Blays whistled. "This is even worse than what the lich doled out."
Dante glanced about but couldn't find another of the foraging rodents. He started forward, keeping his hand near the grip of his sword. "Something bigger than the hail did this. Be on your guard."
"What happens if whatever hit this city hit the Spire, too?"
"I don't know. Even if the Spire's been ruined, it's possible the soul of Farelin might have survived."
"The destruction of this city is of no relevance," Gladdic said. "For just as you imply, we are not here to see it, but the Spire. And to my eyes, the Spire has been saved."
They had crossed through what was left of the city walls and gone up an incline that, thanks to the shortness of the rubble ahead, gave them a clear view out to sea.
Dante craned his neck. At first he could see nothing but the gray curtains of rain falling across the open water. Then he lifted his arm and pointed. "That right there?"
"The spire-shaped object, yes," Gladdic said.
Reassured, Dante took the lead again. Once he got a little further into the city, a sense of seriousness stole over him, and he kept his mouth shut against whatever questions or observations sprung to mind, choosing his steps so as not to kick around any hail or broken pieces of stone. Despite the complete strangeness of the surroundings, he couldn't shake a sense of deja vu. And then it came to him: walking through the tomb-like remains felt exactly the same as it had when he'd first arrived in Narashtovik half his lifetime ago.
It was only the outer rings of Narashtovik that had fallen into ruin, though. There had still been life in its center. Here, all life looked to have been snuffed out.
Sometimes rubble stuffed the street so deeply Dante had to open a pathway right through the stone. This only worked well on the blue rock, though: the pink stuff flowed sluggishly, and flakes and fragments rained down from it wherever he drew it aside, ignoring his commands altogether. It looked like rock, but it sure wasn't acting like it. Coming to another wall of piled-up debris, he bored a passage through it, solidified the "frame" into solid stone, crossed through to the square on the other side, and ran face-first into an enormous crab.
Its body was the size of a merchant's wagon. Each claw was big enough to grasp him around the waist and snip him in half. He staggered back, drawing his Odo Sein sword in his right hand while filling his left with shadows. The crab held position. Nor did it lift its claws from the ground. It occurred to Dante that the thing was, in fact, dead.
This hypothesis was supported by the fact its eyes were sunken into its carapace. Still, not wanting to act rashly around such a large crab, and assuming he wouldn't be able to bargain with it if it was alive, he flung a black dart right into the thing's big weird mouth. The shadows hit with a hard, thin click. The creature didn't stir.
"Huh." Blays lowered the unextended spear. "I think we just found out what happened to all the people."
"You think they got carried off by giant crabs?"
"Didn't you get eaten by a leviathan just a few days ago? What d'you think would've happened to the Galladese by now if we hadn't shown up?" Blays gestured seaward, then to the sky. "I can picture the whole thing. Send in the army of giant crabs, and then if the people try to run, dump the hail on them. An even more brutal storm than the ones they're used to. The crabs are protected by their shells, but the people stupidly covered themselves in that soft tender flesh of theirs."
"So what happened to the buildings? The crabs got mad when they ran out of human-meat, and tore down the city in their fury?"
"That one looks big enough to rip down all the houses it wants. And if the citizens were able to kill that one, think how big the ones they couldn't kill must have been."
Dante nodded slowly. "Maybe so. But the buildings might have been ruined by a third plague. An earthquake, say. Do you think Nolost is intelligent enough to put together a strategy that sophisticated? I got the impression he's not even conscious—at least not in the same way that we are."
"Does he have to be?" Gladdic said. "Perhaps his nature is such that he simply wills destruction upon a place, and the specifics of that destruction unfold from whatever is there to be made use of."
Dante made a mental note to ask Maralda or Carvahal the next time he had the chance. As they continued eastward, they found more and more dead crabs and pieces thereof, most smaller than the first one they'd run into, though a few were even larger. Others weren't crabs at all, but empty shells, presumably of sea snails of some (very huge) kind—although, given that Nolost had conjured them up from the depths of Varalan, it was possible they were something the likes of which they'd never before seen.
That possibility was made all the more likely by the fact the monsters hadn't just eaten the humans, but had eaten the flesh from the shells of their own dead as well.
Ascending a hill, Dante finally got a good look at the shore, which appeared to be a beach of bright pink sand. If it had been a sunny day with blue seas to match, it would have been stunningly pretty.
Dante stepped over a small broken bottle. "I wonder if anything from their libraries survived."
"That's what you wonder about?" Blays said. "Their libraries? Not, you know, them?"
"It's pretty clear there's no one left here. But they may have left things to know them by. Anyway, it's about more than this one city. Think how little we know of the lands far beyond our own. Places like Cal Avin, that aren't much more than names to us, even more distant in their way than the lands of the gods. Well, we've just found a way to visit places we never thought it was possible to reach. If we see our way through this thing, think of how much we'll be able to learn afterwards."
"I'd rather think of how much I'll be able to drink."
It rained a little more, but didn't hit them with any more hail, and they soon found themselves approaching the piers. The shore was indeed pink sand, almost magenta in its vividness. For hundreds of feet out, the water was a mix of light and dark shadows—sand and rock, respectively—suggesting it stayed quite shallow until the sea shifted to monochrome gray just past where the waves began to break. Rock jetties had been piled up to either side of the deeper waters of the harbor. Out to sea, the Spire remained hazy on the low-lying island it arose from.
"Uh." Blays stared at the piers, then glanced behind him, as if suspicious someone was playing a prank and was about to jump out and laugh at them. "Where are the boats?"
Dante sighed in disgust. "Why would they bother to kill everyone and sink all the boats? Didn't they have any other cities to raze?"
A few masts stuck from the water like old pine snags, and here and there a broken hull angled from the waters. But nothing looked to be afloat. They walked down the piers to confirm and couldn't find so much as a single dinghy.
Dante gazed out at the distant tower. "How far out do you suppose that is? Five miles?"
"More like eight," Blays said.
"Do not tell me you are considering an attempt to swim out to it," Gladdic said.
"Just convincing myself that would be as stupid as it sounds." Dante turned back toward shore, boots thumping on the scarred boards of the dock. "We can make it in a rowboat. There's got to be one tucked away somewhere."
As it turned out, there wasn't. Not one that hadn't been pounded into pieces, anyway. They did find a small cache of paddles, which Blays picked up and carried with them, but they couldn't find so much as a canoe.
Blays nudged the prow of the last rowboat they found; the rest of it had been smashed and lost. "Maybe the crabs had nothing to do with Nolost. Maybe they just came here to get revenge on the fishermen."
"There are enough planks, at least," Dante said. "We could build a raft."
"You'd trust a raft in those seas? Even if it wasn't suicide, where are you going to get the rope to lash it together?"
"There must be a roper's around here somewhere. Probably right here next to the docks."
"You could spend days digging through the rubble and
never find any."
"Well digging up rope for a raft is a lot easier than cutting lumber for the ship we have no idea how to build, isn't it? This isn't the Plagued Islands. I can't just go harvest us a boat from a boat-tree."
Gladdic laughed and broke into a wise smile. "But you can."
"Great news!" Dante said. "So where are the boat-trees? Right next to the gold bar bushes?"
"There." Gladdic pointed to a shield-tree growing from a courtyard in the middle of the rubble.
"But that's a…" Dante trailed off. "Almost perfect replacement for a rowboat."
It wasn't quite—the shallow cones that made up the treetops would spin like mad before both currents and paddles—and that tree, like nearly all the others they'd seen, had suffered hail damage to its cap, and wasn't seaworthy.
So Dante cut it off with a wedge of nether, jumped back as it clonked to the ground, then harvested a new cap from the stump. He worked slowly, coaxing its growth to something flatter and more boat-shaped. The end result was more like an oval, but he thought it would do, and cut it down as well. Then, after a glance at the blackness of the clouds, he harvested a second cap, a smaller and thinner one they could hide under in case all hail broke loose again.
They dragged the two caps down to the water and floated the larger of them to make sure it wasn't porous. When no leaks sprung up, they wrestled the shield into it and climbed aboard.
Blays took up a paddle. "I suddenly regret agreeing to this."
The water up to a hundred yards out wasn't so troubled; the storm had broken up the smooth periodicity of the swells, making the waves numerous and irregular, but they were never more than two feet high. Past where the waves first broke, though, the sea heaved and churned, wind blowing spray from the whitecaps, and miles and miles of that between them and the Spire, while they'd wield just two paddles against the currents.
"No choice," Dante said. "So the sooner we—"
A pink claw broke the water beside them and scrabbled for the gunwale. Dante scrambled away from it, almost falling overboard in the process. Blays whacked the claw with his paddle. This resulted in a satisfying crack, but the crab didn't loosen its grip, and instead pulled its dog-sized body over the side of the makeshift boat.
Gladdic extended his hand and annihilated its face with a fist of nether.
"Faugh!" Blays spat pieces from his mouth and wiped them from his face. He reached over the side for a handful of water. "Did you have to aim that at me?"
"Clean yourself off later!" Dante drove his paddle into the water. "That's just the first of them!"
He'd no sooner gotten the words out than another of the things scrabbled over the bow. Something else scraped the underside of the boat. Gladdic blasted the one in the bow, pattering Dante's cloak with chunks. He and Blays paddled like mad, but the deeper waters seemed miles away, and every one of the shadowed places among the sand now struck his eye as a creeping attacker.
A boulder broke free just ahead of them. They yelled out and pulled to starboard. The beast rising from the water wasn't a crab, but something with a squat spiral of a shell, two huge rolling eyes, and a mess of tentacles writhing from the spot where anything else would have a face. From within the squiggling nest, a stinger—or perhaps a tongue, like a butterfly's—unfurled and reached toward them.
Light darted from Gladdic's hand. Quick as a flash, the thing retracted into its shell with a wet slurp; the shell rolled forward, pushing its opening under the water. The ether hit it with a bony snap, knocking a crack into the shell but failing to penetrate it. To all sides, the water churned as more creatures scurried to catch them.
"What's the plan?" Blays yelled.
Dante paddled harder yet. "Keep going!"
"Into more water?"
"Most of these things have legs. Past the break, it'll be too deep for them to reach us."
"What if Nolost has even worse stuff waiting for us in the deep water?"
Somehow this hadn't occurred to Dante, and he was struck by a sudden bout of indecision. At that very moment, though, another mastiff-sized crab grabbed hold of the gunwale. By instinct, he clubbed it with his paddle, then gasped: if his paddle broke, they'd have to turn back for shore.
It held. So did the crab, though. It lifted its other claw and pinched at his face. He ducked to the side, called to the nether, and punched a black spike through the thing's chittering mandibles.
Gladdic had been in pitched battle with the tentacled shellfish all the while. At last, after several assaults on its shell, he broke it open, the ether ripping into the tender flesh beneath. The thing gave a burbly shriek. Its eyes rolled as it sank beneath the water.
Gladdic turned about to say something, then his eyes widened and his face went pale. Fingers outstretched like claws, he fired a barrage of ether over Dante's head. Dante shot a glance over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of stout claws, spiny shells, troubled waves, and strobing light. He turned away and got back to paddling but could still hear the crack of carapaces and the sizzle of water and tissue.
Unseen things scraped and thumped the bottom of the hull. Half-seen others rose from the waves to fling themselves at the boat, but Gladdic was just able to hold them off, cursing as he flung lightning bolts of ether about like Taim in the midst of a great battle. Something grabbed Dante's paddle and gave it such a hard tug it nearly yanked him overboard. He caught himself against the gunwale. As the handle was slowly but steadily pulled from his grasp, he slung the shadows down into the water. The thing dropped his paddle, sending Dante flying down into the bottom of the boat.
He scrambled back into position. It felt like they were only crawling along, but then he looked up from his paddle and saw the surf break ahead. He wasn't exactly an expert sailor and had no idea how to read the waves for the best time to approach, so he settled on driving into them as fast as possible. Foam surged past them; the boat rocked and jostled; they pitched upward as a gray swell lifted before them. Its crest climbed higher and higher, tickled with white as it threatened to roll over and crash down on them. The prow lifted and all three of them pressed themselves forward to stop the flimsy ship from capsizing.
And then they were up on top of it, elevated high for just a moment before they slid down the backside of the wave. Dante could no longer see any hint of the sea bed. Still, he and Blays paddled hard, driving through the next swell before it could reach its peak, and the lesser one after that. Then the swells were no more, and nothing was clawing at the boat or its passengers, and Dante and Blays drew their paddles from the water and flopped back and gasped for air.
"A hundred yards down," Blays said. "Just another all of the rest of the miles to go."
"Is there any way to get eyes down in the water?" Gladdic said. "If it is anything like how it was at Gallador, I would not like to be caught by surprise by it."
Short of catching sight of a fish and striking it dead, Dante didn't think Gladdic's request was possible, and he cursed himself for not thinking of it back when they'd been in the shallows. Turning back would be insane, though, arguably more insane than continuing without any scouts, so he shook his head and carried on, paying almost no attention to his paddle and nearly all attention to the waters. After several minutes of travel, with the shore firmly behind them, he hadn't seen so much as a lone fin or tentacle.
"We might be all right," Dante said. "Like Carvahal and Maralda said, the entity doesn't have infinite resources. That's the entire point of this. He's not going to waste his energies filling this sea with monsters if there's nobody left to be killed by them."
"Oh yes? And all those crabs that just tried to tear us in half, they were just passing through?"
"Maybe some people fled the city and they're sticking around in case the survivors try to come back."
"To the massive pile of ruins?" Blays said.
"They're crabs! Their shells are filled with crab-brains! How am I supposed to know why they're staying here?"
With the wind at their b
ack, and the vessel a lightweight one, the tower steadily grew in size. When they were roughly halfway between it and the city, Blays glanced up at the sky, then did a double-take.
"Are the clouds getting even darker? How is that even possible?"
With the sinking certainty it was about to start hailing, Dante pulled up his hood. "Gladdic, be ready with the ether. If a hail stone punches a hole through this thing…"
"Then I will be furious that you brought me back from my peaceful death in order to suffer a torturous one," Gladdic said.
"What's the big deal?" Blays said. "If you're that sure you're about to drown, just beam some ether between your ears."
This apparently offended a deity of some kind, because the sky immediately ripped in half and deluged them with cold rain. This seemed like more of an inconvenience than a danger until the bottom of the boat began to fill with water.
Blays gave it a grim look. "Don't suppose you harvested a bucket, too?"
"It might be time," Dante said, "to start praying to Carvahal."
He did so. The rain didn't so much as slow down, sloshing about more and more deeply until Dante was ready to cast down his paddle and start bailing with his bare hands.
"Care to give us a hand?" Blays said to Gladdic. "I thought you were against drowning."
"If you wished for me to be able to bail us out," Gladdic said, "then you should not have cut off my arm. Fortunately, I have another solution."
Ether sparkled from his fingers. He sifted it over the water in the bottom of the boat, freezing it solid, then made a fist. With a short rumble, the ice broke into several large pieces. Gladdic picked them up and hucked them over the side and into the ocean.
"Neat trick," Dante said. "Could you do that to someone's blood while it's still in their body?"
"It would be much easier to kill them directly."
"But my way would be much more intimidating to everyone watching."
The rainfall got heavier yet, but Gladdic's technique was enough to keep up with it, and a few minutes later it eased back to a calm patter. Winds roamed over the waves, but their vessel remained seaworthy, and little by little, the Spire drew nearer. It took the shape of a tall, narrow cone—quite unlike a nautilus, despite its name—and with the exception of a few ridges and hills, the land surrounding it was flat and low. The island looked to be about five miles across with the Spire near its center. As they got close enough to make out more details, he watched it carefully, but there didn't look to be any giant crabs or other creatures running along its beaches.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 23