The Red Sea

by Edward W. Robertson

While Dante tried to make enough sense of this to form questions of his own, the air condensed before him. A gray cloud drifted toward them, joined by three others, lower to the ground. These drew together into the shape of the Dresh woman and her three hogs of war.

  "I have been to the Worldsea." Her voice was soft, her expression jagged. "And I have nothing for you."

  Dante tilted his head to the side. "But they were once able to cure the sickness. They have to know how that was done."

  "All those who knew about the ronone, they left to sail the Worldsea long ago. They've forgotten their mortal lives. No one from that age remains here in the Mists."

  "Surely you didn't have time to ask everyone!"

  The woman lifted an eyebrow. "Do you think I had to go from village to village, asking them one at a time? I asked them all. And they all knew nothing."

  "I don't understand. You said they would know."

  "I said I would ask."

  "Knowing they wouldn't have what I wanted?"

  "I had no way to know that," she said. "The ancestors, some might have held on to their pasts. Or been living in the Mists until recently. It was a good idea to try. But the knowledge is lost."

  Dante lowered his gaze to the sands. "Then so are my hopes."

  Blays clapped him on the shoulder. "We're a long way from done. The solution existed once. That means we can find it again. Maybe the Boat-Growers will know. Or one of the peoples on the west side."

  Dante turned to Niles. "Is there anyone on the island who doesn't need shaden?"

  The older man pinched the bridge of his nose. "Everyone I've ever seen has eaten the snails."

  "They'd only do that if they had to. No one knows the secret."

  Blays was staring hard at the Dresh woman. Noticing his attention, she rearranged her expression.

  "What was that?" Blays said. "You looked like you'd just swallowed a live bee and were banking on it forgetting how to sting."

  "Go from here. The dead have no answers for you."

  "Everyone remotely related to this island lies like it's their job. So pardon me if I don't take your word." He gestured toward the distant mists. "Do you know what's happening back in the land of the living?"

  The woman regained her glass-hard expression. "You squabble and you die. Just as you always do."

  "The Mallish are coming back to the island. They want the shaden. They'll kill everyone who doesn't help them and enslave those who do. If you know something more, and you let that come to pass, you're damning these people to the same fate as yours."

  "Sounds like justice to me."

  "The people alive today had nothing to do with that! They need to be cured of the ronone so they can leave. Or freed to use the shells to defend themselves. How can you condemn them like this?"

  The woman closed her eyes. Wrinkles deepened across her face; the skin of her neck slackened. Within seconds, she'd aged twenty years. One by one, the three jone disappeared, leaving her alone.

  "You're not like the others," she said.

  Blays inclined his head. "I know. I'm much better looking."

  "I wasn't lying. All the Dresh who might have known have sailed away on the Worldsea. But not all the Dresh are dead."

  20

  Niles' jaw dropped. "It's been four hundred years since the invasion. There's no way a settlement of Dresh could have survived on the island without being seen."

  "You're right," the woman said. "They're not on the island. They're on Spearpoint Rock. That's where they fled when they knew their land was lost."

  Niles stared dumbly. Dante waved a hand in his face. "What the hell is Spearpoint Rock?"

  "It's a small island just off the north shore. But the Current's so strong there it's impossible to reach."

  Dante locked eyes with the woman. "Do they have the cure?"

  "They don't," she said. "But they've survived all this time. They may remember how it was once done."

  "Are any of their dead here?"

  She shook her head. "You'll have to visit the rock itself."

  "So all we have to do," Blays said, "is go to the place it's impossible to get to. Normally I'd laugh at you, but considering we're gabbing around in the afterlife, I'm sure we'll figure something out."

  "Thank you." Dante turned away from the woman.

  She grabbed his arm. Her fingers were as hard and cold as iron railings on a November night. "If you harm them. Or cause any harm to come to them. When you come to the Mists for good, we'll keep you in a hell that will make you beg for a second death."

  He tried and failed to extract himself from her grasp. "If they're as friendly as you, they have nothing to worry about."

  The woman released him, watching him as he walked into the trees.

  "I need to oversee the defense of the Peaks," Niles said. "Winden knows the way to the north coast. She'll take you there."

  "Think we'll actually be able to get to this place?" Blays said.

  The man laughed. "Anyone else, I'd tell you to give up now. But after seeing what you lot can do, I think you should leave at first light."

  They stretched out in the grass and slept. Dante awoke in the tool shed, head pounding. The moon had only moved a few degrees across the sky. They returned to the great hall. While Niles gave his men their orders, Dante drew Winden aside and told her what they'd learned.

  "I can get you to the shore," she said. "But I don't know how to get you to the island."

  "Leave that to us."

  Feeling suddenly generous, he went to the river on the south side of the grounds. There, he raised a line of waist-high ramparts on the north bank. Once he was done, he returned to the great hall, found a pallet in a quiet corner, and slept.

  He woke before the sun. Unable to sleep, he returned to the river. Niles was there, looking haggard.

  "Been up all night?" Dante said.

  "I don't have any hours to waste." Niles stirred, inhaling deeply. "Not if we're to stop them from retaking this."

  "I've seen their raids. I don't think you could stop them if you had a hundred years to fortify."

  The other man looked Dante in the eye. "Be angry with me until your dying day. But my people have done nothing wrong. Please don't wish for harm to befall them."

  Dante wasn't certain the Kandeans were blameless—they'd been complicit in Niles' lies, after all—yet he felt rebuked. Niles had helped them navigate the lands beyond. As a result, Dante was on the verge of finding his answers. It was becoming more difficult to be angry with Niles. He'd been duplicitous, yes. He'd taken a tragedy and shamelessly turned it into a pillar of his strategy.

  And it was for that very reason Dante felt a perverse measure of respect for the man.

  He readied for the trip, appropriating a small amount of food and supplies from what the warriors had cached at the Dreaming Peaks. Just in case they needed to revisit the Mists, he packed six orange flowers, too. By the time he was done, Blays and Winden were up. Winden requisitioned eight of the captured shaden. As sunlight streamed in and struck the heights, the three of them left the compound, heading north.

  The slopes commanded a view of the upper lobe of the island. As they maneuvered through the steaming, odiferous pools, Winden pointed to the northeast.

  "That curve," she said. "That is the way to Kandak. To reach the Joladi Coast, we veer northwest."

  Dante had seen the Joladi Coast from the deck of the Sword of the South, but in all their wanderings, they'd never gone further north than Kandak. "Whose territory are we entering?"

  "Several peoples inhabit the way to the coast. The largest are the Gauden. They lived on Gaudel Bay in the northwest. Good shaden there."

  "Lived?" Blays said. "What happened to them?"

  Winden stepped down a shelf of purple rock. "The Tauren killed many. Drove the survivors into the jungle."

  "What about the others?" Dante said. "If they've been fending off Tauren raids, are they going to be happy to see outsiders tromping around their territory?" />
  "It won't be hard to avoid them. Most live on the coasts. And the further north we go, the less the coasts can be used for travel."

  "What about Spearpoint Rock? Is it really that hard to get to?"

  "For birds? No. It's half a mile from Joladi. But for people? It's directly in the Currents. They'll sweep you south faster than you can paddle toward it. Smash you into the rocks."

  Dante got out a rag to dab his neck and brow. They were in direct sunlight and he sweated freely. "What if you sail around to the side? Come at it from the north?"

  "Then the Currents will smash you on the reef that grows there."

  "Well, it can't actually be impossible. Apparently the Dresh made it there in one piece."

  "We have a story about their passage," Winden said. "I always thought it was just a fable. It's from the time of the invasion. As the last days neared, and the Dresh saw that the Mallish couldn't leave, the great chief Durado took his canoe and sailed from beach to beach, gathering up all those who'd hidden themselves. It took him forty days, but in time, he had an army. They marched on the Mallish, who had fortified themselves in the High Tower behind their unbreachable gates.

  "The battle lasted six days. On the seventh day, Durado led a charge against the gates. Countless other charges had failed, but this one tore them down. But when Durado tried to take his people through the gap and into the tower, one of his Harvesters betrayed him. Paid off by the Mallish, he snarled the gap with thorns. Durado and all his best warriors were ensnared. There, they died by Mallish arrows.

  "Seeing the battle was lost, Durado's daughter Eleni led their people in retreat. But the Mallish, they didn't stay fast in their tower. They chased Eleni north, into the high country, through the Dreaming Peaks, past the Boiling Fields, and around the Jush Backbone.

  "Finally, Eleni and her warriors came to the Joladi Coast. Knowing their enemy could run no further, the Mallish honed their metal swords, preparing to finish the murder of the Dresh. But Eleni found a way to walk further yet—into the sea. She marched her people toward the crashing waves. As they neared, Mora, the god of the sea, grew furious. The ocean boiled. Steam filled the skies. Eleni walked into the mists along with all the Dresh. And when the steam cleared, the Mallish couldn't find a single trace of those who'd died."

  "That's it?" Dante said. "They walked into mists? Like the Mists?"

  "That's how I always took it."

  "So maybe they crossed into the land of the dead, then reemerged on Spearpoint Rock."

  "But when you Dream, your body stays in this world," Blays said.

  "Maybe they found a walk to walk into the ether." Dante stopped to pick burrs from his sock. "The same way you shadowalk."

  "When I shadowalk, it sure as hell isn't into the afterlife. I'm still right here. You just can't see me."

  "Winden, are there any other stories of Eleni? Or Spearpoint Rock?"

  She made a thinking noise. "According to the story, every last Dresh died there. Eleni, she's never mentioned again. As for Spearpoint Rock, there are stories of shipwrecks there, but the sailors always die in the Current or on the reef."

  That sounded less than promising, but Dante had her recount the stories anyway. They reached the jungle later that day, following the main path for several hours. It was good to be back under the canopy. They made camp by a stream. The next day, shortly before noon, the path veered east around the Jush Backbone, a series of knife-like ridges running north-south. Winden diverted west down what appeared to be a game trail.

  This was far more winding than the eastern trail down to the Broken Valley. Some segments were washed out; others had to be hacked clear of growth. Progress was beyond slow. By the end of the day, they were filthy, scratched up, and exhausted.

  Dante soothed the worst of their aches and pains with nether, then turned his attention to the ether. If he quieted his mind, he could make it appear to him, but he still couldn't do anything with it. He tried to recall the lessons his former mentor Cally had tried to instill in him back when he'd been on the run in the Mallish forests, but after Dante had shown no ability to summon the ether whatsoever, Cally had given up in disgust. Dante couldn't recall a single thing the old man had tried to teach him.

  The following day, the trail smoothed out. Winden warned them that they were entering the territory of the Cadren, a people who followed the fruiting of the jungle's figs and used jone to hunt down mushrooms to trade for shaden.

  The forest floor was hopping with red-furred rodents. Dante slew two of them to scout the way ahead. He saw a few midden heaps and chewed-up fig trees suggesting the Cadren's presence, but saw no people. After a few hours, the path widened, leading into a rubble of purple-black stones numerous enough to have once been a village or a large temple complex.

  Before, Dante had taken the ruins as a simple point of fact. Everywhere in the world carried remnants of long-lost people. Now, knowing these structures had been built by the Dresh, he felt a reverence similar to what he felt when he entered the church of a faith that wasn't his.

  As the sun dropped, clouds piled against the heights. Squeezed against them like a dark, misshapen fruit, they drenched the forest with rain. The clay trail grew so slick they called an early day. By morning, the clouds had cleared out, leaving the scent of rain behind, along with deep puddles filmed with rainbow-colored oil.

  They hiked onward, meeting up with a noisy stream that made frequent drops down shelves of rock. Falls splashed into deep pools, churning the smell of fresh water into the air. They detoured inland around a village of wooden houses on stilts, then reconnected with the river, which had a clear pathway beside it.

  The sky darkened. The rain returned, hissing onto the canopy. The trail hadn't had time to dry out from the previous evening. With the clay squelching at each step, yanking on their shoes, they found it easier to stomp through the rain-beaten grass and weeds beside the path.

  Behind them, birds squawked raucously. Winden stopped, straightening her back. The river had gone brown-purple. An uprooted sapling sped through the water, spinning crown over roots.

  "High ground," she said. "Hurry!"

  Dante broke from the bank, slogging to the right, uphill. He slipped every few steps. His knees and hands grew caked with clay. The sound of rushing water became a low roar.

  Glancing over Dante's shoulder, Blays' eyes went wide. He grabbed Dante's arm and pulled him up. "Less falling. More running."

  Dante ran on. Water surged through the trees, frothy and brown. The leading edge looked no more than ankle deep, but further up, it rose six inches up the trunks, then a foot. Leaves and branches tossed in the flood. It was more than enough to sweep them away. If it didn't drown them, they'd be battered to bits against the rocks and trees.

  He redoubled his efforts, pumping his legs without regard for his footing. The floodwaters sluiced forward faster than any human could run.

  "We're not going to make it!" he yelled over the thunder of the water.

  Winden pointed at a tall tree heavy with long and slender leaves. "Into the tree!"

  Its trunk was thick, but it was also smooth, with no major branches until twelve feet up. She gestured, nether gushing from the damp clay into the trunk. Wrist-thick branches shot out from its side, stout and strong, spaced vertically every three feet. Winden hopped onto the lowest and grabbed the one above it. Clay fell from her sandals as she scrambled higher.

  Blays flung himself into the tree like a golden-furred monkey. Water trickled past Dante's feet. By the time Blays got up to the next branch, the water was an inch deep and rising fast. Dante grabbed a branch and hauled himself up. His boots skidded on the smooth bark. He scraped off as much clay as he could and climbed higher. Water swirled below him in a solid sheet.

  Winden came to a stop twenty feet up. Blays laced himself into the boughs. Dante seated himself, holding fast to the branch above him.

  "Should have known," Winden said. "I almost got us killed."

  Blays slicked b
ack his hair. "We do that all the time. The important thing is you also got us un-killed. Keep that up, and it'll be a regular day."

  Rain pounded through the trees. The flash flood continued to sweep down the hillside. Just as Dante began to fear they'd have to lash themselves into the tree overnight, the waters ebbed, slipping down the trunks. The rain weakened to a steady patter. Soon after, the ground became visible again.

  They made their way down. Whole patches of plants had been yanked away, the earth scoured down to purple clay and black rock.

  "I'd say the trail has departed this world for the Pastlands." Blays jabbed at the earth with a broken branch. The tip sank three inches deep. "Maybe we should have brought a boat."

  "We'll spend the night on high ground." Winden gestured above them. "It will be better come morning."

  The following day, everything remained waterlogged. However, the floods had torn away much of the undergrowth, and they advanced through the jungle with reasonable speed. Near the end of the day, Winden found a trail snaking along a plateau. Beneath it, blades of land slashed at the sky, impossibly green. Beyond, the ocean spanned until the edge of the world.

  "We're close now," Winden said. "Just past those peaks."

  The ridge she gestured toward looked about as surmountable as a pane of glass. The next day, though, the trail led to a pass through the worst of it. Within two hours, they looked down on the north shore.

  "The Joladi Coast." Winden pointed to a small green island a half mile offshore. "And Spearpoint Rock."

  It looked close enough to swim to. But the Current was visibly enraged, white-capped swells rushing past the small island and destroying themselves against the disintegrating cliffs beneath them, the wild spray slicking the rocks. The cries of shorebirds lifted on the wind. Carefully, the three of them made their way down from the heights. They emerged onto a narrow beach stretched between the two surrounding ridges like a hammock of white sand.

  Winden stepped out of her sandals. She smiled. "We're lucky. This beach isn't always here. In the winter, when the storms are worse, it washes away."

  At the moment, the waves looked relatively gentle—a small reef or break was buffering the shoreline—but they hammered the cliffs to either side of the barrier. The tideline was littered with kelp, coral, shells, bones, and sticks, producing a thick smell of salty marine rot. Thousands of crabs scuttled among the debris, clawing up the shreds. Hundreds of birds were there, too, but the refuse of the sea was so plentiful they weren't even bothering to go after the crabs.