What Lies Beyond, page 30
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
He pointed at a very stout tower overlooking a small lake.
Dante frowned. "And if we start rooting through Silidus' throne room and she decides to pop out and kick our heads around the room?"
"Do you really think she's going to stick her neck out in the middle of a war? Now quit fretting about everything and let's go steal."
Dante picked up the pace. Hordes of ramna were dashing all over the place, mostly split into individual bands, though some were grouping together to sack buildings that appeared like they might be full of valuable loot. There was plenty of resistance from Protean soldiers and sorcerers alike, but they were abandoning large portions of the city to concentrate their defenses in its strongholds.
Gladdic appraised this with a baleful eye. "If they cannot—or refuse to—defend their own people, it makes one question what these gods are truly worth."
Blays shrugged. "Presumably they're playing the long game."
On their first visit, large parts of the city had been impermanent markets, stalls, tents, caravans, and small wheel-mounted houses, but nearly all of these had been packed or rolled away in the few hours after the citizens had first seen the ramna approaching from afar, leaving empty fields and plazas everywhere, as if the city was the art of a mad painter who'd finished his work only to blot half of it out.
But some of these open spaces were much messier than others, suggesting their residents had had to act very quickly. As if they hadn't believed the ramna would really break through until it was happening. As Dante and the others penetrated deeper into the city, they entered a field where a group of locals fled with rolled-up bundles in hand. Something glimmered in the corner of Dante's eye; he just caught sight of the people disappearing into not-quite-thin air—escaping through the hint of a doorway, and down a set of stairs leading below the surface.
Dante swung around a corner and plowed right into the back of a melee, ramna horsemen exchanging spear-thrusts with a group of pikemen who were retaining admirably tight discipline. Dante could have blown the defenders apart with a few moments' work, but he swerved around them instead, detouring two blocks before returning course to the palace.
Its five white towers climbed into the sky. Dante slowed as he entered the parkland surrounding the spires. The noise of battle carried on elsewhere, but it was distant enough to hear the trickling of the streams through the gardens. It all felt very peaceful.
Right up until the moment that both arrows and nether poured out of the closest tower and from atop the stone bridge that ran above the entrance to the grounds.
Dante yelled out, swatting down sorcery and arrows alike. In silence, Gladdic cast a storm of sparks at the men on the bridge, doing them no harm but dazzling them enough to disrupt their aim. The three Fallen Landers turned about and dashed over the turf at full speed.
Dante ducked low in the saddle. "I thought you said the palace wouldn't be defended!"
"I said their main defense wouldn't be here," Blays said. "And it isn't. Or else we would have seen it before it started shooting at us."
"They've got hundreds of people holed up here. What are we supposed to do now?"
"I'd say we follow them inside."
Dante followed Blays' eyes to the right, taking in a completely empty street. But he could already hear the blunder of hoofbeats. Scores of barbarians entered the street and pounded down the smooth cobbles toward the palace. They drew back their bows and loosed a barrage at the defenders, who were right in the middle of attempting to shoot down on the riders. On both sides, people fell with arrows sticking from them. Screaming began, mostly from the Proteans, though the ramna had suffered more wounds.
Dante maneuvered through another full reversal of direction, chasing after the invaders. Sorcery flashed from both the tower and the riders, blowing up parts of each. A lone arm spun through the air still clutching its spear. The ramna chant-yelled death threats, boasts, and praise to their ancestors. A second band galloped into the park from the south.
Some of the ramna stayed on horseback to harry the defenders with arrows while others jumped down from the saddle, axes in hand, and rushed the door to the tower, which looked stout right up until the moment a ramna nethermancer exploded it inside the building. Axemen charged inside while the flinders were still falling. As Dante rode past the wounded ramna lying on the ground, he gave some thought to healing them, then remembered he'd only be disgracing them. A pair of barbarian sorcerers hung back, but they were ignoring the fallen in favor of healing injured horses.
Blays pointed toward the central tower. "Suppose the throne room's in the big one?"
"That's where I'd put it," Dante said. "Then again, knowing Silidus, she probably gets tired of it and moves it somewhere else three times a year."
Even if this was so, the tower was the obvious place to start. They rushed past it and into a stand of trees, where they tied up their horses, then ran back toward the tower doors. These were sealed with an ethereal ward of some kind and while Dante was inspecting it Gladdic simply ripped it apart and motioned for them to go inside.
Though it was the middle of the day, the interior smelled like dew on grass at night. A large foyer brought them to the sort of hall that was less about any specific functionality and more about getting newcomers to stop and gawk at the grandeur of its columns, tapestries, space, and ornamentation. Dante jogged forward, hunting for a staircase, and tripped over a servant girl he'd spooked from behind the cover of a purple chaise.
He got to his feet, extending a hand of warding. She trembled on the ground, barring her arms over his head.
"We're not going to hurt you," he said. "Where is the throne room?"
She glanced between the three of them. Face a panicked mask, she reached under her blouse and drew a long, thin knife.
Dante hopped back a step, wrapping his hand in shadows. "Don't you do it!"
The girl lifted the knife, then plunged it into her heart. Her head tipped back, mouth open in shock; the knife twitched with the beat of her heart, then went still. She toppled back.
Blays swore softly. "Apparently you need to warn young women before exposing your face to them."
Trying to scrub the image of her final expression from his mind, Dante reached the back of the hall, found a corridor, and at last a stairwell. This was empty of people, as was the next floor, which held moderately opulent private quarters. The third level was similar except the residences were both larger and more splendid. The palaces he was used to tended to have their main communal spaces on the ground floor, but the lords of the Realm seemed to have different ideas about architecture, and Dante wasn't surprised to find the throne room waiting on the fourth floor.
With its randomly scattered lanterns of white, purple, and blue, and the way everything seemed to be spun as much from dreams as from physical matter, he found the style of Silidus' realm the most enchanting of them all. But he had no time to admire the trappings of the throne room as he ran through it to the door at the rear. This was locked similarly to Gashen's inner chambers, but he forced it open, revealing a room that reminded him of a civilized, indoor version of the caverns of Talassa. The door at its rear boasted a more formidable lock, meaning that it took his and Gladdic's combined powers to break it.
"Hello," Blays said. "I'd say we found it."
In another echo of Gashen's palace, the room they found themselves in was questionably a room in the first place: too dark to see any walls or ceilings, and no echoes to suggest they existed. The air smelled of greenery and flowers, because that's what the room was filled with, particularly ferns, small trees, and creeping vines that sprouted flowers of every color. A pool gleamed ahead of them, reflecting the most arresting feature of the space: seven moons hanging in an arc across the ceiling/sky. The central moon, the highest of them all, was full. Descending along either side of the arc, each moon was a fraction less full than the one above it, until the pair at bottom right and left were no more than thin crescents.
Fairy-lights bobbed in the air, too. Yet despite these, the seven moons, and the reflection of their light in the pool, there still wasn't quite enough light to read by.
"Right," Blays said. "Now how do we find the spear?"
Dante tried to avoid stepping on any of the fragile plants and elaborate insects. "I don't know."
"Er, you don't?"
"That's kind of entirely why I wanted to make Silidus give it to us."
"Well, this sort of place is where all the other gods have kept their spears, right?"
"You mean the two whole other times we've even seen one of the parts? Times when the gods retrieved their parts from what might have been an entirely separate plane of existence?"
"Yeah. So it could be here."
"But we have no way of even knowing that. Or seeing it. Which is going to make it especially hard to take it."
"Not if you just find a way to find it."
Dante pressed his lips together in frustration. He looked to Gladdic for sympathy.
Gladdic took a measured step toward the pool, disturbing a few tiny flies. "If we are uncertain that what we seek is in this room, then we must first become certain—or disabuse ourselves of falsehood. Even if we are unable to see the fraction of the spear, we may be able to sense it in other ways."
"What, like smelling it?" Blays closed his eyes and took a deep sniff. "I dunno, doesn't really smell like spear around here to me."
"Yet we do not seek a spear. We seek its part. Merely one of a greater whole. Just as the parts of a body and the blood within it may be used to locate its other parts, the same may be true of the weapon: for surely it was all forged of the same stuff." He held out his hand. "Give me one of the parts we already possess."
Blays cocked his head, then got out his pack and withdrew the shaft they'd been given by Gashen. "Here. Figure you prefer the non-sharp bit."
Gladdic took the glowing rod and scowled over it. Ether sparked from his fingers. He sent it into the length of the shaft, which pulsed, the ether that formed it swirling more quickly.
"The way I can track someone by their blood," Dante said. "You mean to see if you can track one part of the spear to the rest of it."
"I thought that I had made that perfectly clear."
"That's because you don't seem to have any idea what normal people are like."
"Says the man who favors the company of dead rats." Gladdic turned the ethereal shaft over, then kneeled and set it in the grass in front of him, moving his hand back and forth above it, brightening the light as he went. He sat back, brow furrowed and eyes narrowed. "Do I sense a thread?"
He gestured again with greater energy, fingers dancing like the legs of a spider spinning its web. He leaned forward, neck extended, and smiled.
And then immediate smacked his hand to his forehead, rictusing in pain. "It is here. Very close, yet veiled."
"Can you find its exact spot in the room?" Dante began to pace. "If so, we might be able to tear that part of the veil down."
Gladdic clamped the spear shaft under the stump of his right arm and stood, seeming to feel his way forward with his left hand, leaving traces of ether in the air as he went. He made a circuit around the quiet pool, then wandered to his left before returning to his original spot.
"No. The intensity of it is too much for me to sense it with any precision."
"I was afraid of that," Dante muttered. "Blays, you want to take a look in the nether?"
Blays nodded, rippled, and vanished. Dante had a vague sense of him moving about through space. While he was busy exploring the shadows, Gladdic sifted ether through the air, mumbling under his breath.
Blays returned with a shrug. "Don't see anything."
"You're sure?" Dante said.
"If a piece of the ethereal spear were in the shadows, it would stand out like a star in the night sky. A sky where all the other stars had gone dead. And it's yelling at you in a really big star voice."
Gladdic came to a halt, gazing up at nothing. "Do not search with such intensity for a piece of the spear that you look right past the seam or doorway behind which it might be hidden."
Dante could feel him making a very slow and methodical search of the ether for anything out of place. Dante's own sense of the light was infinitely clumsier, but he pitched in as well as he could.
"Hey Gladdic," Blays said.
"Do not interrupt me."
"You know I hate to do so. But please tell me you're doing that."
Blays was pointing up at the sky. There, all but the highest of the seven moons was moving upward. Watching for a moment longer, their apparent movement was an illusion caused by the lack of reference points. Instead, the crescents and half-moons were all becoming full, as if they were emerging from an eclipse.
As the two moons flanking the one in the center reached fullness, two black shapes slipped loose and fell to the ground.
Dante backed up a step, grabbing the nether with both hands. "Did you see that?"
Blays peered into the gloom, which hadn't lessened despite the extra brightness shed by the uncovered moons. "What am I supposed to be seeing?"
Gladdic waved his hand in a circle. Ether brightened the grotto. And outlined two things that made no sense to Dante's eye. They looked more like shapes than beings—black circles, flattened at the bottom—but long hands dangled from their sides, the fingers hardened into dagger-like claws. They drifted forward on unseen legs.
"What the hell is that?" Dante said.
Blays flicked out his swords. "Something we should kill."
Another pair of the constructs dropped down from two more now-full moons. Dante shaped the shadows into a curved blade and threw it at the closest of the things. Just as the nether was about to strike it, it blinked away, the blade sailing away into the distance. The construct blinked back into being the instant it was safe.
Gladdic was attacking the other member of the first pair with an ether-heavy strike mixed with a small portion of shadow. Just like its partner had done, the circle blinked out of being, the attack passing through the empty space where it had been, and then it returned.
"Nice trick," Blays said. "But let's see what tires out first: their tricks, or my arms."
He bobbed toward the one Dante had attacked. As he closed on it, a third pair dropped from the last of the seven moons, the ones that had appeared to be crescents earlier but now blazed like silver coins.
"They are demons," Gladdic said.
"You don't say?" Dante threw a trio of bolts at his target, staggering their placement, but the monster vanished until all three had gone past.
"Be fearful of their touch."
Gladdic assembled a sophisticated-feeling assault and drove it at the same one he'd attacked before. Dante didn't get to see how this played out, however, as Blays had closed on the other demon and was presently taking a good hack at it. The thing phased away, returned, then blinked again as Blays jabbed at it with his other sword. Looking smug, Blays flicked a lightning-swift backhand at it just as it rematerialized. The stroke cut through the demon's side, spraying shadows, but it lunged toward Blays, claws outstretched.
He jumped back, taking a wild slash at its strange, stubby arm. The Odo Sein steel bounced off the claws with a thud.
"I don't like this!" Blays backpedaled away from the demon, which pursued, flanked by the others.
Gladdic unleashed a swarm of darts, half light and half shadow, whipping them at the flank of the demon closing fastest on Blays. But it simply blinked away. Gladdic had anticipating this, swerving the swarm toward the next target, then back to the first. Again, they dodged. The darts began to frazzle beneath the constant redirection.
Blays fended off another lunge, falling back two steps in the process. "Is it time to run?"
"That's your answer to everything," Dante said.
"That's because it's such a good one."
The things marched forward like a shield wall. Without warning, Blays pounced on them, driving two to wink away and clipping a small wound in the edge of a third, which stopped "bleeding" almost at once. Still, even that was more damage than Dante or Gladdic had been able to inflict on any of them.
As the faceless demons neared, Dante drew his sword with a snap of nether. "If we can't get rid of these things, it's only a matter of time before Silidus sends something even worse to finish us off. There has to be a way!"
One of the circular demons pounced at him. He had just enough wherewithal to jab forward and use its own momentum against it, aiming his sword for the upper spot where its face might have been. As expected, it vanished.
Dante blinked too. "Did you feel that?"
Blays ducked a claw swipe and counterattacked, brutally savaging an empty piece of air. "The advance of my impending death?"
"When it vanished. They're moving in and out of the nether!"
"Then let's see them escape from us both."
Blays shifted into the shadows. Dante jabbed at the demon as it came at him again, shooting a black dart at it for good measure. It blinked—and when it came back, nether roiled from a giant gash in its side, diffusing from the sword wound like blood dribbled into a puddle. Dante grabbed hold of it, wrapping the shadowy cords around his wrist, and pulled.
The circular demon shrieked from a mouth it didn't have. Thick strands of it piled in Dante's hands. He packed them into a wave of darts and launched them at a second creature as it bowled its way toward him. It vanished. Dante and Gladdic drew cataracts of nether from the wounded demon the same way Dante had once learned how to destroy the Andrac. The other four, alarmed or perhaps enraged at this, abandoned their steady advance in favor of a full-bore charge.
The disappeared demon shuddered back into view, leaking shadows from four different cuts. Gladdic shifted to it before it could attempt to heal itself. Dante used his stolen shadows to launch dart after dart at the charging quartet. Yet rather than blinking out of being and risking the same fate as the other two, they lowered their circular bodies into the barrage. The darts knocked little puffs of shadows from them, but not enough to do serious harm.
