Lake water flooded down on his head. He clung tight, hands slipping on the tongue-like flap. Then it was done and he pulled and kicked himself upward, the chamber swinging beneath him, and then he was up through the sphincter, the bottom of the stomach now directly below him, the reflection of his ether sparking from its fetid pools.
He gave himself a few moments to catch his breath. The esophagus was just tight enough for him to brace himself against it with his outstretched arms and legs. He pushed himself upward. He'd barely started up it when it spasmed, its cool, smothering walls attempting to shove him back down. He dug in as hard as he could. The tube squeezed him like the hand of a giant, threatening to break his arms and legs, then eased off. He allowed it several seconds to relax, then resumed his ascent, trying to be more gentle this time. As much as that was possible when you were scaling your way up something's throat, at least.
The passage was shorter than he'd feared it would be. It bent forward and leveled out. The way forward would have been blocked by a wall of clenched teeth if he hadn't already punched two of them out, but he was still trapped by the horn-hard beak beyond those teeth. Cautiously, he reached out with the nether and gave the beak a light scrape. The ground fell away beneath him, then thrust him upward; he found himself sitting on a tongue as it mushed him against the roof of the mouth and worked to scrape him back down the gullet.
It pulled back to give him another brush backward. Revealing two loose slits in the roof. As the tongue attempted to crush him again, he wriggled his way up into the closer of the nasal passages.
He squirmed his way forward. The passage clenched down on him, squeezing him back toward the pit of the mouth, lubricated with gruesome mucous. Yelling out, Dante summoned the nether and punched it upward.
The thing bellowed. The vibration of its voice almost made him faint. The passage widened as the outer nostril flared; water poured over him, along with sick-smelling blood. Dante burrowed into the wound he'd made and braced himself, trying to push himself through the last few feet to escape, but the rushing water was stronger than he was, far stronger, and he could no longer breathe, and he drew more nether to him, and forged it into a shadowy spear, and thrust it above him again—this time not outward through the nostril, but deeper, inward, toward the heart of its head.
The leviathan thrashed back and forth so hard Dante blacked out. Next thing he knew he was floating underwater, thrown fully free of the thing; he couldn't tell which way was up, but his leg struck something as he kicked, and he braced himself against it and launched himself upward or what he hoped was upward. His pulse pounded through his head, surrounding all of his sensations. His lungs clenched harder and harder.
He broke free. And gasped. He couldn't see at all and he rekindled the ether he'd lost hold of. It winked on the surface of the water. And on wet stone. Another cavern. He glanced below himself, then shut off the ether and swam for shore, stretching one hand blindly before him.
He was sure the leviathan would grab him again, or that he would simply sink and be lost. Then his hand brushed rock, and he reached down with his feet and found that it was right below him. He waded ashore and relit the ether.
The cavern was the largest of them yet. High enough that he couldn't see the ceiling, and with wide shelves of rock surrounding the water in the center—which was closer in size to a pond than a pool. He was certain he could hear damp and furtive slithering from somewhere among the rocks, but he didn't see anything moving around.
His swim to the surface had rinsed off most of the filth. Yet as soon as he was reasonably sure he wasn't about to be attacked from the shadows, he waded back into the cold water and washed himself clean.
As he slogged back out, the water stirred and sploshed. He whirled about. The body of the leviathan was bobbing to the surface like a diseased island.
"Anyway," Blays said, nearly causing Dante to piss himself. He spun the other way, but no one was there. He touched his finger to his loon as Blays went on. "I expect whatever you just went through was very tiring, and you're just taking a nap. Trust me, I'd do the same thing. But you might want to wake up and tell us where on earth you are before that thing comes back for us."
"I'm awake," Dante said. "And I don't know where I am."
"You're alive?! Gladdic said you got eaten!"
"I did."
"Is its digestion that fast? And if so, can you make sure to wash off before we come and get you?"
"I came out the other end. The leviathan's dead. One of them is, at least. I appear to be in its lair."
"A lair? Of the big one? Any sign of a doorway?"
"I haven't had time to look around yet. I'll search for a doorway while I try to figure out where I am. Are all of you still there?"
"Somehow," Blays said. "We didn't even lose the boat this time. These things really don't like my spear."
They spoke a bit more, then Dante closed down the loon. He took a step forward, then frowned, reaching into his mind for the undead fish. To his shock, the connection was still there. The fish was floating inside the underground island right where he'd left it. He turned it about and sent it swimming hard for the exit into the open lake.
In his own cavern, he edged forward. Oval boulders stood among the broken stone. He was almost sure these were eggs, and so he ought to smash them up, but many were taller than his knee, and he didn't feel like kicking a hornet's nest so soon after the business with the leviathan. He shed more ether across the space. It was too wide to see the far side clearly, and he circled about the pond, picking his way through the rocks and the mulch resting between then.
Elsewhere in the lake, the fish emerged from the tunnel. Dante sent it toward the surface and oriented it toward himself as it swam.
He wasn't seeing any doorways in front of him. Or things that pointed toward the existence of doorways. Something dark and shiny stirred to his left; it might have been the ripples of a droplet falling in a puddle. He conjured up more nether.
Outside, the fish breached the surface. Its eyes did better out of the water than he'd expected.
"I'm somewhere southwest of the island," Dante said into the loon. "At least a mile away. But no more than five."
"We'll just sail about until we crash into you, then," Blays said. "If you don't hear back from us, that's because we were smashed to flinders by the horde of monsters."
Dante sent the fish speeding toward him and continued circling the chamber. He'd torn through the leviathan's brain, meaning it should be very very dead, yet he couldn't stop himself from glancing toward the pool every few moments. The beast and the waters it rested in lay still.
Something whistled softly from ahead. He froze. A subtle breeze passed over his face. He frowned. Nether clenched in both hands, he stalked forward. The light of the ether advanced past the cavern wall and into a secondary chamber—or perhaps a passage, though if so it was a very wide one, a good thirty feet across. The ground within it was much more level, and clean enough to appear as if it had been swept.
He waited in its entrance, feeling the breeze, until he was convinced there was nothing to hear or smell, then started forward, keeping his footsteps as soft as he could. The space yawned like the vaults of a cathedral. As empty as the broken tomb of a king whose name is long forgotten. He glanced over his shoulder and nearly staggered to the side. He'd been walking into the second chamber for a good thirty seconds. But the chamber with the pool and the dead leviathan was no more than forty feet behind him.
"That's…odd."
Speaking out loud put a chill in him. Recognition crept into his mind, but he couldn't yet apprehend what it was. He walked onward, counting the seconds until he hit another thirty. He looked back toward the main chamber again. It appeared no further away than the last time.
He turned forward, tilting back his head at the empty space. He lifted his hand. Carefully, like he was practicing some delicate craft or subtle art, he sifted nether across the tunnel before him.
And
shielded his eyes as silvery lines blazed into being.
He took a wary step back and reopened the loon. "The hunt is over. I've found our doorway."
~
"Good. Excellent. Very good then." Blays tilted his head at the glowing outlines of the portal. "We have no idea what's on the other side, do we?"
"None at all," Dante said.
"False," Gladdic said. "We know that it will be filled with monsters."
"As I said, excellent." Blays scratched his neck. "Maybe Dante should send one of his pets through first."
"That's…not a bad idea."
Dante furrowed his brow, considering the effort it would require to go out and find a mouse or something to slay and reanimate and send through the doorway to scout. After all, they weren't in any great rush. They hadn't suffered any more misadventures in the time between when Dante had discovered the doorway and when the others had found their way to him, a process, as it turned out, that had required him to open a shaft up to the surface, since the cave system that led to him was both underwater and a labyrinth. So they didn't seem to be in any great danger at that moment, and he already had an easy way outside.
Then again, he already had what he needed, didn't he?
"I'll be right back."
He trotted away from the portal, its light casting a long shadow of himself before him. At the pool, he crouched and scooped up his fish. He'd already retrieved his torchstone from it as soon as he'd navigated it up to the chamber—the stone had been his father's, after all, and while it had felt less vital to him ever since he'd met the man's spirit in the Mists, he hadn't exactly been thrilled at the prospect of losing it at the bottom of a lake, either.
Fish in hand, he returned to the doorway, drew back his arm, and pitched it at the silver geometry. He thought it might bounce off and flap to the floor, but it vanished with a soft flash.
Blays blinked. "Did you just throw a fish through the door?"
"Either that," Dante said, "or what's got to be a very regretful changeling."
"Do you imagine there's a nice lake on the other side?"
"I think it doesn't matter, because it's already dead, and wouldn't care if I threw if off a cliff into the mouth of a flaming lion. Anyway, it didn't work. The only way we're going to find out what's on the other side is to cross over for ourselves."
"And what if we wind up somewhere other than the Mists? Somewhere with no way to get to the Realm of Nine Kings?"
Dante was quiet for a moment. "Then I suppose we'll have to kill everything in sight until the gods show up to negotiate with us."
In truth, the objection had him badly spooked. This wasn't how they crossed to the Mists, after all. But he no longer had the luxury of being overly cautious with his own life.
He took a deep breath, brought the shadows to himself, and stepped through.
A shock snapped through his body. He had the feeling of falling—or maybe the opposite, of being flung upward—through a lightless space. A rectangle of light appeared. Another doorway. He was moving toward it, though again he couldn't tell if he was falling down toward it or flying up to it, or approaching from some other direction altogether new to him.
The light expanded from the size of a thumbnail to a page to a door. Then it became all.
He passed through.
9
Mists roiled around his legs. In the sky, too. It was bright but there was no sun. The mists revealed and concealed pieces of hills and cliffs and ponds. Some of them floated through the sky.
"Hang on, this looks perfectly normal," Blays said. "I mean, by the standards of the Mists."
Dante glanced every which way. "Which isn't at all how they looked just yesterday. Meaning it's even stranger than if it had been crazy again."
"I can't wait to return to a normal, quiet life of violent sectarian war with Mallon."
"We should not linger," Gladdic said. "Even if we do not know the way."
"You know we don't," Dante said. "We don't even know which way is which way. So will yourselves towards a portal to the Realm of Nine Kings, and yell out if you see anything."
It was just the three of them again—though they'd instructed Winden and Wanders to leap through the doorway if anything too dangerous for Winden to handle appeared in the cavern—and Dante led them in the direction he'd been facing on his arrival. He cast his mind across the ether that made up the fabric of this world, searching it for hidden spaces or disruptions.
"Something feels funny," he said. "But I can't figure out what it is."
"I have the feeling of being a stranger," Gladdic said. "And an unwanted one."
They detoured around a motionless gray pool. The fog withdrew to Dante's left, revealing the face of an old man, beardless and perfectly bald.
"Er," Dante grunted. "Hello? Are there any cities near here? Or towns, even?"
The face stared at him. The mist pulled back further, revealing that the head had no body, but was floating by itself at waist height. It stared at him, mouth hanging open, then the fog spilled back over it, taking it from sight.
"Did anything else see that?" he said. "Because it might be better for your sanity if you didn't."
Gladdic looked amused. "I have had dreams of myself like that."
"As a floating, disembodied head?"
"The body is gone and left behind, yet my mind and its senses persist to watch."
"Do I want to know for what?"
"To see if anyone will finally find a way out of this prison. Or if they will simply fall victim to the same traps and mistakes that we all do."
Dante squinted, trying to put his next question into words. In the distance—though it wasn't possible to say how far—something howled, like a wolf, but clearly not. A second voice answered it. Dante wasn't sure it was the same species as the first one.
Gladdic looked serious once more. "Do we know where the invaders of the lake first came from?"
"Well, we know it wasn't our world. So that leaves the Mists and the Realm. And since we've never seen anything like that here before, I'm going with the Realm."
"Are you so certain?"
"Why not?" Blays said. "It's not exactly short on giant creatures that love killing humans. Like that big bear. Or the big worms. Or that really big worm."
Gladdic tipped his head to the side in a shrug. "Even so, what if the creatures in the lake come from somewhere else altogether? Another realm not yet known to us."
Dante raised an eyebrow. "All of a sudden we think there's even more planes of existence that no one ever knew about until right now?"
"We did not know the Mists existed, until we did. We did not know the Realm existed, until we did. Is it so strange to you to think there may be more of these planes still beyond our knowledge?"
"I suppose it's possible. What does it matter?"
"Because it means that if we find any doorway here related to them, it might take us not to the Realm of Nine Kings—but to whatever place these creatures come from."
Dante sighed slowly. The Mists were usually a pleasantly neutral temperature, but he found himself chilly, and walked faster between the pools of still water and pieces of rugged hills. Where the slopes were too steep for grass, the pink and orange and green salts found in the wilds of Gallador Rift gleamed in the non-sun.
"There we go." Blays pointed ahead. "Either I've gone fog-mad, or those are houses."
They were, although where in the other parts of the Mists they'd been to, the houses looked the same as in the corresponding part of Rale, these didn't look anything like the manors of Wending or the fishing huts of the many lake villages. Dante supposed they could have been from an older time, like the odd-looking neighborhoods in Barsil that were inhabited by the dead from earlier times in Bressel's history.
The homes were simple, almost absurdly so. Little more than fieldstone thrown into piles with grass and straw stuffed into the cracks, although there was enough artistry to their craft that the roofs were made of stones, too. Th
ere were some people about, but they struck Dante's eye as odd. As he grew closer, he saw that was because they were all quite small—children, in fact, and likely not a one over twelve. None of them were running about or singing or chasing each other or playing games, though. Some trudged about as if on errands, while others swept or smoked fish or performed other chores, and others sat in the shade and did nothing.
A path appeared on the ill-defined ground. Dante followed it to the edge of the village and beckoned to a boy watching them from the shadows of a fieldstone house.
"Hello," Dante said. "Is your father about? Or your mother?"
The boy lowered his brows and shook his head. He, and all the other children, had skin like nothing Dante had ever seen before, a dark slate gray, with eyes just a shade lighter.
"What about the…mayor?" Dante tried. "Or a chief?"
The boy just stared at him.
"Any adult at all, then."
The boy backed up a step, bumping his shoulder against the corner of the house. "You don't belong here. Go away!"
He turned and fled.
"Can't believe your charming nature made him run like that," Blays said. "I think I'll talk to the next one."
Blays moved past the house to an ill-tended yard where two children were digging up rocks with wooden trowels. They rose, knees bent, ready to flee. He greeted them with some light and very one-sided chatter.
"You see, we're a bit lost," he said after he'd put them somewhat at ease. He smiled. "We'd like to speak with someone who might be able to tell us where we are, and how we can get to where we'd like to be."
They both gazed at him in silence, still holding their trowels. But Blays didn't push them with any more.
"Ove." Keeping her eyes on him, the girl pointed to a house on a tiny hill at the edge of the village. It stones were covered in scaly green lichen. "Speak to Ove."
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 12