What Lies Beyond, page 22
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
He clenched his teeth. Whatever the hell was happening, he wasn't going to play by its rules. Breaking through the door would call down Samarand's wrath, but he didn't have to be half as obvious as that.
He turned to the back wall and sent his mind into the stone, intending to tunnel out and find Blays. The wall didn't move. No matter how many times he tried. As if his ability to manipulate stone was as illusory as the rest of his memories.
Feeling like he might throw up, he took a seat. When this didn't help, he stretched out in the straw. He didn't mean to close his eyes, because that made his dizziness worse, but he was exhausted. He slept.
~
Few things woke a person faster than the opening of the lock to their cell door. As soon as the metal scraped, Dante's eyes popped open. He scrambled to his feet.
Samarand entered, looking as distinguished as ever. "How are you faring?"
"I'm not sure."
"It must be a lot to come to terms with. Under better circumstances, I'd give you more time to do so. Unfortunately, the circumstances are what they are. I need you to answer some questions. And I need you to answer them truthfully. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Why did you agree to assassinate me?"
"Because you were driving Narashtovik to war on Mallon."
"Did Cally at any time tell you who he truly was? That he used to lead the Council?"
"No."
"You swear on your blood that this is true?"
"I do."
Samarand considered him, softening just a little. "Then your betrayal could have been worse. You may have been a tool of a bitter old man, but at least you were an unwitting tool. Still, though, why would you agree to such a thing? You were practicing the nether at that time. In Mallon, they'd kill you for that. So why would you agree to murder the head of the faith that would have welcomed you in?"
"Because you were waging war on my homeland," Dante said. "I thought you were insane. That you had to be stopped."
"You understand he chose you because it's easier to manipulate a child. But I think he had further reasons for wanting to get his hooks in you while you were young."
"What do you mean?"
"He saw the potential of your power. Couldn't you feel it when you took up the true copy of the Cycle? What it unleashed within you? I would have bet my left hand that you could have become a member of my Council—and probably before you reached thirty years old. There's a real chance you could have become something even more special than that. In another world, you might have ascended to a nethermancer beyond all measure. Someone who, in his power, might even have been able to restore Arawn to his starry throne."
She began to pace, eyeing him in a way that was indecipherable but clearly not approving. "Why would you throw this away? Cast aside such a future to pursue a crazed old man's personal revenge?"
"I didn't want my people conquered. And if what you're saying is true, Cally manipulated me into it. He might have even used sorcery to do so. How would I have known better?"
"By thinking it through! You no longer followed the faith of Taim, did you? You hadn't since the day you picked up the Cycle. You should have been traveling here to join me. But you didn't think! You've taken everything your life could have been and thrown it away."
Dante lowered his head. Nothing made sense to him; he no longer knew what to believe. The only thing he knew was that he was here. "I didn't know. I didn't know."
Samarand looked ready to do some more yelling, then sighed instead. "There are no answers to be found from you. Only a sad story of waste. But maybe there's still an opportunity to salvage something from the wreck. I'm going to make you an offer. First, you can choose to die. Beheading, I think. Fast. Clean."
"You're going to execute me?"
She looked down her nose at him. "You came here to assassinate me. You're lucky your guts aren't being reeled from your body as we speak."
"What's my alternative?"
"Submission. Serve me, faithfully, for the rest of your life. You will begin your submission as something even lower than an acolyte, and it will take you years to work your way up from that before you can be trusted with more. I will need to be convinced that your penance is real, along with your loyalty to me, and your faith in Arawn.
"After that, after I'm certain of your reform, you may be allowed to rise among our ranks as you are able. But I will stress again that this won't be easy. You will be a servant. You will have no power and your training will be minimal. You will have responsibilities, but they won't be anything challenging—or, frankly, all that interesting. But what you will have is a chance, in time, to become a useful person once more."
She spoke all this like it would be a grueling punishment. Yet for some reason Dante felt…relieved by her terms. As if a giant weight was being lifted from his shoulders. Check that: lots and lots of weights. No one would be praising him for his deeds, but no one would be hunting him, either. Or demanding the impossible of him, because he was the only one who could even attempt it.
"If I accept," he said, "what about Blays?"
"Clean execution."
"Let him free. Let him free, and I'll submit."
"That's out of the question," she said simply.
"Why? Because he's no use to you?"
"One of you has to die. If I don't impose punishment on people who tried to kill me, then I'll look weak. If I look weak, someone else will come for me. Someone likely to be a lot less crazy than Cally." She glanced up at the wall, as if thinking there might be a window there. "It's getting late. I know this is a consequential decision, but I need an answer."
Dante's head thudded. He couldn't see a way out. The knowledge that Blays had been beheaded in his place would be too much for him to bear. Even if he offered himself up instead, she'd just have the both of them killed. He could try to attack her instead—strike her down, smash down the door, find Blays, and sneak upstairs and over the wall.
Delusional. She was the most powerful sorcerer in Narashtovik, and he was just an apprentice. There was no way out but submission. It couldn't be as bad as it seemed, could it? Blays had been a loyal companion, and they'd even become friends, but still, they'd only known each other a few months. Dante should forget him soon enough.
So why did he know that wouldn't be true? That it would stay with him forever? That it would hurt like losing the deepest friendship of his life?
When the understanding came, he almost laughed.
He lifted his gaze to meet hers. "I'd like to take your offer. There's just one problem. How can I submit to someone that isn't real?"
She sighed and rolled her eyes, gathering herself to argue with him some more. Then she saw the look on his face and her mouth twisted with a sneer.
"I'm far more real than you think. Allow me to show you."
Shadows flew from her hands, all but blocking out the light. Dante was ready. He pulled everything he could to him. Yet what came was much less than he knew he ought to be able to summon. No more than he'd been able to handle as a boy. Samarand's attack rampaged into his defenses, black and white cinders popping in all directions. A few weak blades made it through, cutting him on the face and arms, drawing blood but dealing no meaningful damage.
Samarand summoned a second round of nether. Dante reached for more of his own. The shadows refused to yield with him. A whirling wall of black blades streaked toward his body.
Everything shuddered; with a sound like ripping cloth, his full power came to him, a river of energy that extinguished Samarand's assault at its source.
Dante smiled. "Samarand was never this strong. What are you?"
She stared him down, the quirks of her expression such a perfect match for the dead woman that he had to wonder if it might be her after all.
"I am a future that could have been," she said. "One that ends with Dante Galand, the simple monk who spends his days lost in the books he loves, who many turn to when they need to know some piece of history or lore, but who rarely leaves the Citadel, and never leaves Narashtovik. A man who, when he dies, is all but forgotten within a year. Remember this future when you think to yourself that you might have the power to challenge the gods."
Samarand—if it was really her—struck at him a third time. But he turned it aside, striding across the prison cell, which was already disintegrating around him, and poured the shadows down upon her head. When the nether faded, she was gone, too.
~
He was surrounded by light, a light too bright for him to see anything else. It faded like sunset.
He stood once more on the heights of Mount Arna. The storm was over and the White Tree was gone. He was alone.
He called for Blays, his voice sounding thin and weak in the solitude. Something tickled his face; a drop fell to the snow, staining it crimson. He touched his face. Blood.
Wherever he'd been, whether what he'd faced had been Samarand or something else, the wounds it had given him were real enough. When he healed himself, he felt less nether stirring than he should have had at his command. His expenditure of it had been real, too.
He stood in the cold, but he had no way of understanding what had just happened. So he walked off to find Blays.
There was a chance Blays was gone, buried in a drift or fallen off a cliff. But Dante found him just a little while later, a few hundred feet downhill. He was standing perfectly still and the snow had collected on his head and shoulders and drifted around his legs up to the thigh.
Dante knew before he called Blays' name that he wouldn't respond to it. He walked in front of him, drew back, and slapped Blays across the face. That felt pretty good, so he did it a second time.
Blays blinked.
"Are you in there?" Dante said. "Please say no. I'm not done slapping you yet."
"What do you want?" Blays muttered.
"You're trapped in…well, I have no gods damn idea what you're trapped in. Except I think the mountain's trying to kill us with it. It's time to get out of it."
"But I'm with Lia."
"Oh." Dante turned to gaze across the blankness of the snow. "Well, it's time to come back."
"Just give me one last day."
"I can't do that. If you spend another day with her, you'll wind up spending the rest of eternity with her, because you'll have frozen to death and gone to the Mists. Although you'll probably wind up stuck with Gladdic wherever he is instead, which I don't think any of us wants. Now come on. Come back."
Blays' left eye twitched. So did the corner of his mouth. He trembled, as if from the cold, then swayed forward, catching himself before Dante could. His eyes were hollow with grief and yearning.
He blinked against the sunlight dazzling from the snow. And smiled. "Never seen a blizzard do that before. What do you say we get to the Mill and then get the hell out of here?"
~
More snow. More stupid, cold, slogging, miserable, gods damned snow. Sometimes the monotony of the snow was broken up by the agony of naked stone and they climbed instead of hiked. Dante could see the peak at almost all times now, along with the pure light gleaming from it.
They were getting closer. But Dante was getting tired. He cleansed the exhaustion from their muscles. And walked on.
"We can't spend another night here," Dante said. "The mountain will kill us if we try. Even if we could find shelter from the next blizzard, we can't hide from whatever it's doing to our minds. We reach the Mill today, or we go insane and die."
Blays only nodded. Dante was vaguely aware that he was attempting to explain what they were up against to himself as well. They ascended another cliff, Blays shadowalking to the top and letting the rope down to Dante, but at the next bluff they faced, Blays' nether was spent, and they had to ascend it using nothing but their equipment and their muscles.
After, Dante had to flush the weariness from them again. Even with his healing, they needed a short rest before they were able to go on. The peak was a little larger now but every step felt like Dante's legs were about to go numb and collapse. They stopped speaking except for the simplest instructions. Dante couldn't seem to catch his breath even when they stopped to do just that.
Half a mile from the peak, as the crow flies, Dante's left leg buckled. He fell into the snow. And when he tried to get up, he couldn't.
He gave himself a moment, then braced himself and tried again. His legs would no longer support his weight. He washed the nether over himself, down his legs.
"Up you go." Blays leaned over, planting his hands on his knees. "Quit squirming around like a cave worm and let's get moving."
"I can't walk any more. I can't even stand up."
"Just a little further. We can do his."
"No," Dante said. "I can't."
"Oh, come on now. You're not really going to make me do this, are you?"
Blays dumped out most of his pack, keeping only the bare equipment they'd need to continue, then did the same with Dante's, though he kept the Book of What Lies Beyond Cal Avin. The rest he piled on top of the snow. He'd been carrying one of the ropes around his waist. He uncoiled it, threaded it through a handle on Dante's pack, and tied a knot.
"You're going to owe me a lot for this one," Blays said. "I'm thinking a lordly title. Or maybe two of them in case I disgrace the first one."
He leaned forward. And trundled toward Arawn's Mill, dragging Dante over the snow behind him. Embarrassing as it was, Dante didn't have the strength to get loose even if he wanted to, and he let himself rest instead. His legs spasmed unsteadily. Blays' boots crumped in the snow while it scraped softly beneath him. Other than Blays' steady breathing, there was no other sound.
The sky was a perfect blue, darker than it seemed like it should be, given that it wasn't long after noon. Dante got so lost in it that he stopped thinking of anything at all.
He came to a stop. Something thumped into the snow.
Dante twisted around. "Blays?"
"Your legs seem to have passed their wasting illness over to mine." Blays was stretched on the snow lying on his stomach. "I just need a minute."
One minute passed. Then five.
"I might have been optimistic about the legs," Blays said at last. "Don't suppose you've got any final tricks up your sleeves?"
"My sleeves are frozen."
"Yes, I didn't think so. Well. Our legs may have abandoned us, but there is one last thing we could try."
"Crawl?"
"Crawl."
They crawled. The blizzard had set down a bed of loose snow and there were times they sank all the way beneath it. They'd only been at it for a couple of minutes before Dante knew they wouldn't make it. Still, he kept going, and was proud of himself for doing so. It made it a little easier to accept it when his body gave out and he came to a stop in the snow and knew he wouldn't get any further.
"Thank goodness," Blays said. "I really didn't want to be the first one to quit."
"Outlasting me will be a great consolation when we're in the Mists for however many days they've got left before the lich's sorcery rips them apart."
Blays rolled on his side. "Should I get out the statue to keep us warm? Or should we let it happen quicker?"
Dante thought about it. "The statue, I think. If this place is going to kill us, we might as well make it work for it."
Blays fumbled with the cord of his pack, so exhausted he could barely operate his fingers. In time, he got out the statue of the dragon, which seemed to understand what was expected of it, for it started to emit warmth at once. Drops of water melted from the surface of the snow.
Dante lay on his back. The sky looked an even deeper blue than it had earlier. He tried to think of one last way to move forward, but his mind was as vacant as the firmament above.
Only the sky wasn't so empty anymore. Thin, curved clouds extended across his field of vision, white and branching. There was something funny about them that he couldn't put together until he could: they weren't actually clouds.
They were the limbs of the White Tree.
"Oh, gods damn it," he muttered. "Not this again!"
"Again? Just how many times have you been on the brink of death today?"
The voice wasn't Blays'. Yet it was, in its way, almost as familiar. Eyes stinging with sudden tears, Dante tried to sit up and found that he could; wherever he was, it was a place where he wasn't so exhausted.
He was back in the snowfield north of Narashtovik. An old man stood before him, long-haired and white-bearded, all of it more wild than it should have been for a man of his station. Mischief and merriment glinted in his green eyes—or were they blue today?
Dante's throat closed. "Cally?"
"So you remember me after all. That's good. There are times I feel like you've forgotten everything I ever tried to teach you."
"Are you real?
"Aha, so you've gone crazy. Yes, I feared this day would come."
"I'm not crazy," Dante said. "And if I am, it's the mountain's fault."
"Exactly what a sane man would say."
"That's what Mount Arna does to people. Don't you know of it?"
The old man waved an impatient hand in a gesture Dante remembered perfectly. "Never heard of it. Somehow in your still-young life you've managed to travel to places far more exotic than I ever did."
Dante got to his feet. "I've been…seeing things. It does that to you. Echoes of my past, when I was just a boy. The first things and people were just similar to memories of mine, but the last one was something more than an echo. I saw someone who claimed to be Samarand, who should be long dead, but I'm not sure it wasn't really her. So I'll ask again: are you real?"
