The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 24
"Well," Blays said. "Time to see if this works here."
He rippled unsteadily, flickering in and out of view. And disappeared.
The substrate of the nether rattled and bucked. Dante could feel Blays rushing forward through it, the nethereal commotion following with each of his steps. Dante didn't know if the Hypatians could use the nether—he'd never seen one of them do it—but as Blays neared the knot of enemy sorcerers, three of them lifted their heads in confusion, momentarily distracted.
Blays popped back into being directly behind them. He swung the spear sidelong like a bat. Light seared across the hallway. The sorcerers cried out, grabbing at the soma in a mad panic, but only managed to loose a few stray bolts of it. The spear absorbed them all as it battered into the crowd. Where the blade made contact, it cut through everything it touched, sending halved bodies every which way. Where the shaft made contact, it struck with the force of a giant swinging the trunk of an uprooted tree. If those it hit weren't killed at once, they were when they slammed into the wall an instant later.
Blays stood alone, spear curled behind his back. Gore made unpleasant noises as it slopped down the ceiling and walls. Dante was already running toward Blays and grimaced as he saw the condition he was in. From what Dante had seen, none of the sorcerers had managed to hit him with anything. Yet his clothes were shredded and frazzled, and his face and arms were crossed with oozing red cuts.
"I don't think I should do that again," Blays said.
Dante gathered nether to heal him. "What the hell happened?"
"We should get out of here right now."
He took his own advice, running to the end of the hall and opening the door there. As they headed down the steps, the first of the second group of Hypatians rounded into the hall. Their pursuing footsteps were soon drowned out by screams of horror as they came to the aftermath of the spear.
The four interlopers reached the bottom of the stairwell and Dante led them out into the basement hallway. Three dalaxa clustered not far down it, heads cocked in wonderment at whatever had been happening upstairs. They turned to the outlanders with friendly smiles as Dante and the others ran past them.
It turned out they were in a different hall than the one Dante had explored with his fly, and he had to backtrack once, bringing them into view of the crowd of soldiers and sorcerers that had followed them into the underground. The foes attempted to pelt them with soma, but Dante sprinted around the closest corner and found himself on familiar ground. As soon as he refamiliarized himself with which end of the passage was which, he ran as fast as he could to the stairwell leading to the lowest level of the palace.
"Keep your eyes open," he said, voice echoing around him. "There will be at least one sorcerer ahead of us."
They came to the bottom, where Dante wielded the shadows to cut through the locks on the doors as quietly and discreetly as he could. This turned out to be a total waste of focus, though, because he could hear their pursuers entering the stairs above them, and he now had to turn around, gather the shadows, and slam them into the staircase wall, collapsing it and filling the way behind them with rubble—an event that was about as discreet as a tornado.
He turned away, coughing from the dust rushing past him, and joined the others in the huge cavern.
"It's just ahead," he said. "It will look like a huge wall of runes. Kelen, you're going to have to do something to it."
"Which is?" Kelen said.
"I'm not sure. Something with the red stuff."
"Neuma."
"You'll have to…attack the wall with lightning. In a circle."
"Attack it with lightning?"
"I'll show you. As best as I can, anyway."
Stone grated behind them, but it was heavily muffled. Ahead, an agonizingly bright light stopped them short. He had forgotten to warn them about that.
"Don't worry," he said softly. "Just follow my lead."
He brought the nether as close as he could without actually drawing on it. The hooded figure emerged from the light. Dante couldn't make out his face, but he didn't sense that the sorcerer was yet drawing on any of his own powers.
"Who are you?" The man scowled, leaning in for a better look. "What are you?"
Dante stabbed a blade of shadows through the man's heart. He fell down dead, but he was a sorcerer, and so he stuck a second blade through his head as well.
"He should be the only one," he said. "But I wouldn't say that now's the time to get too relaxed."
Walking forward, the burning-bright light dimmed. Revealing the wall of runes. Dante thought he was at the right part of it, but he badly hoped it didn't matter.
"So." He pointed up at the wall. "What the guy I just killed did to open this thing was to jab it with little red lightning. And then keep expanding and forking the lightning until it formed a circle about thirty feet wide. Like this."
He demonstrated with the nether. A single finger of shadows danced across the silvery runes. It branched into three strands, then seven; at once, there were too many to count. And yet it continued to fork outward, expanding like a stain, writhing like the river of ants they'd crossed in the wildway.
Once it was roughly the same size as the one the dead man had made, Dante gestured up at it and took a step back. "Like that. But with the neuma."
"I don't know how to open it," Kelen said. "I've never seen a style like that before."
"Me neither. Just imitate it and see if that's enough to do the trick."
Brows bent in irritation, Kelen splayed his hand at the wall. Red light streamed to it and spread across it chaotically. It twitched and sizzled as it widened in diameter from a couple of inches to a foot, and then five feet, and then thirty.
"Stop there," Dante said.
"Is it working?"
"Uh…no. But it's the right size."
"Then I've done something wrong."
"Maybe I'm wrong. Try making it a little bigger."
Kelen sent more neuma into the wall, expanding the circle until its lower edge was touching the ground.
"Right," Dante said, trying to remember the exact process the Hypatian sorcerer had used and realizing that accurately memorizing it should have been the most important thing in the world to him. He'd tried to do so, but not as hard as he should have. He'd been lost in the throes of the dalax, though. It would be a horror if they had found a way to escape from it, only for its ongoing consequences to cost them their lives after all. "Now…stop. Everything. Let it fade away."
Kelen nodded and cut off the stream of neuma. He dropped his hand. The circle of lightning dimmed and calmed. Then disappeared altogether. The wall was no different than before.
Blays glanced back at the dead body of the sorcerer. "Maybe you shouldn't have killed that guy."
"We're going to figure this out," Dante said. "We've only just started."
"I don't even know what form to shape the neuma in," Kelen said. "Am I supposed to just leave it as pure light? Or actually attack the wall with it? Or something else altogether?"
Stone rattled dryly in the distance. The stairwell was too far from the light to see. Dante had lost his flies during the skirmish upstairs. But, as Blays had just pointed out, there was another body right in front of them. He reanimated the dead sorcerer and sent it trundling toward the stairwell.
"Try something different," Dante said. "It doesn't matter what."
"It would be a lot nicer if you knew what I was supposed to do," Kelen said.
"Well, I don't. So you can either get to work on finding out what that is, or we can wait for them to break through the rubble and come kill us."
Kelen muttered something and sent more neuma to the wall. He expanded the circle of lightning as before, but this time it made a crackling noise. When he reached the right size and let the neuma fade away, a bit of smoke rose from the wall, but it still looked unchanged.
Dante's zombie reached the stairs. They remained blocked by debris, but a lot of heavy scraping was coming from the other side of the blockage. As another hunk of rock was lifted away, a shaft of light speared through the rubble and into the room the zombie was standing in.
"Try again," Dante said. "They'll break through in another minute."
Kelen sighed testily. This pierced Dante with the sudden urge to kill him, which had to be an aftereffect of the dalax. Kelen swooped his arms dramatically as he struck the center of the wall with a little red thunderbolt. He continued to gesticulate as he drew the circle wider, the neuma reaching out for new ground like inchworms spreading across the bole of a tree. He broke out into a chant. Dante's talisman couldn't translate it, though, and he suspected it was gibberish, and that Kelen was making fun of him.
To stop himself from punching him, Dante shifted his mind back to the zombie. Who at that very moment was watching as a blast of soma battered through the rubble. Two soldiers vaulted through the gap, followed by a sorcerer whose hands were aglow with blue.
The sorcerer froze when he saw the zombie, then cocked his head. "Master Naian?" He gawked at the zombie's forehead. "Are…you all right?"
Dante made the zombie execute an Olastarian nod, then veered back to his own mind. "Get ready. They've made it through."
He was already bleeding from a number of cuts and scrapes, and the nether came readily to his call. Blays fetched the rod-form of the spear from his belt. In the stairwell, the Hypatians pushed more debris out of the way, gathering in the short passage beyond. Two of the sorcerers murmured to each other, eyeing the zombie. One of them lifted his hand. Dante saw a spark of blue. His connection to the zombie went dead.
Red lightning sizzled behind him, making his shadow dance before him. He frowned at it. When the dead sorcerer had undertook his ritual, the shadows cast by it had been stark and sharp.
Dante's was indistinct. Almost gray.
"Make it brighter!" he yelled.
Hundreds of feet away, little blue lights bloomed in the darkness as Hypatian sorcerers entered the cavern.
Maybe Kelen was glad to finally have clear directions. Or maybe he realized they were about to die, and there was no more time for sulking. He brightened the circle of lightning without any hesitation.
Blays nodded across the cavern. "What do we do when they get over here?"
"Fight them?" Dante said.
"Not sure I'll survive another jaunt through the shadows." Blays shifted his grip on the rod. "I guess we'll just have to see what happens."
Dante glanced about for anything he could put to use. But the cavern was empty, and its stone wouldn't listen to him. All he could do was wait for the blue lights to draw closer.
As soon as they felt close enough, he unleashed a tremendous volley, hoping to put the enemy far enough on the defensive to keep them there. Soma flashed from a dozen different hands, snapping into the nether. Gladdic joined in with the ether. Even with just the two of them, the attack was effective enough to kill a few of the Hypatians outright.
But the defenders whittled most of it away. And fired back. Dante had already launched a second assault and had to divert it into a defensive posture against the incoming wall of solid blue, splitting his bolts, which were big enough to kill a man, into the smaller pieces that seemed more effective at knocking the soma off course. This took down maybe a tenth of it. Gladdic rattled off a round of his own while Dante readied his next.
"We won't be able to stop it all," Dante said. "Blays, you might want to get out that spear!"
Blays swung the rod forward and to his side, slinging it out into the shining spear, and dropped into a fighting crouch. Dante shot off another volley of counter-nether and immediately started work on another. The volley tore into the soma, shaving off another fraction of it, but not enough. He was barely going to have time to hit it a third time.
"Humans!" Kelen yelled. "It is done!"
Dante spun about. Starlight glittered on his face. Constellations drifted across a giant doorway.
Blue light gleamed on his back. There was no time to wait, or even to speak. Dante leaped through the doorway, and entered the core.
14
They were still traveling through layers of Olastar, rather than between differing realms, and there was no tunnel to walk down. Instead, he was shot right out into Pholos. That didn't mean there was no feeling of transition, though. As soon as he crossed over, he bent at the waist and clutched his arms to his stomach, which was squirming around like a worm on a hook.
Unpleasant as this was, he forced himself to straighten up and check on the others. Kelen had jumped through ahead of him. Behind him, Gladdic and Blays were both doubled over in nausea.
"Vomit while you're running," Dante said. "They'll be right after us."
"No!" Kelen's voice cracked like a young man's. "Do not do that!"
"We can't fight that many at once. We'll be slaughtered!"
"The gate's already closing. They won't be able to reopen it for several minutes."
"But they—"
"Shut up!" The smaller man swung his fist to his side, scanning the dark sky. "Look around you. Do you see any arad?"
"Any whats?"
"It looks like patches of grime. Or midden-heaps. If they're here, they'll be floating in the air."
Their surroundings were quite dim, almost cave-like, and Dante was only now making sense of them. They were standing on a mesa, the portal fading behind them. Most of the ground ahead of them was too dark to see except for little islands of lighter-colored rock spaced out here and there. This in itself was confusing enough to the eye, but much worse, Dante couldn't tell where the land ended and the sky began. It appeared to be the same structure as Gothon, where the land curved upward instead of downward, and so wrapped around them on all sides.
"I'm not seeing anything," Blays said. "You said this stuff looks like grime? What is it?"
"The sign we have to go back right now." As he'd been looking about, Kelen had been in a slight crouch, ready to run. He straightened. "I don't see any, either. We should have time to proceed. But keep your eyes out for them at all times. Now we just need to find an onas." He jogged along the edge of the mesa, gazing downward.
"And what is an onas?" Dante glanced down at his talisman. He was so used to it translating everything that it was always a little jarring when it couldn't, though that usually only happened when his own language had no equivalent word for the one in question.
"It will look like a boat."
Dante hurried to catch him. And almost fell over. His body felt much lighter than it should, and had ever since entering Pholos. He'd thought that was just one of the disorienting effects of traveling through the portal, but now that he was moving, it felt like something more than that. Still jogging, he jumped forward. He'd had to leap for his life on enough occasions that he knew quite well how far he should be able to fly. On this jump, he landed several feet further than he should have.
The curve of the mesa brought them to a blank dark wall. Kelen spun about with a scowl and trotted back the other way. The portal was now entirely gone, with no more than a few hints of glittering star-like lights to mark where it would return if the Hypatians decided to come for them. As they came to the other end of the mesa, which also terminated against the wall of stone, Dante realized he had no idea why they were looking for a boat when there was no water to be seen.
"It's not here." Kelen crossed his arms tightly and started back toward where they'd come through. "But that's impossible. Even if someone's using the primary one right now, they always keep spares at hand. We must have missed it."
He trudged onward, muttering steadily. The talisman didn't understand a great deal of the words but Dante didn't bother to ask Kelen for a translation, as they appeared to mostly be curses. Thunder rumbled in the distance. It wasn't particularly loud or threatening, but Pholos had been almost entirely quiet before this, and they all skidded to a stop. Kelen stared in the direction it had come from. The thunder came again. It was followed by something entirely different: a painful, metallic groaning.
"What," Blays said, "was that?"
"It's nothing to fear," Kelen said. "Probably." Despite this reassurance, he kept his gaze fixed on the sky—or whatever it was that was hanging over them. His frown gentled as he glanced at something else a little to the right. Then his frown grew as deep as the chasm in front of them. "Burn them to ashes! Why would they leave it there?"
"Have you found your boat?"
"Out there." He pointed to one of the lighter-colored portions of rock several hundred feet ahead of them and a little uphill. "Xanalos had already guessed we meant to make use of his gateway. He must have ordered his people to move the onases away from the dock, where we wouldn't be able to reach them if we happened to make it this far."
"Truly dastardly, dragging it a whole minute's walk away from here. Well, I guess we'd better get started."
Kelen laughed. "Look around you. What exactly makes you think we can just walk to it?"
"Is this the kind of land that feet don't work on?"
Kelen ran his hand down his face, drawing a deep breath through his nose. He lifted his chin. "There's no time for this. Wait here. Don't try to follow me."
He backed well away from the edge of the mesa. Then he bounced on the balls of his feet and sprinted forward.
"What in the name of the gods are you doing?!" Dante yelled.
But Kelen had already come to the ledge. He jumped forward as far as he could. Rather than leading with one of his feet, though, he jumped headfirst, raising his arms before him.
"That's a new one," Blays said. "Is he…flying?"
Whatever he was doing, it wasn't falling. Instead, he was traveling forward in a straight line, already forty feet away from them.
"Not so," Gladdic said. "He is already slowing."
Dante was just noticing this himself: and it looked as though Kelen would stall out less than halfway to the light-colored mound of rock and the oval-shaped onas that was tied to it. Kelen shifted his posture, swinging his arms down to his side. He thrust them out in front of him again, then swept them back to his body.
