Elis was flung to the side. He came down and disappeared under the water at the same time the beast did. Dante paddled madly toward the spot where the boy had splashed down; Blays shrunk the spear and took up the paddle Elis had dropped. Gladdic spread ether across the surface to light up either Elis or the return of the creature. After the hubbub of fleeing and combat, the toss of the waves and the swish of the paddles felt like silence.
Elis broke the surface right in front of them, reaching up toward nothing, eyes darting crazily. Blays all but threw himself overboard grabbing Elis' arm. As soon as he'd pulled the boy back inside the boat, he snatched up the paddle and went to work on the water. The beach receded behind them. The scythe-limbed beings that had been watching them do battle with the beast began to turn about and gallop inland. Toward the Spire of the Nautilus.
The armored creature arose once more. But it was already behind them, and it made no move to get closer. After a few more strokes of the paddles, it turned around and waded ashore to trundle after the army of lesser creatures.
Uncertain whether they had clear waters ahead of them or if something even more dreadful lay in wait, none of them spoke. And that was how, due to some cruel quirk of the wind—or, perhaps, an even crueler trick of Nolost's—they heard the screams of the men and women coming from the island.
Dante didn't slow until they were well out to deep waters. He leaned back and felt something shift beneath his doublet. Celden, the gift Carvahal had given him. He'd forgotten all about it. Would it have been able to destroy the army of creatures that had been chasing them? He was almost certain the answer to that would have been yes. Which meant that, if he had remembered it, and used it, it would have been nothing but a waste, as they'd been able to escape anyway.
The sea air was cool and refreshing to his lungs. Dante was almost happy to know he had so many miles of paddling ahead of him.
"They're all dead." Elis sat backwards in the boat, staring at the fires that lit up the island. "My people are dead."
Dante raised an eyebrow. "You don't know that."
"They have no sorcerers. How could they defend themselves?"
"Isn't the Spire supposed to protect them? Wasn't that the oath Farelin swore?"
"Why do you think we are still trapped here? In such a miserable state? She can't do anything for my people anymore. Only we could have saved them."
"Just how many of them do you think we could have fit in this boat with us?"
Elis glared at him, then turned back to Attahire. "We'll never know how many we could have saved. We didn't even try!"
"And it's a good thing. Gladdic was right—it was a trap. The aspect was only talking to us to buy Nolost more time to get his legions in place. If we'd gone off to try to save the Spire, we'd have gotten killed, too."
"So you admit it. They are dead."
Dante paddled a few times. "It could be. But Nolost sent those monsters to deal with us. I doubt he cares about the Astendi enough to scour the whole island. Some of them might find a way to weather this storm."
Elis lapsed into silence. He was still staring at the island more than two hours later when they made landfall at Snarjlend, just south of the ruined city of Marca. Dante didn't imagine they'd need it again, but he dragged the boat up the shore and hid it in the grass anyway. He was tired, but there was no question of staying in the city overnight, especially with the portal so close, and they cut across the grassy fields until they came to the road to the city. The grass was wet enough to believe it had rained, but there wasn't any hail, let alone the kind big enough to brain them, and Dante wondered if the lull was due to Nolost's attentions being focused elsewhere.
Soon enough, they neared the collection of little hills and canyons where the portal was concealed, and Dante broke from the road. But Elis came to a stop.
"You can rest in a minute," Dante said. "The doorway's right over here."
The boy shook his head. "I'm not going with you."
"Yes you are. We promised Farelin that we'd train you."
"The oath was to train me so that I could restore my people. But all my people are dead now. The oath is void."
Dante gritted his teeth. "You still don't know that. Not for sure."
"I do." They were traveling without any lights and Elis was little more than a silhouette beneath the shield-trees. "A sorcerer is tied to his people. I can feel that they're gone."
"What would you know about what a sorcerer is and isn't?"
"I know that much. If you don't, I have nothing to learn from you."
"You shouldn't just run off on your own," Blays said. "There's hailstorms that'll bash your head in. One got Dante when we showed up here. You should've seen it."
"We still tell stories from before the disaster of the storms on this land and how to survive them. The wisdom of my ancestors will guide me."
"Where will you even go?" Blays gestured to the darkness around them. "We haven't seen another living soul here."
"I got my only wish—to be free of that island—and in the process my only purpose was taken from me. It no longer matters where I go or what I do. Goodbye."
Elis walked away down the road, one more shadow among the many. Dante glanced at the others, but what were they supposed to do? Drag the boy along with them? Leave him with Maralda in the jungle? They had no time for such nonsense. Without the need to discuss it, they threaded their way through the wilderness until they came to the spot where they'd marked the portal. They passed through it into the starry tunnel beyond.
The far continent was behind them. Dante realized, then, that they would be the last ones to ever see the Astendi, and they'd barely known anything about them. When the day of Elis' death arrived—which could easily be within the next week, or even on the morrow—all trace of their people would be lost from the land.
19
Dante wandered down the passage, trailing his hand along the "wall." This was far from solid, and in fact felt between the thickness of water and air, and cold to the touch. It was like nothing he'd ever felt before, as if it had come from a realm all of its own.
Stepping through the other side, they entered the jungle of Yent. It was night there, too, but rather than the cold desolation of Snarjlend, or the raging devastation of Attahire, it was warm and calm and alive with bug-song and brave and curious birds. Dante reminded himself that, however pleasant it might feel, it was likely no less dangerous than either of the lands they'd just traveled through.
This time, they didn't have to hunt for Maralda: she was sacked out in the grass not twenty feet from the doorway. And she was a giant panther again.
"Hello?" Dante said. "Maralda?"
Her great flank heaved upward. She opened a large green eye. "What do you want?"
"Er. To tell you what we've just done, and find out what we must do next?"
She flicked her long tail. "Your troubles feel much less important to me when I don't share your form."
"Then we'll just have to convince you to help us by bribing you with a ball of yarn," Blays said.
"Tell me where you've been. If it's amusing enough, I might decide to give you my aid again so that you might be able to return and amuse me some more."
Dante stared up into the dark branches, collecting his thoughts, then began the story, starting with him getting his senses knocked out of him, which caused Maralda to utter growling laughter. As he continued their travels and travails, though, she gazed off at nothing, flicking the tip of her tail in boredom. She didn't perk up again until they were enslaved.
She asked just four questions, and spent most of the time licking her paw and rubbing it over her ears, which didn't fill Dante with confidence in their prospects. Knowing his hopes outside of Maralda were thinner than a frog after a stampede, he did his best to keep things lively through the end.
"Too bad about the kid." She curled her paw and tugged one of her claws with her teeth. "What was his name? Louis?"
"Elis."
"El
is. Yes, that was too bad. He'll die, of course."
"He's tough for his age," Dante said. "I think he can make it through."
"Alone? In a land he's never set foot in before? While the host of destruction marches across it? If you're that naive, you'll never make it through this." She stood up and stretched out her front legs, bending her back. "Although it's almost a blessing to put the Astendi out of their misery. Imagine falling that far, knowing you'd fallen that far, and not being able to do anything about it."
Dante frowned at her. "You seem…different."
"That's exactly why I take different forms: to get some relief from the one I was meant to spend all eternity as."
"Well, I don't see what was a blessing about it. Their fall didn't have to be forever. The boy was going to try to revive them."
"It's no great tragedy, either. Do you think this is the first time in history that a people has ceased to be?"
"Of course not. I've heard it happening many times over. But I've never seen it happen. Or been a part of it. Or known the people before they were lost."
"It won't be the last time, either."
He took a breath of the warm and fragrant night air. "I don't think we could have saved them. But we didn't even try." His frown deepened. "It wasn't a hard choice. Gladdic saw it was a trap. But I don't think I would have made the same decision if it had been my people that the hordes were headed for."
"That is not an interesting choice to make," Maralda said. "Much more interesting is this: if there comes a situation where you can save your people, but the rest of the world will perish instead—or vice versa—which would you pick?"
"I hope I never have to find out."
"Easy choice," Blays said. "Your own people. After all, if everyone else dies, there won't be any witnesses to your crime."
In a single bound, Maralda jumped onto a branch ten feet in the air and laid herself along it, letting her tail dangle beneath her. "You correctly assessed what you call the 'aspect.' Nolost doesn't have the strength to bring down the Spire of the Nautilus. He probably won't be able to do that until everything else is ready to crumble."
"Probably?" Dante said.
"This isn't quite like anything we've ever seen before. Everything I tell you is uncertain. You'd do well to remember that."
"Well, that's ambivalent news at best. It means that even if he can't smash the Spire just yet, he knows more or less what we're doing right now—and exactly where we're going."
She fixed him with her big green eyes. "But it also means that he's worried enough about you to try to stop you. You'd do well to move quickly, though, as it surely cost him a great deal of his resources to muster that attack. You might have a short window where you will be free of his assaults—the ones aimed directly at you, anyway."
"So where are you sending us next?"
"I'm not sending you anywhere. I am just opening a door." She tapped her long sharp claws against the bough in thought. "I am thinking it will be the Fountain of Iron. It should be the more challenging of the two, so you might as well take advantage of your window to tackle it while your foe is regrouping."
"Where is this Fountain of Iron?"
"Does it matter? You're only going to be there for a short while, and once you're done with it you'll never return to it. It might as well be on the far side of the moon."
"Right," Dante said. "Presumably, though, we're traveling to something that may or may not be a fountain, that may or may not be made out of iron. Of the Four That Fell, two were gods and two were entities, right? We've seen the two gods, meaning this one was an entity. What was it an entity of?"
"Your language doesn't have a word for it," Maralda declared, oddly confident, Dante thought, considering how little she claimed to know or care about their world. "It is something like the urge to explore new places and to build fastnesses out of the wilderness. That's what made him sympathetic to the creation of Rale. His name was Antole."
"What's he like?"
"Now? I couldn't guess. Sandrald and Farelin have become nothing like the figures I once knew, and I never knew Antole all that well to begin with."
"Do you remember anything about him at all?"
Her eyes drifted upwards. It occurred to Dante that it was miraculous they could remember anything at all from so long ago.
"Enthusiastic. Even reckless. He was the type to do a thing as it occurred to him and only give any thought to whether it was a good or bad idea after it was already over, if he ever gave it any thought at all." Maralda shrugged her high feline shoulder. "I tried to visit him once after, for reasons of my own. I didn't get to speak to him. But I learned something of the land. At that time, at least, it was called Bagrad. A place of forests and caverns. The people who lived there were the…" She looked upward again. "The Cantag. But this was a long time ago, by your standards. More than long enough for everything to have changed, and more than once."
"Is there anything else you can tell us? About the place, or the Cantag? It isn't easy to be thrown into these things blind."
"There were monsters in the forests and caves. Bad enough ones that I was surprised to find any people could live there at all. Don't ask me how the Cantag did it. Anyone else would have left the land to its horrors, but they worshipped the Fountain. They would sooner have poisoned themselves than abandon it. Also, they thought rabbits were holy. I remember that because I thought it was strange, how these people survived where so few others could, and instead of venerating wolves or eagles or things like them, they chose to bow to the rabbit." She scratched some bark from the limb of the tree she was resting on. "That's all I can tell you. You should sleep now. Before you travel to Bagrad, you will want to be rested—that much I do know."
"You want us to sleep here?" Blays said. "In the place with the snakes that could swallow a horse?"
Her eyes glittered. "You don't trust me to look out for you?"
"I don't trust the snakes to be full."
They were exhausted, though, and while she was eccentric, it was also true that she was a god. They hung up their ocean-damp cloaks, found an acceptable patch of grass, and slept. Dante's dreams that night were full of flames and smoke and waves, along with the silhouette of a boy with his back turned who didn't move or protest as the advancing fire consumed him.
Given that, he woke in the morning feeling much better than he should have. While he waited for Blays to stir, he looned Nak and caught him up on recent events.
"It sounds as if things are going about as well as could be hoped," the former monk said. "For you, at least. Not so much for the Astendi. And, ah, not that you are to blame for that."
"The lord of the gods has allied with the embodiment of destruction," Dante said. "I never imagined we'd get through it without any losses or pain. And what of Gallador?"
"Well, the skies are still dark. And the food is still poison. So I don't see how any of us are still alive in another year unless something is done about that. But in brighter news, we've killed enough of the sea monsters that we've been able to do a little bit of fishing."
"That's some good news. I don't see any situation where you'll have to wait it out for a year. One way or another, within a fortnight, our fates will be decided."
Dante closed the connection, unsure of his own words. It was true that it might only take them another week or two to find out if they could stop Nolost from ripping the very matter of Rale apart. But even if they could manage that, the events at Attahire proved the war to cleanse the land would take much longer—and that its outcome was far from guaranteed.
He rousted Blays a little later. Within minutes, Maralda was leading them deeper into the jungle. For reasons only she knew, she'd switched back to her human form. Oversized eyes watched them from the shadows, but nothing bothered them as they came to the doorway.
Maralda stopped in front of it. "The Fountain will be a few miles south of the portal, in a wide crater. But be careful. If the Cantag are still there, they won't want to
let you get close."
They crossed over. The tunnel looked the same as the others. Dante sent his mind into its contours anyway. These soon headed out of sight to who knew where, yet just before its glassy curves disappeared from sight, they glimmered a silvery green. He stopped for a closer look. Whatever its secrets might be, though, it kept them to itself.
They came to the blackness of the door at the other end. Having learned from his experience at Snarjlend, before he stepped through, Dante barred one arm over his head and filled his free hand with shadows.
His sight went blurry, adjusting, and he felt the wind on his raised arm. Not feeling any huge hailstones, he lowered his arm from his head, blinking until his vision cleared. He stood just inside the entrance to a shallow cave. He moved outside it. Trees stirred in the breeze. Wherever he was, it wasn't particularly cold: warmer than chilly Attahire, cooler than steamy Yent.
Something streaked across the blueness of the sky as fast as a shooting star. It wasn't night, though—judging by the sun, it was early afternoon, hours later in the day than it had been in Yent.
Another object zipped across the heavens in the corner of Dante's eye, but it was gone before he could get a good look.
"You're still on your feet." Blays emerged from the cavern. "We're already off to a better start than last time."
"I'd rather have a worse start and a better ending."
"There is no such guarantee," Gladdic said. "So enjoy this better beginning while it lasts: for Maralda promised us troubles, and she does not strike me as the type to lie for sport."
The others took a quick look around to make sure nothing was about to jump on their backs while Dante uplifted a column of stone from the top of the little rocky hill that housed the cave. Then they marched south. As soon as they came to a meadow with better visibility, Dante picked out a lone mountain to the northeast to orient themselves to in case the sun became obscured by clouds or smoke.
They'd just gotten back underway when a low boom sounded in the distance. They crouched in the meadow grass, awaiting disaster, but nothing came.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 30