"How much further do we have to go?" Dante said.

  "I don't know," Kelen said. "Going to see the Chained God is forbidden."

  "Because, being a god, he's not supposed to exist."

  "In most kingdoms, only a handful of lords and sorcerers know he does. Most are just told that Pholos is a yawning void ranged by terrible monsters that undergoes regular cataclysms."

  "Which, from what I've seen so far, is true."

  "There's nothing of value here besides the residue that goes into the dalax. That's collected by special crews of people who in most places are vetted by one of the king's highest viziers. It's very rare for anyone else to be allowed through the doorways. It's not hard to keep the Chained God a secret. Most people know very little about Pholos other than it's here, and it's nowhere that any sane man would want to set foot in."

  "That's funny. Because it seems to me like you do know a lot about Pholos. You even know how to maneuver this onas."

  Kelen turned from the steering-stick to give him a look. "I tried to see him, once. To find out if there was a way to destroy the dalax-debris after the storms are over, or to change the storms somehow so that the debris would turn into something useless. I trained and prepared to venture to the core of the Core. But I never made it."

  "What happened?" Blays said.

  "I was betrayed. If they'd been a little smarter, they'd have launched their attack when I was starting my voyage. But they didn't want to risk staging an attack in Pholos, and did so in Gothon instead. I escaped, because I know my way around better than any of them. But I never had another chance to get inside access to another doorway, so I never got to attempt my voyage."

  "Sorry to hear that."

  "It doesn't really matter. I would have found another way to try it if I'd thought it had any actual chance to work. It was just a silly dream."

  "Kind of like our voyage?"

  "So I thought. But I'm starting to believe." Kelen returned his attention to the steering-stick. "All of that said, I do know that Pholos is smaller than Gothon or Ardos. I don't think it will take much longer."

  Dante kept his eyes out, but either they were getting lucky, or it hadn't been long enough since the last storm for too many of the creatures to have populated Pholos yet. Around an hour later, a fuzzy shape appeared in the distance. Getting closer revealed it to be a scratchy tangle of fibrous matter somewhat like the tumbleweeds he'd seen in the Collen Basin. Except the largest of those had been five feet across while this was more like thirty. And instead of being round, it was more like two lumps squashed together. Kelen stared at it steadily.

  "Is that the debris?" Dante said. "Or whatever you call it?"

  Kelen nodded once. "Yes."

  "Is that a bad sign? Is a storm coming?"

  "A storm is always coming. But it's not here yet. Right now, all that means is we're getting closer."

  Now that he'd confirmed what it was, Kelen appeared to lose interest in the debris. As they slid past it, Dante leaned over the gunwale. Deep within the thicket of gray strands, a black crevice hung open. Within it, dim shapes stirred, groping toward Pholos.

  During their travel, they'd heard distant thunder every few minutes. All at once, it grew much closer, a dry, creaking shudder that made Dante's bones hurt. But Kelen ignored this, too, slowly swiveling his head to search for more of the things he'd called lurkers.

  His eyes locked on something below them and to port. He adjusted the onas until they were aimed at whatever he was looking at. Dante strained his eyes. He thought he could just make something out, but it was so dark against the background he couldn't be sure. Slowly, it resolved. An angled line hung across the sky like it had been drawn there, stretching as far as he could see in either direction.

  "What is that?" Dante said.

  Kelen made a slight adjustment to their course. "One of the chains."

  "What, he's actually bound up in chains?" Blays said.

  "It's right there in the name."

  "Yes, but a lot of the time that's just fanciful language. Like Antillar the World-Strider couldn't really stride across worlds. He just had long legs."

  "Well, the Chained God is a god locked up in chains. That one right there is going to lead us straight to him."

  Kelen gradually adjusted their course as they got closer to the chain until they were running parallel to it from a distance of a couple hundred feet. The way Kelen had talked about it, Dante had expected it to be an actual chain—links big enough to break an elephant's back, forged from some unbreakable god-metal by Barrod himself—but it looked more like a solid beam. "Solid" in the sense of it simply being a smooth, unbroken line: whatever it was made of, it was semi-translucent. Its deep blue color suggested it might be concentrated soma, but if so, it barely gave off any light.

  It was only after a minute of staring at the beam that he noticed there were small things moving around within it. He couldn't make out more than their vague shapes, which varied, but it was their movements that gave him pause. Mostly, they drifted about like sticks in a river, brought wherever the water decided to take them. Sometimes, though, one of them took a sudden jump in another direction, or accelerated in fast spirals, or weaved about through the others.

  "The motes in the beam," Dante said. "Are they alive?"

  "Not like you or me," Kelen said. "But it's hard not to think they're animated by a spirit of some kind." He glanced about the onas and gave the steering-stick a couple of waggles, confirming that everything was still operational. "Stay watchful. The creatures don't like to get too near to the god himself, but they're sometimes drawn to the chains."

  Other than the fact they were levitating two hundred feet above the chain, it was almost possible to believe they were now floating along down a river. Rocks hung to all sides, along with occasional thickets of debris.

  Gladdic pointed ahead of them. "There."

  Dante hadn't been able to see the first one until it was almost on top of them, but the creation Gladdic was pointing to glowed with an off-white light as it passed from behind a massive boulder several hundred yards away. Kelen jerked the onas around and coasted to the cover of the nearest rock. Within a minute, the creature moved into view, picking its way from one boulder to the next. It was already moving away from them, but they waited until it faded into the gloom before they came out of cover.

  For a time, they saw nothing besides the now-familiar rocks and the vaguely sinister patches of debris. Another peal of the dry thunder sounded around them. As it did so, the chain brightened and flickered.

  "Not far now," Kelen said, nodding upward. A second beam hung high above them, only just visible. It was running in the same direction as the one they were following. Rather than being deep blue, it was a dark maroon. "Dante, I have the feeling you're about to ask me if the chains are made of soma and neuma."

  "Well?"

  "Yes."

  "Good."

  Over the next few miles, the second chain sloped slowly downwards, coming towards them. As if converging on a single point. This hypothesis was confirmed by the appearance of a third chain, also blue, that was aligned in a different direction from the other two, but grew closer to them both with each passing minute.

  "There it is." Kelen's voice sounded stuck in his throat. He steered the vessel toward an exceptionally large rock a few hundred yards ahead of them. By the time they reached it and came to a stop beside it, Dante could finally see what Kelen had spotted. It was closer than it felt like it should have been, as if it hadn't been obscured by distance, but by a shadowy haze in the air.

  A few miles ahead of them, a dozen or more of the beams came together. They met at the form of a man so colossal it made Dante feel woozy to look at.

  "Are all the gods that big?" Kelen said. It was perhaps the first time Dante had heard real wonder in his voice.

  "Not even close," Blays said. "Don't get me wrong, when you're standing next to one of them, they make you feel like a scrawny little kid. But that guy's taller than any tree I've seen."

  "By a ways," Dante said. "Outside of Weslee, anyway."

  Kelen glanced back at them. "How can there be such a difference in their size?"

  Blays shrugged. "Those chains don't look very friendly. Maybe they stretched him out."

  "Even in the Realm of Nine Kings, the gods don't manifest in their true form," Gladdic said. "Perhaps this is closer to that form. Or perhaps they discovered this was the size he needed to be to perform his task, and used their powers to enlarge him."

  As tall as he was, his arms and limbs were emaciated, almost stick-like. Long dark ragged hair spilled down his shoulders, but his back was to them and they couldn't see his face. His clothes were in tatters, blotchy, pale skin visible through the rips and tears. His arms were held up and to the sides by the chains while his legs were bound past shoulder-width.

  Dante had expected the chains to be manacles. Shackles around his wrists and ankles, maybe one around his neck. But the chains weren't cuffed to him—they were pierced through him. Not unlike the creature's leg when it had impaled Blays. But Blays had been gored through in a single place. The Chained God was speared through his arms and legs, his gut and chest, hanging on them at the stygian center of this world.

  A red beam passing through his shoulder yanked back, tearing at him. He danced in the air as the chain jerked about, entire body going taught against the other beams, until his limbs were stretched so hard it seemed impossible that his arm wouldn't be ripped off. After an excruciating ten seconds, the chain went still, and the god went slack on his suspensions, too exhausted to even lift his head.

  The dry, creaking thunder reached their ears. It lasted ten seconds as well.

  "Well," Blays murmured as it was fading. "Let's go put him out of his misery."

  Kelen started the onas forward. The Chained God grew larger before them. On the earlier parts of their journey, Kelen had mostly kept a straight course unless something got in their path, but this time he moved from rock to rock so there was rarely clear line of sight between them and the god.

  "You can tell who's behind it, you know. He tries to keep it secret—to make it look like there's no one in command of it—by making it suddenly blow in different directions, churn up great storms out of nowhere, and other insidious tricks. But it's him. Everything the wind does is for his purpose."

  The voice wasn't any of their own. It was higher-pitched and tremulous, though on some words it folded into something much harder. There was only one plausible source for it, but the voice of the immense god should have rumbled deeper than the thunder of the shuddering of Pholos. Instead, he sounded like a sensitive young man, sometimes angry, sometimes afraid, rarely if ever at peace.

  "But it was still beautiful. It still spoke truths. Even he couldn't make it lie like he did." The Chained God lifted his head, searching the rock-strewn void. "Where has the wind gone? Did he steal it from me? Of course he did. Of course he did. After all, it's his to control, he always resented me for what I came to knew. I'll kill him!"

  He struggled against his chains. This must have hurt, a lot, but he kept it up for several seconds before going limp again.

  During this, Kelen had steered them behind another rock, bringing the onas to a halt. "Before we get any closer, I thought we might want to decide what we're actually doing."

  "Simple," Blays said. "We float up to the back of his head, where I'll stab him with my spear."

  Dante shook his head. "We can't do that."

  "Why not? He's not going anywhere."

  "He'll feel the soma Kelen's using to propel the onas."

  "Are you sure? He sounds totally out of his mind."

  "Even a crazy god is still a god. We shouldn't call any attention to ourselves until the moment we strike."

  Blays turned to Kelen. "Can he hurt us? He can't even move."

  "It's said that he still has many powers, when he can remember to use them," Kelen said. "I wouldn't want to give him any chance to fight back."

  "Well how else are we going to get to him? I don't suppose he's fond of naps?"

  "I wonder if you can shadowalk here," Dante said. "Then again, even if you can, he'd probably feel you coming."

  "I don't think I'd make it anyway. If the shadows were that bad in Gothon, I can't imagine what they're like here."

  "We could get as close as we dare, then wait until one of the chains starts pulling on him again to go in. He seemed exhausted afterward. Kelen?"

  "The least bad idea I've heard so far," Kelen said.

  "This is a disgraceful conversation," Gladdic said.

  Dante raised an eyebrow. "I thought it was a pretty decent plan."

  "It had not occurred to you until this moment that we might want to employ a more sophisticated scheme than strolling straight up to his face?"

  "Technically, my suggestion was to stab him in the back of his head," Blays said.

  "I have been dwelling on the matter since we came to the first of the chains. One thought I had was to get the onas as close to one of them as possible, and follow it there to the god, in the hopes the activity of the soma within the chain would mask Kelen's own use of it."

  Kelen folded his arms. "That one could actually work."

  "Its flaw is that the Chained God is far larger than I imagined, and from what I see, none of the chains would deliver us to a part of his body where Blays might immediately strike a mortal wound. Hence we would have to use the soma to move away from the chain to a vulnerable part, and in the process we would likely be exposed."

  "It would still give him less time to react. Unless you've got a better idea…"

  "I believe that I do. If the problem is that the god might feel the use of the soma, and lash out against us, then the most logical course is to not use the soma."

  Kelen narrowed his eyes. "But the onas can't move without soma. Unless you're planning to kill him from here."

  "I do not—but the onas does not require the soma. Look how many rocks lie between us and him."

  Kelen stared at Gladdic a moment, as if expecting a trick, then looked out into the open space. When it clicked, he jerked back his head. "You can't be serious."

  "Why not? Should the worst happen, you can simply use the soma to put us back on course, and we will be no worse off than any other attempt, where we would have been employing the soma all along."

  "Am I following this?" Blays said. "You want to hop from rock to rock?"

  "It is a long time since I last went for a swim, and I fear I never will again, in my condition," Gladdic said. "But when I was much younger, there was a pool fed by a high waterfall where we would go to swim when summer was at its worst. It was all but sheer cliffs on the side where the falls poured down, and if you could find a spot to cling to and then push off with your legs, you could travel for some distance underwater without even needing to kick your legs."

  "You want to rock-hop. Literally. And you want to do it all the way to Wessen."

  "As I said, there is no real danger if we fall short or miss our course at some point. The process will take longer than the alternatives, that is all."

  "I suppose it's a lot less stupid than it feels like it should be. All right, why not?"

  The density of the cloud of rocks thickened on the way to the Chained God, but they were still too sparsely spread out to employ Gladdic's plan just yet. Kelen was thus obliged to use more soma to drive them in closer. They were still well beyond the range at which Dante or any other sorcerer he'd known could feel someone else's powers being used, but he wasn't at all sure that was true of Wessen, and he was relieved when one of the chains began to spasm, making the god dance in agony. He then felt guilty for feeling relieved by that. Then again, they were about to put him out of his misery for good, weren't they? Better for him to be too distracted by pain to notice them, then. The tugging of his bonds was hardly the first time the Chained God had been through it.

  Thunder rumbled as the fabric of reality shook. Eventually, the chain stopped jerking around, and Wessen slumped again. He still hadn't stirred by the time Kelen brought them in to a rock and they prepared to make their first jump.

  This was more awkward than Dante had prepared for, as they had to climb their way from the back of the rock around to a spot where they'd have a good angle to jump to the next one, dragging the onas around with them. Given how light everything was in Pholos, it wasn't a grueling ordeal, but it took a few minutes to get done.

  And there were an awful lot of rocks to jump between them and the god.

  "I'll steer. When I give the word, you two jump as hard as you can," Kelen said to Dante and Blays.

  "And what shall I do?" Gladdic said.

  "Enjoy the ride."

  Dante and Blays dismounted, clinging onto the back of the onas. The jump itself was going to be trickier than he'd thought, too: they were going to have to push off at just the right angle while holding the vessel at a different angle. He and Blays shuffled and grappled about until things no longer felt completely awkward.

  "Are you ready?" Kelen said. "Jump!"

  Starting from a full squat, they launched themselves free of the ground. The onas shot forward, but it was yawing to starboard, spinning—Blays had jumped harder than Dante. Kelen steered against it, straightening them out, but the maneuvering killed some of their momentum, and as they coasted toward the next rock, they came to a stop a good twenty feet away from it. Kelen had to use the soma to push them the rest of the way to it.

  "Don't push off quite so hard next time," Dante said as they clambered around the rock while carrying the onas on their shoulders. "We have to get this down before we get much closer."

  Blays eyed the many, many rocks ahead of them. "At least we'll have plenty of chances to practice."

  They got themselves into position, aimed themselves toward the next rock, and jumped. They still spun a little—from Dante's side, this time—but Kelen corrected it at once, leaving them soaring steadily toward their target.

 

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