What Lies Beyond, page 2
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
A cold draft seeped up from the depths, bearing the scent of pungent mold. The bridge rattled beneath their hooves as they reached the thinner secondary platform. It held perfectly firm, though, and they were soon back on solid ground.
Dante lifted his arm to give the bridgeman a wave, then continued east along the road. He'd only gotten a few steps forward when he was struck by sudden doubts about how hasty they were being. As long as they were right there, shouldn't they go back for more precise directions from the bridgeman? Or see if they could barter some supplies from the stocks in the guard tower?
But it was already too late: the soldier was calling to the tower. With a rattle of great chains, the bridge began to lift.
2
The road bore them east. Tall grass surrounded them on both sides. Dante watched it steadily for the rustling of predators, be they human or otherwise. Birds flew above the grass while mice ran around the stalks, but that was as threatening as their surroundings got. They came to the crossroads around two o'clock that afternoon. Crossroads often hosted a town grown around them. This one did not.
Instead, it hosted twelve-foot posts topped by person-sized platforms. The platforms were person-sized because each one of them bore a skeleton nailed to its surface.
Blays rubbed the back of his neck. "Looks friendly."
"No it doesn't."
"Well-ordered, at least. You know you're dealing with no-nonsense people when they nail their criminals to boards."
"Let's hope they were criminals."
"What else would they be?"
"Trespassers."
They turned south, or at any rate what the sun would have indicated was the south in their own world. Yet was that the case here? He glanced about the crossroads, but there were no sign posts or the like to indicate the cardinal directions, likely because the very thought of needing such a thing was ridiculous. So which way was south? Dante felt a moment of rising panic until remembering that the directions Elenna had given them to the doorway at Talassa had involved the same directional orientation he was used to.
Feeling much better, he turned right and headed what was almost certainly south. The bridgeman had told them the journey would be dozens of rowlands, which likely meant something between one and two hundred miles. Using the nether to keep their horses fresh, Dante hoped to cross the distance in three days.
The road had some cracks and gaps in the stones, but was still in fine shape. It unrolled across more prairie where green birds perched on the tips of tall, thick grass. Crickets sang to each other. Now and then weaselly creatures romped across the road.
Ten miles later, a forest swept across the landscape like gale-driven clouds. On entering it, it felt even older than the king's wood on the way to the bridge. Dante couldn't point to any one thing, but something about it felt wrong, and as the sun cut behind the western peaks, promising full darkness within another hour, he sighed, doubting they'd find their way out from it before they'd be forced to make camp.
They didn't. He would have liked to harvest a platform from high in a tree and pass the night there, but he was inconvenienced by the fact that horses couldn't climb trees, so he enclosed them within an eight-foot-high wall of earth instead. They ate some of the sausages and hard biscuits they still had from their earlier travels.
"We should start strategizing," Dante said.
"I thought we already had a strategy," Blays said around a mouthful of very dry biscuit. "Win what we can, and steal what we can't."
"Not for us. For the people back in our world. According to the Book of What Lies Beyond, it took Sabel months to acquire all of the parts of the spear. That's enough time for the White Lich to conquer the entire north."
"In that case, you'd better get the norren moving first. It could take months just to get all the different clans to agree that there's a war on the way."
"They won't all join us, but maybe we can at least convince the others to get out of the lich's path. The clans that do join us can look to organize raids to slow the enemy's advance."
"We can almost certainly count on Gallador to throw in with us, can't we? With the passes and the rift, that might even be the best place for Nak to make his big stand."
"Insisting on holding the battle in Gallador is about the only way we can guarantee they won't join us. We'll probably have to invite them to Narashtovik. The lich won't bother with their lands if they've already emptied them out."
Somewhere in the canopy, a bird hooted, the noise stark and loud in the darkness.
Blays glanced up into the dark boughs. "What was that?"
"The aerial hooting? I'm going to make the wild guess that it's an owl."
"Then it's the biggest owl I've ever heard."
"Unless you think it's an owl-griffin that's about to swoop down and snatch up the horses, I think we'll be fine. Now who else can we bring in on our side?"
"What about Gask?"
"Way too risky. If King Moddegan knows everything that's happening, he might try to sabotage us even with the White Lich on the rampage. At the very least, he'll work to rig any battle so that we get destroyed."
"Well if Moddegan's that much of a bastard, maybe we ought to convince the lich to go attack him."
"How do we do that?"
"By being brilliant and charismatic and irresistible to all women?" The owl hooted again. "I don't know how we're going to do it. I just know that we're going to, because it's our best chance to keep our people safe while we're over here."
"I'll get Nak to start thinking about it," Dante said. "Maybe we can—"
A dark shape swooped over their heads, so silent it might have been a living shadow. Blays ducked and reached for his sword. The two horses shuffled, stomping their hooves. Dante drew the nether to him, but the creature was already fading into the darkness.
Blays jumped to his feet. "That wasn't an owl."
"You barely got a look at it."
"Do you know a lot of owls with long dangly tails?"
Dante scowled and stilled himself, summoning a handful of ether. Its light glared up through the black branches. As he turned in a slow circle, the creature whisked over their heads. Its wings stretched nearly as wide as a man's armspan. But they bore no feathers. Instead, they were leathery. Its smooth chest was scaly. Rather than the mouse-like head of a bat, its head was clearly that of a lizard, and as it swerved toward one of the horses, it opened its jaws, revealing rows of slashing teeth.
Blays whipped out his sword, nether crackling down its steel, and flicked it at the creature. "Hyah!"
The flying lizard lurched upward and disappeared into the trees.
Blays sheathed his sword but kept his hand on its hilt. "If that thing really thinks it can carry off a horse, it's either much less dangerous than it looks, or a hell of a lot more."
It circled about for another pass. Dante shaped a needle of nether and fired it into the lizard's side. It wouldn't be enough to kill the thing, but he was hoping it would be enough to drive it off. It reacted with a trumpet of pain, flapping higher into the boughs.
"Some people say violence never solves anything," Blays said. "But that's just not been my experience at all."
Dante craned his neck up at the trees. The lizard honked again, more distantly. He eased his hold on the nether.
The air filled with the sound of stirring, featherless wings. Three lizards soared down from the trees. Then ten. Then dozens. Blays unsheathed both swords as Dante threw flechette-like blasts of nether at the sudden flock. The lizards at the front diverted from the assault, but many more swooped downward. The horses dashed around the earthen enclosure, shrieking as the lizards nipped at their flanks.
Blays threw himself to the side to avoid getting trampled. "Will you do something? I didn't go to the trouble of stealing those horses just to feed them to a flock of flying lizards!"
Dante shaped a new volley of nether. These bolts were large enough to kill, and when they struck their targets, the lizards trumpeted and veered away—or plopped dead to the ground. Yet the whirl of the flock was denser than ever, as if the brouhaha was attracting even more of them from the depths of the night. He gathered a heaping mound of shadows to him, preparing to blast the entire forest down if he had to, then thought better of it and sent it into the earth below them. Where he hit rock, he softened it and pulled it to the surface, flowing over the hard clay walls he'd originally raised to shelter them. The earth moved above their heads, sealing them beneath a roof of solid stone; alarmed at the unnatural motion, the lizards within the walls scattered upward before they could be trapped inside.
"Okay, so violence solves most problems," Blays said, breathing heavily and staring up at the rocky ceiling. "But magic is even better."
"Not necessarily true. We just didn't have enough violence at hand, forcing us to get creative."
Small claws scratched and dug at the outer surface. Dante shaped a few narrow holes into the enclosure to give them air. Snouts pressed themselves to the holes, snuffling hungrily. Yet for all its numbers, the flock made no progress in gaining entry to the bunker, and as Blays soothed the horses, the noise of the lizards diminished until the night was silent once more.
Blays rearranged his blankets. "Now I know why those bodies at the crossroad were offered to the sky like that."
"To be eaten alive? I hope they at least did something worse than stealing horses."
"Did those things look like dragons to you?"
"No, by virtue of the fact there is no such thing as dragons."
"But if there were, they'd look an awful lot like those things."
"Except much bigger."
"Well, maybe these are just their babies."
It was not a comforting thought that there might be so many dragons about that thousands of their babies were ready to enswarm them every night, but that possibility only helped Dante stay awake during his portion of the watch. The rest of the night passed without incident. Once the soft light of morning filtered through the breathing holes, Dante brought the nether to him, braced himself for assault, and swept open a horse-high hole through the side of the bunker. This revealed a perfectly normal morning.
A few of the dead lizards were lying about. Or their skeletons were, anyway; they'd been picked to the bone. Dante gave them a quick examination like he might a body brought to the carneterium.
He ran his fingernail down a score in one of the larger bones. "As an expert in gruesome matters, I'd say these animals were eaten."
Blays readied his horse. "Is that why none of their flesh is left? I'm just a simple person-stabber, and not a great sorcerer-philosopher, but I'd suggest we get the hell out of here."
They did so, riding through the forest until it gave way around noon in favor of more grassland. Dante opened his loon connection with Nak and the two of them exchanged their plans and most recent intelligence. After Nak's defeat of the White Lich's overstretched Blighted in the forests of Mallon, the lich was doing his usual consolidation of forces, but there was no doubt he'd be back on the march shortly, likely looking to take the rest of Mallon before its people had time to react to the loss of Bressel. Nak's goal would be to get as many Mallish out of harm's way as he could, then harry, obstruct, and delay the lich to buy Dante and Blays as much time as possible—all without risking getting sucked into a head-on battle with the enemy.
Blays made an intrigued sound, pointing across his body. Miles away, a band of people were crossing the prairie, some mounted and others on foot. Nearly all of them seemed to be male and they were all armed with some combination of spears, bows, and axes.
"Better get a move on." Dante nudged his horse faster. "Before they decide we're somewhere we shouldn't be."
"What's the matter? Don't think we can handle a simple tribe of barbarians?"
"I think this place is very strange and we need to do our best not to get bogged down in any entanglements like always happens to us."
They detoured behind a low hill. When they emerged from it, the raiders were nowhere to be seen. The landscape shifted again, to a strange patchwork of small hills no bigger than a house mixed with broad, shallow divots filled with shrubs and standing water. The road did its best to stick to the high points, but stains on the rocky ground indicated the water sometimes rose high enough to flood it.
Blays squinted at one of the murky pools. "What happens if it starts raining?"
"We start cursing," Dante said. "And then we start floating."
He pushed onward, faster, alternating his horse's speed and refreshing it with nether to keep up the pace. The land was bleak, with no hints of human habitation. Something about it made him feel uneasy and he carried on after nightfall, lighting the way with his torchstone, until they passed from it and back into the prairie.
He built another bunker for them to spend the night in. Before sleeping, he paged through the Book of What Lies Beyond the Land of Cal Avin, searching for any places where Sabel might have approached Arawn's land and found a way past whatever made it inaccessible to outsiders. Nothing seemed relevant.
They moved on in the morning, stopping when they encountered wild vines bearing the orange berries they'd seen at the farms, which they could be reasonably sure wouldn't poison them. Several miles onward, giant stone columns lay shattered across the grass, hundreds of feet in length and scores of feet across. Their rough sides didn't appear to be shaped by human hands, but the end of one of the columns was largely unbroken. Its surface was flat—except where the foundations of houses had been carved from it.
Dante ran his hand over the worn stone. "They lived on top of these? What would drive them to do that?"
Blays shrugged. "They were probably trying to get away from all the ground-dragons."
Dante wanted to poke around the ruins for hints of who these people had been and what had had the power to destroy their pillar-towns. But he also wanted to save his own people from being annihilated by the Eiden Rane, and so he rode on, leaving the mystery behind him. Not long after, they spotted a lone figure walking down the road three miles behind them. For a while he seemed to be keeping up with them despite being on foot, but by the time Dante found a fly to kill and send back to spy on him, the figure had disappeared from the road.
Gusts of wind began to blow from the south, bearing dust and grit that caught in their eyes and teeth. The grass and shrubs turned from green to yellow. Soon after they became gray, then disappeared altogether, leaving the land empty, yellowed and desolate, the cracked, dry earth and coarse sand cemented together into one massive brick.
Then the road itself vanished. There was only the wasteland of the Claimless Reach and they continued into it but the land was all but featureless, lacking hills or even boulders to act as landmarks, and Dante had to reckon their direction by the sun itself, or by glancing behind him to confirm that at least the mountains were still there, although he could no longer see them directly to the east or the west. Dante reached into the nether to search for signs of hidden passages like the one Gladdic had found beneath the city of Barsil in the Mists, but saw nothing out of place.
Blays drifted to a halt, gazing behind him, then ahead. Sand rattled over the hardpan. "Are we sure we're getting anywhere?"
"The bridgeman said Arawn's territory was past the end of the road. Just keep your eyes sharp, the entrance is probably hidden from travelers."
"What I mean is I don't think we're moving forward any longer."
"That would seem to be contradicted by the fact our horses' legs are moving."
"But everything's staying the same. Look back there, where the last of the shrubs are. Have they gotten any further away?"
Dante was annoyed, but did so. The skeletons of the dead plants looked to be about two miles to their north. "Well, that's impossible. It's a good thing this is an unpopulated wasteland with no one around to laugh at you, because you're about to look like an idiot."
He nudged his horse into a walk. The sky was starting to grow hazy, likely with fine dust. Dante passed a rock that was just large enough and reddish enough to stand out a bit. He quite clearly moved past it, and when he turned around, it continued to recede behind him.
Yet when he looked back for it a second time, he couldn't pick it out from the landscape. And ten minutes of travel after Blays had made his ridiculous claim, the dead shrubs still looked to be right about two miles distant.
Blays shielded his eyes against a sudden gust of dust. "Now who looks like an idiot? It isn't me, and you're the only other one here."
"It's still impossible," Dante said. "It just so happens that it's actually happening, too."
"At least this means we won't have to go as far to retrace our steps on our way out of here."
"We're not going anywhere. Not until we've checked this where out."
"What exactly are we checking out? The dust? Or the other dust? It feels like we could keep walking forever and nothing would change."
"That just means there's less we'll have to investigate."
Dante reached for the nether, meaning to do some more searching for hidden passages or layers in the earth. He experienced a sensation something like walking through a dark room and dropping down a staircase you didn't know was there.
His mouth went dry. "The nether's gone."
"What do you mean the nether's gone?"
"I mean there's no nether!"
Blays tipped back his head and took a step forward, as if he was meaning to move into the shadows. Instead, he just took a step across the empty desert. "Oh. The nether's gone."
Dante tried a few more times, then cleared his thoughts and opened himself to the ether. It wasn't there, either. "We're either in the exact right place, or the exact wrong place. Do you see…uh, anything?"
"Not since the road ended. That's what I've been trying to tell you."
Dante kicked at the dirt, stirring a cloud of dust that didn't seem to know where to go. He turned in a slow circle. Behind him, the air glimmered, but it was so faint he could barely see it, so brief he wasn't sure if it was nether or ether. The potential threat made him summon the nether instinctually, but of course it still wasn't there. He gritted his teeth, hand on the grip of his sword, and watched the spot where the glimmer had been.
