Blays tipped the cap he didn't have. "Thank you. Sorry for interrupting your work."
He continued to take the lead, bringing them to the lichen-coated house. It had no door and Blays knocked on the wall next to the uncovered entrance, then leaned his head inside. Dante could hear him speaking, but some trick of acoustics prevented him from making out any words.
"It's Ove." Blays pulled his head back out into the daylight. "She'll see us."
Dante followed him in. The ceiling was so low he kept thinking he'd scrape his head against it. It was dim except for the narrow beams of weak light poking in through the holes between the stones, but he didn't need much light to make out the single room with a small bed and table and chair. Near the back, a small figure sat in a second chair that was the only other furniture.
"As I said," Blays said to her, "we're travelers—"
"I see this," Ove said.
"—and we're not quite sure where we're going, but—"
"I see this also."
"Indeed. Does that mean you've seen travelers like us before? Outlanders?"
Dante could barely make out her eyes as she stared at Blays.
"Yes," she said.
"We're looking for a doorway to another place. We know it as the Realm of Nine Kings. I expect others call it many different things. In short, it's the—"
"Yes."
"You know it." Blays waited, but for once Ove said nothing more. "Can you tell us how to get there from here?"
"You're from the fixed land. You think in fixed terms. What can I tell you?"
"Anything of help would be a nice start."
"The doorway is under the mountain."
"The mountain? Is there just the one?"
"The mountain that even the chaos cannot unfix."
Blays repeated her words thoughtfully, then smiled at her. "Don't suppose you can be any more specific?"
Ove stood from her chair with a scrape. For a flash of time, the lights of her eyes seemed to glow blue. "Leave here. Leave here now. Don't come back. Don't so much as look back."
"Understood," Blays said mildly. "Thank you for your time, milady."
He left the house for the sudden brightness of the fogs, heading in the direction Dante had decided was north. None of them said a word until the village was behind them.
"Well, we know it's a mountain," Blays said. "That narrows it down, right?"
Dante had an urge to shudder. "What was that place? Why are there only children there? Did somebody massacre a village, but left the adults alive for some reason? Or were their parents killed as well, but moved into the Worldsea while the youths chose to stay in the Mists?"
"They looked like they were from another land altogether. And they all looked like…siblings."
"I do not believe they are siblings," Gladdic said.
Blays began to glance back, then caught himself. "Then what? They just look alike to our foreign eyes?"
"I believe they were alike. I do not know the nature of this. I know only that I felt it. And that Ove, for whatever her appearance, was no child."
"What else would she be? One of those adults that just looks exactly like a child?"
"Old," Gladdic said. "Much older than myself. Perhaps the oldest person I have ever met."
Dante had the suspicion that Gladdic was right. He didn't have any idea what it meant, though, and he did know the Mists were no longer the quiet, gentle place he'd known them as, and that he wanted to find his way out of them as quickly as possible. He willed himself toward a mountain—"the mountain that even the chaos cannot unfix," though he had no idea what that meant either—and was heartened when gaps in the foggy skies showed jagged black rocks and, soon after that, patches of virgin snow.
Something howled. It sounded closer than the last howls had been. The ground rose underfoot. They leaned forward and were met by a swift wind, cold and carrying the scent of snow. As they climbed higher, small holes opened in the fog obscuring the sky: but instead of sunny blue, they were empty and black.
Since crossing over, they hadn't been able to see more than a mile or two in front of themselves. Yet with the haze thinning, they began to be able to make out more of the shape of things ahead. A mountain towered above them, its details unknown.
"Suppose that's our peak?" Blays said.
"Could be," Dante said. "If so, we still have to figure out how the hell to get under it."
He stopped envisioning mountains and started thinking himself toward passages and caverns instead, which was a little trickier, as he had less idea what theirs was supposed to look like. A scrap of water opened to their right. As they advanced, it did too, as if it was following them. Dante had the urge to get away from it, but they were hiking up a ridge and for the time being there was nowhere else to go.
A hissing stream materialized to cut through the path in front of them. This would have been impossible in their own world, as it was flowing directly across an elevated ridge, but that was irrelevant to the Mists, and Dante muttered some curses as he stopped at its bank and felt down into the ethereal earth.
"We should be fine," he said. "It doesn't feel any more than waist-deep."
Blays waded in up to his shins. "Last time we were here, we were able to be hurt. Suppose we're able to drown, too?"
"If so, that can be avoided by simply not putting your face under the water. I'll demonstrate."
Dante took an exploratory step into the stream. It wasn't as cold as he'd expected, but the current was every bit as strong as it looked, and he made sure his footing was sound before he advanced. The stream bed was made of small flat rocks that clicked under his boots.
It was slow going, but the crossing was only twenty feet wide, and he reached the middle, sinking to his hips before the next step brought him to shallower waters. With the current less threatening, he paused to make sure nothing disastrous was on the brink of happening. Blays had started in behind him and was feeling his way along while Gladdic waited on the bank to watch the course they were taking.
It all looked well in hand. Except for the serpentine shadow stretching toward them from under the frothing water.
"Blays!" he yelled.
Blays spun to his right. Aware that it had been spotted, the tentacle darted forward—while keeping itself underwater. Dante yelled again, wordlessly this time, and scrambled for the nether. It threw itself at him so forcefully he staggered and had to fight for his balance or be swept away by the current.
This cost him the chance to strike at the tentacle before it reached Blays. Yet Blays had already drawn the rod from his belt to thrust it at the threat. The spear unfolded in a blink. Its light dazzled from the infinite facets of the stream. There was something different about it, though. Something Dante had never seen. It was hard to put into words, but the very air around it seemed to withdraw from it. Almost like it was frightened.
The spear's blade sliced into the water, which rushed away from it just like the air had done. It punched into the creature's limb. A trumpeting bellow sounded from beneath the water. The tentacle pulled back, yanking Blays from his feet. He fell under the rushing surface.
Dante gasped in air and waded back toward the middle of the stream. The light of the spear swept toward the edge of the ridge and the plunge into the unknowable drop beyond it. Knowing he had no chance to catch up to Blays, Dante reached into the bed of rocks at the ridge's edge, meaning to shape them into a C-shaped formation that would catch Blays before he fell, but they refused to respond.
Light blazed within the water. The stream pulled away from itself like a ripped seam. Blays crashed down onto dripping rocks that had been submerged an instant before. He worked himself to his knees and then to his feet, lumbering toward the far shore.
"Get across!" Dante called to Gladdic. "Before it decides to come back!"
The old man scowled upstream, then strode forward, the current stretching his cloak out to the side. He refused to falter, though, and soon stood next to Dante and
Blays.
Blays was breathing hard, hair plastered to his brow. "I guess that answers the question of where the sea monsters are coming from."
"Were things like that here all along, hidden in some deeper layer?" Dante said. "Or did the gods start making them here because it's easier to create new life in an area where nothing is fixed in place like in Rale and the Realm?"
"I wouldn't know. Maybe next time you should ask the thing with the tentacles."
Dante walked on with squishing boots. But the water wicked from his clothes with each step, as it had always done in the Mists, and the three of them were soon as dry as they'd been before the stream. Dante redoubled his focus on their destination, this time imagining the heart of the mountain rather than a tunnel. He couldn't help thinking that it was more than mere coincidence when the path bent to the right and began to descend.
A few trees popped up around them, still holding to their long and slender leaves despite the season, then more and more, until they were walking within a thick forest, half the canopy obscured in cloud.
"Do you see that?" Dante said.
Blays glanced up. "The trees? Or do you mean the other trees?"
"Right. Look how many of them there are. And how many of them you can see."
"More than normal? Because the mists are thinning out."
"Like this place is more solid. More permanent."
"A place that chaos can't unfix, you think?"
"I hope. If it keeps up, I might begin to think."
As they continued down the cool, sweet-smelling lane, blanketed by the shadows of the leaves, Dante felt like they were making wonderful progress. Right up until the moment they emerged from the thickest growth of trees yet and barged into a sheer cliff.
Blays tipped back his head. "Who put that there?"
"Hopefully the gods did," Dante said. "Along with a way to go pay them a visit."
He reached into the stone to search for hidden doorways or tunnels that could carry them deep under the mountain. But his sense of it felt blunted, like an old man's eyes that have grown so weak they can only see light and the vaguest of shapes. And when he tried to grasp the matter, his control passed right through it.
"What in the hell? I can't move the rock. I can barely feel it."
"For it is not rock," Gladdic said. "Or any matter as we know it: but instead, the translation of ether into substance."
"Gods, I hate traveling with you sometimes." Dante ran his hand over the rock, which, whatever it might really have been made out of, felt exactly like rock. "Well, if it's anything like the doorway in Barsil, it won't be sitting out in the open. We'll probably have to go through a stupid maze or something just to find it. Keep both eyes open."
After a moment's indecision, he headed to his right and followed the cliffs that way, continuing to will himself toward the heart of the mountain, though he no longer knew if that method of navigation applied to this part of the Mists, where physical geography might be permanent instead of ever-transitory. The stone was dark slate and rugged enough that it might have been climbable if that had been their objective. He very much didn't like the idea of trying that without the ability to manipulate the rock, though, and prayed they'd find what they were looking for down on ground level.
Motes of ether and nether danced about them as he and Gladdic probed the surroundings. As they'd approached it, the mountain had looked huge, bigger than any one peak he'd seen except Mount Arna, meaning that searching just its base could take them days. Yet they'd only been picking their way forward for another ten minutes when he brushed the cliff with nether and a silvery-red lattice glimmered across it before fading.
"Speaking as a well-renowned sorcerer," Dante said, "that looked like…something. Blays, watch our backs, would you?"
He cast more nether across the stone. The lattice returned, somewhat fainter than before, but Dante found he could keep it visible just by sifting some shadows across it every now and then.
He folded his arms and took a step back from the wall. "Recognize anything?"
"If they are words, they are of no language I have ever seen," Gladdic said. "But they look as likely to be runes as words, or sigils, and whatever their origin or meaning, it is completely unknown to me."
"Damn it, that's what I was going to say."
They spent some time poking and prodding at it with light and shadow, trying to find the equivalent of a keyhole or even the edges of it, which the nether might be able to pry open. When this got nowhere, Dante took a closer look at the symbols, but the closer he looked, the more detail and fine lines he saw: he had the distinct impression that there were even more that were too tiny for him to make out, and that even if he could work out some way to see those ones, that there would still be others even smaller that remained beyond his ability to see.
Bored of watching the forest, Blays gestured at the red lines. "Aren't these things always a riddle of some kind? Just figure out what it's telling you to do and then do it."
"I'll try that in a minute," Dante said. "I wasn't done gaping at it dumbly yet."
He tried searching for patterns in the symbols, the sort of designs that might instruct someone what to do without the need for any intelligible language. But this was also a failure, and fiddling with the nether again didn't get him anywhere, either.
"This might not even be what we're looking for." His head hurt from frustration, which was the first time he could remember feeling that in the Mists. "Or it might only be the first part of what we need to find. Let's search the cliffs a little further. If we don't find anything else of note, we'll come back here."
He ran his hands down his face and stepped away from the sigils and lines, which faded back into the blank slate of the wall. He had the feeling he was missing something. But he always had that feeling when he walked away from an unfinished puzzle or project, and he squashed the instinct as unhelpful.
Birds tweeted from the trees. There were rarely many animals in the Mists except around the spirits of dead humans, who still liked to hunt them, herd them, or just be around them, and Dante kept one eye out for more people they might talk to for advice or directions. But the three of them seemed to be the only ones there.
"Hello," he said. "A crevice."
"Why do I feel like you've said the exact same thing while you were out courting?" Blays said.
Dante threw ether into the crack in the base of the cliff. It was the first one he'd spotted large enough for someone to fit through, but his hopes were dashed when he ducked into it and discovered it terminated after just ten feet.
"No luck," he muttered as he emerged, dusting himself off. "It's just a…"
"What?" Blays said.
But he couldn't say what, because he couldn't tell what he was seeing. Before he could start to explain, Blays spun around, hands going to the pommels of his swords. While Dante had been inspecting the crevice in the wall, a different one had been opening in the ground some hundred feet away. Something was now extracting itself from the other crevice like an insect from its cocoon.
Except whatever it was—and since it was all as monochrome gray as the cliffs, it was hard to make much of that out—it was the size of a horse. An estimate Dante quickly had to revise upward as more of it emerged from the crack in the ground. Soon it was the size of a wagon and its team, then larger yet, until at last it was fully in the open except for its serpentine tail, with more and more of it slipping from the crevice until that tail was forty feet long, its end tipped with a spade-shaped stinger.
Wings unfolded from its back. The membranes were faintly translucent, enough to reveal the bones and sinews within them.
"What the hell is that?" Blays said. "A dragon?"
"I fear," Gladdic said, "that we will hope it is a mere dragon."
The beast stepped away from the crack in the earth and swung its face toward them. This was shaped like that of a snake's, or perhaps more like a worm in a way, as it had no eyes that Dante could see.
/> He'd already drawn the nether to him. He brought more yet as the thing took another step toward them.
"What are you?" he called to it. "Can you speak?"
"You think you're going to reason with it?" Blays said.
"Sounds a lot better than trying to fight it!"
It gave no sign of understanding, continuing forward on four long legs, its tail swaying slowly behind it. Blays took up the Spear of Stars and unleashed its brightness. He took one step toward the beast and jabbed at the air, ether snapping away from the spear's long blade.
"Hyah! Get back with you!"
"And you think you can frighten it?" Dante said.
"You should hope so," Blays said. He jabbed at the air again. "I said get back!"
He cracked the head of the spear down into the ground. Ether sparked from it like lightning while the earth roiled and cracked. The spectacle was enough to make Dante flinch despite knowing it was coming. Yet the foe moved forward unperturbed.
"I think," Blays said, "that it's time to switch to Plan Flee."
Dante edged along the cliff, the others moving with him. This only provoked the predator's instinct in the dragon-like being. It rushed toward them with uncanny speed.
Dante hurled the shadows toward the thing's head. Each dart landed, so many in number that its face was completely obscured by nether. Before the shadows had even faded, Gladdic attacked the beast with a volley of ether, light popping about its head like a swarm of fireflies.
Ether and nether cleared away. The creature stood unscathed.
Blays shook his head. "I have no idea what you two would do without me."
He shuffled forward, head swaying in rhythm with that of the beast's. It stopped, considering him and the blazing weapon in his hand. Then it reared back on its hind legs, bent its neck into an S, and inhaled.
"Run!" Dante yelled. "Run run run!"
The thing planted its front feet with a thud and dropped its head. Its mouth peeled open. A tight cone of something like gray steam shot from its gullet. Wherever it flowed, the air darkened, as if the light itself was being leeched from it. Blays flung himself to the side, sweeping the spear behind him. The dark breath of the beast met the weapon.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 13