—yet."
Dante stared at him, then swore. "You think there's another portal nearby."
"To the Becoming, yes."
"Which he can send another swarm of monsters through whenever he pleases. Meaning the people here are still dead. They just don't know it yet."
"Well we can't stick around here to protect them," Blays said. "We'll have to go tell them to flee into the woods." He jerked up his head. "Or we could destroy the portal to the Becoming."
"Even if Nolost reopens it later, that burns time and resources he could have spent scourging somewhere else. Kelen, that device of yours. Can it track portals here as well?"
"I don't know that." Kelen reached into a pocket. "But I can find out."
He got out his copper object. He spent some time fiddling with it—long enough for Dante to spend more time thinking about how, if Kelen were to be killed at some point, they might be able to go on by using the device themselves, meaning he should really try to figure out how it worked—and then flinched so hard he almost threw the device away.
"Yes," Kelen said. "Apparently it can."
He headed, unsurprisingly, in the direction the bladelings had approached from. There weren't any trees either in the gulch or along the bluff overlooking it and after a short distance Dante realized the slope was almost perfectly uniform, as if the people here had engineered it for some purpose. Stone posts were spaced along the gulch every few hundred yards and low stone platforms arose at irregular intervals. A…holy site? Grazing grounds, with the posts to mark whose range was which instead of fences, which would be washed away whenever the gulch flooded? Could be, but he suspected it was used for something else altogether, quite possibly something he'd never heard of before. Whatever it was, he would never see it again.
"It appears our efforts have not gone unnoticed," Gladdic said, sounding amused.
He was gazing behind them. A mounted figure had departed the town walls and was headed toward them at a fast clip. Whatever his mount was, it wasn't a horse; its frame was slimmer, its gait more bounding.
"If he's hostile, they think mighty highly of themselves, just sending the one of them." Dante came to a stop. "Let's see what they want."
The mount, which Dante decided was some kind of deer, was as fast as any horse he'd ever seen, and the man was soon almost upon them, slowing as he approached. He wore a deep green cape and a wrap of the same color around his head. A guardless sword hung from his hip. While most of the people they'd seen in their recent travels had looked wholly strange to Dante's eye, this man likely could have passed unnoticed in Gask, with dark hair, green eyes, and light skin.
"Greet," he said. The talismans Carvahal had given them made sense of his speech, but Dante could still partly hear his actual words, and they were pure gibberish. "Rovis sends me."
Dante didn't know if that was a person or a place, but concluded it didn't matter. "And greetings to you."
"You are strangers? Yet for us you fight?"
"Yes," Dante said, deciding to take a page from Kelen's book when it came to overexplaining himself.
"Yet why?"
"Because we're all fighting the same enemy."
"We?"
"Rale. The world."
"Everywhere this happens? All the world?"
"All the world."
The man's face fell. He gazed off at the heights of the red-forested mountains. "Then it is over."
"No. Not yet."
"How not? The Wise have looked well, and seen our end. They have just one hope left: that some others will live after we don't."
"There's no need for any of us to die. Not if we can stop those things from crossing over to our world."
"The demons? You know from where they come?"
"Hell," Dante said. "But we mean to destroy all the doorways it has to here. We should have that done within two weeks from now. Maybe less. Between then and now, your people need to keep themselves as safe as possible. Flee into the woods, if you have to. The deep places of the world. Wait until we close the hellgates. That's when you fight back. Not a moment before."
"The sign. What will it be?"
Dante pointed up at the angry reddened sky. "The storms, the plagues, the disasters—all of that should stop. But the demons will still be here. A great many of them. We'll have to purge them. If there's too many of them, it could take generations to finish the job. There could even be times when we need to go into hiding and only return when we've rebuilt our strength. Whatever happens, you must endure. Even if there comes a time when it seems like you must be the last people left in the world. Because you just might be."
"You speak like you see the future!"
"No, but I have seen the past. A time much like this one, when it seemed impossible that humanity wouldn't be extinguished forever. But we endured then. And that's what we'll do now." Orange lightning flashed from the clouds, drawing Dante's eye. "We have to be on our way. Tell the plan to as many people in as many places as you can. Then wait for the sign."
"That I will do," the man said. "Before you go—if you fight the demons, were you sent by the gods?"
"Not exactly. But that reminds me: if you've got any special prayers you really want the gods to hear, you better say them soon."
They parted ways. A half mile later, the four of them found the portal half-submerged in a lake that lay at the bottom of the gulch. The deep, triangular footprints of the bladelings marked the mud by the thousands, but none of the creatures were in sight.
They readied themselves and stepped through, ready for carnage. But the tunnel beyond was empty, too. Dante couldn't be sure, but he thought there was something different to the constellations drifting across the black ceiling and walls. Something sinister.
"So that portal leads to a specific place in Rale," Blays said, motioning behind them. "And that portal—" he pointed to the far end of the tunnel— "leads to a specific place in the Becoming. But this tunnel we're currently standing in is somewhere in Olastar?"
"Yes," Kelen said.
"So is there a way to climb through the wall there and out into somewhere in Olastar?"
"No."
"Well what kind of sense does that make?"
"There's nothing beyond the tunnel walls. It's no different than trying to step into the sky at the rim of a wildway. It doesn't go anywhere. You just get dissolved."
"And here I thought I was about to make a Discovery."
Dante stared at the black circle at the far end of the crossing. "Would it be possible to destroy the Becoming instead?"
"Of Olastar?" Kelen said. "Did you think about your question for one second before asking it?"
"Three or four seconds. It seems it didn't help."
"Can you just destroy Rale? Or the Realm?"
"I can't. But apparently someone like the entity can."
Kelen shook his head in annoyance. "Nolost isn't destroying Rale. He's destroying you. After you're gone, and things have settled down here, Taim will repopulate this world and link it to his new perfect afterlife."
"I don't think that's true. I think he intends to have the entity completely annihilate this plane and start from scratch."
"Even if that's true, it's not the point. The point is just what you said: you could never destroy this place, or even come close. So why would you think you could destroy the Becoming?"
"I'm sorry, I must have been confused by the fact we're about to destroy Olastar."
"Olastar is unique in that way. No other known realm is remotely like it."
"Well, it was an intriguing thought," Blays said. "But now that it's proven to be stupid and wrong, don't we have a job to do?"
Dante took another look down the tunnel. But it had been no more than a wild hope. He would just have to take solace in believing Olastar was as awful as Kelen claimed it was.
"Stay right by the doorway," he said to Kelen. "Once this thing starts ripping itself apart, we won't want to stick around."
The cut on his knuckle had closed some time ago and he reopened it. He called the nether to him and forged it into a long, jagged blade. He drove it into the ceiling of the tunnel. And ripped.
A black slash opened behind the blade, perfectly blank. The nether shrank and fizzled away as he pushed it onward, but the edges of the slash frayed too, shedding bits of ether and nether that blinked out like floating ashes. He shaped another blade and dragged it through the substrate near where he'd made his first gash.
"X-shaped patterns," Gladdic reminded him. "That is what worked best before."
Dante nodded, annoyed to be corrected even though it was correct. He withdrew the blade and carved a perpendicular line through the first one he'd made. The four flaps of the X sagged downward like wet canvas and disintegrated, leaving a square of empty blackness.
"Is it that simple?" Kelen said.
"The tunnel walls are just made of nether and ether," Dante said. "They can be damaged with the same substances just as easily. You don't have to tear apart the whole thing, either. Once you do enough damage to it, it becomes unstable and unravels on its own." He drew up another blade. "You didn't know this? I would've thought your people would be the masters of it."
"It's taboo. Wherever there is a link between two places, Olastar wanted it to be there. Tearing it down would be like if you were to smash a sculpture of a god. Even if it wasn't taboo, our sorcery doesn't damage it nearly this much."
"Like how when nether hits whatever you call that blue stuff, they mostly just bounce off each other?"
"The 'blue stuff' is called soma. But yes, I think you are correct."
Gladdic carved out his fourth X while Dante, distracted by conversation, hurried to finish his third. It would probably only take a few more, but better to overdo it than to underdo it and scamper away thinking the tunnel would collapse on its own only for it to still have enough integrity to patch itself back up after they left.
"What's that?" Blays said.
A ripple was passing down the tunnel toward them. Dante dropped what he was doing like it was on fire. Was it collapsing already? But that made no sense, once it began to tear itself apart, the process would begin where they were already doing the damage. He stepped back from the wall as the ripple passed by just like a gentle swell coming in to a beach. As it passed over the ragged black squares they'd cut from the substrate, the stars there gleamed back into being.
"What the hell?" Dante said. "It's fixing itself?"
He raked a load of nether to himself, readying to shred into the passage walls twice as hard. But as the ripple moved beyond them, the stars faded again, restoring the blank black squares. The ripple rolled to the doorway they'd entered through, which bulged before sinking back to its normal state.
"Anyone know what that was?" Blays said.
"It's already starting to destabilize," Dante said. "Be ready to run."
He summoned a new nethereal sword from thin air. From the corner of his eye, he watched Blays draw the rod from his belt. A cold tingle rippled up Dante's spine much as the swell had just passed through the tunnel. They had been sticking close to the entrance, but Blays now took three long steps back from it, keeping his eyes locked on the oily black surface.
"Uh," Dante said. "Exactly what are—"
The doorway exploded with motion. Dozens of black strands shot forward. They were wiry, little thicker than a man's arm. But their modest size was no comfort. For they weaved from side to side with the grace of a duelist, and each one was tipped with a barbed stinger dripping with foul venom.
"Well that's disgusting." Blays shook the Spear of Stars to battle-length. "You two finish up on the tunnel while I cut a hole through this demon for us to jump through."
Dante had already thrown several black darts at the stingered tentacles, but at Blays' word, he launched his next attack at a portion of the curved wall. The darts struck three of the tentacles, but instead of clipping them in half, they did no more than knock loose some black dust. The nethereal blade, meanwhile, barely penetrated two inches into the substrate. Dante leaned on it with his mind, trying to sink it deeper, but it was like trying to wriggle a shovel down into compact clay.
Blays' spear flashed as he cleaved it through a striking tentacle. Both halves of it fell to the ground, writhing into dust, but a new tentacle had sprung forth before the dying one had even smacked down. Ten of them lashed out at Blays in irregular intervals. He dispatched three—which were replaced just as quickly as the first—but was driven back by the rest. Blue light snapped from Kelen's hands as he shot soma into the tentacles.
"I might have been a little hasty on the not-helping-me part," Blays said. "In fact—"
He yelled out as one of the grotesque ropes slithered around his spear and stung him on the left arm. Gladdic whirled about as Blays fell back, waving the spear one-handed at the pursuing limbs.
Dante turned away from the wall, which he'd barely managed to start cutting into, and launched a barrage of nether into the jabbing stingers, cutting a few of them to the ground. Blays surged back to his feet. From his motions, Gladdic had fully healed him, but his face was deathly pale and marred with angry red squiggles, and he was sweating like he'd spent an hour running in the summer sun.
"That," he said, "hurt. But so will this."
He lunged forward, snapping the spear through the mess of tentacles at an upward angle, then spinning it downward and back up to the other side so that it carved a figure-eight through the enemies. It opened a big enough hole in them for him to take a step forward. But the tentacles were replaced with new ones before Blays could even get out whatever insult he was about to shout at them.
The three sorcerers laid into the wall of horror as well, filling the tunnel with the light of their powers and the smoke of severed limbs dissolving on the ground. But if anything the tentacles seemed to return faster and faster, the stingers jabbing closer and closer with each moment. Their venom smelled so sharply it stung Dante's nostrils and when a droplet of it landed on his cheek it hissed and burned.
A stinger twisted around Kelen's soma and stabbed him in the side. He dropped like his brain had been knocked out of his skull by a bolt of nether. It took Gladdic the blink of an eye to cleanse his body of the poison and get him back on his feet, but even that brief distraction was enough for the wall to push them back step after step.
"The hell kind of demon is this?" Blays said. "I've fought weaker gods than this!"
"Because it is no mere demon." Gladdic's voice was a strained croak. "It is him. We stand before the entity."
8
"No," Dante said, shaking his head like he was trying to get a beetle out of his ear. "We would have felt it!"
