What Lies Beyond, page 50
part #6 of The Cycle of Galand Series
"To the portal," Dante said. "And back home."
They flicked in and out of the beams of sunlight cast by the holes in the roof. Half-seen creatures moved beneath the surface, sometimes breaking it with a fin or a claw. They were obviously drawn to the boat, and Dante had no doubt they would have attacked and capsized the vessel if not for Carvahal, whose presence drove the fish away with fearful flicks of their tails. For they were guardians, like the worms at Talassa.
A hissing sound grew ahead, more menacing than the typical rush of the water. A haze grew about them. All at once it was so thick Dante could no longer see the roof above them nor the way ahead. Carvahal steered them onward, making a number of course adjustments with his paddle-pole. The hiss was now a roar: a waterfall. They were racing blind toward oblivion.
Carvahal thrashed at the water, slowing them so much that Dante lurched forward. The bottom of the boat struck gravel, sliding to a rapid stop that tossed Dante down on his face.
Carvahal stepped from the boat onto a shore of shiny red stones slick with mist. The wind from the falls stirred his light cloak. He led the way forward, the bead-like pebbles clacking underfoot.
"This isn't the doorway we entered through," Dante said. "Will it send us back to the same place?"
"To the same part of the Mists?" Carvahal said over the thunder of the falls. "No. But you'll wake from the Mists in the same part of your world that you entered them from."
"Is there any way to use the portals to travel across our world?"
"That would be a useful shortcut, now wouldn't it? Maybe you can work that out the next time you pay us a visit."
The winds heightened. The haze swirled and thinned, revealing that they were walking along a narrow strip of rocks suspended over open space. The river tumbled down a cliff behind them. A doorway stood at the end of the platform, shining fuzzily, its edges indistinct.
"And here we are." Carvahal came to a stop, inspecting them each. "Well. Good luck saving Rale."
"Saving what?" Dante said.
"Rale. Your world."
"I thought it was called the Fallen Land."
"Yes, that's the rude term for it. Rale is its true name. Have you people forgotten so much you don't even know the name of your own home?"
"Yeah, well over the years the ol' Fallen Land's had a tough time of it," Blays said. "But with any luck, we're about to put a stop to the latest apocalypse. Thanks again for the spear, by the way. I've got a feeling it's going to come in quite handy."
Dante did his best to avoid looking down the waterfall, which didn't seem to have a bottom. "One last thing. We would never have found the Realm of Nine Kings on our own. A woman named Isa pointed us to the doorway. After that, another woman named Elenna helped us find Adaine, the man who the White Lich was using to open doorways across our world—and rip the Mists apart in the process. They were working with you all along, weren't they?"
"No," Carvahal said.
"But we wouldn't be here without them. And at that time, you were the only one willing to work against Taim."
"But I wasn't working with them. I could only guess at their involvement. I do know they belong to the only kingdom in the Realm that doesn't belong to a god. They're out on their own, just as you are. Maybe that's why they feel more kinship for the people of Rale." He made a quick twirling gesture. "But I won't betray their confidence any further."
Dante turned to look across the misty river and the tumbling falls. "Now that we're about to leave here, I have so many questions. Almost all of our time was spent chasing the spear. It feels like we barely got to know the place."
"Really?" Blays said. "I got to know it much more than I wanted to."
Dante faced the portal. "Well."
"I wish you luck," Carvahal said. "Genuinely."
Gladdic wrinkled his brow. "Is that a blessing?"
"I'll be watching your progress with great interest. Here's my one piece of advice for you: if you die fighting the lich, you'll find yourselves in the Mists, yes? In that case, I would do your best to try to find your way back here before the Mists disintegrate along with everyone in them."
He gave them a cheery wave, spun about, and clashed away through the red pebbles, whistling as he went. Dante met eyes with Blays, then Gladdic, who both seemed to be waiting on him.
He stepped through the doorway.
Vertigo. The sense of his head being stretched far beyond his feet. A buzzing in his ears that tunneled down to the core of his brain. For a moment, he forgot who he was, or even that he was.
He was standing in a dim room, lit from behind by a doorway. Blays stood next to him, blinking unsteadily. Gladdic waited as blankly as a zombie awaiting its first command. Then he stirred, taking a sharp breath through his nostrils.
It was quite dark except for a small fire in the distance, intense but well-contained, suggesting a brazier. From the lack of stars, they were indoors, though the uncut stone ground suggested otherwise.
Blays stared at the distant brazier. "Does this look like the Mists to you? Don't tell me Carvahal duped us into sending ourselves to hell."
Gladdic closed his eyes. "The ether surrounds us. We stand within the Mists."
"Excellent. Then all we have to do is lie down and go to sleep."
"We can't yet," Dante said.
"Visitors here can fall asleep whenever they want. But if you don't think you're tired enough, I can help with that. Stick out your jaw."
"Not yet. I want to see what's outside."
"A bunch of cloudy stuff?"
Rather than wasting time arguing about it, Dante strode in the direction of the brazier. The others followed without further complaint. The brazier was closer than it looked, burning away by itself, shedding light on a wall of stone so black they might well have broken their noses against it. They were just able to make out a doorway through it.
This led into a labyrinth distressingly similar to the one they'd had to navigate in the Split Crypt in Barsil. And this time, they had no ethereal footprints to follow. The stone wouldn't listen to Dante's commands, either. After a great deal of bumbling around half at random, he was about ready to give up. Then again, if they got lost, all they had to do was go to sleep, so he gave it a few minutes more, and eventually wandered out of a gap and into an open field.
Grass swayed under the night sky. The wind carried the smell of something Dante was almost sure was flowers despite the tanginess of it. Behind them, the labyrinth resembled no more than a pile of jumbled rocks. Woods enclosed the grassy field and they crossed through the trees, swiping at spiderwebs.
The trees were just a narrow ring and within a minute they found themselves on the top of a short hill. At first glance they seemed to be looking down on a field of house-sized mushrooms. Fairly sinister ones, given that many of them were lit by red and green lights. It was the lanterns that made Dante realize the mushrooms were houses, two to four stories tall, their broad caps providing shelter for the balconies on the upper floors. Most of the structures were repaired or supported by materials foreign to the mushrooms, presumably to replace bits of them that had rotted or died, making it look like they'd donned patchwork armor.
Dante couldn't see any keeps or cathedrals or other landmark buildings that typically gave identity to a city, but the place was studded with small green hills that were themselves studded with windows, doorways, and balconies. It clicked into place: the hills were the keeps and cathedrals.
It was obviously a city. But if Dante hadn't been able to see a few people wandering within the subtly ominous green and red lights of the lanterns, he wouldn't have been all sure that it was a human city.
"Huh," Blays said. "Where the hell are we?"
"We already figured that out," Dante said. "The Mists."
"But the Mists are sort of split up, right? With each portion of them corresponding to a different portion of the world. So where in the world is this?"
"Any ideas, Gladdic?"
"None."
Blays put his hands in his pocket. "Carvahal wasn't kidding when he said the gods made our world much bigger than theirs. You could spend your whole life exploring Rale and still miss most of it."
That they were so close to an unknown part of it made it all the more painful that they couldn't go down into the streets, find a public house, and find out where they were—and what kind of drinks the locals served. But now wasn't the time. Dante consoled himself with the thought they probably wouldn't be able to understand each other's language anyway.
The hillside felt a bit exposed, so they returned to the trees, swept away the twigs and leaves, and settled down. Dante was about to ask who was going to take first watch when he realized that, for the first time in two months, they were in a place where such measures weren't necessary.
He closed his eyes. As always, sleep came much faster in the Mists. Dreams claimed his mind, one after another. They seemed to last for a long time.
He opened his eyes. He was still in a forest in the middle of the night. Yet something was different. He knew the chirp of the bugs. He knew the smell of the trees. He knew the feel of the season and the way the nether lurked within the dirt and the leaves.
He was home.
34
The others woke within moments of him. They gazed at each other in amazement, temporarily wordless, then laughed and got to their feet. The first thing Blays did was check up his sleeve to see if he was still carrying the Spear of Stars. It was there, reduced to its rod form. Dante reassured himself that he still had the Book of What Lies Beyond. He wasn't sure that its role against the lich was over.
Somehow it was night, which didn't make sense, as he'd thought the same hour was kept between the Realm and Rale. Either their trip to a strange part of the Mists had thrown that askew, or they'd slept for many hours before being brought back here, to the woods just north of Bressel.
A leaf crunched. Dante grabbed at the nether.
A woman stood frozen across from them. "You return."
"Winden!" Dante ran to her and embraced her, the first living mortal he'd seen since the White Lich had sacked Bressel. "It's so good to be back!"
She disentangled herself and looked him in the eyes. "Do you have it? Do you have the spear?"
With a grand gesture, Blays drew the rod from his sleeve. He held it horizontally before him and tilted back his head. The spear jumped forth from both ends, extending to its full length. The light of the purestone beamed into the night.
"It is beautiful." Winden gave a small bow of reverence. "This kills the lich?"
"If I know what I'm doing," Blays said. "Frightening thing for the fate of the world to depend on, eh?"
They exchanged more greetings, then told each other in brief about what had happened while they'd been separated. Winden didn't have so much to tell. After the lich had marched north from Bressel, some of the Blighted had trailed behind to seek survivors in the forest. After these had finally gone on their way, the refugees had emerged—but most of these were starving and fearful, and quickly turned bandit.
Winden, being a woman on her own, had made an appealing target. Right up until the bandits discovered she was a nethermancer. Rumors spread of an evil witch haunting the woods. It had been more than a month since anyone had dared to bother her.
Dante let the conversation play on for a while, then broached what had been on his mind since before their return. "Our next step is to head north and confront the lich. But you should return to the Plagued Islands. Any of the ports to the west should be able to take you there, but Allingham might be safest."
Winden wrinkled her brow. "Sail to the islands? Why would I do this?"
"Because there's no need for you to stay. There's every chance we'll fail. If we do, it will be better for you to be with your people. You could have years before the lich finds his way to the islands."
"But I am here. I will go with you. What if the lich sends a second agent to the Mists? What if he tries to open another one of his portals?"
"Then we'd need to return to the Mists, too. In which case we'd really want to have you around." Dante smiled at her. "Welcome back aboard. But if our last minutes spent together involve us getting slaughtered by the lich, the Mists getting torn down around our ears, and our souls dissolving into nothing, don't say I didn't warn you."
~
Winden hadn't just spent her time in the forest twiddling her thumbs, dodging crazed undead and even more crazed refugees, and waiting for their return. She'd also been preparing. She had horses. Food. Supplies. They were thus able to ride north at once, veering east as they went, intending to intersect the Chanset and follow the road that ran alongside its bank.
Typically, Dante enjoyed traveling to new places. But he'd had enough traveling to new places in the Realm to last him a good thirty years, and was happy to be on the move in a familiar place. He slew and reanimated a few moths to keep eyes on the route ahead. After being without his scouts and spies for so long, he was immensely relieved to have them back.
Still, for as good as it felt to be home among normal things, it also felt duller in color. As if, despite being much younger than the Realm, it lacked the rawness and vitality of the godlands.
They made camp after a few hours, sleeping until late in the morning. It was past noon before Dante looned Nak. Nak received the news giddily, veering between laughter at their outrageous luck and grave concern for how Taim would choose to punish them for their crimes.
"Even so, it seems you had no other choice," Nak concluded. "How long do you suppose it will take you to reach here?"
"If we can find a second set of horses, I bet we can meet you in three weeks."
"Three weeks until the final battle. It's hard to believe it all draws so near." Nak let that hang in the air a moment. "You know, you should write down everything you went through in the Realm. If we do manage to prevent the White Lich from starting a terrible new cycle, then the next time the world comes to a crisis, your knowledge could be what saves it. Just like you couldn't have done this without the Book of What Lies Beyond Cal Avin."
"It will probably be thousands of years before anything like the White Lich ever emerges again. Nothing I write is going to last that long. That's what the Realm taught me above all else: how much of what we once knew has been lost. Much of that loss was caused by apocalypses like the one we're staring down right now. But most of it was caused by the slow chaos of time."
"Be that as it may," Nak said after a brief pause, "if anyone can figure out a way to preserve knowledge across thousands of years, it's you. In fact, such a mission sounds like the perfect way to keep yourself busy in the many boring years we're going to have once we've dealt with the White Lich."
This was quite optimistic. Then again, that was Nak's way. After some thought, Dante warmed to the idea. As just one possibility, he could write a tome, get his monks to make some copies, preserve them in ether, then embed those in blocks of stone carved with something to the effect of "Smash open in case of looming conquest by overpowering wizard."
As they traveled, he gathered the story in his mind, jotting down some notes when they took breaks or stopped for the night. Soon he was filling up pages of the blank book he carried with him. His work was hampered at times by cold and blustery rains, which spent the days alternating with calm, almost warm weather. They kept their eyes peeled for enemies—be they agents of the White Lich, or those of Taim, even Ka herself—but didn't see anything more threatening than a few handfuls of frightened, dirty people.
While he worked on his book, Blays worked with the spear. The first time he did so, its glorious light piercing through the black branches, Winden gawked in awe. Dante, meanwhile, cursed steadily, certain it would draw the attention of everyone for miles. As soon as he couldn't hold his tongue any longer, and said that if they weren't careful the lich's spies would learn they had the spear, Blays stopped to fiddle around with it. Within a minute, he'd somehow found a way to reduce its glow to nothing, allowing him to resume his jabs, sweeps, spins, and parries.
At times Gladdic joined Blays, lobbing ether and nether at him so he could practice deflecting, absorbing, and redirecting it. Blays had fought quite well with the weapon on the plain below Chronus, but each night he practiced, he seemed to get a little quicker, a little more precise, a little more adept at negating Gladdic's sorcery. Blays lamented his ability to spar—this wasn't really possible when the slightest misstep with the spear would blast his partner into stew meat—but from what Dante saw, he was doing just fine on his own.
After some days, they came to Whetton. Or what had once been Whetton. It now resembled a coastline after a tidal wave had struck it, receded, and allowed it to dry out.
"I've always disliked this place." Blays surveyed the sprawled chunks of lumber and stone. "But I didn't want everyone in it dead."
There were a few bodies, but much fewer than its population. Either they'd fled or been converted into the Blighted. Their fields had been ripped up, too. Before moving on, Dante harvested the roots of a tract of wheat into a ripe crop. He wasn't sure how any of the refugees haunting the woods would mill it, but he couldn't do everything for them.
They picked up five more horses there as well. Now able to alternate their mounts, they could ride faster and for longer durations. They continued to follow the Chanset to the north. Most of the fishing villages and little trading hubs had been obliterated. The few that remained were empty.
The Dundens rose ahead, deep blue, their peaks frosted with snow. They broke northwest along a tributary of the Chanset, which grew smaller and more turbulent as they entered the foothills. It was down to the size of a noisy creek as they came to the town of Shay.
This had been sacked, too, though not as badly as Whetton. But the monastery had been gutted, its windows smashed, its furniture hauled out and destroyed. It was as empty as the rest of the town. Though the Mallish priesthood drove people like him from their country, and enacted a new war or Scour against Arawn's faithful every generation or two, seeing the desecration of the Mallish monastery sank Dante's heart. He hoped that the monk Gabe had gotten himself to safety, and that he and his brothers had managed to take their art and relics with them. Gladdic said a blessing for the site before they left.
