His horse stumbled, hooves skidding. Eyes wide, he plunged his mind into the ground. It rocked back and forth, once-solid layers of dirt and rocks jumbling among each other as if they'd turned into liquid.
"Earthquake!" he shouted, though few would be able to hear him over the groans of the ground—and as if any of them would need the warning at that point.
The world juddered and tilted. His horse tried to bolt, but a thumb of rock thrust up in front of it. The beast reared back, kicking at the sky; another jolt of earth sent it toppling to the side.
Dante threw himself free of it and reached back into the ground, willing it to go still. This had no effect at all. He spread the nether across a wide, squat cylinder of earth and solidified it into solid rock. The ground was still bouncing back and forth, but at least the patch of it he was on was no longer breaking apart.
"The slope!" a man shouted.
Loose boulders slid and bounced from the crown of the hill. Dante launched his mind through the heaving chaos and found that the entire top of the hill was about to give way. As fast as he could, he stretched the nether into a wide net, weaving it through the disjointed ground, fastening cracks back together, sinking other parts back into itself. And then all he could do was hold on, and wait.
The roar reached its peak, then slowly but surely began to recede. Another ten seconds and the ground calmed enough to walk across—although it felt to Dante like it was still shaking, and it was still twitching erratically, like an animal that's had its head staved in.
People began to help each other to their feet, looking around themselves like they were expecting to be attacked from behind. The next half hour was consumed by people asking questions that no one had answers to while nethermancers rushed back and forth healing anyone who'd been wounded during the earthquake. There were plenty of scrapes, cuts, and broken bones, but remarkably, no one had been killed except for an unlucky woman who'd broken out with the Wailing Plague right at the start of the quake.
"Suppose that was a coincidence?" Blays said once they'd gotten back on the move.
"Narashtovik's been rattled a few times in the past." Dante sighed through his nose. "But if I say that was natural, I hope you have the good sense to check my brain for green worms."
"I hope there are a few in there. Then when I ask if you want to bet a thousand chucks that it won't happen again, you might take me up on it."
"No, this won't be the last one. So how do we protect ourselves from a gods damned earthquake?"
Blays turned in a slow circle. "Ka's able to hide from sight. Could this be her work? Or someone else like her?"
"If we are being followed, and if we can find them, can we kill them?"
"A very reputable source once told us everything can be killed." Blays bit his lip. "You know, what if we just killed him?"
"The person we just agreed to kill? Agreed. Again."
"Taim."
Dante swung about in the saddle. "You want to kill a god? Not just a god, but the lord of gods? The most powerful being that exists?"
"He's trying to kill us, isn't he? I say we sneak up on him and give him a taste of the ol' spear."
Dante rode in silence for a few moments. "Even if we were crazy enough to take the fight to them, we don't currently have a way over to his realm. For now, our first priority is getting our people to safety. Once that's done, we can get back to the business of doing insane things."
"Well, I'm going to start praying to Carvahal. He helped us before. Maybe he'd like to see us solve the Taim problem once and for all."
With the threat of earthquakes and landslides in the air, Dante recused himself from healing and turned his attention to keeping watch on the ground. Wails from behind him alerted him whenever there was a new instance of the green strands.
The pace of new cases wasn't as dire as Gladdic had feared, but it sounded worse than the day before. If Gallador wasn't also afflicted with the strands, would they even let his people inside their borders? If the situation was reversed, he didn't think that he would let them into his city. No, he'd make them camp in the fields.
It was possible they'd let him in anyway out of gratitude for defeating the lich. But he was afraid that the old ways of honor and loyalty would be breaking down even faster than the world around them.
That afternoon, the earth rumbled again. People cried out, throwing themselves flat. Dante rushed into the ground, making no effort to stabilize it, casting to all sides for any sense of a presence. But the nether wasn't flowing through the earth the way it would be if someone was manipulating it the way he knew how. By all appearances, it was moving naturally, with no manipulation at all.
He delved deeper and wider. As he reached the very limits of his perception, he thought he could feel something moving throughout the rock. At soon as he had it, the feeling sank away from him, but he could go no deeper, and couldn't be sure that he'd felt anything at all.
On the surface, the earth calmed until it was motionless. The quake hadn't done more than rattle a few rocks loose and knock some cracks in the ground. Dante waited to be sure there wasn't more on the way, then ordered the column onward.
That night, as he and Blays paced around the camp failing to make any headway on the mounting number of problems vexing them, Dante came to a stop.
He lifted his chin, peering off into the darkness. "What is that? A fire?"
Blays followed his gaze to the glowing red spot many miles away. "One of those fires that doesn't flicker?"
"It could be ether."
"One of those ethers that's all red?"
"The color can be changed." Dante frowned. Something was off about it, but it was too far away for him to tell what. "We should send scouts ahead to Gallador and see if they're getting sick, too. If they aren't, they might not want to let us in until we find a cure. And if they are, we can tell them how to treat it—and see if they've found anything else that works."
"Not a bad idea. Although if you really want to find a cure, you should go find out what our foragers have been finding and keeping for themselves."
"What do you mean?"
"As far as I know," Blays said, "not a one of them has gotten sick."
"Probably just coincidence. We aren't sending that many foragers out there. They're barely bringing back enough to keep themselves fed."
"Just thought it was interesting."
Dante tucked his chin to the cold. "What could possibly be doing that, though? If they'd found an herb or some other treatment, they'd have no reason to keep it secret. So is it the fresh air they're getting? The traipsing around in the wilds? We're all doing that. And people are still falling victim to the plague."
"Maybe we just need to make everyone freeze their toes off while eating the field mice they scare up."
"Or make them—" Dante swung about. "Wait right here."
He jogged off through the snow. By its nature of it being a traveling one, the layout of the camp changed each night, and it took him a few minutes of asking around before he came to the tents occupied by Yalla and the faithful of Lia.
"Lord Galand," she said when she saw him. "Don't tell me you've come to offer another prayer with us?"
"That might depend on the answer to this question," he said. "Last night, you said none of your people had been afflicted by the strands. Is that still true?"
"Why, yes. We remain blessed."
He joined them for a quick prayer. As soon as he was done, he dashed back to his tents, where Blays had helped himself to a bottle of wine.
"You get good stuff." Blays swirled his cup. "I need to get promoted to high priest of something."
"I know the source of the strands." Dante grabbed a cup and poured it full. "We're eating them with every meal."
4
Blays lunged forward and slapped the cup out of Dante's hand, spilling wine across the dirt floor.
Dante glared at him. "What the hell did you do that for?"
"Didn't you just say the strand
s are inside our food? And you're about to drink that?"
"It's not all food, you fool. Just the stuff we've been harvesting. I think."
"And that's why the foragers aren't getting it? They're mostly just eating what they find in the wild?"
"It's not just that. Lia's sect has been fasting for days and none of them have been possessed by the strands, either. The harvesting has been acting irregularly for a while now. At first it was much harder to grow things than it should have been. Then some of the plants were coming up gray and withered. Like it was cursed."
"Well that's good news, then."
"How is it good news that our food is poisoning us?"
"Because all we have to do to stop getting sick is to stop eating?"
Dante began to pace across the tent. "It could be that it's just the initial wheat we've been using that was corrupted. If so, if we can find some other seeds to use, we'll have pure food again."
"That's the biggest 'if' I've ever heard. Because if it's not just the one batch of corrupted grain, then sooner or later, every single one of us is going to get attacked by the strands."
"Maybe not if we eat like the foragers."
"Okay, so one in a hundred of us won't get attacked. That's all the more you're going to be able to keep fed with a few pheasants and roots."
"If it means that you, me, and my priests can keep ourselves immune from this, we'll be way ahead of where we were five minutes ago. Right now there's nothing more important than stable leadership. We'll do everything we can for everyone else while we work toward a solution for everyone."
"Should send some of the monks out hunting, then. They'll bring back more deer than the archers."
"What, you're not going to ask me if I'm going to tell our people what's going on?"
Blays gave him a look. "If we were hunting down a rogue priest, or deposing a mad prince, I might have some things to say about keeping our citizens in the dark about our machinations. But the gods have declared war on us. Until the people we pray to stop dropping thunderbolts on our head, it's full rule with an iron fist time."
Dante agreed completely. The one problem with his new tyranny, however, was that if things turned for the worst, the responsibility would be his and his alone.
His dreams were strange that night. He seemed to be in the Mists, but whenever they stopped swirling around his knees enough for him to glimpse his feet, he could see that he was walking on open air and there was no ground anywhere at all. It felt as though this realization should have caused him to fall, yet he kept walking, and others walked up to him through the clouds, people he'd once known but had since died.
They were trying to warn him, he thought, but although he knew the words they were speaking, he couldn't make any sense of what they were trying to say. Once they understood they couldn't get through to him, each one turned and walked away, fading into the mists.
When he woke in the morning, the red light was still shining in the distance. It glared from the tip of a cone of rock nearly as steep as a tower, and smoke and ash billowed from it into the sky.
~
The mountains grew closer, and more of his people fell to the Wailing Plague. While the priests saved lives, Dante tested everything he could think of with their food supplies. He knew he was doing everything he could to cut off the very source of the deaths, but he was still troubled by the knowledge that the processes he was using to reach that end were killing people who were following him.
"I've been experimenting," he announced after three days of this. "And I think I know how this thing works."
"This sounds like bad news," Blays said.
"How's that?"
"Because people are still dying."
Dante nodded slowly. "I've been harvesting different batches of grain. Along with some tubers the scouts have brought back. The people who ate these were still afflicted by the strands, but not nearly as many as the people eating the wheat we've been repeatedly harvesting since before we left Narashtovik."
Gladdic lifted his chin. "You believe the harvesting process is corrupting our supplies."
Blays tossed a small knife to himself. "Why would the gods bother with that when you two and the Plagued Islanders might be the only people in the whole world who even know how to use the nether to harvest crops? Are they personally spiting us?"
"It's not impossible," Dante said. "But I think it's a blight on all crops. Every time you reseed a crop, or a tree bears fruit, the more corrupt it becomes and the more people die. By harvesting ours over and over, every single day, we've sped up that process immensely."
"But the entire point of going to Gallador was to find more favorable soil to harvest in. Even if they let us inside, we'll be faced with the choice of starving to death, or getting eaten alive by green worms."
"They will not let us inside," Gladdic said. "For if Dante is correct, then the Galladese will not yet have been cursed by the strands in any meaningful number. Unless Taim has afflicted their leaders with madness, they will never allow an army of plague-bearers within their borders."
"Wrong," Dante said. "They'll only turn us away if they know we're diseased."
"You would lie your way inside?"
"What other choice do we have? Besides, who cares if our presence somehow spreads the strands to the Galladese? If we don't get our people somewhere safe so we can go off and yell at the gods about stopping this, everyone on Rale's dead anyway."
Everyone seemed satisfied with this. Blays frowned. "All three of us keep agreeing on everything? It really must be the end of the world."
A long stream of grimy clouds appeared in the sky above them. They were blacker than any that Dante had ever seen and he kept one eye on them, ready for a hellstorm of some kind to rain down on their heads. As he came to the crown of a hill, the earth gave a tremble beneath him.
He froze, sinking his mind into the soil, then stopped doing anything at all. Many miles to the north, a cone of black rock had thrust its way from the depths of the earth until it stood a thousand feet high. Its tip looked like it had been scooped out. From this great crater, black smoke reached across the heavens like a demonic hand.
The next day a forward scout returned with a report that a canyon had swallowed the road ahead. Rather than bothering to detour, Dante rode straight for it. Just as the scout had reported, the canyon cut right across the road, three hundred feet deep and a hundred across at its narrowest. Its sides were sheer and impassable.
Blays leaned toward the ledge. "Well, that's new."
Dante pressed his lips together. "If we don't stop this soon, everything's going to be changed forever. Even if we can force a truce."
The stink of sulfur wafted from the crevice. He couldn't see an end to the canyon in either direction, so he nicked the back of his arm and softened the stone at the edge of the gap. He poured it downward, creating a gentle slope in front of him and, over the course of a few minutes, a wide bridge of solid rock to the other side.
"Get our people across," he told his captains. "Quickly now. I'll keep watch from this side."
They ordered the people into a tighter column and guided them across. Dante stood beside his work and gazed down into the canyon. A few minutes into the crossing, with half of the citizens over to the other side, a red lump glowed at the bottom of the crevice several hundred feet to the north. Just as Dante knew it would, it began to flow southward. Toward the bridge.
He waited where he was. People on the bridge stopped, pointing toward the lava. Before Dante could yell at them to keep going, the soldiers did that for him. The people moved slowly, though, gawking and chattering nervously, and many who hadn't yet stepped on the bridge hesitated to do so, obliging Dante to send a mass of nether toward the flow to reassure them he could do something about it.
Lava was a little harder to handle than inert stone. But he'd learned at the Plagued Islands that despite all appearances, the stuff was still stone, and he diverted it, stretching it across the canyon floor
and mounding it up to form a glowing dam that turned many different colors as it cooled.
The sight of this only made more people stop and stare in wonder. Dante understood that (outside of what they'd witnessed in the last few days from very far away) none of them had ever seen lava before, but he wasn't at all sure that some malign force wasn't about to smash his bridge out from under them. He berated them until they got going.
As they funneled themselves to the other side, he began to seriously contemplate foisting them off on his Council while he took Blays and Gladdic to find a way back to the Realm of Nine Kings.
He might have done so then and there if not for the fact he didn't yet know where to go, and wouldn't until they heard back from Naran, or turned something up on their own. Anyway, they were almost to Gallador. He would deliver them and be off.
~
Snow clung to the mountains ringing the riftlands, but within Gallador, it was likely that there wouldn't be any snow at all except in the highlands. It was as if it had been enchanted to be temperate and inviting.
Or perhaps it was everywhere else that had been cursed.
They started up the incline to Elladen's Pass. In normal times, there would be steady traffic on the road even now, in the middle of winter. The merchants of Gallador didn't let a little thing like seasons or blizzards interrupt them from piling up their riches.
Just then, however, the road was deserted. Maybe the White Lich was to blame for that. He'd struck at Gallador on his way north, and the only reason the locals hadn't been routed was that the People of the Pocket had decided to drop a mountain on the lich's head.
But the Galladese would have heard about the lich's death more than two weeks ago. It wasn't fear of him that was keeping them off the road. It was something else.
Dante wasn't surprised, then, when a scout returned with news they'd built a fort across the pass, and that it was occupied by a host of armed men. Dante instructed him to return to the fort and apprise the soldiers that the people of Narashtovik were approaching, and that they sought aid.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 4