The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 3
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Dante jolted into a run. But the valley was so tight and the barrage of trees was so large he could already see there was no time. He couldn't bury the three of them safely underground, either; he'd been testing the earth as he traveled, and the dirt here was as unmalleable as it had been at the site of the flood.
That only left one option.
He bit his lip, tasting blood, and pulled as much nether to him as he could. He fired it upwards in a flock of wedges, breaking apart a circle of trees into hundreds of chunks—any one of which was still large enough to bash his brains in. Heart pounding, he scrambled to pull together a second assault.
Ether glared to his right. Blays grabbed him by the arm and all but threw him into the hollow that Gladdic had just carved out from the bare rock of the cliffs. The three of them flew inside it simultaneously, pressing themselves as far back as the shallow depression allowed. It smelled of hot stone and though the surface was freshly cut it was already sweating.
Whole trees thundered down onto the ground just outside the little cavern, showering them with splinters. They pressed their hands over their ears, watching as the entry to their shelter became completely blockaded by branches and trunks. The whole thing was over in a matter of seconds, leaving only the aftermath, a steady trickle of falling pebbles and leaves, and the settling of the debris under its own weight.
"Everyone alive?" Dante said.
"Until someone comes along and lights all that firewood," Blays said.
Mildly concerned something like that might actually happen, Dante felt about in the debris with his mind, hunting for the shortest path out. As soon as he had it, he went to work on it, hacking wedges of shadows into the branches and leaves until he had a tunnel wide enough to squeeze through. Outside—which was no longer bare, scabby ground, but rather a pile of smashed-up fragrant trees—he kept both eyes locked on the clifftops until Gladdic and Blays had made it out as well. It took several minutes to pick their way through the rubble until they got to open ground, but there were no further attacks.
Blays turned about for a look at the dozens of trees that had tried to crush them. "That was a lot closer than I would have liked. How far are we from Kelen?"
Dante fetched the honeydrop from the pocket he'd stowed it in during all the excitement. "No more than twenty miles."
Blays laughed, brushing twigs and dirt from his damp cloak. "Is that all?"
"It could be as few as ten."
"Double that, accounting for the way back. I don't think we're going to make this one."
Dante glanced back the way they'd come. "We could go back and tell them as much. I doubt we can convince Maralda to do anything about it, but Carvahal might be willing to lend us a hand."
Gladdic shook his head slowly. "The gods will not aid us. All we would accomplish is to waste time and pass even more miles in the dangers of this land. We must find our own way forward. Even if there appears to be no way at all."
"He's right. We've lived this far. Maybe we'll get even better at it as we go along."
He thought this was possibly even true, yet he hurried down the narrow little valley anyway, and still felt plenty uneasy even when they passed from it. On the other side lay another patchwork terrain, where grim and smelly little bogs sat right next to startling little craters colored pink and green and orange and aquamarine.
It reminded him of the salt fields in the highlands of Gallador. Which is what made it so surprising when, with a muffled rumble, a pillar of steaming water shot up from the middle of one of the craters, climbing scores of feet into the air.
They stopped to watch it for a minute, both to make sure nothing terrible was about to happen to them, and because it was astounding. Steam poured from both the column of water and the vent it jetted from, the thick clouds pulled into thin ribbons that dissolved into nothing. Gladdic turned away with a grunt and walked on to the east.
Crossing the bogs was impossible, and it seemed extremely unwise to cross through the craters, filled as they were with brittle and slippery minerals which, if one were to fall and slide down, would deliver the fallen directly to a boiling hot hole in the ground. They wouldn't have had any way forward at all if not for the fact the bogs and craters were separated by narrow lanes of solid ground. These were filled with whip-thin red trees, but they sported very little in the way of leaves and branches, and were easier to pass through than they looked at first glance. The ground was springy, oddly pleasant to walk on, except where it was interrupted by big white lumps of rock that stuck up from the earth like jagged tombstones.
"Someone's been watching us, haven't they?" Dante said once they'd established a pace through the fractured land. "Waiting for us to reach the right spot—and then springing their trap. We're talking about a sorcerer. Possibly more than one. Gladdic, keep yourself attuned to the ether. I'll watch the shadows. With any luck, we'll be able to neutralize the next attack—along with whoever tries to make it."
With this, Dante stretched his mind as far out into the nether as he could. Every few minutes, the ground would rumble loud enough to feel it underfoot and in their chests, and a geyser of water would froth up from one of the craters, spraying high into the air. These eruptions carried the sulfurous smell of rotten eggs, and Dante was sure they were growing more frequent over time—and that the next assault would come from the geysers, whether in the form of trying to dump them into a pit, or in another flood: except this time, the water would boil the flesh on their bones. Dante made constant notice of the nearest high ground to flee to.
Water whooshed and squelched to their left. His heart choked his throat as he made to dash back to the hillock they'd just passed by. But the noise wasn't coming from one of the bright-colored scaly craters. Instead, the surface of one of the loathsome bogs was churning with bubbles.
"Do you feel anything?" Dante said.
Gladdic shook his head. "Not the barest disturbance."
"Is this another trap?" Blays said. "And if so, why aren't we screaming?"
"It doesn't feel like it." Dante glanced around, first with his eyes and then with his mind, but nothing else looked to be happening. "Is it draining?"
It obviously was, for the water was starting to move about in a circle, like a basin with the bung pulled out of it. Great big globs of dark algae and half-translucent goo spun about in the current as the maelstrom gathered speed. There was a lot more sludge in the bog than it had looked from the surface, and it began to emit a great deal of wet slurping noises as it sucked down into the bowels of the earth.
In under a minute, it had emptied completely, leaving a soggy bowl carpeted with various algaes and underwater plants, now collapsed and scraggled about like sodden trousers. As the three of them turned to go on their way, though, clear water welled up from the bottom of the earthen bowl, swaying the plants upright. The bog was soon just as full as it had been before, though the previously mucky, oily water was now clear enough to see to the bottom.
Dante rubbed the back of his neck. "What exactly did we just watch?"
"Whatever it was, it felt gross," Blays said. "Now please tell me Kelen is just around the bend?"
"Still miles out. But we're making progress."
The next several patches of bog they passed were filled with clear, clean water as well. Gladdic stared into them as if expecting to see something profound lying on their beds, but he gave no answer when Dante asked him what had him so fascinated.
Dante moved his mind into the honeydrop. As he tried to get a read on how much further they had to reach Kelen, the reed-thin red trees around them stirred in an unfelt wind.
"Get out!" Gladdic hollered. He ran sidelong from the little pocket of forest toward a crater, the bottom of which was steaming—it had either erupted recently, or was about to.
The ground bucked under Dante's feet, throwing him to his hands and knees. His right knee landed on a lump of white rock and stars of pain flashed across his eyes. He pulled the nether to him and sent it to his knee as the spindly red trees lashed at him from all sides.
Wood cracked as sharply as the clack of a crossbow. Just behind Dante, Blays had drawn his swords and was chopping through the trees as they sought to ensnare him. The ground jolted again, then began to slide. As Dante picked himself up, Blays gave out a yell.
The forest was ripping apart down the middle, opening a chasm in the earth. Its rim was studded with the pale, conical stones. Dante had been following Gladdic's path toward the crater, warding the way forward with his hands as he watched what was happening behind him, but he tripped again. A pair of the trees had thrust their trunks in front of his shins. As he fell, others thrust at him, pressing him down and poking at him, trying to entangle themselves in his limbs and clothes.
The ground lurched upward, tilting toward the rift. Dante was scrambling for the shadows as ether pulsed ahead of him. It rapped into the trees, shredding them. He used the broken stumps to hold himself steady as he ran uphill. Blays was beside him, slashing at any trunk that bent toward them.
The edge of the slab of earth they were on was now raised ten feet above the marsh it had once been almost level with. Before Dante jumped, he darted a look behind him. A muscly red tentacle rose from the rift, as thick as his waist and twenty feet long. It waved about, snake-like, and swung to face them.
But both Dante and Blays had already launched themselves off the still-tilting slab. Dante filled his hands with shadows in case they were about to sprain or break anything, but as he came down on the slope of the crater, the scabby surface crumbled under his weight—and sent him sliding down it.
He shouted and flung his limbs wide. This slowed him, but there was nothing to find purchase on, and the bed of pebbles he'd dislodged with his landing kept him rolling smoothly along. So he shaped the nether he was still clinging to into a bludgeon and smashed it into the ground in front of them. This pounded the minerals there into a flat, sandy bed, which he and Blays thumped into, bringing them to a stop.
Gladdic blinked at them, ether winking over his fingers. A sheet of little pebbles hissed down the slope and poured into the hole in the nadir of the crater.
Shaking, Dante got to his feet. "I recommend we stop being here!"
He moved laterally along the incline, trying to find a way to both remove himself from whatever was going on and not fall to his death down the crater. After a couple of frightening slides, though, and with no sign of anything else emerging from the grove of little trees, he slowed, advancing carefully until they reached the far side of the crater, where they stopped to gather themselves.
Blays folded his arms. "Did you see that?"
"When the forest came alive and tried to murder us?" Dante said. "It caught my attention, yes."
"Did you feel any sorcery going on?"
"No. But it was all so fast."
"How about you, Gladdic? You were first to spot it."
The old man shook his head. "The trees were moving, but there was no wind. I took it for a poor sign. Yet I detected no sorcery, either."
"That's because we're not under attack by sorcerers. The land is alive—and it's trying to kill us."
The three of them stared at each other. Dante rubbed his mouth. "You mean alive like a fire's alive, right? Or the wind?"
"I mean alive like a bear is alive, and also it's the size of a kingdom."
Dante drew his sword and jabbed it point-down into the ground. He cupped his free hand to his ear. "I don't hear any shrieks of pain. Or see any blood."
"Yes, great work there. Now explain why you can't manipulate it."
Dante lifted one boot clear from it, then the other, struck by the sudden urge to levitate to get away from whatever he was standing on. "Because whatever it is, it's not really earth. All right, maybe you're right about that much. But that doesn't mean it's skin or flesh or the like, either."
"Do you really think the gods kicked this place out of the Realm because they were afraid of a few flooding streams? Or a tree falling on their heads?"
"It was quite a lot of trees."
"And I imagine that's nothing compared to what this place can do when it gets really worked up. I expect it's barely been noticing us so far."
"No, this is ridiculous. This place is enormous. If it was a living being, it would be more powerful than any god or entity."
Blays shrugged. "Well, it could be an idiot. Or maybe it's rooted in place like a tree and so everyone else is fine as long as they stay away from it. Anyway, you saw all the proof you need right back there. The thing that tried to swallow us was a mouth. It even had a tongue!"
"I believe that he is right," Gladdic said. "Consider also the draining of the bogs. When the land grows hungry, it consumes the vegetation within the pools, then refills them with water so that they might replenish themselves."
"If it's got that many mouths, let's hope we don't ever stumble into the part where it keeps its other ends." Blays gestured behind them. "The good news is we don't have to fight any enemy sorcerers. The bad news is we're trying to walk across the body of a hostile titan."
Dante exhaled through his nose. "Let's say you're right. How does that help us survive to find Kelen?"
"I'm the one who figured this much out. Seems to me it's your turn to come up with something useful about it."
"If this land is alive, I don't think it's very bright. Certainly not enough to talk to or reason with. It's also much, much too big to fight it or kill it."
"Are we so certain of that?" Gladdic said. "After all, we are about to attempt to slay an entire world."
"Fine, 'kill the thing we're standing on' will be our backup plan. But there are lots easier ways to get through this. Like trying to deceive it. We've seen animals here, right?"
Blays frowned. "If you're about to suggest we need to kill something and wear its skin…"
"Then what? You'll kill me and wear my skin?"
"I doubt just looking like a deer would fool this place. Although if that's all it takes, we will absolutely be doing some skin-wearing. I suspect we'll have to act like them. Or smell like them. Or something."
Gladdic brushed some dirt from his robe. "Then the questions appear to be this: how does the land sense what moves upon it? And when it has sensed some being, how does it know which of them to let live, and which of them to slaughter?"
"How should I know?" Dante said.
"Unless you saw some detail that only now makes sense to you, you should not. And we will not be able to know just by standing here and trying to make reason of it. We will only learn by walking into that which would kill us, and watching for what provokes its attempts."
He was, unfortunately, correct, and after another minute of fruitless discussion, they admitted they had no idea how to avoid blundering into any more disasters, and struck out again with the hope the next one would teach them to do so. Now that Blays had implanted the idea of the place being a living thing into Dante's mind, the appearance of it was unsettling, even grotesque: bare patches of earth now looked like scabrous skin; the grass like long sickly green hairs; even the geysers, once so pretty, came across more like festering boils with blazingly-colored infections. At least it didn't particularly smell. Except for the geysers. Which made him want to look at them even less.
He kept watch on the animals instead. There weren't all that many of them, but songbirds he didn't recognize flitted between the thin red trees and picked bugs from the bogs, while here and there a hawk floated above them. Delicate-bodied deer picked through the groves, their flanks painted with rusty red stripes that matched the trees and made them all but invisible when they were standing still. Badger-like animals rooted around in the mucky banks of the swamps. As he watched, one scooped its claws into the earth, dug out a fat pile of black dirt, and swished it back and forth in the water. When it lifted its claws back up, the dirt was gone, revealing a writhing mass of juicy worms topped with a black daisy, like a pretty ribbon tied around a package of dung. It flung the worms down its gullet and dug out another lump of earth.
Several types of bugs flitted about as well, including some big ones whose long legs dangled beneath them idiotically. He killed a few of these out of spite, reanimated them, and sent them in various directions to expand his observational range.
Even with their help, though, he saw no hint of whatever the local fauna might be doing to avoid being drowned, crushed, or devoured. It was quite possible they simply knew which spots to avoid, in which case the three of them would have almost no chance of getting all the way to Kelen. As the day wore on, it wore on Dante as well. Nolost was at that moment slaughtering countless people of Rale. Entire kingdoms were being torn down and their people exterminated, as had happened at Snarjlend, and as was presently happening at Kalabar.
Meanwhile they were dawdling across some wretched and murderous hinterland of the Realm in the hopes of finding the one person who might be able to help them achieve their very last chance of avoiding annihilation. They were further away from home than ever and everything was starting to feel very hopeless. If this living land was going to kill them, Dante wished it would just get it over with already.
They did their best to avoid the pockets of skinny red trees, sticking to the outer edges of the marshes and craters instead, until they came to a line of trees that stretched from one horizon to the other. With the aid of his scouts, though, Dante could see the woods were less than a hundred feet across. They braced themselves and entered. Dante watched the trees like a hawk for any sign of motion, but they stayed perfectly still.
On the other side of the narrow forest, the landscape shifted again. Rivers of sand wove between islands crammed with trees bearing round blue fruits. There looked to be more than enough to eat, but bands of small golden monkeys with big black rings around their eyes squawked and menaced each other in the branches anyway, sometimes tussling with each other in frantic little skirmishes before suddenly breaking apart to holler back and forth at a distance. The creatures were so taken up in this that they didn't even seem to notice the three humans passing below their trees.
