He'd been afraid they'd be cooped up for days waiting for enough information to come in for them to try to locate the source of the invaders, but it turned out that the Galladese had already compiled much of this in hopes of determining if there were any safe routes across the lakes. After another excellent dinner, Lolligan reconvened them in the Celerium, bearing a thick sheaf of notes and several intricate maps.
"I have good news," he said. "I've only been able to speak with the interested parties of Wending, of course, but so far support for our deal is overwhelming, if not quite universal."
"What's the argument against it?" Dante said.
"That the gods would never destroy their own creations. Meaning that whyever these things are here, they weren't sent by the heavens, and so launching an attack on the heavens can only make our situation worse."
"They're wrong."
Lolligan eyed him. "I know that, inasmuch as I can trust you. And if you're engaging in some form of fraud with me, it's so far beyond my comprehension that I wouldn't know how to oppose you even if I wanted to. As I said, only a small minority holds this position. I know you're the type to get annoyed when there's any disagreement with you at all, but the naysayers won't be an issue."
"Unless they're fanatics for their position," Blays said. "And unless some people here still hold a grudge against us for the, er, assassinations and things. Then they might get the idea to do something similar to us."
"Then let them come for us out on the water," Dante said. "Because that's where we'll be. As soon as Lolligan tells us where all of this started, anyway."
"We don't know that," Lolligan said. "But we do have a heap of evidence to help us narrow it down. First, let's take a look at the region as a whole."
He produced a map of the complete territories of Gallador. It was egg-shaped, ringed by mountains on all sides, and best defined by its three main lakes. Wending was positioned on the southern banks of Lake Owlin, the southernmost of the three. To the north of it lay Lake Ellowyr, where they had met Captain Wanders. And to the west of both, positioned a little more northernly than Owlin, was Lake Fendayle, which Dante had spent very little time on.
Each lake was connected to the other two by a narrow channel like the one they'd gone through to get from Ellowyr to Owlin. At the center of them rose various crags and peaks that were sometimes occupied by soldiers in times of strife but had few permanent settlements.
"Now, the very first sighting of the creatures came some two weeks ago, here at Ynding." Lolligan tapped the upper eastern shore of Owlin. "After that came two more attacks on boats almost directly across it on the western bank. These continued southward very rapidly while other incidents picked up here, moving north." He ran his finger along a curve of the southeast portion of Lake Ellowyr.
"After that, attacks sprung up on all three lakes on all of their shores, with no clear pattern of any movement to the invaders. They simply seemed to be everywhere." He looked up from beneath his white eyebrows. "I see two possible conclusions to draw from this. One, that the creatures had saturated the lakes at that point. Or two, that they entered not from a single doorway, but from many."
Dante's eyes skipped across the map. "If there's many, it only helps us. We only need to find one. We'll start by looking at Ynding."
"Do you think so?"
"Are you asking if it makes sense to start looking for the source at the place where the things we're hunting down were first spotted? Lolligan, do you need me to check your mind for senility?"
He gave Dante a dirty look. "It doesn't take that long for these beasts to move around. Most of the attacks after that were all on the western shore. Ynding could have been an anomaly. Remember also that a lot of this is based on the word of simple fishermen. And take the reports from Lake Fendayle. Supposedly they happened later than the ones at Owlin, but are we sure of that? It's further away, maybe the reports got garbled in the passing of them. Maybe we don't even have knowledge of earlier attacks that would point to the source being somewhere else altogether."
"It might make sense to ask all these questions when you're safeguarding a potential new investment and also you're not on the brink of getting exterminated. So we can sit here and paralyze ourselves with analysis. Or we can get out there and find out the answers for ourselves."
"I was just sharing my thoughts," Lolligan said, a little wounded. "If you don't find them of any worth, you're free to cast them away."
"If I'm wrong, they might be invaluable. For now, we'll pursue the simplest answer first. We'll leave first thing in the morning."
It was after dark, but just past six o'clock, and Dante meant to use every hour he could. Feeling a lot like a toy ball on a string, he headed right back to the docks to see if the Dart had been bashed up badly enough to require yet another boat. As it turned out, the local shipwrights had had virtually nothing to do for a week and counting and had leaped at the chance to not be bored out of their minds. They were patching the Dart up at that very moment, with the promise that by the time they were through, it would be better than new.
"We have ourselves a lead," Dante said. "We mean to leave in the morning."
Wanders nodded.
"We'll need someone who knows the lakes," Dante continued. "If you'll act as our guide, we'll get you a new boat. We'll pay you, too."
"Won't turn it down," the captain said. "But I'd go for no reward at all."
"You would? You did see the three-mouthed shark, right?"
"That's the thing that convinced me. They're here for us. There's no runnin' from it, nor hiding neither. This is my home. Got to fight for it."
Dante hurried back to the manor to nail down their remaining business. With official writs from the local authorities of the Tradesman's Association of the Greater Valley of Gallador, they no longer needed Halbank to vouch for them, and he happily agreed he had no business hunting leviathans.
They'd need Winden, though, in case crossing through any doorway they might find ended up requiring the use of the dreamflowers. Just in case they had another unfortunate shipwreck, though, she took one of the flowers, transferred it to a pot supplied by Lord Perreven, and harvested it until it seeded.
In the morning, the dawn was brittle and pink. They bore a wagon down to the docks. Wanders was already there, poking and cursing at the Dart. They soon had it loaded and ready.
"There is one thing we didn't discuss." Lolligan's brow twitched upward. "What if you don't return?"
"We're not the only ones in the world," Dante said. "It could be that people we don't even know exist can do more against this than we ever could."
Lolligan uttered a laugh. "It strikes me as more likely that no one else in the world even knows what's going on."
"Then tell them what's happening. Just like we planned. Besides, if we don't come back, it doesn't mean we're dead. Maybe it means we crossed over to the other side."
He clambered into the boat and they cast off. Wanders navigated them toward the exit of the bay. The moment they were beyond the fortifications, he cut to starboard to keep them running alongside the shore. Dante had gotten two maps, one of the three lakes and a more detailed one of Lake Owlin, and he split his time between studying them and watching over the unsteady gray waters.
They soon came across a smashed-up barge lodged amongst the reeds. Bodies bobbed beside it, none of them intact. Dante took a quick look around, but there was nothing to be learned except that even the shallows weren't safe.
There had been some clouds and mist early on, but the wan sun burned these away. At high noon, with no warning at all, a fish hurled itself from the water and thudded into the boat. It was as round as an inflated bladder and looked as though it should hardly be capable of swimming, let alone moving over land, but with a waddling, wriggling motion, it propelled itself toward Blays, extending its toothy jaws toward his ankle like a reaching hand.
"Lyle's balls!" He scampered back.
The interior of the sloop was too tight
to wield the spear, but he drew his sword instead, silver nether crackling up its blade and shooting off purple sparks. He drove it downward through the abomination, pinning it to the deck. Black goo shot from it like a squished grape.
"At long last, we did it." Blays staggered back, barring his arm over his mouth and nose. "We finally found something that smells worse than swamp dragon bowels. You'd better hope I can—"
He was interrupted by a confusion of splashes. Three more of the things bounced themselves from the water, bloated bodies spinning helplessly. Dante wrapped his hands in the nether and spiked one, which exploded in black gibbets. Wanders cursed and threw himself flat as another soared over his head. At once there were a score of them, then far more, the lake erupting around them on all sides.
Even elite soldiers might have been done in by them, if not by the sheer number of the monsters then by the shock of being bombarded by such living horrors. With three sorcerers, however, they were able to slaughter the fish as fast as they could leap at the boat.
It was all over within thirty seconds. Then the waters were silent again, and the five of them gazed wildly at each other, breathing hard, both themselves and the boat spattered with blackish chunks.
Winden gagged. "The bounty of the water, this is the first time I hate it."
Dante was about to order Wanders to get back underway, but the stench was so much it was making him dizzy. "Get to shore. If we can't clean this out, we'll have to find another vessel."
Wanders sighed slowly and put them in to shore. While the others scrubbed their clothes in the shallows, Gladdic stood over the Dart, face bent in disgust as he used the ether to burn the remains away. When they were all done, the smell was mostly gone—mostly. But it had cost them over an hour of travel, and was oddly demoralizing. None of them had been hurt, but the beauty of the Rift had been corrupted, and it felt as though all existence might soon become just as loathsome.
The banks of Owlin steepened as they traveled north, resulting in many small fjords. Rather than obsessively following the shoreline, Dante had Wanders cut across the mouths of the inlets instead. Risky, but he was still annoyed about the leaping balls of living filth, and anyway the gamble paid off, as they reached the village of Ynding shortly before four in the afternoon.
Blays hopped off the boat onto dry land, then set his hands on his hips. "We're sure this is it?"
"It's right where the map said it would be," Dante said.
"Then let's hope the map is wrong. Because it doesn't look like there's anyone here to ask."
A few boats creaked at the docks, empty and still, but otherwise the place was silent. In Dante's rather extensive experience, most raids involved torching everything that could be torched—people loved to watch it burn—but there was none of that at Ynding. A few of the flimsier buildings had been ripped down, thatch and clay bricks scattered across the unpaved streets, but most were just fine.
But the bodies scattered everywhere weren't. A few goats milled about, munching on the sprouts of the untended gardens, unconcerned by the slashed-up, half-eaten corpses.
Blays turned in a slow circle. The land to north and south sloped gently upward to the east for a quarter of a mile, at which point rocks and cliffs jutted up sharply. The habitable land was half open grass and half orchard.
"Not seeing any doorways from here," Blays said. "Presumably it'll be down in or on the water?"
"That sounds like a strong guess," Dante said. "Considering that everything we've run into has been an awful shark or squid or fish and not, say, a fifty-foot cow."
"Should we look for tracks? Or…something?"
There were plenty of these, it turned out, narrow teardrop shaped prints sunk deep into the muck, with much smaller and shallower ones on the packed roads. The kind of tracks that giant bugs or crabs might leave. They followed these back to the water, where they disappeared.
"There could be an underwater cavern," Dante said. "Unless they stuck it halfway down to hell, I'll be able to feel it. But I doubt they put it right next to Ynding."
"Are you telling me that you're about to spend a lot of time doing something boring while I stand around trying to remember the last time I saw my wife?"
"Oh, it's only been a few days for once. And yes."
"Then I'm going to go poke around town. Try not to open any ghastly hives."
He headed back up the main road through the town. Winden watched him a moment, then trotted after. Dante closed his eyes and sent his mind down into the earth below him, reaching out into the lake bed. At first it was muck and silt, then clay, then hard rock. The softer layers held things he couldn't feel—debris of some kind, maybe old shipwrecks, maybe the ruins of much older settlements. The rock held a few nooks and crevices, but nothing nearly large enough to be what they were searching for.
Once he'd gone as far and deep as he could, he walked south, where the land was less cultivated and more wild. After a quarter of a mile without finding a cavern any larger than a keg, he turned around, meaning to gather the others and continue the search in the sloop. The sound of a man's scream lifted from Ynding.
He broke into a run. The scream sounded again. He couldn't tell if it was Blays. It didn't take much more than a minute to reach the outer ring of houses, yet it felt like ten times as long. He slowed, nicking the back of his arm and pulling the shadows to him.
"Blays! Blays!"
"Ah," Blays said. "Over here."
His voice sounded funny. Dante ran toward it, coming to a stone wall enclosing one of the wealthier structures in town, though it was nothing compared to the splendor of Wending. He turned a corner, revealing a garden set with a few paving stones. Blays stood near its middle, a little in front of Winden. Across from them, a man backed into a corner brandished a sword at them, holding its grip with both hands. He appeared to be naked, unless all the mud counted as clothing, which it probably ought to have, considering it was thicker than Dante's traveling cloak.
"See there, fellow?" Blays said. "We weren't going to hurt you. We're here to hurt the things that hurt you."
"Can't." The man swept the point of his sword in Dante's direction. "Can't kill them."
"We already have," Dante said. "And we're just getting started."
"No. They'll kill every one of you. Eat until they can't swallow any more. That's what—"
"You see this?" Dante swept back his cloak to reveal his trousers, and the many stains left on them by the encounter with the bladder-fish. "That's the blood—or something much worse—of the things that attacked us on our way here. We killed them all. And we've got a deal with the TAGVOG to exterminate everything else that's infested the lakes. But it won't be easy. If you witnessed the attack on this place, you might be able to help us."
The tip of the blade quivered. The man let it droop a few inches. "What do you want?"
"Were you here? During the…invasion?"
The man nodded.
"Where did they come from?"
"The water. Where else?"
"Directly out of the water and into Ynding? Or did they come down from the north, or up from the south?"
The man wrinkled his brow, crackling the mud there. "Straight in. No warning. One moment—sun on the water, people bringing in their catch. The next…"
"Had any of you heard of any events like that before it happened here in Ynding?"
"There's been more, then?"
"Yes."
The man laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. "Knew there would be. We did something wrong. Broke a deep law. Defied a covenant. I don't know what. But a thing like this, monsters such as that, that's not ill fortune. It's punishment."
"You're more right than you know," Dante muttered. "Had you heard any rumors about anything like this before the attack? Any sightings of strange creatures?"
The man shook his head, then froze, eyes sliding to the side. "One thing. From Old Sane Jim. He used to spend days at a time on the lake. Weeks, even. Most people hoped he'd never
come back. But he came in, three days before this. Maybe four. Said he'd seen something. A horror. That it ate his catch and nearly him, too. Claimed he'd never go back out on the water again."
"Where did he see this?"
"Didn't say. Or what he did say didn't make sense. Said he'd been fishing at the Legs Without No Body. That if any of us valued our lives, we'd steer well clear of it."
"And where is this 'Legs Without No Body'?"
"The hell should I know? You think we called him Old Sane Jim because he was?"
Dante pressed his lips together. "Do you have any guess at all? Can you show me where Old Sane Jim lived?"
The man's eyes darkened. "Why'd you need that? Who are you, anyway? You got a strange accent. Like a northerner, but not."
"That's because I've lived here for a long time, but I was born in Mallon. I'm Dante Galand, High Priest—"
His eyes flew open. "It was you that defied them. You that opened the gates to their wrath. It's you that's got us all dead!"
"What are you talking about? If we hadn't—"
"Shut your fucking mouth!" The man lunged forward, swiping his sword through the air between them. "Don't you touch me! Nor taint me with your lies!"
He lashed out again, forcing Dante back a step. Then he dropped his shoulders and bolted for the exit from the walled-in garden.
Dante motioned to the others. "We can't let him go!"
"What do you intend to do?" Gladdic said. "Bring him with us?"
"He's the only link to what happened here!"
"What happened here drove him mad with fear. He will tell us nothing more. Pursue him, and he will force you to kill him. Neither he nor we will be served."
This was so clearly true that it only made Dante madder. "I didn't find any caverns or hideaways that might be hosting a doorway. But I didn't get far. We'll sail the Dart up and down the coast and see if there's anything hiding from us."
Blays shaded his eyes against the high sun. "What about the Legs Without No Body?"
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 8