What Lies Beyond, page 32
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
Dante took another stab at getting her to tell them how they might go about locating Urt's realm, but she'd have none of it. After a few more formalities and expressions of thanks, they ended the discussion, with Dante and the others riding east while she and her escort watched from the road to make sure they weren't about to try to sneak into Crosswater for some reason.
"One last feat wins us the full spear," Blays said. "And none of this would have happened if we hadn't turned the ramna on Protus. Guess there's something to be said for burning down your enemy's cities after all."
Gladdic smiled thinly. "I have made many similar arguments in the past."
"In any event, do we know where we're going now? Or is the plan to blunder around until we stumble into Urt's realm?"
"Denhild is just a short ride from here," Dante said. "We'll try there first. Gashen might allow us to research his archives for information on where to find Urt."
"Why don't you get hold of Lars on that thing he gave you?"
"I'd hardly call this an emergency. Anyway, we'll be at Denhild by tomorrow."
"Where there's no guarantee they'll give us a shred of help. Better to learn that sooner rather than later. Anyway, call me paranoid, but this feels like the most vulnerable part of our whole venture. Taim has to know we took part in the raid at Protus. Ka is probably out searching for us as we speak."
"This is true."
"There's also the possibility that Phannon is a double-agent and just fed us a huge line of bullshit to get us to expose ourselves to Taim. It would be nice to confirm her story with Gashen and Lars."
This was enough to make Dante reconsider. He got out the iron disk Lars had given him, running his finger over the raised lions as he dithered about whether the situation really called for it, then decided to hell with it, jabbed his knuckle, and dabbed blood onto the disk. It flushed bright red. The nether within it churned rhythmically.
He thought he knew the way to Denhild, but consulted his map anyway. He confirmed they were going in the right direction, then examined the map for hints of where Urt might be, whether direct ones—like, say, an X labeled "The Kingdom of Urt"—or indirect, like gaps in the landscape where a realm might be. But the landmarks weren't distributed at all evenly, and there was no telling where something deliberately unmarked might be located.
He was interrupted from his examination of the map by the pulsing of his loon. Nak reported that he'd maneuvered his forces as skillfully as he could to try to avoid direct warfare with the lich, but for all his efforts, he feared they were about to be outflanked. Barring some error on the lich's part, or an inspired escape on his own, he expected battle within the next day.
Dante told him to do all that he could. And that if it turned out not to be enough, that he understood.
They weren't quite halfway to Denhild when dust spiraled up from the road ahead: General Lars and his men. Dante and the other two hadn't been sparing their horses, so meeting at this distance between the two cities meant the general must have left within minutes of receiving Dante's message.
"Friends!" Lars scoured the horizons. "What danger threatens your life?"
"It's not quite here yet," Blays said. "Really, it's more of the looming kind. Or maybe the impending."
Lars gave them an angry look that was alarming despite being just a portion of what he was clearly capable of mustering. "Why was the signal raised when there is no disaster at hand?"
Dante and Blays explained quickly.
"Is the gods' offer true?" Dante said. "Or is this a way to destroy us?"
"Ah!" The general broke into a grin. "Rejoice, you persistent mortals. The offer is real."
"Incredible!" Blays punched his fist into his other palm. "But I don't see how we're expected to even be able to get to Urt's realm in the first place. How are we supposed to cross that desert?"
"The Desert of Yula? There are fearsome creatures within it, but the desert itself is not that wide."
"That's a relief, but that area beyond it—I don't even know how to describe it—"
The general crinkled his brow. "The Knifelands are not so imposing as their name implies. Especially for two sorcerers and a warrior of your caliber."
"Even so, it sounds like the sort of place you could get lost in for ages before finding your way to the doorway."
"The challenge you fear is not half as daunting as…" Lars trailed off, mouth twitching at something he saw in Blays.
Dante had maintained a straight face this entire time. Although it must not have been quite as convincing as he thought, for when Lars glanced at him in suspicion, the general cursed and stomped his foot.
"You've been playing me! Plying me for information it wasn't mine to give! Is that the entire reason you summoned me?"
"Not the entire reason," Blays said. "We really did need to know if the gods' offer was legitimate. My friends here had no idea about the, er, other reason I was so insistent on speaking with you."
"I ought to gut you and leave you to the drakelets." Lars glowered at Blays, who was looking very innocent. The general swore again. "If this is what it means to be your friend, no wonder you are so much of a burr under the saddle of your enemies."
"You know, now that you've told us where Urt's realm is, you might as well tell us the best way to get there."
"You god-blind ruffians." Lars wasn't quite done being angry, but he was laughing now, too. "Figure the rest out for yourselves! Or you are not worthy of carrying the spear, even if your company remains welcome within our walls."
"Getting there should be easier than normal anyway," Dante said. "Given that most of the ramna who'd otherwise be crossing our path are currently in Silidus' wine cellars instead."
"You will have other challenges, but the ramna won't be one of them. They do not bother Urt."
"Are his mysteries that frightening to the savages?"
"Urt is the only one of the gods who has never harmed or betrayed them, though that is of course in their opinion. But he is also a seer. Sometimes the ramna come to him for visions or answers and sometimes he grants these requests." Lars leaned forward, dropping his voice so that the soldiers who'd come with him couldn't hear. "Though I have long suspected that some of the prophecies he gives out are not meant to predict the future so much as they are to cause it."
"That would be most clever," Gladdic said. "Position yourself beyond the politics and petty struggles of the realm while manipulating others to exert your will without understanding they are being so used."
"Then we'll take anything Urt says with a grain of salt. Assuming we've got any left by the time we get there." Dante tapped the horn of his saddle. "Why make such a big deal about not telling us where Urt's kingdom is? What if we'd just gone to a pub in Denhild and asked the locals where it is?"
Lars looked amused. "Then most would not have been able to answer, and the few who did would have given you false counsel."
"All right, then what if we'd asked the ramna? If they go to him for wisdom, I'm going to make the mad assumption they know where to go."
"That is only sometimes true. You assume that Urt's realm is just like any other. That is a foolish thing to do, considering that Urt is like no other! If you did not want people to know where your home was, how would you stop them from finding it?"
"Hide it?"
"No," Gladdic said. "I would hide it and move it. And move it again whenever word of its new position began to be known."
Lars nodded. "So Urt does with his kingdom. Congratulate yourselves for beguiling its current location from me. But if you do any dawdling along the way and then find that it is no longer where it once was, don't expect to find it again any time soon."
This was all the encouragement Dante needed to bring the conversation to an end. They parted on good terms—though the general made Dante promise not to use the disk again unless it was a real emergency—with Lars and his men heading east, back toward Denhild, while Dante and the others cut south-southeast, where his map indicated the Desert of Yula was located. The map's sense of scale was wanting, but given the endurance of their new horses, Dante thought it would take no more than five days to reach the desert, maybe as few as three.
For the time being the way was easy, open grassland with little threat of running into ramna bands. Despite the trouble-free path—or perhaps because it gave him nothing else to occupy his mind—Dante's nerves drew tighter and tighter as he waited to hear back from Nak regarding the results of the confrontation with the Eiden Rane.
The longer he went without hearing anything, the more convinced he became that Nak had fallen, with all the strength of Narashtovik perishing with him. Dante was compelled to loon him and check if that was so, but in case it wasn't, and Nak was still in the middle of the fight, then doing so would only distract Nak, perhaps ruinously. And so Dante bit his tongue, even as his worries threatened to drive him crazy.
At last the loon pulsed in his ear. Dante opened the line, half certain that it would be to the mocking laughter of the lich.
It was Nak. He sounded exhausted. Beyond exhausted. And the story he told made Dante's throat close so tightly he all but couldn't breathe.
Blays acted like he wasn't listening to the conversation, watching the wide-open prairie instead. But as soon as Dante shut down the line, Blays turned on him.
"Well? How'd they do?"
"They made their stand at Varradun Pass. A little south of Cling." Dante's head felt light and he squeezed his legs to his horse's flanks to stop himself from slipping. "The lich made his move. Marched his main force right up the pass at them—and in the meantime cleared a route for a secondary force to march on their right flank. There was nothing Nak could do."
"Oh." Blays' voice softened. "How many of them made it out?"
"You don't understand. Nak didn't get any reinforcements from Gallador. But he did get them from Pocket Cove."
"The People of the Pocket? How did they know to help?"
"You can probably answer that question better than any of us. But my impression is they don't keep themselves nearly as walled off from the rest of the world as they want us to believe. In any event, they turned the mountain against the lich. Brought landslides down on both Varradun Pass and the path the lich had built for his sneak attack. They killed thousands of Blighted before the lich knew what was happening. Still, the lich managed to stop them from crushing his entire army—and that's when the People of the Pocket dropped a cliff on him."
Blays went still. "Don't tell me…"
"He survived. Of course he survived, you'd have better luck trying to kill an ocean. But they did manage to wound him."
"Well, we've done that much ourselves. And it took them a whole army to match our feat."
Dante grinned, turning his face to the day. "They've bought us more time. Let's make the most of it."
23
They had grown used to traveling across the wilderness of the Realm of Nine Kings, and with the ramna pulled away to plunder the north, there was little to slow them down. The grassland gave way to undulating fields of boulders, then a pimpled land where muddy little volcanoes pushed themselves up from the earth, spewing loose and odiferous soil that Blays made any number of jokes about. In case Ka was on the hunt for them across the lands between them and Urt, they veered somewhat more easterly than Dante thought they needed to.
During the nights, Dante built their stone shelters, but disguised them to match whatever was around them—first the muddy volcanoes, then an all-but-sealed hollow in the side of the endless canyon they followed on the second day, then the turf-covered hillock in the forgotten reaches where wild horses played among the ruins of a city long dead.
On that same day, while watching the horses in silence as dusk stole across the reaches, they were attacked by three flying creatures with wingspans as wide as a king's road. Though the creatures were otherwise feathered, their long tails were scaled, and Blays swore he saw serpents' heads at their tips. They dispersed after Dante pelted them with a few darts of nether.
The following day, the fields remained verdant and flower-filled until they came to a wide river. The opposite bank was fringed with green, but beyond that, the land was all low, yellow hills.
Blays shielded his eyes from the sun. "Suppose that's our Desert of Yula?"
Dante gave it a once-over. "Unless the map I made in haste from a much larger one where I deliberately changed some of the signs and scale has made a mistake."
There weren't any bridges in sight, nor likely anywhere else on the entire run of the river, and Dante felt along its bed to confirm that it was much too deep to ford. But as he waded his horse into the shallows to raise up a land-bridge, the animal strode into the waters and began to swim. Blays shrugged and rode in after him. Dante dismounted into the water to swim next to the horse, pushing his saddlebag onto its back to keep the contents dry.
"Do not forget the lessons of the swamps." Gladdic illuminated the water around them. There were plenty of fish drifting about, but nothing like a school of ziki oko or anything longer than a man's arm, let alone the size of a swamp dragon, and they came to the other side without drawing interest from any animals.
A warm wind blew in from the south. They wrung out their clothes, Gladdic using some trick of the ether to hurry the process. Outside of some small game and a few grouse, they hadn't had much fresh meat on their recent travels, and Dante used the nether to spear several fish, which Blays said was cheating—although that didn't stop him from helping to eat them.
They entered the desert. The hills were gray dirt baked so hard that even the horses' hooves hardly scratched it. Sparse and dead grass rustled in the breeze. In less than a mile, the hills were replaced with dunes of coarse sand.
"Damn," Blays said. "It's that kind of desert."
Gladdic scowled at the ground. "In what cursed place was the ground made of such shifting sands?"
"It's called Morrive. You aren't missing out."
"Even worse." Dante nodded to the east. "The horizons are getting blurry. Just like they did when we traveled to the Claimless Reach. We're not going to be able to tell what direction we're going."
Gladdic sounded amused. "Are you expecting the sun to be swallowed as well?"
"As it happens, that's exactly what happened last time."
"Then use a compass to guide your way."
"Those don't work down here. The iron just keeps spinning."
"I refer to an ethereal compass."
"A what now?"
Gladdic pressed his lips together. "You do not even know of the ethereal compass?"
"Have you ever seen him try to use the ether?" Blays said. "It's like watching a newborn deer trying to run. While playing chess. With its nose."
Gladdic muttered an exasperated appeal to the heavens, then lifted his finger and drew a glowing line in the air, aligning it parallel to the ground. "There. We have our compass."
"A line?"
"What is the needle of a compass if not a line? Look: I have set it north to south, and fixed it to the ether so it will not change direction when I do."
"At least draw an arrow on one end so we don't get turned around. What do you do when you're going to go to sleep and you have to shut down the ether? Draw a physical line in the dirt?"
"That is one way, yes. You are one who prefers complex solutions. Perhaps that is because you believe they display that you are clever. Yet the simpler the solution, the less likely it is to fail."
Dante presumed he should feel rebuked, but the insight didn't sting at all. As they walked south through the dunes, making their way toward the Knifelands, he kept one eye on the compass floating beside Gladdic. It seemed to be doing its job.
The dunes looked absolutely desolate, but there was life here, too. Birds with wings wider than a man's armspan glided across the sky, hardly ever having to flap, their long tails stretched out behind them. Lizards skittered through the sand, making strange trails as they went. Ants and colorful beetles scooped up anything left behind by the larger creatures.
There weren't any plants to be found, but small, gnarled rock formations broke the sand here and there, green and blue and orange, stuck together in round and knobby bulbs that reminded Dante of something you would see exposed at shore by a low tide. Some of the beetles, wasps, and small rodents took a particular interest in them, even trying to nibble pieces off of them. Rock-eating mice would have marked one of the oddest things he'd seen in the Realm until he came to understand the rocks weren't really rocks at all: in fact, they were tough, hard plants, or perhaps even a fungus.
The sand slowed their animals, and with a lack of any horizons to provide reference points, it seemed as though they weren't making any progress at all. Yet if Dante's map could be believed, they'd be out of the desert by the next day. Night neared, and the day's warmth fled; a sudden wind had them spitting sand and rubbing it from their eyes. Dante called a halt and hardened a shelter from the sand. They built a small fire and cooked the last of the fish they'd caught earlier that day, which Gladdic had preserved with the ether. Beady little eyes gleamed from the darkness, unseen paws swishing through the sand, but none of the animals approached close enough to the circle of firelight to see what they were.
The nights were growing longer and they were ready to begin again before the sun was up. Something about the light of the ether on the endless dunes felt threatening, or perhaps sacred, and they didn't speak to each other until the dawn flooded over the sands.
With the spell of silence broken, they passed the time recalling scriptures and stories about Urt in preparation for whatever he had in store for them. There wasn't much to be learned: Urt didn't come up often, and when he did, his motivations—even his role itself—were so opaque that scholars could spend a lifetime arguing the nuances of a single story.
"Yet there is one tale that could shed light," Gladdic said after a lull. "The Rebirth of Tulgen."
"Who died fighting the sea reavers." Dante had to think a moment to remember more. "When he fell, the ancient and faraway city of Tarmor was set to be conquered. Only Urt restored Tulgen to life. What significance are you seeing in this?"
