"And it's much closer than I thought." Kelen angled to his left, keeping the device in hand while he peered through the black tree trunks. Spotting something he liked, he broke into a jog.

  He came to a stop in front of a massive tree that had uprooted and fallen on its side. Quite recently, too, for its leaves were still mauve and unwithered.

  "Should be right here." Or so Kelen claimed, but "here" didn't look to be any different from the rest of the forest they'd been passing through. He looked to the copper device once more, sprinkling it with blue light. It responded with a green flash that made Kelen flinch. "Yes. It is."

  Slowly, he made his way around the upthrust roots, reaching out to touch them now and then. Dante followed him, but saw nothing more than roots and dirt.

  "What are we looking for?" Blays said. "A big whirling blackish thing? Because there definitely aren't any of those here."

  Kelen shook his head. "Not what we're looking for."

  "Hmm. Then I'll just busy myself making sure nothing jumps out and kills you while you're looking for whatever it is you're looking for."

  Kelen ignored him and continued to make his way around the tree. On an instinct, Dante felt down into the ground beneath the great trunk, searching for any doorway-sized holes the tree might be covering up. He didn't see anything. He could feel the earth here, though, which was good to know.

  Kelen made his way around the entire tree without uncovering anything of note. He lowered himself into the gaping hole where the root ball had torn loose. A minute later, he emerged looking annoyed but thoughtful.

  "You're sure it's here?" Dante said.

  "Yes," Kelen answered.

  Dante lifted his gaze upwards in an attempt to stop himself from berating their guide for being supremely unhelpful. His eyes snagged part way up the toppled tree.

  "The branches," he said. "It was hidden up in the branches."

  Kelen backtracked along the trunk until he came to the place where the tree's branches began to sprout. He used them as handholds to pull himself up to the top of the trunk. Dante kept right on his heels, determined to learn how to maneuver through Olastar for himself no matter how uncooperative Kelen might be. Kelen picked his way through the upthrust branches, batting down the occasional spiderweb in his path.

  He slowed, staring at the bark underfoot, and drew blue light to his hands. He cast it before him like a farmer sowing his fields with wheat. Twenty feet further down the trunk, a doorway shimmered into being. This one was different from the others. Smaller, quite a bit narrower, almost more of a crack in the face of reality than a round passage.

  "Got it," Kelen said. "Get your friends."

  Dante called to them. Blays sent Gladdic up first, watching his progress. It didn't seem like an old man with one arm should be able to climb a tree at all, but he summited it without the need for any help. The four gathered in front of the doorway.

  "Any chance something's going to be waiting for us on the other side?" Dante said.

  "There shouldn't be," Kelen said. "But you should act like there will be."

  Dante nicked a knuckle, summoned the nether, and gathered himself. He stepped through. This time he felt almost no disorientation at all. He stepped to the side so as not to be trampled by whoever came next and spun in a circle. They were in a canyon of some kind, narrow, cliffs made of blue stone. Some shrubs scattered about. Spongy, mossy grass underfoot. Nothing immediately threatening in any direction. A few ducks flapped around further down the canyon. The others arrived one after the other, looking about themselves while prepared to do violence, before relaxing somewhat.

  Dante pointed to the crack in space they'd emerged through, which was starting to fade away. "Is that normal?"

  "It's only fading from sight," Kelen said. "It will still be there. If our luck is strong, we'll be able to use it on our way back out."

  Dante smeared some blood on the rock wall to the right of the crack. "So this is the Shell?"

  "Gothon."

  "Now how do we get from here to the Knot?"

  "Pholos. That will be…harder. First we find out where we are."

  Kelen stalked forward. The sky was lower in Gothon than it had been in Ardos, and though it was just as packed with clouds, these were swifter and more motile, closer to floating fog than a cloud bank. Here and there, thin waterfalls spilled down from the cliffs. It was pretty, in an austere and somewhat forbidding way.

  "If the next step is figuring out where we are," Dante said after a few minutes, "then shouldn't we be trying to get to high ground? Like the exact opposite of the bottom of this canyon?"

  "There was no way up it where we arrived," Kelen said. "That is why we are walking: to reach somewhere where there is a way up it."

  "There's a way up it wherever I am." Dante had released the nether after confirming the coast was clear, but he brought it back to himself and sent it into the cliffs. Rock flowed away, revealing the first step of a staircase, then a second, then a third. Dante strolled forward, inscribing a path upward along the face of the cliff as he went.

  "Stop," Kelen said. "I don't think we're in Gothon," he breathed. "I think we're in a Pocket."

  Dante swiveled his head. "A Pocket?"

  "A trick. A cruel one, meant to make us think we are happy when we are about to be very unhappy. We have to get back to the doorway." Kelen said all this in something just above a whisper. "Now, Dante!"

  Still, Dante hesitated, glancing to the others, who could only shrug. "I don't know why you're so spooked," he said. "But your knowledge of this place was supposedly worth us dying for. If you say we need—"

  Kelen jerked his head upward and gasped. He took off at a run.

  Dante dashed after him. "What is it? I don't see anything!"

  "The clouds!" Kelen shouted, waving his hands about. "The clouds!"

  They still looked odd to Dante, but not in any particularly threatening way. In fact they looked like they'd be nice to walk in; if they were down at ground level, like fogs were supposed to be, he expected it would feel gauzy and cozy.

  "Hang on," Dante said. "Are they getting lower?"

  The question already felt stupid. When they'd arrived in this place, whatever it was, the clouds had hung some six or eight hundred feet above them. Notably low, though he'd seen similar patterns in the winter on certain coastlines.

  Now, however, they were less than four hundred feet up. And dropping fast enough that, although they'd traveled a mere quarter of a mile from the passage, he didn't think they'd make it back before the clouds would fall all the way down, and surround them.

  "Run!" Kelen yelled.

  "What do you think we're doing?" Blays said.

  "Run more!"

  Dante found he could run a hair faster, and with the exit just a minute away, he expected he could maintain the pace. But Gladdic was already falling behind them. He cursed himself for not even trying to see if they could ride horses through the portals. Not that there were any in Yent, but Maralda almost certainly could have gotten her hands on some through one of the many other doorways she had scattered throughout the jungle. Dante was suddenly sure she must have thought of the idea herself, but had chosen not to say anything about it unless they thought of it on their own.

  The canyon veered right, swinging into view the patch of rock that housed the now-unseen passage. Above, the clouds touched the top of the canyon. Less than a hundred feet high. Streamers reached down, trailing mist behind them, groping about like blind tentacles. Kelen launched a beam of blue sparks ahead of himself. It spattered into the base of the cliff. The crack that led to Ardos swam into being, dim and translucent, but growing more defined.

  The fog slid down the canyon walls. It pushed a blast of cold air before it, one that smelled of a receding sea.

  Kelen shot a glance up at it, then at the still-cohering crack. Staring dead ahead, he pulled more and more of the sapphire light to his hands. One of the misty tentacles dropped like an anchor. Kelen and Dante broke to either side as the limb whooshed between them. Dante glanced over his shoulder just in time to catch sight of Blays spinning away from it while lashing out at it with his sword. The sizzling purple blade sank into the fog. As it passed through it, viscous transparent goo sprayed to all sides.

  "Did the fog just bleed?" Blays yelled.

  It was now just forty feet above them, lower than the nave of a cathedral, sinking closer with each moment. Another limb swooped toward them. Kelen punched his arms upward. Two streams of blue light punched up as well, spiraling around each other as they went. They drove into the belly of the clouds like a lance into a boar.

  The fog quivered and leaped upward, drawing back from them by a full thirty feet. Dante glimpsed a host of ringed tentacles and round, slavering mouths, before these retracted as well, disappearing back into the swirling fog.

  "Through the doorway!" Kelen ordered. "Fast as you can!"

  Blays was in the lead, and he glanced back. Dante nodded. Blays sheathed his sword and raced through the crack in the side of the cliff. Kelen was just a few feet behind him and ran through without hesitation. As Dante neared the portal, Gladdic had fallen well behind.

  "Go!" The old man had known him long enough to read his mind. "I will be right behind you!"

  Dante skidded to a stop just in front of the cliffs. He spun about, grabbing at the nether like the reins of a horse. The clouds had already recovered and were plunging groundward again. He imagined that, once they touched down, it would be a mercy if all they did was smother him.

  A shroud of mist stretched toward Gladdic. He hacked into it with the ether, sending clear globs of goo flying. It wavered, then pressed onward. Dante chopped the shadows into it from the other side. A long lump of mist severed from the rest and landed heavily beside Gladdic as he ran past it, coiling up into itself. The fog faded away from it, revealing a writhing black tentacle deflating on itself as it ejected more goo from its cut end.

  The ceiling of clouds rushed toward them exactly as the ground would have if they'd flung themselves from the top of the cliffs. Gladdic leaned forward and ran through the crack in the wall with a rustle of robes. Dante launched himself in right behind him. Something snagged his ankle, pain shooting up his leg, and he hung in darkness, caught somewhere he didn't know: and then the thing released him.

  He tumbled onto the bark of the toppled tree and rolled downward. His slide was broken by a handy branch. His ribs creaked. Before he could fully sense the pain of it, or in his bleeding ankle, he doused both in shadows.

  "What the hell was that?" he and Blays said at the same time.

  "I told you." Kelen rubbed his hands together, scowling at the crack in space among the branches. "It was a Pocket. And since I know you'll ask, a Pocket is how Gothon protects itself from being found by people like you."

  "A Pocket," Gladdic said. "As in a pocket of Olastar composed only of its self, which exists to kill those who wander into it."

  "Yes, that's what I said."

  Dante scrunched his eyes tight. "And you can't tell the difference between an entrance to Gothon and one that leads into one of these Pockets."

  "What kind of a question is that?"

  "A damn good one?"

  "No, it's a damn bad one. If I could tell the difference, then the only reason I would have walked into that one is if I had gone mad."

  "Or you wanted us dead."

  Kelen drew back as if stung, then swept toward Dante so smoothly his feet hardly seemed to move. "I am here because I want this world destroyed. It deserves to be destroyed. Think! If I wanted you dead, I could have left you there in the Pocket. Or led you down any number of the other ways that Olastar would easily kill you."

  Kelen was a head shorter than him, and much slighter in build. Yet he was so animated by the spirit that had taken him that Dante wouldn't have wished to fight him in that moment.

  "I meant no insult," he said. "But I was taken by surprise. If you'd warned us in advance that things like these Pockets exist, we wouldn't be talking like this right now."

  The other man stared at him, then softened, if only in the way that hard-frozen ice that's finally begun to melt a little has softened. "Does this place frighten you?"

  "Shouldn't it? If you want to destroy it as badly as we do, there must be something hateful about it."

  "There is. We should get on with our business."

  "I can see why you liked exploring this place," Blays said to him. "It's like Gharadhain, but even worse."

  They got down from the tree. Gladdic healed the scrapes he and Blays had suffered while Kelen prodded his device before ultimately leading them in the same direction they'd been going before diverting to the toppled tree. Dante still had no good sense of how long they'd been awake and once he got tired it happened all at once, trudging onward like a yoke had been laid across his neck.

  Kelen kept going even as the overcast gray light dwindled and the woods fell into darkness. They soon learned why when Gladdic's ether glinted on a pair of yellow eyes. Dante assumed it would be a cougar, maybe another heavily deformed one like the pale green elk, but when Gladdic brightened his light to ward it away, it revealed a lizard the size of a horse. Instead of being squat like a swamp dragon, the thing stood upright like a horse as well, and stepped through the trees almost as agilely as a cougar would have.

  "That doesn't look friendly," Blays said.

  "It's not," Kelen said.

  "Should we kill it?"

  "If it tries to rush us."

  "Should we run?"

  "Running will cause it to rush us. Then we will have to kill it, and the scent of its blood will draw others. It is best to leave it be."

  The three sorcerers kept their hands full of their preferred power as they slogged along through the dead leaves and snaggly grass. The lizard was soon joined by another, both of them stalking along just beyond the range of the light, betrayed only by its ever-flashing eyes.

  Another joined them every few minutes. A few were smaller, farm-dog-sized, while others tromped about on their hind legs while their arms sported blade-like claws. Before long, a whole pack of the things was trailing them, spread out across a semicircle.

  Just as it seemed that the humans would have to stand their ground, lay waste to their pursuers, and then flee as fast as they could before more arrived, something rumbled from the forest behind them, huge and unreal. All of the lizards stopped and spun about, lifting their heads high.

  "Now it is the time to run," Kelen said.

  They did. So did the lizards, scattering in all directions. Footsteps boomed through the woods. Something shrieked and was then cut short. The trees thinned around them while the grass stood higher, the dew on it soaking their trousers up the knees. Holes began to appear in the ground around them, just a few feet across and several feet deep, but getting bigger and bigger the further they traveled, until some were three hundred feet across and a hundred down to the bottom—or at least to the surface of the water that filled the bottom.

  These were not pleasant to have to run around next to in the dark. Still, it seemed to be keeping the lizards at bay, as well as whatever had terrified the lizards, and the night was quiet around them. Finally, Kelen called for them to make camp inside a small grove. He even offered to take first watch. Dante was too tired to be more than mildly suspicious.

  He dreamed that night of a city of squat round towers with domed roofs. Dawn broke over terraced fields filled with shallow pools and thriving crops. He'd never seen such a land, nor heard of it, but he was somehow sure that it was on Rale.

  Soldiers in crisp uniforms stood motionless on the walls. Thousands more emerged with the sunlight and began to drill in the yards while priests in red robes practiced with both nether and ether. It was a city to rival Bressel or Setteven at their height.

  When the holes opened in the ground, and the dark beasts began to emerge from them, horns blasted across the city. Soldiers and priests hurried to their positions. They had just made it to the walls and gates as the horde of blade-limbed beings from the Becoming entered the range of the archers. With great volleys, first of arrows and then of sorcery, the defenders heaped up such huge numbers of corpses that the attackers were soon running across their own dead instead of the ground.

  Fewer than one in ten of those who crossed the field reached the walls, and an even lesser fraction of those that reached the walls were able to climb them. The city looked like it would surely hold, until the moment that another hole opened up from beneath the gate itself.

  Stones and men tumbled into it as it cracked wider and wider. A huge hand, as black as obsidian, grasped hold of a guard tower and dragged the whole thing into the pit. The blade-limbed creatures poured through the rubble and into the city. The defenders did all they could to hold them back. It wasn't enough.

  Once it was finished, and the creatures had no more to do but wander the city stabbing at bodies that had long since stopped moving, a blank eye opened from down in the depths of the pit.

  And the entity spoke Dante's name.

  He thrashed his way out of his blanket. Gladdic, on watch, turned to look at him, but said nothing. It was Dante's turn for watch a few minutes later. He spent all of it trying to convince himself the vision had been no more than a dream.

  In the morning, Dante didn't see Kelen eat anything. But his breakfast might still have tasted better than the brick-like biscuits the others ate. The clouds that day were as perforated as the ground and beams of light slashed through them like the Spear of Stars. Where they were angled right to strike the pools at the bottoms of the caverns, they turned the water as bright as turquoise. Golden fish stirred in the depths.

  As they passed by one of the largest holes yet, Kelen stopped and consulted his copper device. "It's somewhere close. Very close."

  He strode about, casting blue dust here and there, whispering as he observed the results. He found the passage with almost no trouble inside the rim of the huge cavern they'd been standing next to.

  Blays folded his arms in front of the softly glowing crack in the rock. "How do we know this isn't another Pocket?"

 

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