The 13th God (The Cycle of Galand Book 8), page 6
"But where will that doorway put us?"
Carvahal lifted his eyebrows. "It could be anywhere, couldn't it? Including somewhere even worse. Best keep on your toes."
He stepped back. Dante felt that he ought to say something to mark the occasion, but nothing was springing to mind. Blays shoved him in the back and through the portal.
His mind tilted as he arrived in a dark tunnel. The stars that speckled the tunnel roof weaved among each other in obscure patterns. Once the other three had joined him, he headed onward toward the doorway on the far side. The venture before them had the feel of something that was going to take more than a day or two and it occurred to him that the two gods probably weren't going to just sit around and wait for them back in Yent. Then again, they must have been intending to set up something to alert them when the mortals returned. They wouldn't just walk away and abandon them. Would they?
A dark shape skittered across the tunnel twenty feet in front of him. Dante skidded to a stop on the smooth and uncertain floor. "What the hell was that?"
"Tunnel rat," Kelen said.
"Tunnel rat? I've never seen a tunnel rat before."
"That's because you've never been to Olastar before."
Blays loosened one of his swords in its sheath. "Just as long as there are no tunnel tigers."
Kelen didn't seem concerned with it, but Dante brought some nether to hand anyway. He came to the far doorway without encountering anything else amiss. The circular entrance shimmered, rotating slowly.
"Be ready," Kelen said.
"For?"
"That depends on where we come out."
Dante decided this meant a lot of nether. He checked to make sure his sword wasn't stuck in its scabbard. Kelen looked to be waiting on him, so he braced himself and stepped forward.
The passage into the tunnel hadn't felt any different from the other times. Passing through this one, however, his senses shrank rapidly until he could no longer see or hear or feel anything at all, and he seemed to hover in an unknown space, with only the faintest awareness that he existed, and no memory at all of who he was, let alone his purpose.
He had no idea how long this state lasted. It felt like it could have been hours. Then some layer of his awareness was restored to him, both of himself and the reality around him, followed by another layer, until he had regained enough of his time-sense to know that whatever was happening was taking no longer than it would take him to lift his hand and wave at a friend on the street.
With the next layer, he remembered his name; with the one after that, his first memories returned. It felt less like he was being transported and more like he was being reassembled. Whatever was happening to him, it finished fast, almost too fast for him to take in.
And then it was over, and he stood once more on solid ground, looking out on a world like none he'd ever before seen.
4
He stared at it in wonder. He could hear the others arriving behind him, but he couldn't pull his eyes away from Olastar. In a trance-like state, he wandered forward, into it.
Kelen barred an arm across his chest. "Don't you move."
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know where we are yet. So don't move."
Dante was irritated by this command of him, enough to defy it out of spite. He strangled that emotion down quite thoroughly. Wherever they were, he could absolutely believe it was as dangerous as Kelen feared it might be.
What he gazed upon appeared not to be a single place, but many. And not in the patchwork sense that Gharadhain had been. Full gray clouds hung over the land, unbroken, spectral lights rippling within them. If this was lightning, there was no thunder to match. It cast crooked light down to the earth, giving the impression that it was rippling in places.
They were up on the flank of a low mountain and he could make out no fewer than six different lands below them: a forest here; a prairie there; a badlands; what looked to be the crater of a great big mountain, although it and its rocky flanks were just a few hundred feet high. A dark forest of some kind, along with a rugged shoreline with tall whitecapped waves, though the lake it enclosed was only a few miles in each direction.
There were no sharp divisions between sections, however. Instead, they flowed into each other, shifting from one to the other. Yet the transitions were still quick. Too quick to exist within a natural landscape, or at least any Dante was familiar with. Very little of the colors were what he thought of as natural, either, with few of the greens and browns and yellows that made up most of everywhere.
Here you had purple grass, pink slopes around the crater, pale blue dust in the badlands, mauve leaves on black branches in the forest. Even the water looked more silvery than blue or the leaden gray it ought to have looked under the heavy clouds. Columns of fog streamed between one environment and the next. Some patches glimmered on and off, as if they might be mirages, or filled with fairies. Others looked to be in motion in a way that was hard for the eye to comprehend. It all felt very much like a dream.
On an impulse, Dante stretched out for the nether. It was still there. So was the ether, though as always it resisted his command. But he felt both more strongly behind him, back toward the portal, while ahead of him they were thinner—except for certain currents that ran past him in thick black ropes, that eventually spread like fingers or deltas into the terrain below him, like the path that water might take, except the places the shadows ran thickest were where water wouldn't, on the little ridges and plateaus of the little mountain. Yet then, bafflingly, they were spread most evenly at the base of the slope, exactly where the mountain streams might pool, before flowing further downward.
All of this was so much to take in that he'd barely paid attention to what Kelen was up to. But a spark of blue grabbed his attention like a slice of beef dangled before a dog. He turned just in time to see the puff of sorcery fade away over an ancient-looking copper device sitting in the man's bluish palm. Kelen stared at it with grave intensity as the seconds ticked by. A vane-like instrument popped up from the works, swung back and forth a few times, and then steadied in a single direction.
"There," Kelen said quietly. "We may have a way forward."
"Does that mean we can talk now?" Blays said.
"You could always talk."
"Good! Because don't tell me this place is alive, too!"
"It's not."
"Good!"
Kelen had replaced the copper device into an iron box laced with a script Dante had never before seen. Still, it was obvious to anyone who knew the nether that the symbols were wards. The man started down the slope, gaze shifting tirelessly.
"A way forward?" Dante said. "What does that mean?"
Kelen didn't look his way. "We will see."
"Enough with the mystery."
"Remember that you came to me. I am not your servant."
"No, but we can't leave everything in your hands, either. It's dangerous here, right? Dangerous enough that we had to travel across a monster the size of an island just to find someone who could give us any hope of getting us through it alive. But if something happens to you before we get to where we need to go, we still have to get there. We still have to tear this place down. Keep your secrets, if you like. Just know that if you die, they die with you—and if they do, we may no longer be able to destroy this place."
Kelen moved steadily downhill, keeping one eye on a pillar of green rock as they moved past it, as if something might leap down from it. "If I die, you won't be able to do much of what I do. It will be almost futile. Jokes would be made about you afterward." He didn't smile at this. "But here is the journey before us. Right now, we are traveling across Ardos. The Shell."
Dante blinked at this: hearing that word, Ardos, and in a heavy accent, he understood the talismans Carvahal had given them had been translating for Kelen all along. He felt foolish for only just realizing this, but he supposed he'd been pretty distracted.
"What we are looking for is a way down—a way in—to Gothon, the Curve," Kelen continued. "In Gothon are the only routes to Pholos. The Knot. Pholos is where you can unravel this world, and separate the other worlds from each other, and save your own."
"And that coppery thing you've got, that's leading us to the Curve? Gothon?"
"With luck."
"How does it work?"
"For you it would not."
"Let me take a wild guess: because it takes that blue magic of yours, which you think I can't use."
"Can you?"
"Well no," Dante said. "But I'd never even heard of it before you used it against us. I might be able to learn it."
"No you wouldn't."
"That seems…definitive."
"Because by definition you can't."
Dante held his tongue for as long as he could. "Is everyone where you're from this argumentative?"
"Some. For most it's quite the opposite. That's part of why I hate this place."
"Fine. Let us assume I am too stupid and incompetent to learn to wield your sorcery. If Nolost reaches out of that lake over there and eats you alive, is there some other way for us to find entry to Gothon?"
"Yes. You could find it by sheer luck."
"As in, the same way we might suddenly discover a well: by falling into it. All right, then how does the device function? Maybe I could find another way to make it work without your blue magic."
"It searches for doorways."
"Doorways? As in portals, like the one we just stepped through?"
"No."
"I'm guessing you already know what my next question is going to be," Dante said as evenly as he could. "So I'm going to make the brash suggestion that you simply answer it without making me ask it a bunch of different ways first."
Kelen sighed, veering away from another of the rocky pillars. "It's like your god told you. There are doorways everywhere here. But we're not looking for doorways that lead further away from Olastar. We're looking for doorways that lead deeper into Olastar."
"Then your device can track the inward-leading doors? Or at least tell them apart from the outward-leading ones?"
"It's hard to tell the two apart. The doors leading deeper try to conceal what they are. But yes, that's what it does."
Dante pried at this line of questioning some more, but Kelen didn't seem able to explain the planks and nails of it. Dante supposed he'd just have to hope that they were able to cross Ardos without an incident major enough to claim their guide's life.
They descended steadily. The constant flashing of the clouds and the stirrings of the mirage-like patterns had Dante's eyes flicking back and forth like the tail of a fly-addled horse. It was very hard to tell what point in the day it might be, but it was definitely in the day and not night, which it had been in both Yent and Gharadhain, though at different times of night. Dante found himself badly disoriented by it all. He struggled to remain focused.
They made good time down the foothills and soon reached the base of the slopes. These had been rocky, growing little vegetation besides grass and the occasional shrub, but the mauve-leafed forest now stood before them. Kelen observed it for a minute before leading them into it. The glossy black trunks were alarming, as if they might be made out of beetle chitin instead of bark. There was a strange odor to the air, too. Not overwhelming, but certainly unpleasant, in a way that also reminded Dante of insects.
He kept an eye out for some to kill and send out as scouts. There were some things creeping around on the ground, but it took a couple hundred yards of walking before he saw anything that could fly. He rolled out some little needles of nether and lobbed them out to slay the insects just like he'd done hundreds of times before.
The needles were crafted to be fine enough to kill a bug while leaving it structurally intact. Yet when they struck the flies, which were buzzing around a moldering black fruit, the flies exploded into dust.
Dante stared in confusion. There were multiple other flies left, and he summoned a few drops of nether and shaped it into even smaller needles.
Leaves rustled ahead. A sprig of forking branches moved toward them and for a moment Dante was certain that this land was just as alive as the last one had been, and that they'd been led into some perverse trap. But these branches were a pale tan, almost white, and as they moved from behind a wall of brambles, he saw that they were in fact the antlers of a huge elk.
"Vomiting gods!" Blays said. "What the hell's wrong with it?"
Dante grunted and took a step back. The thing was mal-born. The worst he'd ever seen. Its spotty fur was a pale green, and where it had fallen out, the skin beneath was either pure white or an angry pink rash. Its eyes—the one on the right side of its face, and the two on its left—had neither pupils nor irises. A squat trunk protruded from its nose, tasting at the air like a snake. It bore three pairs of full-grown legs along with an atrophied and useless one that dangled from its front right shoulder.
It gazed at them, huffing steam from its nostrils. Dante held a wad of shadows in each hand. He was certain the foul thing would charge them—the spikes of its antlers were stained the color of rust—but it turned its head and lumbered away.
Blays grimaced as it vanished into the brush. "Is everything here that, ah…unique?"
"Yes," Kelen said.
"Really? No wonder you're so cavalier about ending the place."
"In Ardos, the land isn't fixed. Wherever there's a portal, whatever's on the other side bleeds over here as well."
"That's why this place looks like a giant quilt?" Dante said.
"Yes. Somewhere in each portion of land you see is a doorway. Sometimes doorways close, or switch where they lead to. Then the land switches with them. But the animals within a changing region can't change as freely as the land. The process warps them instead."
Concluding this was more than enough questions, Kelen walked on. But Dante could tell from Gladdic's posture that the old man was thinking, and wasn't at all surprised when he swiveled his head toward their guide.
"Olastar," Gladdic said. "Is it also known as Zandragrab?"
Kelen hopped over a brook of tinkling silver water. "Who calls it that?"
"The scholars of the Anasid Empire did so. Though it is believed their knowledge did not arise from themselves, but was looted from eastern kingdoms by the warrior-priests known as Agon Rul—"
"I don't know that place. That's some place in your world. How would I know what names your people use or what stories they tell?"
Gladdic eyed him stonily. "It is most likely that you would not, though Maralda described you as a traveler and an explorer, so it is not beyond possibility. Regardless. The Anasids believed that those who spent too much time with their minds submerged in ether or nether were in danger of becoming untethered from Rale—and being lured into another. One that was not fixed in place, but rippling and shifting, much like a dream. It was further dream-like in that it was often beautiful and enchanting, yet could reverse into nightmarishness in an instant, and without warning."
Kelen didn't seem to be paying any attention, trudging along as always, but after a few seconds he glanced at Gladdic. "How do you know these people were speaking of Olastar? Maybe they were just speaking of dreams."
"Their scholars asked the same question. Yet most concluded that this was not the case, for dreams are of infinite variety, while the stories of Zandragrab nearly all shared certain details. For instance, that parts of it not ten miles distant from each other might look as though they came from kingdoms separated by hundreds of miles. As well, they warned everyone who entered Zandragrab to never lose track of where they arrived, for if you departed through a different region, you would all but certainly find yourself not in your homeland, but somewhere far away instead. It was also said that if instead of finding a way out, you find a way further in, you will be beset by beings who appear as men and women, but who only wear such bodies as a disguise, concealing a demon within."
"Your people are right," Kelen said after another pause. "They must have been able to find their way here. Which then makes me wonder why you need me as a guide when you have people who know their way around Olastar."
"Because the people he's talking about aren't us, and died a long time ago," Dante said. "When they died, they took their knowledge with them. Just two years ago, none of us knew that any of these other worlds existed. At least not as places we could go to. All we have left is a few stories, a lot of which aren't even true. We've had to figure out everything else on our own."
"The time we live in feels degraded from the age that came before us," Gladdic said. "Perhaps it is a good thing that Taim conspired to destroy Rale during our time, and did not have the patience or wisdom to wait another five hundred years, when it might have degraded so much further that it could have been overrun without any resistance at all."
"You never cease to be a source of inspiration," Blays said. "If this plan doesn't work, we could always try sending you to Nolost to try to cheer him up until he hangs himself."
The forest was almost silent outside of the droning of a few bugs and the sporadic calls of birds that sounded as though they knew they were just wasting their time. Dante attempted to kill and reanimate another batch of flies, but as before, he was so effective at the killing part that there weren't enough remains left to reanimate. Even when he assaulted them with little more than a speck of nether, they flew apart like he'd hacked them with a double-bladed axe.
As they walked alongside a silver stream, Kelen stopped short, drawing a sharp breath. He got out the copper device covered in script and poked at it, eyes darting between it and the woods.
"What is it?" Dante said. "What are we on the watch for?"
Kelen didn't answer right away, consulting his device some more and mumbling under his breath. He normally bore a rather dour expression, but when he looked up from the device again, he was smiling.
"Stroke of fortune."
"Tell me you've got us a way into the Shell," Dante said.
