"We don't know where that is. It sounds like the ravings of a crazy old man. But if we don't find anything here, we can ask the nearby villages if they've heard of such a place."
He thought it was a good stout plan. Yet as they sailed a few miles south back down the coast, finding nothing, and then flipped about to return to Ynding and go another few miles past it to the north, also finding nothing, he began to hope they'd be attacked by something just so that he'd be able to blow that thing up.
The closest village north of Ynding was empty, though there were no bodies or other signs of slaughter. The one just up the coast from that, a place of two dozen rustic dwellings (shacks, to put it less diplomatically), remained populated. But no one there knew anything about the Legs Without No Body, or had any useful stories of their own to share, though they were plenty eager to gossip, speculate, and rumor-monger.
They pushed off as soon as they could disentangle themselves from the locals, continuing to the north out of a general sense that traveling away from Wending implied they were making progress. Wanders kept their speed modest enough for Dante to feel down into the earth as they went. The shallows were just muck, though, and further out into the lake was just muck with more water on top of it.
Once true sunset approached, and not the false early one created by the mountains, they put ashore, dragged the flat-bottomed boat up on dry land, and made camp, buttressed by a few earthen fortifications compliments of Dante. It was nice to have some work to do, but as soon as he was finished, he was annoyed again.
"Did you intend to help?" Dante said to Blays, who was staring out at the quiet lake with his arms crossed. "Or are you enjoying the sunset too much for that?"
Blays pointed west-northwest. "What's that?"
"Lake."
"Past that."
"Rocks."
"What do they look like?"
"Hard things. Good for building other hard things with. Or bashing softer things with."
"Look better. Or else we're about to find out whether your skull or my fist is harder."
They were at a narrow part of the lake, but it was still a few miles to the far shore, and it took Dante several more moments. "Columns. Or stumps."
"Two of them, right? Two long, tall stumps. With those lumps of rubble or whatever at their feet. Or should I say, as their feet."
"The Legs Without No Body."
"And not far south of that is where the other early attacks came. The ones right after Ynding."
"We'll take a look first thing in the morning," Dante said. "Assuming no other disasters hit us before then."
He'd been dreading sitting around stewing all night until he was tired enough to sleep, but he was all but convinced the landmark Blays had spotted was the right one, and his spirits bobbed upward like an unloaded boat. And as it turned out, now that he was done moving, he felt good and tired, especially after they'd eaten dinner and talked for a while with the waves lapping at the shore and the stars twinkling overhead.
He soon fell into a pleased and easy sleep.
Some hours later, the entire world exploded.
That was how it sounded, at least: the noise was so loud, so sudden and violent, that Dante was propelled from his blankets as if by the very same force that had caused the bang; he stumbled and slipped through the grass, both still half-asleep and also astoundingly, primally awake.
The others had jumped to their feet as well. Ether flashed around Gladdic's hands while shadows surrounded Dante and Winden's. But the night was dark, and the fading rumble gave way to an almost perfect silence.
"What in hell was that?" Wanders said.
"Something bad?" Blays suggested.
Dante glanced behind them. "Like what? Two mountains fighting?"
"Either that or the god who's been stalking us came down with some bad indigestion."
"We are not dead yet," Gladdic says. "So it is likely we will not be by morning, either. Until then, I will have my sleep."
They went back to bed as best they could, but set a much stricter watch. The dawn was as slow as Dante had ever seen it, a cold, gray thing that dragged itself over the eastern mountains like a dying soldier crawling toward a ridge in hope of one last glimpse of his homeland. After a few minutes, it stopped growing brighter at all.
"What is that?" Blays said. "Smoke?"
"I think it's like the volcano we saw on the way here," Dante said. "But much bigger."
Gladdic watched it, his eyes and head motionless, trying to track the direction of its travels. "Fill the waters with demons. Choke the skies with smoke and ash. Leave little left to eat, and of that, corrupt it with an awful poison. Even having fought them—having seen all that I have seen—I did not believe they would ever become so cruel."
No one had anything to say to that, so they packed up and got underway, heading northwest at first, then bending southwest as they reached the far end of Owlin and followed its curve toward what they badly hoped was the Legs Without No Body. Assuming they could even recognize it when they came to it: the day was light enough to travel by, but it was too gloomy to see the details of anything more than a mile away.
They came under attack again in the late morning or early afternoon. It was another of the bulbous sharks, but smaller, and only possessing two mouths, though it looked like a third was ready to erupt from the left side of its face. They dealt with it the same way they had with the first. They left the carcass behind and sailed on.
"That's it." Dante squinted against the dimness. "I think."
"Orders?" Wanders asked.
"Slow her down. I'll search through the earth. Blays and Winden, watch the land for anything out of the ordinary. Gladdic, watch the water for anything trying to eat us."
The Dart eased its speed to a brisk walk. They were approaching the central mass of peaks and ridges that rose from the middle of the three lakes. Gravel beaches lined much of the shore, and the ground in front of the heights was even enough that it could have been settled, but the few structures spangling it looked very old, abandoned decades or even centuries ago. From a distance, the two giant bodyless "legs" looked like they'd been carved, like ancient craftsmen had begun the project only to realize just how much work it was going to be, but as they got close enough for a decent look, it became clear they were natural stone, darker than the other formations of rock around them.
"Stop the boat." Dante stood and moved to the starboard gunwale, which was a stupid thing to do, because as Wanders turned to slow them it nearly flung Dante overboard. "We've got a cavern."
"Oh good," Blays muttered. "Nothing bad ever happens when we go into those."
After some mental exploration, Dante had Wanders put them ashore. Wind tousled the grass. It had smelled vaguely of ash all day, but it grew momentarily stronger.
"The mouth is underwater," Dante declared. "But I think it might be dry beyond that."
He opened a hole in the ground and sank a sloped tunnel down to the chamber, which was only a few feet beneath them.
Blays coughed. "If the smell's any guide, we've come to the right place."
Dante scratched his arm and brought a little nether to him. He started down the passage, digging out his torchstone. After the gloom of the day, its stark white light was painful to the eyes.
He came to a pool of water. He extended a shelf of dirt along the edge of the cavern, which was some twelve feet high and twenty across at that point. As he advanced deeper, dry land rose from both sides, though a watery channel continued to run through the middle of it. It carried on like this for perhaps another two hundred feet, wending this way and that, before opening up into a roundish chamber. The ceiling was a little higher than the tunnel's, but it was much wider, eighty to a hundred feet in diameter with an oval pool at its center.
Dante edged into the space. Before, the dirt had been fairly smooth. Here, it was broken and uneven, littered with knee-high rocks and broken shards of thin stone. The odor of the place smelled like it was fainte
r than it must once have been, but he found it distinctly reptilian.
He stepped past a pile of shards, brushing against them. One slid loose with a brittle rasp. He frowned and continued forward, casting the light of the torchstone before him, drawing long shadows from the rubble.
Winden grunted and came to a stop. She leaned forward at the waist to examine an arrangement of shards that had cracked apart and fallen away from each other at the top yet remained connected to each other at the bottom.
"It is here, in this." She grabbed Blays' sleeve. "Do you see?"
He took a gander at the formation. "Ah…what exactly am I looking at?"
Winden glanced back at him. "The great turtles, you've never seen them?"
"None of the turtles I've met ever impressed me as all that great. They mostly just sat there."
"These shreds, what do you think they are?"
"Rocks? That someone got very cross at?"
She shook her head slowly. "They look as rocks, but they are not. They are eggs. The biggest I have ever seen. And they are hatched."
7
The revelation sent a hard chill down his neck. He pulled more nether to him, turning in a circle, flinching at the swift movement this provoked among the eggs. But it was only the shifting of the shadows cast by his torchstone. Once he was sure they were alone, he was overcome by a moment of elation. Yet this faded from him just as fast as it had arrived.
"This isn't what we were searching for," he said.
Winden gave him a puzzled look, almost angry. "It is the home of the beasts."
"It's a lair, certainly. But where's the doorway they came here through?"
This quieted them. Gladdic was first to speak. "If it were me, I would have closed such a door once I had my pieces in place."
This rang with enough truth to sting Dante's spirit. "It could be hidden. Take a hard look around. At everything you can think of."
He reached out into the earth, questing. He felt Blays shift into the nether. Winden moved between the shells of the eggs, frowning at the broken pieces. Gladdic whispered to himself and conjured ether into disorienting geometry. For all their efforts, though, none of them found the faintest whiff of a portal to the other realm.
"We've only barely started to explore the Legs," Dante said. "Maybe we're looking in the wrong place."
"Sure," Blays said. "Or maybe we're looking in the wrong place."
"The smell of this place must be addling your brain. I just said—"
"We can't cross directly from Rale to the Realm of Nine Kings, can we? We have to go into the Mists, and then find a doorway. Are you sure it's any different for them?"
"It certainly could be." Dante scratched his cheek. "But there have been times, however rare and freakish, that you've been right. Besides, we're already here. Gladdic, stay here with Winden and Wanders in case any of these things returns to its lair. Blays and I are going into the Mists."
"I don't remember volunteering," Blays said. But he was already moving across the rugged ground and into the tunnel, where it was smooth and flat. He stretched out his cloak underneath him and sat down.
Dante did the same. Winden brought them each a dreamflower. The taste, as always, was hideously bitter, more like poison than any of the actual poisons Dante had taken throughout the years.
He stretched out on his cloak. In no time at all, the rocky floor no longer felt so hard against his back, in fact he wasn't sure he could tell which part was his back. The ceiling flew away from him: or wait, no, he was falling, wasn't he? Down into the ground, and the black of the lake below it.
~
He passed through an empty room, or perhaps a cavern; he could feel the walls even if he couldn't see them. It felt like he'd been walking for some time without knowing it. A doorway appeared ahead of him, but none of its light spilled past its frame. He walked through it.
All he could see was white, but he could smell the moisture in the air, different than the kind that wafted off the lake. This was purer. Like the clouds stretched across the canopy of the sky must smell.
The land cohered around him. Though much of it wasn't land at all. Rather it was a shifting vista of fog, rocky outcrops, and pools of rippling water. Every other time they'd been to the Mists, the clouds had been stark white, and while it had been too hazy to see the sun, it had always been very well-lit.
This time, the light waxed and waned between regular daylight and deep twilight. And what it illuminated was far from disorientingly whimsical. Many of the trees were rotten, beetles and their maggots dripping from the boles. Others were on fire. Among the formations of rocks, some were unremarkable, but others were heaped up in steep cones that belched smoke and ash and creeping lava.
Some spots were so dark that whatever might be within them could barely be seen. There was movement there, though, and Dante couldn't tell whether it was the shifting of mists and land, or of living things concealed in the shadows.
Beside him, Blays' voice was tight. "You're seeing this, too?"
"This…is not how I remember it. We're sure we're not in the Pastlands and it's just messing with our minds?"
"No?"
"I suppose we could find out if we tried to go to sleep and woke up back in our bodies, proving we were actually in the Mists." Dante gazed across the patchy chaos of the sky. "But I feel like the ability to even have that thought implies we're not in the Pastlands."
Blays wandered forward, keeping one eye on the fog wisping around his legs. He moved his hands nearer to the swords on his belt. "Is this more of the damage done by the rips the lich made to the Mists? Or are the gods assaulting the Mists the same way they're attacking Rale?"
"I thought we stabilized the Mists once we stopped the Eiden Rane from using them as his personal portal. They should be recovering right now. This has to be the same force that's afflicting us."
Blays considered his surroundings a moment longer. "Then let's find that doorway so we can get out of this hell and get back to our own one."
Dante had no idea which direction to go, but then again, the geography of the Mists wasn't fixed. Instead, you willed your way toward whatever it was you wanted to get to. He strolled forward, envisioning doorways, the Realm of Nine Kings, and just in case neither of those worked, a city where they might question the locals. He wasn't sure the latter would work, though: while the Mists weren't fixed, they also bore a loose correlation to the geography (or perhaps the people?) of whatever part of Rale you'd entered them from. And they'd crossed over from a section of Gallador that was more or less unpopulated. With this thought, he reoriented toward what he told himself was the south, toward the villages the beasts had attacked right after Ynding.
The landscape shifted wildly, peaks and crags blooming into being in front of him only to wear down and crumble into mounds of rubble all in the span of mere seconds. It felt less like the uncertainly of the Mists and more like they were seeing through time. It was close enough to the experience of a Glimpse that Dante tried to reach out to the Golden Stream to see if that was causing it, but he couldn't coax a single mote to appear.
Blays drew his swords. "What in the afterworld is that?"
At first Dante took them for stubby saplings undulating in an unfelt wind. But they were much too thick for their three-foot height to be trees, and they weren't just swaying, but bending at articulated joints. A grove of hands reached up from the fog, grasping at the empty air.
"Hello?" Dante brought the ether to him, which was much easier to do here, as the entire place was made of it. "Is anyone there?"
He edged a step closer. The arms swiveled to point their palms at him. A groan sounded from down in the fog, followed by others.
"Are you prisoners?" Dante tried. "Who put you here?"
More and more of them—or other things that lurked among them—joined the moans. Some began to wail.
"Are you trying to help them?" Blays said. "They're just a bunch of arms!"
Dante blinked. As if wa
king from a bad dream, he saw them anew: a field of disembodied limbs, mindless and ghastly. He backed up three steps, then turned and walked quickly onward.
Formations of rock and water coalesced before them, cycling into disrepair and ruin before they could reach them. Some time later and Dante still hadn't seen any settlements or houses, let alone any people. He sank his mind below the surface of the ether, hunting for hidden planes like the one Gladdic had found beneath the Mist-city of Barsil, yet found no hints of anything more than what they could see with their eyes.
"Another one?" Dante muttered. Ahead of them, another grove of arms grasped and waved. He bent course to go around it.
"This isn't another one of these things," Blays said. "It's the same one."
"Spent a lot of time classifying hand-forests, have you?"
"Look at that one there. Missing its first two fingers, just like last time. Those two are greenish, same as before. And those ones are even browner in hue than Naran, also like last time."
"You're trying to say we've just gone in a circle?"
"Would we even know if we hadn't? In the Mists, it isn't exactly easy to know where you are during normal times, and right now this place is a long ways from its very loose standards of 'normal.'"
Dante glanced around him, seeking landmarks, but of course that was futile. "We'll try another direction, then. See if that won't—"
He was standing forty feet back from the arms, which seemed as firmly rooted to the ground as oak trees. Yet something leaped up from the mists concealing his lower legs. He cried out and stumbled back, managing to avoid the worst of the striking limb of his attacker, but the glancing blow was enough to knock him from his feet.
Sickly gray fog closed above his head. It seeped into his lungs like cold tendrils. He gasped and kicked himself to his feet. A figure swung its claws at Blays. Its upper body was strong and broad while its lower body trailed away into indistinct ribbons. It had a head, but its face had only the suggestion of its features. Even the solid parts of it gave off the feeling of a piece of clay that's been shaped but not yet fired.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 9