Two dark bolts flew over the heads of the warriors surrounding him. Dante knocked them down with almost no effort. With the bodies heaping up around Blays, Dante thought it felt like a damn good time to try to rout them, so he slung a salvo of nether into their backs while casting some ether about in random flashes and running at them with his sword raised while screaming his head off. Just for good measure, he shook the earth beneath their feet.
Those on the left flank yelled out in terror and ran from him. The middle followed as soon as they realized what was happening. This left less than a score of them around Blays, and as he gutted one of them while cutting off the hand of another, the remainder backed off and then sprinted away, some going so far as to throw their weapons down behind them as they fled.
"Good start," Dante said.
Blays breathed hard, his face and hands streaked with blood. "Still a hell of a lot of them."
"Then that's going to make the rest of them all the more frightened by how many of them we're about to kill."
Gladdic had dispatched the second demon and moved to rejoin them. Their part of the grounds was now very quiet as far as battlefields went. The orange-clad soldiers they'd saved eyed them flatly, betraying no emotion, then ran to join the fighting where it was still thick.
Dante made a quick assessment of the field and decided to follow a short distance from the flank of the running orange-men. The main body of enemy soldiers looked to be in a state of shock at the total collapse of their charge and they were struggling to put up a defensive formation, ordering the few of them that were carrying wicker shields to form a line at the front while they summoned more of the demons up as reinforcements.
They were momentarily vulnerable, so Dante didn't see any reason to not ruin them then and there. He ripped the earth apart beneath the front lines, sending them to their wailing deaths. Before the ground could stop shaking, he pounded the remaining lines with pillars of fire, sending the formation into total disarray.
Bolts of nether streaked in from the enemy sorcerers to try to put a stop to the mayhem, but the rag-dressed warriors were already fleeing as fast as they could, and no amount of shouting from their superiors could convince them to stand and fight, even when a trio of the demons arrived to back them up. Gladdic countered the enemies' nether while Dante hacked into the nearest of the demons. Realizing the tide had turned, the creatures swung about and romped after the retreating warriors.
As a gap opened between the two armies, a man and a woman stepped forth from those in orange. The man wore a battered tall-crowned hat, the woman wore a torque of what looked to be plated if not solid gold, and they both wore the noble bearing of command.
The woman lowered her axe. "Do we pursue them?"
The man watched them go, breathing hard, then swung his arm to the side in a chopping motion. "No. We're lucky just to be alive. We must learn why we have been spared."
He pivoted sharply on his heel and crossed the churned-up field toward the three foreigners, stopping ten yards back from them to examine them. His skin was as richly dark as Captain Naran's, and his hair even more tightly curled, to where it corded on his head like peppercorns. But his eyes were more hooded than Naran's, and his features more strong and thick, so if they were of the same broad type of people they were as distant kinsman as Colleners and Gaskans were to each other. Once again Dante was reminded that should the world fall, no one would understand the full scope of how much had been lost.
The man in the battered hat pointed his two-pronged spear at them. "Throw down your weapons and fall to your knees!"
"I don't think we'll be doing that," Dante said.
"Then we will kill you!"
"I don't think you'll be doing that." Beside him, Blays slid the rod from his belt and held it to his side, a flash of pure light dazzling the orange-men's eyes as the spear sprung from two feet long to twelve. "Why does everyone we meet keep trying to kill us?"
"Perhaps the gods are trying to give us a sign that we are too stubborn to accept," Gladdic muttered.
"Where are you of, amber-bringers?" the man demanded of them. "And what right do you think you own to join us?"
"We're from places you've probably never heard of," Dante said. "And we're not here to join you. We attacked your enemies because that's what the gods have sent us to do: punish the demons and throw down their master before he can burn our world down to ashes."
The woman frowned at them. Like the man, she was dressed in a sleeveless orange tabard. She wore a green skirt beneath it whose hem hung two inches above her knees. He wore something similar, but more like the bottom half of a robe, and it fell halfway down his shins. These, along with their forearms, were protected by wooden bracers that looked like they must once have been elegant but were now as shabby and beat-up as everything else they owned.
"Do you call us idiots?" she called at them. "You are not god-sent. You are mere men!"
"Fine," Dante said. "We were only sent here by one of the gods. The most powerful of them is trying to destroy us all. That means no one from the heavens is going to come save us. We have to save ourselves. That's what we're here to do."
The man nodded, but the gesture was much faster than Dante was used to and had much more upward motion to it. "Could it be that you are demons yourselves and you speak to deceive us? Or even agents of your false gods, here to slaughter us just as you say they wish to and then laugh that we were so stupid to trust!" He made the chopping motion again. "You will leave here and you will not come back."
"You're the Kalabari, right? Proud keepers of the Emerald Titan? I guarantee you that the same entity that has unleashed all these troubles on the world is about to try to destroy the Titan. It could be doing so even as we speak."
The woman laughed out loud. "That is why there is no part for us to play together, amber-bringer. You are so ignorant you don't even know that the Emerald Titan can't be destroyed!"
"Maybe not by any power of this world. But the entity is not of this world."
All the amusement fell from her face. "They are so boring, Juleni. Can we kill them already?"
"Go," the man said to them tiredly. "Before that must be so."
Dante had kept some shadows in hand in case he needed to use them, but he turned to the others in defeat. "Look, these won't be the only people in Kalabar. We can find someone else to guide us. Or find out what direction the Titan's in and go to it by ourselves."
Blays nodded. Gladdic tilted his head to the side in a shrug.
"We'll leave you, then," Dante said to the Kalabari. "But don't be surprised if the gods see fit to punish you for not helping those who've just helped you."
Juleni and the woman laughed and many of their warriors joined them. Dante tightened his jaw and turned away.
"Hang on there," Blays called out to the Kalabari. "You seem to think we're so ignorant of you and your lands. But if that was true, then how would I know about the deeds of Haladi the Claw-Taker? Or that during the Siege of Mokaloa, it was Walei's daring raid through the sewers that saved the city from being overrun?"
This drew a few intrigued murmurs from the warriors. Juleni pushed out his lower lip.
"If you know so much about us," the woman said, "then you should know that there is not just one Kalabari. So which one are we?"
"Er…the…Balabari?"
The crowd jeered and muttered. The two leaders looked disgusted.
Blays shrugged. "Well, I tried. Suppose we'll just have to run down those fellows we just butchered and torture them until they agree to help us."
Within the crowd, a young woman held up her hand and stepped forth. While most everyone else was dressed in more or less the same things, with personal variations to their jewelry, belts, and satchels, a small number of the Kalabari wore red cloth wound around their bodies and limbs, bound in place by metal pins and fasteners of silver, iron, or bronze. Somehow, Dante knew at once that these people were their people's sorcerers. Judging by the young woman's b
ronze fasteners, she was likely a low-ranked one.
"What if there is a use for these three?" she said.
Juleni scowled at her. "What use could there be for them other than something to throw rocks at?"
"We go with them to the Undazim. I think they have the strength to break whatever enchantment has been placed on it. Look what they just did to the Dunites!"
The other woman folded her arms. "What does the Undazim matter now?"
"If it was open, we could raid the Dunites' lands! We could scout what lies below! And if fate chooses to hate us, and brings our doom down on us, we can use it as a path to escape."
"Adi speaks right," Juleni said. "It would be of most benefit to reopen the Undazim. But everyone who has gone to do that has never been seen again."
"What of it?" Adi, the young woman, replied. "They are just amber-bringers. If they die, who cares?"
"But you are volunteering to go with them."
"No. Tono and I are volunteering. It isn't safe, but life is no longer safe, is it? It seems to me that it will stay dangerous until enough of us take unsafe acts to change it back from what it has become."
Juleni considered this, glanced at the other woman, then held up his right hand with his thumb and forefinger held in the shape of an L. "Then you will go to the Undazim. If we do not ever see you again, we will tell each other stories of your foolishness and how we tried to stop it but you would not listen."
Adi smiled and gave the two leaders a stiff and partial bow. She moved swiftly toward Dante.
"While I am quite appreciative that you've intervened on our behalf," he said, "we don't have the time to run off to solve your problems for you."
She bunched her brows at him. "Yes you do. If the Undazim is clear, you will be able to reach the Titan much faster than if you have to walk down to it."
"Down to it? It's underground, like the last place we were at? So what is this Undazim, a staircase?"
"How do you not know where we are?"
"If you want to understand us, it might be best to pretend like we fell here from out of the sky," Blays said. "Because that's almost exactly what happened."
Adi watched him for signs that he was kidding, then made a circular gesture. "This here, it is the Vault of the Sky. The Emerald Titan stands in the forests far below us. There are cliffs to all sides; getting down them will waste much time. But there is also a river, and on that river is the Undazim. It will bear us to the belowlands in very little time."
"But we have to make it usable again first?" Dante said. "What's wrong with it?"
"That is what is not known and what will be for us to learn."
As they'd been speaking, the soldiers had been gathering up what little was to be taken from the dead Dunites. All finished, Juleni marched them toward a nearby wood. The only one who stayed behind was a young man—Tono, presumably—who was dressed just as Adi was, and looked almost like her as well. He joined them then, though he didn't say a word even after they introduced themselves.
"This is my twin brother Tono," Adi confirmed. "He will also go with us."
"When do we leave?" Dante said.
"We leave in this right now."
She turned and walked from the field of battle. They'd heaped up and burned their own dead, but had left the Dunites' bodies to rot. Dante had a fleeting thought to sweep the earth over them in burial, then reminded himself they'd been fighting alongside Nolost's creations.
He couldn't see the sun and had no idea which way they were traveling. But the tree they'd come in through was both distinct and visible for miles, and he further marked the spot in his mind with a mesa a couple of miles away from the tree. At the moment, they were walking through a broad ribbon of grass between two groves of trees, no type of which he recognized. Unseen animals hooted and babbled from within the woods.
Blays nodded up at the flaming tatters that had been drifting across the dark sky ever since their arrival. "Should we be concerned about those?"
"Only if one lands on you," Adi said.
"Ah. Right then."
"How long has the Undazim been troubled?" Dante said. "Specifically, was it before or after the plagues began to hit?"
Adi thought for a moment. "It is three dogons since it was able to be used."
The pendant utterly failed to translate the word. "Dogons?"
"Why did you ask the question when you would not believe my answer?"
"No, I mean what is a 'dogon'?"
She turned to him in irritated disbelief. "Is this disgracing me?"
"This question will not sound in earnest, yet it is," Gladdic said. "What do you call the period between one sunrise and the next?"
"Are you asking me what a day is?" Her eyes eased with understanding. "In your land, you have the day. But not the dogon. The dogon is the length of twelve days."
"So this Undazim just came under attack a little over a month ago—er, thirty days ago," Dante said. "Nolost's work, then."
Blays laughed. "You went through all this just to figure out if the disaster we're off to clean up was the work of the guy causing all the disasters?"
Dante chose to ignore this. "And nobody knows any details about what kind of trouble is happening there?"
Adi gave him another look. "How could we be told that when no one who has gone to it still walks in the grass?"
"You mean, is still alive? You know how to use the nether, right? The shadows? You could have sent an undead scout into it or something."
She broke into laughter, covering her mouth. "Much of what you speak are words but then sometimes you spit out babble!"
"It's a miracle we can even understand each other at all," Dante muttered. "How far is the Undazim from here?"
"Twenty or so kundales."
"Gods damn it…"
"If the spirits hum with ours, we will be there the day after tomorrow."
Dante nodded. While the talisman Carvahal had given them was still doing a more than adequate job, the Kalabari language was clearly distant enough from their own that its translations were no longer fully reliable or comprehensible, especially when it came to their figures of speech, and it was oddly tiring to hold an extended conversation. Blays picked up the slack as Dante fell silent, asking Adi any number of questions, though he appeared to be much more interested in confirming or disproving certain details of The Troublesome Travels of Riddick Dover than in learning about the task ahead of them.
Adi hiked them up a grassy slope pimpled with red rocks. The trees fell away. Ahead and to the left, the view was foreign but nothing so strange as to stop Dante in his tracks: meadows and groves in roughly equal proportion, with a lot of rusty red rock jutting up like the broken bones of the land, and occasional patches of what looked to be ruins.
But the view to the right made him want to sit down and clutch his head.
They were walking on top of what must be an immense plateau. Where it came to an end some half mile to the right, the ground fell away in stark cliffs. A sea of blackish clouds covered most of what lay below, but where there were gaps, the forests and rivers looked to be no less than two miles beneath them, if not more.
Significant parts of what Adi had called the belowlands were burning. The red eyes of volcanoes stared up in anger at those on the mesa. Where there was open grass, immense herds of creatures fled from the dangers. They were too far away to tell if they were normal animals or abominations from the Becoming, but the way they moved made Dante think they were of Rale.
"That's where the Emerald Titan is?" he said. "Down there?"
"In this way." Adi pointed ahead and to the right. "With the Undazim, you will soon be the Titan's slave."
Blays glanced away from the cloudscape at her. "That's a figure of speech? Right?"
The siblings looked at each other and laughed. Adi, perhaps feeling the same translation fatigue that Dante was, wouldn't explain further.
The land declined. Trees sprung up once more and Adi walked along their edge. The
smell of strange flowers wafted from the wood. Not a hundred feet ahead of them, a troop of people carrying makeshift weapons emerged from the treeline. The five travelers shrank within it and took cover.
Dozens of people filtered from the woods, then hundreds. They said nothing, glancing about themselves as they jogged toward another forest three-quarters of a mile across the meadow.
"Dunites," Adi murmured once the last of them had emerged.
Dante shifted closer to her to keep his voice low. "Who are they, anyway?"
"Old subjects of the Talso. New enemies."
"The Talso being?"
She frowned at him. "The Talso being us."
"Civil war," he said. "Of course. How did it start?"
"It had stopped almost. Only the most bonto kept in the fight. Both sides spoke of agreeing to peace. But when the demons arrived, the Dunites allied with them to betray us."
"I might not believe it if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes. But how did it start to begin with? What could drive them crazy enough to side with demons?"
"Envy." Adi stood. "We will keep going."
Soon, they heard rumbling in the distance. But there was no lightning, and it didn't quite sound like thunder anyway. Within the lushness of the forest, unknown animals cawed and shrieked.
Night fell without warning. The cries of the animals ceased, but were soon replaced by a different and more sinister set of calls. Under typical circumstances, Dante would have pushed on for hours more, but he was exhausted from the day's effort, his head aching and logy, and he was more than happy to agree when Adi suggested they make camp for the night.
They did so a short ways inside the treeline. As they bedded down, Tono walked in a circle around the camp, filling his right hand with shadows and transferring them to his left, which gestured in complex patterns as he sifted nether onto the ground.
"What's that about?" Dante said.
The Twelve Plagues (The Cycle of Galand Book 7) Page 41