The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 34
The sky to the east lightened from black to gray. A line of pink appeared above the treetops. They were just wrapping up the last island as proper dawn broke, hard yellow light glaring through the openings between the islands of clouds.
Blays set his hands on his hips. "We're absolutely sure that it's here?"
Dante pressed two fingers to his forehead. "This gets weaker outside of this open area. Even you must realize that means it's somewhere here in this open area."
"That's only if what you're feeling really is a link to the source."
"What else would it be?"
"The ghost of the White Lich reading your mind and playing a trick on you to waste our time and get us all killed searching for something that no longer exists?"
"But if we die, he dies too."
"He's already dead. I doubt being a little more dead would make much difference to him."
Dante wasn't so sure about that—even if the lich was somehow still conscious within the stone, he would likely rather bide his time for however long it took for him to get a chance to reemerge—but it was true that he didn't have the faintest idea how to find what they must be so damn close to. It was even possible the source wouldn't let itself be found except by someone it wanted to: the stories, after all, had said that it had shown itself to the sorcerer who became the White Lich, not that he'd found it for himself.
Though that story also had something else to say about that. "The lich supposedly found the source in a cavern, right? I don't suppose there's one around here?"
He certainly hadn't seen any caves in the islands within the clearing. None of them were even tall enough to host such a thing. But he hadn't gotten a good look at a lot of the perimeter yet, where the islands were big enough to host a cave, and the trees were thick enough to hide it. He sent most of his scouts low through the branches while flying one high across the clearing on its way for a more elevated look.
Three-quarters of the way across the mostly-open water, Dante brought that fly to a halt. As he rerouted it, he reached his mind down through the water and into the swamp-bed beneath it.
"It feels like we're right on top of it," he announced, "because we are."
Blays bulged his lower lip, then jerked up his chin. "It's underwater."
"Under a lot of mud, too. Much deeper than I've been searching. I thought it was the bedrock, but it's a structure of some kind. Meanwhile, the shape of this clearing isn't natural. It's shaped like an eight-pointed star. Whatever we're looking for, I think it's this whole place."
"Then we're looking for a hidden doorway down to it?"
"Any such thing should be easy for me to spot. Unfortunately, however, I'm going to be too distracted searching for it to do any paddling."
Blays gave him a dubious look. Dante closed his eyes and made a show of summoning up the nether and sending it down through the waters to the mud below.
Blays started them off. The tunnel had to be hidden in one of the islands and so he headed from one to the next. Dante reached his mind into them, searching well below the surface in case they'd hidden the entrance through the simple trick of burying it. As they combed their way across the clearing, clouds gathered overhead like a crowd assembling to watch them. It began to drizzle, the drops so small they made no sound as they hit the water.
The storm broke open halfway through their search, the rain hissing into the swamp, falling straight down in a way that suggested it would continue like that for a long time. It still hadn't abated by the time they came to the last of the islands.
"Nothing at all?" Blays said. "Could it be down under the water somewhere?"
"I wasn't just searching the islands," Dante said. "I was searching the swamp bed, too. I didn't see an entrance anywhere. Just a bunch of loose muck."
"Suppose the way in is hidden past the perimeter? Out in the trees somewhere?"
"I could feel the edges of the structure, too. There was nothing there, either."
"Then the tunnel's way down there somewhere, and feeds into the underside of it."
"Even if there is a tunnel, the other end of it could be anywhere out there in the woods. It could take days to find it. It will be much faster to make our own. Take us in to that island."
They made landing. The ground squelched under Dante's feet. It was almost soupy, like it was made of powder. Still, he didn't think anything of this until he reached his mind into it and tried to compress it into stone. He was able to squeeze some moisture out of it, but it didn't want to cohere into anything more than a thick, gritty paste. Head spinning, he tried again, using different sections of muck, but none of them were any better.
"Something's wrong. I can't get it to stick together as stone." Dante paced about, splashing across the little island. "Impurities in the soil, maybe. Like with the grimstone. Too much dead matter and not enough dirt. It could even be some side effects of the things Nolost is doing to Rale. But I'm not going to be able to get it down to the structure."
"Then can you bring the structure up to us?" Gladdic said. "Shape some of its stone into a passage?"
"Not a great idea. That thing's been down there for a long, long time. If I start restructuring it and it starts falling apart, it'll flood. And we won't have any way to get the water back out."
"Then how do you propose to gain entrance?"
Dante heaved a sigh. "I'm going to lift the whole thing out of the water."
The old man frowned. "You have the strength to do this?"
"We're about to find out."
He supposed the island they were standing on was as good a place as any to work from. He cut the back of his knuckle. The heavy rain washed the blood away immediately, but the nether didn't care. He breathed deeply and steadily as he reached down into the ground, and then through the structure beneath it, until at last he came to the end of the shaped stone, and back into dirt.
Once there, he searched outward in four directions, following the underside of the building to its edges. The thing was big. He'd moved much bigger sections of earth than it in a day before, but that had been over the course of hours. He didn't think he'd ever moved anything close to this size all in one swoop.
He breathed a few more times, taking in the shape of it, getting a read on the ground underneath it. Then opened himself to the nether. It poured through him like the rain beating down from the heavens and he channeled it down through the water and the muck and the stone and the dirt at the very bottom. He took hold of the base of the structure and lifted.
It didn't move. He took in and thrust down even more nether, a great river of it, flooding it into the earth. The island trembled; the rain-lashed surface of the swamp sloshed back and forth. He felt the building give way like an arm popping loose from the shoulder.
He pulled as much ground as he could muster into the gap underneath it. Nether continued to flow through him to the deep earth as he pushed the building up from beneath while pulling it toward him from above. The island lifted from the water inch by inch, then foot by foot as his efforts gathered speed. All of the other islands around him were rising as well, giving the impression that it was actually the swampy forests surrounding the clearing that were sinking, and as the clearing continued to gain height the water within it poured over its sides into the perimeter, churning it into a filthy, muddy froth.
Dante's hands shook as he sent more shadows streaming into the depths. He fought to control his breathing but it kept getting faster as he struggled to keep his hold on the giant stone structure while continuing to scoop earth into the hole he was creating beneath it, tamping the ground down as much as he was able.
Mud and slime slid from the edges of the eight-pointed plateau. A twinge shot up Dante's spine. All of him was shaking now, a cold sweat springing up from his skin. They were already higher than some of the trees beyond the clearing, but there was still much to go. He halted to collect himself, but he could feel that if he stopped for more than a few seconds, the building would start to slip from him. He'd only recovered a fraction of his strength before he had to continue extracting it from the deep muck.
It sounded like the rain was falling harder than ever, but that was just a rushing sound in his ears, one that became a roar. His sight grew dark around the edges. The ground beneath him trembled and he slipped to one knee. They were no longer on an island: nearly all the water had poured down the sides of the platform, with only a fraction of it still caught in numerous puddles.
It felt like a hand was shoving down on his neck as he got back to his feet. They were now more than sixty feet in the air. Almost there. His vision tunneled as he drew the last few feet of it free of the ground.
He sank to his knees, whole body buzzing. The core of him stung where the nether had almost burned him. Any more of it, and it surely would, but he tunneled his mind into the earth beneath the risen structure. It was holding firm. He fell forward onto his hands, panting. The air smelled of mud and muck and soggy tangles of exposed aquatic plants.
"You alive?" Blays said.
"That," Dante said, "was hard."
"You look every bit of it," Gladdic said.
"You're definitely going to have to handle the lichstone. I'm not even sure how much strength I have left."
"Such was always the plan."
"Right," Blays said. "How do we get down to the door?"
Dante shook his head. "There's a protrusion on top of this thing. I'm almost sure it's an entrance."
When he was ready, he got to his feet and drew a strand of nether to him—a very slim one. Even that small amount made his insides seize up, and so he had to wait a few minutes for the threat of netherburn to subside enough for him to turn his attention to the earth piled on top of the structure. It was quite damp and loose, though, and he was able to swipe it away easily. Revealing a part of the structure proper. One that resembled a small temple—or perhaps a burial vault. It bore a single door on its face.
Blays stepped toward the entry. "How likely do you suppose it's managed to go all this time without being flooded?"
"Not very," Dante said. "But now that it's above ground, it'll be a lot easier to drain it if we need to."
He approached the doorway, feeling as though his sense of cautiousness might be somewhat unnecessary, considering it had been buried underwater and underground for what was likely centuries and that nothing could possibly be alive in it. Then again, with such a place, living things weren't his main concern.
The door was covered in dirt. Dante moved into the dirt with his mind and scraped it away. A point of light shined from its surface.
"Ether," Gladdic said. "Be wary."
As Dante had suspected, the surface of the door was crowded with markings. He reached out to touch them, then stopped himself. "Are these runes Inarian,?"
"They are." Gladdic looked them up and down. "Shall I read them out loud?"
"Why wouldn't you?"
"Because they might be a curse."
"I don't see how we can get any more cursed than we already are. Read away."
"Whatever brought you here, turn away and go home." The words Gladdic spoke were from a language Dante had never heard other than when Gladdic had also spoken it at the Riya Lase, yet he understood them perfectly. "Turn away and go home, because the light here is not the light that warms, but the light that burns. It will burn you too. If you are still here, do you wish to be burned into ashes, dispersed by the wind?"
"I think this is the first time I've ever been threatened by a door," Blays said.
"Those who would seek the light do not see that they will be blinded by it. Once they are blinded by it, they will become lost. Once they are lost, they will be claimed by the light. Do you think you will fare any better? To fare better, you must hide your eyes from the light, you must look away from it. Only when you look away from the light, and look to the shadows cast by the light, will you move past the gates, and deeper into the mystery."
Gladdic stopped reading and cleared his throat. "It is more than a threat, or a warning. It is a set of instructions that goes on for some time. Decipher it, and we may enter."
"Screw this," Dante said. "I don't have any idea what it means. And I don't need to play games with it when I can do this instead."
He lifted his hand. Keeping one eye on the spot where the ether had gleamed, he pulled the shadows to him and sent them into the wall beside the door. This was stone, and so he simply drew it aside as easily as he would open a curtain.
The ether sparked from the door. Dante looked to it, then quickly averted his eyes in case that would draw its attention. It burned angrily as he stepped past it into the vault.
Gladdic lit the interior. It was round, fifteen feet in diameter. It smelled moldy and damp, but it wasn't especially wet. Either the layer of swamp bed had stopped it from flooding, or the door had held its seal all those years.
The walls were inscribed with mold-covered runes. In other times, Dante would have insisted on reading them all, but he gave them no more than a cursory glance as he moved to the stairwell in the middle of the vault. This was a spiral, and its steps were so short his toes hung over the edges of them. Built for slight-bodied Tanarians. Or their ancestors.
The stairs brought him to a much larger room with a high ceiling held up by square pillars. Despite the airiness of it, it smelled stale, with an undercurrent of old smoke from the burning of something noxious.
Blays tipped back his head at the dark ceiling. "If this place was sealed tight against the water, what are the odds the air hasn't gone bad?"
Dante skidded to a stop. After a moment of near-panic, he produced some nether, sent it a few feet from him, and squeezed it until it burst into an angry red flame.
"Fire has to breathe just like we do, and it looks to be breathing just fine. Anyway, I'm sure your brain can survive on much less than the rest of us."
He snuffed the fire. The pillars were painted with uncanny images of sorcerers speaking with faceless figures, sacrificing animals, fending off grotesque creatures, and waging battle. He had seen images like them in other similar places, and didn't give them much thought except to confirm that this was such a place, and to examine the style of the art itself, which had a pinched, pulled quality to it, as though it had been made by someone whose eyes literally saw the world in a different way.
However, one of them stopped him in his tracks.
"That's Arawn," he said.
"What of it?" Gladdic said.
"I thought the Tanarians didn't believe in the Celeset. They had a batch of weird stories instead."
"This place was not built by Tanarians."
"Fine, it was built by the Inarians or whoever. But that means the Inarians believed in the Celeset."
"Perhaps." Gladdic moved closer to the image. "Or perhaps they knew nothing of the Celeset, and saw this event with their own eyes."
Dante cocked his head. There could be no doubt the figure in the painting was Arawn: not only did it physically resemble him—or, at least, it resembled what had been said about Arawn; Dante hadn't seen him in person—but there were various images associated with him integrated into the piece, like a one-eyed dog standing in the trees behind him, and a large black moth with white markings on its head hanging from a tree trunk off to his left.
As for Arawn himself, he wore his black cloak, the hood swept back to reveal a face wrenched in anger. His hand was outthrust and nether spewed from it like invective. It was aimed at another figure, equally tall as Arawn but broader and stronger, like a man who wrestles bears. He was facing Arawn, and so his back was almost fully turned from viewers of the painting. He wasn't wearing his armor or carrying his great weapon, either.
Even so, there was no more mistaking him than there was Arawn.
"Is that other fellow the White Lich?" Blays said.
"His skin's glowing blue," Dante said. "Who else would it be, the village charwoman?"
"Well, it could be a different lich. Maybe our guy became the White Lich by doing the same thing we're trying to do with that guy's lichstone."
Dante looked around them, up at the heights of the ceiling, at the pillars and their paintings. They looked old, but not ancient. Though it was impossible to say how things should age when they'd been sealed up and buried for who knew how long.
"If so, that would mean there have been at least two liches," he said. "Yet in all the time we spent in Tanar Atain, we never heard any stories about such a thing."
"As previously noted, that could be because their rulers repeatedly lied about everything in history. For all we know, there were five hundred liches, and when they were done terrorizing the natives for the day, they liked to come home and unwind by reading each other poetry."
"I think there was just the one lich. And I don't think that's really Arawn—or more accurately, that might be Arawn in the painting, but it wasn't Arawn in real life. It was probably just some sorcerer who they started telling legends about. Like in the Collen Basin, when they thought I was the avatar of Arawn."
"What do you think, Gladdic? You're the expert on this land."
"I do not believe that anyone born outside Tanar Atain can ever become an expert on it. Even those born here rarely grasp the whole truth of their home and its history. It is too mysterious a place for that. But this temple—for that is what I think it is—feels like it holds secrets that even those who know Tanar Atain best have never heard of."
Dante had a look around at the other pillars and walls to make sure they weren't about to walk right past something vital. And to see if there was anything else involving Arawn or the lich. There wasn't, at least not anything that he recognized, and so they hunted about for another staircase.
As Dante moved between two close-set pillars, the floor seemed to shiver, just enough for him to feel it. He shifted his sight to one of the scouts he'd left circling above the clearing to make sure the temple wasn't about to be sucked down into the mud like Blays swallowing an oyster. It was still raining hard, enough so that it had started to wash the mud off the top of the temple, but there didn't look to be any sinking, tilting, or sliding going on. Maybe he'd just imagined it.
