"How much sailing through the Hell-Floods will we have to do before we reach the Fountain?"
Artag gave this a fair amount of thought. "We will travel first to Kwoonto. It should be safe there. And from there, it will only be a few hours' journey to the Fountain. If we are lucky, we should reach Kwoonto by the morning after next."
"And if we're not lucky?"
"Then we will die."
"You sound…sure of that."
"I sound sure for the reason that I am sure. Once you enter the Uncleared Lands, you keep moving until you have left them behind you. If you get slowed down or stopped, then you die."
~
Dante's watch, when it came, passed without note, as did the rest of the night. He'd endured enough pre-dawn marches that it wasn't at all strange to get up while it was still dark, but as they traveled on for one hour and then a second while all the world remained black and quiet as the middle of the night, an uncanny feel stole over Dante's mind.
He looked up toward the high ceiling of the latest cavern that was just visible in the light of whatever was glowing on its surface. "What's that?"
"Lichen," Artag answered.
"Not that. That humming sound. It's like something's vibrating."
The man shrugged. "In the undertunnels, there is much that cannot be explained."
They came to another stream. It frothed and pounded along like it was being set aboil. A bridge crossed it, but this was in even worse repair than the last one, and half of it washed away before their very eyes. Dante extended the ground across what was left of the frame. The water was rising visibly and he hurried to the other side. A surge hit the foot of the bridge and he turned his face away from the spray.
Yet Artag turned back toward it, touching the droplets running down his beard. "It's cold. It's coming from above."
Dante looked up again, but the ceiling was no longer visible. "Where else would it be coming from?"
"Below."
Looking troubled, the man moved forward at a jog through a field of waxy little formations of stone so well-ordered Dante would have sworn they'd been gardened that way. Trickles of water ran between them. The hiss of the river faded behind them, but the spatter of water falling from the ceiling picked up in its place.
"Are we being flooded?" Blays said. "Is that normal?"
"No," Artag answered. "But nor is it unheard of."
His boots splashed through the sheet of water running across the ground. Everything smelled like damp stone and the green light picked up bits of debris tossing along in the current. The water rose to their ankles, then to their shins, and shallow though it was, it was already threatening to yank Dante from his feet.
Artag increased his speed until he was flat-out running toward what Dante presumed was the passage to the next cavern. But as his light came close enough, it revealed that passage was vomiting thousands of gallons of water directly into their path.
"Is it wise to remain in this place?" Gladdic said. "It has the feel of a jug that will soon be filled."
Artag rubbed his face, eyes darting across the chamber. "There are no tunnels to the surface here. Can you make one for us?"
"No problem." Dante angled away from the rush of water toward the wall.
When he was almost there, he stepped in an unseen hole, plunging up to his thighs. Before the water could whisk him away, he threw himself forward, crawling back into shallower flooding. He'd scraped his shin doing this and the nether came readily to his call. He opened an ascending tunnel into the stone, curving it slightly as he went.
The blunder of the water grew softer and softer as he climbed until Dante could hear his breath echoing about him. He was making the tunnel as steep as he dared, but even when he reached up as far as he could, he still couldn't feel the surface.
"Just how deep down are we?"
"Deep enough to hide when we need to," Artag said.
"Who is we?" Dante said. "The Cantag? Or your order?"
"There is no difference."
Dante soon was able to feel where the earth ended above him and he worked his way steadily upward, gentling out the angle of the tunnel as he got closer to the surface. It was only for this reason that, when he opened a hole out to it, the wall of water that rushed inside didn't instantly flush them down to oblivion.
Dante yelled out, burbling in the cool water as he was dragged along in its flow. Inspired by the stunt he'd pulled on Attahire, he gathered up earth behind them, catching them, and pushed it forward up the tunnel until they burst free into open water. The daylight felt incredibly bright despite the churn of the water and the overcast sky.
They were floating in a pool of rain-water, and rather than swimming to a nearby hill, Dante lifted up a little island for them to stand on. As the rain beat down on them in solid sheets, they goggled at the landscape around them.
Or what was left of it. The water lay so deep on the ground that it was more like a shallow sea, with each hill and ridge its own island, an archipelago among the flood.
"This is worse than anything we've seen," Dante said. "Nolost is working directly against this land. Artag, we can't stay here."
"That is evident," Artag said. "Yet I am unsure where to go."
"Just a suggestion," Blays said. "But how about the Fountain of Iron?"
"It is the route to it that I must consider."
Dante tugged up the hood of his cloak to shield his eyes from the rain. "What are our options?"
"None of your concern."
"We might be about to drown in a massive flood. One that's probably full of monsters. I'm more than a little concerned!"
The man shook his head. "We must set aside your business for the moment. If this flood lasts, all my people will be killed. We must put a stop to it."
"How do you intend to fight a storm?"
"We can't stop the storm. But we can stop the floods. We must go that way." He pointed what might have been to the east. "Build one of your bridges to that ridge there."
Dante drew up the nether, but didn't yet send it into the earth. "We'll have to hope your people can take care of themselves. We can't afford to delay our mission."
"But you must. To ignore this would be to sign the death warrant of everyone I've ever known."
"That's what you'll be doing if you insist on diverting us. The entity that's causing this storm has already set up a trap for us just like this before. Your only hope is to get us to the Fountain as fast as possible."
Artag gazed at him, jaw and eyes tense with contempt. "Then you can find it for yourself. I know what I must do."
And, bulky and armored though he was, he jumped into the waters. He surfaced and swam in the direction he'd pointed earlier.
"I can't help but notice he's getting away," Blays said.
Dante swore. "What do you want me to do? Tie him up?"
"Why not? None of us knows where the Fountain is. And it sounds like everyone else who knows is about to drown."
Dante swore more loudly. "Why do these idiots keep doing things like this? Can't they see the scale of what's happening? Some of them are going to have to make sacrifices!"
As he railed on about this, he uplifted a narrow causeway of earth, jogging along it as he extended it. He quickly caught up to Artag, who was managing to keep his head above water, but whose gear had slowed his swim to a crawl.
"Would you get out of there already?" Dante said. "If something happens to you, we're all screwed."
Artag stared at him, then snorted and heaved himself up on quasi-dry land. Even after his dip, he wasn't any more wet than the three of them were.
"To the ridge, then," Artag said. "I will lead us from there."
Dante built out the causeway until it met up with the ridge. They ran up it, which revealed it as just one of many that ran miles to the east. Artag glanced about himself, but seemed satisfied they were headed in the right direction.
The forested ridges made for easy travel and Dante rarely had to smooth out t
heir path. Lightning flashed through the gaps in the branches. The first of it was unremarkable, though close and loud, but it then heightened to orange bolts that would strike the same spot two or three or four times before relenting, and from there it became blood red, like the angular veins of a god of the rocks. The red bolts stabbed down over and over again, not at a single point like the orange ones had, but advancing leap by leap, eerily silent and thunderless, leaving a line of exploded and blackened trees in their wake.
Blays grimaced. "Remind me not to make that stuff mad at me."
"I fear it is too late for that," Gladdic said.
"Oh, you're always saying things like that."
"Be that as it may, the lightning is getting closer. As though it is hunting us."
Dante wasn't sure about that last part, but after watching its advance for a few seconds, there was no denying it was headed in their general direction. But there were several other strikes going on in the distance, just visible behind the layers of rain, and those looked to be heading off at random rather than homing in on them. The forest thickened as they headed downhill, stealing their view of the surroundings.
"All right," Dante said, shouting over the regular bursts of thunder. "We've agreed to help you. Now are we allowed to know what we're running off to do?"
Artag didn't answer right away. "We are going to reopen the drain."
"Your land has a drain?"
"More than one. Though they were not built to be drains, they should function just like one. It is my belief that your entity has closed them in order to sink all Bagrad beneath the waters."
This was an odd enough belief that Dante thought there might just be something to it. A mudslide smeared the way ahead and he hardened the ground enough for them to run across it. It had also swept away a swath of trees, leaving the sky unoccluded by any branches or leaves. Allowing him clear sight of the red lightning as it strobed through a patch of trees, sending their flinders flying two hundred feet into the air.
With visible reluctance, the bolts pulled themselves away from the grove and entered the mud-emptied ground the four of them were currently running across. Artag bent course to get away from it, but the red strikes angled back toward them.
"Is it just me," Blays said, "or is that lightning following us?"
Dante clapped his hand to his head as a charred piece of tree whacked down into the mud. "Don't go giving it any ideas!"
"If we don't do something about it, it's going to fry us like a Collenese meat-stick!"
As Blays spoke, the lightning jumped closer and closer, until Dante could hear the rain sizzling away from it, and its flashes grew so bright that dazzled specks swam across his eyes. He considered swaddling themselves with rock, but he didn't think it was a good idea to stop moving—or to blind themselves to what was happening around them.
He flung his mind to the side, rooting around in the muck until he found what he was looking for. Concentrating so hard it made his head hurt, he pumped fallen and buried trunks full of nether, harvesting them clumsily and fast. The new trunks popped free of the mud and shot upward toward the storm-tossed sky. Behind them, he grew more, creating a line of trees that led directly away from the four of them and toward a copse standing where the mudslide ended.
The lightning pounded the first of the harvested trees. Yet the next bolt veered back into the open field, toward them, smashing a crater into the mud. Dante dumped more nether into the first of the trees, growing them higher yet. The third of the crimson streaks bent in mid-air to come down on one of the trees Dante was working on. As it was torn away from him, leaving him quite abruptly with nothing to harvest, he was struck by the same disoriented feeling as when he missed a step on a flight of stairs.
The lightning continued along his chain of trees, breaking to the southwest. It entered the forest there and continued uphill, already obscured behind the torrents of rain.
"Nice work," Blays said. "Kind of like feeding your fattest friend to the bear to stop him from eating the rest of the group."
"Exactly," Dante said. "If there aren't any trees around next time, then as the tallest one of us, it'll be your job to run at the lightning waving your hands around at it."
They reached the low point between two hills and started up another ridge, leaving the mudslide behind and entering another arm of forest. Leaves and branches fell all around as the rain stripped them away. Their path veered toward a hard slope where nothing could grow but grass and short shrubs and Dante could see across a narrow lake to the next hill where dim hideous figures chased after a handful of men. Artag stared at them, but if he was having any thoughts about trying to help those people—presumably his countrymen—he gave no voice to them.
They traversed another hill. The red lightning disappeared to the south only to reappear to the northeast a minute later. It was soon obvious that it was wandering their way again.
"Down there." Artag came to a stop on a shelf of rock overlooking an almost perfectly round lake that was actively being fed by multiple arms of water coursing in between the surrounding hills. "There should be a navel beneath the water. One large enough to drain the flooding nearby, if not all of it. Something must be blocking it."
Blays rubbed his chin. "Something like a malevolent entity with a growing personal grudge against us?"
"I should be able to feel it," Dante said. "But we'll need to get closer."
Doing that looked like it would take a lot of maneuvering about in search of a good path down to shore. Dante compromised by circling a short ways around to a likely-looking spot and then carving his own stairs and slopes out as necessary.
Halfway down, he caught Artag's eye. "You're right. There's no lakebed at the bottom. Just a plug of bare, solid rock."
He still couldn't feel where that plug ended, though, and had to get almost all the way down to the bank before he was able to feel any empty space beneath it. The rain beat the surface of the water into a thick mist and he could no longer see the far shore, just the vague humps of the hills behind it. Waterfalls coursed down the hillside to either side of them and fed into the lake, which Dante thought he could see rising before his very eyes.
He sent his mind down into the stone plug, feeling around its edges. It was shaped just like a bung.
"Is there anything beneath this?" Dante said. "More specifically, anything you wouldn't want smashed by an enormous falling rock?"
"There is much beneath it," Artag said. "And it all deserves to be smashed."
Dante nodded. Rather than bothering to dissolve the whole plug of rock, which was the size of some towns, he went to work on the earthen walls that supported it, which were angled, allowing the plug to rest within it like a stopper. He dug into that angle, dissolving the earth there so that the rim ran straight down instead.
He had barely begun his work when he felt a chunk of the rim near the bottom slide away and pass beyond his ability to sense it. He kept at what he was doing and felt another piece break loose. Suddenly wary, he stopped to get a better handle on what was happening.
When he did, his pulse pounded his ears like a fist.
"Uh." He backed up a step. "Run!"
He scrambled back up the path he'd helped shape. The others clambered behind him, running too hard to even ask what was going on.
Behind them, the water blooped as bubbles broke the surface. As Dante was still turning around, the bloop became a noisy boil. The entire lake hopped and frothed. If he hadn't already known it was a lake, he wouldn't have had any idea what he was looking at.
And then it all dropped like a rock down a well.
21
Dante whipped his head forward and ran as hard as he could. Throat gone dry, he moved his mind into the ground underfoot. It gave a huge jerk, throwing him onto his face. He clung tight to it with both his arms and his mind, ready to mash it back into a solid piece if it threatened to slide out from beneath him.
But the quake was already over. Behind them, the surface o
f the lake had plunged some fifty feet or more. The narrow rivers that had been flowing into it now dropped into it as waterfalls.
Dante thrust his fists into the air. "You were right. It's draining!"
"Do not celebrate just yet." Artag sounded much less enthused than the situation seemed to warrant.
"But why on earth…" Dante trailed off. "Wait, did it stop draining already?"
"I did not really think that it would be this easy. But don't lose all hope. This is merely a lesser navel. And it feeds into the system of the Great Navel."
"Yes of course, the Great Navel." Blays grabbed Artag by his armored shoulder and gave him a shake. "What the hell are you talking about?"
"He is saying that the same thing that was done here has also been done to the place that this one feeds into," Gladdic said. "Meaning that we must travel to the Great Navel and unblock it just as we have done here."
"But what is the Great Navel? And what's this one?"
"It is of no matter," Artag said. "For Gladdic is right. Nor is the Great Navel too far from here. But we will want to hurry to it before nightfall or further disaster."
The man turned away and trudged eastward. Yet Dante kept staring at the receded lake, feeling spent and defeated, until the others yelled to him to come smooth the path ahead.
~
The water crept higher. Here and there a body floated at the edge of a pond or lake that hadn't been there the day before. The corpses of creatures were drowned as well, some like the one they'd killed on their arrival, others altogether different. Artag marched grimly past the bodies. On two occasions, a monster rushed from the shrubs to waylay them, but they killed both quickly and were back on their way within another minute.
For a time the red lightning paralleled their course, then drifted off into the distance. Just after they slew the third creature to assault them—a lizard-like thing that ran on two legs, balanced by a long thick tail, that clawed at them with four long arms—the crimson storm curved about to the southeast, nearing with unnatural speed.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 33