"There are refugees there." Gladdic pointed to the ridge directly south of them, where dejected shapes moved beneath the wan cover of the trees. "Are they of yours, Artag?"
"They must be, unless things are even stranger than they appear to be," the warrior said. "Nevertheless, for the time being, they must fend for themselves."
They were on their way across the saddle between two hills when the things came at them as if from a hole in the ground. They ran on four legs and looked like unfinished wolves or cougars with little in the way of features besides long teeth and dark smudges of eyes and Dante couldn't tell if they were monsters or undead.
One leaped at them and Blays swung his spear and whacked it through the air, depositing it into a running channel of water below them, which sucked it beneath the surface and swept it away. Gladdic ripped two of them apart with icy ethereal knives. Blays jabbed one and then another, the Spear of Stars tearing both in half despite the simplicity of the attack; Dante brought down another as it tried to jump on Blays' back.
Yet more and more of the creatures dashed into the open, coming at them in a grim stampede. Blays shot Dante a stony look and widened his stance, cocking the spear. Dante filled both his hands with nether and laced it through the ground between them and the coming horde.
The creature in the lead broke to its left. All of the others followed it, mud and turf flying from their feet, which were as hard to make out as the rest of them, and could have been either clawed or hoofed. The stampede continued to bend course until they were running directly away from the four travelers. A few of those running along the edge of the hillside slipped in the waterlogged grass and spilled into the cataract below to die. The drumming of their feet receded as they retreated into the brush.
Blays straightened, planting his spear against the ground. "Did any of you do that?"
"Do what?" Dante said.
"Whatever it was that terrified the rampaging horde of shadowy monsters from the underworld. Because if you didn't, I'm guessing something even worse is on its way."
Dante couldn't see any threats aside from the pounding rain, but his heart sank, certain that Blays was right. The same instinct prompted him to take a long look where he'd last seen the lightning.
"Where did the red storm go?" Gladdic said.
"Exactly what I was thinking." Dante kept the nether in hand. "Artag, let's keep—"
He jerked his head to the side as the red lightning came down a hundred yards away from them, shattering a tree. A second bolt torched a shrub ten feet closer. Dante raced his mind into the trees ahead and to the right of the lightning's path, harvesting them higher. This time, the lightning ignored his efforts, jumping forward step by step as the trees it tore apart steamed and sizzled in the rain.
The four of them broke into a dead run. What could Dante do to stop the bolts? Heap the earth up over their heads? That might delay their fate, but only for the minute it took the lightning to blast a crater down to them. Nor was there any hope of delving deep enough to be sheltered from it. Not when everything was flooded. He tried again to grow a group of trees tall enough to lead the storm astray, but it didn't waver from its path, as untempted as a gods-fearing monk.
"Is this the big plan?" Blays called over the wash of the rain and the roar of exploding boles. "Try to outrun the thing that moves at the speed of actual lightning?"
"The original plan didn't work," Dante said. "This is what it looks like when we no longer have one."
"Ah, so that's why it felt so familiar."
They ran on. Artag glanced back and winced as a strike hit the grass thirty yards behind them, sending hunks of sod cartwheeling in all directions. "Is that it, then?"
"You're supposed to be our guide," Blays said. "Don't you have any suggestions?"
"My kind are bred and trained to deal with all the terrors of Bagrad. But nothing I have ever heard tale of was a tenth as grave as what I see before me now."
They ran up an incline toward the crest of the next hill, threatening to slip with every wet step, the rain hitting hard enough to knock them to the ground. The red lightning had been strobing like mad but abruptly winked off, leaving them in near darkness. Five seconds of calm ticked by. Just as Dante began to think they might have been saved by some divine providence, blood-red light stabbed through the rain and the gloom. Shards of wood hummed past him and speared into the standing puddles. He closed his eyes.
"Has anyone ever had the balls to try to fight lightning before?" Blays said. "Or are the bards about to have to add another verse to my song?"
He skidded to a halt, water spraying from his boots, braced himself with the butt of his spear, and shoved off—neatly reversing direction. Straight toward the crimson storm.
Dante was too shocked by the sight of it to stop running. "What the fuck are you doing?!"
Blays said nothing—or perhaps he did, but it was entirely swallowed by the sound and fury of the deluge. A bloody fork hit the earth before him like a godly javelin.
Blays braced himself and dropped into a fighting stance. He drew back the Spear of Stars, elbows bent at the ready. "Strike at me, if you dare! For if you strike me once, and I'm still standing, it will be me that strikes at you!"
The lightning came down once more, almost silent except for its sizzle through the rain, touching the ground no more than twenty feet in front of Blays, who flinched but managed to hold his ground.
The lightning flashed again, directly above him—and stopped. It hung there as if frozen, crackling down to its waiting tip. But if it was hesitating, Dante didn't think that it was out of fear. It looked more like a lancer casually adjusting his grip as he rides down an unhorsed man.
The red bolt dimmed, brightened, and struck straight at Blays. Blays jabbed back at it with his spear. The lightning washed over him, staining the grass and the rain with its bloody light. Dante tried to keep his eyes locked on the sight of it, but they teared over. All he could see was a slowly fading blur of light.
The lightning blinked away. The ball of red light around Blays dimmed and then shrank to little more than an ember. The ethereal light of the Spear of Stars was nowhere to be seen.
At some point, Dante had stopped running. He drifted toward the storm, knowing there was nothing he could do to harm or stop it, and that whatever it had just done could not be undone. Yet he felt compelled to confront it: both for what it had just done, and so that when it came for him, he would not be fleeing with his back turned, but facing it, with his hands filled with nether and his mouth filled with curses.
"Damn you, Nolost!" he yelled into the rain. Red light stirred high overhead. "Come out and face me! Come out and face me, and we will see which of us walks away from it!"
The light expanded, cohering into a bolt that flicked in the sky but didn't yet strike. Dante shouted wordlessly and heaved a huge black bolt of his own up at it. The red light shrank—but only for a moment. Then it snapped back to its full size, and dived down at Dante.
He yelled out once more, this time in shock, and shaped the shadows into a writhing column. Crimson light flared to all sides except down the center where the nether blotted it out. Yet still the bright bolt flew downward, evaporating shadows like water; Dante felt his hair stir and rise, tingles running up his limbs and back. Fast as he could, he scooped more nether to him, casting it upward and—
The fist of a titan pounded him into the ground. He blacked out. He had the sense his eyes were open, but it was a moment before he could see through them. He found himself on the sodden ground. His cloak was soaked through yet it was also on fire. Someone was yelling at him. He tried to muster the nether, but could only draw forth thin tendrils that looked flimsy enough to be washed away by the rain.
Directly above him, the black clouds swelled with furious red seams. A fresh bolt assembled itself and punched downward, bound straight for his head.
Light blazed beside him and he knew that he was dead and he tried to call out Arawn's name but he could
n't remember it. The new light was white and not red and he didn't understand this and the white light seared toward him but the red light fell even faster.
The white light thrust into the sky and met the red. The flash was so bright that Dante would have fallen if he wasn't already on the ground. The pale light glowed from a long rod being held by a man with golden hair whose eyes sparked like fires.
"I warned you!" Blays screamed up at the sky. "I warned you not to let me get back up!"
The red bolt tussled against the spear and Blays drove himself against it. Someone grabbed Dante by the arm—Gladdic—and heaved him to his feet. Blays twisted the spear and shoved it upward and the red lightning shattered into ten thousand sparks that winked out in the rain.
Blays laughed at the blackness of the clouds. "What do you suppose happens when I figure out how to throw them back at you?"
A new bolt shot down through the still-twinkling remnants of the last one. Blays met this one with the spear as well, giving another twist to the shaft and breaking the second bolt as easily as he might pick up a cup from a table. A third one licked at him instantly, but he broke it as quickly as he had the second.
The clouds seemed to take a deep breath. Even the rain slackened, the first time that it had done so since they'd emerged from the undertunnels. With a blood-red blast, one bolt after another lashed at Blays and he parried them just as he would an enemy lance and then snapped them, showering a blizzard of crimson coals down on their heads. Not a single one made it past the weapon to strike Blays himself.
The sky groaned and cracked apart. From this crack emerged a great tangle of bolts that zagged downward as slowly as falling leaves. As they crossed the gap between heavens and earth, they cohered into five distinct structures.
"By the gods," Artag choked. "It is the hand of a titan!"
The vast hand—for now that he'd named it, there was no denying its nature—grasped ever closer to Blays, setting the entire hillside awash in its light. Blays adjusted his stance but made no effort to flee. Doubting there was anything he could do with it, Dante brought more nether to himself anyway.
The hand of lightning neared the ground, spreadings its fingers wide. At the last moment, Blays vaulted himself upward with the spear, soaring inhumanly high. He wheeled his weapon about and slashed its long tip at the index finger of the entity.
The Spear of Stars shredded through the electric flesh as if it was mortal. That finger jerked back, but the others closed fast. And clamped down on the spear. Blays yanked back on it, and though he wasn't able to pull it loose, the spear magnified his strength so much that he was able to drag the hand down with him and land safely on the ground.
The two powers strained against each other. They barely so much as moved, but the earth beneath Blays' feet shivered like a man fallen into a frozen pond. The hand gathered itself and pushed him back a step, then another. Blays tried to give the shaft a hard twist. This looked to do no damage, but the immense spectral hand came to a stop.
So it reversed itself, and pulled on the spear instead. Dragging Blays toward the still-rising water just twenty feet in front of him. Heart hammering, Dante leaped into the earth and uplifted a curb of solid stone just in time for Blays to brace his feet against it. The hand tightened its grip and pulled so hard that the lightning that made up its frame began to vibrate. Blays gave his elbow a flip upward, twitching the spear to the side. Its point ripped through a second finger and pulled free, sending Blays stumbling seven steps backward.
He caught himself and snapped the spear forward. High overhead, a second constellation of red lightning emerged from the clouds. Dante knew what it was before it had drawn itself halfway to its final shape: an immense face of crimson lines, scowling down at them with raw and unshaped hatred. Not long ago, Dante had squared off against the lord of the gods and lived to tell about it, but the sight of the entity drawn across the sky was almost enough to make his knees give out beneath him.
Threads of lightning streamed to the hand, filling out its wounded fingers. It flexed itself and swept downward with increased speed.
"I was hoping you'd show up." Blays gave the spear two good stamps into the mud. "Remember all that lightning you tried to smite me with? I saved it for you."
He snapped his body into a combat stance and punched the spear forward. A tight spiral of red light shot forth, a corona of pale flame wavering around it. It tore through the reaching hand and toward the outlines of the face far above it. The face shifted to the west, but the beam shifted with it. The face drew back into a grimace.
The beam hit it square in the nose. For a few seconds, the storm-blackened sky glowed more brightly than the heart of the nether. When it faded enough to see anything, both the face and the hand were gone.
The rain eased to a steady patter, then sporadic droplets. Dante held his palm out in wonder.
"The face in the sky," Artag said. "That was it, wasn't it? The being that you are fighting."
Blays shrunk the spear and dropped it through the loop he'd tied to his belt. "I would hope so. If that thing was just his lieutenant, we might as well pack it in right now."
"Is it dead?"
"If it had died, I am certain we would have felt it," Gladdic said. "But its power appears to be broken, if only for the moment. We ought make the most of that moment."
Artag nodded, reoriented himself, and headed east toward the so-called Great Navel, as if nothing had happened at all. Dante kept his eyes sharp for the return of the horde of shadowy animals, but the storm appeared to have scared them off—either that, or the temporary breaking of their master had.
The rain never completely stopped. But they got more than two good hours of marching done before it started to pick up again. Dante was tired by then, and cold too, but he knew it was only going to keep getting worse, and gave no complaint or made any suggestion they should stop. Anyone could see Artag's stoicism within minutes of meeting him, yet as they traveled deeper into the land of Bagrad, Dante could see the worry deepening the lines of his face.
Good. For now that he'd seen the enemy they were contending with, and what would befall his home if they failed, he would be sure to do everything that they needed to reach the Fountain of Iron, and convince whatever remained of the entity within it to close off the world to the worst of the great destroyer.
"We're being followed," Blays said. "Ridge to our right."
It took Dante a moment to see it, though the foliage was too much to make out exactly what the four-legged figures were. "As long as they stay on that ridge."
"They won't."
"I know, but do you have to say it?"
They dropped into deeper woods. The path was clogged with storm-battered branches. When they emerged onto another ridge, instead of being shadowed by two or three creatures on the opposite "island," Dante saw at least a dozen.
Gladdic peered across the way. "How much further to our destination?"
"Not far," Artag said. "More than five miles, but less than ten. Why? Do the creatures on the ridge trouble you?"
"No. But the ones in the water do."
Dante made a face, assuming the old man was having a go at them. But in the water running between the two hillsides, fins broke the surface, attached to much larger shadows below it. He suggested they run.
The return of the rain seemed to mirror the increase in the number of beings chasing after them. Soon, the things moved along the other hills by the score, while those in the water increased from a handful to a school. It struck him as absurd, painfully so, that so many forces would align themselves against them, especially after what they had just been through: except at the same time, it was excruciatingly real, for the exact same reason: it would not let up, not for more than brief moments of respite, and then they would face mortal peril all over again, much worse than they should ever have been taxed with. And maybe that was their fate—prey animals, run down by an endless number of wolves, until the very last of their endurance was exhaust
ed, and they could do nothing more than succumb.
The land flattened into what must have been a plateau when it wasn't surrounded by water but now appeared more like a plain. The animals kept pace along the ridge, as did the fish. Judging by the size of the fins cutting the water, some were as large as the black and white whales that patrolled the seas around Narashtovik.
"They don't have any problem keeping up," Blays said. "So why aren't they attacking us?"
"Maybe they're just here to cheer us on," Dante said.
"If they are biding their time, it can only be for two reasons." Gladdic sounded irritated he was even having to explain this. "Either they are waiting for more reinforcements, or for us to become more vulnerable."
The land had gotten less sodden, making for better running, but the rain was starting to come down in buckets and it was turning into a slog again. Dante had to ease their muscles with nether to allow them to keep going. Even with that, it was barely enough to get them up the long incline of the next hill. At the top, they were treated to a view that might have been beautiful if they weren't running for their lives: a broad lake, almost perfectly round, surrounded by a dozen other hills, and fed by the dozen channels of water that ran between those hills.
Artag gave it a cursory, professional look, then led them hastily down toward the lake. The shadowy creatures crested the next hill over and started down it as well.
Artag came to a halt at the shore, looking pleased with himself. "Behold! The Great Navel!"
Dante swept his head from side to side. "Where?"
"Right there!"
"All I see is water."
"Yes! For it is beneath the water!"
Dante's face grew hot with embarrassment. Before anyone could say anything more, he sent his mind plunging into the water like a thrown stone. Just as he was about to hit the limit of his senses, he hit solid rock. Rock that was perfectly and unnaturally flat.
"You were right about this one, too," he said. "All plugged up. Just like the other one."
Artag nodded. "Can you remove this one as well?"
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 34