What Lies Beyond, page 33
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
"Many hold that Urt brought Tulgen back to the field to quench the fire of the reavers at Tarmor before it could spread across the interior. But it is my belief that he intervened to save the city of Tarmor itself: for it was the seat of the University of Nalgar, first of its kind to transmit knowledge of the nether in organized form. After Tulgen saved the city, its knowledge spread to many other lands, which arose from their dark ages to seed the soil for what came next: among them the two tribes of Rashen and Elsen in the north, that would become Narashtovik, and the tribes of Stotts and Helods in the south, that would become Bressel. If Tarmor and its university had fallen to the sea reavers, our world might remain in an era of darkness to this day."
"But why would Urt care about that? He's hardly a humanitarian. If anything he's destroyed more people than he's ever saved. He's not a huge proponent of knowledge, either. What about the time he flooded the Monastery of Alquibias?"
"His resurrection of Tulgen was not a matter of saving lives or lore. Rather it was to prevent a new cycle of civilization from being strangled in the cradle."
Dante waved a fly from his horse's neck. "That's pretty speculative. On the other hand, it would tie into what you told General Lars about Urt being the lord of cycles. After all, what is the cicada if not an insect that returns in…"
He lost the focus to complete his thought. Gladdic followed his eyes to the dune in front of them. There was no wind, and the ground beneath them was perfectly steady, but sand was spilling down the side of the dune, more and more of it with each second. A dimple sank into it, first a hand wide, then a foot, then a yard.
"What've we got," Blays said, "some kind of sand-mole?"
Reflexively, Dante drew his knife and scratched his arm, drawing on the nether. The first shadows touched his fingers as a domed shape six feet across broke free of the sand. A great worm extruded twenty feet into the air before bending forward on its thick body. It opened its mouth—four flaps making an X-shaped opening—and revealed a ring of huge, crystalline teeth.
Blays edged his horse back from the worm, reaching for his swords. "These things again? Did this one think Talassa was too gloomy and headed south for warmer weather?"
"Hit it down its throat," Dante said. "That's what hurt them worst."
"We could give it a fight, which seems to be what it wants from us. But why don't we just go around it?"
This seemed reasonable enough, so Dante angled his horse to the right. But the sand in front of him sucked downward. A second worm thrust its head into the sky, translucent teeth scraping against each other as it flung its jaws wide and then slammed them back together.
Blays unsheathed his swords, shaking his head. "Why does everything insist on making me kill it?"
Dante's horse was getting a little jumpy, but it responded to his command to get two steps closer to the second worm. The worm reared back, springing open its jaws again as it prepared to strike. Dante waited for it to snap its head toward him before launching his nether. Most of the shadows hit its teeth with a blood-curdling grate, but a few flew down its throat. The worm clacked its mouth shut, thrashing its head side to side.
Yet twenty feet to its right, the sand was sucking downward. A third one of the beasts emerged into the daylight, cutting off that much more of their angle of escape.
The first worm snapped at Blays, who backed just out of range. "Just how many of these things are there?"
Dante threw a bit of nether at the third worm to keep it occupied, then sank his mind down into the sands, seeking open tunnels or worm-sized gaps within the earth. When he found what he was looking for, he tried to swear, but the word stuck in his throat like a too-large bite of beef.
"There's just one of them," he managed.
"Just one more?" Blays swiped at his opponent as it extended further from the sand. "Well that's good news."
"No," Dante said. "It's not."
"But we dealt with much worse in the Cavern of—"
"Run! Run run run run!"
Dante yanked the sand away from beneath the worm that had been menacing him, half-burying it. He dashed past it, glancing back to ensure Gladdic and Blays were doing the same. His eyes went even wider.
The entire dune they'd been on was sinking, draining away like wine from a barrel with the bung pulled. More and more of the worms wriggled free from the loose sand. They were arranged in an orderly ring and for the moment none of them were giving chase.
The sand drained lower, revealing a hill of bare, tough rock. In most un-hill-like fashion, the hill bobbed upward, the ring of worms that surrounded it rising with it.
"What the hell am I looking at?" Blays yelled.
Dante leaned forward in the saddle. "If you can still talk, you're not fleeing fast enough!"
Their horses struggled through the deep sand. Behind them, a worm the size of a river surged upward, a blizzard of sand falling away from its segmented body, the smaller worms—in truth, just tentacles—that ringed its mouth waving madly.
"By the souls of the gods," Gladdic said.
Blays' mouth hung open. "Why would they make something like that?!"
"I don't think they did," Dante said. "I think this world created it on its own."
The worm swayed in the air, as if getting its bearings. It didn't seem to have any eyes, yet it swung its enormous head straight toward them, then sprawled forward, landing so heavily the ground rattled, knocking sand down from the surrounding dunes. It squeezed more and more of itself out into the air, racing after them with horrible speed.
"Unless we go faster, it's going to eat us," Blays said.
Dante called down the nether. "I can see that."
"It's going to eat us, and its mouth is so big it won't even get to taste us."
Dante swept a lane of sand ahead of them, hardening it into solid ground. The horses clattered along it, tripling their speed. Which meant the monstrosity was only gaining on them at a modest rate rather than an insane one.
"Should we even bother to try to kill it?" Dante said to Gladdic.
Gladdic glanced over his shoulder. "That would seem slightly more likely to succeed than attempting to reason with it."
They lobbed a barrage of ether and nether behind them, but while all of their attacks managed to strike the leviathan, Dante couldn't tell if they'd even scratched it. They fell into darkness: its shadow had caught up to them. It had at last fully emerged from the ground and was moving forward with a serpentine wriggle, although the contraction of its armored segments against the ground seemed to be propelling it as well. The hiss of its passage chased after them like a rainstorm heavy enough to dissolve the world.
The vast shadow raced ahead of them. The worm was rearing upward, preparing to smash down across the ground. Its body toppled toward them like a tower. Dante swept the weariness from the horses, allowing them a renewed burst of speed, and sent his mind into the sands just behind him. The worm's head swung toward them, the motion appearing ponderously slow despite its great speed.
The size of it gave Dante vertigo. He shook off the sensation. As the worm neared impact, he shaped the sand into a cone, the base twenty feet wide, the tip a sharp point.
The worm landed on the spike of rock in the fuzzy boundary between its head and its body. Rather than penetrating its skin, the rock burst apart.
The leviathan struck the ground. Dante had his hands pressed over his ears but the boom of the impact was so loud he almost passed out. The road Dante had been building for them shattered; the horses seemed to drop for a second, then to float. Dante's guts followed a similar process. Their mounts fought to maintain their footing on the shifting ground. Just as they steadied themselves, a cloud of dust and sand enveloped them from behind, blocking out all sight.
Dante rode blind, praying the worm wasn't already launching a second attack. The dust thinned; as soon as he could see the ground, he laid a new road beneath them, letting the horses race forward.
During the confusion, Blays had gotten ahead of him. Blays turned around in the saddle, face covered in dust from brow to chin. "Get us off the ground!"
"Unfortunately, we appear to be stuck to it."
"Off ground level!"
The worm had fallen back a little to collect itself after its attack, but was now shooting forward again, its shadow edging closer and closer. Dante pulled nether to him from all sides and pumped it into the ground. A squat column of stone rose beneath them, lifting them into the sky. Dante expanded its edges, building the base of the plateau bigger and stronger while keeping the top smaller and more compact so he could lift it higher.
The worm drove into the base of the plateau, rattling it. The blow did nothing to rattle the worm, however, as it drew back and slammed into the rock again, bashing free a hunk of stone.
"This will not save us," Gladdic said.
Dante wiped grit from his eyes. "Do you think your naysaying will?"
"We cannot outrun it. Nor can we elevate ourselves to safety."
The beast struck again, crumbling another piece of the platform. "Not helping!"
"Sure it is," Blays said. "We just have to do something that isn't one of those two things that won't work."
"I'm open to suggestion!"
"Well, you could ride off that way as a decoy to die helplessly while Gladdic and I ride off to glory. Or you could do something to stop the mini-worms from sensing us."
Dante braced himself as the leviathan pounded into the plateau again. "Mini-worms? The ones around its mouth?"
"They're the ones that found us, right? So just do something to stop that."
Dante gazed down at the beast as it drew back for another attack. There were dozens of the smaller worms and even if he could begin to disable or destroy them he imagined the giant one could destroy his platform much faster.
Then again, he didn't have to destroy them.
The worm swung its head at the plateau like a flail. Just as it was about to make contact, Dante softened the rock, pulling it over the worm's head like a sack. The beast made impact, but it was barely enough to shake the pillar. It drew back its neck in confusion and Dante hardened the rock coating its head, encasing it in yellow sandstone. The worm shook its head violently, which didn't help at all.
Blays laughed. "Like a dog with its head stuck in a bucket."
"I'm sure I'll find it a lot funnier once we're not in danger of being crushed into bloody human-parchment."
Rather than building a ramp down to the ground, Dante dissolved the plateau beneath them, which had the added benefit of guaranteeing the leviathan couldn't bash its head against it to knock the stone loose. They hit the sand. Dante's command was growing weak, but he extended a thin road beneath them, galloping south at full speed. The worm continued to thrash and squirm, falling further behind.
Only when the haze of the horizons swallowed it up completely was Dante comfortable enough to stop laying down road and let the horses slow.
Blays sleeved the sweat and dust from his forehead. "Please tell me that thing is too big for the desert to hold more than one of."
"I will tell you whatever makes your ears feel nice." Gladdic motioned to the empty sand before them. "Yet there is no way to know what lies ahead until we cross it."
~
They hadn't spent two full days in the desert, but when it came to an end, the relief Dante felt was as if they'd been lost in it for a year.
By name, the Knifelands promised something far worse. And maybe it might have been worse if they'd been ordinary travelers: for the land could hardly be more treacherous if it had been designed to be, which maybe it had. It was similar to the maze-like blades of rock they'd had to cross through on their way into Carvahal's kingdom, except far worse. There were tunnels, too, and pits to nowhere, and sudden cliffs, and little blind canyons, and some parts of the rock were treacherously smooth while other parts were ankle-breakingly jagged and uneven.
It would have been impossible to navigate on horseback, and only slightly easier on foot. Except that Dante could clear a path wherever it got too bad, and Blays could pop into the shadows to scout the best route like he'd done on Mount Arna. And though there were disorienting curves that often looped back on themselves, Gladdic's ethereal compass kept them pointed south no matter how much the landscape tried to turn them about.
All told, a passage that should have taken them at least a day to get through—assuming they didn't have to make too many detours, or get lost for more than a few minutes—only hampered them for three hours. Then they emerged from the knobs, pillars, defiles, and arches, and looked down on a new desert almost as stark as Yula had been.
At first, Dante took it to be a dried-out sea bed: a crusty gray mass stretching as far as the eye could see. A little closer, however, and features emerged. Dead trees. Very dead trees. Most of them didn't have more than a few branches left, and most of these were draped with old spiderwebs, or equally dead moss, or just general condensed filth. Likely all three. The ground looked to be coated in debris, but that debris was coated in turn by the same dry gunk the branches were.
Blays sighed. "We have to go into that?"
"Urt's realm is supposed to be just south of the Knifelands," Dante said, checking his map to make sure that was right even though he was absolutely positive that it was.
"Well, Urt's realm looks disgusting. No wonder he's always hiding away. I'd hide too if I was this much of a slob."
They crossed the dusty, unremarkable ground that formed a no man's land between the Knifelands and the dead forest. Dante reached into the nether and the earth to search for potential threats, but felt nothing.
They entered the forest, if you could call it that. Much of what appeared to be solid ground was in fact a spongy, desiccated layer of branches and leaves so time-worn they crumbled to dust beneath the horses' steps. Most of the tree trunks were broken off four to fifteen feet up. Some looked as spongy as the ground, but some looked to have been turned to stone.
On the ground, other objects lurked within and beneath the filth. Bones. Corroded objects that might have once been metal but were now just masses of green and red and orange knobs, not unlike the fungus in the desert. It smelled of an unpleasant variety of dust.
If anything the unsteadiness of the ground was growing worse. They dismounted to lead the horses on foot. Blays frowned at a skeleton leaned against one of the old trunks, its head tipped back and its jaw wide open. It wore the shreds of a robe that, whatever its original color, was now the same dull yellow-gray as everything else.
The skeleton leaned forward, its jaws coming together with a bony click. It stared eyelessly at Blays, then attempted to take a step toward him.
"So it's this kind of forest, is it?" Blays drew one of his blades and cocked back his arm.
"Cease!" Gladdic yelled, but Blays had already begun to swing. Gladdic, however, seemed to have anticipated this, blasting Blays aside with a blunt club of ether.
Blays made an involuntary dive into the clutter, disappearing under a cloud of dust and snapped debris. He thrashed about, stirring more of it. "What are you protecting that thing for? Are you half skeleton on your father's side?"
"Behold!" Gladdic extended his left arm, pointing to a shred of robe hanging from the skeleton's chest. Just visible beneath the grime was the faded stitching of a cicada with its wings folded behind it.
The skeleton swiveled its skull toward Gladdic.
"Who are you?" Gladdic said.
The undead stared at him, perfectly motionless. "I…do not remember."
"It can talk?" Dante said.
"And you may not," Gladdic snapped at him from the corner of his mouth. The old man tipped back his chin at the skeleton. "Are you a servant of Urt?"
"Yes," the skeleton said after a moment of thought. Its voice was the dry rasp of large stones dragged across each other from a distant room. "Yes, I was, once."
"We have been sent to find him. And once we do, to compete for his part of the Spear of Stars."
"Somehow I know this. How?" The man, or anyway his remnants, was gaining strength before their eyes. He tilted his head, and almost seemed to be trying to wrinkle his bony brow. "Well? What are you looking at?"
"Urt wishes to see us. As his servant, you are bound to direct us to him."
"I wouldn't say that he wants to see you. But if you want to see him, he's right in there." The skeleton swept its arm toward the depths of the forest.
"I don't mean to insult your beautiful woods," Blays said. "But it doesn't look like there's anything in there."
"But there is a path to Urt."
Blays narrowed his eyes. "Are you Urt?"
The skeleton laughed dryly. "If I was Urt, I would look much better than this."
"Well, the way you guys are, I figured I'd better ask."
"How do we find our way to Urt?" Dante said.
The undead swung its eyeless sockets toward him. "What are you here to do?"
"Like we said. Earn the Spear of Stars."
"Why is Urt allowing you the chance to do this?"
Dante thought for a moment. "To see if the time has come for the cycle to turn over into a new era—or if the people alive now should be allowed to live on for a little longer."
The dead man nodded gravely. "Seek the cycle. Find your way back to Urt."
"What do you mean, back to Urt?"
"I've served my purpose. Go seek him within the Great Wood, or turn away and leave me be."
He insisted they leave their horses behind, stating that it wasn't the place for them. The situation felt a little fishy, but there didn't seem to be anything else they could do. So they dismounted, leaving the horses with the servant, and made their way into the dead forest.
The skeleton stood motionless, diminishing behind them. Dante motioned to Gladdic's floating compass. "That thing still working?"
Gladdic turned in a circle. The ethereal compass stayed fixed in the air. "Just so."
A short way into the forest, the dead trees grew a little higher while the rubble on the ground thinned enough to walk through it without too much trouble. They still had to choose their footing carefully, however, as patches of it weren't solid at all, and they often found it crumbling beneath them with a brittle crackle as they sank to the ankle or even to the knee before hitting hard dirt.
