The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 26
"Why would you assume that?"
"Otherwise any kingdom that didn't have a doorway would just construct one of its own."
Kelen nodded. "You're correct. There's no known way to create new doorways."
"You wanted to put an end to the dalaxa, didn't you? Did you ever think about destroying all the doorways to Pholos? Cutting off the supply for good?"
"Yes. We tried. That can't be done, either, they just repair themselves. The only way to end the dalax is to end Olastar itself." Kelen normally had an irritable edge to his voice, but as he said this, he took on a tone of both eagerness and reflection. "We've gotten off course, though. As a god, Wessen is one of the only beings who can weather the storm. But it still hurts him. It hurts him greatly. He went insane countless eons ago."
"So not only do we have to kill a god," Blays said, "but we have to kill a batshit insane one."
Gladdic shrugged a bony shoulder. "I should think I would rather be tasked with killing an insane god than one with a clear and functional mind."
"To think we'll still have to fight off all Nolost's legions after this."
"If we come to see that time, at least it will no longer rely on the three of us alone. Rather, all the world will be fighting alongside us."
"Is that everything?" Dante said. "What else should we know about Wessen? Or Pholos?"
"There's nothing else that's relevant," Kelen said. "All we have to do is get to Wessen and kill him. Then your job is done."
"That does raise one more small question," Blays said. "Say we find him, we kill him, and Olastar explodes, all according to plan. Does that mean we get exploded with it?"
"I don't know. I've never destroyed a world before. If it doesn't happen right away, we might have time to make it back out."
"Meaning we'd have to get back to the doorway, cross through to Gothon, find a portal back to Ardos, and then find another portal back to Rale. All before all of the portals collapse altogether."
"Yes."
"Excuse me just a second, I need to kiss my ass goodbye."
This turn of the conversation set everyone alone with their thoughts. They were skimming along about as fast as a sloop with a good wind, and had already put several miles between them and the platform, which Dante could no longer make out. Everything looked more or less the same. Without any landmarks, he didn't see how Kelen was going to find his way back to the doorway. Even if he could, it would probably be occupied by Hypatians. The palace they would have to escape through obviously would be as well.
It was somehow only now occurring to Dante that they had embarked on a suicide mission. One that, one way or the other, was about to come to its end. It felt tremendously, cosmically unfair. To save the world, only to die for it? And not even to save it—just to give it a reprieve, the chance to save itself, a chance they'd never get to see the results of. After they were sure Wessen was dead, would it be better to immediately kill themselves, to make sure that they were sent to the Pastlands? For if they died after all of the portals were gone, he feared they would simply cease to exist in any form, anywhere.
By the gods. Were they about to doom all the people of Rale to the same fate? A brief mortal life, followed by a void of infinite length? Would such lives even be worth having? A few decades, with no knowledge of the gods and their ways, and then annihilation? Surely the people would sooner or later realize their condition. How would they react then? Mass madness, he thought. Even widespread violence. Not in the sense of the war of one kingdom on another, or the occasional squabbles and murders of the city streets, but senseless and everywhere, until even the most well-ordered realms fell into cruelty and misery.
It was almost enough to make part of him hope they were going to fail. Compared to the future they were planning to help create, maybe it would simply be better to let Taim wipe everything clean and create a new existence instead—one that worked as it was meant to, as a mortal reflection of the heavens, with a much longer and more serene life after the first one for those who'd lived that first one well.
These thoughts felt so dangerous he was badly tempted to speak them out loud to provoke one of the others into arguing him out of them. But he feared he might be right enough to cause doubts in them. Besides, they were headed to their deaths, right? At long, long last, after all they'd endured—all of the violence and combat, including against each other, especially in the case of Gladdic, but even once with Blays, long ago though that time now felt—the hour was now before them. At the very least, they deserved to die with the pride of having undertaken the most valiant act they could. The others didn't deserve to be burdened with the thought that they might have condemned everyone they'd meant to save to a living hell instead.
Ahead, the empty space became a lot less empty. At first Dante feared it might be the detritus Kelen was so leery of, but it turned out to mostly be more rocks, many of them more greenish or reddish than gray. Dante didn't know how familiar Kelen was with operating the onas, but he'd already improved markedly since he'd started their voyage, and he threaded neatly between the silent lumps of stone like a bargeman who grew up on the river where he makes his living.
Pockets of light appeared within the darkness like a few late-night travelers carrying lanterns with them along almost-black city streets. Kelen looked to be avoiding these pockets.
"Is there something wrong with them?" Dante said. "The lit-up parts?"
"Lights attract things you don't want to meet."
"But I thought—"
"Don't say a word." Kelen's gaze had jerked up and to his left while his eyes had gone as stony as the boulders drifting around them.
Whatever had alarmed him, Dante couldn't spot it. Kelen had snuffed out the sparks of soma he'd been using to propel and guide the vessel and he now wrenched on the steering stick, throwing the others about. When he straightened the onas back out, it was headed straight for the closest rock, one big enough to carve a house out of. Without the soma, they were bleeding speed, but the rock was only forty yards away.
They were on it within moments. Dante slumped down in the onas and braced himself against the gunwale. Just before they were about to crash into the boulder, he glanced up and saw something move into the fringe of one of the spheres of light. Something alive. Its edges rippled like a sheet in the wind as it moved across the darkness.
At first it looked to be the size of their boat, if much stouter and rounder, but as it glided forward, more of its mass was brought into the light. What he'd taken for its body was just its head, if you could call it that—he didn't see any eyes, just a host of mouths, with instruments that might or might not have been tongues flicking around inside them.
Below the head lumbered its body—no, strike that, two segments of a body, each an uneven oval at least three times the size of the head. Long, stick-thin limbs, or possibly antennae, poked out from these two segments, twitching and swiveling about. Both the head and the segments were a sickly gray mottled with dull yellow. It was so hateful to the eye that Dante would have thought it was from the Becoming, but its features were too well-defined for that, and it had too much color to it, too.
He was so absorbed by the horror of the thing that he momentarily forgot they were about to slam into the rock until Kelen jerked hard on the steering-lever, swinging about while killing their speed so much that they all had to brace their arms and legs against the inside of the hull to stop themselves from getting flung out of it. The maneuver left them just feet away from the boulder, arranged parallel to it instead of nose-on. They were still drifting toward it, and as they were about to bump into it, Blays reached up with flat palms. He touched them to the rock, letting his elbows bend as he absorbed the last of their momentum.
They were now hanging underneath the boulder, which filled nearly all of their vision. Kelen crouched motionless, gazing up at it. Dante drew the nether close, waiting.
A few minutes went by. Eventually, Kelen sat back in the hull, relaxing his shoulders. Dante pointed to his own mouth. Kelen gave a short nod.
"I thought you said only a god can survive the storms here," Dante said.
"That's true."
"That's funny, because I've met a few gods, and none of them were blobby abominations that looked like something fished out of a cursed sea."
"We're here, too. None of us are gods."
"You're saying it got here the same way we did. Or in through the cracks you were talking about?"
Kelen nodded again. "Mostly from the Becoming, we think."
"Things from the Becoming don't look like that. They look more like models for things. They're all smooth and don't have many features."
"Traveling through the cracks warps them somehow. It could be that they're getting smashed together with things from other places that are also adjacent to the cracks, or it could be that the cracks are unnatural, and the act of passing through them twists your body into something equally unnatural. Sometimes you can see the creatures changing in front of your eyes."
"But every time a storm passes through Pholos, they're all killed."
"That's another small benefit the storm provides."
Dante frowned. "If something that big got here, just how big do the cracks get?"
"They're still small. Or else we'd be seeing debris. That thing is much too big to have come through in its current shape. At first, it probably wasn't any bigger than a lastos." Seeing Dante's blank look, Kelen made a rolling gesture. "It's like a rat."
"And it got that big just since the last storm?" Blays said. "What the hell's it been eating?"
"Good question."
They'd been talking just above a whisper, and while Kelen seemed to think that was safe enough, he waited several more minutes before informing them it was time to move on. Blays gave them a light shove away from the boulder, then Kelen drew on a sprinkle of soma and propelled them forward.
He cut off the stream and used the steering-stick to heave them about. They sailed clear of the boulder and back into open space. After being stuck tight under the boulder for a quarter of an hour, the airscape felt almost frighteningly yawning.
Kelen let them coast while he examined their surroundings, then muttered something to himself and pumped a healthy dose of soma into the onas until they were cruising along just as fast as they'd been before. Even then, it wasn't fast enough to outrun the three-segmented creature when it unfolded from behind a tumbling rock and launched toward them.
15
Kelen shouted some words the talisman refused to translate and poured more soma into the vessel, nudging its speed to what was presumably the fastest it could handle. Though it was still some ways away, the creature extended some of the limbs hanging under its body much further forward than they looked possible of reaching.
Dante scuttled around to face it and launched a volley of nether toward it. Gladdic did the same with the ether. The creature didn't waver as it sailed closer. Both forces struck it head-on, pounding into its gooey-looking skin. But this was like throwing small stones into thick mud. The bolts sank into it, spraying some ichor around, but left few marks.
"Tell me you know how to kill that thing!" Dante threw another cluster of bolts.
"I've got an idea." Blays crawled to the back of the onas and got to his knees, drawing the rod from his belt.
"We can't let it get close enough for you to use that!" Kelen said. "If it damages the onas, we'll be stuck out here."
"Then tell me you know how to kill that thing!"
"Sorcery."
"We're doing that," Dante said. "We're barely scratching it."
"That's because they're all but immune to sorcery." Kelen adjusted course to avoid a rock. "But that's the only thing that might kill it."
Dante's second attack hadn't fared any better. His third was about to strike it in the face again, but he split the volley in two, sending half toward the legs while trying to steer the remaining half of the bolts into its mouths, which kept opening and closing like a diseased fish. He managed to get three or four into its gullets, but it showed no sign of pain.
The nether did clip through one of the legs, though, breaking off the last two or so feet at the joint. Not much, considering the joints further up the legs were thicker. But it was a start. He shot forth another round.
"There's no time," Blays said. "It'll be on us in another quarter of a minute."
"I just wounded it. I might be able to—"
Blays pointed to the right. "Kelen, swing past that rock!"
"Why?"
"Do it!"
Kelen used both the soma and the steering-stick to veer hard to port, veering just past the rock he'd adjusted away from earlier. In the stern, Blays stood. And jumped. The onas bounced as he pushed off from it.
"What in hell!" Dante halfway stood, but it was already too late.
He spent half a second blinking, then battered the creature with more nether, concentrating on its legs. There was no way this would kill it before it was upon the onas. Nor did he have any hope of wrecking all its limbs before it could use them against the vessel. But there was a chance he could do enough damage to persuade it to leave them alone.
He glanced up. Blays was just coming to the rock they'd swept around. He had swung his body about to land on it feet-first, which was insane, since he had too much momentum and would just bounce off it even if he tried to cushion his landing with a crouch.
As his toes touched down, he bent his knees. Dante gritted his teeth. Just as he'd guessed, Blays should have tried to land spread-eagle or something. As it was, Blays just…
…jumped again. Out into open space. A move that made even less sense, as it sent him flying off to the side. He cocked back the rod. The creature shot around the side of the rock, on a course that would send it right into Blays—or Blays right down one of its mouths.
The thing didn't have any eyes that Dante could see, but it shifted its head toward Blays the instant he flew in front of it. It rolled its head about to align one of its mouths to him, opening it wider and wider, wider than should have been possible, until the gaping maw took up half its head, needle-thin tongues and prongs shifting about within. Blays had no way to alter his course. And probably wouldn't have anyway. At the last moment, he thrust the rod forward into the Spear of Stars.
The creature hesitated. But only for a blink. It snapped its head forward, mouth wide enough to swallow Blays with room to spare. Blays was yelling something, but Dante couldn't hear what. He fired a burst of nether toward the thing as Blays punched the spear down into its mouth.
Light flashed from its gullet. A torrent of viscous matter spattered from it and over Blays. The creature swung its head sharply to one side, then the other. The spear was lodged deep in its flesh and the weapon would have been ripped from Blays' grasp if not for the cord that he'd thrown around his wrist as he activated the spear. As it was, he was slung side to side like a rat in the jaws of a terrier.
Droplets of ichor showered through the air. The thing wrenched its head about again. The spear popped loose and a fountain of gore spewed from the wound. Blays found himself spinning about while drifting alongside the creature. He stabbed at it again, but its head was just beyond the reach of the spear.
Though it had no eyes, it somehow glared at Blays. Then began to rotate its bulbous body. Dozens of spindly, pointed limbs twitched from its underside. One jabbed out at Blays. He swung the spear like a staff, intercepting it, breaking the limb in half with a brittle snap. Another stabbed at him and he flicked his wrist to bring the spear about in time, cracking that one in half too.
But it was already thrusting at him with two more. Somehow, Blays blocked and broke one of them. The other pierced through his gut, its tip punching out his back.
The creature tried to pull free its leg for another stab. Blays grabbed it tight with his free hand. As the limb drew back, it drew him down toward the body. He rammed the spear straight into its belly.
Light bloomed in the watery flesh beneath its skin, illuminating snarls of veins and fibrous matter. The creature's entire body shuddered. Blays yanked the spear loose. A cataract of gore gushed from the thing's guts. In its pain, it had retracted the limb Blays was impaled on even closer to it, and when Blays made his next stab, he drove the tip of the spear four feet deep inside its core.
The thing exploded. Gooey slabs of it flew in all directions while legs were thrown around like twigs. The only part of it that didn't burst into unrecognizable pieces was its head, which twirled away from the wreckage gnashing its multiple mouths at the empty air.
Blays tumbled away, motionless, the leg still jutting from his body.
"To Blays!" Dante shouted. "Fast as you can!"
During the battle, Kelen had swung the onas about and brought it to a stop, leaving them a short jaunt away. Soma blazed around them as he sped the onas forward and heaved about to bring them alongside Blays. Dante grabbed his cloak and pulled the leg free, throwing it to the side. Gladdic sank a pool of ether into the wound. Dante couldn't tell if Blays was breathing. As the last of the ether faded away, Blays flung open his eyes and coughed up blood.
"That was kind of fun," he said. "Until it really wasn't."
"You smell terrible." Dante wiped ichor off on his pants. "In fact, maybe we should just tow you behind the ship."
They settled themselves and Kelen got back underway. He steered as if he expected another attack at any moment. Or for some unknown fold of the world to break apart and engulf them, ending it then and there.
But as they sailed across the void—though Dante was now sure it was something more than void, something like ether or nether, likely another byproduct of the bent and creased layers of Olastar, that created so many things that shouldn't be—they traveled, for the moment, in peace.
~
Blays spent the next thirty minutes trying to scrape the gore off himself without using any of what little water they carried in their skins. He was moderately successful.
The path ahead became clustered with little rocks that kept clunking against the hull even with Kelen doing his best to avoid them. Eventually, he had to detour around the area altogether, muttering to himself until the air thinned out enough for him to get back on course.
