The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 31
"But we have to try anyway."
Gladdic nodded. "I will go by myself, if need be."
Dante pressed his hands together. "If we had another course of action to consider, I'd say it's time to split up and chase after them both. But we don't. We'll go with you to Tanar Atain."
"Do you think you speak for me?" Kelen said.
"I'm sorry?"
"Rale is your world, not mine. I have no wish to enter it."
"I wouldn't presume to insist you must," Dante said levelly. "But I think you'd be of help to us there."
"I won't be going." Kelen folded his arms and looked out at the debris scrawled across the sky. "There is another option left to me. It's a thin chance—but if I have time to speak to Maralda by herself, I might be able to convince her to do what Carvahal won't."
"But if she does, we'll be stuck in Tanar Atain when the portals collapse." Dante pursed his mouth. "Doesn't matter though, does it? If you can talk her into it, don't even hesitate. We'll find our way home in time."
He finished conjuring up the spectral image of the Riya Lase. Wessen regarded it, swimming through his memories of creation until he remembered its place in Rale, and then opened yet another portal. Kelen brought the onas alongside it.
"Wessen." Dante stood. "We only have ten days left before Nolost brings our world to its end. If we're not back before then, you won't see us again."
Wessen started to say something, but one of his chains jerked about, likely in response to the portal he'd just opened. Dante bowed his head to the Chained God, and leaped through the portal.
18
Islands of bone topped by ghostly white trees bubbled the surface of the blood-colored swamp. Wessen had managed to send them right to the Wound of the World—and even better, the grotesque white mesa that housed the Riya Lase stood right in front of him.
What Wessen hadn't managed to do was set the portal above solid ground. Dante dropped straight down and plunged into the water.
It was cool, but far from fatally cold, and after the initial shock, Dante kicked his way to the surface, trying not to get any of the water in his mouth or eyes. He had just gotten a few strokes away from where he'd made impact as Blays and Gladdic plunked down into the water themselves. He treaded water, waiting for them to emerge.
"What are you doing?" Blays said as soon as he popped to the surface. "Have you forgotten about the ziki oko?!"
In fact, he had. Dante cursed and thrashed toward the nearest source of solid ground, a heaped-up pile of bones scattered with a few leafless white trees. It wasn't thirty feet away, but Gladdic shouted out just moments later. Behind them, the water churned and foamed, the disturbance speeding toward them many times faster than they could swim.
Gladdic wasn't going to make it. Dante's brain lurched back to the time when he hadn't quite gotten away from them. What they'd done to his legs. He pulled up the nether, but the water was too thick and opaque to make out any of the ziki oko—or even to be sure they were ziki oko, and not something even worse native to the Wound.
Gladdic swam onward, his face resolute. The thrashing patch of water raced toward him. Dante lifted the nether, about to separate it into needles and just shoot them down into the water, then he gasped so hard he inhaled some of the red liquid. Coughing, he swept the nether under the surface. And into the ground some ten feet below it.
Praying he wouldn't find more bones or grimstone there, he tried to grab hold of it. It moved. He yanked a rectangle of it upward. The land slammed into them from below, tossing them above the waterline.
They found themselves two feet above the water stretched out on a gloppy mound that was already sliding back into the swamp. Dante hardened it, purging it of water as he caught his breath. The water around the islet frothed angrily.
"You know," Dante said, "when I first learned how to move the earth, I never imagined it would end up so useful."
"When I first learned how to use a sword, I instantly knew how useful it'd be." Blays picked himself up and shook some of the muck off him. "Suppose you can build us a bridge?"
The white hill stood fifty yards from them. In some ways it resembled a temple more than a hill, with a huge ceiling held above the floor by a great many pillars. The "pillars" were far from straight and orderly, however: they rose at every which angle, and looked as much grown as carved, something like a very messy spiderweb made up of very thick strands. It was as dreamlike and unreal as anything they'd seen in Olastar.
Dante reached into the muck and lifted. With no idea of the tasks ahead of them, and how much they might require him to draw on his powers, he kept the causeway thin as he extended it toward the landmark. He was pretty sure the Tanarians had had a name for it, but he'd forgotten it as soon as he'd left the place well over a year ago.
Small ripples broke the surface next to the causeway as they advanced along it. He had the idea they were being made by something much larger than it appeared. Whatever its intentions, it kept them to itself as Dante brought his bridge to the ledge of the white hill and stepped onto its surface.
A canoe rested on it ten feet away from them. Blays took a look inside it, then glanced up at the tangled webbing of the structure. "Suppose someone's in there already?"
"I suppose their corpse is," Dante said. "That boat's bone dry."
"Then I suppose they won't mind us using it when we leave."
They entered the cavern that opened beyond the pillars. The ground was all grimstone, white and bone-like. Red pools clotted its surface.
Blays glanced back at the bleak, overcast light behind them. "That means some of the Tanarians survived the lich, doesn't it?"
"There is no guarantee," Gladdic said. "That vessel could have been left here by one of the last of them, who came here in desperation, searching for a means to stop the Eiden Rane after we were driven from this land."
"Yeah, but Tanar Atain is pretty big, right? And most of it is swamps, brambles, man-eating fish, and man-eating lizards that are also psychotically big. It isn't exactly easy to sweep it clean."
"When he was restoring his power, the Eiden Rane took many of its villages, including the remote ones. Then he took entire cities, leaving nothing but the dead and the Blighted, who he surely sent out into the wilds and reaches to scour any who survived. It was well within his power to take every last soul from this land."
"Maybe so. It was definitely a pain in the ass to kill him, so I wouldn't want to underestimate him. But this is one of the harshest places I've ever been to. Not just the land, but the history. With all that the Tanarians have been through, I'd bet some of them made it through this as well."
Gladdic didn't argue the point. The cavern narrowed. A strip of red water clung to each of the walls, the strips widening as they advanced until they had to walk single file along a path of grimstone wedged between two thirty-foot-wide pools.
"There may or may not be Tanarians left alive," Dante said. "But what about Blighted? They didn't just drop dead when the lich did."
"That's one of several reasons I didn't want to come back to this place," Blays said. "That, and the fact it feels like we're walking through a giant corpse."
"I suppose if there are any lurking in the pools, they'll be too sickly without the lich to be any threat to us." Dante glanced up from the waters. "Gladdic, if you're able to take on the mantle of the lich, what happens to all the Blighted still out there? Will they regain their strength?"
"I do not know for certain," Gladdic said. "Though I suspect the return of their master would bring the return of their vitality as well. You should at least pray that it does."
"Why in the world should I do that?"
"Because if I am able to take on the mantle of the lich, then I will also take command of the Blighted."
Dante blinked. "That could go a hell of a long way to fighting off the rest of Nolost's forces once we've got him out of Rale. Got any other tricks up your sleeve?"
"I expect I will discover further abilities as I learn more about my new condition. But all will depend on whether I am able to maintain control of myself, and not fall into the darkness that is the very heart of lichdom."
Dante had been starting to feel some perverse pangs of jealousy at this talk of commanding armies of Blighted and discovering demigod-like powers. But Gladdic was about to sacrifice himself, wasn't he? Sooner or later—whether it was after they killed Wessen, or sometime after they drove the last of Nolost's hosts from the land—he was going to succumb to the malice of the lich.
And then they would have to put him to an end, too.
The air smelled like he had a nosebleed. They came next to a spot where red water filled the entirety of the path forward. The walls were scorched and the ground was littered with bones, many of which were wrapped in rags or withered skin.
"Speaking of the Blighted," Blays said. "If I'm not mistaken, these were the first of them we ever met."
Dante scowled at the perfectly calm water. "There's going to be more of them in there, isn't there?"
Blays kneeled and picked up a few leg and arm bones. "If there are, we learned enough about them since then to know they're too dumb to avoid getting tricked."
He underhand tossed one of the bones into the water, generating a healthy splash, and followed it up with another. Before he needed to throw a third, a pair of V-shaped ripples moved toward them. Step by step, two Blighted emerged from the water. The things never looked healthy, but these ones looked like sick old cats who'd spent the night out in the rain. When Dante killed them with a quick burst of nether, they almost looked grateful.
The ground sloped up, bringing them clear of the water, and then into a forest of blade-like protrusions of grimstone. There were no other surprises, though, and they soon exited the caverns onto a ridge. It had started to rain while they were indoors, heavy intermittent drops that hit the grimstone with loud splats.
They hiked their way up. As they crested the ridge, the rain was coming down hard enough for Dante to pull up the hood of his cloak. They stood on the rim of a bowl of land a quarter of a mile wide. The surface was gnarled with formations of grimrock and spangled with lumps of iridescent iron-colored rock that bled bright red water as the rain washed down them.
They tramped down the bowl toward the hillock at the center of it that held what was left of the Riya Lase. Bodies were strewn about here, both of Blighted and of humans, though they were so rotted away that it was sometimes hard to tell which was which. Axes and swords rusted in the rain.
At the top of the hillock, the huge shards of the Riya Lase lay in heaps. They appeared to be iron, too, but for all the time that had passed since they'd last been to the site, there wasn't a fleck of rust upon them. A body lay face-down in front of the wreckage. Unlike the others, which were mostly skeletal, along with clumps of hair and twisted skin, this one was intact. And fresh enough to stink.
"Guess we found our canoe-ist," Blays said.
"So," Dante said. "What now?"
Gladdic wandered toward the iron slabs. "It is strange to return here, the source of all this strife. Even stranger to recall that all of this is your fault."
Dante felt his face redden. "I had no idea what this place was. I'd never even heard of the Eiden Rane. Anyway, I never would have been out here in the first place if not for your obsession with dominating every land Mallon could get its hands on."
"I suppose it is of no use to comb through the remains of that which cannot be changed." Gladdic kneeled to touch one of the cracked slabs. "And it is true that, whether in another year or many hundreds of them, it was only a matter of time until the Eiden Rane would have fought free of all the restraints these people kept him trapped within. Perhaps it was our fate to face him in our time instead of theirs."
"Again, what's the plan here, then? It's been way too long since he left this thing for there to be anything left to follow."
"Do not be so sure. Some connection to the source may remain, no matter how obscure. He spent ages within the Iron Prison. Despite his death, I can still feel his presence in it."
Skeptical, Dante closed his eyes and sent his mind into the wreckage of the Riya Lase. He grunted and fell back a step as a surge of cold shot through him.
"All right, maybe I was a little hasty. Still, even with a trace of him left in this, there's no way you're going to be able to follow it back to this so-called source of yours when it's been eight hundred years since it turned him into the lich."
"Again, do not underestimate what might be possible. We are not dealing with anything like the rules you have been used to in the past. We are dealing with the White Lich."
Dante bit his tongue. After a glance around their rain-beaten surroundings—he was sure they were alone, but his brush with the hint of the lich in the Riya Lase had spooked him—he closed his eyes again and returned his focus to the iron shards.
The coldness came for him again. This time, he brushed it off, and it faded. Though he suspected that didn't mean that it was gone.
All he could feel was ether. Ether so bright it was like it was blinding his mind's eye. He didn't think he could do very much with that, so he attempted to "squint" that mind's eye, cutting back the overwhelming ethereal glare. Still, he saw nothing. Just when he was about to conclude there wasn't any nether at all, he glimpsed a tiny thread of it, tucked away in one of the many runes carved into the surface of the iron.
Moving quickly so he wouldn't lose it, but carefully so he wouldn't snap it, he isolated the thread and sent a small stream of his own nether into it. He crouched and set his hand on the metal. It felt almost cold enough to burn him. He didn't pull away. Gently, he drew the thread to him until some of the nether reached his hand.
The faintest of pressures appeared in his head.
"I may have something," he said. "I can barely feel it, but I think I've got a link."
Gladdic glanced his way, but continued his own work with the ether. Still crouching, Dante turned in a slow circle, trying to get a better feel for the nethereal thread. But it was too subtle to get a sense of anything more definite than that it was connected to something, somewhere.
That meant he either had to find a way to amplify the sensation, or make himself more sensitive to it. The latter was an intriguing thought, but the former was much simpler, and so he just tried feeding the thread more nether, starting with a few drops until he was reasonably confident it wasn't about to burst apart, then increasing it to a generous trickle.
The thread widened, undulating as it expanded. It was soon five times its original diameter, and the pressure in his head had increased even more than that.
"Got it! Whatever it's linked to, it's in that direction." Dante pointed north-northeast. Then tilted his head. "No, more like over there." He adjusted his arm a few degrees eastward. Then a few degrees more. "Oh shit. It's moving."
"The thing it's linked to?" Blays hooked his thumb in his belt next to the rod tucked into it. "Is it, er, alive?"
Dante waited a minute longer, hoping his instincts were wrong, then swore some more. "No. I don't think it's even an actual link. It's just moving around in a circle like the hand of a clock."
"What does that mean?"
"I don't have the slightest idea."
"Well, please get one. The sooner we get out of here, the sooner I can stop hating it."
Gladdic sent some ether into a slab in front of him, its light reflecting off the wet iron and the grimstone it rested on. Dante concentrated on the movement of the pressure in his head. It was still sweeping slowly about. Could he stabilize it somehow? Given that he didn't even know if it was a real link to anything, should he even bother? He muttered something that wasn't quite words and moved to a different chunk of iron. He isolated another thread of nether within it, brought it to him, and used the same process to expand it until it was big enough for him to sense the direction it was linked to. This accomplished the feat of giving him not one but two threads of nether meandering through a pointless circle.
He turned away from the remnants of the Riya Lase to clear his head. Rain beat down on the grimstone and on the tattered remains of the dead from a battle that felt like it had taken place many years ago instead of just one. He said a prayer to Arawn that Kelen would succeed in his task, because he was already doubting they would in theirs.
"Ha!" Gladdic said.
Light sprung up behind Dante. The way Gladdic was leaning forward to inspect it made it clear that the ether wasn't his own.
"What've you got there?" Dante said.
"I am not yet sure. I sensed a pattern within the ether, and brought it forth."
"But the ether's filled with all kinds of patterns. That's kind of what it does."
"This was one that I had not seen before. What does this look like to you?"
"A heap of old cotton?" Blays said. "Or the hairball of an albino cat?"
"I can't tell," Dante said. "Can't you make it any clearer?"
"That is just what I mean," Gladdic said with a flourish of his hand. "It resembles an image that is attempting to resolve itself, but cannot do so. I will see if I can convince it to show us what it wishes it could."
He pulled a skein of ether to himself and sank it into the slab the blurry image was hovering over. Dante spent a couple minutes watching him, at which point it became clear that whatever he was trying to do was probably going to take a while. Dante wandered to the other side of the rubble and isolated a third strand of nether just to make sure the first two weren't just anomalies. They were not.
He stared at the pile of broken iron until it occurred to him that there might be parts of it he couldn't see. Maybe even underground chambers. He sent his mind into the grimstone beneath the rubble. It wasn't true earth, or perhaps more accurately it was earth but also something else, but he could still feel the shape of it even if he couldn't move it, and that was enough for him to discern that there weren't any hidden underground chambers. Meaning the lich had just been stuck in that iron box for however many scores of years. That must have been unpleasant.
